Massenomics Podcast - Ep. 317: Garage Gym Competition with Joe Gray

Episode Date: May 2, 2022

Big Joe Gray joins us for this one to fill us in on the fast growing Garage Gym Competition! We also talk about twitter, Garage Gym Reviews, and IG Subscriptions. Juggernaut AI: juggernautai.app and use code MASSENOMICS to save 10% The Strength Co: https://www.thestrength.co/ Swiss Link: https://www.swisslink.com and use code MASS to save 15% Fusion Sports Performance: https://www.fusionsp.net/ MASS to save 20% on all FSP supplements Spud Inc: https://www.spud-inc-straps.com/ Texas Power Bars: https://www.texaspowerbars.com/

You know, thanks for what you do with your podcasts and all the rest. You're doing a great job. Hope everybody keeps tuning in. You get a lot of good info, a lot of insights, understandings on how to get strong, how to stay strong, how to use your strength. You do a great job, dude. You make things better than they are in real life, I think.

If you don't follow Massanomics, y'all do it. Social media, website, everything. Massanomics! Massanomics! side everything massonomics welcome back everyone for episode 317 of the massonomics podcast the lifting podcast about nathan my name is tanner and my name is tommy and of course we're coming to you live from western northeast south dakota where else would we be from really i don't know where else there's no place else that exists.

Not in my eyes. We're right here in the Great Plains, the Midwest, whatever it is you want to call us. That's where we're at. And you'll be happy to know that this week the MathSnomics podcast is brought to you by our great friends over at The Strength Co. Interesting thing about The Strength Co. They recently came out with the 35-pound plates.

They were such a hit, in fact fact you might be asking yourself right now how did the 35 plates 35 i think that's why everyone tuned in they want to know uh they were such a hit that they have been sold out really first run already first run is sold out that doesn't make it like a week i don't even know if it lasted a week that's how popular 35 pound plates are especially the strength call 35 it's kind of like the whole thing of when everyone says they hate nickelback but then actually they're like but then spotify is like well they're in pretty high in several states so yeah people's like yeah so yeah all you all hate nickelback except yeah here they are like towards the top of you know of all of all the playlists but everyone doesn't like them i guess everyone just is listening to it ironically it's they're

buying the just like the 35 pound plates from the strength co and uh of course they've got all the other size plates you know the 45s the 25s uh the 10s the fives the two and a half so one and a quarters all the way to the big old Hondos. So you can outfit your entire gym with Strength Co. plates. It's what we've done at Massanomics Gym, and it's actually why they've become the go-to plates of Massanomics Gym. Well, there's a number of reasons that they've become the go-to plates. Part of it is just because of how good of plates they are,

but they really are the bee's knees. Go to them and buy some. If you want 35s, you might be late on this first run, but get on the site and get signed up and get yourself some when they come back in stock. Do it. Today's episode is also brought to you by Juggernaut AI. I have to prepare my voice for this uh get it going come with me for

this ad if you want to lift i need your clothes your boots and your individual weak points on the major lifts juggernaut ai totally individualized training so it can be used by everyone from beginner to advanced lifters volume frequency, frequency, exercise for weak points, phase potentiation, and periodization strategy all customized to you and your lifting style. You can pick the date for your meet or your testing day, and that's what you train towards. You can pick how many days a week you want to train

and several other individual characteristics about you and your lifts. The training is continually adapting to your feedback. The changes happen like right within, if you're squatting for the day, your second set could be different than your first just because of feedback you're giving on your first set. That's how quick the updates come at you. Find out more and get signed up at juggernautai.app or just look up the app on your phone. The future has not been written, but your juggernaut AI discount code is it's massonomics and that will save you 10% for the life for the whole life of your membership.

We'll be back next week with another juggernaut AI, AI ad read. So yeah, juggernaut, we both use it. You should too. Several people have been signing up also yeah um cool to see it is it is we've said it i've said it several weeks now the spreadsheet is just going to be really tough to ever look at again it's obsolete now isn't it

it is the world's moved on yes uh tanner we there was a few things that happened this weekend yeah speaking of the world moving on things that happened this week uh so one of uh one of the local uh water and holes in town shut down oh yeah did you go to it towards i did go for their last and final night was there a concert that night yeah they had a band in there and it was a very busy night and i couldn't help but think because that place was pretty open to doing whatever i think people would suggest from a performance standpoint that we really missed our shot for a live massonomics podcast i think that would have been a real hit with that crowd too actually there would have been at least 10 people there but it's yeah once you weed out our family maybe two or three yeah um

i that's all i could think of when we were there is oh yep we totally could have this would have been our shot for a live show at a place that would have made sense and and we blew it we blew it we'll have to wait for the next type of place like that to come around and hopefully catch it right before it closes yeah someone said top shelf at the zoo no it wasn't the zoo no no could we do i don't think you could do a live performance at the zoo no that wouldn't be possible like there is actually hundreds of people going crazy and the uh it would have been a lot of this like what get me one me you you me you you me me just. Just liquids going everywhere. The lights and the sound would have been too crazy.

Shots, shots, shots. Yeah, this other place would have been, it's not busy enough on a Wednesday night that you could totally have kind of taken control of the area and put on a little show, and it would have been fun. Well, it apparently wasn't busy enough on any of the nights because it's not open anymore. I know.

Before we went out, though, before we went out, I went to old Flying Ryan D's house. I've heard of the nights because it's not open anymore i know um before we went out though before we went out i went to old flying ryan d's house i've heard of the guy and as heard on the massonomics podcast yes absolutely he cooked up a little dinner for us he's kind of a he's a bit of a chef a bit of a handyman in the kitchen so to speak we had some some rigatonis with a little vodka homemade vodka sauce on them you know you just pour the vodka over the noodles. That's the sauce. Yeah. So the food was great. But then a lot of times when we're sitting around waiting to go out,

we just get into kind of like a YouTube music video thing. Yeah. And Ryan, you've been a part of this before. Oh, right, right, right. And there is one channel that it was the hardest I'd laughed in a very, very long time. So we were kind of going down memory lane, doing some things from the early 2000s. And then in the suggested videos, a thing comes up called DJ Cumberbund. And I've heard Ryan play this before.

And the one that I remember hearing Ryan play is this guy just masters up like the dumb. He kind of tries to make the dumbest mashups. Sure. And the one that he would play is Dancing in September by Earth, Wind & Fire and Crazy Train by Ozzy Osbourne. Mix it up. And then he does the music video for it too where he matches up the music videos.

And it's really funny. They're surprisingly well done and he has a lot of those. And he had a few with... He had some Ramstein ones. DeHost. Yes, he has DeH with uh uh play that funky music white boy and uh obviously yes and so there's just a bunch of them and there was one that was

really really funny because we didn't know it was coming and i don't know if i want to totally ruin it for people because i think they should watch it but it is the um if you go dj spoiler alert yeah dj cumberbund and if you go pants feet and i'm not sure if i can even play any of it um but basically here i'll just do like a quick second because i think we'll be okay okay um what ad that's Okay. What ad is coming up there? Oh, I always get survey ads. So they're mixing up photograph and whatever that other one is. So it just keeps going like that. And then eventually it turns into I like your feet around your pants.

And then it just turns into I like feet. I like pants. So is he singing? No, it's the Nickelback guy singing so he has like like he mixes it I don't know how he does it

but it just keeps going and then let's see and then let's see and it's it's really good so if you're ever feeling kind of a goofy mood go check out check out dj cummerbund pants feet and it is hilarious and there's a little uh another little band gets mixed in at the end. Oh, okay, that,

and actually the other one that got us going. So you need to watch that one, people, if you're interested. But then the other one that really had us laughing hard was just recently, because my brother follows this guy pretty closely, because he's like, I haven't heard this song before. It was Down With The Sickness.

Oh, it's called the neck sickness and uh here you got the plug over there it's called the music video and then some papa roach gets mixed in there too that's some uh you know he's like that's yeah yeah like that guy's doing it's not just the song it's the fact that on youtube he mixes all of the so like there it's mixing next episode like it's mixing tour footage from snoop dogg and dr in with like disturbed concerts it's a pretty entertaining uh pretty entertaining view if you're uh ready to go on a musical tour so i would recommend that to him i do like that i like his uh selections that he's playing with there. All the songs felt very relevant to me for some reason. So go check that out.

That's good. I do like that. We have a can. Do we want the can yet or do you want to wait? We could do it. I don't know. What do you think? Let's do it.

All right. I'm kind of thirsty. I'll try anything once. Okay. Well, I'm going to need to throw that blindfold on. Oh, is this a real segment to throw that blindfold on then. Is this a real segment? This is a real segment. Someone fire up the Massanomics wiki to add this one to the...

What's in the can. Here we go. How do you work this thing? Oh, we have a Sparklebot. Did you know this? Oh, yeah. Now that we have the wiki that has all our historic ratings, now on Discord you can fire up the Sparklebot

and it'll randomly give you one of the cans we've had in the past and give you what we rated it. Wow. And sometimes I think it maybe tells you what my guess was or some other. We have the Steam Whistle Lemonandy says tanner rating 3.5 tommy rating 3.5 average rating 3.5 okay tanner i do not have a koozie this week so you're just gonna have to let the cold aluminum go right to your hands but there you go okay i'm very curious

what this is going to be like curiosity killed the cat you know might just murder your taste buds too hmm i think okay that is hard i have a strong feeling i'm not gonna get this I have a strong feeling I'm not going to get this. Oh, I don't even know what I would guess on this. It's like a... This isn't an alcoholic beverage, correct? It is not.

There's zero alcohol involved here. That's not... Like, it almost... I have, like, a beer flavor. Like, some kind of beer flavor but then fruity too i have absolutely no idea what this is i usually not this stumped where i can usually if i think a little bit i come up with some sort of uh i think if you take your blindfold off you're gonna get you're gonna get a little bit of the i don't even know what to guess so i'm not even wagering a guess on this

because I can't even think of anything that makes sense. Okay, let's take a look. We have an AHA. Okay. Pineapple Passion Fruit. Okay, so let me... The pineapple, I think, is obvious once you go back. Passion Fruit, I have no idea what a Passion Fruit tastes like.

Right. I really had a hard time with that one yeah i think also the pineapple i think we've had one or two flavors of alcohol in here that had pineapple in them so that might be thrown out too it's a common one yeah like it's citrusy but canned pineapple isn't like my go-to flavor right i. I don't know. I might actually struggle to finish this one. I'm not sure. I probably got to give it like a three, I think. I'm giving it a three.

Yeah. Yeah, not ideal. Nope. Okay. I'm giving it a three. Have we mentioned the giant check in the room? It's not a giant elephant. There's a giant check in the room.

And by the time the week that this episode comes out we will have selected a winner of the uh reveal contest which we have those entries rolling in right now by the minute yep there's a few good pretty good ones in there today i like uh there was the uh someone that basically said like if you want to do a mass dynamics reveal you have to like be scantz and it was like all the things of being scantz best part at the end he was on his knees to represent like his shortness and there was a record in there and i am kind of a record guy you know that i'm a bit of a record guy so that fits in but yeah keep the uh actually by the time this comes out don't keep the

submissions stop the submissions but uh if you're listening one of the people listening live keep the submissions coming we're enjoying it and uh us two and scantz are gonna have a hard time picking the winner i know that that's gonna be the case by the end of this thing yep not gonna be easy we do have after last week's uh mole reveal the discord room was busting at the seams yeah it's a little bit more of an intimate group this wednesday afternoon yeah yeah especially being the afternoon and on short notice for everyone i know gotta keep them guessing that's right okay so we've had a lot of thing we actually have a lot of things to cover this week yeah i don't know if we'll get it to at all or not probably we should talk about elon must buying twitter you

know that's gonna be on that is relevant next week so um i don't know what it means to me i don't i don't use twitter i don't use twitter i don't really care um 44 billion dollars seems like a lot of money it seems like a lot of money for a social network um a lot of people the impression i get is some people seem to think that their whole lives are going to change now that he owns twitter and i would question how much time you spend on Twitter if that's the case and what type of stuff you're posting about. I also, there's a lot of people that are really, really excited he's buying Twitter. I don't know. I don't get that excited for billionaires to buy stuff. Like it just doesn't. I don't really care. I guess I couldn't, maybe this is ignorant of me, but I

almost couldn't care either way yeah i just don't really even care yeah it's weird i guess it was a platform maybe i used i would care maybe yeah maybe like if he bought instagram yeah i would just more so be like okay what are we doing yeah what's gonna affect me yeah right big one right um it's just weird to me how many people think of him as like their personal savior like don't doesn't it come off that way or am i like i read i don't even know enough about it but it's just weird even in our local community when things get posted about it and i'm reading i'm like god if i didn't know any better i'd say like this is people's like hero of the world yeah um i don't know i guess i don't think of i don't think of him that way i I also don't think much of Twitter either.

We probably have a pretty lame take on it, not being Twitter users, but I don't know. Maybe my takeaway is it's just more rich people buying more stuff. That's why, at the end of the day, my thing is to be like, what actually is going to change about anything? I don't know. It's just the trend of everything consolidating more and more.

It's like, what happened this week. It wasn't like Turner and Disney and all of that, like merge to like, it just more and more. It's just like, we're at the rate in 10 years from now we'll have like four companies. I think. So I guess,

yeah, we got to keep, we got to keep that going. If that's the rate, if that's what we're going to get to after. Yeah. We can't still let down. So yeah,

someone, I'll buy that. And then I guess, yeah, just Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, we're gonna get to after yeah we cancel it down so yeah someone uh buy that and then uh um i guess yeah just elon musk jeff bezos and some other guys will rule the world rule the world own everything five years from now yeah what what about um well we should mention that on the week that this is coming out the week that this is coming out, the week that this is coming out on that Thursday of the week coming out, we do have a very special thing. Yes.

Okay. Yeah. I'm not saying a drop. I mean, I guess. Release. A release. A very special. Very special.

Some might even say limited. Some would say limited. And it's small batch small batch yeah it's artisan small batch limited uh any other um bespoke it's almost uh it's culty in a way even i would say maybe too but um it will be on Thursday. What is that, like May? 7th or 8th, I think.

I'll take his word for it. Thursday the 5th. Oh, it's way off. Swanson, Samsonite. Yeah, the 5th, Thursday the 5th. Thursday the 5th, there's going to be something uh big and exciting happening and i we're just not saying we're keep it we're playing this one a little close to the close to the chest close to the vest for now so just uh be out on be on the lookout for that it's going to be it's going to be something you're not going to want to wait

around on i would say that i mean you don't sleep on it we said limited special and bespoke yeah you know and artisan and artisan yes this isn't just handcrafted by somebody yeah yeah probably not someone touched it with their hands someone did touch us with their hands so be on the lookout for that we'll we'll talk more about that next week though yes but don't be late to the party on that one or else you're gonna be kicking yourself there it's very bespoke very bespoke very artisan what about the uh ig subscription thing yeah i wasn't to say i wasn't super familiar with this either yeah um but it looks like instagram i think starting at the end of 2021, they started rolling out a subscription feature

where people could subscribe to basically private, I shouldn't say private, gated content is probably a better word for it. Right, right. Paywall content. Yeah, content that's behind a paywall. And that you can do this on your Instagram account. Seems like an interesting feature. I don't know if this is sort of like their way of getting in on that subscriber slash Patreon slash OnlyFans market.

Right. But it is a feature that they appear to be rolling out slowly. I've only had two people in my timeline pop up. And it was Jamal Browner and Ben Pollack. Me too. I got it in my notification area. It said that they both had like subscription i can't even remember what it's so you immediately signed up so i signed up for

the most expensive tier i could right away now i think they were both at like five bucks a month i believe is what it was and the interesting thing about it though so one it is interesting that instagram is like testing the waters or looking at this uh they do have a very large subscriber base and there's a lot of people that I'm sure would love to have this and could probably make a lot of money off of it. Yup. But what's interesting is right away off the bat, they're taking 0%.

Right. Like all of the money is yours. IG meta is not getting any of it. They're, they're passing all the money right onto you and savings onto you. I can't believe from long that that will be the if this actually goes through that that will be the business model uh the internet companies they obviously need to make money but they're notorious

for taking a pretty hefty cut when it comes to subscription type things uh for example a very popular one that a lot of people might not know about is like the app store. Anything that's sold through the app store, Apple takes 30%. So that blows a lot of people's minds that like, whoa, so you make this app and Apple gets 30%. It's like, yes, that's how that works. So they've been coming under fire a lot for that. Just recently, Instagram's parent company Meta said that everything in the metaverse, I don't know if it's everything you sell. I don't know what it was, but they're going to take a 50% cut of everything, which seems insane that they get 50% of it. So just based off of the fact that their parent company has another

business model where they will be taking 50%, it seems hard to believe that if this subscription thing gets up and going, that Facebook isn't going to start or Instagram, I should say, isn't going to start taking some decent cuts of this in the future. But I'm curious to see how people use it. I don't, I, I don't see myself probably ever wanting to be on a gated, pay to be on a gated Instagram feed. I like big Matt and the discord are our private uh member only discord community so and that's what and yeah so we and i guess probably full disclosure we should say we do have a discord that has actually yeah people do got to pay to be in it yeah uh i would make the argument that that's pretty different than instagram just being the fact that like the discord you can have

different threads channels chat rooms whatever you want to refer to them as you can actually have long-form conversations like instagram still has a comment section not very good for actual conversations also in this model we don't have to give any of that money to uh meta or you know whoever you know when someone's signing up it's not uh filtered through right yeah yeah and i guess in instagram as of the way they have it set up as of now you don't either but what do they do when you get a whole bunch of people signed up on that and then all of a sudden they do decide they want to take 30 of it yeah that and also you know these people are supposedly i i think the goal here is that you're trying to build some type of community um i don't believe instagram shares emails or contact info so that's always tough to uh to market or keep the connection going when you don't have Instagram shares emails or contact info. So that's always tough to market or keep the connection going

when you don't have any way of really getting in contact with the people besides through the community. And I do believe that Discord is a superior platform for something like that. True. I know it's not an apples to apples comparison, but I do think Discord, just being the fact that you can post memes and videos

and different types of content besides just text, I think makes it a little more interactive in that way too. So fruitly, we'll probably keep an eye on that just to see what happens. But I, I haven't noticed it taking the, uh, take an IgE by storm these last couple of weeks.

And big Nate from the discord mentioned, we also have bots in the discord. Are they going to get bots like ours? Yeah. Uh, Instagram is also great at having bots too just they're all really shitty bots our bots are i would use the words curated handcrafted artisan yeah yeah limited these are we do have some very unique and informative

downright informative helpful yes like any good bot should be so for this subscription thing we're just going to keep our eyes on it we don't have any intentions of utilizing it for ourself but we're just curious what it uh what it does yeah although every time i've said anything on this podcast then five years later we did it someone always make sure to find it yeah i'm like that was like 2016 dudes people gotta understand our views on anything are fluid. They're a living, changing thing, right? Yes, but in November of 2016, you said that you weren't going to have phoning guests on the podcast. Well, it's part of growing up and becoming more mature and learning.

That's true. You can't just decide in your mid-20s that this is the position you're going to hold the rest of your life. So we change up. Just like you said said it's a living breathing organism just the bots are going crazy in here i'm just just keeping up on the forgot we even had um prep i think we just we'll just have to wait a minute we got a little time to wait we got we have time to go over some more topics right here quick do we have one more topic time i think so okay i mean you're the guy that has to make the phone call so i think we're good side and i want to talk about this so it's the interesting um news i mean it's not new news but it's just something that we became more more aware of the the inner workings of if uh uh coop over at garage gym reviews he's we've had him on our podcast

before and then uh he did a gym tour of mass dynamics gym and how many years how long ago was that do you think i think i think this summer will be three years okay it was just after i moved into this house i hadn't been in here very long time flies when you're having fun huh time flies when you're podcasting yeah yeah when you're changing your views on things and podcasting yeah close dear friend of the podcast coop um so the uh we just weren't aware of this other people are this probably isn't news to a lot of people but uh it's just interesting to us as we became more aware of it that people have, you know, through our Discord and, you know, online Instagram and other people we talk to, people have made the comments how it seems like there's been

somewhat of a shift in his content and stuff lately. Or like the coverage of the type of things that are being focused on. Production quality and stuff is real good, you know, probably as good as ever. But like there's just been a shift. And they made a video like a month ago saying, oh oh they have a team of more than a dozen people i think right right it's like that's a pretty big thing for a youtube channel to go from like one or two people to over a dozen right but for those of us that are more so in the community that we're in

or like the strength training community it's gone a lot away you know from what i've noticed far away from a lot of those products and there's a whole bunch of like high-end cardio equipment reviews that weren't as prevalent uh he wasn't pumping those out near as much as before and in particular like tonal is the one that people make jokes about yeah but there's all if you actually look there's all kinds of them you know there's tons of these large like almost like commercial treadmills and stuff like that we were like well is it just like the few videos that pop up on our feed that we're just like oh this is just hitting our radar or is is it actually is there actually a lot of cardio stuff and we we had to hop on the website just to see um you know is that true and you know if you look through the most recent reviews there's like this

climber stair cardio thing then the next one's an assault bike then the next one's a bow flex bike then the next one is a some type of uh mix two bike then there's a bench then a massage gun then a treadmill then a recumbent bike then a excellent peloton app competitor then there's a rack then another treadmill and another treadmill it's like yeah whoa like if you said i'm starting a garage gym and those were like the first 15 things you saw on the site i guess i need a couple treadmills and a bike or two you'd also be like i don't know maybe this isn't maybe i'm not in the right spot because that's i don't know it seems like if you're starting a whole a garage gym those maybe aren't the first things that you're interested in. And I get our view of fitness is different than a lot of people's.

But typically when I think of garage gyms, my vision of it is usually like people lifting weights in a garage gym. Right. And I think that's the corner of the world that we're speaking from. A lot of our followers and a lot of people that listen to this show and us personally. our followers and a lot of people that listen to this show and us personally and but what i would even say is what the the content for that he was making in the past was also much more geared for that it was way more barbells racks um barbell accessories you know plates and all that sort of stuff and it just uh as of late it's less of that and the the interesting thing, I mean, that's just all stuff we've noticed. But then the interesting thing that we learned about that makes it probably make a little more sense is that, actually, I'll just say it even. People use the phrase, it feels like he's sold out.

You know, like that it feels different because it's he's sold out. And there's a reason for that. He sold out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, that's the that's that's the literally yeah he it's a pillar for media owns or i believe actually and to full disclosure we obviously don't know the inner workings of the deal or anything like that we just know what we saw from just some quick google search right that that pillar 4 media now owns garage gym reviews

and he probably much like this check behind us got a it was probably like 10 times yeah yeah yeah the check was probably took up the whole room that he got from pillar 4 media probably worth four or five times as much too we don't know what he could have got maybe he's maybe he is still part owner you know and that's you know or maybe he owns equity and that or the pillar 4 media or whatever it is there's probably some sort of deal like that but he did sell out there they're the owners of it and that explains why he's got like this much bigger staff now and uh this pillar for media they own like five or six different companies yes most of them are mattress yeah

it makes sense but it's an oddly specific thing. Like, okay, I guess. Yeah. But it's whole market or a whole referral affiliate programs built around mattresses too. Right.

And the specifically on mattresses from what I've heard is the affiliate programs are so lucrative. Like they can sell a mattress and like on affiliates make like $300. Yeah. I'm sure. I'm sure. It's like furniture. Mattresses are marked up a thousand percent.

Right, right. So I think there was like one other fitness related company that Pillow 4 owned. We were looking at the sales rate and I can't remember either, but we went on and it seemed much more like a generic kind of just fitness website. I wasn't quite, nothing there clicked with me right away.

And like then the ones who knew that, you know, the Garage Gym Reviews had put out a video video i think it was in from like february that was like where garage gym reviews has been and where they're going yeah and it was weird to me that that wasn't mentioned because that's like a big part of where they're that kind of felt like almost part of like the disclosure of like a review website like a lot of review websites say especially bigger ones maybe they aren't big enough but a lot of them say like okay we're a subsidy of this or we're owned and operated by this company um so i thought oh this was the i haven't been paying enough attention lately right

this is the video that will explain i'll understand we got acquired but you can still expect the same great coverage and all this and it like it doesn't make mention of that it's just like oh no we just blew up in size and it's like oh wow like, it doesn't make mention of that. It's just like, Oh no, we just blew up in size. And it's like, Oh wow. Like that's something really, really changed here. But, uh, we don't know what or why.

Right. Until you do a little digging. Right. But it looks like they got acquired according to pillar four's website. A year ago. A year ago. Yeah. And I'm sure these things take time.

It looks like maybe that's just starting to come to fruition these past few months here. Right. Right. Um, and, but in going back to the affiliate thing, my assumption would be the affiliate payouts from companies like Tonal or a $7,000 treadmill

are pretty sweet, relatively speaking. So if your parent company is in the business of making... That is their business model. Yeah, they're in the business of making money, the return model. Yeah. They're, they're in the business of making money. First of all, like is like when you go to a larger company, that's always going to be more of a larger focus than when it is like an individual founder.

Like we like to make money, but at the same time we'd like to do really crazy goofy. Right. Where if we, if somebody else that didn't really get us quite as well, companies, you don't get to do as uh as many goofy things as we do because uh profit tends to be one of the most important if not the most important factor in the

business right so it makes sense to shift more towards those products that uh we've conventionally not been as interested in but they probably make a lot more money good margins on those things yeah so now you know, yeah. And I don't know. It's, it's not, we're not even saying that it's hidden through garage. I think you figure it out. If you look into garage,

you look on the careers page, you can figure it out. Cause it lets on that. They're a subsidy. But as far as we, we know it was never, never really formally in any of those videos, like explained or anything,

which almost just seemed kind of weird that you wouldn't, it seems like an interesting talking point for content. And not that every company has to say everyone who owns them, but usually it seems like in the world of reviews, there's a little more disclosures than most as far as was this product paid for? Did I buy this? Was this given to me?

You know, who, how is money being exchanged? Because money does, because you're relying on that review. Yes. because money does change people's perceptions of things and uh it does affect people's uh ability to look at something critically when there's money involved right and when money is like passed around like and you don't really know how like that can affect reviews so um yeah and it wasn't we weren't just crazy like we had we had

had conversations where it seemed like content was changed we found out some people um also thought it felt like things were changed and it wasn't because it just felt that way things actually did change so yeah it wasn't it more so just makes sense yeah it was like man we weren't just going crazy it wasn't just like this invisible thing it actually did happen so uh there was a shift we felt the shift the shift was confirmed yes now we know so watch out for that i guess yeah so all this to be said uh we plan on being acquired by pillar four media sometime within the next few months no no no i was gonna tell you i'm working out a deal with pillar five it's actually one one better like oh you only have four pillars

we have all corners and one in the middle it's very you know how much more stable five pillars is than four a lot more 25 more you could say uh it's almost embarrassing to just have easily four pillars so So, yeah. The funding's going pretty good. Yeah. So, you could say we're going to be getting a giant check of our own here real soon. Yeah. Yeah.

Who do you think we afforded this giant check over here? Are we going to get our guest on? Yeah. Should we do that? I suppose. And we'll catch up on this'll do i need to read an ad speaking of money you can do i think should i read an ad right now let's let's we should hit them with one i think full disclosure this advertisement was paid for yeah these are

paid ads we don't do these i didn't just go online and type in ad reads although we do like all of these companies yeah we do we do vouch for their uh their goods i especially like fusion sports performance supplements wow what a coincidence that's literally what i was gonna read that's so crazy okay don't mind if we do a little selling out of our own here let me get let me get to this this episode is brought to you by fusion sports performance supplements do you know what's in your supplements? If you use Fusion Sports Performance, you always will. Fusion SP prides itself on being fully transparent,

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and it won't cause any stomach discomfort. Available in vanilla ice cream, chocolate fudge, and frosted cinnamon roll flavors. Most orders are shipped within one business day, and every Fusion Sports Performance product fudge and frosted cinnamon roll flavors most orders are shipped within one business day and every fusion sports performance product comes fully backed with a 30-day money-back guarantee go to fusion sp.net and use code mass to save a massive 20 on your order thank you fusion sports performance thank you uh before we get our guests on we should do a quick supporting our supporter

member segment oh yeah this is a relatively new segment to the podcast. And what we do is we have this supporting member community. A lot of them are on our Discord. We've talked about it earlier in this episode. You get to get on there. That's part of just one of the many things you get out of being a supporting member of the Mathsonomics podcast. On top of knowing that you're giving us money. Right. That's the best thing to influence our podcast yes um so we're not just selling out to one parent company we're selling out to all of you yeah some people have one boss we have hundreds of little bosses and they're all sassy and mean and they all call you out if you say something years ago and then

you go back on it years later you think you have a micromanager? Try having hundreds of micromanagers that go deep into your past history. But each week we like to try to give back a little bit to some of these supporting members, and we like to give them kudos for things we've noticed they've done that are worth giving kudos to. So first one here is uh big sarah strong uh she competed in a powerlifting meet this last weekend i believe she won first in her

weight class yeah yeah she did it with a 265 squat a 155 bench and a 292 deadlift and she brought home gold of course nice so good work big sarah and then with this being the last episode of the month i would also like to just uh give a shout out to all our new members this month yes welcome so welcome uh maybe any of you are listening any of the new ones are listening here live i'm not sure but i'd like to give a shout out to big ryan thank you big j Joseph, welcome. Big Michael, hello. Big Noah, hi. Big Ian, hola. Big Daniel, met you at the Arnold.

Well, and also welcome to the Discord crew. Big Derek, big Griffin, big Jordan, big Matthew. We really needed another Matthew. I think he's Matthew 5. I was going to say there's only like four before, so we got to pump those numbers. Big Jordan. Big Matthew. We really needed another Matthew. I think he's Matthew 5. I was going to say there's only like four before him, so we've got to pump those numbers up. Big Nathan.

You know who you are. Big Trenton. And Big Thomas. Welcome to all of you. Sounds like a great group of guys. I think guys was the correct word, right? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know if there's any gals in that group.

Interesting tidbit there. Four in a row that joined up were all from the state of virginia yes and they all joined within like a day so i don't know what's going on there something in the water uprising something in the water isn't there yeah i had uh we had a conversation like do these guys all know each other and i think our takeaway was that they didn't really know each other i don't think so it was just i guess coincidental yeah like we have like our our virginia supporting membership crew went up by like 300 strong virginia contingency yeah there's definitely a virginia contingency now isn't there there is okay well thanks guys that's and i do think i made it like through six people before i ran out of a hellos i'm gonna work on that better for like next month and see if i could like really

yeah drag that out a long ways hopefully more people sign up so i get to do that again uh so thank you supporting members and speaking of thank you supporting members should we kick off our supporting i suppose they've had enough fun. We'll kick them out. Bye, Discord. And now should we get our guest on the horn? Let's do it. There we go. This is Joe. this is joe big joe is that you this is him uh big joe you're live on the massonomics podcast with tanner and tommy what's up joe and how much i'm excited it's uh what day is it i don't even

know wednesday yep we're recording on a wednesday it'll be sunday or monday when people get to hear this we get the first shot at listening to this cool i was just talking to scantz so he was he was giving me a little bit of the lowdown so so are you are you working on a uh massonomics garage gym reveal video i am okay yeah yeah i got an idea i had one in my head a while back uh not necessarily for the reveal, but just this idea of like a video I wanted to post. But I didn't have a proper placement for it, if that makes sense. And then the reveal contest came up and I went, that's it. Okay. I ran it past him and said, hey, what do you think about this idea?

And he thought it was hilarious and would work. And so then I ran it past my wife to make sure she'd still be with me afterwards. And we're good. This idea sounds like it has a lot of promise already. Just so you know, we've got the giant check sitting right behind us. And the pay to the order of line is still blank. So it could have your name all over it for all we know. I'm excited. A sweet $69 check for you to hang up in the garage gym.

That'll be awesome. It'll look perfect. And for anyone that doesn't know, this is Big Joe Gray, and Big Joe runs the garage gym competition, and you also run the Home Gym subreddit, correct? Yes, I'm one of the lead moderators over on Reddit for our Home Gym. Okay, so we've got a lot of stuff to talk to you about, but one of the most timely and probably most interesting right now is the the garage gym competition that's coming up um first of all what what is the dates of of that competition that we should be sneaking up here soon so this one that's coming up right now is may 14th to the 22nd so it's a full week you know know, plus the weekends on both sides because we let people compete at any time during the week, throughout the week.

So, yeah. So for people that aren't familiar with it, can you kind of explain the competition, how it gets started and and just a little bit about it? Yeah, of course. So 2018, beginning of the year, I kind of have this idea that it'd be cool to have a competition for people that train at home. Kind of that simple, right? I had lifted for the better part of, I was in and out of the gym when I started when I was 18. I got a little more serious when I was about 20-ish. Then realized that that wasn't serious until a few years later and so on and so forth.

Classic. Yeah. Pulled my first 500-pound deadlift probably about 10 years ago to give you a timeline of how long I've been lifting and all the ups and downs and stuff. But I never competed in an actual powerlifting meet. I always had an excuse, you know, I was working at school, uh, you know, whatever other stuff. And so I thought there'd probably be a lot of people that were like me that had the similar concept of, I like to lift, you know, I put in the time, um, at home, but I'm, I'm just too busy to show up to something for whatever reason. I reached out to, um, Adam, you guys talked to Adam

Grudgen lab as well as big Adam. Uh, have you guys talked to, uh, Jake at Grudgen experiment yet? Big Jake. We, we, we met Big Jake for the first time in person here just at the Arnold this year. We haven't had him on the podcast yet, have we? We will at some point in time, and we also talked about going on his podcast sometime soon. You got to do like an inception thing where you're on his podcast

while he's on your podcast. A podcast within a podcast. There we go. So Adam, Jake, JB, which is who runs garage gyms.com um and a handful other guys uh john greeves the garage gym wife all these different people that i'd kind of talked to here and there and just said hey i have this idea power lifting me for people that live at home what do you think and like i didn't have any other details that was basically it and they all

went yeah sure let's do it and so I asked them like do you want to sponsor it in some fashion yeah okay Jake put up a few flags his GGE banners I got a couple of shirts those kinds of things really simple and I made the flyers and paint and put it out there and just said here it is like I ran off my personal account now are you saying you literally painted flyers and put it out there and just said, here it is. Like I ran off my personal account. Now, are you saying you literally painted flyers and put them out there? No, no. Are you talking telephone?

That probably would have been better than the, than the, than the Microsoft paint flyers that I made. So it was like, you know, Google search power listing images and then, you know, Google search power listing images and then, you know, type it up and then like put that all in a Google image shirts picture of a garage and then said, yeah, that's close enough. Uh, that'll, that'll work. Um, put that out there. And then I had a handful of people that came back and were like, Oh yeah, uh, I want to sponsor too.. OK, so we ended up with like I think about 11 or 12 sponsors. It was really simple word of mouth.

That all went out like I think it was middle of March and we competed middle of May and we had 80 people. And so I went, oh, cool. OK, that sounded like a good number to me. Let's do it again next year because people wanted me to come back. And so that was really the inception of the idea. And as we went, I made up the rules. So people were like, Hey, um, I've got a bum shoulder, so I can't squat with a straight bar. Can I use a safety squat bar? And I said, yeah, sure. Why not? And then the next person says, Hey, uh, I, you know, I can't deadlift with a straight bar cause I got a bad back.

Can I use a trap bar? I said, yeah, I don't give a shit. That's fine. You know, go for it. And then the next person's like, Hey, um, I have the whole week. Can I, can I do a squat on Monday, bench on Wednesday and deadlift on Friday? And I said, yeah, that's fine. And then the next guy, you know, so there's, there was all these questions I kept rolling in and basically the answer was, I'm not a federated meet. I'm not trying to run it as a federated meet. I don't have any intentions on this being a USAPL,

USPA, anything like that thing, right? We're going to give out the prizes at random. So if you participate, you get a chance to take home something. Um, and, and it's going to be free, right? So it's just, it's going to be super easy, super low barrier to entry. Um, it's going to be for fun. Uh, if you want to show up, you show up, if you don't, no big deal. And so I don't have to come up with all the same rules that all these other guys have, because I'm not, not running a sport. Right.

Um, and so you had, uh, same thing, like, do I have to weigh in? No, I don't give a shit how much you weigh. Right. Um, do I have to wear a singlet? And I go, no, um, wear whatever the fuck you want. And this guy goes, can I do it naked? I'm like, if you really want to. And then, you know, so then, of course, people take that as a challenge.

And one dude wears a banana suit. And then some guy wears a luchadora mask. But it was fun, right? People had fun. People liked it. Came back the next year, did it again. Next year, next year. And then, you know then you know this year 2022 we're on year five so and have you seen uh good growth like has the community been pretty positive all through all the years yeah so year one was 80

people and about uh like i think about a,000 in prizes from about 11 sponsors. Year two, we had a little over 200 people, about a couple thousand dollars in prizes. And then year three was when COVID hit. So we were doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes. I had made a website, a dedicated Instagram page, and all this other stuff. And then all of a sudden, every single gym on the planet was locked down and everyone had to lift from home if they wanted to do anything at all. So you had these guys who were literally dragging their in like pioneers competition and set state records and stuff go, Oh, what, what is this thing?

I guess I'll list in it because at least I can compete. So we went from 200 people in year two to 1200 people in year three, which is a little bit of a bump. We had a little over $10,000 in prizes from sponsors. And then year four was interesting because COVID wasn't as much of a thing. It was certainly still a thing, but you had a lot of states who had reopened their gyms and things like that. And so a lot of the people who participated because they kind of had to, right? Like they were forced into the garage gym life, um, bailed. And so we had like an 80% new lifter rate, uh, between year three and four. And so we went from 1200 people

to 1200 people. So, which was, which was weird. Like I, I was expecting to probably clear that 2000 mark, but because we had such a huge drop off in returning participants. And it was when I went and I looked at all of that, I'm like, oh, yeah, it's literally all these guys who have competition experience and things like that that didn't come back because they went back to their commercial gyms. Right. But year four, we had a little over thirty thousand dollars in prizes from sponsors and then this year we are doing two meets so one in may and one in november and we have a little over thirty thousand dollars in prizes at each uh event so obviously i don't know how many people have participated because we're not there yet you know how many bonus points does someone get if they do the dev the jefferson deadlift style uh probably five okay okay yeah we'll make sure to write that yeah so is there um like i know like the prizes aren't based correct the prizes aren't based on like performance really it is like everyone that enters gets a shot at the prizes. Is there like a sheet or like can people that compete,

can they see like how they stack up against other people that are competing or how does that work? Yep. So you can go back and you can look at all the results from the last four years. So it's tied to like Instagram account. Cause that's where we've historically done it. And it'll have like your first name

uh you know what you did on each lift and your total and then uh yeah and so you can you can see how you stack up you can see um i think last year we added wilks and maybe dots to the uh spreadsheet as well um this year i think i'll have a handful of other things. I basically have just, I, I did a post and said, Hey, um, how many of you would be okay with having like, um, first name, age, gender, and body weight as a default category to be publicized out there. Right. Um, I'm always concerned. Like I've talked to a few people who they're concerned about their Instagram page, having any kind of personal information on it because they've been stalked by people or, you know, whatever it might

be. So I never, like, I never want to cross that line of like, Hey, here's, you know, Stephanie, you can go find her. Cause you know, exactly all of our info. Right. Um, so, uh, but it was like 96% of people said, yes, we're good with that. Um, so on the form that I'll have people submit, there'll be an opt out option. So for some reason, you're like, yeah, I don't want any of that out there. You can just no thank you um but for everybody else we'll have a handful more things to hope you be able to see how you stack up against everyone so because that's i mean i was gonna say even in a non-competitive environment like we have people still like to see you know did i take fifth or 500th or you know whatever yeah for sure

do you uh offhand do you know anything like who's the oldest person you've ever had do it or what like the biggest total someone's ever had that's done it do you know any of those yeah so the the two biggest totals one was um in year three we had had, I think his Instagram was like red beard or something like that. Okay. Or bearded brawn. Big, big dude. Really big dude. And he hit a 2,000 pound total, like on the dot.

Yeah. And then last year, Travis Rogers, who you might know as Papa Bear Rogers. Yeah. He hit a like 1990 something. And so and his was in. He used a couple of specialty bars and stuff like that. So, like, I think he benched with a Duffalo bar and things. So in theory, he probably even had a couple more pounds in him. Um,

and I think when he competes in the competition, he doesn't actually like do his full peak. I think he just goes, okay, here it is, you know, give me a week or two, uh, for prep and then goes for it. Um, and he's gonna, he's actually gonna compete this year again. Um, I don't know if you guys follow him. He tore both of his his quads. So under under like 700 pound squat or something, he tore both quads like about a month or two ago. He's been doing pull ups in the gym in like strapped into his wheelchair and stuff. strapped into his wheelchair and stuff. And so he's going to compete this year and

he's going to bench. So he'll do a Larson press and probably still beat like a quarter of the people who participate. Right. What were the other ones you were looking for? If you knew anyone that, you know, has there been

anyone? Because there's quite a few people, older people out there that train. I just wondered if there's... Yeah, I know. I think we had 62 was one of the oldest. Hashtag masters. Yeah, we had a couple of 62 and 63-year-olds. I think they were probably 62 last year.

Yeah, because it's got an Excel formula on it. So, yeah, so 63 now. It looked like we had three of them last year uh yeah because it's it's got a excel formula on it so yeah so 63 now it looked like we had three of them last year at 62 so um and then a handful i mean there was six people that were over that were 60 or above that competed last year okay so and then we've got we've got kids who compete so my daughter just turned five she'll compete this year for her third year um we've had people you know i mean everything down to like the like kids have the little like rattles that look like a dumbbell and they have their kids lift those too they've got like my

daughter has her own oso bar and i made her plates out of um i think it's like pine so it's supposed to be like a like a tabletop but i bored out the center hole uh so it's a two inch hole so it fits onto the uh the oso bar so it's like legitimately the size of the plates. And my cousin helped me cut out the, um, the rest of the stuff. And I've got like her name on the plates and her birth date and stuff like that. So you've got, you got everything from like, Hey kid, you want to lift to kids who've got their own gear and stuff, um, and all kinds of things. So you've got their own gear and stuff and all kinds of things. You've got families who make it a day of it. The competition normally runs over Mother's Day, at least

one of the days. I think last year we had a couple of people that the mom was like, this is what I want to do on Mother's Day is lift heavy weights with my family, which is pretty cool. Who's your favorite sponsor for the May competition? There's these guys called massonomics.

They're pretty cool. Yeah. They're all right. Aha. Excellent choice. Yeah, that's cool. I think it's great.

What do you see? What do you see going forward? You know, in future years, you know, do you think going forward in future years? Do you think two competitions will kind of be the norm then? Or anything else you expect to see different? Or what's the game plan? Yeah, so two is definitely the plan. I mean, what I've always said is like, if people don't want it, then I'm not going to do it.

Because it's a waste of time. So for some reason, we do this November event and I get like 25 people or something. Then I'm not going to do it because it's a waste of time. So for some reason we do this November event and I get like 25 people or something that I'm not going to, I'm not going to do two again. Um, but assuming it's, you know, similar to the turnout for May, then we'll do two every year. Um, I think that makes sense in terms of timelines, uh, in terms of giving people a good off season and then you know prep and peak and deload and the whole deal to just kind of fits really well with that like one of the things we kicked off this year was we were going to do it in year three but again COVID showed up was this concept of these local meets so one of the guys guys, uh, Ryan D Pompeo on Instagram,

he goes by a working class beast and his gym is working class barbell. Uh, they're out of Illinois and they run a, he runs a like a, just a hardcore garage gym. It's him and a handful other people that show up regularly and they i think at this point they've got like two combo racks a monolith um like one of every texas bar um all kinds of stuff he's got comp rogue plates and probably a couple thousand pounds in iron just on the side for funsies um all kinds of crazy stuff and since year one he's ran this meet at his house that happens to line up to the timing of the grand trim competition so the first year he just had a bunch of people over they lifted they you

know maxed out and that was it um but it was it was lit like they they, they, you know, maxed out and that was it. Um, but it was, it was lit like they, they were, they were, you know, hitting pneumonia, taking shots of whiskey, yelling, screaming, listening to loud music and stuff and having just the most amount of fun you could have lifting weights. And then he's come back every year and done it again, bigger and badder. Um, so he got like a, a beer sponsor. He got a local food vendor. He got Porter potties. He built himself a red and white light, you know, box for his judges. He, um, like I said, they moved up to the combo racks and stuff. Um, and they, they don't let anything like stop them. Like last year, the rain kicked in, they just set up an easy up over the top of the combo rack that was in the driveway

and just said, who gives a shit? Let's keep going. Um, and so watching those every year, it's just awesome. And what we wanted to do was give other people the ability to do something like that. Um, and now you don't have to aspire to be Ryan necessarily, but if you just want to have some friends over, lift, laugh, have some fun and eat some food afterwards, we want to help coordinate that with you. And so that was a big one this year. Jake at Garage Room Experiment was a local sponsor.

So he's sending out some cash to people to help buy drinks and stuff like that. So that was a big one this year. Jake at Garage Room Experiment was a local sponsor. So he's sending out some cash to people to help buy drinks and stuff like that. And we've got people down in Texas, here in California, like I said, up north and on the East Coast and everything. I think it's about 20 or so of them that have registered that are going to do that. They're going to have anywhere between four to 10 athletes come over. Some of them know everyone, some of them don't, some of them are just opening their doors and they're going to have anything from just, Hey, let's hit some PRs. Then we'll see you later to, uh, you know, uh, real crazy,

basically just shy of a legitimate powerlifting thing. So, um, so I, I want to, I want to push that even further in the next two years. Um, I'd like to have a few of those become live streams, um, have some of the sponsors maybe provide some equipment and funds to those people who are making those things happen and that kind of thing. So that's a big one on my checklist. The other one I've been asked to do, which I think will be fun would be these kind of like mini competition concepts.

So we have a, we have downtime in June and December where we're kind of transitioning between the last, uh, competition and the next one. And I think it would be fun to run, um, like I said, many comps. So it'll be something like a week long on Sunday, I'd announce it and the following Saturday it'd be done. Saturday it'd be done. And it would be something like, um, um, overhead press, uh, one RM kind of test, right. Um, something easy to throw in. Uh, everyone should be able to do it, that kind of thing. Or, uh, talking to, uh, one of your guys is, uh, he's, I think he's the one who helped you guys with the uh drinks bar um about a like a mini hoop slam dunk contest in the garage right yeah um so we we do anything we do fun things uh we can do you know legitimate lifting things that kind of stuff but something simple

you'd probably it'd be the same thing where you'd enter and we'd give the prizes out at random for participating. It'd be another way to just kind of have some fun with lifting and being in the garage. And you'd probably win like 100 bucks to sponsor your choice or something like that. So what else? I want to expand on maybe some other social media channels. We'll see Facebook and Reddit were the two big ones this year on top of Instagram, emails and stuff like that. I think that's the main stuff. I'm a big believer in like only do the things that you're good at. And so I'm trying to keep it reasonable for me to manage myself throughout the year and to do what I'm good at, which is like, I know powerlifting

fairly well. I don't know Olympic lifting. So like, I'm not going to run an Olympic competition. Yeah. Um, you know, I've had people be like, Hey, could you do a bodybuilding one? And I'm like, well, I mean, I like bodybuilding, but I don't like, I have no idea how to tell people how to run a virtual bodybuilding event. If someone can tell me how to do it, then I'd be more than willing to look into it. But right now I'm not going to spend the time to figure that one out. I think you just watched pumpkin iron and then you're an expert. Yeah, there you go. So yeah, I will continue to run two powerlifting events for the foreseeable future, hopefully, assuming people show up and participate

and the sponsors still want to be involved. And I'll sprinkle in a handful of other cool things here and there as we go. All right, cool beans, cool beans. Tommy, what do you think about doing a little over under i think let's do all right big joe we've got this little game we like to play called overrated underrated i'm not sure if you're familiar with it or not but we have a special uh garage gym competition handpick set of topics just for you and it's your job to decide if each is overrated or underrated and you just have to remember you can't ride the line unfortunately

you have to come up with either a strong under or overrated yep I gotcha and everything rides on this it's really important so don't take it very seriously my goal is always to do better than Adam on podcasts

I know he did a pretty good job on his so I'd have to rewind and just I'm not sure if that's true we'd have to listen than Adam on podcasts. I know he did a pretty good job on his. I'd have to rewind. I'm not sure if that's true. We'd have to listen to it again. Overrated or underrated? Basement gyms.

I'm going to say underrated. I think that there's a lot of people who don't grasp the simple beauty of the basement gym in terms of weather. So one of the hardest things, so I live in Northern California. Winters are pretty easy, not a big big deal we don't get much below like low 30s but the summer as we get up into like 110 and especially in the last couple of years we've had fire seasons that have been crazy so I have to squat in my 110 degree garage with the garage door closed with smoke billowing in through the cracks. Yeah, those are tough conditions. Yeah, it's not exactly fun. So whereas if I was in a basement, I wouldn't have to deal with any of that nonsense.

So I know that they do have downsides, you know, things like trying to get commercial equipment down the stairs and things like that. It's a huge pain pain big boxes and stuff but um i i think the uh not having to deal with the elements it would be a huge win um i'm sure i would have complaints if i had one but yeah i'm gonna go with uh underrated all right and uh you like you're saying you train out of your own garage uh so you gotta practice what you preach and i know you've done uh plate restorations and some different things like that. So overrated or underrated Facebook marketplace?

Right now, especially, probably overrated. Over the last couple of years with COVID, it's been a shit show. years with COVID, it's been a shit show. Um, you know, people like, uh, so I've been in my gym since 2013, uh, exclusively. So, and it was like, I think, uh, end of 2013, I bought my rogue rack and things like that. So like on their black Friday. So I'm at like about eight and a half years at this point when i first started you'd go out and you'd buy plates used and at that point it was craigslist it wasn't marketplace but you'd buy them for 50 cents a pound and there was i mean there was no haggling there was no nothing like you didn't have to search for a deal um it was like the first week I wanted to buy equipment. I literally found two people selling, uh, you know, 250 pounds of plates each for 50

cents a pound. And they were within 15 minutes of me. And I just went and bought them and brought them home. No, no big deal. I bought a bar for 50 bucks and a, you know, a bench for another 50 bucks and things like that. Um, and throughout the first, like four to five years of my time in the garage, I constantly found good deals on stuff, you know, good deals on a hundred pound plates and horse stall mats and, you know, I would flip things cause I'd make enough money off of it. But for the most part, I was just buying stuff to put in my garage and then COVID hit and it, everything just got wrecked.

And, you know, you had people who were selling plates for $4 a pound that were rusty pieces of shit they found in the corner of their garage. or their garage um and uh what i'm seeing now is it's like you got some people who bought a bunch of stuff during covid because they had to have it because they had to keep working out or because they were bored so they were like oh maybe i'll try this getting in shape thing right uh bought a bunch of stuff and then now they're like uh it's taking up space, but they want to sell it for like almost what they paid. And to be fair, it's because I know that when they looked on Marketplace before or if they look at any kind of past stuff, they're seeing these outrageous prices. So they're thinking that they're actually listing it for a good deal. seeing these outrageous prices. So they're thinking that they're actually listing it for a good deal.

But like, I'm not going to buy your Dick's sporting goods, $500 rack for $496. Right. So, um, yeah, right now, definitely overrated. I would think that I would like to hope that in a couple of years, if the world becomes a somewhat normal place again, that equipment used becomes a better option again. And you don't have to like really, really search for a good deal. You can actually find stuff decently often. But right now, definitely overrated. Okay, makes sense. Overrated or underrated adjustable dumbbells um i would go with overrated and that's probably simply because i don't have adjustables at this

point so i i used to i had iron masters which i really liked. I think they're a great set of dumbbells. I know a lot of people love their PowerBlocks. So Reddit just finished up their voting for their favorite dumbbells and the PowerBlocks won. So that's their favorite. And that beat out standalone dumbbells and everything. PowerBlock took home the the gold and they make sense in some spaces but um the way that i use dumbbells most of the time i do a lot of supersets and um you know circuit stuff and whatnot so i like to be able to do you know three things at one time with the dumbbells the adjustables just suck like it's just it's it's almost impossible you can't you can't do a set of almost impossible you can't you can't do a set of you know lateral raises with 30 pounds and then go directly into a curl with 10 and then go into a chest press with 80 or something like that like it's like a five minute ordeal to go between one to the next to the next instead for me i've got dedicated dumbbells i just grab whatever ones i. And then I've got the micro gains dumbbell

plates. So I don't even have to have, like I have 10 pound jumps. So I go from 10, I've got fives and tens, and then it's from 10 to 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80. I can throw on a two and a half and go up a little bit or another two and a half and go up, you know, five pounds, another two and a half, go up seven and a half. And then the next next one is a 10 so I don't have to even worry about having literally every dumbbell I can still fill the gap so yeah we've never really had we don't have a need to mess with the adjustable ones because we're fortunate to have full set of course but uh yeah I that'd be one of the pain points of the home gym I I think, is getting used to adjustable dumbbells. I think there's most things you don't really have to have a trade-off,

but a lot of people aren't going to end up with a full set of dumbbells at their home gym. So that is one of those areas where you probably have, you know, you sacrifice something in that case, maybe. If you do really straight sets, like if you just, if you're like, all right, I do dumbbell incline bench and I do twenties and then thirties and forties for my warmup. And then I do fifties for my working sets and that's it. And you're not super setting, you're not doing anything crazy, no drop sets, whatever.

Then they, they work out really well. Cause it's not really all that different. I mean, you would have to make a few adjustments in between each set but that's just your rest time um but if you do anything other than that or like like me my wife lifts on a regular basis if we wanted to lift at the same time uh i'd have to have two sets of handles right and potentially even two full sets of adjustables and now if you've got two full sets of adjustables they basically take up the same space as a full rack um so like what are you even doing right right um and like for me so back to the whole you know pre-covid used market i got most of my i got the 510 2030 the five, 10, 20, 30, 40s. And I think fifties are you max commercial urethane dumbbells that I got for

90 bucks. Um, which is just stupid. Like the five, the fives are worth like a hundred dollars or something like that. So, um, and then I picked up the other ones piece by piece as we went. So, and I think I got the, it's a three tier rack for like 75 bucks or something. So, you know, I, I'm all in on the dumbbells and like, I don't know, $400 or something maybe. And I, and I'm good to go. So, um, whereas if I was going to buy a new set of adjustables, they'd be way more than that and I'd get way less function. So. All right. Uh uh you are one of the main moderators for the uh for the home gym

reddit community so overrated or underrated reddit going public did they did they i guess i'm not in the loop did they recently do that or are they considering it i think they're considering it i think they're gonna supposedly there's an ipo on the horizon here um i uh how do i answer that is so is is overrated mean i don't like it or underrated necessarily that's kind of the trick it's how you follow yeah yeah okay that's that's depends on how some people don't look deep enough into the overrated underrated but that's as you really look into it deep, that's where the answers get tricky. Sometimes the more you think about it, you know, what is people's perception versus how do you feel about it? I'm with you. Okay. Well, since I didn't even know it was a thing, I'm going to go with underrated.

So the last corporate company that I worked for was privately held. They were in like 40 different countries. They were a bank. And by being privately held, one of the nice things was they didn't have to abide by stockholders. So they can actually do the right thing for a customer, for their local communities, for their employees, because it was the right thing to do, even if they didn't see a return in six months, a year or two or maybe even more. Whereas a publicly held company, they don't have that, right? If your stock, especially as a CEO,

if your stock goes from 50 to 40, you could get booted tomorrow, right? Simply because of that. So I kind of, especially for something like Reddit, as a media company, as a huge news source, right? They don't do news themselves, but they're definitely where people get a lot of their information and news from, um, information, all kinds of different topics. I'd hate to see them go, uh, public and have somebody, you know, like this, you know, Elon Musk trying to buy

Twitter thing happen and someone come in and just totally tear up what Reddit has been about for the last couple of decades. So, yeah, that's good justification to me. Right on it. That was the last one. Let me add it up here. Yeah, it looks like you passed overrated, underrated. So good work.

All right. We'll have to do a little comparison to see who actually did better between you and Big Adam. No comparison. I won. Okay. I guess we can't argue with that. That's the beauty of coming on the show later is that I get to just say I won.

He doesn't get to do anything about it. No, we appreciate you getting on and filling us in more on the Garage Gym competition. The one thing I was going to add, Juggernaut AI is a sponsor of the Mastodonomics podcast. I think they were involved more now before than they have been. Are they just a sponsor or is there something with if you're competing you use that or what's how's that they are so there's never any stipulations on basically literally anything to compete so you don't you can you can use whatever training you want wear whatever clothes whatever plates bars whatever doesn't matter. But yes. So Chad and I started talking last like November or something and very quickly got them involved. They are the presenting sponsor for this year, which in the most layman's terms means that I get to use all of their cool content and then their logo goes on everything that we do.

So there's more to it because, you know, they get involved in most of the email blasts that I send out. And, you know, they get a lot more visibility and things like that. But it's a really good win-win for his community because he had told me they were going to try and set up a online competition for the people that are that use Juggernaut AI. And then he saw what I do and he goes, how would I just have you do it? And I said, yeah, sounds like a great idea. Right. You don't have to hire a full time person. I get, you know, because I've had people ask for more tips and tricks and help and stuff on how to squat better, bench better, deadlift better. I've got people over the years who have participated in the competition and then gone, hey, I'm actually kind of interested in this quote unquote real powerlifting thing. Right. So they want more details on like what's the difference between the garage and competition and a federated meet of some kind.

difference between the garages and competition and a federated meet of some kind um you know what's the difference between like do i like can i can i do i guess i have to show up and like you know you've got people who legitimately like they could participate in my meet and it's the first time they've seen a barbell right um so it's all over the place. But having Juggernaut on, they've got so much good content around from beginners to experts that can scale and I can leverage in so many ways. So I don't have to do it, which is always nice for me. And everyone who participates gets to learn and grow from all of that as well. gets to learn and grow from all that as well. So, yeah, they're the Big Mac Daddy sponsor this year. I'm hoping it's working out well for them and that they'll be back next year as well. Good stuff.

We're excited to see how it goes this May and who gets to win some drink spotters and lift shorts and that sort of thing. So those will be the real winners. I think everyone in the garage gym competition is a winner, but the people that win Mast. So those would be the real winners. I think everyone in the garage gym competition is a winner, but the people that win mass dynamics prizes are the real winners. That's the unofficial official grand prize. Yep.

Okay. All right. Good stuff. Thanks, Big Joe. Thanks, Joe. Yeah, of course. Thanks, guys. All right.

See you. All right. Bye. Cool beans. Cool beans. Cool beans. Serve them up with the double cool beans cool beans cool beans cool beans serve them up

with the double cool beans serve them up the cool beans I'm not sure if maybe they have a juggernaut AI code but if they do don't use that

use ours yeah we have a vested interest in you using ours right I'm gonna read you another ad here Tanner alright

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It was created to enable anyone to train on any door. Wait, wasn't that the name of that porno movie in The Big Lebowski? No, that was Log Jammer. This is kind of like that, only it was created to enable anyone to train on any door that they can find utilizing bands. Okay, okay. it was created to enable anyone to train on any door that they can find utilizing bands based on whatever need you have they have created three different variations to fit your need although uh home gym band training is nothing new especially nowadays the ease of use and setup has always been an issue and some of what of a hindrance in most cases so like everything else spud ink did a voila and poof the door jammer series came into existence nothing new by the way just the spud touch to make it a great system

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ink dash straps dot com. Thank you. Spud ink. We also had a sack segment. Let's do it. Let's do it.

And do you can you remember back to last week on the mass dynamics podcast? I mean like seven days ago last week. Yeah.

We had a big Ray Williams on the podcast. Right. We did. We sent us a little something. And this is from his company, Absolute Aid. He had mentioned he was going to be sending us something.

He sent us a few stickers here for seek to do more from Absolute Aid. Pain-infused transdermal CBD cream. Yes. So this is the absolute aid. Soreness and headaches. Direction for muscle and joint pain. Apply to affected area three to four times a day. For tension headaches, apply a small amount to the temples.

So this is absolute aid. And like Tommy said, a CBD cream. Yeah. I have not ever used anything like this before. you i'm gonna go home i'm gonna go uh when you leave and bathe in this see if i can reach some superhuman powers i need the jumbo size put it all on me so this comes in like the crown royal style yeah it's a very fine packaging here and velvet bag got some stickers etc damn big ray hooking it up so we can't we haven't given our full review yet we haven't used it but uh check out um absolute aid i just seen

if i had the website i assume just google absolute aid and you'll figure it out how about that that make the most sense to me if it's good internet enough. Have you heard of it? If it's good enough for Big Ray, it's good enough for everyone. Exactly. Did we have anything else we need to... Was there one other thing? Oh, that's what I was wondering. Just felt like there was another thing,

but maybe I just felt it. Maybe there actually wasn't. Yeah, right. Oh! No, I guess that was about it. We supported our supporting members, didn't we? Yep, yep, we did. I mean, I do got to read one more ad still.

Oh, you got one left? Okay. You got one more up your sleeve? I do. I'm just kind of putting it off. Okay. But maybe I'll just get to it here. Yeah, that's good.

Okay. Let's do it. Today's show is also brought to you by Texas Power Bars. Buddy Caps first started lifting weights in the late 60s and began powerlifting in the mid-70s. At the time, he was working for Image Barbell building gym equipment. Around 1976 a local machine shop started making Olympic bars for them calling it the Image Bar. In 1977 Image Barbell became Champion Barbell. It was then

that Buddy started looking at the bars with an intent of changing them for the better. In 1979 Buddy bought his first lathe to begin addressing the known issues. In 1980, his passion, drive, and purpose now had a greater mission. Buddy set out on his own to make what he believed was the greatest bar he'd ever seen and trained with, and the Texas Power Bar was born. It was strong as a house with the best knurling and was maintenance-free. Hundreds of state, national, international, world, and massonomics powerlifting records have been and continue to be set and broken on the texas power bar to learn more about texas power bars and buy one of their legendary bars visit texaspowerbars.com excellent uh i think that will mostly wrap us up for this episode i think that's

about it uh hopefully you all got your submissions in for the massonomics reveal contest but we'll be starting a very intense jury selection on those. Yep. Make sure to, yeah, hopefully the, the week that this comes out, we'll be selecting that winner.

So be on the lookout for Instagram. We'll make that announcement. I think sometime this week of who won the giant check that's sitting behind us. It'll be time to put a little ink to that and see who the winner is. Packed it up with love and care and figure out how to get that ship to someone. It's a big box for a lot of farts in that it's gonna be who better start eat go to taco john's right now and load up on some six packs and a pound go make sure to stop at taco bell when you leave there too yeah got work to do and then stay frosty for thursday we have that uh artisan do we need to repeat it artisan limited special bespoke handcraft it? Artisan, limited, special, bespoke, handcrafted.

And this is limited. This is, you know, there's limitations on this. There are. Statute of limitations applies to this. Yeah, okay, that was a good episode. The only other thing I was going to note that was cool, did you see the new locker we had in the gym? Yeah, I did.

How could I miss that thing? The only other thing I was going to note that was cool, did you see the new locker we had in the gym? Yeah, I did. How could I miss that thing? Yeah. Normally people don't get their own individual lockers, but when someone like Dante Culpepper joins the gym, exceptions are to be made. Yeah, he gets to have a locker that's three times the size of everyone else's with his own engraved nameplate on it. Right.

So that has been pretty cool. I don't know, maybe we'll talk about that more later, but it was just a neat thing I thought I'd throw in yeah i just like to look at it just gotta look at it yep all right uh make sure to follow us everywhere that you follow stuff facebook make sure to subscribe on youtube if you've listened to this a long time and you've never subscribed on youtube get over there every once in a while we pop out we every podcast episodes on there but every once in a while we pop out a few other things on the youtube so make sure you're subscribed on there

become a supporting member leave us a 5 star review we're up over 430 now so it won't be long until we're pushing for 500 so if you could help us go leave us on Apple Podcasts one of those 5 star reviews it'll help us get there sooner and if you're not listening on Spotify or if you have Spotify

give us just a 5 star rating very simple takes about 10 seconds. So give us one of those ratings. Probably even longer than what it takes. Probably closer to two. Yes, good point. Tommy, where do they find you at? You can find me at Tomahawk underscore D.

You can follow me at Tanner underscore Baird, but just make sure to follow Mastonomics at Mastonomics. See ya. you