In this conversation with Nick Koumalatsos, a former Marine Raider turned entrepreneur and coach, we explored the intricacies of identity, purpose, and community—all integral parts of Nick's journey from adversity to leadership. Through his experiences, Nick offers a roadmap for those looking to take control of their lives, build meaningful connections, and redefine their futures.
What You'll Learn:
- Identity and Purpose: Understand how personal identity can shape your journey and why aligning your purpose is crucial for growth.
- Facing Adversity: Learn how turning negative experiences into opportunities for growth can set you on a path to success.
- The Role of Discipline: Discover why discipline often trumps motivation, particularly in achieving long-term goals.
- Community and Connection: See how building and being part of a supportive community can transform lives and why it’s important to foster such environments.
Key Takeaways:
- It's never too late to redefine your path and take control of your life's direction.
- Success starts with personal accountability—master yourself first.
- Community is crucial for healing and growth; we thrive together, not in isolation.
- Discipline can be your greatest ally; it sees you through when motivation wanes.
Resources:
Explore Nick Koumalatsos's work at his website, which provides resources, coaching, and community for men seeking purpose and growth. Dive deeper into his mission of empowering men to lead fulfilling lives through his community, the Agoge.
Support the Podcast:
If you found this conversation insightful, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review on your favourite podcast platform. Your support helps us reach a broader audience and share these valuable discussions.
Support and Share:
If this conversation inspired you or moved you to rethink how you approach your own life's challenges, consider sharing this post with someone who might benefit from these insights. Together, let's foster a world where personal development and community support go hand in hand.
02:12 Facing Adversity and Overcoming Challenges
08:18 Joining the Military
12:10 Marine Corps Training and Setbacks
20:00 Transitioning from Military to Civilian Life
25:25 Transforming Body and Mind: My 90-Day Journey
26:23 The Birth of a GOGI: From Fitness to Mentorship
26:54 Purpose and Identity: Beyond the Marines
28:26 The Power of Forward Motion and Service
32:44 Building a Community: From Fitness to Mindset
39:07 Mastering Yourself: The Foundation of Success
40:10 Leading Your Family: Building Trust and Intentionality
42:03 Financial Mastery and Legacy Building
44:52 The Impact of Community and Brotherhood
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Nick, come aos, did I get anywhere close to that?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
It's your accent. It's just it's an accent thing.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
It's not well, tell you what, in Australia, very few
people can understand me because of an Irishman living in Australia.
So yeah, yeah, so we'll just run with that thing,
like welcome to the podcast. You are lots of different
things to lots of different people, right, So you are
(00:38):
a coach, you run Man's health for teacher, you're an
entrepreneur and you've been in a fitness industry. You're ex military.
So just give people a bit of a sense of
your story from a high level, like just starting starting
as a kid, and take us through the journey.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah, I grew up without an active father in the home,
not something that I even realized was unnormal. And obviously
that plays into a lot of different things, right, I
mean we know the statistics really worldwide, any first or
(01:21):
second world country that doesn't have a father in the home,
how that kind of plays out with you know, education, crime,
et cetera, success later in life. Anyways, So yeah, I
didn't grow up. I had my brother and my mom.
We used to, you know, make jokes that my mom
was running from the law because we were literally we
would move every six months to a different school. Wow,
(01:44):
you know, and you know, as an adult, you know,
like why were we moving around? You know? And she
was like, honestly, it's just jobs. If I could get
a job making this much money and I would move,
I'd move us. As we were just trying to survive.
And I asked her when I was like, how much
were you making, you know, take care of you know,
she was laughing. I was like thousand a months. She
was like sometimes like five hundred a month, five hundred
(02:08):
to one thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
A month, and trying to bring up two boys on that.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Trying to bring up two boys on that. So like
later in life, I honestly was like, man, it's actually
pretty impressive. Like we're survivors, you know. And it never
took really a handout from anything, but no stateside, you know,
we never got on welfare. She always worked. That was
kind of like one of our family things. You know.
I come from kind of a poor family, and but
(02:31):
they never they just valued hard work. I think I
had a lot to do with my grandfather. My grandfather
was a Korean War and Vietnam veteran, and he just
had a very like we had a very high work
ethic and realizing that what you make is based off
of comes off your own hands. And and that was
(02:52):
very Even as a kid, I remember that kind of
that core value, if you will, kind of being an
and it stuck with me. At eleven years old, I
started got my first job. Like you know, in the States,
we get this thing called it's like a social Security statement,
and you pay in like you take they take it
out of you know, most in most countries they take
(03:12):
wages for taxes and for different things. Right, one of
the things is for social Security for your for your
your retirement, if you if when you reach that ripe
old age, right, well, if you go back on my statement,
it says that I've I've been paying social Security since
nineteen ninety three, which was I was eleven years old. Wow. Yeah,
(03:34):
and uh and I think we lie. I don't even
know how it because that's like at that point, I'm
not even sure that was legal, but somehow we squeezed
through and my social Security started started nineteen ninety three.
So it was just always a thing that like you
if you want money, if you want things, you got
to work for it. That's how that's how it goes.
So anyways, you know, long story, stort I hated moving moving,
(03:57):
but I'll kind of come back to that when I
get them to the military. Because I didn't have an
active father in the home, I did have a stepfather
that was coming in and out. I believe he worked
on like gash ole pipeline type stuff like rigs, and
so he was kind of coming and going from the
time I was about five until the time I was
(04:17):
about eleven.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
I'm nick was not was did you find that to
be helpful or more disruptive? Having this guy who used.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
To I'll tell you he was. He was physically abusive
to me and emotionally abusive to my brother, right And
obviously I'm a kid at the time, so it's you know,
you take you gotta have to take it. And at
eleven years old is the time that I fought back
and I got thrown through a closet door. We had
(04:50):
a little tussle. Obviously there's a grown man. I'm eleven.
You know, we know how that's going to go. But
that tussle is what woke up my mom and she
was able to she got that's when she found out
of the situation. And then it all came out. I
jumped through a window, I excaped, you know, I escaped
the house and ran away and that was the end
of that. And she left him that on the spot,
(05:12):
kicked him out, left him on the spot. And to
be honest, you know, she never knew any of the
other stuff was going down. But through that, the lack
of a you know, lack of an actual, you know,
positive real mole model, I went straight into this need
for community, this need for acceptance, which landed me in
(05:35):
a basically a quote unquote a gang.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
All I was just about to say, there is a
bit of a phenomenon in Australia about young meal gangs.
And you know a lot of people are pointing the
finger that a lot of them are immigrants, but a
lot of them tend to have absent fathers and you know,
brought up with no role models, and they just gravity
(06:00):
towards their own groups, don't it because they need that
sense of connection.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
And you know what, and and because I didn't have it,
they were right there waiting on it. And I tell
people all the time, I'm like, guys, if you don't
man up and be that there is a there's a
group of people out there that is waiting for that
young man to show up and be like, yeah, come on.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
And that's where you then get your values from and
all on your behaviors and all of that stuff.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Right, that's right, that's exactly it. Now, that becomes your
core values, that becomes the rules of engagement for life.
And that's exactly what happened. And so that happened right
out at eleven. It was ironic, like look, being at
the age I am now and looking back at it,
like you know, that altercation happened in me feeling in
danger or me feeling weak or something like that, and
(06:52):
I was like, well, I'm not going to be a victim,
and I'm going to go I'm going to go get
someone who is going to have my back and be
a part of a community that is going to protect me.
And and if you look at it, and ironically enough,
it was the gang was called the the Irish Shenanigans.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
There you go, the token there.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
And what's funny is my my actual father, like you know,
he wasn't around, but when he found out, he was
pissed and he was he was like, He's like, you're
not Irish or Greek? What the you know? Anyways, it
was funny, but yeah, man, by the time I was thirteen,
So that happened when I was eleven. By the time
I was thirteen, I was a two time convicted felon
as an adult. Yeah, so just two short years U
(07:39):
two short years, had two felonies under my belt that
would not get expunged when I turned eighteen. I thought
it was going to but it did not. Yeah, cost me,
cost me something in the future. So that happened, and
I got rolled up with the police and obviously got
thrown in juv That was a that was a long
(08:01):
It was a whole long time right there. And I
make a joke. I say, by the time I was fourteen,
I was cleaning on the straight and arrow. I'd stop drinking,
stop doing drugs, stop breaking laws. So by fourteen, I'd
cleaned up my life, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Wow? And what then led you to the military?
Speaker 2 (08:22):
That's where it goes. So I am seventeen years old.
I just turned seventeen years old. I'm working at a
place called Baypoint Marriott. In the morning, I was an
audio visual consultant for I want to say, I was
making like fifteen dollars an hour in the mid nineties
(08:44):
hooking up you know, a conference center, so like hooking
up projectors, lights, microphones from six am to two pm,
and then I would take a thirty minute break. I'd
have a club sandwich and fries. Every single day at
two thirty to ten thirty. I was a bellman at
the same resort. It became very consistent and and I go,
I don't I don't want that for my life in
(09:06):
twenty of thirty years. Like, that's not where I want
to be in twenty or thirty years. So I make
the joke saying that I like, I hit the nuclear option,
I like blew up my life. And I was like, well,
screw it. The only way out that I know is
the military. My grandfather did it. And you know the
time in the nineties that I don't know if you
know this, but the Marine Corps marketing tactics in the
(09:28):
nineties was spot on. I mean spot on. You had
guys battling dragons with swords, and they're saying that like,
you know, we don't promise you a rose garden, and
they're like this is the hardest thing. And they had
sexy uniforms, and I'm like, dude, if I'm gonna do
(09:48):
join the military, I'm obviously going to go fight dragons
and be a marine. Yes, And what young man doesn't
want to go fight a dragon right with sword? And
so I went and talked to them recruiter, and he
did his thing, and then he got my information down,
went in the back and I'll never forget the look
on his face when he came out and was like, kid,
(10:11):
you're not joining the Marine Corps nor any branch. You're
a high school dropout and a convicted felon. And keep
in mind Clinton was in was the president at the time,
so that he was like he was crushing. He was
in the middle of crushing the military. He was. It
was a huge draw down. So like there, So I
had medical issues, a drug I didn't need a drug waiver.
(10:35):
I had to. I had to have a waiver for
my criminal background. I was a high school dropout. And
he told me no. And I'll tell you right now, Paul,
that was the biggest mistake he could have done, was
tell a rebellious kid no, because all I did was
(10:55):
like that became my mission. M HM, quit my job,
moved in with my grandmother, and you're talking. I threw
that all that money away and moved in my grand
with my grandmother, started working nights at a movie theater
for like four fifty an hour. I remember getting my
first check after two weeks and it was like one
hundred and seventy five bucks, and I'm like, how are
(11:17):
people surviving off of this? And then joined the college
to do a semester, because if you join a college,
get accepted, and do one semester and then drop out,
you're no longer a high school dropout.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
You're ah, you're a college drop fight.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
And we know the military loves a college dropout. So
that's what I did. So I did that. It almost
took me two years to get in, and so that's
what I did. I got a one hundred letters of
recommendation from from bosses and friends and family and people
my mom knew about me, and I just made it.
(11:59):
I just went on a man that was my mission
and uh and joined them and ended up joining the
Marine Corps at eighteen turned nineteen and recruit training. And
in two thousand.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
And how did you how did you find the training
for the Marines and that whole community. Was that something
that you just I mean.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
It was I guess you could say it was hard
in a way. I mean you got to keep in
mind that, you know that that era of youth was different,
Like we grew up outside. We did that. We didn't
have social media, we didn't have the internet. You know,
the Internet came around late nineties for us. Yeah, but
it wasn't nothing to sit around on. It was like,
(12:44):
you know, we used I remember using Aol messenger. Hey
where are you at? Okay? Cool, I'm going to meet
you over there, you know what I mean. It was
it was more of a way to message people. And
so we just we were very I was very physical.
I was already lifting weights, you know what I mean,
Like I wanted to get jacked all the time, you know,
eating protein, following old you know, our old bodybooks. Yeah, yeah,
(13:07):
that's that's just what I That's just what we did.
And so it was very, very different. It wasn't nothing.
It was hard, but it wasn't something like we didn't
have this belief that we couldn't do it. I couldn't
do it. The issue came into play where after working
for almost two years to get in the military. On
training day seven, I broke my wrist and I got
(13:29):
dropped to a medical rehabilitation particular.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
This is this is post. This is post when you
finished all your training.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
No, no, this was in boot camp. This is in
recruit recruit training. I got there, I was like, yes,
I made it, I'm going in. Everything was going good.
On training day seven, I broke my wrist and I
got dropped, and that spired me for a little bit,
and like there was that was a whole weird experience.
But once I got over myself and stopped being a
(13:56):
little baby about it, because I had a moment, you know,
I'll be honest, Paul, I had a moment where I
was I turned into a little baby and threw a
tempotenttrum a little bit. But once I got over that,
I realized, Okay, how can I turn this negative into
a really good positive? So, honestly, the criminal, the criminal
in me, just came out. I'm like, I learned all
(14:18):
the drill instructors, habits, their rotations, how the island worked,
the timing of everything, who's who in the zoo, how
the system works on the island, And I just learned
everything and when I did, and then after two and
a half months, I went back to two and a
half months, I went back to training picked up on
(14:39):
twenty Ay seven, but I had been there for almost
three months, so like nobody could hold a candlestick to me,
I was the leader. I became the guide and the
leader of the platoon, and I held that and ended
up graduating number one, all because I made the decision
that I was going to utilize this as a positive
to learn as much knowledge, like what's on the test,
(15:00):
what's on the test in two months? Well, I'm going
to learn all of it. And I did. I studied
all the books. I paid attention to what was coming
and going. I knew all the cycles of all the
journal instructors and what platoons, and like if anybody wanted
to know something, I knew it. I knew all of
the history, I knew all of the data. I knew everything.
So before they knew, before they came in and said
(15:20):
what they were going to say, I'm like, oh, it's
it's week four. This is what we're going to go.
Do you know? This is the cycle that we're in.
So I'll tell the guys and like Okay, get ready,
this is what's going to happen. Just the old thing
is like I turned you know, I turned lemons and lemonade. Yes, yes,
you know that's as it really is. Like I got
handed a bad deal and I just manipulated it for
(15:41):
a positive. I could have sat there and been sad
for two and a half months and made no progress
and then picked right back up. But I chose differently.
And it's little things like that over a period of
a life that really changes where you're at.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
That's a big philosophy of the ancient stoic for loss
of verse is to to make the best of a
bad situation, right.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
It's a lesson that it's a tuition payment if you
if you want it to be right, that's the that's
the real school. And uh and you know, now being
forty three, almost forty four, looking at life, I'm like, oh,
there's a there is a reoccurrence, reoccurrence of the same
situation over and over and over, and I keep making
(16:25):
the same decision. And a good friend of mine said,
you know, we have the freedom of choice. We don't
have the freedom of consequence. Yeah, yeah, yeah right, and
we we but we do have the freedom of choice
and in which direction and how you're going to perceive
something as one hundred percent on you. And over a
period of time I've just through I think it all
started in my youth of just having to persevere through
(16:46):
adversity and not really having a choice. That that just
became like a like a core DNA thing of me,
almost to a fault, because there's sometimes that I get
told no or something gets you know, I have this thing,
and man, I'm like a freaking bulldog.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
And this is the thing. The bit that all the
positive psychology in the world can't teach you is the
lessons that are learned through adversity and through doing hard stuff.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Yeah, so now I teach that's funny. I have this
on my have this on my thing. If you can
see that hard over easy and now, so I teach
this concept of choosing hard over easy, because you can
choose hard now and have it easy later, or you
can choose easy now. And I promise you hard is
going to come.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Yeah. Yeah. I often say in workshops, like it's not
easy getting up early in the morning and going and
doing a work hard. It's not easy turning a lovely
warm shower to cold right. It's not easy choosing the
healthy food over the unhealthy attractive food. It's not easy
(17:56):
to have to do the work right. It's all hard,
but it's a shit load harder when you talk to
people and later in life who you are in shocking sheep,
riddled with disease and nowhere near the potential. So it's
all hard. So choose your bloody heart right, Choose.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Your heart, man, that's it, you know, and now And
it's so funny, like that became like we've done this
for so long, and now it's become like I got
my wife saying that, like we'll say something about our
you know, our relationship, and it's like, well, choose your
heart right. You want to have a hard conversation now
or you want to ruin a relationship later, you know,
two years down the road.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
So I mean, this is and the reason that this
is top of mind for me is I've I've just
submitted the manuscript for my second book, which is around
thank you run something called Heartiness, which you'll be a
fan of now, And I start with a story that
has has influenced a lot of Western philosophy, and actually
(18:55):
what we're talking about right, now, and it's the trials
of Hercules, you know, way back in Greek mythology, where
the young Hercules ends up at a crossroads and there
are two paths, and one of the paths is shown
to him by Kakia, who is this very beautiful young
(19:16):
woman and promises a life of ease and all of this,
and then the other path is the path of Arite,
and where she says, if you choose this path, life
will be hard, but it will be meaningful. And that's
the path that Hercules chooses, right.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
It's funny you say that when I when I talk
to people about joining the Agogi, our men's community, my
coaching group, I'm like, I will be one hundred percent
honest with you. Your life will not get easier by joining.
It will be actually much harder. All of the easy
choices that you're choosing now won't be there. You're going
to have to choose the hard choices. But your life
(19:55):
will be so much better and so much more meaningful.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
And so let's jump in to that. So why why
particularly did you start to focus on man's health and
man's coaching? Was that just because of the journey that
you'd gone through and seeing lots of people on the
wayside and actually going, hey, there's a different path here.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Yeah, so I guess it really started my transition. I
wrote a book called The Excommunicated Warrior, The Seven Stages
of Transition, and that story kind of outlined my exit
from Special Operations. So what I didn't really talk about
is once I got into the Marine Corps, I joined
a unit called Second Force Reconnaissance Company. I was with
(20:37):
recon for you know, a number of years, and then
Marine Special Operations Command stood up. I took selection for that.
I spent the last half of my career working with
SOCOM under Marine Specials as a Marine raider and you know,
doing special operations in the support of global warrantrorism until
twenty twelve.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
And then I exited from that. And when I exited,
I thought I had it all figured out, but unfortunately
I did. I did not, and I had a very
rough Like you hear, a lot of veterans have a
very challenging transition back to normal life.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Yes, yes, what was the most difficult thing for you?
Speaker 2 (21:17):
When it comes down to it, it's you know, if
I strip away all I could say a lot of things,
but if I strip away all of it. It comes
down to identity. You really start, you really lose your
identity of who you are. Because Nick, it was a
reconnaissance marine, I was a force recomrane. I was a
marine raider and that and what that means is it's
how I train, That's like, that's while my brain works.
(21:39):
It's the clothes that I wear, the neighborhood that I
live in, the job that I do. It's it's how
what I look up on the internet, it's who I
can conversate with. It's it's everything, right, And if you
take that away from me, then who who and what
am I? And I didn't know. And there's a lot
of rhetoric for like saying software life, you know, Special
Operation Forces for life, Marine raider for life, this and that,
(22:02):
recount for life. But the reality is when you leave,
you're done. The phone stops ringing, Yeah, your buddy, stop call,
they're they're moving on. They think that you're good. So, like,
we could talk for hours about that. And what's what's
interesting about that is that is the same across the
board anything law enforcement, firefight, the fire service, medical community.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
A lot of athletes right have similar I said.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
It is the story I put in my book is
like this about about a young man who starts like
little like pee wee football at four years old, and
he plays football there. He plays in elementary, middle, high school, college,
gets in you know, or gets drafted straight into the NFL,
and then blows his knee out at twenty three years old.
(22:49):
This man does not remember not playing football. He is
a footballer, that's what he does. And at twenty three
years old he blows his knee out and can't play anymore.
And Paul, I cannot tell you how many of those
people have reached out to me and how many people
I've met, and that same exact thing. At that young
of age, they go, if I can't play the sport,
(23:10):
I don't know what I'm supposed to do in life.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Yeah, I think it's it's it's across the board, right,
is that when people have their identity wrapped up in
their job and then that changes that that often people
have a very very hard landing. And then and then
often it will then coincide with age and the whole
(23:36):
midlife crisis thing and changing hormones and all of that shit.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
That it's like a colossal, just epic shit chill, shit
show all at once. That's exactly what happens, and that's
the reason why. So so going back to your question
is like one, it really started with me. I mean here,
I am a six foot tall, two hundred and four
ten percent body fat, you know, in my early thirties
(24:03):
to a couple of years later, six foot tall, two
hundred and forty almost thirty percent body.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Fat, jumping jasus.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Yeah. I love sharing that photo because to me, that
the photo of me on the beach in Greece with
my family looking like that shows how far you someone
can get lost. And the truth of it is that guy,
you know, and people go like, well, that wasn't that bad.
You didn't look that bad, blah blah blah blah blah.
You know, I think I did because the way I look,
(24:33):
But you know, like I wasn't, you know, four hundred pounds,
like we get guys that are coming in. I was
out of shape. I was softened out of shape. And
uh but the reality is, Paul, like I was depressed.
I hated myself. I had a lot going on in
my head that like that guy was miserable that lot,
and that guy was living a life of quiet desperation.
(24:55):
So through through a friend and actually a good friend,
Nick Bear and BPN, I was doing a lot of
media stuff and I became an athlete through Bear Performance
Nutrition and one of their first actually and I said, hey, dude,
I want to get in phenomenal shape. I want to
show people what you can do. So I started this
(25:15):
thing and I just like snapped out of it. I
remembered who I was, and I did the did this
thing called the ninety day vlog where I launched a
business in ninety days. I went from like twenty eight
percent body fat to ten percent body fat in ninety days.
And I was going to make a video every single
day for ninety days and just document this journey of
(25:37):
how basically it was like a New Year's instead of
having New Year's resolutions, because everybody has a New Year's resolution,
but without a plan, your new year's resolution is just
a wish, right, Yeah, So I want to show people
how to execute. So I just threw myself in this
hopper and I got in phenomenal shape. When I did
the next year, people started asking me and I said,
(25:59):
and it changed so much, Like as soon as I
got in shape, I had you know, and I got
my hormones figured out. On TRT, I had a lot
more clarity in my life. Right the brain fog lifted,
I had more energy and more drive. I had clarity
in my vision of where I wanted to go. And
I was like, holy shit, man, this is really this
is the real deal. And then guys started hitting me
(26:20):
up and I was like, oh, man, well you just
need to get in shape. So Josh and I started,
who was a teammate of mine, started what now is
the AGOGI in twenty eighteen, and it was like old
school fitness and nutrition coaching. I send you a Google sheet,
you know, we worked off Google sheets and or whatever
they were at the time. People would put in their
(26:41):
macros and then we'd issue training and very rudimentary and go.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Ahead before we dive, because I do want to dive
into that, but I just want to rewind a little.
How much of the how much of that descending fog
and the difficulties of leaving the marines. How much of
that do you think was that loss of identity as
I'm no longer a marine reator, and how much of
(27:11):
it was a loss of purpose? Have you ever thought
about those elements.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
I think it was. I think it was one and
the same. I think I think it was one and
the same one, you know, one it's not who I
am and then I And the thing is is I
still had a job to do, like I still always
created something. But I didn't know. I think I was
just doing Paul, I don't think I had a true purpose,
(27:36):
which is okay. I think people, I think we give
too much weight to purpose. Purpose can be whatever you
make it to be. It doesn't have to be this like,
you know, like the heavens open up for the sins,
you know. But I think people are waiting on that.
They're like, I don't I haven't had this epiphany of
my purpose. I'm like, dude, your purpose can be whatever
you want it to be.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
I also say people are waiting for the purpose fairing.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Yeah. Yeah, I'm like, dude, like there's so much weight
given to this word purpose. And I'm like, dude, purpose
can be whatever you want it to be. This week,
like change it and it should change in a year
it would be different. But to give your point, I
didn't really know. I guess what direction I was just doing,
which is good, right if you don't know what to
(28:20):
do just do just that. Yeah, yeah, and then through
that execution you'll find and that's exactly what happened to me.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Well, I think they're doing is you're you're in forward
motion towards something, right, and that that is what that's
what brings them. We're talking about fairies, purpose veries, but
that's what brings the motivation fairy. This is a lot
of people are sitting waiting for the motivation fairy when
they don't realize that if they start acting and have
(28:49):
a goal and say they're in forwards motion towards your goal,
that's what releases still puming in the brand and gives
you further motivation.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
And through this journey right of this this this meat transitioning,
it's all in the book me transitioning out of military
and learning. I threw myself into like different therapies, and
I threw myself. I became a guinea pig because I
was running a nonprofit helping other veterans and so and
that's and there's something to that, right, there's this this
idea of service. You know, if you're depressed, go help somebody,
(29:18):
go help, go help three people that are worse off
than you. So I started doing I started doing that
more and more, and because I was on this journey
that was really no there was no destination for this journey.
I was just doing. I was just executing. But through
that I started to find different people and different things
that would come across my life that I would gain
(29:41):
more even more clarity. And it was like a positive
snowball effect, and that I think that's it was. It wasn't.
I didn't have this like idea of purpose other than
I did this idea that I just needed to keep
moving forward. And and that's when I developed my kind
of like there was this thing that I say, and
(30:01):
people even say it back to me now, and I
have a shirt forward is never quit, never surrender, always forward,
and it's just you know, by with and through. It's
kind of like the old Special Operations idea of things.
It was just continue if you you know, if you've
got to go to move forward. If you hit a wall,
maybe you need to go through it, maybe you need
to go over it, maybe you need to go around it,
(30:22):
you know, but regardless is don't stay where you're at,
just keep moving forward. And and that's where I was
for a long time. I was like, I'm just going
to move forward. Now. Obviously, the more you lean into
personal development, the more that I leaned into growth, the
more that I kept doing that, things became I got smarter,
(30:42):
and things did become more clear, and then I start realizing, like,
what my you know, there was a thing that happened
that I realized what my personal mission was. And once
I realized that, things became even more clearer. And then
and then we just dialed everything in over the Now.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
That's really interesting that you talk about that, because often
if I'm in workshops and I'm talking about purpose, so
and I'll say, very similar to what you're doing. There's
a lot of people think that their purpose in life
needs to be running a multimillion dollar startup and an
orphanage in Nepal at the same time. And I'm like
that that's bootshit when you look at all of it.
(31:22):
It's about being of service, being an integrated part of
the of your community, right, And I'm like, just just
just start with something. And I get people to write
a little tombstone statement about how they would like their
life to be viewed when they've passed.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
And yeah, eulogy too. Yeah, it's powerful.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
And it's powerful right. But it then what it does
is it starts to get people to think about how
they want to be. And then I say, all I
want you to do now is what you've written down here.
Spend five to ten minutes day deliberately acting on that.
So if it's about being a great dad or a
great mom, spend five minutes a day deliberately being great.
(32:09):
Because then when your attention is on it, your brain
is going to commit sales to it, and it's you're
going to get clarity over time, right, which is exactly
what you just said.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
Where your focus goes, your energy flows.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Right, yeah, yeah, absolutely so, So let's let's let's then
tase apart. So I think we've established the importance of
being in forwards motion and of of that. I loved
what you said about was it by round and through
in terms of all and through, by with and through,
(32:42):
which is which is is awesome? So what what are
talk me through some of the elements of your coaching,
Whether you know how much of its mindset, how much
of its physical? Why is the physical important? All of
that stuff?
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Absolutely? So it started out physical pretty much only, and
then Josh and I we get this stuff back because
you do like weekly check ins, right, and we would
get their stuff back, you see their weight, you know,
and then we'd see their logs and we're like, dude,
why can't these guys, these are grown men. Why can't
these grown men stay consistent? Why can't they hit their numbers?
(33:21):
Why can't they do the things that they're supposed to do?
They wanted, they signed up, they're the ones paying. Why
can't they do it? And so we started talking to
these guys and we realized that they didn't have a
fitness to nutrition problem. They had a mindset problem. They
had a limiting belief problem, had a trauma problem. There
(33:42):
were just broken men really on the on the inside
that knewbody nobody knew. And so so we turned it
into almost a men's mentorship community. So we started hosting
I started hosting coaching calls. And this is really when
things started to like we started to actually build a
(34:02):
real company away from Excel sheets. So we had like,
we developed an app and we started having zoom you know,
group zoom calls, and we developed the thing that we're like,
they could all be talking to each other like in
social media, yeah, and really build a community. And we
realized that when we started to attack the deep underlying
(34:23):
issues of why they're self sabotaging, why they're choosing food
as comfort, why they're choosing all these bad habits, that's
when we started to see results and it wasn't enough.
We started to like last year we actually just went
through another revamp where we created I was like, it's
not enough, man Like, still not enough. So two things
(34:44):
that we did was we created this educational We have
our pillars, which is our fitness pillar. Like I feel
like fitness is a gateway drug to success. I love that. Yeah,
it is because through fitness you find discipline, you find consistency,
you find delayed gratification, which transfers into all areas of
your life. Right, So fitness and then discipline, discipline in
(35:08):
your life, discipline with your marriage, your children, your time,
just being disciplined over well, being able to say no
to things. Right.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
And it's interesting Nick that the discipline, it's like the D,
the bad D word that people don't talk about right
when it comes to behavioral change. And you read all
the research and I'm thinking, where the hell's the discipline
element to this? Because your motivation is great when it's around,
but when motivations not there, that's when you're discipline is.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
And I love that you brought that up, because, Paul,
how are you.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
I'm fifty three fifty that's a lie. I'm fifty four
fifty four.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
That's what happens over fifty. I don't think it matters
when you say that I.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Just started fifty four last week.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
There you go, So at fifty four, are you motivated
to get your body up and go train every day?
Speaker 1 (36:01):
That there's not a shitload of motivation, but I do
it exactly.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
That's motivation is great. It's like a drug. It's like
doing a line of cocaine. But it fades, Yes, it fades.
And that's what people hit me out there, like, you
don't need motivation. You don't need motivation, which you need
as a plan. What you need is a why. And
that kind of goes back to the third pillars. That is,
we wrote belief for our third pillar, and belief being
(36:27):
belief in yourself, believe in that you're worthy of love,
being believing that you are worthy of success, that you
don't have limiting beliefs, that you don't think that your
past failures are going to be your future failures. That
you're stuck in this whatever the system is, that you're
in the belief that you can have the body that
you want, that you can have the relationship that you
(36:49):
want with your wife, that you can be the father
to that you need to be with your kids, that
you believe that. We found that when people don't believe that,
they'll never achieve it until they start believing it.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Yeah, And it's I think that concept of belief is
heavily wrapped up in hope and optimism. Yeah, if people
don't have hope for the future, like Jesus, the wheels
can come off big.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
Time, right, and then at the joint, right, if they
don't have that, then what's the point? And the last
one being tribe and we kind of it's kind of
a tricky one because what it really comes down to
for us and Josh and I and the rest of
the guys is why do we Why do you get
up in the morning and go sacrifice? Why do you
go to the gym? Why do you why do you
delay gratification? And for us, it's really about our tribe.
(37:35):
It's it's our why because when we find a guy
that's like, I just want to look good, naked for me. Well,
when it's four o'clock in the morning, it's it's it's
thirty degrees out in the garage and you got to
go do burpies for you know, for time for ten
minutes Like that doesn't sound real fun, but it's so
that my son looks at me and doesn't think that
I'm a fat piece of shit. It looks at me
as a superhero and a role model and says that
(37:57):
on when I grow up, I want to be like you.
That's what will get you out out of the bed.
You know, looking good naked, that's only going to get
you so far. It's like motivation. We have to have
a deeper why of why we are doing the uncomfortable things,
why we're choosing hard over easy every single day. And
it's got to be greater than ourselves.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Yeah, yeah, and not three welbins. Find your why, you'll
find your way. But he stole it from Frederick Nietzsche,
the German philosopher one hundred years ago said he has
a why to live for can bear almost any high.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
And I'm sure it probably came even further from that
than you know, lots of and you know, and probably
they stole it from who knows what you know prior
to that, but it is true the human body. I
like Simon Sinek's talk on how great leaders inspire if
you ever if anybody's ever seen that, and he really
breaks the psychology down of the why and the humor
with why yeah, and how we associate with things at
(38:51):
a very deep emotional level, and then you get people.
If you want to inspire people, you have to give
them the why. And that's part of the one of
the reasons why we do so we had those are
our pillars. Those are the foundation, a bedrock of what
we stand on. But then we took another phase. We
took it another step further. We developed these four phases,
and the first one was mastering yourself, Like you have
(39:13):
to master yourself. You can't do anything until you can.
You can master yourself in all areas, your fitness, your belief,
those pillars that we told you about. And a lot
of guys like, well, I want my money better and
I want my relationship better. I'm like, well, none of
that's going to be better until you are better. Like
you can. If you don't have the discipline to put
the cookie down, you're not going to have discipline to
(39:35):
save a tenth of your earnings.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
I think it's Leonardo da Vinci who talks about dominion
over yourself and having master and he says, he said,
without that and you got nothing.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
You got nothing. So we developed this educational platform and
we broke down what does it mean to master yourself?
And so what we did was we created that, right,
we created this platform to to really dive into how
do I master myself? With all the worksheets, all the coaching, everything,
the videos, and then we and we make it sequential
(40:08):
because like the second one is leading your family, Phase
two is leading your family. You cannot lead your family
until you can lead yourself. Because if you come in
and we saw this and we used to do these
thirty day challenges, Paul and these guys would jump on
the challenge and they'd pay their little ninety nine dollars
and they'd do this thirty day challenge like, oh yeah,
I got my Macros, this is my food list, and
they go into the kitchen they start throwing stuff out
(40:29):
and Okay, tell the whole family that we're doing it.
I'm doing a challenge. You're doing a challenge. We're all
doing a challenge. And the wife's like, you are the
one puking picking cheetos out of your belly button last
night while you were sitting on the couch watching Netflix.
Who what are you talking about? No sugar and all this,
you know what I mean? Like just trust, absolutely, no belief, no,
(40:51):
you know, like absolutely, just you know, a complete hypocritical person, right,
And I was like, guys, and we saw this time
and time again, like my family won't get on board,
et cetera. I'm like, of course they're not going to
get on board, Like you're not consistent, they don't believe you,
you're full of shit.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
You got to earn the right to lead in any
any to me in.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
Right, heks? Right, So so that's what we did. And
then and then we start to and then phase two
is really diving into with the significant other leading the family.
Being an intentional father. What kind of father are you?
You know, truly being an intentional one, not a present one,
but an intentional one, having rebuilding rebuilding trust from broken promises,
(41:32):
you know, and having to kind of you know, there's
some workshops in there of having needed what we call
the need a needy conversation with your significant other where
they kind of down, they kind of get to download
everything that they've that you've potentially done to them, vertally
or invertly. It doesn't really matter right or indirectly or whatever.
Not on purpose maybe, but how how it affected them,
(41:56):
And maybe there's some resentment that's being built up. And
resentment will kill any relationship. It's like a cancer. We
have to get rid of resentment. So we have these
things in there, and it's only then that we can
get the phase three, which is master your finances. Funny
your financial plan. Well, then you're going to have You're
gonna have problems there, You're going to have rub there,
(42:16):
You're going to have strife in your relationship because you
guys are not heading in the same direction. You don't
have the same vision. So all this financial stuff that
you want to do and I talk about online or
I talk about in the group is not all or
not because it's going to create havoc in your in
your house. She has to be aligned with you. The
only way she can be aligned with you is if
we go back to mastering yourself and that you're leading
(42:38):
with intention and purpose. Right, she has trust you guys
are on the same page. You've rebuilt your relationship, you're
dating your wife, your wife is now your girlfriend, you
know what I mean? Yeah, And it's only then that
we can master your finances. And then we get into
really really diving into what that means and really unconvinced
(43:02):
wealth wealth growth, like really how wealthy people utilize wealth,
you know, utilizing debt and how they use debt and
life insurance and a lot of different things for investments
and whatnot. So we dive heavily to that. And the
last phase is the legacy, the leadership. You know, what
is what is your legacy? What is that going to build?
(43:23):
And kind of go from there.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
Yeah, I like the step wise approach through that that
it's that it's it's built from the bottom up. And
I think that I mean a few elements of that
that basically, trust really comes from doing what you say
that you're going to do. And if there's broken promises
that that will kill the trust in and if people
(43:44):
are not aligned. You got two different people rowing in
different directions, the folk's going breaking now.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
Yeah, and how many times have we met people or
seen that where it's like, oh, you guys are a mess.
You guys are going nowhere fast right. Yeah?
Speaker 1 (43:59):
Yeah, So me, what's the what what is the biggest
thing that kind of comes out from guys who've gone
through your program, Like, what what is the biggest difference
you see from the start to the finish?
Speaker 2 (44:14):
Man, I'll say this, I got a text from a
guy just as we got on chance down in Florida
with the fam riding roller coasters left and right. Last
time here, I was too fat to write anything. Now
I'm making memories with the kids. Thanks for giving me
this gift.
Speaker 1 (44:30):
Wow, that's pretty cool. That must give you goosebumps when
you get stuff.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
Like that makes you want to cry, Paul, that's every day,
that's every day. I think the biggest thing out of
is that I give people the permission to take over
their life, to be the capital of their own ship
and the CEO of their own life. Yeah, that's very cool.
Speaker 1 (44:48):
I mean the last question and how much building a
community and how much is it done for you? Having
been the guy who's been through several different identities and
now you've got that community, what's the impact on you? Man?
Speaker 2 (45:08):
I'll tell you. I literally will post in our group
all the time because I'll link up with people there
isn't a problem or a place that I can go
that I don't find somebody from our community and have
the most wholesome, real world conversations that men aren't having
(45:28):
anywhere else. And the fact to think that me and
my best friend built this over years from nothing, and
I learned so much just being just linking up with
these men and having them kind of open up. And
it's to have to give them an opportunity to just
be open and real with really what's going on, because
(45:50):
everybody's pat this facade, right, nobody, nobody ever. You know,
you ask a man how he's doing, fine, the reality
is you scratch just a little bit of crust off
the surface and there's a lot of pain going on,
a lot of lone a lot of loneliness, a lot
of heartache, a lot of frustration and uh, and to
be able to create have created something that gives them
(46:11):
a place to be open and honest. But not just
like don't get me wrong, we're not a cry like
a crying place. You know, we'll acknowledge the pain, we'll
acknowledge the trauma. And I kind of want to talk
about the retreat real quick, but we'll acknowledge all that.
But we're a very because I think of our background,
we're a very tactical community. Like I like, that's why
(46:36):
the phases were so important. I have to give a
man needs a task. Okay, this is broken, this is
not right. What is the tool that's going to get
me to the next level? Right? Like, I don't want
to just give it to God, I don't, you know.
And I understand that I'm a faith guy as well,
but like God doesn't drive a park car, like, we
have to actually do.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
Something, and he's not coming to sort your shd eyed either, right.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Right, He's already given you the tools. You got to
do the work, right. And so I think that's what
it comes down to is just the fact that we've
been able to like I feel so fulfilled that we
have created a place for the men that raise their
hand and say, you know what, that's the type of
guy that I want. That's the type of guy that
(47:22):
I am, and the inside I just got to get
I just got to get all this other stuff out
of it, you know. And I think it's designed because
you take men and you isolate them and they lose
their power. Unite men in a community can't beat them. Yeah,
you can go to my website Nicko Molassos dot com,
Orthegogi dot com. Thank you Paul very much. Oh so
(47:55):
this is yeah, Paul, this was This was the biggest
thing man, because we've been running events for a long
time and you can only do so much online. I
was literally talking to my wife. I was like, I
just need to get my hands on these guys, like
I want to get my hands on them and have
and online is great. Online's great, but there is something
(48:16):
kind of magical when you get a group of men
in a room together. I and I can prove that
to you because if any man listening to this thinks
about when there's no women around and they go link
up with all their bros, whether it be for positive
or negative reasons, whether they're drinking or they're doing something
like a camping trip, it doesn't really matter what it
(48:38):
is doing jiu jitsu doesn't really matter. When guys link up,
the weight comes off their shoulders, they laugh more, they
tell stories. That's what we created. But with intention. What
I learned was that through doing this and I really
(49:00):
they didn't believe it. I didn't know one in three
men are physically abused one in four men are sexually abused,
and that statistics rain true every single time I get
a group of people in their inner room. And this
is the reason why men continue to step sabotage, and
(49:21):
they do. They do the roller coaster because they haven't
dealt with that. And I have this thing where I
talk about I can take shit and turn into apple pie.
And I really believe. I really do believe that, and
I've got I've proven it multiple times in private rooms
where the worst of the worst and you're like, there's
no way, how do I turn this into a superpower?
And we do it every time, but I can't. That's
(49:42):
not something I can do online. I've got to break
bread with you. I've got to sweat with you. I've
got to earn your trust. I've got to give you
permission to know that my heart is your heart and
your heart is mine, and we're good to go. We're friends,
we're brothers. And when all of that, and I know
it sounds crazy, but when all of that weight comes away,
all of that verbado and all of that ego comes
(50:05):
away and stripes down, that's when men can open up
and the most amazing thing happens and when you when
a man can shed that weight that's he's been holding
on for years, is when he can really really his
life will sore. He can be the leader that he
(50:26):
can be the leader that he knows he was supposed
to become. He can he can be the husband that
he knew was supposed to become. He can have the
body that he was always meant to have. And it
was those little things that was that was keeping him
from that. It was the obstacle. And that's what we
do on these retreats is we break bread. And it's
(50:46):
crazy twenty twenty five, we're more connected. I'm talking to
you in Melbourne, Australia. I got family there, and I'm
in North Carolina. We're more connected than we ever have
been ever in the history of men. Right yet we
are more disconnected than ever before as well. And that's
what that's why I think this mission is so important
(51:06):
is online communities are great, but we have to break
bread together. We've got a sweat together.
Nick, come aos, did I get anywhere close to that?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
It's your accent. It's just it's an accent thing.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
It's not well, tell you what, in Australia, very few
people can understand me because of an Irishman living in Australia.
So yeah, yeah, so we'll just run with that thing,
like welcome to the podcast. You are lots of different
things to lots of different people, right, So you are
(00:38):
a coach, you run Man's health for teacher, you're an
entrepreneur and you've been in a fitness industry. You're ex military.
So just give people a bit of a sense of
your story from a high level, like just starting starting
as a kid, and take us through the journey.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah, I grew up without an active father in the home,
not something that I even realized was unnormal. And obviously
that plays into a lot of different things, right, I
mean we know the statistics really worldwide, any first or
(01:21):
second world country that doesn't have a father in the home,
how that kind of plays out with you know, education, crime,
et cetera, success later in life. Anyways, So yeah, I
didn't grow up. I had my brother and my mom.
We used to, you know, make jokes that my mom
was running from the law because we were literally we
would move every six months to a different school. Wow,
(01:44):
you know, and you know, as an adult, you know,
like why were we moving around? You know? And she
was like, honestly, it's just jobs. If I could get
a job making this much money and I would move,
I'd move us. As we were just trying to survive.
And I asked her when I was like, how much
were you making, you know, take care of you know,
she was laughing. I was like thousand a months. She
was like sometimes like five hundred a month, five hundred
(02:08):
to one thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
A month, and trying to bring up two boys on that.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Trying to bring up two boys on that. So like
later in life, I honestly was like, man, it's actually
pretty impressive. Like we're survivors, you know. And it never
took really a handout from anything, but no stateside, you know,
we never got on welfare. She always worked. That was
kind of like one of our family things. You know.
I come from kind of a poor family, and but
(02:31):
they never they just valued hard work. I think I
had a lot to do with my grandfather. My grandfather
was a Korean War and Vietnam veteran, and he just
had a very like we had a very high work
ethic and realizing that what you make is based off
of comes off your own hands. And and that was
(02:52):
very Even as a kid, I remember that kind of
that core value, if you will, kind of being an
and it stuck with me. At eleven years old, I
started got my first job. Like you know, in the States,
we get this thing called it's like a social Security statement,
and you pay in like you take they take it
out of you know, most in most countries they take
(03:12):
wages for taxes and for different things. Right, one of
the things is for social Security for your for your
your retirement, if you if when you reach that ripe
old age, right, well, if you go back on my statement,
it says that I've I've been paying social Security since
nineteen ninety three, which was I was eleven years old. Wow. Yeah,
(03:34):
and uh and I think we lie. I don't even
know how it because that's like at that point, I'm
not even sure that was legal, but somehow we squeezed
through and my social Security started started nineteen ninety three.
So it was just always a thing that like you
if you want money, if you want things, you got
to work for it. That's how that's how it goes.
So anyways, you know, long story, stort I hated moving moving,
(03:57):
but I'll kind of come back to that when I
get them to the military. Because I didn't have an
active father in the home, I did have a stepfather
that was coming in and out. I believe he worked
on like gash ole pipeline type stuff like rigs, and
so he was kind of coming and going from the
time I was about five until the time I was
(04:17):
about eleven.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
I'm nick was not was did you find that to
be helpful or more disruptive? Having this guy who used.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
To I'll tell you he was. He was physically abusive
to me and emotionally abusive to my brother, right And
obviously I'm a kid at the time, so it's you know,
you take you gotta have to take it. And at
eleven years old is the time that I fought back
and I got thrown through a closet door. We had
(04:50):
a little tussle. Obviously there's a grown man. I'm eleven.
You know, we know how that's going to go. But
that tussle is what woke up my mom and she
was able to she got that's when she found out
of the situation. And then it all came out. I
jumped through a window, I excaped, you know, I escaped
the house and ran away and that was the end
of that. And she left him that on the spot,
(05:12):
kicked him out, left him on the spot. And to
be honest, you know, she never knew any of the
other stuff was going down. But through that, the lack
of a you know, lack of an actual, you know,
positive real mole model, I went straight into this need
for community, this need for acceptance, which landed me in
(05:35):
a basically a quote unquote a gang.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
All I was just about to say, there is a
bit of a phenomenon in Australia about young meal gangs.
And you know a lot of people are pointing the
finger that a lot of them are immigrants, but a
lot of them tend to have absent fathers and you know,
brought up with no role models, and they just gravity
(06:00):
towards their own groups, don't it because they need that
sense of connection.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
And you know what, and and because I didn't have it,
they were right there waiting on it. And I tell
people all the time, I'm like, guys, if you don't
man up and be that there is a there's a
group of people out there that is waiting for that
young man to show up and be like, yeah, come on.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
And that's where you then get your values from and
all on your behaviors and all of that stuff.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Right, that's right, that's exactly it. Now, that becomes your
core values, that becomes the rules of engagement for life.
And that's exactly what happened. And so that happened right
out at eleven. It was ironic, like look, being at
the age I am now and looking back at it,
like you know, that altercation happened in me feeling in
danger or me feeling weak or something like that, and
(06:52):
I was like, well, I'm not going to be a victim,
and I'm going to go I'm going to go get
someone who is going to have my back and be
a part of a community that is going to protect me.
And and if you look at it, and ironically enough,
it was the gang was called the the Irish Shenanigans.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
There you go, the token there.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
And what's funny is my my actual father, like you know,
he wasn't around, but when he found out, he was
pissed and he was he was like, He's like, you're
not Irish or Greek? What the you know? Anyways, it
was funny, but yeah, man, by the time I was thirteen,
So that happened when I was eleven. By the time
I was thirteen, I was a two time convicted felon
as an adult. Yeah, so just two short years U
(07:39):
two short years, had two felonies under my belt that
would not get expunged when I turned eighteen. I thought
it was going to but it did not. Yeah, cost me,
cost me something in the future. So that happened, and
I got rolled up with the police and obviously got
thrown in juv That was a that was a long
(08:01):
It was a whole long time right there. And I
make a joke. I say, by the time I was fourteen,
I was cleaning on the straight and arrow. I'd stop drinking,
stop doing drugs, stop breaking laws. So by fourteen, I'd
cleaned up my life, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Wow? And what then led you to the military?
Speaker 2 (08:22):
That's where it goes. So I am seventeen years old.
I just turned seventeen years old. I'm working at a
place called Baypoint Marriott. In the morning, I was an
audio visual consultant for I want to say, I was
making like fifteen dollars an hour in the mid nineties
(08:44):
hooking up you know, a conference center, so like hooking
up projectors, lights, microphones from six am to two pm,
and then I would take a thirty minute break. I'd
have a club sandwich and fries. Every single day at
two thirty to ten thirty. I was a bellman at
the same resort. It became very consistent and and I go,
I don't I don't want that for my life in
(09:06):
twenty of thirty years. Like, that's not where I want
to be in twenty or thirty years. So I make
the joke saying that I like, I hit the nuclear option,
I like blew up my life. And I was like, well,
screw it. The only way out that I know is
the military. My grandfather did it. And you know the
time in the nineties that I don't know if you
know this, but the Marine Corps marketing tactics in the
(09:28):
nineties was spot on. I mean spot on. You had
guys battling dragons with swords, and they're saying that like,
you know, we don't promise you a rose garden, and
they're like this is the hardest thing. And they had
sexy uniforms, and I'm like, dude, if I'm gonna do
(09:48):
join the military, I'm obviously going to go fight dragons
and be a marine. Yes, And what young man doesn't
want to go fight a dragon right with sword? And
so I went and talked to them recruiter, and he
did his thing, and then he got my information down,
went in the back and I'll never forget the look
on his face when he came out and was like, kid,
(10:11):
you're not joining the Marine Corps nor any branch. You're
a high school dropout and a convicted felon. And keep
in mind Clinton was in was the president at the time,
so that he was like he was crushing. He was
in the middle of crushing the military. He was. It
was a huge draw down. So like there, So I
had medical issues, a drug I didn't need a drug waiver.
(10:35):
I had to. I had to have a waiver for
my criminal background. I was a high school dropout. And
he told me no. And I'll tell you right now, Paul,
that was the biggest mistake he could have done, was
tell a rebellious kid no, because all I did was
(10:55):
like that became my mission. M HM, quit my job,
moved in with my grandmother, and you're talking. I threw
that all that money away and moved in my grand
with my grandmother, started working nights at a movie theater
for like four fifty an hour. I remember getting my
first check after two weeks and it was like one
hundred and seventy five bucks, and I'm like, how are
(11:17):
people surviving off of this? And then joined the college
to do a semester, because if you join a college,
get accepted, and do one semester and then drop out,
you're no longer a high school dropout.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
You're ah, you're a college drop fight.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
And we know the military loves a college dropout. So
that's what I did. So I did that. It almost
took me two years to get in, and so that's
what I did. I got a one hundred letters of
recommendation from from bosses and friends and family and people
my mom knew about me, and I just made it.
(11:59):
I just went on a man that was my mission
and uh and joined them and ended up joining the
Marine Corps at eighteen turned nineteen and recruit training. And
in two thousand.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
And how did you how did you find the training
for the Marines and that whole community. Was that something
that you just I mean.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
It was I guess you could say it was hard
in a way. I mean you got to keep in
mind that, you know that that era of youth was different,
Like we grew up outside. We did that. We didn't
have social media, we didn't have the internet. You know,
the Internet came around late nineties for us. Yeah, but
it wasn't nothing to sit around on. It was like,
(12:44):
you know, we used I remember using Aol messenger. Hey
where are you at? Okay? Cool, I'm going to meet
you over there, you know what I mean. It was
it was more of a way to message people. And
so we just we were very I was very physical.
I was already lifting weights, you know what I mean,
Like I wanted to get jacked all the time, you know,
eating protein, following old you know, our old bodybooks. Yeah, yeah,
(13:07):
that's that's just what I That's just what we did.
And so it was very, very different. It wasn't nothing.
It was hard, but it wasn't something like we didn't
have this belief that we couldn't do it. I couldn't
do it. The issue came into play where after working
for almost two years to get in the military. On
training day seven, I broke my wrist and I got
(13:29):
dropped to a medical rehabilitation particular.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
This is this is post. This is post when you
finished all your training.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
No, no, this was in boot camp. This is in
recruit recruit training. I got there, I was like, yes,
I made it, I'm going in. Everything was going good.
On training day seven, I broke my wrist and I
got dropped, and that spired me for a little bit,
and like there was that was a whole weird experience.
But once I got over myself and stopped being a
(13:56):
little baby about it, because I had a moment, you know,
I'll be honest, Paul, I had a moment where I
was I turned into a little baby and threw a
tempotenttrum a little bit. But once I got over that,
I realized, Okay, how can I turn this negative into
a really good positive? So, honestly, the criminal, the criminal
in me, just came out. I'm like, I learned all
(14:18):
the drill instructors, habits, their rotations, how the island worked,
the timing of everything, who's who in the zoo, how
the system works on the island, And I just learned
everything and when I did, and then after two and
a half months, I went back to two and a
half months, I went back to training picked up on
(14:39):
twenty Ay seven, but I had been there for almost
three months, so like nobody could hold a candlestick to me,
I was the leader. I became the guide and the
leader of the platoon, and I held that and ended
up graduating number one, all because I made the decision
that I was going to utilize this as a positive
to learn as much knowledge, like what's on the test,
(15:00):
what's on the test in two months? Well, I'm going
to learn all of it. And I did. I studied
all the books. I paid attention to what was coming
and going. I knew all the cycles of all the
journal instructors and what platoons, and like if anybody wanted
to know something, I knew it. I knew all of
the history, I knew all of the data. I knew everything.
So before they knew, before they came in and said
(15:20):
what they were going to say, I'm like, oh, it's
it's week four. This is what we're going to go.
Do you know? This is the cycle that we're in.
So I'll tell the guys and like Okay, get ready,
this is what's going to happen. Just the old thing
is like I turned you know, I turned lemons and lemonade. Yes, yes,
you know that's as it really is. Like I got
handed a bad deal and I just manipulated it for
(15:41):
a positive. I could have sat there and been sad
for two and a half months and made no progress
and then picked right back up. But I chose differently.
And it's little things like that over a period of
a life that really changes where you're at.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
That's a big philosophy of the ancient stoic for loss
of verse is to to make the best of a
bad situation, right.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
It's a lesson that it's a tuition payment if you
if you want it to be right, that's the that's
the real school. And uh and you know, now being
forty three, almost forty four, looking at life, I'm like, oh,
there's a there is a reoccurrence, reoccurrence of the same
situation over and over and over, and I keep making
(16:25):
the same decision. And a good friend of mine said,
you know, we have the freedom of choice. We don't
have the freedom of consequence. Yeah, yeah, yeah right, and
we we but we do have the freedom of choice
and in which direction and how you're going to perceive
something as one hundred percent on you. And over a
period of time I've just through I think it all
started in my youth of just having to persevere through
(16:46):
adversity and not really having a choice. That that just
became like a like a core DNA thing of me,
almost to a fault, because there's sometimes that I get
told no or something gets you know, I have this thing,
and man, I'm like a freaking bulldog.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
And this is the thing. The bit that all the
positive psychology in the world can't teach you is the
lessons that are learned through adversity and through doing hard stuff.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Yeah, so now I teach that's funny. I have this
on my have this on my thing. If you can
see that hard over easy and now, so I teach
this concept of choosing hard over easy, because you can
choose hard now and have it easy later, or you
can choose easy now. And I promise you hard is
going to come.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Yeah. Yeah. I often say in workshops, like it's not
easy getting up early in the morning and going and
doing a work hard. It's not easy turning a lovely
warm shower to cold right. It's not easy choosing the
healthy food over the unhealthy attractive food. It's not easy
(17:56):
to have to do the work right. It's all hard,
but it's a shit load harder when you talk to
people and later in life who you are in shocking sheep,
riddled with disease and nowhere near the potential. So it's
all hard. So choose your bloody heart right, Choose.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Your heart, man, that's it, you know, and now And
it's so funny, like that became like we've done this
for so long, and now it's become like I got
my wife saying that, like we'll say something about our
you know, our relationship, and it's like, well, choose your
heart right. You want to have a hard conversation now
or you want to ruin a relationship later, you know,
two years down the road.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
So I mean, this is and the reason that this
is top of mind for me is I've I've just
submitted the manuscript for my second book, which is around
thank you run something called Heartiness, which you'll be a
fan of now, And I start with a story that
has has influenced a lot of Western philosophy, and actually
(18:55):
what we're talking about right, now, and it's the trials
of Hercules, you know, way back in Greek mythology, where
the young Hercules ends up at a crossroads and there
are two paths, and one of the paths is shown
to him by Kakia, who is this very beautiful young
(19:16):
woman and promises a life of ease and all of this,
and then the other path is the path of Arite,
and where she says, if you choose this path, life
will be hard, but it will be meaningful. And that's
the path that Hercules chooses, right.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
It's funny you say that when I when I talk
to people about joining the Agogi, our men's community, my
coaching group, I'm like, I will be one hundred percent
honest with you. Your life will not get easier by joining.
It will be actually much harder. All of the easy
choices that you're choosing now won't be there. You're going
to have to choose the hard choices. But your life
(19:55):
will be so much better and so much more meaningful.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
And so let's jump in to that. So why why
particularly did you start to focus on man's health and
man's coaching? Was that just because of the journey that
you'd gone through and seeing lots of people on the
wayside and actually going, hey, there's a different path here.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Yeah, so I guess it really started my transition. I
wrote a book called The Excommunicated Warrior, The Seven Stages
of Transition, and that story kind of outlined my exit
from Special Operations. So what I didn't really talk about
is once I got into the Marine Corps, I joined
a unit called Second Force Reconnaissance Company. I was with
(20:37):
recon for you know, a number of years, and then
Marine Special Operations Command stood up. I took selection for that.
I spent the last half of my career working with
SOCOM under Marine Specials as a Marine raider and you know,
doing special operations in the support of global warrantrorism until
twenty twelve.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
And then I exited from that. And when I exited,
I thought I had it all figured out, but unfortunately
I did. I did not, and I had a very
rough Like you hear, a lot of veterans have a
very challenging transition back to normal life.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Yes, yes, what was the most difficult thing for you?
Speaker 2 (21:17):
When it comes down to it, it's you know, if
I strip away all I could say a lot of things,
but if I strip away all of it. It comes
down to identity. You really start, you really lose your
identity of who you are. Because Nick, it was a
reconnaissance marine, I was a force recomrane. I was a
marine raider and that and what that means is it's
how I train, That's like, that's while my brain works.
(21:39):
It's the clothes that I wear, the neighborhood that I
live in, the job that I do. It's it's how
what I look up on the internet, it's who I
can conversate with. It's it's everything, right, And if you
take that away from me, then who who and what
am I? And I didn't know. And there's a lot
of rhetoric for like saying software life, you know, Special
Operation Forces for life, Marine raider for life, this and that,
(22:02):
recount for life. But the reality is when you leave,
you're done. The phone stops ringing, Yeah, your buddy, stop call,
they're they're moving on. They think that you're good. So, like,
we could talk for hours about that. And what's what's
interesting about that is that is the same across the
board anything law enforcement, firefight, the fire service, medical community.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
A lot of athletes right have similar I said.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
It is the story I put in my book is
like this about about a young man who starts like
little like pee wee football at four years old, and
he plays football there. He plays in elementary, middle, high school, college,
gets in you know, or gets drafted straight into the NFL,
and then blows his knee out at twenty three years old.
(22:49):
This man does not remember not playing football. He is
a footballer, that's what he does. And at twenty three
years old he blows his knee out and can't play anymore.
And Paul, I cannot tell you how many of those
people have reached out to me and how many people
I've met, and that same exact thing. At that young
of age, they go, if I can't play the sport,
(23:10):
I don't know what I'm supposed to do in life.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Yeah, I think it's it's it's across the board, right,
is that when people have their identity wrapped up in
their job and then that changes that that often people
have a very very hard landing. And then and then
often it will then coincide with age and the whole
(23:36):
midlife crisis thing and changing hormones and all of that shit.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
That it's like a colossal, just epic shit chill, shit
show all at once. That's exactly what happens, and that's
the reason why. So so going back to your question
is like one, it really started with me. I mean here,
I am a six foot tall, two hundred and four
ten percent body fat, you know, in my early thirties
(24:03):
to a couple of years later, six foot tall, two
hundred and forty almost thirty percent body.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Fat, jumping jasus.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Yeah. I love sharing that photo because to me, that
the photo of me on the beach in Greece with
my family looking like that shows how far you someone
can get lost. And the truth of it is that guy,
you know, and people go like, well, that wasn't that bad.
You didn't look that bad, blah blah blah blah blah.
You know, I think I did because the way I look,
(24:33):
But you know, like I wasn't, you know, four hundred pounds,
like we get guys that are coming in. I was
out of shape. I was softened out of shape. And
uh but the reality is, Paul, like I was depressed.
I hated myself. I had a lot going on in
my head that like that guy was miserable that lot,
and that guy was living a life of quiet desperation.
(24:55):
So through through a friend and actually a good friend,
Nick Bear and BPN, I was doing a lot of
media stuff and I became an athlete through Bear Performance
Nutrition and one of their first actually and I said, hey, dude,
I want to get in phenomenal shape. I want to
show people what you can do. So I started this
(25:15):
thing and I just like snapped out of it. I
remembered who I was, and I did the did this
thing called the ninety day vlog where I launched a
business in ninety days. I went from like twenty eight
percent body fat to ten percent body fat in ninety days.
And I was going to make a video every single
day for ninety days and just document this journey of
(25:37):
how basically it was like a New Year's instead of
having New Year's resolutions, because everybody has a New Year's resolution,
but without a plan, your new year's resolution is just
a wish, right, Yeah, So I want to show people
how to execute. So I just threw myself in this
hopper and I got in phenomenal shape. When I did
the next year, people started asking me and I said,
(25:59):
and it changed so much, Like as soon as I
got in shape, I had you know, and I got
my hormones figured out. On TRT, I had a lot
more clarity in my life. Right the brain fog lifted,
I had more energy and more drive. I had clarity
in my vision of where I wanted to go. And
I was like, holy shit, man, this is really this
is the real deal. And then guys started hitting me
(26:20):
up and I was like, oh, man, well you just
need to get in shape. So Josh and I started,
who was a teammate of mine, started what now is
the AGOGI in twenty eighteen, and it was like old
school fitness and nutrition coaching. I send you a Google sheet,
you know, we worked off Google sheets and or whatever
they were at the time. People would put in their
(26:41):
macros and then we'd issue training and very rudimentary and go.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Ahead before we dive, because I do want to dive
into that, but I just want to rewind a little.
How much of the how much of that descending fog
and the difficulties of leaving the marines. How much of
that do you think was that loss of identity as
I'm no longer a marine reator, and how much of
(27:11):
it was a loss of purpose? Have you ever thought
about those elements.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
I think it was. I think it was one and
the same. I think I think it was one and
the same one, you know, one it's not who I
am and then I And the thing is is I
still had a job to do, like I still always
created something. But I didn't know. I think I was
just doing Paul, I don't think I had a true purpose,
(27:36):
which is okay. I think people, I think we give
too much weight to purpose. Purpose can be whatever you
make it to be. It doesn't have to be this like,
you know, like the heavens open up for the sins,
you know. But I think people are waiting on that.
They're like, I don't I haven't had this epiphany of
my purpose. I'm like, dude, your purpose can be whatever
you want it to be.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
I also say people are waiting for the purpose fairing.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Yeah. Yeah, I'm like, dude, like there's so much weight
given to this word purpose. And I'm like, dude, purpose
can be whatever you want it to be. This week,
like change it and it should change in a year
it would be different. But to give your point, I
didn't really know. I guess what direction I was just doing,
which is good, right if you don't know what to
(28:20):
do just do just that. Yeah, yeah, and then through
that execution you'll find and that's exactly what happened to me.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Well, I think they're doing is you're you're in forward
motion towards something, right, and that that is what that's
what brings them. We're talking about fairies, purpose veries, but
that's what brings the motivation fairy. This is a lot
of people are sitting waiting for the motivation fairy when
they don't realize that if they start acting and have
(28:49):
a goal and say they're in forwards motion towards your goal,
that's what releases still puming in the brand and gives
you further motivation.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
And through this journey right of this this this meat transitioning,
it's all in the book me transitioning out of military
and learning. I threw myself into like different therapies, and
I threw myself. I became a guinea pig because I
was running a nonprofit helping other veterans and so and
that's and there's something to that, right, there's this this
idea of service. You know, if you're depressed, go help somebody,
(29:18):
go help, go help three people that are worse off
than you. So I started doing I started doing that
more and more, and because I was on this journey
that was really no there was no destination for this journey.
I was just doing. I was just executing. But through
that I started to find different people and different things
that would come across my life that I would gain
(29:41):
more even more clarity. And it was like a positive
snowball effect, and that I think that's it was. It wasn't.
I didn't have this like idea of purpose other than
I did this idea that I just needed to keep
moving forward. And and that's when I developed my kind
of like there was this thing that I say, and
(30:01):
people even say it back to me now, and I
have a shirt forward is never quit, never surrender, always forward,
and it's just you know, by with and through. It's
kind of like the old Special Operations idea of things.
It was just continue if you you know, if you've
got to go to move forward. If you hit a wall,
maybe you need to go through it, maybe you need
to go over it, maybe you need to go around it,
(30:22):
you know, but regardless is don't stay where you're at,
just keep moving forward. And and that's where I was
for a long time. I was like, I'm just going
to move forward. Now. Obviously, the more you lean into
personal development, the more that I leaned into growth, the
more that I kept doing that, things became I got smarter,
(30:42):
and things did become more clear, and then I start realizing, like,
what my you know, there was a thing that happened
that I realized what my personal mission was. And once
I realized that, things became even more clearer. And then
and then we just dialed everything in over the Now.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
That's really interesting that you talk about that, because often
if I'm in workshops and I'm talking about purpose, so
and I'll say, very similar to what you're doing. There's
a lot of people think that their purpose in life
needs to be running a multimillion dollar startup and an
orphanage in Nepal at the same time. And I'm like
that that's bootshit when you look at all of it.
(31:22):
It's about being of service, being an integrated part of
the of your community, right, And I'm like, just just
just start with something. And I get people to write
a little tombstone statement about how they would like their
life to be viewed when they've passed.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
And yeah, eulogy too. Yeah, it's powerful.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
And it's powerful right. But it then what it does
is it starts to get people to think about how
they want to be. And then I say, all I
want you to do now is what you've written down here.
Spend five to ten minutes day deliberately acting on that.
So if it's about being a great dad or a
great mom, spend five minutes a day deliberately being great.
(32:09):
Because then when your attention is on it, your brain
is going to commit sales to it, and it's you're
going to get clarity over time, right, which is exactly
what you just said.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
Where your focus goes, your energy flows.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Right, yeah, yeah, absolutely so, So let's let's let's then
tase apart. So I think we've established the importance of
being in forwards motion and of of that. I loved
what you said about was it by round and through
in terms of all and through, by with and through,
(32:42):
which is which is is awesome? So what what are
talk me through some of the elements of your coaching,
Whether you know how much of its mindset, how much
of its physical? Why is the physical important? All of
that stuff?
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Absolutely? So it started out physical pretty much only, and
then Josh and I we get this stuff back because
you do like weekly check ins, right, and we would
get their stuff back, you see their weight, you know,
and then we'd see their logs and we're like, dude,
why can't these guys, these are grown men. Why can't
these grown men stay consistent? Why can't they hit their numbers?
(33:21):
Why can't they do the things that they're supposed to do?
They wanted, they signed up, they're the ones paying. Why
can't they do it? And so we started talking to
these guys and we realized that they didn't have a
fitness to nutrition problem. They had a mindset problem. They
had a limiting belief problem, had a trauma problem. There
(33:42):
were just broken men really on the on the inside
that knewbody nobody knew. And so so we turned it
into almost a men's mentorship community. So we started hosting
I started hosting coaching calls. And this is really when
things started to like we started to actually build a
(34:02):
real company away from Excel sheets. So we had like,
we developed an app and we started having zoom you know,
group zoom calls, and we developed the thing that we're like,
they could all be talking to each other like in
social media, yeah, and really build a community. And we
realized that when we started to attack the deep underlying
(34:23):
issues of why they're self sabotaging, why they're choosing food
as comfort, why they're choosing all these bad habits, that's
when we started to see results and it wasn't enough.
We started to like last year we actually just went
through another revamp where we created I was like, it's
not enough, man Like, still not enough. So two things
(34:44):
that we did was we created this educational We have
our pillars, which is our fitness pillar. Like I feel
like fitness is a gateway drug to success. I love that. Yeah,
it is because through fitness you find discipline, you find consistency,
you find delayed gratification, which transfers into all areas of
your life. Right, So fitness and then discipline, discipline in
(35:08):
your life, discipline with your marriage, your children, your time,
just being disciplined over well, being able to say no
to things. Right.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
And it's interesting Nick that the discipline, it's like the D,
the bad D word that people don't talk about right
when it comes to behavioral change. And you read all
the research and I'm thinking, where the hell's the discipline
element to this? Because your motivation is great when it's around,
but when motivations not there, that's when you're discipline is.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
And I love that you brought that up, because, Paul,
how are you.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
I'm fifty three fifty that's a lie. I'm fifty four
fifty four.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
That's what happens over fifty. I don't think it matters
when you say that I.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Just started fifty four last week.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
There you go, So at fifty four, are you motivated
to get your body up and go train every day?
Speaker 1 (36:01):
That there's not a shitload of motivation, but I do
it exactly.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
That's motivation is great. It's like a drug. It's like
doing a line of cocaine. But it fades, Yes, it fades.
And that's what people hit me out there, like, you
don't need motivation. You don't need motivation, which you need
as a plan. What you need is a why. And
that kind of goes back to the third pillars. That is,
we wrote belief for our third pillar, and belief being
(36:27):
belief in yourself, believe in that you're worthy of love,
being believing that you are worthy of success, that you
don't have limiting beliefs, that you don't think that your
past failures are going to be your future failures. That
you're stuck in this whatever the system is, that you're
in the belief that you can have the body that
you want, that you can have the relationship that you
(36:49):
want with your wife, that you can be the father
to that you need to be with your kids, that
you believe that. We found that when people don't believe that,
they'll never achieve it until they start believing it.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Yeah, And it's I think that concept of belief is
heavily wrapped up in hope and optimism. Yeah, if people
don't have hope for the future, like Jesus, the wheels
can come off big.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
Time, right, and then at the joint, right, if they
don't have that, then what's the point? And the last
one being tribe and we kind of it's kind of
a tricky one because what it really comes down to
for us and Josh and I and the rest of
the guys is why do we Why do you get
up in the morning and go sacrifice? Why do you
go to the gym? Why do you why do you
delay gratification? And for us, it's really about our tribe.
(37:35):
It's it's our why because when we find a guy
that's like, I just want to look good, naked for me. Well,
when it's four o'clock in the morning, it's it's it's
thirty degrees out in the garage and you got to
go do burpies for you know, for time for ten
minutes Like that doesn't sound real fun, but it's so
that my son looks at me and doesn't think that
I'm a fat piece of shit. It looks at me
as a superhero and a role model and says that
(37:57):
on when I grow up, I want to be like you.
That's what will get you out out of the bed.
You know, looking good naked, that's only going to get
you so far. It's like motivation. We have to have
a deeper why of why we are doing the uncomfortable things,
why we're choosing hard over easy every single day. And
it's got to be greater than ourselves.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Yeah, yeah, and not three welbins. Find your why, you'll
find your way. But he stole it from Frederick Nietzsche,
the German philosopher one hundred years ago said he has
a why to live for can bear almost any high.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
And I'm sure it probably came even further from that
than you know, lots of and you know, and probably
they stole it from who knows what you know prior
to that, but it is true the human body. I
like Simon Sinek's talk on how great leaders inspire if
you ever if anybody's ever seen that, and he really
breaks the psychology down of the why and the humor
with why yeah, and how we associate with things at
(38:51):
a very deep emotional level, and then you get people.
If you want to inspire people, you have to give
them the why. And that's part of the one of
the reasons why we do so we had those are
our pillars. Those are the foundation, a bedrock of what
we stand on. But then we took another phase. We
took it another step further. We developed these four phases,
and the first one was mastering yourself, Like you have
(39:13):
to master yourself. You can't do anything until you can.
You can master yourself in all areas, your fitness, your belief,
those pillars that we told you about. And a lot
of guys like, well, I want my money better and
I want my relationship better. I'm like, well, none of
that's going to be better until you are better. Like
you can. If you don't have the discipline to put
the cookie down, you're not going to have discipline to
(39:35):
save a tenth of your earnings.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
I think it's Leonardo da Vinci who talks about dominion
over yourself and having master and he says, he said,
without that and you got nothing.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
You got nothing. So we developed this educational platform and
we broke down what does it mean to master yourself?
And so what we did was we created that, right,
we created this platform to to really dive into how
do I master myself? With all the worksheets, all the coaching, everything,
the videos, and then we and we make it sequential
(40:08):
because like the second one is leading your family, Phase
two is leading your family. You cannot lead your family
until you can lead yourself. Because if you come in
and we saw this and we used to do these
thirty day challenges, Paul and these guys would jump on
the challenge and they'd pay their little ninety nine dollars
and they'd do this thirty day challenge like, oh yeah,
I got my Macros, this is my food list, and
they go into the kitchen they start throwing stuff out
(40:29):
and Okay, tell the whole family that we're doing it.
I'm doing a challenge. You're doing a challenge. We're all
doing a challenge. And the wife's like, you are the
one puking picking cheetos out of your belly button last
night while you were sitting on the couch watching Netflix.
Who what are you talking about? No sugar and all this,
you know what I mean? Like just trust, absolutely, no belief, no,
(40:51):
you know, like absolutely, just you know, a complete hypocritical person, right,
And I was like, guys, and we saw this time
and time again, like my family won't get on board,
et cetera. I'm like, of course they're not going to
get on board, Like you're not consistent, they don't believe you,
you're full of shit.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
You got to earn the right to lead in any
any to me in.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
Right, heks? Right, So so that's what we did. And
then and then we start to and then phase two
is really diving into with the significant other leading the family.
Being an intentional father. What kind of father are you?
You know, truly being an intentional one, not a present one,
but an intentional one, having rebuilding rebuilding trust from broken promises,
(41:32):
you know, and having to kind of you know, there's
some workshops in there of having needed what we call
the need a needy conversation with your significant other where
they kind of down, they kind of get to download
everything that they've that you've potentially done to them, vertally
or invertly. It doesn't really matter right or indirectly or whatever.
Not on purpose maybe, but how how it affected them,
(41:56):
And maybe there's some resentment that's being built up. And
resentment will kill any relationship. It's like a cancer. We
have to get rid of resentment. So we have these
things in there, and it's only then that we can
get the phase three, which is master your finances. Funny
your financial plan. Well, then you're going to have You're
gonna have problems there, You're going to have rub there,
(42:16):
You're going to have strife in your relationship because you
guys are not heading in the same direction. You don't
have the same vision. So all this financial stuff that
you want to do and I talk about online or
I talk about in the group is not all or
not because it's going to create havoc in your in
your house. She has to be aligned with you. The
only way she can be aligned with you is if
we go back to mastering yourself and that you're leading
(42:38):
with intention and purpose. Right, she has trust you guys
are on the same page. You've rebuilt your relationship, you're
dating your wife, your wife is now your girlfriend, you
know what I mean? Yeah, And it's only then that
we can master your finances. And then we get into
really really diving into what that means and really unconvinced
(43:02):
wealth wealth growth, like really how wealthy people utilize wealth,
you know, utilizing debt and how they use debt and
life insurance and a lot of different things for investments
and whatnot. So we dive heavily to that. And the
last phase is the legacy, the leadership. You know, what
is what is your legacy? What is that going to build?
(43:23):
And kind of go from there.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
Yeah, I like the step wise approach through that that
it's that it's it's built from the bottom up. And
I think that I mean a few elements of that
that basically, trust really comes from doing what you say
that you're going to do. And if there's broken promises
that that will kill the trust in and if people
(43:44):
are not aligned. You got two different people rowing in
different directions, the folk's going breaking now.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
Yeah, and how many times have we met people or
seen that where it's like, oh, you guys are a mess.
You guys are going nowhere fast right. Yeah?
Speaker 1 (43:59):
Yeah, So me, what's the what what is the biggest
thing that kind of comes out from guys who've gone
through your program, Like, what what is the biggest difference
you see from the start to the finish?
Speaker 2 (44:14):
Man, I'll say this, I got a text from a
guy just as we got on chance down in Florida
with the fam riding roller coasters left and right. Last
time here, I was too fat to write anything. Now
I'm making memories with the kids. Thanks for giving me
this gift.
Speaker 1 (44:30):
Wow, that's pretty cool. That must give you goosebumps when
you get stuff.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
Like that makes you want to cry, Paul, that's every day,
that's every day. I think the biggest thing out of
is that I give people the permission to take over
their life, to be the capital of their own ship
and the CEO of their own life. Yeah, that's very cool.
Speaker 1 (44:48):
I mean the last question and how much building a
community and how much is it done for you? Having
been the guy who's been through several different identities and
now you've got that community, what's the impact on you? Man?
Speaker 2 (45:08):
I'll tell you. I literally will post in our group
all the time because I'll link up with people there
isn't a problem or a place that I can go
that I don't find somebody from our community and have
the most wholesome, real world conversations that men aren't having
(45:28):
anywhere else. And the fact to think that me and
my best friend built this over years from nothing, and
I learned so much just being just linking up with
these men and having them kind of open up. And
it's to have to give them an opportunity to just
be open and real with really what's going on, because
(45:50):
everybody's pat this facade, right, nobody, nobody ever. You know,
you ask a man how he's doing, fine, the reality
is you scratch just a little bit of crust off
the surface and there's a lot of pain going on,
a lot of lone a lot of loneliness, a lot
of heartache, a lot of frustration and uh, and to
be able to create have created something that gives them
(46:11):
a place to be open and honest. But not just
like don't get me wrong, we're not a cry like
a crying place. You know, we'll acknowledge the pain, we'll
acknowledge the trauma. And I kind of want to talk
about the retreat real quick, but we'll acknowledge all that.
But we're a very because I think of our background,
we're a very tactical community. Like I like, that's why
(46:36):
the phases were so important. I have to give a
man needs a task. Okay, this is broken, this is
not right. What is the tool that's going to get
me to the next level? Right? Like, I don't want
to just give it to God, I don't, you know.
And I understand that I'm a faith guy as well,
but like God doesn't drive a park car, like, we
have to actually do.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
Something, and he's not coming to sort your shd eyed either, right.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Right, He's already given you the tools. You got to
do the work, right. And so I think that's what
it comes down to is just the fact that we've
been able to like I feel so fulfilled that we
have created a place for the men that raise their
hand and say, you know what, that's the type of
guy that I want. That's the type of guy that
(47:22):
I am, and the inside I just got to get
I just got to get all this other stuff out
of it, you know. And I think it's designed because
you take men and you isolate them and they lose
their power. Unite men in a community can't beat them. Yeah,
you can go to my website Nicko Molassos dot com,
Orthegogi dot com. Thank you Paul very much. Oh so
(47:55):
this is yeah, Paul, this was This was the biggest
thing man, because we've been running events for a long
time and you can only do so much online. I
was literally talking to my wife. I was like, I
just need to get my hands on these guys, like
I want to get my hands on them and have
and online is great. Online's great, but there is something
(48:16):
kind of magical when you get a group of men
in a room together. I and I can prove that
to you because if any man listening to this thinks
about when there's no women around and they go link
up with all their bros, whether it be for positive
or negative reasons, whether they're drinking or they're doing something
like a camping trip, it doesn't really matter what it
(48:38):
is doing jiu jitsu doesn't really matter. When guys link up,
the weight comes off their shoulders, they laugh more, they
tell stories. That's what we created. But with intention. What
I learned was that through doing this and I really
(49:00):
they didn't believe it. I didn't know one in three
men are physically abused one in four men are sexually abused,
and that statistics rain true every single time I get
a group of people in their inner room. And this
is the reason why men continue to step sabotage, and
(49:21):
they do. They do the roller coaster because they haven't
dealt with that. And I have this thing where I
talk about I can take shit and turn into apple pie.
And I really believe. I really do believe that, and
I've got I've proven it multiple times in private rooms
where the worst of the worst and you're like, there's
no way, how do I turn this into a superpower?
And we do it every time, but I can't. That's
(49:42):
not something I can do online. I've got to break
bread with you. I've got to sweat with you. I've
got to earn your trust. I've got to give you
permission to know that my heart is your heart and
your heart is mine, and we're good to go. We're friends,
we're brothers. And when all of that, and I know
it sounds crazy, but when all of that weight comes away,
all of that verbado and all of that ego comes
(50:05):
away and stripes down, that's when men can open up
and the most amazing thing happens and when you when
a man can shed that weight that's he's been holding
on for years, is when he can really really his
life will sore. He can be the leader that he
(50:26):
can be the leader that he knows he was supposed
to become. He can he can be the husband that
he knew was supposed to become. He can have the
body that he was always meant to have. And it
was those little things that was that was keeping him
from that. It was the obstacle. And that's what we
do on these retreats is we break bread. And it's
(50:46):
crazy twenty twenty five, we're more connected. I'm talking to
you in Melbourne, Australia. I got family there, and I'm
in North Carolina. We're more connected than we ever have
been ever in the history of men. Right yet we
are more disconnected than ever before as well. And that's
what that's why I think this mission is so important
(51:06):
is online communities are great, but we have to break
bread together. We've got a sweat together.
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