Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: So we have Jim Gatz here with us. Very excited to chat with you here, Jim, today and to hear more about your story.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Currently I work with numerous people, mostly high end athletes, business professionals, individuals that are very motivated and driven in order to be better versions of themselves. Currently, I'm finishing up distribution of a film that everyone will get to watch on their streaming at home called the Keto Project movie, and just recently had a number one bestselling book based on the background of that called 600 burgers in 30 days. While doing that, I continue to be as active as I can in my local community, coach youth sports and make better versions of young men, boys becoming young men, if you would, as the future of the world as well as currently I'm at. And the story of how I got there is definitely not linear, that's for sure.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: So what inspired you? What drove you to go there?
[00:01:07] Speaker B: Well, the you side kind of comes from the fact that when you eventually do have a child, for the individuals that have chosen to have children, or my wife and myself, we never chose to have any of our children. I'll just be as blunt as possible.
This happens to a lot of parents. You have very blessed accidents, and it just happened to us three times. So we've got mimosa and malibu as we kind of have fun with our nicknames of our children here. That's kind of how it finishes up here. So when I like to be very hands on, obviously, with kids, and so when our son or daughters have activities, I would like to be a part of that. I noticed in this day and age, there's a lot of people who kind of volunteer just to kind of show up, but I prefer to be active in what we do. I like to help mold the future, utilize the lessons that I've learned in life and others around me have learned in life to help avoid the same pitfalls, the same mistakes, and show the ways and the things that have actually worked, if you would. But as it comes to the more adult side, it kind of, I guess, starts way back in the day.
Kind of coming up, I guess, starting in undergrad, really. I grew up, I guess, the all american upbringing, stable household, mom, dad, sister two years younger than me, and family vacations in the summertime. We never grew up rich by any means, but we didn't grow up dead broke. I'd look in the fridge at times, my dad would be between jobs, and yeah, there's orange juice. That would be it at times. But I never really quite thought twice about that. Everyone's always very happy, very caring, very loving. And my spare time, which was frequent as a kid, I mean, what else are you going to do? Was playing baseball. I love to play baseball. That's all I did ever since I was three years old. I wanted to hit. I wanted a field. I want to be the best there was. And I love the game, and to this day, I still love the game greatly, and I want to be involved in it as much as I can at all times. So in my mind, I'm going to be a professional baseball player. And that was it. And when I eventually got to the point of going to college, I was fortunate. I had offers from a lot of schools, and it kind of came down to two. One was Arizona State, where the coach at the time told me that I could probably start as a junior. Cool. I looked at the outfield wall. I saw names like Barry Bonds, Reggie Jackson.
And then I went down to the University of Tampa, and they said, you have a chance to start as a freshman. And I said, where do I sign? So go down there, down to Tampa. And as all young men do, they tell their fathers, I'm going down for an education.
I was going down to play some baseball. Let's just face it.
Got to be in communications, to which I thought was what you do when you're done your career. So I'm being the responsible guy now, so I could be a broadcast journalist at that point. And after a few run ins with the head of the department, communication was not happening for me. So my girlfriend at the time, who was actually my wife and my roommate, who also played on the team, we were all sitting around, him and I are playing video games. She's hanging out with us as we did pretty regularly.
She said, why don't you just change majors? Like it's something simple to do, right?
So I said, you know, what in the world else am I going to do? She says, well, you like to play ball, like Duhdeh kind of majoring in that the best I can, you know, what else can I do? She says, well, you like to work out, right? Like, yeah. Do you play baseball when you're not actually, you know, on the field? So she said, well, why don't you major in that? What? Working out? I mean, that's kind of weird. She said, no, exercise science. I said, is that a real thing? I mean, you can actually major in this. She's like, yeah, you idiot. So sure enough, we walked over to the registrar's office, and she was telling the truth. There's a real degree called exercise science.
So immediately, I switched majors and fell in love with what I was doing. The human body. The human body is an amazing thing. And it was just so awesome to learn how it worked. There was a guy named Raf who was on campus, Rafael Ruiz, who is a mentor, great guy down in Tampa. If you name a top professional athlete that lives down there, he's their strength edition coach. He works with them. And so I asked him, hey, can I get an internship? And he said, no. Why not? He said, well, you don't have the experience. I said, okay, how do I get the experience? He said, go get a master's degree. I said, well, I'm only a sophomore in undergrad. He said, yeah. And so I begged him and pleaded with him day after day after day after day, you know, for the internship. And finally, I think I was annoying enough, he just laid me out the ride up. He said, fine. You want an internship, we work out at 05:00 in the morning. Means you get here at 445, be here and be ready. Bust your ass. And after that, pretty much it comes down to, and pardon my french, you're gonna be our bitch. You're gonna do all the cleaning. You're going to anything that nobody wants to do, pretty much, you're gonna do. So I said, fine. Anything you want, I will do. So he said, fine. I'm reluctant, but I will do it. Welcome aboard. So on the first day I got there, we did a workout.
Sucked, and it was different. It wasn't like the usual bodybuilding workout. You're training as an athlete, a lot of functional training, a lot of different movements, a lot of jumps. Everything that I actually needed for myself, to which I then started sharing with the rest of the team because the guys that we were working with just were not the exact same. From there, I realized that, yeah, now I'm going to smoothie king every morning, getting your smoothies. I'm doing everything for you. And it was a very humbling experience to the point of bring me an article, which was every morning an assignment, bring an article to talk about. And I was going to get, like, muscular development, flex magazine. He's like, no, these are not articles. I'm talking about research journals. So then I had to actually, at this point, which is kind of crazy. What is a research journal? I mean, just the evolution of where I'm at now to back then is far, far different. Fast forward a little bit. I go through with the internship, I keep playing ball, and my elbow then starts hurting greatly to the point that my elbow is the size of a softball every single day. So I also realized on the baseball team, back up a little bit. The University of Tampa. For the listeners and the watchers of this that don't know, we've now won nine national championships. The goal every year is you win a national championship. If you don't win, it's a failure of an entire season. So a lot of people think t shirts are cool, you know, game mode on I am the man, this and that, but those are t shirts. To be a champion year after year and compete at a champion year after year means that you've got to not only be the top of the top, you got to work harder than everybody else. It's not an easy task, I got to tell you. And we went through hell. I remember one season, we went on a seven or nine game win streak and the coach said, it's great. I'm proud of you guys. You're doing great. You got to be humbled. So therefore, you got breakfast club for everybody, which is breakfast club. It sounds really nice. Breakfast club is a punishment if you're late by 1 second, meaning if you're 15 minutes and 1 second ahead of time, you're now late. That 1 second makes you late. And they're going to be on you for that, which means get to the field, you clean up the dugout. You're going to run and sprint and run and sprint until you puke or the sun comes up, whichever is first. Now go to class. So you guys are on a win streak. Congratulations. I want to humble you guys. You're not that great. So breakfast club for all you. And this is kind of like the culture and kind of what we go through and what you learn along the way. And it was rough, but it was great. I mean, if I could do it again, I would do it in a heartbeat. I really, really would. And yeah, my dream was to be a major league baseball player whose isn't right, but writing a book right now and on baseball for athletes who are up and coming and just doing the research on that, realizing that it's not just the top 1% of the top 1%. When a youth athlete starts playing little league, there are over 3 million boys that are playing. Of those, 3,000,007 become hall of Famers. That's a huge, huge number. You've only got 600 of those guys that'll ever make the major leagues. 600 and change. The numbers are just so infinitesimal. So when you watch guys on tv, and I don't care what sport?
My gosh, the best of the best of the best who are playing at that level, who are, you know, the news and the media just pounces on them because I had a bad day or this and that. At any other level below them, they are so dominant. They are that good to suck. So those that are really good, man, they are just something else and unbelievable. And to get to be that point, it just takes work and determination. I got to tell you, at one point, I thought you could be very well balanced and still do that, and that's not the truth. That's your life. That's it. You know, you look at guys like Tom Brady, for instance. Like that. He was married to a supermodel. They had a beautiful child together, and he can't stay married. Reason being because football is number one love. So when I eventually did get married to my awesome wife, she knew that she was number two, and she's gonna be number two forever, and she was okay with that. Hence, we have a baseball family now. She's really okay with that. She loves baseball. I mean, I even walk home right now, and I know I'm going off on a tangent. I'll come back real quick here. My daughter, who is 16, walk home, and she's watching a Tampa Bay Rays game, and she's yelling at the tv and screaming at it, and it's just the way that the culture embodies itself, so it ends up becoming your life.
There is no sacrifice. People say it's a sacrifice. It's not a sacrifice. Sacrifice means doing something that you don't want to do if you're passionate and you love it. Like Wayne Gretzky would say, the story with him is that when he was. I think it was in high school, his dad would pretty much beg and plead, here's $20. Go out with your friends to the movies tonight on a Friday night. And he would say, why would I want to do that? You know, I'm doing something that I don't love to do as much as playing hockey. I'd rather be by myself playing on the pond all night than being out with my friends. And that's very true. That was the same way with myself. I would rather be playing ball during the summertime. I was able to wrangle myself a key to the field.
And when there was an off night, my then girlfriend, now wife, would say, hey, you want to go down to the fields? And it wasn't for that usual college, you know, taboo stuff. Let's go down to the fields. It's I'm going to throw you soft to us. I'm going to put balls on a tee. And we would just talk. We'd hang out, she'd put balls on tee. I had work on hitting corners. Can I hit the top right corner of the cage ten times now the bottom right corner and just work the corners?
And eventually I would, but my elbow ended up swelling up so big.
Later, I found out that I actually tore my MCL needing Tommy John's surgery. Nobody diagnosed it back then, so I ended up being on seven aleve, four tylenol, multiple times a day, every day. Yeah, I see your face there, Jordan. It's not healthy for a liver or kidneys or anything. No, it is not. But they did that just so I could stay in. And the way I got my starting spot in college was because during pre season, the guy that was six foot, 4225 pounds, way bigger than me, could hit the ball way farther than me, smacked a ball off the outfield wall in a scrimmage and came around first base, pulled up lame, his hamstring was pulled, and I now am the starter.
So I knew if I sat just for one moment, one day, somebody's breathing down my neck, they're gonna take that starting spot. And that is so true in life. We all think that we're the greatest, we're the best, we're not. Everybody is really equal, and there's always somebody else out there that wants it just as much as you or more, and they may be just as talented or one step below us, and they're gonna take our spot. So I stuck with it and stuck with it. Earned myself a spot on the national baseball team. And I just couldn't throw. I couldn't throw the ball anymore, and it sucked. So, unfortunately, I didn't get picked up by any major league teams here. I had a lot of offers across Europe and saw the pay over there of $800 a month and said, after college, okay, now, how would I stay in the game? What else can I do? So I was still in strength conditioning at that point. I was at the University of South Florida working under Ron Kiefre, who is my second and another true mentor to myself. We still remain in touch to this day. He's actually in the Kedu project film, very kind enough to be a part of it. He's now at the University of Alabama, at the football team there as strength edition coach and special assistant to the head coach. But he gave me an opportunity at the university of South Florida to be a strength edition coach, which I forever indebted and forever grateful we were you. We finally got to number two in the nation until we came up to Rutgers and got knocked off on one fateful night. Unfortunately, coach Levitt, who was the head coach at the time, he was like Bobby Knight in basketball, the football. He was a huge disciplinarian. And unfortunately, a young man got out of line, and it was dealt with in a manner that was not kosher in this day and age anymore. So, unfortunately, coach Levitt was unceremoniously let go of his position. University of South Florida has never been where they are, where they were back in the day, I should say, unfortunately. And he's been floating around the NFL, but never got the position that he should. He definitely deserves a head coaching position somewhere. He is an amazing coach, and from there, coach Mack. He has a lot of connections through all of athletics just because of the integral part. He is a strength conditioning coach in both collegiate and professional athletics to this day. He got me a lot of interviews in major League baseball, which he knew was my dream. I wanted to be in baseball. I had opportunities with the Yankees, the Rays, the Orioles. It really came down to the Colorado Rockies and the Toronto Blue Jays.
The Rockies, obviously are out. You guys are. And the Blue Jays were on the east coast. They were already down in Florida, in Dunedin, and I thought, good opportunity. Let me stay on the east coast. I should have went to Colorado. It was just a bad situation. A team that did not want to win at the time, they still don't really want to win. They never really wanted to win. They take their top ball players, they ship them off once. They want their maximum contract values. It's very frustrating because they have good talent, they've got good coaching, and they just get rid of them eventually. I couldn't take it anymore and I resigned. I should not have, but I did. So then what am I going to do at this point? All right, let me work with some of the guys on the side, like raph does. As I brought up earlier, I did. You know what? You can't make a living working with professional athletes. There's not enough in the area, not enough guys in the area. So then you got to work with the general public on top of that. And I couldn't really take the general public. It's a different mindset. On one end. You got people that simply just want to lose a couple pounds and you say, why? I don't know. I just want to be healthier. You know, what is health? It means it's the absence of disease. So you want to be better than not having something that wasn't diagnosed. At this point, it didn't make sense.
So I kept on reading and reading and reading medical books. No reason. It was just interesting. You know, some people want to read Harry Potter. I wanted to read Ray's anatomy. It's just what does it for us, right? What's the most interesting? So what's the best choice? Let me go get a license to be a mortgage broker. Let me go get a license to be a correspondent lender. Let me get a finance. Let me, at this point, also get into, what else was I getting into at that point? Everything that I didn't resonate with is really what I got into. I did end up finding and getting very creative. I started a bank in Belize that did pretty good. I started a lot of asset protection services for individuals, a lot of investment vehicles that are not offered here in the United States, that I was a gift for people down there. And then I started getting some ideas of grandeur of, you know what, let me be president of the United States. How would I do that? Let me start local. So down in Florida, Marco Rubio, the senator right now who had been presidential candidate, he was at the state senate level, and I knew he was going to be leaving. He wanted bigger things. So if I could run and get in for two terms at the local level down in Florida, his speed would be open at that point. At that time also was a high speed rail that was being built from Jacksonville to Miami, and it was also connecting over across the state to Tampa, cutting right through Orlando. So I thought, you know what? The Tampa Bay Rays need a new stadium. They have nobody going over there to St. Pete. What if I moved it closer to Orlando? Now you get the high speed rail. You get everyone from Tampa, you get it from Orlando going in. You could jet up from Miami. If you really wanted to take a couple hours to come to a game, this could actually work. How do I do this? So I started looking into it and I started campaigning. And at that time, a buddy of mine named Brent, he was a teacher, the wrestling coach over at high school, and love talking about him, how he had his cup in the WWE for 2 seconds. There's one rule, and again, a little quick tangent just for fun here. There's one rule in the WWE back in the day, and that is do not hit on the boss's daughter. What did he do? He hit on Stephanie McMahon on the first week. So that's why he only had a cup of coffee there. But regardless, him and I became buddies, and he said, hey, can you help me coach the wrestling team? I said, I have no wrestling experience. I said, that's great. I don't need you for wrestling experience. I want you strength conditioning experience. I want this team to be the best shaped team in the entire state. I said, done. So I went over there and we took a bunch of boys. That or young men. I mean, they're kids in high school. They had not much experience. I gotta say, they sucked. Nobody had a winning record. They were all failing out of school. This was more of an inner city school, too. So they're having troubles with the law. Lo and behold, after the first year, we had multiple state qualifiers. Everybody's on the honor roll. One young man who had a very terrible record in his freshman year, he goes to state, he becomes one of the top guys in the state. He becomes a national champion. He ends up being prom queen. We changed the team around. We changed the school around. We changed the culture around. It was amazing. It felt great.
These guys were my boots on the ground for the political campaign also that came to follow. I ran against an incumbent who had been there for a couple terms. We were winning. We were winning good. We were winning big.
And here's where my life and the fun story starts changing here. Finance, politics. What do you think happens to a guy like that? Nothing good. Especially a 27 year old at the time who is in now way over his head. I'm dealing with political figures that are powerful. I'm dealing in finance, with money. And remember, I have no financial background. My background is in baseball and strength conditioning and coaching. So best way to put it, those investments that I made, I also made them myself and others that got tied in with them. But when the money passes through somebody's hands, whether you take it or not, they pass through your hands. I promise. I never meant ill will towards anybody, but money was lost. And through no fault of my own, money was still lost on my watch. The interesting day was, I'm working. I'm on the phone with somebody and start noticing people walking across the front lawn, and they're wearing jackets and they've got letters on them. Go ahead, pick. Pick a three letter organization with the United States. Anyone. They were there that day. So I called my wife and say, we have some problems. She's like, what? I'm like, they're at the door. I did not see it coming at all. I really did not. So we got the FBI, we got the IR's. We've got.
They all came that day. At that point, I was lost. Now we got news vans puddling up because I'm now a political candidate. CB's is out there. I'm now lost. What the crap is happening? Oh, my God. I couldn't believe it. They trashed my home. Absolutely. You name it. Plates broken. Don't think they come in and they're nice to you. They're not. Fortunately, there was two guys who were actually the leads I had. One guy was a Detroit Tigers fan and the other guy, if I remember right, was a Kansas City Royals fan. They were okay. And to this day, I could actually thank them. At the end, I did. We talked baseball and they kept shaking their heads and they kept apologizing the entire time. They kept saying, I don't want to do this. You are a good guy. We get it. Fortunately, ignorance of the law does not excuse you from the law.
I said, I promise I have no idea what you guys are talking about. So educate me and let me learn at least. So they did. And I learned a lot that day. And I learned some of the things that had happened and gone on that I should have known better on. And I just.
I'm 27 and it's no excuse. So it's a hard lesson very fast. So at that point, everybody that I ever knew, except for my immediate family, they peaced out on me. I'm now a dangerous person. They're terrified of me. I might as well be a serial killer. I'm now alone. I'm now drinking a bottle. You can see my hands here. Biggest bottle you can of gin, vodka, whatever. Get my hands on. Every single day, I'm blowing up. I am in a corner. I have anxiety and fear that they're coming to get me. And the next day comes, same thing, you know, enough days go by, no one comes to get you. You start to wonder if they're coming to get you. It was so bad, though. My parents said, you guys want to come live with us? We know you're going through a tough time.
We weren't in a financial crisis at the time, other than the fact that I had lost myself, probably half a million dollars in my own money in this investment. The others that lost their money, if people after this point want to go look at the newspapers, didn't lose as much as that. I lost more money than anybody else in this whole thing. But again, it came through me. And my bad is my watch. So I take responsibility for that aspect of it. So we packed up and we left. We left Florida. And we're actually looking to move back at this point, miss it very, very much. So we left, and we left for the reason that during the meantime, I had a pinch nerf, as they call it. It's the layman's term for it, up in my left upper trap. And a girl that I had known said, go see Doctor Shaker. Doctor Shaker is, go figure, the doctor of chiropractic down in Tampa. That again, if you're a professional athlete, he's your guy. He knows techniques that'll people get on chiropractors and call them chiropractors and forget that they're actually doctors because of how the majority of doctors of chiropractic unfortunately practice. He practices like a top level physician. People talk about Doctor James Andrews as their top orthopedist down in Alabama that everyone goes to see for surgery. Doctor Shaker is the top doctor chiropractor that you want coming with you and traveling with you because he's going to keep you on the field and healthy at all times. Again, quick little tangent. There's a running back, I'll say, work done that played for Tampa Bay Buccaneers the year the Tampa Bay Bucks won the Super bowl in 2003. He should not have been on the field. Doctor Shaker kept him on the field. After the season, he went and got surgery. His goal was to win the Super bowl. They had a good team that year. Most doctors have said, you're out. That's the best thing for you. But when an athlete has a goal and an athlete makes a living off of hitting his goals, and his next contract is, well, back then it was seven digits. Now it's eight to nine digits. Then you got to keep him out there. And that's what doctor Shaker did, and he's very good at it. Well, after he fixed me, I went to pay the bill. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I went to pay the bill. He said, you free right now? I'm like, yeah, I get a little time. Come on, don't worry about the bill. He sat me down in his office like a high school principal does to a student and says, you look bored. I am bored. He said, you need more than being a strength conditioning coach. Have you ever thought about becoming a chiropractor? I'm like, I never have. I mean, my dad is bad mouth chiropractors my entire life. They're quacks, right? But you just fixed me in one visit, and I see your walls. Pick a pro athlete down there, professional wrestler and a musician, and you got pictures of them all over your wall. You know, what do you do? So we talked for an hour, just a heart to heart talk. I left there, and I started looking at schools, and I applied to a couple schools, and one that stood out was the University of Bridgeport College of Chiropractic up in Connecticut. It was very medically oriented. However, it's also very biomechanically oriented and really treats the source as opposed to, here's another pill. I applied. They called me and invited me for an interview. I went, and they accepted me. Yay. I've got direction. The direction I wish I had done first, nonetheless. So I went up, moved back up to New Jersey, brought my family. They stayed with my family while I went to Bridgeport. I stayed in Fairfield for four years, and I thought I worked hard playing baseball. Oh, my God. It's like you take a fire hydrant, you open it up, and here's knowledge and information. And instead of saying, you know, learn as much of this as you can. Don't spill one drug. You better damn well know all this, because someone's life could be on the line down the road. So I meticulously studied, and on my first test in the cadaver lab, which is the anatomy to golf part of the course, I got a 47. I think my next test was the 59. It's, like, quick timeout.
You've gotten this far in life.
You're about to fail out of the only other thing that you know what to do right now. You've got all this legal stuff that you're hoping people kind of forgot about, but, you know is still going on right now. You better figure this out quick. So I figured out. And then I started doing better. I learned how to study. For the first time in my entire life, I actually embodied what I was doing. I became what I was doing down to the point of, I'm now going to the cadaver lab at 10:00 at night, looking in the bodies, cutting the different areas of the bodies, doing the different studying. And I'm going to tell you, you jest and joke about things that you'd hear at a cadaver lab at those hours is true. There are creaks, there's sounds, there's noises that are insane at that time. It's freaky, but, okay, let's play with the ghosts or fail out and let your family down. And nothing wrong with becoming a trash man, but that's what you can do for the rest of your life, and you can't support a family and the wife that supported you and that you met very young on an undergrad every step of the way. She can leave you, too. I mean, that's just inevitable at this point. Get your act together, man. So I did. I gotta tell you, every day, I was afraid. I was fearful someone's coming to get me. I got up super early in the morning because. Why? They probably know where I live. Let me get out of the house. Let me get my workout in now. All right? They won't get me here. And if they do, you know what? Everyone else here's probably gone away, too. Right? Um. And then the most terrifying part was in class. I always thought someone was coming to get me in class, and I was terrified. I did my best, and I focused. I made some, what I thought was friends at the time, colleagues at the time, and went through year by year. And I get better every year until I got to be in my final semester. Doctor Terry, my clinician, who's still to this day, she's like my big sister. I love her. She's great in every way. I'll do my best not to tear up. She's just. I can't say enough great things about doctor Terry. She's the only person who's stuck in my corner. At first, she didn't want me because she had seen newspaper articles, and she thought I would be disruptive again. That whole stereotype of an axe murderer. Right? I'm an awful person. She actually got to know me, and I'm one of the few individuals, I think, to this day, that she actually got to work with every single day that we still keep in touch. I'll support her forever and ever, and she supported me. We got to the point where I was the only student doctor who was seeing multiple patients at the same time. By the same time. I mean, it's 10:00 in the morning. You've got four people to see, and they've all got a 10:00 a.m. go. She gave me the most complicated cases as well, and I would make sure she was a New England Patriots fan. Tom Brady was playing quarterback at the time, so I'd make sure that I would put a big photo of Eli Manning, the giant at the time, who she loathed, on the back of her chair. So every time she spun around in her chair, wouldn't see it. I would throw pencils up in the ceiling, not tell her. I mean, I played all the different practical jokes that would screw with her and had a good time with it, and, you know, kind of made medicine fun if you would, because at the end of the day, it was about the patient. But who said you can't have fun in the process? Feds finally came and got me. We had three weeks to go until my case had the statute of limitations dismissed. They dusted off an old file, said, we have to go get you. They did, and they embarrassed the sh bleep bleep out of me in front of everybody. They couldn't have just come to my house. They could have made a phone call. Before that. I went and got a high price attorney and Manhattan Arne Chris, if there's a murder, he will get you out of it. Financial case? I'll get to that in a second. But he said, please, can we do this with dignity? If you want to get him, for some reason, first and foremost, let us cooperate the best we can. And if you want to get him, just phone call and we'll turn ourselves in. I was a political candidate. They had to make a spectacle of me. So they did. Right on campus, right in front of the building, before I was going into class in the afternoon, they came and got me, cuffed me. They started yelling at me and berating me in every single way. There is not one thing I can possibly say about any federal agency out there. They trash my home. They embarrass me in front of everybody. They curse at me. When it eventually did go away, they beat me. What we see in the news is not real. What we see in the news is something placated to make everybody feel nice and safe.
They hurt me. They hurt my family greatly. It is very painful. So much that. Well, I'll get to that in a second. So they take me away. I go home.
Tears.
I cried the entire way home.
I took Friday off from class. I didn't want to, but I couldn't show up. I showed up Monday. And I remember first class, 08:00 a.m. was adjusting class. Couldn't physically do it. One of my classmates who saw what happened, Natalia, bless her heart, she was cool about it. She just let me be the patient the entire time because I couldn't turn over, bawling my eyes out quietly for 2 hours in class. She just kept pretending to do justice on me the whole time. Thank her greatly for it. One of my roommates at the time, Mike Ingui, good dude.
His first thing was, let's go to Pepe's. Pepe's up in Connecticut is a coal fired pizza place. Let's go hang out. So every Friday, him and I made a tradition. He helped me get through it. We would go to five guys burgers, and we'd have a burger together. We both also were getting into. We were running Amazon businesses at the time to get by with some extra money. He was. His dad used to own Arizona jeans company, which kind of helped. So they started a yoga brand company. He had all those connections in China.
And I was running a baby soap company because, well, at this point, I had a baby. So we had a lot in common on that point. Fast forward a little bit. I went to finish, and the head of the department over in the clinic, him and doctor Terry got together, and they said, now they want to kick you out of school and you finish all your requirements before anybody else. Let me sign off on everything now, like, the crap is going on, okay? So I went up, we signed off on everything, said, good, you're done. You've got all your stuff done. Technically, you don't have to show up anymore. You can if you want. So I did. I showed up every day. I had my patience, and that kind of got me through everything. Just keep my mind on it working, because now I'm preparing for a federal case, literally. So I had a choice to fight it. But the federal government gets 99% of people. They build a case. You can't win. You just can't.
They have this thing called conspiracy, which, thankfully, didn't throw on me. If anyone gets caught with conspiracy, it means that you. We don't have enough on you to get you for anything, so we'll throw a conspiracy. So, therefore, if we think that you may have at one point been thinking about or planning it, we got you the same way as if you actually did it, we kind of looking at it, it was almost inevitable that while there was a hope that I might just get some probation slap on the wrist. First time you were 27. They weren't doing that. They were going for the max. They were going for, like, 20 years. What the crap? Based, though, on the financial amount, it was going to be a little over two and a half years would be the absolute max. They thought I'd probably get like, a year and a day, which meant, like, seven months. All right, that sucks. Excuse me? Nine months again sucks. It's the term of a baby. The school eventually tried to kick me out. I went after them when I got out for that, to get my degree, because I earned it greatly and, you know, paid how much money I paid for all that education, too. They took every single penny of it, but everybody turned their back. Every classmate turned their back. Mike Ingui, he turned his back. Everybody except for one roommate who works with me now, doctor Mike Brandon, he never turns back on me, not once. So I've got my wife, my kids, my parents, and doctor Mike there. They're the only people that stayed in my life. Everybody else leaves you no matter. No matter what. I mean, I had an entire church that left me, and we were active there. We started the softball program. We did so much there had so many friends. My little man's godparents, they left, totally left, because, again, I'm now an axe murderer, right? I take a deal so I don't get the absolute, you know, 20 years. So I went there. I was called to court for the sentencing. I got the most I could throw at me. I got two years. And, well, pretty much two and a half years they gave me, and they let me walk out. And then I found out that the day I had to go in was a week before Christmas. They didn't have to do that, but they did. So I went in to at that time and, yeah, talk about fear. Holy geez. Fear. I'm now in with gangbangers and a lot of drug dealers and murderers that have worked their way down. They were there, too, and just fighting every day. It was a fight for my life. Going to the positive aspects. I met billionaires, I met Fortune 500 CEO's, and that's where my company kind of came from. Not kind of. My company straight up came from there. I wrote a book there. I built my company talking with financial and corporate gurus, and that's a lot of where I got today. Alberto Velour was a billionaire. He's passed away since. I actually shed tears when I found out it was passing. He taught me spanish, actual written Spanish. Chris Finazo. These guys are vilified. But when you get to know these people as humans, they're like everybody else. They have fears, they have joys. They're not bad people when it comes into business. I met with somebody earlier today. We're talking business. And he even said, nobody needs to know about the invoices I've deleted.
People play the gray area. People play the dark area all the time. Does it make it right? No, but that's the way the world. It's how people get to certain ways where people get to it just. It really is sad, but true. Fast forward. I had a congressman who was beaten with a lock and a sock. I overcame a gangbanger from Cali. There's this nickname, Callie, if you're not his color. Unfortunately, you're not good people. This is what I dealt with on a daily basis. And, yeah, my first day, I was walking to the cafeteria. A guard took a look at me. I went to grab the door. My hand was in. Slams on the door. Slams my hand in the door, blood everywhere. He's laughing at me. You know, these are not good people.
I learned a lot. You know, I. Obviously, I failed somewhere, and I needed to fail forward at this point, so I came home. You have to go to a halfway house. But I was able to go home home. But you have to have a job. They want you. And I talked about they. The federal government, the halfway house. They. You have to actually. When you go to a job interview, you have to place a call on a landline from the location just to prove that you're actually there when you leave, you have to place a phone call on a landline from that location to say that you're leaving, going home. Then you get home. You have to place a call from your home. They want to track you everywhere. Who's going to hire you? Nobody. Nobody wants somebody like that. So the halfway house was threatening at that point. I was going on six to seven interviews every single day at this point. Now, if you look at my resume, I should get a job anywhere.
I'm going to jobs like the vitamin shop, GNC, the mole, janitorial jobs, anything I can do. Nobody wants to hire me now because I'm a convicted felon. So I found an attorney to take me in to do some financial forensic accounting. I don't know. This is why I'm in trouble in the first place. So I start going through his books and doing that kind of stuff. Then he starts realizing that to pay payroll, it's going to cost him money for taxes and this and that. So I end up paying the guy $260 a week to hire me. So money's coming out of my pocket just so the halfway house is a piece. Now. Some guy comes and checks on me, I'm there. So it's now costing me over a month just to stay out of prison. Finally, thank God that is over.
I could go on. I mean, we could have an entire series of podcasts just based on those experiences alone. I promise you.
Now I'm in the real world. I get a job at a local gym. They hire me as a training manager. And they were, of course, cautious at first. I was almost, like, on a double secret probation, but because of my background, and again, they took the time to get to know me and because they took the time to get to know me, they gave me an opportunity.
Within a few months, I rose to the top and I started being the top producer. And I give them a lot of appreciation. I thank a lot for the opportunity there because it helped me create my stash again, to be able to create my company function us, which is a complete healthcare company, anti aging. And we do science. It's really what we do. It's all science. That's what we do. So then I started getting up earlier so I could, before I went to work at the gym, I would go into the office that I now got an office space for at my lunch break. It was an hour away. I had to finagle it. And I gotta admit it, the love here and this here, if they ever listen back on it, that I was figuring out ways to massage, maneuver to go see people at my lunch break and then head back. I was an hour and a half late every day. But no one knew it at the time. I had people covered for me and they knew what I was doing. And then I would jet out after hours to go back and start seeing people again. Then I brought on one of my roommates, Doctor Mike, now, who's been around forever. He's family. I was just in his wedding over in February.
And then my wife, who became a psychologist, she came on over. And then we needed bigger space. And then I was able to resign. And now what do we do? We're growing. We're growing the community. My other experiences, like the business association, they liked me. They wanted me on their board. And a month later, I was blackmailed to be off the border, where they grew my company. Yeah, because of the background, I got into the baseball league, and the team had never been to the playoffs. Now we're not only making the playoffs, we're winning the games in the playoffs. The kids are doing well. We got to start googling. And guess what? We don't want you around anymore. So I'm starting to quickly realize the better I do, the less people want me around. So that's been a great struggle, I gotta say, even to this day, it's a great struggle.
I'm actually being kicked out of a Latip group right now because of that. Which they never actually asked for in the beginning. They never said, you need to read this section of the bylaws, to which we just changed six times in the last year to reflect this, to get you out. These are the struggles that I do go through every single day. But I can't stop living.
So, like, during the COVID era, people are shutting down. And I found the loophole to stay open. People need healthcare, so we stayed open. We want to treat people. We were not scared of it. We did the science. We know that we're not going to die from it ourselves, so we're good with that.
Our business actually thrived because people had nowhere else to go during that time.
So I thought to myself, what can I do? Put some in bucket list, climb out Everest? Okay. I want to wait and do that with my son when he gets old enough. One day. I want to make a movie. I want to do that back in undergrad. So I created a movie called the Keto Project movie. I called all my colleagues and said, guess what I'm doing.
I'm gonna feed my buddy here, doctor Mike, 600 burgers, which we calculated as the caloric equivalent of what he needed every day to survive. We're not changing anything in his life, just his diet.
So we took a group of individuals from our lab and we sat them down and did a double blind taste test of no burgers. Excuse me? Burgers, no patties, no condiments.
What is the best tasting burger in America?
It was unanimous. It was Burger King. So we took his caloric requirements and he ate 20 burgers a day, living his life drinking only water, and let's see what happens.
He almost died.
He really did. His testosterone was a 16, I think was the number. His testosterone now is at 600 and something. One night when it got really bad, he was sleeping over our house and he fell over on the couch, and I thought, okay. I said, dude, you falling asleep? You want me to go to bed? He said, no, I fell over. I can't get up. Can you help me? It was legit. He's very hardcore.
He actually has his first boxing match come up that he'd been training for a year and a half on in two weeks in Atlantic City. He's a hardcore guy, and for him to say, I can't get up, that's something. It was a fun movie. We did it. It'll be out around November. So what else can I do? Let me write a book. What else can I get invited to do in the community? So really it has become, at this point, getting out there, doing podcasts, writing books, making this movie, seeing as many people as possible, making positive impacts and influences the best way possible. That's what I've been living my life as, really. And I guess the big point of the story here is, you know, there's a lot of discrimination that goes against people.
We are all equal. I don't care who you are. I don't care who your background people say, we're all born this naked, we all die naked. It's true. I don't care if you are a billionaire, who's a celebrity, or if you're dead broke, living under a bridge. We breathe the same.
We all eat who we all feel. Nothing is different about us other than the situations that we have put ourselves, found ourselves in. I go through these struggles every single day.
Great deals of anxiety. I have PTSD from the experience that I went through. I actually started seeing somebody for that. Who? Gina? He's awesome. I appreciate him and the ways to refocus and reshape things. I don't be a victim of anything. I wish I could obviously have followed through and become a professional ballplayer. Ended up coaching, was wonderful. Now I get to be a part of helping people live better lives, helping people overcome illnesses, overcome diseases, positively impacting lives and families lives. And, you know, hopefully through my experiences, which are neither good nor bad, they just are. Hopefully I can help positively shape and impact others along the way through my experiences, through their own, so they can avoid the same pitfalls that I've avoided, find the same positive paths that I found, and find their own way along the way in their own journeys, and hopefully one day do the same for others. So, I guess, long story long, obviously, I could go through tangent upon tangent of stories along the way there. That's the story of how I've got to be sitting in front of you right now.
[00:46:25] Speaker A: Jordan, wow, that is an incredible story. I just want to take a minute to thank you for sharing that, you know, incredible level of vulnerability and just the ups and downs that I feel like I just went through with you.
Like, emotional. Like.
[00:46:49] Speaker B: I'll admit right now I've gotten, you know, in the back of my eyes, I'm. I feel it. I do.
[00:46:53] Speaker A: I love, you know, what. What you mentioned that everyone is. Is equal and everyone's the same, and it's, you know, very easy to look at someone and say, this is what they did, this is their situation, and, you know, they're bad. And to completely vilify right people, it's easier to be black and white than it is to see in shades of gray where we all have good things and bad things about us that have happened to us. And it sounds like that's been another big lesson that you've learned throughout your time.
[00:47:22] Speaker B: Absolutely. I mean, it's the toughest thing in the world to look in the mirror and see what's staring back. And so if we don't look in the mirror and actually see what's staring back, then we're perfect, and we can say and do anything we want. But when we really take a hard look inside ourselves, we may find some things that we don't really like.
It's like I tell every athlete that I ever meet with after every session, is, what is one good thing that you think you did well today and then one thing you need to work on. And it's that second part that's the toughest part. Pick out the part that you suck at. Now go work on that and become really good at that. You know, if we can start doing that, I think this entire world would be a lot different. We'd be a lot further along in a lot healthier manner. Not healthier, like, we're not coughing and sneezing, but from a mental aspect and from a progressive aspect. And how we treat each other as humans, that really comes down to is how do we treat each other as humans? And, you know, we're one species. If an alien life form comes out, like an independence day or something like that, and starts attacking us, well, why do we only unite then? Why can't we unite now? I think, you know, singing Kumbaya sounds like an ideal world, but I think we definitely a lot more, a lot less deaths in this world, a lot less violence in this world. A lot more good times between people.
[00:48:42] Speaker A: Yeah. Kindness is an underappreciated and undervalued contributor to society, which it seems often is decreasing more and more over time, which has a real. It has a real impact. Right. I mean, people are incredibly lonely. People feel very alienated, I think, on all sides, which is, which is, you know, it makes things difficult. It makes being a human difficult.
[00:49:09] Speaker B: Thousand percent. Absolutely.
[00:49:11] Speaker A: Yeah. If you could give any piece of advice to your younger self, what would it be?
[00:49:18] Speaker B: You know, irony on this one is a quote that I would give to my younger self from a man who hurt me greatly and kind of put me into that situation.
Don't let your feet walk you into a room that your mind's not ready to be in. I got myself into many situations that I was not educated enough via books and or street smarts, and I got myself into a lot of situations like that with a lot of people that had a lot more experience than me. I just wasn't ready to be there. So before we get into situations and our ideas of grandeur, which grandeur and ideas like that. Anybody can do things that they want in this world, but you got to be ready for it. You got to embrace it. You got to research it. You got to become it and be a master and expert at it. And until you're there, the whole idea of don't fake it till you make it is not a good idea. Really embrace who you are and what you're becoming. I tell young men all the time when we're working on hitting that, don't just take what I say and just think it's going to happen. Embrace it. Be that hitter, be the ballplayer that you want to be. Be the whoever it is and whatever it is that you have a passion about.
Be that. Don't just think it's going to happen. You're not going to wake up to tomorrow and be in the National Football League. You've got to get up every day. You got to grind. You got to take the hits. You got to hit. You got to go through all that and love it and be better at that and do it because you want to do that. And when you do that, yeah, then you can become senator. Then you can work your way up there. Maybe you become president of the United States one day. If you decide that's who you want to be, you can be a professional athlete. You can be a health professional. I mean, name the profession you want to be. You can be that. Be in that situation, mom, daddy, whatever it is that you want to be and do, but don't take it lightly. You really have to encapsulate that and follow it with a passion, then, yeah. You can be excellent at that, for sure.
[00:51:11] Speaker A: Well, I can't think of a better way to end the interview. Thank you for sharing that. I love that.
[00:51:16] Speaker B: My absolute pleasure. Thank you, Jordan, so much for having me. I really appreciate being here.
[00:51:20] Speaker A: Likewise. It's been incredible to hear your story today, and I know that the audience will enjoy it as much as I have. So thanks again for being willing to share.
[00:51:29] Speaker B: My pleasure. Hopefully your audience gets something from it and walks out just a little bit better than they did before they heard it.
[00:51:36] Speaker A: I certainly think so.
[00:51:37] Speaker B: Thank you so much, Jordan.
