A lot of people do it for the money. We did it for something we wanted.

You have the Nelk boys, you have a YouTube channel. You got a podcast, you got a seltzer.

If you have a great product, the job is easy.

You gotta put, like, 10,000 of these cases. Day one, this is gonna fly like absolutely impossible. Day one, everything sold out.

We have the UFC, Dana.

Even the Snoop partnership was incredible, because this year we'll do about 3 million cases. We've done over 450 of them.

400 and meetups. Yeah, we'll send it three to 4.

Million listens a month when we make a product. What would Gary say? Can we drink this with Gary? I think one of the best things you say is ultimate human.

Hey, guys. Welcome back to the Ultimate Human podcast, where we go down the road of everything, antiaging, longevity, biohacking, and everything in between. I'm so pumped for today. I'm actually still laughing from the pre podcast, before the cameras started rolling. I've got two of my closest friends and just amazing human beings on the podcast today. The Shahidi brothers, co founders of the Shots podcast network, the Nelk Boys. The very popular YouTube channel, the Nelk Boys, and maybe most importantly, happy dad Seltzer. These guys are just icons in the industry. They're great human beings. I've gotten to know themselves and their families pretty intimately over the last two and a half years. We've had an amazing journey together, health journey together, which I'd love to go into. They've built some iconic brands, and they are social media icons and ecommerce experts. And I want to go down the road of ecommerce and social media today with these guys, as well as health and wellness. But welcome to the podcast.

Thank you.

Thank you. We're in the beautiful podcast. I've only done one.

You've only done one. So this is the second one.

The second one.

And this is maybe your.

I do maybe two or three a year. I try to be selective, but I think this one, of course. Congratulations on everything. Thank you. I think Patrick Bette, David. I'm going to be doing something with him.

Oh, you are? I love Patrick bet David.

Yeah, dude. I love that guy. He should come on here.

Yeah. Patrick, if you're listening, you're welcome on my podcast. I'd love to be on yours, too. You're an ultimate human. So I'd love to interview.

Before we get started, let's get Patrick at David locked in, because that's what I love to do.

I love to book, I love these guys. No grass growing under their feet. Let's just get him on the phone. I don't know if he was always everywhere or if I just started seeing him, but, dude, that guy is so viral right now.

I watch him every day before I go to bed when I leave work because he has so many different formats.

I was actually just watching him on Brad Davis. Is he on there?

Pat? Hey, I got to introduce you to someone real quick, and you guys got to get to know each other. Go on each other's podcasts. One sec.

Yo, Patrick. Bette. David.

How are you, brother?

How are you, man?

Great, man.

How are you? You're everywhere.

I was just saying that on the podcast about you, I'm like, this guy's everywhere. I love your content, man. I love your perspective, love your message.

I look forward to us breaking bread here soon together.

Maybe we'll do a podcast together. Amen. I'm in Miami, so anytime you're in Miami, we'll get together. We can shoot there. Where are you out of? Fort Lauderdale. If you're ever out there, we'll show.

You our entire operations, everything.

We'll do something together.

Love it, brother. Love your content, man. Keep up the great work.

Thank you.

Thank you. Take care, guys.

All right. Love you, bro. Bye bye.

How many other people are we going to talk about? Let's get Dana white on the phone.

Well, that's what I do. I think, obviously, we wear many hats, but I think one of the most fun things I do is help book guests on podcasts, and I think that's what our network is pretty. Our network is pretty fun and powerful. But I think of the amount of guests that come through full, send a safe place pivot. One night with Steiny.

I've had nights with Steiny. I almost had a night with you guys last night. I bailed on you at about 130 in the morning.

Sage kept up with. I live Las Vegas.

I know.

By the way, how beautiful is this hotel? Blue Las Vegas. Jeff Sofer. Jeff Sofer to Brad Muffin. Dave Grupman.

Dave Grupman, everybody. Dude, they really pulled it. Mean. So we've been to poppy steak. We've been to know. I just finished. My fingers are still white. If you can see those from the coal plunge this morning. They got amazing spa.

Yeah, the spa's insane. The gym's crazy.

Incredible gym. It's really over the top. The grand opening. Justin Timberlake was amazing, guys. Excellent job, man. Jeff. So for.

Yeah, well, actually, what's crazy is Jeff and Dave and all them the found blue Miami was the first. We call it on premise. In the alcohol industry, it's like a grocery store versus like a property. They were the first account to carry Happy down Florida when we launched.

Wow. Happy dad Seltzer.

Yeah, happy dad Seltzer.

So let's talk a little bit about know for the folks on my podcast that are not familiar with these mean they have an iconic Seltzer brand. I mean, they've broken into so many know your merch is killing it. Talk a little bit about the genesis of the company. I know you came from the entertainment and talent management industry. You guys have managed some massive talent. Justin Bieber.

Justin was more of a partner of ours, and he's actually a partner in the Shots podcast network.

Oh, right on.

Yeah. Since 2000.

It's been a while. I think the one thing that we've done, and we're really happy that you're doing this, and we're always happy to help you, is the important thing we've done is we built this network on YouTube, and we've been not dependent on, you know, being dependent on advertising. You're seeing it with a lot of different things. And I think there's been some hot topics when Theo and had Dana white on, and obviously Elon Musk talking about advertisers on X. Oh, God, Theo, Dana.

White podcast was hilarious.

Oh, my God.

That one took me to my knee. Yeah, please watch that.

If you haven't watched it, you got.

To go back and watch it.

Two of the best people on the planet together.

My mind blew up. But I think it's one thing that we've learned is, like, advertisers are not loyal, advertisers are not going to pay you what you won't ever understand your know, very few advertisers have vision. And we've seen know for a long know. We saw that a long time ago when we worked with Mayweather. We worked with Floyd Mayweather. And he had a hard time getting endorsements as one of the greatest boxers. And yeah, he had a hard time.

Getting.

I mean, we'd be talking about massive fights versus Miguel Cotto and all these other fights, even up to, leading up to Manny Pacquiao. And it's like he would get like six figure offers and people just didn't really understand. They would see the bad side and the negative side of things and not necessarily the positive and get stuck on one tweet or one Instagram post. So that's when we actually built the money team brand with him.

How did you get around that we.

Just built our own company with him. We just went in and we built our own company. And that's, I think now what's led to what we have today is building our own brands around our podcast, starting with Nelk and Folson is we built happy dad together with them. Because advertisers have always been terrified of working with Nelk. There's a select few really controversial. Controversial. They go on a, you know, you saw Dana and Theo talking about, it's like they tell you, hey, take this part out, the content. Take this. Don't say this. Don't say that. Don't hang with Trump.

Take this person off your to. I have to actually give you a major shout out because I have no social media experience. I didn't have any podcast experience before I started the podcast. I just wanted to get the message out. And I was so passionate about the message and so intentional about the message. I started this podcast platform by the grace of God. It shot to the top of the charts on the health and wellness space. And at the same time, I hired these people to help me build this TikTok channel, and the content really starts going viral. And all of a sudden, I realized I kind of sold my soul to the devil. I had a media partner, and all of a sudden, they were like, hey, you have to do this ad read for this energy drink. You got to do this ad read for this multivitamin. You have to do this ad read for this new CBD gummy. I go, I don't believe in any of these things. It's got anticobalamin in. It's got 300 milligrams of caffeine. It's got folic acid. The CD meaty gummy has no research behind it. It's all sugar.

I was like, I don't want their money. Send their money back. Oh, no. You got a contract. You have to sign this. And I said, I'm not going to take 25 years of research and experience and get to the top of the mountain and then just become a prostitute, you know what I mean? And just sell out to any brand that would sponsor me. And you were super instrumental in helping me get back my TikTok channel and get back my podcast. Take 100% ownership of it back.

So that now I dropped hammering, by.

The way, looks like a nice. I was copied on those emails. I was like, whoa. Every couple of times a year, John comes in hard, and I'm like, oh, what this?

Pardon my French. We'll cut that out. But he was like, man, we're going to help you get this back. And it's such a blessing now, because I will not do an ad read on a podcast for a product or service that I do not personally use in my life on a daily basis or that I have personal experience. I've tested it. I would back it. So not for any price, right? You cannot pay your way onto my platform because I loathe the people that have gone out and built this massive amount of trust and confidence in their audience. And then they flip the script and they just become a feeder for the highest bidder.

Yeah, I think so. That's funny, because even going back to happy dad, when we started, we met Kyle. We had dinner the first night, and we're like, hey, let's go do a product together, right? And build something together.

This is before merch, before anything, before all that.

Yeah, where's Merch? But it was those that get the full send merch going on. But what was important for us, and this is like, you see how much we love the brand, right? We drink it all the time, but we will never, ever release anything that we, all of us, me, John, Kyle, Steve, all of us, love. So flavor, a product and everything, it's so.

Are. We're everywhere all of a sudden, especially a happy dad. And that's not an easy industry to break.

No, it's the hardest industry on a planet. We have prohibition laws and stuff that we have to follow in states, and it's very complicated business. But at the end of the day, we are obsessed with the brand, and we will never release anything that we don't like. So we have every flavor we've had. The four of us, me, John, kyle, steve, all have to love it, right?

Has to be ten out of ten out of ten.

Yeah. All that stuff. A lot of people do it for the money. We did it for something we wanted, right? And we wanted that. And listen, we all drink alcohol, so why don't we make the best version for us and then eventually gets out to everybody else?

I was with shahab from symbiotica.

Love that brand by the.

Yeah, yeah, I've got some.

I don't just endorse my own brand. If I see good people doing good things with real ingredients, I'm happy to give them a shout out, support their symbiotica is a shout out.

I don't travel without this, literally. Renee. Renee will pack these for me. And so, like, hey, just make sure you have a little bit of everything. So I got the glutathione oh, yeah.

I take these every day.

I'm fire one of those up right now.

Wait, but where I'm getting at with this is I said this to shahab, and it just clicked with me yesterday. And I think with what you have built, what we have built, what he has built, what Dana white has built. If you have a great product, the job is easy.

I agree.

It's really easy to market a great product. It's really easy.

But I think the challenge in the marketplace for the consumer is how do I discern between a great product and really good marketing? Because there's some really shit products that have great marketing behind them.

They don't last, though. I don't want to name a couple.

But there's some greater products out there.

I think it's the realness and honesty. I think people are smart enough that hopefully that they could catch onto it. So if you look at Dana, you, us, even the way even Kyle does things, people can tell that we genuinely care. We want it.

Right? Yeah.

And right now, I think in the world, there's so much noise that they see us from brand. Yeah. It takes time, right? I mean, I'm 40 now. A lot of people talk about, like, wow, how do you do this? I was like, what's the thing? Like, 10,000 hours? You get really good at something.

Yeah.

I was like, I got, like, 25,000. And then we just finally hit our mode. But at the end of the day, it's about being honest and caring. And you see that even, like, dana's press conferences.

Yeah, well, Dana's the most loyal human.

Being on the planet ever.

I mean, I can't even.

I got funniest story I heard the other day. I met this artist, and he was telling me that, I don't know. This is so funny to me. He told me that he had painted Trump as a picture, and Dana got wind of it or something and commissioned the artist. And the artist actually knew trump somehow. So he went to Mar a Lago, and he said, hey, Dana White commissioned me for this painting. Do you mind signing it? And he looks at him, he goes, you're not going to charge him more just because I signed it. Are like, that's how sharp the man is.

You know why? Because I think Trump is as loyal to Dana as he is to him. I mean, Dana's been insanely loyal to know he gets accused a lot of times of getting scammed, know me having paid him. I'm like, do you guys understand how much money I would have to pay him to move.

He does not care about money at all.

None. And he's very real, very loyal. Like, sometimes I wake up in the morning and I open my instagram, and Dana White's been on my instagram hammering trolls all night. You juice monkey, you better take that post down. Where are your results? Breakfast. The realest guy, and I just so deeply appreciate him. He's done more for my career than probably.

We're very grateful.

That's, like, God loyal to your happy dad.

If you Wikipedia loyalty, it's probably Dana White's photo on there.

There's a flip side to that, too, though. If you get on the other side of.

No, no. You don't ever want to go on that side.

No.

I always like. Since this is health and wellness, longevity anti aging podcast, I always like to bring the health component into it, because what you guys have done is so iconic. But we've had a journey for the last two years behind the scenes, and if you don't mind, I've got some. No, I'd love data here, because I think we started when you were 39 and you were 40. You're 42.

When I saw you, Sam was like 37. 37. It was like two and a half years. I think that's interesting. One, because it was before everything exploded on everybody. And I had Covid twice in one year. Strep throw. My system was shot. And I met Madison.

Even had shoulder issues.

Yeah. So I had torn rotator cuffs on both of my shoulders from old injuries from triathlons and rugby and all that stuff. But I never wanted to do surgery. I was like, I don't want to get cut. I knew. So I just lived with just. I couldn't even turn a light, was. I was almost like, having, like, a dead shoulder.

Right.

So whatever.

I just kind of gave up on that. Obviously, my system was completely shot. And then met Madison through. Yeah, it was just an ivy in Miami, and I was like. And she was just explaining insane things. I was like, wait a minute. I didn't even meet your dad.

Yeah.

I'd love for you to just break down the blood work because it was wild.

Feel free to tear me up, because I know it was probably the worst result.

Well, I think there's so many people that are listening that were or are where you were, and part of what I really like to do, I want to get information out there that inspires people to make a transformation, because 100%, I'm partnered with Grant cardone and ten x health. And I remember that he told me one day. He's like, if people don't make a transformation, if they don't take action, you really haven't done anything. You've entertained them, you've educated them. But if you actually don't cause them to actually take action, to do something about it, you haven't helped anybody. And so just getting your message out there isn't good enough. You have to get a message out there that inspires people to take action. And so by having people on the podcast and having them just viscerally talk about their journey, and where was I? Where am I now? And how has my health change impacted all of the other aspects of my life? Like what's going on my relationships, what's going on my company, what's going on with my sleep? How do I feel about myself, my own self image? Let's just start with you, John.

When we met.

Well, Murray, you got to tell him the pass out.

Will, I'm sure he.

Was your place in Newport beach, and he came over with his parents, and Dr. Sarda and I were there, my daughter. And we just ran a simple, what's called a Myers cocktail, which is a cocktail of vitamins, vitamin c, B complex, a, b twelve, some magnesium, some vitamin c, some calcium glucanate, just a basic hydration, detox.

What do you get when you nutrition, iv, hungover, whatever, just like the most basic thing on the planet, basic iv.

And so Dr. Sarda starts this iv, and, I mean, it hit your bloodstream, and a minute later you were passed out face down in a trash can.

Yeah.

My mom was looking at me like, who are these people you brought here? I was like, I don't know. I'm like, listen, I've never seen this in my life happen.

And Dr. Sarder was like, she was so calm. She was like, this is just a vasovagal. It happens all the time. He'll be fine.

I thought it was dead. I was like, this is death.

Why did he pass out?

It just shows you how. Well, first of all, you have something called a vasovagal, right? Which is where just from getting a needle stick, even sometimes before you get the needle stick, you can get nauseous and light.

Real quick, can I explain to the audience my life at the time? My life at the time was zero. Gym, diet Coke every single day, red meat six days a week. Stress eating, stress eating cookies, four or five meals a day, sugar, alcohol, alcohol, a lot of cigars, which is fine, don't judge. But all the other stuff, like diet Coke, like red meat, I didn't care about organic foods. My wife Renee has always expressed, organic, dude, same shit, all that stuff. That was my life. And then working seven days a week, every day, zero exercise. Like, zero. Like, checking the mail was my exercise at the time. That was it. So just want context.

You were a big boy when we started, too.

This time, I think what we're talking about right now is, like, end of 2021. I think I was somewhere between 270 to 280 pounds today. Pre this Vegas trip, I was 207.

That's amazing.

Yeah, that's amazing. But that was my life at the time. During this, for context, and that nutrient.

Iv hit your bloodstream, and it made you violently ill, and you're thrown up in the trash can. That was the point where we said, hey, listen, let's take a deep dive here into what's going on in the blood, and let's get some data. And that's another thing I'm big on, is we need data to make a change, right? And a lot of times, I'll bring young entrepreneurs up on a stage with me, and I'll ask them questions about their business. I'll say, how much money did you make last month? Oh, $622,000.

Great.

I mean, what was your net income last month? $144,000. How many employees do you have? 17. What's your revenue per employee? 71,000. What's your hemoglobin? A one c. Where are your hormone levels? What's your insulin? They have absolutely no ideas. Do you know where your triglyceride levels are? So they know more about their income statement, their balance sheet, their PNL, than they know about their own temple. And the temple is way more important than the balance sheet. And I think that's the shift that happened in you guys, is you guys said, listen, I'm my late thirty s or early 40s. I'm at the prime of my life. Shit's blowing up for you guys. And yet your health had taken a backseat. And so many entrepreneurs are in that position where they don't put self care before them.

Also, you're hearing a lot more of people, like, oh, the guy had a heart attack at 37, right? A lot more people getting cancer, a lot of things. And we talked about, like, I want the last half of my life to be my healthiest part of my life.

So, look, we went into the blood work. A couple of things that jumped right out of the blood work were your testosterone level, which should be in the 600 to 900 range for a 40 year old male at the time was 224 224, you could quadruple your testosterone and still be in the normal range. Interestingly, we did not put you on hormone therapy. Dr. Sarda put you on raw materials to help the body make its own hormone. You are clinically deficient in vitamin D three, the most important nutrient in the human body. You are clinically deficient in DHEA, another precursor to make hormones. So the first thing we did was put those two raw materials back into the human body. We used a peptide to stimulate your own testosterone production. And then your levels shot into the 700, 800 range. But at the same time, you're pre diabetic. And this is like a silent. This thing lurks in silence inside our bodies. Right. You're two points away from being an insulin dependent diabetic. You're insulin resistant. What does insulin level diabetic meaning? At a certain level, you have diabetes. When your hemoglobin a one c is 6.4, when your hemoglobin a one c gets to 7.0, you require insulin, meaning you can no longer control your blood sugar and you need to take insulin.

Is that when people take the insulin shots?

Insulin shots. So we were heading that direction. Vitamin D three level was at 26. The body was just so deficient in the raw materials it needed to do its job. So the first thing we did was, we said, all right, let's take this gene test. Let's take this blood test. Let's start supplementing for deficiency. We put what's called methylated vitamins into your bloodstream. We used peptides to increase your testosterone. We used raw materials like vitamin D three with k two, dhea. And then all of a sudden, as these levels start to rise, you got that energy level back and you had that positive aggression towards life again. Then that positive aggression towards working out again. And I remember when we went to your wedding, I was like, holy cow, man. You're a completely different human being than the day that we met.

Yeah. And I'm even better now. Even wedding time, during this phase, I was 272, 80. I think wedding time, I dropped down to about 250. And now it's still going.

Yeah, but how much better do you feel like, how is it affecting your business? How is it affecting your relationships, how it's affecting the way that you just operate?

Well, I think the most important thing it's affected is a couple most important relationships. I have, obviously, first and foremost, relationship with God. I think it's really like, amen, brother. It's always been, I'm catholic, so I going to church Sunday and just actually getting up and going and doing all the different stuff with my wife and I. So I think it's, like, built a better relationship with God because it's opened up my eyes so much more to life. I'm not sin because one of the things we're talking about is, like, all the toxins, remember? My body's like, I couldn't hold a pen. I couldn't sign a check.

My hand.

I did not know that.

I know.

You were so inflamed.

But, yeah, he was so inflamed. We were going to meetings, and he'd just be like, my hand.

I would be that guy that was texting like this because I couldn't use. I couldn't use my thumb. So I was, like, texting like that. I think my relationship with my family, my relationship with my brother, we used to fight seven days a week, you two. Seven days.

Who won a week? Let's not over there.

But you know who won the fight?

My mom.

My mom always calls that, hey, we got to have dinner.

My mom loves you. I don't think she knows we're doing this. She's going to be surprised when this podcast goes live. And then my relationship with my wife. I love my wife so much. And there was a time that I would, before go to bed at night, I would pray to God that I would wake up the next morning and she wouldn't find me dead in my sleep. That would be my prayers at night. Please make sure I wake up tomorrow morning. I don't want my wife to find me dead. Wow. And that was the biggest thing for me, was like, we just got married. I love her. We've been together five years. I'm not going to do that with her. Yeah. So that was my biggest thing. That was my biggest, biggest, biggest thing.

When you're that unhealthy, like, insecure is anxiety. All the mental things that go right. He was pretty damn wild in a bad way where he was just so anxious. Right.

Well, that anxiousness and that anxiety comes from very often from nutrient deficiencies. I mean, a lot of people, if you're listening to this podcast and you suffer from anxiety, you suffer from anxiousness, poor sleep, poor focus and concentration. Very often. This is just simple missing raw materials in the human body. You don't have generalized anxiety. You don't have a disease, a mental illness, a pathology. My message is a lot about, we are not as sick and broken as we think we are. We are usually a few nutrients away from being optimal, and then obviously, you flicked the switch in the diet and the exercise. So the majority of your turnaround was on you. It wasn't on me. I just gave you the pathway to do that.

And it wasn't expensive. That's the really important thing is a lot of people, because ever since you've grown so much is all my friends, because everybody's always like, sam, how are you doing this? Right? Because for my life, I just pulled out. I've flown over 150,000 miles domestically in the US this year.

Wow.

And a bunch of other stuff that goes on. I wake up 430 in the morning. Sometimes I'm at a bar.

Well, I was with you till 02:00 this morning.

Yeah.

But the most common thing is I have a lot of my friends are like, man, I want to do what Gary's preaching, but I just don't have the money for that. I was like, it's not a $40,000 thing. Yeah, $600 blood work.

$600, yeah, and $600 gene test. And that's gene test you do once in your lifetime. And I say all the time, we're not the only people that do gene testing. There's a lot of great gene testing companies, but just make sure you look at the genes of methylation, how the body is converting raw materials. And I think everybody should be on a methylated multivitamin. I'm also not the only one that makes a good methylated multivitamin. I make one, but I'm not the only one. You can get these off of Amazon and just make sure your body has the basics, right. Optimal health is more about the presence of the good than it is the absence of the bad. Meaning can you have a diet of soda once in a while? Can you have a little alcohol? And how is your body going to handle that? Well, if you're nutrient deficient, then most of your diet is seed oils and fried foods and you're not exercising, then the impact of that bad is going to be way worse. Right? But if you're eating whole food diet, whether you're a vegan, vegetarian, carnivore, keto paleo, if you're eating whole foods and you're moving, you're 70% of the way there, right?

And you get some data on your body, put the nutrients back into the body, get your hormones balanced, get your sugars under control, and go on about your life.

I think one of the best things you say, and it always sits in my head outside of first light. First light is very important. I love to talk about that because that's a thing that we have now so important. But is sitting is the new smoking? It is. And I think that's such an important thing because we're all working, we're driving to work, we're commuting, we're flying. It's so important to get that movement, get those steps in. I've got a goal a day every single day. It's a couple of goals I have every day. Part of this new. There's a lot of goals and we'll go down, sprinkle them through this episode. But there's two that come to mind. One is minimum have to hit 10,000 steps. It's not the greatest. I think 15,000 to 20,000 a lot better. But don't do less than ten because I think by default just sitting around, you're going to hit maybe 2500 if you're just sitting around, not really putting effort with some effort. A couple of hikes, come a walk around the blocks, get on. What I do now is if I have a conference call, I'm doing on a walk instead of sitting behind a desk unless I have to do a Zoom video and presentation.

But I do some of those too. Just walk on a treadmill.

Just walk. Just walk treadmill around the block. If you live in a quiet neighborhood or a quiet business park, the business park where we're staying is pretty quiet. So it's not in a lot of traffic. But I think that's one. And the other thing I do this sounds funny is hydration is so important.

I'm a big believer in hydrogen water.

Hydrogen water.

Hey guys, I think the most important website you may ever go to is the ultimatehuman.com. That's the ultimatehuman.com because on this website we can directly interact with one another. You can give me suggestions for podcast guests and topics that you'd like to see me cover. You can ask me any question that you'd like. More importantly, you can sign up for my entirely free newsletter. It comes out every single week. I write this so I can get the information to the masses on how to live a healthier, happier, longer, chemical free life. You can also sign up for a preorder of my book. And if you'd like to take the genetic test that I talk about all the time, it's available there too. And lastly, you can even see all of the products that I use in my daily life for a chemical free, healthy living style. A lot of people ask, know, what do you use in your daily Life, Gary? What do you brush your teeth with? And clean your countertops with. Well, it's all there if you'd like to see it. And you can again ask me any question that you'd like. And get my free newsletter, the ultimate human.

I promise you that information will help change the trajectory of your life. And now back to the Ultimate Human podcast.

And I think the electrolytes. The electrolytes is kind of this hack as well, because I don't drink soda anymore, and you're talking to someone that was drinking Diet coke with breakfast. Like I was having a Diet Coke with my eggs in the morning. That's how sick I was. Right. And now it's adding an electric like stick. We should actually talk on fasting as well. That's an important.

Well, I got 50,000 people entering a fast tomorrow or Tuesday. I'm doing it Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Yeah.

So December 18, was it 19th? 25th. Yeah.

Okay.

But the ultima that Dana was talking about, like that thing, putting a scoop of ultima in water or any kind of zero calorie, no artificial sweetener. Electrolyte, I think that's become my new soda. That's become that new. It takes away the sweet tooth. So now my other goal is ten to twelve peas a day, every day. If I pee less than ten to.

Twelve peas a day, you have now.

As a matter of fact, yes, ten to twelve peas a day, every single day is an important goal as well. But it's important.

Well, there you have it, guys. You heard it here first. But the transition to now is incredible, right? Your sugars have normalized this three month average of your sugars. Your testosterone now pushing 700. Hormone therapy cholesterol was close to 300. Now it's 119. Ldl cholesterol. Triglycerides were close to close to 300. They're now 65. If you know anything about that. I mean, that's the amount of blood fat and the fat in your blood. Your d three was below the lowest, measurable end of the range. Now it's in the 60 to 80 range.

You were going to get prescribed cholesterol prescriptions, medication. Medication which you do not need anymore. And then you never did that, and you switched over to diet.

Is eggs whole foods? Yeah, whole, organic. Everything I'm going to say is organic. Organic eggs. However many eggs I eat, cut half the yolk. So if I eat four eggs, take out the yolk out of two. If I eat two eggs, take out yolk out of one. That's what I do in the morning.

Okay.

Snack throughout the day. Celery sticks right on.

Negative caloric food right there.

And organic celery sticks, of course, if I want a little bit more flavor, dip in some organic hummus. Lunch is shredded chicken.

Right on.

Got this crock pot. We throw some organic chicken. When I go to the office, I pack, but this is all at home. But I do pack lunch at the office, or else it's doordash cheeseburgers, chinese food. But I stay away from all that worse and worser. Yeah. So organic chicken, I'll do that. Made in broth, add some pepper, usually with mustard.

Yeah.

And then dinner. And then if I want another snack throughout the day, I got an air fryer, and I just throw in spinach and have it kind of sauteed in olive oil. Throw in an air fryer or zucchini slices, and it kind of feels like you're eating chips.

See, this is what I mean. These are relatively simple changes. They make a huge impact.

But everything I named is so delicious. And at night, I usually stick with the fish. So we'll do either sushi. If I do sushi, I'll ask the chef to wrap the rice with cucumber. Most places I do that, I'll either.

Get the sashimi or get it wrapped in.

That's pretty much been my diet, and I think it's dropped the cholesterol. It's helped me drop a lot of.

Weight, dropped the cholesterol, dropped your insulins, dropped your sugars. The other thing you had was you were hypothyroid, according to the labs. Right? So the thyroid makes two hormones, t four and t three. And one of those hormones, t three, was low. And little known fact about the thyroid is that it only makes 20% of the t three in your blood. The rest of the t three hormone is converted from thyroid hormone, t four, in your liver and your gut and your periphery. And so you actually didn't have a thyroid problem. You had a nutrient problem, and we started supplementing for thyroid support. Your thyroid completely normalized. And remember, the thyroid is what's regulating your metabolism, your body temperature. For women, it regulates the menstrual cycle. For men, it controls our testosterone level, not controls our testosterone. It controls our metabolic rate. So thyroid has such a big impact, and unfortunately, we accuse it of crimes it doesn't commit all the time. You had a very similar scenario. Your thyroid hormones were off. You were also pre diabetic.

Well, what's crazy is that I'm not, like, a big guy, right?

It hides inside of.

Yeah. So I'm not a big guy. But I'm still pre diabetic. And what was that? I was eating mcdonald's. I was eating fast food all the time.

I was, like, 204, drinking pretty heavy.

Yeah, I haven't stopped that, though.

Little truth bomb on there.

Yeah. But my adjustments, though, because I'm very different than him. I'm never home. I'm on the road six days a week. So all I have is airports are, like, my number one place I could eat at, right? Fast food deliveries. All that is an airplane, right?

Airplanes, airplanes, all that.

So what changed for me diet wise was I started saying no to things. So I don't eat on an airplane ever. Anymore.

Yeah, good. That's one of my things. I fast on airplanes, period.

Half.

Unless it's an international flight.

Right.

If you give them 15 hours to.

Die, I'll take some snacks that I bought, maybe like, a bar.

Beef jerky.

Yeah, something like that. And be like, beef jerky or whatever. What I did was I started not eating late night food. So after I'm drinking, I'm drunk. I don't go and get a late night pizza. That's completely out of my life. That right there is probably, like, 15 pounds. That's 15 pounds. That's major airplane food done. When I doordash, uber eats and all that, I try to just eat something healthy. I'll get, like, a soup. Yeah, all that.

But it was a major transition for. You mean, like John's? It was a major transition. And then there was kind of a funny little bump in the road that we had. I remember I told you I was going to throw you under the bus on the podcast. Here it comes. Sammy has this major turnaround, like, dramatic turnaround. And I remember we got on the phone, we were going through his labs with our clinical team, and I was like, dude, I cannot believe. Your labs are literally perfect. Your sugars, your thyroids. Like, everything is so perfect. And he's like, that's freaking awesome. And then we didn't talk for, like.

A few, like, three months.

Three months. And we got labs again, and you.

Went off a cliff.

And I go, what the hell happened? You were like, I just wanted to see what would happen if I stopped taking everything and I eat like shit. Just started drinking it. What I did was freaking does that.

And they went to complete shit. Listen, I had to challenge you. I had to challenge you because I wanted to check. And my vitamins are very simple. Like, I take multivitamin to ten x.

Our ten x multivitamin.

Yeah. And I do. Was it d twelve d fatty acids. Yes. And then I do the symbiotica.

Yeah.

Can you talk about that? Because you brought me into mnm a while ago.

It's hard not to say. M m's, but.

It's really hard to say. But when you see it, you'll. Can you explain? Because that's been helpful for me, but I'd love for you to explain what that is.

There's a compound, bioactive compound, in the human body, B vitamin, called nad. If you actually look at NAD, it's actually nad plus it's the reduced form, and this is paramount to healthy mitochondrial function. Right. In fact, you can actually chart the decline in NAD levels with age. Right. So, biological age and NAd levels follow one another very closely. Dr. David Sinclair from Harvard is probably the biggest, most vocal proponent of these precursors. But you can't take NAd orally, right? You can do it by injection, do by iv. There are some sublinguals, so you have to take the precursors to have your body make it on its own. Those are either nicotinamide riboside, nicotinic acid, or NMN nicotinamide mononucleotide. I'm big fans of these because, again, these are compounds we put into the human body that cause the human body to do its job on its own. And my big message is, why don't we give the body the resources it needs to do its job and then get the hell out of its way, right? Because most of us are not thriving, not because of a sickness or an illness or disease or pathology. We're not thriving because our bodies are nutrient deficient.

So NMN is a precursor for NADH.

And what's kind of the end result of being on NMN for a while?

Better energy, better focus, better concentration at a cellular level. When you give a cell more energy, it has more resources to accomplish its functions, like waste elimination, repair, detoxification, regeneration. Every single cell in your body is like a mini fortune 500 company, right? It's got a CEO, it's got the dna, it's got a bunch of minions running around in the cells, making proteins, throwing waste out, pulling nutrients in. It's got this phospholipid bilayer, this sort of barrier that protects it from the outside environment. And it needs raw materials, including NAd, to do its job in order to. So I'm a big fan of.

You'd be proud. But our break room at the office, at the happy diet office, we have coffee, we have fridge, we have snacks.

Kudos. Popcorn.

I saw the protein popcorn right next to that guy, the UFC light.

Oh, he's awesome.

He was like, I wish the fight would move over a little bit so they could see my logo.

But then we have unlimited bottles of encourage. Our executives, the whole staff fire them up. Yeah, we have that.

But, Gary, I think with my lab work is I drink. Right. We've established, you know, I do spend a lot of time with, like you say, take a lot of glutathione.

Yeah, I have a sublingual glutathione. That's another oral.

Yeah, that's like the symbiotic glutathione that I take every day. Why do you tell me to take?

Glutathione is the most prevalent antioxidant in the human body. Right. There's not a single cell in your entire body that does not contain glutathione. Not one. There are even tests that you can do to tell how long a cell is going to live by its level of glutathione. And it's the biggest antioxidant that nobody knows about. Right. It's manufactured by the liver. The liver actually makes glutathione. It's also one of the biggest consumers of glutathione. I mean, the body is this fascinating chemical factory. One of the reasons why being a scientist is actually deep in my faith is because no one will ever convince me that this thing was made by two bacteria banging in a mud puddle, right? And then they crawled out and became a lizard, and then that became a monkey, and that became human. Right. This thing was assembled by God, because the level of intelligence, right. It cleans itself. It recycles trash from one transaction and puts it into another transaction. The body has this process called autophagy, where it actually eats cells that are no longer doing their job and turns them into proteins and energy for the rest of the body.

It's extremely efficient. And glutathione is the most prevalent antioxidant. It's contained in every cell in the body and made by the liver. And when we put the liver under stress, like in your case, I originally put you on our sublingual glutathione because your liver enzymes were high. Right. When the liver gets inflamed, it stops filtering the blood, and then this poison level called alkaline phosphatase starts to rise, and you have all these other issues. So that's another big fan of glutathione.

And then when I did my lab work and Madison did, like, a scan on me, I remember she called me. She's like, I don't understand how your liver and everything is perfect.

Yeah. I'm like, it's standing on.

Yeah. And all that stress I put on my body and everything and all that, but I don't work out. I know. You've been kicking my ass for two and a half.

He doesn't work out anymore.

Both of these Christmas presents going to be a trainer package. That's what. I'm getting him fired.

Good, though, man.

I do. Because I say no to the bad things. Pretty much all the white stuff, the flour, even last night. Yeah, I have to be gluten free. And I remember one of the first tests because you're like, hey, every time you eat something, like, white, like a burger or a wrap or whatever, you're like, do you feel foggy? I go, yeah, my whole day goes to shit. I just can't think straight at all that. And I still sometimes, I mean, I'll have a cheat day here and there with like an in and out burger once a month or something like that.

But you can get those with lettuce, too.

Yeah, it is pretty good.

You know what I do at in and out? I'm telling you right now, it's as good no matter what anyone says. I get it with lettuce and I replace their secret sauce with mustard.

Yeah, but he's a big, like, lettuce wrap guy.

Obviously. I like my greens and I like.

So good, but I just did such simple things, right. I'm not doing some crazy, fascinating stuff like multivitamins, NMN, glutathione packs. I'm obsessed with electrolytes and water. You got me hooked on in the mornings, the himalayan salt.

And do you guys have the hydrogen water?

No, I want to talk on that because the last few years, maybe about four years ago, I switched to alkaline, and I was drinking, buying alkaline bottles, all the different brands of alkaline, if it had alkaline from 8.5 up, biggest.

Marketing myth ever sold.

Yeah, I want to hear about that. I want to hear about it because I've heard that you've kind of talked about that. I want to learn more. So then this past year, we switched to all spring water. So I will almost drink mostly spring waters if I get my hands on spring.

Yeah. If I can't get a hold of high.

Actually, we get.

Mountain Valley is.

Yeah, mountain Valley.

We get five gallons delivered to our house, but we get those delivered every Wednesday to our house. So that's that. And then now I'm hearing about hydrogen, and I would love to hear about that more and why.

Well, before you go, I started drinking hydrogen water, like, two and a half weeks ago. I can't drink any other water since.

Yeah, I want to hear why drinking hydrogen water. Because we have a whole class of bacteria in our gut called hydrophiles, which need hydrogen. There's high amounts of hydrogen in running waters and rivers and streams and lakes where river is actually passing over rocks, where water is passing over rocks or coming down from a glacier. So it's a very natural gas that's in water. Obviously. Water is h 20. Adding extra hydrogen to the water adds electrons that actually can neutralize free radicals. They actually help you absorb supplements. They help you digest your foods. Hydrogen is very consumed in enzymatic activity. So, like, digestion, breaking down foods, emulsifying foods, the process that bacteria go through in your gut. So I'm a huge fan of hydrogen water. If people don't want to spring for a hydrogen water filtration bottle for their house or this portable one that I use, then.

But the portable one is the simplest thing, because when I first heard about.

The portable one's called echo, there's a lot of chinese knockoffs out there, so be careful. Don't go save a buck by finding that chinese one. It's called echo.

But I think when you were explaining hydro water back in the day, I was like, I don't know if I can invest three grand into this. Da da da, whatever. Right, right. But then I bought one of these guys.

Yeah, they're about 230 or 240.

Yeah, but how much money do you spend on ball water in a year or whatever? So we would just get whatever the water poured in. I've traveled within that, never my wallet. And that thing is, like, I get upset when I have to drink ball water and other things, but it tastes so good. Yeah, but I think I feel better.

Well, think about it. We're somewhere between 75 and 85% water. We use water in every transaction. Our mitochondria are voracious consumers of water.

I need to refill my drink.

You got the suggestion. The power of suggestion. I want to transition a little bit. I love the health journey that we're on. You guys both look amazing. Where we started, by the way. I'll finish up your story because it ends very well. You are like, oh, yeah. Okay. So I got back on the supplements, I got back on the protocol, and now your labs are back almost perfect.

Feel great.

Yeah.

You got to remember, on our side, too, we have 102 employees. Now, when we first met.

You have 102 employees.

Full time employees in what?

Full send. Happy dad.

Just happy dad alone.

Just happy dad.

Happy alone.

What are 102 people doing?

We have a sales team that goes into stores and makes sure everything's merchandise. We. It's mostly sales teams. Like, I think we're at 68, as it say, sales teams. And then, I mean, the alcohol.

Regional managers.

Regional manager managers.

Direct chain managers. Like, someone that just calls on Walmart. Someone calls on 711.

Wow. Now, did you guys raise money for happy dad?

Fund it yourself?

No, we self funded it the first four months ourselves, and it exploded. It's a funny story, because when we first started, we had no alcohol experience other than drinking.

Drinking alcohol.

Right. But our idea was, I like beer, but beer makes me. Made my body feel like crap.

Beer is awful for it, terrible for.

It, and it sucks because I wish it wasn't. So we wanted to obviously make something that was best. So what we did was, one, we wanted it to feel like a beer. So that's why our cans, in a regular twelve ounce campus, is skinny can. So we have, like, a whole saying, like, no skinny can bullshit and all that, because we just want to make it feel like a beer. And we get friends all the time, like, saying, oh, man, I love your beer. I'm like, no, it's a seltzer.

Yeah.

We lower the carbonation by 30% so it doesn't give you that acid reflex.

Wow, you actually thought about it.

Yeah. And the flavor is really low. So it's 1 gram of sugar, because we didn't want to drink a lot of sugar.

Gluten free.

Gluten free has electrolytes in it.

Okay.

And electrolytes were inspired by you when you used to tell me the himalayan salt putting in in the mornings.

It's another way. Great way to get minerals. I mean, I tell people all that all the time. Celtic salt, pink himalayan sea salt. I've been reading some studies lately about the amount of heavy metals, sometimes in pink himalamian sea salt. So I like baja salt, I like celtic salt. And those are dirt cheap ways to get basic.

Yeah. So we made the best version. Alcohol is not the best for you, but we want to make the best version for us and everything. So we did that. We made the branding, the happy dad. Whole story was we knew we could market to 21 plus young adults, but we wanted the dads and everybody to all.

I think the brand's got such a cultish following, but I'm interested to know. So you raised a little bit of.

Money, we raised a little bit.

Self funded it yourself.

Self funded it. So what happened was, we're trying to. So in alcohol, you have to get a distributor. It's a law. It's called a three tier system. So we can't sell to Walmart directly. We have to have a state distributor or county. We sell to them and they sell, they put on a shelf. Okay? That's the US compliance taxes, whole thing, right? So when we started, those Celsius were exploding and nobody wanted to partner with us because we had no experience. We had a bunch of crazy guys on YouTube.

We were a trending category, trendy category in seltzers, right? There was gazillion very oversaturated. We were a trendy category in a celebrity brand. It's like, okay, here's another celebrity brand. Nine out of the ten of them fail. More than that, 99 out of 100 fail. Seltzer, same thing. 99 out of 100 fail. So it's like, wait a minute, you're a seltzer and you're a celebrity brand. We're good.

So what's crazy is I remember I called Dave Grupman. So I called Dave, and I was like, Dave, we have this awesome product, and we need a distributor to kind of support us. And then we got connected with Gopuff.

Those guys are great.

Yeah, they're great, Raph, but we didn't have a distributor. So then Dave connected us with David Booth. We met in Chris Carlos, and they're like, like, I remember I just made super connector and I met with them and they're like, hey, how much sales are you going to do this year? And I just made up a number because I had no idea. I had no clue what we're doing.

We didn't even know what number was good to be. Yeah, we didn't know.

And we're like, hey, listen, we're going to do 100,000 cases. A case is 212 x. We're going to do 100,000 cases this year, America. Chris Carl was like, if you do 100,000 cases, you guys are going to be on a rocket ship. So then FMO Gopuff comes in, which is they have like 160 plus stores in California and Arizona. We're in just in Arizona.

Yeah, California.

Yeah, because they purchased, they took out.

Bevmo, which is like one of the largest chains in California.

Okay.

Yeah. So they acquired that chain like, maybe like six months before or so they become our partner to launch the brand.

Well, they give us a chance, right? So I called Raph, I said, hey, listen, I've got a drink. And he also said it like, don't tell me it's a seltzer.

Don't tell me it's a seltzer.

I'm a celebrity brand. Please do me a favor, give us a chance. Give us a chance. Put us in the stores. I promise you it's going to do well. This is not going to be all other celebrity brands. It's not going to be all other seltzers. He's like, okay, I got you. He's like, he's friend and he's like, he's a good. Do you this favor. Yeah, sweetest man.

Now, once he did that, did you guys parachute into town and then try to drive?

It was funny. We were talking to one of the person, I was organizing the stores and I remember the really nice lady, she was like, hey, listen, so we're going to send a couple of twelve packs to a couple of stores and everything. Try it out. I was like, oh, no, you got to put like 5000 of these cases. Day one, this is going to fly. That's impossible. Absolutely impossible. No chance. Whatever. So we launched a brand that day one, everything sold that. They put it in five to 1010 amongst all stores. Yeah. So they had pallets of happy dietary. Wow. Everything sold out the first day. It just flies. It gets crazy. We're selling like masks and everybody's like, what the hell is this?

You guys are standing on it on social media and you push on social media pop ups.

It really comes down. Going back to what I was saying earlier, is when you have a great product, the marketing is easy. And I think for us, marketing has always been easy because we've always made great products, great podcasts, great alcohol, great merch, all that. And I think what happened was the marketing was really easy. So we did what we did best. We're like, all right, cool. Our partners helped us make a great product. We're going to do what the Shahidis do best, which is marketing. So we went and marketed and it just blew up. And I remember what Sam's talking about. We launched on, I believe it was a Tuesday, those stores all got wiped out. And Wednesday, Bedmill's biggest competitor calls me, hey, why don't we have happy dad?

Wow.

Thursday, the other biggest competitor calls me, why don't we have happy dad? It just became so that 100,000 that he was talking about that in a year, he said, if you guys hit that, you're going to be golden. What are we going to do this year?

This year, we'll do about 3 million cases in that six month period. We were only in five states. We did 349,000 cases. We did 100,000 the first month, and then we ran out of cans. We had a supply chain issue and all that stuff and fixed that.

But that's a high class problem.

Yeah, but we could have easily done a million cases within that six month period. But we just didn't have product. Right. Whatever. It's fine. But going to fast forward, it's pretty crazy because we've gone from not knowing that you had to get a distributor and not know anything. I can tell you every single law by every single state. We're such experts in it. But we love what it is. And what's really important, too, is, like, our partnership. Having good partners is so important. The way my brother, myself, Kyle, and Steve work. We have so much trust with each other.

Yeah.

And now we have Sugar Sean in the mix, who's a whole sole partner now, and he's on a different level.

Is he on the happy dad side?

Yeah.

He's been one of the greatest partners. Him, Justin Geishito. The two of them have joined. Who else? Snoop Dogg.

That's a whole different story. The Snoop Dogg stories are one of our favorite ones. Yeah. So he invested. Our favorite thing is the alcohol industry is such an old school boys club in a way.

Right.

And we do it what we think is best for us and our customers. Right.

And is this kind of what you would recommend, too? Because I know a lot of people are listening to this. It's not like a business building podcast. It's a health and wellness podcast. But a lot of people have. They're entrepreneurs, and they're building a business.

I do want to talk about that, because one thing that's really important for us has been, is this is what's so stupid about the alcohol. This. I actually had a dream that I took this to the supreme court. We cannot talk about how healthy of a product it is. So I'm not saying it's healthy because I can't say it right. So do your own homework. But there's a lot that we cannot do. So. But when we make a product, we don't say it's healthy, but we think, and Kyle and Steve think. What would Gary say? What would Gary say? Can we drink this with Gary?

Yeah.

It's literally not. Is this healthy? Can we drink this with Gary?

Especially? There's tons of vodkas that are gluten free, and there's ones that aren't. There's so many things that you can't even put in a packaging to tell people what that is because everybody's always scared against you. There's too much weird stuff.

Hey, guys, if you've been watching the ultimate Human podcast for any length of time, you know that one thing I do not do is push products. I do not just let any advertiser into this space, because I believe that the products that appear on the ultimate Human podcast should be things that I use every day in my life to improve my own physiology. One of them is something called the echo go plus. The echo go plus is a hydrogen water generator that you can take on the go. You essentially take the top off of this bottle. You pour bottled water in this, and repeatedly, it will make high part per million hydrogen water. You press this little button, you'll see these bubbles going up in the water. That's hydrogen being created in the water. There are all kinds of peer reviewed, published clinical studies on the benefits of hydrogen water, including reduced inflammation, better absorption of your supplements, better absorption of your foods, better balance of the stomach acid, and it feeds an entire class of bacteria in your gut. Hydrogen water, in my opinion, is the most beneficial water that you can drink. And now you can take it wherever you go.

You can go to echoe choh 20. Com. That's echo echoh 20.

Com.

Enter the code ultimate ten for a discount. Echo H 20. Enter the code ultimate ten for a discount. And now back to the ultimate human podcast.

I think that's one thing with one thing, and we've talked about this recently, too, is we're getting into other products as well. Probably not other alcohol products. There'll be other variations of happy dad, but other alcohol. But we're getting into other products, and every single one is. What does Gary think? What does Gary think?

Wow.

Thank you. And even Steve will say, like, hey, listen, this one ingredient, I don't think it's.

He will tell me that once in a.

One thing that's important to us right now is snacks. Because snacks, like I said, I have celery sticks, air, fried spinach. But most snacks out there are so bad for you.

Oh, my God.

Most protein bars. Protein bars are bad for you. You think it's good because it has the word protein, but it's not good for you. Kids, we know what their snacks are. Eminem, snickers, ice cream. Yeah, everyone knows which, by the way.

A lot of those food dyes are getting banned on.

We said, all right, so how do we make a Healthy snack? And how do we make something that hits the protein? People who need the protein, whether they're gins or kids, and this is a product that we have coming out. Check it out.

Board jerky, protein.

Steve will do it. I haven't ran this by you, but I ran it by Steve, and I said, what do you think gary's going to think? He said, I think he's going to like it. So I want you to double check before we go live with this.

Okay.

And let us know.

I'll take a deep dive into this. We can get a grass fed, grass finished source. I mean, I do eat beef jerky. The grass fed, grass finished sources of beef jerky. How many brands can we put on here at one time? We got the data white contender series. We got the ultimate human. We got happy dad seltzer.

Power slap is coming in February, guys.

It is power slap. Yeah. The monster energy truck show.

But I think the important thing here is, I think with our world is we're never going to get into a product that's legit.

It's super good.

That is legit.

I know I had to stop eating because I ate too much of it was so good.

I'm going to take this on my trial.

Are the sodium levels okay?

Yeah, contrary to popular belief, I mean, the source of the sodium is a big deal, but also sodium is not as dehydrating as we think. In fact, most people that are suffering from migraines or are clinically dehydrated are very often clinically dehydrated because they don't have enough sodium in their water.

All right. Yeah. I just want to make sure, because we're supposed to go live with this soon, and I haven't had a chance because I know you've been really busy the last few months. I didn't want to bother you.

We're just doing it live on the podcast.

I literally had one bag. I brought, like, ten bags of Vegas. So two birds, 1 st. I got this approved to go live, and we got promo on one of the greatest podcasts.

Really good, man.

Yeah, no, it tastes great. I just want to make sure that macros and everything were okay, because.

We'Re.

Not going to get behind. I'm going to tell you guys right now, we're not going to ever get behind anything that's not healthy for you. We're not going to do it. Even recently, Kyle had a massive offer from a vape company. And massive offer, like, probably could have made tens of millions of dollars a year. And he was like, I can't do it. I'm not doing it. There's nothing you can do. And I think we can. I believe now with our flavoring team that we have built within our company, we can make products that are great, that actually taste good, but are actually healthy. I think symbiotic has done that. We've done it with happy dad. We're going to do it with jerky. And I think that's what we want to start doing moving forward.

Is that kind of the direction of happy dad? It's obviously known as the Seltzer, but is happy dad going to expand?

Yeah. Well, I'll say it now. So we are launching a hard iced tea. The number one hard iced tea company right now has 21.9 grams of sugar per twelve ounce serving, or 1 gram.

And what's crazy, but they're 24 ounce is the popular one, so you're getting two extra.

Yeah. So those little, like, sugar packs, those little sugar packs that people. I think the sugar packs that you put in your coffee is like 2.6 grams of sugar. So my 2.6 or 2.8 soda is about 52, 54. So this little twelve ounce can has 21.6. This brand that is our competition is the biggest brand on the planet when.

It comes to artists. We're not going to say their name. And what's crazy is we're gluten free. Yeah, we're gluten free. But what's crazy about this other brand? One last thing I'm going to say is the demographic that drinks them, usually kids in their mid 20s, they're putting out like four or five of them. It's not like they're having one quick one. It's like, all right, whatever. We'll look the other way. They're putting out four or five of them.

Wow.

So the hard tea, we're going there and we're launching that in February. But in general, we're just growing the seltzer business. It's a big business, us doing almost 3 million cases next year.

We have the UFC and Dana.

We have that. And even the Snoop partnership was incredible because with Death Row Records is, we grew up in LA, so we grew up with Death Row Records, which is like the most iconic brand.

Yes.

I grew up with that, too. I knew every word.

Dr. Dre Snoop. And it was original record label that Snoop had.

So Snoop, yeah, my generation's big on that.

So Snoop bought Death Row Records, became the CEO, and called my brother and they were talking, know, just doing stuff. We've done stuff with Snoop in the past, he's the best freaking partner on the planet. And we're a let's do a flavor together. And he brought up grape, but we're like, let's do a death row logo. So this is where the story gets crazy. So we do this. We have a grape. We go out to the market, we tell all of our partners and everybody, hey, we're launching this thing, death row grape.

Grape.

Yeah. And it's going to be, you know, sales guys. Everything's made death row grape. And everybody always says their product's gonna be big. Right? That's just the thing. John comes in, is like, we got to do minimum orders on it has to be crazy numbers. Everybody was like, there's no way we're going to order this much product. That's crazy.

Well, they were like, we're going to test a few, couple thousand cases. I was like, no, you don't tell us what you're testing. We'll tell you what you're testing.

That crazy how the script has flipped. And we're like, bended. Need, like, please take our product. Here's your minimum.

We always over promise and we over deliver.

Yeah.

So we knew what it was. So we come out, boom. This thing explodes out the gate. We can't even keep it in stock.

Really?

Yeah.

We can't even keep it behind a variety pack. It's the second largest skew right now we have.

But you know what? It's one thing. The flavor profile of it. I'm not a grape drinker.

They are good. I mean, I'm not a salt drinker, but they are good.

Well, I'm not a grape drinker at all.

We had a couple last night together. We did.

So as a non grape drinker, it's my favorite flavor, so I was able to convert myself. That doesn't like that type of flavor profile and whatever. So we explode. Crushing it. We just got into 3017 Walmarts. 30, 17, 17 Walmart.

That's crazy.

Starting like, March 1, they'll bring in grape everywhere. This thing is a phenomenon now. Right?

It's so cool.

But what's important about it was the partnership, because you could pay any celebrity anything in most cases, and they'll do whatever, right?

Yeah.

But we hit so many demographics and cultures, and we converted people that weren't drinking seltzers into a seltzer brought.

That's what Walmart told us. And we knew this, but Walmart even validated us. We had a meeting with them a few months ago. You just brought a whole different category of people or a demographic of people into the category. You brought a whole new, like, we've never seen this customer profile walk down a selfie section.

Just so important for the audience to hear, though, because you trailblazed in a highly competitive, highly saturated market. And let's face it, I mean, some.

Of your hardest market on a plan.

Very deep pockets, and obviously have their dirty distribution.

They're dirty, too.

Oh, yeah. No, they're dirty. And tell me a little bit about how having all of these different facets to your brand, like the Nelk boys, the podcast enterprise, the Happy dad Seltzer, and the fact that you're growing other people's podcasts, what sort of synergies exist between what seems like very different industries? Right? You got a podcast, you got a seltzer, you have the Nelk boys, you have a YouTube channel. How are you playing this like a symphony. How do you put these together?

Because the core of the foundation, like, when you go on a whiteboard and you draw everything we're doing, the core of the foundation is the media company. So we pride out the media company.

So you got the media company, the media company, which you can control and you own.

We've made a lot of our top podcast.

I learned that.

Partner in it. Yeah, we don't do this third party stuff at all. That's why when I got wind of that, that you were part of that, going back to what we're talking about.

And I've never really thanked you for that. It was a blessing that you came in and helped me get the podcast back and help me get.

I think it's very, very. Because you're sold. Podcasters are sold on the dream, right? They're sold on know. Hey, look what Rogan did with Spotify. You can do know this, this that I know. So and so. I'm friends with this guy, and I could book this person for you, your podcast, all the stuff you're going to be sold, the dream. And the reality is, if you're going to be dependent on other people, you're never going to get there because the authenticity of your podcast goes away. And that's why I was so overprotective. You're probably like wondering like, john, why.

Are you so you came in like the hammer.

I was like, because I'm so protective of your brand, because you're so protective of us as humans, and I'm protective of you and your kids, too, which I love. I think it's so important for a podcaster to. I talk to Theo Vaughn about this all the time.

Theo Vaughn? Yeah.

Because what's so special about Theo Vaughn? I talked last night, and I tell know what's so special about Theovon is Theo Vaughn. What's crazy is he's a top five podcast on Spotify. Spotify won't tell you. You go on the charts that aren't hand selected. You'll see him. But when you go to their know top podcast, he's not on there, which is mind blowing, but whatever. I told him, who cares? You are massive. We couldn't walk 2ft with him last night, right?

I saw that.

We couldn't walk 2ft with him, right? It was crazy. It was crazy. So where I'm going at with this, but Theo is special. Theo is massive. Everyone loves Theo. You can't walk 2ft with Theo because Theo Vaughn is a three person army.

Really?

Three person. His whole entire team is three people. He has no massive podcast network. He's not signed to our podcast network. Everyone assumes, because we're friends and I help him, he's not signed to us, and nor do I want him, because I want to help him. I want him to remain as a three person. Same with you. I could have approached you, said, join our network, want you to stay where you are, keep the authenticity of this podcast, help make the world better, which Theo's doing that, right? You're doing it with, I think, internal health. He's doing it with laughter, which is also a great medicine. So you guys are kind of doing the same thing just in different ways. And I think that's what's important, because what happens you, when I called you is when I saw the podcast hit the top of the Spotify charts, right? And I said, these fucking sharks are going to come after Gary. I know it. I was like, this is when those sharks just look down those Spotify charts and they start fucking telemarketing you. I could do this. I could do that. I could do this brand, sell this, sell that huge.

I mean, it costs us a lot of money to get out of it.

So that's when know had to come in. And I was like, all right, time to build a great wall of China around know, just like I've helped build around Theo. And I think that's what's so important with a podcaster, is don't be sold or convinced by these other people. Do your thing. Grow organically. Some will have overnight success. Be lucky. Some won't. Theo Vaughn's podcast is, I think, like five years old. Theo's been doing this.

What's his big mean? He's a comedian, so it is his stage presence. And then that feeds the podcast. And I also do want to get back to this media company because I think it's important how you guys are driving this brand. You started with the media company, and then this feeds the brand.

I'm sorry I got off track, but I do want podcasters to be careful and don't fall for the sharks. You could always message me if you're not sure. I'll help anybody. You can have five subscribers on YouTube. Message me. I'll help you. So we have the media company. It's kind of like, all right, and going back to what do we do? One of the things that we have out there is brand sales team.

So that's like the hub, and now there's the spokes of the wheel coming off that.

So there's brand sales team. There's creating products. There's merch. We used to have, like, film tv, and we've done a couple of stuff in film tv. We sold shows to Netflix and Amazon, a couple of other people. We kind of x that part out, that part too much of a headache. And now the one that's been the most fun control, given us the most control and actually made us most money, is build products. Happy dad side. So we said, all right, let's actually do less brands. We have a couple of great partnerships. Price Picks is a great partner, a couple of other guys, but the building brands part. All right, we've nailed that. So now how do we create more brands? But then what?

More brands or expand the happy dad brand?

Well, happy dad is like, that's my role. That's 90% of my.

That's what Sam does. Sam's the CEO. Everyone reports to Sam at happy dad.

Right.

Sam is the beast when it comes to that. So happy dad's become his. My role is create other brands and.

Also take care of you and all that. But I think on our side, though, the 102 employees I've interviewed, every single person, really, we will never hire a single person without. It goes through me. I don't care if we get to 2000 employees.

Wow.

They need to know how special of something we have. Also, something that we've done really great, is we do everything internally. So, for example, we just added 14,000. We have 14,000 sqft with our merchandise.

Yes.

We grew the merch so much, we wanted to control the.

This is the new happy dad UFC.

Oh, happy UFC.

Yeah, it's got a little UFC logo.

Inside?

Yeah. Does it? Yeah.

That's a big deal for you.

Not available for sale yet, but hopefully early next year.

All right, there we go.

We had a 14,000 there is just to fulfill our merchandise and ship it, and we built all that. Normally, you get a third party partner. We're doing this all in house because we want to control our customers experience and have the best customer experience. But the challenge, I think, for entrepreneurs as a whole, though, is, again, as a CEO, you have to be hands on with everybody. You're going to get people telling you, yeah, want to hire great people. So as I've hired some incredible managers, all these people that we brought on board, it's pretty crazy because my brother and I were so hands on in the business right now. There's all these things that we used to always be obsessed over trying to fix. We hired a plus guys to come from Anheuser Busch, Dr. Pepper, all these things. So I don't even know what's going on there, because they're so good that you trust them. Yeah, I trust them, and they fill me in. They give me 15 minutes a week. I go, hey, fill me in on.

Because there's a lot of dynamics going on in your business, too. Like, you got the family dynamic. You got this outlier. Steve will do it, who is, like, amazing, but out of his mind. So you have this craziness. I'm sure you can't have it get too crazy, damage the brand, which is a constant.

That is a constant thing.

I love Steve, man.

Yeah.

He's like, you don't want to change him. But then you're like, you know what?

Change. Steve will never. No, no. This is what I tell everybody.

Such a good human.

I tell everybody this about Steve. Steve will never change. That is, Steve will do it. That's who he is. You just got to ride the. You can't get asked. He asked, hey, can I come to this thing or do I need to come to this thing? I go, no, you don't need to. But you know what? Steve and Kyle have done something really big about our brand. So we do these meetups, right? We go to grocery stores, liquor stores, whatever. And we have all our fans come. Like, yesterday, we did one Lee's liquor in Las Vegas. We had 300 people show up. We do signings. All that we've done over 450 of them.

450 meetups.

Yeah, a minimum of three or, sorry, a minimum of 30 minutes to. Minimum 30 minutes. But we're always 45 to an hour and 15 that we're in there signing.

Really? Okay.

That's how many we've done. We've never stopped.

Nobody else gets to touch a brand like that. I mean, these are kind of some of the things I like to expose on the podcast, because these are great tidbits, really viscerally. Bringing your brand down to your audience. Now they know you, or they feel like they know you.

It's incredible.

I definitely try to do.

And we call. Let's call them, like, secondary. So, like, yes, Dallas, Texas. Cool for us to visit, but those. Yeah, like, there's San Marcos, Texas. That's, like, on my list. Right? It's Texas estates there. But the reason why is what we've done with the brand and will never change because we're obsessed with this is we love going to places that nobody else wants to go. I can't tell you how many stores we've gone to where I'm like, hey, have you ever had a celebrity? Like, no. No one's ever shown up here. No one's ever.

Wichita, Wisconsin.

Yeah.

They're going to Vegas. They're going to Miami. We're going Nashville.

When we launched Texas, remember, we started in Houston and we drove, drove, road trip, road trip all the way. Houston, Texas. College station, Waco. Bunch of little stores. We visited 32 stores in five days.

Is that a big happy dad truck? There's like a truck? No, we just saw one that was like a.

That follows us.

Camper.

Yeah, that follows us sometimes. But no, we were just in suvs. Because you drive faster, right. It's more logistically. Um, yes.

John calling on John over supplementing.

Tell me about that, because this is what happened. One day. One day I got a giant package from symbiotica to my house, and I took a picture on Instagram. My dms were filled. You should be listening to Gary Brecka and hear about over supplementing.

Yeah, I want to message back, like.

Don'T tell me to listen to Gary Brecka. But I was like, all, like, so I do want to hear, because I've had, like, five of these, and it made me think of, you know, over.

Supplementing is the thing that I'm very conscious about, too, because most people are supplementing for the sake of supplementing. They're not supplementing for deficiency. That's why I'm so big on data. We spend so much money getting data on our business, right? And data on our marketing, data on our revenues, data on our net operating costs, and we don't get data on our bodies. And I always preach about the genetic test? Yes, I am trying to sell a genetic test. We're telling people they need to get a genetic test. But this tells you what your body's deficient in, right? So you start with the basics. Methylated multivitamin. I personally believe that everybody should be on a methylated multivitamin. Our food supply is way too nutrient deficient right now. And we have so many excess toxins coming into the body that we actually need additional support. Most of us. I'm not talking to the super woke biohacker. I'm talking to the every man and every woman, right? And I want my mean, I love the super woke biohackers. I mean, some of these guys are my idols. Have been Greenfield's, the, you know, getting online and trying to impress each other with how smart we are is much different than trying to get a message to the masses.

And the message that I have for the masses is stop supplementing for the sake of supplementing. Start supplementing for deficiency. And yes, you can add glutathione, extra detoxification support. Yes, you need a methylated multivitamin because our food supply is just so strip the nutrients. Unless you are that ultra woke biohacker that's getting everything organic and eating grass fed grass, finished meats and bringing their own foods to events and things like that. But that's not the audience that I'm trying to help. They're already helping themselves. The audience that I'm trying to help is the guy that's like, where do I start? Over. Supplementing is a huge issue. When I open most people's supplement cabinets, it's like salt, pimento, st. John's word, ashwagandha, coq ten multivitamin d three nmn nicotine. My robicide. It's like, whoa, what are you taking all this stuff for? And the question is, does your body need it? Right? And I'm a huge fan of brands that build supplement lines, like mine and some of these other brands that build supplement lines. So then when people have deficiencies, they have a quality supplement there to answer that deficiency, but not just shoveling them all in, hoping that you hit the mark.

And that's why I say the basics are human beings need 91 essential nutrients. These are minerals. And I prefer you get these things from like celtic sea salt or baja sea salt or one of these kinds of supplements. Then we need nine essential amino acids. We need three essential fatty acids. The source of those is important. And then beyond that, we should be really judicious. Like for example, there's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. So we should be very judicious with our carbohydrate choices. I'm not saying you can't have carbohydrates or shouldn't have carbohydrates, but those should be some of the cleanest fuel sources, like organic, non fortified, non enriched white rice, sweet potatoes, fruits that end in berry, BlackBerry, blueberry, raspberry, natural honeys, like a manuka honey, or natural maple syrup. Those things are carbohydrate sources that are clean. They're rich in carbohydrates, but they're healthy sources of carbohydrates. Most of us get our carbohydrates from bleached white flour, enriched white flour pastas, other white flowers, breads, cereals, grains, which are terrible sources of carbohydrates. And most of them are GMO. They're genetically modified. And so this is what sucks the life out of you, destroys your mood, reduces your emotional state, jacks up your gut, takes away your energy.

I have a simple philosophy kind of about food in general, that I look at food and I say, are you going to serve me or are you going to steal from me? If you're going to steal from me, you don't get to come into the temple. Because if we protect the temple, this is our vehicle, right? So we have two choices. We can either filter things before they come into our bodies, or we can allow our bodies to be the filter. I did a simple demo on instagram the other day. It went really viral. I'll probably do a podcast on it. I took two glasses of tap water, right? And I had max, my cameraman was actually the guinea pig. And I said, take four of your fingers and put them in one of these glasses of tap water and hold it there for 30 seconds. He puts four fingers in the tap water, and then he takes his fingers out. And then I test both glasses of tap water for chlorine. The one he did not put his fingers in was full of chlorine. It turns bright yellow. The one he did put his fingers in had no chlorine.

It tested zero. The reason was the chlorine left the fluid and entered his body. That's how quickly we absorb.

That's crazy.

Chlorine.

And it was like I could feel the tada moment for people, like, okay, I understand that. Wait a second. He put his fingers in for 30 seconds and sucked the chlorine right out of that glass? Yes. Along with the fluoride, the microplastics, and maybe heavy metals that were in there, or even pharmaceuticals, micropharmaceuticals that were in there. So it just brings home the notion that we have to be diligent about filtering things before they come into our body. And it seems like a lot of fear mongering. But we're not trying to fear monger. We're trying to just get people back to the basics. Because the majority of what's wrong with our food is not the food itself. It's the distance from the food to the table. Glyphosphates, preservatives, insecticides, pesticides, preservatives, all the nonsense that we put into our water. And if we're a little diligent about filtering the environment around us, then we take a lot of the pressure off our bodies. And so I'm a huge believer in supplementing. I do not think that we can get the raw materials the body needs to function properly without some basic supplements, like a methylated multivitamin.

Glutathione is another amazing one.

So, Gary, if you had to choose what's, like, the simplest but the healthiest breakfast for someone.

Well, again, I'm a big fan of whole foods. Eggs, avocados, meats, grass fed grass, finished, pasture raised meats, pasture raised eggs. It's sad that we have to be so diligent about label reading, but all we're really trying to do is navigate around the industrial processing and get to the whole food, right? So a lot of the labeling organic is not really as beneficial as it used to be. Now, I preach a lot about not eating GMO foods, but now they're taking the word GMO off the labeling, and they're changing it to bioengineered. And bioengineered maybe doesn't sound as bad as genetically modified, but it's still the same process, right?

Sounds pretty bad. It's bad engineered. I don't want to engineer to my food. Maybe in a building engineered.

Yeah, exactly. You want to engineer your building, not your food. We genetically modified foods to make seeds resistant to glyphosphate. A poison, an insecticide. It's in roundup. And we didn't genetically modify it to increase the yield. We didn't genetically modify it to increase the nutritional content. We genetically modified it so it wouldn't be killed by a poison. So now this means that the foods that are genetically modified are likely being exposed to that poison by virtue of the fact that they're genetically modified to be resistant to it. And now we're eating these foods that are not even really foods, sometimes when we genetically modify them, we actually make them nondigestible, and we make them unrecognizable to the body. Right. And so we think that we're doing the right thing because it's wheat or it's bulgar, or it's quinoa or it's kale. And once we understand that a lot of these products, soy, corn, are genetically modified, we look for those things on the label and try to get back to the whole food.

Are there any foods that you're not sitting here worrying about the label, but you're like, you know what? That food is fine. You're not like kale, for example. Kale.

Jen, I'm not a big fan of kale for a whole host of other reasons.

I don't know what kale to the rabbits, but is there certain things where you're not sitting there trying to look at all this package and see if it's.

Once you get to the organic section, I tell people, shop the perimeter of the grocery store. The less you go down the aisles, the more likely you are to be getting whole foods. Most of the things that are perishable are on the perimeter. And if they're perishable, that means that they're either alive or they're a whole food, because whole foods go bad. So if you kind of shop the perimeter of the grocery store, first, do as much as you're shopping there, and then go down the aisles as little as possible, that's better. As soon as you actually start to make some money in your life, you should invest in organic foods. You should go out of your way to have a water filtration system. You should go out of your way to not eat genetically modified foods, because you're allowing your body to get back to the basics, to things it recognizes called metabolites, that it can actually draw nutrients from and can eliminate the waste from the breakdown of those nutrients. And as simple as that seems, it's harder and harder to eat healthy now because of the other day. I forget we were watching a football game or a basketball game.

And just for shits and giggles, we really paid attention to the commercials. It is all shit food and candy and processed food commercials, all of it.

And then fast food, and then Ozempic and manjaro, and then Ozempic and manjaro.

Which is another thing. You do a whole podcast on Ozempic and Manjaro. I'm not necessarily anti ozempic and manjaro.

But it's just funny that they target you right after food. That person who's eating junk food, it's.

Like, hey, they're like XYz pizza and Skittles and then Manjaro. I mean, we're one of only two countries in the world that allows big pharma to advertise.

That's mind blowing. I've heard that directly to New Zealand, I think it was.

Yeah, New Zealand. Yeah, it's New Zealand and New York.

So really, us.

We'Re spending $4 trillion on health care. We're ranked 52nd in the world for health care delivery. We're ranked 30 eigth in the world overall for life expectancy. So we know that money doesn't correlate to outcomes. Right. Because by a factor of, like, ten, we're spending more money than any other country. $4 trillion. We're one of the sickest nations on the planet. And a lot of this has to do with our food supply and being nutrient deficient. So just to round out your question about over supplementing, I mean, first we have to supplement for the basics, and then we can target supplement for other things. We want to support the body. Yeah.

Just so you know, what I've taken is either something you've told me I need to take, or maybe I'll just add, like, a basic thing, like a multivitamin, vitamin C. I think those are. I do take NMN, which you did tell me about. You didn't tell me.

And you guys are both on my multivitamin. But I'm not the only one who makes a good multivitamin. There are other great brands out there.

There's a lot of bad ones too, though. You want to give credit to some people. Let's not give credit to. Not just anything.

Yeah, I mean, the ones that don't have folic acid, that don't have cyanocabalmin, that don't have nonorganic binders and fillers. They're doing probiotics that are actually protected from stomach acid so this bacteria don't die in the stomach on their way to the gut. Going that extra mile to make sure that not only we're representing what's in the capsule or the tablet, but we're making sure that once it goes into the body, the body can actually use it.

Yeah. That's one thing I've learned about some of the tablets right now, is I've noticed a lot of tablets I've gotten recently says taking three, and I thought they were trying to scam me. Like, why take three? They used to be taking one. But now I realize it's actually because that one was filled with so many bad fillers that now the three has been split up into like three without the fillers. So I think the fillers is something very important as well to pay attention.

Super important. Ingredients matter, especially in human beings. Ingredients matter. And I was talking about this at the fights last night. The fights were awesome. By the UFC was crazy last night. I think that went more viral than the fight itself.

I love the guy.

When did you become a UFC fan?

How many years? Gosh, I've been a UFC fan for a long time. Years ago, I owned a nightclub, and I was a partner in a nightclub in Miami called Mint Lounge, and we sponsored a fighter called Diego the Nightmare Sanchez. Do you remember him?

No.

Diego the nightmare. See, this is going, like, way back. And I've always been a fan of the UFC because I'm a fan of jiu jitsu. I'm not no jujitsu skills at all, but I just thought of it as like a real thinking man sport. Right? It takes a lot of skill and you need to be physically fit and all of that. But it's like one of those sports where the guy that's two or three or four moves ahead is probably the one that's going to come out on top. And it's also kind of a metaphor for life, like being calm under stress.

And that's why fighters, and I know, we both know a lot of fighters personally, they're the kindest.

They are the kindest guys.

Most of us have a very difficult time meeting our protein needs, and certain protein sources like whey protein and others can be as little as 20% absorbable. This is 99% absorbable, and it has all of the essential amino acids that the body needs to build lean muscle to recover, to improve our exercise performance, and most importantly, to repair after we have intense exercise. So this is called perfect amino by body health. It's like I said, 99% absorbable. It only has two calories. Eventually, the caloric intake has virtually no caloric intake. It will not break a fast. It tastes amazing. You mix it in water. I take this literally every single morning. If you're working out in a fasted state, you have to take a full spectrum amino acid prior to your workout to preserve your lean muscle and make sure that you're recovering properly. And again, it will not break your fast. So the Caloric impact is virtually zero. You get all of the full spectrum amino acids. It tastes wonderful. I use it every single day. You can go to bodyhealth.com ultimate. That's bodyhealth.com ultimate. And look for the perfect aminos. They actually come in capsules if you're on the go, or it becomes in several flavors that they make in a powder, which I love.

It's flavored with natural means of flavoring. So there's no artificial sweeteners in here. So this is one of my absolute favorite products. Give it a try. If you are working out at all, you need a full spectrum amino acid. Go to bodyhealth.com ultimate. That's bodyhealth.com ultimate. I love their lab tested products. You can actually see the absorption rate for all of their products. They've got great electrolyte protein combinations. My favorite is the perfect aminos. Bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate. And now back to the ultimate human podcast.

And obviously, we're friends with sean o'malley, justin Gage. I love jorge masvidal. All these guys are like the, like, these guys are like the kindest guys. I was with gilbert Burns last night, like the nicest, nicest, nicest guys.

Well, you're heading to a podcast after this with.

Yeah, we got to go, actually.

I don't want to wrap this, so we got to keep going because this is important.

But is it with Sean Strickland?

Yeah, sean strickland. He's headed. Like I was saying before, I love booking guests, sometimes a pain in the ass. But Sean strickland is coming on theovon podcast.

Oh, he is.

We should go together.

I'll go together.

You should meet Sean. Sean is great.

Speaking of hard, nice guy on the planet.

Sean strickland is. When you're not on x, reading his posts on x or watching his videos on social media, Sean strickland is one of the sweetest guys.

He's really such a good.

And he's real.

Oh, he's a real deal.

He's a real, real person. I know there's a lot of people have opinions about. My opinion about Sean strickland is. I love the go. I want him to get to know you as well.

All right, sean, I'm coming to watch your podcast.

Yeah. And come on here, too. Yeah, I don't think he likes Dualock podcasts, but he has a big fight coming out in January, so maybe he will.

Who's he fighting in January?

The guy that he fought.

I saw the highlight reel of it. Who got the better of that fight?

Yeah, it got broken up pretty fast, though.

Did they?

Yeah, it was like split up within like a minute, right? It was like a 32nd.

Was it just like, they start mouthing off to each other and then just Sean? I don't know.

We got to go there and find.

Out, you know, what happened. You know how I found out? So, between one of the fights, we went into the back room, and I knew Sean was there because I was talking to Sean before, and Sean didn't want to come. Actually, I kind of feel guilty a little bit. Sean didn't want to come a week ago. He and I were talking. I was like, hey, listen, Trump's coming. I think it should be a good chance to come meet Trump. So, in between one of the fights, I didn't know this had already happened, fighting the crowd, but I didn't know. I wasn't really on my phone, so I was like, oh, Strickland's here. But we're not sitting next to each other. He's sitting with all the fighters. We're sitting with, you know, in a different section. So I texted Strickland. I was like, hey, where are you at? So I could come bring you to Trump. And he writes back, are you not at the fight? I was like, no, I am. And then late, everyone's like, yo, Sean, Strickland got in a fight. Oh, shit. And that's how I found out. I had no idea it happened.

I'm, like, texting him, like, where are you at? So I can bring you to Trump. I don't know if he got kicked out. I don't know what happened, but it's all over social media, man.

I mean, when I was coming back in to get my wife last night, there was a guy that was actually handcuffed, strapped to a wheelchair, and hogtied at his feet, and his face was a little busted up. So I don't think it was the guy that Sean fought. Maybe it was another guy that got in the fight, in the crowd. He was just mouthing thing.

But that thing went viral on X.

Yeah, but, yeah, it went viral everywhere. But platform X is the best platform we got to get. You got ultimate human. Yeah, we got to get the ultimate it. I think there's a few things. I think it's awesome that you interview people. Obviously, it's worked for a lot of people. It's worked for Rogue, it's worked for full send. It's working for Theo. But also, my favorite thing that you do is when you do the one on one looking at a camera, right? I think it's the thing I share the most. If I haven't sent it to Renee, she's already sent it to me. If I haven't already sent it to Sam, he's already sending me. It's the most shared thing. And short form the YouTube algorithm, which I know in and out. That's our business. We know in and out. It likes two things and two things only. Extremely short content or extremely long content.

Extremely short or extremely long?

Extremely short or extremely long?

Okay.

Extremely long kind of depends. It changes all the time. We can't tell. I mean, if you ask me, I haven't looked recently, but most recently, it was something around 42 to 48 minutes. And up is extremely long. So the 20 minutes mark, I know they're trying to change it up a little bit to get it down to 20 to 30 minutes, because there's so many.

I try to keep them under 20.

Yeah.

Because I think what's happening, the landscape of podcasts has changed so much is hundreds of thousands of podcasts have launched in 2023.

Right?

So it's like, all right, am I going to give Gary an hour of my time, or am I going to give it to Theo? Am I giving it to Rogan? Am I giving it to Nelk? Am I giving it to Yachty? Am I giving to this? But people want to listen. They want to hear. Because you're different than Theo. Theo is different. Nelk is different than Rogan. So I think now, cutting them up shorter is what YouTube is trying to recommend. But if you do a 20 minutes episode, it's not going to do as well, or 30 minutes episode is not going to do as well. So you're not doing it. You're going that 42 to minute and up. Right. Because it does well, but that's not what the consumer wants. So YouTube is learning that right now, and they're going to make some adjustments.

So one thing, though, but because your format, 2030 minutes, is nice, because that's how long a normal person takes to drive to work.

Okay. Yeah, this is like a big help. See, I'm new to this.

I want the information to get an average time. If someone goes to work, let's say it's like 30 minutes, right, in the subway or whatever and all that.

It's actually not 40. 45.

Yeah. Well, okay, I'm going back to six.

Years ago, 45 minutes. Now, the average commute to work, 45 minutes is the average gym time as well. Some people go to gym. I'm in there for an hour, 15 hours, 30. But some people just go in, but 45 minutes.

So they listen to a podcast, 45.

Minutes to an hour and that's why that's always been the sweet spot. 45 to an hour of podcast, that's pretty much how long someone's been over. Or if it's 20 minutes, it's okay. I'm going to list halfway to work, halfway home.

That's why on Tuesdays, I launch a full length podcast. Like, this will be a Tuesday launch for us. And then on Thursdays, I do a short, and I try to really keep it under 20 minutes. I'm shooting for under 15, and I want to take a topic that people are interested in and give them a real practical step that they could take to change the trajectory of their life by implementing whatever. Like, last week, I did vitamin D three. I did a 20 minutes short on water fasting, getting GMO foods out of your life, getting tap water out of your life. How do we avoid seed oils? And then here's what a seed oil is. Here's why you don't want to have it in your life. Here's how you get it out of your life.

You know what we got to do is we got to get you on Snapchat, because the consumption of alcohol for young kids is actually declining.

Is it really?

Yeah, I just read a report the other day.

Oh, wow.

Declining because people want to live healthier.

Yeah.

Do you think it's because they want to live healthier or because they're vaping or because there's something else going on?

No, I think it's.

That's great.

Generation wants to be in control, okay. They don't want to lose that control. So they're still drinking like they're drinking seltzer.

What are we talking, light beers now?

I'm talking like, are you guys millennials? I'm last year millennial.

Okay. Last year millennial.

Yeah.

Okay. And now we're Gen Z. Yeah.

So Gen Z. Gen Z. And then, I don't know.

I go by years.

I think they want to be in control. This actually goes to health as well as they want to look good on social media. That's something that people want to look good. They want to naturally look good when they're posting that selfie. They want to post that selfie. If a random friend takes a picture and posts it without their approval real quick. Well, one is the only thing. Don't post that picture. I don't look good. They want to be fine with. It's like, oh, I look great. Yeah, don't even ask. I look great. And I think that's what the thing. Because there's only two ways to look good on social media, being healthy, being in shape, or adding 50 filters to the picture. I understand that it's sadly a situation of some people, but I think that's a couple of things we're learning from social media, and we're also learning from COVID as well. One thing I've learned two things from COVID be healthy and make money.

Those are the people. Be healthy and make health.

Those are two people didn't make, you know, unhealthy didn't make it, and those who weren't making money, that whole middle class has been wiped.

So true.

So I think those are the things. But going back to snap, I think where Sam's talking is about, know the thing with short form content, which there's IG reels, there's TikTok Snapchat, there's YouTube shorts, is that short form content is great. They're so shareable, but it ultimately becomes a trailer for the mothership, the episode, right. It becomes a trailer. And the beauty is like a lot of these platforms, YouTube, Snap, especially TikTok, some, they'll pay you, too. So it's, know, we think about a movie. An hour, hour and a half, two hour movie will make a two to three minute trailer. Spend all this money on making the trailer, spend all this money on advertising the trailer where you're other way around. You take a two to three minute clip max, and you put it out and you actually make money off that. And then that person's like, hey, I got to watch this full episode.

And that's really what I'm trying to do is I realize how short the attention span is on social media in general, whatever platform you're on. So I have a short period of time to educate somebody, hopefully inspire them, which ideally leads to a transformation. Right? And so the one thing that I get attacked by some of my haters is that they'll watch a three hour podcast and take one little snippet and try to go, got you this, and I'm going to pull that snippet out and we're going to publicize it and try to shine a bright light on it. But the majority of the time, I'm just trying to give as truthful and accurate information as I can in the shortest period of time possible because I want people to identify with it. Oh, my gosh, my feet are sore and achy when I get out of bed first thing in the morning to go to the bathroom and take my first piss. Oh, man, my libido is off. I have brain fog. I have that same waking mind that Gary talks about. So that little bit of education and then the longer video designed to inspire them to say, listen, there's so many.

People that are, when was last time someone shared you an hour and a half video? Be like, hey, man, you should check this out.

Yeah, exactly.

It's always like, check out this three hour video. Yeah, it's always like 8 seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds.

There's an active, though. I mean, I watch a lot of hour, hour and a half videos. It's usually if you're a YouTube premium member, you can save, download to your device, you can listen to it on a flight.

Yeah, that's.

I do a lot of that thing to do. Yeah. I don't think a lot of people don't know about YouTube premium, but that's the best I do know. A bit of advice on podcasts. I think the future of podcasts, I've been saying this for a while, it's actually happening now. So it's not necessarily future podcasts, it's the present state of podcasts is video. Podcasts are important. And the two best places for video are YouTube and X. YouTube and X.

Not Spotify.

Spotify video is there. It's not a behavior that someone's used to, on to. And that's why I think YouTube music didn't do well, because it's not a behavior to just listen on YouTube and not watch. And I think Spotify has the same challenge where I'm used to listening on Spotify, not watching on Spotify. It's a ten plus year. Spotify has been around in the US for almost over ten years now. Ten year behavior that you're trying to break. So it is a feature that's a.

Big watch platform, YouTube, obviously. Big watch platform.

Yeah, those are the two. Yeah, Spotify, I think that they're trying and they've got Rogan to change that behavior. I think it'll take a while for that to happen, but at least they have that right. And some of their other originals are doing it too, I think holler Daddy and a couple of others, but no one's really watching, even if it's available on Spotify. But they're watching on YouTube. They're watching on X. And I think those are the important ones people want to see. I think people want to see the interactions. A lot of podcasts, they pull up the video and if you're listening, what video are they watching? Reacting videos. There's that thing as a podcast, they're going back to building products is how else were you going to see the product? I mean, look at happy dad all over the full sent podcast, right? They really talk about Happy dad, but they have it displayed there. So now when you're walking down the aisle at Walmart, you're like, I've seen that twelve pack somewhere.

Yeah.

It was on the podcast that has tens of millions, hundreds, billions of impressions all over social media.

Okay.

Makes sense. So I think it's like, from a business side, it makes sense. From a user experience side, it makes sense. And it's the direction that listeners are going. Podcasts are no longer just audio, they're video. So I think that's an important thing. So video podcasting is important. So what do you do then? Because I think the first episode that you launched, I called you, I said, focus on one platform to send your traffic.

Yeah, you did. I remember I just landed in LA. You're like, hey, first of all, congratulations. Second of all, yeah, focus on for now.

For now.

We don't really take in that advice.

Yeah, they'll find you other places. If they're listening on Spotify, they'll find you there. If they're listening to you on Apple, they'll find you. There's even small audience on like, I heart and these other smaller audio platforms, and they'll find you there. But focus on one mean, sadly, that's the currencies. When we're booking someone for someone's podcast, we're like, hey, come on. This podcast, it gets x amount of views. Oh, okay, I'm in, right?

Or we're ranked X on Spotify.

Yeah, we're X on Spotify. Or eventually, when you're big enough, you say, collectively, we're big everywhere. Which is like, what full send is. I can share. Fulson's audio numbers are not public, but Folson is not a top 100 podcasts on Spotify. But because of the catalog of Fulson, Folson gets three to 4 million listens a month on Spotify.

Wow.

Because of the catalog. Because people are going back and listening to an old Trump episode, an old Elon episode, old Theovon episode, Mr. Beast.

I mean, guest wise, you kill mean. And most of those people that have.

Had a harvest journey, I was blown.

Away by Stephen A. Smith, Dana White. Those are some of my favorite.

Obviously, everyone knows how we feel about Dana, but Steve Harvey, you know how many hours I've spent watching Family feud? How many times he's made me laugh?

Such a great human. And his story about getting in the coal plunge is a comedy show in and of itself. Just that snippet of him. And the same with Stephen A. Smith. And those two are really good friends. And they were going back and forth behind the scenes about getting into the cold plunge. It was hilarious.

I've never done it.

Yeah, never done the cold plunge.

You've never done it.

What? I've done 30 seconds.

How did I have you on my.

Podcast and you've never. I've never want to tell you.

This.

Morning, hey, can I have time for a cold punch?

I'm like, picking up the podcast time. You're like. I'm like, great, we moved it a half an hour. I got time to get in the cold punch.

You notice I didn't even reply.

Yeah, you were just busy.

I can't go in my hot tub if it's under 90 degrees. Wow. I don't know what it is. I'll get there one day.

You're going to air the episode of John Jihiti getting in coal Punch because I had Gabe and Kyle on last time.

From my congrats to both of them.

What?

Their health journey.

Oh, dude, they're doing amazing. Gabe just got 50 grand for his big. I feel like I'm 15.75% responsible, by the way.

I asked him for a commission.

Gabe, we should be getting.

And then he said, well, I wore a happy dad hat or shirt. I wore the happy dad shirt on my after post. I was like, awesome, man.

He's got a little sharp, though. He was like, yeah, they end up posting me with happy dad. How much do I get from you guys?

We didn't post you with the ultimate human, so I need my 15%, Gabe, if you're listening. Well, look, guys, I mean, this has been amazing. I know we got a podcast to run off to, but I try to end every podcast the same way by asking the same question, and there's no right or wrong answer. But what does it mean to you guys to be an ultimate human?

I think being an ultimate human, I think you got to get your order of priorities in life straight. Obviously, we all believe not we all, but here hope many of you believe God is why we're all here. But outside of that, I kind of had my life unorganized a little bit. My priorities unorganized. Before, I used to always say family first. I used to be family first, work second, health third before I met you. Now it's health first, family second. Because if I'm not healthy, going back to what I was saying about fear of waking up dead and my wife seeing me with dead.

Yeah.

It's health first, because with your health not there, your family is going to suffer. Health first, family second, business third.

Amen.

Yeah.

I think if you end up being an ultimate human, you're going to also make a lot of other people better if you're not healthy and if you're not in a good spot. And that's what I do right now. I mean, employees, everything. And I'm the first one up. I'm the last one to go to sleep and everything, but I make everybody else better as well. But if you're the example, so if you're the example, then it's going to make your parents happy. Hopefully, Steve will do. Was one of them. We were the same was when we started becoming healthy. Then we converted our parents into being healthy.

Right.

And that's the most important thing is know you want your parents to live and not suffer and all that stuff and everything. And then eventually, if you have kids, you also don't want to be that old grandpa or never even see your grandkids because you weren't healthy. So you got to focus on yourself first. And then everything else comes in and it becomes a beautiful thing.

Dude, I love it, man. Guys, this has been amazing, man. Thank you so much for the insights. Business, health, family, faith, all the things that make you guys tick. I hope that the listeners got as much out of it as I did. And as always, if you have any questions about or you'd like to submit a question to the podcast, or you'd like any information on any of the products or services that we talked about on the podcast today, you can go to the ultimatehuman.com. You can sign up for my free monthly or free weekly newsletter. You can go to ultimatehuman.com and find links to any of the products or services we talked about on the podcast. And as always, that's just science.