The Sevan Podcast - #6 - Ken Miller

Episode Date: May 9, 2020

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. Last night, well, you know, there's like things in life like that you just, that are just amazing to hear. Like some chick telling you you're just eminently fuckable. Like no one's ever told

me that, but if someone did tell me that, I would be, I mean, that would be like a, a real high point. Or you go to the doc, it could be, you go to the doctor and they're like, man, you're really healthy. And these things are just words, but they feel good. And last night my wife said to me, you know, I'm really proud of you. And I, that kind of caught me off guard. My, my wife doesn't usually say stuff like that to me. And I looked at her and I go, what's up? She's all because you started the podcast again and I know you really like it. And then I was thinking, man, it's weird how just these little words, like someone just

saying they're proud of me, like that really, I mean, I do a lot of cool shit every day, but just my wife saying that to me was like the highlight of my day. I must've been high as fuck for like hours after that. I didn't tell her, but you know, like it. And I just started thinking then this morning, I wonder, do you know the last time someone said that to you? Hey, Ken, I'm proud of you. Oh, I was like, that I'm fuckable? No. I've been married for five years. I haven't heard that for quite a while.

But have you heard, have you heard, um, Hey Ken, I'm really proud of you. Um, uh, my wife tells me I'm proud. She's proud of me, but, um, it's been a while. Yeah. It's a trip, right? Yeah. No, it's very powerful it's been a while. Yeah. It's a trip, right? Yeah. No, it's very powerful when someone tells you that. Yeah. You, I was on a phone call with you the other day and I heard you, it was a zoom call. There were gang, gang of people on it. And I didn't even really know who was talking.

And then all of a sudden I was just kind of like the call. I don't know what I was doing. I was kind of spacing out or writing something down. And then I heard someone say, yeah, I used to weigh 600 pounds. And I was like, what the fuck? I started looking around at the zoom call. Like it's like someone on this, like I never met anyone who ever weighed 600 pounds. But when I was a little kid, I was fascinated. I'm 48. So when I was like eight or nine years old, I was fascinated with really, really big people, really tall people and really obese people. But we didn't have a lot of obese people in California at that time when I was like eight years old. And I remember the guys in the Guinness Book of World Records, they were the heaviest twins in the world. Have you ever seen that picture? And they would be sitting on motorcycles and the motorcycle guys yeah and at the time i was just fascinated and now at 48 it's it's um i'm fascinated still but it's um when i'm eight i bring no baggage to it when i'm 48 and heavily involved in health

and fitness as my um vocation it's like, holy shit. Like, that's not good. Like, that person has a long road to tow ahead of them. And so when I see that you go from weighing 600 pounds to owning a CrossFit gym and to steal Greg Glassman's line, a place where you can cure the world's most vexing problem, chronic disease. I'm just like, and that's why I was saying, I'm so excited this morning to talk to you. Like to dig into that journey is like. Cool. Yeah, no, I'm glad, glad you invited me. I'm glad to talk about it.

Am I coming through okay? I was having trouble with my headsets. You look great. I approve of the hat on backwards and you sound great. Well, I'm bald now, so I have to like kind of cover, make up for it somehow. How old are you? I'm about to be 40, 40 in August. And where were you born?

Santa Ana, California. Okay, so you're a California boy boy and how long did you stay in santa ana until i was about 13 and then my family moved to arizona and you own crossfit tempe crossfit tempe in arizona great name i wonder if they would give you that name today because you know they don't do they don't do that anymore yeah yeah you're stoked um yeah it's like i'm not the most uh creative person when it comes to names and that kind of stuff um it's kind of a long story but if you don't mind i'll tell it to you yeah about not being creative or how about the crossfit tempe name okay go for it yeah um just that uh so i used to be i bought it my first affiliate was called crossfit 602 and we were located in phoenix and i had a partner and we moved to tempe

and uh we decided to split ways and i was like well i'm in tempe now and tempe's area code is 480 so um i wrote h HQ and I was like hey can I I'd like to rename my my gym to CrossFit Tempe and they replied they're like sorry we don't let you name CrossFit affiliates after the cities anymore and I replied I'm like listen my partner and me just broke up I have no creative like I don't know what to call myself. Every name that I looked up, I like wrote this big, long, panicky email. Like every name I thought was cool was already taken. So I just got like a one-sentence reply.

Your request has been approved. And I'm like. That shit works? It works. I am telling you, Greg Glassman will say yes to anything. That's amazing. I basically just begged. Yeah, that's good. I mean, when it comes down to it, the Greg and the affiliate team, all they want to do is make the affiliates happy, but that's awesome. I would not have thought that works. So you got a,

Hey, I want to change my name to CrossFit Tempe. Fuck you. And then you said, please, pretty please. And they said, okay. Yeah, basically. And in fact, it kind of comes full circle to the weight thing. Cause it's like, I've learned through CrossFit and losing the weight that, you know, just determination and just keep trying. And even if you fail the first time to keep going and, and you might succeed, you know, giving up is the only time you truly fail. So, when I got that, when I got that first response, I was like, listen, I'll just lay it all out and give it one last try. And I ended up getting it. So. Roderick I don't want to forget this question. It's too early to ask it, but I'm going to ask

it because I don't want to forget it. What's the most weight you ever gained back after your lowest point? So, let's say you were, we'll get the real numbers here after your lowest point so let's say you were we'll get the real numbers here in a second but let's say you were at 600 and you went down to 300 what was the did you ever make it back up to 400 again actually um it's it's kind of in my notes but it is skipping ahead but yeah um i have gained weight back i'm at 400 now. Okay. And that's a long story too. So, but yes, I've gained a hundred back and I'm in the process of going back to 300 is my goal. Yeah. Good on you. So, it's funny. So, I had a guest on about, I don't know, three years ago and she recently hit me up just out of the blue and we were not close. She was just a guest that came and went.

And she just texted me out of the blue and she said, hey, I put on 80 pounds. And I knew what she was saying. Like anyone to text me out of the blue to just say 80 pounds, they want me to fucking gut punch them. Right? They need a fucking like, they're like begging for someone to slap them. So I said, hey, what the fuck are you doing? This COVID-19 thing is not a fucking joke. And you'll be at the 90-yard line of protection if you just cut out all refined carbohydrates right and then we went back and

forth she said thanks for fucking the check and and then what it ends up being is is like um even in my own like fitness and my own weight loss journey um and it's it's it's nothing worth talking about but you know everyone everyone even the healthiest people in the world have a weight loss journey. It's like quitting smoking cigarettes. You have to try a thousand fucking times. Gary Roberts said it. We named the show Killing the Fat Man. I did a series on this guy who lost 100 pounds, Gary Roberts.

And the name of the show is Killing the Fat Man. And he said, hey you it's it's a mistake you can't you don't ever kill the dude you fucking knock him down the stairs and he's like he comes back up he's like he's chasing you you're basically jason yeah yeah he's chasing you your whole life it's it's no it's true um and one of the things I really want to talk to you about, especially in my personal case, but I I've working with, um, people the last eight years or seven plus years, um, in my particular case, like I will always have an emotional attachment to food. Like you hear about alcoholics and drug addicts, you're never really recovered.

Unfortunately, you have to have food to survive. But when I was a kid, anytime I had a bad day at school, my mom took me out for ice cream. Anytime I got a really good score on my test or I got straight A's on my report card, my mom took me out for pizza. So even now when I'm stressed out about my marriage or at the gym or like whatever, my first instinct, or if like we're celebrating, my first instinct is always, all right, where are we going to go eat? You know? Um, and those are like the biggest demons for me. Cause I love working out. I love doing CrossFit. I love doing all that kind of stuff. working out i love doing crossfit i love doing all that kind of stuff um my biggest demon will always be food and you just schooled me i'm the world's greatest dad i don't know if you knew that but and and i do that to my kids shit i better stop that shit no way it's really easy because

like um and i'm not saying that obviously it doesn't happen to everybody because because lots of lovian some pavlovian shit though you're pointing out i mean it's no and um and then like my grandma used to like poke my belly and call me chubby but it was like an affectionate thing i know i know she wasn't trying to be mean i know she was just being affectionate but like growing up the my two biggest things was i always thought I was fat because my grandma always called me chubby and would poke my belly. And then my mom always took me out for ice cream all the time to cheer me up. Because my mom was going through a divorce.

Right. What's the first memory of realizing that you were chubby? I've always thought I was chubby? I've always thought I was chubby, like, because I was always told I was. Because my brother was always really tall and really skinny. And I'm really tall, but I'm whiter. But if I sent you a picture of what I looked like when I was, like, in junior high, you'd be like, what are you talking about? You're not fat.

But I grew up always thinking I was fat. When you was, was there, so I, it's funny. I haven't thought of this in forever. I remember watching like a kid's version of the wheel of fortune or jeopardy. And I was a little kid or some game show. And I was probably like 10 years old. And the girl who, the girl who was answering the question, she was cute. She's like another 10-year-old girl. And the host said, do you have a boyfriend? And she said, no, but I want one and I really like chubby boys. And I remember thinking in my head, oh, maybe she'd like me. Right at that point, I must have, you know what I mean? I knew it. And there's other moments like that. Wearing a t-shirt to swim parties in the seventh grade like a jackass and

you being the only person there with a t-shirt and you're pulling it off your rolls of fat the whole time and i did that that was me i was i was the fat guy in the t-shirt in the pool yeah but was there any one incident like do you have an incident where where you remember it or was it was it was that grandma was it grandma and you're like oh I'm chubby as far as I can remember even when I was like four or five like I always thought I was chubby like um did you eat that's actually a really good question I've never really thought about when I actually I can tell you right, looking back at my pictures and the pictures and my memories don't line up because like I look back at high school pictures now, I'm like, man, I was good looking. think why would a girl want to be with a fat guy you know that kind of stuff so i guess i just always had really low self-esteem as far as and body uh i don't body dysmorphia or whatever you

want to call it um and like i said i would never blame my family it's just how we always are right right and now you know if you have kids to be to just to be even more careful right that's actually i talk to parents all the time because it's like me and my wife talk about having kids. And I'm like. I want to raise them responsibly with their health and like awareness of nutrition and that stuff. But then you have things like kids' birthday parties, like Halloween, Easter. Like how do you raise kids in a world of candy and eating like crap but still want them to have that mental mind state where they respect you? They're so easy and so good. If you draw the boundaries, they'll never break them.

Like my kids only get cake at birthday parties. They're never allowed to have soda ever ever never fucking ever um they would never i would never take them out and buy them pancakes they still don't know what syrup is and they're three and five years old you can just yeah my kids like at the swimming pool there's an ice cream machine i never let them use the ice cream machine there why because we go swimming three days a week and i know if i crack that seal once it's broken it's the same way you would never drink a coke at your gym right you would never let your clients see you drink a coke right exactly kenneth i'm super duper

uncomfortable um with my shirt off like crazy uncomfortable and yet i force myself to fake that shit around my kids and always walk around the shirt with my house with my shirt off and when i go to the beach act like i'm the coolest best looking fucking person ever i just fake that shit and i take my shirt off because i'm trying to make it so my kids don't know i don't want them to have that you know what i mean i don't want them to have what i have because i seen that fucking fat kid in college with his shirt off and super comfortable and pimping all the hoes. And I'm like, God damn, he's 30 pounds bigger than me. And he's most confident, handsome, sweetest dude ever. And the girls are all over his shit.

That's all it's about, man. It's all about confidence. Yeah. Because I know like after I lost all that weight, i felt like i was the sexiest guy in the world when i probably wasn't um but then i started you know you start asking girls out when you start feeling good about yourself yeah no but that's good to know about the pancakes and stuff oh you just got to be vigilant one or two times you know you go into a starbucks and some other kids there and the kid says hey mom can i get a donut and your kid's like can i have a donut you say no and they start crying and you just put the Starbucks and some other kid's there and the kid says, hey, mom, can I get a donut? And your kid's like, can I have a donut?

And you say no and they start crying and you just put the fucking hammer down. You pick them up and you walk outside and you say, hey, don't cry in there. And they don't. That's it. But if you crack once, they'll see the crack. Right. And they'll wedge in there and make your life. Kids always want to push the boundaries.

Yeah. Do you have a kid. Kids always want to push the boundaries. Yeah. Do you have a kid's class at your gym? We just launched one during the whole COVID thing. We're doing a virtual kids class now because all the kids don't have anything to do because all schools canceled. So, so we just launched one for the second time. We launched one a long time ago. And it was really popular for like

three months and then it kind of slowly faded away so yeah that's that's typical of us parents we get really into something and then i'm like all right i'm tired of doing that i do remember that when i was a kid like uh my mom signed me up like karate for like a couple months and then we'd do something else for a couple months it's like yeah so when does it um when does it how tall are you six three okay so you're a giant dude already i'm a big bear there's a reason why our gym's logo is a bear okay big hairy and what's your what's your ethnicity? I'm half white, half Indian, Native American. Okay. And you, so you're in Santa Ana until you're 13, California. You end up moving to Phoenix.

You go to high school there. Yep. And when you graduate high school, how big are you? I was like 225 my senior year. Okay. I also, I did wrestling and football and stuff like that. So, um, That was a crazy metabolism too.

Yeah. I would say wrestling was probably the, one of the best shapes I've ever been in. I was running seven minute miles, which is a lot for me. Um, that kind of stuff. But yeah, I was like two 25 by the time I graduated and just, I'm anticipating a question. I'll just skip ahead. My metabolism was crazy at that time. I was eating King size Snickers, two liters of Mountain Dew. I could not gain weight. And then all of a sudden high school ended and I stopped playing sports and I stopped I was just going to parties and drinking um and all of a sudden I would start

gaining weight it was just weight gain after weight gain like literally when you were in high school for for people who don't know I can I tell them and please stop me when I'm going wrong you could sit down with a bowl and put a whole box of cereal in it and eat that for breakfast and for lunch you could have eight peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and stack of ritz crackers and a bag of salami right i mean yeah there was no end to how much you could eat right at 225 doing wrestling and six three and a growing boy with testosterone pouring out of your ears. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, no, it, uh, and then realize how much kids can eat. It's especially big men like you. It's crazy. I don't know. And then you go to, you go to McDonald's for dinner with your friends and you put that, put down like a double quarter pounder with cheese and, you know,

supersized fry. And then you and your friends would go play basketball at night and nothing, nothing. It didn't seem like, like I never, never clicked in my head that, you know, eating like shit was going to catch up to me. Right. And then, then you add beer into the equation when I was in my twenties, that shit is no joke either. Cause I can, I can probably drink a, you know, nine, 10 nine ten beers without it you know that'd just be a typical party i bet you at 400 pounds you could drink coors lights all day and just

keep a buzz you could just well if we ever meet in person i'll challenge you to a drinking contest um so so so then you're in high school and you graduate from high school. Do you go to college or do you go straight to work or? I went straight to work. I was done with school. I went to, I got a job as an electrician and, and just worked in construction for most of my twenties. And then I got a, an office job in my late twenties. And is that when you hit 300?

Yeah. So when I got the office job, um, well, it's kind of an office job. It was half office, half out in the field fixing machines, but I was just, I was just driving around in a van. Anyway, I hit 300 around that point, my late 20s. And then I got really depressed because all my other friends were just graduating from college. Does depressed mean suicidal? Like when people say that, I was like, oh, does that mean they're suicidal? Like what's depressed? Um, I had given up on being happy. Like I had accepted that I was always going to be fat and miserable. So I drank anything that was in front of me. I ate whatever was in front of me. I started doing drugs. Um,

like what kind of drugs? Weed and cocaine. Yeah, weed doesn't count. I mean, I don't smoke weed, but in your 30s, that doesn't count. Cocaine counts. I started doing cocaine. Did you get girls when you were on cocaine? What's that?

Did you get girls when you were on cocaine? I didn't get girls for most of my 20s. All right. I mean, that's the only good thing about cocaine is like there's usually some girls in the mix. So I went to a lot of really good parties. Yes. There was a lot of girls at the parties. No, it was more that it was just numb. I just wanted to be numb.

And the coke would make me numb all around your weight your personal image all the depression and everything was around your personal image exactly i was so i was i felt so ugly my entire life um it's actually the hardest part to talk about it's just you look in the and you're just you're just so fucking disgusted with yourself and you just you're like well nobody's ever going to want to marry you so you're never gonna have kids um every time you didn't get the job or didn't get the promotion you just look in the mirror and you're like who would promote you you fat ass you know look at you and you just constantly just talk bad about yourself. And the only thing that ever made me feel better was drinking myself to a stupor or,

you know, doing some kind of drug or, or, you know, just going to the bar and eating 24 chicken wings and, and downing some beer. Like that was like my daily rituals just getting off of work and going to a bar and just eating chicken wings and drinking beer and and then on the weekends by yourself by myself yeah and then I would just party with my friends on the weekends so in the quick exchange we've had and we've talked before this, but we did a quick text and I said to you, hey, that blows me away that you weighed 600 pounds. And you said, it's a, man, it was a great line. And I said, you should write a book.

Sweaty, uncomfortable, and lonely. Yeah. That's described. And I was like, wow, that's some powerful shit. I had a friend who wasn't necessarily fat, but he weighed 300 pounds. He was six, two. Um, he was just juice to the hill. Just fucking just a big old Roy monster. Good. Great dude. I love him. Um, and he told me that when you go over 300 pounds, you have to have air moving on you at all times. So like when you go to bed and now you got to have a fan on you,

he says, you can't sit still. You just, if you're just in homeostasis you start sweating yeah dude i so at my heaviest i had to sleep in a recliner because if i slept in my bed my body weight would suffocate me um i would wake up for real you're not exaggerating. No, I'm not exaggerating. Like I could not physically breathe when I was laying on my back. I was fighting for air every fricking night trying to sleep. My back and my knees always hurt. Just walking from my car to the office, I would be drenched in sweat. Just to walk up a couple things of stairs, I had to hold,

I'd have to hold the rail because I couldn't even get up the stairs without just being completely winded and sweaty and just covered in sweat. And then you get in the office and, oh, here's another girl. Since we're getting to know each other. And, oh, here's another gross. I might as well, since we're getting to know each other. My circulation was so bad in my legs that my calves were like this big, but it wasn't because of muscle.

It was just all this fluid was building up in my calves and my shins. And eventually they would get sores on them and they would pop. And there'd be a bunch of fluid coming out of my legs because there was just so much fluid that couldn't get up to the lymph nodes you know and it would just come out of your pores it would just come out of the pores yeah so if i'd wear jeans to work by the end of the day my jeans would just be covered in this fluid and that doesn't help anyone's self-esteem that definitely does not help yourself would you ever i had this car and it was just a piece of shit and i used to drive around and be like does and like see if i could ever the game was for me could i ever find a car that was worse than mine

and did you ever play that game where you're like like you're like oh my god it's been six months and i haven't seen a human being larger than me yeah i mean you're like, oh my God, it's been six months and I haven't seen a human being larger than me. Yeah. I mean, you're very aware of everybody else's physique when you're going through what I went through. Even today, I'll walk anywhere and just kind of size up people and not in a bad way. Like I'm not judging anybody. I'm just like, am I the ugliest or fattest person in this room? Right, right.

No. That's how I feel on every Zoom call when I go on the Zoom call with all the CrossFitters. Holy shit, I'm ugly. Oh, my God. If I had your job being around the people you have to be around, I'd have, like, major, like, I don't know, body heat show. Oh, I do. I do. Constantly flexinging just walking around when yeah when you're with guys whose lats when you're with women whose lats are

when they're resting are bigger than mine flexing it's uh it's tough so you so you you got this desk job you get to 300 pounds you're not happy with yourself you're doubling down on the drinking you're partying more um did you roll joints or bong or do all that when you smoked weed the whole gambit usually bongs and pipes uh yeah um rolling joints is fun though i don't have that coordination like The only thing I miss about smoking, it's the only thing I really miss about college is just the rolling of the, just rolling stuff. It is more of a ritual when you, when you get to roll it.

Yeah, I can see that. So then you put, so then you put on weight and when, when is there a time when it really starts putting on um like how do you go from 300 did you actually make it to 600 pounds yeah i mean well a little bit under like 590 ish how do you how do you know how how do you someone weigh themselves who's 590 oh my god could you stand on two scales does that no i i weighed myself on what like so i worked in this warehouse that had like um you'd put pallets on and it would weigh the pallets uh-huh and so i would weigh myself on those things whole and where was that can you tell me where that was at it was

at trw it was uh they they made airbags and so and that was for shipping like you would have to weigh a pallet before you shipped it yeah so i had to i had to step on a shipping scale and so no one would be around and you'd be like looking both ways and shit and then just be like hit the the tear button it's you see zero and jump on, it's actually worse. My coworkers were talking shit to me and one of them said they'd pay me $50 if I could prove that I weighed under 600 pounds. So I stepped up on the scale, yeah. Holy shit.

Did he give you the 50 bucks? i got it yeah holy shit i turned into like one of those mikey like mikey likes it guys people would dare me to do shit and i would like one time i drank an entire big ass bottle of tabasco sauce for 50 bucks like i did a lot of stupid shit just to get attention even though it wasn't positive attention i would take any attention at that oh i understand i had a boss yell at me one time and she goes i'm sorry i yelled at you i'm like i'll take any attention i was like holy shit did that come out of my mouth it's true though it's like when you're when you feel so bad about yourself like just anybody paying attention to you feels good, even if it's not the kind of attention you really should be getting.

So did you ever have a girlfriend before you were married? Yes, I've had a couple. And that was early in high school? So I had a girlfriend in high school, and then I had a girlfriend right out of high school. Then we broke up, and that's when I started really hitting the drinking. But then I didn't have a girlfriend throughout the rest of my 20s and early 30s, no. I just shrunk into myself. I shrunk into myself and just, I don't know if I would say, I don't,

I wouldn't say suicidal as much as I didn't care if I died. If that makes sense. Like I wasn't actively trying to kill myself, but if it happened, I wasn't going to be upset about it. Right. Like I was going to eat, drink and do drugs. And what if I, if I didn't live to 30, whatever, I don't care. There's a friend of mine named Matt Bickle. I don't know how much he weighs. I don't know if he ever made it to 600, but he was really big.

He definitely made it to 400. Now he's 300. Excuse me. He was at my house, and he went to go sit in a chair i was like whoa whoa whoa and he goes i'll test it first he and he made some joke about knowing the chair test like how to test a chair uh-huh and i'm guessing like i guess maybe you didn't go out much anyway but once you start getting to 400 pounds and over maybe even 300 pounds and over like you have to be careful where you sit right like plastic chairs i feel like you have to be careful where you sit, right? Like plastic chairs. I feel like you've spied on my life because they're,

well, I've just talked to a lot of people. I've talked to a lot of people. It's a fascinating subject for me. The chair stories are always crazy. Like someone will be like, I, I crushed a steel chair. I'll be like, what? One of my saddest memories is I went to, uh, I was working at the power company. This is the last job I had before I worked. I got, I have an affiliate was, I worked at a power company and we got invited to this luncheon and I get there. I'm excited because, you know, I got invited to this big special event and I find out that it's outside and it's all in plastic chairs and everybody sat down and everybody's eating. So I sit down and as soon as I sit, the plastic chair just evaporates. It just

explodes. And I'm, I fall to the ground. I'm like a turtle who can't get up. Cause I'm so big, like two people had to come over and pick me up. Are you kidding me? I'm not kidding you, dude. They brought me a chair from the inside. I don't even think I ate lunch. I just went to my work van and just cried. I probably cried for about 30

minutes straight. Like sobbing, crying? Like sobbing, crying because was like so embarrassed and i heard people laughing and i just that was probably one of the hardest moments of my life is that one the chair incident is something that i look back on even now i'll go to like restaurants and stuff and look out on the patio and i'm like i don't want to even if it was the most amazing weather i would probably still not sit on a patio just because of that one instance you're scarred i'm scarred for life on that one yeah i i i've heard i i um trying to remember who told me this story it wasn wasn't Athena. Someone told me a story about how they were in a supermarket and a piece of fruit rolled off onto the floor.

And they knew that they couldn't pick it up because they were too fat. And they looked around and a lady saw them, saw her drop the fruit. And so now she had the social obligation to pick up the fruit, but she knew if she went to the ground, she wasn't getting up. Oh my God. And Athena Perez told me that she was so big that she didn't go upstairs to her bedroom for a year. She just started living in her living room. Really? Yeah. And I hear stories like that and it's like, wow, that's, that's, that's not, that's intense, right? I mean, basically it's your carbohydrate addiction and correct me if I'm wrong, your carbohydrate addiction has come to a point. It's like an alcoholic who can't go to work anymore, right? Like hindering your everything.

You start planning your whole life around eating and not just eating. I don't know about the other people you've talked to, but I used to hide eating. So I would go out with my friends and I wouldn't eat, but then on the way home, I'd get drive through and then I would eat all the food in the drive through. And then I would stuff all the wrappers in the glove box. And, uh, it really was like, like, you know how people like husbands and stuff, like hide their heroin addiction or whatever from their wife or their mistress or their mistress or whatever it is yeah that was um that's basically was my life is just not eating around other people and then anytime i was alone just freaking binging on food yeah and then feeling that shame afterward. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Gary told me that like in order to be as big as he was, when your wife would announce dinner was ready, you'd be like, oh, I'm going to run to the store real quick. And then you just go to McDonald's and eat two hamburgers and then come home because you didn't want anyone to see how much you really needed to fuel yourself. Yeah, for real. That was exactly me. Like anytime I had to go to dinner or anything like that, I would stop somewhere else and stuff my face. Yeah. So, you know, it's like that for smokers too. And it's almost like that for me with caffeine now. Like I plan my day around caffeine. It's funny because the quarantine has kind of stopped that a little bit. But anytime I was like, oh, I'm going to go over to so-and--so's house let's say I had a meet or I'm gonna go to work and have a meeting okay I'll swing by Starbucks like I'm always rewarding myself like with a cup of coffee

as I went down and when I smoked cigarettes in college it was like that it was just moving from one place to another to have a smoke yeah and uh and yeah i could totally see how food it really it really is an addiction it's just and it's the hardest addiction in my opinion i i've never been addicted to pretty much anything else but um just because you have to have food to survive like you'll die without it have to dance with the devil like i can tell my devil fuck. I'm never touching nicotine again. Right. But you can't do that with food. Right. And it's really easy to fall into those traps where you're like, well, I've been so good.

I'll just have pancakes today because we're all going out to brunch. Then you have pancakes and all of a sudden you're like, Ooh, that was amazing. And then the next day you're like, well, I guess I could have pancakes again today, you and um by the way if you have no pancakes are like my my biggest trigger like i started eating pancakes and i'll be done for the next couple weeks as soon as you said it you started smiling ear to ear so how you get on the scale at 590 in a warehouse where you're where there's pallets um and and then you it's sometime later that you're at a party and a chair breaks what is what what ends up being rock bottom and are you doing any like working out during this time or have you just stopped working out

since the day you graduated from high school so the chair incident was my original rock bottom because after i collected myself from being a big cry baby sorry one more thing one more thing did you know at that time at 590 that you couldn't stand up if you laid down yeah so that was something you had to deal with every day in your day-to-day life you know that if you went to prone getting up was going to be like i mean could you do it i could um it's not something that i would actively try to do because it was a process to get up off the ground so like you gotta grab usually it involves grabbing something else and like hoisting yourself up instead of just being able to stand up off of your own you know power so there there were there was a there was

a way to do it it's just something i wouldn't want to do in front of other people right so you knew the second that chair broke was that like one of the first things that popped in your head oh shit how am i gonna get up uh my first thought i pretty sure my first thought was oh my god i just did that in front of all these people that was my initial thought then my second thought was now i gotta get my ass up so yeah like if i get embarrassed i always have the option to run but you're just there's no run no running i guess i could have rolled away okay so that was your first rock bottom was there another one so i joined a typical globo gym after that um hired a personal trainer like i want to say like 60 dollars60 a half hour or something like that.

So expensive. It was very expensive. Um, and he wasn't very good looking back on it. Um, did he care? He didn't really care. It was the same workout every single day. It was 10 minutes on the treadmill and then we would carry kettlebells around the gym for a couple of minutes. And then we would do some step ups. I mean, granted, there's not, you know, when I was at my biggest, there wasn't a lot that I could do, but, um,

I would never recommend that to anybody that experience because I lost some weight initially, but just the repetitiveness of the treadmill or the elliptical. And then you do a couple things and then you go sit in the sauna. Like the rep, the, the repetitiveness of it was so boring to me. Um, and I never, I would always just go hard, you know, go for a week and then quit for a couple of weeks, go for a week, quit for a couple of weeks. I was in that cycle of, all right, I need to lose weight,

but this sucks. I hated, I hated machines. I hated, I pretty much hate every exercise in a typical Globo gym atmosphere. Um, so I finally, I was just like, like you know what i went back after a couple months of that i was like you know what fuck it um i'll just be fat you know i just reserved myself and then in why did you get a personal trainer you wrestled you you you did football you um why would you need why wouldn't you just go in there and do your own shit um part i think part of it was just i felt like hiring a personal trainer made myself more serious okay like i was taking it more seriously to have a personal trainer like accountability even or yeah like accountability because but he didn't give it to you before i had

the personal trainer i would walk in i don't know am i allowed to say names of gyms yes okay i would walk into the la fitness bankrupt okay well i don't know if they are i think they are i think they are changing it i would walk around the gym and be like, all right, well, this looks cool. And I would do this, you know, and then I, or then I would just walk around and not know what to do. Cause when I was in wrestling and football, we just had free weights. We never had machines and LA fitness was just machines. So I didn't even, and that was, you know, at the time it was like 12 years before that.

So I just thought having a trainer would help me better get my results. Okay. But then, so after I gave up that in August of 2012, my mom got diagnosed with breast cancer. cancer. And, um, it already, by the time she got diagnosed, it already spread to her liver, her brain and her, um, her hips. And so, um, sorry, it's kind of hard to talk about. Um, so they told her that she was going to die. And we transfer her to hospice. And right before she went into a coma for the last time, she made me promise that I've been so miserable for so long. And if she could just do one thing, it would be to, she just wanted me to be healthy and happy was her big thing. She wanted me to get back in shape and find a wife and have a family. And I was blown away because there's this woman who's just, who's in the bed.

She's already lost like a hundred pounds. She's like this skeleton. And her biggest concern right before she dies is me. You know, I'm like, that blew me away. I was like, why are you worried about my health and my happiness when you're in this bed dying? And it was so powerful and so sad because I'm like, I didn't understand. I guess I never really understood love until that moment, you know, where someone you love is dying and they're more worried about you than them so anyway there's no there's no self right yeah she had already accepted her fate and she was yeah yeah i think there are 110 podcasts i never cried oh really i'm sorry damn that is an incredible story and at this time this is 2012 you're 32 you're 32 year old man you're like you're basically in your prime yeah and you're waiting you're waiting and you're so big you can barely go through the door at the hospital

pretty much yeah i was so i never really left her side during that and they would always be your dad alive at this time my dad left when i was like three and i've never i've never really i've never seen him since i was three so okay that was part of the whole like my grandma used to poke my belly every day because after my dad left my mom moved in with my grandparents so and you know what um i i a very close friend of mine told me she's a young lady she's 28 years old she has three boys also and she says it's so hard because when she cooks with sugar her boys tell her she's the best cook ever and all she wants to do is hear nice things from her boys and she was just telling me all this stuff and i wanted to give her the tough love and be like i don't give a fuck don't feed your boy sugar but anyway i didn't do that i just hung tight and i heard her and i think that with your mom

and your grandmother yeah they wanted to make you feel good your dad fucking split and what better way to make you feel good than to feed you nice things oh Oh, totally. Right. I mean, sweet things. Okay. So your mom dropped this bomb on you. Yeah. She drops this bomb on me and then she goes to sleep that night. And little did I know she wasn't going to wake up. Um, but I was by her side at the hospice. Do you have siblings? I have a brother. Okay. They weren't as close. I was like the mama's boy. Okay. So anyway, I was watching TV by her bed and I was flipping through, I think it was ESPN. And it was those old Reebok commercials where Reebok would show like people doing box jumps and Olympic lifts.

And it was like a nano commercial or whatever. And, and I was like, Oh my God, I was so blown away by that stuff because it was something I'd never seen before in an LA fitness. So I did some research about the commercial and the shoes. And that's how I found out about CrossFit was because of that commercial of seeing all those people doing those crazy CrossFitty what I hope but what people say now the crazy CrossFit stuff uh I was so blown away by and I just made that promise

to my mom and I'm not like a like a super religious person or like you know whatever but I was like I just made this promise to my mom and then this commercial came on. Like I took it as like this big sign. So. I've heard people say that, um, the devil talked to them through a Simpsons episode. So to say God talked to you through a Reebok commercial, I'm down. Maybe Reebok will sponsor me after this interview. You weren't even on drugs. drugs yeah you weren't even on drugs

okay that was that was not on drugs at the time let me just right right right right literally in the room with your mom after she's dropped this bomb on you she's on her last she's having her last breaths and this commercial comes on tv and you fucking whammo yeah exactly that's exactly what happened i love it it's actually really crazy to think about how my life has changed because of that one day you know right um so then after she passed away are you a nano two guy a nano two yeah i had the nano twos but what's your favorite nano what's your favorite shoe are you are you a reba guy now or yeah no um i love the newest no no i think these are the 19s okay um but i was a devout to a nano two guy for forever i hated every nano me too they got like super narrow i'm nano two

till i die i have like 20 hairs just in case they ever stop making them. I'm terrified. I can't wear other shoes. The 19s aren't bad, but the 2.0s are still my favorite. Yeah. Yeah. I went out when I Googled, you know, CrossFit gyms near me, and I went to my first one. And before that, I bought these $300 pair of running shoes with the super squishy heel.

And I thought, I was like, yes, I'm here. I walk in and everybody's wearing the nanos. And I'm like, what the hell? And then I go. This is when you first went to a CrossFit box? That was my first CrossFit box experience. That was the first thing I noticed. I was like, I'm wearing the wrong shoes. Like, I'm wearing the wrong shoes.

So you see the commercial, your mom passes away, and your journey begins, like, right away? You're like, all right. Kind of. So I Googled CrossFit gyms near me. And then after the funeral, I, uh, about a week after the funeral, um, I drove to the, to the gym, the crew is CrossFit Mesa. Um, and I pull in the parking lot and I, I have this weird mind where I'm picturing just shirtless bros and girls in

booty shorts doing curls. Cause I didn't even know what CrossFit was at the time. I like your image. I'm down with that. I was picturing just buff dudes doing curls and benching. I don't know what the hell I was thinking, but I pictured walking in there and them telling me that I wasn't welcome or them just like looking down on me. So I got, I was like, screw this. And I just backed out of the parking lot and drove down the street

um that happened I parked in that parking lot I'm not even exaggerating for like a week like I would pull in the parking lot chicken out and drive away for like a week because I was just very common story brother Ken so common it was is it so common i just heard that story just a few months ago from a lady who works out at crossfit hq now i think she weighed 500 pounds and she knew that going walking from her car to the class was going to be more than she could handle so she justified not even going in there and then i think one of the trainers came out and knocked on her window and said okay time to get out of your car. And that was her workout that day.

I think they had to walk to the box and walk back to the car and she was done. But yeah, total common story, right? People get terrified of going in the box. I'd be terrified too. I'm terrified now when I visit boxes. No shit. Me too. I own one and I don't like it. I get scared.

Yeah. I was like like where can i go um okay so so for a week you're pulling into the parking lot for the 10 a.m class are you calling them at that time letting them know ahead of time or you're just gonna walk in cold no i'm just gonna walk in i wasn't even at the point where I wanted to let people know I was interested. I was just like, um, I was just so worried that they would tell me I wasn't good enough to be there. And then would you go home and then research it some more online and do some more trolling and look at it and be like, okay, tomorrow I go. Yeah, pretty much. Um, I would, every day I was driving away, I was like, like okay just go to work we're gonna go to bed early then you can come you know tomorrow's the day tomorrow's the day tomorrow is always tomorrow you know uh you made this promise you have to keep your promise you know that kind of stuff um but then i walked in i finally got the courage to walk in and it was it was a night it was good guess you said 10 a.m it was a 9 a.m class

and it was all like 40 year old uh moms with pvc pipes and i walk in and every like everyone came in even the members would come in and shake my hand and they're like you know what's your name welcome to crossfit temp or tempi crossfit. The coach came over and greeted me and treated me like a, you know, a person. And then I watched the class and after the class, he explained what CrossFit was and asked me if I wanted to try it. And the next day I went back and I tried the class and with all the moms, I was, I was a big a big 9 a.m guy because i was very comfortable working out with the moms for sure but my first workout was thrusters box jumps and a 400 meter run and they scaled it to a pvc thruster where i didn't even have to squat i would just sit in a

bench i'd like my butt would touch the bench and I'd come back up. And then I would go on a 50 meter walk. And then I would do step ups onto a 45 pound plate. And that workout destroyed me. Like, I was- How much did you weigh at this time? I was close to 600. I wonder if you're the – I would be willing to bet $1,000 of your money.

You're the heaviest person that ever walked into that gym. And I'd be willing to bet $5,000 of your money that you're the heaviest person ever to start CrossFit. You think? It shouldn't be that way. And that's another reason why I need to talk to you. Everyone needs to do that. But kudos for the gym to take the challenge. Like, Hey, that's how good a CrossFit coach and CrossFit gym is. We're not asking you to do anything except what human beings do.

Yeah, exactly. And now that was the thing that I loved is not only like, I'm just doing things. The workout was just things that human beings do, which really made me happy because I wasn't trying to look, I wasn't going for aesthetics. I was going for health. You know, I want to be a healthy person and it made more sense to me to do movements that your body was supposed to do in the real world, in the natural world, as opposed to, you know, peck decks and curl machines and that kind of stuff. So I really dug the whole compound movements, natural movements, that kind of stuff. So I really dug the whole compound movements, natural movements, that kind of stuff. But I was going to say I'm actually really happy.

I was probably one of the happiest people in the world when Greg decided to focus more on the health and not focus so much on the competition side. Because I'm not going to lie. I've signed up people who've come in here and gone, I've seen the games documentary. I want to be Matt Frazier. I want to be Froning. I do sign up those people, but most of the people I sign up for are trying to get healthy.

And, you know, those are the people I want to work with really are the people who are trying to be healthy. I went through that evolution. I started CrossFit at 34 and I wanted to be Miko Salo, but now I'm, now I'm on the other side at 48. I just want to be healthy. Isn't that crazy though? Cause I went through that. Honestly, I went through that too. When I lost, when I got down to 300, I was like, I'm going to regional someday i'm gonna be a badass like i had all these like delusions of grandeur and like like now i just want to have a kid and be able to play with them right it it literally is like that like um doing um i i don't know like if like if i'm following

something that like a prescribed weight i'll look at the women's weight and then I'll cut that in half. Yeah. Like literally. But I'll still go hard and I'll still move, you know, and I really like I'll go to the hurt place. But I am not interested in the risk of any injuries, not even it. Like I like to be sore. I like to be really sore. I enjoy being sore.

But you know what I mean? I'm really there just to maximize a different, um, I'm looking really, I'm looking at the length. I want to do CrossFit my whole entire life. Yeah. Yeah. And I had a really good coach when I first started who would just be like, um, I know you can do the RX weight, but you're not going to have that intensity and what's the point of being able to lift something uh once as opposed to just keep

just we just want to keep you moving like you want that intensity and and and it was really really good to have somebody who was there good at scaling so i think i did like you said uh the woman's rx weight like half of that was like my go-to weight for the first year and then all of a sudden i became a competitor in my brain and i was like i'm rx plusing everything i don't care if i get this time how old are you at this time uh when i was at my most broey um probably 35 36 yeah that was i was super it's actually really funny i get it yeah i like cold bar 225 clean just because i couldn't and i'm like nowadays i would be like, that is so stupid.

Right. So now I'm back, now I'm back to lightweight and just keep moving and, you know, try to get that heart rate up and, you know, and I do a lot of, what's up. I do a lot of the things that just suck. I do a lot of burpees. I do rowing. I do the assault bike. I forced myself to do rope climbs, you know, just stuff that I really, that I can do, but I just, it's just puts you in the suck zone, but just fucking discipline. Do it. Right. Yeah. That is the one thing I need to do better at. I have been known to cherry pick burpee workouts. You mean around them?

Yeah. I work around. Yeah. Most people, I think over six feet tall, they're not. I have a dear friend who comes to the house a lot and there's absolutely nothing I could beat him in. He's a young man, a cop, but I think he's probably 6'6". But maybe the only thing I have a chance to beat him in is burpees. And I almost feel bad watching a man who's 6'6 do a burpee. I'm like, Jesus. Oh, my God. So my wife is five foot one and I hate working out with her just because everything is better for her. Like we do thrusters. Like my one thruster takes like three

or I have to do, or she can do three thrusters by the time I do one burpees, forget about it. Like she destroys me on burpees. The only thing I can beat her on is wall balls. That is like the only fricking thing, even like deadlifts. She just has to like bend her knees and she's standing up. Do you guys work out a lot together? We try to, yeah. All right. You've got me all opened up. I'll talk to you um so when we first started dating i would uh or before we were dating i used to coach her and then um when we started dating i tried to coach her and she was like don't don't coach me don't coach me like as soon as we started dating

like something happened in our relationship where I could no longer give her feedback on her, her cleans or her snatches. But now we've, we're good. We've gotten back to a place where we can critique each other's movements. And it's like, you know, it's fun again. It's finally gotten fun again for us to work out together. I haven't ever heard. That's interesting. I've never heard anyone go through that evolution. You're the first person. I've heard a lot of people say, oh, you should never work out with your wife. You should never work out with your girlfriend. Oh, it always leads to fights. My wife and I just, we like before we had kids, we worked out every time together.

And now when I'm working out, she'll come in the garage and cheer me on. Or if I know she's working out, I'll go in there. But we never went through the phase where you couldn't coach each other. Maybe that's just because she never coaches me and I'll go in there. But we never went through the phase where you couldn't coach each other. Maybe that's just because she never coaches me, and I only coach her. Maybe if she tried to coach me, I'd be the one. Have her do it. It's fun. As you crinkle your mustache. Okay, so you're at CrossFit Costa – not Costa Mesa. You're at CrossFit Mesa, and you start there.

How long do you go there before you start being like, oh shit, this is it. I'm going to start losing weight. I'm going to fulfill my mom's wish. I lost 27 pounds my first month. Okay. Wow. So, um, it was, so when I signed up, they had just started a 30 day paleo challenge, um, which was really good for me. Cause I, 30 day paleo challenge, um, which was really good for me. Cause I, like you said, I have that carb addiction. Um, so I went to CrossFit three to five times a week and then I would do the, I, I killed it at the paleo stuff. Um, and yeah, I lost like 27 pounds the first month. And then I was like, well, shit, this, this stuff does does work let's keep it going um so yeah and how long were you there i crossed with mesa yeah so i opened up my own place so i opened up my own place in may of 2013 so you were there a year yeah i was like there a year yeah and how much weight had you lost in that first year

um I got I lost 150 the first year so you went from 600 to 450 and when did you take your L1 um in the summer of 2013 so and and did you take your L1 because you wanted to open an affiliate or did you take your L1 because you're like, Hey, I just need D I want deeper knowledge. Just cause I want a deeper knowledge. What's that? Was that scary? The L1 as a 400 pound man was really scary. Yeah. I was definitely not the least fit in that entire group, but it was fun. I learned a lot.

A guy I still talk to, Zach Forrest out of Nevada. Love Zach. Yeah, he's amazing. Amazing. I love Zach. So much good energy from that guy. And what a beautiful mover too. Man, he's amazing. Amazing. I love Zach. So much good energy from that guy. And what a beautiful mover too. Man, he moves good.

I hate him. When me and my wife got married, we got married in Vegas and he actually opened up his gym so me and my wedding party could have a CrossFit workout the day of our wedding. God, Zach is great. Yeah. He's just an amazing guy. Yeah. I don't know if he's still on the L1 team, but he definitely used to be on the L1 team and that's how I met him. And he always, I always looked up to him.

Yeah. He, he taught me so much in those couple of days about movement to coaching, you know, just being a good person. Like he's that kind of person that just you're around him for a couple days and it could change your life you know i mean isn't that amazing um and i just love blowing the l1 so so so bear with me but people think like you're not you're going it's a two-day you think you're going there for a two-day like hey to get a certificate or to learn some stuff about crossfit but you really you're getting this crazy cultural um um uh what's the word indoctrination you're you're like you're getting it's really not it's really not explainable but when i hear you say that you were just there

two days and one of the trainers there is a dear friend of yours now or at least someone that you you you can even go to their gym with your wedding party I mean that it just speaks volumes of that familial experience it's like it's like the best summer camp you had as a little kid but it's a two-day CrossFit L1 I mean it's nuts yeah um the way I would describe it for me was before I got my L1 I just thought of CrossFit in the context of CrossFit Mesa like I didn't think of CrossFit in any other realm other than that's my gym that I go to to do these fun workouts and get in shape and then I got my L1 and all of a sudden CrossFit in my brain became this global giant community of like-minded people like all trying to help each other and it's not just it's not just the workouts it's the culture it's the community it's you know

the coaching like things that you I didn't really think about before. It was just, like I said, like, I had no idea. I actually didn't even know what the games were when I decided to get my L1. And then all of a sudden I was like, Oh, there's this thing called the games. It just, the world got a lot bigger. The CrossFit world got a lot bigger after my level one. So. So then you, and it's a, it's a thousand bucks. It's been a thousand bucks for as long as I've been around for 15 years. Was that hard for you? Were you like, Oh God, a thousand dollars

for two days. And I'm like, I'm 400 pounds. And like, really, is this for me? And like, you know, I didn't even think twice about it, to be honest. Like I was so in love with CrossFit at the moment well I still am but um I never even thought twice about the price I was like this is the way I describe it to a lot of people is like the Ken who the Ken you're talking to now is not the same Ken who was sitting in that parking lot before he walked into CrossFit Mesa. Like after I got into CrossFit and started doing the workouts and losing the weight and meeting the people, like I had this transformative experience where like, not to jump too far ahead, but that's why I decided to pay it forward and open my own affiliate is my old life was boring. Like I, I didn't, I felt no excitement going to the bar with my friends and eating chicken wings. I felt no going to work became the most mundane, boring thing when it was a job I used to love.

Um, but it no longer excited me. i loved this crossfit thing and this health thing and fitness and like i was obsessed i became obsessed with it so when when i've heard about level ones and stuff i was like taking my money i don't you know it was saving your life and you wanted to get drink even more from the fountain exactly from this well that was saving your life this well knowledge so then you take your l1 and then do you tell the the owner of crossfit mesa hey thanks for the for the warm one year welcome and changing my life i'm gonna open my own box um no and that is probably one of my biggest regrets is I was worried that though. So I don't know if you're familiar with the Valley, the Arizona Valley, but Mesa and Phoenix are like opposite ends of the Valley. Um, I opened up a box on purpose on the other side. So I wouldn't

even be tempted to poach people or anything like that but at the same time like I was afraid that he would think that right right so I I saw I bought the affiliate and I you know I started the process of putting the gym together and all that kind of stuff and eventually he found out. And then we had like a, I wouldn't say a fall. It wasn't a falling out. It was just more like a, you know, why are you keeping this a secret from me and all that kind of stuff, which in looking back on it now, I wish I just had the balls to be like, Hey dude, I want to pay it forward. I want to open up my own gym. You know, thank you so much for

everything you've given me, you know, that kind of stuff. But right. I wasn't there mentally. It's, it's one of my biggest, biggest mistakes. But that's the advice you'd give to anyone who's going to open their own box. Just tell your affiliate owner, Hey, basically you inspired me and I'm ready to pay it forward. Exactly. And that's, and then if something, if that happened to me, like I already know if someone

just came up, came up to me and goes, Hey, I want to start my own affiliate. I'd be like, cool. Let me give you, let me tell you every mistake I made. Let me tell you, you know, what you need to do to succeed. Don't buy jerk blocks. They're just going to sit in the corner. No, I would, I would love to help somebody, somebody you know that'd be the ultimate path forward you know helping someone open their own affiliate it was you know it's um when you were telling me

the story about your mom i was just the whole time picturing myself telling my kids that because it really is like that it's like the the selflessness you get from having kids it's bizarre you can't even fathom it. Like I always used to wonder, I wonder if my parents would dive in front of a car to protect me or save me or like, and then now that I have kids, I'm like, Oh shit. They were constantly like willing to throw their, put their life on the line for me. And I could see it now. It's still such a, cause I don't have kids. It's such a crazy concept to me.

Yeah. It's still like a, cause I don't have kids. It's such a crazy concept to me. Yeah. It's still like, if, if I could talk to my mom one more time, that would be probably what I would say is like, thank you for, thank you for teaching me what love is, what true love is and thank you for taking the time to change my life by making, having me make that promise like thank you for giving me a second chance at life right so you start this gym and that's crossfit 602 and you start it with a partner yep and

you regret having a partner you should have never done that i'm making that up you didn't say that probably my my first advice to someone who wants to open an affiliate is don't have a partner you should have never done that i'm making that up you didn't say that that would probably be my my first advice to someone who wants to open an affiliate well if you're gonna have a partner just realize well even if you don't just realize the money isn't gonna flow you know year one i think that's the biggest mistake that affiliate owners make is they think oh i'm just gonna slap CrossFit on my, on my door. And all of a sudden I'm going to have like 500 members and we're going to be swimming in money. You know, if that's, if that, if swimming in money is your goal, you shouldn't own an, you shouldn't open an affiliate. It should be about, you know, like I said, paying it forward and helping people. But I feel like so many people don't realize that it takes years of a small business to grow and to,

to, you know, to see results. It's just like opening a small business is just like working out. It takes a lot of shit work and a lot of dedication and a lot of, um, long days and long nights. And eventually you're going to see the results, but you're not going to see the results right away. Where did you find your partner at for CrossFit 602? He was one of my coaches at CrossFit Mesa. Okay. So you guys start this gym together and how long are you there before you part ways? A little over a year. Okay. And is he still in the affiliate business? Does he still run an affiliate? No.

I'm not sure where he's at, but he originally was. So when we split, he opened up a different affiliate in another city, but then he closed that one. And I think he moved to Chicago. I'm not 100%. Okay. So you leave 602 and you open CrossFit Tempe yeah and at this point you are two years into your CrossFit journey you're single you

you are how much do you weigh at this point? I'm under 300. I'm on 280, 290. Oh, shit. So you're really, you're on your game now. Yeah, I was feeling good. Okay. And how old are you now, did you say?

I was 36. No, but how old are you now? 39. Okay. Hey, you better stop dilly-dallying. Dude, it gets harder. I'm 40. I was just going to say, you had a kid at like, what, 42? No, I'm not talking about the kid thing. You can wait as long as you want to have kids. Don't hang out. If you want to be down at 300, don't hang out at 400 too long man it's so hard to lose weight at 48 whoo oh i bet at that point it really you're still you still have a couple more years where you can work out and lose some weight at my age like it's all food it's it's all about the food man like i just like if i had two m&ms i'd fucking fucking blow up like a balloon it's really the inflammation's crazy so okay so you're you're 36 and you and you start your own gym crossfit tempe and um and that's where i'm

talking to you right now and you're sitting there uh yeah okay i'm at the gym yeah and um and tell me tell me about that journey so you open a gym do you have any coaches how much does it cost to join your gym how many members do you start with give me the whole um when i was first on my own um i had two or three coaches um yeah i had like three coaches or three coaches. Yeah, I had like three coaches. I think we're charging $99 a month if you sign a year contract. It was like 130 something if you signed like a six month or something like that. That would be my other advice is know your worth because once you start charging 99 a month it's really hard to actually start charging you know more money okay good point advice yeah um yeah we weren't we weren't charging nearly enough for what we were giving everybody

um so yeah we had we had three or four coaches charging about 99 to $135 a month, 1200 square foot facility, about 1500 square foot facility. And, and did you have plenty of equipment? Did you have enough equipment? Man, I had enough equipment,

but then I went to the games one year and I bought a worm and that worm sat in the corner of my gym for about a year before I got rid of it. So two things. Don't get a worm and don't get jerk boxes. Exactly. I like it. It's going to be the name of my second book after, was it Sweaty Something and Lonely? Yes.

Second book is Don't Buy a Jerk Block and Worm. What is it? Sweaty, Uncomfortable, and uncomfortable and lonely yeah so that's it so so you open the gym and uh that's in 2013 you've been there seven years and somewhere in there you meet your current wife yeah so. So how did that happen? How did, tell me about her first day at CrossFit. Um, so we went to high school together. Um, but then after high school, we lost, you know, we stopped talking. Um, we were never dating in high school. We're just friends. And then, uh, she saw me post something about, you know crossfit and my gym and she

reached out to me uh actually i was doing a group on i was doing a group on and she messaged me through facebook and she's like hey i always want to try crossfit um can i just pay you instead of group on because i know you have to pay group on some of the money and i was like yeah come on in and so her and her friend came in. Was she hitting on you or did she really want to try CrossFit or both? What's the real story? My theory is that she's always wanted me since high school. I like it.

This was her chance to get with me. What did she say? Did she say that's true or what? No, hell no. She's in denial? She's in denial to this day. or what no hell no she's in denial he's in denial to this day you know no she uh I guess she just wanted to try because her cousin did CrossFit and um so we she signed up and we started coaching and because we had a history together we just always had this relationship we would tease each other

even on the floor of the gym we'd always tease each other. And I had a girlfriend at the time. So even if she threw herself at me, I would have said no. But did your girlfriend go to the box? Was she at your gym? Occasionally, but she really wasn't into the CrossFit thing. She was more of like a marathon runner and that kind of stuff. But we broke up, me and my old girlfriend, and me and Michelle, that's my wife, Michelle,

we did a partner workout together. And after the workout, we just started talking shit to each other, laughing and joking. And this girl who went to the gym, she goes, you guys are such a cute couple why don't you guys date and just like that yeah i was like another client just throw that on yeah another client just threw that i was like i was about to say you know maybe and before i even could say anything michelle just started laughing her ass off she was just laughing and laughing. And then she goes, I could never date

Ken because he's like a brother to me. And I was like, oh my God. The brother zone. I got the brother zone. I didn't even get the friend zone. I got brother zone. So I took that as a challenge. And then later that day or the next day, uh, there was a birthday party and there was a ton of people at this birthday party. This is all people from the gym. And I messaged Michelle and I was like, Hey, nobody showed up to the party. Can you come? Can you come?

Cause, uh, everybody's sad that nobody's here. And she goes, fine, i'll come down so she got ready drove in there's like 50 people at this party so i tricked her and uh i made my move that night i just you know let her know i liked her and you know about six months later we were married we got engaged after three months of dating um and is she younger than you she's actually a month older than me or three months older than me and what year is this when is this this was in we just had our five-year anniversary so this was six years ago so does it fuck up the dynamics of the box at all to have your wife in there so

when we were dating we kept it a secret for a really long time well not really long because we're engaged after three months for the first couple months it was a secret because we didn't want to fuck up you know anything like when i opened an affiliate my very my one of my first rules were i'm not going to be that creepy guy that dates members right right i don't want to be that weird coach who's always hitting on girls and that wasn't me uh so when i first helped yourself yeah i couldn't help myself um but when we started we started dating i was like let's just see where this goes first before we tell anybody just because i don't want to mess up the community at all but we really loved each other and we decided to get married and then we told everybody and that kind of stuff so and is it okay is it okay in the box having your wife now she's my business

partner so yeah but um it's actually the greatest thing that ever happened to me because she loves doing all the things that I hate like paying taxes and paying the rent on the building and employee taxes and payroll and all that crap. All this stuff that takes brain power. My wife does all that stuff, too. All the brain, all the anything with numbers and writing. I could even tell you how much is in my bank account now. She just handles all. I just give her my check.

I'm like, you just get everything going. So, so you're cruising along. And when we started the call, you said you were 400 pounds now. The first questions I asked is, have you ever put on, after you got down, have you ever, what's the most weight you ever put on? And so it sounds like the most weight you've ever put on is 115 pounds yeah is this how did you get on this journey and is it scary and especially relating to this COVID-19 thing like are you are you freaking yourself out are you like oh yeah it's very scary from someone because I know obesity the things that hits the hardest with COVID.

So the weight gain is a very, it's an embarrassing story, but I'm open to sharing it. Right before, the day before me and Michelle got married, I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to pay the rent for the gym because we had just lost a bunch of members. It was the lowest point in my affiliate careers. We lost a bunch of people. I thought we were going to close. I thought I was, you know, I didn't want her to marry a loser. So I told her that, hey, we might be closing next month and I'm broke, you know, so you might not want to marry me. And she said that she didn't care about me being broke. She didn't care if I owned a gym. She just loved me and wanted to marry me. So I decided, so we got married and I made her a promise that I was going

to be the man that she deserves. So I ended up working seven days. So let me back up. When I first started owning a gym, I sucked at sales. I sucked at marketing. I thought being a gym owner meant working out two to three times a day, you know, having fun with everybody, you know, coaching people like, you know, my priority was coaching people and nothing else and having fun. That was all that I wanted to do because I was very immature as a affiliate owner and in real life, I'm pretty immature there too. But after I got married, all of a sudden my whole mindset changed. And I was like, you need to provide for your family.

So I worked seven days a week, 15 hour days. I made sales marketing a priority. Like I, I, we grew, when we got married, I had like 80, 90 members. Well, over the years we got to 200, 250, 300 members. And I was just became a workaholic. And I was just like, I just want to be successful. Um, and I want to, and that's a, that's a selfish reason. But another reason I wanted to be successful is like, I want to help as many people as I can. So if I wasn't selling, I was coaching, you know, I was either coaching or selling. Those were the two things I was doing all the time. And I never worked. I started, I didn't, I shouldn't

say never worked. I went from working out three times a day to two times a day to one time a day to every other day. You know, it's a slippery slope. So I stopped making myself a priority. Like I put myself at the bottom, which if based on this conversation, I hope you, this whole conversation, I think you might understand that with my self-esteem issues, it's really easy for me to put myself at the bottom. Right, right. I'm a people pleaser.

I want everybody to like me. I want to be successful. So my own health wasn't a concern post-marriage. Right. So, and it's a horrible excuse. I feel really ashamed. No, no. Hey, no, hey no you know what that you're you're nailing it the the really good thing is is most people don't realize it until they lose

their wives yeah you have a friend of mine told me my friend jeff holman he's been my friend since the second grade he one time told me that you have to put 90 of your energy into yourself so that and that 10 that you give to other people, be completely selfless. But it will be the best 10%. It will blow people away. And it really is like that. And what you did is you filled your gas tank up for a couple years. And then you went the other way.

And it sounds like spent all your shit. When really you need to constantly be filling your gas tank, right? People need to be like getting the overflow, not the, not, not you draining it down to empty. No, what you're saying is smart. I think what you're saying, I don't think it's embarrassing. I think what you're saying is like 99% of the world's, well, out of the world, I think it's the people in the United States have that problem a lot. I agree. They're going to help other people, but they don't want to take first. And part of it is because they don't want to take personal responsibility. People need to take personal responsibility for themselves and then give that overflow. I give you one example. I give myself

all day to my kids, no matter fucking what, but when I'm working out, I completely fucking ignore them. And if they step into the garage while I'm working out and get too close to me throwing weights, I'll just yell at them, step back. I'm like, they'll start crying. And like, I would never talk. I don't talk to my kids like that unless it's that situation, but they're going to know that that 30 minutes to 40 minutes every day, like, fuck you. And I'm doing it for, for you, you know? So I love your story story i think it's like thank you yeah i love your story so basically it's hard to do i mean i like glad you like it it's just it's hard to it's hard to actually say it because it's like i was so big and then i lost all that weight and then i i

i didn't prioritize myself enough to where then I gained some of it back. So yeah, it's just hard to say out loud, you know? Yeah. So, so what, what, so, and, and, and are you working out now? Yeah, I am. It definitely, it's working out a lot slower. My, my Fran time isn't what it used to be. Can you do a pull-up right now not now not right now no i used to back in back at the 290 mark i was doing pull-ups and stuff handstand push-ups do you think you're gonna get back to that i'd like to but my main goal is just like glasman was saying yes was it yesterday the day before just just fucking work out every day yeah do something

physical every day um me and my wife went on a two-mile walk um and i felt amazing afterward and i was like my mind was more clear and i'm like i haven't felt like this in a while you know um you owe it to her too, you know? Exactly. And she, she is kind of like your new mom. I mean, I don't want to get into the Freudian weird shit. No, but it's funny. Cause I tell my, I tell my wife that all the time and she freaks out. Well, the thing is, is your whole life, you're trying to please your parents.

And then if you, if you're lucky, you have a moment of enlightenment and you realize it's not like that. You're free from your parents. And then if you're lucky, you have a moment of enlightenment and you realize it's not like that. You're free from your parents. But then the second you get married, it's going back to that or have kids like you owe it to be, you know, there's that saying you are the five people you hang around or your wife's just going to reflect you. So if you let yourself go to shit or she lets herself go to shit, the other person will start involuntarily reflecting that. You can't do that. You like, you owe it to her to get back in and grind.

I've never heard like that before. I like that. That's pretty, you are, you become who you hang out with. Yeah. And so you can't, I mean, if I, if I see, if I open a beer at noon, my wife will have a sip of it. If I don't open a beer at noon, my wife will never have a fucking beer at noon. I mean, that's a really oversimplification, but really it just works like that. And so if you let yourself put on 100 pounds you are basically signaling everyone

around you that it's okay right and we and uh and as as um i'm not saying that for guilt trip or anything i'm just saying we just all do that too the the peer pressure that you've put on yourself by owning a gym is awesome i fucking personally love it yeah it sounds like it's almost like your job is to give people accountability but you get it paid back right because you're accountable to them and you know your clients would support you through all of it yeah they're not going to look at you and be like oh my god you're the coach and you're fucking up or every like no one no one on this planet looks like anyone who's a god. And if they do, they're fucking idiots because none of us are, you know what I mean? We're all, we're all just reflecting each other's weaknesses and strengths.

Anyway, sorry. I like it. I like that 90% selfish thing. That's, uh, that's kind of where I've come to in my life. I didn't putting it like that, but if I'm not selfish and put my health, I can't help other people unless I'm healthy. Right. And I want to help. When I opened up the affiliate, my whole goal was just to help as many people until I die, and I can't do that if I die at 40. Right.

You found the elixir to life and you want to share it. Exactly. So now my new philosophy is I just want to do a lot every day or maybe take a couple days off and, you know, like take rest days. But, you know, just move. Don't worry about the number on the weight or number on the bar. Just even a shitty time is a good time. Don't worry about the number on the bar. Even a shitty time is a good time. Because another thing that I had, I mean, another problem I had is I got into that competitor mindset where you had to do weightlifting.

You had to do a session of just conditioning. You had to do a session of just conditioning, you had to do a metabolic conditioning session. Like in my head for a long time, I was like, I have to have two hours a day to work out. And if I don't have that two hours, then screw it. You know, even though through my, all my training as an owner or as a coach, I'm like, you just need, you know, 15, 20 minutes, 30 minutes a day. And that's all you really need. If you're eating clean and moving, that's all you really freaking need. You don't need this tons of volume. So it took me a long time to even be like, well, okay, I don't want, I need to be selfish so I can help other people. I get that. But where do I find this two hours to work out? And then if then finally, like, you know, about a month or two ago, I was just like,

you don't need that much freaking time, stupid. When you were 600 pounds doing CrossFit, you just went to the gym and did an hour workout or it wasn't even an hour workout. If you take out the warmups and cool downs, like you just do the workout and then you go home and eat freaking you know protein and vegetables and you'll be fine you know it's it's so weird how at least for me I fell into this trap of I need all this time and volume to be successful as an, as an athlete. And, and, uh, it's just, it's just, um, my brain is an interesting thing where it goes. Don't, don't make the same mistake I did.

Don't wait till you're injured to have that really thrown in your face. So like, uh, just your basics, just fucking idiotic shit. I was at a friend's house two Christmases ago on Christmas Eve and I ate 75 cookies and 300 beers and I just gorged myself right on Christmas Eve. So on Christmas morning, I'm like, I'm going to do three workouts today. And I fucking woke up in the first workout in the morning. I woke up and I did some deadlifts and i tweaked my back oh no and then it's been two and so these and that's that'll be two years ago this last uh this christmas but ever since then i'm like i'm never doing that again that was my wake-up call hey jackass i was 46 at the time stop doing that yeah stop doing that if you have a crazy night where you eat a bunch of cookies don't you're not going to fix it by

working out three times. Just get back on the wagon. You know what I mean? And boy, I feel so much better. But like not having, I mean, I was probably never nearly as competitive as you, but I did like to lift heavy weights. Lifting heavy stuff, you know, was fun. But a couple years ago, I just was like, it's not, it's not, um,

it's not important. And then when I do need to lift heavy shit, I still can. It's not like I can't do it, but like I can do thrusters all day with 45 pounds and then put 95 pounds on the bar and it doesn't feel any heavier, but I still just don't do it because I'm 48 and I'm five foot five and I just don't need to do that. I don't need to put my shoulder, my lower back. I don't need to put that stress on me anymore. Me personally. Yeah. I think it was like, I think it was Ben Bergeron. He's like, if you do competitive programming, it's not about if you're going to get hurt, it's when you're going to get hurt. Right.

And for someone like me who just wants to be healthy and active, For someone like me who just wants to be healthy and active, like all that volume and lifting heavy weight really isn't needed. You can get an amazing shape by just, like you said, 45-pound thrusters. Like you don't need – I had to have a big ego check. Like I'm married. I mean my wife doesn't even know that a 300 pound clean is a, is hard to do. So why, why am I trying to do it? I can, I could do a 185 pound clean and a 300 pound clean. And my wife would clap for me just the same. Right. That's a great point um i heard greg say that

to achieve cardiovascular health you have to take some risk with orthopedic calamity so basically every time you wake up and get out of bed the chance of injury is there so how how much more do you want to do than get out of bed? Well, the best thing you can do is you and I both know is CrossFit safely. And then, and then, and then you go to what Ben was saying. Yeah. If you drive, you know, there's, there's a safe zone to drive between 45 and 65 miles an hour on the freeway. If you, if you go slower than that, you're not going to get to where you want to go. But if you go faster than that,'re not going to get to where you want to go but if you go faster than that the chance of an accident increases dramatically and so it's like oh that's a really good metaphor i like that thank you i'm known for those i really like that yeah i'm gonna steal that you at one point well i want to finish on this i want to finish on the covid thing because it's so big okay

so on one hand it's fucking amazing you found crossfit because if you were 600 pounds and you get hit with covid you're toast if you're worried about not being able to wake up because of being your lungs being crushed under your own weight at 600 pounds then if you get the flu you're toast right yeah um and now you're 400, right? Yeah. And now you're 400. Are you freaked out at all? Are you like, oh shit, I have to just like, like what's stopping you? Like if I was you and I was like, got really scared, I'd be like, okay, I'm going to fast for 36 hours and just drink water. And then from there, I'm just only going to eat meat and fat for 21 days. You know what I i mean i would just like fucking i would

have to be scared to death to do that but like it's kind of like that right like literally the underlying conditions everything i'm seeing is just fucking diabetics and obese people dying i mean let's just say it's 90 right well um the good news is is even though I got out of whack with my workouts and eating and I gained weight, I'm still actively doing CrossFit and I still work out. And every time I do get my blood work, my doctors always are amazed by it because they're always like, so you're 400 pounds, but you're not diabetic. You're not pre-diabetic. Your liver functions. Great. Like, like, I don't know if, I don't know if I'm just this weirdo or just because I do metabolic conditioning, um, the markers are still pretty low for me.

So that helps me not freak out um i am taking my have great eyes by the way like you look like a fucking alert uh alert alert person do you know what i mean you don't look like someone who's metabolically deranged you know like sometimes their eyes are doing some weird shit i mean you look like when i stare at you i'm like fuck this is a healthy you look like a crossfitter yeah um thank you um so i'm not so much worried because my markers are still pretty good um that being said i know i need to get you know get it down there but um i've been doing social distancing and all that stuff so uh i'm not overly concerned besides the fact that um i'll tell you about how i like new ken has this confidence and all this stuff like i don't want to live in fear so like yes covid's a scary thing and I should take it seriously and do the social distancing

stuff and you know not just try to hug every stranger I see but at the same time I'm not I'm not so obsessed with fear that I let fear control every decision I make the best I can do for me is eat healthy work out every day and you know hope for the best i'm not gonna like go on some crit because i have such an unhealthy relationship with food like it would be really bad for me to like you said like go on a like a juice diet or proteins and fats and just you know because you would swing back the other way you're saying i would swing back the other way yeah like like crazy two months of perfection and then fucking 1200 pizzas exactly i would be great for a month and then i would just have pancakes and pizzas for a week yeah and i and i try to do things the way i would tell one of my members i would never tell a member to just, you know, just drink juice for a month or

just starve yourself or just eat fruits and or meats and fats. Like, God, you're so much more stable than me. You have such a good head on your shoulder, brother. I just like, I feel like, you know, like a real coach. I'm like a wannabe coach behind my microphone. You should treat yourself like you treat a client. Like, and that's how I try to live my whole life really is like, would you be talking to somebody like that? If you were at the gym coaching them, you know, like,

and the whole fear thing, I feel like our whole society is just so over we're we're frozen with fear not just with COVID but like everything everything is this heightened super heightened thing where it's like light everything has to be life or death you know everything's extreme there's no moderation anymore there's no middle ground it's either you believe this or you're a piece of shit you either believe that or you're a piece of shit you know uh even with nutrition like nutrition is a funny thing too like if you're not doing keto you're stupid if you're not doing intermittent fasting you're stupid if you're not doing

paleo you're you know um politics is the same way. It's just, I don't know. I try to be as sensible and logical as I can because my natural tendency is to be really emotional. So I try to be introverted in a way. And like, so even like when I'm having a fight with my wife like she'll come to me with a problem because it's usually my fault and then instead of just engaging right away i will like sit there and i'll be like okay let's think about this you know and that's how i try to treat every situation in life like um don't respond to things with emotion. Try to use logic and reason and everything that you do. And you'll be pretty much better off. Cause if you, if you wreck, if you,

if you respond emotionally to things like I'm sure you've done this where someone sends you a messed up message and then you type this big, long, fuck you, you piece of shit. And then like, as you're like reading it, you're like, I better delete like i better delete this you know what i mean for sure so that's how i try to treat life is like think of something then rethink about it and make sure that it's the right course of action before you actually do it some guys some guy um wrote on my instagram account the other day um i i posted a video of my kids wrestling and he, and there were 30 comments saying, this is amazing. And then there was one comment and the guy said, Hey,

you're fucking stupid. You're going to get your kids hurt. You're being reckless. He just wrote all this shit. Right. And I wrote this response like, Hey dude, you don't have no fucking idea what you're talking about. Didn't if you, maybe you didn't have siblings, but but that's what siblings do and wrestling is the funnest thing in the world with your siblings and i just and i wrote all shit and then i erased it all and um i said something very simple like okay or just you know just just like i i heard you and then he wrote sorry. Nothing personal, but if you're going to put your life out on Instagram, people are going to judge it. And then I wrote back to him, this is all public. I said, Oh, it's definitely personal. It's touched a nerve with you. And I was, and he, then he wrote back something nice. You're absolutely right. It's touched a nerve with me.

And then he explained something that happened in his childhood. I can't remember, but my point circling back to what you were saying i felt so much better that i took a break and let him come to terms with why he said that to me than me saying fuck you yeah and it's kind of like that um this covid thing or our president president trump um there are these things they're so polarizing and or women who are pmsing they're so polarizing um what do you said to me you said to me just now you're like yeah you have to come at them with logic i was thinking about how about that one week when you can't come at them with um uh god i'll say that there's one week a month me and my wife fight a lot so yeah it's just that one week that's it i swear to god yeah i tell her just don't go nuclear on me because then it takes

long to recover um but but it's just you're right it's amazing no one wants to be like you could be like um what did you think about trump this and someone will be like he's a fucking racist nazi and you're like okay and you're a scumbag if you like him you're like all right you know what i mean like there's no there's no conversation and it's like that i feel like with the covid too like um there's the group that just wants the vaccine and be absolved of all personal responsibility and then there's the other side that it's like, Hey, this is everyone's personal responsibility to make themselves better. Yeah. That's unfortunately the side I sit on, but I'm able to talk to the people on the other side. I don't have to like, um, I don't have to call them a name. I don't have to, I don't think they're stupid for thinking that. No, I think,

I think a good person can have two conflicting ideas in their brain and not get angry about it right like i feel like we've that's what we've really lost in society is like you can put two different conflicting ideas in your brain to work itself out and without and have the maturity to not lash out with anger right oh because like you said with politics it's like if you're a conservative you're a racist xenophobe if you're a democrat you're a communist who's trying to take away everybody's money right right right middle ground nailed it that's what i think of both of those abortions the same way man that thing deserves to be thought out every time on one hand you have people who think you're killing babies and shit man that's a valid concern and on the other hand you have this thing

of protecting women's rights totally valid yeah how is there not like how can there not be a civil discussion around it they're both such valid points and it's like but no people just want to go nuclear on you like throw a rock at your car window or something yeah and then when you go to covid it's like yeah like you're saying you either have to shut yourself off for some society um or you have to like go back to life as normal i mean there's a whole middle area where we can come to some understanding and the worst thing is sorry no no you go ahead the worst thing is what good the worst thing i see from a small business owner side is people who dismiss me wanting to open up the gym when it's safe as, oh, he just wants to go to the bar and get a haircut.

I'm like, you know, I'm sure you've seen that, but it's like, no, there's lots of people who want to open up the economy because I spent seven plus years of my life building this small business. What's wrong? What's wrong, Ken? You don't care about people dying? You're so selfish. You're so selfish. You want to open your business and let an 83-year-old who's going to die next week die today? Sorry. Now you know it's that I fall on. Yeah, no. I pretty much, the HQ politics has been pretty famous for a while. Yeah, it's, none of us want anyone to die.

Yeah. But the discussion needs to have on what's both on the scale, right? It's a scale. We've closed the economy to save X lives. Now, what's on the other end of that scale? And no one wants to talk about it how many kids are being molested at home right now how many women are being beaten how many small businesses are going out how many kids aren't getting educated like how many people aren't going to the hospital

and dying of strokes because they're afraid to go to the hospital because they're gonna get the covid i mean there's all this shit on the other end of the scale yeah to save these lives of people with underlying conditions but no one wants to have that discussion. I mean, you and I are now, but. Yeah. But like the politicians need to like really, I mean, is that how you see it too? It's a scale, right? There's a price we're paying right now.

What is that price? I guarantee you alcoholism is on the rise. Thank you. I'm part of that. Bad eating. Me too. Yeah. It's like, like you were saying, it noon it's noon i could have a beer i told my wife i woke up this morning i'm not drinking today i mean why the fuck am i saying that at eight in the morning right isn't that crazy you're like and then

have yourself a pep talk about not drinking today. Right. And I would never do that pre-quarantine. Right. I, yeah, no, unless you're on vacation, maybe. Right. But yeah, so we have to decide, like, do we, if we save every human being on the planet, but we're all back to a third world country is that really worth it if everybody loses their small business alcoholism is on the rise there's gonna be more suicides unemployment uh horrible shit the food chain the supply food chain is being broken like there's a lot of shit that's going down because we're being so precautious. And I'm, and when the governor shut us down, I didn't really think twice about it. I was like, okay,

the people in charge say it's best for us to close our doors for a little bit, you know, but now two weeks became a two, a month and a half, a month and a half turned into two months. And it's like, we need to get something going, you know, and we have a big gym too. So it's like, we need to get something going, you know? And we have a big gym too. So it's like, we could, we could have 10 feet of separation and still have 10 people in the gym, you know, and we could set weights. How big is your gym?

It's 6,000 square feet. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. So we could have, yeah, our commercial rates are a little better here than California. Yeah. But yeah, we could have 10, 10 by 10 squares with 10 feet in between and, and service 10 people at a time. It's, it's not undoable,

but the government wouldn't even let us try. It's like, they just told us what to do. I could have perfect social distancing in this gym where nobody comes near each other and everybody can still work out. And you could have a taser and shock anyone who comes close to. That'll be my job. I'm going to sit in the rafters and just shoot anybody that comes near me. Like a salt gun. I want to ask you one final question.

All right. like a salt gun i'm gonna ask you one final question all right to anyone who's listening who's intimidated to go to a box whether they're for whatever reason they're overweight they're anorexic they're blind they're they they have some they have some issue. What, what, what advice would you give them? Don't be, don't be ashamed of what, what you've become. You can't change the past. You can only make your future better. I would tell them just take it one day at a time. Just try to get a little healthier every day. It's a marathon, not a sprint.

I would tell them that CrossFit boxes aren't the scary place where it's just a bunch of super in shape people who look down on unhealthy people. It's quite the opposite. It's everybody wanting to help you and nurture you with this positive, welcoming environment. And it's saved a shit ton of lives and it could save yours because, you know, metabolic conditioning is the way to, you know, like you called it, the fountain of youth. It's, it's pushes away all those chronic diseases, you know, diabetes, all the,

all that kind of stuff, cancer. Um, I would just tell them that there's hope, Like you don't give up hope. There's, there's so many people here who want to help you. And you can, you might be able to do it alone, but the odds of you doing it alone are not as great as doing it with the community. Cause there were days when I, even when I was in CrossFit, there were days I would just sit in the car and be like, I'm not going in today. I just don't. And like a coach would walk to the door and just knock on my

door and be like, Hey, you're going to jump into this workout. That's how much the difference between a CrossFit coach and like a personal trainer at like an LA fitness from being on both ends, um, is that we care. Like you're not just, you're not just a paycheck. You're not just, you know, you're not just, um, a number on a name tag. Like we want to help you. We want to scale the workouts to meet where you're at, to get to you, to help you get where you want to be. Like, that's the most important thing. I guess I'm rambling here, but I'm like, this is good. I'll interrupt you if you're rambling. I'm like, that's our job as CrossFit affiliates and CrossFit coaches. Our job is to take you from

where you are and help you get to where you want to be. And it's not going to happen overnight, and help you get to where you want to be. And it's not going to happen overnight, but we're going to slowly move you along and eventually you're going to look back and not be able to recognize the person you used to be. So that was my experience. Like I said, even with the weight gain that I have now, I'm nowhere near the same person I was before i walked into crossfit mesa um how proud is your mom of you that she told you to save yourself and instead you've

you saved yourself and now you're paying it forward i feel like she would be i hope she'd be proud of me. Fucking dude. I just, this is the most noble, I didn't self-serving for me to say this is the most noble profession you can be in right now. It's not a doctor. It's not a lawyer. It's not a politician. I think the most noble thing you can be do do right now in this society. That's so fucking sick is you're basically manning the lifeboat. When I think of you as an affiliate owner and some of the stories you're telling,

I have this picture of you on a lifeboat, like waving your hands over here, over here. Yeah. Well, I'll help you on. I'll help you on the boat. Come on. I feel like if we could figure a way out to show people their future self

and make them feel how they would feel if they just gave us six months then you wouldn't even have to sell crossfit memberships people would just be in lines just trying to give you their money wow so a machine you pointed at them and then it gives them hey this is you not you. Not only what you look like, but somehow you would transmit that feeling. Because for you, it was a feeling, right? You went from a guy who was scared and wanted to hide under the covers to asking girls out. I mean, that's kind of the boyhood dream, right? I mean, that's the dream you have your whole life from when you're seven years old and

you see that first girl you have a crush on to when maybe you're 12 and you have the courage to get told no the first time. Get no a lot. Yeah. No, CrossFit gave me superpowers. It gave me the ability to talk to girls. So, and honestly, like even when people come into the gym and they're like, I want to lose 20 pounds, what they're really saying to you is I want to feel good about myself.

I want to feel good in my skin. I want to feel good naked. I want to go to that pool party in July and not have people snicker at me, or at least think people are snickering at me. Right. It's, there's always like this, like people tell you what they want and that's a very superficial want. But then if you keep digging and digging and digging, you'll eventually come to the core of what they really want.

And what they really want is, like I said, to unlock their full potential feel confident feel good about themselves feel you know feel comfortable in their own skin feel good naked like um and then obviously people especially in your in our 40s like we look at you know how our grandparents were when they were 50 60 years old you know like i don't want to be like that you know so for a lot of people who come to my gym it's like it's uh people like listen i'm about to have i'm about to be a grandma but i want to be a cool grandma that can play with them and not just be in the corner on a respirator right like they want that fountain of youth so it's not it's not even like i would say it's not even health

it's not even healthy they say they want to be healthy but they're in their mind they're like scared scared shitless that they're going to be like their grandma who was on a ventilator in a wheelchair and they're like hell no no, I don't want to be that person. I want to be that fun grandma that took their kids mountain climbing. You know, that's the feeling that they want. It's not necessarily, you know, health, even though health is important. Right. It's cool that you're using the grandma. So when you're, when you're 20, it's not that you want to be, you want to lose 20 pounds. It's that you want to get a girlfriend. And when you're 70, it's, Hey, I want to be able to play with my grandkids. It's not, you want, it's not,

you want to lose weight. It's Hey, I want to play with my grandkids. There is always that you're right. There's something you want to do with that new you that you don't feel like you can do now. Exactly. Yeah. And it's, and the cool thing about CrossFit is the methodology and the programming accommodates your why, regardless if you're 15 or 70, like everything, everything that we do in these affiliates can help a 30 year old trying to lose 50 pounds it can help a 20 year old get the girl it can help the 70 year old play with their grandkids it can give the pro football player his 13th year in the nfl exactly right all of it everything and it is a really if you sit and think it is such an amazing methodology and concept that regardless of your why or your, your past,

we can help you with your future, you know, wherever you want to go, this programming and this coaching is going to work for that. And it's, it's a powerful thing. And that's the reason I get up every day is I get to be that guy to help people's futures. You know? I like that as an ending. I like it too. Ken, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you. This has been fun. This is my first ever thing like this. So I hope I gave you something to use. Yeah, it's great. People are going to love this. Your next thing is to be a motivational speaker. Okay. You're my new agent. Book me some tours. All right, brother. I'll see you around. Thank you so much. All right. Talk to you later. Bye.

Okay. Bye.