EFR 778: Is Coffee Bad For You? The Truth About Caffeine, Coffee Alternatives, and Alternative Coffee with Adam Von Rothfelder

00:00 - Speaker 1 The following is an operation podcast production.

00:03 - Speaker 2 So you have coffee alternatives like mudwater and things that try to be coffee but are so far from it. So these are the three kind of categories that we're sitting in in the CPG space and in like the industry, right, because people are under the understanding that maybe coffee is not good for them because it's causing anxiety. Yet they're not looking at their daily practices of everything else before they start abandoning something that's existed in our diet since the 1400s. When I look at caffeine, caffeine is a great tool that can give us energy through some hydro cortisol release. It also can decrease our cortisol right. So over time consumption of caffeine, our cortisol actually reduces.

00:43 And if you're caffeine sensitive and you're looking at your cell phone on Instagram and you're seeing all the things that you don't have and all the things you want, you're starting to feel anxiety. You're obviously gonna put it all on coffee. That's not the problem, but I do see that as throwing a little gas on the fire. What's going on? Everybody? I'm Adam Von Rothfelder and you are listening to Ever Forward Radio. Come, get some.

01:04 - Speaker 1 This is your number one source for inspiring content from people who are putting a purpose to their passion and truly living a life Ever Forward. I am your host, chase Tuning. This is Ever Forward Radio. Uh oh, what's going on everybody? Welcome back to Ever Forward Radio. I am your host, chase Tuning, health coach, wellness entrepreneur, an Army veteran and just someone who is very passionate about the human potential, someone that is curious about how can we fine tune things to just get a little bit more enjoyment, a little bit more efficiency, a little bit more performance out of life. But also, what are the things we need to be aware of to maintain our happiness and fulfillment and weight and profession? Because, look, getting better or going just one step more is amazing, but oftentimes we need to just take a step back and find gratitude and solace in what we have and really reflect on all the hard work that got us here today. This is the all-encompassing philosophy to living a life. Ever for it. I say so. If any of this rings true for you here today, you are in the right place.

02:20 I had the pleasure of sitting down with my man, adam von Rothfelder, for I don't know probably the third or fourth time here on the show. Over the years. Adam has been a friend, like a brother, for many years, ever since connecting with him way, way, way back in my entrepreneur journey Back in February of 2018, I'll never forget at the Fitness Business Summit 2018, hosted by Beidro's Coolion in San Diego, california, and I met him and I met his incredible product called Strong Coffee Company. You all have heard me talk about Strong for years now. This is, really, unless I'm going out to a coffee house and getting an espresso or something which is a couple times a week, I am drinking strong coffee daily, at least four times a week, five times a week probably. Strong Coffee Company is the first thing in my cup after water and after my greens, because it is just one of the most incredible products I have ever found to support a lot of things in my wellness, my cognition, but it's seriously just a phenomenal cup of coffee because it's real coffee. I can make it hot, I can make it ice, but I'm not gonna get into the nitty gritty here because Adam breaks it down and I have not sat with a founder of a consumer product good, a nutritional supplement technically, if you wanna look at it that way and ever really who knows his product, the way that Adam knows his product the ingredients, the dosages and what they do to the body.

03:50 This is more than just a cup of coffee. This is a way of life. This is something that is going to fuel you from the inside out. And when you hear his passion and when you hear his tenacity for really the level of integrity he holds for his company, for his brand, we even kinda get into no shade here. But talking about maybe, where we don't see that as much, and the consumer product goods in general in the marketplace today, share it out with anybody in your life that is drinking coffee or coffee alternatives or, like Adam will say, alternative coffees or anybody that just cares about what they're putting into their body.

04:29 I was in person with my man in Austin not that long ago. If you wanna check out the video, I'll have that link for you, as always in the show notes, under episode resources. You can also learn more about strong coffee. Click the link in the show notes or head to strongcoffeecompanycom and if you wanna try it, I promise you, if you're a coffee drinker or have been trying to even reduce caffeine or reduced coffee, I get by with one cup, and that is because of the quality ingredients and the things that are in it, more than just a coffee. So if you don't absolutely love it, money back guarantee. But I know that you're absolutely gonna love it Again.

05:03 Make it hot, make it iced and you can actually say 15% each and every time when you head to strongcoffeecompanycom. Throw it down code chase C-H-A-S-E at checkout and you're gonna get the homie hookup there 15% off each and every purchase. You're in good hands. I promise you you're gonna love it and you're gonna really love this conversation. So Adam and I let it rip for a while, so I'm gonna get us jumping into the conversation right here, right now with Adam von Rathfelder back on EverFord Radio. But still, what's it like knowing that you and your baby and your product has been fueling damn near no bullshit every podcast since I found it?

05:41 - Speaker 2 I mean dude, it means the world to me. I mean honestly, like I, strong coffee. People look at success in all different ways. I have looked at strong coffee as a success in so many ways that other people maybe wouldn't view it as a success. But seeing individuals like yourself fuel your life, fuel your company, like Operation Podcast and being from a coffee background, you know your family-owned coffee shops for you to trust in.

06:18 Strong coffee, I mean it means everything. It's like no, it doesn't, that's not what like keeps the lights on, but that is what keeps me going. Right. People telling me that stuff. I mean I get DMs like oh my God, I've been drinking your product every morning for three years and I've lost this amount of weight. Or you know, I love your product. I actually work at Starbucks or whatever. I mean it's wild.

06:44 Some of the DMs I get are some of the customer service stuff that I get, because my wife does all the customer service, so she knows that I'm very hard on myself and the success and where I want strong coffee to go and where I see it one day and the distance between here and there and hearing things like that are what helped me put one foot in front of the other right, hearing things from Caleb about his belief, like he hasn't had another coffee in a year. Right, and that's not because they're drinking the Kool-Aid, right, it's because We've seen the light. We've seen the light. Right, I've never convinced anybody that strong coffee is better. Right, I've always looked at it in a way that's like selling weed. It's like, right, try it, and then it speaks for itself. Right, and I want sold weed.

07:36 So I can understand this basic concept of trying something and them loving it. Right, and then you're not even selling it to them, right, like I was just smoking with a friend one day and they're like dude, I'd love to buy some of this from you. And it's like cool, I actually have some to sell. That's how I started selling weed when I was younger. It wasn't like I'm gonna go sell weed, and that's how strong coffee was created. I mean, it was literally created in my kitchen. People would smell it that I was training because I'd be. I lived right above my gym. I'd come down with a cup of coffee at five in the morning.

08:08 - Speaker 1 Yeah, you would really use it more as like a pre-workout in the beginning, right?

08:12 - Speaker 2 My pre-workout slash, pre-life. I called it yeah, yeah, yeah, and I was trying to lose weight. So it helped me with weight loss because I was transitioning from fighting and to modeling at the time. I had to find a way to keep my calories really clean while at the same time helping me be focused to run this company that I started and I was bartending at night. So I'm like getting five hours of sleep, waking up, water make my version of strong coffee, which was like eight ingredients and a blender and a huge fucking mess. But eventually those free hits turned into the idea that maybe this should be put in a bag because, like, maybe other people would love this as much as I do and as much as my wife does, as much as my friends do. And you were literally one of the first 10 people if not in the first five people that tried strong coffee in its infancy.

09:08 - Speaker 1 Back then it was Cafe Latte. Right, it was just called Cafe Latte. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

09:12 - Speaker 2 And we had these. I had a company blend up a big batch of sample packs and put in these little craft Ziploc baggies with a little sticker label on it, and I gave you one or two or three when we were at it.

09:28 - Speaker 1 This is February, february 2018. Yes, yeah, we were at Badger's Coolions Fitness Business Summit 2018. Totally, and you were there doing your thing, and that was the first time that I had ever really done anything. I was an entrepreneur for less than two months at that time.

09:46 - Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean you literally were just getting your podcast Podcast feet wet. Yeah, you were in the podcast room and I was with Barbelle Shrugged at the time and they all believed in it. Like I would get lost in the science because I'm a nerd that way I'd be like, oh my God, and the effective amount of altheanine and its relationship to the amount of caffeine that we're using are this perfect ratio as shown in these other Nutropics that have had these studies and this and that? And they're like dude and it mixes easily and tastes great, but we're still.

10:19 - Speaker 1 we're just like yeah, but how well does it mix, Right, how?

10:21 - Speaker 2 well, does it mix and how good does it taste? And that's where everybody was sold right. It wasn't as much as I would love everybody to be in awe of the science and the brain that went behind all the ingredients At the same time. I'm just at this point where it's like yo, it's just better coffee and it just tastes great and it's better for you.

10:43 - Speaker 1 That's really where I wanna kinda really get into the nitty gritty with you, man, and it's nitty gritty, it up, it's nitty gritty. So anybody that wants to really kinda understand more your backstory because you and we'll probably touch on a few things here but the life that you have lived, the hats that you have worn, the suffering that you have endured and the obstacles you've overcome, that's all in the older content. For sure Got your life story. I'll link that down in the show notes for everybody. But I wanted to kinda really hype up strong coffee in the beginning and I think we got that covered because it's just, it's a fucking amazing product and it's one of those things that, even if you're not in the health, fitness, wellness space right, you're not a trainer, you're not a coach, you're not an influencer or whatever and you're looking for something that you can for lack of a better term pedal or like what are the cool kids drinking on? That I would feel left out.

11:34 If you're just a human being that consumes coffee and you give a shred about your general well-being, it's one of those. Just why isn't everybody drinking it? And I'll say that till, like how comes home in? But I wanna ask when looking at strong coffee company as, let's say, besides the product like a CBG business, consumer product, good business. What is in it, what is not in it and what sets it apart from other similar CBG products Like other, we'll say, coffee alternative products?

12:07 - Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, I mean. So I think there's two classifications that you know. There's three classifications of coffee in my mind. Right, there's coffee, and then there's coffee alternatives and then there's alternative coffees.

12:23 - Speaker 1 Coffee, coffee alternatives and alternative coffees.

12:27 - Speaker 2 Right, so you have coffee alternatives like mud, water and things that try to be coffee but are so far from it, right?

12:33 - Speaker 1 instead of coffee. Hey, get rid of your coffee. Have a nice swap it out with this.

12:36 - Speaker 2 So these are the three kind of categories that we're sitting in the CBG space and in, like the industry right, because people are under the understanding that maybe coffee is not good for them because it's causing anxiety, yet they're not looking at their daily practices of everything else before they start abandoning something that's existed in our diet since the 1400s, right?

12:56 So when I look at like that thought process, the alternative coffee is where we sit, right. So when I look at caffeine, caffeine is a great tool that can give us energy through some hydro cortisol release right, it also can decrease our cortisol, right. So over time consumption of caffeine, our cortisol actually reduces, but you still have cortisol elevation spikes that you have to be concerned about, especially with people who are, say, caffeine sensitive right, and if you're caffeine sensitive and you're looking at your cell phone on Instagram and you're seeing all the things that you don't have and all the things you want and there's fear mongering and all these other things and you're starting to feel anxiety, you're obviously gonna put it all on coffee, right, that's not the problem, but I do see that as throwing a little gas on the fire. So we look at how do we mitigate or eliminate any type of cortisol increase by putting adaptogens in our coffee at ethical amounts right.

14:05 - Speaker 1 And adaptogens are what For maybe somebody who's not?

14:07 - Speaker 2 Adaptogens are a natural substance, generally from a root or a mushroom, like Rashi, lion's man, ashwagandha. These are all forms of adaptogens that help our body deal with stress and anxiety of sorts, also can deal with the kind of the free radical stress that it can have on our cells. Right, so they can do a lot of different things. And then we start getting into the conversation of antioxidants, right, because now we so we're going past the point of like, okay, we've reduced stress, but there's still stress, radical damage from excess.

14:46 - Speaker 1 We've reduced kind of like that palpable feeling of stress.

14:49 - Speaker 2 Exactly.

14:50 - Speaker 1 But there's still internal free floaters.

14:51 - Speaker 2 Exactly so. What we do, then, is we look at antioxidants. So coffee is a great antioxidant, right? However, even a more powerful antioxidant, if not the most powerful antioxidant in the world, actually comes from coffee, but not coffee beans, coffee berry, berry, yeah. So we take an extract of that coffee berry. That has clinical proof you know scientific white papers of increasing a neural protein in your brain by 143%. This is due to the high antioxidant bioavailability of coffee berry. So, talking about BDNF BDNF, brain drive, neurotropic factors right, so we are increasing this essential protein in the brain that fights off Alzheimer's dementia.

15:35 - Speaker 1 I don't want to say fights off but when there's a lot of growing evidence showing that it should be strongly considered. As I'll say prevention, Prevention right.

15:45 - Speaker 2 So the higher the BDNF, the lower the likelihood in all studies of Alzheimer's and dementia. So when you look at Alzheimer's and dementia, you look at, you know what's causing it. You know, is it because I was, I drank? You know, is it because of the stress? Yes, yes, for you know it's all around us, right, like the environment. Right? I used to work with this guy and we'd be in like a dusty garage and be like atmospheric contaminants. You know, like we are being contaminated, go, go, go, go, go, go go. We are being contaminated from all over the place, right? So when we look at coffee, I'm like 76%, 80% of Americans are drinking it.

16:28 - Speaker 1 So that's it. Honestly, I would expect it to be more you know it fluctuates but like it's a high percentage, right?

16:35 - Speaker 2 Well, if that's the pill that everyone's taking, why don't we just make the pill better, right? Why don't we make the pill help them with the things that maybe they don't even realize that they're going through dehydration right? So we put coconut water extract, hyaluronic acid added, Himalayan salt right, so there's magnesium, potassium, sodium, hyaluronic acid. You know, women hear about it.

17:04 - Speaker 1 It's in all the creams. It's all in the creams, right, it's coming on topically, yeah.

17:07 - Speaker 2 But what is it actually doing as a cream on your face? So why is it in that ingredient? So that's what a lot of people don't know. So the magic behind hyaluronic acid is that it's a sub-dermal, so it's trans-dermal, right, it can literally pass it can permeate multiple layers of the skin and the blood-brain barrier? No shit really. So when we look at hyaluronic acid in our product, it's not in there just for like possible moisture Should we be using this as a scrub.

17:38 - Speaker 1 Is that what I'm hearing you say? That we could, maybe. No, what?

17:40 - Speaker 2 it's doing is it's literally helping the Nutropix and the caffeine and the adaptogens and the different nutrient benefits of strong coffee that are cognitive to actually possibly get into the blood-brain barrier, and there's studies in Russia that completely support this. We at one time took hyaluronic acid out of the product, trying to reduce the cost of manufacturing it. I remember this, I remember this yeah.

18:09 And I literally did not feel, because the one thing that everybody asked me about strong coffee why do I feel it in the first couple of sips, versus any other energy drink or coffee I take? And it's like one the MCTs we're putting ketones in your brain. We only have five grams.

18:26 - Speaker 1 You're never gonna shit your pants on strong coffee, you're just gonna have I'm gonna test it out You're just gonna have a nice ketone.

18:32 - Speaker 2 kick of that going on. Saturated fats are not bad for you. You need saturated fats. It is literally the foundational block of hormones testosterone, things like this that we need to actually have in our diet, and we're still recovering from the fat-free kind of genre of eating that is still popular in two thirds of America.

18:53 - Speaker 1 Yeah, so many people are still beating that dead horse of cholesterol is the devil. Cholesterol is the devil. Cholesterol is the devil. And even kind of getting. Oh, I got my metabolic panel and my cholesterol was high, but what does that even mean? What does that look like? Are you symptomatic? Do you have genetic predisposition? Totally, what are we actually looking at? Are we still just latching onto? Oh well, atkins said 10, 15, 20 years ago, fat was the devil.

19:16 - Speaker 2 Yes, 100%. I think that when he was talking about like polys and or Atkins was like supporting proteins and fats, correct. He was like the no fat, no fat. Yeah, I'd have to look back at Atkins. I'm not as familiar. I thought he was the guy that told everybody to eat fucking bricks of cheese.

19:34 - Speaker 1 I don't think so. Maybe we'll get a fact check around. Yeah, we'll get a fact check.

19:37 - Speaker 2 I wish at this point we needed like how Rogan was like hey, jamie look that up.

19:42 - Speaker 1 Can we build an AI coder for that? That's coming soon, coming soon.

19:46 - Speaker 2 Fat question. So we've talked about the hydration benefits, the cortisol benefits, the Nutropics. Right, like people. I don't know about you, but when I was a kid I would look at somebody drinking coffee and I would think, based off of the way people act about it socially and speak about it, that it's relative to like Adderall or cocaine. Right, but it feels like none of the two.

20:14 - Speaker 1 Hey Everett Ford radio listener. I got to take a quick break from my conversation with Adam to pay some bills here straight up. I'm gonna be honest. You know, thanks to our amazing partners we continue to be able to level up the production and travel and do all the things to make this show as best as possible. And you know as my primary source of income total transparency here. I am just so honored that you all find value in the products that add value to my life and you invest your time, your money Into these things, like today's sponsor that is going on year two with us here at Everett Ford radio and that's my topure by timeline nutrition.

20:51 I recently was going over literally every supplement that I take and kind of the ones that I take daily. I was going over this with a longtime coaching client of mine, actually, and Was like, okay, if you only had to take one supplement or what are you taking daily? Non-negotiable, it's this, hands down. I've been taking my topure daily For about a year and a half now and I can tell you ever since starting with it, the way that my baseline energy is just at a new level is is mind-blowing. I haven't found anything else out there in a daily capacity. That is contributing to my baseline energy, but also with ten years of trials human trials before coming to market, they've got the longevity, the data, to show that it actually is contributing to human longevity.

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22:25 But thanks to timeline nutrition and their product might appear, we can use this to boost energy at the source. If you don't love the way you feel, hit them up, get a money back guarantee. That's a timeline nutrition comm slash ever forward to try your Mito pure cellular nutrition today and a check out. Make sure to use code ever forward as well. You can get that 10% discount. Well, how many of us were probably raised, hopefully? You know it was kind of forbidden, especially as a kid. Yes, this is for adults, or this is something that you know, you kind of make. I don't want to say do in secret, but you definitely weren't just like slinging coffee, drinking coffee, you know, taking your kids all around you. No, it was like a private thing.

23:05 - Speaker 2 No, it was. Yeah, it was something that your dad had in the morning and your mom had in the morning before you even woke up.

23:09 - Speaker 1 I'm almost even made to believe, like a lot of things as a kid. This is bad. Yes, don't touch it.

23:15 - Speaker 2 Right. Well, at the same time, they're drinking five, six cups of it a day, right? So when I first had coffee, I was like this ain't shit, you know, and I'm like I need to put the hype. Yeah, this is what all the hype is about. So you know, personally, I think that coffee has always been overrated as an energy drink and underrated as a social tool, underrated as a Transportation device to get other nutrients in, and that's like where I enter the conversation, and I'm not the first person to say put something in your coffee, but I do believe that In that strong coffee we are having the most complete conversation about how to start your day. I have been a trainer for over 20 years.

24:06 Before leaving, strong coffee, before starting, strong coffee and the question that continued to be asked every day. It didn't matter if it was the intermittent fasting craze, the paleo craze, the keto phase, you know, whatever was going on in the world as a diet kind of spectrum. The question constantly remained what do I do for breakfast, what do I do in the morning? And Ultimately, strong coffee just hits all those things. It has the nutritional equivalent of two eggs. It has new tropics, adaptogens. It's like if you're buying athletic greens and you're choking it down because you want to get some nutrients in your body. It's like you're not even getting proteins and healthy fats in that right Right. You're like you're literally just getting some dry vegetables. We're at that point like the amount of money you're paying for dry vegetables is crazy to me. You're adding a cost to your life. What I'm trying to do is not only reduce a cost in your life. The average individual spends $95 on coffee a month.

25:07 - Speaker 1 I Know you're like, I don't even want to tell you. You're probably like 500, so the average individual is LA, it's like $12 for a course, of course, only after I've had my strong which?

25:16 - Speaker 2 makes it, which makes way more sense when you're only paying 230 a serving for strong coffee, right? It's like, oh, wow, I'm getting. I'm getting proteins, healthy fats and tropics, adaptogens, organic coffee All for under $2 and 30 cents. Then you look at something and I'm not knocking athletic greens. I love what they do, right, but that is something in the world of CPG that exists that people don't Actually acknowledge. They don't want just your money, they want your time. What do you mean by that? All products consume your time and your dollar. Okay, so that is why people put such high ticket values on ready-to-drinks Because you don't even have to make it. You're paying for convenience. You're paying for the convenience because it's not taking time away from you.

26:03 To make athletic greens. It takes you 30 seconds. Grab the container, fill up your cup of water, do the thing, chug it down, whatever. I know it's only 30 seconds, 40 seconds, a minute, whatever it is, but every product requires time. If you're going to go make your coffee conventionally, way the beans, grind them, you know, throw them in your brewer, fill it with water, hit the button, okay, it's the cake up. You know it's like swap out the old cake up, put the new cake up in, put the water in, pour the coffee. Okay, it's like all those things Take time. So with strong coffee, my idea was like what's the shortest amount of time that something like this could take with the greatest Value and benefit at the same time? So it's like instead of spending $90 a month, you can spend $70 and drink strong coffee every day.

26:56 - Speaker 1 Yeah, and think about all the time that you're getting back.

26:58 - Speaker 2 I mean, I think even if it's 30 seconds or if it's 20 minutes, right, right, 20 minutes at a coffee shop. Sorry to interrupt you, but that's like that's the line that people are standing in, and it's like I always kind of joke around about how they don't understand the funny similarities between the cocaine line on a mirror and the and the line that they're standing in. What do you mean? How? They're both just a waste of your fucking time because the energy that you're gonna get from them are both subpar and minimal, right, and it's like you're just standing in line for a line, right. And it's just like because you want to belong, right, you want to. You want to have that little.

27:33 - Speaker 1 Paper cup with the.

27:34 - Speaker 2 You want to be seen walking around with that Starbucks because it's a symbol of status right and, ultimately, what should be a greater symbol of status if we're in a world that's concerned with environmental impact and everything else would be you walking around with a stainless steel strong coffee mug, with a product that you made at home that Use one 12th of the amount of plastic that anything else is using for 12 servings versus one serving, which, thanks to you, I do most of the time.

27:59 - Speaker 1 I've got my strong coffee company Stainless steel mug make it. It's everything you're talking about. I'm just like in my head screaming yes, yes, yes, and I hope the listeners really picking up because For me it all comes down to kind of putting my old coach hat on here. Behavior change what do we know is true about behavior change?

28:15 Most people, when they want a healthy habit, as we're talking here, january 2024 this probably really top of mind for a lot of people. I want the best thing possible in support of my goals. That takes as little time as possible, if not any time. Maybe I'm not adding in a new habit like a greens or something like that, which I'm adding in time, but it's also in support of my goals. We can get on board there. What am I already doing? And I can kind of like stealth ninja in there and just swap it out totally. That is bottom line what is going to work and what is going to keep people adherent, whether we're talking about healthy coffee, coffee alternative or alternative coffee or whatever that thing is for people. If you can just boil it down to that and like let's all agree that that will help you in pursuit of your goals, like just copy and paste that model.

29:02 - Speaker 2 I've had this term kind of bouncing around in my head for years that I've really never talked about, but it I passive health, mm-hmm. So passive health decisions. If, if you choose so, you have back issues, right, or say you have a hip issue, not you chase. But if somebody has a back issue, a hip issue, and it's whenever you wake up in the morning that you see it's the worst. You buy a mattress, you buy a new mattress, right, and it costs you a thousand dollars, but for the next three years you wake up Without your back hurting, without your knees hurting, without your hips hurting right, that was one decision that you made that created nine, one thousand 100 and some you know days of passive Health.

29:52 Right, you make the decision to switch away from your morning coffee routine mm-hmm and Choose to subscribe or buy strong coffee, and you have made one decision that will make the rest of your life faster, better, more focused, and it's completely passive. After that moment, all you have to do is decide To make a change. Yeah, right, and it's it. Committing to that change Is not hard. When you realize that it is better, yeah right, waking up pain-free with that new mattress, you're gonna feel amazing, going to work, not thinking about what to eat or the jitters or that you're weirdly thirsty or Whatever it is your mouth feels like a fucking sock, like that's the one thing I hate about regular coffee.

30:40 Like I just got done finishing that espresso, my mouth literally feels like it has a sock in it when I get done drinking my coffee. Like my mouth is moist afterwards right Because of the coconut water and the and the fats in it. So it's like my lips don't ever get like this. So like right now I'm feeling it. I'm like you know, but you can make that passive decision and there's so many great passive decisions. One of the things that I like to do that I tell people is like why do you sit and talk? I Never sit and talk. Do I ever sit and talk? I never fucking sit and talk. I will. Literally, if I'm going on a 30 minute phone call, I am out the door. Oh right, yeah, yeah, I cannot. So it's like when you're talking about the fact that you don't get enough exercise, individual be in this world and you have three hours of phone calls a day Nothing says that you couldn't have walked three hours today.

31:28 - Speaker 1 I'll do. On days when I have calls, I'll stack them up, I'll get. It's easy for me to get 17,000, 18,000, 20,000 steps of walking talk right exactly dude, the walk-and-talk model.

31:41 - Speaker 2 I mean, that's like that is another passive health decision. It's you just. You just go out there and just do it a little differently, and everything is that much better. I haven't worked out in seven and a half months. The only thing that has literally kept me fit is walking. Damn like. I have just been walking. Damn Well you look great Well, thank you always 20, 25 years of hard weightlifting gave me like a little bit of a bank and I'm like how do I get away with not doing anything?

32:11 - Speaker 1 Well, all you got to do is invest daily for 20, 25 years, totally, and then you can take a few months off.

32:16 - Speaker 2 I had never taken longer off than two weeks in since I was 13 years old I'm 41, damn so. And and the other, that two weeks happened more than once. I had, I had mono, I had even when I had coven. I only took four days off the gym. I mean, I was still working out late, you know, and it's just like but seven months of not working out at all, well don't jump the gun because I definitely later on I want to dive into kind of more your routine.

32:41 Let's do it, because you I mean you have some great questions at 41 Shugging away.

32:45 - Speaker 1 Doshucks and 41 man. You're killing it and I want to get kind of more into your routine, your, your, your approach to fitness, to diet, kind of like how you are staying in great shape internally and externally right now. Let me see here I Want to Respectfully call out some other brands to kind of wrap up CPG, because, look man, as someone who is in the business and someone myself that you know, I use a lot of products, I Work with a lot of products. You know, I think CPG consumer product goods it's. They're everywhere right now and they're making our lives more convenient and in a lot of ways, I think if you do your research and a little bit of homework, they're making your lives better. You can swap out a healthy habit, the passive health or this other concept I love from the homie Jason Goldberg All it's stealth help. It's like little, just little, like ninja habits. You can swap out stealth health, stealth help.

33:49 I'll go help stealth health also. Yeah, look, these things are conveniences but Fatally Give Darren.

33:58 - Speaker 2 Darren only and fatal conveniences.

34:01 - Speaker 1 I love Darren man, but I feel like sometimes I'm like come on, man, like yeah, yeah, yeah, let me have that one fucking pig. But, you know, please unpack for us, maybe in certain types of CPGs that Most people look at. This is a healthy product. I'm eating this, drinking this, using this to promote wellness. Are we actually doing our bodies a disservice with some of these products out there?

34:26 - Speaker 2 That's a good question. You know, I'll answer that with a funny story and then I'll answer the question so and the so. When I used to travel around with Paulie shore, and this was before Joe Rogan blew up, I was telling Paulie shore like how much I love Joe Rogan. Like you know, that is, this is. This is eight years ago, right?

34:47 - Speaker 1 so this Joe Rogan just started his body if ideal before people are like who the fuck is Joe Rogan?

34:52 - Speaker 2 way way before that I mean like eight years ago, right, I mean he was just starting this podcast, really and and so I was telling Paulie and Paulie was telling me that Joe's irritating sometimes and I said why is that? He's like, well, he acts like the sheriff at the comedy club and he calls people out on their lazy and stolen jokes.

35:18 - Speaker 1 And the call us man. See a shit, the Carlos.

35:20 - Speaker 2 Mancia, shit right. So I have always pride in myself, kind of on the sheriff of supplement sites, which I have spoke up many times Against. Many different supplement companies that have used misleading information have not proper numbers on their products based off of the proper weight of the ingredient. You know, like, where it's like. Yeah, it's like you have to really know what you're looking at. Yeah, but you'll figure it out and you'll see that people are lying. So protein, for instance for somebody to make a claim around how much protein they have to, they actually have to put like two to three grams Additional protein over the actual amount that's in there for them to actually claim that. So when you see 21 grams of protein powder, sometimes on the back and they don't talk about how much protein is actually in it, they'll say like 20 plus grams of protein or something like that.

36:11 - Speaker 1 Yeah, they're not super clear with it.

36:13 - Speaker 2 It's because there's not actually 21 grams of protein in it. There's 21 grams of protein powder, which is about 97% actual protein or 95% protein. So then it's like, oh, so there's fillers in it. And everybody's like, oh, there's no fillers in this product bullshit, right. You literally can't make protein without something else in it, right, without a small little byproduct of something else that that's in it.

36:38 You talk about like a protein powder, protein powders, right? Oily ingredients like phosphatidylsirin, you know, or certain ingredients that are like super oily and nature have to be cut by like 50%. So it's like the ingredient is phosphatidylsirin. Right, that is the raw material, but within that phosphatidylsirin there are other ingredients, so you don't see that though. So it's like 500 milligrams of phosphatidylsirin. That may not be, that may not be accurate. That might be 500 milligrams of phosphatidylsirin as a raw material, but not in the actual efficacious dose. So there's like some weird things that can happen around packaging and marking.

37:18 There was a company that I called out previously and I saw that they made a change, so I'll give them their flowers. Jaco's brand, on their energy drink, touted only 95 milligrams of caffeine on the front of it. What they weren't telling you is that there was 200 additional milligrams of none Caffeine based stimulants in that drink as well. That act just like caffeine, holy shit. So they were putting 295 milligrams of stimulants in their energy drink, holy shit. So they, what were they using? They were using theobromine, an additional 100 milligrams. Then they were using green bean extract, which is 97 percent caffeine. That is in so many products, so many cbg products and you don't even see it.

38:05 - Speaker 1 Listen to this caffeine and it's marketed as like caffeine, free Holy shit, Wow. So when you start looking at, you know um, let's talk about human Right.

38:15 - Speaker 2 So they've been selling this miracle drink Ketones. Okay, does it put ketones in your body? Yeah, hvmn, hvmn. Yeah, it used to be called human like they and they spelled it with a V. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah right.

38:31 So that was like years, years ago when they were on like shark tank, right, and They've done so many product line changes and focuses, it's blowing it might. That's what happens when you fall in a tech space with Super nerds who have silly amounts of money just to continue to invest in an idea right, to support their nuances, right. So it's like okay, this ketone thing. It's like this huge craze right now.

38:55 - Speaker 1 Well, I'm all for it. You know I use ketone like you always do. You know I use ketone like you all the time.

38:59 - Speaker 2 What's wild about it, though, is ketones have Technically existed for a long time right, yeah. So the company that actually had the patent on Buteric acids lost their patent like a couple years ago, which is why you started seeing all these other ketones pop up, oh, wow, okay. So when you look at it, though, the way they make you, the way they talk about it, they would have you think that it puts you in ketosis. Yeah, that's not true. It's not true. No, because what does ketosis actually mean?

39:30 - Speaker 1 What are you asking me? Yeah, I mean that's, you're running on ketones.

39:33 - Speaker 2 Well, you're running on ketones, but what is your body using to create ketones?

39:39 - Speaker 1 fat converts it Right. So you take saturated fats and they turn into ketones through it, like a process right, it's made into the brain of the liver, right, right, yeah, okay, yeah. So when?

39:51 - Speaker 2 you're, but but when you're in ketosis, the whole benefit of ketosis for all the individuals that are dieting for ketones is to burn fat for fuel. So are you burning fat for fuel just because you drink ketone IQ? No, no, very misleading. Yes, you are getting ketones in your body, so then you're not in ketosis.

40:17 You're not technically in true ketosis. You're in an induced state with exogenous ketones. So you are ingesting ketones, which puts ketones in your blood, in your urine, in your brain. However, you are not getting the anti inflammatory benefits. You are not getting the fat burning benefits like you would from an actual ketogenic diet, from actually earning it, from actually only having 70 grams of protein a day, roughly, at most maybe 40, right, because of gluconeogenesis and the idea. No, no, even proteins are that low.

40:56 Really oh yeah, full ketogenic diet If you were to read primal, if you were to read primal fat burner by Dr Narragagadius right, she breaks down the actual true ketone diets right, I never heard protein needing to be that low because of gluconeogenesis. Right, yeah, right. So she told me, with how active I am, that 70 grams would be pushing the idea of staying in ketosis?

41:19 - Speaker 1 Is that because, like, at that point, your body is going to be moving to proteins? For, for no, it's gonna start turning proteins into carbohydrates sugar through the process of gluconeogenesis.

41:29 - Speaker 2 So it's like okay, so real ketone diet, ketosis diets are low in protein, low in carb, high in fat, and it's just like so when you see the easy button, of course you're going to take it. I don't blame HVMN for leaving holes for you to fill them right With your own thoughts. Oh well, this is way easier than eating low carb to get into ketosis and lose fat, you know, through through burning it, through fuel for a lot of people looking for I'm looking to get into ketosis.

42:06 - Speaker 1 I personally use it and love it for just like a clean energy, basically for cognition focus flow. I'm definitely not a keto guy, so that I think that's another case and point about knowing what you're looking for, knowing the end result, but also like, why are you in pursuit of that? If you're, someone looking to a ketone product will say like HVMN, because you are trying to adopt a ketogenic diet to get into ketosis, for probably, you're probably more focused on fat loss, endurance, maybe even a health concern outside of the cognition and focus flow state you can get in Like that. I see how you're saying that could be misleading. What right? Because someone like me, like I don't. I personally don't need or want that. I'm just looking for the energy Totally and I?

42:50 - Speaker 2 I'm saying all this with the idea that whenever I take ketones, I do like the way I feel. Right, they are clean energy for the brain.

42:58 - Speaker 1 which fun fact. I'll stack it on IQ with strong coffee.

43:01 - Speaker 2 Totally, it's next level shit we looked at doing a butyric based, really, coffee. It was just too salty and off tasting it's it's really bad. So the amount of butyric acid that you need, the the or not butyric acid, but the, the salts that you need for ketosis, it's really high. It's like you know, two grams or almost three grams or something like that, and it just tastes God fucking awful. I think to like wrap up, the question is that we all too often fall to marketing and not education and we don't know what the actual efficacious amount of an ingredient is to elicit the benefit that we are seeking. So I'll pick on one more thing right. A lot of influencers out there promoting brands on a regular basis. There was a guy recently promoting a product it was Brian Mazza and he is a great dude from all accounts that I know but a product that he was promoting I was like how could you even ethically say this out loud about this product?

44:17 Was this a supplement, so this was a yeah, so this was a ready to drink HMB and HMB drink. Now, if you know anything about HMB, their initial claims like 15 years ago when it came out, is that it was going to be like the next creatine, like it was going to destroy creatine for muscle muscle building.

44:36 - Speaker 1 It's a bold statement.

44:38 - Speaker 2 Well, it ended up falling completely short, as they proved that it actually doesn't develop any muscle at all.

44:44 - Speaker 1 So not only does it just not work as good as they were hyping it up, it doesn't work period.

44:48 - Speaker 2 It doesn't work period for building new muscle, but what it does do is it preserves muscle loss through by being a positive anti-catabolic which is not bad, yeah, but it requires 3000 milligrams of a minimum effective dose.

45:05 3000 milligrams, so three grams. So you can't promote a drink to build muscle using HMB that only has a thousand milligrams in it. One, it's 2000 milligrams short for the actual claim it can make. Two, you're making a claim that it actually can't make, right? Not even the ingredient itself can make that claim. I don't care if you take 6000 milligrams a day. It is not building new muscle, it is preserving old muscle. So, like when you look at things like this, it's like God. Wouldn't it be amazing if there was a drink that helped me put on muscle, an ingredient I've never heard of?

45:40 - Speaker 1 right. How many people will jump at the fact of getting on something, the new creatine? Well, I mean when? How proven we know creatine to be.

45:46 - Speaker 2 I don't mean to like rain on anybody's parade, but I mean this is how this person obviously promotes products, makes money, you know, for himself, makes money for the brand and really it's just goes to show that even somebody like him, who is a very intelligent, well educated individual in the health and fitness space amazing transformation, amazing transfer transformations, well respected it is.

46:10 He doesn't even know because the company is telling him that, and he's not even taking the time because who the fuck has the time to Google minimum effective doses of every ingredient in every fucking thing that they consume?

46:21 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't. I don't know if Ryan is doing this, but I'd be willing to bet that he probably is not carving out in his time blocking research white papers for every product that I'm using or you know, especially like endorsing. So what do you do?

46:34 - Speaker 2 You look for the company to tell you the truth, right To protect your integrity, right To protect your integrity right. So they're buying your voice and you trust them because you know them, you had a conversation with them, you got some money from them, they paid on time, all these things they paid on time.

46:55 - Speaker 1 The number one thing influencing most influencers brand deals.

46:58 - Speaker 2 Yeah, when you see net 30 and it actually heads net 30- and it's like net 18, you're like, Holy fuck, these guys are amazing.

47:04 - Speaker 1 Right, or like they pay, before you ever even started talking about it.

47:08 - Speaker 2 If you ask me if they're able to do that, more than likely their product doesn't work. It's like the Frank Thomas shit. What's that Like new? Like the new Gen X, you always see?

47:18 - Speaker 1 like the testosterone ads with Frank Thomas. It's like Frank Thomas the big hurt.

47:23 - Speaker 2 The dude was Jack. It was a big guy his entire life. He's a big guy. He does not need new Gen X. If he needs anything, it's probably TRT and a proper diet. Right, like it doesn't matter. That bottle of pills probably cost less than $3 to make. So when you look at something on I've I've created like crazy dream supplements just to see like how much a bottle would cost. Comparative to like another brand, like a sleep aid, yeah, like, yeah, like whatever you know, like oh, let's copy that exact product. So I like write down the milligrams. I do all my raw material sourcing and I just look at it, not like I'm going to make it, I just want to see how much they're paying for it.

48:02 - Speaker 1 You're workshopping it ingredient by ingredient, by dose, by dose.

48:05 - Speaker 2 And when you look at pills, bro, that is. There's a saying in this industry pills pay the bills, right, but flavoring systems and sweeteners are like 60% of the cost of most hydration drinks, 70% of the cost. So when you look at pills paying the bills, if I could just do a hydration pill, I could literally give you all the magnesium, potassium and sodium you need in two little pills for 14.99 and probably make 10.99, 11.99 per bottle, oh shit. But you could sell it for 60. Right, and that's what's crazy is that not only are they not putting minimum effective dosage in these pills as like this way to pad their margins on all the other things, when in fact that should be the one thing that they put the highest minimum effective dosage in, because you don't have to worry about hiding it behind flavors. Right, like I'm okay with taking six pills If I know these six pills are going to really fucking do what I want them to do.

49:10 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean. Another thing I'll say to kind of wrap up this section, is that you know, knowing you over the years and just like on a personal level, your commitment to your passion but also your commitment to being a consumer of your own product and having been yourself a consumer looking for a better product, the reformulations, the like, attention to detail, the changing manufacturers, like all this stuff. Yeah, it comes down to business, I know, sometimes, but like, ultimately, I know, like everything that you do and every change that you make is because it is necessary, it has to happen, because the same thing wasn't good enough or there's a dosage that has I've never ran the company one time by the money or the books.

49:52 - Speaker 2 I literally just had a first PNL ever in five years, six months ago, and I actually looked at it and I have ran this company from my heart, yeah, and when I tasted something and I knew it could be better, because I may have tasted something out there that was better or maybe whatever it came to me and I just had a different idea about hey, let's maybe swap out the, the natural flavor of this vanilla for this vanilla, and let's reduce this by this and do this and just see what it tastes like and send it to me. Right, and I've done that over 37 times for morning fix. I mean, hazelnut's about to have like a little upgrade, right, and that's already a new product. It's already a new product. But it's like I took the deep dive on Amazon because I'm you have to be able to go through constructive criticism, no matter how brutal it is. People on Shopify are the nicest, like. We have incredible reviews on Shopify. You go on Amazon still got great reviews, but people are fucking ruthless.

50:59 - Speaker 1 What is? What is a ruthless comment someone could say about this product?

51:02 - Speaker 2 Shit doesn't even taste strong. I don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Blah, blah, blah.

51:05 - Speaker 1 You know, it's just very like. Well, I would say to that person you missed the point.

51:09 - Speaker 2 Well, right. So it's like, okay, Um, doesn't taste. It tastes like a protein drink with coffee in it. Okay, you know, uh tastes boney. I've never known a man to eat a bone. But and like, live to tell about it. But like, yeah, I get it. I mean, bone broth doesn't even taste boney to me.

51:31 - Speaker 1 So I don't really understand that.

51:33 - Speaker 2 What does that mean? Right, so you know Hazelnut is getting a 10% increase in a sweetener so it has a little sweeter tone to it. So it's like the Hazel kind of cocoa comes out a little bit more because, like what I'm reading on the review, is cause morning fix. In my opinion, morning fix always was our best tasting latte most popular.

51:57 - Speaker 1 I mean for people that read one that's more like the vanilla. It's our vanilla product, yep.

52:01 - Speaker 2 Sweet Right. All of our lattes are creamy, but we, we, we vary on the spectrum of sweetness between them. All right Morning fix. In my opinion. Compared to Hazelnut or peppermint, mocha or honey, lavender doesn't taste nearly as good. It's still great. It's my favorite. It's what I drink every morning, but you're talking strictly on like a but if I'm breaking down like the actual experience, full blown experience.

52:29 The morning fix doesn't have as smooth as a taste as the other ones that are brand new flavors, right. Yet the morning fix has the highest reviews and I'm like well, what's the difference? Oh, it's the only sweet one. Why is daybreaker? Why is daybreaker still behind, when Hazelnut and peppermint mocha are out selling daybreaker, and they've only been out for a month, you know, and they have continuous buyers. Well, daybreaker isn't sweet at all, right.

53:00 - Speaker 1 So it's like which is your jam? So?

53:02 - Speaker 2 it's like okay, so daybreaker is clearly not the thing that's going to build the company, because 90% of people that drink lattes want something fucking sweet. If Starbucks has taught us anything about 76 grams of sugar in a latte, it's that we like sweet things.

53:19 - Speaker 1 They want hot diabetes in the cup with a little splash of flavor.

53:22 - Speaker 2 And if we could give them that exact thing without the diabetes, cancer and heart disease right, and without the time suck of standing in line and the bullshit of your name being called the wrong name, whatever it is, and you've been able to spend just a couple more minutes with your wife or kids in the morning before having to leave to get coffee or whatever.

53:41 - Speaker 1 Dude, we're the fucking heroes, which is also kind of like I joke when I do it. But if I'm ever out getting another cup of coffee and if I get, usually around the holidays, around the wintertime, is the only time I get any kind of like fancy flavored coffee. Peppermint is my jam. I'm finally getting some more Now. You guys sold out but pepper, have you tried our peppermint? Yeah, last year.

54:00 - Speaker 2 No, no, no, no, no, no this is you guys.

54:02 - Speaker 1 You guys sold out before I get to get some. We sold out so fucking fast. Well, now I got some. Thank you, caleb, but I joke when I say it, but there's the only time of year that I do it, so it's kind of like my freebie. But I do love a peppermint mocha. That is my sweet flavor, latte, kind of like crutch, and so when I go, I'll literally go. I can get half diabetes, oh yeah, and they'll look at me funny and they'll finally look up from the register.

54:26 I'm like I want half the peppermints or I want half the mocha If it is even real cocoa, depending on the place, it's not. But just that little nuance. Like I'm joking when I say it, but I know that should I consume this on a regular basis, I am putting myself most likely on a path towards diabetes, especially someone who has diabetics in his family. And I just want that little nuance to kind of sink in for the listener.

54:47 Because if this is you and you are looking for a little way to tweak something, just changing your wording about a small little nuance, such as I want half the syrup, a little bit of less, put in, what the result is that you're actually thwarting or getting diabetes, chronic illness, disease. These are the small little things that creep up months, years at a time and it all can come down to just a small change like that. But if you say it out loud you're actually making it real. I wonder how many people, if you go up to the counter and go, I want one pump or I want three pumps or whatever diabetes instead of the flavoring like just thinking that out loud, saying that out loud, you're going to act differently. You're going to make totally different changes about that.

55:33 - Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, 100%. And once you, once you change your mind, you have palette will change with it. Right, where it's like truly, if you ever go back to that one thing that you had that you really love, that was super sweet, you'll be like this is fucking disgusting, yeah, right, and it really does hit you like that. I used to have a thing about peanut butter cups, and to the point where it was like not a healthy relationship, but because I could train so hard and eat clean the other part of the day, eating for peanut butter cups a day wasn't a problem because I'm like I just worked out I can have 50, 60 grams of sugar.

56:08 Dude, talk about the minute I cut out peanut butter cups, how much leaner I got, how much clearer my head was throughout the rest of the day. You know, it was just. And now I'm at the point where we take our kids out to ice cream or get ice cream, maybe once or twice, you know, maybe a couple of times a month, whatever it is. I don't even get my own ice cream. I just take a scoop of my daughters, a scoop of my other daughters, a scoop of my wife's, and I'm done.

56:37 - Speaker 1 Poison control right For the kids? Yeah, poison control. I call it dad tax, but yeah, I mean it's it's it's.

56:44 - Speaker 2 changing your mind leads to changing your palate right, and once your palate is in control it it will truly tell you what is good and what is not good. I mean, put a thing of bone marrow in your mouth and tell me that you shouldn't be eating that, right when it's. Like a kid would look at it and think it's disgusting because they have to get past this, all these other treats that they're having all the time, right when it's. You Strong coffee may not taste exactly like your favorite coffee that you're drinking right now, but drink it three days in a row and don't drink another sweet thing, and it'll literally taste exactly the way it was meant to in your mind, right Like it'll hit you.

57:22 You'll be like oh this is exactly what I needed.

57:24 - Speaker 1 Especially once you get on the path. I've seen this so many times over the years with a coaching client to mine. I've like, once you actually understand like you have just laid out so clearly for us, and to understand what you're doing versus the healthy habits swap, how much better this thing is for you. You can actually really conceptualize. More than conceptualize, you can actually fully understand what is going on internally and I think for a lot of people that goes. That speaks volumes to a behavior change swap. Do you actually understand what you've been doing to your body Beyond just a preference, beyond like a taste or convenience, when you were like, oh shit, I've been doing what to my metabolic health? I've been doing what to my fasting glucose? I've been doing what to all of this stuff with just my cup of coffee?

58:09 - Speaker 2 Yeah, when you understand that, it's almost like wait until you see what strong coffee does to your fasting glucose it lowers it.

58:17 - Speaker 1 I'm wearing the levels again right now. I do this snapshot probably like two times a year.

58:20 - Speaker 2 Have you ever seen it lowered? Yeah, strong coffee.

58:23 - Speaker 1 The other day I was with friends for New Year's and I hit watch this. I go to drink the strong coffee. I look at my glucose before and after and it's yep, same thing with Sam dancer.

58:32 - Speaker 2 He literally is like dude. It's the best pre-workout because the way my blood glucose levels find their foundation he's like I never have a dropout. I don't ever feel like all of a sudden my blood sugar elevated and then dropped.

58:44 - Speaker 1 No, like I do with any other type of coffee. Exactly yeah.

58:46 - Speaker 2 Right. And because coffee does raise blood glucose levels, right it just from a general response, even though it doesn't have sugar in it.

58:54 - Speaker 1 Before you put any other shit in it as fiber in it.

58:56 - Speaker 2 Yeah, right, so it does have some kind of effect on you. And I mean it's wild when you know you see people, influencers, health people, and they're promoting the machine. They may not be promoting the drink, but they're promoting the machine that's giving everybody the drink, right You're? If you're posting about Starbucks, you literally are fucking supporting diabetes, cancer and heart disease Like it is. It is so fucking crazy that I made a post about it and it's like one of our highest liked posts when I was talking shit on influencers who turned down.

59:46 We don't have the money to pay you to talk about it. I'm sorry, right, it's just a small family company that is continuing to grow and one day we will be that big, right, but in the meantime, you just keep paying for your coffee and promoting the shit that is making other people fat and fucking sick. And then you tell me how you're dealing with your Hashimoto's or you're dealing with your this and your that, and then, on the same side, you're promoting this coffee that is slowly poisoning people on every corner. I'm not talking shit about the little coffee shop who make their homemade fresh lavender syrup by boiling sugar and like doing it the right fucking way, or that roast beans and small batches and artisan craft coffee.

01:00:33 Go on with your bad self, right. That is high society coffee. I'm not talking about coffee that is trying to like. They're selling something that is knowingly unhealthy. We are selling something that is knowingly healthy. It's like why do you promote this? Why do you continue to do it? You want to make a change than you have to be the change yourself.

01:01:00 - Speaker 1 I love promoting Starbucks these days as my conduit for my strong coffee. That is the only love Starbucks gets from.

01:01:08 - Speaker 2 Even now, dude, I'd be hesitant because of the all the shit you see about the the inside lining the chemical chemical on the cups, yeah, or even we like when we go to Starbucks now and we do our gag where we get our free water and water added my strong coffee we put in our mug.

01:01:25 So we like travel with our mugs, just clip to our backpacks, right, and like, that's why we did a double wall stainless steel mug so you could really bring it everywhere. I mean, I've dropped one off the side of a mountain, went down and grabbed it, you know, in Colorado, and it was like oh shit, you know I had a little couple of scratches and stuff, but it was totally fine still. You know, and it's just, it's just, it's it's weird, right, it's just it's hard because, like I lost my dad to cancer, I know you, you, you, you have the same right. Like I lost my, my brother died of, you know, effectively a heart attack. Right, I had an overdose, right.

01:02:00 When I see, like the things that I've been around, and when I see everybody else and their sad stories of cancer and heart disease and obesity, and you're fighting like the patriarch, one bicep curl and one motivational speech at a time, and then you promote that, it's just like you have to truly leave from the front, right? Otherwise you're just doing what Elon Musk said, right? What's that I'm telling? I'm tired of fucking people pretending to do good while doing absolute evil. We're even doing nothing or doing which is which might even be worse. Might be worse, right? I mean, do you remember the last Seinfeld episode when they all were getting arrested for not helping?

01:02:43 - Speaker 1 the good Samaritan law thing, the good Samaritan law.

01:02:46 - Speaker 2 Yeah, everybody on social media. Look it up, the good Samaritan law, because if you're fucking promoting Starbucks, you're fucking up right, that's whoo.

01:02:56 - Speaker 1 I mean I got to get off this topic because I got some other things I want to cover with you, but like I could sit here and talk about this stuff all day long, I just want to wrap this up, I got to get that on my chest.

01:03:05 It's so coming for you Good. And if you're a coffee drinker looking for somebody to make a swap or something that can be more than just a cup of coffee, it can be your breakfast, it can be your pre-workout, it can be your focus flow, new tropic, it solves so many problems. I don't even know if I have fully realized all the things that I can swap it out for. I use it, I love it, I talk about it all day long. Man, so I said earlier, you're 41 years old and you have been doing a lot of things for many, many years to take care of your body and your mind. So I just want to ask you right now Do you credit a former homie, a Homer from Deuce, to LA Gym, back where I used to train at Deuce when you were in LA?

01:03:45 I'm pretty sure I heard it from him first. I don't know if this is a Homer original, but we're creating father figures, not dadbots. Yes, and I put you in that category, man. Hey, thank you. What is your current training routine? Look like you were saying earlier that you haven't really worked out traditionally. I'm assuming that's what going to a gym and what six, seven months.

01:04:05 - Speaker 2 Yeah, so what do you do? Well, for the last seven months I had some. I'm still trying to pin the source down. I'm pretty sure that I have a slight impingement in a nerve in my neck in my C6, C7, because I have bone spurs there from my fighting career and that C6, C7 pathway is literally where the nerve that goes down to my elbow was kind of triggered. So I had some interesting inflammation in that. The amount of driving I was doing and in front of the computer over the last 12 months was just unlike anything I'd ever done before, with stress being compounded with everything. Strong coffee went through, with whole foods.

01:04:45 - Speaker 1 Yeah, which I want to say again. Like there was not a fitness wellness event expo in the last two years that I was aware of, that I didn't see you behind the wheel driving to Caleb setting up shop, slinging coffee man. Yeah, that's just another testament to like the passion and why behind strong coffee.

01:05:01 - Speaker 2 Dude, we're the only coffee company with a heart. I mean, I say it all the time. I mean it's literally written on our fucking chest, yeah Right.

01:05:08 - Speaker 1 So you think maybe this is kind of where some of that.

01:05:11 - Speaker 2 Yeah for sure the stress compounded. You know I'm sitting like this driving my levator scap started causing a lot of issues on my left side, you know, all of a sudden just having extra neck tension, sort of having elbow tension, just kind of like straighten up and pull it up for the five minutes and then all of a sudden find myself right back down there, you know. So I decided to take the first break I've ever taken and you know, in in working out I mean previously to this, I mean, like I said before, I had never taken longer off than two weeks and my training has kind of remained the same, you know, since 12 years old. I mean in many ways, I, you know, or I could at least say, until since I was 19,. I mean when I was 19, I feel like I found my original path in how I would wait train because of my background. I was a gymnast, I was a martial artist and I was a soccer player.

01:06:04 Well, what a combo man. All very, very different schools of thought. Yeah, right, gymnastics go higher, martial arts go deeper Right. It's like there are these like I haven't heard that. I like that, I like that. Yeah, so it's like gymnastics higher Right Martial arts deeper, like they'd come behind you and fucking push your back down when you couldn't go into the splits. Right, there was that mentality, yeah, whereas you know, and soccer was go faster Right, so fast feet, you know I could still do back tucks at 41 years old, I, you know it's like I can still kick over somebody's head. That's six foot something, and I'm I was told like three years ago that I probably have to get my left hip replaced in like five to 10 years.

01:06:49 - Speaker 1 Well, we can talk shop when that day comes. Yeah, I'll walk you through that one.

01:06:53 - Speaker 2 So to kind of go into, you know, up, leading into this, I've always been like this proponent of lift something heavy off the ground, move like an athlete, like a fighter, right. And it mixed it up with bodybuilding, you know. So it's bodybuilding for joint maintenance is what I've always said. Like, oh, I'm working on my ankles, it's like my ankles are calf raises Right. So it's like these are the way I've always kind of seen it. I'm like, oh, I'm working on my knees, deep quads, right. I'm working on my hip, hinge Deadlift, right. Or I'm picking an atlas stone off the ground, something like that. So Atlas stones has become my deadlift. I no longer deadlift at all. I just use like 150 pound atlas stone and do like that'll get the job done.

01:07:40 Yeah, I'll do 10 full pickups rested for like a minute and I just started. You know this is what I was doing but, like I said, I took a break. While this break has been extremely helpful because I've been able to step back and let somebody else be the coach, so I hired a functional patterns coach. Shout out to functional patterns Texas, my trainer, ben. There I mean the first time in my life that I've ever had a trainer, since I was 13 and I hired a trainer with paper boy money who was my first trainer and only trainer in between that stage.

01:08:12 - Speaker 1 What's been like kind of letting go of that authority, that power, a little bit that knowledge, to kind of put yourself into like I know how to do all this stuff. That's the thing. Choosing to not know now, so that's the thing.

01:08:24 - Speaker 2 I know more than 99.9% of all trainers in conventional fitness, so there's no way that I could have learned or handed over my control in my realm of territory. Okay, so nobody was going to tell me how to deadlift, right? Right, like, I'm still at the do sport for one, I have the second highest vertical. Oh shit, like I didn't even warm up, I just walked in and hit a 36. Holy shit, right, they were doing vertical testing. I'm 39 years old, 10 years older than the person above me, right, like Logan.

01:08:58 But Galbrake is who's above me, right, and it's like he's 10 years younger than me. So it's like, when I, you know, jumped up, it's like, hey, this is what my body's always been able to do. Well, I knew that I had to go way outside my book, so I hired functional patterns. Now, what functional patterns is super controversial, right, it's been like not the Ocular, the guy that founded it. He's been a very controversial naysayer against all conventional fitness, that it's all fucking wrong and that we're all breaking ourselves and that we're not moving right. Okay, that's not my belief, but the again, the only way that I could give myself to somebody else teaching me to do something would have to be something that I absolutely know nothing completely about.

01:09:45 - Speaker 1 I'm familiar with terrorism Blank sleep.

01:09:47 - Speaker 2 A total blank slate. So functional patterns was crazy. I mean, the first two months that I was training there I literally felt like I knew nothing and I could do nothing Right.

01:10:01 - Speaker 1 I mean Caleb saw me when you were in LA a couple of months ago. We went to the gym and you walk me through just one movement and I have never had to think that hard and that long about what I am doing, which muscles are contracted, which ones I'm letting go, stance, posture, I mean. I don't even know if I ever got fully, one full sequence in of what we're doing, because you were just like queuing me the whole time, totally.

01:10:23 - Speaker 2 I'm not the person at home. It's imagine you have a cable machine and you're sitting in a split squat stance with your right hand holding the weight right, your right hand holding the cable, your left leg being forward with 80% of your primary weight on that leg. Your leg is gassing right Like your quad is on fire, your glutes on fire, your gastroc is firing, so your calf is like flexing and what you do is you load and by turning into that leg first, and you get that oblique lat connection, but without bringing your shoulder blades together. So how do you do that without retracting? Well, first you have to have your shoulders and then you sit there and breathe them really wide, right and you fill that chest with air and your lats with air and you expand.

01:11:04 Well, the way I got there was literally like him wrapping rubber bands around my lats and I'd have to sit there and breathe with my arms over my head, with my ribs locked in, and sit there and expand the rubber band and hold the tension of the rubber band. So he had to see white in the rubber band, meaning that I was like holding it right and you learn how to like hold the pressure up here but still breathe with your lower ab and exhale. So as I load from here, then I pull, stay looking forward and it's all in my oblique shoulder swing. So from my right shoulder locking into that oblique curving around the back, I mean my shoulder curving around the back to my opposite, oblique to my glute, to my hamstring, to my quad and rotating the shoulder your entire right chain without turning my head.

01:12:02 - Speaker 1 No, this is something that was brought up because, like hey, most people aren't doing this, or based on your symptoms and what you're experiencing. So what functional patterns?

01:12:10 - Speaker 2 Yeah, what I think the patterns has shown is that people with any type of spine issues or winging scaps have a way higher likelihood of like all these different injuries elbows, neck, all these other things, all other weightlifting, the basis, the, the, the. There's two things to break it down into the most. That of why this helped. It was like therapy, right, using muscles and chain patterns that have never been done before. Right, which creates parabolic, what they call like parabolic training, which means that you're utilizing as much energy and muscle adaption as possible per rep, right?

01:13:02 - Speaker 1 Highly parabolic bottom line most bang for your buck. Most bang for your buck for that exercise.

01:13:06 - Speaker 2 For that exercise, well, not even just for that exercise, for your whole fucking body, because your whole body is interconnected, right, this tensile to that tensile, to this tensile. And if this is pulled, this has to go this way, this has to go that way and this has to go up, right. So it's like if your right hip is hiking, that means your left hip is dropping, right, yeah, right. So if you're doing that and then you're loading that weight, then you're overloading one side, not loading the other. But if you were to get them exactly to hold symmetrically and move them at the same time while holding the other one from turning in and the other one from turning out, that creates this parabolic thing.

01:13:41 So what I've noticed from is, like I've never being a kicker my whole life I always had overdeveloped obliques. Sure, yeah, my obliques are getting like thinner and thinner for the first time in my life. Or I'm like, oh, if you're a bodybuilder and you're literally looking how to like trim down your obliques, you should really check out functional patterns. Wow, I mean it's wild how much my obliques have gone down in size from doing these different types of movement patterns. It translates into so much, but ultimately it's just now something that's in my tool bank, in my, in my tool chest, where I first I just started working out my you know in my way in my home gym for the first time yesterday and I'm combining like how I used to train with this now. So I'm hitting a set of you know goblet squats on a slant board for 20 reps, and then I go and do these rows, these functional patterns rows, and then I go and lift this atlas stone 10 times.

01:14:44 - Speaker 1 You're your own new kind of hybrid athlete.

01:14:45 - Speaker 2 I'm just creating this new hybrid training because they don't believe in anything else, right, which I'm like. I can't get down with that, you know. So it's like you could never train the world's strongest man, right? Because you just couldn't Like there's so many things you couldn't do with just that mentality.

01:15:03 But if it is a way that you are learning and consistently utilizing to create neuromuscular engagement in these patterns so that when you lift things in other ways, you kind of tie it in, so, like when I do bicep curls, I don't do like this with, like, my shoulders back and like set in, I now flare my lats super wide and I do bicep curls with my lats in a lat spread and I'm flexing my pecs the entire time. I'm doing bicep curls and I'm leaning over like five degrees and it's like why? Well, because if I'm leaning over five, 10 degrees, the angle of my elbow at the peak of contraction is having a certain type of gravitational pull, versus like pulling it up here and then the weight coming down on the elbow. So it's just like being smarter about your angles.

01:16:01 - Speaker 1 Right. So it's just like You're not fucking up your elbow. Basically, at that point You're actually hitting the muscle that you want to train.

01:16:06 - Speaker 2 Right without having to overload it, because you're under loading it from the angle. So most people lift heavier than they have to because the angle or the compensation that they're using to move the weight is excessive.

01:16:24 - Speaker 1 Right, so Especially in a bicep curl.

01:16:27 - Speaker 2 So like when we went and did one of the what was it like the chest press? That was like way harder, or like there was like a move-.

01:16:33 - Speaker 1 Yeah, it was a seated chest press machine. It was like a weird angle, like your shoulders and everything were almost like really really set back and kind of like low Right. There was no real way to kind of adjust it for your height Totally and that you sit there and your shoulders are compacted.

01:16:45 - Speaker 2 So you're working through a point of compression where, with functional patterns, you're decompressing while you're lifting. Oh wow, because you're creating space in the joint and in the shoulders. Because if your shoulder blades come together, what does your lower back have to do? Gotta get in there. It's gotta move forward, right? So if your shoulder blades pull back that's how my shoulder blades pull back my lower back has to go in. Our spine is made up of four pieces our cervical, our thoracic, our lumbar and our sacral, and they go every other. So our cervical controls our lumbar and our thoracic controls our sacral, or reverse, and they're like that so we don't fall over, right? So it's like if I put my head forward, my butt has to go slightly backwards, right? If I put my neck backwards, my hips have to go forward Right.

01:17:40 If I put my chest forward, my back has to curve in. If I put my chest back, my back curves out Right. So these angles of compression are what you're learning how to avoid while still moving in an athletic manner. And I mean, on top of that, I walk. I do slack lining. Slack lining, I think, is the thing that will probably keep my legs strong throughout my entire life.

01:18:07 Anybody who is looking to find a way to hack their legs into stronger, more adaptable, agile legs, just walk on a slack line.

01:18:18 Just teach yourself fall a million times, just walk across it.

01:18:22 I do this thing called a press test, and this is how I teach people how to start walking on a slack line. So go up to a slack line and, on your left leg, you know, keep your left leg on the ground, put your right leg on the slack line and put as much leg press tension into the slack line that you can until you hit the floor of your back or of the resistance of the band, and then you start feeling your left leg float up and your whole body comes off the ground the amount of shake that you see from high level athletes and super strong guys just from trying to press that thing down. That's like moving like this and like this at the same time crazy, right. The minute you can get something like that under control, you'll have super strong legs. It's like the only reason why my legs have stayed in shape over the last eight months is cause I literally take phone calls walking on my slack line Shut up. No way, yeah, I mean, I do pistol squads, I like.

01:19:13 - Speaker 1 I mean the other day I was making coffee on the slack line.

01:19:15 - Speaker 2 He was like throwing me everything and I was did you see the video?

01:19:17 - Speaker 1 I saw that video. Yeah, you did it. I did it. You did it. Yeah, I mean I did it. Who else can make a cup of coffee on a slack line? I mean he took the cup, the powder, the hot water, the stirrer.

01:19:27 - Speaker 2 I mean like bro it was all thrown to me too. I mean there's a lot of. I would love to say that I'm some super talented slack liner, but I, for a non slack liner, I'm a really good slack liner for an athlete. Okay, okay, right, there are guys on slack lines that do flips and crazy shit. I mean I can jump in the air and turn and stand on it and like all these things, but there are people out there that are really amazing. I see it as a tool for meditation I have never sought, so I started writing a really short book on it and it was. It was called the act of meditation, balance, right, and it was the. The cover was just going to be a triangle right, standing on, standing on its end, and the. It's funny when I saw the Rick Rubin cover.

01:20:18 - Speaker 1 I was like, oh, that's kind of like how I was going to do the the balance.

01:20:22 - Speaker 2 You know meditation and meditation and action. And the reason why is slack lining, is the only thing that I've ever found or tight rope walking or balance beam of any sort that there is a clear moment when the individual loses presence. So when you're on a slack line, you have to be, you have to be fully empty. The cup cannot have anything in it. You cannot think about how you're slack lining, you can't think about telling somebody about it, you can't think about your day, you can't think about the future, you can't think about anything. The minute you even start to think to yourself that you have balance and that you can have any other thought outside of this exact moment, you literally will fall, you'll start to shake it's and it is the fastest way to tap into flow when you're ultimately present and walking with risk.

01:21:34 Risk creates a state of flow, right, like Steven Kotler talks about it. I was just gonna say yeah, yeah, so in rise of Superman. Well, there's a risk of falling. It may not be great, you're only two feet off the ground. I've never fallen and hurt myself on a slack line. Right, you jump off. So the risk is mitigated, but it's still potential and you don't want to fall off. You want to stay on.

01:21:57 - Speaker 1 At risk, or even I think he talks a lot about fear too, the fear of falling right.

01:22:02 - Speaker 2 So a lot of times I have to get people to overcome the fear of falling on a slack line before they can even try to be present with it. Right, cause the fear just keeps overtaking them. The fear is just a component of it. But, like when you're in this state of controlled fear, where you can, I am present of the idea that I could fall, and I am present in the idea that I am standing, and I am present sitting with standing with fear and not letting it overcome you, because that's when you start having thoughts about your bills, that's when you start having thoughts about your business, that's when you start having thoughts about your family, whatever it is, and all of a sudden, you're not in the slack line anymore.

01:22:46 Right, so it's a way that it's kind of count.

01:22:49 - Speaker 1 You know, whenever I'm overly stressed.

01:22:51 - Speaker 2 It's like sex or a slack line. You know it's like one of the two are going to put me in a state of like absolute presence. Have you tried both? You know it could be like a nice bounce. You know you gotta have RSL.

01:23:04 - Speaker 1 You trained in the same way, I didn't get RSL you gotta slack like for a little while.

01:23:09 - Speaker 2 First, you're going to start a only slack, yeah, only slack.

01:23:13 - Speaker 1 Yeah, only slack.

01:23:15 - Speaker 2 You know. But speaking of that, I love to kind of shift into.

01:23:18 - Speaker 1 You know you're the family man. You know you're the family man. You know kind of my goal in this conversation today, the interview, which I didn't preface this at the beginning of it, but like I think you're such a great example of, honestly, a lot of what I strive for as an individual, as a human striving for to use your word, striving for what is it striving to reach? To reach our natural greatness daily yeah.

01:23:43 There we go. So, on the individual level, there's just so much potential and optimization. All this stuff from the entrepreneur side, just the passion and commitment and the why, the like, the physical self, all the things that you do to take care of your body. And you're a dad. You have two beautiful daughters and your wife, our Sely, met them many, many times and you have such a commitment to them and that relationship and that component of who you are, as you do in everything else.

01:24:08 Honestly, I'm kind of baffled. I don't know how you have like it's, it's admirable, dude, like, seriously, the level of commitment and passion to all of those buckets that are any. Any one person would love to just nail one of them at a time and I see you doing them all three so well. And I know that you recently get something, of course. Of course I know you recently did something very, very, I'm sure, scary and unknown territory. As a partner, as a husband, as a friend to your wife, you helped her find and meet her father, her birth father she had never met before. I want to know, like, what was it like from the partner, the husband perspective of preparing yourself and preparing your wife for that interaction? Because I can only imagine that could go one of two ways. And not an easy task, not a not an easy thing to even, I'm sure, agree to yeah.

01:25:06 - Speaker 2 I mean being, you know, being a father, being a father, being a father is the greatest thing I've ever done, right, like there's nothing in my past or in my future that will ever supersede the love and the experiences that I have for my kids. You know, and I am very thankful for the parents that I had for teaching me the things to do and the things not to do, right by example and by lesson, and I have valued time in such a way that it makes me able to do things that other people look at and wonder how I do it Right. And I there's been moments where I've I've never envied or wanted not to have the responsibilities that I've had, but I've I've definitely have seen the speed that other people have moved at you know, who are just worried about themselves, you know, or them and their wife, or them and their girlfriend, you know, whatever. And it can be challenging sometimes because I'm like, well, I'm jumping in this pool competing against you and I have three people that I'm towing, but when I look back they're my reason and then I just go that much faster, right. So my wife, you know, and I I hope that's what I'm talking about, you know, and I hope this comes out the best way is that I've known her since she was I'm eight years older than her and she didn't have a positive father figure in her life.

01:26:50 She then wasn't shown a lot of things, wasn't taught a lot of things, and at a young age, you know, I met her at 20. She was, you know, just going to school and like like I had this. You know, I had a tough, I had tough relationships with my dad and my mom, but I was given privilege in the sense that I had love and support and a positive roof over my head with whether it's food or clothing or, you know, a place to go and feel safe. Sure, so I became that for our Selly, you know, and I kind of raised her in a way over these last 13 years I mean almost.

01:27:39 You know she's 33, right and over these last 13 years have shown her what like a strong, like male figure is like in her life and have, you know, not always been perfect and yet I always wanted nothing but the best for her. So she has had, you know, a very difficult time. You know she had a stepdad. She thought this other person was her dad, you know, when she was younger and this other you know, both dads fucking sucked and at 33 years old. You know we I was like we should do. She had this like inkling that she thought that she had like sisters out there.

01:28:27 Like this like an intuitive feeling, and she has five other sisters. You know with her, with her mom, yeah, but she had a feeling that she had other sisters and I was like you know, maybe we should do the 23 and me DNA, let's do a DNA, let's do a DNA test. And so we, we bought one, and a message comes through like a couple months, you know in two months, like who's your, who are you related to? And blah, blah, blah, like oh, you might be my cousin. Boom, boom, boom. All of a sudden a couple of questions to RSLE's mom. Our SL's mom is like I did have a one night with a Raphael and all of a sudden she has a dad.

01:29:20 All this has been a matter of just a couple of months, last couple of months, all of a sudden she has a dad and three sisters that lived two blocks away from her growing up.

01:29:30 - Speaker 1 Holy shit.

01:29:32 - Speaker 2 I mean this is a girl who, like, grew up in a rundown house with cockroaches and you know, if you don't, if you've never been in the inner city, inner city of Milwaukee, I mean, it's like Baltimore, yeah, yeah, okay.

01:29:46 - Speaker 1 So it's like it's, it's, it's good. Michael Nicola was. Yeah, I know that.

01:29:49 - Speaker 2 Yeah. So there is a lot that she went through and she had this loving dad who was a really good guy, who raised three really great kids, just two blocks away from her. So come Thanksgiving I mean I'm I'm in the fucking thick of it between strong coffee, 60th and up them, you know, just doing all the things remodeling this house and I was like we got to drive up and see him, you know, and through the through, the kids in the car. After we were literally in New York for 36 hours with my wife and kids doing a serving event with Caleb we fly home on Sunday land at three o'clock we jumped in our car at the airport and we drove to Wisconsin and celebrated Thanksgiving for four days and hung out with her dad almost every day and he made us food every day and it was amazing. I love Mexican food so I was like fuck, yeah, all the Pusole and tacos I could eat for days.

01:30:53 - Speaker 1 And did you have to do a lot of convincing to get her on board.

01:30:57 - Speaker 2 No, what, you know what.

01:30:58 - Speaker 1 I. Why did you feel so strongly about it? I?

01:31:02 - Speaker 2 she Selly, always wants to make sure that I'm good, because I'm the one, you know, like I'm the guy that goes through all the stress, right, like I'm the.

01:31:15 I'm the guy that the breadwinner, I'm the guy that's like moving and shaking, you know, making sure that the family is taken care of.

01:31:22 She never wants me to stress out about something with her. So at first it was kind of like I don't know if I want to go up to Wisconsin for Thanksgiving, and then this whole dad thing happens and I'm like, well, we have to go. And she wasn't afraid to go, but I did want her to set her expectations appropriately and to like understand that you know, like, hey, our kids shouldn't like feel like they have to like this guy, you know, or I don't want you know, like we just have to be really careful on how we do this, cause I also don't want you to be hurt, right, if it's not what you expect, right, and I don't want you to. You know, they're her, your sisters, they're just people, right, and I don't want to think of them as their opinion matters, right, like if they don't want to know who you are or for some reason, like anything like that you have all the choice, all the power right.

01:32:27 - Speaker 1 Right, all the choice, all the power, be or not be, as much as totally one.

01:32:31 - Speaker 2 And her and her dad talk every day oh shit, every day. She says sometimes it can be a little stressful because she has somebody that now cares about her and has an expectation of her calling him and I'm like well to set the expectation like he doesn't know anybody as busy as us. You know what I mean? It's. It's very rare that somebody from a normal life could understand our life Right Like the quick trips to New York, the coffee events on the weekends, being in front of your computer. The minute kids go to bed we're back on our computers from eight to 10, you know like, whatever it is, you know it's. We are parents first and then we're everything else and then we're somebody else's kids and friends.

01:33:21 - Speaker 1 So she's navigating this new relationship with her dad. Well, now it sounds like yeah yeah, it's her and him, you and her, you and him.

01:33:28 - Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, I mean I, I am always watching. You know I'm the watcher. So it's like I don't allow myself to like in situations like that, because if you like, you can be blinded very quickly. So I'm I'm the lookout for her feelings and emotions and making sure that the situation is good.

01:33:53 - Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

01:33:55 - Speaker 2 And I mean at some point he'll earn my trust and respect, you know, but that's going to take a little bit. So not for anything that he did. You know, it's just who I am.

01:34:05 And the totally new dynamic my wife and my kids are mine to protect. You know it's like this may be your daughter but like, effectively, I've been responsible for her for the last 13 years. You know I've. When she woke up in absolute agony and you know crying, she had, you know, some issue in her ovaries, like I mean I literally picked her up out of bed and carried her two blocks to our car and drove her to an urgent med. You know, when she was 20 years old, you know I mean there are things that I've had to do, not had to do, but was able to be there for her in that moment that there is a certain sense of protection that I have over her that supersedes in, you know, the feeling of she is my wife you know, yeah, what about your daughters?

01:34:55 - Speaker 1 I personally kind of feel like I'm prepping myself already for being a girl dad. You know, my wife and I were trying and not trying your doing and having a great time.

01:35:04 - Speaker 2 We are doing, powered by strong coffee. Should we go again?

01:35:09 - Speaker 1 We're doing and you know my heart, my heart of hearts. I kind of feel like I ideally would love a boy to be first went multiple kids, but I kind of feel like it's in the cards, it's in the stars for me to be a girl dad. So I look at you for some notes here, man. As a father of two daughters, what are you most concerned about for their future? What are you most concerned about, and maybe your way to protect them from the world or to prepare them better for the world? What has your, your attention right now the most, as a father of two girls?

01:35:43 - Speaker 2 Yeah, I think the greatest thing that you could give girls is confidence and a feeling of independence. Right, and you know the when I see my girls, the thing that I can do the most is support their passions and be honest with them. Right, I think that we all too often protect our children.

01:36:08 - Speaker 1 You're saying be honest with them? Are you also saying they're don't shelter them?

01:36:13 - Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, I'm just honest with them. Yeah, honey, that dance is really nice, but you should try to put more than five minutes of effort into it before you call it a dance. And I'm only saying that to you because you are a dancer and we pay for your dance lessons and you dance hours a week.

01:36:30 Bringing in the reality of it takes more than four minutes of planning to create a TikTok video, and I want you to feel confident in this, and confidence comes from preparation, right? So why don't you spend at least 30 minutes, right? And you know, I never want my kid to feel like whatever she's doing isn't enough, but I also want to always. I also want to set the expectations of what they seek to be a reality. Our parents would have said pick something more realistic, right? Yeah, right, I'm saying just be more realistic about the amount of intention and practice that you're going to put into it. I like that to become that. I like that. So I want you to be that and I'll support you to the fucking ends of the earth. If you tell me right now that you want to be a professional dancer, then we need to do X, y and Z Right, and I want my girls to be confident and know that they don't need somebody next to them, right?

01:37:37 It's very easy to like let your kids sleep with you all the time, but then you're creating a state of dependence that then, when you're not around for them to sleep with, they'll look to sleep with somebody else, right? I mean, that is literally a thing that is subconscious. That is happening. I don't ever tell them that I'm too busy for them. I tell them I have five minutes. Right, cause if I can give them five minutes more than likely, that's all it's going to take. Yeah, I bet. Right, my kids are stoked if I play tag with them for five minutes. Right, if I jump in in the middle of my day and play it because the kids are home or it's a weekend and I play a game of fortnight with my daughter, it's 15 minutes. If 15 minutes is going to keep me from being successful, I'm doing something wrong. You got bigger problems. I have bigger problems than that. Right, we all too often try to push our kids aside and then we buy their attention later.

01:38:34 Right, I'm building a tree house with my daughters this break. So it's like, hey, I need you to go paint those tri beams while I drill this hole. You know they're sitting there like painting, right next to me, and I'm waking them up at seven in the morning telling them I got to leave in three hours. So if we're going to work on this tree house, we need to start working on it right now. You know, and these are things that I'm I'm showing them, I want to show them as much as I can, and us as parents, we have to lead from the front. So it's not just showing, but it is doing. My kids would naturally go out in the garage and work out.

01:39:10 - Speaker 1 Really. Yeah, I'm sure they're emulating modeling after what they see you and mom do.

01:39:13 - Speaker 2 My daughter arrow loves the aerosol bike. Who loves?

01:39:17 - Speaker 1 the aerosol bike.

01:39:18 - Speaker 2 She literally just jumps on it. She was like dad, I just did 10 calories real quick. You know, she just she loves the thing, you know, and it's like it's so funny cause she's like pedal and then it rolls and then it's pedal and she's like just reaching, you know, for it, cause she's so fucking little. But I mean, she, she crushes it. And you know, I I always talk about this one joke that I heard that, you know, louis CK says, which is like hey, boys, they're fucked up. I mean they, they, they fuck shit up.

01:39:46 Girls girls are fucked up, right. So it's like this is how he explains. This is how the comedian explains it. He's like my daughter ripped a head off of one of the dolls of my other daughters. So my other daughter comes up to me and says dad, dad, blah, blah, blah, I ripped the head off my doll. And he's like, well, what do you want me to do about it? She's like ripped the head off her doll. That's fucked up. So what did he do? He ripped the head off the doll cause he's a boy and he fucks shit up, right. So, like I teach my girls a little bit of both, you know, and I, I'm, I'm trying to raise them so they're not girls, but they're women and strong, okay, right, like lionesses, not raising passive little ones. Like I tell my girls all the time like you're going to keep your last name Rothfelder, cause if a guy really wants to marry you in modern age, he'll be okay with it.

01:40:45 - Speaker 1 I mean, I want bone Rothfelder. I mean, who the fuck doesn't way cooler than shooting yeah?

01:40:50 - Speaker 2 I mean, you know you got a good last name, but I mean it's, it's these things that I'm putting in their head so that they never have to think that they have to do something that they don't want to do. You don't have to give up your last name. You don't have to sleep with this person. You don't have to do this as a job. You don't have to go to school, right, you can do whatever you want, as long as it will take care of you and not hurt somebody else. Right. And like teaching them that and how to look at the world. My daughters both have tried starting businesses two times.

01:41:22 My one daughter sold out of her first business at a school event. What, what, what was it? She created stuffed animals out of socks and they were called mushrooms and they she took a sock and like tighten the top, so like the top of the sock kind of looked like a penis head, you know, like a mushroom head, and then the rest of the sock was like thin and like wrapped it's like lamb chops, sing along and then they had like little eyeballs on them and stuff and they're.

01:41:44 She was selling them for like a dollar 50 for, like you know, I was like we're technically losing money, but the kids loved the idea yeah.

01:41:52 - Speaker 1 As all first businesses usually do.

01:41:53 - Speaker 2 Totally yeah. So we're actually working on launching a company for them and it's going to be out pretty soon, no way. And yeah, so it's a kid's drink and they're going to be running the company, so they're going to be doing the social media. How old are they? Nine and 10.

01:42:12 - Speaker 1 Yeah, so they're going to start their own little podcast and oh my God, dude, this is the most modern entrepreneur family thing I've ever heard.

01:42:20 - Speaker 2 Yeah Well, you know it's. So when is this podcast?

01:42:22 - Speaker 1 coming out. It'll be February.

01:42:25 - Speaker 2 Oh cool, so we'll probably be ready by then. So we'll. So it started. They want to start a lemonade stand and I was like, well, you can't sell sugary shit.

01:42:34 - Speaker 1 Of course, right, I mean if we're here to help better society and the community.

01:42:41 - Speaker 2 So I formulated a hydration lemon drink for them and they're coming out with a hydration lemon drink and it is actually a kids affiliate company. So the whole idea is for kids to start their own digital lemonade stand.

01:43:01 - Speaker 1 A digital lemonade stand. What does that look like?

01:43:04 - Speaker 2 So they'll. They'll have the ability to start their own lemonade stand, so they will be able to buy our product, their product, at a reduced cost and they'll actually be able to buy a little lemonade stand that will get shipped to them. That's like these panels.

01:43:19 - Speaker 1 Oh, this is genius, and they will then have, like a white label, lemonade stand.

01:43:25 - Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, it's our brand, wow, and it'll say and it'll say proprietor, and then they write their name on it. This is amazing, yeah, and it's called Mighty Lemon, and so the, the digital lemonade stand, is a way for them to create residual income from their community. So they will have an affiliate code and their own website through Mighty Lemon. So say, your kids want to start a lemonade stand. They start a lemonade stand. They buy the lemonade stand kit, right, it comes with a certain amount of lemonade, comes with the, comes with the little setup, everything, and it's all affordable, right, because we want you to be able to afford starting it. Your child to start. It Comes with a workbook that shows them how to like set it up, how to configure pricing, how to talk to people. So there's like sales pitches and different things in there, rebuttals, different things that, like I learned when I was 18 at Best Buy like a rebuttal book right.

01:44:26 Hey, if they say this, say this, right. So then when that person leaves they'll be able to go to a landing page that will have like a picture of that kid in front of their lemonade stand and say like, welcome to Mike's lemonade, mike's Mighty Lemonade Stand. And it's like add to cart right or start your own lemonade stand right.

01:44:49 - Speaker 1 And it's like add to cart so you can buy the lemonade or you can become a lemonade proprietor.

01:44:55 - Speaker 2 Physically and online, because it'll just be an affiliate program. Wow. So every kid will just become an affiliate and we'll make them a landing page. So we'll make them a. So when we get a new kid that signs up for a lemonade stand, we then spend the time to make a. We use, we're using AI to make a website. They just send us a photo. We send, we put their photo in the AI. It refigures the website of what it'll look like with their name on it instead of the other kid's name on it or the other kid's name on it. So then we'll just have thousands of affiliates out there, like Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America, but not selling sugary shitty fucking cookies, right, so genius, wow.

01:45:38 My hope is that in time, mighty Lemon will actually be the new Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America. The idea that and not because I don't want you know the non-binary, whatever, right we we want and I don't say whatever to dismiss anyways, thoughts or feelings on it, but I'm just saying that idea with the idea of boys and Girl Scouts, doesn't make sense. Sure, yeah, we should have them together. We shouldn't separate them. Right? Girl should know just as much about outdoors as boys, or girl boys should know just as much about knitting as girls or like whatever the fuck's happening in these isolated containers. We could put them together into a healthier foundation that's built around the idea of being Mighty, right, and that is like what I want kids and my kids to feel like, like they can do anything. It just takes some work because the juice is worth the squeeze.

01:46:39 - Speaker 1 Dude, like if there's a way to like crawl inside of your head and kind of like you wouldn't want to go there.

01:46:45 - Speaker 2 It's crazy, it's crazy.

01:46:48 - Speaker 1 We'll do that as we kind of get to a close here. Man, I just want to say again anybody interested in learning more about your backstory and all the things you've done in TV and fitness and entrepreneurship and fighting like there is so, so much that we did not uncover- 60th and up them 60th and up them.

01:47:06 What you're doing now in helping other brands get started, your incubator, all this stuff. Of course, I'm going to have link down for all your content, all the old episodes we've done together, everything you're working on now. You just got so much to offer Besides a banging cup of coffee that. I have been drinking, endorsing, promoting slinging like send. Anytime we travel, I'm always like sending it ahead of my time or all Christmas. This year, every stocking stocking suffers were a travel packets for everybody.

01:47:35 - Speaker 2 Amazing. We appreciate you.

01:47:36 - Speaker 1 Yeah, dude, it's just like it's one of the biggest no brainers in my life. And like so many things in our life, when we latch on to something that adds value to our life, it solves a problem. But then there's a next level solves a problem and I can't not share this with the world. That's what strong copy is for me, man. But the last question I ask everybody and I don't know if I was poising or throwing up this question when we were on last but ever forward to move forward in any unique area of our life, or all the areas. There's a lot to be extracted and what you talked about, that somebody can figure out how to do that. But to ask you bluntly, man, how do you live a life ever forward? What does that mean to you here today?

01:48:23 - Speaker 2 You know, I have this burn the boats mentality. There is no backwards, so Ford's the only thing that exists and that's how I live it. I have no other option. As much as you would like to be able to go back to change the thing, you can't. So you change it, going forward, you know, and then you have the experience to understand how to deal with it If it ever happens again. Right. So we're just getting stronger and better. And you know, you may think with age, you know, with with wisdom comes age, but it's actually the other way around, right, and so all my past experiences are allowing me to keep going ever forward.

01:49:08 - Speaker 1 I mean you embody it, you live it, you breathe it and like no bullshit man. You're a guy that I look to in the CPG space. You're a guy I look to as a dad. You're a guy I look to as a no bullshitter. I didn't even get to this, but I might know it. So I wanted to kind of go down like you're the guy, whether it's solicited or not, if, like, a certain brand or a certain thing comes up because you know, fuck that guy, fuck this, but in but the most, how do I ever want to say this Like the most rational way possible.

01:49:36 You're a guy that is very plugged into a lot of different things and people that cross past with a lot of my life, personally and professionally. And, like your, your opinion on so many things is probably one of the ones that I take the most seriously and it doesn't always, I will say, completely sway me. But I take a step back and I think I reflect on my okay, am I getting caught up, maybe, in something? Am I just saying yes to something or am I not seeing Cause? I'm definitely more of that. Hey, we're all in this together, Everybody. Why would you screw me over? Why wouldn't you be telling me the truth kind of thing until maybe there's a hard example. But I mean your, your insight, your experience is one that I take very seriously.

01:50:16 - Speaker 2 As a midwesterner you know, growing up in a cold city and so close to Chicago, right, there is no room for bullshit when you're fucking freezing and you know there. There's other places in the continent that are obviously cold. But something about a gritty Midwest blue collar person. I've seen my parents fucked over by so many people taken advantage of. I've seen so many situations. My brother was a devious one. I can read fucking lies and drugs and from a mile away on somebody, oh, I bet you're having that addiction in your life. So it's like there is very little you're going to get past my meter. And you know I hate to be the guy that ever says I told you so and I, I. I try to never do it, but there are plenty of friends that would hear you say that and it'd been like, yeah, I learned to listen at them the hard way.

01:51:12 - Speaker 1 I've talked to a few of them where it's like shit I totally should have fucking listened to them about that person.

01:51:18 - Speaker 2 And now I'm figuring out how to get parts of my company back from that fucking person, you know, and that's like happened numerous times just in the last couple of months. And I only say that because if I ever share something with you, whoever you are in the world, it is not coming from a place of jealousy or spite. It is coming from the fact that I have been fucked over and I don't want you to get fucked over because I honestly care about fellow man. Right, I don't even have to know you. Yeah, I've literally said to complete strangers that person you're dealing with as a fucking shiesty motherfucker. Be careful. Wow. And they're like I've known that person this long and I. And then three months later it's like hey man.

01:52:01 - Speaker 1 Adams are a little strong angel coming in the whisper on the shoulder.

01:52:05 - Speaker 2 Swoop a coffee and a little truth Go hand in hand, my man.

01:52:10 - Speaker 1 For more information on everything you just heard, make sure to check this episode show notes or head to everforwardradio.com