Mark Bell's Power Project - How Hostage Tape Became A UFC Partner And Multi Million Dollar Brand - Alex Neist || MBPP Ep. 1103

Episode Date: September 30, 2024

In Episode 1103, Alex Neist, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about how Hostage Tape went from a simply idea to a multi million dollar brand and The Official Sleep Aid of the UFC. Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐 ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to get Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   Follow Hostage Tape on IG: https://www.instagram.com/hostagetape/   Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below!   🥜 Protect Your Nuts With Organic Underwear 🥜 ➢https://nadsunder.com/ Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 15% off your order!   🍆  Natural Sexual Performance Booster 🍆 ➢https://usejoymode.com/discount/POWERPROJECT Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!   🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎 ➢https://emr-tek.com/ Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!   👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶 ➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject   🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!   🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!   Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐 ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained:      ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Become a Stronger Human - https://thestrongerhuman.store ➢ UNTAPPED Program - https://shor.by/JoinUNTAPPED ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Podcast Courses and Free Guides: https://pursuepodcasting.com/iamandrewz ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz/ ➢ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

The whole time I'm thinking like, there's just no way this is gonna happen. We are the official sleep aid of the UFC. You had a product that absolutely worked. It was what we call product market fit, where it checks all these boxes, it solves a problem, cheap to make, it ships really easily, it's small,

it's a daily consumable, and the branding. For anybody out there that wants to start a business, solving a problem is one of the best things you can do. What do you think was the thing that allowed you to scale the business? When you're putting money in and you can scale and reach people, the best way to do that on social. I mean, I spent a million dollars on ads in one month and Facebook, like that's wild,

but you're going to get your money back if you do it right. Where'd you start though? You can do like $50. Yeah. And most people do. If you want to start a business, learn how to run Facebook ads. It's a valuable skill. You sell tape and then you learn from some dude that you never met via YouTube. You punch a bunch of buttons into a computer and the next thing you know, you're doing stuff with UFC and all that crazy stuff. If you guys have been enjoying the content we've been bringing here on the

Power Project, consider leaving us a review on Spotify and Apple. We've had podcasts with people from Functional Patterns to Ben Patrick to Jack Cruz, who roasted us on air, but we did that for you to bring you some of the best information in fitness. We're learning along with you and leaving a review with how you dig the podcast is really gonna be something that helps the podcast move forward.

So if you can, leave us a review there and enjoy the rest of the show. What was that shot that you had? What are your shots? Oh yeah, like a mind bullet. Fucking mind bullets. and enjoy the rest of the show. What was that shot that you had? What are your shots? Oh yeah, like a mind bullet. Fucking mind bullets. I was gonna tell your guy, definitely give me a mind, no.

Oh, you don't want to? That stuff was so wild. I still have. It's a good ride. I still have, because when I left, Nseema pulled me into your office. He's like, here, take some. And he gave me like a dozen of them.

So I've still got half of them on my desk at home. That's great. Every time I take it, I feel like I'm taking it narcotic. I love it. I literally feel like I'm on drugs. We got Alex Niest on the show today. He's talking about some mind bullet that he was- Mind bullet, baby.

Last time he was here. Since last time you were here, your company's really blown up and I think it'd be really valuable to the audience to get the lowdown on what's going on with Hostage Tape, this mouth tape stuff you just put on your mouth, you got tape on your nose, you got a couple of these other items here.

But sounds like a stupid idea, sounds like a small, simple little thing, but turned into something pretty cool. I mean, who'da thunk that I would've turned a mouth tape brand into an eight figure brand in two and a half, three years, right? It's wild. And on top of it, we are the official sleep aid of the UFC,

which is a story that we'll get into and we can talk some, we can swap some Dana White stories here, but it's wild, man. Like, I mean, most people, again, maybe people still haven't heard of Mounta, but it's crazy. Like, when you think about it, it solves a very specific problem. And I think we just tapped into this idea

of this problem that it solves, and then using really polarizing great branding. My business partner, Ben, did a phenomenal job of creating this brand, much like Liquideath. Very polarizing, very, very, it's gonna catch your eye. I mean, look, you're scrolling on Instagram, you're scrolling on Facebook, and you see hostage come across it,

you're not gonna look away, and you're gonna always remember it. The amount of people that I get that stop me in an airport or in the store, because I'm always branded, they'll say, oh, do you work for Hossage Tape? And I'm like, well, I'm actually the founder. People just don't forget that name.

So you got a bunch of stuff with you at all times, pulling it out of your pocket, your backpack. So we've got these sample packs that have sample maltape and no-strip in it, and I've always got yeah, so we've got these sample packs that have sample mouth tape and nose strips in it and I've always got them in my pocket. Because everywhere we go, right? I get people that ask me or talk to me and they want to try a sample.

And then I'm like, here you go. I think people know about the nose tape. I think it's pretty obvious. It just kind of pinches the nose a little bit together and maybe helps the nose open up a little bit, right? But when it comes to the mouth tape, why do you think this has been something that has caught on? And what are some things that,

seems like people are real worried about it. They're like, I don't wanna tape my mouth shut. Well, it's definitely, it looks really weird, right? I mean, you put tape on your mouth, it looks asinine, It looks crazy, right? And I think this concept of mouth taping in Western society is a bit foreign and weird that we lost, right?

Like, we've been athletes our whole lives, right? All of us, right? I was a football player, you were a soccer player, I think you were a football player too, right? Did any of our coaches ever teach us the importance of nasal breathing and mouth breathing? No. Nope. I heard about it like in the last like five, six years probably.

Never, right? Which I think is fascinating. And so I think we've lost it in this culture. We've lost this idea of what nose breathing means and why we should be doing it, why we shouldn't be mouth breathing. And so when you take a brand like ours and then you spend as much as we've spent on marketing and you get it out there, right, for people to see it, and people start to pay attention to it, it's just crazy, it's weird, it's strange, right? So, yeah.

What does taping the mouth do? So at its core, taping your mouth and keep your mouth shut so you're breathing through your nose. And we're talking about primarily taping your mouth for sleep. Right, primarily, right, you're taping your mouth for sleep, and so here's kind of the simple signs

behind it, right? Because people always think taping your mouth shut, breathing through your nose, what the hell does it matter? Like, what is the air coming in through my nose? Why is it different than it coming in through my mouth? So it really comes down to this. So when you breathe through your nose, you're actually getting more oxygen.

You're getting almost up to 20% more oxygen, right? And it comes down to a scientific principle called the Bohr effect, right? I'm gonna bore you with the Bohr effect, okay? So what this says is that there is a relationship of CO2 and oxygen. So when we take in oxygen, there's a one for one exchange. So one oxygen comes in, one CO2 goes out.

So what that means is our body has to have CO2 in order for us to use oxygen. So the Bohr effect says the more CO2 that I have in my body, the more oxygen I can pull into my muscles and use for energy, real simple. So when we mouth breathe, we're exhaling more CO2 than we should be, so that we don't have as much to be able to pull all the oxygen in.

So that's really one of the simplest reasons why you're getting more oxygen uptake throughout your body because you're nasal breathing. Now another one is this idea of when you breathe through your nose, you're triggering the release of nitric oxide. And nitric oxide's actually a vasodilator that opens up the blood vessels,

it encourages the blood flow and that oxygen then to move throughout your body. It also does some things like it helps you feel calm, makes you feel good. It also is one of those things that helps us get our dick hard too. And that chick ox that, yeah. Actually, wear your hostage tape

and you'll be able to get your dick up. You'll breathe slower. And you know, breathing like that's no good for you. We should. One of the coolest things though that I've heard from multiple people now, Alan Belcher has mentioned this before and even some few people I know at Jiu Jitsu, because a lot of people have a tendency to breathe through their mouth. Some people say it's hard for me to breathe through my nose.

It's something that it's hard for me to do because Alan, for example, I think he actually had a deviated symptom. He had an injury in a fight, but he mentioned as he started to force himself to breathe more through his nose and his coach, the movement doc, really encouraged him to do that, he started to be able to get use of his nose again. And now he breathes through his nose like he used to. So people that are like fighters,

if they have a deviated septum, or if they have issues breathing through their nose, the more you do it, the better it gets at working. But if you avoid it, you're not gonna be able to do it. It's like a muscle. It is. It's tissue that you just, if you don't use it, it starts to slowly close up and not work so well.

So we have to use it and then it'll open up. I think a lot. It'll actually work. I think people have a lot of concern over wearing it at night and that they're not gonna be able to breathe, but for anybody who hasn't tried the product before, I mean, your mouth is not restricted completely to not open up.

Okay, you do have tape on there and it's pretty secure, but you can just pop your mouth open. You could also, you know, if you panicked or something, you could easily get the tape off and obviously you could use your nose. So I understand like people's reservation about it, but it's important that they understand like, you're gonna be okay.

Yeah, well, it's, so it's a normal reaction, right? The first time that I mouth taped, that was my first thought was, wait a minute, if I put tape on my mouth, what happens if my nose gets stuffy? Am I gonna like not wake up? Am I gonna die? That's a normal reaction that everybody has.

And so what's interesting is, so we're actually partnered with the largest ear, nose, and throat clinic in Southern California. Okay, and their CEO, he's a board certified surgeon, what he tells his patients is he says, look, if you can lie down and you keep your mouth shut and breathe through your nose, just fine, it's safe. You can wear mouth tape and it's perfectly okay.

Right, it's not like you're running 30-yard sprints, right, and you're trying to mouth tape and keep your, you know, breathe through your nose, right? You're just, you're sitting sedentary, laying down, if you can breathe through your nose, and there's not like a major blockage where you have to open your mouth, it's perfectly safe to do it.

And he's, again, he's a doctor who readily recommends mouth tape to people because he'll tell people look this idea of needing surgery yes there's a place for it but he's like take it for me I'm the one who does these surgeries it's really painful to do surgeries for snoring and your insurance doesn't cover this stuff so I recommend he's like I recommend to a lot of my patients, just try this. It's low-hanging fruit, doesn't cost very much money. It's easy.

And if you have got a mouth tape for the rest of your life, there's a lot worse things. But trust me, like going in and getting surgery, it's painful, it's expensive. Sometimes it doesn't work. What percentage of people report back to you about maybe they don't snore anymore? Yeah, so I think that certainly there's a percentage

of people who it doesn't stop snoring completely, right? Like I know- Andrew can snore right through it. Yeah, I got skills. Cause look, like the end of the day, snoring is about tissue in the back that's vibrating. And so there might always be some tissue that's still vibrating because when you're breathing

through your nose, it's still moving and creating vibrations in the back. And so that's still a possibility, right? But at the end of the day, what's most important is you're not breathing through your mouth, right? You're actually breathing through your nose. You're getting better oxygen. You're feeling better.

And yes, if you're breathing through your mouth, you're gonna sound like a freight train and your wife's gonna hate you, right? She's gonna make you sleep in your other bedroom. And at least if your mouth's shut, now it might not be nearly as bad. I think it's important to tell people as well, this is not a cure for sleep apnea.

It's not doing necessarily anything with your tongue or anything like that. However, some things that I've noticed from using mouth tape for a few years now and experimenting with like on runs and a bunch of different things and just getting myself to like breathe harder and to get myself to be able to do more challenging tasks,

breathing in and out of the nose, I've just noticed an easier time keeping my mouth shut when I'm sleeping. So I don't know if it's like, it was just a cue and then sometimes I don't wear it. And it seems like, I don't really know, but it seems like my mouth is shut. There's no drool on my pillow.

My mouth isn't all dry and all those kinds of things. And so, and also my wife is like, yeah, you haven't snored in years. So for me, it's been amazing. And I still do love to utilize it on a run here and there because sometimes when you're running, it's sometimes a duration that gets you. So if you're running like a 10 or 11-minute mile pace,

depending on your fitness level, some of that's pretty manageable, but you start doing it for three miles, four miles, five miles, six miles. You know, you start creeping up on the mileage and your heart rate starts to get elevated and it gets to be more and more challenging to get that breathing in and out of the nose.

So I will still use it on some runs. I'll still use it sometimes on like an assault bike or just something to give it a pretty good challenge. And what I wanna share with people and I try to explain to people all the time is that when you train primarily with nasal breathing, it's not like it makes you indestructible or invincible. However, if you stick to the principles

of only breathing in and out of your nose and resting appropriately so you can get back to, nasal breathing if you're doing sprints or something like that. Your recovery from that workout is gonna be very, very easy most of the time. Again, I'm sure you could red line it. I'm sure there's people that can get in good enough shape

to figure out how to make themselves super sore or something like that. But that's what I've enjoyed the most about it really is that it's put a governor on my training that has kind of dummy proofed my training of like, you can't overdo it anymore because if you really stick to nasal breathing, your heart rate is not gonna be at 180 or 170.

And if it is, it's just, you know, at these 170 or so, it's just at these higher levels, just for a real brief burst. And then we're getting back into really calming down and breathing slower. Especially as you do it for a longer period of time, because it's hard when you try to do it very early on, you're fighting it, and you're like, this is hard,

this is really difficult, but then if you fight through it, then what you start to realize is the longer gains of being able to nose breathe, you can actually power through the run, you can power through the workout because you're getting all the oxygen benefits of what's happening in your body longer. And as you said, it doesn't feel as hard.

When you're breathing through your nose, you're more in a more parasympathetic state, you're more relaxed. Your heart rate is actually gonna be lower than when you start having a. Not first, at first you might feel a little bit, but then once you get through it, you get past it, you go, oh, and then it's very calming.

And the thing for people to remember is, Mark, it took you a while to get to that point, right? It took me so long that I thought I was never gonna be able to really do it. I felt defeated. I was like, I don't know. And Seema keeps telling me about it, and I keep hearing, we got guests on the show,

and I'm like, and Seema's a mutant, I can't figure it out. But I stuck with it and eventually, yeah, it clicked for me. And that's the thing, like, if you start doing this, if you start focusing on breathing through your nose, give it time. It's gonna feel really uncomfortable. Yeah, try it with something simple first. Try it with some walking and then maybe try like a little bit

of a weighted vest or a walk uphill or something simple, something easy and something that is safe. And like an exercise bike, we had what's... Julian. Julian Peneau. He came by, right? Go on an exercise bike, 10 minutes, go up to a certain wattage, whether it's 250 or 240 or whatever,

go on a wattage where you can breathe through your nose consistently through that and maintain that, right? Just work on that. Like trying to do that for what, three minutes or so, Andrew? Yeah, the practice that he took me through, it was like a slower, longer duration.

And his thing was like, yeah, breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. But it was actually Josh that was like, hey, let's focus on these sprints. They're gonna be all nasal breathing. Oh yeah, Josh Settledge, right? And then after the sprint was over, it was kind of like just completely stopped.

But if you can focus on just the nasal breathing, then you're in a really, really good spot, right? I was having a hard time with it, but I can definitely see, if you can do that through just nasal breathing, man, what a huge, huge edge you have on everybody else. You know what's amazing is, so, I love going to New York City in the summer.

I love going to Central Park, and I love doing runs, but I also love to New York City in the summer. I love going to Central Park and I love doing runs, but I also love to people watch. And what is amazing is the amount of people who are, they're running and they got their mouth wide open. And now that I'm, you know, I'm the founder of the biggest nasal breathing company in the world, I'm very attuned to all the people that you see around you just aren't breathing correctly.

So the amount of people who are just huffing and puffing with their mouth, it's mind blowing. I wanna like get up and just tell everybody, shut your mouth, shut your mouth. And it's amazing. Sometimes people are running pretty fast though. So I see the same thing, but I'm like, that guy's running like a six minute mile pace.

I can't say anything to that dude. Hey, one thing to mention though is like, it's not bad to breathe through the mouth, but when it's necessary. Cause most of the people start breathing through the mouth before they actually have that output where it's needed. Cause for example, when you're fighting somebody, if I'll notice most people that I grapple with,

their mouth will open before mine, meaning I have you on the breathing right now. And then if I wanna start speeding things up and I wanna get my heart rate up to make it faster, I'll go in through my mouth, I mean, in through my nose, out through my mouth. Now my heart rate's higher, but now they're really having a red line, right?

So it's one of those things where you want the capacity to keep it through your nose most of the time so that when you have to use your mouth and you have to increase that heart rate so you can go faster, you can do it before your opponent does if you're fighting, or it's not, you don't have to use your mouth at an earlier part of your workout if you're just a runner.

Right? Like, hard runs, hard sprints, yeah. But it shouldn't be when you're just trying to jog or go for some distance. And on the flip side of that, just sitting at your computer at home. Right? So, I want everybody to think about this. When you're at your computer at home and you're working or you're sitting watching football on Sunday,

is your mouth shut or is it open and you're breathing through your mouth? And that's an opportunity to start being mindful of like, just shut it and start breathing through the nose. Makes a big difference. Huge difference. When I was in my early 20s, you brought that back. I'd work on my computer a lot, and I'd have headphones on.

And my girlfriend at the time would be like, Nseema, what? She's like, your mouth breathing. I'm like, but I do that often without realizing. I'd catch myself like, why is that? Well, maybe that's just whatever, right? But it's like, no, that's not healthy. I was also snoring at the time. it took me a while to fix those issues.

But it's all that bulking. You don't re, I was 270. You don't realize that shit, you know? It's insane. Yeah, for sure there's gonna be somebody listening that will say this because this is what I said and that is Alex, I can't do it because I have bad allergies, right?

My nose is always stuffy. There's no way I need to get oxygen through my mouth. I did have this exact same thought. And what I noticed right away was, I guess there was that little bit of a claustrophobic feeling the first time I did mouth tape years ago. And little by little, all of a sudden,

my nasal passageways would just start to open up. And I'm like, whoa, what is going on here? So what is that? Yeah, let's talk about that. So a couple of things happen there. One is when we breathe through our mouth, number one, regardless if you've got allergies or not, when you breathe through your mouth, the brain actually triggers the nose to create mucus.

So then it creates this vicious cycle of mucus, mouth breathe. So any, especially when you're sick, people will notice this when you wake up and then you start to open your mouth, boom, your nose just flares up and it gets clogged. It's because that's what our brain's telling our nose to do. So number one is, if we just keep our mouth shut and fight through, assuming not allergy, but it's just normal clogged nose,

you just fight through it, your nose will naturally start to open up because that's how we were meant to breathe. Now from an allergy perspective, yes, there's always gonna be an element of, if you have an allergy, you may not want to mouth tape because there's something that might be affecting it, but I will say this,

your nose was equipped to filter out all those allergens, all those issues much better than your mouth. Because imagine this, right? You got allergies, you much better than your mouth. Because imagine this, right? You got allergies. You're breathing through your mouth. What in your mouth is gonna filter all that stuff out? It's going right into your lungs versus your nose is gonna filter out a lot of that shit

and do the work for you. So now, that's actually helping you, right? Now I'll say this. I've been mouth taping now for probably almost five years. I've never not mouth taped, even when I'm sick. Cause that's a fear too. People think, well, if I'm sick, I don't want to mouth tape cause I got a clogged nose.

You can try it, but I'm telling you that your nose will open up. It will open up. I've done it as well. I've noticed that you can breathe just fine, even at just one nostril. Sometimes the other nostril is clumped up. Yeah, exactly.

Still got enough room in there to make it work. There is a cool trick that I learned it from this video from Patrick McHugh and you close your nose. It's like, let's say you're trying to go to sleep and you just can't breathe through your nose. Hold it, like sit there, nod your head up and down for like 20, 30 seconds until you feel the need to breathe.

When you open up your nose, you're going to feel like mucus and stuff, like you're able to blow your nose and get it out and breathe clear. You do that for two or three cycles, your nose is opened up or it's opened up way more than it was. Yeah, it's because you're moving the sinuses around and you're getting that stuff to clean out and move, right? Yeah. For sure.

Yeah, the allergy thing I think is tough sometimes. I think that we immediately reach for medicine. We think like when we have a cold, then we think the cold medicine. Take a boom boom stick. We think the cold medicine at the store is gonna like do something for you. Grab a hit of it.

But I think one big issue is people just reaching for allergy medication, maybe just a little too early. Like I'm not saying don't take it at all. I'm not recommending that you never use it. There's always circumstances where people need to do certain things, but get outside, get used to the things that are causing the allergens, get around some of these plants unless you're like insanely allergic to where your eyeballs swell up and everything like that.

But for the most part, I mean, it's just, we just need to get used to these things. Yeah. I think we're too medicated. I think we take too, too, we put too many things inside our body that we don't need to. When rather we should just get outside, move around, eat whole foods, right? Or maybe not eat as much food, you know? So. I have a question for you. Have you, do you think about anything when it comes to like full foods, right, or maybe not eat as much food, you know? So. I have a question for you. Have you, do you think about anything when it comes to like people's tongue posture? Yeah.

So what are your thoughts there? Yeah, so 100%, I was talking to Andrew about this before. So there's absolutely something about keeping the tongue on the roof of your mouth, for sure. Because when the tongue falls down and back, now it's helping to create issues, blockages, snoring sounds, and it can still happen sometimes, even with your mouth shut.

So one of the things that I actually do, I wear this mouth guard in my mouth, a very small one, because I grind my teeth, and it has a bridge on the top of it. And what I find myself doing is naturally putting my tongue on the roof of my mouth. So it's almost like subconsciously my tongue says, Hey, there's something there. You should touch it. So then I'm putting the tongue in the correct posture, but yeah, absolutely.

What we should be doing, even when we're sitting in a computer with our mouth shut, our tongue should be on the roof of our mouth like this at all times. And that's something that everybody can practice it and get used to it. It shouldn't be down on the bottom and back. If you're listening, you got like some water with you, drink some and see what your tongue does. When you swallow, it's the same motion

that happens when you swallow. Or just swallow some saliva right now. When you do that, that's where your tongue's supposed to be. Yeah, I'm into all this weird shit. swallow some saliva right now, when you do that, that's where your tongue's supposed to be. Yeah. You know, I'm into all this weird shit. So I bought this, it's called Remplenish. And I don't have any, like, it didn't solve anything for me at the moment.

I just started to use it. But Andrew, maybe you can look it up. But it's something that you just put at the end of a straw and you suck through it and you push your tongue to the roof of your mouth against this kind of rubbery type thing. And then you have to kind of like suck at the same time as you're doing that and it creates this like suction,

but it works your tongue and your tongue actually, when you use it properly, your tongue actually gets pretty tired. Oh, nice. So I was like, let me just try this. Cause I kind of find myself like, I have the mouth tape on, my mouth is closed, I have the hostage tape on, and I feel like I'm sleeping well and everything like that,

but my jaw and my tongue just feel like they're maybe not in the best spot. So I've been trying to think of like, what are some ways I can work on this? So it trains your mouth when you're drinking. Yeah, it's like a strength workout basically And again, I don't know how I'm just I'm not trying to sell anybody anything I don't know how effective this is, but if someone's got It's just like worth a shot. It's like very inexpensive and It seems like a simple concept and so I'm like f it. Let me give it a try

It seems like a simple concept and so I'm like, F it, let me give it a try. So you basically just push your tongue against it and then you, and intermittently will suck on it at the same time. Yeah, there's the demonstration. Got some pretty good graphics going. The things that we'll do, huh? Mark's version isn't a straw. Exactly. Oh, I see what's going on.

It's like, I mean, it's pretty much like you're using a tool to mew, right? Yeah. Yeah, mewing tool. Okay. I know we've all had our tongues tired before. There's no reason not to talk about it. Yeah. Wow.

Andrew's into it. Mm-hmm. No, because I did see this before, but sometimes I see something and I'm like, am I just too crazy? But then I'll send it to Mark or the group. Like I said, it might be dumb, but I feel it's exercising my tongue in some way. So maybe it's worth a shot.

You know, I remember as a kid watching, boxing was so popular when we were younger. And now things have kind of switched to UFC and those kinds of things. But I remember in boxing, that was a huge barometer of the type of conditioning and the type of shape the other guy was in. They'd be like, oh, look at the other guy.

It's like the sixth round, it's a 12 round fight, championship fight. And they're like, he's got his mouth wide open. And the mouth wide open causes so many problems. I mean, if you think about in the NFL, why do they wear mouthpieces or in boxing, why do they have a mouthpiece in? It's to really try to keep the mouth shut

to a certain extent. It's not completely closed all the time, but it's to keep the jaw in alignment and it's to help prevent concussions. And I remember seeing boxing matches and even being someone that got into some boxing, they're like, if you want to breathe like that, you can go ahead, but not only are you going to get knocked out easier, but you're going to get a broken jaw.

And I was like, what? Okay, I'll keep my mouth shut. So it can have really detrimental effects. And you think about in the NFL, NHL, and some of these combat sports and stuff, how much people are really colliding and slamming into each other. And even in jujitsu, it's like, you know, if someone takes you down in grappling or wrestling

and you're breathing in and out of your mouth, it's like, that's gonna have a way different impact on your ribs and your whole body. It's gonna register completely differently. In comparison to if you're able to handle that in a much more calm fashion, it probably means that you feel like you still are somewhat safe and you probably feel like

you're in a better position, but these football players and stuff like that are really getting some crazy damage and a lot of it could have to do with just excessive breathing, could be a big part of it. You know, it's interesting. So I grew up playing football. I was a quarterback and I never thought about that before.

Never ever did I, I mean, concussions weren't really quite what they were back when we were younger, playing. Maybe they were around, we just didn't talk about it as much, but I never thought about the mouth guard. I actually never wore one. I always kept it out because I needed to always talk. I'm calling to play in the huddle, I'm calling to line of scrimmage,

so I always hated having one in. But I wonder, yeah, maybe if I actually had something in and I kept my mouth shut, maybe I would have been even better. Maybe I would have made it through the NFL, and I didn't, that's why. It's because I didn't keep my mouth shut. The mouth guard thing is interesting though,

cause I like, it's used a lot in jujitsu. I see a lot of people's like new people to use a lot, but I do notice that it almost makes it- To keep the mouth shut on purpose. And also to like help prevent, cause like sometimes, you know, you might get hit in the face. You might be, so you, you want to keep your teeth safe. Some people use it for that reason.

But the thing I noticed is that it just, it makes a lot of people just inherently breathe through their mouth. Cause they have this like kind of mouth guard in. So it's hard for them to keep their mouth shut. And I noticed like for some people I'm like- If it's like a big one, yeah, bulky one. Even some of the smaller ones,

I just find that some people just get a tendency of just keeping their mouth a little bit open because they don't like to close down on the mouth guard. And it's like, isn't that kind of maybe, I don't know, it seems counterintuitive. Doesn't seem like it's doing what it should be doing. Interesting. So I've never worn one.

I just never found it comfortable either. Yeah, I have the opposite experience. When I don't wear one, I find my mouth will open just because it's, you know, whatever. Like, I don't mean in the role, I just mean like walking around like, why is my mouth open? But when I have my mouth guard in, I don't mean in the role, I just mean like walking around, like, why is my mouth open? But when I have my mouth guard in, I have to bite down

or I'll sort of like fall off or I'll start drooling or something. But I do hear other people talk about like, oh, I need to wear one because I don't want to like lose a tooth or something. So like... You usually use it for protection. Right, yeah. Which I do too, and because like I have been like neat in the face and like, oh, thank goodness I had my mouth guard.

And because it was, instead of it, you know, pushing my jaw one way, it was just like a, you know, kind of like a solid shot, but it wasn't that bad. But for me, it reminds me to keep my mouth closed. And it's to, yeah, I find it very beneficial for that, you know, for that reason. Interesting. Yeah. But I also could be just be aware of it too. And Seema, I know you've read up a bunch on a lot of these different things that have to do

with nasal breathing. What do we have? James Nestor is a really good resource. Yeah, Patrick McEwen's book. Patrick McEwen. One of my favorite stories about James Nestor and I'll tell it again. So for most people that don't know,

so there's an experiment that James did. So James went to Stanford Medical Center, and for 10 days, they plugged their nose, so they only breathed through their mouth. And over those 10 days, they developed sleep apnea, and they snored like crazy, and their oxygen level plummeted through the floor. So then after those 10 days, they unplugged their nose,

and what do you think happened when they mouth taped? Everything went back to normal. Everything went away in one day, right? So I know when I read that, that was actually what sent me down this rabbit hole of learning about maltape, right? That was the reason I actually started maltaping to begin with, was holy shit, you mean maltape? Like that was it? And so reading this experiment where this guy goes to Stanford Medical Center, you know, one of the greatest institutions in the world

with their doctors has this anecdotal experience of how it was mouth breathing the entire time, right? So it's something that everybody can try. Anybody at home can try this and not have to spend a bunch of money. So it's easy. It's low hanging fruit to try it out and see if it works for you.

People that want to research this more, there's also the book Jaws. There's a lot of people who've had various theories on why today's people tend to mouth breathe more. I got a great one for this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay. So I was in Houston last month

and so we're partnered with one of the leading airway surgeons in the world and he's out of Houston, Dr. Elfie, okay? And so we did a pod and I asked him this question. I said, okay, Dr. Elfie, you're one of the leading surgeons in the world that does surgeries on jaws, everything for sleep disorders, all of it, right? And he said exactly what James Nestor's talked about.

He thinks that it's all related to obviously what we're eating, the processed foods, all of that. But there was something even more interesting that I'd never heard before, breastfeeding. He said, he believes that from all the research that in this country at some point, I don't know if it was in the 70s or 80s or whatever, there was a turning point where we stopped,

I could be wrong on that date, but we stopped breastfeeding. 70s I think is accurate. We stopped breastfeeding kids as much. And what happens is when we're breastfeeding, we're using our tongue, we're using our mouth, we're using our jaws way more to really work for it. So we all know what this is like right now.

Right? And so because we've taken that away and now we've made it way too easy for a kid to get milk, we're not using and developing those muscles in the tongue anymore. And so that's then creating this cascade effect of poor jaw, poor teeth, poor tongue posture, and everything else.

It shapes the, I mean, it's kind of a funny thing to envision, but a boob is like way up in your face. And if you watch a baby getting fed, they have to figure out a way to breathe through their nose with this kind of like boob in their face type thing. That shapes like your whole face along with training the tongue. And so there's a lot of reasons to breastfeed if possible. I think it's the way that we were meant to be.

Yeah, totally. It's one of the most, if you see a kid, any young kid who's mouth breathing at night during the day, you got to nip that one in the bud because that's really dangerous for young kids. Young kids shouldn't be mouth breathing because then it sets up just awful breathing issues as they get older, recessed jaws, completely, look like completely different people when they're mouth breathing as young kids and then they just develop in a really poor way. Another one you may not have heard of is there's also

some beliefs that this has to do with the sun and people's lack of sunlight and maybe potentially some of the reasons why some people from the UK have malocclusion, which is a larger upper face and a smaller, softer jaw. And so some people, you know, getting vitamin D and stuff like that from the sun naturally. And then also our foods, you know, we're not like,

you know, eating bone marrow and some of these things like we used to. Tough meats. Yeah, tough meats and getting all these amazing fat soluble vitamins from our foods. You know, one thing I'm curious if there's like, nowadays at least, if there's any better artificial options as far as, you know, kids, babies getting their breast milk.

Because like when I was a baby, my mom, she was under a lot of stress, so she like, I had to talk with her, I was like, was I breastfed? She's like, actually, I dried up a few months in because there was just so much stress. My dad left, there's a bunch of shit, right? So I was a formula baby, right? But nowadays there has to be some stuff

that kids are able to use that has at least shaped like a boom because I know I've seen something like that on Instagram, right? Is there anything that's a better option? That's a good question. No, there is. We didn't utilize any of it. Careful what you Google here.

I know, right? Careful what you Google here. I know, right? Careful what you Google. Especially in 2024. But we didn't utilize any of them, just because thankfully, my son was breastfed until he decided that he didn't want it anymore. But yeah, they do exist. But I don't know if the nipple of it

simulates what it takes to get it out of a natural breast. The other thing that's really fascinating is that baby formula is just pure shit. Like it's crappy. It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable that no one's made a higher quality one. They're pretty junky. They have seed oils in them and stuff. It's wild. Lots of lead and shit. It is really bad. And then there's a shortage of it too. So they charge a lot for it. I know.

And when that happened, I was like, why don't they just use protein powder? And people were like, that would be crazy. I'm like, it would be better. It would be so much better. It would be probably way better. I think we got a new product. The hostage boob.

The baby formula. The hostage boob feeder. The boob feeder. Right? Don't let bad baby feeding hold your baby hostage. I like it. There we go. There we go. How did you kind of like, I guess,

like fit into position of a CEO of a company that's doing so well? Like what's your background? Or do you not have a background and you're just like making shit up? I just walked in here off the street, cold, you just saw me and you're like, hey, you look interesting.

Let's slap his shirt. No. So my first love was football. I was a football player. I was one of those kids who nobody ever thought I was gonna be the guy. So I was always an underdog. I always had a chip on my shoulder. Going into high school, there was the other guy

who was gonna be the quarterback, and I'm like, no, I'm gonna be the guy. And so I proved everybody wrong, became the quarterback. And that was kind of my life story from high school, then into college, and then into professional. So I played professional football up until I was, I don't know what, 25ish or some at some point, 25, 26ish.

And when I didn't make it to the NFL, because I wanted to be the next Kurt Warner, right? Playing arena football. Kurt, greatest Cinderella story of all time where he- Selling some insurance or something like that. No, he worked at Hy-Vee. He was stocking shelves at a Hy-Vee in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And Jim Foster found him and said, I want you to be a quarterback in the arena football league. And then he wasn't going to do it because he thought it was below him.

But then he realized, I need tape. I need something to show teams that I can still play. And so he started and he lit it up. And then he went on and went to St. Louis, right? And then Trent Green went down and then the rest was history. So that's what I wanted and didn't happen. So when it didn't happen, I pivoted and then I started a business.

I actually started a sports company that was in my wheelhouse of what I loved. And I ran that for 16 years. I bootstrapped that and all of, I like to explain Hoss' Tape as a, it's a 16 year overnight success, right? Because for 16 years, I bootstrapped and ran this for the company, a lot of failing, right?

You know, when you run a business for that long, there's a lot of failures, there's a lot of things you learn, there's a lot of things you go through, that then when you look back, you go, dang it, I wish I would have known that. Then maybe it wouldn't have taken me so long, or maybe I would have pivoted, I would have done this. So all of those 16 years of learning then on this next venture, I said, okay, now I

know how to do it. Now I know what I'm going to do because I had so many reps at it, right? That I know exactly how I need to get to there. So when I launched it in the two and a half, three years ago, we launched it, I knew that we had to put a couple of things together, right? We had to take a great brand, build this great brand, and then actually inspire men and solve a problem, right? So then it was just through all of those experiences and everything that we built this up.

And then in two and a half years, just scale the hell out of it, right? And then understanding like what levers you have to push, right, because that's what's important too, right? If you're gonna scale a business, you gotta know where are you gonna put your money? Where are you gonna push here? Because what's really scary

for a lot of people starting a business is spending money on marketing. Like if you're gonna put out $50,000 on marketing, how do you know you're gonna get back? That's scary for most people. And so if you understand it and you understand your numbers, then you know how to push those levers to then get your return and then continue to scale.

Did you have money going into it? I did, yeah. So I was able to have capital from the first business that I put into this company. I think that's really important. And I think that that's like, the reason why it's important is because hostage tape, even though you were gonna be,

you were going to make it work, it kind of didn't have to work. And that's a different mentality than scarcity of like you're saying, like somebody being scared to put money forward to promote the product more or just spend money with influencers. It's like you've done a lot of this before.

Not that it doesn't matter, but you had a safety net, which I think makes you feel a little bit more secure. Actually, that was not how I approached it. I actually approached it from a sense of, I'm a burn the boats guy. Like I've got a, I've got a post on LinkedIn where I talk about this, where I met Dean Graziosi at an event that I spoke at and Dean was speaking at the event. And Dean talks about burn the boats where it's exact opposite of that.

And so actually what I did going into this was I'm a delusionally optimistic guy. So regardless of most people will look at a thing and go, here's all the reasons why that's not going to work. Oh my God. And then they think of all the reasons why they're going to fail and all the bad things. Whereas me, I look at all the reasons why I'm gonna succeed. And I take every setback, every challenge, as the universe saying,

okay, Alex, are you good enough to succeed? Because if you're good enough to succeed, if you can get past this, well done. You've moved on to the next level. So that's how I see that. So I see what we did as, I was delusional and optimistic that we were gonna build this into something amazing,

something big, you know, this billion dollar brand idea. And, but it was also too, I just knew. Like sometimes you have an idea and you just in your gut, you know that it's great. And anecdotally, it had changed my life in so many ways that I just knew that it made such a big impact on me that it was gonna make an impact on so many other men our age around the world.

And so I went into it not thinking, I'm okay if it doesn't work. No, I literally like, I put all my money into it. I put all of it in that if I lost it, I wouldn't have had anything. I guess some of my point is that you had something to give in the first place. You know what I mean?

Like, whereas if somebody's like, livelihood is on the line, it's gonna be much harder for them to get that business going. Well, okay, to your point, I'll say this. Look, in this day and age, it's hard to start a business and scale it without capital. It just is, right? It's really, really hard.

Now, social media has made it a little bit easier, like TikTok. Yeah, you can go viral, and you can do something kind of interesting with it. But if you want a brand that stands the test of time, you gotta have money to be able to put into it and scale it. Cause look, like the first year that we put money into it, I put a lot of money in knowing that we weren't gonna make

money out the first year because it was gonna take time. Right, cause look, maltaping, hostage tape, you know how much shit we got for that? Like for a year, the amount of people who thought we were the craziest motherfuckers on the planet to call it that and actually come out with this maltape thing. So I think having capital gave me also

that delusional confidence knowing that I've got the fuel that I need to put my pedal, put my foot on the pedal and move forward, whereas most people maybe don't have it, so then they don't have the confidence to move forward with it because they think, well, I can't do it because I just don't have capital. I don't know how I could even do anything with it.

Being able to handle the stresses of your day, the stress of exercise, and being able to stick to your nutrition plan takes good rest and good quality sleep the night before. And if your mouth is opening during sleep or if you're snoring, well, your sleep quality is compromised. That's why we partnered with the best mouth tape in the game, Hostage Tape. If you have a beard, it's going to stay on. If you have a CPAP, it's going to stay on. This tape is not going to fall off your mouth like most other tapes do when you're asleep.

And to enhance the way you breathe through your nose, they also have no strips. Head over to hostagetape.com slash power project where you can get a three-month supply of hostage tape for only 65 cents a night. On top of that, you're going to receive a free pack of nil strips as well as a bedside tin. Again, that's at hostagetape.com slash power project. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. I'm also curious about like how you scale because like one thing a lot of people are trying to start brands especially younger people to start an online business of some sort right yeah but you had a product that absolutely worked you know if a guy with a beard puts on hostage tape he's going to have a difference with the way he sleeps he's going to be able to tell the difference between a

piece of tape that falls off in the middle of his sleep, right? So it's a great product, but for you, what do you think was the thing that allowed you to scale the business to where it is now, like initially? So I think a lot of people are trying to figure out how can I make this bigger? Do you absolutely need capital?

Like, how do you go about that? So we scaled a couple of ways. One of them was I knew that we were gonna use Facebook, meta ads, right? So when you're putting money in, right? And you can scale and reach people, the best way to do that's on social. So that's how I knew we were gonna be able to do it, right?

And it wasn't just gonna be organic. And again, like you can hack that using something like TikTok, because you can go viral on TikTok pretty easily and potentially get a winner without needing to put money into paid media, like doing ads on TikTok. But with Facebook, you can actually build a brand, you can put money, and you can,

I mean, I spent a million dollars on ads in one month on Facebook, like that's wild. But you're going to get your money back if you do it right. Where'd you start though? What was the first amount that you spent? I think the first amount I spent was, you know, maybe $1,000 a day, if that. And you gotta start somewhere.

You gotta put one foot in front of the other. And you can start even lower. You can do like $50 and stuff like that, right? Yeah, you can. Yeah, you can definitely start with a couple hundred bucks a day and most people do. But Facebook ads is one of the skills that anybody can learn it and everybody should learn it.

Like if you want to start a business, learn how to run Facebook ads. It's a valuable skill. But that was one of the biggest levers that I knew. And one of the other levers was obviously branding. We knew that we needed attention. Attention is the currency in today's economy with social. So I knew that hostage tape was gonna get people's attention

and it was gonna work, it was gonna be polarizing. And also we seeded product with people. In fact, you are one of the first major people that when we seeded it, you got back to me, you messaged me. And so then we kept seeding product to people like you, high level, visible people. And like somebody like yourself, what was so amazing was,

so you loved it, you loved the product, and then you started giving the product to all the other people that were on the pod, these high level people. So the product seeding, getting product into people's hands, that's another thing I would tell people. Some of the best marketing you can spend is getting product into people's hands for them to try it

because you're gonna learn a couple things. You're gonna learn, okay, is the product good? What's the feedback, right? Because you can't live in your bubble of, my product's great, I love it. Yeah, but what do your customers say? You can't be afraid to talk to your customers and get feedback and then iterate, change it, evolve it.

And then just getting it out there for people to use, and if they like it, then they're gonna tell other people, and you can move, right? So that was definitely one of the pieces that we did. So how did you learn Facebook? Because you kind of went over that kind of quickly and that's a major skill set that you learned and you know a lot.

Like I've talked to you about it before and I was like, you gotta talk to somebody else, bro, because I don't know what the hell is going on anymore. It's complicated. It's very complicated, but like anything, once you spend the time and you learn it, it's easy. It's complex, but once you learn it, it's easy. You walk into the gym here,

the average person walks in here and they're like, what the hell are all these things? But they're easy to us because we've been working in these machines our whole lives. So there's plenty of educational videos that you can go on YouTube. YouTube is the best university out there. Go on to YouTube, you know who to look for. There's plenty of guys you can watch. Get a great foundation of how to learn how to do just simple basic Facebook ads. Maybe you don't be afraid to even pay to have someone teach some of the stuff to you.

No, that's not a bad area either. You gotta be careful. Like a seminar or something. There's a lot of people teaching it. There's a lot of people teaching it, so you definitely wanna be careful of who. Start with YouTube, start free. Well, I would say go to Ben Heath.

Ben Heath, phenomenal YouTube channel. Shout out to Ben Heath. He does a great job of teaching fundamental basics of how to learn how to do Facebook ads. This is just like, it's like so wild to me. You know, like you start to really think about some of this stuff. You sell tape and then you learn from some dude

that you never met via YouTube. Yeah. You know, and then you punch a bunch of buttons into a computer and the next thing you know, it's just amazing. It's incredible. And then now you're doing stuff with UFC and all that crazy stuff. UFC is a wild story.

Yeah, we'll have to, we can get into it and talk about some Dana White stories here for sure. But, uh, Before we jump into that, like what is, what is like, is there a part of your job that you're uncomfortable with or you don't like? Like, do you, do you sometimes like, oh man, you know, I got to hand these things out or I mean, it seems like you're always excited about it, but do you sometimes are like, I don't want to bug people or it's just part of your job or how do you feel about it?

So what? Okay. This one sounds funny. So I'm always carrying these samples in my pocket. I haven't done it yet, but whenever we go to a restaurant a lot, we eat out a lot, because when you work from home,

I've been working home for 20 some years now. So going out to eat is my way of getting out and feeling like I'm in the world. So whenever I go to a restaurant, I always have a thought of, should I just start walking around and giving people a hostage tapeistape in the restaurant? Or like, when I sign the bill,

I also leave a packet of hot sistape. At some point, I'm going to do that probably, and I always think, why don't I just do it? Kind of talk yourself out of it a lot. I'm like, is that too far? No. You know? Is that too far?

But I'd be into it, I'd be like, oh my God, this is great. Give this a try. So I haven't gotten to that point yet, but no, I mean, I think one of the things that I'm getting, okay, I'll say this. I'm getting on stages more, right? So I did a stage talk in front of like 10,000 people. With the muscle, right?

Yes, yeah, so it was limitless. So limitless, so the muscle, he puts that on. And that was an amazing lineup, like literally. That looked wild, that party looked crazy. The party, Ludacris was there singing. I don't know if you can find it on, maybe on the muscles, what's his name? Keaton Hoskins, yeah.

Yeah, it was the party the night before was wild, but the event was, it was like 25 of the top people, you know, again, Dean Graziosi, Gary Brekka was there. Goggins was there. Lewis Howes was there. Andy Elliott was there. It was just like all these people. And then it was me, right?

Now, granted, I was the sponsor of the show, so I kinda... Like, I played quarterback. I'm a nobody, you know? But getting on stage and talking in front of people is now becoming a thing that I'm starting to do. And it is, it's nerve wracking, man. Getting up, no matter how well-prepared you are, in fact, going onto the stage,

I prepared, I literally prepared my speech so many times, probably 200 hours worth of reps, and then I would actually make it more difficult. So I would go for a run with headphones on, listening to loud music while I would do the speech. So I would try to give myself as many distractions. It's just like when we do a rep in football, right, or in sports, you try to do a rep

in the most difficult scenario, so when you get into a game, everything slows down. So that's how I prepared myself. But even still, you get up there and you're still like, oh my God, you're in front of all these people. And so right before you go on, that is nerve wracking. And as much as I love it, I hate it, right? It's super, super nerve wracking to get on stage.

And that's a skill, man. The guys that do that day in and day out, you need years of reps at it to where you get to the point where, like, okay, one of the events I talked at, this sounds, I love explaining it this way, but I opened for Ed Mylett. Oh wow. Okay, I spoke and then I came off and Ed Mylett came on.

And I didn't even know, if I had known, I probably would have been like way more nervous. But I come off and then the guy announces Ed Mylett and I went, holy shit. I just opened for Ed Mylet, right? Ed Mylet's arguably one of the greatest speakers on the planet, right? And a guy like that, he's been doing it for so many years

that it's just easy, but you have to put those reps in to get to the point where then he makes it look easy. But that's wise, because he's done it for so many years. So that's, I think, kind of the answer to your question is, is speaking in front of people, I love it and I hate it at the same time. I do find it really funny how you just like, you know, you just, all this easy stuff,

you mentioned like the Facebook ads, they're easy. They're complicated, but they're easy because it brings me back to, Hodge Gracie is like the best grappler of all time and he has shirts and he always says this whenever he goes to seminars and stuff. It's like, zhezhezu is easy. He just says it's easy.

It's like, he's so easy. And it's like, when you hear him say that, you get it. But it's just so funny. When you put enough time in at something, it becomes just easy. The way he describes like, he's like, it's an armlock. It goes this way, goes this way, goes that way. And when he shows it, he's like, it's an armlock. It goes this way, goes this way, goes that way. And when he shows it, it's easy, right?

And I'm like, all right, cool. Easy for you. No. It takes time. Yeah, that was the VIP party the night before. I met Donald Trump Jr. Yeah, it was wild. It's Dan Fleischman Keaton.

It was crazy. It was fun.man, Keaton. It was crazy. It was fun. That's when he gave away a bunch of stuff, right? He gave away, yeah, he gave away a Tesla. Oh, okay. So there was like a, I don't know if it was a Model 3, a Model Y, but he gave it away at the end of the show. So, but that was crazy, man.

That was awesome. So what's, I'm sorry. Yeah. What's the, go ahead. I was gonna say, so what was great about this too, for me was because I was able to get on stage and do this talk, it was great content that now we use for Facebook and YouTube, and it's actually, it's that speech, if people wanna see it,

you go to our YouTube page, go to the Hot Static YouTube page, it's the video that go to the hotchett tape YouTube page It's the it's the video that that pinned to the top and it's our best performing YouTube video right now that we use it's got you know over a million views and You get to see me talk and do my thing, but I was really nervous I didn't look it but I was that was nerve-racking and was that pretty much put on by Keaton. Yeah. Yeah, that was Keaton He's a hell of a guy, I like him a lot. Yeah, he's great, he's phenomenal.

So what's the experience been like with the UFC? Cause that's like a, probably a huge commitment to advertise and sponsor with those guys. So we are the official sleep aid of the UFC. Never in a million years, yeah there's a picture of me and Dana, so I'll tell this story about this night, me and Dana White. Never in a million years did I think that we were going to be involved with the UFC

because I wasn't a, I'm not a combat sports guy. I grew up a, you know, sticking ball guy, right? A football guy, baseball, golf, right? I wasn't into fighting. So this was prior to the Super Bowl of this last year. And the UFC reaches out to my partnerships guy, Pat, and says, hey, we're interested in working with you guys and we think it'd be a great fit for Power Slap.

And we can talk about Power Slap. Power Slap is wild. In fact, Andrew was saying you guys were going to do a PowerSlap here on the pod today. Oh yeah. Andrew and Mark? So I go first and then I sub you in. You get up and go, okay, I'm ready. And now you. So I'm not sure if I could like let somebody hit me that way. Like somebody gets me, they get me, but like just to stand there and let somebody wild.

Not allowed to do that. Close your eyes. Yeah, wild. So they wanted us to be a power slap. And I'm like, okay, well, this could be interesting, but you know, at the stage of where we were in the company, this is a big play, right? This is a play that Monster Energy, Prime,

and Manscaped and these bigger brands do. And I just, I'm like, I don't think we're there yet. Maybe like a year or two from now we'll be there. But me, I'm the kind of guy where I'm action-orientated where I'm gonna move, I'm gonna act, I'm gonna do something. And so, high agency, right? So I said, screw it, we're going out to Vegas.

So we got on a plane, went out to Vegas, this was the weekend of the Super Bowl, right? Part of me was thinking, okay, maybe they'll invite us to the Super Bowl, or maybe there'll be some way to get into the Super Bowl that weekend. So we go out there and we go into USC headquarters and we sit down.

The whole time I'm thinking like there's just no way this is gonna happen, but we'll just see, you know, we're at USC headquarters. We're meeting all these guys and then they they flipped the script on me and said Alex, we actually think you'd be the perfect fit for the UFC. Not just PowerSlap. And I'm like, whoa, okay. You got to pitch me on this because let's understand where we're at, guys. We're not Prime, we're not these big brands. This is where we're at on revenue, we're not there. So they took me through everything and I went, holy smokes, this actually makes a lot of sense, right,

if we can make the numbers work. Because for us in the UFC, it was, we get to use their licensing. So for anybody knowing that, hey, this is hostage tape, they're the official sleeper to the UFC, that's a huge objection handler right there. People doubt who we are, they doubt the brand, they know, oh, they're with the UFC,

okay, they're legit, right, big brand. And it hits our target market of these 30 to 50 year olds around the world. So I love that idea and I'm like, all right, cool. And they're like, all right, so tonight we're gonna go to PowerSlap. And I'm like, I've never been to PowerSlap and they're like, you're gonna love it.

It's gonna be wild, right? So we go to PowerSlap that night and you go into this room at the casino, right? They have one of those conference rooms, and they've got the big stage in the center, and it's a VIP event where nobody gets in unless you're invited. So everybody in there is the who's who the internet, right?

Like literally all the big people on YouTube are here. Mm-hmm. I remember that night, there was Tom Segar at Birdcrayure, the Nelk Boys, everybody, Tom Brady walked in. Okay, so next to Dana and Lorenzo and Hunter, there's a, like I call it the big dick of the moment seat. Right, so Dana will bring in a guy to sit down with him because this is all, this is a dog and pony show, right?

Is what this is for. He wants all these influencers to film this stuff, give a PR, have these viral clips, right? So all these guys are walking in, Travis Scott sits down for five minutes, Charles Barkley sits down for five minutes. For me, it was when Tom Brady walked in and sat down. And for me, like Tom's the goat, you know?

Former quarterback, I wanted to be like him. He's my, you know, whoa. So he walks in, sits down, they, the UFC comes up to me and says, all right, Dana's ready to meet you. Are you ready? And I'm like, fuck yeah, I'm ready to go meet Dana White right after Tom Brady. So the event actually ended.

And then we go into the back room, into the VIP room where everybody was, right? All the VIP people, the NELF boys are back there, like everybody is in there. So I walk up, Dana turns around, and he's got the big old grin, right? And he sees me and goes, Lorenzo, where's Lorenzo at?

Lorenzo, come here. Lorenzo walks over, and Dana goes, look Alex, we're sitting there, right? And Lorenzo bumps me and he goes, look, the hostage tape guys are here. Right? So Lorenzo's like, dude, I just want to thank you. I've been using the hostage tape for a couple of months to change my life. Hunter Campbell walks up, says the same thing. And Dana's like, yeah, dude, you guys are killing it. I'm seeing your brand everywhere. I had sent him some, hopefully to get on one of those fucking Fridays that he does.

And he's like, yeah, you sent me some. I got it at the office. And so I'm standing there. It was, I had a moment, this like out of body moment at that moment where we took this picture. And I'm like, I'm standing here next to arguably one of the most well-known dudes on the planet. One of the most powerful dudes on the planet.

And this brand didn't exist two years ago and now I'm standing here and all these guys know exactly who we are and love this. This is wild. Absolutely wild. So then we just sat there in this room the rest of the night, just kind of like soaking it all in, going like, oh, hey, look,

right behind my right shoulder is Kyle from the Nelk Boys. I got a Nelk Boys story too, but like, it was just crazy. And then a few months later, we negotiated the deal and we became the official sleep aid of the UFC. Yeah. Right, so wild. But yeah, and then Joe Rogan's a user. So this was all around the time when we became a sponsor

of Joe Rogan podcast, Joe's a user, and then Gary Brekka is a huge, he's a huge hostage tape user. And so all the people that Gary works with, you know, like Dana, he'll Dana, if they need mouth tape, he'll recommend hostage tape. So we were at the last PowerSlap in Vegas at the Fountain Blue and I'm in there,

their weight room is amazing. If you've never been to the Fountain Blue, it's phenomenal. So I'm in there working out, the Nelk boys walk in, Kyle sees me and he comes up to me and he's like, hey, you're the hostage tape guy. I'm like, yeah, he's like, oh yeah, Breckett got me on to wearing hostage tape. I love it, man, I wear it every night.

And I'm like, holy shit, this is crazy, right? So it's been a wild, wild journey. Yeah. So. That's cool. What's the aftermath of that? Like the next day, you're kind of like, what the hell just happened?

It's, you're just on cloud nine, right? When you're just, it's all real, but it all feels so satisfying and good to know that just all the hard work pays off, right? You're in the rooms with these people who can help make your dreams come true, right? Just being around these guys. I think it's really cool when something like So Simple

can make such a big difference for people. Like, cause when you think about it, it's literally, it's mouth tape. It's really quality mouth tape, but at the end of the day, it's mouth tape. And it can move somebody's health in such a different direction from where they are right now. It's actually kind of crazy.

It's always something that can happen in America. Like, you can think about dog. It's awesome. That's what's so beautiful about the product. Yeah. That's why it has product, it's what we call product market fit, where it checks all these boxes of,

okay, it solves a problem, number one. So like for anybody out there that wants to start a business, solving a problem is one of the best things you can do. One of the best products that you can try to sell or service is solve a problem. So it solves a problem, right? It's cheap to make.

It ships really easily. It's small. It's a daily consumable that people use constantly, right? So the LTV, the lifetime value of somebody is not just gonna be on a one-time purchase, but a continual purchase over many, many, many years, right? And the branding, so it checks all these amazing boxes that we just kind of found lightning in a bottle

and we'll see where this ends. We'll see where this continues to go, so. What about fundraising? And maybe you can tell us a little bit about fundraising in the beginning versus fundraising now. Yeah, so at the beginning, we bootstrapped it. So all the money that I put in was money that I made from my previous venture.

So again, it's called bootstrapping, taking all your own money, putting it into it. So we didn't raise any outside capital. And so now as we scale scale though, the challenges are, I mean, when you go from zero to eight figures as fast as we've done, it might from the outside look like, oh my God, you guys are making tons of money. Like, yeah, but all the money comes in

and it goes right back out, you know, because you're paying for marketing, you're paying for inventory, you're paying for all these things to paying for inventory, you're paying for all these things to keep it moving, to keep it growing. And because you're growing that much, now you have these growing pains of, well, how do you actually continue to scale if you can't put money back into marketing or inventory? Now all of a sudden, you got all these more people who want to buy malatate.

Well, you got to pay for the inventory. That costs a lot more money. So the challenge then is finding the finances, finding the capital to help do that. And so that's kind of what we're in now. We're in this phase of, we're going to be moving into retail this next year. Going into Walmart, going into some of these places

where now, again, it's not like you go into retail and it solves everything. It gets harder, you go into retail, right? Because there's more moving parts, there's more money that you gotta have to be able to invest in getting your product out there for people to have access to. And how much inventory do you need to be in Walmart?

You need a lot, there's 4,500 stores, 4,500 doors. And the thing about like a store like Walmart is, you can't fuck up. You fuck up, they fine you or they drop you. And then you're out. Not keeping up with the orders and so on. Oh God, yeah. Yeah, if you screw up, like you can't screw up

with those guys, cause if you screw up, then they'll fine you and just kill you. Have you floating down a river somewhere? For years on this podcast, we've been talking about the benefit of barefoot shoes. And these are the shoes I used to use back in like 2017, 2018, my old Metcons. They are flat, but they're not very wide

and they're very stiff and they don't move. That's why we've been partnering with and we've been using Vivo barefoot shoes. These are the Modest Strength shoe because not only are they wide, I have wide ass feet and so do we here on the podcast, especially as our feet have gotten stronger, but they're flexible.

So when you're doing certain movements, like let's say you're doing jumping or you're doing split squats or you're doing movements where your toes need to flex and move, your feet are able to do that and perform in the shoe, allowing them to get stronger over time. And obviously they're flexible.

So your foot's allowed to be a foot and when you're doing all types of exercise, your feet will get stronger, improving your ability to move. Andrew, how can they get the hands on these? Yes, head to vivobarefoot.com slash power project and enter the code that you see on screen to save 20% off your entire order. Again, that's at vivobarefoot.com slash power project. Links in the description, as well as the podcast show notes. What you got to go on over there, Andrew? Do you guys just rely on the product

and the experience being so awesome for customer retention? Because I just think that, for one, I can't live without it. But then I was looking at it, I'm like, how do you retain customers over the long haul because it's almost like a subscription type thing, and sometimes people will look at their spreadsheet and they'll kind of be like, okay, where can I trim the fat?

Yeah, so believe it or not, yes, if you've got a great product, people are gonna tell other people about it, right? I feel like this podcast turned it into a business podcast, right? It feel like this podcast turned into a business podcast. It happens, honestly. It's good, it's good. But yes, people are gonna talk about it

and you definitely want that word of mouth. Word of mouth is a great thing to have, but what we do is we leverage email. We send a lot of email out. So we're pushing email out every day, sometimes twice a day to our subscriber base. We've got over a million people on our email list. And we've done collaborative stuff together

where people receiving slingshots and the protein powders and stuff like that have gotten the hostage tape and stuff like that. Yeah, exactly. And that's what you gotta do. It's a never-ending hamster wheel of, you just gotta continue to remind people. Our inboxes are cluttered, there's a lot of stuff.

We see a lot of different ads and different videos and things on Instagram and Facebook that you have to stay relevant. You have to stay top of mind for people. And one of the best ways is for retention is email. And so that's for us, one of our biggest channels, one of our biggest growing channels to keep retention, keep people top of mind that, hey, hostage tape is,

I gotta reorder hostage tape, right? It also helps that this happens to be a product that you use every night. So it's easy, right? It's always on your mind. So that's, I think, heart works in our favor, you know? I use two every night, because I always end up pulling one of them off

for some reason. I don't know what I do when I sleep. Have you ever tried an X shape or something, or like a cross shape? You know, I don't, I could try it, but I think like I just literally, like I don't know why I pull it off, but I just take it off.

I don't know what the hell I'm doing. Interesting. Like it doesn't fall off, I take it off. Yeah, that's a normal thing. A lot of people do that. A lot of people that subconsciously, because look, we're not supposed to have something on our mouth normally, and it's a normal reaction

for people to go, like this fight or flight mode of ripping it away. So it's a normal subconscious reaction for people to go, take it off and they wake up and they're like, wait a minute, where did it go? Oh, I took it off. So does that say something weird about me that I keep it on all night?

I like things on my mouth? You like rest and you like being jacked. Interesting. So weird. It's kind of like swaddling, I think. For me, it's become this thing where when I put my mouth tape on, it's comforting. It's comforting and then it like signals my body,

it's time to go to bed now. And then I just fall to bed and then my wife's like, how the fuck do you fall asleep so fast? Does your wife not use it? No, my wife doesn't need it. Cause here's the thing, most women, more, most men, look, this issue, 75% of people out there are men. We're the ones who have this issue. Most women don't.

And so my wife, she's 44ish, 45ish, my same age as me, and she sleeps with her mouth shut. Doesn't have the issue. So, but yeah, she'll bump me and tell me like if I forget to put it on, honey, put your fucking tape on. I get that too. Well, you know, I think I might have mentioned this already and I think you mentioned this too. One thing I do like is that,

like I literally just ran out of tape yesterday and I had to sleep without mouth tape this last night and I'm sleeping with my mouth closed. You know, it's like now I'm, but I still like rather just sleeping with the tape on, you know? Well, here's what's gonna happen. So there'll be times where if you don't sleep with it on, yeah, your mouth might stay open for a few days,

but then it'll naturally start to drop open again. I haven't ever really experienced it myself where my mouth doesn't, it doesn't stay shut. I have to always wear tape. And I think that's just normal. I don't think there's anybody who, the older we get, you're able to keep your mouth shut naturally just because our muscles are atrophying,

they're getting older. The balls are getting lower. You can't control it. It's just normal stuff. So, I mean, is it really that bad to put tape on your mouth for the rest of your life? No. And you look bad ass doing it.

You mentioned Facebook. Do you sell on Amazon as well? We do. Yeah, we are in Amazon. Amazon's like tricky for some people, but how have you navigated that? Amazon is a bit of a beast because Amazon actually,

they don't allow maltape, believe it or not. So, but you can find it on there. So look, when there's millions of products on Amazon, they can't monitor everything, but when you're the category leader like we are, it's easy to monitor us. So we're constantly getting removed, but we just keep relisting it.

And so, you know, Amazon is a beast where like they can make kind of make their own rules, right? So if they don't like a product or think like it's unsafe or for whatever reason, they can remove it. So there's a lot of mouth tapes that are there that are copying us, obviously. There's a lot of copycats for sure. If it's not hostage tape, it's a copycat.

It's not the original, buy the original. So we are on Amazon. It's not a primary channel for us, though. We are recently now on walmart.com. So that is good, legit. Walmart actually came to us and said, we want you on Walmart, because you guys are an amazing brand.

And the idea is, again, build on walmart.com so then we get into Walmart stores. Anything TikTok wise or Snapchat or like, do you advertise in other areas? Not really. YouTube. I mean, we're big, so we've been spending a lot more money on YouTube. YouTube, so in the Ecom world,

Meta has been pretty unstable this year. There's a lot of crazy things going on in social and a lot of algorithm changes and updates with everything that everybody's doing. Like what, one of the things that meta has been doing is they're trying to capture what TikTok's done. TikTok's done a great job with their algorithm on the content, but TikTok has struggled

actually running a good, clean strategy on just the content and keeping the creators happy and having a good, like that's been a mess. And then, you know, with the potential of being banned, it's like always under scrutiny. And so Meta has been trying to adapt to that and adapt, you know, their content for people. And so it's created issues. So we're getting more into YouTube, getting

more into these other platforms. I would say a lot of our spend goes to YouTube right now. A lot more to YouTube than to Metta, believe it or not. So somebody actually, let's say that they are wanting to run ads for their business, whatever that may be. Do you think that they should still focus on Facebook and Meta or should they actually try to learn YouTube stuff or is it like the same? Facebook. Facebook.

Yeah. The reality is that we're a point now where so many people know who we are. We have such a large user base around the world. So many people use us, people see us everywhere, and we've been on Google and YouTube for so long that we have a lot of just equity built into our account and our videos that we're able to get a return out of it. Whereas the average person starting out, you won't. So you're better off going to meta.

It's easier to get started, it's easier to start from nothing to get some traction, get moving, before you wanna actually go to YouTube and start doing, not to say you shouldn't, you still can, but you'll be more successful, I think, starting out with meta than you would be on YouTube. Why do you think the straightforward ads work so well? Because what I see a lot on,

it's just even my own social media or other influencers, I'll see a lot of pushback. Someone will, I might make a video and I might have a protein shake in it and say, buy my steak shake or something, or you can get it here, or it might be casual, or it might be more direct, right? If there's no ad dollars behind it,

it is very flat and it will just have negativity in the comment section. However, if I take that same exact video and put just even the smallest amount of ad dollars behind it, it can do amazing and it can help make us a lot of money. So why do you think, like why are people so receptive to the direct ad, do you think?

Like why are people so receptive to the direct ad, do you think? It's because platforms like Meta have become pay to play. And what that means is the organic landscape of content has changed, right? The algorithms are changing, they're constantly evolving. Right? So like, for example, guys like you, you've got pretty large follower bases

on your Instagram accounts. The reality is, is example, guys like you, you've got pretty large follower bases on your Instagram accounts. The reality is, is that's not helping you anymore. Doesn't help you anymore, because the algorithm is adapting and changing towards having just great content, fun content. So now it's allowing somebody with a smaller account, right, smaller follower base to actually get boosted in the algorithm just because they've got great content.

So now they're not being hurt because they've only got 5,000 followers or you guys have six figure followers where it's easier for you, it would have been easier for you to get eyeballs. And so they're forcing you to have to then put dollars behind content. And then what they do is because you're putting money behind it, now they're strategically serving it to people that they know are going to actually react to it.

Right. So organic content, if it doesn't go anywhere, it's not going to get any traction, have any responses because nobody relevant is gonna give a shit about it. But Facebook is so good at knowing who to target. You put some money behind it. Now it's gonna find all the best people who are gonna react to it and potentially want it. Yeah, the advertising to me is just like interesting

because I remember as like Instagram was growing and YouTube is a little different, it's always kind of had a longer format feel to it, but I just remember people being really frustrated with say the Rock's Instagram, now everything you do is a sale. But meanwhile, people buy so much stuff off of Instagram and Facebook

and all these different platforms. And I think the difference, I think, some things I've noticed is like an ad on Facebook or via Facebook on Instagram, Metta, it doesn't need, there doesn't need to be much of a story. There doesn't need to be beginning. There doesn't need to be a middle. There doesn't need to be an end.

There doesn't need to be nearly as exciting as you might think because it says shop now on it. And so the person, if what the person sees that image or the voice or whatever, if something just captures their attention, doesn't really matter how you do it. And they see that it says shop now, I think their defenses are down.

Whereas like if you come on screen and you start talking about something and you're like, oh, I got this product and you guys should go check it out. I think you'll really enjoy it. They're like, oh, he's trying to sell me on something. Exactly. It's like changes the mindset somehow. Yeah.

There's a psychological barrier that if people feel like they're being sold to, they go, the defenses go up. They're like, ah, I don't want to. But you're touching on an interesting concept of like using a hook, right? Using a hook that's getting somebody's interest. And so you can create interest in the first three seconds, hook them, and as long as you hook their interest, then you can get them to go somewhere else

that might convert. Maybe it's shop now in a meta shop, or maybe it's on a landing page. We typically do a listicle landing page. So you're looking at all that stuff. All of it, yeah. You personally like diving in. Yeah, well, because look, if you're selling a product,

you gotta understand your funnels and how you're getting people to convert from start to finish. So if I've got like a 10 second video and the first three seconds of it are really meant to hook you in, and I'm not telling this whole story of the product, which we don't typically do,

it's I'm getting your attention, getting your interest to then take you to a listicle that has, here's six reasons why this matters, right? Because that's where then they're gonna wanna learn about it, and then actually do something from there. And so, but also too with that, there's this idea of seven. So the average person needs seven touches to make a decision on a product.

So for example, if you see like, well, let's use true classic tees, right? I love studying true classic tees. They do a great job of just their ads and everything they do. They just sell t-shirts, right? So free plug for true classic, right? So they do a great job of just making ads and everything they do. They just sell t-shirts, right? So free plug for true classic, right? So they do a great job of just making some fun ads,

different things with their t-shirts. But what you'll find is you might look at it, you see an ad, but you don't take an action. But then what they do a great job of is the next day, you'll come back on Instagram and you see another ad again. And then maybe later that night you see another one chipping away at you. And then by the time you realize

you're ready to make a purchase, you know, I should try this. I keep seeing this everywhere. Click shop, buy, you buy a pack, boom. And then what you realize is the average is there's seven touches of everything, of everywhere. So our strategy with that has always been, we put content out on every single platform.

So no matter where you go, whether it's Instagram, whether it's Meta, whether it's YouTube, whether it's Twitter, email, you're gonna literally be inundated with the web of our content everywhere you go. So you feel like, oh my God, these guys are everywhere. And on top of it, you're seeing people like yourself, you're seeing these other creators, well-known people posting about hostage tape, showing mild tape, no strips.

You're seeing it everywhere. In addition to this paid we're doing, forcing stuff in your face so that you see it so we know we're getting all of, we're building equity, we're building, we're investing in these seven touches so then now we can start to convert you. Well, at least people are getting converted into something that's gonna help them out. Exactly.

Because there's a lot of ads for shit that's gonna, that's not that great. But this is pretty amazing to, I think, a lot of people that are actually getting into business stuff online, because there's so much opportunity with so many different products. I learned a lot right now. This is helpful.

I would say this. So again, this is turning into a business podcast and not a health podcast, but that's probably good, right? Like, there's a little bit, little diversity of things to talk about. So anybody out there that wants to start a business, they always ask, well, what kind of business should I start? I mentioned it earlier.

Try to find something in your life that solves a problem. And actually start paying attention to it. Start opening your mind up to, okay, what sort of problems am I experiencing that I can actually solve? And then you can start from there and find a business that you could start. That's what I would tell anybody.

Is there anything over, like, maybe you would have mentioned what it is, but obviously this is what you're working on right now. Is there anything else in the future that you thought about getting into, if you even would mention that? Yeah, so, so okay when you think of the hostage brand, right, this idea of hostage, right, so we had always envisioned that yes, we're hostage tape, we're about don't let bad sleep hold you hostage, but at some point

it becomes don't let life hold you hostage. Right? So don't let fill in the blank hold you hostage. So think about, there's other products, there's other simple things that we can do that set you free. Right? Because it's not just sleep, right?

Like, okay, yes, we're primarily a sleep brand, but when you think of this nasal strip, a lot of people don't realize that you can wear this when you work out. I wear this exclusively when I, I did a run here this morning on this road, along the highway right here, wear my nasal strip, running down the road,

and that's an area that's not sleep-related, but it's something that it's working out, right? So there's areas around working out, daily life, small things that we can start to now do and enter in under this hostage idea, this hostage brand of don't let life hold you hostage anymore, or your family. Don't let this hold your family hostage, or your wife, or your kids.

So that's kind of the direction we're moving in. We talked about this a little bit last time you were here, but what are some things you do to stay in shape? You mentioned running, do you run pretty often? I try to run at least three times a week right now. So I'll do a three to five mile run every morning. So every morning I'll get up and I'll do, I do red light therapy.

So I've got one of those. I think you and I both have one of those huge. Like fire hawk. You have the fire hawk? It's not a fire hawk, but it's like, it's this huge thing that I'll sit on the floor and I'm really into stretching. The older that I get.

So I sit on the floor and I stretch and I have the red light therapy up. So I try to get as much. Right on your balls. Paint us a picture. So, okay. I used to actually do that. I used to actually do it bottomless.

Yeah. Right? I don't do it anymore. Why not? There's a window. I gave everybody a show. The Amazon guy comes dropping some stuff off like, yo. So I don't do that anymore, but I do it shirtless.

And then I also look into it with my eyes because Gary Breck has talked about this where red light therapy can be really great to help with your eyes too. So I do the red light therapy, I stretch, I get a sauna in every day. I try to get a cold plunge in, not every day, but every other day usually.

And then I'm getting a run in three times a week, and then I do the weight room, probably the other two or three days of the week. But like look, at my age, I'm 45, not a football player anymore. I'm not pushing around iron, a bunch of iron anymore. I just do as much lighter pull-ups, push-ups, just very light dumbbell stuff.

Yeah, I mean, I get a pump in, but it's not, I'm not getting down on the bench pushing three plates anymore. I just, I don't clean, I don't squat. I don't do anything. I stay away from doing Olympic lifts, I don't squat, I don't do anything. I stay away from doing Olympic lifts, the older that I've gotten, because the last thing that I want to do is hurt my back. I actually had a stinger about two months ago. I had a stinger in my neck.

And if you've ever had a stinger, dude, Yeah, they suck. Like I literally thought I was gonna die. Right? And so it makes you appreciate the older that we get being healthy and actually being able to move. And so I stay, I avoid doing super heavy Olympic lifts just because I don't want to tweak my back or do something crazy because of when I experienced that, it was terrifying.

What about a little bit of like a sprint or maybe add weight to a particular exercise? Like you mess around with any of that or you try to really just stay in your lane and keep it? The sprinting is good. So what I'll try to do sometimes is I'll add variation to it where I might jog for a little while and then I'll hit a part of the block and then I'll sprint the block to try to get the heart rate moving. Because I think if there's one thing

I don't do a good enough job, the older I get is getting my heart rate up. I don't think I get it up moving as much as I should be. Yeah, I really enjoy that. Yesterday I did some sprints and it just feels awesome. It's just fun. It kind of just reminds me of being a little kid. You just sprint somewhere and it feels good.

Doesn't matter how shitty you are at it or how fast you are, it's just fun. Totally, yeah. It feels good. Yeah, it does. Where can people find you? So they can find us at hostagetape.com. You can also buy us on Amazon.

You can buy us on walmart.com. And you can go to all the socials at Hostage Tape. Oh, by the way, I wanted to thank you for talking to my buddies over at NADS. They were really Dan Beard and those guys, they were really excited. And they said that when they talked to you, they got off the phone with you

and they were just super fired up. I was like, yeah, Alex has the tendency to do that to people. Awesome, I mean, look, like they're at a stage where like we've all been there when you start a business and you're trying to grow it. But I think one thing that I love is when,

when you've had as much experiences as I've had, you know, running a business, even like you, you love to be able to pay it forward and help somebody else who was in your shoes, five, 10, 15 years ago. It's like being a coach. I'm a coach. I've been a coach my whole life. Like I just got back into it. I'm coaching my son's freshman football team. Oh, nice.

Right? And for so many years, I was a high school coach for like fifteen years. And then I retired just because running businesses and having the kids and everything. But now I'm like, I don't have a hobby right now. I need to get back into coaching. So I contacted the head But now I'm like, I don't have a hobby right now. I need to get back into coaching. So I contacted the head coach and I'm like, hey man. And he was like, yeah, you're more than qualified. Come on, come on out, you can coach the freshman team. And I said, you don't have to pay me.

But so getting, it's kind of like coaching, right? I love coaching. I love being able to get out on the field, coach quarterbacks, coach players, take all this knowledge of 20 some years and coach the sport that I love. Football is my first love. And business coaching, it kind of meets that same itch

of being able to coach people on something that now I have 20 some years of experience and I feel like I've gotten pretty good. I've got a long way to go and where I want to be. And so being able to help people and coach people on how to get better at business, how to do certain things, how to do this. I love that man. And it makes you feel good.

Like when you can help people, I think that's something we don't lean into enough is there's something about human psychology that when we help people we do things for people There's no better high and there's no better feeling than helping people and doing things for other people Strength is never a weakness weakness is never strength catch you guys later. Bye