Episode 91: When to Hire and Delegate to Grow Your Online Fitness Business

0:00:11.5 Mike Vacanti: Hello, Jordan.

0:00:12.6 Jordan Syatt: What’s going on, Michael?

0:00:15.4 Mike Vacanti: Not too much, my man. How about you?

0:00:17.9 Jordan Syatt: Bro, not too much, but I’m pretty tired, just so you know.

0:00:25.4 Mike Vacanti: You had a late night with the baby.

0:00:27.5 Jordan Syatt: I had a late night and an early morning, with the baba, with the baba.

[laughter]

0:00:36.5 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. It’s all good though.

0:00:37.6 Mike Vacanti: You just gotta roll in though.

0:00:39.4 Jordan Syatt: Oh yeah, just got some jujitsu in, and yeah, see if I have a workout later.

0:00:45.7 Mike Vacanti: Maybe we start here. I think a lot of people in this current day and age would say, “Jordan, you just had a baby, your first baby, why don’t you take a month off or a year off?” Or like, “Why don’t you… Why are you going to jujitsu? Why are you lifting weights? What are you doing?”

0:01:02.6 Jordan Syatt: Dude, you don’t think a lot of people would say that, you know people are saying that.

[laughter]

0:01:08.5 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, I think what people might say… Yeah, you know people are saying this to the point… Or they’re putting it in my Instagram Q & As, saying things so snarky, like, “Why aren’t you setting an example of that, you could take two years off after you have… ” Alright, relax. Our society is too lenient as is, alright. We need to buck up and put a little effort. You know what I mean?

0:01:36.0 Mike Vacanti: I like it, I couldn’t agree more. Are you finding it more difficult to get those workouts in and to, I guess, continue to do the important things for your health that you have been doing before your child arrived?

0:01:51.4 Jordan Syatt: Honestly, not really. In terms of… I think it would be different if my goal was different. If my goal was something I didn’t care about like, I don’t know, improving my pec separation, then yeah, it would be really difficult for me to get motivated to do these workouts. I just don’t care. I guess… “Oh yeah, this program is to improve your calf, girth, and your pec sep.” It’s like, “Alright, well, I’m gonna skip these workouts.” But because I know these workouts are so good for my health and my jujitsu performance, and those are just my main goals right now, it’s not really that difficult for me to get them in. The difficult part has just been structuring my schedule around the baby, so I’m deliberately working out significantly later so that I can do the late night feeding shifts. So like I’m working out around 10:00, 10:30, because I know it’s gonna keep me up late. And that’s fine, it’s not really an issue for me, but…

0:02:56.1 Mike Vacanti: Any caffeine pre-workout?

0:02:57.7 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. At first I was like, “I’ll just have sugar.” Just ’cause I was like, I don’t wanna have caffeine that late, because I was worried that the caffeine would keep me up. And then I’ve become so tired that the caffeine just doesn’t keep me up, so… [chuckle]

0:03:14.9 Mike Vacanti: Well, and you wanna stay up to an extent, you don’t wanna stay up all night, but you wanna be awake enough to do your shift.

0:03:23.3 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. And it’s fine that by the time my shift is up, I have about 100 milligrams of caffeine pre-workout, it’s not crazy. And I do it like about 45 minutes before the workout, so I’ll do it around 9:00, 9:15, so I’ll get in there by 10:00, finish by 11:00, 11:15, and then I’m up until another two or three hours and then I’m good. So, yeah. It’s timed pretty well.

0:03:50.1 Mike Vacanti: Nice. It sounds like a nice little routine.

0:03:52.5 Jordan Syatt: Oh yeah. It’s good, man. Things are good.

0:03:55.3 Mike Vacanti: That makes sense. Your health and fitness goals are very aligned with your wants, and so it’s no easier or harder other than moving some pieces around so that you can fit it all in.

0:04:09.5 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, that’s pretty much it. It’s just, you gotta do what you gotta do.

0:04:13.4 Mike Vacanti: I love it.

0:04:14.3 Jordan Syatt: No, that’s it. You just gotta fucking do it, you know what I mean? I’m tired of the complaints and the whining, and the excuses, I’m tired of it, I’m tired. I’m tired of it. Enough. Audio podcast, video pods, coming soon, maybe.

[chuckle]

0:04:37.6 Mike Vacanti: Probably not. Maybe. Maybe. [laughter] Never say never. Never say… Don’t count us out just yet. I have a theory that sleep-deprived Jordan has some real raw rants in him, based on what I just saw here in this first few minutes.

0:04:51.4 Jordan Syatt: You know what it is? I’m just so surprised at how surprised people are that I’m still working out. People are just like, “Oh God, I just can’t believe you’re still… ” People are like, “I really didn’t expect you to be able to do this, I really didn’t expect you to still be working out and all that stuff,” and I’m like, “The fuck did you think I was just gonna stop all the… You actually thought that? Do you think I’m that soft? Like I’m just gonna stop?”

0:05:20.6 Mike Vacanti: You were like, “My wife had the baby. I didn’t push a child out of me, my body’s fine.” [chuckle]

0:05:27.3 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. She had the hard job, and she’s still ready to get going, she’s ready to get back in gym and moving more and exercising. Since she had the difficult… Well, her body went through the trauma, that’s a real stressor on the system. But yeah, people are… They’re just surprised, and I’m like, I’m figuring out why they’re surprised. I don’t know.

0:05:56.4 Mike Vacanti: Got it. And why do you think they are so surprised?

0:06:00.8 Jordan Syatt: I feel like in other country… And this is not answering your question, but I feel like in other countries, they would be surprised if I had stopped working out. I feel like in like Russia, they’d be like, “What do you mean you stopped working out because you had a baby? Get the fuck back in the… ” I feel like in a hard… They’d be like, “What is this excuse?”

0:06:17.7 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. Hard country, it’s not just any non-US country, but sure.

0:06:21.6 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. It would be like, “What is this? Your wife had baby, you didn’t have baby, get to gym, lift weights, go, go, go.” [chuckle] Or like, “What’s this bullshit?” You know what I mean?

0:06:32.0 Mike Vacanti: Yeah.

0:06:32.9 Jordan Syatt: I just, I feel like the US is just so, “Yeah, take all the time you need. What are you doing?” And then they’re surprised that they’re getting sick and out of shape, and they’re…

0:06:46.0 Mike Vacanti: That seems like a Western phenomenon to me, not… I mean, yes, the US, absolutely, but I don’t…

0:06:52.4 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. Canada too.

0:06:53.9 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. A lot of Europe.

0:06:56.6 Jordan Syatt: But what they don’t realise is they’re just digging themselves a bigger hole by not focusing on their health, even just a little bit. It’s like, you don’t have to have a two-hour workout, but if you just stop altogether and you do that for six months, it’s gonna be so hard to get back into it. Obviously, you can do it, but it’s gonna be way harder than if you just maintained with a lower frequency, lower intensity, lower duration, just kept going, kept doing something. It’s gonna make your life so much easier and better.

0:07:24.6 Mike Vacanti: And this applies to so many situations other than having a child too.

0:07:28.6 Jordan Syatt: Yeah.

0:07:29.7 Mike Vacanti: All upticks in busyness or time requirements or lack of sleep, this same logic can be applied to. Which, and we’re probably just preaching to the choir on this. This is a very personal trainer/fitness enthusiast audience, this isn’t like a gen pop, random sampling of the West listening. I’m sure we’re getting a lot of head nods on this, it makes sense. But how to communicate that message to people who might not be looking for that message is interesting.

0:08:03.6 Jordan Syatt: But you know what else? So I think the personal trainers listening to this podcast are like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” But I bet a lot of you aren’t making content as consistently as you should. And I get a lot of personal… “Oh man, how are you still making content?” ‘Cause I’ve actually increased my content productivity, I’ve been making more content. And I’m like, “Just fucking do it. If it’s important to you, you do it.” You know what I mean? It’s the same concept. And personal trainers are the biggest hypocrites when it comes to… They’re like, “Yeah, just gotta get the reps in. Gary talks all the time, gotta get the reps in, da da da.” But then when it comes to content creation, they’re like, “I just… I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I’m just not gonna do it. Whatever.” It’s like, oh, come on, motherfucker. Just make something. Consistently, do it.

0:09:00.2 Mike Vacanti: Reps in the gym, reps on the internet.

0:09:02.8 Jordan Syatt: Internet reps.

[laughter]

0:09:10.2 Mike Vacanti: Complete shift in gears. Has anything changed with you over the last decade that… Or maybe nothing changed, and you’ve always had this desire? But speaking from personal experience, I have a much harder time than I used to sitting still. And I don’t know if it’s because my calorie intake’s higher, my NEAT is higher, my… I don’t know what it is, but my desire to be active and whether that means actually training, which I’m very consistent at regardless, but getting steps in, getting high-frequency movement throughout the day, is so much higher than it was in the 2010-2016 window.

0:10:01.4 Jordan Syatt: Interesting. Why do you think that is?

0:10:04.4 Mike Vacanti: I have no idea. I was trying to get a real answer in my head of, “Okay, is this like the… ” I think it was Steven Pressfield talked about, or he might have been quoting someone when he talked about it, but talked about the procrastination of the artist, and I feel like it involved Jerry Seinfeld somehow, but I don’t remember the exact details, but basically, you would find anything to do other than sit down and write. So this procrastinating writer is sitting here looking at this blank Word document and they’re like, “Oh, you know what? I gotta clean my tennis shoes because they don’t look that white over there. They’re like… Got a little scuff on ’em. And I gotta… I really gotta clean those tennis shoes and spend the next half hour scrubbing them.” Basically will look to do anything other than do the work, put your ass in the chair, do the work. I was trying to ask myself if it was that kind of “resistance phenomenon,” but I don’t want to do other lazy things. I don’t want to do other sedentary activities. For example, in Minnesota, there’s a great card club, a great casino that has tons of live poker running all the time. And I haven’t been there since I moved back here. It’s not like I wanna go sit and do something fun for hours instead of work for hours, or even watch movies or lay around, it’s activity-driven. So I don’t know. I don’t know what is… I have no idea what’s driving it.

0:11:32.6 Jordan Syatt: Do you think it’s because you’re also more focused on your health and you’ve been consuming more content related to health and longevity and living a higher… Could that be one of the motivators for it?

0:11:45.8 Mike Vacanti: It definitely could be. And if that knowledge has just become internalized to the point where it’s subconscious now. It’s not like, “Oh, I gotta get my… ” And probably having the Garmin watch and seeing my steps daily, that slight gamification of it, there’s definitely something to that, perhaps. But it also just feels… It feels so cerebral. It just feels like I really want to do it, without thinking about it. I don’t know. What’ll be interesting is if I cut at any point in the next year, if on… If being in a deficit, I don’t wanna be as active with… In that physiological downtick in energy.

0:12:32.8 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. You’re just a little more tired, wanna relax, watch some TV. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That will be interesting. For me, I think it’s the health for sure. If I have a day where I’m just sitting down a lot, I’m just like, “God, I’m dying.” I’m just like, “Oh, sitting down all… I need to get up, do… ” And it’s not necessarily because I want to. It’s not where I’m like I’m craving movement, it’s more just like, “Oh, I need to do this. I just… It needs to get done.” But there’s not this…

0:13:08.5 Mike Vacanti: Innate drive to do it from within.

0:13:11.2 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. It’s not just like, “Oh, I gotta… ” It’s like, “No, I can be super comfortable lying down here on the couch, but I just… I gotta get up.”

0:13:19.9 Mike Vacanti: I feel better with more blood flow and more activity. I just know after even 10-15 minutes of walking, I’m gonna feel so much better and so much more alert.

0:13:31.5 Jordan Syatt: Oh, yeah. Yeah. No question about it.

0:13:34.7 Mike Vacanti: So what do you think is the difference between your desire or ability to, let’s say, for example, be on a cross-country train trip with your laptop on your lap, grinding hours and hours of emails consecutively, versus now where… And maybe you could, and I’m just wrong, and you could turn on the jets if you… Maybe it’s a lack of…

0:13:58.5 Jordan Syatt: No, I couldn’t… Those jets don’t exist anymore. Those jets are in a museum.

0:14:02.6 Mike Vacanti: That’s what I’m asking.

0:14:03.6 Jordan Syatt: Those jets are in a museum like an old antique, like, “Look at these. These used to be in use and these used to be super powerful, but they’re burned out now.” [laughter]

0:14:11.4 Mike Vacanti: That’s what… Or even like, “Hey, write 24 articles over the next year that are at least 2000-3000 words in length each that you put… That.” Sit down for six straight hours and research and write, and any kind of that kind of work.

0:14:30.4 Jordan Syatt: Those jets aren’t in the museum. I could do those jets if I really needed to. The email jets, I can’t. Those are gone. That’s in the museum of modern history. I think there’s a couple differences. The main difference is, email is one individual. It’s I’m responding to one person. And oftentimes, it takes so much time to reply to that one person because I’m considering tone, I’m considering all these things. And I remember, I vividly remember, I used to… When I started to struggle with email is because I was like, “This is only gonna help one person.” Helping one person is great, but I could spend an equal amount of time and help thousands. It’s actually why I used to start getting really upset about doing the consult calls, because on these calls I was like, “This is an hour-long call, and I’m spitting fucking fire, and I could help so many people with this one call.” So when I realized I could record them and turn them into a podcast, now it’s like I love doing those calls because I know it’s gonna help the person and thousands of other people.

0:15:50.5 Jordan Syatt: So the articles I could do again, because I know it’s gonna reach more people, whereas the emails for me, I was just like, based on the time that I’m spending on these for each individual one, and knowing that it’s literally going to only meet one set of eyeballs, it really started to get under my skin, being like, “There needs to be a better way,” which is why then I can delegate to my assistant Kat, who is amazing, and she knows all my answers, and if she’s not sure she’ll ask me and I’ll tell her, and she can feel those questions, versus me then being able to create content on social media, or if I had to do an article or a podcast or a YouTube video, it’s I can now disperse my knowledge effectively across a greater population and help more people. That’s why the email jets are done.

0:16:41.1 Mike Vacanti: That differentiation makes sense completely. I’m even talking about emails that don’t help anyone. Like logistical, “My tax guy wants me to fill this out, my so-and-so wants me to introduce them… ” Even those kinds of emails that build up, not client emails and not even helpful, free, just questions from your audience that happen to come through via email. But just call it logistics.

0:17:10.3 Jordan Syatt: I started to get real anxiety around my inbox, I think, in 2017, just because, dude, and you know, we were there grinding at 3:00 in the morning, just blasting music in our earphones and trying to, as you say, goose-egg the inbox. And it was… I remember when you and I would work together and one of us would get the inbox down to zero, it was the best feeling ever. And so, let’s say I was at your apartment. At your apartment, goose-egg the inbox, it’s 4:00 in the morning. Nice. Sick. Go back to my place, get in bed, “Oh, I’ll just look at my inbox.” 47 new emails, within like 30 minutes. And it’s like, not even 5:00 AM yet. I’m like, “Jeez.” And then I go to bed for a few hours, wake up, and I’ve got 284 new emails now. I’m like, “Oh.” So I started to get this huge amount of anxiety. And it’s not like one-line emails either. These are like, word salad…

0:18:10.5 Mike Vacanti: Sentences and paragraphs, yeah.

0:18:11.7 Jordan Syatt: Oh yeah. Emails, just long, long, long. And I’m like… So I started to get this real anxiety about any time I opened my inbox, just knowing there’s gonna be a lot in there. So I think… Oh, and then I would… Even around scheduling logistic ones, you know I’m awful with scheduling and all of that, but I would… It would be really bad, and I started to not burn bridges, but I would piss people off because they’d be like, “Hey, let’s schedule something.” I’d be like, “Okay, cool. Let’s do it. How about this day?” But then my inbox would fill up to a 1000-plus, and then I would miss that email for a week, and I’d be like, “Oops, sorry. Missed that. How about this day?” Then it would go up to like 1000, and I would miss it again, I miss it again. And I’m not super organized, so I didn’t have these labels or anything. So I would literally just go one by one through the emails, and my assistant is way…

0:19:00.7 Mike Vacanti: You also didn’t have a calendar.

0:19:02.6 Jordan Syatt: I didn’t have a calendar. Yeah. Yeah, at all. Yeah. It’s funny, I would deliberately… [chuckle] I knew that would happen in terms of… I knew what would happen in terms of my inbox getting really full and I would miss these emails, so eventually, when someone would… When we were trying to schedule a call, I would deliberately ask questions in a way that would put the onus on them to schedule it and make it last… Make it take a while longer. So they’d be like, “Hey, let’s hop on a call.” I’d be like, “Okay, cool. Let’s do it sometime in… After the next two weeks. So shoot me some days and times after two weeks that will work best for you,” So that way, after if I didn’t see it for another week or so, there is a little bit of buffer around…

0:19:51.6 Mike Vacanti: Gave yourself a buffer. Yeah.

0:19:52.7 Jordan Syatt: Yeah.

0:19:53.7 Mike Vacanti: Do you know how many emails Kat responds to a day?

0:19:57.2 Jordan Syatt: So many. And she’s a savage. She just… She never complains. So we just ran a flash sale in the Inner Circle, and part of the flash sale was, I said, “If you’re a current Inner Circle member, you also get… This applies to you.” So I said, “You can email me and get 30% off your most recent payment.” And I didn’t tell Kat beforehand.

[laughter]

0:20:22.4 Jordan Syatt: ‘Cause I just made it up, as that’s… Make it up, which… And that’s… And Susan, if Susan’s listening, she’s laughing ’cause I do this shit all the time, I just make shit up in the moment where… I remember for the first Inner Circle retreat, someone was like, “We should have a watermelon eating contest,” when we were doing a live Q & A, and I was like, “We’re having it, we’re gonna do a watermelon eating contest.” And Susan’s like, “What are you… ” I was like, “And you know what else? I’m gonna have a podcast with every single person at the retreat during the retreat,” and Susan is like, “You’re… Stop. Stop talking.”

[laughter]

0:20:51.6 Jordan Syatt: I’m just making shit up. And so, yeah, I just made up… And it made sense. And I think a lot of business owners would be like, “Why are you doing that?” But man, I got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of emails from current members being like, “Man, economy is really down, money’s super tight. Thank you so much for doing this.” And it was like many, many, many thousands and thousands of dollars that Kat refunded on my behalf. It was like, she spent days replying to every email, going into the system, manually refunding every single person, and yeah, she’s just a beast, she’s an absolute beast with it. So I would say, I don’t know, but probably between 200 on a low day, to 800-1000 on a high day, probably.

0:21:44.1 Mike Vacanti: This is a cool conversation because even though it might not apply to a ton of business owners, a ton of personal trainers right now, it very likely will in the future, and so this is really good insight that I like. I wanna go deeper on this. How long did it take you to, let’s say have Kat operating at 90-plus percent or operating close to… I don’t know, you can frame it in your words, but without needing you over the shoulder?

0:22:13.3 Jordan Syatt: So, when she first came on to work for me… I’ll say this. One of the things about Kat is, she was a previous client of mine, which I think is one of the best people to hire in your business, she did not want to start her own fitness business, I think that’s her really important distinction, because a lot of coaches will hire someone else who wants to start their own fitness business and then they get really mad when six months, a year, two years, four years go by, and then they leave and they take clients and they’re now our competitor. She did not wanna start her own fitness business, she was a previous client of mine, she very much understood my methods, believed in them, so she was a really good fit from the beginning. But I was petrified about letting anyone else in my inbox, ’cause I took a lot of pride in answering every email myself.

0:23:06.1 Jordan Syatt: And I also… It’s my business, it’s my baby. I didn’t wanna potentially screw anything up. I didn’t wanna have an email be sent to someone and have it be rude or burn a bridge or whatever it was, I was like, “I do it perfectly, I’ll do it.” But it started to really get in the way because it was taking me a month to reply to people and I was missing scheduling stuff, and my inbox was causing me anxiety. So when she first came on, I was not ready to really let go. So I let her in my inbox and I was like, “Okay, here’s what you can do, you can just get rid of all the spam emails.” I was like, “Do not open any client emails, those are for my eyes, do not open them, only open and delete spam emails.” And she was like, “That’s it?” I was like, “That’s all you’re gonna do.” And she was like…

0:23:58.1 Mike Vacanti: Wait, wait, wait. Real quick. You had client emails in the same inbox as everything else?

0:24:02.9 Jordan Syatt: I have one inbox.

0:24:04.6 Mike Vacanti: Okay. [chuckle] Cool.

0:24:05.9 Jordan Syatt: Just one inbox. That’s it.

0:24:08.7 Mike Vacanti: Cool.

0:24:09.5 Jordan Syatt: I didn’t know how to organize tabs, none of that. Carter Good is really good with tabs, so now he has all these different tabs and colors and stuff, I was just like, “Yeah, I just got one inbox.” So yeah, I was like, “You can go through and delete all the spam.” She was like, “Okay.” And I think she would probably spend seven minutes a day just going in and getting rid of all the spam. And that was it for the first two or three months, and eventually we had a call, she was like, “You can give me more. You can give me more to do.” And I was like, “Okay, well, what else?” She was like, “Well, you get a lot of questions from people who aren’t clients, I could start answering those.” And I got really nervous and I was like, “Okay. Well, here’s what you’re gonna do. Any question that comes in, you can write a response, but I have to read it and edit it first before you send it.” So then she would get the email and then she would leave them in there, and then I would go in and I would see the drafts, and then I would edit it or whatever and send it. And we did that for a few months, and then finally I was like, “Okay, here’s the deal. ” ‘Cause after several months of reading and editing, it was essentially as though I was doing it myself anyway, I was still taking the same amount of time, and I saw she was answering the questions perfectly, and exactly as I would.

0:25:25.9 Jordan Syatt: I was like, “Okay, you can do this on your own now.” So it took about half a year for her to go from literally just cleaning out my spam to actually answering questions from people who were not clients, but she never answered client emails. That was really important. It was like, I was the only one who had answered my paying client emails. But then I was like, “But if you’re ever unsure how to answer something, call me, we’ll get on the phone, da da da da da.” And that’s what we still do, if she’s ever not sure how to answer something, we’ll hop on a phone call once a week and just go through all the emails that she is not sure what to do, but that’s… She basically understands everything at this point, and we’ve been working together for years, and she’s incredible. But it took six months to get to that point, but then even, probably another six months to a year to really streamline it to where I wasn’t micro-managing her, ’cause I was micro-managing her for a long time before I really let her have the reins.

0:26:25.4 Mike Vacanti: Do you have a standing meeting when you talk once a week, or is it just a random?

0:26:30.2 Jordan Syatt: Completely random. Completely… It’s basically, usually what I’ll do is I’ll call her when I’m driving back from jujitsu. At one point throughout the week I’ll just be like, “Hey, what’s going on?” ‘Cause what she does is she’ll text me updates everyday, “Here’s this, here’s this, here’s this,” and I won’t reply to any of them, I’ll just look at them, look at them and I’ll be like, “Cool, cool.” She’s like, “I have a question about this, question about this, question about this.” And eventually it’ll pile up enough where I’m like, “Okay, I need to call her.” And I’ll call her at one point and she’ll pick up and I’ll be… And she’ll be like, “Cool, let’s go through all the questions and emails that I sent,” which is good, ’cause then we have a backlog, we have notes of everything that she’s wanted to cover. But yeah, I hate replying on text or email to these… I don’t know, I don’t like doing it, I don’t like…

0:27:14.4 Mike Vacanti: If it’s not urgent too, especially.

0:27:16.8 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. I just also hate… I hate when people send me really, really, really long texts, and I hate writing really, really, really long texts. It’s just annoying. I would rather get on the phone. I’m a phone call guy. So I’d rather just hop on the phone, figure it out, talk, ’cause I feel like a lot is lost in translation, especially over text.

0:27:35.5 Mike Vacanti: Is the reason you don’t like writing long text the same reason you didn’t like emails back in the day, ’cause it’s one-to-one and not one to many?

0:27:40.4 Jordan Syatt: Probably.

0:27:41.6 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. ‘Cause I don’t like writing…

0:27:42.7 Jordan Syatt: ‘Cause I don’t like writing long captions.

0:27:45.0 Mike Vacanti: I was just gonna say, I don’t like writing long text ’cause I don’t like writing on my phone. I feel I’m like a boomer, I’m fat-fingering everything, it takes me forever, the keyboard doesn’t match up, I don’t like, it’s just… But you will write, you’ll spend 20-plus minutes writing for a single story…

0:28:02.7 Jordan Syatt: Oh yeah. Yeah.

0:28:03.7 Mike Vacanti: Fitting 1000 words on the screen, it feels like, so…

0:28:06.2 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. I think it’s… I hate taking that time to do that, it’s just… I’m like… I hate it. That’s one of the reasons I like voice memos, ’cause voice memos I can just do so much more quickly.

0:28:17.9 Mike Vacanti: It’s a great leverage of time, having someone in your inbox like that who you trust and have come to like…

0:28:24.6 Jordan Syatt: Yeah.

0:28:25.8 Mike Vacanti: Yeah.

0:28:26.7 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. So for everyone listening, it took me until 2017, and I started my business in 2011, so it took me from 2011 to 2017 before I even got someone in there, and it was really probably 2018 until she was really actually, until I let her really take control of it, so… And Susan does all the Inner Circle emails. So between her and Susan, they absolutely crush it. And Susan answers an ungodly amount of Inner Circle emails.

0:28:55.4 Mike Vacanti: What a beast.

0:28:56.5 Jordan Syatt: Yeah.

0:28:57.5 Mike Vacanti: Do people… That’s actually… That’s another interesting thing. You know how information products used to be much more popular, one of many reasons why we’re not huge fans of them is because if someone buys a $25 workout e-book from you, they’re still gonna be asking questions about the workouts. And you’re still…

0:29:18.5 Jordan Syatt: Exactly.

0:29:19.7 Mike Vacanti: What, are you gonna be like, “Oh, this product does not come with email support. Sorry.” You’re not gonna do that, so you’re gonna be emailing back and forth about the workout product, it’s one of the reasons why we like one-on-one coaching. But for the Inner Circle, do a lot of… Because most of the interaction’s in the Facebook group, you’re in there weekly doing a Q & A, Susan is in there weekly doing a Q & A, how much non-logistical email is there? Meaning like not, “Hey, I meant to cancel,” but how much like, “Hey, I’m really struggling, I had a binge last week and this… ” How much of that comes through the inbox?

0:30:00.2 Jordan Syatt: Honestly… So, it’s not that much, especially relative to my personal email. My personal email gets way more of those, just from people who are not paying clients, just random people who follow and want… And have questions answered. It is there, but the majority of emails in Inner Circle inbox are new orders, like people who are buying it, people who are canceling it, people who potentially want a refund, people who have a question about how it works, like, “Hey, where do I find this? How should I do this? Or is the Inner Circle for me?” A lot of those questions. But the majority of questions about, “Hey, this is my height, this is my weight, da da da da… ” They’re like, “I need the substitution.” Most of that goes into the Facebook group. And we really try and emphasize that as often as we can, “Any questions, post in the Facebook group. Any questions, post in the Facebook group.” So the vast majority of them go there. But there are a good number of those emails everyday, but the vast majority are in the Facebook group.

0:31:04.2 Mike Vacanti: Nice. I think that’s where my stream of questions runs up.

0:31:08.9 Jordan Syatt: Cool. Yeah. I didn’t expect we’re gonna go down that route, but…

0:31:13.5 Mike Vacanti: Me neither. It’s good, especially for people considering the membership option and just at a certain point in your business. I don’t get as much email as you get, but I don’t have anyone in my inbox besides me, but rather than goose-egging once every two weeks, I just let it build and build and build, and I goose-egg twice a year.

[laughter]

0:31:37.9 Mike Vacanti: On the non-client email inbox, which is not optimal, but…

0:31:44.7 Jordan Syatt: Still good, better than not goose-egging at all. I’m pretty sure Joe…

0:31:48.6 Mike Vacanti: You know what story I’m thinking of?

0:31:50.3 Jordan Syatt: Joe DeFranco. I love that guy. Joe DeFranco’s one of the funniest guys. And I’m pretty sure he just doesn’t ever answer email. [chuckle] It’s like a running joke where he’s just got thousands and thousands and thousands of emails and he’ll just… He just never checks.

[laughter]

0:32:07.8 Mike Vacanti: Never even looks at it?

0:32:09.0 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, doesn’t have someone in there for… At least this is what I heard a couple of years ago from him when we did a seminar together, but yeah, it’s… After a certain point, man, it’s just… It’s draining. It’s really draining. The inbox is brutal.

0:32:22.1 Mike Vacanti: There is an online fitness OG who, we won’t name and I don’t… Maybe you do, maybe you don’t remember the story, but basically he was like, “Yeah, you ever get to the point where your inbox is just so built up that you just delete them all and start at zero?”

[laughter]

0:32:43.4 Mike Vacanti: And this was in 2013, and I couldn’t comprehend it, I was like…

0:32:46.8 Jordan Syatt: Yeah.

0:32:48.4 Mike Vacanti: “What?” [laughter]

0:32:48.6 Jordan Syatt: No. That’s crazy. [chuckle]

0:32:52.3 Mike Vacanti: Well, not only because I didn’t have the volume of email to care that much for it to be a problem for me, but also, I just couldn’t wrap my head around having all these emails and then just, delete…

0:33:03.3 Jordan Syatt: Check box.

0:33:04.5 Mike Vacanti: Delete all. “Alright. There’s a fresh start.”

[laughter]

0:33:09.8 Jordan Syatt: I think it’s ’cause you… It’s like, you just delete so much potential goodwill, everyone who’s emailed you is expecting a reply. And you know what’s so funny? A lot of times people don’t know what they want. I remember, ’cause it used to take me two to four weeks to get back to people sometimes. If they were not a paying client, two to four weeks. Paying clients, I would get back to as quickly as possible. But if it was just a random person asking a question, I was like, “No, gonna wait, gonna wait, gonna wait.” And I remember, I think it was 2000… I vividly remember, it was 2017, it was right before I hired Kat. And I put on my Instagram story, I was on a flight, I forget where I was going, but I was going somewhere with Gary. And I put on my story, I was like, “Question: Would you rather hear from me… If you email me a question, would you rather get a personal response within four weeks, or get a response from a personal assistant within three days?” And the vast majority, I think it was like 80-plus percent of people said they would rather wait a month to hear from me.

0:34:12.3 Mike Vacanti: Wow.

0:34:14.0 Jordan Syatt: And it’s just not accurate. I think, in the moment they’re like, in that moment…

0:34:19.4 Mike Vacanti: What do you mean it’s not accurate?

0:34:20.7 Jordan Syatt: I don’t think it’s accurate. I think that they think they would like that, but when push comes to shove, when people send an email, they want a response in a timely manner, they don’t wanna wait a month. So I think… There’s an old saying in marketing, an old belief system, principal theory in marketing, that it’s like, “Oftentimes the buyer doesn’t even know what they want. They think they know what they want, but they don’t actually know what they want.” And this, I think, was the perfect example of that because I was getting people really angry, “I emailed you three weeks ago, why haven’t I heard back?” And these are not paying clients, these are just random people, “I emailed you three weeks ago, what’s going on?” But then as soon as Kat starts replying within 24, 48, 72 hours, there are none of those emails, and no one is upset that my amazing assistant is giving incredible answer and no one is ever upset about that. No one was like, “Oh, I really wish Jordan was replying to this.” They’re like, “Oh, thank you so much, Kat. That was really helpful.” No one was ever mad, ever. But people were mad that it took me a long time to reply to their email for free. So I think it was one of those things where in their mind they thought it would be cool to hear from me within a month, but they actually do prefer a quicker response from someone who’s able to give an equally as effective response.

0:35:39.7 Mike Vacanti: You know what’s interesting, we’ve talked about this, when you over-deliver, and I would categorize replying to all of your emails yourself, having back and forth with people who aren’t paying you, sinking minutes and minutes and hours into helping people for free one-on-one, I would lump that, especially at the stage of your career you’re in, I would lump that into over-delivering. You’re beating the expectation, you’re beating the industry standard. Once you do that with someone, their expectation adjusts.

0:36:15.3 Jordan Syatt: Yep.

0:36:15.6 Mike Vacanti: Meaning, now they expect to be able to go back and forth with you. I’m gonna leave out some details because I’d be super bummed if this person was listening but…

[laughter]

0:36:25.6 Mike Vacanti: Basically, gotta change some details of the story around, but make the point still hit. Someone asked me to do something for them, and that thing was a pretty big ask, and I pulled strings and did the thing. And a few days later, that person asked me not only to do the thing again and pull the strings again, but if we could do that once a week, because it would really help that person. And my mind…

0:36:57.5 Jordan Syatt: I know exactly who you’re talking about. [laughter]

0:37:00.0 Mike Vacanti: My mind exploded.

[laughter]

0:37:06.8 Mike Vacanti: People… And I can see it myself too, and I’ll give you an example. In 2014, I emailed James Altucher, who I was a huge fan of his blog, and I read one of his books, maybe two of his books, and I was a big fan, and he replied, and like himself, “Thanks so much, Mike, great to hear from you,” said a few things in this email. And there was a micro-second where I was like, “Man, this guy is amazing, this guy is the best, this guy is better than anyone else,” and that within a very short period of time, kind of just reset to a baseline. I didn’t try and have a back and forth email with him obviously, I wasn’t gonna do that, but I… I don’t know, there was an adjustment in my brain, his response or the fact that he was spending hours a day replying to emails from strangers every single day, that didn’t necessarily… I don’t know. ‘Cause now I feel like it does matter, but on another level it doesn’t matter.

0:38:14.0 Jordan Syatt: It’s interesting, this is making me think, this happens in all forms of businesses and even in life. I’ll give you an example of the Inner Circle. So when the Inner Circle first started, there were not hundreds and thousands of people in there, there was a handful of people. So I was giving these handful of people unbelievable amounts of individual attention. And as it grew, and as it grew, and as it grew, I can’t give that same level of attention anymore. And so those initial people feel like the service has gone down, which… ‘Cause candidly, it did go down from when there were 10 or 40 or whatever people in there, to when there’s 200, and then 400, or whatever it is. So oftentimes, I think… And I think this happens with friends too, where it’s like, let’s say, I don’t know, maybe you’re roommates with someone in college and you see them all the time, you’re there and have these amazing conversations, but then you’re no longer roommates and then you move to a different state, and it’s like you’re not as interactive anymore and, “I feel like we’re drifting apart,” that it’s like, “Well, it’s not that I don’t care about you, it’s just like, it’s just not what it once was.” And so for the Inner Circle, there were some people who are like, “I just feel like it’s changing,” I’m like, “It is changing. It absolutely is, because the more people are involved, which means that you’re gonna get less one-on-one attention.”

0:39:40.3 Jordan Syatt: And I know there was a… Initially, there was a group of people in there that were like a really, really, really tight clique, and some of those people left and some of those people stay, and right now there’s about half of the people from that clique are still in there and they love it, and they’re like, they embrace the change. And the other half like, “Yeah, it’s not for me anymore.” Which is totally fine, but that’s what happens when things grow, and it’s important to understand that that’s going to happen. And so then when people who are in there from the beginning, oftentimes, they’ll see the change and they think, “Oh, it’s getting worse.” But new people will come in and they’ll be like, “This is amazing,” ’cause they don’t have any idea what it was like before. They don’t have that perspective, if that makes sense. It’s like, they just come in now with more and more people and they see what’s offered now, they’re like, “This is incredible.” But often, the older people who’ve been in there from beginning, they’re like, “Oh, it’s not as good as it once was because I’m not getting the same attention.” So you can have the exact same service, but because two people saw two different things, one came in first and one came in later, they have a different perspective on it and they think of it differently.

0:40:47.6 Mike Vacanti: The person who you emailed with one-on-one a bunch of times back and forth in 2014, and then when they emailed you in 2018 and your assistant was responding, not you…

0:40:57.6 Jordan Syatt: Yes.

0:40:58.3 Mike Vacanti: That might hit different than someone who’s never reached out to you, just stumbled across you, sent you a series of questions and got a reply within 48 hours detailing all of it… Great answers from your assistant, that person’s pumped. They don’t know any different.

0:41:10.7 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, the person in 2014, they’ll get an email reply directly from me, or we’ll say 2015, ’cause the Inner Circle’s 2015. Person in the Inner Circle, 2015, one of the first founding members gets an email reply from me immediately, whereas… And they’re like, “Wow, that was amazing.” Now they’re like, “Oh, you only have an hour to live Q & A every week.” Whereas someone comes in the Inner Circle now and they’re like, “Oh my God, I’m only paying $24.99 a month, and you do an hour live Q & A every week? I’ve never been a part of a group that does that.” It’s like, it’s the exact same service for both people, but because one of them has a perspective of what it was like before it had grown, one of them is not as enchanted with it, and the other one is overly enchanted with it, which that’s also part of business growth and that’s normal, and it’s fine, it’s not…

0:42:00.2 Jordan Syatt: It doesn’t mean you’re doing anything bad or wrong, just that’s what happens when you have different perspectives on a business. And some of the people who are there from the beginning love it, and they’re like, “I’m so proud of you,” ’cause they almost feel like they helped… They take ownership, which I love, they take, like, “I helped build this.” Which they did. They helped build it. They were part of the building blocks. So they take pride in knowing that they were some of the founding members. Whereas other people are like, “Yeah, it’s just not for me anymore.” And that’s okay, it’s just… And new people come in and they fall in love with it. So it’s very interesting how that works based on what they saw and what they were initiated with.

0:42:37.5 Mike Vacanti: This is great, a little bit shorter one today, logistics on scaling your business. Something along those lines. I have a doctor’s appointment, a physical with a new GP, get a little blood work, make sure everything’s dialed in.

0:42:54.2 Jordan Syatt: You getting any specific blood work test?

0:42:56.4 Mike Vacanti: No, I’m not, just general. No, nothing… Cholesterol, triglycerides. I’m actually probably not getting blood work done today actually, ’cause I’m not fasted, but I’m getting a physical and then we’ll ask for blood work and we’ll go to a lab and do that.

0:43:11.9 Jordan Syatt: Testosterone, you’re gonna get that checked out?

0:43:15.3 Mike Vacanti: I will at some point because I’m curious, but I’m not going to a GP for that.

0:43:20.7 Jordan Syatt: Where do you think you’re at? If you have a guess.

0:43:24.9 Mike Vacanti: It’s funny because I’ve made a YouTube video about this a couple of months ago, and I was like, “My T is high, I feel great, I’m da da da da.” And in the last week or two, I’ve had a few days where I’m like, “Man, I’m pretty low energy. I wonder where on that, even though I’m sleeping eight, nine hours a night, even though I’m eating nutritious, eating in a maintenance to a slight surplus, training heavy, da da da da da, doing all the right things.” 35, I’m getting… I feel like… We’ll see. I don’t know where I’m at. I was…

0:43:58.0 Jordan Syatt: Put out a guess. Put out a guess and then we’ll come back and once it’s tested, then we’ll see how close you were.

0:44:02.6 Mike Vacanti: Okay. Well, my total test five and a half years ago, which is the only time I’ve had it done, which I wanted to basically get on steroids so that I could sleep less and have more muscle and for aesthetic purposes and all the wrong reasons, and I was like, “Please be 200.” And it was 867 total test.

[laughter]

0:44:22.4 Mike Vacanti: And then I was like, “Okay, well, I’m not gonna think about this again, ’cause I’m in a great spot. Don’t be an idiot.” And I didn’t. But now I’m curious… I don’t know. Okay, so this is literally just an uneducated guess.

0:44:39.6 Jordan Syatt: You just gotta throw out a random guess, yeah.

0:44:41.8 Mike Vacanti: I’d be disappointed if it was under 700, I’d be like, “Wow, what’s wrong with me?”

0:44:46.2 Jordan Syatt: Yeah.

0:44:47.4 Mike Vacanti: So my guess is 705. But I have a sneaky feeling it’s gonna be like 662. I’m gonna be like…

0:44:55.7 Jordan Syatt: Really?

0:44:56.8 Mike Vacanti: Mm-hmm.

0:44:57.1 Jordan Syatt: Okay. Okay.

0:44:57.8 Mike Vacanti: Yeah I do. I do.

0:45:00.8 Jordan Syatt: If it is that, if it does drop by over 200 points from five years ago… It’s funny ’cause you did that five years ago, right after you stopped coaching Gary, right? Right after…

0:45:10.7 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, it was Feb 2017. So it was…

0:45:14.2 Jordan Syatt: February. Oh, like six months later.

0:45:16.3 Mike Vacanti: Eight months after, yeah.

0:45:17.6 Jordan Syatt: Okay, eight months after. But you were traveling around with the Staples boys and doing that stuff, you were still…

0:45:22.3 Mike Vacanti: Yeah.

0:45:23.9 Jordan Syatt: So you’re still working super hard, not sleeping a ton, so to have your test be that high with all that going on…

0:45:32.9 Mike Vacanti: Well, doing a lot of things wrong.

0:45:35.2 Jordan Syatt: Now, you’re doing so many things right, sleeping, lifting, eating well, moving, all that. So if it is a huge drop, that will be interesting to see, this is purely age-related, age and genetics as well, but age genetics-related, it’s not like lifestyle factors that contributed to a massive drop. Or it would be cool where if it’s like, who knows? Maybe like a 15-point drop. Not a huge drop. It’s like, cool, you’ve done amazing, you’ve improved your lifestyle. So it will be cool to see where that is.

0:46:10.8 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. It’d be really interesting.

0:46:12.9 Jordan Syatt: Cool, brother.

0:46:14.2 Mike Vacanti: Well, now, you just brought up test and blood work on the bet like, now I don’t want the pod to end, now I just wanna…

0:46:20.6 Jordan Syatt: Well, let’s keep going. Let’s keep going.

0:46:21.8 Mike Vacanti: I don’t know, I gotta go pretty soon though. Yeah…

0:46:24.4 Jordan Syatt: At what point would you need… At what point would you be like, “Okay, now I need to go on test”?

0:46:32.3 Mike Vacanti: I think it’d be more symptomatic rather than number-related, and I’m not a low T guy.

0:46:39.4 Jordan Syatt: And you were like, yeah, you’ve been feeling a little bit tired, low energy, but not that you’re even more low energy…

0:46:42.7 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. Compared to my baseline, I think so. I don’t know. I don’t know. Because I’ve… Here’s some real, real stuff. I… That was a very Gary thing to say. I…

[laughter]

0:47:00.2 Mike Vacanti: I want to and have wanted to for a long time, I have a more addictive than average personality, and so I’m really glad I didn’t do it, I’m really glad I didn’t take anything when the primary… When one of the primary reasons was aesthetics, I’m glad I didn’t because I hate that game. I actually had a client reach out recently, he’s like, “Hey, do you think I should get on some PEDs or some steroids to speed up progress?” I was like, “Absolutely not.” Because the primary reason why he wants to do that is to see more muscle and less fat, and that’s just… That’s a… One, TRT is basically for life, and if you’re gonna run real body-builder cycles, well then, one, you can’t do that forever, your heart’s gonna explode at some point. You’re gonna reach your peak physique in the near future, and then once you stop, you will never be able to regain that. There’s many sayings about it’s, “Climbing the mountain is more meaningful than reaching the top.”

0:48:00.8 Mike Vacanti: If you reach the top when you’re somewhat youthful, and then you know you can never go back to that because you’re like, “Okay, well, I blast and cruised for 10 years, and now I need to just be on a low maintenance kind of protocol, and I’m never gonna have that level of physique that I had before,” that would be a mind fuck for me. At this point, when the reasons are purely physical and energy-related, it’s more interesting to me. I’d still like to not though. I don’t know if it’s the unknown, if it’s like, a feeling once I start, it’s a lifelong commit… There are a lot of things that go into it. I’d rather just be good for a while longer. But we’ll see.

0:48:53.3 Jordan Syatt: Do you have an age at which you’re like, “Alright, I will be okay starting at this age,” not worried about it being a lifelong commitment or anything like that, like, “Hey, no, I would be comfortable starting at a certain age”?

0:49:06.7 Mike Vacanti: For some reason, 40 stands out in my mind as being a more real number. Post having as many kids as I want to have is also an interesting thought. It’s not necessarily like a male birth control, but it’s definitely harder being on stuff. Yeah, that’s an interesting question. No, I don’t know that there’s a number that I’m like… I don’t think it’s age-related because for age, it’s almost just like… It’s symptom-related and how I would feel related and blood work-related, doctor recommendation-related, it’s not… Because with the age, that’s just purely public perception. If I felt like complete shit and was doing everything right in my… It wasn’t a deficit, it wasn’t not sleeping, it wasn’t like trying to stay too lean, wasn’t doing all the dumb things that lead to low T and then you’re like, “Oh, I just can’t… You know, I need to get on TRT,” because it’s like, “No, you’re trying to be 7%, you’re not sleeping, you’re partying, you’re drinking, you’re blah, blah, blah, blah.” But if I was doing everything right and it would benefit me, the only difference between that being at 35 and 55 is… Would be because of public perception.

0:50:25.6 Jordan Syatt: That makes sense.

0:50:26.4 Mike Vacanti: So no, I don’t have an age that I care about.

0:50:31.0 Jordan Syatt: So it seems like it’s how you feel, it’s energy, and it’s dependent on your energy, your actual numbers, probably all of that, how you feel, and then also lifestyle, do you have all the kids that you want? You probably wanna wait until you have children before you start doing that, just to…

0:50:52.9 Mike Vacanti: Probably. Unless I do this next month and bang a 333 total, and…

0:51:00.4 Jordan Syatt: Then everything changes.

[chuckle]

0:51:02.0 Mike Vacanti: Then no…

0:51:03.4 Jordan Syatt: Like, “Hey, remember when I said it wasn’t number-related? It is.” [laughter]

0:51:05.1 Mike Vacanti: It is. “And by the way, my doctor recommended 500 mgs a week, so we’re going hard.”

[laughter]

0:51:21.4 Jordan Syatt: “Right cheek, left cheek, right cheek, left cheek, let’s go.”

[laughter]

0:51:26.8 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. It’s… Yeah. But most of the… I don’t know. There’s a limitless pill kind of fiction mystery around it to me individually, where I’m like, “Oh, if I was at 1200 or 1500, I could probably… ” And it’s all work productivity, maybe some strength, but it’s all like how I feel related.

0:51:56.6 Jordan Syatt: Yeah.

0:51:57.1 Mike Vacanti: Whereas… And I’m probably not considering any of the potential downsides that go along with that.

0:52:05.6 Jordan Syatt: What downsides?

0:52:07.5 Mike Vacanti: I don’t know. Road rage.

0:52:09.8 Jordan Syatt: That’s… Don’t perpetuate those myths.

[laughter]

0:52:14.5 Jordan Syatt: People believe that stuff. Roid rage is not real. It’s not real.

0:52:18.3 Mike Vacanti: No, I said road rage. Road rage, related to…

0:52:19.6 Jordan Syatt: I know. But road rage from your roid rage.

[laughter]

0:52:24.7 Jordan Syatt: There are people who legit… People in the fitness industry think because of the media nonsense that people get…

0:52:30.8 Mike Vacanti: No, no, no, but I don’t… Sorry. If I was perpetuating roid rage, that wasn’t my intent. But if you take someone who has… I historically have used anger as fuel very effectively, so I know I have that in me. If you take someone at 800 who can use anger as fuel and you put them at 1600, maybe they got a little too much gas in the tank.

[laughter]

0:52:53.9 Mike Vacanti: Maybe you don’t know what’s gonna happen. I don’t think that they change someone’s character or change someone’s… No. But maybe a degree of impulsiveness and… I don’t know. I don’t know.

0:53:09.8 Jordan Syatt: I think, the best way I’ve heard it described is, number one is, if you’re just doing a normal hormone replacement therapy dose, all you’re doing is bringing yourself back up to baseline. There’s a difference between doing testosterone replacement therapy that’s like 150 to 200 milligrams a week, very low, just designed to bring you back up to baseline, versus running 500 to 1000 milligrams a week, that’s bringing you to supraphysiological levels. So that’s number one.

0:53:40.3 Mike Vacanti: I know people who at 150 to 200 have been in the 1200-1500 total range, which isn’t necessarily supraphysiological. 1200 was the high-end of the… Was the top of the normal range not that long ago, and now it just comes down with our… To bring the episode full circle or softening society, my earbuds are about to go out, by the way.

0:54:00.5 Jordan Syatt: Okay.

0:54:01.4 Mike Vacanti: Oh, they’re going out right now. I think we got… This is such an unfortunate time to wrap this. Now, one of them’s still going. Keep going.

0:54:08.9 Jordan Syatt: So if you’re using an appropriate dose, either way, you’re fine, you’re being monitored by a doctor, but if you’re doing too much and you’re blasting and go on super high test, the best way I have heard explained is, it makes you more of what you already are. So if you are an angry person, an aggressive person, it will probably make you more angry and aggressive. On the other hand, if you’re generally a more soft, empathetic or whatever, whatever, you’ll be more of that. So maybe for you, I could see you increasing in a road rage ’cause I feel like I’ve been on the phone with you when you’re driving and you’re like, “Motherfucker… ” [laughter] Maybe…

0:54:56.7 Mike Vacanti: That was someone else.

0:54:57.9 Jordan Syatt: I hope it wasn’t…

0:55:00.0 Mike Vacanti: Oh yeah.

[laughter]

0:55:01.5 Mike Vacanti: I’m good with road rage. But your point still stands. Your point still stands.

0:55:07.9 Jordan Syatt: So you don’t have much road rage to begin with?

0:55:10.7 Mike Vacanti: No, not road rage. But I don’t know, I have… I can make myself angry for the purposes of productivity, even though I’m less angry than I used to be. And we’ve talked about this on the podcast, like manufacturing faking or for productivity, doesn’t feel like a good long-term strategy. Bishop Barron, this iconic priest, gave a sermon on the seven deadly sins and was talking about wrath in there, and that had me really contemplating, like, “I was using anger for, to achieve an end, is that really a good move for my soul? Is that leading me where… ” I don’t know, a lot of thoughts.

0:55:49.4 Jordan Syatt: I feel like you’d just be in a good mood all the time. I feel like you’ll just be super positive and like, “Yeah. Yeah, let’s go on a walk, getting the sun.”

0:56:00.8 Mike Vacanti: That’s what I do now. Do I need more walks and sunlight?

0:56:01.6 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. But you do it in an even better mood.

[laughter]

0:56:05.9 Jordan Syatt: You’d be like…

0:56:06.0 Mike Vacanti: So you think it would only be mood-enhancing, it wouldn’t be productivity-enhancing?

0:56:12.2 Jordan Syatt: I don’t think so. I have a feeling it would cause you to just be more like, “Life is great.”

0:56:20.2 Mike Vacanti: And more vascular, and have harder muscles and…

0:56:21.7 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. Better workouts in the gym. Definitely better workouts, and you’re lifting more, your joints would feel great. I think, overall, the workouts would feel… I bet your sleep wouldn’t be great.

0:56:35.6 Mike Vacanti: My sleep’s unbelievable. I might come back at a 1000.

0:56:36.7 Jordan Syatt: All of that would be really good.

[laughter]

0:56:39.4 Mike Vacanti: It might have gone up since 2017.

[laughter]

0:56:41.8 Jordan Syatt: So, the back and forth within those, if I have to guess is like, “Oh yeah, I think it might be, I have a sneaky suspicion it’s gonna be 652, I’m over 1000.”

[laughter]

0:56:52.1 Mike Vacanti: Well, you’re selling me on the only benefits, or I’m gonna be happier and I’m already very happy, so I’m like, alright.

0:57:00.9 Jordan Syatt: No, and workouts are gonna be better, joints, you’re gonna feel great…

0:57:01.0 Mike Vacanti: I have great workouts.

0:57:01.5 Jordan Syatt: You’re gonna get strong…

[laughter]

0:57:04.8 Jordan Syatt: You hurt your neck really bad in the last podcast.

0:57:07.8 Mike Vacanti: That’s true, that’s true.

[laughter]

0:57:10.5 Mike Vacanti: Maybe I just take a stem cell to whatever vertebrae that was.

[laughter]

0:57:17.6 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. I feel like you’d be… You’d get… Your strength would go up considerably.

0:57:25.4 Mike Vacanti: That I do know.

0:57:26.6 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. Your strength would go up, all that.

0:57:29.6 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, that is interesting. We’ll see. We’ll see.

0:57:33.7 Jordan Syatt: But I could be wrong. I don’t know. Maybe you’d more productive.

0:57:34.9 Mike Vacanti: Look, here’s one thing I will say, if any progress is made on this front, there’s gonna be a very clickable YouTube video about it, and we’ll do a deep-dive here on the pod, and it’ll be real fun for everyone, but I don’t see any moves being made here.

0:57:51.4 Jordan Syatt: I’ve never heard of productivity benefits as a result of testosterone. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist.

0:57:57.7 Mike Vacanti: I have in these guru-y and entrepreneurially…

0:58:00.1 Jordan Syatt: Huberman podcast?

[laughter]

0:58:02.6 Mike Vacanti: No, not on the Huberman Podcast. But on…

[laughter]

0:58:10.7 Mike Vacanti: You know what? I think Attia has actually talked about that some, but I’m talking about these internet entrepreneur YouTube productivity hacker, tech circle guys.

0:58:21.6 Jordan Syatt: Within their content?

0:58:22.8 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, if they make a productivity, it’s like low-dose test is on there for their own personal output.

0:58:29.8 Jordan Syatt: They’re just trying to get content and drive views.

[laughter]

0:58:35.3 Mike Vacanti: There’s also a million other things, blue light blocking this and this supplement and…

0:58:38.9 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, they have their code for the blue light blockers that you can use.

[laughter]

0:58:43.9 Mike Vacanti: No, no, no, no, no, not a lot of… I’m not following hard affiliate marketers, come on.

[laughter]

0:58:51.2 Mike Vacanti: Come on. Alright, I really gotta go. This was really fun. This was a great episode.

0:58:55.7 Jordan Syatt: Love you, brother. Have a safe drive.

0:58:56.9 Mike Vacanti: Love you, bro. Thank you.

0:58:58.0 Jordan Syatt: And get it. Tell your doctor I say hello. Ask your doctor about this.

0:59:03.9 Mike Vacanti: I’m good, I’m good.

[laughter]

0:59:07.3 Jordan Syatt: See ya, man.

0:59:08.1 Mike Vacanti: See ya.