The Carnivore Diet | What Is the Carnivore Diet & How to Start the Carnivore Diet? With the Best-Selling Author of The Carnivore Diet & Joe Rogan Podcast Guest Doctor Shawn Baker + Tips, Tricks & Most Common Pitfalls + TipTopK9 Success Story

Audio Transcription

Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show, but this show does. In a world filled with endless opportunities, why would two men who have built 13 multi-million dollar businesses altruistically invest five hours per day to teach you the best practice business systems and moves that you can use? Because they believe in you, and they have a lot of time on their hands. They started from the bottom, now they’re here. It’s the Thrive Time Show, starring the former U.S. Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark, and the entrepreneur trapped inside an optometrist’s body, Dr. Robert Zilmer. 8 kids co-created by 2 different women. 13 multi-million dollar businesses. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We took life, started from the bottom, and now we’re at the top. Teaching you the systems to get what we got. Colton Dixon’s on the hooks, I break down the books. See, bringing some wisdom and the good news As a father of five, that’s why I’m alive So if you see my wife and kids, please tell them hi It’s the C and Z, I’ll call your radio And now, 3, 2, 1, here we go! We started from the bottom, now we’re here We started from the bottom, and we’ll show you how to get here We started from the bottom, now we’re here We started from the bottom, now we’re here We started from the bottom, now we’re here Yes, yes, yes, and yes, Thrive Nation on today’s show. I am very fired up because I’ve had two long-time clients that keep getting smaller. And now they were never huge people, but a few months ago, maybe, we’ll get into the And I’m going, all meat? Are you going to die? You need vegetables? Don’t you need fruits? They said, no, no, we’re going all in. And since that time, they’re 100% not dead and they keep losing weight. So Jordan, how much weight have you lost? And when did you start this diet? I started it about a year ago, but probably within the first two months, I dropped 30 pounds. And Nace, how long have you been eating only meat? And you appear to not be dead. How long have you been eating only meat and how much weight have you lost? Yes, Clay, so Jor and I both started at around the same time, so I’ve also lost about 35 pounds. Wow, well now the source of the problem is here today, Dr. Sean Baker, welcome onto the Thrive Time Show, sir. How are you? Clay, I’m doing well, thanks for having me. I’m relieved to find out that both these guys are still alive after a year of eating meat, so that makes me happy. Okay, so I have some questions I want to ask you. So, Sean, I know your background, but could you share with the listeners out there just a brief synopsis of your background and what you are in fact a doctor of? Yeah, so I was a, you know, just traditionally trained medical doctor, I’ve been an MD. My specialization was in orthopedic surgery. So I used to replace knees and hips and shoulders and fix broken bones and do sports surgeries and stuff like that. I graduated with honors from medical school many, many, many moons ago. I’ve been a lifelong athlete, so I’ve broken a number of world records in various different sports and I continue to compete even in my nearly, I’m almost 60 years old right now, so I continue to compete quite intensely. I’ve been an advocate for this so-called carnivore diet now for just about almost the last decade. I’ve been doing it, you know, just over eight years myself. I found that, interestingly, having spent many years practicing medicine, that a lot of what I was doing, even as the surgeon, was really just treating a bunch of lifestyle conditions. You know, you think about, you know, you’re replacing someone’s knee and it’s surgery, but I ended up, it turns out, you were just putting Band-Aids on the problem. We’re not really addressing the reason for the disease in the first place. And so, once I started shifting my practice a little bit to start to convince people to change their diet and lifestyle, I started seeing pretty impressive results to the point where I often had to cancel surgeries. I thought, you know, in years past I would have definitely done the surgery. Now I’m like, I’m not sure the surgery was necessary. And so that kind of led to, you know, me kind of full-time adopting more of a lifestyle approach. I formed a company called Rivero where we’re licensed in all 50 states where we take people that have various chronic diseases, whether it’s autoimmune disease or metabolic disease like diabetes, obesity, and things like that, and we treat them with basically nutrition and lifestyle modification. So that’s what I’ve been doing and advocating for for the last several years. I think our healthcare system is broken. I think our food system is basically, literally poisoning us, you know, poisoning us and we need to fix it. And that’s been my soapbox, which is what I regularly stand on. Now I believe the website for Rivero is REVERO.com. That’s REVERO.com. Is that the right website there, sir? That is correct, yeah. REVERO.com, just like you spelled it. Okay, now let’s talk about this carnivore diet here. What is the carnivore diet? Because when Jordan and Nace told me about the diet, you know, I thought to myself, this doesn’t seem well, this doesn’t seem like the move. But now, I mean, they keep dropping the weight. I’m worried if a strong breeze might blow them away. They’re dropping weight, looking great, feeling great. So what is this carnivore diet? Well, it’s what it sounds like. It’s basically a diet that consists of basically animal products. And so whether it’s meat, milk, eggs, dairy products, any kind of animal, it’s got a face you can eat it, basically. So, I mean, it could be hippopotamus. Most of us consume a lot of beef, to be quite honest. It tends to be very heavy in red meat, which is something we’ve been told traditionally, hey, we should avoid red meat, we should cut back on red meat. It turns out that red meat is probably the healthiest food that there is. And I say that without sort of qualification because I’ve just seen, and you talk to these guys getting thinner, but I bet they’re getting stronger too. That would be my supposition is they’re not going to blow away in a breeze. They’re going to be more vigorous and robust people. So it’s definitely a red meat heavy diet. It excludes fruits and vegetables and whole grains, all the things we’ve been told that we need to eat. This is what our food pyramid has told us. This is what the USDA has told us to eat for years. And interestingly, the USDA is probably not the best organization to recommend a diet because they have to sell, they’re selling our commodity crops. That’s their job, is to sell corn and wheat. And where does that stuff show up? It shows up largely in garbage. Most of our U.S. diet right now is processed food. So the carnivore diet is no processed junk. It’s high quality protein. It’s high bioavailable food. It is free of things that people often have allergens to. So it’s kind of like I would consider a low-carb elimination diet. And I promote it as a therapeutic tool that you can use for a period of time. Some people choose to consume it long term like I do, but it’s certainly not necessary for everybody to do it. A lot of people like these two guys here will find that they just get better and healthier and that they can stay on as long as they want. If they wanna reintroduce some blueberries or something like that along the way, that’s totally fine too, just depending on how they tolerate that. So it’s one of those things that, again, we’ve been told a lot of things over the years that we find out that maybe we’re wrong. And I think this is another one. Jordan, do you feel stronger? Are you getting stronger? Are you getting weaker? Now you’re only eating meat. What’s happening? Yeah, I think before I started, I could do about five pull-ups. Now I’m about, I’m at like 25 pull-ups and not like the Mark Wahlberg where he’s thrusting his body up. Are you disrespecting Mark Wahlberg on our podcast? I was disappointed when I saw what he did, but I was at a point in my life where I was teaching basketball to my son. I was like, no, then you got to push it harder. I ended up tearing something in my knee, but I didn’t go to the doctors because I don’t trust them. And so I was like, I got to figure out how to be better. I saw Sean. He’s 57 years old. I don’t know if you’ve seen this. He literally lifts 500 pounds unsupported. I’m like, how is Sean doing this? And I’m tearing my knee at 40. And so I started down this journey with Sean whenever I saw him teach about it. So let me ask you this Sean. So if you’re sitting down with somebody, you have very limited time, but the person is very interested. You know, they’re on an airplane with you. They’re sitting in first class with you. They’re very interested. We have very little time. The plane is landing and they go, okay, so what can I eat and what can I drink? Could you tell that to our listeners? What can they eat and what can they drink if they’re gonna follow the carnivore diet? Yeah, I mean, as far as what you can eat, steak, eggs, fish, you know, other seafood, dairy products, if you tolerate it. There’s some people that have issues around dairy. That’s basically the crux of the problem. Some people like to add some organ meats in there. Not necessary in my view, but it’s mostly, you know, ground beef, hamburger steak, lamb, chicken, pork, any of those things are on the diet. I would avoid like a lot of the processed meats that have a lot of garbage in there. You know, if it’s filled with sugar and, you know, wheat products and soy products, I would avoid those. So, really, whole unprocessed meat would be the ideal thing. Some of the processed meats like bacon and some of the lunch meats may be okay, but I wouldn’t make that the steak. So, I mean, whole cuts of meat, stuff you cook at home is probably going to be the best way to do it. If you go out to eat, just go get a burger patty at a burger joint. Just go get a plain burger patty. Most of them will sell them to you without problem. Now what can you drink? What liquids can you drink and what can you not drink? Well, obviously water is fine. Every animal on the planet drinks water. Humans are no except, so water is clearly on the thing. Some people like flavored carbonated waters. I think those generally are okay for most people. Dairy products, again, I don’t like people drinking calories. I think that is counterproductive for weight loss, if that’s your goal. So you just have to be mindful about that. If you’re trying to lose weight, try to avoid drinking too much stuff. Some people, coffees and tea tend to be fine. A lot of people, you know, I don’t know what the percentage of Americans who drink coffee, but it’s a significant percentage. And many of them have kind of a caffeine addiction. So I tell people in the beginning, just keep drinking your coffee. If you want to give it up later, three, six months in, then you can consider weaning off that. But a lot of people do. Alcohol, alcohol is not a healthy meal. You drink it, drink it in moderation. The nuts thing, it’s not an invitation to go out drinking, but we know that saturated saturated fat actually protects our liver from damage induced by ethanol, which is the ingredient in alcohol. Animal studies and human studies have shown that clearly. So if you’re going to have a glass of wine, have it with your steak. That’s a better way to do that. But I mean, in general, that should be minimized. So what are the first steps our listeners need to take right now? For listeners listening, they go, okay, I’m going to do it. I’m in. I’m going. Here we go. What are the first steps? What do they need to do to go all in and actually try the carnivore diet? Yeah, well I think, again, if you’re particularly sick and you’re on a lot of medications, you should probably do it with the support of a health care provider because you might have to taper off diabetic meds, you might have to come off antihypertensive meds. That’s what Rivero is set up for, so that’s one option. But if you’re not sick, I mean, I wrote a book called The Carnivore Diet, which lays this out pretty nicely. There’s a website called carnivore.diet. I’m there every day doing little Zoom calls with a community of anywhere between 50 and 100 people typically. So we can answer questions there. But I mean, really, I think finding a community of supportive people is very helpful because a lot of people aren’t gonna support you in this. I mean, a lot of people are gonna be like, your physician, your family may think you’re crazy or you’re going to harm yourself. I think that the first thing you have to do is long-term wise, you can’t be hungry and you can’t not like what you’re eating. So you’ve got to buy food that you know you’re going to like and you’ve got to eat enough so that you’re satisfied. Otherwise, you’re going to be looking in the kitchen closet for cookies or in the fridge for ice creams and things like that. So making it easier on yourself, if you can get rid of a lot of stuff from your health, if you’ve got a supportive family member, if you’re living with family, try to let them know that you’re going to do this and you’d like support. I think that’s important. Nace, have you gotten stronger since you’ve been on this diet or was the wind, it was kind of windy out there, was the wind blowing you away? You getting stronger? How’s that going? No, no. So for myself, I actually got stronger and kind of like Jordan. I had a sports injury in high school. And so a couple of years ago, I was doing MMA and I popped my shoulder out. And for a whole year straight, my shoulder would pop out nonstop. And so 2022 on Christmas, I was wrestling my three-year-old son and my shoulder popped out. I couldn’t get back in. I was like, I have to, something has to change. And so I went to the doctor and my chiropractor. They said, you’re definitely going to have to have surgery. And so Jor and I, we were doing some research together, both hurt and we started on the carnivore. And now I’m over 14 months without my arm popping out. I can throw the football far again. I can play basketball. I can wrestle with my kids. So I’m getting stronger, yes, for sure. Dr. Baker, I want to ask you this. Is this normal? Do you hear these kinds of things anecdotally often from the people that are on the carnivore diet or is that kind of abnormal feedback you’re hearing? No, that’s pretty typical. I mean, with musculoskeletal things like arthritis, it’s interesting there’s a condition called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which is a genetic condition where people have a collagen disorder and their joints pop out all the time. And I had a lady who was a 57 year old emergency room physician who’d wake up every day with three or four joints dislocated and have to put them back in as you go to work in the ER and her shoulder would pop out about every other shift. She went carnivore within a month, her joints stopped dislocating, which sounds very, very crazy to me. I’m like, how the hell did that work? I think the diet that we eat does impact our tissue quality, the quality of our tendons and ligaments and muscles and things like that. So it does seem to be helpful in that way. But I think we often see people lose weight. We often see people claim that their mental health has gotten better, their mood has gotten better, their ability to think has gotten better, their overall inflammation in their body goes down significantly so that their gut feels better. Like I said, aches and pains go away. A lot of people just say, I feel younger. I mean, that’s something I see consistently. Jordan, before you started on the carnivore diet, you were a jerk. Now you seem to be a really nice guy. I’m just kidding. Has this helped you at all, the carnivore diet? Has it changed your attitude or the way you think? How has it impacted you? It’s changed a lot, but one of the biggest things is that I sleep really fast. I go to sleep really fast, but I don’t sleep very well, so I require more sleep. So I have noticed that it has improved my quality of sleep. I don’t snore as much, my wife says. When I’m at work, I have better focus. One thing that I really enjoy about carnivore diet, it isn’t convenient by any means to prepare your food. I think that’s one of the biggest things people get hung up on. But as far as eating, like I never have those moments in the day where I crash and I’m like, oh, I think I need to take a nap. So I just keep cruising on through that. There’s not those highs and lows. Now, Dr. Baker, I’ve been doing podcast interviews for years and sometimes I’ll have a show where I’ll have somebody on the show and maybe it’s controversial or it’s exciting and it’s Wim Hof or Wolfgang Puck and all of a sudden that show will go viral. And I think to myself, was it the title of the show that got people to click? Was it the thumbnail? Was it the thumbnail and the title and the show and the intro? And then I’ll ask listeners and they don’t really know, but there are certain shows that just have a life of their own that continue to produce fruit years later. And your show, your interview with Joe Rogan, your 2017 interview with Joe Rogan, that’s when I first started hearing of you and about you. Was that sort of a defining moment or how did that Joe Rogan interview impact the movement of the carnivore diet? Yeah, I think it’s the initial thing that put it on the map. I mean, prior to that, there were a few thousand people that were doing this, who was aware of it. I think everybody thought they were kind of crazy. It was kind of funny because I was recently interviewed again on Rogan’s show a few months ago. And the first time I went on there, he kind of thought I was kind of crazy. I could tell it. You can tell when people think you’re nuts. The change between then and now, the second time I went on there, he was like all on board. He said, man, everybody I’ve ever talked to that’s been on Carnivore has seen significant positive benefits. So it’s kind of been a little bit vindicating to see that he has changed and he’s done the diet many, many times and pretty much eats mostly meat now anyway. So yeah, I became public enemy number one for every vegan on the planet after that episode. It was kind of funny how, because I was just there sharing, like I thought it was interesting information. And all of a sudden I’ve got this whole entire, you know, group of people that now largely just hates me. And I’m like, I’m just a guy trying to help people get healthier. Now, real quick, this is so, it’s so interesting you said that because your life and my life are very parallel in that regard. You know, I was trying to explain to people like, hey, if you don’t want to die from COVID, you can take hydroxychloroquine or budesonide or ivermectin and you won’t die. And I only knew this because I have doctors that are in my life that were treating patients and nobody was dying. I mean, nobody. And I never thought that I would, that would take me into the direct, all of a sudden you become public enemy number one against people that feel like everybody needs to take a shot for every condition. And as I started researching this whole, I don’t know, you can call it the tyranny or the great reset or whatever. There’s a group of people that really want us to eat insects and they want us to stop eating meat. You know, Yuval Noah Harari wants us to stop eating meat. You have Klaus Schwab wants us to stop eating meat. Bill Gates wants us to stop eating meat. Synthetic meat and clean meat and 3d printed meat or insects Well, let me get your thoughts on just that idea of Synthetic meat and insects and this massive. I mean, it’s clearly a big agenda this anti meat Movement, what is that all about? I think it’s about greed and profit quite honestly, I mean, I think that’s really what’s driving this I mean, it’s, you know, any sort of quote unquote altruistic sort of intentions that they claim, whether it’s to save the planet or improve people’s health, is not based on anything, any reality. I mean, it’s clearly just to, you know, further centralize the food system, further control the food system. You know, that is going to be potentially disastrous, in my view. I’m not going to be lining up for the synthetic meat. It’s likely going to be worse for the environment. We keep talking about how cow farts are boiling the oceans and things like that. That’s all largely nonsense. We’ve had roaming ruminant animals in excess of the numbers we have today for literally thousands and thousands of years on this planet without any negative consequence. I think that, you know, they look at that and if they can go, you know, like this whole meatless Monday, like, you know, you got Mayor Eric Adams in New York pushing meatless Mondays and vegan Fridays, you know, that is simply, you know, money driven. And, you know, they, some people believe this. I think some people actually believe that it’s healthier and healthier for the plant. I think they’ve been brainwashed. But the reality is it’s going to make people sicker. It’s going to further drive up the dependence that we have on. I mean, it’s clearly, we have a food system that poisons people and we have a health care system that massively profits on that. And they know each other. I mean, these guys sit on each other’s boards. I mean, it’s clearly designed to not be healthy for the majority. We already eat 70% ultra-processed food in this country and everybody’s sick. Half the people have some kind of mental health disorder. It’s not a good place and it’s just going to drive that more and more. Now, you, back to the carnivore diet, because you are the expert on this thing. What are the non-negotiables? If someone says, okay, I’m in, getting into a flow, getting into a new habit. I work with my business clients a lot on this, not eating, but on growing their business. I tell them, you have certain non-negotiables. So you’re going to have to, if you’re going to grow a successful company, you’re going to have to have a to-do list. You’re going to have to have a calendar and you’re going to have to become good at blocking out time. It’s going to have to happen. To-do list, calendar, block out time. You just, there’s only so much success you can have if you don’t have a to-do list, a calendar, and you don’t block out time. So back to the basics of the carnivore diet. What are those non-negotiables? What are those things that people simply, if you’re on the carnivore diet, you can’t eat this, you can’t eat that. And if you’re on the carnivore diet, this is, you should eat this and you should eat that. I just wanna make sure people don’t leave here with any confusion about what they need to do. What are those non-negotiables? Well, I think all of us need to cut out the ultra-processed food out of the diet. There are no carnivore, I mean, you can go to the grocery store and find ketogenic garbage. You can find vegan garbage. That doesn’t exist on carnivore. You shouldn’t introduce it. I mean, I think you shouldn’t under-eat. I mean, I think that’s an important concept there. You need to eat enough to stay well-nourished. And if you don’t do that, you’re going to be craving all this other garbage that you’re so used to doing. I mean, if humans, you know, if we were out in the wilderness looking for food, there’s not a lot of things we would pick up. I mean, we’d kill some animals, maybe we’d find some berries and things like that. But I think eating plenty of meat is a non-negotiable. I think you got to eat a lot of it to get the best. Do you have one piece? Go ahead. I’m sorry, cut out there. Do you have a specific times of the day that one should be eating meat? At certain times, they shouldn’t be eating meat. Is that part of the plan? Think about a froze. Are you there, sir? Check one, check two. Might have froze. PM, that’s going to be not conducive to good night’s sleep. I tend to front load my calories early in the day and have a smaller dinner. And I think that works pretty well for most people. Got it. Now, with your business here, Rivero, with your… Tell us about this solution, Rivero. If I go to Rivero.com, I’m pulling it up right now so people can see it. What are the solutions that you provide? Who has Rivero been designed for? Yeah, so Rivero is designed for people that are suffering from what it says, their metabolic disease, autoimmune conditions, inflammatory conditions. So if you have diabetes, if you’re overweight, if you have hypertension, you have metabolic syndrome, if you have a whole host of autoimmune conditions, inflammatory bowel disease, IBS, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, things like that, we are well set up to take care of that. So, what every patient, they meet with our, you know, our practitioners, our healthcare physicians and whatnot to oversee the care. We have a team of coaches that helps them to stay on track. We have all kinds of technology. We collect data from the patient every single day and we make adjustments based on what’s going on. So we will provide you a suggested diet, we’ll see how it’s working for you, we’ll make the necessary shifts. Not everybody on this Rivera will need to do a carnivore diet. Some will, some won’t. But we think about it as kind of a lower carbohydrate elimination diet. So some conditions like maybe Crohn’s disease might need a strict carnivore approach, whereas type 2 diabetes perhaps can get away with something less strict, perhaps. And so that’s what we do. We anticipate most of our patients will be with us for about a year. I think that’s what will be necessary to get them healthy. And then hopefully we don’t need to see them again. I mean, that’s what health care should be. You shouldn’t need this constant recurring business model where you keep, you know, keep people on beds for the rest of their life. I mean, our goal is to get people off medication whenever possible. Do you charge people? Is it a monthly fee? Is it a monthly fee? Yeah, exactly. So it’s a monthly subscription. Right now, our business is a direct business to consumer. We will be expanding to direct to businesses so we can work with you. Maybe your employer will start to cover that later as we finish expanding. And then eventually, hopefully getting on insurance plans for some of the people that want to use that. Now, Nace, I want to really tap into you and both you and Jordan, your experience on the carnivore diet, because you two guys have been living it. And this is exciting to see that you guys are living it. I mean, and I’d love to get you, give you opportunity, Nace, to ask any questions to Sean about the diet, about the program, about his philosophy, just anything you want to ask there, sir. So I’ll go to you first, Nase. Okay, perfect. So you said at the beginning of this interview, you said being poison. And so when Jordan and I did the carnivore, instantly, within one day, we had night sweats. And we just like, this is 38 years of just eating processed foods or sugars. And it was truly amazing, like within four days, I was looking at my brother’s like what symptoms are happening and we were just going through a detox within 24 hours of starting the carnivore with just no processed foods or sugars. So what other symptoms do you have people with a detoxing or cravings during their first I would say for us it was probably a good month of detoxing of cravings and then probably the second month we start seeing more healing abilities in our bodies. Yeah, well, I mean, you’re absolutely right that it does take a little bit of time for our body to shift to sort of a new energy supply, basically. You go from a high sugar, processed food sort of energy, which is very quickly absorbed in our body, to something that kind of lasts a little more slowly and is digested a little more slowly. So you have a more even energy once you adapt to that. But you have enzymes that are upregulating, you have your gut microbiome that’s changing over time. So that is a process of a month or so, maybe for some people two months. We do see that people will notice their bowels will change. You’re eating food that gets absorbed, whereas before you’re eating all these sort of fibrous foods where you just end up, half that food ends up in the toilet. So you end up absorbing all your food, so your bowel frequency is going to change. You’re going to be less inflamed. You’re going to retain less water. So a lot of people will notice that because the carbohydrates tend to stimulate our insulin more and our insulin causes us to hang on to more water in our kidneys, sodium and water. So you’ll end up sort of diuresing out all this water. So the other thing is you have to make sure you stay hydrated. You have to make sure you’re consuming enough food. One of the biggest problem people have is they don’t consume enough food. And they end up, they’re hungry, they have cravings, they don’t have much energy. So staying on top of getting enough calories, which is kind of interesting because most people over consume calories. But on carnivore, sometimes the problem is under consuming calories. So those are some of the more common things I’ve seen. Jordan, I want to ask you, what questions do you have for Dr. Baker? I have two questions. One is what are some of the common mistakes that people make? You know you talked about under eating and so you got those sugar cravings and stuff. And then what are some tips and tricks that you do that helps you stay on top? I noticed the other day you said that you went on a trip and you’re in a car so you just kind of fasted for that 24 hours you know and I don’t think that’s a big deal but what are some of some of those tips and tricks that when you are out, you know, whether you have to prep ahead of time or I saw that stuff you made the other day, you call it like, it was like meat chips or something, it was like crack or something. Cardboard crack, cardboard crack. Yeah, that’s just taking some steak thinly sliced and dehydrated with a little salt on there and that’s delicious. I think one of the things that I think is really important is, we talk about cravings. When you first start this diet and you eliminate pizza and donuts and chocolate cake and all that stuff, you’re going to have cravings for that at some point. I think the biggest thing is having a plan in place because failure to plan is basically planning to fail. I tell people, hey, what do we know? Cravings tend to be in response to a hormonal fluctuation. So there’s one called ghrelin in particular, often peaks around 8pm. But it usually lasts for about 45 minutes. So if you know you’ve got a craving, it’s only going to last for 30 to 45 minutes. So what can you do for 30 to 45 minutes? Go for a walk. Go ride a bike. Get on a phone call. Do something to get past that thing. That’s very helpful as a particular trick. I mean, like I said, the biggest mistakes that I think people find is, you know, if you’re not having enough variety, not enjoying it, I mean, you should not be counting calories and obsessing about this. There’s no other animal on the planet that’s out there checking a Fitbit or reading you or calculating the calories, I think that you should really try to enjoy the food, really have some variety when you’re starting out. Don’t allow yourself to be hungry all the time. No one is going to succeed on a diet that you’re hungry all the time or you don’t like the food. So you’ve got to figure out things you like and make sure, and you’ve got to learn how to cook a steak, man. I mean, that should be a requirement for every human on, you know, every American should know how to cook a decent steak. And so I see you a lot with that big knife and then your steak board and then you sprinkle a lot of salt. Is your favorite cut the tri-tip or what? Well, I’m a fan of ribeye steaks, man. Okay, gotcha. Because, you know, I’m not consuming a lot of carbohydrates, so I need to get energy from somewhere. And, you know, I exercise pretty hard. I’m always competing and training hard. So I need energy and my energy is coming from fat, not carbohydrates. And so I like rib eye steaks, I like, I don’t know, picanhas, I like New York strips. I mean, you know, ground beef is good too. I mean, ground beef tastes really damn good. You can make some good ground beef stuff. Right. And now I remember when I first started, I had a buddy that was already doing it before me and I was telling him that I was having a hard time with it. And so he kind of gave me some tips and tricks but he said one you got it you got to up your salt intake and you need to start getting more electrolytes and stuff like that so now is that is that something that you also recommend as well have having a good salt that you’re that you use or yeah well as I mentioned before when we go on low carbohydrate diets our bodies tends to let go of sodium and so we can become relatively dehydrated. So I think particularly in the beginning, having enough electrolyte is important. And then, you know, as I mentioned, I’m always working out, doing jiu-jitsu, rowing, sprinting. So I sweat a lot. And so I need to replace those things. So that’s why I tend to use a little bit more salt than probably many people might need. Gotcha. Now, I have multiple friends of mine who have appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast, Alex Jones, Jim Brewer, and they absolutely love the experience with Joe. They always have great things to say about Joe, and actually they have a lot of wonderful stories backstage or behind the scenes about what kind of a guy he is. How would you describe the Joe Rogan experience, or how was your Joe Rogan experiences? Again, Joe is a busy guy, obviously, and he has a lot of things going on, but he’s been very nice. I mean, the last appearance, he found out I had injured my neck doing jiu-jitsu, and he said, hey, let me get you out to Austin. We’ll do a podcast, and I’ll hook you up with some guys who do some stem cells. So he was very, very – I mean, he didn’t have to do that. A very gracious guy. I mean, he’s been a very nice guy. I mean, behind the – I haven’t spent a lot of time with him outside of the podcast, but he has been, you know, it’s pretty clear to me that he is very much in favor of what I’m doing. In fact, he just sent me a message this morning and asked me about to comment on some particular video of some crazy kind of vegan guy. But you know, the experience was quite good. I mean, it was very different in the first time I went on in 2017 versus the 2023 appearance I did. You know, he’s obviously grown enormously since that time. At this point, he’s arguably one of the most influential media people on the planet. But he’s still, I mean, he’s a regular guy. I mean, he’s just like anybody else. I mean, he’s got the same… You hear about all this stuff in the media, and you’re like, who are these wacko people? Then you talk to regular people, and no one thinks that way. I think he’s kind of just a regular dude. How big is the studio, the physical space that you’re recording in? How big is it? Well, the actual physical space was probably, I’d say, about maybe 30 feet by about 15 feet, the one room, but the whole entire studio complex is quite big. He’s got a gym. He’s got an archery range. He’s got hangout rooms. He’s got an entranceway. I mean, it’s a – I don’t know how many square feet. It was probably maybe a 15,000-square-foot facility. I’m thinking something like that. But the studio itself was just a pretty large room. Now, for guys like me, I have in-person workshops all the time where I’ll bring in folks like Tim Tebow or other folks to come speak. Do you do that? Do you come out to events? Can people hire you or have you come out to speak at events? Yeah, I mean, I’ve gone to various… Yeah, I go to… I speak at a lot of conferences. I’ve gone internationally. I’ve spoken all over the world. I speak to some, it’s kind of interesting, I often get asked to speak at cattlemen’s producers meetings right now, which is kind of funny because I literally have to tell the cattlemen that the food they’re producing is health food and they’re always shocked to hear that. So it’s kind of funny, but I’ve spoken at all kinds of events. In fact, I’ve got several this year that I’m scheduled to do. My next one, I think, is in May, I think in Austin, Texas. So yeah, but I do that for sure. Well, I might be talking to you offline about that because we always have conferences every two months. And what I’m finding is, as people are seeking truth, in a world of deception, more and more people are seeking truth. And when they do, they find the carnivore diet. It’s sort of a weird deal. It’s like people are looking for the truth about whatever the issues are plaguing the earth right now. And they go, hey, what do you think about the carnivore diet? It’s like the two fit together. It’s very interesting. It’s kind of almost like libertarians or people like Joe Rogan that maybe started out left of center, but now he’s kind of migrating to more of a centrist, libertarian, constitutional worldview. These different podcasters and people in my world keep running into the carnivore diet. Are you discovering that, too, the kind of connection of those two worlds? Yeah, there’s essentially some Bitcoin guys that do it. There’s a lot of people that, politically, maybe are more libertarian in their approach, tend to do that. I know Elon Musk says he used to be in the middle, and now the middle has shifted so far to the right compared to the left. It’s like he hasn’t changed, but everyone around him has. We definitely do see an interesting… The thing about the truth is, and it’s hard because if somebody says, hey, the climate is changing, I independently cannot confirm. I can’t walk out and say, oh my God, it’s clearly warmer or colder. But I can tell my body. I can literally look in the mirror and say objectively I’m better. That’s something you can’t hide. You can try to gaslight the hell out of people about everything else. It’s hard to gaslight somebody into saying I’m not healthier when clearly I’m no longer sick and I can look in the mirror. So this is the nice thing about truth. Now, as far as tips and tricks, I encourage everybody to pick up a copy of your book, but I want to ask you about tips and tricks. I’m going to pull up your book so we can see it here. There’s a lot of books now that are being written about the carnivore concept. There’s a lot of different books out there, but is this the book, first off, that everybody should pick up if they’re looking for the carnivore diet? Is this the one you recommend to carnivores? Yeah, that’s why it’s kind of funny that there’s been a couple of counterfeits that have my picture on it, which I have no idea. I had nothing to do with it. That’s the book I wrote. That’s, I think, the one that many people have read. Yeah, that’s a good one there. But as far as tips and tricks, I mean, yeah, the book discusses it, I think, in pretty good detail. It’s simple, though. It’s not a… I think the problem is a lot of people try to make nutrition more complicated than it needs to be, and therefore to make themselves useful. If you tell people, you’ve got to eat food in this order, and you’ve got to have this amount of this and this amount of that, and you need to have all these supplements, I just don’t believe that’s the way we’re designed. What I’m going to do today, because I’m pretty excited about this idea here, if you go to Amazon.com and you buy a copy of Sean Baker’s book, and if you’ll go ahead and go to thrive timeshow.com folks and you can text me proof that you bought it okay and again I haven’t talked to Dr. Baker about this he hasn’t agreed to this this isn’t something that he’s pushing I’m just doing this because I have an itch that I need to scratch here done an itch I need to scratch so if you go if you buy a copy of the book step one you buy a copy of the book then you text my phone number right here nine one eight eight five one zero one zero two proof that you actually bought the book, just a proof of purchase kind of a thing, a screenshot. Then what we’re going to do is I’m going to give you two tickets for our in-person business workshop. And this show is going to be running for years. So as long as this show, as long as you find this show, that offer stands. Okay? Because again, so you go here to Amazon, you buy the Carnivore Diet, boom. Then what you do is you text me proof that you bought it, and I’m going to give you two tickets for our in-person business workshops. That way, it’s kind of a way to encourage you because I’ve noticed with Nace and with Jordan, I mean, you guys are, I mean, you’ve always been good guys. I mean, Nace, you’ve always been a great guy. I mean, Jordan, since he got out of prison, he’s been great. And I’m just kidding, but you guys have both been great guys. But I feel like you guys are up, like your energy’s up. But it’s like, you’re up like 15%. You’re like, you’re super. It’s like extra strength now. If you were a medication to be extra strength. Um, what are your thoughts, Jordan? Do you feel like you’re extra strength? Are you, are you feeling super? I definitely feel the best that I’ve felt probably since I got out of high school. Wow. I thought, Nase, how would you describe how you feel? Because you, I mean, you guys are longtime business clients. It’s been a great helping you grow your business, but I feel like you guys are feeling, you’re looking super. Yeah. I mean, um, for us, our background, we have five different companies. So we’ve been, you know, kind of emotionally, mentally drained at points. And so by the last year, Jordan and I were able to focus better. We were able to get our to-do list done. Our mind clarity is on point. Our energy is high. We’re not having, you know, crashes. The only time Jordan and I actually had a crash is kind of funny. We were at a business meeting and they didn’t have meat and they had a salad. So the first time to have salad in a year and we were leaving, I was like, man, it felt like I used to when I would go to like rib crib and have meat and you’re like, okay, I need to take a nap. But it was opposite. So now when I eat meat, I feel great all day. My energy levels are just solid. So I feel great. I wanna ask you this, Dr. Baker, why do they feel better now when they eat meat than when they eat salad? What is that all about? Well, I think for one, it’s tolerated better by the gut. I think our human digestive tract is extremely well designed to consume and tolerate meat. I think their energy is more stable. Meat is something that, by intention, one is fully absorbed in the gut. Remember, the fiber from the plants is not going to be absorbed. It’s just going to be gotten rid of as waste. And so, as it’s slowly absorbed, they have steady energy throughout the day. So, they don’t have these crashes. When you’re on a more carbohydrate-based diet, you have energies that are ups and downs and ups and downs. And particularly as we get older and older, we become less tolerant of that. And so, we start to feel that afternoon crash, that post-lunch slump where you can’t do anything. Whereas at this point, probably they have steady energy throughout the day. And I think the background sort of resting steady state is just kind of chilled out and happy. I think that’s why most people on a carnivore diet, they’re just kind of like, you know, they’re pretty calm. They’re able to rationally think. They don’t get too, you know, put off by stress. They can handle things better and their mind is more clear. Now, one thing I want to ask you, Dr. Baker, do you have, with the Roberts, you know, these guys, they have their own company they started. When did you guys start selling meat? When did you guys start selling meat? It took us about a year to get off the ground, but probably three months ago. What they’re doing is they’re selling freeze-dried meat that lasts a long time. That’s what they’re doing. And you guys have become obsessed with meat. I think all of our meetings are about meat now. You’re into meat all the time. And again, their site is griddownchowdown.com, and you guys, your sales are taking off, and that’s great. But do you have a different resource that you recommend for meat for people that are like, you know, I want to stock up on meat. I want to team up with meat. I want to get the best meat. Have you found some meat resources at this point, Dr. Baker, that you recommend at this point? Well, I mean, I think the ideal thing is whenever possible, support your local ranchers. Because these guys, I mean, if you guys don’t know that, back in the 1970s, we had 1.3 million ranches in this country. Right now, we’re down to around 700,000. So several thousand ranches every year go out of business in this country, which is alarming to think about it. So I think the first thing you do is just look who’s local to you. Go buy a side of beef. I think that’s the best thing to do. And then you can support, you know, like these guys support companies like that. I mean, there’s many, many ranches. Some of you guys remember Ronda Rousey. I just interviewed her the other day. She was a UFC champ and her husband. They’ve started their own little beef company out there in Oregon. They ship nationally. So I think the more we support ranchers directly, the better it’s going to be for us in the long haul. Because we want to avoid consolidation of the food supply. So I think that’s the number one guiding principle. And then you can decide on if you want something that’s grass finish versus grain finish. You can decide on what breed of cattle you might like. I’m kind of like a meat connoisseur at this point. I’ve had so many different breeds and different types and finishes that I can kind of taste the difference and I have my own particular preferences on things. But I mean it’s interesting that the best thing I can say is support your local guys whenever possible and then if not, buy direct from ranchers. I think that’s the best way to do it. Jordan, did you have a hard time finding local ranchers to work with or how did you guys find your meat supplier? Yeah, we teamed up with some local people here in Oklahoma. It made sense, you know, they had the same principles that we had about the beef. We wanted the best quality beef. This is freeze-dried raw, so it lasts 25 years. So we wanted a good product that people could trust. I think people right now are scared about what’s in their food, and so we wanted to team up with some good ranchers. Dr. Baker, I want to compliment you on this. You always, during your interviews, you always come across as a very calm, confident dude, despite the fact that the most insane, hyperbolic, threatening comments get posted about you nonstop. I want to ask you that because a lot of our listeners to our show happen to be household names. A lot of my friends I interview on the show, they happen to listen to the show, and they get horrible comments written about them every day, but the comments written about you are truly next level. My son the other day, my son, he’s 16 years old, I told my son I’m interviewing him, he goes, dad, I think if you go on that diet, you’re going to slowly die inside. And I go, listen, I’m going to mention that, I’m going to mention that, I just want to get your thoughts on how do you respond to the avalanche of hate that comes your way for promoting the carnivore diet? How do you deal with it? Well, I mean, to be fair, most of what I get is people like, you know, these two guys saying, hey, I’m better. I mean, I see that like 20 to 1. I mean, for every hateful comment, I’ve got 20, 30, 50 positive comments. So it’s not like I don’t see a balance there. But I mean, honestly, I mean, you know, it’s words. I mean, sticks and stones type stuff. I mean, I’ve been to war. I’ve been, you know, I’ve been, you know, in, you know, in places where I’ve been on the athletic field where I’m getting punched in the face. This stuff doesn’t bother me. This is kind of like, ah, whatever stuff. It makes me laugh. And a lot of times I just turn it around on them because you see how ridiculous they are. You know, they’re, they’re crazy, wacko, are you see how unhinged and crazy and you just, you just let them speak for themselves. Like a lot of the videos I’ll do online, it’s just me sitting there calmly eating a piece of steak while some lunatic is ranting about some craziness. And I just, the contrast is obvious. This person’s a wacko, and here’s a guy that’s just like chilled out and enjoying life. So I don’t worry about too much about that stuff. My final two questions I have here for you is, one is for people out there that wanna know a little bit about your background. Were you in the military? And if so, what division? Tell us about that background a little bit. Yeah, I was in the military twice. I came in out of college. It’s kind of an interesting story. I started medical school. I left to go play professional rugby, came back, joined the military so I could continue my rugby career. I served in the United States Air Force as a nuclear weapons launch officer, so I would have launched nuclear bombs had we gone to war. Then I went back to medical school. The military paid for it. Then I came back in as an orthopedic trauma surgeon, went to Afghanistan, did a lot of work on the, you know, the injured troops that were in Afghanistan. So I was in twice. Okay, my final question for you. If you had like a massive billboard and you could tell every one of our listeners something via this billboard, and you only have a certain amount of characters, so maybe it’s a sentence or two, what is it that you want to share with our listeners today, sir? I would say eat more meat, stop eating ultra-processed garbage. I mean, I think that’s, that’s, that would help. That would help if everybody in America would do that, we would get rid of probably 85% of our healthcare issues. Wow. Well, I’m going to pull this up again, folks. Now again, everybody out there, if you want to get a chance to win a, then we’re going to Amazon real quick here and I’m going to Amazon. Then I’m going to look here for carnivore diet and I’m looking for the real book. I’m not looking for a knockoff. I got to find the real book, got to scroll down a little bit here. Boom, there it is, bestseller, 4,489 reviews today. Folks, if you’ll buy that book, and then you’ll text me proof that you actually did, proof of purchase to my cell phone number, that’s 918-851-0102. We’re going to enter you in, so you’ll actually get called by our team. We’re going to call you and give you tickets to our interactive two-day business workshops that we’ve been doing every two months since 2005. So again, folks, get the book, get a ticket to the conference. Dr. Baker, I really do appreciate you carving out time for us. Thank you for impacting the lives of Mason, Jordan Roberts, and the millions of people all throughout the world who are implementing your program there. Again, thank you for your research. Thank you for your time. We’re honored to have you on the show. Clay, I appreciate it. And thanks guys for confirming what I’ve been saying for many years now. Hey, take care. Bye. What’s up, Sean? Good to see you. Good to be back, Joe. Thanks for the interview. You’re still alive. You’ve been eating nothing but meat and you’re still alive. I am still alive. Doubters be gone. Yeah, yeah. When I just eat mostly meat, I feel so much better. I mean, maybe it’s anecdotal, maybe it’s just me and you, and many other people that do it, but there’s something to it. But you know, I’m not a big fan of the idea of being a big fan of meat. I’m not a big fan of the idea of being a big fan of meat. I’m not a big fan of the idea of being a big fan of meat. I’m not a big fan of the idea of being a big fan of meat. and you and many other people that do it, but there’s something to it. But you’re an extreme example because you have been doing it now for how many years? So I’m starting my eighth year. So just just… Eighth year. Yeah. So when I came to see you last time, it was almost six years ago. So I had just finished seven years now. So yeah, it’s been a while. And people should know that you’re actually a doctor. away because you were providing medical information, but you got it back? Yeah, it was kind of an interesting thing. So when I was practicing medicine, busy orthopedic surgeon, plugging away, doing a thing, and then I started realizing, hey, I can have people avoid surgery by changing their diet and their pain went away. I was like, you don’t need surgery. Well, that is not what hospitals want you to do. They want you to keep the engines turning, so to speak. I said, hey, look, I want to practice some lifestyle stuff. That ended up leading to a long battle with myself in the hospital. The hospital basically suspended my privileges and went to the state. The state said, hey, you can fight this in our state medical board situation or you can get independently evaluated because I don’t I don’t don’t see I have a hospital and so that was done It was like right at the time when I saw you a couple days before and they came back and said there’s nothing wrong with You go back to work And so I got that I got that and then I had to you know Reapply to the board reapply for a license. They granted my license and I renewed it three times since it so I’m a licensed medical You know licensed doctor, you know, but I just you know right now I’m not actually actively practicing because I got frustrated with the medical system. I think our health care system has some serious, serious problems, some serious conflicts of interest, some serious, I think the incentives for providing what I think is appropriate health care is misaligned. And so over the last few years, we set up a company which is called Rivero, and we’re licensed in all 50 states. We have physicians all across the country. We’re basically set up to provide what I call actual health care, root cause medicine, get people off the medications, actually try and fix their disease and not just medicate everybody because we have such a system where everybody is just like, you go to the doctor, here’s your diagnosis, here’s your drugs, keep staying on them the rest of your life, which I think is the wrong course. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. What’s the name of the company again? So the company is called Revero, R-E-V-E-R-O. We raise a bunch of money from crowdfunding and also a bunch of venture capitalists. We’ve been basically building that. We’ve got thousands of people that are basically on the waiting list. We launch in a couple of weeks. Like I said, it’s going to be something that I think will provide healthcare as it should be. Instead of, like I said, just the symptom management, putting band-aids on stuff, actually getting people healthy. I think a lot of the diseases are reversible. We’ve seen that all the time. We see that pretty frequently. In fact, there was a study done out of Harvard University two years ago. I don’t know if you saw that. There’s a guy named David Ludwig who is a senior author. David, I’ve talked to him. He is the most ethical, just like he does not want any money from industry. He refuses to take anything. He’s like, I want to make sure I do pure science. They did a study and they looked at 2,000 people on a carnivore diet and basically what they saw was 95% of the people, significant improvement across the board. Now the thing that was interesting to me is that diabetics, we had like 225 diabetics in that population, 92% of them came off all their insulin. These are all type 2’s. That’s insane. 100% came off all these other injectable drugs. GLP-1 receptor agonists, which we’ve heard so much about lately, the azempic, the semaglutide, came off something called the PCSK9 inhibitor, no sorry, the SGLT2 inhibitors. 84% came off the metformin. So it’s just like, this is clearly a, at the very least, a therapeutic tool. And that’s how I push this. I don’t tell, like I wrote a book on this, I didn’t say humans are carnivores. I said humans are opportunistic omnivores. If we were living in the Middle Ages and we were out hunting mammoths and all of a sudden the ice ages were out and we came across a tree full of Twinkies, we’d be like, I’m going to eat that. We’d try to eat it, right? Because you know we would. And you know there’s obviously people that eat plants that aren’t dead and are doing okay. So we’re omnivores. But from a disease mitigation standpoint, a therapeutic carnivore diet is tremendously effective. It’s one of the more effective things I’ve seen across the board. At the very least, you’d say, let’s explore that aspect of it. Like I said, there are people that are suffering. We’ve got so many people. I know we talk about vegan carnivore, everything in between, but I think at the end of the day, everybody’s eating processed garbage. We’re just eating bullshit. That is really one of the problems. And the one thing, and you said this, Joe, when you eat this meat, you’re like, I don’t want that other bullshit because you’re actually satiated. And this is the thing that’s, I think, problematic because if you look at, actually there’s a study that just came out now looking at the financial incentive for ultra-processed food. Why do we have this stuff? So you look at the big asset management groups. You’ve got BlackRock, you’ve got Vanguard, you’ve got State Street and Capital. Those guys collectively own huge portions of Nestle, Pepsico, all these other processed food companies. They also have significant shares in pharmaceutical manufacturers. So you basically sicken the population by feeding them garbage and then you profit on their disease. I think that’s what’s going on and I think it’s really unfortunate. I think some people make an argument, is there a net benefit from feeding more people versus how many people are getting sick? I think there’s a point where the line goes, if most people are getting sick from this and only a few people are benefiting, then you’ve kind of crossed that line of is it for the greater good? It becomes almost evil in my mind. I went to those guys at the beef checkoff and I said, hey look, we want to spend a little bit of money to do a study on beef versus diabetes because we know the results are going to be. People are going to go on an all meat diet or close to an all meat diet and their diabetes is going to go away. It’s simple and it takes all the confusion out. You hear all these dietary studies and it’s like, oh, but he was eating hamburgers and french fries and there’s all this confounder. So it’s like you can’t really test it. I’m like, the perfect way to test if meat is healthy or not is to just put them on a damn carnivore diet and see what happens. It’s the only way to test it. Right, right. If you do an epidemiology study and you don’t account for sugar, sugar, Coca-Cola, bread, pasta, lasagna. Yeah, that’s exactly, that’s what Harvard did recently. They didn’t account for sugar intake when they said beef causes diabetes. I’m like, you got to be kidding me. You’re not even counting sugar? That’s so crazy. Right, but they get this published, and this is really bad science. And guys like John Anaitis, who’s one of the most cited scientists in the world, has basically said all this epidemiology we’re doing, we’re just wasting money. It’s not telling us anything. This is all garbage, but they keep doing it over and over again because they generate headlines. The headlines they want. But anyway, back to this beef checkoff thing. So I said, hey, look, every year you award money, tens of millions of dollars to promote beef. I said, let’s get a little bit of money to do a research study on diabetes. They literally said, no, we’re not interested in doing that. I’m like, you’ve got to be kidding me. The beef industry is taking a beating right now. You listen to it, it’s like everybody wants to get rid of beef. The cow farts are boiling the oceans, it’s going to kill you, it’s going to give you cancer, which all of this is largely nonsense. In my view, this type of study would clearly, clearly demonstrate that not only does beef not cause diabetes, in fact I talked to the CEO of the NCBA two years ago. I sat down and I presented in front of the California Cattlemen’s Association and literally the President of the Association stood up and said, I went on a Carver diet and it cured my diabetes. It’s like, yeah, it’s clear. And the guy said, yeah, I get it. We’re going to help you out. We’re going to get this going. I didn’t hear, I heard nothing from these guys. So what I think is going on is the USDA kind of oversees all these checkoffs and they just kind of say, look, you can’t say that because we want to promote, you know, because again, they have all these processed food lobbies and Nabisco and PepsiCo sitting on the, you know, they’re on the board and they’re like, if we promote this one food and people stop eating all this processed food, then what are we going to do? We’re going to lose a lot of money. You think about it, not that I’m advocating that everybody’s going to go on a carnivore diet because I don’t think that’s necessary for one, but if you significantly cut back on all these people consuming all this garbage, what does that do economically to this country? Think about how much money is spent on garbage food, the drugs that are needed to treat them. We spend $4.3 trillion a year on health care in this country, and what do we get for it? We’ve got one of the sickest populations in the world, our life expectancy is going down, everybody’s fat, everybody’s depressed, everybody’s on drugs. It’s crazy. It is crazy, and it’s crazy that they don’t look to diet as being the primary cause of that. Or if they do, they look to these epidemiology studies that don’t take into account exactly what you’re eating with the meat. Why is it meat that’s always demonized? Well I think for a number of reasons. One, if you go back to like dietetics in the beginning, like back in 1917 the American Dietetics Association was formed. This was formed literally by Seventh-day Adventists who are religiously vegetarians. You go back to the Kellogg’s brothers, John Harvey Kellogg, where he’s out there circumcising females and saying, we can’t eat meat because it’s going to make you have sex and make you have lust and masturbate. This is all like this religious stuff. People don’t know that, but they should know that he developed this cereal, this bland cereal, to discourage masturbation, which is one of the wildest things I have ever heard. Yeah, that guy was a wacko, man. He was in there fucking giving himself like high-pressure enemas every day. It was just like fucking 20 gallons a minute enemas. Really? Yeah, he was a wacko. He was a really nutty guy. You read about some of his stuff. 20 gallon enemas? It was some ridiculous like super high capacity, like a soaper soaker on steroids thing. Are enemas bad for you? Because I’ve always wondered if your internal gut flora is important, and it is, isn’t that getting washed out? I think to some degree it is. I don’t know that anybody’s really looked at it from that angle, but I think in some cases, like you know, some people’s got some problems with constipation, it could be helpful, but I don’t think it’s generally a healthy practice for most. I know there’s people that are like putting weird stuff up their butt. I think it’s good. It might. It flushed out. It might. But it also makes you see everything come out of you, I guess. I’ve never done it, but apparently there’s a tube and they look at it, oh, look, here’s your problems. Yeah, it’s kind of like these, there’s this thing these crazy vegans do where they consume like this charcoal and this jelly and stuff, this kind of gruel mix, and then it kind of like fills up their intestines and they poop it all out and they say, that’s clearing out all my intestines. I can’t remember what they call it, but it’s like there’s these crazy, crazy videos where they’re just pulling all this gelatinous black stuff out of their butt, but it’s like you just ate all that stuff. That’s what’s coming out of you. Oh, look at all the toxins. Exactly. You just ate that, stupid. You just ate the same toxins. People are obsessed with that term, like releasing the toxins. They really think that’s what’s happening when you sweat, you get in the sauna, you’re releasing the toxins. Like, when you’re sweating, your body’s regulating your heat temperature. Yeah, that’s what’s going on. You know what clears your toxins? Your fucking liver. That’s what that thing’s for. Yeah, liver, kidneys. We’ve got a pretty good detox system for sure. You don’t need all the smoothie, juice fast detoxes. It’s like some people are detoxing when their teeth fall off. They’re detoxing their teeth. The other thing is with the smoothie thing is, my God, you’re getting so much sugar. You’re getting it in a weird form. If you’re eating fruit smoothies, you’re getting sugar in a very unnatural form. Fruit juices, we used to think that fruit juices are really good for you. Most doctors would agree that fruit juices are very high in sugar. To get it in that sort of liquid dose where it just goes right in here and bloodstream in your liver That’s a lot of sugar man Will you think about because you like you’re out hunting all the time and you know you get when you’re going out and you’re like If I had to get food out here, what would I what would I have available to eat? I can tell you what you wouldn’t you wouldn’t have all this processed food, but particularly like like powder You know like we make powdered sugar we make powdered flour, and we combine them together But we’ve changed the nature of the food so much that it’s interesting. I saw Darius Mouzafarian, who’s a researcher at Tuff, he’s the guy that put out the study that says, or was part of the study that said, lucky charms are healthier than eggs. You saw that last year. That’s total BS, right? Hilarious. But one thing he did point out was that over the last 20 years or so, we haven’t really been eating much more calories than we were. From the 1960s to about 2000, we ate more calories and maybe that explains why everybody got fat. But since that time, we really haven’t eaten much more, but we’ve eaten so much more ultra processed food. In fact, right now the U.S. diet is close to 70% ultra processed. What do you think about that? It’s like crazy. Our kids are getting fat. But one thing that’s interesting is like, because you’re talking about the microbiome actually consumes some of it. Up to 22% of our calories can be consumed by our microbiome. When you’re just eating sugar, it goes straight in you. So those calories, your gut microbiome doesn’t get any of that. It’s like you’re absorbing more calories. So just by changing the quality of the food, you’re changing how many calories you absorb. Some people say that’s part of what leads to this obesity thing. But we know, for instance, here’s another thing. USDA came out with a study like three months ago. 91% processed food diet is healthy. This is what they’re pushing. Because they’re trying to position us to say… What was this study? This was USDA put it out. I think it was the NOVA study. I might have that on there, Jamie, but it’s basically because there’s starting to be backlash against ultra-processed fruits. South America is starting to ban this stuff, which I think, I’m not for banning food. I think that gets into freedom of choice and things like that. So you shouldn’t ban. Just like you can still smoke if you want to. You know it’s not the best for you, so you don’t want to do that. But at the same point, they’re saying this stuff is, there’s a lot of backlash. People like myself and probably you and others are saying, look, this ultra-processed garbage is literally killing us. It’s making us crazy. It’s making us depressed. All these people with mental health disorders, a lot of that nutrition is part of that and we can talk about that. But what they’re saying is there’s a backlash against that. So that’s the NOVA. Dietary guidelines meet NOVA, developing a menu for a healthy dietary pattern using ultra-processed foods. So they’re basically saying, hey, how do we make people eat more processed food and make it quote-unquote healthy? And they showed that they could make a diet that’s like 91% ultra-processed foods and still be quote-unquote healthy. Look at what it says here. It says, the purpose of this proof of concept study was to determine the feasibility of building a menu that aligns with the recommendations for a healthy dietary pattern from the 2020 DGA and includes a over 80% Kcal from UPF, ultra-processed foods, as defined by NOVA, designed to accomplish this objective. We first developed a list of foods that fit NOVA criteria for UPF, ultra-processed foods, fit within a dietary patterns in the 2020 DGA and are commonly consumed by Americans. We then use these foods to develop a set, what is that, 7D? 7-day, 7-day, 7-day 2000 kilocalorie menu modeled on the My Pyramid sample menus and assess this menu for nutrient content as well as for diet diet quality using the healthy eating index. The results in the ultra-processed DGA menu that was created, 91% of the kilocalories were from ultra-processed food or NOVA category four. The HEI 215 score was 86 out of a possible 100 points. The sample menu did not achieve a perfect score due primarily to excess sodium and an insufficient amount of whole grains. This menu provided adequate amounts of all macro and micronutrients except vitamin D, vitamin E, and choline. Conclusions, healthy dietary patterns can include most of their energy from ultra processed foods, still receive a high diet quality score, and contain adequate amounts of most macro and micronutrients. Boy. Right. So, remember, USDA, the guys that go there, they leave USDA and they go sit on the board of directors at Nabisco and PepsiCo. So this is really, I think, what this is. It’s positioning us as a society to accept that ultra-processed foods are our food. It’s really human pet food. I mean, you see what happens to our pets. And everybody’s fat, so we’re going to say, well, it’s still okay. It’s okay if you eat your human dog chow or your human chow. Just keep doing that. Don’t ask questions. And oh, by the way, here’s an azempic shot or some aglutite shot we’ll give you to kind of keep you chilled out. So it’s really, I mean, it’s almost sinister in a way. It’s very bizarre. It’s very bizarre that this isn’t challenged. And that shows you how captured our food industry really is. The fact that that’s not challenged, the fact that our health guidelines aren’t set on, hey, what you should be eating is what human beings are designed to eat in nature. Well I mean, my opinion on dietary guidelines, because we have a USDA that meets every five years and by the way, so USDA dietary guidelines, did you see there’s a physician from Harvard named Fatima Stanford, right? She went on 60 Minutes and said, obesity has nothing to do with diet. It has nothing to do with exercise. It’s all disease and genetic and there’s nothing you can literally do. She’s also sponsored by Nova Nordisk, who makes Ozempic, right? She’s also a member of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Panel. So 95% of the people that sit on the U.S. Dietary Guidelines panel today for this next one when they’re going to come up with 2025 guidelines all have financial ties to processed food companies. Yeah. Which, I mean, you think about it, it’s just like, this is crazy. So if you go to like Brazil, like Brazil’s dietary guidelines, or at least one they released a few years ago, it was like, here’s what you should do. Cook at home, don’t eat processed foods, and eat with people around that you love. That is their recommendation, which I think is better than our guidelines. If left to our own, we are now being told we’ve got to eat all this garbage, and it’s just making us sick. It’s crazy. Well, Thrive Nation, on part one of today’s show, we just interviewed the guy that invented the carnivore diet. You might have saw him on the Joe Rogan interviews. interviews and so on. Now we’ve got to switch gears from optimizing our health into optimizing our wealth and today’s guest knows quite a bit about both of those actually. So I’m excited to have him on today’s show. Peter Taunton, welcome on to the Thrive Time Show. How are you sir? Hey, I’m well brother. How you doing? I’m excited to have you on today’s show and again for anybody out there that doesn’t know your bio, your background, can you tell us just a little bit about the brands that you’ve been able to build throughout your career, sir? Yeah, look the about 25 years ago. I’ve been I’ve been in business for 40 years, but 25 years ago I started a franchise brand in the fitness space and Every now and then things work out with the right vision and the right human capital and the right execution Sometimes amazing things can happen. I built some fitness brands over the 25 year period, I built three brands. All three of them, I grew them to over a thousand locations. Today, I have roughly 4,000 locations in 28 countries. Look, it’s not a race. I stepped down from those three brands about five years ago. I’m still chairman of the board of those brands. But now what I do is I build companies. And I found within the franchise space that it doesn’t matter if I’m launching fitness or launching acai bowls, the fundamentals, the day-to-day block and tackling, the vision, the execution, it’s all very similar. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to pull up the Nautical Bowls website real quick. And as I do, I want to introduce you to, we have Nace and Jordan Roberts here. They own a company called Master Machine. Master Machine, it’s based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They make parts for Tesla, the U.S. Army. That’s a master machine is their company, mmm-usa.com. They also have a freeze-dried meat company called Griddown, chowdown.com. That’s the two brands that they work on. And then we have a JT Lawson here from Make Your Dog Epic. That’s his brand. And so I wanted these guys to ask you questions about how to grow their businesses. It didn’t happen to your expertise. So JT, I’ll let you go first there, sir. Well, one, I just want to point out how impressive it is that your bicep vein is showing through your polo. I just want to point out that that’s a very impressive thing. I don’t know if it’s the acai bowls that’s your 24-7 diet, but it’s working. That’s called working out since you’ve been 12 years old, never stopping. Okay, good, good. Well, I think one of the… A question that a lot of people have is, I mean, you’ve done this and you’ve built from the ground up multiple times, but a lot of people are at the point where they just want to know where to start, where they have their business, their foundation. Where would you say the most important part of that foundation or where to start would be? Look, when I’m meeting with young entrepreneurs, when I say young, not age-wise, but just new being into being an entrepreneur, a lot of times they’re caught up in their passion for something. What I always have to check is the viability of the vision. Is it relevant? That’s important, because the last thing I want you to do is running down this path with all this passion, but it’s a pet project and the consumer, it’s not relevant in the eyes of the consumer. So you put this hard-earned cash into the business and it’s hard to get any lift off, it’s hard to get any trajectory. So first and foremost, is the product relevant in the eyes of the consumer, number one. Number two, how do I build something that’s scalable? And there’s a lot of times when I’m talking to people about franchising, the business is too technical. So I always say in franchising, you gotta dummy it down. You gotta dummy it down so I can take people from all walks of life and make them successful in the business. Those are the two starting points. And then, you know, don’t worry so much about cash because I’m a big fan of bootstrapping. Okay? Bootstrapping keeps you creative, it keeps you engaged. You know, I always get concerned when people say, yeah, I’m raising money. And when they’re doing their capital raise, they have 2 or 3% of the cash needed. So that’s OPM, other people’s money. I want people who are going to have their own money in the game, their own skin in the game. Those are the people I like to bet on. Okay? Because every now and then you have to bet on the horse. Just a quick comment there. Warren Buffett, who couldn’t be on today’s show, but he says, I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them because sooner or later one will. And when I think about JT, what you’re building there with Make Your Dog Epic, one of the things that blew my mind is we had a coaching client in Tulsa years ago who was a tutor. He was tutoring kids. And, Peter, this guy was passionate about teaching kids math. I mean, he wanted every kid to know math and geometry and algebra. And he was into it. He was feeling it. And this guy, he got to the top of Google. He had the best website. But he said, Clay, the dog guy who comes in to meet with you before me, he makes more than I do. I go, what do you mean? He says, I might work with 40 kids a week and parents might complain to pay $50 an hour to teach their kid math. This guy’s charging $2,000 to teach people how to train their dog and he only trains 10 dogs a week and he’s making more than I do. And I go, well, yeah, that’s because people care more about training their dogs than they do kids. You know, it’s just, it’s a fact. And he had this mind-blowing experience. He’s like, you mean eight years of education? I just now had my epiphany. I’m like, yeah, I think he did. And he switched careers because he was so emotionally invested in something that just wasn’t paying him. And I just think it’s so important people find a viable business model. Peter, any other thoughts on that? Because I see people who are just so emotionally invested and excited about their thing, but nobody wants to pay them for it. I see, look, I think the dog space is unbelievably relevant in today’s market. And I see it here in Miami. I mean, honestly, the people, it’s their kids. And now people are so mindful of the fuel that we give our dogs and that we give ourselves. That, you know, the old 50 pound bag of Purina that we served our dogs when we were kids, hard dog food, I mean, it’s come so far now. And so I love it. Even where I live here in Miami, I see vans driving around that’ll do dog washing on the spot. It’s next level across the board and people are paying for it. That’s why when you say you train your dog for $2,000, hey look, there’s people that’ll do that because it’s, you know, having a well-trained dog it makes life easier. And JT, you rolled out a deal where you actually will beat anybody’s price and you do scholarships too, so I mean what is the average ticket price? Because I know you have things for people that are in need or have, you know, financially conscious, but what’s like your average ticket? Yeah, well, typically it’s between 400 and 4,000. It just depends on how advanced somebody wants it. So like we offer a money back guarantee. So whatever your goal is with your dog, we promise we will get them to that goal or it’s a money back guarantee. An average is right around that 2000 mark. But we have, we have scholarships and on the lower price or they see my personal dog and they’re like, dude, I need your, my dog to be exactly like yours. I’m like, okay, well that’s the bigger one. But no one actually quote-unquote needs that. That big one’s more of a want. But if you want it, I’ll do it. I think it’s incredible you can teach dogs to speak Spanish, JT. We’ll talk about it on tomorrow’s show. Okay, so now the Griddown Showdown, you guys are hucking meat. I mean you guys are selling lots of meat. You also build parts. You build parts. The US Army, Tesla, etc. What questions would you guys have for, I’ll start with you, Nace, what questions would you have for Peter Taunton, sir? Yeah, so I guess for us during the last three years in the shutdowns and whatnot, you said you had a lot of locations. So with us, something that we struggled with was having good employees or finding good employees and knowing when to get rid of, like right now, when to let someone go. Well, how many locations do you have? So right now we have five different, five different companies, just different, totally different. But we have two locations in Oklahoma City for basically barbershops. And then for the grid down, we have one location right now. Yeah, look, I mean, human capital is important and you’re only as good as your worst employee, especially if your employees are customer facing. So the guest experience is everything. I don’t know. You’ve got to look at what drives your business, what are the material movers, and make sure that you’re honing in on those things. If it is in fact the guest experience, if it’s the guest experience, then you’ve got to be really focused on those people who are consumer facing. If it’s product experience, it doesn’t matter who’s making it as long as the throughput is accurate and meets your criteria, right? Now, human capital, if they can’t get along with their coworkers, that’s one red flag. I’m a big advocate of mentoring, okay? Because you guys, you’re almost like casting directors. Think of it that way. Yeah. You’re casting people into a film, and you’re going to cast them into roles. And part of that is sometimes you can cast somebody in a role that maybe they’re not best suited for. So I’m a big advocate of mentoring, working with people, but making sure that they understand exactly what it is you’re looking for. Because people can’t follow what they can’t see. Very important. So look, if people aren’t willing to follow your lead, if they’re not willing to follow your message, your vision, and I would make sure that everybody understands what makes you guys click. Okay, what is it with you guys? What fires you up in the morning? Okay, what’s that fire in your belly? Your employees have got to see that because if they don’t see that, then they’re missing out on a big piece of this, all right? Because passion is contagious, right? People love to know what fires you guys up. And when they see that, if you’re putting them in an environment where they can thrive, they’re going to thank you for the opportunity to having a front row seat to the American dream. All right? But there’s too many times I tell people, hey, look, they’re having big turnover with their employees. And you know where the problem starts? At the top. I tell them, you’re hard to follow. You’re condescending. You’re a little bit of an ass. Okay, I gotta give it to them real, because they can’t, right? I mean, there’s a lot of gold there to unpack, but you get what I’m throwing down. Yeah. Peter, I wanted to read this quote to you. This is from Jack Welch. He says, by the way, Jack Welch, folks, if you don’t know, he grew GE by 4,000% during his tenure. GE was a stagnant organization before he took over it. That was the company invented by Thomas Edison. And he once said here, Jack Welch, he says, if you pick the right people and you give them the right opportunity to spread their wings and you put compensation as a carrier behind it, you almost don’t have to manage them. Change before you have to. So I’ll just give people an example for, back to the dog world, make your dog Epic JT. You’ve got a guy right now at the mall and he’s doing demonstrations of dog training. And you pay him basically per successful demonstration. There’s a way we gauge it. And you got a guy faithfully doing two or three demonstrations an hour right now. And that’s how you pick up new business. People walk by the mall, they see you training the dog, they see the different tricks you can do, and you pay him. And some people in that environment are making 40 bucks an hour. And some people are making 15 bucks an hour. But you have a compensation plan in place, you know, JT, that keeps the employees fired up all day. I want to get your thoughts going back to business management there, Peter, you know, for the average listener right now who has a business that doesn’t have some sort of merit-based pay or some sort of carrot and stick, what would you say? What would you, what would be some, what were your thoughts on a merit-based pay incentive program of some kind? I’m a big, I’m a big fan. Every one of my companies that I own, I have a pool of stock or shares, equity, that I allow the employees to participate in. But here’s my rule. I mean, it’s my stock, it’s a gift, so I can make up all the rules, just to understand that. And one of my rules is, you’ve got to be in the seat at the point of exit. Because every one of my companies, I get into them, but before I even start them, I have an exit. I have an exit strategy. I’m not building something I’m going to hand down to my kids. I am building an empire, and I know that the hang time in this from start to finish, the first bite of the apple is typically five to seven years. I carve out about 5% equity of my employees. I want them to feel, they understand, they fully get the vision. I pay them a fair wage. I don’t overpay them, but they get a fair wage and I give them opportunity that they can grow within the company. But more importantly, when I exit, okay, the first time that I sell a portion of my company, every one of them, and literally every employee participates from the receptionist to the evening cleaners to the C-level employees. Now granted, they participate at different levels, but when I sell, they get a check on top of their, and that keeps them, why do I do it? It keeps the revolving door from happening. People constantly, churning human capital is a pain, okay? Especially when you’re talking, if you’ve got a division that’s IT or sales related, because it takes people time to ramp up and to get pace with everyone else and time is money. So if I can find a way to keep people in the seat for five to seven year period, it’s paying me dividends, make no mistake about it. Okay. Now to your earlier point, and I don’t know Nace if it was you or Jordan that asked, but look, as it relates to when do you terminate somebody? Hey look, you terminate somebody when they’re not leaning in, they’re toxic to the people around them, they’ve just got bad energy. They’re there to pick up a check, they’re not giving anything over and above what’s expected of them. Those people, I mean, that’s not gonna make it. If you’re trying to grow your brand, you need people who are hard chargers. You don’t need dead weight. Do you spend any time or effort trying to redirect somebody or do you just see, hey, this person’s not going to go any further than this and you just remove them from the culture? Look, I don’t, that’s a tough call to make. This person, he’s reached his capacity. I let them, when I’m pulling somebody aside, I mean, there’s been times that I’ve pulled people aside and I don’t do it in front of everyone. I bring them into my office and I say, hey, look, what’s going on? If I’m in a gaslight, a room, I’m going to do it with all the decision makers in the room, okay? And I’m not going to pick on anyone, but I will just say, hey, look, you know what? Here’s the reality. We’re just not that great. Now that breaks their heart. If you’ve got people who will walk on fire for you, and you say, you know what, here’s the reality. We’re not as good as we think we are. We’re not that fucking great. And when you say that, and when I do that, I’ll leave the room. I’ll leave the room. I’ll go, and it’s all staged. I have my cup of coffee. I’ll go like I’m going to go get coffee. I leave them in the room. And I tell you what, they get to the bottom of it because they want to show up, how they show up every day. And then there’s times that I got to pull somebody aside and say, look, what’s going on? And then, hey, Peter, what do you mean? What’s going on? What’s going on? What’s because look, I know I’ve seen how great you can be. What’s going on? You got something going on at home because you are so much better than what you’re delivering to me today. So tell me I need you to get in the game okay re-engage yourself. So I put him in a position where I’m saying look I’m I’m telling them you’re so much better than what you’re giving me and when you when you talk to people man to man or man to woman however you’re doing it man if they care about the culture that you’re doing if they care about what they’re doing, they will say, hey man, give me a shot. And I can’t tell you the amount of times people have come back to me six months, eight months later and say, man, I’m so thankful that you didn’t give up on me. Firing people is easy. It’s the easy way out. So just remember that. Have a criteria on what you’re looking for. And when people can check the boxes when you’re hiring them, invest in them, okay? And I’m reporting soundbite, I said earlier, people can’t follow what they can’t see. So when I have department heads, I say, yeah, I’m gonna let them go. You know what I do? I pulled a department head person into my office and I said, tell me what happened. You’re gonna let them go. So what was it that happened? Because you hired them and you went through this protocol and you picked this person out of a lineup and they were great. So what happened between being great and I’m gonna fire them? What happened there? Because I want, I tell you what, all of us, we run companies. You can’t be 10 places at once. I’ve gotta be able to create people around me that can be great mentors, that are gonna create leaders, okay? And when you do that, magic happens. So invest in your C-level people, but make darn sure that they’re investing in people underneath them. And then as owners of the company, make sure you’re making the rounds, okay? There’s times throughout the day when I was running my companies, I would get up and I would walk around every corner of the office talking to people, how’s the family? I’m making it human, okay? Because I’m not that guy that sits in the corner of an office that is just pulling strings, okay? I connect with the employees and that’s another, to me, call it old school, but if you want to keep people in the saddle, you got to relate to them. Peter, I’m going to pull up your website again here. This is again, Nautical Bowls, folks. If you’re looking for a franchise that doesn’t require a lot of employees, that’s affordable to open, that allows you to earn time, freedom, and financial freedom, that has a food, it’s basically a meal replacement is what it is, that’s on trend. You should check out nauticalbowls.com. Now, Jordan, you’re the second, you’re, you know, there’s Nace, and then you’re your brother, you’re our second favorite. So we wanted you to go second because we like Nace a little bit more than you. And with that being said, what question do you have for Peter there? You had mentioned whenever you have a product-based company that you want to figure out if that product is viable to the customer. What are some ways that you’ll test out a product in the marketplace? Well, look, I mean, I make sure that I’m not doing it in a vacuum. So if I’m coming up with something, I’m going to have tastings, right? I’m going to invite guests in and look for honest criticism. And I do it even when the stores are open. And then even today, we’ve awarded about 195 territories. We’ve got 65 or so mini stores open. We still, we secret shop the stores. We secret shop to make sure that the guest experience is on point. But look, anytime we’re introducing a new product, we make sure we get the feedback from the guests because they’re the ones that are frequenting our stores. And that’s where it starts. It can’t be, oh, I think this is phenomenal. If you let 10 random people try it and they’re not raving about it, look, it’s probably not going to give you the lift that you’re looking for sales-wise. Now, in the final five minutes we have here, Jordan, I want to give you an opportunity to share, Peter, what you’ve been eating nonstop for the last year, and then I’m gonna go to JT for the final question, okay? So, Jordan, tell Peter what you’ve been eating for the last year. I just wanna get his reaction to it. Yeah, so I’ve been eating a purely carnivore-based diet for the last year, dropped about 30 pounds. I feel better, I don’t have any more back pains, I don’t have any more knee pains. You know, I did something to my knee, it took about two years, but after I got on the Carnivore Diet, you know, that healed. But I’ve seen a big improvement in myself and in my body. I’m 41 now. I found my place. I found myself in a place where I was getting out of shape. I was seeing older men in better shape than I was. And yeah, so I’ve been doing the Carnivore Diet for about a year. Peter, I want to say straight up meat, right? Straight up meat, just meat? Just animal byproducts, so whether it’s raw milk, eggs, cheese, you know, dairy, stuff like that. Peter, you’ve got to put that in a cup. Meat in a cup. Frozen meat in a cup. Yeah, what’s your reaction to that, Peter? I just want to get your thoughts as a fitness enthusiast. No, you know what? I mean, there’s some real science behind that. There’s a lot of people that go that path. You know, it’s protein-based diet, not a lot of greens, and it works for them. So I think there’s different body types for everyone. For me, I tried to do a straight-up plant-based diet at one point, and I hung in there for about two months. For me, it didn’t work for me. I felt tired. I was not keeping weight on. It was just not the, not the jam I was looking for. I kind of, my diet is, is high protein and vegetables, okay? And I should probably do more vegetables than I do. All right, but it’s kind of high protein and vegetables that works well for me. So, but I know some people that do straight up carnivore diet and they love it. So go figure. JT, what final question do you have for Peter Taunton, sir? Sure, well I’ll keep it on the subject of working out. But you have all these companies, because I feel like this is a thing a lot of people struggle with, because you’ll see these guys that are super jacked, but they have no money, or these guys who have a ton of money, but they aren’t in shape. How do you personally find the time to do both? I mean, it’s a priority, right? It’s a priority. So for me, I don’t leave my master bedroom in the morning. I don’t come into the main house without my workout clothes on. Because I know if I don’t do that, if I don’t put my workout clothes on and I say, I’m going to get to it this afternoon, I’ll talk myself out of it. It’s the first thing I do every day. I come out, I have a cup of coffee, I gather my thoughts, I might answer a couple of emails, but by 7.30, 8 o’clock in the morning, I’m in the gym and I’m in and out of there in an hour. It’s right in the building that I live in, in and out of there in an hour. And then by 10 o’clock, I’m in the saddle grinding. Okay. So it’s a priority. I know for me, just like most of us, look, when I start my day with a workout, it sets me up for the day. And I’ve been doing that since I’ve been, honestly, I started working out when I was 12 years old. I never quit. I’ve worked out, you know, today I probably work out every, you know, I’ll do 10 days in a row. I don’t work out every day, but I’ll probably work out 27 to 28 days a month, I guess. Wow, folks, we talked about health, wealth. Now let me talk to you more, folks, about buying a franchise. Again, so many people tell me, Clay, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know. I want to be self-employed. Maybe I have a job, but I’m looking for extra income. Maybe I want to switch careers. And they say, what should I do? What’s a career that I can pursue? And for our longtime listeners, you know, we’ve been talking about Oxifresh for years. We’ve actually seen Oxifresh and worked with Oxifresh to help them grow from just a handful of locations to 550 locations now. There’s 557 Oxifresh locations that are open. And when people reach out for locations of an Oxifresh, a lot of times we don’t have any options available because we’ve sold out most of the territories. Now, so another opportunity now for you folks is nauticalbulls.com. My final question for you, Peter, how much money does it cost to buy a Nautical Bulls franchise and what is the action step people need to take to learn more? So the cash required to get into the business as an investor, it’s 100,000 cash. And then there’s financing. You’re gonna finance about 150 on top of your 100. So this business is about 250 all in to get into it. So 250 all in, 100 of it is your cash. You’re gonna finance 150. To find out more information on it, just click on franchise opportunities. But look, this one, simple. One full-time employee, 10 to 15 part-timers, requires no restaurant experience, there’s no cooktops, there’s no exhaust hoods. This is a simple, simple business that’s in a relevant space. People today, they’re dialed into. They understand two things. It makes sense to be active, lead an active lifestyle, and it makes sense to watch what you put in your mouth. So this product is plant-based, dairy-free, gluten-free, soy-free, made with organic, all-natural ingredients. It’s right in the wheelhouse of what people are looking for. To what Clay said earlier, it’s not dessert. This is a meal replacement. And that’s another thing. Any product I bring to market, the relevance. Some people have it for breakfast, mid-morning snack, lunch, mid-afternoon snack. You’ll even have it for dinner. You’re not gonna go to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse and then go to Nautical Bowls for dessert. That’s not, we’re not dessert. So it’s a great product in a relevant space which explains why I believe we’re the fastest growing acai bowl concept in the country right now. Peter Taunton, thank you for your time, sir. And we’ll talk to you next week. You’re the best, thanks guys. Nice meeting you all, take care. Take care. Oh, look at this cute baby. What a great baby. Quality baby, that’s a healthy baby. Okay. All right, Nation, on today’s show, I’m very excited for you to hear this success story about this wonderful couple that, Sean, I would describe them as they are killing the game in the most nonviolent way possible. They’re killing the game in the most nonviolent way possible. They are blowing up in a good way. Folks, I’m telling you, these folks are really growing their business, and what makes them great is they’re really kind, hardworking, diligent people, and we’re honored to serve them. We’ve got Jenny and Mike here joining us. Jenny and Mike, welcome to the Thrive Time Show. How are you two? Hi, thank you. Good, we’re doing well. Okay, now I’ll start with you, Jenny, because frankly, Sean likes you more, no, I’m just kidding. So how did you first discover us and the business coaching that we provide? So I was listening to different podcasts about business. I was starting up our business. And so you were the first one to pop up on our podcast on Apple, I think Apple is what I was on. And so I started listening to you. I got on your website and I was just a little girl starting a business. And I said, I’m gonna ask this guy to be my coach. And I don’t think I’m gonna get a shot, but sure enough, within a week, you called me. Now who is this cute, cute child here? But Micah, who is this cute kid here? It’s Lennon Rose. She is about to be 10 months old. I hate to do this to you, but can you kind of hold up the baby to the camera a little bit? This is for all of us. Oh, look at this cute baby. What a great baby. Quality baby. That’s a healthy baby. So, so Mike, can you tell us, what’s the name of your website there? I think people want to look you up and verify you’re real people that don’t just happen to have a cute baby. Yeah, our website is newconcept.healthcare. Newconcept.healthcare. So newconcept.healthcare. I’m gonna pull it up right now, folks, so we can all verify that they’re not just a couple who’s taking advantage of the cute baby they have to get a podcast here. This is a real couple, because I’m pulling it up here. So this is the website, it’s newconcept.healthcare. And can you tell our listeners, what services do you guys provide at newconcept.healthcare? So we offer more functional medicine. So we offer IV therapies, we offer hormone replacement therapies. We also do acute care. We do pretty much everything, but we’re very much alternative. So we believe in medical freedom, and that’s what we offer. And you guys, you reached out. Do you remember that initial consultation there? Do you remember Mike, that initial consultation? Did you remember what that was like? Yeah, it was actually pretty overwhelming that we started in this business with absolutely nothing and we had the opportunity to work with a five-time chef. Well, you know, the one thing I always try to do is, you know, my father, great guy, may he rest in peace. He worked his tail off like so many people do. And there was no real economic results that was achieved from it. There wasn’t any, you know, he had a college degree. He’s working two jobs. I remember he’s late thirties. He’s working at Domino’s delivering pizzas, working at Quick Trip. He worked at furniture stores. And I always try to look at every new client we have as though I’m talking to my dad. You know, because like, what would my dad, you know, what could he have learned at the age of 37 that could have changed the financial trajectory of his life? You know, and I try to look at it that way. And so you guys, I paired you up with Sean, you’ve been working with Sean, I believe Sean, since October of 2020, is that correct, Sean? I think that’s when they started their business. It wasn’t until about April of 2021 when it actually got going. So April of 2021, and at that point, from that point to now, Sean, how much growth have you guys achieved from 2021 to now? Do you know that number? Yeah, I mean, we’re sitting at 2023 revenues were $821,000. And there in October of 2020, like they only had a few months, they made about $95,000 by the end of 2020. And then we grew significantly that first year about 375% to 588,000. And we continued to grow there ever since all the way up to where we’re getting close to the million dollar mark at this point here just like three years in. Jenny, how would you describe the growth? Would you say you’ve doubled or you’re five times larger? How would you describe that? Oh, no, I definitely feel the growth. There’s been some growing pains, and you guys have helped us through that, too. So it’s been amazing. It’s been amazing to help people, because that’s what I’m passionate about. And you guys have really helped us expand and tell people what we’re about. So step one here, we did, we do this with all the clients. I’m going to walk people through the steps. We really needed to nail down your branding. And that’s a big thing because, you know, branding is to humans what clothing is. So as an example, you know, you wake up today, folks, if you run around and you’re streaking through life, you’re probably not going to get a lot of conversations started. So we all have to be intentional about, you know, what are we going to wear? Are we going to wear a tie? Are we going to wear a polo? Are we going to do makeup? Are we not? So people, they judge us based on our appearance. And so we really had to get a website built. We had to optimize the online brand. Jenny, we do it all included for our clients. So we don’t refer you to another vendor. We do it all. Can you talk about the impact that that has made on the business? Oh, for sure. Just the website itself, it looks so great. We would never have been able to make it look that great. The way y’all optimize everything and keep us with Google, just where people search us and we’re the first people that come up. And that’s actually how we’ve established our business and started offering some of the things that we offer is because of the tags that we have. I didn’t originally start off as doing IV therapy, but due to people Googling, you know, health care functional medicine, I had three phone calls in a week that said, hey, do you offer IV therapy? And it was very interesting. And I was like, well, no, but I can. And so it was because of you guys that that kind of snowballed and took effect. So yeah, there’s a lot that you guys have done for us. Now, Sean, we’re working with these wonderful clients here. I’ll pick on Mike here. You know, you always say great things about Mike and Jenny. You’re always, what makes them good to work with? Because I want to make sure for anybody out there, if you go to thrivetimeshow.com, I consistently offer a free 13-point assessment. I’ve been doing that since 2005. I do it without reservation. There’s no obligation. But there’s usually about one to two knuckleheads a week that will fill out the form and probably 20 really great people that fill out the form. And then we only take on 160 clients. And so I don’t want anyone to waste their time. What makes Mike so great to work with? Well, Clay, I mean, when I first started coaching, you taught me about these two types of business owners. There’s the happy hopers out there and then there’s the diligent doers. And I think these guys are a great example of the diligent doer. They continually apply effort to work on their business, not just in their business. They consistently show up to their meetings. They track all of the critical numbers of their business and they are, they’re aware of what’s going on with all of their employees. They’re paying attention to all the little things going on, they’re keeping all the plates spinning, and they ask great questions. They actually really do make a great effort consistently to apply our systems and help their business grow. It’s been working. So step one, we get the branding nailed down. That’s the website, the print pieces, the logos, the business cards. But then you have to develop that online reputation. Now that could be a tough thing to do, Jenny, and I’ll just, I’m not, this isn’t a backhanded compliment. I’m just saying, but for people that are humble and very kind, of which I would put Jenny in that category, sometimes asking for reviews is more difficult because you almost feel like you’re self-promoting. I’ve never had this conversation with you, but when you, has that been difficult for you to ask people to give you video reviews and Google reviews after you provided the service, or was that easy for you to do? It was not, it’s not easy. It still isn’t easy. Okay. It is, it’s difficult because you feel like you’re begging for something, even though you know you did the right thing. So it is, it’s difficult for me. It’s just my personality type, but we get it done anyways. I’ll find this for the diligent, kind customers we work with, it’s very difficult sometimes to ask for those objective reviews from real customers. And I find that from my clients I’ve worked with that are sort of like self-described barbarians. I had a guy years ago I worked with, he’s a, I won’t mention his name or his industry, but I’ll just say he’s obsessed with physical fitness. And he told me, he says, I’m kind of a business barbarian. You tell me what to do and I will slay the dragons. And I’m like, okay, you need to get Google reviews from everybody you’ve ever worked with. And he’s like, oh, I’m on it. And this guy’s just shamelessly calling through his phone and just lighting people up going, give me a review. Come on, give me a review. Why would you not give me a review? I’m like, go ahead, dial it down a little bit. So again, you guys are humble, diligent doers. You’re the ideal person here, so I appreciate you sharing that. The next thing we had to do is we had to create a no-brainer. Now a no-brainer is an offer so good, so amazing, that people simply cannot say no to it. Now I won’t mention the name of the company, but I worked years ago and I still work with this company. They’re a medical company. They’re doing well now. And for whatever reason, they put on their website, first initial consult, 497. And he went to one of these like borderline spiritual motivational conference things where Jesus isn’t described, but they kind of talk about metaphysical alignment and getting your woosah, getting in your groove, alignment, no friction. And he came back and he’s like, Clay, I believe in the seventh number of completion. I go, I agree. He says, four is the number that’s urgent. I’m like, okay. Not, and I go, what? I don’t want tire kickers. So I’m going to do 497 for my first consult. That way I don’t deal with the tire kickers. And I’m like, Doc, I love you so much. You’re a doctor. I love it. You don’t have any customers. That’s why you came to me. You don’t have any customers. So why don’t you do a first free consult? Say, I’m not going to do it. I’m going to kick out Sean, the tire kicker. So I’m sure you’ve never seen this with a client. Oh, never. And so now what makes it worse is his wife also went to the Metaphysical Alignment Motivational Jackassery Festival. And she was like, 497 is the number. I had a dream about it. I’m like, yeah, you probably talked about it all weekend. You probably are subconsciously thinking about it. You’re probably creating a neural pathway related to 497. And so anyway, after about a year, he finally says, okay, I came to your conference and I saw a person that did the first consult for a dollar. I’m going to go with that. And now his business is blowing up. Could you talk about your no brainer, your first consult for a dollar? How has that helped you having that no brainer offer? Yeah. So it gets people in. And so when we get people in, we know that we’re doing a good job and we know that we’re trustworthy and our healthcare is superior to most. So just getting people in for that dollar, because a lot of people are, you know, they’re nervous about going to the doctor or they don’t trust healthcare system. And so they know that they can come in, they’re only going to spend a dollar, they can figure out whether or not they trust us, figure out whether or not we’re the place for them. And we know 100% of the time we will be. So it’s really helped us just get people in and get people to trust us more. Now once somebody fills out the form, folks, again, there’s a linear pathway here. I’m trying to give you a visual here. So you establish your revenue goals, you figure out your numbers to break even, you figure out how many hours a week you’re willing to work. Even though you have a cute baby, you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to get it done. Step number four is you define your unique value proposition. What makes you unique? And that’s something you and Sean have worked on together. You improve your branding. Now you’re coming in contact with humans. Business is a contact sport. I love this part. That’s when you start marketing. You launch your marketing. You have your online ads. You optimize your website. You begin to come up top in the search results. You start to get leads. Do you remember what it was like, Jenny, when you first got your first online lead? Do you remember the first one where you’re like, it’s working! Do you remember that moment? Yeah, it was almost like we wanted to, well, we did celebrate because it finally had happened. And then as soon as the first one came in, the second one came in. And like I said, it was almost a growing pain experience. We had so many leads so fast. So it was great. And we still celebrate every lead that we get. Now, Mike, the next step is you have to make sales scripts. We recommend to every client that the calls are recorded for quality assurance. You have a one sheet that tracks your pricing. You have pre-written emails. You begin tracking. Sean’s always bragging about you guys with tracking. Mike, how has it helped to have tracking in place where you can see – how does that help you? Well, it’s really a good benefit because, you know, at the end of the week, you know what your income was. You know what your lead was. wherever we’re lacking in, we can quickly adjust and make that adjustment to make it work for the next week. Now when you, if you don’t have tracking, uh, folks, this is a true story. It’s kind of a sad story. So I’ll speak in generality. Sean, I talked to a guy the other day and just share a terrible story. Longtime client and he got motivated. He set up a trade show. He didn’t tell me he’s doing it. It’s fine. You don’t have to tell me, but he set up a trade show. I think he was going to try to surprise me with the fruit, the trade show. So he set up the trade show and he gets on the call. His energy is kind of off and I’m like, are you okay? Yeah, dude, fine. What’s wrong? Hi, just, I don’t know. I’m like, your lead sheet, we’re getting, you know, 10 to 15 leads a week. It’s very consistent. Revenue looks good. He’s like, yeah, I’m in a tight spot. We are in a tight spot. We’re in a tight spot. He says, I did a trade show. You did a trade show? Yeah, I got roped into four. I did a thing where you get the billboard, you get the trade show, you get the magazine ad and I did the trade show and we got no leads. And I go, what kind of trade show did you do? And he says, well, I went to the whatever trade show. And Sean, what I find is that there’s the emotional excitement about being on the billboard, being on the magazine cover. And he got called by one of these kind of scam, I call it a scammockery or jackassery. They call you and they go, hey, is this Sean? Yeah, this is Sean. Sean, yeah, we noticed that you have an incredible health care company. And we want to honor you by giving you the Yadda Yadda of the Region Award. It’s the Yadda Yadda. It’s a regional, it’s a prestigious award. We’d like to meet with you. Can we meet with you? Yeah. So now I meet here. Now, Sean, again, I’m not on the phone, but I still like the phone voice here. Now, Sean, so because we’re so honored, we’re inviting you to a plated dinner to honor your, just your honor, your honoredness, your greatness, your humbleness. And it’s going to be a thousand dollars a plate, you know, for you and your wife. And did you want four seats or eight? Because most people do eight. Oh, um, I guess just four, four, four. And that does include a glossy magazine feature and we’ll just call it like Missouri local top doctor Jack Assery. It’s a great magazine. And you’re also on the you’ll be on a billboard. We’ve teamed up with the billboard. It rotates through your… Hey! Don’t get too excited. It’s just because we’re honored. We’re not you know again we’re just honored. Now do you want to do the four tickets? Yeah, absolutely. Now the way it works is it’s gonna be four payments of four thousand for a total of sixteen thousand. And that’s… No, I’m serious! And now they’re in the trade shows and he’s going to the trade show and there ain’t nobody there. There is nobody there. It needs to be technical. Nobody was at this trade show. I mean, everybody was not at the trade show. He’s got photos of like him and his wife and his team in an empty booth and he’s got a magazine and no leads are coming. And he was so excited to tell me. I’m sure you’ve never encountered this sort of thing, Virginia. Have you, you know, Jenny, have you ever seen a situation where that sort of shamockery advertising has been entered into your world in some capacity? I’ve been there. I’ve been exactly where, what you’re talking about. And I’ve set up everything and paid employees and I felt like I was nothing more than a free pin show. The only people that were there were people looking for free pins. Oh, I know. And it feels terrible. And then you kind of have to sell it to yourself all day. Guys, we’re getting our name out there. Sean, can you pass the megaphone back there? Right behind you. Yeah, because I always tell people, when you get your name out there, what you do is you just run outside and say, all right, come visit New Ponce Up Healthcare. And people go, why are you yelling at me? I’m trying to shop for my groceries. New Ponce Up Healthcare. My name out there. Getting my name out there. Is this effective? It’s, of course, it’s effective. I’m getting my name out there. And that leads to buying Frisbees, branded Frisbees. Yeah, you’re getting your name out there. And I’m like, I’m getting my name out there. I’m getting my name out there. I’m getting my name out there. I’m getting my name out there. That leads to buying Frisbees, branded Frisbees, Goozies. You know what I’m saying, branded pens. All of a sudden you buy these things. Sean, you know what I’m talking about. Oh yeah. So now we have to do, and I’m going to show you, this is kind of the back end of one of my companies called Elephant in the Room. You do a search for eitrlounge.com and then you go to forward slash staff. I’m not going to give you the password, folks, but you log in. And these are all the systems needed to run the haircut chain. Now, one thing I thought was very interesting is Truth Social, President Trump’s social media platform, the other day they were disclosing Newsweek was disclosing the revenue of it. And I just want people to know this because I think, and just full disclosure, I’m a very conservative person, but I just want people to see this. This is just something to look at. Truth Social, they declared in their filing that they did 3.3 million dollars of revenue and had 49 million dollars of losses, which by the way, that’s very normal for a tech startup company. And their users are going up and they’re having an after, there’s like a reaction in the marketplace, people are actually putting more money in, they’re investing, the stock price is going up. But I don’t know anybody that I’ve met in my life, I’ve never met a client that can afford to bring in 3.3 million and lose 49 million. So like for my haircut chain, we have five locations, we bring in more than 3.3 million, and this just in, we don’t spend 49 million. So we have to – we call it a lean startup. You’ve got to keep that thing lean. And so when you go to eitrlounge.com forward slash staff, every document needed to manage the business is here. So the opening checklist for the manager, you click here. Boom. This is what the manager has to do to start the day. Everything is documented. And that’s kind of where we’re at right now with Ginny and Mike’s business. We’re in the process of building all those checklists. Yeah. Sean, what kind of checklist have you built so far? Oh, man. We have a whole page. Their staff page is pretty built out. We’re really getting there. I think more right now it’s getting, correct me if I’m wrong, we need some managers in there so we can free you guys up from the business. So we have a lot of the worker level systems, we’re just now working on more of how do we get those manager level systems and find those high quality managers. So let me give Jenny a little mentor moment here, this will be helpful for you. I’m going to hop on a flight in about two and a half hours, three hours to go to Denver. And I got to go to Denver to meet with the founder of oxyfresh.com. This is a brand we’ve worked with and helped them to grow to 550 locations now, 550 locations. And if you type in carpet cleaning floats we’re the world’s highest rated and most reviewed company in the world, in the world. 274,000 reviews. We’ve been holding this idea in our mind for 15 consecutive years. I’ve been working on this, Sajan, before I met you. We just were grinding, okay? Yeah. And the biggest challenge that the locations have is managers, finding a good manager. And I tell people this, and it never goes over well, but hopefully eventually it will. I’ll keep refining it, refining the idea. The kind of person that enjoys conflict, but also likes people, is a good manager. Let me try that again. The kind of person that enjoys conflict, but also likes people is a good manager. And I have found it’s not so much trainable as it’s findable. So as an example, where we’re getting ready to head out to Denver, Sean, you know my personality type. And you know that I have to pack all this stuff to get ready to go. You saw my suitcase out there. Yep. How many times do you think I followed up with the people involved in the trip so far before leaving? Oh man, it’s probably on your to-do list and you’ve checked it off like probably at least five times today I would think. And what kind of things do you think I might have put on my checklist to travel to Denver? First off, just making sure that the timing is working, making sure that you have all the stuff that you need, making sure that you have double of the stuff that you need in case something gets broken, making sure that the people who are there know you’re coming and when you’re going to be there and what to expect from you. Do you think I’m checking a bag? Oh, yeah. You’re probably not checking a bag. There it is. You’re going to get lost. Right. No. And am I getting a flight a lot earlier than I need to be there? Way earlier. Yeah, if I’m having a meeting tomorrow, which I am, I’m leaving today at 1230. That’s the sort of paranoia that makes management possible. So I have literally called. I said, all right, I’m getting on the 1230 flight. We’re meeting tomorrow. I should be in by like 4 o’clock Denver time. Our meeting’s tomorrow. If that flight gets delayed and the next one gets delayed and the next one I’ll still be there. I’ve got backup phone chargers. I have a rule, everybody going with me. You cannot check a bag. I want to check a bag. Can’t check a bag, why? Because it could get lost. This is real. I’m not, I am completely paranoid. And that is the paranoia is what makes the businesses run. Yeah. And I asked my staff every day, guys elephant in the room, did you guys get a review? And they say, yeah, we got a review. You asked me 10 minutes ago. Okay, well, I’ll talk to you in four minutes. You heard me say that. I’ll say, I’ll talk to you in five minutes. Yeah. And I’ll do it. And it’s a follow up of, because I have to make sure that the checklists are being followed. The reviews are being followed. We’re a licensed business. People don’t know that. Haircare, you’re licensed by the state. So we have certain cleanliness standards. We could have random people from the state show up. So we got checklists and I follow up and it doesn’t bother me to follow up with the same adult who’s in their 40s six times within a 50 minute span of time, it doesn’t bother me. But most people that bothers them. And so have you found that Jenny, that a lot of people don’t like to follow up? Have you found that? Or is that just something unique to me? I found that they don’t like to follow up. No, people don’t like to follow up. It’s a almost like an awkward communication thing that people try to avoid. Yeah. And it’s not necessarily that you’re being mean or any type of way, but that’s I feel like that’s probably the way that we feel when we continuously follow up, like we’re having to step on people’s toes. But really, we’re not. We’re just getting my mentorship moment for you is it’s probably the same feeling you have when you ask for reviews. Yeah, it’s probably the same. So, and I’m just saying, and then, and if Mike, do you ever play football or a sport of some kind? Yeah, I used to play soccer. Okay. Soccer. So like when you, what position did you play? Uh, goalkeeper. Goalkeeper. Okay. So is a goal. This is a great, great example. I didn’t know you were a goalkeeper, but when you’re a goalkeeper and someone’s kicking that ball at you fast, I mean, just the balls coming in there. I mean, people can really kick a soccer ball fast. There are certain people that want to be a goalkeeper, but they kind of avoid the ball. They try to hide from it. They flinch. You know what I’m talking about? But you actually would lunge into it. Am I correct? Right. I mean, you’re aggressive, right? I mean, you’re like, you, for some reason, you enjoyed it. Yeah. Right? I’m getting a hundred miles an hour fastball. Did you ever see somebody who tried to be a goalie? I’m not looking for a name here, but somebody who would kind of hide from the ball. Yeah. This is the same thing for management. Like as a manager, you have to want, like you have to sort of seek out conflict, but like people. So I’ll say things like, okay, it’s eight o’clock. I need to make sure you put out the flags in front of the elephant in the room store today, Mr. Manager, put out the flags that draw the attention by the road, put out the flags. And I’m going to call you in 10 minutes to follow up. Call him in 10 minutes. Are the flags up? Can you send me a picture? They’re like, do you not trust me? Absolutely not. I trust nobody. Go ahead and send him. And then I’ll call him back 30 minutes later. Hey, did you get Google reviews? Yeah, we got one Google review. You know, the quote is 10. Yeah, I’ll call you back in two minutes. You know, call him back. Hey, did you get a review? It’s been two minutes. I know. I’ll tell you what. I’ll call you back in an hour. And my whole day is just following up. And then over time, the culture happens where people go, he’s going to follow up. And now the people that like the follow up like to work there. And it’s become a great thing. And that’s where we’re kind of at right now, I think, is we’re getting into the follow up phase. Do you have call recording in place there, Mike? Do you have the call recording for quality assurance installed yet? Yes, we do. And are you learning some things? Yes. It is very hard to train people on recording. It’s serious. Yeah. That’s something we got to do. Now we’re just going through the workflow. And then the wowing the customers. What Sean is saying is that your patients are consistently wowed. Now, I don’t know if that’s because Sean is your hype man or if that’s a real thing, but it seems like people are actually wowing. They’re being wowed right now. People, when they come in, if you look at the workflow, they buy something. Right here, we have to wow them. You’ve got to create that wow moment. And again, if you want to download this diagram, folks, just go to Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash millionaire, Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash millionaire. You can download my newest book called a millionaire’s guide to become becoming sustainably rich. You got to create that wow moment. I mean, you, amidst the checklists and the tracking at some point here, you’ve got to create a moment that wows people where they go, wow. So I’m trying to get everybody’s creative juices flowing here. So if you have a restaurant, I work with a restaurant in Florida right now, a great restaurant. They say, welcome in. Is it your first time? They say, yeah, it’s my first time. Oh, well, hey, you get free appetizers on us today and one free adult beverage. Welcome in. And that every time it’s that wow. And then when you come back later and ask for a review or hey, what entree do you want? Guess what? People become generous with how they buy. Another example, I work with an auto auction. The auto auction says your first time that you buy from the auto auction, you only have to pay a dollar more than the actual cost of the vehicle just to wow people, to get that going. I happen to work with a carpet cleaning business, carpet cleaning business, and what they do is they say, hey, the first time we clean your carpet will be any competitor’s price and it will be at least half off of our normal price. And they go, okay, great. You gotta have that wow moment. What are you guys doing, Jenny, to wow your customers there? Well, there are things that we do. We will oftentimes give samples of certain things because we know they work. We have a lot of supplement sales that we do. Again, the dollar consult is a wow moment because we will spend 10 to 15 minutes explaining how we’re different. I feel like they’re wowed because of that. Also, our services are so much different. We spend time in the room with our patients. We listen to them. They’re not just a number. And a lot of times people have never experienced that. So there’s a lot of wow moments, I think, for all of our patients. I understand that 59% of your customers are now from word of mouth. Is that accurate? Yeah. That’s huge. Yeah, well, and with the customer acquisitions cost, too, I’ve heard you say this before, Clay, that if you’re advertising and you’re doing a good job wowing at the same time, they compound each other and you’ll end up having two to three word of mouth referrals from those patients that are wowed for every one lead you have from advertising. We measured and tracked that they had this last year. For every dollar they spent on advertising, they were able to bring back in $4.61. So that’s a 461% return on their marketing investment. It’s incredible stuff. And the great news is as we build these systems, if you guys ever wanted to franchise or license or open up multiple locations, if done properly, you should be able to scale it. It should be very repeatable, very duplicatable. Other things you guys have done, you’ve implemented a database to keep track of your customers, you’re gathering objective video reviews. You guys are really checking all the boxes. I’d like for you, if you can, Jenny here, to give a word of encouragement for any of our listeners out there that are a little bit on the fence right now and they’re going, you know, I have thought about scheduling a free consultation but I don’t know. I hear it’s $1,700 a month. Can you maybe explain your thoughts, what you’d say to anybody who’s a friend of yours or family that asks you about the value about the business consulting? Oh, well, I would say that the $1,700 a month is an excuse not to have someone to mentor you. It’s kind of like being in a gym when you need a trainer We’re not always perfect and business owning is not easy and you need a mentor I’ve never missed the $1,700 a month even when I was only six months in when we started With you guys, I’ve never I’ve never even considered it a loss It was it was scary at first to make that but if that was an excuse I knew I needed someone to guide me through this and you guys have guided us through this through the entire thing, through employees, through income, through spending, through all of it. We come through so many problems. There are a lot of problems that are established when you have a business. You become very overwhelmed very fast, and you need somebody that you can call who’s successful, who’s been there, that says, you’re not crazy. This happens to all of us. Here’s what you do about it. It’s been the best decision that we’ve made. Final question I have here for you, as far as having a turn, like a one stop shop. Years ago, I hired a business consultant who was great and he would say things like, and I’m not ripping him, I’m just telling you what would happen. He would say, Clay, you got to work on your business and not in it. I’m going, that’s true. He goes, you got to delegate to elevate. That’s true. Clay, your website is not optimized. And I’m going, this is great. Fresh perspective. I go, Bruce, could you help me optimize? No, I don’t optimize. Could you help me work on it? No. Could you help me make a checklist? No. Do you make, do you help me with the print pieces that I need to make? No. Can you make a video? No. Do you help me with my online ads? No. Clay, and he would use to, he was kind of an Eastern, he’s an Eastern, Northeastern American guy. And he used to say, Clay, baby, let me tell you what. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t make print pieces. What am I, a print piece guy? I’m not a web guy. We know what I am. I’m a work on the business guy. You got to find a good web guy. So every meeting we would have would result in me having to find another vendor to pay another $8,000 to build the website, 4,000 to make the video, 5,000 to do. So every time you give a recommendation, it would lead to another cost. Can you maybe explain the value of having a flat monthly fee? Yeah, I don’t have to ever worry about it. Like I know if I need the website updated, it’s a text away. I know if I’m having trouble with an employee, it’s a text away. I know if I have need financial advice, it’s a text away. And again, we meet every single week and all our questions are answered and we’re held accountable to what we need to be held accountable for. So it really works for us. Jenny and Mike, thank you guys for your time so much. I really do value your time. I appreciate you guys being here today. And on part two of today’s show, we’re going to tee up another success story because we want people to know it is possible Despite the financial Jack or Jack assery plaguing our nation right now It is possible to become successful and you guys are a living example of it Thank you guys for bringing your baby on the show. We’ll talk to you soon Over last year we are Jared and Jennifer Johnson We own platinum pest and lawn and are located in Owasso, Oklahoma. And we have been working with Thrive for business coaching for almost a year now. Yeah, so what we want to do is we want to share some wins with you guys that we’ve had by working with Thrive. First of all, we’re on the top page of Google now. I just want to let you know what type of accomplishment this is. Our competition, Orkin, Terminix, they’re both $1.3 billion companies. They both have 2,000 to 3,000 pages of content attached to their website. So to basically go from virtually non-existent on Google to up on the top page is really saying something. But it’s come by being diligent to the systems that Thrive has, by being consistent and diligent on doing podcasts and staying on top of those podcasts to really help with getting up on what they’re listing and ranking there with Google. And also we’ve been trying to get Google reviews, asking our customers for reviews, and now we’re the highest rated and most reviewed Pessimon company in the Tulsa area. And that’s really helped with our conversion rate. And the number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. Wait, say that again. How much are we up? 411%. Okay, so 411% we’re up with our new customers. Amazing. Right. So not only do we have more customers calling in, we’re able to close those deals at a much higher rate than we were before. Right now our closing rate is about 85% and that’s largely due to, first of all, like our Google reviews that we’ve gotten. People really see that our customers are happy, but also we have a script that we follow. And so when customers call in, they get all the information that they need. That script has been refined time and time again. It wasn’t a one and done deal. It was a system that we followed with Thrive in the refining process. And that has obviously, the 411% shows that that system works. Yeah, so here’s a big one for you. So last week alone, our booking percentage was 91%. We actually booked more deals and more new customers last year than we did the first five months. Or I’m sorry, we booked more deals last week than we did the first five months of last year, from before we worked with Thrive. So again, we booked more deals last week than the first five months of last year. And it’s incredible. But the reason why we have that success is by implementing the systems that Thrive has taught us and helped us out with. Some of those systems that we’ve implemented are group interviews. That way we’ve really been able to come up with a really great team. We’ve created and implemented checklists that when everything gets done and it gets done right, it creates accountability. We’re able to make sure that everything gets done properly, both out in the field and also in our office. And also doing the podcast, like Jared had mentioned, that has really, really contributed to our success, but that like is it the diligence and Consistency and doing those and that system has really Really been a big blessing in our lives and also, you know It’s really shown that we’ve gotten a success from following those systems. So before working with right we were basically stuck Really no new growth with our business. And we were in a rut, and we didn’t know. The last three years, our customer base had pretty much stayed the same. We weren’t shrinking, but we weren’t really growing either. Yeah, and so we didn’t really know where to go, what to do, how to get out of this rut that we’re in. But Thrive helped us with that. They implemented those systems, and they taught us those systems. They taught us the knowledge that we needed in order to succeed. Now it’s been a grind, absolutely it’s been a grind this last year, but we’re getting those fruits from that hard work and the diligent effort that we’re able to put into it. So again, we’re in a rut, Thrive helped us get out of that rut, and if you’re thinking about working with Thrive, quit thinking about it and just do it. Do the action, and you’ll get the results. It will take hard work and discipline, but that’s what it’s going to take in order to really succeed. So we just want to give a big shout out to Thrive, a big thank you out there to Thrive. We wouldn’t be where we’re at now without their help. Hi, I’m Dr. Mark Moore. I’m a pediatric dentist. Through our new digital marketing plan, we have seen a marked increase in the number of new patients that we’re seeing every month, year over year. One month, for example, we went from 110 new patients the previous year to over 180 new patients in the same month. And overall, our average is running about 40 to 42% increase, month over month, year over year. The group of people required to implement our new digital marketing plan is immense, starting with the business coach, videographers, photographers, web designers. Back when I graduated dental school in 1985, nobody advertised. The only marketing that was ethically allowed in everybody’s eyes was mouth-to-mouth marketing. By choosing to use the services, you’re choosing to use a proof-and-turn-key marketing and coaching system that will grow your practice and get you the results that you’re looking for. I went to the University of Oklahoma College of Dentistry, graduated in 1983 and then I did my pediatric dental residency at Baylor College of Dentistry from 1983 to 1985. Hello my name is Charles Colaw with Colaw Fitness. Today I want to tell you a little bit about Clay Clark and how I know Clay Clark. Clay Clark has been my business coach since 2017. He’s helped us grow from two locations to now six locations. We’re planning to do seven locations in seven years and then franchise and Clay has done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with running the business, building the systems, the checklists, the workflows, the audits, how to navigate lease agreements, how to buy property, how to work with brokers and builders. This guy is just amazing. This kind of guy has worked in every single industry. He’s written books with Lee Crocker, head of Disney with the 40,000 cast members. He’s friends with Mike Lindell. He does Reawaken America tours, where he does these tours all across the country where 10,000 or more people show up to some of these tours on the day-to-day. He does anywhere from about 160 companies. He’s at the top. He has a team of business coaches, videographers, and graphic designers, and web developers, and they run 160 companies every single week. So think of this guy with a team of business coaches running 160 companies. So in the weekly, he’s running 160 companies. Every six to eight weeks, he’s doing Reawaken America tours. Every six to eight weeks, he’s also doing business conferences where 200 people show up, and he teaches people a 13-step proven system that he’s done and worked with billionaires, helping them grow their companies. I’ve seen guys from start-ups go from start-up to being multi-millionaires, teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system. Critical thinking, document creation, organizing everything in their head to building it into a franchisable, scalable business. One of his businesses has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. Amazing guy. Elon Musk, kind of like smart guy. He kind of comes off sometimes as socially awkward, but he’s so brilliant and he’s taught me so much. When I say that, Clay is like, he doesn’t care what people think when you’re talking to him. He cares about where you’re going in your life and where he can get you to go. And that’s what I like him most about him. He’s like a good coach. A coach isn’t just making you feel good all the time. A coach is actually helping you get to the best of you. And Clay has been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that we became friends. My most impressed with him is when I was shadowing him one time. We went into a business deal and listened to it. I got to shadow and listen to it. When we walked out I knew that he could make millions on the deal and they were super excited about working with him. And he told me, he’s like, I’m not going to touch it. I’m going to turn it down. Because he knew it was going to harm the common good of people in the long run. The guy’s integrity just really wowed me. It brought tears to my eyes to see that this guy, his highest desire was to do what’s right. And anyways, just an amazing man. So anyways, impacted me a lot. He’s helped navigate. Anytime I’ve gotten nervous or worried about how to run the company or navigating competition and an economy that’s like, I remember we got closed down for three months. He helped us navigate on how to stay open, how to get back open, how to just survive through all the COVID shutdowns, lockdowns. I’m Rachel with Tip Top K9, and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey guys, I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrive 15. Thank you to Make Your Life Epic. We love you guys, we appreciate you, and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us. This is our old house, right? This is where we used to live a few years ago. This is our old neighborhood. See, it’s nice, right? So this is my old van and our old school marketing, and this is our old team. And by team, I mean it’s me and another guy. This is our new house with our new neighborhood. This is our new van with our new marketing. And this is our new team. We went from four to fourteen. And I took this beautiful photo. We worked with several different business coaches in the past. And they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales, which is awesome, but Ryan is a really great salesman. So we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into manuals and scripts and actually build a team. So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to 10 locations in only a year. In October, 2016, we grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now, it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd. We’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month, and we still have time to go. We’re just thankful for you, thankful for Thrive and your mentorship, and we’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us. Just thank you, thank you, thank you, times a thousand. The Thrive Time Show, two-day interactive business workshops are the highest and most reviewed business workshops on the planet. You can learn the proven 13-point business system that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. We get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website. We’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two-day, 15-hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days you can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re gonna leave energized, motivated, but you’re also gonna leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter Bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get-rich-quick, walk-on-hot-coals product. It’s literally we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying, but I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert Zellner and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s going to be the best business workshop ever. We’re going to give you your money back if you don’t love it. We built this facility for you, and we’re excited to see it. If we go back eight years ago, think about the number of clients you had back then versus the number of clients you have now. As a percentage, what has been the growth over the past eight years, do you think? We’ve got to inspire somebody out there who just doesn’t have the time to listen to our call. Well, Clay, it’s like I would go up and down from about $10,000 a month up to about $40,000, but it’s up and down roller coaster. So now we’ve got it to where we’re in excess of 100 clients. That’s awesome. And so I would have anywhere from 5 clients to 20 clients on my own with networking, but I had no control over it. Without the systems, you’re going to be victimized by your own business. For somebody out there who struggles with math, if you would say that your average number of clients was 30 and you go to 100, as a percentage, what is that? I have doubled every year since working with you. I’ve doubled in clients, I’ve doubled in revenue every year. That’s 100% growth every year I’ve worked with you. We’ve been good friends 7-8 years and I’ve doubled 5 times. Which is just incredible. I mean the first time you do it, that’s one thing, but when you do it repeatedly, I mean, that’s unbelievable. We’re working our blessed assurance off this year to double. We’re planning on doubling again. We’re incorporating some new things in there to really help us do it, but we are going to double again this year. I started coaching, but it would go up and down, Clay. That’s when I came to you, as I was going up and down, and I wanted to go up and up instead of up and down. And so that’s when it needed a system. So creating a system is you have nailed down specific steps that you’re going to take no matter how you feel, no matter the results, you lean into them and you do them regardless of what’s happening. You lean into them and it will give you X number of leads. You follow up with those leads, turns into sales. Well, I tell you, if you don’t have a script and you don’t have a system, then every day is a whole new creation. You’re creating a lot of energy just to figure out what are you going to do. And the best executives, Peter Drucker is a father of modern management, he said, the most effective executives make one decision a year. What you do is you make a decision, what is your system, and then you work like the Dickens to make sure you follow that system. That’s really what it’s all about. With a script here, we have a brand new gal that just came in working for us. She nailed down the script, and she’s been nailing down appointments. Usually we try to get one appointment for every hundred calls. We make two to three hundred calls a day per rep. Right. And she’s been nailing down five and eight appointments a day. Somebody out there’s having a hard time. Call them in script. So she’s making how many calls a day? She’s making between two and three hundred calls a day. And our relationship is weird in that we do… if someone were to buy an Apple computer today, or let’s say you buy a personal computer, a PC, the computer is made by, let’s say, Dell. But then the software in the computer would be Microsoft, let’s say, or Adobe or whatever that is. So I basically make the systems, and you’re like the computer and I’m like the software. It’s kind of how I would describe our relationship. Tim, I want to ask you this. I think it was in the year 2000 and, what was it, maybe 2010? Is that right? 2011 maybe? Or maybe even further down the road. Maybe 2013? 2012. Okay, so 2012. And at that time I was five years removed from the DJ business. And you were how many years removed from tax and accounting software? It was about 10, 11 years. We met, how did we meet? What was the first interaction? There was some interaction where you and I first connected. I just remember that somehow you and I went to Hideaway Pizza. But do you remember when we first reconnected? Yeah. Well, we had that speaking thing that… Oh, there it was. So it was Victory Christian Center. I was speaking there. My name is Robert Redman. I actually first met Clay almost three years ago to the day. I don’t know if he remembers it or not, but I wasn’t working with him at the time. I asked to see him and just ask him some questions to help, you know, direct my life to get some mentorship, but I’ve been working with Clay for now just over a year. The role I play here is a business coach, business consultant. I work with different businesses implementing best practice processes and systems that I have learned here by working with Clay. And the experience working here has, to put it real plainly, has been just life changing. I have not only learned new things and have gained new knowledge, but I have gained a whole new mindset that I believe, wherever I end up, will serve me well throughout the rest of my life. Since working with Clay, I have learned so much. I mean, I would like to say almost everything about business in terms of the different categories. I haven’t learned it all, but I’ve learned all about marketing. I’ve learned about advertising. I’ve learned about branding. I’ve learned how to create a sales process for organizations in any industry. I’ve learned how to sell. I’ve learned how to create repeatable systems and processes and hold people accountable. You know, how to hire people. It’s almost like every aspect of a business you can learn. I have learned a lot in those different categories. And then, again, the mindset that I’ve gained here has been huge. You know, working here, you can’t be a mediocre person. You are a call to a higher standard of excellence, and then as you’re called to that standard here, you begin to see those outcomes in every area of your life, that standard of excellence that you want to implement, no matter what you’re involved in. I would like to describe the other people that work with Clay are people that are going somewhere with their life. Marshall, in the group interview, talks about how the best fits for this organization are the people that are goal-oriented. So they’re on their own trajectory, and we’re on our own trajectory. And the best fits are those people where there can be a mutually beneficial relationship that as we pursue our goals and we help the business pursue those goals, the business helps us pursue our goals as well. And so I say people that are driven, people that want to make something of their lives, people that are goal-oriented, they’re focused, and they’re committed to overcoming any adversity that may come their way. Clay’s passion for helping business owners grow their businesses is, it’s unique in that, I don’t know if there’s anyone else that can be as passionate. You know, whenever a business starts working with Clay, it’s almost as like Clay is running that business in the sense that he has something at stake. You know, he’s just serving them. They’re one of his clients, but it’s as if he is actively involved in the business. Whenever they have a win, he’s posting it all over his social media. He’s shouting it across the room here at Thrive. You know, he’s sending people encouraging messages. He can kind of be that life coach and business coach in terms of being that motivator and that champion for people’s businesses. It’s again unique because there’s no one else I’ve seen get so excited about and passionate about other people’s businesses. The kind of people that wouldn’t like working with Clay are people that are satisfied with mediocrity, people that want to get through life by just doing enough, by just getting by. People who are not looking to develop themselves, people who are not coachable, people who think that they know it all and they’re unwilling to change. I would say those are the type of people, in short, anyone that’s content with mediocrity would not like working with Clay. So if you’re meeting Clay for the first time, the advice I’d give you is Definitely come ready to take tons of notes every time clay speaks he Gives you a wealth of knowledge That you don’t want to miss I remember the first time that I met clay I literally carried a notebook with me all around I was looking at this notebook the other day actually I carried a notebook with me all around and I just took tons of notes. I filled the entire notebook in about three or four months just from being around Clay, following him and learning from him. And then I would say come coachable. Be open to learning something new. Be open to challenging yourself. Be open to learning and adjusting parts about you Be open to learning and adjusting parts about you that need to be adjusted.