Ep. #107: Helping people, building a brand, and my biggest lessons learned

[00:00:00] Hey, it’s Mike. And this podcast is brought to you by Legion, my line of naturally sweetened and flavored workout supplements. Now, as you probably know, I’m really not a fan of the supplement industry. I’ve wasted thousands and thousands of dollars over the years on worthless supplements that. Basically do nothing.

And I’ve always had trouble finding products actually worth buying. And especially as I’ve gotten more and more educated as to what actually works and what doesn’t. And eventually after complaining a lot, I decided to do something about it and start making my own supplements. The exact supplements I myself have always wanted a few of the things that make my products unique are one They’re a hundred percent naturally sweetened and flavored which I think is good because while our official sweeteners May not be as harmful as some people claim There is research that suggests regular consumption of these chemicals may not be good for our health particularly our gut health So I like to just play it safe and sweeten everything with stevia and erythritol Which are natural sweeteners [00:01:00] that actually have health benefits, not health risks.

Two, all ingredients are backed by peer reviewed scientific research that you can verify for yourself. If you go on our website and you check out any of our product pages, you’re going to see that we explain why we’ve chosen each ingredient. And we cite all supporting evidence in the footnotes. So you can go look at the research for yourself and verify that we’re doing the right thing.

Three, all ingredients are also included at clinically effective dosages, which are the exact dosages used in those studies that prove their effectiveness. This is very important because while a molecule might be proven to, let’s say, improve your workout performance, not all dosages are going to improve your workout performance.

If you take too little, You’re not going to see any effects. You have to take the right amounts. And the right amounts are the amounts proven to be effective in scientific research. And four, there are no proprietary blends, which means you know exactly what you’re buying when you buy our supplements. All of our formulations are 100 percent transparent in terms of ingredients and dosages.

So if that sounds interesting to you and you want to check it out, [00:02:00] then go to www. legionathletics. com. That’s L E G I O N athletics. com. And if you like what and you want to buy something, use the coupon code podcast P O D C A S T, and you will save 10 percent on your order. Also, if you like what I have to say in my podcast, then I guarantee you’ll like my books.

I make my living primarily as a writer. So as long as I can keep selling books, then I can keep writing articles over at muscle for life and Legion and recording podcasts and videos like this and all that fun stuff. Now I have several books, but the place to start is bigger leaner, stronger if you’re a guy and thinner leaner, stronger if you’re a girl.

Now these books, they’re basically going to teach you everything you need to know about dieting, training and supplementation to build muscle. Boom. Lose fat and look and feel great without having to give up all the foods you love or live in the gym, grinding away at workouts you hate. And you can find my books everywhere.

You can buy books online like Amazon, Audible, iBooks, Google Play, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and so forth. And if [00:03:00] you’re into audio books like me, you can actually get one of my audio books for free with a 30 day trial. Free trial of audible to do that. Go to www. muscleforlife. com forward slash audio books.

That’s muscleforlife. com forward slash audio books. And you’ll see how to do this. So thanks again for taking the time to listen to my podcast. I hope you enjoy it and let’s get to the show.

Hey, it’s Mike and welcome to another episode of the muscle for life podcast. Sorry that we missed last week. If you listen to my voice, you can probably guess why. Unfortunately I was sick and again, this winter has been brutal to me and my family really for the last seven weeks, we’ve been passing around this cold flu plague thing that’s been going around and yeah, it’s been really annoying.

It’s just been this lingering. I got it first, I don’t know, six, seven weeks ago, and then gave it to my wife and son. And then I got better, but they still had it and re gave it to me a couple of weeks later. And it’s been very annoying, [00:04:00] but we’re all better now and the cold weather is going away.

Maybe I can just chalk it up to my first real winter or something out of Florida, even though this was a pretty mild winter. Just a couple of weeks ago, we were having like sixties. 70s and sunny here in Virginia. So that was pretty cool. But anyway, let’s get to the point here. So this episode is going to be a little bit different as it’s me being interviewed for another podcast called the business of coaching podcast.

That podcast is run by a super nice guy named miles who reached out to me because he wanted to have me on his show. And he heads up a company in the UK that helps mainly life and business coaches, get more clients and get better results with those clients and so forth. Now, I want to share this interview with you, despite the fact that it’s not about health and fitness.

Instead, we talk about a variety of things ranging from business to personal growth and happiness, money, fame, and more. And I really would like to hear what you think [00:05:00] About the discussion reason being is I plan on branching out from the health and fitness space and producing more and more content along these lines, because more and more people are asking to hear my thoughts on these things these days.

And they’re also subjects that I enjoy to read about and speak on. So I think it’s going to be a win. So much so that I’m actually working on a new book that I don’t really have an elevator pitch for just yet, but if I’m going off just shooting from the hip here, it’s going to be, I guess you could say it’s going to be like my playbook, so to speak, for achieving happiness and success and fulfillment in life.

What are the things that have really worked best for me? For me, in almost all cases, these are ideas and tools that I’ve just taken from other people and other things that I’ve studied and put into practice and found helpful. I know that sounds like every other self help self development book out there, but I promise that mine is going to be unique.

It’s not just going to [00:06:00] be another uninspired rehash of the same old shit explained in the same old ways. And if you’ve read any of these kind of books, you know what I’m talking about. If you just look at the table of contents, it’s just a combination of stuff like creative vision and set goals, work hard, develop good habits, don’t give up, help others, blah, blah, blah.

And it’s not that any of those ideas are bad per se, but in the end, it doesn’t really matter how insightful the ideas are. It really comes down to implementation. It’s what you can do with the information that matters, not how it makes you feel while you’re reading it. What we really want from any of these books is lasting change, right?

And that’s why I want to produce a book that isn’t just insightful or enlightening, but is also Practical. It doesn’t just give you titillating ideas, but it shows you exactly, step by step how to use them to improve your life. So I’m on a [00:07:00] tangent at this point. So I think I’ll just shut up and get to the interview where I share a few of the ideas that are in the outline for the book.

So again, please do let me know what you think about any of what we talk about in the interview. Really. I really would like to hear your feedback, Shoot me an email at Mike at muscle for life. com. I get a lot of emails, so it’ll probably take a few days at least for me to see yours, but I will see it and you will hear back from me.

So with that, let’s get to the interview. Mike, welcome to the show. The best place to start is tell us who is Mike Matthews. Tell us a little bit about your personal and then maybe fitness journey for those that are not familiar with you. Mike. Yeah. Absolutely. So yeah. Thanks first for having me on. I appreciate it.

And so I’ve been in the fitness space for a few years now. I first published a book called bigger, leaner, stronger in 2012. So that was the beginning. At the time I was in a different line of work and that was just a nights and weekends project. And the reason why it even came about was I myself had gone through a bit of a transformation which I can talk about [00:08:00] briefly in a minute.

Thanks And I can also people can if they want to know more about that, I’ll just send over to my website and they can read the whole thing. You don’t have to go through all the details. But so I went through my own kind of personal transformation with my physique and then was essentially training just friends and family.

Really? I wasn’t. I didn’t even set up a business at that time. It was just sharing what I had learned and what had worked for me with people that I knew. I knew that it just asked. They really, they saw the change and they’re like, Whoa, what are you? What are you doing? I’ve always liked to read.

I’ve always been a good student and had interest in writing. And at the time, back in 2011, I guess it was Amazon’s KDP platform was getting a lot of media attention because when I first heard about it was there was a dude named John Locke and he’s still actually writing. Interesting guy. So he, yeah. I think it was an insurance business and then sold it and then did it again in an even bigger and better and sold it again.

He had built up and sold like two companies and made enough money at that point where he basically was like, okay, [00:09:00] I don’t need money anymore. So what do I want to do? And he just chose to write, he chose writing. It’s something he always wanted to do. And so he writes, I think they’re mainly, the books are mainly for women.

I think they’re just they’re fiction or I think they’re just fun stories with, sex and violence and stuff and whatever. He was like the first dude to sell us books for 99 cents or that really, that, probably not the first to do it, but he was the first one to do it in a big way.

So he was the first guy to sell a million books. And one of his things was the first self published author sell a million books on Kindle. His thing was he sold them for 99 cents because he didn’t care if they made money like he was just doing it for fun anyway and he thought like at the time you couldn’t now there’s obviously there are cheap books all over Amazon and some of them are okay and some of them are not okay but yeah at the time that was pretty novel that you could I Read a book that you would enjoy for 99 cents, as opposed to a 50 page piece of shit that was written by English as a second language person in some random hole in the world, in some random country.

So when I heard about that, I was like, huh, I’ve always been interested [00:10:00] in writing. This might be an opportunity to do something. So that was just like a serendipity, just a. Confluence of circumstances there where I just like this community opportunity. So a nights and weekends thing.

I wrote bigger, leaner, stronger, and just laid out. And it’s not so much what has yes, it’s what has worked for me, but it’s also just breaking down the in simple layman’s terms, the science of diet and training. And of course, there’s a lot more than that. You can know that even the book now is I’ve overhauled it since first releasing it.

And so now it’s bigger and better now, but still it’s not everything that you could know, obviously that could benefit you. But I would say it’s probably the 20 percent out of everything that you can know. That’s going to give you 80 percent of your results. So it’s the 20%. basics of diet and really how the, metabolism works and how energy balance works and how macronutrient balance works and the truth about, nutritional value of your diet and how does that relate to body composition and how does it relate to just general health and performance and so forth.

And then [00:11:00] the training side of things, some of the basic variables that you need to understand with training, some of the basic fundamentals of muscle growth, what really causes muscle growth, what’s the primary driver, how do you stimulate it best, and then it gives you a kind of a prescriptive. Here’s a routine.

Do this. So on the diet side, here’s how to make a meal plan that’s going to work. Here are all the pieces. Here are some examples. Okay. Do it yourself. Step by step. In the gym. This is what I want you to do. I want you to be doing that. These exercises I want you to be doing, so essentially the training program is it focuses on heavy compound weightlifting.

It’s moderate volume. The workouts aren’t very long. They’re 45 to maybe 75 minutes at most. Most are around an hour. And that’s with a fair amount of resting in between sets because we are focusing on gaining strength on key lifts more than getting a pump or just sweating or just moving around a lot.

And some people, when they come from the more high intensity style of exercising where you’re always moving and you’re rarely resting and you’re doing tons of [00:12:00] reps, they’ll come from that to what I espouse. And they’ll. I’ll get emailed sometimes where people are like skeptical because they feel like they’re not doing anything compared to how they were training before.

But then, they stick with it and then they’re very surprised to see how their body responds. And they can get a lot more if the goal is to get stronger and gain muscle mass and even to get leaner, which obviously is more diet than anything else. It’s heavier weightlifting and focusing on compound exercises is going to do a lot more for you than lighter weightlifting for a billion reps and doing, tons of machines and bodyweight exercises and isolation type work.

That’s basically what kind of got laid out in the book and a little bit of information on supplementation as well. I put it up in 2012 with no, so I didn’t have a website. I didn’t have a following, it was just, I just put it up on Amazon just to see if anybody would care. It got maybe like 20 downloads in the first month and I thought that was pretty cool.

And then maybe it got 30 or 40 in the next month and [00:13:00] it started to pick up exponentially because it was getting good word of mouth. People started emailing me because I set up an email address and I was like, if you like the book, you can always email me if you have any questions. And so I, I started getting people actually emailing me and saying they really liked it and having questions about how to do this or that.

Yeah. And by the end of the year, it was selling a few thousand copies a month, and I had also started on, I think I’d already published one or two other books that also were minimum viable product type approach where they were shorter books, they were simpler. I was just trying some different ideas to see what would resonate, so it was at the end of 2012 when I saw that this is more than just like I can make this into my theme.

thing, this could become my full time job. But initially, actually, I didn’t really want to be a fitness guru guy. I wanted to take what I had learned with my own books and with, how do you go from just an idea to a book that sells? There’s a lot that goes into that obviously.

And I wanted to create a publishing company actually and publish other people’s stuff. And so I recruited my friend Jeremy and we started working on that together. So it was like, I remember [00:14:00] talking to Jeremy, I was like, honestly, I don’t really like The fitness space. It’s a lot of bullshit, a lot of scammers.

And I like helping people and I like that element of it. But I wouldn’t be willing to do the standard type of approach, which is you have to get networked. You have to get in with people, if you normally, if you want to, Have a guest article anywhere on any website that has any sort of traction and traffic.

You have to either know someone or you have to already be established. So it’s there’s that catch 22 there, but it can be hard to get to know people if you’re not established. So a lot of that in the beginning, I just wasn’t really interested running around trying to suck up to people who I honestly didn’t really respect.

And. Now that I’m obviously much more familiar with the industry, I would say that’s still true, although there are quite a few people whose work I really do like more of the evidence based type people. A lot of them are not necessarily great marketers, so their work is obscure in the grand scheme of things.

A guy like Lyle McDonald, super smart dude, really knows his shit. I [00:15:00] had him on my podcast recently. Yeah, my wife loved that episode, by the way, she loved it. Oh yeah, great. So yeah, Lyle is an example of someone who I really respect him for the work that he does, but he’s not a great marketer and I don’t think he would even take offense.

If you were listening, I think he would say, yeah, that’s just not his thing. He’s more of a science guy, so I didn’t, when I was initially getting into it, I didn’t know about Lyle actually at all. I just looked around and Go to the bookstore and just go see what you have available for you in Barnes Noble.

If you want to try to, let’s say you’re someone that wants to get in shape and the people that get the book deals and that are most out there, in the public eye are generally just full of shit. That kind of includes. People in the cooking space, like what is it like Rocco Dispirito, negative calorie plan, shit like that, where it’s just ridiculous.

So so initially I was like, yeah, fuck, I don’t want to do that. Let’s do it. Let’s create a publishing company. There’s an opportunity. It’s still actually is an opportunity. It’s something I’m going to be pursuing. There’s an opportunity because traditional publishers have distribution and they have that [00:16:00] lockdown.

Of course, if you want to get into Barnes Noble, you can get in as a self published author. It’s just hard. You have to. To have serious numbers like I know I can get into Barnes Noble and get into other places. I just haven’t. I’m bringing somebody on this year to help expand everything on the book side of things because I’m not going to do it myself.

But if you don’t have big numbers that you can show, it’s going to be hard to get, a buyer at Barnes Noble to even care. So of course you have to go through a traditional publisher. Now traditional publishers, that’s what they have. What they don’t have is. A little most cases, they’re not very good marketers.

They’re not good at helping refine concept of the book and the hook of the book, taking that initial rough idea and turning into something that will really grab people’s attention and make them want to buy. They’re not good at necessarily, this is, these are generalizations, but they’re generally true, not good at helping with.

Getting to a title that again, really grabs your attention and really promises strong benefits and evokes curiosity and so forth. And they’re not good at writing copy for the book and [00:17:00] et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So they also don’t know shit about internet marketing and there’s so much that can be done there.

So I, I was saying like, we could do this, we could actually one other thing is this is more true now, even. then in 2012 or, I guess it’d be 2013 actually is when Jeremy and I were looking at this. The publishing industry is very, they want people like, I’m actually going to be doing a book deal this year because I want to actually need the distribution because I’m going to do a New York times campaign.

So the next book I’m going to write, I’m gonna make a New York times bestseller, which I have a big enough following to do that. Basically, if you can get 10, 000 preorders, you’re good to go. If you can get five, if you can get 5, 000 preorders, actually, you’re probably going to make it on the list.

But it’s not just about numbers with the NYT. It’s also about who published the book, where is it available? So there’s a lot. The safest bet is to just go with the traditional publisher if you want to do that and I want to do that. But publishing companies are interested in just working with people like me.

I have websites to get a couple million visits a month. I [00:18:00] have over 300, 000 people on my email lists. I’ve sold close to a million books, self published over the last, since 2012 and blah, blah, blah. I have a popular podcast. They want home runs. Or they don’t even want to talk and it’s becoming more and more true.

So Jeremy and I were looking at that going, we could find people we know what good content is especially in the health and fitness space. And we could branch out into other stuff. We could get people that otherwise publishers, they don’t want to take the time to really put the work into developing.

They want just a casual. Killer proposal that shows this person has it all. They have the marketing brains for it. They have the following. They can create the content. The publisher just wants to almost be the facilitator. They don’t want to take something that is rough and really mold it and shape it and do a lot of editorial work and so forth.

So we were going down that road. But then during that. A couple month period of putting it all in place, getting the website created, putting, just creating our plan and shit. The book sales kept growing and I kept on getting more emails and more and more people were [00:19:00] happy. We looked at it and actually we’re like, really, we probably should just go with this opportunity.

It’s a better opportunity really. So I just was like, all right I guess I’ll become the fitness guru guy then. And so that was 2013 and then so we launched muscle for life and we’ve changed gears, just pivoted to in the other direction here and launched. Muscle for life in March of 2013 and it grew very quickly.

It’s really a glorified blog, but it’s going to get a complete overhaul this year. We’re going to be ramping. It’s going to get completely redesigned. We’re gonna be adding a store, new products, new services, cleaning everything up, and then I’m gonna be ramping up the content production on it.

And we have some big plans for it because it’s been neglected, honestly, because we’ve been focusing so much of our marketing. bandwidth on Legion, which is my supplement company. And so yeah, so 2013 and since then it’s just been continuing just nose to the grindstone and continued recruiting people as I needed them and, building out the organization and launching Legion and writing more books and writing doing stuff, a podcast.

And I [00:20:00] released an app recently and The idea is it’s not like really what we’re building is an ecosystem. So where everything can feed everything else. So book sales feed, supplement sales, feed, book sales, app sales feed, and then, and so as we add more and more things. It allows them, and there are many advantages to that it’s not just good for having multiple streams of income, but it’s also good because it allows us to, our customer acquisition costs are much lower than many of our competitors in each individual space because, like my supplements, one of the USPs of that company is we simply spend a lot more producing our products than most supplement companies, and we spend that money intelligently, meaning that we put it into good formulations.

We’re not just spending it haphazardly and have expensive products that with most products and services, you get what you pay for. Not entirely true with supplements because [00:21:00] you a lot of supplements are expensive, but they’re complete shit just because of the markups really that are needed in a traditional retail model.

You have to sell a supplement for 8 to 10 times or 8 to 12 times what you paid to create it what would it cost you, that’s a lot of things like whatever shirt you’re wearing, same thing, your product costs. 10th or even 1. 15th of what you pay? But you don’t care because it’s a shirt.

You bought it because forever reason you bought it. You like the brand. You like the fit. It’s a shirt. You don’t even give a shit. You just bought it and it’s not being stoled like it’s going to do anything special for you. It’s a shirt. Where it or don’t wear it. It doesn’t matter. Supplements are very different one.

The hype obviously is just over the top and most supplements are sold with, they promise all kinds of things they can’t deliver and you can’t make a good supplement for you can’t make a good pre workout for 5 a bottle. You can’t period. I don’t care what it is. I don’t care what you try to do.

It’s going to be crap because you’re not going to be able to use ingredients that are actually going to be able to do [00:22:00] anything and you’re not going to be able to use. One of the things with Legion is we just spend a lot more. Like I’ll say, my green supplement cost me almost 20 a bottle to produce.

We could have done a shittier green supplement and it would actually be more competitive because green supplements are usually about 20 retail, meaning that like most companies, like if you’re anyone listening, if you’re taking just a green supplement, just some vegetable and fruit powder type of run of the mill green supplement, it probably cost them a few dollars, maybe four.

3 to produce. I want to do something different though with green supplements and that’s why mine is very expensive to produce because it has things that you just don’t find in other green supplements because they’re expensive and the margins work because I have a direct consumer business and my green supplement will never be in GNC.

The margins aren’t there. It would have to be 100 or something. You know what I mean? Even if I’m willing to not take the normal type of margins that supplements want, or supplement companies want when they sell to wholesalers or distributors, and even if GNC [00:23:00] were willing to take lower margins, which they’d have to, it still would be a 100 product, maybe 120, 130 product.

What the one of the reasons why I can do that though, is because I have this ecosystem that drives customers to Legion. Of course we do a lot in terms of advertising and paying the customers, but we also get a lot of customers that we actually don’t pay for. In fact, we make money like on book sales or on app sales or on in other ways.

And then that also gets us customers for everything else. So that was the approach from the beginning. It’s pretty obvious and straightforward, but it’s just a lot of work and you have to, you Go about the right way. Yeah, that’s a pretty much kind of the whole story and in a nutshell, to where I am now.

You know what? That’s the primary reason why I wanted to get you on, Mike, because it leads really well into my next question. What I’ve long since loved about you and my perception of you and my perception of some what differentiates really good Markets is experts, whatever they perceive to be called in that space is the ones that go from just [00:24:00] doing something because it’s enough money for them to achieve their financial obligations versus the ones that seem to make it an ethical obligation for them to help other people get the result they want.

Like what you said about Lyle. I also know some really great trainers. That are working. It seems to be unintentionally quite selfishly on their own space, their own needs. It’s yeah, I’ve got my financial needs met. I’m cool. I don’t need any more clients rather than the way that I perceive you to be doing it, especially when you talked about.

I’ll just interject that. I don’t know if that’s Lyle’s thing. I think there are people like I’ve spoken to people that tell me just that But I don’t know if Lyle’s one of those guys. Yeah, no, obviously I don’t know Lyle. Yes, definitely not. I’m more so in definitely in our space. I know that the coaches, trainers, consultants, probably some that are listening right now that can look and go.

Yeah, that’s me. When I talk to them about what would success look like to you at the end of 2017 and they talk about like their needs and their goals and what they’re going to achieve for them rather than the human need of [00:25:00] contribution. And you struck a great chord for me when you said about, we recognize that getting a book out, getting a publishing deal one is bloody hard work and two, they don’t seem to always have your best interest at heart. So we’re going to do it ourselves to help other people get their message out. And that’s, I love that about you and that leads me to my next question, which is why do you do what you do?

Like what’s, Different for you. Neurologically that made that shift for you where you went from. Maybe you’ve always been this way, but maybe doing things just for you and your needs to go. And you know what? I’m actually going to do what I say. I want to do. And I’m actually going to give a shit about people and not just say it so that I can achieve my own little financial goals.

So why do you do what you do? It’s a good question, and it’s sometimes hard because I’m me and I’m in my head looking out and it’s just, it’s been a part of my personal. I wouldn’t say that I’ve always been a super selfless type of person, but I definitely have always had a maybe a sense of ethics and some sort of integrity, but where it probably begin would [00:26:00] be in how I was raised.

So my parents and my dad in particular is very much like that. I say, and I say my dad in particular because I saw it in his work. My mom’s like that too, but she raised me and my brother, my dad, he has built up a couple of businesses and so he’s a successful business person. So I always had that as a model growing up and he’s very much like that.

He’s, he has a bigger heart than I do for sure. And that’s not a slight against myself, it’s just, he’s like one of those guys that everybody likes because he’s. Super generous and super nice and really cares about people. And again, like I actually don’t know of anyone that actively really dislikes my dad.

Some people here and there, whatever, especially his ex business partner, maybe doesn’t like him so much, but that guy though, that’s a whole nother story. That guy’s an interesting dude. And that was my dad sucking, getting, because he was too nice and giving this guy so much stuff. But anyways, I probably internalized a bit of that just growing up.

And it was never and how I was raised, I [00:27:00] guess I wasn’t maybe raised in the same way that many of, Other millennials have been raised, which is a whole nother discussion, but I think we’re seeing a lot of blowback from just terrible parenting and I was maybe instilled, had certain values of hard work and personal responsibility and also just responsibility in general responsibility to others.

I’m all for individualism. In certain ways, and to a certain degree, but I wouldn’t say I think I ran took it a bit too far. I liked parts of what she had to say and Alice shrugged, but then other parts. I was like, all right I disagree with that. I think that we all live together.

And so we do have. I don’t think it’s, I don’t look at responsibility as a burden, I don’t look at, I have a responsibility to do these things for other people and it’s such a burden, I look at it as something positive as I truly believe that, service to others is in a way, it’s like a rent that we pay for living on the planet and I very much disagree with people that only [00:28:00] live for themselves and don’t want to give back to society and don’t want to give to others and just want to take, those are, just deep seated, Values are virtues for me, and they’re very much tied into the type of person that I want to be I’m more interested in being the type of person that I want to be, and that matters more to me than even the things that I’m doing or the things that I get from what I’m doing, like what I have from it.

So what I mean by that is. I get satisfaction more from, I would say, exhibiting the type of person that I want to be and being that person actively and doing the things that like that. But what I do is more coming from that as opposed to doing things just to have shit just to be like, Oh, I want a Lamborghini.

So I’m going to do whatever it takes to get a Lamborghini, like those types of. Ambitions are, I think, meaningless and they are more conducive to the corner cutting and the selfishness and just because they’re so [00:29:00] empty and they actually they are just inherently meaningless. I don’t know.

I don’t know if that’s helpful at all, but I haven’t honestly thought all that much about it. So I’m just trying to reverse engineer. How did I come to that? type of approach. I’d also believe in cliched shit, like you should treat other people the way that you want to be treated. And if you do that, then, it comes back to you in spades.

And again, it’s not so much that I feel like I do that just so I can get things from people, but that makes me feel good about myself. And again, that matters how I feel about myself and how I feel about you. How I feel about my character and how it’s developing matters a lot to me. That means that in a lot of cases I’ll do things, of course, that maybe I don’t really feel like doing at that time.

Or, if I were just more into programming, Pleasure than actual satisfaction and fulfillment, then yeah, I would probably live very differently. I wouldn’t work as much as I do. I wouldn’t, there’ll be a lot of things that I wouldn’t do. I would [00:30:00] do a lot of things that I’m not doing right now. And I would, live in a way that would be a bit more what people would honestly expect because you, there’s a certain level, you reach a certain level of success financially and people expect you to just turn into a prick and and just, yeah. And just fucking throw your money around and try to show off how cool you are and try to make other people envious. And I find that like abhorrent though, I would legitimately hate myself if I became that person. Again, I don’t know if that’s helpful, but it’s makes a lot of, makes a lot of sense.

And my background started out in the fitness industry as well. My mom managed a gym, a health club for 20 years. And I grew up in that environment. I was like covering on reception when people came to the door from like the age of 10 and my mom, similar to what you said about treating people the way you want to be treated.

My mom’s motto for me growing up was, she said, miles, if you treat people that little bit better than they expect, you can’t go wrong. And I always remember that. on the gym floor. And then that ironically led me to niching out and now [00:31:00] working with some of the gym chains and brands around the U.

1. on retention of members and customer experience for those members. And that arguably wouldn’t happen if it hadn’t been for the upbringing in the gym and also just some great experiences, some valuable experiences of meeting people, like showing them around the gym and hearing some of the personal stories.

I’ll never forget a quick story. A woman who came into a gym really closed off, really defensive, apparently I just want to have a quick look round. I’ve only got 10 minutes. I’ve got to get back to work. She was on the surface, really quite rude. And after just asking her some questions to show that I gave a shit, she actually opened up and started to get quite emotional and then actually did started crying.

And she said, do you know what I’ve had Three or four tours in the past week in gyms, and I haven’t joined any of them. And in truth, the real reason why I’m here miles is because my husband and I haven’t had sex in about four months. And I realized that if I don’t do something to improve my physical appearance, [00:32:00] I think my marriage is going to be frankly over.

And that since then was like, wow, that’s that was a cat. So if somebody ever asked me, why do you do what you do in that industry? I’m like, it’s things like that, it’s things that really just treating people, had I not treated her that little bit better than they’d expect, like her marriage could be over.

And there’s a positive end to the story. Cause I still know that Jim on a personal level and her husband are both still members of that gym and they’ve been members together now for about 10 years. Who knows what might have happened had she not had that experience. Yeah, that’s awesome.

And I, I get I get a, I’ve gotten quite a few over the years now quite a few of those types of stories. And those are always my favorite. Yeah, it’s cool for people to go from out of shape to in shape, but it’s coolest when there’s real context there. Yeah. And to hear just how it affects other areas of people’s lives, because, I think getting into great shape or just getting into good shape and, just getting into the routine of it all is probably one of the easiest things you can do to improve every area of your life.

[00:33:00] Everything gets better. If you are exercising regularly. If you have a good diet and if you’re not overweight and there’s a point obviously where there’s there are diminishing returns in that regard, but if you just look at how the average person lives in terms of like sedentary living and overweight and terrible diet.

And then if you change all that to active, there’s also something to be said for the vanity of it too. There is, that matters to all of us how we look. So there are the psychological and the emotional benefits that come with that just go beyond the physical, but yeah, it’s cool. Yeah, love that.

Here’s a question. I was just having a look back through your website for the purpose of doing the bio the other day, and I found it really cool because I was wanting to ask you the question. What’s the vision for you personally? And also because I know you’ve got a little one now. What’s your vision for you personally in the business?

Over the next 5, 10, maybe 20 years, and I know you talked about it and called it your big evil master plan, which [00:34:00] I need to update that. That’s also going to be updated when we do this update, because I’m probably like, I can’t say, I’ve obviously reached a lot more than a million people now, but I can’t say that I’ve actually.

My work has helped a million individuals. It’s definitely in the hundreds of thousands now, so I’m getting closer to that. But, yeah, that’s going to be updated with the new site. Because I have now Lennox, who, he’s a little guy in the on that page. Now he’s four. It’s been a couple years. Wow. I have a girl, I have a daughter on the way.

She’s going to be here in August. Amazing. Congratulations. Thanks. Yes I’ll be updating that. But yeah, so to your question. So the big picture if I have to break it down by property I guess for Muscle for Life is I want to make it really the go to place for not just evidence based You Material, but evidence based material that you can really understand that’s been something that I’ve really, I think I’ve improved on actually quite a bit since the beginning and, but was still my really what I was striving to do in the beginning is not show off my [00:35:00] intellect or my vocabulary or my writing skills per se, but really just explain things clearly.

And in a way that anyone can understand them and give people practical advice that they can apply, for example, someone whose work I like in this space is Greg Knuckles, and he has his following is growing and he’s doing a great job, but his material is very hard to understand if you don’t already have a very good understanding of a lot of different things, including biomechanics and he does a tremendous job serving the crowd that he serves, but the general fitness person He would never be able to read, try to read his how to deadlift article, for example, or any of his stuff really.

And the problem is not that he doesn’t do a good job explaining things, but it’s written at a fewer to put it in like a Kinkade, reading one of those reading assessment. It’s probably a high school, college level. That’s what it would score. And he uses a lot of jargon. There’s gonna be a lot of words that people don’t understand.

And that, if you don’t understand, The words, [00:36:00] how you’re going to understand the sentences and the paragraphs and so forth, as much as I admire what he does and how much of an expert he is, I am not trying to necessarily be him. I’m trying to more just serve the people that are especially.

I really like helping people that. They don’t necessarily have to be new to the health and fitness space, but they have never really gotten good results because they never really learned the basics. And so that, that’s the crowd that I’m looking to serve with. Also then I would say that’s probably like my 80%.

That’s the crowd I’d like to serve. And then more intermediate and advanced people with, certain articles that I write are just more geared toward those people. And so I don’t want to completely neglect. People that want necessarily the life cycle to be like, once you know something, you could just move on.

But, I’m definitely weighted toward bringing in more and more people that can really benefit from a discussion of, like I was saying earlier about energy balance, for example. And how does calories in calories out really work? What does it really mean? Just because those, [00:37:00] I think.

people are, they have the greatest potential benefit because if you have someone who’s a more intermediate or advanced person, they’ve already say of a guy, he’s already gained, 35 pounds of muscle. He’s already gotten down to 10 percent body fat. He’s strong. He knows what he’s doing. It’s cool to take a guy like that and show him how to go to the next level, but I guess maybe it’s more emotionally satisfying.

To help people go from, really not knowing anything and being upside down and hearing and just being lost in all the conflicting information to finally going, Oh, wow, this is actually how it works. And you get to that point where then you realize that you’re in control of your body composition now.

You realize that you’re never going to struggle to lose weight again. You’re never going to struggle to gain muscle again. You are going to get the body that you want if you just keep on putting in the work and you can maintain it for the rest of your life. That’s just like in the beginning that was my target.

Those are the people I wanted to go after and I still feel that way. So I want muscle for life to really be a, a go to kind of resource for the, [00:38:00] for them. And I have a lot of. Plans in terms of expansion, ramping up the content more by working with some other writers, again, going to be adding a store and you see better monetized.

Really? Again, it hasn’t been the focus, but we’re going to be focusing on that. I’m going to be putting together digital courses, which I could just write more books and I will continue writing books, but also want to have some digital courses because I think having some multimedia stuff would be cool.

And I have a coaching service. That’s I promote it, but I don’t push it that hard because it’s very high touch kind of personal one on one service that we are. We’re like maxed out right now. So we’re very picky with the coaches that we work with. So now we’re bringing on another coach. She’s getting trained up and then I’ll be able to take on.

It’s just growing stepwise as opposed to like the lazy way to do it would just be. Give people copy and paste bullshit plans and not really care or whatever. This is very much the opposite of that. So it’s more work, but it’s a really good service. Like we have some awesome success stories, the kind of stuff like you, like what you’re talking about earlier, which [00:39:00] is really cool.

So expand that out to, we have about a hundred clients active right now, so that really can scale. I think by the end of this year, we could have it at. A few hundred active and it just scales beyond that. I want to certify coaches because I get a lot of people asking if I could recommend a PT or a coach like wherever they live.

Unfortunately, I don’t have that. I don’t have even a Rolodex like that. What I would like to do is start certifying coaches so they can, they would go through a whole training thing and then I would funnel, I would send them people because I get people asking again, like it’s every day, every other day, someone’s asking about it.

I don’t even, of course I don’t promote it. I don’t even talk about it. I don’t have anything to offer. And I think there’s an opportunity. to take the coaching service offline and to do a boutique gym kind of concept where it’s a personal coaching only. Like one of the things that with the coaching service is we pitch it as a 90 day service and that we want you to fire us after 90 days.

This isn’t something that you’re supposed to just come on, pay us [00:40:00] for the, for the rest of your life. We’re not only going to tell you what to do, but we’re also going to educate you so you can just do it yourself after we don’t. Want to create people that are dependent on us to continue in their journeys, basically.

And we actually ended up offering a continuity service because people were like demanding it. But, in the beginning it was, there was none. It was just like, no, 90 days, that’s it. Like you’re going to pay this amount, this is what we’re going to do. And then by the end you’re going to be good to go.

But then, we’ve worked with a lot of people by now it’s been a year. And we’ve put a lot of people through it. There are quite a few of them that a few hundred dollars a month, they don’t care about the money. They just like the accountability. They like their coach. It’s just working, so they want to stick with it.

But I think it could be taken offline. And there’s a gym concept there where it’s not a gym where you go to work out. If you’re not working, like the people there, they come to get trained. And that, we take care of everything in the way that we do with, meal plans, and we have a whole system in place so that it could be exported offline.

I’ll probably start doing [00:41:00] live events myself next year, probably. And so I would say that probably falls under the umbrella of Muscle for Life. Right now, again, like I said earlier, it’s a glorified blog. I want to turn it into, there could be a digital magazine and so forth. Almost Publication of sorts, so I guess it’s a bit more like a real brand, a real health and fitness brand.

You could say that is known for specifically education and services like working with people. So that’s muscle for life legion over the next 5 to 10 years. I think revenue wise. I think it is very realistic that. It could be like our Jeremy and everyone in the group, like our big goal is a hundred million dollars a year in revenue which is a big number, but it’s big in the sports nutrition space in the supplement space.

Honestly, it’s not probably, it’s a decent sized supplement company, but in the sports nutrition space, that’d be one of the bigger ones, but I think we can do it. And given the trajectory so far I think it’s very realistic. And there’s a [00:42:00] lot of course that, a lot of work to do and we’re gonna need to catch lucky breaks and blah, blah, blah.

That’s with anything really, aside from revenue, I would like it to be like the premier natural science based supplement line. Basically and, a lot of people, a few years ago when we started Legion, not very many people were talking about clinically effective doses and were taking that contrarian stance of like supplements are on the whole shit.

They’re not necessary by any means. You don’t, supplements don’t make great physiques, proper diet and training does and the right supplements can help you in certain ways. But if you don’t, Want to take supplements or you don’t have a budget for it. Don’t worry about it. You’ll be fine. And that was unusual.

That was unique in the beginning. And now you have a lot more companies that are saying the same thing where they can’t compete though is I think I have a few kind of competitive advantages. One is that I spend a lot more on their products on my products than they do, depending on the company.

They just can’t do that. If they’re in retail, they can’t make my products. They can make shittier [00:43:00] versions of them. But they can’t make them. And then also, like I was saying earlier, I have this ecosystem that’s growing and I also have a personal, it’s, I’m the face of the company. And that also is something that’s unique in that.

I think that I resonate better with my potential customers or my crowd more so than the face of other brands that I won’t name or the faces of other brands. In some cases, the namesakes, the. And in other cases, the top tier kind of athlete dudes that, cause even in some cases like, I’ll say take Steve cook for on, it seems like a cool dude.

I’ve never met him. Great physique. Very good looking guy has is the whole package in that regard. But I wonder how much beyond that. I don’t know for me. I think I just have a different, I retract a different type of person, maybe, because beyond how it looks and just his personality seems like an effusive, friendly dude.

There’s not much else there from what I can see. And I’m [00:44:00] not saying that to criticize Steve. I’m just trying to view it objectively as a marketer. Obviously, On is massive. They probably close to a billion dollars a year in revenue at this point. That’s neither here nor there. But so that’s the goal with Legion.

It breaks down into, there’s a lot of specific things that we want to do in terms of new products. We also are very much about customer experience and not just trying to sell people stuff, but actually. I’m going to be talking about protein powders and how they can help people get into shape. And that’s ultimately the goal.

When they come to us, they’re not buying a protein powder because in most cases, they’re not buying a protein powder for random because they heard of protein powders is because they like the taste of protein powder or something. You know what I mean? They’re buying stuff from us because it’s part of an overall journey.

And they’re buying stuff from us. Going through, I would say probably 100 percent of our active customers that order from us every month are exercising in one capacity or another and are doing it, because they want to look better. They want to feel better and so forth. So our thing is very much.

How can we help them do that? And [00:45:00] then also. As a byproduct, sell them supplements. So we’re gonna be doing just more and more in, in that regard. And we already have our very good customer service in that like people can write us with any question that they have and we’ll give them real help. It’s not just gonna be, Oh yeah, here, buy this fat burner.

That’s what you need to do. In fact, in some cases we may recommend I know for a fact actually in many cases that people will ask, Hey, should I take this supplement? And we’ll say Not really. Should I take this fat burner while I’m bulking so I can just minimize fat gain?

There’s plenty of companies would be like yeah, definitely. You should take all of them. You should take everything. We’ll tell them, no, actually it’s probably, it’s a waste of money. Like it doesn’t count. You should buy our supreme bottled air as well. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you should huff that shit every time you work out, every time before you squat.

Trust me. Hold that, future. That’s it. Yeah. That could work. Actually. We could just say it’s like high oxygen. It would work. Someone would buy it. So we go about things differently. I also would like Legion to have a reputation [00:46:00] as really as a company. Yeah. People that really care and a place you can go and actually really get help and have a community of good people.

People that again are supportive and are real and are willing to answer questions and help. And we have that growing. We launched a Facebook group recently. And it’s yeah, the group of the group is fantastical. Yeah, really good. Yeah, exactly. So I want to see a lot more of that kind of stuff in addition to revenue, of course.

So that’s Legion on the book side of things. My initial goal was to sell my initial big. What I felt was a stretch goal was to sell a million books, and I’m. I have to get my final numbers for last year, but I’m pretty much there. If I’m not there yet, I’ll be there by probably the end of next quarter.

That’s done. So I guess the next stretch will be like 5 million books and to get there just recently started working on a new book, which is going to be Yeah. There are a handful of health and fitness books that if I could just clone myself that I would also write concurrently, because I think that they could serve a need and there’s a gap there [00:47:00] and I could do a good job on them, so I probably will end up doing them actually, or at least turn them into digital courses, so I have that content out there for people that want help, but.

The next book is going to be a lifestyle kind of play. Like I would like to branch out into the self development, self help, self transformation space. And I honestly, I don’t like a lot of the material in the space, I almost feel like it’s a, it’s deja vu from when I got into the health and fitness space where I was like, this space sucks.

A lot of this content sucks. A lot of these people suck. And I don’t mean suck in Oh, I’m just so better than them. But no They’re dishonest. They’re unethical. I don’t like what they’re doing. They just take advantage of people. Yeah, so I feel similarly about the self help, self development, self transformation space.

I honestly, I don’t think it’s as bad. I think it’s worse in the health and fitness space, but I want to write a book that is going to be. I guess a kind of a manifesto of sorts for my tribe because I’ve built a pretty big following by now and I know just from [00:48:00] emailing. I checked the other day.

My email inbox has 55, 000 emails. I’m not unread, but that’s the total amount of emails that are in my Gmail. And so I’ve spoken with literally tens of thousands of people. Of course, there’s that includes all back and forth and stuff. But and so I know that part of the reason why. People follow me is, yeah, they like my health and fitness information and like we have to say in that regard, but they also, many people like what I have to say about stuff like what we’re talking about in this interview whether it’s more life related or business related or marketing related.

Again, I don’t say that because I think I’m so cool. I’m just looking at it again, objectively as a marketer and saying, okay, what’s working. here. If I were breaking down all the individual factors of why do I think I’m achieving success and what is working and okay, so if we have five different things, I’m really strong and really focusing on three of them.

And in two of them, I think there’s opportunity to improve. So I feel like this is an area where there’s [00:49:00] opportunity to improve. I also just staying in touch with so many people keeps my finger on the pulse, I guess you could say. And I get asked, for example, regularly, because a lot of people that follow me, they know that I’m, I read quite a bit.

So I get asked a lot for book recommendations for, again, self help type stuff, like just being a better, because a lot of people that obviously that are into fitness also are interested in improving their lives in general. Absolutely. It’s a certain type of person. It’s not, there are a lot of people that, they’re not into working out and they never will be there.

It’s because of an underlying type of. personality and they’re also not really that interested in improving their life. They’re just complacent and they have whatever they have and they’re doing whatever they’re doing and they are however they are. They don’t really feel a desire to change and that’s fine.

I just don’t know how to serve those people. So the people though that I know that I can serve are the people that have a desire to change, that want to change. Fitness is one element of that and then vice versa. So you have people that. Just want to improve their lives like they want to [00:50:00] change conditions in their life for the better and they inevitably find their way into fitness because that’s the easiest place to start if anybody’s if anyone when anyone says or feels like hey I wish I would have like I wish I was just like a little bit happier in life or I wish I just had a little bit better of a life or if we start going to the gym and or even just I sometimes would say it could be even simpler than just you know, because happiness is obviously just a state that’s elicited just by you A change in physiology.

I’m like, you could just stand there. I’m like, try being in a shitty mood by just doing 10 jumping jacks on the spot, but yeah, that’s true. Yeah, just looking at the at the neurochemical element of it. So that’s the book that I’m going to be. Working on, I am working on it’s a book that I would like to have the manuscript done by the end of the year.

There’s going to be a bit of work cause I want to really put in the time and make sure I do a good job on this because I would like this book to outsell everything that I’ve produced so far and I would like it to serve as the platform for other intellectual properties. Yeah. [00:51:00] I think it’d just be fun.

It’s something I’m just personally interested in and I think I could offer something unique. I think I can my story. I think I’ve achieved enough, at least outward success that, Legion’s an eight figure business, MFL’s a seven figure business, I’ve sold over a million books, blah, blah, blah.

Like I have things where I think I can stand on that and say, Hey, this is what I’ve done in the last four to five years. And in a sense, here’s my playbook, here are the things that have helped me the most, and here’s what I believe in and again, going back to, and this is going to be something I want to talk about in the book, what I was talking about earlier I very much believe in being The type of person, if you’re starting at just, I want to have more money, let’s just say a simple thing that a lot of people a lot of, desire to just be more financially successful or have less financial stress.

And a lot of people, they go straight to just. Okay. So what are the tricks? What are the shortcuts? How do I, and I believe more in starting, yes, of course there are things [00:52:00] you have to do, but I believe more in starting with getting real about who is, okay what does it mean to really be the type of person that is financially successful?

What does their worldview look like? We can get to what they do, but I would start more with who is that person at their core? Who is their, what is their character really look like? What are their values? What do they think is important? Sure. We’re going to get to what you need to do, but I think a lot of the do again comes from the be, it comes naturally through the course of my life.

I’ve met people that are extremely, if we’re just saying financially successful, I know two people right now who are. One guy’s worth 800 million, another guy’s worth close to 5 billion. And I know people that run very big businesses. And again, I’m not saying that to brag. I’m just saying I just know these people and I have spent a lot of time with people like that.

And in just so many cases, it has struck me that a lot of what they do that is obviously contributing to their success. It’s not something that [00:53:00] they force themselves, not like it wasn’t part of some calculated plan of theirs. It’s just felt natural to them. They’re just like, yeah, of course you do that.

What else would you do? You know what I mean? And that’s because it’s intrinsic to them. It’s an expression of who they really are. If you’re talking about again, just financial success, honestly, there are so many elements to it and so many things. There are certain things that you would have to do that it can be very hard to try to keep them all in and it can try, it becomes training in terms of willpower and it requires a lot of self discipline.

And if you don’t have the other stuff worked out where eventually I just don’t think it ever really works. I think that there is, there’s something a bit more fundamental that has to happen personally before it’s worth even getting into. What to now do, because in the case of anything, really, if we look at it, I think achieving success, whether it’s like in the gym with your body or.

with a business or in any area of [00:54:00] life, a lot of it is like the people that are successful, they do the stuff that people that aren’t successful don’t like to do. Absolutely. And they do it every day. And it’s not that they always even like to do it, but it’s that their purpose is strong enough.

That their desires are subordinate to their purpose. They value satisfaction and fulfillment, which requires delayed gratification. They value that more than, I just want to feel good right now. I’m just rambling about it, because I’ve started to put together an outline for this book. But that’s going to be, that’s going to be the book that I’m working on.

And I want it to serve, again, as A touchstone for this is what we’re all about, similar to for example, the Spartan race thing up. So that guy Joe, he has a book called Spartan up. So he has a book called Spartan fit, which I haven’t read it, but I guess it’s a lot of just getting fit probably for obstacle courses and or maybe it’s just general fitness. I don’t know. And then he has a book called Spartan Up, which I did read because it’s relevant to what I’m doing. And that’s very much what I’m talking about. Honestly, I didn’t really like the [00:55:00] book very much, but it’s the idea is he’s saying, here’s his story.

He has achieved, A lot of success. He has a family. He seems like a good dude. Somebody we can learn something from. It gives a bit of his world view on things and also says, this is what we, obviously his tribe, he calls them Spartans and he’s saying, this is what we’re about.

This is what it means to be a Spartan. And yeah, it sounds cheesy and whatever, but that’s the idea. Mark Sisson has the primal blueprint. The paleo mythology has been more or less debunked in terms of the pseudoscience of it. Yeah. But, it’s a fine way to eat.

I don’t agree with all the saturated fat obsession, but and it’s probably not good. Why? We know now for a fact it’s not good for some people. Some people, genetically, it is going to increase, like if they’re eating, 70 grams of saturated fat a day, it’s going to increase their risk of heart disease.

It is not necessarily healthy at all. But I do that paleo is a high protein diet. I like that it promotes fruits and vegetables and nuts and so forth. So there, there are, it’s better, it’s much better than the [00:56:00] average, just standard American diet type of approach. But that book is, that’s what that is for system.

It’s here’s the book that says, this is what I’m about. If you’re about this, come on over, you’re going to like being here kind of thing. I think that bigger, leaner, stronger and thinner, leaner, stronger are like that in their own little space. Niches of, but they’re more mechanical.

This is how you get into shape. Yeah. So I wanna, do, I wanna do something that’s more comprehensive. I want that book alone. I would love my, my big goal on that would be if that book could sell a million copies in the first, let’s say two years, first year, maybe. I don’t know. I have to see.

But, I wanted to. Achieve a lot of success outside of my following, all the people, I’m sure I can sell a lot of copies to the people just tapping into the people that are in my orbit. But I really want this to create a beachhead into a new space that I can expand into.

So that’s the books. And this is stacked. I want, I’m going to, I want to make it like the premier. weightlifting app, basically, or resistance training [00:57:00] app, I would say, it’s not ever going to be like just the gen fit. Hey, if you want to just do some jumping jacks, here’s a, here’s a jumping jack routine with some videos.

I want it to be for people that are a bit more I’m going to make it more newbie friendly going forward. It’s not newbie friendly at all right now, but that was intentional. But I want to make it for people that Or they’re into training more so than exercise, meaning that like exercises, you just move your body around and burn calories and find it’s great.

It’s exercise. Your body needs exercise. But training is a bit different. Training is more structured. It’s goal oriented. It’s a different type of crowd. That app is I’ve soft launched it because I wanted to see how this first build would stand up to 10, 15, 000 users before I just go apeshit.

And, I still think by the end of the year I can get it to 500, 000 downloads. So that’s what I did. So I emailed basically one time to one 10th of my lists. It’s gotten about 14, 000 downloads in the last few weeks. There were big bugs that need to be fixed, so I’m glad I did it this way. We’re getting through that probably in three weeks.

All the [00:58:00] bigger problems are going to be. Ironed out and then we’re going to get to a few weeks of improvements that I need to make before I officially launch it. And then I’m going to officially launch it. But one of the nice things about this app is its best competitors are in my estimation good.

They’re not great. They’re good. And it’s taken them a few years of development to get to good. And I don’t know why that is, but. I just know that it’s an opportunity for me to just jump in and say, okay, I’m going to get to great in six months. So whatever. And then we’ll see who wants to keep up.

And I have advantages for the more from the marketing side of things because I can, again, I’m going to make it like everyone that comes into contact with anything of mine is going to learn about this app. I also, I think I have a financial advantage in that I don’t care if I make money from it or not.

In the immediate, like in the long term, sure, at some point I’ll make money, but I’ll end up spending a million dollars on development before, I don’t even care, like I’m not, I’ve spent 250, 000 just to launch it, and I probably have another 500, 000 in [00:59:00] development already lined up guys. Go fast, do all this stuff and going forward.

I’m just going to always be rolling its money back into it, which I don’t know if anybody else directly in its proximity is going to be able to do that. So we’ll see. Yeah. That’s better. I guess that’s that’s those are the bigger plans. Some really great stuff there. And I think really well into the next question, which is, what’s been your biggest lesson on building your own brand?

And for those that are listening, there’s probably a lot of coaches, trainers, consultants that are probably right now hovering probably around the six figure mark or then there’s even some startups in there as well. They’re just getting started out in the coaching space. What would be a biggest lesson that you’ve had on building your brand and something that could be used really as advice for them?

So I’d say probably top of the list is really doing whatever is needed to serve and really be helpful. I still answer emails. Obviously, I have some help now, but there are still, because a lot of questions that I get asked are actually just Hey, that’s [01:00:00] a good question. Go check out this article.

So I have that. One of my coaches helps and he jumps in and answers some questions for me, but I still answer emails from people every day. We have a little system in place where if he’s not sure, then I have somebody else that if that person’s not sure, then it’ll come to me kind of thing. And then there are also just communications that are directly to me, like people I’ve been in touch with and they’re like, Hey Mike, and then so it just gets, forwarded to me, up until that has been only in place probably for a year or so for the first couple of years.

I got to where I was spending four to five hours a day just answering emails and social media messages, everything. I would answer everything, every single, anything, any type of communication that anyone sent me on any channel. If it didn’t get answered, it’s because somehow I didn’t see it, but I would go every day and answer everything.

And that’s something that. I think played a huge role in how quickly everything has grown because nobody’s willing to do that. And that is something that wows people like they didn’t when [01:01:00] somebody emails you and they don’t even expect a response because it’s even more. So now, because I’ve achieved a bit more altitude, you could say, but even.

In the beginning, when I just said publish the book, I had no name, I had no one knew who I was. They still were surprised that just an author, because I guess probably because I had a book that comes with a little bit of cachet, that, yeah, that the author would actually respond with a real response and actually answer questions and tell you, Hey let me know if you need anything else, just email me and not ask.

I didn’t ask them to buy anything. All I would ask is if they liked the book, if they could just leave a review on it. That’s it. And of course, they don’t have to do that. I would just ask as a, like a PS basically. So that’s hugely important. It doesn’t scale, which in many ways, there’s a really good article.

I think it was by Paul Graham from Y Combinator. And if you just Google Paul Graham, things that don’t scale really good article. And I really believe in that, that there is a lot of. Value in things that this isn’t, of course, everything, but [01:02:00] things that don’t scale can be hugely valuable for various reasons.

And in this case, it was because it created a real personal connection with people. And it’s again, something that no one else is really. I say no one, but very few people in any sort of position of anything would be willing to do. And I still do that. Today, and that will never change like I, yeah, I may need at one point, I may need five people to help, sort through everything, but people will always be able to reach me if I’m needed.

You know what I mean? For example, if someone emails and says, Hey, Mike, how do I lose stubborn fat? I may not actually, I may, that may be me replying to it. Or it may be like Roger right now. He doesn’t reply as me, he replies as Roger, but Roger might jump in and grab that and be like, Hey, I work with Mike.

That’s a good question. Check out this article. I just have an article. That’s the answer. It’s Hey, just read this article. Check it out. But if it’s something more specific or something directly to me, then I’m going to get it. So that’s something that will always stay, stay in. As a funny little anecdote, Charles Darwin personally answered letters.

That was what he did every [01:03:00] night for, I think, most of his life, like after he was Charles Dawridge, after the origin of the species, he still did it and he just maintained personal connection with people. And I think there’s a lot of power in that because I think that, again, people expect you to just forget about them basically.

Like they expect you to use them, exploit them, take their money and just move on. And when you don’t do that’s how you win customers for life. And it’s not just about. Customers, but you wouldn’t friends or whatever. A lot of people have just become friends. I’ve never met them, but I would still say they’re friends because I’ve spoken so much with them.

And so that’s very powerful. And it’s also divorced from the finances of it. It’s I don’t know. It’s nice. It’s nice to go and. I can say that I get to email with all these different people that again, I would consider friends or at least acquaintances. I don’t know. That’s my version of social network.

I don’t use social networking for anything other than just business. I don’t care about it personally. My personal friends in my personal life. I’m You know, I would talk to on the phone or something like that. I just don’t, I don’t really care about to use Facebook or Twitter or [01:04:00] anything, that’s my version of social networking.

So that was hugely important again, being willing to do a lot of the work that you don’t, maybe you don’t feel like doing something. I’ll talk about in this new book, but it’s not just about doing it and force yourself to do it, but it’s actually changing your paradigm. So you feel differently about it, and part of that is probably just learning to have contempt for your feelings at certain times, I think is very valuable.

I’m very much not a person. I don’t care very much how I feel about things at all, honestly. And that’s not because I have no emotions. It’s just I don’t trust feelings. There’s who knows. What lurks in my head in my subconscious mind that can, that can dictate my feelings and also feelings are just too malleable.

They’re too influenced by culture, by environment, by who the fuck knows what. So I don’t trust them. I trust. More my analytical [01:05:00] forward looking type of mind where I can say, what would my life ideally look like in 5 years in 10 years and really paint that picture and go, yeah, that’d be awesome.

That’d be very fulfilling. That’d be very satisfying. I’d be very happy with myself. If that, if I could put that in place and have that kind of life, not just with business or money, but, with my family and with here’s the type of circle of friends I’d like to have. Then. blah, blah, blah. Yeah.

And then working it back to, okay, what’s it really going to take to get there? What are the specific goals, the measurable goals? What’s the timeline and so forth. And so I kind of gravitate toward that and naturally away from feelings and immediate gratification, which are on the other side, just for me personally, again, that’s been something that Think has been very helpful because it has helped me do the amount of work that my average work week is probably 70 hours.

It’s 60 to 70, and sometimes it’s a little bit less. Sometimes it’s a little bit more, but it’s been like that since the beginning and in some cases it’s been higher and, but I never [01:06:00] feel burned out. Like I’m just not one of the, I just don’t have that I don’t even necessarily feel the need for quote unquote downtime.

I don’t need to like, oh, I was, I worked hard today, so now I can just, now I’ve earned four hours of Netflix, like I don’t even want. To do that shit. I don’t enjoy it. I don’t think that’s because I’m necessarily like my brain is just wired differently. I think it’s been more conditioning than just some sort of innate thing.

Because when I was younger, that wasn’t necessarily the case. When I was younger, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. And I knew that I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And my wife’s from Germany. So at the time we were dating, I would go and visit her, she would come and visit me, we would usually flip flop, but like every, probably let’s say, four to eight weeks, I would be over in Europe, and I would stay there for a few weeks, and I would just travel, we would travel and stay in nice hotels and just have fun, and it didn’t bother me at all, I didn’t feel like, oh, I’m not being productive, I should be doing things.[01:07:00] 

At the time, I was like, this is what I’m doing, I was very much I didn’t have all this other stuff worked out and I, at the time I was like, whatever, I’m 20, I’m sure I’ll work it out at for now for the next year or so, or whatever it was, I’m just going to enjoy myself because I’ll probably look back on this and be happy that I did it.

So I know what it’s like to be on both sides of that coin, and I probably could go back to being that person if I felt I had a reason to, it’s just. That’s just not where I’m at right now and I think probably my next version of that will probably be something with my kids as they get older, where I do want to make sure I’m involved in their life and not just be the dad that made a bunch of money, but was never around and we never saw him and.

I think that fatherhood is important, even from what I was saying earlier with millennials and parenting and stuff, I’ve seen people that only had a mom that didn’t really have a dad. And I don’t think that I just don’t think that’s healthy. I don’t think that there’s biologically a reason why it takes a man and a woman to produce a child.

And I think there’s [01:08:00] value in the nuclear family. And I think both parents, yeah. Bring different things to parenting and so forth. So that’ll probably be my version of that in the future will be working less hours, but I’ll be working in another sense. Like I have another purpose. It’s not just going to be, I’m going to work less so I can go drive my Lamborghini around.

So that’s been a big part of it. And then one last thing I’ll say is self education is a huge on that and I 100 percent believe really honestly 100 percent that people that aren’t continually educating themselves are not going to live very good lives. I’ll just say it that way, but, and that’s you can say that’s by my standards or whatever, but I’m going to say that they’re probably not going to there’s a quote from a guy named Joseph Campbell, who was a big fan of his work.

He was a comparative mythologist and he’s most well known for a book called the hero with a thousand faces, the hero’s journey, the Monomyth. That’s what Star Wars was based on the original Star Wars movie, like episode four. [01:09:00] And so there’s a quote from Joseph Campbell, where he says, basically that he doesn’t think that people are so much like looking for the meaning of life, but they’re looking for the feeling of truly being alive.

They’re looking for what can they experience in the physical realm that results in true emotional and spiritual satisfaction in a sense, and where they can get caught up in the rapture of being alive and the joy of being alive. That really resonates. With me, and I think that self education is a huge part in achieving that.

And there’s no, that’s something I look at, even in my own life where I feel like I’ve done a decent job now of putting something in place where I can say that I really, I do on one level. Feel alive. I like that feeling of having energy and being in action and enthusiasm and so forth, but honestly, there are people I would know.

I know some of these people that would step into my shoes for a week and they’d be like, this is fucking terrible. You’re like not, maybe this is the most low [01:10:00] energy, Boring shit life I’ve ever seen and they couldn’t wait, because there are some people that it’s not just about being more frenetic and sleeping two hours a night, but it’s about the quality of their life and the amount of responsibility that they’ve, that they shoulder.

Which I think also is hugely tied into just personal growth. I think going in what we were talking about earlier, if you’re just living for yourself and you have no responsibility, even for yourself, let’s say you don’t even have responsibility for taking care of your body, you haven’t even gotten that far.

That’s a pretty sad state. But then you have people like. Elon Musk who look at the amount of responsibility that dude shoulders and he loves it. You know what I mean? So I would hope to improve in that regard for the rest of my life. I would hope that five years from now, if I look at myself personally, that there are certain probably principles and values that at the core, I would hope wouldn’t change, but my understanding of them and maybe my manifestation of them or my embodiment of them, I would hope is going to improve and change over [01:11:00] time.

And also then I just. I hope that my, if I have more or less the same ideas about everything that I have now, five years from now, I failed myself as an individual, I think, and a huge part of that is self education, more the philosophical angle of it. But then there’s also the practical angle.

If we’re talking about building a business, the least common nominator that I’ve found in just, again, knowing and meeting a lot of very successful people is they’re always into educating themselves. They love learning new things. They have a bias toward action, not just like reading ideas, but doing things with ideas.

I, if I were to run down a list of the most successful business people that I know, one for one, they’re avid readers. They’ve been like that their entire life. They’ve built up. Such a huge repository of information over the course of decades now that they have all their personal experience, plus all the accumulated vicarious experience almost that they’ve gleaned from books and from whatever, and there’s so many different ways you can educate [01:12:00] yourself now.

It’s a joke with your phone. You can tap into all the knowledge in the world, basically. Just something I observed to where I was like, okay, I’m going to say that’s like a law basically. So if you want to become very successful in your business, you have to be continue educating yourself. So for me, I like to read.

So I’m just biased toward that. But of course there are podcasts or videos, there are digital courses you can do, blah, blah, blah. And I think that there are, it helps in a few different ways. One, It helps you model yourself. It shows I really like biographies. Personally, you get to get down into the muscle bone and connective tissue of who these people really were and how did they live and what did they really think about things?

How did they view things? And you’re not getting someone else’s distillation of a life and someone else’s feelings. Filter on what they thought is important. You can just get here’s all the raw information and you come to your own conclusions. It also, for me, it helps me hold myself to a high standard where I look [01:13:00] at talking about Elon Musk.

I recommend everybody read the Elon Musk biography by Ashley Vance. Short, simple, quick read. It’s not your normal thousand page type of biography. It’s more of a pop culture type of book. I like that. I just find it inspiring and I like some of. Musk’s ideas like there’s a little anecdote in there early in his career when he was meeting with investors and he was pitching them on trying to raise money for one of his ventures, one of his first things.

And he was saying basically that like he told them when a part of his pitch, I think it even came down, like they were asking why should they invest in him? You know what I mean? And he would basically said, because he looks at business like a samurai in that he would rather die than fail. And so that was enough.

They’re like, yep, now the You see that dude you read that book and you read what that motherfucker went through. That’s those aren’t just words like that’s who he is there’s a point in his life that they go over in the book where it looks like everything is fucked It looks like he’s gonna have burned through all of his money.

He made with PayPal It looks like Tesla’s gonna go under they haven’t even gotten to launch yet [01:14:00] and they’re way over budget way over schedule SpaceX is down to its last Launch has no more money after this launch. If it doesn’t work, that’s dead. He barely made payroll. Tough times, but people just for example, people that were interviewed, that worked with him at that time said that they actually didn’t know when he went home to even shower.

Because he slept on a beanbag in his office for four hours a night and he would work. That’s all they ever saw him do was working and sleeping on the beanbag. So it was like a joke at the office dude, I think he legitly hasn’t showered in like a month. Like he doesn’t even leave but it was definitely musk by surname and musk.

I didn’t even think of that. Oh, the pun musky musk. Yeah. So hit again. Not just words. And so you’ll pick up things like that. And you’ll, I just think that the stories that we tell ourselves and the mental models that we have created are super important and they influence us [01:15:00] in so many ways subconsciously.

And we’ll turn to them throughout every day in one way or another. We’re going to turn to these stories that we tell ourselves about. Ourselves about the world around us about other people, somebody said, I forget who it was, but we’re not rational beings were rationalizing beings. I very much agree with that.

If we can find excuses to get out of doing the things that we need to do. We’re going to take them. And that’s very much like a resistance, war of arts to impress field type of thing. But I believe in that. So it’s just self education has helped me tremendously. And it’s been something throughout my entire life.

Again, I’ve always enjoyed reading. I was a good student growing up. And, I also would say that I think in business, continually educating yourself. Improves your business instincts. I think that even, of course, you’re not going to remember all of the key takeaways that you had highlighted in a book you read five years ago.

But subconsciously, I do believe that we absorb a lot more than, it’s not just can we remember word for word or even the basic [01:16:00] concept of something that we read. But in the future, when you’re faced with a decision, which I think a big part of being a good CEO is the quality and the speed of your decisions.

How quickly can you make decisions? And how good are those decisions? So when you’re faced with decisions every single day, things feel right or they feel wrong. Again, feelings. Where are those feelings coming from? If they’re not coming from a place of education and a place of insight and knowledge, where are they coming from?

Who the fuck knows? It could be like some shit you saw on Kardashians three years ago. Honestly, not joking. And you don’t remember, you don’t remember, but you’re just like, I don’t know. It just feels right to tell this person to go fuck themselves. Fuck off and he’ll kill himself. Yeah, I’m going to do that.

I look at myself as there are so many things I don’t know, and I have myself plenty of bad ideas and bad stories and models that I want to root out. And I think it’s I’m going to die that way, but I’m going to I’m going to continue working on it. But if you don’t work on it, I really, honestly, and again, it sounds [01:17:00] bad, but I think If you take a person that doesn’t educate themselves and spends most of their time on social media and just like watching reality TV and nonsense, most of their ideas in about life are bad, basically and it’s unfortunate because those are the ideas and those are the models and stories they turn to guide them in life and most are just fundamentally flawed and are going to lead to unhappiness and pain and suffering and so forth.

So yeah, I’d say those are probably the three biggest things. And again, this is all stuff that I’m going to be talking about in this new book. So if anybody, if this resonates with any at all for people listening, I’m going to be working on it this year. I want to have manuscript done and it’ll probably get published.

End of next year, most publishers, they want a year, at least from the time they receive the manuscript. I’m also going to be writing some articles and stuff on this to put up trial balloons and see how people respond to the concepts. I don’t want the entire book to just, be posted on my blog, but I definitely want to see how people [01:18:00] respond to some of this stuff.

Cool. I’ll happily. Promote that once that’s ready to go. Just let me know, because I think that there’ll be a huge benefit, no doubt to the people that are listening to the interview for them with that. So cool. So and that leads me actually to really last question, which is first. I just want to thank you for taking the time to come on and for being so real, honest, vulnerable, transparent.

I think you’ve really broken down some of the myths. on what it takes to just be a great human being, let alone build a great brand. And I think the two intrinsically go together. I love what you’ve said about doing the inner work and doing the basics really well. Probably a lot of people that are listening in maybe think that they’ve got a, I ran a workshop yesterday, very brief story on podcasting, like how to start a podcast because I podcast a year ago.

And a big believer in you once you’ve learned something, then go and teach it and share that with others. It’s really interesting. The people coming into the group, many of them when we wrote, I said tell me what [01:19:00] your outcome is that you want to leave at the end of the day because I’ve got a training manual of stuff.

But that’s not the most important thing. What’s most important to me is that you leave with the outcome that you’ve come with. It is amazing how many people came with all these technical things that they, about the editing and everything. When in actual fact, the yeah. When we chunk down to it, that it was the purpose, the real reason why they wanted to create it, that they knew deep down.

was what was gonna keep them going. And I think you’ve highlighted some really good examples today on, the it’s great to learn all the technical, complicated stuff. And this is what I’ve learned just from your books is, the repetitions, the mother of skill, doing the basics really well in any area of life, in business, in health, in a relationship.

Doing the basics really well and treating people as better than they would expect or as good at least as they would expect will go so far and above. And just doing the inner work will go so far above any clever shortcut that people think that they can grab out that’s gonna get them [01:20:00] what they want faster.

And then, it may get them what they want to make it and what they want faster. But. That happiness isn’t going to be there because happiness comes from the sense of contributing and making a real difference and really giving a shit, I think that’s the cliche of like money doesn’t buy happiness.

I would say having money is more of an absence of a negative than a positive, my opinion. So it’s nice that I don’t have financial problems. I don’t, I know I can pay my bills and take care of my family and I’m really not into buying stuff. I think the only thing that I’m going to.

Be interested in spending money on, so to speak, is collecting things like just things that I think are cool that have significance to me, especially because I history is the subject. I’ve always like to read about. So there’s just periods of history that I find very interesting. I like to collect things, but that’s where that cliche though comes, where you have someone where they think Oh, how amazing would it be to just to make a million dollars a year and have that Ferrari and in fuck have five Rolexes and how all these people that are going to look at me and I’m going to be so sick.

And then, some people have a strong enough [01:21:00] drive and they sometimes catch lucky breaks or whatever and they get there and then they realize like this is really not as cool as it was in my head or they stay married to it. They turn to golem. It’s like the ring. That’s the metaphor. Honestly, dude.

Like I think. When it comes to attention, being, interesting, trying to get attention from people is, again, this is something I’ll probably talk about in this book, but I think it’s so much more important to be interested in the world, interested in people, than it is to try to get attention.

Absolutely. And that manifests in different ways. It’s look at me, look at my cool tattoos, look at my cool this, cool that, look at my money, look at the, look at my cool words that I say like everybody else. And I listen to look at the cool music I listen to. And yeah, it’s fine. I guess you can get it.

But the further you go down that road, the more you’ll get. I think the worst you get as a human, with fame, the moment when you start desiring fame, that’s when you’re fucked. If you can deal [01:22:00] with fame, if you don’t care and you actually don’t want it, but when you start wanting it, then you’re fucked.

I saw a study, it was either a poll, like a Pew research kind of thing, or it was a study that, that, so they asked X thousand teenagers aged, I don’t know, 13 to 17, what they want to be like when they grow up. And it was, I want to be famous. That’s terrible. Again, terrible parenting. Terrible. That’s the worst possible goal.

Honestly, I think, actually, I think being rich is a better goal than being famous. Yeah. It’s still, being rich is still a shitty goal, but being famous is probably the worst. It’s short of psychopathy, short of, I want to murder 500, 000 people or something. I want to be, I want to become a dictator.

Just interject there. Yeah, I think it’s the money is never in the things are never as satisfying as you think when you’re getting into it. If you don’t find that, if you don’t find really where the fulfillment is, then that’s, I think you can lead you down a dark path. Yeah, I agree.

I would say that the, I’m [01:23:00] forever banging on about the Tony Robbins human needs model. The people that go for significance, especially external significance and don’t go consciously and not aware of the importance of contribution will never will just never be happy. Yeah, I had a great conversation a couple of weeks ago with coach called Rich Litvin and we were talking about significance and, that is a need that we all have. And like, how do we fulfill it? And we were talking about, I said something I do have been doing, some real deep in the work of the past year with my coaches every morning, do the obvious thing to you or I, which is like journaling what I’m grateful for.

But something else I’ve been doing is writing down what I’m proud off your character development and how you take great pride in that. Kind of writing down. What am I proud off? And not just not external achievements, but internal achievements, character developments. Where am I now? I did a video the other day, like people talk about their goals and where they want to be.

And I’ll say, this time last year, are you closer to your goals than last year? And also, Have you taken the time to [01:24:00] look at what you’ve created in the past year, both internally and your character and also in that makes a difference to other people and a lot of people go, Oh, no, I’m so busy working on the next thing.

I haven’t done that. And I’m like, I spoke to a guy the other day who’s in the UK is a very well known kind of fitness model type. We were having conversation. He was saying, I never stopped to think about what I’m proud of that in itself. To me, that’s now like calories in calories out. It’s. It’s so common sense, but not common practice.

I think. Yeah. No, I like that. Actually, I like as I also do use the five minute journal. Yeah, I like the addition of proud because it does give you a bit of insight into like where you’re at. Basically. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Mike, it’s been a real pleasure. I won’t keep you any longer.

Tell me what’s the best way that people can connect with you and stay in touch with you moving forward. Sure. Yeah. Muscle for life is like the epicenter, of all of my stuff. So if you just go to muscle for life. com, right again, it’s getting a whole overhaul a little bit later [01:25:00] this year.

We’re wrapping up some work on legions, doing a refresh of the legion website, and then we’re going to be doing a stem to stern on muscle for life. But that’s where people can find me. And contact me. And, I have hundreds of articles that I’ve written on all kinds of things. So they might like that as well.

And yeah, links to all my social media and so forth. That’s the simplest way to check out my world. Awesome, Mike. Listen, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for sharing your views on some really incredible things today. It’s been a wonderful conversation. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks a lot for having me. Thanks, Mike. Thank you. Take care. Hey, it’s Mike again. Hope you like the podcast. If you did go ahead and subscribe. I put out new episodes every week or two. Where I talk about all kinds of things related to health and fitness and general wellness. Also head over to my website at www.

muscleforlife. com where you’ll find not only past episodes of the podcast, but you’ll also find a bunch of different articles that I’ve written. I release a new one almost every day. Actually, I release [01:26:00] four to six new articles a week. And you can also find my books and everything else that I’m involved in over at muscleforlife.

com. All right. Thanks again. Bye.