I Refuse To Be A Fitness Influencer

The fitness internet is getting louder, meaner, and weirder, and it’s exhausting. Today Mike flies solo and says the quiet part out loud: platforms don’t reward the most helpful coach, they reward the most shareable fear. If your feed is full of seed oil panic, sunscreen paranoia, “miracle” peptides, and comment-section cruelty, you’re not imagining the shift.

We talk through what that does to real people trying to lose weight or get in shape, especially beginners who already feel exposed. Mike breaks down why fitness is one of the only “learning” spaces where newcomers get mocked for not already being good, and why that ugliness rarely shows up the same way in real life. The fix is not another hack. It’s community, context, and a return to human-to-human communication.

So we get practical and concrete: Third Space is evolving into more in-person connection, including walks, runs, hikes, and a sanctioned 5K planned for mid-November around World Kindness Day. Mike also shares a big long-term vision: building a physical gym location targeted for early 2027, plus “Project Lifeboat,” a push to move people off fragile algorithms and into more stable resources like groups and newsletters. Along the way, he shares a run-club story, how to test your baseline safely, and why “week one shouldn’t look very different from week zero.”

If you’re tired of the noise but still want real progress, hit play, subscribe, and share this with someone who needs a kinder path. After you listen, leave a review and tell us: what would help you feel more supported in your health journey?

Transcript

Solo Check In And Grievances

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I think we are recording. Yes, we are. Normally I get a countdown for this. Hi, everybody. Sorry to disappoint you. It's just going to be me, Mike Pridgin, also known as Mike Needs a Plan on all the socials. I realized that I don't have any variations in my name when I went to go and update my Facebook profile. Not my personal one, because who uses Facebook anymore in a sea of AI and it's it's it's all AI articles. Have you noticed? Have you looked? You probably haven't looked. Most of you are 18 to 34. Uh anyway, I went to go and look, and it's all of my everything Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, YouTube. This is not a plug. This is me expressing great frustration, which is going to be the point of today's episode. Now, uh again, we do not have Rob or Liam here. So uh sorry about that. If you're looking for either of the two of them, you can go to the next episode or the one before this. And I'm sure that we will all be there uh barring any serious tragedy. Uh Liam just got back from New York City. He was doing some stuff and he's tired and he's taking care of stuff. Rob is in the same boat. He's been taking care of a lot of stuff lately. I have too, but I guess I've been taking care of the least stuff on this day, which is uh a pretty high barb because we are all very busy people, but we want to get an episode out to you every week. And today I I because we were trying to figure out like, you know, what should we even talk about? What should I discuss on the show? I think I'm just gonna air some grievances. I know that it's not festivous, but it's time to air some grievances. I have beaten the odds. I really have. Uh the fact that I'm here on this program every week is incredible because I was not here for the founding of this show. I was, uh I used to just be a fan. I remember being excited about the launch of the show, going, oh wow, what what a great thing that Rob and Liam are doing a show together. I love those guys. And I came on to the show in April of 24, and we just hit it off. We had a great time, and they invited me to play some games with them, and it was just off to the races from there. I came back for many more episodes, and whenever Rob needed a fill-in guest, I would come on. Uh, he would call me and I'd I'd I'd pop on late at night. And then it just got to the point where he was like, You want to just come back for every episode? And now here I am. Uh, hopefully you guys like me. I I don't know if I'm a hindrance, I'm the weird new guy, or I've been a good addition to the show. Either way, I appreciate everybody that tunes in every week and has sent me lovely messages over on my Instagram. I I love hearing from you guys, so please continue to do that. But I I started making videos, it was May 25th of 2023, and I just wanted

From Fan To Co Host

SPEAKER_01 3:05

to talk about my journey. I, for those of you that don't know, I lost 110 pounds. Um, I'm the obesity hire, as I like to say here on the show. And I just wanted to chat about it because I had beaten it finally. I was getting to a to a point where my mindset was in a much better spot, and I wanted to share that with people in hopes that I would reach just a couple of people who could benefit from the message. And not a month after that did I have an influx of followers and new people that were watching me, including Liam, including Rob, who both followed me, and that was a crazy day in my journey. But I'm not, I've done well for myself physically. I'm not, I don't want to talk myself down, but I'm not your typical fitness influencer where I've got all these big muscles and a chiseled jaw and everything. I'm a very average-looking guy, right? It's you wouldn't know that I lost a bunch of weight, but you also wouldn't know that I've ever been inside of a gym just by looking at me. But that is very accessible to a lot of people. And I still believe that that is probably the reason why I've gotten the kinds of followers that I have, is that in a sea of unrelatable fitness influencers, I'm just the normal guy talking about normal stuff. And I so much appreciate my position in the ecosystem. I have been able to pay my rent doing this for three years in an industry in a medium, both, that regularly chews and spits people out in a matter of months. So I I have and I love what I do, and I've never had to compromise on my morals, not even once, in a space that handsomely rewards people that do. So, you know, I'm not rich by any standard, but I I am paying my bills and I'm not worried about next month. So why am I frustrated with all of this? Because all of this uh so far, like the things that I'm able to do, the the coaching that I get to do as my full-time job, I hope I get to do that for the rest of my life. I will never have a complaint about that. What I do have a complaint about is the social media landscape. And I know a lot of you come here listening to Liam's videos, and he's very much, you know, an anti-influencer as well. He he has a very good, positive, benevolent message, probably the most notable uh example of such a case because there's so much hatred and division and anger and bullying and disinformation in the space, and to have somebody like Liam and to have somebody like Rob who used to make incredible content, we got to get him to start making content again, guys, by the way. If you want to see Rob make videos again, start commenting, start posting, start sending messages to the inmoderation

Why Social Media Feels Broken

SPEAKER_01 6:05

email. He sees them all. He makes great videos, he's he can make great videos, and he made fantastic videos. We got to get him to do that again. But anyway, I don't feel like what what I'm doing right now matters all that much anymore. It's it has gotten so far into the weeds on disinformation, and everybody's talking about seed oils and red 40 and and all this. Don't use sunscreen because it'll give you cancer. All of this is untrue, by the way. Um and I don't have a bombastic claim. I don't have a good hook, right? So I'm I'm losing interest because I don't have a tall tale to tell. And I feel like my time on social media is wasted, largely. I came here to educate and inspire and motivate, and I feel as though when I try to do that, it doesn't quite get out into an algorithm on a platform that profits from disinformation and fear and anger. And I have heard a lot of you message me, and I I've seen the comments and I've seen the messages of people thanking me for being a reasonable voice in this space. That's crazy. Um, that that's me to some of you, you know, that and I'm so grateful that that is me to to many of you. But I I've got to say, I don't like feeling like I'm not doing anything. But I've come too far to only come this far, right? I I've done too much to only do this much. And I've got a policy these days. If I believe in something, I've got to find a way to execute it and make it happen. Because for a lot of years, I didn't. I would let every inconvenience and insecurity and obstacle stop me from achieving the things that I wanted to achieve. And what I've noticed, especially like in my coaching community, is the most powerful resource we have access to is human-to-human communication. And we don't get a lot of that on social media. We have comments, we have videos, uh messages, but that's not real communication, right? It's it's synthesized. It's it's enough for the inner room, but we need to see people face to face. And as somebody who works from home, lives in an unfamiliar state, I was not uh born and raised here in Texas. I am a transplant. I have friends all over the world. And I get to talk to so many of you out in the world, and I'm sure there are some people here that you know I talk to regularly that are listening. And I'm grateful to know you. None of you are here. So the the only opportunity that I have to get to see people are on trips and events and such where you know we we organize these things to get people together. And so I'm have been talking with my team from my coaching community, which we have now called Third Space. It's uh the the new name for it, to try to figure out how we can connect more people in the real world in a way that feels impactful and inspiring and relieving for lack of a better term. I feel relieved when I see people in person that share my message or my mission and my drive and the things I'm passionate about. It's it reminds me that the the social grindstone that benefits from keeping our attention through fear and anxiety is not the overall truth. It is not the reigning force in this world, and we can walk away from it, and we can not be a part of it. Now, this is how I make my full-time living. This is how I get clients. I go to the internet and I make my silly videos and I reach people who want to connect in a more meaningful manner. And that's those are the people that I get to bring into our coaching community that I get to bring in as personal clients, though I have my book is full right now on that. Please don't schedule a call. Just come into the coaching community. Uh but it, I just I don't want to do this forever. I want to do the coaching side of this forever. I want to be in person forever. I want to reach people forever until I'm a hundred years old. That's what I want to do. And so we've got to find a way to do that. And so, like I said before, I'm talking with my team on figuring out ways that we can do in-person events where we say, hey, come meet us here at this time on this day. We're gonna do a walk. We're gonna do uh we're gonna do a run, we're gonna do a hike. Um, oh, um,

Third Space And Real World Meetups

SPEAKER_01 10:55

in November, we are going to put on a 5K. Now, I don't mean we're going to attend one that's already happening. I mean we are going to put together and run a real sanctioned 5K event where all are welcome. We don't have the full details on that yet, but it'll be somewhere in the middle of November around Kindness Day. I found out there's a World Kindness Day. And um it's what better of a thing. You know, my whole thing is be kind to yourself. So we got to run something on Kindness Day. And so we're gonna run a 5K. We're gonna have medals, t-shirts, and motivation, connection, friendship, and all of that. And uh to those of you who are tuning in who are tired of the same things I am, I hope that this podcast can just give you the indication that like things aren't quite as bad as maybe they do seem. I I hear it all the time, where people will say, like, it, I don't even want to try to lose weight anymore, or I don't even want to try to get in shape anymore, because everything I see is people criticizing me for not already being there, or people telling me that there's a peptide that I need. Please stay away from the peptides, by the way. I it's it's all garbage. It's um it's astrology for Jim Bros. I don't know what to do, I don't know what to take, and this person's selling me this, and this person's telling me that I'm not, I shouldn't even try. And I took a picture of myself in the gym, and some kid with a with a lightning aqueen profile picture called me fat. And the real world isn't like that. It just isn't. But Meta has curated an ecosystem that keeps us scared and confused because they can sell ads over it. And I want to break out of that. I want to get to the point where social media is something that I can just hop on to to say, hey, by the way, we're we're gonna be over here. And I'm not thinking about metrics. I'm not thinking about I've got I've got to get this many videos out every day, and uh I've I've got to hit this metric, and I need to keep this amount of attention by the four-second mark and and all of that. Uh it's just not sustainable, and I don't think it's real. I want to do something real. And ultimately, I think the the biggest thing I've I've got to say here is we are working on building a gym. Now, if all of this sounds lofty and like I'm just throwing ideas out there, I am throwing ideas out there, and they are a little bit lofty, but why not? One of the things that I had pitched when I was talking to my team about this, one of the questions I'd posed to them, uh, because the gym was not my idea. The gym is uh I'm influencing it and talking with them about it. But I had said, why has this never been done before? I know a lot of people with enough capital and enough resources to make this thing happen, and they don't do it. I've never seen them do it. And somebody had brought up it's not as high of a profit margin to run a physical location as it is to just have online clients, have 5,000 people that you're just sending a Chat GPT plan to. And I'm not interested in doing that. Uh, my team is not interested in doing that. We want to reach people where they are, we want to leave an impact on them, and we want them to feel connected. I cannot wait to give you the details of this gym. We are working on getting it figured out sometime in early 2027. At the time of this recording, it is June uh 24th, 2026. This comes out tomorrow. And in less than a year, we're going to have a physical location where the messages that we share, the motivation that we share, the morals that we share will be located somewhere. And I'm I'm very lucky to be in a position where I can imagine and see this happen because not everybody is, but what I'm hoping is we can reach the people who can't create it, you know, and for the stuff we can't create, we can reach people who can. And there can be a network of people who are rejecting this move towards AI and technology and and the anger economy. Because I frankly, I'm I'm sick of it. We talk about a lot of positivity and reasonable measures towards your health and kindness here. We also joke around. We try to make

Planning A Sanctioned Kindness 5K

SPEAKER_01 15:30

this thing accessible to everybody in an industry that is very anti-that. As a former heavier person, all of the voices that were around me were angry. All of the voices around me were blaming me, which is is, I believe, fairly unique to the fitness space. In the sense of, like, you know, if you were going to be a pilot and you went to school to be a pilot, you're not going to go to aviation school and all the people there are gonna bully you.

SPEAKER_00 16:00

Why why can't you fly a plane yet? Stupid, you friggin' idiot. You should know how to fly a plane already. That's your fault. The information's there, you just didn't take it. Like, no, I'm here to go to school. Yeah, you just you're just you're just landlocked, buddy. You just can't fly a plane because you're stupid. Like, that would be ridiculous. You go to any school anyway, you go to a medical school, you go and, oh wait, you can't perform surgery yet? What are you an idiot? Everything, it's all available on YouTube, bro. Just go look up how to do a brain surgery. No other industry, no other line of work or practice is treated in the same way that fitness is.

SPEAKER_01 16:36

Because when you decide you want to start losing weight, you post a picture of yourself. I see it all the time. Somebody who's still in a heavier body will post themselves at the gym, and everybody in the comments, again, no profile pictures, will be like, and then she went to McDonald's afterwards. It's the only time I ever see anything like that. But that doesn't happen in the real world. I barely see that in the real world. People always talk about hearing it online and barely anywhere else. If anything, that they get a glancing look or it is an isolated incident where somebody makes a snide remark, and that's just the worst kind of person there is. Bullies are afraid in the real world. Bullies are scared. They don't want to be seen. That's why you look through all of those comments that they have there, and the majority of them do not have their real name, do not have their actual vase and their profile picture. They're cowards. They're snivelling, slimy little cowards. They'll never reveal themselves because that's the only place they have power. They don't have power in the real world. They don't have power anywhere that meta doesn't give them power. And so we go to the real world, we connect out there, and everything is better. It's different. We have control over it. A prompt can't create that for us. We have to create it. And so three years on in my journey here on social media, that's what I'm working on. I don't want to be an influencer. I want to be a coach. I want to be a motivator. I want to be a leader. I want to be a collaborator. I want to be sitting in a room full of people with similar ideas, listening and bouncing things back and forth and hearing something that somebody says and then giving them something and building on top of it until we've got something that not one of us alone could have created. That's what social media doesn't allow us to do. I don't want this to be single channel. I don't want this to be here, just get on this program and execute it here step by step by step, and then three months later it doesn't matter because none of it's stuck. I have been unequivocally blessed to do what I've done and to meet all the people that I've met and to be regarded highly and kindly in an industry that just a handful of years ago I could not have even imagined attending as a as a guest. And now I'm

Building A Gym For 2027

SPEAKER_01 18:55

here as somebody who helps people and creates things. And I want to create something new. And I say all of this not to toot my own horn, but in hopes that maybe you will hear something that I say and you'll be empowered to create something on your own, whether that be something where you have outreach in your community, or you start posting your own videos and you have a similar trajectory to me. I'm just a guy. I'm not special. There's nothing particularly extraordinary about me. There's a few of you out there that, no, no, you're special. No, I'm not. I wholly reject that. I am a normal human being that has been able to achieve extraordinary things. If I start claiming I'm special or divine in some way, it limits people who feel that they are normal or whatever, whatever that means. All of us are normal. Some of us are just a little bit more bold, and bold is not anointed, it is chosen. I've not been bold my whole life. I've not been super confident my whole life. It's it's fairly new to me to be able to talk with the kind of conviction that I have. And without stuttering, I I have a bit of a stutter. You'll notice sometimes when I get stuck on a word, it'll repeat a few times. I've reined it in over the years as I've had a career in communications as long as I have. I've found ways to figure out how to like stop my um see now I'm tripping over my words because I'm thinking about stopping the stutter and the speech impediment while I'm actively trying to stop it. So it that doesn't mean I'm any less good at talking. Just means it's a momentary lapse and I'm back. You know, a brain fart is not the symptom of like the dementia setting in. It's just a brain fart. But you can build on top of that and you can start stock stacking and stacking and stacking in security until suddenly you've convinced yourself that you you just shouldn't be doing it. When all it was was a momentary little trip. That's it. You know, the best runners in the world can fall. Doesn't mean that their ability to run is any any more hindered just for the moment while they're getting up. The other day, and I'm gonna be talking about this more in detail on my podcast, but I think it bears repeating. Uh, yesterday, I there's a run club here in uh Dallas. It meets in Allen. It's called uh Ready Set Run over on Instagram, and it's uh put on by uh this person named Claudia, who's uh just doing a fantastic job putting this together. And I I have no professional affiliation. I'm I'm just um it's ready set run club, but with two B's at the end, all one word. And uh I've I've been going there uh the last couple of Tuesdays. I'm gonna keep going there. So if you're in the area, uh come hang out. But I decided yesterday I wanna I wanna I wanna figure something out. I want to see how far I can go. Now I'm not a run, I'm not a trained runner. I've done a few 5Ks and a 10K, but I'm not a run, I did not train for any of it. I probably should have, but I didn't. And so, you know, I wasn't setting records or nothing, but I did go there to participate. That was all. And with the run club, I figured, well, this will be a good opportunity to again connect with people in person, uh, but also to see what I can do and start building a new skill and to have that under my belt. Yesterday I pushed it real hard. You'll notice if you're watching the video, which why would you right now? It's just me sitting in my chair and shaking my leg. Um, I'm not walking. One of the reasons I'm not walking is because I crushed it yesterday. I don't have the conditioning to crush it, but I decided I was going to crush it and figure out how much I could do. Not to find out what my limit is, but to find out what my starting point is, because that's what you're doing. Right? You're not going there to figure out, like, well, this is as much as I'll ever be able to do. No, this is the beginning. If I keep training, if I keep building, if I keep doing things, I get to the point that I can run more. And the run that I did yesterday is no big deal. The full course is 2.3 miles. And I just said to myself, I'm just going to try to run as much of it

Why Fitness Bullying Is Unique

SPEAKER_01 23:25

as my body will allow. For context, I have a heart condition that gives me circulatory problems and an arrhythmia. And strenuous exercise like that, if I'm not very careful, can be detrimental to my health for days afterward. And it it is. I'm suffering at the moment. I'm recovering, but I'm suffering. You know that feeling when you get out of a pool and like your lungs are kind of like sore? I I'm I'm gonna have that for a few days. I'm gonna struggle to catch my breath. There are gonna be periods of time where I'm just kind of breathless and I can't catch it. I'm very lucky that right now I've got my breath about me because earlier in my live Wednesday class for my group, I I lost my breath. Luckily, my assistant coach and dear friend Mandy uh was able to uh zero in on that and take over. So we we were able to get through class with uh with my contributions, uh less than my my lead. But when I started running, I thought to myself, okay, I'm just gonna make it to that corner up there. And I did. And then I thought, okay, you know what? I'm gonna make it to that tree. And then I kept going. And I said, okay, I'll make it to that parked car up there. Cool. I'll hit that one. Let me let me make it to that parking lot. And before I knew it, I had ran basically two miles. There was one period where I stopped for about a minute, and then there was another period a little bit further in where I started walking rather than running for about 20 to 30 seconds. The rest of the time I was out there, I ran. I have never ran that much consecutively in my life. But yesterday I decided to find out how much I could. There was the possibility that I found out I could run a mile, and that was that. But I found out that I can pretty much run two kind of, which can be improved. I I've I've got my baseline. That's pretty, pretty darn cool. When was the last time you challenged yourself? I'm not just saying like, you know, you got out of bed and did a thing. I'm talking like you got to take a break the next day, challenge yourself. Because I I'm I'm not I didn't go to the gym today. God, no. I I it would be irresponsible for me to do so. I'm I've got some Oh, at the end of that run, my feet started getting numb. And I I was like, this is this feels like a health problem. I don't know what's going on right now. But the finish line was right there, and I I just toughed it out. And then I went and I I laid down, I put my legs up against a tree, and uh, you know, allowed my my heart rate to slow down. But I needed to find out what I was capable of, and I needed to not let anything except nature tell me when to stop. I couldn't let my beliefs stop me. I couldn't let my my notions stop me. I I couldn't let temporary discomfort stop me. It had to be my natural stopping point. There was a lot of discomfort, and the whole time was just me trying to figure out like, is this my stopping point or is this just me wanting to stop? Because you're allowed to want to stop. You just can't. And that's how I'm treating this next endeavor here. That's how I'm treating my current bout with social media because I'm currently I'm pumping as much energy into social media as I can to try to get the algorithm to listen to me for a little bit longer. I'm calling it Project Lifeboat. I can talk about this here because I can't be shadow banned here. Um so in the background, internally, I'm calling this Project Lifeboat, where I'm trying to get as many eyeballs on my page as possible. And then when the moment is right, I'm just gonna start spamming. Hey, come to this link over here, come to this resource over here. We've set this free thing up. There's a free group over here, there's a newsletter here, and just spam, spam, spam until Instagram has completely nuked my reach. I'm just piling people into lifeboats. I want what we do to matter. And it's I it doesn't matter if I've got you know, I've got something like 600,000 followers across my platforms, right? If a thousand of them get in the lifeboats, success. Absolute success. If a hundred of them get in the lifeboats, absolute success. I'm just I I'm I'm tired of playing this game of uncertainty

The Run Club Challenge And Baselines

SPEAKER_01 27:56

and kneeling to an entity that does not care for your betterment. I'm here to help people. I'm not here to make a quick buck off a sponsorship. I am I'm here to make real, positive, and impactful change. And every time I want to stop, I remind myself, or I think to myself, or I assess with myself, is this really my stopping point or is this just uncomfortable? I hate to say it, but growth happens in discomfort. Everything we want, everything worth having, is on the other side of uncertainty. You know, that whole thing about you'll choose a familiar hell over an uncertain heaven or what have you. It's we're all choosing familiar hells. Those of you that are tuning in for fitness advice and you're hoping to hear the thing that gets you to uh be motivated to get up and start making a change. Well, I eventually I'll hear the right information. Eventually I will hear the right piece of advice that will get me going again. This is it. This is the one. You've got a folder full of information, and if you don't have a physical folder, you've got a Rolodex in your head of all of the information that you've been collecting, hoping that one of the things will be the thing that'll get you going. This is not criticism, by the way. This isn't me belittling you. This is me relating to you. I understand. There's a reason for those feelings. You know that? You're not dumb. You're protecting yourself. Failure sucks. Being embarrassed or having hopes and having them crushed sucks. It's not a good thing. And so we will self-isolate or uh self-insulate rather by convincing ourselves that we're not capable, that we shouldn't, that we don't belong, that it'll never work out anyway. And we truly believe that. And it comes from a place of benevolence, but it doesn't get you anywhere. I I was on Ethan Supley's podcast uh the other day, lifelong. This fantastic show, wonderful man. Uh he's of all the people that I've met on this journey, um, he is, I truly believe, one of the people that cares the most about people getting good information and and really changing their lives. He's got such a fantastic perspective. We got to get him on this show. I'm gonna reach out to him. It's crazy that I know him. It's crazy that I know Liam and Rob, but it's crazy that I know anybody. I again, I'm just a guy. But we were talking about how week one shouldn't look very different from week zero. A lot of the fear right now in getting started for you, if you are not already started or you're hesitant to make much of a change, is that you think that you've got to change everything all in a day. And I know you've heard this before. You're gonna make little changes. Well, what does that mean? I hate little changes. I know you hate little changes because you want everything to change right now, but you're responding to trauma with trauma. You're not responding to the situation with logic. You're responding to something that hurts with another thing that hurts, hoping that they'll cancel each other out. That's not how it works. And if it did, most of you would have completed your journeys by now. We've got to go about this in a measured way. We have to go about this slowly. If you're looking to change your life, it should not be a grand demarcation line. It shouldn't be uh a, as Doc Brown would say, a red letter day in history. It just needs to be another day and then another day, and another day, and another day, and another day, until all of the days have accumulated into something that you don't even know when you changed. My before picture, you know, when I'm at my heaviest, if you guys have seen it, it's me in a big flannel and a sloth t-shirt. And I'm I'm looking fairly round. I almost look like I'm holding my breath in that picture. It's it's strange. The next day, I looked the same. And the day after that, I looked the same. And the week after that, I looked the same. And yet I have an after picture in which I look entirely different. And the after picture, the day before that, I looked pretty much the same as the after picture. And the day before that, I looked pretty much the same as I did the weeks before that one. And yet, somewhere in between, I was different. Oftentimes I will ask people, on which day did you grow up? Can you give me the date? And they'll usually respond with laughter. So what do you mean? I just, you know, it was this is the period in which my childhood happened. Okay, cool. That's when you grew up. It wasn't a day, right? There wasn't a day where you went from a child to a teenager or a teenager to an adult. It's just one day you look back and realized it happened. The only way that happens is if we decide to make that change and we stick to it long enough to see it through. All of the changes I'm making right now are very slow. They're very uncertain. I'm in uncharted territory, really uncharted, because I I unlike my coaching, whether it be my one-on-one or my group or my social media career, any of that, I don't have a model by which to base this on. I don't have anybody to ask about this. I don't know anybody who's done this before. So I'm just going in blind. And it's spooky, yes, but it's also spooky to me, if not spookier, to stay exactly where I am and do nothing. Because right now I am circling the drain, doing social media stuff. I'm not building anything. I'm just keeping my head of my digital head above water. It's not a very fulfilling feeling. There were periods on my health journey, my weight loss journey, where I was doing the very same thing. I was just kind of keeping my head above water. I'm doing the things, I'm I'm inputting the input and outputting the output, and because I'm contractually obligated to do this because I want to lose this amount of weight and all that. It doesn't mean anything. Eventually you lose all the weight and you have nothing more to do. And so you occupy your time with eating. Because you never figured

Project Lifeboat And Leaving The Game

SPEAKER_01 33:45

out why you were eating so damn much. I am at the beginning now, three years later, from when I started this journey on a new journey. I'm I'm I'm standing on the precipice of it. And I can't see very far. I can't really see too too much ahead of me. But I don't need to, because my step, my my stride is not that long. It is only as long as my legs will take me in a single stride. And so the only amount of distance I need to be concerned with between now and that next stride is the distance below my crotch. That's it. Beyond that, if my balls can't see it, it doesn't matter. If your balls can't see it, it doesn't matter. Gotta mention balls. And we gotta mention DeLoreans. Shout out DeLorean. I I see Rob just came back. Uh shout out, buddy. He's uh he's tired today, so I'm taking over the show. But I think that'll be the uh the moral of today's story. If your balls can't see it, don't don't worry about it. You know, just worry about your stride right now. What could you accomplish if you decided to put everything into it? Short burst. Doesn't have to be forever. What could you accomplish if you put a hundred percent of your energy into something and then you promised the next day off? I'll give you that. I just want to see what you're capable of. I want you to start adjusting your brain to the idea that you can. I did that, and now I know I can run two miles. There are some people out there to whom two miles is nothing, and then there are some people out there who might look at me and say, two miles? I can't even walk that. That was me at one point. Now I can run it. What could you accomplish if you started building it slowly today? I'm gonna come back in a year. I'm gonna come back next week as well, but I will also come back in a year, and I will tell you about what we've built in the time being. I'm gonna be talking about it on my podcast. Do you want to guess what the name of it is? Those of you who were here in the beginning of the episode, yeah, it's Mike Needs a Plan. Surprise. I'm not good with names. That's why I'm not gonna ever have kids because I'd never be able to name them. One of many reasons. The other being, I don't know, all the horrors. Um anyhow, go do something you didn't expect you'd be able to do just to prove that you can. Take the rest of the week off if you need to, but prove it today. Set some small changes in motion. Deny the image you have of yourself in your mind. Deny it. Why? It's in your mind, it's not in the real world. Deny it. You guys didn't know who I was before I got here. I told you who I was and you believed me. And eventually it became true. Most importantly, the number one thing of all, anytime anybody asks me, what's the most important piece of advice you can give to anybody on a on any kind of journey? And it's no one ever likes the answer until, of course, they put it into practice and they execute it and they realize it was the answer all along. It is not the answer, but it is the method and and the the the platform by which all of it occurs, and that

Small Changes And Being Kind

SPEAKER_01 36:55

is to be kind to yourself. I was incredibly horrendous to myself. I said things uh to myself that I would never say out loud or that no one's ever said to me, and I never made progress that way. There are some people that'll tell you you've gotta you've gotta be tough on yourself, you've got to fight demons. And most people they don't last long. I want to last long. That's a new feeling. You be kind to yourself, and everything tends to fall into place behind it. I think that'll be it today for in moderation. Thanks for joining us very much. Follow us on all the uh the social media platforms. Check out Rob's Twitch stream. It's twitch.tv slash rob laugh em. You can find me at Mike Needs a Plan, and you can find Liam just by typing in the fucking bean guy, you'll find him. But see you guys next week. Be kind to yourself.