Scott Howell (Coaching, Health and Marksmanship) - Episode 915

I'm extremely excited to announce a brand new sponsor for the Behind the Shield podcast that is Transcend. Now for many of you listening, you are probably working the same brutal shifts that I did for 14 years.

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So to learn more, go to transcendcompany.com or listen to episode 808 of the Behind the Shield podcast with founder Ernie Colling. This episode is sponsored by a company I've used for well over a decade and that is 511. I wore their uniforms back in Anaheim, California and I've used their products ever since.

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I ended up buying real ballistic plates rather than the fake weight plates and that has been my ride or die through Murph the last few years as well. One area I want to talk about that I haven't in previous sponsorship spots is their brick and mortar element. They were predominantly an online company up till more recently but now they are approaching 100 stores all over the US.

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And if you want to hear more about 511, who they stand for and who works with them, listen to episode 580 of Behind the Shield podcast with 511 regional director Will Ayers. Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast as always my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show strength and conditioning coach, podcaster and the man behind red dot fitness Scott Howell.

Now in this conversation we discuss a host of topics from his early life, his journey into the world of coaching, his transition into running his own business, the impact of the pandemic on our gym owners, training the tactical athlete, weapons training and so much more. Now before we get to this incredible conversation as I say every week please just take a moment, go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating.

Every single 5 star rating truly does elevate this podcast therefore making it easier for others to find and this is a free library of over 900 episodes now. So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them. So with that being said I introduce to you Scott Howell.

Enjoy. Well Scott I want to start by saying thank you to Joel Evan for connecting us and I want to welcome you to the Behind the Shield podcast today. Thanks for having me, honored to be here and yeah I'm thankful for Joel as well as a good friend and good dude out there doing good stuff. How did you guys meet?

Actually so Joel is from the area that I'm in, I'm in the Bay Area of California and he was a police officer who left the Bay Area and he's doing some things on the health and wellness side of trying to take care of people in general which is what I do and I think our paths basically crossed in the world of health, fitness, wellness and I had him on the show and got his whole background which is very interesting and that's how that started and that was a couple of years ago now.

Yeah it's crazy I just had a LA firefighter on who lost his job in November to the vaccine mandates even now we have all the evidence showing and again I'm not anti-vax I had the vaccine myself so I could travel and see my grandmother but to then stand behind your decision to terminate first responders knowing how ineffective it actually was disgusts me so I hope down the road anyone that lost their position gets compensated for it to say the least.

Yeah it's interesting specifically that was in San Francisco, San Francisco PD, Joel's been pretty open about that.

It looks like some of that stuff is starting to come full circle now and they're starting to hire some people back so interesting how that works on a side note I literally just got a message today from a from a sort of professional colleague who has gone into physical therapy school working on their doctor of physical therapy wants to volunteer some time in terms of her clinical hours at the VA and without a vaccine they won't accept her even still now.

I mean this is a person wants to give their time right and they're still having a tough time doing it it's mind-blowing to me. It is especially now the if I'm not mistaken the most recent things are you know basically if you got COVID but you're feeling okay you can still come to work I think that's what people are talking about but yet you still need a vaccine come on. I don't know what to say to that I really don't. Anyway I digress.

So very first question where are we finding you on planet earth today? I'm in San Jose California so for those of you that may not be familiar with the region California is a big place the Bay Area is in the northern part of the state you got San Francisco on the tip of the peninsula out there right at the edge of the Pacific Ocean Oakland's on the other side of the bay and then we're right at the bottom of it so I'm literally like sitting a mile off the bottom of the South Bay.

Beautiful well I would love to start the very beginning of your journey so tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic what your parents did how many siblings?

Okay so I was originally so I was born in Santa Monica California my mom at the time and did this for over 40 years was a nurse spending most of her time in sort of the I would say like the higher intensity areas of the hospital either it was emergency or med surge intensive care and so and then my father was a an industrial hygienist and safety engineer he actually had a couple of master's degrees but he worked for a huge missiles

and space company which a lot of people know as Lockheed Martin is what it's called now and mom's job allowed us to kind of move around a little bit because she could kind of get work anywhere and dad was kind of chasing his career and worked for some really big companies outside of Lockheed Martin so I spent so we moved around a little bit I've kind of lived I lived in Utah for a while as a kid I lived in Delaware for a short time but on the East

Coast but most of my growing up was right here in in in Northern California right here in San Jose my parents still live in the same house we moved into when I was just about eight years old so and and they're still local I have a brother who's local as well married got a nephew but yeah so kind of came back I lived all over Northern California or sorry California but moved back to California or Northern California not well probably it's

gonna be 15 years ago now 16 years ago now and been been holding it down here to be close to the family. So firstly with your mom four years in nursing is phenomenal and but I'm imagining if she was in the ER setting there were times where she was working shifts when you look back now if you ever had a conversation with her in the past did she ever talk about the impact of the actual profession on her and her own health?

Yeah it's interesting so mom was always and I find this with most most nurses that in general they're helpgivers and they generally do a very good job at taking care of everybody else and not such a great job of taking care of themselves that was not my mom my mom was always the matriarch of obviously our family but the larger family as a whole and she shared with us the things that she experienced not in a like not in a traumatic way but in sort

of here's a lesson kind of way here's the realities of the world we live in anything from you know just taking care of your general health to I don't want you riding a motorcycle you know to you know make sure you wear your seatbelt because here's an example of what happened here's the tragedy you know that gets dealt with that kind of thing in terms of how it impacted her and her maybe bottling it up and not I guess the word gets or the

analogy gets used like that rucksack that just kind of gets filled with rocks or stones you never really deal with it and then one day there's like a career incident and it kind of explodes my mom's rock and you know I think part of probably her her relationship with my dad which is still very strong to today probably her faith kept her very sane and and and straight you know kind of straight-lined about everything she's very very good about

you know kind of handling things in my mind it's interesting you're asking me that my studio here that we're recording this in is is in the gym she's out there right now working on on the floor with with with one of our coaches and that's just my mom she's still taking care of herself at you know it's late in her 70s now so she's was I think different than maybe a lot of people in the profession yeah yeah I mean there's a lot of self-care

that's needed in in these kind of professions and I think it's interesting you talked about you know making sure that you're healthy and don't want to you riding a motorbike because that's the tug-of-war that we have you know in the first responder professions too you see such horrible things at work you almost want to just wrap your kid in bubble wrap you know not letting do anything and you have to kind of fight against that I've got I've

got a 16 year old who I gave him my car when he turned 16 in August you know and and there's a part of me that if he's not back the exact time he said he was gonna oh he must be wrapped around a lamppost somewhere but you have to calm that down and be like look you know you trained him a certain way but you've got a you got to cut the apron strings otherwise you'll end up being detrimental to their upbringing yeah my parents were very good about letting

us kids gonna set up like I mentioned I have a brother explore things and do our do our own thing we earned trust you know to go out and do things but we also respected where mom and dad were coming from in terms of their you know what they were worried about and the reasons they were worried and and but you know they let us they let us get out there and do stuff there wasn't there wasn't a ton of coddling there was hey we want to make

sure you're safe but we also understand that you need to get out there and do things and experience things and so we were definitely never wrapped in bubble wrap and then that certainly didn't play out I mean I I was on a first name basis with the emergency room staff not because my mom worked there she was actually in an intensive care room because I made many visits there for broken arms legs feet you know sutures all kinds of stuff that

was just part of growing up but also had a different perspective my mom you know I had a different perspective because my mom never freaked out about any of that stuff you know if we broke an arm well let's get through it here's here's what we got to do and it is interesting like being the matriarch the extended family still to this day calls my mom when something's going on if somebody's having a health problem or something like

that they look to her for advice because she's just she's rock solid on all that she's going to give you here's this side here's that side here's the middle here's all the things that could happen she's very very practical about it yeah yeah I think you see that a lot with children that are you know have first responders you know paramedics etc you're not going to get much sympathy and then if they're like oh my god yeah it knows okay I'm really messed

up because you're right I mean unless you're bleeding out your eyes you're going to school right you know like exactly no you don't feel good today well you look fine and you don't have a fever so I'll see you at three o'clock you know absolutely it'll take your mind off it yeah exactly what about your dad obviously our military is extremely important in the defense of our country but there's also that industrial military complex conversation where

in a lockout Lockheed mining which has a factory here where I live in Ocala of course when we're at war they're going to make more money that's just basic economics did he ever feel conflicted at all with what he was doing I don't think there was a confliction in terms of his job specific to what the company was producing and what that meant sort of in the longer term I know there were there were more conflictions if there was confliction was

confliction about good people you know or bad people if you will just bad bad leadership bad management and then you know I know he made some pretty tough decisions along his career like I this is not something that somebody I can work for it was always family for me first for my dad and there were there was one there were a specific time we left his job because his boss saw differently than that he's like well I'm here I'm here before

you I'm here before anybody else and I leave after most most people but I will be leaving here at this time so I can be home with my kids and my wife you know whatever before for bedtime it was more of that kind of confliction but I don't think there was any and as a result he left his job but he he there I don't think there was anything like that and my my parents very you know I shared my mom did share lessons with us but my dad didn't talk a lot about

work while I knew work was very important to him it wasn't something he brought home as you know that I can remember as a kid there was no no real talk about it and part of it was a lot of the work that he was doing was stuff that he shouldn't have been or couldn't have been talking about but I don't think he thought it is important I think he was very he could very easily compartmentalize gotcha beautiful well then when we're you

know with you as a child still you ended up being a coach what were you playing and doing when you were a high school age yeah wow so coming of coming of age I guess I was very into sports very in athletics and I thought you know I wanted to maybe go to go away to school and kind of get that college experience and and also study and I didn't want to stay in school very long I knew that it wasn't really for me I was a very good student I

had very you know academically I did very well but I originally I wanted to be in law enforcement and I went to school for that and it spent about a year doing that and I had neighbors around us and we had sort of acquaintances of the family and the more I talked to him at the time so for going back this is very early 90s mid 90s I graduated high school for for I guess for for chronological sake in 1993 so this is going back a ways

and in San Jose this was coming off of we were one of the safest cities in the United States at the time and there the the job as the way they described it to me was kind of one of two ways was either very boring or very dangerous some of these guys were doing kind of high-risk jobs and I do remember hearing a story from somebody that you know at one point while I was going to school just about how his wife worried about him coming coming

home from work every night and that he had kids and as I was going through even at 18 years old coming or 19 years old that really resonated with me given my strong family dynamic that I had with my own family and I couldn't imagine thinking of my dad maybe not coming home from work because you know something some bad guy you know was having a bad day and my dad was the was a recipient of that that resonated with me and so I changed gears

and went into into business and started studying business and then that started kind of a whole line of like what am I doing here sports is over for me I still love the gym and started to explore you know what could I maybe do to do the things that I love doing stay doing the things I love doing maybe make some money doing it so I you know I started making some changes what about the sports themselves what were you playing in high school yeah I was

a football and wrestling were life for me I did track and field as a means to stay close to the football and wrestling coach because he he coached both and he was kind of running the weight room during the spring season which was the the track and field season so I was a thrower through shot and discus wasn't gonna run I hate running always have but yeah so everything that I did it kept me out of trouble it kept me focused it it you know I was in

sort of leadership roles and things like that was very very good for me and I can't imagine where I'd be without the sports to be quite frank what was it that dropped off after school because this is such an interesting conversation I have with many many guests now but when I first came here from from England I was amazed at how many uncle Rico stories I heard and you know I say that affectionately but it was I mean all these dudes in that late

20s early 30s like I could have should have would have been you know if it hadn't been for my knee my shoulder you know insert joint here and then I started like seeing you know learning about travel ball and camps and all this stuff that you know colleges and high schools squeeze out performance from our young athletes but one would argue you know often it's at the detriment of their health and their longevity and if you go to England yes

we have some high level athletes in our country but most people just play a sport in school right then they graduate and they keep playing public so you know whatever it is and so there's far more focus in the game and playing rather than winning and and squeezing out performance so you know what is your observation in your own journey and also just in that kind of that philosophy in general so I had a very I would say I had a very good experience in

sports as a kid in that when I was playing I guess when I was a kid kids played everything and there was always maybe one more one focus over the other but we played soccer we played baseball wasn't allowed to play football till I got to high school mom's like now you're not going to do that till we get till we get to high school and they're a little older a little bigger which is interesting because I showed up on the field as a freshman and

there's grown men basically out there smashing you you know and getting and getting joy out of that but I played a lot of different things that a lot of different experiences I was involved in other things too that they kept me active and giving me exposure and and not being all in on one sport gave me the opportunities for the things like the Boy Scouts things like you know being involved maybe in church clubs or things like that where we went out

we did different stuff was we were very into the outdoors and so that said like as I got in to you know football was kind of the focus I knew if there was going to be a run that I could make in college or get some type of a scholarship or whatever it wasn't going to be for wrestling I just wasn't that good I could kind of hold my own with football and and again there was no you know I'm doing this so that I can go pro or that life wasn't

football but it was very important to me and it gave me direction and I didn't know what I didn't know at that time.

There's I didn't continue on I played played a couple of years there but I didn't continue on and that was more of sort of a I got disenfranchised with how decisions were being made about players and you know a coach would leave and then all of a sudden you know you were a you were a popular guy and you were the guy and then all of a sudden a coaching staff leaves and your coach is gone and then you're you're nobody and you know you're fighting your way

through it that was frustrating for me but going back to the philosophy on the chasing the win and chasing that sport for the rest of your life I think it's really easy for for kids and more specifically parents to fall into that trap and that's what I think it is.

I think it's a major trap and I think there are kids obviously that are going to go on and they're going to play pro or they're going to play at a higher level and you know as they become young adults and even adults such a small percentage of the population and within that I think you take things away from kids in their youth when it's all that thing all the time for all the good things it provides I think you know psychologically socially

it pulls things away and I'll give you an example I have a few different perspectives on this because I have a daughter an older daughter she's about to turn 22 years old who is highly competitive in soccer and I loved it for her because there was structure there and it kept her fit but it also the social group was all structured around this and the the sense of accomplishment was all structured around this and while there was

a good sense of the importance of hard work winning losing being part of a team working together for a greater cause all of all good things when that gets taken away for whatever reason or it stops people I find that there's there's an identity attached to this and this is I think where we'll probably go with this maybe later in the conversation but there's an identity attached to this and there is a real struggle to find their way around that

identity in a way that's productive most often times it becomes very unproductive and I see that quite frequently you know in my business now and certainly in the genres I I play and explore and I don't know if that answers your question but I think people should should play more do more things and explore more things for the for the joy of doing it right versus the winning or the being the best at this obviously there's a time and a place

for that but man I think you lose you miss out on so much if you if you get hyper focused like that no I agree completely I've watched it with my son he ran track the last two years and did really well I mean he was he's a junior now so in his sophomore year he was running a five-minute mile which is not bad for that's pretty good yeah and he was still kind of going through puberty at that point but I but his just his heart fell out of it you

know and now he's into volleyball and skimboarding and again I'm like brilliant he's done jiu-jitsu he's done all kinds of other things and this is just it you know this the importance of play and if you look at Finland their education system like that is a big part of why they are number one in the world for education because they look at the whole holistic child and play is a big part of it and they have recess and you know movement is huge but then

you you know you look at these just like you said these kids and all they've ever known is baseball or even high school if all they've ever thought about is high school I had a young woman on Emma Benoit and she was I mean beautiful young lady now she was a cheerleader so on the outside oh she's definitely popular but she didn't you know so there was some bullying and but her biggest thing was she was about to graduate and she didn't know

what to do what she was going to do and that was just enough with all the other compounding elements of her life to literally drive and she she went through with the suicide attempt and survived so that identity piece I think we don't we did I don't think we give it enough thought of we literally gave birth to a child before they can even really understand the world we put them into an education system that they were then in until they were 18

years old and whether they were cheerleader or sports person or just thrust into academia you know if they don't understand that they are you know Suzy or Steve that is going to school that that's not their identity then yeah of course our teenagers are going to struggle whether it's physically mentally or both yeah 100% and so many levels and things that you know I see the the teens and the parents being challenged with now when it

comes to social media and how things are being fed to them and what they're seeing you know kind of socially is not making that any easier it's it's there's very much a false narrative of this is what success is this is what failures is what you should do versus what you shouldn't do and and those identity are the sorry the extent to which the identity is formed or perceived with that compounding it I think makes it very very tough so I I think I get

yes with the the the development also you don't have a fully wired frontal cortex until you're you know and I think you know men mature slower than the women do and they and they have different you know I guess that they have different paces at which they move and different experiences and different challenges and whatever else but if you get to 18 years old and you've missed out on all these experiences good bad or indifferent man going into today's

world being confused not understanding which direction to go I mean I see it a ton and then I see them make I don't want to say they're bad decisions but just really uninformed decisions that they don't know how to maybe walk back from or or pursue further to maybe even to fix correct or continue to excel at whatever they're whatever they're doing it's it's rough for me to watch it really is I think one of the things I just had a conversation

with the firefighter yesterday about this one thing that you know nauseates me is for example the whole participation trophy discussion because I think it's been completely skewed if I have never seen a group of children that put in zero effort and then were given medals but I've seen loads of kids that didn't win whatever little mini league they were on that showed up the same time showed up for practice that played in the heat played in the rain

and you know at the end of the day depending on you know what the factors were they became second third fifth sixth that is and it's funny because he came up with uh it wasn't participation it was accomplishment and it was like yeah your completion trophy that's what it should be called because I always say right you run a tough mudder 13 miles through electrical wire and barbed wire and you know and they what do they do at the end

they give you a participation trophy because you completed it because you showed up you know in the middle of a farm somewhere and were cold and wet and you helped other people through obstacles and you know you had this shared suffering the sense of accomplishment that is what we need to be encouraging kids rather than this sitting from a lazy boy pointing fingers saying you know back in my day you know if you're not first you're last like

yeah if you're in a competitive environment if you're at the olympics by that point yeah that conversation is is is appropriate but if you're talking about children in general encouraging them to play even if they don't even follow the rules you know if kids are out in the park and that's not what you're supposed to do then let them let them develop their own rules they come up with their own game so i think that's another important part

the conversation is play is okay and not everything is about winning and just when you were talking before about social media there's that one guy bodybuilder that had almost zero body fat was close to it you can and he and he died 20 whatever years old millions of fans viewers likes whatever you call it but he's dead because it's not about the pinnacle it's about you know the overall universal human experience yeah i so going back to play at

some point we stopped playing and we turned play into p.e. now i don't think that's altogether bad because i think what p.e. there was there to do originally was to give the experience right keep people physically active you know challenge their bodies in healthy and productive ways and introduce them to all different types of things that they they might pursue as a as a kid but at some point p.e. turned into like a chore and then it was graded right

like and the grading system on p.e. obviously is is very arbitrary and you know it it goes back to participation you either showed up or you didn't you either dressed out for p.e. or you didn't you were trying to avoid it or whatever else and i think it just got a negative connotation and so as as the youth goes through this experience of like what are we really doing here and it gets wildly perverted quite frankly with regard to the

the things that are considered p.e. physical education versus what aren't or what are now versus when i when i was a kid and i i don't like to look back like in the good old days i think you just mentioned that but we were challenged like there were things like you're going to run the mile and not everybody's going to be good at running the mile but everybody's going to make an attempt at running the mile we're going to try to get better at this and

maybe you get embarrassed because you're not very good at you're not as good as the other kids maybe maybe you don't like the feeling of being physically challenged and so forth these are life lessons and those were you know that was the experience that you got for p.e. and maybe you hated that but you loved badminton you know when we got to the badminton section and you kicked the the crap out of the kid you know you know figuratively

on the on the badminton court when you got to that the kid they could run the mile super fast these were the experiences again it became a chore and so i think you know kids are taught now to not really love it or have fun doing it and it's it's worse than just a participation it's like let's find something that everybody is good at and so that nobody feels left out and everybody has a good experience when the reality of it is that's not reality and then

in the end you know you get a grade for it and what's the what's the point of grading the kids so again going back to like the play versus being a chore as you graduate on to being adults i think what we what we teach kids a lot of time is to hate exercise it's not fun right it's not fun it doesn't it's not comfortable i'm not coordinated or i'm not good at this so i suck again there's an identity issue there and so as they get to

be adults they really haven't learned anything or how to enjoy themselves or or what what you can get what are the benefits of being active right and being uh um going through that journey or that experience and and the things that you can pull from it it's again it's about winning or losing or about you either got an a or you got a an f you know and i think that's really challenging in the fitness business because we're we're a lot

of times overcoming that when we're talking to clients about like what what is what how are you defining your success here and they haven't been taught how to figure that out they don't know that they know through work you know in their profession their bank account says this their title on their business card or on the door or their the the placard on their desk says that but in in terms of physical fitness and that connection to being healthy

it's there's a huge gap there i couldn't agree more i mean i think it's it's spot on and it was sad sad slash i was proud i guess because my son was supposed to do what they call hope now we don't know what the first two um letters are but it's basically pe in high school and about three weeks into school he was like dad i signed up for jrotc i was like oh wow okay cool nice why because i've been in pe now for three weeks and we haven't done any

exercise yet yeah we've done is watch you know tv and stuff so i mean you know i just have done something right raising up to that point because i mean he chose the harder option but um you know this is the problem and and i had uh doug orchard on the show and if you ever seen the film the motivation factor it's a documentary yeah one of his his was sad you were one of the only people i've ever asked that question they said yes and i've

got a lot of people in the strength and conditioning world and i wish everyone had seen that film because if you look at las sierra high school in the 60s even if you were the band kid and you didn't want to be an athlete your level of fitness your your potential lifespan has been maximized through a solid comprehensive p program that you do with all your friends and you just want to stay on that bottom tier beautiful you'll be the fittest unfit person

in your whole school versus you know i mean now if you look at that some of the least fit people in las sierra would probably be in the top 28 percentile of any american high school today so this is i think yeah the other shift is like you said taking away winning and losing but you know they reported that the grades improved they reported that bullying went down massively because everyone is going through this they're working in groups as

a shared suffering a sense of accomplishment and yes of course you have your elite you know athletes that then can go play basketball or baseball or football you don't have to worry about conditioning they're already conditioned they're fit as hell we just teach them how to throw the ball and catch it right but then you know you've got the chess club and and the poetry you know the poets and everyone else that really isn't leaning into sport

they are just simply healthier so it's an absolute win-win and what we've done is we've completely deconstructed any love of movement and outdoors and sunshine and you know demonize it and like you said sucked all the fun out of it and just made it basically seem like a punishment to a lot of kids these days yeah with that in california pe isn't an isn't even compulsory all the time i mean used to go to pe every single day you know now you

might go a couple of days a week and going back to like what are you actually doing uh we don't run the mile here in california anymore because it makes kids feel bad about themselves uh literally i'm not that's as the governor's made that decision several years ago it's it's it's um it's challenging it's interesting the the physiological effects and the less bullying and the more productivity these are things that are completely discounted

like is it less bullying because there's there's shared suffering and uh you know teams or people are having to work together and whatever i don't know maybe that's part that's definitely going to be part of it but part of it is just the physiological response so now i'm directing my energy somewhere else i have something to do i have there's hormonal response to this right there's an endocrine response to this and these are almost invariably all positive

things so obviously to me it would be obviously that would trickle down to you know less bullying you know more attentive in class uh you know obvious obvious things to me but somehow the school boards and you know the educational system doesn't see it that way yeah well i always say sarcastically if only we'd had a two-year pandemic that would put health on the forefront imagine imagine we have a captive audience for two years and we absolutely

fucking blew it by just focusing on masks vaccines and chinese conspiracies you know i had for a long time for a lot of that time i had hope man i i did and i was like this is going to be awesome right people are going to come out the other side of this as a as a business owner that is completely invested in your client and your community's you know health and wellness this is going to be awesome because we are in a position to to help people

at a at a it's this is that the business is not you know swipe your your card come in work out go on your own this is all personalized services we have personal relationships with all of these people and we're able to provide very specific solutions to their specific needs and wants in terms of health and fitness i was like this is going to be awesome we're going to not only we're going to have a captive audience i mean we're going to have a very

motivated audience and and we're going to be able to do all the things that we love doing at the next level man was i wrong about that i mean we're still talking vaxes and masks i mean i can go outside on the street right now and see people with masks on still it's wild it's that human psyche just it really blew my mind i was like way overestimated people yeah well i mean i think also to be fair to people a lot of them put their trust

in who they frame as a leader and if there was ever an example of you know pieces of paper and and promotions don't make you a good leader it was the pandemic because you saw so many people that are paid hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars of taxpayers money shit the bed for lack of a better word and we're like oh you actually don't know what the fuck you're doing do you and so a lot of people were were left completely

just confused without any any north anymore and sadly the real holistic health voices of the world were held as heretics how dare you say that obesity is part of the covet deaths because it fucking is that's why and even to this day like at the end of it there was that well we don't want to talk about it anymore well now if we can't talk about it in 2020 then we need to talk about in 2024 because there was some glaring lessons and

it's not just even our resistance to disease because another virus is going to come but also think about you know a threat from another country how terrified do you think china or russia would be when they walked into you know an average walmart in america and it sounds like a horrible dick thing to say but it is what it is 70 of our country is overweight or obese you look at a lot of our children there are some phenomenal phenomenal athletes

you know unhealthy children in our population but there are some that are overweight there are some that have never even lifted anything so they're not overweight but they have you know they're already hunched over like it like a pensioner this is such a disservice to the american people and so a real leader puts health and fitness at the very very forefront just like jfk did you can't i could not agree with you more and i don't think you can underestimate

the failure that has happened over over time but just got amplified and i think what what we witnessed in 2020 through 22 if you will everything got exposed all of the all of the bad all the the weak and i would say disgusting underbelly of the medical industrial complex as well as the pharmaceutical industrial complex and on our government and how they are all intertwined was was exposed and to your point like oh we just don't want to talk about it

anymore that is the bigger travesty of this all is that we can't we don't have leadership we can't find it anywhere i mean just look at what's being presented to the american people as their choices for um you know for leadership for the future of our country what is that showing us um it's uh it if man it infuriates me i guess my my my point of this is is what it's left is a wake of people being more confused less trusting um it's certainly

not for a lack of information all the information is out there they just don't know what to do with it and that i think is telling about the american people that they still can't figure it out like where did so many of them can't figure it out like where where are you where did we lose you here like where because if if you can't get it at this point like again like i'm very challenged with in my hope and my faith in humanity at times when

i'm looking at it going what is happening here like how is how are we still doing the same it's that definition of insanity we're still doing the same thing and expecting a different result um but uh to to your point is with it as it relates to threats just in general whether that's a virus whether that's a foreign um adversary or whether it's just it's an adversary here you know in the united states whether foreign or not foreign or domestic

we have a very weak platform right now and and and i've and it and i see it on a daily basis and and and i live it on a daily basis i work with people that are doing sort of the bare minimum to maybe feel better about the fact that they that they may be doing something about they're paying money to somebody to give them a result they're going out and they're trying to purchase health or they're trying to purchase capability uh they're trying

to purchase resiliency um when the reality of it is is it's it's an inability to take care of yourself and you're dependent on somebody else to do that for you and i think what we're what we're witnessing and what we're dealing with right now in america is just complete dependence and that's scary that that is a scary place to be one of my guests a while ago and i've quoted him a few times now made a great observation he said america is the

poster child for democracy like if we're selling this you know political philosophy to other nations we're we're the advert we're the commercial and when you're looking from the outside in and you see you know uh trump and biden i think they're both a fucking joke out 330 million people and this shows our system is so broken with you but you know you look at the obesity you look at the school shootings you look at the gangs on our streets you look

at the fact that we consume 75 percent of the world's opioids you look at i think we are two we make up two percent of the population i think something something around that two three um and we have 20 percent of the world's incarcerated population so you know we beat our chests and say we're the greatest country in the world because it's easier just to wave that flag than to actually look in your own home and then out your front door and go how

can i fix this and this is the problem is that we there's a lot of kind of finger pointing rather than looking in the mirror and going what can i do if 330 million people excluding really small children who wouldn't be able to do this um looked in the mirror and said what can i do we would absolutely revolutionize this nation and if we actually demanded a different system that put good good leaders on the ballot card for us to choose from but

also not just focus on that and then have good leaders in our cities and our counties and our schools and our fire departments and our gyms and everywhere else my god i mean it would be phenomenal but if we just sit down point fingers and tweet and say we're the greatest country in the world one day this country is going to belong to someone else if we don't fucking change things soon yeah it's a scary prospect uh you know going

back to your jfk reference a minute ago i think what what he was saying there in a sense is just you need to take personal responsibility for yourself like that that really is it at the root at the root of this is take personal responsibility for you for yourself and when you do that you will ask those questions and you will be forced to look at what you've what you're doing well and what you're not doing well again it's this it's this taking

stock and this this general check-in of a lot of different things um and when i when i look at health i look at you know what what is financial health what is your you know your physical health what is your your relationship health and how do those things stack up to one another it's not hard to know where you're getting a c plus or c minus and something and an a and something else and as a country uh right now and and again i love the country

that we live in and uh i am um i am challenged on a daily basis when i look at kind of the state of where it is and when we look at the things that we've gone through we don't have a very good track record in a lot of ways and to your point i think there's a there's a mystique about it but underneath all of that there is a reality of kind of what what exists there and the taking or having somebody else occupied or take it over i think people

look at these things very black and white and they're looking at like oh well you know china's not just going to show up on our shores and you know if they do then it's you know the america will rise and you know we'll take care of business it's happening right now as we speak uh with regard to you know what we've outsourced and who we're dependent on you know specific to our to our resources or whatnot uh my the point of this is is it's

it's already happening um it it to how much longer can it happen before it is we're forced to look at it in a in a different way or those who refuse to look at it that way don't have a choice again like the pandemic like oh our food supply our you know our freedoms or you know whatever else those are those toilet paper for god's sakes like you know like we are we're riding a very thin line and you know it's three days without food and things

get fucking weird real weird real fast uh and and you know without resiliency or without capability you are you're you're very exposed we are very exposed and that that i'm challenged by that yeah well i think the counter argument is well you know if you don't like it get out kind of thing especially if you're not from here originally like me but um you know i came from another country deliberately to this country and i served in uniform for 14

years for a reason and now i do this because if you do nothing then it gets worse if you stand up and say hey here's the issues it's a beautiful country that's why i live here that's why i raised my children here but you know here's all these areas that we can do better and here's these countries that are doing it better we don't even have to reinvent the wheel you just have to have a humility to say hey finland tell me about your education

system again but if you just sit there and go you know if you don't like it get out then you're part of the problem and you're just going to watch you know watch the devolution but if we have these conversations in these amazing mediums like social media and podcasts and all these things this is how a collective voice pushes back because again if we if we haven't seen behind the curtain after the last three or four years then then we are

not doomed yeah i think you're going back to kind of what our choices going back to the pandemic the vaccines things like that it would just it would be how how much further could we get down the road if somebody somewhere just stood up and said you know what we were wrong and we were we were we made a mistake we made a mistake here was the mistakes here's the major mistakes we made which led to a lot of other mistakes but let's focus on the

biggest ones and here's how we can we can overcome that here's how we can make it right in fact maybe we can't overcome it we just have to start trying to make it right now and here's the steps that will go go about doing that how much mileage would you buy how much mileage would you get out of somebody just saying yeah we messed this up and we messed it up pretty good and and here's what we're gonna and you know what we're trying

to hold ourselves accountable you know people you got to fire people you got to hold them and i believe that i mean that those are those are tough decisions that need to be made but at the same time like let's just start with admitting we're not as great as we thought we were we didn't do as good a job as we thought we did which goes all the way back to what you were saying at the beginning of this which is the participation trophy we live in a world

where people are used to just being given a trophy for showing up rather than performing and you know again going back to the p.e. and performance based and whatever else there still is a time and a place for performance and we're not measuring that right now uh objectively it's being it's it's wildly it's mysterious like what are the goalposts today and you know what are we actually aiming for and there's a lot of distraction i don't think

people really know and that and again we're going to be faced with the lesser of two evils here wherever you might stand with regard to an election cycle and we are right back to where we were neither is a good neither is a solution neither is a solution yeah and then again i've i've literally posted about this and talked about is on the show 330 million people you should never have to hear the phrase the lesser of two evils yeah again like this

is the best america can come up with i i don't think that's the case i don't i refuse to believe that uh it's but our system is so again perverted and and bogged down uh it's it's got people disenfranchised and i have to you know i have to be i have to admit like i've been very disenfranchised um at a lot of levels you know does my vote count at a national level um and what could i influence at a local level really at this point to you

know really influence some change given how layered uh everything is and how much liability exists or liability protection exists within all of those layers to make change but at the same time i can't sit there and go well you know i'm just gonna have to protect and look out for look out for myself to your point i have to do something what can i do um and those are the the questions that everybody should be asking themselves not like i'll

let my neighbor take care of it absolutely well getting back onto your kind of lifeline we've gone on an awesome philosophical you know rant for a bit um you talked about law enforcement then you found yourself in the world of business walk me through that and how you ended up working in in the gym setting so the business piece came up my i have family here in california that's very heavily rooted in agriculture and agricultural business and

i can tell you if you want to make money uh there's a lot of money in agriculture and i i i was sort of um i i think there was some fantasy in the lifestyle uh you know living in wide open spaces and having a little bit more autonomy and i actually did some some work and some internships uh through my agribusiness career or uh time with some companies in some places that i thought i might want to be and i recognized very quickly that is not where

i wanted to be going back to sports or pe and getting experiences you won't know unless you experience things so i went out there and i did that but all of this time at that point like football had stopped for me but fitness working out was very much a part of who i was and what i enjoyed doing and uh that was always there and i had built relationships in the local gyms and with with people uh the gym owners employees uh members there

was a community there that i felt very attached to and um i was also sort of exploring my own fitness journey and uh part of that was i wanted to give like bodybuilding a crack like a competition i was like oh i think i can you know i think i could probably you know from an amateur perspective i want to go through this experience i had the fitness piece figured out like and i think more than probably a lot of people did at my particular

age at this time i was in my early 20s but the nutrition piece was something that i was i was sorely missing i didn't understand how these guys got to look like that at a lot of levels um we start talking about peds and things like that but so i hired a coach who happened to be an owner of the gym who happened to be a professional bodybuilder and it just opened up my world to this whole concept of like i could do what i love and i could maybe

make some money doing this because i had to pay this this wasn't free and i was a starving student um who managed to scrape together the funds to to get a coach and part of that part of that deal was i couldn't pay full price but the coach who knew me from the gym and knew my you know my work ethic and kind of how i was working i was like okay i'll tell you what you'll pay this much but the other end of this deal is you have to meet

me here every morning at 4 30 a.m to train with me because i need a training partner it's like show me where to sign so i went down this path of basically being mentored tutored as well as getting coached as well as learning about the fitness business and how that worked how personal training worked how membership worked how sales how marketing back then which was the the the late 90s and i decided like i'm learning more i'm getting

like a master's degree in like uh i guess like fitness club management here while i watched my friends go to school to literally go to school to learn how to do this stuff and i'm comparing notes i'm like i'm chasing this so i abruptly stopped going to school and chased a fitness career and the rest is history that's 25 years later now now when i first moved to america um the one of the first places i ever went because i was not

in fire academy yet so i went to a place called bally's and dropped in an application so talk to me about that company so yeah for my first my first few years i worked for some private i worked privately as a as a personal trainer i worked for a small small company i was had you know i was then managing a a fitness let's just call it the the fitness department um at the time uh there were two really large companies out there 24 hour fitness and bali

total fitness uh bali was buying up and acquisitioning a lot of clubs that were existing a lot of other brands while 24 hour was building brand new beautiful clubs and property and things like that and uh i was on the central coast of of uh of california a place called san lisa bispo beautiful little town there's a college there called cal poly that's where i was going to school and that's where i was working not too far from there in the central

valley is a is a city called fresno it's kind of smack dab in the middle of the central valley bali had bought up five clubs in this region uh in in 2000 sorry in 1999 uh 1999 i was looking for a bit a little bit of a career change i had a you know my girlfriend who later became my wife uh um who've since divorced was from this area she had some connections there she was graduating college i applied to to manage a club or to basically be in

charge of a fitness um the fitness aspect of this one club they hired me immediately because the experience i had i got over there and before too long i had five clubs so bali total fitness at the time had about 390 some odd clubs nationwide they had close to four million members at this time they've been in business since like 1964 they were a machine um and i didn't really know what i was doing i was just you know they'd offered me a position

i said how much does that pay they told me i said i'll take it it was way more money that i was making and i don't know that i saw it as a real career path or what that could have done for me my plan was i'll move there i'll build up my personal training business i'll quit and open my own business which is what i want to do and i'll take all my clients with me which is a common dream uh and approach for a lot of personal trainers not as easy

as you might think when i got there um i was afforded all kinds of opportunities and i took advantage of every single one of them um you know all kinds of management development programs uh certainly being in front of some very very experienced and uh knowledgeable fitness professionals but also business professionals learned a ton and uh that that getting to sort of the end of that story uh you know i had one club then i had five clubs then

i was you know promoted and i moved down to southern california uh there's some restructuring going on there was like 60 clubs down there um i moved back to northern california to take on some business and then ultimately finished my career in my last few years there as a national director of personal training development for the company and with a couple of other guys we had over 450 clubs all with um personal training departments and group

exercise departments and we were we were running that business um and uh it was a good 10 year run had a lot of opportunity and and looking back i don't regret any of it um i'm really grateful and thankful for the experience that i had it was uh it was a lot of fun what impact if any did you see with the advent of crossfit great question uh i was busy and wasn't really paying attention initially uh one of the guys i worked with

at the at the national level uh had been exploring it more we were traveling all the time i was on planes trains and automobiles every week i was traveling all over the country and i knew it was coming up and we were paying attention to it but it wasn't i was paying attention to it but i wasn't you know like enamored by it i just saw it as this is pretty extreme this is my life this is much different than than what we that the the folks doing this the clientele students much

different than what we were dealing with on a daily basis we had our hands full but we did see with some trickle over um from the crossfit world into the mainstream with some of our more let i would just say um more rehab focused coaches or facilities where they were getting a lot of the the bleed over from people that were getting injured or just they were just outdoing themselves and they couldn't maintain it anymore and that's how i kind of envisioned it was like

it's just going to blow people up you know and and then you know you'd see the games and just i was always very impressed by the athletes and still am to this day i was going that is such a small percentage of the larger population um it didn't it didn't really register with me until my end of my time with uh with ballet which was going to be like 2008 2009 and crossfit was gangbusters um i never subscribed to the methodology never never um you know committed

to training that way or whatever but uh it what it did was exposed people to fitness in a different way which i am at all a turn be eternally grateful for it it taught people that they needed to move they needed to get off machines they needed to move they needed to use the barbell they needed to lift heavy shit it it taught and it encouraged women to lift heavy shit um it encouraged people to be competitive which has its pros and its cons uh to enjoy fitness it built community the

thing they nailed and nobody will ever do it the same is the community aspect that it brought together which every gym every club every private gym owner says they're doing or dreams of doing it um or tries to sell like here's your fitness family you know and we're going to take care of you and we're going to be here for we're going to encourage you we're going to motivate you we're going to be here every day for you nobody's done that like crossfit did uh and that really impressed

me uh to the you know it kind of became cult so uh in a sense but it but it got people very fit and it exposed people to um a you know methodology and uh of training that could for lack of a better term cross over into a lot of different worlds and i think that was that was super important for our for our industry and for our culture to have that so i'm i'm very respectful of crossfit in a lot of ways it was interesting watching because i my origin story across is in um anaheim one of the

firefighters trained in hunnington beach was one of the very first gym um back in i always forget that the i think it was like either side of oh six oh yeah i was six or seven um but uh you know i was blown away because i did martial arts and i did you know regular weightlifting i wasn't a bodybuilder but you know the that you said the machines and the dumbbells and that you know when he first put me through the first one i was like oh my god what what is this and as a firefighter

it was so good and there are times where you know i had friends that were on a fire ground that didn't work out like that and you know they were extremely tired and you come along and you and you get the job done and so you see okay this is working you see on jiu-jitsu mat okay this is working so it's phenomenal but when i moved back to florida it was to the ymca so you're back in the kind of you know i know that the tongue-in-cheek kind of globo gym environment but i was doing

crossfit and then i just remember these people looking at me like what the fuck is this guy doing yeah and then these high school kids were you know like making fun you can see them sniggering in the corner but then as you said the games came in and i have i'd never have done a competition in my life unless it was a fundraiser and crossfit because i you know to quote kenny powers don't want to be the best at working out but you know the application is phenomenal but then you know

two or three years later the same high school kids like hey bro can you show me how to do that muscle up perception same exact workouts just the you know the image has changed so that was really interesting but then as i progressed through i haven't done haven't really been consistent for the last year but i switched into the kind of wolf brigade philosophy now okay um and uh you know just slowing everything down because i'm about to turn 50 on friday and now i'm at the point where i

worked on my motor for all these years i was strong i was as strong as i needed to be i'm never going to be strong just my body type isn't that way but i was strong enough to be a good firefighter but now i've been a stunt man i've been a martial artist i've been a firefighter now i've got to start kind of fixing all the things so that i can squeeze out that performance because i'm not going to get fitter and stronger at 50 if i've if i've been fit and strong up to that point i can focus on

one thing but what's the point if i've got dysfunction and imbalance and you know things that i need to look on so you know it's been interesting being a you know arguably pretty early in the crossfit journey riding that crest of like you said where it absolutely was a cult for a bit and every person in the gym had knee wraps and wrist wraps you know the whole the whole you know halloween outfit to them when there was a kind of awakening where they really started understanding

how to coach and say they me as well um you know to to now kind of slowing it down taking some of those philosophies but but you know bringing in maces and sleds and sandbags and some of the other things that me personally i like to to move around space so that i'm getting that 360 kind of uh benefit yeah i think it was it was interesting the it grew so fast it grew wildly out of control and i think this is kind of a sensitive end of the topic for those that are very much uh ingrained

or were there at the beginnings of crossfit you mentioned a couple of things there one of which was you know you could very easily have a crossfit affiliate and anybody could do this right and so you had all it was growing exponentially but what was and they were literally across the street from one another and cannibalizing one another and that that became a little bit of an issue but the cream as they say kind of rose to the top and what that cream was this is where these this this particular

box is turning out competitors that go to the games or winning regionally or whatever else to this other one which is this is more for the mainstream person who just wants to fitness and use crossfit to do that um they have a really good set of coaches and they are managing the attrition rate not because people aren't paying their bills but because they're not getting hurt as often and it kind of it kind of um again there was this this separation um the the challenge that

i had with it was i think for a lot of people the crossfit crossfit was very misunderstood by both the public that wanted to participate in it but also by a lot of the coaches that were coaching it um so when we get into the concepts of like strength and conditioning nobody to this point had really put together like what crossfit had done this multi-disciplinary multi-modality type of fitness program programming where you were hitting hypertrophy strength

power agility speed there was all these components that were putting in there now the the closest thing to this that you would you would have found at the time would be like walking into a a a strength conditioning room say at university or in the pro ranks but they were always very focused on a specific athlete and the specific things that that athlete needed to do and you could break that even further to like positionally what does this athlete need to

do on this team you're not going to train a wide receiver the same way you're going to train a offensive tackle they need to do similar things but they're not going to do all the same things um and in there i will tell you this in strength and conditioning there's way more strength happening in most strength and conditioning rooms than there's actually conditioning so already a very misunderstood topic at the time when crossfit came out i was actually

heavily into multi-sport i was doing a lot of triathlon and actually adventure racing which is another thing so i was exploring more of the conditioning um and endurance side of things and so which was very mysterious and almost very scientific there's still a lot of that going on on the strength side but nobody brought those two things together yet and so going back to the misunderstandings we're trying to put all this stuff together and what it just looked like was

whatever the wad for the day is however there were very smart coaches that were putting these things together and the athletes that were winning the competitions and the games initially maybe weren't doing this but they were over time when you think of like the rich fronings jason kalipas uh those type of dudes they they weren't doing crossfit as most people think of crossfit every single day and they if even if you look at so if you look at those what i'm saying is they were

periodizing their programming to be able to get these aspects of fitness these different domains of fitness done they were doing in a smart way so that they had longevity and still are able to perform at high levels today and there was this whole group of people that were getting wildly kind of off pace or off piste if you will sorry specific to like i just need to go hard all the time so you just the reason i say all that i say all that to say you recognize now that that is not

something you can do all the time at 50 years old and expect to number one be fit and recover and be able to do your job and be a dad and all of that stuff and so i see a lot of people out there trying to take aspects of crossfit and put it together with where they are now to be able to particularly in the first responder world or mill world um because they remember how fit they were and how good they felt when they started crossfit when they were 25 you know years old or whatever but

they there's no way they can do that now so they're searching for a smarter way to do it and they're hearing it's still not registering yet they're hearing you need to do a little less you need to slow things down a little bit more you need a little bit more rest and recover recover because in their head they're hearing no go hard or go home no days off i you know it's intensity or nothing um you know but their body is telling them otherwise and so i think there's this huge wide

open market now uh for folks to to really take advantage of because there's a lot of i'll just say like james you're a super fit guy who knows a lot of stuff and you have a lot to offer and there's a lot of guys like you that want to be fit right and don't want to hurt all the time and still need to perform on their job and all those things there's like this i think we're a spot right now where there's a there's almost going to be kind of this resurgence of i don't

want to say crossfit but something similar that caters more to guys like you and me yeah i agree completely even if you look back to be fair to the original programming i think about the main site years ago it would be a lift that's it just literally i forget how many sets it might be three you know five sets that was it and then that was it for the day you're done go home and then there would be kind of more of a kind of metcon and maybe the the third day would be a longer

slower one and then the fourth day was a day off so it was originally written like that even you know and then people like well let's do a lift before every you know metcon and then we got to squeeze accessory work and there was a point which i love this but you know our gym had a gymnast class a barbell class you know endurance class but then you realize okay there's only so many hours in the day i can't do all these things at the same time but you know i think that less is

more is is a big thing now and even if you look at the combat world you know that they're not heavy sparring in most gyms and they're realizing now oh maybe i shouldn't you know get concussed before my fight maybe that wasn't a good idea and i lived that i was at shootbox for a while i was at shootbox for just under a year in la and absolute the fight club like i've you know perforated eardrum broken nose i mean all the things you know and uh so yeah i think this is interesting and then

as you age you need more rest and recovery and so my philosophy now is all right how close can i get my body to the way it's supposed to move you know my shoulders getting back to where they are and you know my knees and my hamstrings and my quads and everything kind of aligned again because that in itself will make me fitter and stronger i've done the work for decades i have done the work i don't need to be beating the 20 year old in the gym i need to be swinging the mace

and pushing the sled and doing all the things that are gonna you know kind of as we say cribbing in the fire service fill those voids so that you know i still move well and you know and the big thing is the pain so yeah i mean you know that kind of young bull old bull you know i've got i've got the i've got the efficiency now now i've just got to kind of make sure that the foundation is still strong yeah essentially what you mentioned about where crossfit started the volume and intensity

was very closely managed then you you mentioned you know then they they they went to or you would you could go to like more gymnastics based or more barbell based ollie ollie lifting type stuff where the skills people recognized oh i can work on the skills and then you only have so many hours in the day so what would you do well let's do a double day because more is better right and i can practice my skills in one part of the day and i can do my you know metcon in another part of the day

and it just kind of started compound and then of course the nutrition piece came in and you know you know the paleo diet was the diet you know for a long long time that's where people were planting their flag a lot of great things about that but we recognize maybe we need a little more carbohydrate in here it's just you know we're we need we need that energy and not everybody's going to be fat adapted and so forth but the the the layering on the pieces and then again it kind

of got bastardized and to to i think to fulfill the emotional piece of i'm not working hard enough or i should be doing more and then to your point like ultimately that catches up with you in in more ways than you got joints that you got to worry about you've got you know recovery systems hormones that you may have you know pushed into the toilet as a result of overtraining under eating being under nourished all of those things and so inevitably you kind of hit this

this point where you have to kind of reverse think the process and reverse engineer it and the you know because when i look at this in terms of my philosophy on on fitness like if we can get people to know all this stuff before or at least sort of comprehend it before then they're not trying to untangle this sticky web later in life and they're not wrestling with it you know emotionally uh you know or psychologically to where they feel like they're not doing enough but to

your point like if you can get to a level of fitness whatever that is for you and let's not try to define like you either are you aren't it's just and let's not define it as fitness is the deadlift fitness is crossfit fitness is running a marathon fitness just what are all the aspects of fitness and how am i how am i getting through my journey here i'm never going to be perfect at all of them that's what crossfit was trying to do right impossible right we know that there's not

and there's not a lot of longevity in that so understanding how to cycle through different things and experience different things so that when you get to 50 years old i just turned 49 um and i have all all all kinds of issues my back is a dumpster fire because i didn't do what i'm saying right now which is like let's work on moving well let's move on let's work on moving consistently but not necessarily pushing balls to the wall every single time we go out that's not

you don't need to do that and try different things uh you know get out there and do different stuff you know you mentioned the combatives you mentioned you mentioned the crossfit you mentioned um you know uh one you know being just active in general and and also having to be a firefighter in there somewhere uh and not putting yourself in a position where you're trying to perform in all these other things and then you show up to the job and you can't perform as a result of overdoing it on

you know through this other stuff so um that's a big missing piece i mean i think particularly in law enforcement and and in the fire services pushing constantly to the point where you're risking ability uh when you have to perform the job uh at some point and obviously if it's how you make your living that's compounded uh that risk is compounded and and i there's better ways to do it the people that are selling this programming um it's not popular when you tell somebody to slow

down it's not that's not a sexy thing to to say it's not it's not popular to say you should be doing two recovery days a week and you need to you know go to yoga do some do some mobility work um not a lot right not another 5k you know for time or whatever else so we're in this transition right now and and so when i get to talk to people like you that kind of get it at this point i'm always like if you could do if you knew then what you know now what would you do different

um i could i could go on and on and on about that absolutely well you mentioned the tactical athletes the first responders and the military um walk me through how you transition from balis and you created your own red dot fitness and then let's talk about the tactical population that you work with today sure so you know the ballet was ballet career was a good run again it was 10 years in that time i'd gone through several leadership changes at the at the sort

of the executive level with the company uh there was a lot of things going on um it was a publicly traded company in 2000 uh i started working for the company in 2000 and 2001 is when the like well 2000 is when like nron and worldcom happened in the stock market so for you might remember that maybe some of your listeners have no idea what that is but it changed a lot of things in the landscape of um uh the stock market and how things how financials are being reported and effectively

ballet was kind of caught in the middle of that too like you can't report your earnings this way anymore because you're not showing kind of what that bad debt is um and so that changed kind of how the company operated and i got to be a part of that which was important for me but it also meant there was new people coming in new people there were cuts being made restructuring things happening we got to the third one of those and i just didn't i knew i didn't have the energy for it anymore i

saw the writing on the wall the the the company was going to have to go through a bankruptcy and um i didn't want to be a part of you know that for any longer than i had to be and i always knew i wanted to have my help my own business that was the dream i assumed i was going to be doing it before but i had this great job it's very lucrative good money and afforded me a really great lifestyle a lot of experience but i knew i was going to have to make the change i did i literally walked away

from it um and rented space as a personal trainer from a uh a coach that had a space in town here in san jose uh that had worked for me at one point she had said hey if you ever you know if you ever need it i don't know why that would be scott but if you ever need it you're welcome here so made the phone call and i started with absolutely zero clients i had no clients and i basically kind of put my proverbial balls on the table and said well scott if you're going to do this this is the way

to do you're going to start from scratch and that's what i did so i started with one client that turned into two that turned into four and um over the next couple over the next year i knew i needed to put my name on a building kind of put my brand on a building and to expand it i had plans for that it was it's all it was all personal personalized coaching and some group training and uh you know my approach was um you know not to do anything cookie cutter which is very tough

to scale and but i knew because i'd done this before with ballet i knew there was a way to do it i met uh my now um i met my partner my partner in life and business now uh cc and uh we shared a space i rented a building shared space grew that space outgrew that space uh and then pushed into um pushed into the space we are now so i started in a building it was 580 square feet it's just a room um there's just a little room and now we're in a a building that's 6000 square feet and have

multiple employees and so forth and the business evolved and uh you know it it was it's when i talked to people that have been in the fitness business like you're kind of the only one that i know that's been able to do it the way we all wanted to do it but weren't able to do it um and we were very successful and we were doing fantastic we'd you know we'd bootstrap the whole thing and then 2020 showed up uh and uh we live here in in santa clara county which was the toughest

harshest county in co with regard to covid restrictions we were the first to shut down um then it was san francisco and then it was everybody else uh almost uh four years ago to the day that we're recording this it was like march 17th um when that happened and we got destroyed uh you know we our business was closed the long story short the business was closed for a year like the doors were closed and this was not something that you could make a lot of like

yes you could have made choices and we did um but the health department the county health department is literally two blocks away and to say that they were harassing people would be a massive understatement um to give you some numbers there was like combined um combined fines written to businesses in the bay area there are eight counties in the bay area or sorry seven counties us being one of those it was like there was like 1.8 million dollars written in fines 80 000 of that came from

the other six counties the rest of that came from santa clara county so that's what they were doing to businesses and this was the people that they were attacking there were three major culprits if you will we were the we were the problem gyms which we had shut down right from the get-go right salons and churches these were the three businesses that were apparently spreading the virus and were the most high risk they were labeling us that and you had people that were

pushing back they felt very strongly about like people need to stay fit they need to stay healthy right they need to go to church they need to have their places of worship like this is not something you can take away from them uh and then on the salon side of things like you're talking about independent contractors and they're everywhere this is how they put food on the table how are they not supposed to you know how are they not supposed to pay themselves so long story

short we had to pivot very very hard we found a space outside we don't have like a parking lot so we were able to lease a small space from the city um put we tried to put together sort of a frankenstein type gym out there um meanwhile the the the city is starting to kind of implode and deteriorate homelessness going nuts the fentanyl crisis was right in front of our our face we were in a downtown area um only about a mile from the city center and uh so it was it was a very upcoming

area um because google had promised and had purchased a large piece of property just blocks from our building and so things were dry there's a lot of economic growth new businesses new homes new high-rise apartments buildings and that was what was supplying our business with with members well when that when covid hit they shut things down and we're in tech central we're in the heart of the silicon valley uh people that were paying four thousand dollars a month for a thousand square

foot apartment you know or whatever in downtown san jose which is an awesome we're like wait i don't have to live here anymore but i'm going to still make the same amount of money living somewhere else um they bailed out and everything just kind of started to empty out and again like i said things started to deteriorate and those were our clients those were our friends that was our community and it was gone so again outdoor gym we're trying to put together some online

products and services and again all that's happening in 2020 and then the events that happened with george floyd took hold um and as if we weren't kind of already in a new you know having our challenges city hall like i mentioned is about a mile down the road protests were happening the weekend after the incident that happened um in minnesota and let's just say the gatherings got to be fairly large our our law enforcement here handled it

pretty decisively um i give them a lot of credit for what they did as soon as things started getting lit on fire and you know windows getting broken and things like that they they broke that up pretty fast well they pushed it out but it started to come towards us now i lived at the time just two blocks from the gym the gym big glass front windows it's on the main drag uh and then we uh i'm watching what's happening in the down in front of city hall happen on tv like everybody

was doing two blocks from the house i'm sitting there with my my daughter my stepdaughter and and cc and i'm going in a matter of minutes they're going to be in front of our building these are a bunch of angry entitled whatever people you know we had already been through the last six or eight months of just or six months of ridiculousness we're watching our business business be destroyed or financially we're getting crushed.

All the things with the vaccinations and all the things that just the, the, the disconnect and the divisiveness, you know, I just said, I can't let the business go like this. I can't watch everything that we've worked be destroyed. I have to do something. I'm going down there and I'm at least going to be in my building and try to deter people from breaking or destroying what we have left.

And so I packed up, packed up a backpack, a couple of firearms, a little bit of food, and I marched down to the, to the business and I planted myself in the lobby, which again, faces the street there.

I have a couch and the TV above the, above the windows there trying to kind of, I was watching the TV to kind of see what was happening and slowly but surely here comes these, these crowds kind of coming in and I made eye contact with every single, let's just say, um, less than desirable individual that was out there, uh, to try and let them know, like you can go somewhere else. You can, maybe you can try and do something, but I'm going to be here on the other side of this glass or this window.

If, if you do something, I had no idea what that meant. I just, I just felt really strongly like somebody needs to do something here and nobody's going to do that for me. Uh, police are obviously wrapped up. Places are burning. Things are happening. We did not have, San Jose did not have the same stuff you saw in a lot of other major metropolitan cities, but I saw what was happening and I knew there was potential for that.

So long story short, I sat here for three days, um, lived here, you know, went home occasionally for some food and stuff came back, but I watched what was happening out on the street and I realized how under equipped and ill-prepared I was for w all the things that were going on. All the things that had happened for the previous months with lockdown, supply chains, things like that.

Um, just with regard to being able to protect my family, protect my business, uh, what, who wasn't going to protect my business, uh, who wasn't coming if I had called, uh, even if I, if I needed to. And, uh, I, I transit, I quickly realized like, I need to, I need to improve my skillset. I need to understand things better. And, uh, so I started to, uh, I started to train. I looked for firearms training at a different level. I looked for medical training.

I had had some combat and I had a little bit of this in my, in my past, but I was determined and dedicated and I had nothing but time to do it with. Uh, and so I started to, to explore all of these different worlds of, you know, these genres with regard to the world of preparedness and self-reliance. And, uh, started on my journey to understanding that better, uh, which took me down quite a few different paths that lead me to where I am now. I think I asked you this when we were on the phone.

Um, what would the, what was the spectrum of training that you discovered? Cause I know that you ended up training with, you know, arguably some of the, the most skilled warriors on the planet. Um, what was the spectrum of training that you were seeing and, uh, and what was it about the good training that made it the good training? So this was the interesting piece is somebody that was walking into this. So I, I, I already told you I'd spent over 20 years in the fitness business.

And, and, you know, in, in the, the time that we were in, I was, I was entering into this kind of blindly. Like I'd never explored any of this. And I think where a lot of people go with this is I feel unsafe. What should I do? Go buy a gun. Right. Go have a firearm. Well, I already had that. And I knew sort of what the realities were to some extent of that. But one of the things I wanted to do was train to be more proficient with that far with, with the firearms that I did have.

And I recognized that maybe I wasn't as well equipped as I thought I might've been with training and, or just, um, equipment, if you will. So that was the first place I went. Where do you go? You go to social media, right?

You start looking around, you kind of seeing what's out there and man, that is where things got really wild for me because there's so much to consume as you start to get into the world of firearms and firearms training, completely overwhelmed, like, where do you even start with this? Like, who is this guy? Like, who is this guy who says he's got this huge resume? You know, there's a, there's a, there's a Trident next to his, in his profile. There's a couple of American flags.

There's this many deployments, this unit, you know, whatever. It's got some pictures of him doing some cool stuff with some things like that looks good. He's wearing full kit, you know, like he's, he's in shape. There's that guy. And then there's this other guy who looks seemingly the same, but he wore a different, uh, insignia. Actually he wore a beret, right? And he did all these other things and had these deployments work with these guys. And he's doing some other cool stuff.

And somehow these guys are mad at one another, but they don't know one another. They just hate one another and they're talking trash on the internet, whatever. It was really interesting. It was really weird.

Um, and what I also recognize about that is how similar it was to the fitness business and you know, for that I had seen for a long time in this in-fighting this, everybody trying to make one another look bad and this guy's got this piece of paper on the wall and so he knows more than the other guy. It was, it was really interesting. So what I was searching for was more of like an intelligent conversation, like, and who are these people?

Like what, why, and who are the people that are going to these people to be trained? And so I started sort of locally with a, with a local guy and, and, and learned more, he would kind of fill me in like, Oh, this is my impression of this guy or, you know, Hey, you should follow this other dude. And so I started doing that.

And, and what I started to recognize was, okay, there there's intention in some of this that, you know, I was, I was starting to separate the, what the person was training versus what message the person was giving, and I could very easily relate that to fitness, like this exercise doesn't get you this result applying this exercise this way could based on your individual needs goals currently where you're coming into that and so forth.

So I saw some people doing a better job with communicating this message and I wanted to talk to those people. And so I did, I reached out to them, you know, like on Instagram and I was surprised with the responses that I got. Some of them very willing and open to have, have conversations. Some were very insulting and demeaning, you know, when you'd ask a very basic question and so I didn't take that personally. I was just like, what a Dick, you know, like I was just asking a basic question.

I guess I'm not in that circle, so I don't want to have anything to do with that. So I just started having these conversations and slowly, but surely got connected with one or two people, um, to where I could have deeper level conversations who would give me maybe a little bit more insight to this weirdness that I was seeing out there or, you know, this false, I would, I don't want to say false information, the bad information versus the quote unquote good information.

Now, during that time, I still had a business to run and I was trying to drive revenue and drive brand awareness. So we created some online, uh, we created some online programs and I needed to drive traffic to those. Podcasting was something that I had kind of wanted to do and had been suggested that I do a long time ago or previous to this.

So I started a podcast and it was, and it was about health and wellness and it was strictly to drive awareness, education, get me in front of some smart people within the fitness industry. Cause I needed to have these conversations. I was driving me nuts being stuck here in San Jose and, and, and, and not having a business to run every day, if you will.

And so as I, I was having these conversations and within the podcast and I was doing this training saying combatives, firearms, medical, all this other stuff. I was running into people that far, they were firefighters. They were, uh, there were a lot of law enforcement officers, some ex mill guys, current mill guys, things like that, current current, uh, professionals. And I saw this gap like in what they were doing to take care of themselves physically.

And from a nutrition perspective, it was like, Hey, maybe I can contribute something to this community, uh, somehow, uh, cause I'm recognizing the con, what they're consuming with regard to information on fitness. They were buying, let's just for lack of a better, I'll just throw it out there. They're buying fitness programming from a former Navy seal who says, this is the programming that you need, right?

With no consideration for who this person is, what their fitness health history is or where they're coming into the program, but these guys are buying and paying for this stuff based on this guy looks great. He's just, he's an ex seal or an ex whatever, you know, um, ex, uh, quote, unquote operator and they want to be like that guy. And I was like, that's completely inappropriate for you. So maybe, maybe I can fill a gap here.

Um, and then as I realized I was having these conversations, I was having these deeper conversations with the guys in the firearms instruction community. And they were really interesting conversations that I wasn't seeing happen in social media and I wasn't seeing them happen on a platform anywhere. I was like, I wonder if people would be interested in this. People would be interested in hearing these conversations.

So then I started to record these conversations and have these as part of the podcast. Um, one conversation turned into another, you start to get into these circles and the rest is history. And now here we are 250 episodes later.

Um, we've talked to all kinds of folks and I consider myself very fortunate for essentially just being able to share my journey and share the knowledge that I've been able to gain as well as have these people share their knowledge, um, of the things that they know, and that has blossomed into all kinds of stuff, way beyond the firearms in the training. It's been very rewarding.

When you started interacting with the stay in first responders, so these police officers and these firefighters, what was the disconnect that you were seeing through a coach's eyes between what we are required to do as our job description, which in the fire service is bloody everything, um, versus the programming that was being presented to them.

Well, first off, what I recognized was that the government was in no way ever going to give the, the amount of resource and quote unquote training that I believe our first responders should have and need. So whether you're on the law enforcement side and that, and we want to talk about like combatives and firearms training, they're getting, there are some places do a better job obviously than others, but you're there.

They're not getting nearly enough and haven't gotten nearly enough and aren't going to, unless some things change and they are on the firefighter side of things, it's exactly the same. You just mentioned it. These dudes are overworked. They are underpaid. They're underappreciated.

Remember we're going back to COVID, particularly on the law enforcement side of things, um, again, the George Floyd incidents or whatever, such a hard time to be a first responder, particularly law enforcement, but the disconnect really was, is there's very little emphasis put into somebody's health and wellness. They don't get enough sleep. They're not eating very well. You're right. They're overstressed.

They are, um, they're, uh, overworked and, and you're either not training at all, or you're extremely overtrained. Uh, people are overreaching. It was a combination of all of these things. So again, going back to that term I used earlier, sticky web, there was a lot to untangle here and I wanted to understand where the disconnect was.

And what I, what I really, I guess found out at the end of the day was unless you were a self starter or somebody that took a lot of personal responsibility for understanding all these things as a firefighter or a law enforcement officer. And that is like human physiology, right? Uh, uh, human performance, all that stuff. You were lost kind of, and you were just kind of given or taking what was given to you or what you might've been associated with or kind of going through the motions.

And even as dedicated as people were to their fitness, going to the gym every day, they could have been doing so much better. They just didn't know. They don't, they just didn't and don't know any better.

And I didn't see anybody really delivering, or at least talking about delivering to them any kind of programming or advice that to me made a lot of sense for, let's just say your average Joe, not again, your tier one operator, but the dude that shows up on the truck every day and, and, you know, works a 72 hour shift that might sleep six hours of that, you know, of those three days and somehow is trying to find some workouts done in there and get some nutrition in and then go home and be a

human to his, you know, deal with the traumas and all the stuff that he had to deal with for those, those few days and then go home and be a dad, right. And be a husband and all that stuff. There was, it was wild and it was shocking to me. I don't know why, but it was, it was shocking to me that there wasn't better for them than for guys like you. That's a, I mean, it's, it's so, it's the right way of saying this even.

Um, it's a perspective that I didn't understand the enormity of until I took a step back because I came through exercise physiology and sports science in London and then UF, I was an athlete, I was a martial artist, I was a coach.

And so I'm going in there and seeing the same kind of thing, but to understand what an average person is experiencing, you've got to strip all those perspectives that I have and you've got to walk in like, I'm trusting you fire service with, you know, teaching me how to be fit and we're in a fire academy. You know, they do a good job. They really do. I mean, you, you basically move the things that you're going to be moving as a firefighter for hours at a time in a fire academy.

It's like a bootcamp. You are going to get fitter and stronger. And there is an element of periodization and I'll credit higher Leo fired upon me, but I'm not going to be a firefighter. It higher Leo fire department, for example, I was hired with a bunch of people that were not certified. So they sent all those people to school and the other half of us had all our, our certs, they just beat the share of us for three months. And it was phenomenal.

But the PT we started Jim shorts and t-shirt, and then we had to add, I forget what the first piece of equipment was, but every, every week you added a piece, so by the time you were done, you're doing pull-ups and all kinds of stuff and full gear, breathing air, tank on your back. And so, you know, periodization, you're, you're adding load. But yeah, when you look at the resources for the first responder community, you know, again, there are some departments that do it very well.

There are some departments that actually hire strength and conditioning coaches or have, you know, physiotherapists on staff, but those are the anomalies. Most of the guys, they are at the mercy of, you know, and I've heard this, you know, the local football coach will come in and they're not, you know, they're teaching them all the wrong stuff, you know, and there's different ways of doing it.

Matt Wenning has a powerlifting perspective and he works with a lot of firefighters, works really well. Matt Chan's programming really good. Jeff Nichols, Navy SEAL strength and conditioning guru, another great one. So there are great programs out there, but I only know about them because of what I do in my journey, but you know, for the average police officer, paramedic firefighter, there isn't this great resource.

And even within our union, there's a peer fitness trainer, you know, I'm not saying it's absolutely terrible, but when I watched, you know, some of the stuff that they're teaching, they're not talking about push, pull, carry, you know, climb, you know, it's stretchy bands and Swiss balls a lot of the times. And it's like, that's not what we do. You know, you have to be strong, strong.

And, you know, someone just told me the other day about how that program has, I would argue devolve, like now we're just trying to get the firefighters moving. It's like, no, that's not what the fucking job is. It's not, you know, we're not going around the park and feed the ducks. We've got to go up a high rise with a hundred pounds of gear and go get someone out of a fucking burning building. Exactly.

So we've, we've just allowed this, this, you know, bar to lower and lower and lower and where we need to think. And this is what all of the, uh, you know, the SF and special operations guys and girls have told me like, no, no, we hold you to the same level as us. Like, why would you not be, you know, the fit is strongest version of yourself when lives are in your hands. So, you know, when going back to the programming, I completely agree like with, there should be, you know, uh, a spectrum.

So if you're a triathlete, you don't need to focus so much on your endurance, but it's probably going to be your strength. If you're the, the powerlifting firefighter. Okay. Well then we got to work on your muscular, um, you know, endurance and that kind of thing, everyone's got their thing. So it's not one size fits all, but the principles of how we're exercising and then the importance of the rest and recovery.

I mean, I talk about giving our firefighters more days off in between shifts all the time, because you look at the sporting world, there isn't an athlete on any podium anywhere on the planet that doesn't sleep every third day. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you, you hit a lot of things there. I think that was what was shocking to me was trying to, it was understanding this not being from that world or that community or those communities for that, for that matter.

Also being faced with if you're in one of those communities, being faced with your reality that you're not very fit and that if you did adopt something, you're going to be exposed. And this was, I was seeing this like, say in firearms training, standing next to a guy in firearms, in a firearms training line or a few, few people that were law enforcement officers, and I had had a couple of months worth of training under my belt.

And I am out by far out shooting, you know, these, these, these people that are to my left and right now, not to take anything away from them. They were there on their own time and their own dime doing that. And they had, they had also whatever stuff, their ego down or, or, or, or whatever down enough to be there to actually take that class, right. And go, I want to get better. And I recognize I'm not good enough. I want to be better.

And there's other people here that don't wear a badge and carry a gun every day. And they're way better than me. Same on the field. They're way better than me, same on the fitness side in recognizing like number one, you have a lot of things to fucking do as a firefighter or as a law enforcement. There's a lot of stuff to know. It gets described a lot of times as like a pie chart, right? Like, and you have all the things you need to know. You need to understand fire science.

You need to understand structure. You need to structures. You need to understand. I don't know. Uh, a lot of the engineering and math that goes into, you know, how much water, what size hose, all this is all of these things that go into this. Then there's fitness, then there's health, right. Or wellness piece. And then I, they're combined, but they're, they're different things. Where do I spend my time? Right.

In the, in that pie chart, um, and still be able to do the job and how much information or education do I have about all of those things to help me be better at those particular pieces of that pie. And fitness is one of those things, which is oftentimes very generalized. And you, you kind of, you default to the most fit person in the, in the firehouse or the most, you know, the person that gets assigned, you know, that thing. And it doesn't really matter what their level of knowledge is.

You happen to be in a much different situation than probably 90% or more of the, of the other guys that you work with. You have a background, so I'm sure they default to you and they come to you when they, when they have questions and you're probably very willing to help them, which is great, but there's nothing standardized.

There's nothing structured and there is no comprehension of all the things that you just mentioned with regard to how much are you sleeping, how much you're eating or the opposite of that, how much aren't you eating or how much aren't you sleeping and how can is what's more important right now, getting you more sleep or doing the wad that the CrossFit guy firefighter who's in charge of the, the fitness programming at the firehouse put on the wall for today.

How do you approach all of these things? There is going back to the periodization piece and you mentioned some of my most favorite people out there, Matt Wenning is a legend and I love, I love Jeff Nichols and his wife out there. They're, they're some of my favorite people as well. And here's the thing, a lot more people probably know about Matt Wenning than than they know about Jeff Nichols. Right.

And the difference between those two are not to take anything away from Wenning because the guy is a literal genius, he's been around the block a few times, but you talk about having a culturally competent, right?

Culturally and competent person putting this program together for that very specific audience, we're talking two different things now, somebody that's actually been through it or understands it at a much deeper level and interacts with individuals that do this job all day, every day, whatever it is, and applying the programming specific to that person, to their needs and what their job requirements are based on a whole slew of things, health history, fitness

history, um, uh, you know, recovery, you can call it recovery scores, you know, things like that. How are we basing this programming? This is all lost and it's not impossible. And it doesn't have to, it's very complex, but it doesn't have to be over complicated if there was a want to put it into place or put it into, you know, put it into these departments or put it into the regular training programs.

If they put as much effort into doing it on the daily or on the weekly after they graduated the Academy, which you just explained was pretty well put together if you just put it out there. And I believe there needs to be some level of a requirement. There has to be the carrot and the stick. So, you know, like you can't just say you have to run the mile and do this many pull-ups and this many sit-ups. And if you, if you don't, you lose your job or you lose pay or whatever else.

You have to give them away. And what about a reward system? You know, to keep people wanting to train, you know, to do these things. So there's all these missing pieces to, to, to providing a quality product, um, and a quality, uh, a way for, for, for folks like you and others to do this in a way that makes sense, that doesn't leave them on an Island all by themselves or doesn't leave them looking at that piece of pie, just going, I just have too many other things to do.

I can't worry about this. Um, I'll just go down and pay my $29. 999 a month or whatever my $19 a month at the fitness 19. And, you know, I'll go a couple of days a week and we'll call it good. Cause that's what I saw happening. You know, that's what I, that's what I saw when I got involved in. I'm like, man, major missing piece that could mean the difference between life and death, not just of you, the officer or the firefighter, but of my mother or me, if I got a call because I need help.

And that was, I was very challenged by that and it, and it really resonated with me. And I felt a calling to at least try to help and promote the message. And now I'm getting up on a soapbox. Sorry about that, man. No, no, no, no problem. I like soap boxes. Um, well, just one more kind of perspective then, and we'll go to some closing questions. You've worked with people from all walks of life. Is there a profession that stands out where they seem to have got that balance, right?

That the wellness of the employee and, and, or physical performance, if that fits that particular profession was valued in a way that maybe police and fire have kind of dropped the ball on. Oh gosh. I think, man, that is a really great question. Interestingly, and I'll put it this way, but I'll say it was valued, but the intention was weird, believe it or not. And that is because my deep level experience here in the Silicon Valley and the tech world, and let me explain. Very competitive here.

When you think about like, I can walk out the door and within five minutes I can hit Apple, I can hit Google, I can hit eBay, I can hit Metta, I can hit all these, these made Adobe. I can literally throw a rock and hit. Um, um, my point of this is, it's very competitive. The tech world is very competitive. And as a result, uh, they were these major businesses or major companies were trying to put together basically campuses and, and, and, and, and, and put together basically campuses that.

At least gave the impression that they really cared about all of this stuff, right? For their employees. And these were people that didn't have a physical requirement to perform their job. But on site, they had a gym, they had a wellness center. And in that gym, we're talking top notch had all the latest and greatest, right? They all had their chiropractor in there or chiropractors. They had physical therapists in there.

They had nutritionists in there or nutrition coaches or registered dietitians. They had a recovery center, you know, in some cases, cryotherapy, um, massage, um, acupuncture things all on site or all at least excess, uh, having, um, being very accessible to them or partnered with places that provided this, this, these services for their employees that were either fully paid for or subsidized personal trainers on, on site. Right. Um, and also like these relaxation rooms in some cases, right?

Where you could go, they were, the goal was to get them on campus or get them to the business and keep them there and making them feel like they were valued, uh, at a lot of levels. Now there wasn't a lot of education, I think that went into like, why you should you all use all these things, much like there should be more education for firefighters and, and, uh, and law enforcement officers was specific to why, how all these things fit in and why you should do them.

But they didn't, they did an outstanding job of at least from the outside, looking in, if you wanted help or you wanted these amenities, you wanted these services, they were all right there for you. Um, and to me, and you mentioned this earlier, there are departments that, and there are anomalies and I know a couple of them actually there in Florida. I think if you go up and talk to your buddies up there in Fort Lauderdale from, or yeah, from where you are, you still at Hylia.

Is that where you are? Uh, not anymore now. I live up in Ocala now, but I will guess. So I know, I know Lauderdale is looking to, to really improve their situation there. Um, you know, Miami date, I think is the sheriff's officer is really look, really improving their situation where they're starting to bring these things in.

Um, and so I guess my point is, is like very interesting that the opposite, some of the most unhealthy, uh, least connected people to their health and fitness in the same way that you might be connected to yours, got the most amount of help to yours, got the most amount of resources and what it re what it really boils down to is money and, uh, the desire to retain people, uh, once they put all the money and effort into recruiting and hiring them, uh, which is a whole other story

in terms of that, how, how that, that whole business works. It's very, very competitive, but yeah, that's if I had to, I'd, nobody's ever asked, asked me that question before. Um, and that's, so that's certainly the first time I've ever articulated that. And I'm just in my own mind, kind of blown right now that that's the case. Well, I actually got to see it a little bit.

I went to London last year, um, with my sons last year, it was just over a year ago, um, and the, one of the women who was heading up the firefighters charity at the time, her son worked for Google. So we got to go to Google and it was beautiful. We stood on the top of the, the terrace and you got to see the city of London from whatever it was, six, seven stories up and, but yeah, we saw the gym, you know, the, the whole cafeteria was free, you know, and they were, they had chefs.

They were making real healthy food. It wasn't health food. It was healthy food. You know, I think you, you could get, you know, french fries and things, but that was just a tiny part of this massive menu. Um, you know, and there was that culture and, you know, he didn't have to be there at a certain time and leave at a certain time, there was flexibility and trust. But you just hit on something.

I don't even know if you realize how valid that point was at the moment, but when you show employees that you value them, that increases, um, uh, recruitment, recruitment and retention. Yeah. So we have a massive hiring crisis at or recruitment crisis in the first responder professions at the moment. And, you know, when I talk about solutions, people are like, well, we can't even hire people now.

I'm like, but this is why you can't hire people now because you're asking the same people to work the same amount of hours when the calls and the types of calls have grown exponentially. And then people have started to leave because you, you know, you fired them because of vaccines or you didn't support them when someone said that every police officer is racist.

Yep. And now there's even less people and now who are left, having to run even more calls and by the way, we're, you know, they're, they're retiring medically. They're getting cancer. They're overdosing, they're taking their own lives. And this isn't an old doom and gloom thing, but this is like, I always said this, how many people need to die before you start fucking paying attention? Like, give me a body count. We'll, we'll finish off the last whatever, and then we can start fixing it.

You know, but if you look at the corporate world and people say, oh, the fire service, like a business, I couldn't disagree more. It's not a fucking business. It's a service, but okay, let's just play ball for a second. Your model is the Indonesian sweatshirt. Why are you ignoring the Google, Apple, Adobe Virgin that are investing in their people?

So this is what the fire service and law enforcement and dispatch and, you know, the EMS world need to understand is that in 2024, a young potential candidate can look on the internet and see everything about the fire service. They can see the amazing job that it actually is, but they also can see the working environment. They can see the impact on marriages. They can hear about the toxic leadership.

They can hear about the, the firefighters that were held, lauded as heroes one minute without PPE and then fired a year later because they didn't have a vaccine. They can read all of that. So this is the environment that we're in. And that is why people are not applying like they used to, because I, I tested against a thousand people to work in California and Anaheim, a thousand, and they were all resumes like this thing. So that was only, you know, 15 years ago.

So this is such an important point. If you want to talk about the fire service being like a business, then look at the business world, the leaders in those business and look at how they are treating their people. The irony in this for me is, is that in both of these, whether you're talking about the fire service or you're talking about law enforcement, primarily decisions are made based on data. And it's, you know, does this work out? Like what are these numbers say?

And these are how decisions are made. These are how check or checks are written. And this is how people, you know, things are presented in front of city council. And here's what we know. Like you touched on one that's again, when I said the, the podcast has, um, exposed me to a whole new level of things on, on, on many, many different levels, I guess that's redundant. But one of the things is mental and emotional health and suicide prevention.

And so going back to retention and recruitment, recruitment, hiring and retention, one of those numbers that's come up recently for me on some of the podcasts that I've done is that more law enforcement officers died by their own hands last year than in, and then in work related deaths. That's shootings, stabbings, vehicle accidents, and so on. So, you know, these, these stabbing vehicles accidents, uh, you name it.

Uh, or anything else that piece of data again, to your point is the same piece of data that a young, you know, maybe aspiring firefighter or law enforcement officer sees it's the exact same piece of data that a chief or that a city council person or a mayor or a governor or whatever sees over here. And they're both making the same decision. the potential law enforcement officer, I'm not doing that job then. I'm not even, no way, that's not, I'm not doing that.

And that the guy on the other end, I don't know, the city council person was, oh, I'm not gonna pay attention to that. Like we're not gonna do anything except for tick a box, which is, hey, we have an EAP program, you know? And so we can say that we've done something. So again, going back to those layers of liability I was mentioning earlier, as long as we can say we did something, we're good. Yet they sit here and they complain that they can't hire enough people and that that's a money problem.

I don't think it's a money problem, right? It's not a money problem. It's not a financial problem at all. This is a quality of life problem. And you're looking at way different things than what's really happening on the inside. Again, so going back to like being data driven and how we're making decisions, you know, looking at why you can't hire people. I think the other part is, is like on the law enforcement side, you have to empower these guys to do the job that they signed up for.

Like going back to, you know, the, you know, what they can actually get accomplished while they're out there and why would they wanna keep coming to work every day if they arrest somebody because a small business owner had their business broken into or whatever, they take them to jail and that guy's right back out on the street. And then they're called to arrest the same guy again, back to the fire department. How many times can you go pick up the fentanyl overdose person that's done that?

However many times, take them to the hospital or whatever it is that you're gonna do or leave them there now. Like now we're just giving them, we're not even taking them in. We're giving them Narcan and we're walking away. Like at what point do you feel like you're not getting, you're not even being valuable. You can't even do your job. These are things that are, to your point, are public.

These are the things that I'm challenged when I talk to 15 year veterans on either side of the, you know, the first responder community and those dispatchers as well. And even like people, you know, nurses and that are working in the emergency room that are just going, I don't know how much longer I can do this for. And to your point, treating it like a business versus treating it like a service with a business mind, like an Apple or a Google or whatever else.

Something I've been extraordinarily passionate about and I try to bring light to with different guests on the show and that there are solutions for people that are in this, having these challenges and dealing with these that are in the professions, dealing with these things that are in the professions now, to kind of deal with some of the things they wrestle with in their head so that they're not negative and they're not bitter and they're not depressed and, you know,

they're not seeking, you know, unproductive behaviors and risky behaviors and things like that. But again, those messages are continuing to come out. And to your point, like somebody that's maybe thinking about doing this is looking at that guy and, no, thanks, man, I'm good. Yeah, I'll choose something else. Sounds better. Maybe I should go into computer engineering or, you know, computer information systems and go apply at Apple.

Yeah. Well, even with the money side, I've had a few guests on now that have shifted from what we call a 24-48, which is 24 hours straight and then you have a 48-hour period off, to a 24-72. So they put an extra 24, which brings it down to a 42-hour work week. Basically the same as everyone else works. It's not below any standard, but these are the people that are waking up at 3 a.m. to come get your kid.

But the reason behind it, the people on the show obviously care about their men and women, but the reason why it was approved is because they realized how much money they were wasting working their first responders the way they do.

And this is the false economy element to, again, you beat your chest and talk about being a business where you've got no economic sense whatsoever, because medical retirements, workman's comp claims, overtime covering all these vacant spots, lawsuits because we make mistakes because we're so tired, you're bleeding millions and millions, probably hundreds of millions in large, large counties and cities. You take some of that money, you actually stem the leak upstream.

You give resources, you have enough staffing now because people want to work for you because you fixed it. You bring in coaches, you have, remove barriers to entry for mental health counseling. You provide high-level training when it comes to combatives and firearms so that arguably you are less likely to ever draw a weapon. And therefore, now you save your city or county millions of dollars, but it takes courage as a leader.

And that's where back to our 2020 conversation, that is the problem because there are people wearing bugles on shirts in the fire service that have no fucking balls. And all these funerals don't even make them raise their head. So until we fix that problem and replace the cowards with real leaders, then our men and women are still gonna be put into the ground. I couldn't agree with you more and amen to that. It really is about humans, it is about people.

And that's going back, you were asking about the training and the disconnect and who these people were. They're just dudes. They're just dudes and chicks that are out there doing a job right at the end of the day. Yet they're being expected to perform at like a robotic level. And then they're being chastised or being, yeah, they're being put down because they are acting like robots, they seemingly don't care. Or they're seemingly just showing up, punching in and punching out. It fries me man.

And it doesn't have to be like that. And again, going back, it just takes one or two leaders to turn the tide. And you mentioned it, it's courage. It's saying what nobody wants to hear. It's saying, you know what, we fucked up and we can do better. And here's the things that we need to start doing. And here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna start ending some of these relationships with people that have been stifling the process. You're fired. We're not gonna vote for you. We're not gonna elect you.

We're not gonna appoint people that go against what we're trying to get done. It's really that simple. I understand it takes a long time to go about doing that. It really just takes the right person to do that. And man, I live in a city where it just seemingly, it's the same music being played by the same people over and over and over again.

It's very frustrating for me to watch, which is why I'm such an advocate for all the things that we can do to support our first responders in whatever way that is, whether that's raising funds for training, whether that's offering services to folks within those communities to help them be healthier, be better, to go to events and help promote events, to raise awareness for whatever it is that they're having to be, whether that's mental health, whether that's fundraising for equipment.

For the families, for whatever it happens to be. And I only say this because that's what I can do. That's where I don't wear the uniform. I'm never gonna have any idea what it's like to do that on a daily basis. I care, but I don't in the sense that it doesn't matter. All I know is that this is where the gap is and this is where I feel like I might be able to help.

So until somebody tells me to stop doing this, I'm not gonna be able to help, so until somebody tells me to stop or that I'm not helping, I'm just gonna keep doing it. Absolutely, it goes back to that mental shit that we talked about earlier. Well, I wanna throw some quick closing questions at you so I can be mindful of your time. The first one I'd love to ask, is there a book or are there books that you love to recommend? It can be related to our discussion today or completely unrelated.

Oh, gosh. Yeah, I mean, so there's, it's called Tribe and the author's name just escaped me. Sebastian Junger. Yeah, Sebastian Junger. Just one. Yeah, it's the one. Yeah, it's right up here on my shelf. Actually, I should've looked. I love that book for a lot of reasons, but it talks about community. It obviously talks about Tribe and maybe not in the way that most people think about it. And I really love the way he wrote it. I really love the way he wrote that book.

And I encourage people, like if you're not one to sit down and read, listen to it, because he narrates it. Awesome book about the concept of how people feel when they're really attached to a community, when they're truly part of a community versus the false narrative of like we talk about community and the lengths that people will go to protect it and to serve it.

And the bigger takeaway for me on that was that the biggest thing or the biggest violation you could ever make is to, or violate the community is to take away from it without giving back. And I think it's a short read. I think everybody should read it. I think it's super relevant. 100%. Yeah, he's been on the show several times. And I actually got to get him back on because he had a near death experience about a year ago and he's written a new book coming out in May about that. I had no idea.

Yeah, yeah, he almost bled out. But circling back to what we were talking about with the young athletes, what he does beautifully is talk about the identity piece too. And if all you've visualized yourself as I am a Marine and he has these incredible warriors that he was embedded with and they were cohesive, even though they were being shot at, it was after, it was when they felt like they were outside the tribe, a lot of them struggled. Yep, yep.

Yeah, I think that's the, I talked to a lot of folks that are ex-military and if there's a thing that they struggle with, it's that. It's that identity and trying to find their way after spending 15 years doing a very specific job with the same 16, 18, whatever guys, and not having that and struggling to find purpose, which is really the, they don't have a why. They don't know what their why is. And they, it's a tough place for people to be. That book speaks specifically to that.

I had no idea he'd been on the show a couple of times. I have to go back and find those episodes. Yeah, actually I repost, did I? I think I reposted my first one with him as a bonus not too long ago, so it might be kind of near the top, but. Okay, good. He's an amazing guy. All right, well then the next question, is there a movie and or a documentary that you love? Geez, I don't, honestly, I don't watch a lot of stuff anymore. I don't have, if I go back, I don't know, I'm stumped on this one.

Okay, yeah, so, Last of the Mohicans. If you've seen that one, it's a classic. Going back to Tribe and what people will fight for. There's a bit of a love story in there.

That's not really the point for me, but kind of the, I guess the antagonist and protagonist in that movie, I think it's actually a very strong metaphor for kind of where we are in our country right now and fighting for what we believe in, those that are, and those that are just doing the job for somebody else and the conflicts that exist when it really basically boils down to some really basic things. But I love that movie, it's pretty violent.

So be prepared, strap your, maybe it's not suitable for the kids, but a great movie. I think it teaches a lot of lessons and some outstanding actors in that one too. Yeah, phenomenal. I actually climbed Chimney Rock, I think they call it, in North Carolina. I haven't been, it's on the bucket list. I gotta get out there and do it, yeah. Yeah, absolutely stunning.

All right, well then the next question, is there a person that you'd recommend to come on this podcast as a guest to speak to the first responders, military and associated professions of the world? I, yeah, I got a few. I know you've already had, you've already had Greg Groganon, who's a good friend of mine from the Overwatch Collective. Yes. Here, he's currently working with Travis Gribble, and I don't know if Travis has been on your show.

Travis is my arena on Instagram, if you go to the social media stuff. He has a very compelling story. He's a former law enforcement officer, SWAT officer, went through his own mental health, emotional health struggles. He has a very compelling story. And I think that the story in and of itself is more about him finding answers to, to get out of the darkness, for lack of a better term. I highly recommend Travis on that end of things. He's a very good, he's a very good guest.

He's very good at getting the point across. And I think a lot of people could relate to him, not just those that are, when you talk about the community, the wives, the kids, the husbands, the moms, the dads of first responders, I think it could take a lot away from Travis's story and the things he's bringing to the table. Brilliant. Yeah, I will definitely get him on. I was following him and you know, I'll be completely honest, because my brain is literally like a colander.

I was, he was coming up on my feet and I'm like, why do I know him? Because I'm following him, but I couldn't put two and two together. And now I know, because I think you'd mentioned him before as well, but also like you said, the Overwatch Collective. So it makes sense now. So I will definitely reach out to him. So thank you. Yep. All right, well, in the very last question, before we make sure everyone knows where to find you, what do you do to decompress? Couple of things.

First off, getting outside is my, you know, nature is sort of my therapy. Whenever I can, I live in the concrete jungle. So, you know, getting outside and away from people and the city is important for me. And that can mean a lot of things. One of the things I'm very fond of and passionate about is shooting.

I just spent a couple of, I just spent an entire week sort of doing some work with the podcast, but traveled to a couple of places to do some distance shooting, which takes you outside and takes you out into the great wide open. I was in Georgia for some of this with some good friends and I was out in Reno, Nevada for some other stuff. You know, on the daily, because I do live in the city and I do work, it's very metropolitan here and so forth.

My thing is every night I go for a walk and I take the dog, take my dog, Rue, who's like my best bud, and we go out and we do a few miles just through the neighborhoods. I'll strap on a podcast sometimes, I will just talk to my friends, just try to catch up, check in on people. Sometimes they'll be checking on me. And sometimes just listening to music, but it's just getting away and kind of down regulating because my mind is always going.

And so, yeah, it's just getting outside and going for a walk, getting some fresh air. And sometimes it's like habit stacking, trying to listen to a podcast, get a little education or whatever. But that's it. And then on the side, going back to the nature, being with the family and just sharing time, doing stuff that's traveling. We have a travel van. The process of getting a new one, it's a long story, but the homeless encampment next door burned my other one down.

Yeah, so that took me out of the getting out, or that took the getting out easily away from us. So we're looking forward to restoring that, but getting away with the family and just hanging out and enjoying one another's company and experiencing new things. There's an irony to a homeless person burning down a place that could be. Isn't it though? I gotta tell you, I got lots of feelings about that. Yeah, it's ironic, that is for sure. Yeah, all right.

Well, then firstly, your podcast is Iron Sites podcast. So where can people find that? Yeah, super easy. You can find us on all of the major platforms. So Apple iTunes, you can find us on Spotify. The Instagram is at iron sites podcast, super simple. Or the website is iron size podcast.com. Super easy to find us. We're most active on the Instagram. You'll see us post lots of stuff there.

If you wanna get a feel for kinda what our guests are, who they are, who our guests are, the kind of subject matter we cover, that's a pretty good spot to go. The other thing is the gym is red.fitness. It's red.fitness. So you see a lot of the health and fitness podcast stuff that we do on Iron Sites shows up there on the red.fitness page on Instagram. So that's where we're most active. You can find us there. Beautiful, and what about red.fitness, the website?

Yeah, so that's red.fitness.net, but I encourage people to just go to RDF train online.com. So as in RDF red.fitness, RDF train online.com. It'll take you right to the site. You can find out more about the stuff that we do, both in studio and then our self-guided programs as well as our online membership and our remote personal training or virtual personal training programs. Brilliant. Well, Scott, I wanna thank you so much. It's been an amazing conversation.

We've gone all over the place today, which is my favorite way of having a conversation. So I wanna thank you so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today. I appreciate you. I'm honored to be here. It was honored when we got connected. Thanks, James. I had a lot of fun. Thanks for keeping me on track and bringing it back. I'll see you next time.