The Evolution of Fitness Industry Gurus

i want to say you know i have immense respect for charles and what he did for the industry And I think he had as much of an impact as something like CrossFit in terms of the information he was putting out there So many of his methods like tempo training and stuff, he popularized so many different things. He got girls doing pull-ups and stuff, immense amount of stuff. That being said, he got kicked out of his own company for people who didn't realize. and this isn't about throwing Charles under the bus but I think the point I want to make here or what I think maybe you can shine some light on Luke is that someone like how does you said eventually the stuff they started teaching wasn't factual like and that's something that we started to notice later in Charles Charles's career he started saying some stuff that just started to become outrageous like don't touch receipts because you'll get the ink on you and the ink will cause cancer and stuff like that some outrageous stuff what is it that you see like happens to some of these people that become these massive thought leaders. And then at the start, they're so good. But then eventually, it just becomes this almost guru status. And the information they start giving out is just like so far off because we saw it with Greg Glassman in CrossFit. Some of the stuff he's giving out now is just outrageous. What do you think happened in Charles' situation? You know, it's a trap that a lot of people get into. And I will forever be grateful for the relationship I had with Charles. And our relationship was not good at the end because there was all kinds of strife going on between Pollock and group and him and, you know, uh, myself as to find results, but the other guys got kind of caught in the middle of all that, um, whether we wanted to or not. And so, but I mean, without Charles, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing and I would never have fallen in love with strength and conditioning. I definitely would not have fallen in love with sports nutrition and supplementation and the science behind all that. But you know, the trap I see people get into is exactly what happened on Instagram right now. Like everybody, he was, there's two people I would say that are the best in the world at programming for long-term like Olympic level athletics. And it's Stefan Kozolt and it's Charles Pollock. Like hands down for being able to find systems or other people's types of ways they're doing it. Girona stuff, Reg Park stuff, physical culture. Charles was a massive fan of physical culture, which I am too. And that's something we're losing these days. so he was able to take all these different systems say well how do we periodize them together and make them make sense and put them into uh into a usable system for people right that makes sense he was brilliant at that but the problem is with a lot of people is they want to find what's the new edgy woo-woo shit and it kind of got too much into that where you you start learning from from functional medicine type people right and then they start losing the force for the trees and they start saying, well, the reason you're fat is because the BPA on the receipts that you're holding. No, the reason you're fat is because you're fucking overeating. I mean, that's, you're stressed out and you're overeating and you're probably not moving enough. I mean, that's what it all boils down to. But when people are overweight and they're desperate, they don't want to hear shit like that. They want to hear what is the weird thing, because I don't want to think that it's my fault that I can't stop eating and that I can't control my hunger signals. And for a lot of people, those hunger signals can be so powerful that they they simply can't, but it all boils down to simple basic physiology. But some people want answers and they want it to be something that it's not them. Right. And so there's a lot of people that cater to that. They're like, well, it's probably because you have estrogen dominance or you have a high cortisol. You have this, well, let's find some woo stuff that we can put in our system and trademark that I can then sell. And you see it all over Instagram. Now, especially all these people that want to get into the education side of the business that I'm on, it's like in my day, when I got into it, you were selected to come work and become part of an education company. Now, because of the internet, anybody can start an education company and anyone can make themselves look like an expert, right? All you have to do is watch a YouTube video and then make your own YouTube video. And now you're an instant expert, but what you're doing, it's like, it's like stolen valor. It's like a guy that dresses up like a Marine and puts all of these like a purple heart and all these but they actually were never in the Marines. Like, so you get a lot of people who are teaching things and they don't actually have a portfolio. They don't have a track record and they don't actually understand what they're talking about. Right. I know I'm digressing away from Charles's thing, but there was a thing where, you know, people can get caught in dogmatic beliefs about how they think things work. So if low carb works for me, it has to work for everybody. If Rhonda stuff works for me, it has to work for everybody. So you get stuck into that and you start giving that their money and you start preaching and then it becomes almost like cultish, like a religion. Yeah. So you felt like it just became too good for business to keep going down these side avenues that didn't really have much substance. Well, there was some merit to a lot of the stuff, but there was also the bad that you had to take with that. And, you know, Polycom Group is a supplement company. So in order to sell supplements, you have to come up with ways of selling supplements.