The Pomp Podcast - #1135 Liver King On Steroids, Joe Rogan, and Billionaire Status

Episode Date: December 12, 2022

This episode is with Brian Johnson, aka "Liver King." Through his "ancestral living" lifestyle, he has taken the internet by storm, amassed a large following and built multiple businesses. However, Liver King has been involved in major controversy lately over the discovery that he has taken steroids, a claim that Brian has repeatedly disputed in the past. In this conversation, We dive into all the controversy as well as talk about his life before the "Liver King" persona, how he built his businesses, why focus on social media, and what his plan is going forward. ======================= Exodus is leading the world out of the traditional financial system by building beautiful and user-friendly blockchain products. With its focus on design and user experience, Exodus has become one of the most popular and loved cryptocurrency apps. It’s supported on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to sync your wallet across multiple devices so you can have access to your funds anywhere. Interactive charts let you view an asset’s price history and your portfolio’s performance over time. And maybe the best part, Exodus is integrated with the Trezor hardware wallet - making advanced security easy for everyone. Visit exodus.com/pomp for your free download or search Exodus on the App Store or Playstore. ======================= The number one name in NFT domains and the world’s most powerful wallet are teaming up to bring something new to the crypto and Web3 world: <Your Name.Blockchain> Either sign up for a free blockchain.wallet or visit Unstoppabledomains.com to buy your domain today. ================== With a Messari Pro subscription, you gain access to exclusive industry-leading long-form daily research reports, daily crypto news & insights in your inbox, advanced asset screeners, curated sets of charts and metrics and so much more. Try Messari Pro today! Get up to 25% off their Messari Pro membership by visiting www.messari.io/pro and entering promo code "POMP" at checkout. ======================= Arculus is the next generation crypto & NFT cold storage wallet that combines one of the world’s strongest security protocols with the easiest to use form factor and app. Arculus requires 3-Factor Authentication to ensure only you have access to your digital assets – something you know – a PIN, something you have – the Arculus Key Card, and biometrics. Learn more and buy it now on getarculus.com. Use promo code POMP to save 15%. Remember, with Arculus, it’s your keys, your crypto. ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit https://compassmining.io/ to start mining bitcoin today! =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. This episode is with Brian Johnson, aka Liver King. Liver King has taken the social media world by storm. He's got a number of massive businesses. He's got a very large following across various platforms, and he continues to promote the ancestral living lifestyle. There has been a ton of controversy around Liver King, steroid use, and a number of tactics he used to build his audience, and we get into it all. In this conversation, we talk about his life, who he was before the Liver King character, how he built his businesses, why he is doing

so much on the internet, and what his plans are moving forward. I continue to seek out anyone who I can have a conversation with, that I can learn from, and that I can gain more understanding from. This conversation was no different. Sometimes it was fun and full of laughs and other times it was hard and there was some tough questions. I really enjoyed this conversation with Liver King and I hope you guys enjoy it as well.

After you get done listening, jump on Twitter and let me know what you liked, what you didn't like, what you agreed with and what you disagreed with. I love the feedback and it helps us get better. All right, here is my episode with the Liver King. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast

are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got the liver king here. I thought a great place to start was right now you're like in the shit, right? You've got uh this massive social media following that exploded over the last couple of years uh allegations came out about steroid use you're like yep i did steroids i said i didn't but i did them uh and if you open your phone right now people are saying all kinds of crazy shit they're saying

you're a fraud you're a liar you're a scammer you're name your you know thing that they could say what does that feel like psychologically like when you open your phone and you're just got like the mob coming after you what is that like man i gotta move forward you know um the what what's going on right now i have to deal with 100 face on right um i know i always butcher this but winston churchill said something like you know when when you sense danger um tackle it head on and then you cut the consequence in half and and this has always been my experience in life so it's like let's not spend a minute crying over spilt milk like what i did was wrong you know um i immediately apologized to my kids. I've immediately apologized to everybody. You know, I feel horrible

about this. I probably regret this more than anything else I've done in my life. Out of all the dumb, stupid shit I've done, I did this, you know. But, you know, I feel like a deeper obligation. You say, how's it feel like? I feel like a deeper obligation to really do my job as a CEO of the Ancestral Lifestyle. Not just for me to model, teach, and preach this message, but we need a hundred liver kings out there. We need the guys like Ben Greenfield. We need the guys like Andrew Huberman, you know, that are saying the same thing, you know, these nine ancestral tenants, because people are hurting with such depth and desperation that this message has to get out. And so how does it feel? You know, I'm embarrassed about it. I feel like I humiliated

myself. I feel like I earned all of it. I deserve all of it. You know, I read the DMs and there's a lot of hate. There's also a lot of support, you know, and guys that have seen the Andrew Schultz podcast flagrant and uh Schultz isn't funny no not at all um but Akash is funnier than Schultz oh that guy yeah they're a good team by the way um I think uh Akash was actually really coming for me by the way yeah he came after me too don't worry okay good I'm not alone and uh and so that you know that I'm like I deserve all of it you know I deserve all of it and I'm gonna handle all of that you know right now um and you know what I just I really do want to take a second also to tell you thank you you know for having me on today giving me this

opportunity every saturday i give this barbarian speech and i say we do this to honor our earliest ancestors our recent ancestors and all of this ancestral heritage in between so that we can be here today enjoy the spoils of the bond world and what i really mean by that is all that ancestral heritage in between our veterans that have protected the perimeter so that we have the freedoms that we have today so that we can be on this podcast so i want to say thank you to you for your service and protecting the perimeter for us yeah so when you think through kind of this entire situation. One of the things that fascinates me is you have multiple phases of your life, right? You have kind of your childhood, which I don't think a lot of people understand how tough that

was and some of the things you went through. Then you had this, what I'll call almost like a device salesman, you know, phase of your life. Then you guys had the dentistry phase of your life. And then you have what everyone knows now as liver king. And so maybe let's just go through each phase and kind of get some of the context. I think one of the parts when I told a couple of friends that i was going to talk to you they're like why the fuck would you talk to him i can't believe you're going to do this but whatever and i said look i've had people on that uh folks love i've had people that i've had conversations with people absolutely fucking hate bbd told me yesterday goes i've had murderers on here i've and i'm like holy shit okay you think i feel better

now yeah you put me in the same context as that yeah but yes but the conversation is important and part of it is like you can see things on the internet you can judge people by 30 second clips on the internet right i've been judged by 30 second clips on the internet and it fucking sucks at the same time you sit down and have a conversation with somebody you understand them it doesn't mean you're going to agree with them doesn't mean you're going to disagree with everything but you at least understand them better so like take us back and who were you before liver king right and what is your childhood like where did you grow up what exactly was that experience yeah i was born on a naval air base in cebo puerto rico i come from a military family

My dad had been moved around station, you know, from base to base. He died before I have any memory of him. And so I really predominantly grew up in San Antonio. I come from a single mom household where I have an older brother, about two years older than me. I don't know how far back you want to go, but I think, you know, I'll just say like up until about 10 years old, I feel like I had the best, you know, childhood ever. My mom would take us on ski trips. I know she loved us.

You know, she always complimented us. She always put her arms around us. she gave us incredible opportunities she gave us lots of freedom and she also disciplined the fuck out of us too you know you think all that's normal you know growing up and then you realize you know what your parents are just trying to do the best job your parents is trying to do the best job they can and guess what they probably learned that from their parents too and so I just remember then around 10 or so going to middle school and in the first day of middle school I got my shit handed to me and and you know I never had anything like that happen before I mean I just

remember in you know fifth grade was like i was king of the mountain everything was great you know just go to the play i mean there's nothing to think about or worry about you don't measure yourself against anybody and then the first day in middle school i mean everybody was trying i was like going to school with adults these kids had everybody had a mustache had underarm hair you know they were twice as big as me and they all spoke a different language i mean they all spoke spanish you know and and i didn't speak any spanish even though i was born in sable puerto rico no i'm gonna listen i'm not asking for any sob stories um but i was hearing impaired and i had plenty of ear surgeries and i didn't actually speak my first words for i was in speech therapy

forever and um and so this is why i didn't actually learn spanish um because they were afraid that i wasn't going to learn english so i get i get to my first day there um this one guy felix sanchez uh hawks a loogie in his hand lets me have it almost knocks me out first time i'd ever been you know handed something like that uh but man this just kept happening and i came home this kept happening the same day um and i remember the way i looked i was a skater at the time just skateboarding you know thinking oh this is what people do um but then i get to middle school there's not one person dressed like me or that looks like me or that's getting their shit handed to them like me um and uh and i i came home and uh and i i cried to my mom and i said i'm never

going back and before i could finish the sentence she she didn't even listen to the rest of the sentence she made it so crystal fucking clear that you're going back and that i'm not even going to listen to anything else you have to say. That's how I remember it. And so I just remember thinking, okay, maybe tomorrow won't be as bad. Maybe that's the first day. Every day was like that. Every single day was like that. And somewhere along the way, I remember that one of my mom's boyfriends gave us some heavy downs. And the whole time I'd been trying to blend in and look more like my peers. And I wore these cool red wing boots, these guest jeans, a cool shirt. I felt like a million bucks.

That is the first time in like a couple of years going to school. I'm like, oh, I feel pretty good about myself. Later that day, we had gym class and I come back from gym class. All my shit's gone. All my stuff's gone. I told Coach Moberg, hey, all my stuff's gone. He searched the lockers. We never recovered it, you know, and I end up going home that day in my socks and somebody else's clothes, some gym clothes.

But this continues really all through middle school. Just I had no self-worth in middle school. Yeah. I remember looking in the mirror, and I've told this story several times, so people might hear this again. I was just completely embarrassed and ashamed of the guy in the mirror, this brain and this body. I never stuck up for myself, not one time.

And I wish somebody at least told me, hey, man, you got to at least fight back. You got to at least take a swing. Why do you think you didn't fight back? Was it something where you thought you couldn't? You thought it's not worth it? what do you think it was you know from day one i saw how giant and powerful everybody was and then every day there's bloody fistfights at my school and a teacher wouldn't dare break that shit up because the teacher gets retaliated on and so um the gym teachers would have to come from five

minutes away and there's it was the most violent thing i mean i'd never seen anything like that before so the kids are just fucking going at it going at it at school oh yeah yeah i mean these These are the days you could wear steel toes to school. Kids carried little 380 guns. I mean, there were weapons everywhere. There were no metal detectors. There was nothing like this. But there were just bloody ass fights.

And so something got imprinted up here like, you don't want any part of that. And so, like I said, I don't know exactly why. I just know, like, I actually didn't have it in me. I'm sure I always did. But I believe that I don't even have it in me to push back. You know, so I just retreated and retreated. And I took the punches and I took the push downs and, um, you know, I, I never used the restroom cause that's where fucking got, you know, the worst.

So I remember holding that shit all day long. Um, and, and then of course, like you wouldn't have a sip of water in school, you know, cause you're not going to make it any worse. So this is what happened. Most of my middle school, you know, it was just like, I just felt inadequate. Like I knew, I knew that the world would be a better place without me. What about your relationship with your brother? Right.

So I grew up in a family of five boys, and one of the things our parents always told us was like, hey, you five are going to fight all the time at home. We know that. There's no stopping that. But when you guys leave here, it's you guys versus the world, right? And I remember specifically one situation where one of my brothers, he got his finger broken on the bus. They used to play this stupid game where they would basically turn around on the seats, and they would like slap at each other's hands. And he ended up breaking his finger pretty bad. And we got home from the bus, and he walks home.

he's like hey mom look and like his fingers like literally you know at an angle and uh i remember talking to my parents and they were like immediately what'd you do and i was like what do you mean i wasn't involved right like don't get me in trouble over this and then i know that's the problem was you were there with your brother and something happened but like what did you do did you stand up for him you have his back whatever i remember that moment vividly because it just reinforced this idea of uh sometimes you just got to find who are the people who are gonna you know you can surround yourself with that always have your back regardless of what happens in the world so you talked a little about your mom but what about your brother and kind of what

was your relationship like him yeah he was two grades above me so i was in sixth grade he was in eighth grade um and there was no discussion about anything that happened at school when i came home you know there was no message from my mom you better fucking be there from them there was no message from my mom hey how you doing was your second day any better than the first there was none of that i mean from the first day she made it really clear i'm not hearing any of this so there was no more of this shared with her and so in her defense there was no discussion with my with my brother you better fucking watch over him yeah um and so my my brother was i have no recollection whatsoever my brother standing up for that for me or being there for me you know i

learned these values later um i did end up getting strong and when i got strong i'm like um i became the big brother and there you know people would come after my big brother and then mark would run to me saying hey man i need your help and i loved being able to help him the tables got turned you know from working out so i wish i could tell you that my brother was there for me my brother wasn't there for me how old uh did you start uh working out i was around eight or nine at the time yeah and when you first start like are you just doing push-ups and sit-ups like what is my mom's boyfriend at the time gave us his old bench yeah uh i don't know if there's any irony in this but He was a pharmacist, a big fucking pharmacist, like 6'4", really big.

Michael Gleisner. I don't know. All this might be edited out. But he gave me this old bench that was falling apart, rusty as shit. And I went to town on bench press, curls. I started getting all the muscle magazines. I would read the exercises I could do. It was one of those old ones that had like the leg extensions of the curls out there.

I wish I was doing power cleans and squats and stuff like that. But that's the kind of bench I had. that's kind of working out i was doing i really wasn't doing push-ups but i remember um i did have some self-worth back home because some of the other kids up the street they couldn't bench nearly what i could bench um and and i knew that i was getting strong um but i also knew at school any retaliation from me any standing up for me you got 30 other people that are coming and that's another thing that happened at school that i think i left out the fights would happen and and if the tables got turned for a second you got 20 other people jumping and that are gonna beat the fuck

out of you and i just remember thinking man i don't want any of this was the school aware of this stuff happening were they trying to stop it or it was just a situation where like yo this happens at our school we do the best we can but like these kids are just going to beat each other up i think both uh i mean happen every day it was part of the culture and and i remember that's crazy right like to send your kids to school and if you're aware that there's a chance that they're going to get in an absolute you know face ripping fight every day you're kind of like you know am i doing my kid a disservice to some degree yeah well that's for sure what happened at my school And there was a history teacher who tried to break up a fight.

And later that day, he got the shit handed to him by the gang. The kids were beating up the teachers. Yeah. And the teachers know not to break up the fights. The gym guys have to come over. And then nobody's messing with Coach Boberg. I mean, this guy looked like a lineman for an NFL team. But that's what happened.

And I think that's part of the concern that I was terrified. You know, like, could that happen to me? yeah and so again i know how much uh there's a great there's a great example this guy chuck came to school another white kid like me way bigger than me but still he came to school and i thought i'm gonna make a friend i could do this and i kind of made a friend um but he starts getting into these fights and they're bloody as fuck and he's doing a pretty good job actually these fights um we start making a friendship but he fought back enough times they took him in and then it was him against me and then he picked a fight with me this sounds

almost identical to uh like prison culture right where basically people uh set up alliances with each other uh and some of it is literally based on race language creed you know whatever the the kind of uh way that the population cuts themselves uh and then it is almost the most animalistic thing in the world of just like who has physical dominance over other people it was pretty animalistic and um yeah i i get like i mean i tell my kids all the time jokingly you know you guys go to jail you better fucking pick a fight on the first day you know and again like i wish i i wish god damn i wish somebody just told me i wish somebody told me man this is what's going to happen to you yeah i wish somebody just said and when it does you're going to get your fucking

shit handed to you you're going to get bloody um but but you're going to be able to push back and you're strong and and you'll get through it man and it's going to happen five or six times but you'll get through it they'll take you in um but nobody told me that um you know what i just also want to make it clear that I know we're still talking about this phase you want to hear about all my phases but um I couldn't be more grateful for for this was my first true rite of passage in life and I had to figure this out and I had a little bit of help along the way one of my one of my friends moms um knew about someone who challenged me to a fight and I said why would I do this I'm not getting into a fight long story short she mentors me and says you're strong you

got to get into this fight she drives me to the fight she drove you to the fight she drove me to the fight to fight this guy this kid had to get in a fight in front of his gang to be initiated into the gang and so this kid chris with like a bunch of people um and and so um anyways what ends up i don't know if you want to hear the details of the fight but um i i found out how strong i was that day and it had to take all these fucking years to figure that out it it took her saying hey you're strong you can do this um her son justin's like yeah man you could do this my brother was around at that time my brother's like yeah man you could do this too like you guys have no fucking idea you have no idea because i knew i couldn't do it um but you know what's also cool

about skateboarding is like you drop it on a 15 foot ramp with vert enough times and you just fall and you fall i mean imagine throwing yourself off a 15 foot building you know and again you don't fall 15 complete feet but you take enough spills and you're like oh i'm gonna be okay i'm gonna be okay enough experience says um i can develop high courage and one day i can face danger and i'm going to be okay and what ends up happening you know through through that fight is i realized like i actually am strong like i looked pretty strong i actually was strong i figured out that i was strong and um and i actually let him go i i had him pinned on the ground and i could have done what i needed to do to him and uh and you know what maybe it's because i didn't have the experience

maybe it's because um i looked in his eyes and i saw how pathetic and scared he was and i saw myself in his eyes uh and i couldn't strike him um sometimes i think fuck like i really regret that yeah that could have changed everything for me i think it could have but a lot of people uh have told me man i respect you so much more for not doing that but again i think this is a rite of passage for me um i wouldn't wish this on anybody but i ended up figuring it out and i ended up i was getting strong the whole time but man this happened i got this fight and i doubled down on working out i've been thinking about this i'm some kid at home i'm working out once a day but now i'm working out twice a day. And now I'm really learning, you know, doing everything in the

magazines. Arnold Schwarzenegger was my hero. You know, anything he would post at the magazines I was doing, I had all his posters everywhere. And so that, that I think would, unless you want to get into it more, it would summarize my 10 to 14, 15 year old self. What's interesting to me is a lot of the things you're describing still happen today in schools, but now it feels like maybe society's changed. Maybe the way that people, young kids because social media or what, I don't know what it is, but the story that maybe we would have heard 20, 30 years ago, right, was if you're a young kid and you're getting your ass kicked at school, if you're getting bullied, if you're whatever, you basically change schools, you stand up for yourself, you work out, you do something

to try to impact the situation. And it usually was the release of working out or building a friendship with another bully that could, you know, back you up or whatever. Now, I think a big fear of parents and and uh many people in society is like that kid who's getting bullied goes and gets a fucking gun yeah and shows up to school and just starts shooting people i want to make a comment about that because um i had my list and this is i think when jordan talks about you know the the young men today that are hurting and hating and suffering and struggling the most um when you don't have self-respect for yourself which is me when you don't have any respect from your peers this is me um there's enough time that goes by where you start to

become dangerous to society because you can get a gun all the kids at my school had guns so i knew i could get a gun and so i kept a list of the guys that i was going to take care of when i could get myself a gun you know that's how much i hated what was going on it was like it was it was either myself i thought about that myself taking my own life or or figuring out a way to get them and and And do you think that's just like a human nature thing, right? Is that like you eventually reach a breaking point where you're just like these people have been fucking with me for so long. I have to do something, whether it's fight them with my fist, whether it's shoot them or whatever. Like why is it that even then when people had guns at school and it wasn't kind of the environment it is today, the response, like the human nature response was exactly identical to what it seems like young kids today are going through?

I think that nothing in life really stands still. You know, everything's evolving. And I think that's the evolution of what happens. You know, again, an expert like Jordan Peterson can tell you, like, the trajectory of that evolution. I don't know why. All I knew is, like, okay, the hurt and the hate that I had, this can't continue forever. I mean, I did this for years. And so my 15-year-old, actually, it was between 10 and 15.

I was in middle school. So I think I was in seventh grade. so maybe I was like 12 or something like that. My bus driver committed suicide. And at that time I knew, okay, this is actually possible. Now I could think about this. And the kids were talking about it? Like the bus driver committed suicide and like word spread throughout the kids that he committed?

There were so many fights on our bus that he would have to stop the bus. You know, let's stop fighting. He would have to try and – he was a big guy. He was a really big guy. He could break up fights. And then one fight he had a lot of trouble breaking up, and I don't even remember exactly what he did. But I think he got suspended.

and then the next day the bus didn't come and then later that day at school they announced it and they said hey we're here to talk about it you know kind of deal oh my god like that this can actually happen i'd never heard of this ever before in my life but but i'd heard of it then and so i just think that um that there's this trajectory like there's only so much of that you could take either for yourself you know you got to do something you know for yourself but doing it even for yourself is like i'm gonna take care of these guys you know and i think that that's an issue like with violence it's like people can get a gun today people can drive a car today you know um yeah they can use any any tool that is a part of everyday life and use it

as a weapon if they so choose or if that's what their intentions are yeah so i want to make make this point about the silver lining is um you know how much hate that i've received from the beginning of social media which is at least 10x right now but but when i when i see this that's shocking that people hated you at all at any point okay okay i'm like well is he serious um but the thing is i know how that feels you know like i know exactly how that feels and you know whenever you read a word or a text or you hear the word it's like it's up to your brain to assign meaning to it and and so since the inception of liver king whenever i i got any of those hate messages i'm like i know exactly how this person feels that this was me and this person's hurting the most

and this person is actually why I have this why in the world because people are hurting at these desperate rates and I know the solution to get them better and so I got to find a way to connect with them you know because if you see some of these messages like you might think I can't believe you didn't retaliate with words you know like and I'm like and I can't tell you how many times I've written back

I know how this feels I know exactly how this feels and let me tell you I agree some of what you're saying is true especially right now the message I'm getting is I know exactly how this feels What I did was wrong.

I own this. I am sorry to you, and I'm going to do everything I can do to be better. Please continue to engage with my content or some sort of ancestral living so that you can get better too. A lot of that is understanding of the situation, but a lot of it is maturity as well, right? If you were getting those messages at 21, I don't know. You know better than I do, but would you be responding the same way? Oh, man. you know, once I finally got strong after I got that fight and I got strong and I realized what

I was capable of, this is why I have an obligation now to, to do whatever I can to do good. Because I did a lot of not good things for those years. What's the worst thing you ever did? Well, they're all fights, you know, they're all fights. And, um, but I mean, there, there, there would be guys that like, I just, I, I handed it to him, you know? Um, so I mean, but, but I I mean, I never, like, sent someone to the hospital. Yeah. Did you have, like, almost a redemption arc to some degree? Yes.

Where basically, hey, I used to get my shit, you know, beat up, and now all of a sudden I'm doing the beatings? Yeah, you know, there's these movies. Do you remember Boys in the Hood or Menace to Society? Yeah. These raised me, you know. And so the minute I got strong. Classics.

Yeah. I mean, really. And this is when I realized, look, you don't talk shit about your mom. Like, this is when I started to learn, I think, a lot of really valuable experiences, actually. um and and i think that this is one one of the movies you know like somebody looked at us and they're like hey let's take it outside and i would do that all the time be like hey man you got a problem yeah let's take it outside and and you know most of the time nobody wanted to take it

outside and when we would take it outside this was an opportunity like okay now i'm actually pretty good at this well i'm fascinated by the uh bifurcation of society because there's a whole bunch of people who think we'd be better off if that was still the way that things worked right It was basically forget what words you put on the internet, right? If you wouldn't say it to somebody in person, into their face, don't say it online type of situation. And I think it's Mike Tyson's like, hey, people forgot they can get punched in the fucking face. And people do this all the time too in crowds, you know, because you would think I would get a lot of hate in public. I don't get hate in public.

No. You know, I can't believe how incredible people are. And then and then it reminds me that you got a vocal minority here, you know, that are being really vocal because we get out in public and people are amazing. And you can feel their spirit energy in this connection. Every once in a while, you hear somebody mouth something off and it's in a crowd and you're usually going opposite directions. And I would never do anything to them. Yeah. Like, you know, let them have it. You know, and I've told my kids, you guys know how much hate we're going to get right now.

And we've not been out and about yesterday. we were out and about and just trying to go onto the beach to go swimming as a family um yesterday by the way my son striker beat me in a race it's the first time he's just fucking smoked me physically athletically um and uh and we're on steroids he'll tell you he'll tell you he stacks the night ancestral um but uh there was so much love yeah there was so much love and and again i'm expecting it i'm expecting to hear it and again i'm gonna say i deserve it all yeah i own all of it, you know, so bring it on. I want them to be prepared. Uh, but it's really interesting. And I do believe that we would be far better off as a society. Say it to, if you're not going to

say it to their face, what do you, what do you think you're doing? You know, what, what does it actually give you to do this anonymously on the internet? I'm not, I'm not sure what that accomplishes. Um, but, but I do know how it feels to hurt and to hate your life that badly. And maybe it makes them feel good for about a second, but obviously nobody's actually getting to the root issue when they do that. Yeah. Uh, I think anyone who has any size following on the internet obviously has uh uh people who love them people who hate them and everyone in between um but when you start to think about it as wow you really got to be in a bad place to say some of the things that are said online uh there is this like compassion almost right and uh it's hard to

have that conversation with people who don't have a big online following because they don't they haven't seen it they haven't seen how i think vile and just disrespectful uh even sometimes dangerous people can be right if you gotta i don't know maybe more than 100 000 followers on the internet there's you do it long enough you're going to get a death threat you're going to get you know whatever the the worst thing you could think of people send us our my address you know they'll they'll they'll send the address i'm coming my address you know my personal address uh what do you do in that situation when somebody says that you just you just ignore it or you know no we don't we listen we got a pack of dobermans at the house and we have an arsenal of guns

out of control you know um i do believe this is my responsibility to be able to fight provide and protect my family um so listen i'm not saying hey come but if you come uninvited this is this doesn't end well um i want to say i think that maturity started way way before um being able to connect and know what it feels like to hurt and hate your life because um this whole thing started my business is really as an evolutionary hunter as an entrepreneur started because my kids were sick because they couldn't breathe and and we just what does that mean they couldn't breathe um they were going to the hospital because they were allergic to things and they would choke up would have anaphylactic shock and they would turn blue they were gonna die first time it happens

that's gonna be scary oh yeah i mean but it keeps happening and every time it's scary and every time you think oh my god i could lose but what if my kid wasn't here what if we didn't have an epi pen what if we didn't have all this stuff figured out um there's only so much of that you take we figured it out through ancestral living ancestral living was our savior you know this is why we so deeply believe in this is why i'll never stop this fight even if it's not liver king that leads this charge like i'm gonna make sure there's a hundred other ceos of the ancestral lifestyle that are preaching that liver is king i know what that is like to go through that kind of health crisis and i've always said what kind of piece of shit am i going to be if i don't spread this message

if i don't make this my why in the world so what ends up happening is um i started a company and the the whole purpose of this company was to advance ancestral living and we also sold some notes to tail nourishment liver bone marrow heart all this kind of stuff and um a lot of customers would come because they had a health issue and what ends up happening invariably you start to get some negative reviews. Hey, I bought this. I thought it was going to work for this. It didn't work. And, and they're mad and I didn't have the money to spend on it. And I think all the reviews are fake and bullshit and all this stuff. And I just started thinking, Oh my God, like you're just like my boys. You know, I got to figure out a way to connect with you before I even responded

to them. I mean, I handled everything in my companies. Right. Um, and I knew, I know what it feels like to go to the doctor and the doctor doesn't listen to you at all because you're saying the same story. You know, you've been to five or six doctors. They don't want to hear it anymore. You're telling your friends, they don't want to hear it anymore. So every customer that came to me, you know, like I know what it feels like. And so I'm going to connect with you. We're going to talk. And before I would even write an email back, I would always give them a refund.

And I always knew I, the meaning I assigned is they're not really hurting and they're not hating me, right? They came to me because they were suffering and we got to figure out a way to get them better. And oftentimes it doesn't have to do with a supplement at all. Somebody has high blood pressure. Maybe they just need to get midday sun. Maybe they just need to take off their shoes and connect with the earth.

they need to deepen a parasympathetic bond. You need to put down the damn phone and hold the hand of somebody that you love and take in the sunset, you know? And so when you get to nurture them along with these nine ancestral tenants, and they see there's no financial incentive for you. And then you say, I think we got the initial product suggestion wrong in the first place. Let me buy you the next couple of months on the house. And we'll just see how you feel doing that. So I think where this initially came from was there was a connection. My kids were hurting. I knew that we were and I was mad I was mad like every fucking you who we met at all the doctors you're telling me that all we can do is give them this epi pen in their leg when they can't breathe

you know you're telling me and really even if it wasn't like an acute situation you could listen to them and they weren't breathing very good you know even in their sleep it's like there was wheezing and so I was bad and so I think that's where I started to connect with this whole philosophy is I understand that hurt and hate and they came to us because they were suffering with something, they're still suffering with something. And I do believe that the path forward is ancestral living. I got to be able to guide you and coach you. And once you can see some benefit and value, and invariably when you do that, this is the most loyal customer on earth, just because you did the right thing. And so I wish it, maybe it's a combination of maturity

and experience, but I've been through all that. You know, the 10 to 15 year old self, I've been through that. I hated my life. I know what that feels like. When my kids couldn't breathe and they're going to the hospital i hated my life again because it's like i'm doing this to them this episode is brought to you by exodus accessing web3 across multiple networks just got a hell of a lot easier exodus is one of the most popular crypto wallets for mobile and desktop and they just added chrome and brave web browsers to the lineup the new exodus web3 wallet is a multi-chain browser extension that lets you safely navigate web3 and defy apps on ethereum solana and algorand from one wallet manage mint and sell nfts on multiple networks in one wallet you can swap

solana and eth tokens natively right within the extension and if you ever hit a snag world-class customer service is available 24 7 more of your favorite chains are on the way so run don't walk over to exodus.com slash pump to download the exodus web 3 wallet right now again exodus.com slash pump go check them out today this episode is brought to you by unstoppable domains they've partner with blockchain.com to create nft domain names ending in dot blockchain it's the perfect ending to show that you're a believer in a decentralized future the blockchain.com community can join a short wait list to get one for free at blockchain.com slash waitlist slash blockchain domain free nft domains provide all the benefits of premium unstoppable domains including fee-free

lifelong ownership if you don't have a blockchain.com wallet no worries there's new free domains available to everyone either join the wait list for a free blockchain.com domain or visit unstoppable domains.com to buy your domain today starting as low as five dollars unstoppable domains.com one of the arches of life is that like you're a kid and then you become a parent you mentioned earlier that your father passed away before you really ever experienced uh or had any memories with him how did he pass away or how do you think that situation impacted uh both in your kind of adolescence but then also when you became a father you know i don't know about my adolescence you know um i have nothing to compare it to but uh as a father like you know

what i have an obligation to be here i i know ancestral living these these are the principles and philosophies that will enable me to be healthy to do my job as a dad i need to be here as a dad it's one of the reasons that we do um a five-day water only fast once a quarter i hate doing that it's have you ever done it uh no i one time didn't eat food for 24 hours i thought i was a gangster i was like hell yeah and then people were like no i did five days but i was like all right yeah well every wednesday and sunday i do a 24-hour water only fast hold on every wednesday and sunday yeah for 24 hours you don't eat that's right so you only eat five days out of the week well if you think about it on tuesday i had dinner so then all i have to do is get breakfast

and lunch on wednesday presumed dinner got it yeah and so you end up having 24 hours it's like a busy day basically it is yeah you just forgot to eat um but people are so used to just snacking and feeding non-stop that they think if they're gonna skip skip a meal and a lot of people call if i skipped a meal and i'm fasting i don't really call 24 hours fasting even uh but this is a reason why that to me is effortless but to do a five-day water only fast is not easy and then i would say on day two or three you know the liver queen and i like we'll go on a walk we're holding and we're like oh my god you feel like shit yeah i feel like oh god why do we do this you know i do this it's because i grew up without a dad and i'll be damned if there's something i can do about it

to be there for my guys what happens to your body when you go through the five day fast like what's going on physiologically physiologically like the benefits or yeah yeah like what what why do people say hey it's good for you to do or whatever yeah have you ever heard of apoptosis no um you sound like a like a wikipedia entry right now no way no way what is that so there's a few benefits and i'll explain some of them so there's apoptosis autophagy metabolic flexibility something called mitochondrial biogenesis like um apoptosis is when it's a natural process that that we would go through um our early ancestors with a feast and famine cycle when you're not eating apoptosis is a natural process where the cell self does a sick

cell will self-destruct okay and today we're always feeding ourselves we don't have that natural process that should be ongoing which can lead to cell mutations and chronic health issues so apoptosis is a natural process that should be happening when we don't eat for a few days so and again this was something naturally that would happen autophagy is like a cellular house cleaning it's like kind of the garbage in the cell you know that should be cleaned out which again doesn't happen very often unless we fast metabolic flexibility you might know is like um if you're not eating for a while then beta oxidation or living off of ketones and fat instead of being a sugar burner like it allows you to be a lot more metabolically flexible and then lastly um

mitochondrial biogenesis is like it's all about energy production right and you're not eating anything and so now your body starts to say oh my god he's not eating anything um there's a whole lot of other things that that are going on like are something called reverse thyroid goes through the roof it starts to slow you down and then you start to be able to produce more mitochondria to try and give you more energy so i'll tell you what ends up happening after a five-day fast like again the five-day fast is horrible i think there's a lot of incredible longevity benefits that happen but almost immediately afterwards the performance benefits are through the roof like your brain you ever seen the movie limitless yeah it's i mean i've never had that pill but it's

like that for a while you know and so it feels so good i'm like oh i'm gonna do this every quarter again that week is hard but after a couple of days of recovering man you feel incredible so there's a lot of benefits um even if you take the benefits out i think what's most important reason why we do it is um modern day primitive cultures do it not intentionally because they're going on hunts and they're not they're not getting the kill our early ancestors always had these feasts and famine cycles so it's to honor the struggle of our early ancestors right and it's to honor these nine ancestral tenets that always enabled us for millions of years to express robust health, we stopped doing this.

You work out while you're doing it? Not really. I mean, we'll go on long walks. Yeah, but you try working out on. So on day one, I do what's called a simulated failed hunt. Okay. And I think it's pretty natural to what early ancestors would have gone through. You would have gone on a hunt.

You would have failed it. You'd deplete any glycogen in your body. I think the metabolic flexibility benefits will come. I think all the benefits come on sooner. if you can do the failed hunt. What do you do for a failed hunt? You just go run around in the woods? Kind of.

Yeah, I mean, it's something kind of intense in a shorter time domain to simulate a failed hunt. Maybe it's just taking like a heavy D-ball, which is like maybe a 100-pound ball or something, and doing a whole bunch of ball cleans over the shoulder for 10, 15 minutes running around. Physical exertion to get your energy up and sweat a little bit and then basically say, hey, look, I did some physical activity,

but I didn't get any food at the end of it. Right, right. And then I would say day two, three, and four, like you don't really have a whole lot. Like even if you wanted to, man, you could try and put yourself in the gym and it's just not really working out. I might do a couple of pushups here and there

to try and get a little bit of energy. But then on day five, when you're breaking the fast, I'll do a simulated successful hunt. And then I'll carry the carcass back. And again, I think that this is all evolutionarily consistent with what our early ancestors would have gone through. And it feels good. You know, like if you think about it,

early ancestors one day wouldn't have just woken up after five or six days of not eating and not had to put forth any effort and then they get to eat you know like you would have had to put forth some effort yeah but you just pop in a pop tart and the uh and the toaster of that shit is good as fuck so easy yeah i don't know i don't know those guys tried to make me eat donuts the other day i saw shoals had the donut g day you know what i call that the subprimal plate you know and when i look at that plate and i look at what i get to eat back home the primal foods that i get there's nothing more delicious than the primal foods that i get to eat and we are spoiled we have liver king chef lionel that makes these incredible meals for us like there's nothing you could put in front

like when i see that plate i'm like it looks really interesting right like the way that they try to make bright colors the whole thing sprinkles i mean the way that they're pat all of it i'm like oh they got you and and it's crazy that people are buying what they're selling um but uh yeah you say pop tar i'm like what the hell pop tar but so what you live in uh in texas right right All right. Uh, what I understood, there's a couple of things in, uh, uh, emails and, and, uh, uh, a number of the messages I watched a number of videos. There's probably more research that I've done for, for a conversation in a while. Cause I was like, oh shit, I don't know anything about this. Let's go get educated. Um, and I'm just going to throw out things that surprised me or,

uh, were interesting to me as I kind of watched these. The first is that you live on a pretty big plot of land in Texas. And, uh, and one of the emails that you sent, uh, to, I guess it was a doctor right where you're asking for uh medical advice and help and coaching and all this stuff yeah uh you talked about everyone comes to you you don't go to an office or what is like the the work uh setup that you've got going on and are people just showing up to your house to like do work or what yeah this is really interesting you ask um i know we probably won't say exactly every phase um we've covered the 10 to 15 year old phase uh from 20 to 30 what was the corporate phase okay and i didn't you wore suit and tie i went to like a corporate office well for i wore

suit and tie for about five years okay and then i wore scrubs uh for maybe like the next five years and i didn't see my kids yeah um my wife didn't see our kids um and and so she put her foot down she goes hey listen i'm i'm done we're both providing for the family i'm not caretaking i'm not nurturing them i'm not nourishing them i'm done as a professional this is on you and i'm like think well actually at the time i wasn't like thank god um actually at the time i was like you know trying to twist her hey just a little longer just a little longer um you guys were making like decent money or it was a struggle what was it like 20 to 30 yeah when we first met um i was making about a quarter of a million she was making about a quarter of a million when we

met we were making about half a million a year and this was 20 years ago so it was pretty decent money you're bold we we did good what kind of car were you driving oh god um i was i was driving a I was driving a Range Rover, but, but you were fucking bald. Let me tell you why it's come on. Let me tell you why. That's the fastest way to figure out. Come on. Let me tell you why, why, why this is funny. Because I just met my wife snowboarding. She's a, she's living in New York. I'm in Houston and, uh, and I'm living in like this really big house.

All right. Uh, it's like a three-story house widening. I mean, you name it. By yourself? By myself. And, uh, and I go, listen, I go pick her up from the airport where we had met snowboard. She goes back home. I go back home and then she comes to visit me. And I'm thinking, if she comes to visit me, I'm going to pick her up in my Range Rover. I'm taking her back to my mansion. It's done. It's done, right?

It's done. Anyways. My fucking ancestors. I got a goddamn modern cave over here. So this is what I think. This is what I think. And then after a couple of weeks, things are going really, really well. And we get engaged really quickly.

We get married. But she's got to move to Texas. I say, hey, what kind of car do you want? And she goes, a car? I don't know. I mean, I'll just take the same thing that you have. And I'm like, do you even know what I have? Do you know what that?

And here's the thing. It didn't impress her at all because she had no idea. So she ends up having to get one too. She goes, I want what you have in blue. Okay. So what ends up happening after that? So you had two Range Rovers. So you're definitely balling.

Yeah. Well, we were doing good. We were doing good. But I would say then the evolutionary hunter entrepreneur side came out almost not too long after we got married. and what so this is the dentistry uh kind of is that a network like what was this because this is fascinating to me that like uh you were doing pretty well uh by all measurements in corporate america and and things like that you all get together uh she's a uh dentist yeah and then you guys build a business but um one of the things uh that i've taken away i've talked to a

lot of different people i am very fortunate i got a lot of friends that have built massive online followings whether it's podcasts or emails or fucking social media whatever these people are not dumb. Right. And it's easy to look and say, Oh, look at this idiot. You know, he's just taking photos. Look at this woman. She's just take a photo, whatever. But like these people understand stuff. And I think seeing that you had already built another business that had been quite successful is, you know, a data point of like, you guys understood how business works. And so walk us through just like, what was that business and how to exactly did it work? Yeah. So she didn't want to work for anybody anymore. And I said, cool. Cause you know,

were like, I know I'm pretty good at what I do. And the kind of commissions I was getting was such a tiny fraction of the sales. I'm like, hold on a second. I'm, I'm doing 30 million in sales and I'm getting, I'm getting this. Yeah. What were you selling? Medical devices. Okay. And, and so I said, Hey, do you, do you want to do this business? She's like, yeah, let's do the business. I want nothing to do with it. I'll, I'll, but I want my own practice. I'll be the dentist. You do the business stuff. So we bought this practice for about half a million. And then i started figuring out okay so cash um no no no no no how do you structure the deal you remember um we just got a loan from a bank it was like a seven year and here's the thing like we had never

had a note so big in our lives yeah like we hold holy shit we got to pay seven thousand dollars a month you know on this thing um we had never done anything like that before i sell the range rover everything was leveraged we didn't know any different i mean everything and what ends up happening is i'm like okay now we got to make money because now we got to pay that back um and And so I started looking at the model of the business and I just spent like a couple of days there. And I'm seeing they're referring all these patients out to the oral surgeon, the periodontist, the imaging center, the lab. And you sit there for a day like, what the hell are we doing? Why are we not doing all of this? So somebody comes into the dentist. The dentist is essentially like the primary care of the mouth, if you will.

And there's work that's being done there. People are paying or the insurance company is paying for it. but you're saying then, oh, you need additional work. So you would refer it out. And in the legacy model, do you get a referral fee for that? No. So it's just like, hey, I'm sending you to my friend because they can do the oral surgery. You might get a Christmas basket.

You might get tickets to go watch a game. This is what would happen. And so you know who really suffered was the patient because the patient comes back and the radiographs aren't there or they're fucked up. Oh, hey, I'm really sorry. Got to go back to the imaging center. The crown or whatever product you get back from the dental lab, that's fucked up.

Oh, it didn't fit. Sorry, come back next week. Go back to the dental lab and all this stuff. And we're like, for continuity of care, and this makes sense, why don't we start bringing this all under one roof? Got it. And so we doubled. So that practice was doing about $400,000 or $500,000 a year when we bought it. We did 1.2 within the next year, and then 2.4 the next year, and then almost $5 million the year after that.

I'm like, you know what? We're pretty good at this. And the growth that's happening there is you're growing like the primary care business or you're bringing in these other components and now it's all that revenue. We vertically integrated the whole thing. Yeah. So now she has every specialist in dentistry working underneath her. We had an imaging center in our same building. We bought the real estate.

We started a dental lab. And so not only are we benefiting from our own, we're referring to ourselves, but now we're getting other places to refer to us as well. And so that started to kick ass. um what was it called like ancestry dentistry oh i wish i wish um if i had the opportunity right now to rename it it would have been called strong jaw strong jaw and that actually is a company that that we're launching in in the near future what's fascinating though is uh i actually didn't know this i was reading a book uh james nester uh wrote a book called uh breath or breathe yeah and um you know somebody recommended it to me and and i knew it was going to be a good book because

literally i was here somebody was on the podcast i had the book we got in the elevator and he was like that was that book was stupid it wasn't very helpful to me like it's you know just breathe right and we got in the elevator there's a dude who saw the book and he was like i was literally just doing breathing exercises the most amazing book when i was like all right i got to read this thing and in the book they talk about how actually savages have better teeth than the civilized populations and their whole thing was you know soft foods like all these things i'm sure that you've talked about and it just blew my mind that like literally the civilized people were actually fucked up more than just people who live naturally you go see modern day primitive culture

tribes their oral health their dental health is almost flawless and this is the thing we believe we're sold this bill of goods if you brush and floss this is the oral hygiene hypothesis if you brush and floss you're not going to get cavities well our early ancestors didn't brush didn't floss and they don't get cavities modern day primitive culture tribes we've been to the amazon africa and Mongolia. We've seen six or seven different tribes. They don't brush. They don't floss. They don't get cavities. It comes down really to about two or three things. One is the nutrition, right? So you have, this is why liver is king, right? You need the fat soluble system, vitamin A, D, K, and some E. So you need to have that fat soluble system, but you also need to have the mechanical

loading. So if we're eating baby food, we're eating the mushy stuff and you don't have the mechanical loading. You can't just have one without the other. There's some other stuff going on there. Listen, I'm not saying don't brush your teeth. If you want fresh breath, go brush your teeth. But this isn't really fixing the root cause. And so I think over time that this is really what she got fed up about. She's like, I'm not addressing the root cause. I'm just fixing. It's all band-aid solutions. And she starts talking to them about nutrition. Weston A. Price wrote this book, Nutrition, Physical Degeneration, all about this stuff. It's really well documented. And she starts talking to him about, you know, hey, let's get you eating

liver. Let's get you having some bone marrow, some egg yolks, some midday sun. And the patients are like, just fix my teeth. You know, just fix my teeth. And then as she starts to say, hey, listen, I'm done doing all this. She's frustrated. She needs to go be a mom. I start thinking, well, how do we get this kind of nourishment? How do we address the root cause? And so that's kind of when a supplement idea came up to me. And I thought, man, this is way bigger than this. Like, look at how we addressed our kids' root cause. There's so much more good we can do spreading this message. So I think we did a pretty kick-ass job in dentistry. We, at the end of it, we own a $6 million building. She sold the practice, which was about a $5 million sale for the practice.

So we did a decent job. We struggled a lot through those years. You know, we couldn't make payroll a lot through those years, you know, because we overbought the real estate, but guess what? At the end of it, we own the real estate. Explain overbuying real estate. What exactly that meant? Yeah. She saw this building at this intersection, this really fancy intersection. I don't know if anybody knows Houston. It's called River Oaks. It's like the most affluent neighborhood in Houston. And one day she's like, hey, I want to buy that building. I'm like, okay, let's go see how much it costs. And I think we had like a three or $400,000 budget. Well, the building was 3 million. Then it's a couple more million to build out. And so the bank was dumb enough to

loan us the money to buy it you know and the covenants of the loan like well I got to keep my job because I was doing pretty good um but then we couldn't afford the note anymore payroll wasn't working out and so I had to quit the corporate job to come figure that out and I mean everything was being repossessed we had everything really oh the banks are calling um and I'm like I can't I tell the front I can't talk to them on the phone I gotta go make money you know if they want to come visit. They got to come here. I'm in crisis mode, right? And I'm so glad we went through this too, because we figured that out too. You know, if you figure out enough things like that, you have enough rites of passage. I think this is what ends up like really building high

courage. Oh man, we could do anything. So it wasn't smooth sailing, but that's what I mean by we overbought the real estate. We couldn't afford it. We figured out a way to barely make payroll several times. I mean, several times we just had to get cash advances on the credit cards, right? But after all the cash advances were done on the credit card to make payroll, you know, then there's something called care credit. We would, we would do that. We would find some way to sell something to get something for, for payroll, you know? And meanwhile, I thought, Oh God, we're losers. Like my confidence was really rocked. You know, I thought, Oh, we could do a lot of stuff. Maybe, maybe I can't do this. Maybe I can't do anything. Um, and then at the end of it, you look like,

you know what, we, we still got this building. And now what the building is generating for passive income for the rentals we have is pretty like, Oh, we did that. This is what we walked away with. We still own it today. We still own it today. So you sell the practice. Is that the first time that you guys put like material money in your bank account well it's really funny because of all the debts that we had you know like we ended up paying off our debts so we've i remember we were down to one car in a rental house really we we went from the range rovers the big house all this stuff uh down to a rental house and we shared one old white beat-up chevrolet yeah we didn't really have money to put in the bank and so when you do that why jump back in to start

another business. Why not go back and say, you know what? I was pretty good at doing the medical sales. I thought about that. Oh, trust me. I was talking to everybody. Hey man, you think I should come back? Um, because I knew that was easy, you know, and I know that, you know, there's like, usually the easiest thing is probably not the best. Um, but then I thought, man, I'm an evolutionary hunter. Like if I were going to design my next business, what I would make sure is I don't make the same mistakes. I had a brick and mortar, right? That was open from like seven the seven, one location, one little spot. I'm like, you know what I'm going to do is I'm going to figure this thing out. What's my real why in the world? My kids weren't healthy. We figured

out how to get them healthy. How would I like to sell this, right? I would like to sell it 24-7, 365 across all continents in 55 countries, right? It's always available. And so I started to write this stuff down. I'm like, okay, you know what? This is actually my why in the world, you know, and, and I know how to do this. And so I said, I know how I, I believed we could do it, figure it out. Yeah. And so it's really interesting. I tried to hire consultants. Hey, how do you start this kind of business? Nobody would help me, you know? And so it's just one fucking step at a time, you know, and it's wild what you could do after five or six steps. And then eventually, you know, we have one product. How much of the beginning is like you sitting down there, there's a story.

um, uh, Scott Adams got a book, uh, and he talks about, uh, the two different political campaigns in 2016, Hillary Clinton and, uh, Donald Trump. And the way that he positions it in the book is he says that, uh, Hillary Clinton was very much, you know, the political machine and, uh, they do all their testing, uh, of all the different mottos and messages and all this stuff. And they do their focus groups and they get it back and they end up coming up with the slogan. I think it was, uh, stronger together. Right. And, uh, the way that it describes in the book is one day Trump walks into a room and they're like, Hey, we need a motto. And he like thinks for a second, he's like, make america great again right i'll tell you right now that's me because i i my motto is

fire fire fire aim fire fire fire will aim right like my motto is take fucking massive action at whatever you do make all the mistakes because i make all the mistakes man but i course correct along the way and and at the end of this the trajectory where you end up i can't tell you how many brilliant people i know that are still talking about this business idea right there's still way back here way smarter all the financing financial backing in the world and and they're like still at like step two or three yeah you know so i'm definitely the latter when it comes to that and i also think it's like a intuition thing right like some people have intuition other people may have intuition they don't trust their intuition and so they do the testing or whatever and there's

arguments for for both i don't think either one's like right or wrong i think you got to know who you are um so you guys started the business uh do you raise capital for it do you just like figure out some way to get a website up like what do you do you know we uh with the sale of the practice we were able to pay off debts uh pretty much i was able to clear some credit cards i was able to use seven thousand dollars on a credit card to place a po um i learned how to this is before the shopify stuff um so i i learned some coding i learned to make a website uh i built it all in the kitchen in our kitchen i'm making the website i'm taking the pictures i did it's just me you know and i'm handling all the emails and i didn't raise any capital i i put seven thousand

dollars on the credit card you know as soon as we started to make some money and i start thinking oh my god like this is actually going to work so it's pretty much profitable from day one because it had to be it sounds like um not really because uh then we're just living off credit cards because um it actually did so well that um and now i've got to place a bigger po and a bigger po and a bigger po and and and then you know what i can't do this by myself anymore and so i ended up hiring a guy for next to nothing. And I, and I remember the resentment, I'm paying you this money next to nothing. It's hardly any money and I'm not making any money yet. And so, you know, that's what happens, you know, a lot of times in business at the beginning of businesses, you get paid last,

you know, dead last. So that happened. Um, I would say it probably took about maybe a year, year and a half, you know, to, to really start to see the profits coming from it. And while you're doing this, you're still into working out, uh, kind of, uh, lifting weights doing all this stuff? Oh yeah. Um, I've, I've always been obsessed with that. Um, here's the thing. I didn't leave my house for years. I mean, like I wouldn't, my kid wanted some like workout bar from downtown. I'm like, Oh, that's awesome. You want a workout bar, but I can't drive you because all I'm doing is this, you know, from five in the morning to like midnight, this is all I'm doing. You know, customer emails are coming in people that

are sharing their health crisis. And I know I have to be there for them. Right. And so this is, it's like 20. And not only am I handling all of these emails to take care of the customer, but then I'm doing the packaging and then I'm driving to the post office, you know, because it's time for me to go to the post office. It's wild. I mean, this is what I did. People don't realize that this structure, this mechanism is like pretty much all these Amazon sellers there are hundreds if not thousands or tens of thousands hundreds of thousands whatever in the united states uh and also globally but in the united states where these small businesses basically exist online and this is the daily routine of people yeah they basically get orders

they respond with the customer they do whatever with their widget that they're selling and then they either leave it outside for uh you know amazon or the post office or whatever or they drive there yeah and if you go and you stand in a post office in like pretty much any town in america you will see the small business owners that are selling stuff online, come in, drop stuff off and do it every day, day after day. So to answer your question related to working out, I mean, if I had customer emails, there's no way I could go work out, but I had to work out. So I would do whatever I needed to do. And I would say, okay, if I can get caught up to this mount and there's only one or two emails,

I'm going to go in there as fast as I can and go get a work. And then I would get a couple of mini workouts and doing that. So I was still able to do that. And how big are you at that point? how much do you weigh you think 175 175 pounds all right and so as the business starts to grow this is i'm assuming we're getting now into like the late 2010s or so kind of 2018 2019 somewhere in that range right you at some point are like i want to grow the business so like let me create liver king or like how does that idea kind of come into your mind before you even do anything so i i already had a couple of businesses okay so now you got multiple businesses yeah i'm like you know what um i don't know if you've heard this but but the why has been because my kids

right and then you realize how desperately people are hurting and so um you've probably heard these statistics but i just want to say it one more time um 85 of the population struggles with self-esteem issues 80 struggle paycheck to paycheck and you got to figure out why is that why do we spend more money than we make right and a lot of times it's because we're trying to express our worth and value with shit that we buy on a credit card right instead of going in here expressing our worth and value. 70% of the population are overweight, half are obese, 50% on prescription medicine, 40% have or will get cancer, and 20% want to have kids and can't have kids. And I'm getting all these emails in, and I see how desperately they're hurting,

and how they hate their lives. And I'm seeing this simple solution, ancestral living, these nine ancestral tenets, sleep, eat, move, shield, connect, cold, sun, fight, and bond. Somebody comes to us with a neurocognitive issue, and they're asking for a product suggestion. I'm like a product suggestion, you know, have you ever heard of ketosis, right? Have you ever heard of egg yolks? Have you ever heard of getting the sun? Have you ever heard of these ancestral tenants? Here's what we need to be talking about. And if, if, if we can start to ratchet up some health improvements there, then let's start talking about some of the nose to tail stuff that you can be doing. And it's so funny because I can't tell you almost every time they're like,

hold on a second. Do you sell sunshine? Are you selling egg yolks? You know, what we're doing is we're selling a path to a better life. And when you see that work so successfully in a business, you know what i got to do more of this and so i opened up more businesses and the goal is to open up businesses that sell ancestral living in every category of business um and so when i talk about strong jaw this is the category it's a dental category we have a canine category coming up we have a gut category coming up a neurocognitive if i'm going to get this message out this is one of the house so you know the why this is one of the house um that we're going to do it how many businesses you got today about 10 10 and how many you think that you can get to we're going to get

to a hundred. You think you're going to have a hundred businesses? We're going to get to a hundred in every different category. This message is going to go mainstream and people still go to the dentist every single day thinking that they're going to brush and floss and they have recurrent decay and they can't figure out why do I have the current decay? And guess what? They have much more deep health issues. This is a sign of what's really going on in the rest of the body. This is not okay. We're going to have to change this paradigm. We have to change the paradigm. You know, it's not how you brush and floss your teeth. This is how we're going to have to educate.

And it's all nine ancestral tenets. And we're predominantly going to meet people here in this category. And that's going to go in every respective category. So I just want to be really clear. The vision has never changed. We have to acknowledge that people are hurting at record rates. There's a better simple solution to go forward. And so businesses are kicking ass.

This episode is brought to you by Masari. Your days of spending hours scouring the internet for quality crypto insights are over. Masari is your one-stop shop for all your crypto data and research needs. With Masari Pro, you can gain access to exclusive, industry-leading, long-form daily research reports, daily crypto news, advanced asset screeners, and curated sets of charts and protocol metrics. If you try Masari Pro today, listeners of the Pomp podcast can get up to 25% off their Masari Pro membership by visiting www.masari.io backslash Pomp or enter promo code Pomp at checkout. That's www.masari.io backslash Pomp and use promo code Pomp. wallet app and arculus key card your keys are generated and encrypted on their secure element rated ccealp6 plus if you don't know what that means that means you and only you own your keys

and therefore your crypto keep your digital assets secure and safe from exchange freezes bankruptcies and hacks with arculus save 20 through december 10th with promo code pop go to arculus and use promo code pump today you went 10 for 10 or did you have businesses that You tried, and they failed, and then you moved on to the next one. We're 10 for 10. 10 for 10. Doing this. Okay, and what's the craziest one that maybe people wouldn't know about?

Well, I don't even know. How would you define crazy? What do you mean? What's the one that you're like, oh, people have no clue that this is even a business that we have? Probably most of them don't know. Most of them? Here's the thing. Let's just go through them.

What's the first one? The first one is this. If it's okay with you, I don't want to promote any of my businesses. If anybody really wants to know, you can go look it up online. But this is getting to your question. the whole liver king when did liver king come in here liver king came in because i can't tell you how many people come to our house and they're like holy shit like you guys live this way and we're like well this is of course we live this way like how do you live and time after time

people be like dude you got to go on social media you know time after time people like they got to make a documentary about you guys the way that you do all nine of these ancestral tenants like you guys are out of a movie. And, um, and so the vision is to raise awareness. People are hurting here. Here's, here's the data, right? And here's the solution forward. I'm like, how do I do a better job at that? And the way that you live, I think this is the first time I ever saw a piece of content from you was, uh, there was a tour of your house. I thought you were fucking crazy, man. Right. I'm telling you that, uh, you, uh, I think you basically start and immediately you're talking about uh faraday bags grounded uh house uh at one point you talked about like the ethernet

cords are like unplugged from all the devices so just like why is the structure of the home forget the workouts the food all that but just like the home itself what is like the general idea you're trying to protect like radio waves the electronics and forest shield right and early ancestors had to shield from lions and neighboring tribes and the illusion of danger is kind of gone like oh we're safe but we're really bombarded with so many horrific things you had a guest on recently that was talking about uh plastics and phytates and how that affects hormone those are hormone disruptors those are all around us right but but a lot of those things that you can see and there's a lot of data on those things um we're now we're swimming in an experiment non-native emf so you

come in our house and if you have we don't want you to bring your cell phone in our house but if you're going to bring your cell phone in our house it goes in a faraday uh container what happens so i take my cell phone i put it in that bag what's that bag doing that that's beneficial yeah it's blocking any input or output from the phone so basically the phone's down i can't use it for all intents and purposes yeah that's right uh same thing with with wi-fi you know people like well how are you gonna do your thing do your businesses yeah you ever heard of ethernet you know how many people have never heard of ethernet connection they're faster they're more secure you know i'm like um so you have no wi-fi in the house we don't have any wi-fi in the house yeah so uh and again

And like all this is, there's some data on voltage-gated calcium channels and how that affects cells and cells can't cell signal to each other to express their default functions. There's some data on that. But I would say, listen, let's pretend there's not. We're doing an experiment. We've never had non-native EMFs the way we do now. What is a non-native EMF? So there's natural EMFs that come from the sun, that come from solar flares. There's EMF pulses that just happen naturally.

on earth but but now everyone in here with a phone has the running an experiment and look at how many there are and normally now like in office buildings and apartments and all this stuff everybody has wi-fi there's modems everywhere you know and emf sensitive people can even tell you here's what i feel from this and so we built our house as a sanctuary like this is where we're going to heal rest recover do our best work i think the sleep environment absolutely needs to be pristine most people won't argue about the sleep environment so we make sure the sleep environment is perfect and this is how we've built our house and it's funny you said these things because once again when you live this way if you were to say hey man describe your house i wouldn't

describe any of that this is just how we live so when you're saying this like it kind of reminds me how neurotic and obsessive we are and i'm like our kids are in here our kids are developing you know it's my obligation to make sure that they have the best shot they can be you have a flip phone or you got a like a smart yeah i got a regular phone you got a phone you carry it around or no okay what do you do with it uh well so like right now yeah just like just in an average day are you carrying your phone around in your pocket what are you doing to uh increase the odds that you're living a more healthy kind of ancestral life but still have access to the night so we have we have a regular phone at the house you want to call me like there's a landline you call me on

my landline um i just started cracking them because derrick shared my email with the world and hundreds of emails from people and people found my phone number too they're calling that too um but uh but my phone is on airplane mode i would say 99 of the time it's on airplane mode so it's like is this a phone or is it a swiss army knife and i really use it as a camera and so i'll record when i need to record from it i'll take it out of airplane mode maybe or i might leave it in airplane mode and just plug in uh the ethernet with an adapter and do what i need to do to upload to social so i don't talk on my phone like my cell phone you don't talk on your uh really every once in a while i shouldn't say never um uh every once in a while i'll have a phone conference but

the phone conversation should happen on the landline if that doesn't happen we're out and about i'll do a speakerphone and i'll talk for a minute but you're asking like where's my phone my phone's not in my pocket my phone's like usually uh i call them my places right like they're it's usually in my office or it's in the gym or it's another you know place and so i have a couple of different phones i just leave there like if i need my phone to go record which is really my camera that's what i go and get yeah it's it's fascinating and then you mentioned sleep what do you do from like a sleep hygiene or sleep routine what does that process look like that you've now found works for you yeah I'm so glad you asked because this kind of ties in everyone's

gonna like most people like hey dude you're so crazy I'm not gonna do any of that yeah and we know that most people won't do that so what are some things that they can do you know and so from a sleep hygiene standpoint the best way to set up your sleep is by getting early morning sun through the eyes on the face on the skin first thing in the morning we need to get this exposure even when it's overcast outside and two minutes is better than none five minutes is better than two i always say if you can aim for five to ten do that and so first thing you should like literally you get up you go pee and then go outside or you go right outside i go outside okay i take a piss on my favorite tree outside all right uh i get the sun on me i have my bare feet connected to

the ground and i'm making a video at the same time so you're stunning your balls in the morning too no no i mean if you got your thing out right oh technically if i'm taking a piss that's what i'm saying i i wanted to push back on that because liver king suns his balls at nine o'clock in the morning or seven o'clock somebody made a video about this calling it a tenant to sun your balls in your ass and i'm like hold on where did you get that for i'm like hey guy whoever said that i'm like that might be your tenant let that be your tenant but like i just want to make it really clear this guy has never gone on record saying to do that but technically you know our early ancestors would have had some exposure when they're taking a piss and so you go outside you

get the sun early in the morning. That's right. That's right. So I get that part done. So in terms of sleep, get early morning sun through the eyes on the face on the skin, right? You want to finish your last meal three to four hours before bed. And then it's really important to take in the sunset as the final environmental cue that the day is winding down. This is really important. And you don't want to come back in the house to all the artificial lights. Either you can have those lights off and just have firelight in the house, which I know isn't really practical for people or you can put on these uvex glasses that will block a lot of those those those lights and so these are there's there's 20 if you want to know all 20 things you should go to liverking.com

there's a nine and central tenants ebook it's free um there's a lot but those are the like three or four main things that that will do but like you sleep uh i think in the video you sleep on like a wood wood plank bed what is that yeah you know well today like what is it that people sleep on today yeah you know when you go visit with modern day primitive culture tribes there's not a no like look at beds today they're the perfect height you just barely fall into it you know and you wonder why people keep hitting snooze they're so comfortable like they just stay in there's like a cast they have these metal springs that can also conduct ambient electricity you need to be in this deep parasympathetic state again even if you take this out of the equation most

mattresses are off gassing you know and and you can get an off a non-toxic a non-off gassing mattress but if you look at modern day primitive cultures they don't have these beds at this height they're on the ground and you have 70 80 year olds that that can do full squats get up and down from the ground without using their hands if you continue to use that kind of mobility you won't lose that kind of mobility and that mobility also confers a balance and agility benefits so you don't break a hip because you know what happens when you break a hip man like you're almost done all the comorbidities that happen when you break a hip um these modern day primitive culture tribes are kicking our ass in life and so this is one of the things that we've learned from them that we

took back home. My wife wanted just to sleep directly on the floor and with no padding, nothing. And I'm like, hold on a second. It doesn't seem very evolutionarily consistent. Why don't we have some plant material, maybe some dirt, maybe something. And she's hardcore, you know? And so after a year or two of trying that, like I got bone bruises that aren't getting any better. She's like, I love it. I love doing this, you know, like not me. And so we got about maybe that much cushion that simulates some plant material. So that's why we sleep on the wooden playing bet is because it elevates it a little bit because of the humidity. There's no more mold or moisture that creates any massive issues. So that's a big deal. And like I said, there's

like 20 things. If you read the ancestral tenants ebook, which is free, you'll see all of them. I think the big things are that most people, because again, people aren't going to go do that. Almost no one's going to go and do that. Get early morning sun, finish your last meal three or four hours before bed, take in the sunset as a final environmental cue, and then block the blue lights, hopefully with with the uh uvex glasses got it so you've been living this life right and it works for you it works for your family uh there's some people who are like yep i agree with everything he just said and i'm trying to do all that shit i got a faraday bag i got the glasses i'm eating the liver whatever there's other people who are like bro shut the fuck up i'm eating mcdonald's

and like good luck right and everyone in between but what i find fascinating about your story is was all the information that's now come out is you basically called your shot on the liver king thing right so i saw some of the emails uh derrick for more plates more dates uh uh published and i listened to one of the interviews he did with chris williamson over at modern wisdom and one of the things in the uh in one of the emails is basically like i'm going to get a million followers and i'm going to do this this and this and i was like you know the crazy part is not that he wrote the shit that he went and did it and so forget for a second the steroids and kind of all the controversy and stuff talk about the invention of liver king right because i think that what

many people don't understand about the internet is that most of the shit you see on the internet is not real life. Like I always say, Twitter's not real life, right? It's like, yeah, you might be using your real name, maybe re using your real photo. You may think you don't have, uh, uh, you know, uh, another, uh, um, you know, character or anything that you're using on the internet. But come on, if I talk to you in person at dinner and I see what you're tweeting, you're a different person on the internet. You drew a line in the sand and you were like, there's me and there's liver king to some degree. And so like, what was the, the idea or the strategy? I would say most of that is to a degree, you know, earlier you said, um, about the email,

how do I bring everything to me? You know, um, I'm really good at focusing. And if you don't have to drive in your car or go anywhere or deal with any bullshit conversations, it's like, you know, how much more productive you can be when you know what your roles and goals are. You can say, I'm going to have a million followers by March 2nd. And this is not even a full year. You know, I'm like, I know I can do that. And this, I remember the guys I'm talking to, everyone's laughing. They had to hold their laugh back. They were almost embarrassed. They're laughing in my face. I'm like, listen, I know this is an unreasonable goal. It will take unreasonable things for us to get there, but I know we can do this. I believe in it. And what I need for you to

do is not laugh at it just to say, Hey man, if you're willing to do anything and everything it takes to get here, we can do that. And so this is why if I need to meet with an accountant, I don't go to the accountant. The accountant comes to me, same thing with a lawyer, same thing with any meeting that I have that they all come to me so that I can stay focused on my main roles and goals as, as a husband, as a father, as a primary role to express my highest, most dominant form as a man, as a CEO of the ancestor lifestyle. And so whenever all this happened, I'm like, okay, this is the goal. And there wasn't really this line in the sand per se. What I said, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to call it passive income. You guys are going to record most of what

I do. I sleep, eat, move, shield, connect, cold, son, fight, and bond this way every day. So I'm going to do this. What you guys are going to do is keep up with me and record this. Now, is it all 100% like that, I would say there's no doubt there are days where I feel like shit. And I wake up and I say, good morning primals. It's prime time to do this. I'm like, fuck, I feel like shit. You know, really what I need to do is take a cold shower. You know, uh, I think yesterday or today, this is what my good morning primal was like. I don't really feel very good, you know, and I'm doing more of that right now. Um, but, but I would say, um, sure there's some elements to liver king the character but the the thing is most of what we do is really my truest primal

authentic self on there one of uh one of the guys on our team always says like everything's the wwe right of just like wrestling is such a good uh comparison to the rest of the world because everyone is putting on their face they're putting on the act they're doing all this um and there's positives and negatives to it obviously uh creating the liver king character has led to a bunch of positive. You've talked about this ad nauseum. And I think that it's not just around eating certain things or working out or whatever.

There's mental health benefits, like all of that. But there's also this danger of audience capture where all of a sudden, and I've even had it happen to myself, where you're like, the audience expects me to do X. If I deviate from X, they're going to come for me. They're going to expose me. They're going to do this.

They're going to piss me off. You know, whatever the thing is. Have you had that? like was it something that you realized like oh shit like i have been captured by the audience to some degree or is it something that like maybe now you're realizing steroids or something else just in general i'll say in general again like this this is the relieving thing it's like if i'm gonna go on social media you guys are gonna record what i do this is how i eat this is how i live you know like people are especially right now saying liver king's a character um this is how we

live our life and and you know what's crazy this is how liver queen lives her life too we're all eating raw liver and raw testicle and raw bone marrow every single day you know and all of it's revealed in the stories i couldn't imagine how exhausting it would be to probably make five six seven eight stories a day my good morning primals what i eat how i work out the liver king philosophy going on a walk i mean there's so many things that are in here like oh my god what if i like i don't know how exhausting that would be if a wwe character had to do that and how sustainable and scalable so i'm like um i've never really been worried about getting caught yeah other than what let's just happen but in terms of um expressing my primal true form this is what you

know the reason why i came up with the name liver king wasn't really just to like capture this larger than life character it's i gotta get this message across that liver is king if you don't let take anything else from this podcast or when when you meet this guy it's like oh he's talking all this nonsense. Just remember one thing. If you're going to just do one thing overlay on top of your, you don't have to change your life. Just start eating liver. And when people start eating liver, they feel the difference. And so this is the message I wanted to get across. And normally I say liver King here, here's what liver King's having for dinner, liver King out. And I've said it three times and somewhere in there, I always say, because liver is King. And that's now when

I meet people all over the place, like, Hey, liver King, let's do this thing. And I'm like, hold on, hold on. Why is my name liver King? Let's talk about that. Do you know why? And impressively, a lot of people know why, but thank God. And then I say, are you eating it? Well, most of the time they're not like, well, if all I'm doing is entertaining you, then I'm failing you. You have to be eating it. And then I go home and I figure out how do I get people to connect more deeply with this message so that it can change and impact their life. I know I've said a lot there, but I would say that, um, I never really drew a line in the sense that, okay, here's Brian Johnson and here's liver King. It really has been like, okay,

we're going to record the way that I live my life. I do these crazy workouts. I eat these crazy things. I sleep this way. We live this way. And so the nice thing is it really hasn't been exhausting. Could you have gotten as big on social media if you did under Brian Johnson? The name? Yeah. Or do you think that, do you think the, the branding that like the character, right? Even though it is a reflection of what you do every day, uh, was important to get the social following? You know, um, so before social following, I had a beard before social following, I didn't wear a shirt you know before social following like I looked spoke talk like this guy you know um and and so you scared of shirts well you know what I'm scared of not getting sun

you know and and also um I think it is important to know you know again like before social I didn't wear a shirt so now I'm going on social and I'm wearing a shirt now actually I'm playing a character you know so I didn't feel comfortable trying to play a character you know again it's like okay so now we're recording let me hold on guys let me put my shirt on you know it was like i'm going to go do this stuff you guys just recorded you know and half the time where's thomas thomas is like hey i didn't get that i'm like he says can we do it again i said no you got to keep up with me you don't do you don't do second takes i i sometimes i will but i you know what um you might call it roid rage you know like i've never had patience i always say in life you

get what you tolerate you get what you demand i demand the most of myself so i demand the most of the people around me. I don't have a lot of patients. You better keep up with me. And so imagine if I started to say, Oh, hold on, you're recording. Let me go put a shirt on. Um, how different would it be if I called myself, Brian Johnson didn't have a beard and I don't know, look like everybody else, probably pretty significantly different, you know, but, but then I also think about, um, think about how effortless it is that I get my message across. The name is liver King because liver is King that that's, if I can do that, you know, I don't know if you listen to the Joe Rogan one with Derek, but in that, in that message, Joe Rogan said how

great liver is and that he eats it all the time. Derek said that he eats it every day. All I heard was liver is king. That's all I heard. And I'm like, you know how great this is. Yeah. I don't think anyone has an issue with the ancestral living, uh, with liver is king. Like, like all those things. I think actually most people are like, no, he's a hundred percent right on that stuff. It's like 95% of the message people are like, yup. And we need more people doing that. And whether it's you, whether it's Huberman, whether it's, you know, uh, uh, Rogan, whoever is like pushing this message forward is, uh, a hundred percent what more people need to hear about.

Um, we've even had people come on, uh, uh, there's this one guy, Texas slim. I don't know if you've come across him yet. Uh, but he talks all about like how corrupted the food supply system is. And, uh, cattle ranchers are basically, you know, uh, the big, uh, uh, cattle companies basically got them by the balls. Right. And they're making them do things they don't want to do and all this stuff. And it's just economics at play.

um so i don't think any people people have a problem with that the steroid thing obviously people got a problem with um but i'm gonna do my best to unpack what i think is a nuance here uh but i need to caveat with i don't fucking know anything about this shit so you're gonna give me a little bit of an education but when people hear steroids what i think they think of is ornal schwarzenegger they think of like uh you went you bought steroids in like a back alley you're jabbing it in your ass and like let's see what happens uh that is like maybe one extreme we'll call it the back alley steroid uh use then there is uh what i think has become socially uh more understood acceptable uh and uh maybe talked about which is like this hormone therapy stuff

where people are like yo testosterone's down a shit ton over the last couple of decades why is that happening and what can men do about it and so that's maybe like the other end of the extreme. If you had to explain to people that don't understand a lot about steroids or hormones or whatever, like, where are you on that spectrum in terms of what you've been doing? Is it just the hormone stuff? Is it somewhere in between? Like, how would you think of that spectrum? Yeah. Um, there's been times where it's been in between. Okay. And when I tried it in between, this is why I reached out to Derek and that coaching guy, because I needed help because my blood chemistries got fucked up because my lipids got high. Um, my, my liver enzymes got

high and um and i did have a clinician monitoring me the whole time and so but my clinician i felt like wasn't as valuable so i'm like okay let me get a second opinion let me get a third opinion let me figure this out um we came off of some of those other things which were the winstraw and the nandrolone and stayed on testosterone and growth hormone and then everything looked pretty good and so technically i had somebody tell me the other day hey man don't tell people that you're on steroids because what you're on is trt and growth hormone you're on hrt you're on hormone And I said, listen, do you know how, I haven't been forthcoming. I haven't been honest.

So what I need to do now is overshare. I've been on steroids. I'm on steroids now. You know, technically testosterone is a steroid. Growth hormone is not a steroid. It's a peptide hormone. For all intents and purposes, like these are PEDs, right? These are things that help us in the gym, help us to recover, help to build muscle,

help to lose fat. Like there's no doubt that these things, you know, help with that. So we draw the kind of line in the sand of like the TRT, the growth hormone, that is more like hormone therapy type stuff that I think people are talking about. Many of the folks who have been talking about you take it. They openly share, you know, pros, cons, why they do it, whatever. It's important to say that that's HRT if it's managed in the normal range. HRT, for those that don't know. Hormone replacement therapy.

Okay. Um, if you're above the, like, uh, the, the normal physiological, if it's super physiological, well, I think now you're talking like bodybuilder levels or something like that. And so this is like windstroll and all these other things. What is the difference of the impact on the body? Right. So, so you said when you took some of the other stuff outside of just the hormone replacement therapy that you started to get fucked up basically. Yeah. Like why do people take it and what is the intended outcome when they put that in their body? Yeah. I don't know why uh i can't speak for other people you know i'll just say for me um i have to get into

the gym multiple times a day and it's at least two times a day sometimes it's more times a day and this isn't like just doing regular workouts i mean even when i show on on my stories it's like i only show three or four things that i do i probably do six seven eight things you know like i gotta take myself to this point where i know i'm crushing myself where i'm destroying myself and it's like okay that makes me feel good enough for a while until i have to do it again and i have to do that at least at least twice a day for me to look at myself in the mirror like before i go to bed i sleep good by the way i sleep good and i do have self-worth but that's what's required of me to have self-worth and if i leave out one of those i don't yeah how old are you i'm

44 so 44 and i'm assuming that like most men at some point in your 30s you started to feel like uh hey i can't do the same amount of volume of workouts and intensity uh that you previously were doing is that something that you think hormone replacement therapy uh most men in america are going to experiment with and like can get back to how you know what i hope more than anything is that the first thing they look at are the nine ancestral tenants these things that our early ancestors have done since the beginning of time 50 years ago we had almost 50 higher testosterone It's really clear things are happening today in the modern world, and if you look at modern-day primitive culture tribes that are kicking ass, their neurochemistry is pretty good. I don't know if their hormones have been measured, but, you know, the low-hanging fruit here really is sleep, eat, move, shield, connect, cold, sun, fight.

Now, there's work that has to go into that. There's no doubt about that. My hope and goal, like, is people are saying, hey, so you're going to be an advocate for it now, and I would say this is nuanced. You know, for a young person, hell no. You know, there's no place, there's no form of it unless you have hypogonadism. So instead of like, instead of, or unless there's like a physiological impairment for you to produce adequate testosterone, there's no place for it if you're a young person. Now, I think if you're, I don't know, in your mid thirties and you know about some of these natural levers, like the nine ancestral tenets, and you're doing this stuff, give yourself that shot. Now, if you're doing this stuff and you still have low testosterone, if you feel like shit, if you look like shit, if you function like shit, go talk to someone who knows their shit and have that conversation and decide for themselves.

There's no doubt that our test, I mean, you probably know some of the statistics, right? A lot of it has to do with xenoestrogens and phytoestrogens. And if you just shield properly and get your estrogen exposure down, you know what a difference that makes. If you start sleeping, all of these things make such a big impact on our hormones and our neurochemistry, and sleep is probably the biggest lever. You start getting early morning sun, you finish your last meal early, you take in the sunset, you block out all these blue lights

instead of looking at your phone right before bed. And you can do that if you have your UVA glasses on. if you just fix your sleep, your testosterone will go up a ton. Your growth hormone will go up a ton. You know, I do think that as we get older, we're not meant to still be in this warrior archetype where we're working out two or three times a day. You know, there's something I'm dealing with internally that I never really faced before. Not until all of this came out. Right. And then I said, well, you know what? I got to do this every day. I got to get into the gym. When I'm on vacation, I got to get into the gym. Yesterday we had a really busy day. I crushed myself in the

morning. And then we ordered dinner. I'm like, Oh, well, guess what? I got to go do this thing again before we go and eat. Um, this is again, what I have to do. And then somebody said, well, why do you have to do that? And I, again, I know I'm dealing with this. You know, I think it probably harkens back to my 10 to 15 year old self. I think it harkens back to like when I figured out that I was strong, um, and I doubled down on that. And it's like, okay, before that, I felt worthless. And then I figured out, man, if I can do that, I think I'm capable of anything. and so part so this is what is required of me to feel this way so to me it's pretty deep to me there's a lot of stuff that i need to do um but i think that there's a time and a place for it

and and so i'm glad to be able to talk about it now i think it's just really important to know if there's a time and a place and you're trying to do these things naturally um how much you want to bet most people will have such a meaningful this happens every day i get tons of dms every day i felt like shit i had issues with my hormones and i started following some of these things and now i feel way better i'm building more muscle i'm finally the husband that my wife married i'm finally the dad that that my boys deserve because i started doing these fucking things i'm like oh god thank god so people need to do these things because they work um let's say people are doing these things and it's not working out go go get monitored no matter what you gotta go to a trained

hormone clinician you just try and go to a guy at the gym you know and you're gonna take something that might not be pure you know you might do a whole lot more harm than good and you got to get monitored you know like for me to figure out my exact dose i had to get monitored i have such a specific dose you know for me to feel the way to feel good and to make sure it doesn't have an effect on on my lipids or any other chemistry i needed the exact dose and i wouldn't know that without being monitored remember you're talking to a complete idiot about this stuff so i'm asking you some basic questions you just shoot yourself with a needle in the ass like what is the application process i'm glad you're asking because i think one of my sons actually asked uh mom that

the other day um so growth hormone is right here in the stomach or right here on the side just uh it's uh subcutaneous in the fat um and then once a week we do testosterone in the ass in the ass and like you self in the ass cheek in the ass cheek just just so you guys know and you're doing it yourself or or somebody's helping you like how does that work both you know sometimes i might do it myself you know sometimes i'm like lyric queen not feeling real flexible today help me out a little bit um and and then when you do this uh in one of the emails i can't remember the email or maybe one of the uh conversations uh you said that you would take it before you went to work out right and so could people go and get this stuff they do it would

their bodies change at all this is like if you don't work out what happens there's the overwhelming majority of people that are on hormone replacement therapy and trt testosterone replacement therapy um they still look like shit you know they might feel better right um and they might look better but most people i mean i guess it's important to know if you think you're going to take that and you're going to look incredible like you got another thing coming i mean there's a lot of work that has to go into it uh so i would say um i don't know if you heard but i'm going to peel all this stuff back i'm not going to take it anymore you're going to go completely clean that's right what's going to happen to your body well this is yeah why i wanted to share this

because i hope you'll have me on in a year yeah um and i'll weigh 15 i'm gonna be bigger than you you know you might be get the trt you might be but um i mean i know exactly how it looked before yeah and here's the thing i bet if you saw me before you'd probably be like he looks pretty similar most people in the fitness industry know the difference uh so we're talking about a 15 pound difference so what so you weighed like i think you said 175 at one point earlier uh before you took this a year and a half ago or whatever about 175 and now you're like 190 200 yeah i'm 195 so so i probably am up to one between 175 and 185 ish um without anything it was 10 15 pounds basically by coming off of it. And then, uh, and you're still the record, um, that that's when I had reached

out to get on growth hormone. I had been on some testosterone placement therapy a couple of years prior. This episode is brought to you by compass mining, the world's largest marketplace for mining hardware and hosting with compass. Everyone can mine Bitcoin. You can do it at home or in one of their 23 hosting facilities around the world. All you need to do to start mining your own Bitcoin is go to compass mining.io today. Again, if you want to get into Bitcoin mining, go check out compass mining.io today. And so when you reach out to these people, one of the things that, uh, when I saw the emails, I saw Derek's thing and I saw podcasts, I was like, Oh shit, here we go. He's going to go, he's going to go through the fucking ringer. And there's one or two paths that

you can choose. You can either know that's not true. That's bullshit email, whatever. Or you can just be like yes that's true i'm sorry right which is the path you took how many people did you email before liver king became a thing and the reason why that was one of my first thoughts was like dude this guy's been living like this for a year and a half knowing there's fucking emails out there yeah that disprove something that he is saying on some of the biggest podcasts in the world yeah so was it just derrick and this coach or did you email like 200 people and everyone's stupid didn't check their email 100 people no no no no i was like holy shit just the two of them yeah really so just those two guys basically or you know very small number of people

that yeah and I do want to make it clear I don't think Derek did anything wrong you know I called Derek almost immediately just say thank you for doing this um I don't know what good will come of it but thank you for doing this I asked him how long it took to make such an incredible documentary I was really impressed actually how he put it all together I mean the way that he went through the email and read everything I wrote and the way he laughed at certain things I'm like oh i would laugh at that too when he laughed at it i'm like oh i said that exactly and i'm laughing at it too the emails are funny i agree like i don't know how you were writing them i don't know if you were like ready to you know put fucking trt in your ass as you were doing some shit but

like they were hilarious thank you you know um when when he went over i'm like i said all that and it's me to a t i'm like well there's no disputing any of this now and and there's no doubt like i also saw this as a path you know to to me be exactly who i need to be to express who i actually am i i've i've been honest about everything else that this one thing you know this has been weighing on me for a long time and so did you like go to sleep and you're like fuck tomorrow maybe the day i figure it out oh no no just just like over the year and a half when you knew these emails were out there or did you even forget that i know that a superpower that i have is focus and compartmentalizing and so this is not a lingering thought that i had um now i refer to him as the

clown coach the other guy who had reached out to and i say that because he made a video um saying that he refunded my money that he's not tech he was not technically my coach so if he wasn't technically my coach was there technically a breach of confidentiality he's trying to pose these kind of rhetorical questions so you're like pretty sure he's the one who leaked this oh he admits it okay he says i'm the guy who leaked it and i know right now he's trying to save face because he has all of his coaching clients said hold on you're going to leak my information you're telling me that what we exchange is not confidential and so is it clout chasing to some degree i don't know like he wants he wants to be the guy who like outed you or is it

just like all the press is good press like what do you think's going on you know i'm not really sure um but i just want to make it clear because we're being honest about everything yeah he did not refund my money and i'm not asking for a penny back actually okay how much do you think you paid him? I was probably like five or $6,000. Okay. Yeah, exactly. Listen, I don't need a penny back. Um, and, and he, he was my coach and he did send those emails to somebody else. Again, I think what he did, there's a, there's some issues there. Um, what Derek did to bring all the information forward. I don't think Derek did anything wrong. And there's so many silver linings that have come from this. How much money do you think you've spent total on steroids,

hormone replacement therapy etc over your life yeah well there's no doubt it all comes from the growth hormone because testosterone is like maybe 100 120 dollars for like a three-month supply so you take out the testosterone and all i tried was uh windstraw and uh and nandrolone uh maybe twice for the that's dirt cheap too okay um and so you're looking you're looking at the growth the better question probably is like how much you think you spent on growth hormone um growth hormone is expensive like how expensive uh well here's the thing for me to be in the normal range so at first it's like oh you just need um the small dose so so here's maybe it was like two thousand dollars a month at first uh and so i would go and get tested and nothing would

register no growth hormone no igf1 increase um so it's like okay let's double it um and so fuck now i'm gonna spend four thousand a month um so we tried doubling it and nothing happened we tried doubling it nothing happened and i'm like now we're spending all this money and nothing's happening and my blood chemistry is getting fucked up i'm getting pretty frustrated i'm reaching out to derek i'm reaching out to this other guy for help and uh finally we got to a pretty high dose again i don't know if you saw the email um the clinician thinks i'm i was a hyper non-responder whatever that means um but it took a pretty high dose so it took quite the average person would never have to spend this much money on it how much do you spend it listen um it's not i need a number come

on what is the number it's enough to buy a car every month a 50 grand no not not a 50 grand all right 30 grand do you know the number that he said in the email i don't remember okay so the number i think at the time was like 10 or 12 was like maybe 10 to 15 000 okay it's a little bit more than that so like 20 grand yeah do you think you spend a quarter million dollars on growth hormone over the last year and a half two years yeah oh yeah a million no no no no not a million you're saying that like it's crazy well let me tell you what what's really incredible about this all right Derek shared my email with the world yeah right and so now I have dozens of emails that have come in that say you know you're paying double the price because I ain't going to nobody

you know after I got this locked and loaded uh but hey guess what the world knows and so now consistently so many clinicians and hormone clinics have come in said, boom, here's a new quote. It's half the price. We're also a clinic, endocrinologist, medical director, yada, yada, yada. And so far I'm like, thank you, Derek, for that. You know, but pretty soon I'm going to save a hundred percent. Right now I'm saving 50%. Hopefully soon I'm going to save a hundred percent. So basically you spend about quarter million dollars on steroids and got a million followers on social media. That sounds really bad to say, a quarter million dollars, but. But I mean, it just is what it is, right?

I don't even think it's necessarily a good thing or a bad thing because there's a lot of people who take growth hormone for medical purposes under the consultation of a physician or whatever. And they're probably spending the same amount of money, right? Or maybe they're spending half of that, but they've done it for five years. I want to make it clear. Very few people will need the amount that I'm taking. What do you think the average person, the person who's taking it, all the caveats, they're supposed to take it. The physician tells them to take it, whatever. What do you think they spend on growth hormone?

like maybe 50 grand a year uh well first of all again keep in mind i've been a hyper non-responder and so i think the average person might be closer to a thousand or two thousand a month yeah so maybe like 12 to 24 000 or something right yeah that was public math that was pretty good on the fly um all right i want to talk about one other thing which is uh joe rogan uh a couple months ago i think was saying uh no fucking way he's definitely on steroids just look at them like there's no way you can do that whatever i saw you get asked about it and you had like very nice things to say about joe and i think that you were like look i look up to this guy in some form or fashion uh i enjoy his content all this stuff and uh you took kind of the high road

i think in the response uh he had derrick come on they had a fucking blast uh and joe basically was just like i what are you guys talking about of course he was on steroids right what is it like uh Joe Rogan's got the biggest media platform in the world he's bigger than all the mainstream media all this stuff uh what is kind of your reaction or your thoughts of seeing that conversation happen and they're talking about you it's not they're not talking about something you do they're talking about you what are you thinking as you're watching that yeah well two things um earlier you had asked about like how I felt about something and and I'll tell you how I felt about that initially is um I feel like a piece of shit you know this whole time he's been saying this

this whole time i've been lying so first thing i feel like is a piece of shit um i also just want to make it clear i'm not asking for any sympathy i did that i did all of it i deserve all of it i lied about it um i was wrong to do all of that right um i am sorry for that that's what i'm sorry for and then i'm watching the two exchange here um really there's there's one thing that upset me and it's when he talked about the 4,000 people a day, I'm talking about the 4,000 people a day that kill themselves and the 80,000 people a day that try

and the way that he chuckled about that pissed me off. You know, that pissed me off because I think you got such a big platform. You got a responsibility and an obligation to address this. Hate me, think I'm a clown. He's been on this the whole time. Fine, but I think he should have paused for a second and said, hold on a second.

This is not a conversation about Liver King. This is a second where we're gonna say this is a problem and and if you are thinking like this way you do need to get some help um i was i was frustrated about that uh but then i thought you know they talked about lever king for 35 minutes i was not physically on the show and they talked about me for 35 minutes you know how many times i've been on joe rogan's show without actually physically being there he's talked about i can't believe it you know and then he said he's been front row at my comedy i saw him at the canelo fight i've seen him at the ufc and he's talked about me so many times um are you guys boys like are you friends

um i've never met him before okay so you guys never talked before like in person i've i've always if i've seen him i would love to have a conversation with him you know uh again i think that he what he's done is incredible i still hold him in the highest regard i think he's a giant he's done something that no one else has ever done and most of the ancestral tenants he's talking about not in this organized packaged way but he talks about liver all the time he talks about thermal pressures and getting cold and sauna all the time. I mean, he talks about virtually all nine ancestral tenants all the time. And so, um, I'm, I'm, I'm really just grateful towards the end of that. He's saying how great liver is the other guy saying he eats liver every day. And

really when I'm, and thank God I'd already taken this load off me. I made an apology video. I did what I needed to do for me to move forward. And so now he's just making fun of that with a lot of chocolate and i deserve all of it the one thing that i think that that i wish he had done better is address the suicide thing in a different way but other than that i'm like hey i deserve it i feel like a piece of shit i own all of it bring it all on except for that one thing and then at the end of it he bookended it was saying in my opinion what he said is liver is king i felt pretty good about that yeah i think again i think most people all my friends who you've talked to got on the podcast uh etc it's just like you know 95 of this stuff is like very real and people

should know it they should follow it they should do all the stuff uh the steroid thing like i think it's split actually half of them are like oh he told me that uh he didn't take steroids and he did like he lied to me the other half of them are like dude are you guys fucking kidding me like the dude's 45 years old i've got a lot of years old like he's ripped out of his mind did you think he wasn't on steroids listen i've gotten so much of that like hold on you guys actually didn't think he was already. Um, but I also still want to own that. A lot of people gave me the benefit of the doubt. A lot of people believed in me. One guy, Joe aesthetic believed in me so deeply. He took 10 minutes to explain to me and the rest of his community why I'm natural. And that probably

tugged at my heart more than anything else because of how much he believed in me. Um, and so I want to take credit for that. You know, um, nobody had deceived themselves. I, I did all that. how do you balance in your head uh you create liver king you take steroids uh you absolutely explode on social media one thing no one will take away from you is you fucking exploded on social media you built this massive audience uh and again 95 of the things you're talking about there's a lot of people with big audiences uh who are very educated much more educated than me on fitness and and uh diet and all these things and they're like yep all this makes a ton of sense um and then there is the uh accusation that some of those people in the audience are going there

buying the supplements they're doing all this stuff and to me i don't think people are dumb enough to actually believe if i take a supplement i'm going to look like that uh but there are definitely people who uh say oh this guy is cool or this is something i aspire to right and so he has a product and i go and i buy it so there's like nuance to it but but how do you kind of think through where maybe the critics are right and maybe where they're not as accurate in terms of your rise as liver king and the use of PEDs

and then like impact on your businesses. Yeah, this is really complex because overall, we talked about these statistics and how desperately people are hurting. People, the average person today goes to a job that they hate. They come home to a life that they don't love.

They sedate themselves with enough screen time, with enough bullshit that their day's not really meaningful, right? This is my true north. And so the critics, and I should be criticized for so much more than this, but the critics of the ancestral lifestyle, normally what I say is I push back and I say, you had your fucking time. You had your chance. Your ways didn't work. The world is hurting at record rates. I told you all the statistics. None of that's changed. All those are facts. You can't criticize that shit, right? And you can't criticize what my message is. This is the message of our ancestors, of your ancestors,

of what you're trying to critique. And so I would just say, remember that the true North will always remain the true North. You don't got to buy anything from me, right? You don't got to follow me. You don't got to engage with me, but you do have to follow and engage with other CEOs of the ancestral lifestyle, like Ben Greenfield, like Andrew Huberman,

like the other people that are advancing this, because most people hate their life. Your life fucking sucks. There's a better life to live. It's called ancestral living. And so the critique about if I benefited from this message and my supplements, I'm wrong about all that. Again, I deserve all that. And if somebody wants to go, first of all, I hope they don't go anywhere else.

But all I care about is I talk about this all the time. You've got to get liver in your life because liver is king. Go on a hunt, first and foremost. That kind of connection with the animal and land will do more for you than getting it anywhere else. If you can't do that, go to the butcher. If you can't go to the butcher, go to the – find a way to get liver. There will always be a segment of the population that's going to say, fuck all that. Give me the pill, right?

You don't got to get it from any of my companies. Go get the pill. Go get the liver pill from Amazon. Go do your research. Go look at the reviews and go get it from somebody else. Don't, because of me, you can't be disloyal to the facts that this is how bad people are hurting and there's a better way to live. You got to get this into your life.

You don't got to get it from me. So I would just say, I think that there's truth, there's weight to what the critics have said. I deserve it all. And if somebody, again, I hope they continue to engage with the message. And all I care about is go on that hunt, go get liver, go do these nine ancestral tenets because the world is hurting and this is a better life to live. You've been incredibly, I think, kind to the critics in the sense of you're like, look, I deserve all this. Is there one critic where you're like, yo, fuck that person?

Like they just gone above and beyond in the hate and just like coming after you? You know, it's really interesting. My disposition, I don't know if you've heard me talk about this before. I say this to my kids all the time. And I alluded to this earlier. When you read text or you hear a word, right, especially if you hear it, like, these are broken down into syllables. These vibrations go into your ear canal. Your brain assigns meaning to it.

The meaning that I assign immediately is how bad that person is hurting and hating their life. And so I've not gotten upset at anybody. I've never said, hey, man, go fuck yourself. You're wrong about all this. I will say there's one time that I felt really frustrated. Okay. And, uh, and it's with this coaching clown that came up and said all these lies. I refunded his money X, Y, and Z.

Um, the, the silver lining is here, here. He's not unraveling any of the ancestral tenants. You know, I think he's just trying to save himself and I don't even know why that bothers me. You know, I won't even say his name cause I don't want to promote him, you know? Um, but anyone else you say I've, I've been nice about it. Um, I think I'm glad you're saying that I'm just being 100% earnest and sincere about it.

when this whole thing happened uh it's like okay what what is getting mad gonna do i did this like if there's anyone to be mad at you fucking idiot i mean i look at myself you you asshole for about five seconds and now guess what man you got to claw your your way out of this because the message is so much bigger than you and your brand and if your brand is gone tomorrow i gotta work with a hundred other ceos of the ancestral lifestyle you know sometimes people talk about oh all this money i make you know because i make a lot of money all how much you make um well i have three companies that do 100 million plus a year all three do 100 or no combined um and this is what i want to say about that okay what do i do with it you know what i do with it i make other ancestral companies i

reinvest that money to make other ancestral companies other ceos of the ancestral lifestyle to advance this message to have a hundred ancestral companies and a hundred different categories that's how deeply i believe in this so 100 million dollars in revenue this is a big ass business a hundred million dollars in revenue how many employees do you think you have across all the businesses 50 50 that's fucking two million dollars in revenue per employee that's a big that's that's a fantastic business right yeah is this something that other people can replicate or do you think that you have like unique skills and knowledge to be able to you know what the i'm in this mastermind group where very few people have that kind of revenue to

employee ratio and they're like oh you know and then i hear how they talk about their employees And I'm like, that's why, you know, because I think the highest leverage opportunity is to hire true believers. I got into this because of how deeply I believe in this because of my kids, because of how badly people are hurting. I only hire people in my companies that have been through a health crisis

that have recovered their health crisis through ancestral living. And through this whole issue, I'm the one who has compromised. I've compromised the perimeter. I know that. And that's why, like, I better do a goddamn good job moving forward.

I always say our sustainable competitive advantage is we only hire true believers. We care more deeply and we care more because you know how many people want to go do this for money? Of course. I'm like, oh, cool. You know, like, do you even know what money is?

And I'm like, let's talk about what money is. Money is a proxy for the value that we create in the world. And so all you want to do is go create more of that, but you don't even know why you want to create it. I figured out why I want to create it because my kids couldn't breathe. You know, because of people like Kat

who couldn't have a kid, had infertility issues and started doing ancestral living. Now she has a beautiful baby. You know, we have an employee, Ben, was bedridden with intractable depression, intractable Crohn's disease, and recovered his life and is kicking ass because ancestral living. There's this other kid, Sao, who lost 60 pounds, who's reconnected with the outside world. You see this joy in life that otherwise wouldn't be possible with ancestral living. So what I would like to say is I hope there's thousands

of people that replicate this business, but you better do it by putting the why at the center of what you're doing, because I need everyone. I had one guy come up to me one time. He's like, hey, man, I want to open up a business just like yours, exactly like yours. And I said, cool, cool. And he goes, what do you mean? Cool. Like, I'm going to be your competitor. You think you are going to be my competitor? And I said, listen, here's the issue. The world doesn't know about ancestral living. The world doesn't know about organs and glands. If you do a good job, you're my greatest ally in the world. I'll tell you how to do everything. But here's the thing. You don't give a shit about people. And because you don't give a shit about people,

you can't do this and you're not the right person. But this is what I need. I need hundreds and thousands of people to say, I want businesses just like you, but it has to come from in here. Their why has to be probably because they recovered a health crisis themselves or for their family. And then they need to only hire true believers because you hire a true believer, they'll do the work at 10. I'm sure you know this. You hired one right hire. It changes your entire company. Imagine if all your hires are the right hire. It changes everything. And so this is, when I say that this is really nuanced and complex. I don't know if you heard my apology video.

I said, man, this is complicated as shit to me. And you know how much criticism I got. They're like, no, no, it's not. You're either on steroids or you're not. Well, this is one of the complexities, the layers of the nuances. I have all these companies that I've hired with true believers

that have come here to do some goddamn good, to make their greatest contribution in the world. And I'm letting them down. I have compromised the perimeter. But I also say to them, you didn't come here for me. You came here because you had your greatest why in the world you've recovered this health crisis and now you know that you need to do this with other people if you're here for me you're not here for the right reason there's the door but but

you're here to do this and i'm going to do anything and everything in my power to help create the right environment the right culture and and i also want to make it really clear i don't lead any of my companies you know i'm you're not the ceo of any none of them they have their own leadership team their own culture their own chemistry their own electricity their own values you know um i may have helped give a blueprint and an ethos but i've always said if it's the same as the way i left it you guys fucked up horribly right nothing should stay the same you guys should should do this thing on your own anybody quit when all this came out no uh not yet not yet i hope i hope nobody does you think somebody will i i know i know i've made some issues yeah i know i've created some people

who are upset yeah you know i mean this is like a classic business story right it's like there's a leader whether they're actually running the business or they're uh the founder or whatever they do something sometimes it's like super controversial they get caught you know uh breaking the law or doing something like that sometimes it's bad business decisions sometimes they say something about politics that has nothing to do with the business but people don't want to be associated with that or whatever and then you got to deal with like this like real life shit right now you got to deal with yo i got all these great people that work for me we got these businesses that are going fucking turmoil inside right yeah you know that that's tugs up my heart

amongst you know like i would say i feel like the the kids that i've let down that that's the worst and then i think about the people in my companies they move their whole families here you know and this has been the hardest thing to find are people people that are true believers that are capable of doing you know what what they're doing um so man i really hope not and it's possible but yeah but you're hoping not um are you a billionaire no i'm not bullshit i'm doing the fucking math in my head i think that you're a billionaire i'm not all right well let's talk about it because you do 100 million dollars in revenue listen you go eat donuts with schultz but i fucking do math do 100 million dollars in revenue right you got 50 employees you're probably

doing 50 plus million dollars in profit 20 times multiple on that like you probably are close to a billionaire and i'm not saying that in like a derogatory way and people may get mad about it But like in some way, like if you are a billionaire, you've had a fucking run from an entrepreneurial standpoint. That's probably one of the better runs in recent memory for people. And nobody thinks of you that way. Like in some way, Liver King is one of the best fucking founders in the world hiding under everyone's nose. And people will say, oh, he took steroids. He's not a – it doesn't count or whatever, right?

Okay, lay all the critiques. But you're a fucking billionaire. First of all, I'm not. Okay. We'll disagree. I'll also say I'm, I'm, I'm not really far. Um, and I hope I, I, I've never wanted to identify with that. You know, um, everything that I've done in business, I did before the liver King launched the liver King is brand new. You know, a lot of people like, Oh, liver King did all this stuff. He made all of his money, you know, from this sort of deception. I'm saying, throw that out. I'm talking about you as an entrepreneur, forget liver King,

forget the fucking character, all that I'm talking about. If you build businesses that do a hundred million dollars in revenue with the employee base literally for you get off the internet tomorrow that is one of the most impressive fucking entrepreneurial stories thank you you know i deserve it i know i earned it you know and i know that i earned it because again the why in the world what we're doing and this is why i welcome everyone to to continue to do it i don't need more money this is why more money is going into doing a hundred of these businesses, because that's the only thing I care about is advancing this message, making sure people acknowledge that how desperately people are hurting and that there's a simple solution

to a better life. Um, and, but the only pushback I want to give is just to remember you said liver King aside, right? But liver King's only been here for a year, a year and a couple of months. Right. And so if we had the same discussion about how much money we're making a year and a couple of months ago, it's not that different. It's not that different. Um, liver King was strong. My companies were strong before liver King. My companies will continue to be strong after liver king you mentioned employees obviously there's some things you got to work through partnerships things like that have other people had issues as well or is this more of uh your employees or somebody that you trust they join because they're true believers things like that

uh but the partners are like you ask all the right questions our sales fucking flying off you weren't asking this one um you come on how do i do for a living of course i'm gonna ask this shit yeah um and you're like okay let me do the math he knows there's um one partnership that uh might not withstand this storm got it and and it's more so they just want to distance themselves from controversy in general i'm assuming you know what i don't want to talk about any of the personal things related to that but but but there's one um and again i i know i did this yeah um and that that's actually the hardest thing on me is like fuck all this stuff i did could compromise this one incredible it's not a company it's like it's a living breathing thing

where everybody believes in what we're doing and once again i gotta be like i did that you know like you know you you know when you don't believe what you did was wrong man you'll fucking defend it you will die on that hill there's no dying on i can't defend this thing you are you reading my text messages with my wife i didn't do that right no but but in all seriousness like i i do think that um it's easy for people to point and say oh you said x you did y whatever wrong i think you've said it's wrong uh we can sit here and beat that you know till it's dead but uh there's also like real life shit that's attached to this and you know i usually see it from the investor seat with companies i've invested in where something goes wrong and i'm on twitter just like everybody

else i'm fucking doom scrolling usually late at night right before i go to sleep like i'm not supposed to and i'm reading it and i'm like man these people are just laying into xyz person or company or whatever and i'm like they got no clue the shit that that person's dealing with right now because they got their employees they got their investors they got their own fucking families like you start thinking about this stuff and it's interesting perspective because of again i of course i know that yeah i'm thinking nobody fucking knows that and nobody listen again i'm not asking for sympathy but you're the first person who's ever actually said that you know the the layers deep that this goes my wife and i said a long time ago i would never go and i would

never have a partner ever again because in the dental business we took on a partner and then the mission that we wanted to drive became convoluted you know when you can no longer do exactly what you want to do and it's not driven by your benevolent principles now we got an issue because now it gets driven by an ulterior motive. I'll just tell you. Okay, she wants to give people liver, bone marrow, and egg yolk. Okay, the surgeon's like, well, hold on a second. You're going to put me out of business.

And he's a percent partner now too. Hey, this isn't okay. I don't want you telling people how to fix a root cause. And she's like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, why would I not? And so after that, she goes, hey, anybody you interview, you tell them in the interview, zero percent equity is on the table and it never will be.

And so all my interviews, that's what I shared with people. Well, I got softened up and started to believe over time. And I don't think anything's wrong about it. I think that I chose the best partner in the world to do this with. Again, this is of my own creation. And so I know you hear this all the time, but it's like you want to go fast, go alone. You want to go far, go together. You can go fast and far with a group of true believers.

When you believe that deeply and you've got those principles, you've been really public about your why. This is the great thing about like when you're really public about your why in the world and you could then only hire other true believers, you can do incredible things together. So I did that. I'm like, oh, you know, and again, there's so many complexities that come into that, that come into play. So there's a lot going through my head right now, you know, and again, I listen, I'm in the middle of it. I'm going to deal with all of it, you know, and some people are like, hey, why aren't you doing this? I'm like, listen, do you know how much is going on and what I'm dealing with and how I'm trying, you know, to do the right thing. but there's a lot of moving pieces to it you're right my last question for you is uh rogan after

uh he was like yeah i told you guys well whatever uh he said uh he thinks the rock's on steroids you think the rock's on steroids you know here's the thing no i don't here's the thing what did you think the rock is on steroids i'm i'm not picking any fights with anybody i i don't think he should have picked that fight either you know well you know there's bad blood well how so people people forget this uh and this is my external perception when uh the mob came for rogan and i think i told you when uh andrew schultz was one of the first comedians to stand up and say hey i know this dude you know uh whatever uh the rock actually posted initially and said he's not racist i know this guy or something like that and then the mob came after him oh and he basically back

track he was on fucking roller skates and he was like oh sorry i didn't see the video or whatever he said and again like i never judged anyone because i don't know was he getting phone calls from people was something going on did he see something i didn't i have no clue but there was almost like a retraction and my guess is that uh that left uh a bad taste in wow i didn't know that um i mean here's the thing you know the the rock what he's accomplished i think he's gonna be president yeah he could be i i i've been saying this for years now i think the rock will be the president of the united states but if joe rogan asked him if he does steroids then that's gonna be a you know again i i you don't want to pick a fight with the rock literally or figuratively i

mean this is this is not the guy you know and so i'll just say i think uh i think what the rock has done has been absolutely incredible yeah you know and so is he on first of all i don't think He's on steroids. Is he taking any hormone replacement therapy? I don't know. What percentage of American men do you think is taking any kind of hormone, TRT, GHG, stuff like that? Like is it like 1% or do you think it's like 20%? I bet it's tiny.

I bet it's about 5%. And I think the clinics know that most men, because of the lifestyles that they lead today, because of the things that are within their control, like the non-ancestral tenants, they could recover this. but a lot of these clinics know we got such a tiny fraction of the population that are underserved i wish the hormone clinics could also get behind this message it's not real good for business you know for the financial piece still five or ten million men yeah i mean like just in the united states you know you start doing five percent depending on how you want to calculate adults and like all these different numbers or whatever i bet if you tested though you have such a significant amount that needed that needed well i shouldn't say that needed that need to increase

it find a way to increase it do it either naturally or yeah yeah i can't believe you tried to make me make an enemy with the rock i love the rock no no not not an enemy i mean look it's uh it is uh it's interesting that you said that you wouldn't fuck with them though because i seen joe rogan do some roundhouse kicks i won't fuck with rogan either yeah i still wouldn't fuck with rogan you know it's like again you'll never hear me say anything negative about anybody like that's not in me i'm not capable of that you hear people say oh it takes two to tango well guess what we won't be doing that i'm not capable of that i know why you're doing what you're doing you're hurting man you're hurting and i can see you're hurting you know and the last thing you

need is a guy to get to now engage with that kind of thing you know i still think what rogan does is incredible i think what the rock does is incredible i don't think anyone should attempt to discount somebody's achievements and go where they're going by saying any of that kind of stuff if i have the chance to meet either of them i hope one day that i that i have the chance to with both of them and have this kind of to have a great conversation because man like you put down the phone and you have do what we're doing today like doesn't that just fill you up yeah i mean this is ancestral tenant nine which is bond put down the goddamn phone and and and just connect with people and to be able to do that with giants like that um pbd said to me the other day hey man

who do you have around you that's way better than you and i said i got people around me number one my wife number one my wife uh but but now i'm like i'm looking at him like well you now you and now you, and I hope to God one day I have Joe Rogan and I hope to God one day I have the rock, you know? And, and again, I'm not saying I was hoping this opportunity would come, but it's come, you know, Derek has helped me face my reality. This is, this is it. And it's also led to some incredible opportunities for me to be as transparent as we have been today about it. And for me to have some of these incredible connections. So I'm filled with nothing but gratitude. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you coming in and, uh, and talking about it. Uh, I think

just sitting down talking to people uh you learn so much more about it and there's plenty of people who watch this and be like nope i still hate this motherfucker people like i love them right and everything in between and and so uh i'll keep having the conversations and i i'm just thankful for you to come here and uh i appreciate it and i wish all the best to you and uh and your incredible family who for those that don't know there's like 17 000 people in this room right now uh who have been listening this entire time but uh but i really appreciate it and we'll definitely do it again in the future oh yeah thank you thanks so much for listening to today's episode I really hope you enjoyed this one.

Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program

with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies, go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io.

If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends and I'll see you all for the next episode.