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Hungry Dog Barbell Podcast
Jeremy Moore: More Than Fitness
We get into the heart of More Than Fitness, Jeremy's nonprofit, which began as a simple weightlifting and meditation program and evolved into a haven for young individuals seeking to build a strong body, resilient mind, and unbreakable spirit. Learn how the innovative social-emotional wellness curriculum supports students' transitions into adulthood by focusing on essential life skills. You'll hear about the Belafonte Brawl, a spirited fundraising competition that fosters community and showcases student success—all with the support of an incredible team of collaborators.
In a touching conclusion, Jeremy opens up about his gratitude for sharing his story and the overwhelming support he's received. He also discusses adaptive sports, inspired by his friend Artie Mays, and his vision for a community that supports veterans, students, and individuals in recovery. By creating spaces filled with passionate role models, Jeremy aims to fill the gaps left by traditional education systems. Tune in to celebrate resilience, adaptability, and the power of community in transforming lives.
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Website:
https://morethanfitness.
What's up, dogs? Welcome back to another episode of the Hungry Dog Barbell Podcast. This week, I'm joined by Jeremy Moore. He's the founder and head coach of More Than Fitness, a nonprofit based in Delaware. More Than Fitness' mission is to help people build strong bodies, resilient minds and unbreakable spirits.
Speaker 2:I know about football. I watch football yeah.
Speaker 3:Would you consider yourself an Eagles fan?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, we all are.
Speaker 3:I'm curious about that because I know South Jersey is birds right, but what about Delaware?
Speaker 2:Yeah, from Dover up is definitely Eagles and then maybe from Dover down is going to be the Ravens. Yeah, there's a mix all around, but yo yeah, we consider where we are Philadelphia fans. It's 20 minutes away from us.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, is it the? What's it called? Like the. Is it the Sixers or the Eagles that have the training facility up there by like the river? The Sixers, yeah, sixers, yeah dope. Uh, what do you think about the birds right now, bro? Like is? Is Jalen getting it done? Is Sirianni getting it done? Like, do you think they should both keep their jobs?
Speaker 2:man. So I was in, I was a massive Eagles fan, uh, all throughout high school and then in college and then I joined the army and didn't have. I had stuff I had to do on my Sundays and after I got out I was like man, I kind of like doing all this stuff on Sunday. So I will sit down about the game and appreciate a good game of football, but I couldn't tell you what is going on with the Eagles right now.
Speaker 3:Oh, oh bless your soul, bro. It's much more peaceful to be living like that. You know like it's back to stressful times. If you were ever an Eagles fan through the stressful times, it's back. That's what's happening right now. It's not the good days.
Speaker 2:I had my Monday ruined because of a Sunday.
Speaker 3:Oh my God, Literally so many of them. Of a Sunday. Oh my God, literally so many of them. Like there's the highs of, like the double doink era, but then there's like the next week where we lost, you know, and it just carpet pulled out from under you. One of those kinds of moments that did you? Did you join out of high school, or how old were you? I know around.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was. I was 21 when I joined. When I graduated I hadn't really worked that hard in high school as far as academically, I just did enough to get by. So I was really unprepared for college. But in that era I graduated in 06. The push was that everybody should go to college. If you want to be successful, you need to go to college. Everybody that I knew was either going to college or it looked like they were going to go on a very unsuccessful life trajectory. So I went to college and I didn't want to be there and I wasn't academically prepared. So I bounced around to three different colleges in three years and then eventually decided like maybe I don't, maybe I shouldn't go to college right now.
Speaker 3:So I went out west for a year and then after that, I joined the army. What was your headspace like? Were you before that, before you went to college, like out of high school? Had you ever had that thought in your mind before that? Maybe you want to enlist? Or what was the headspace that led to that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I had always had a had an affinity for the military. This area in North Wilmington is not a very veteran, dense population, so it's not something that I would see on a regular. It wasn't something that was like right in front of my face as a possibility and my parents are very supportive with whatever I do. But, like my dad was a conscious objector to Vietnam, my mom is sort of a hippie, so it just wasn't something that I felt like I could have open discussions about. It was something that I, you know, was kind of trying to protect them from, so Right Kind of in the back of your mind.
Speaker 3:you had it like, said it out loud. Yet, Before you go on, are they from like that area that you're talking about, like in Delaware? Like did you got? Is this like local to them?
Speaker 2:So my mom grew up here, she lived here and went to Ursuline and Christ, our King, and my dad moved here when he was either a junior or senior in high school, so he graduated, so they both had been here for a long time.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So then you talked about already right, like once you got in, you're driven, you're like I want to work on these things. Were you going in with that mindset? Were you working out beforehand, like were you taking care of yourself? Like tell me about that mental state as you went in?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I had the blessing of not being incredibly athletically inclined. I never had kind of the raw skills, so the only way I was ever making it onto any teams or getting any time was if I worked really hard. And I figured that out at a really young age. So I had that idea in my head that I can work hard and make it. And so I was I. As soon as I signed my contract, I actually was living out west working doing a program called AmeriCorps and working with the Forest Service and I came back home and said, hey, everybody, I joined the army, I'm leaving in three months. I didn't really consult with anyone, I just turned over there.
Speaker 2:And yeah, when I got home I prepared and then when I got the basic training, I kind of looked around and was like, were you guys doing anything to prepare? Like why, why are you struggling to run two miles? I've been, I've been doing nothing but training for the probably the last 10 years and kind of immediately was like, okay, well, what's next? What's the next challenge? What's the next level of thing that I can do to get up to another level, like a higher echelon? And I just kept doing that. Every opportunity I got, I signed up to go to every school that I was allowed to go to and put packets to go to this and go to that, and go to this and go to that. And I ended up in in like a mid-level, uh cool unit. It's called the 82nd Airborne Division. It's people some people have heard of it.
Speaker 2:Um, it's not like it's not the highest, the highest no special forces or ranger of it. Um, it's not, like it's not the highest, the highest, no special forces or Ranger regiment, but it's something that separated us from like we would call it the regular Army or the big army right.
Speaker 3:So tell me, like, how do you think you went in and how do you think you came out of active duty, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it was a massive transition for me. So after about two and a half years of preparing to go to Afghanistan, I went to Afghanistan and I got injured. I dropped 60 feet and broke a bunch of bones in my legs, had a spinal cord injury, cracked a bunch of vertebrae yeah, broke ribs, ripped my shoulder out, had a brain injury. So I obviously came out a lot different than I, than I went in. I walked to the cane for seven years after that injury. It took me forever to recover and so I initially came out just really broken, psychologically, physically, emotionally, spiritually, career wise. I was just, I was a wreck. I mean I was back living in the bedroom that I grew up in just, I was a wreck.
Speaker 3:I mean, I was back living in my, in the bedroom that I grew up in, so so what year was that that you came home, that you first come home from afghanistan?
Speaker 2:you're injured I got hurt in 2012 and I got out of the army in 2014.
Speaker 3:so I I stayed in the army because I was I was too up to even get out right, like they have to keep you there on the on their medical so they can like take care of you, send you home like mobile. Um, how so? That was like a two-year process of you even trying to like rehabilitate to be able to go back home, right? So what's it like once you get back home? What's the next step?
Speaker 2:oh, it's awful like my life is terrible. Coming back from coming back from being at the top of my game was hard enough, as is. I was an impressive specimen in my own evaluation. I was doing stuff that I never thought was even possible that I was ever able to do, and just constantly going from one difficult thing to the next really difficult thing, to the next really difficult thing to not even be able to take to take care of myself. Uh, so it was brutal, Um.
Speaker 3:Do you remember what you were thinking like on the plane ride home, Like, did you like were you starting to make a plan or was it just like, damn, I just got to get back home?
Speaker 2:I made a plan of I'll do this, I'll do this, I'll do this, I'll do this. But I had no concept of how painful it was going to be to come home, Because when I was in it was different. I was hurt, but the people that were taking care of me were other people in the military. They understood. I definitely came back with some psychological wounds from deployment that I didn't have to address in the environment of active duty. Once I got home, it was as if the whole world was crumbling around me.
Speaker 3:You've got to face it all now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, nobody cared. I had built a reputation for myself before I got hurt, that I garnered a certain amount of respect, even though I moved really slow and I walked with a cane and I needed help really slow. And I walked to the cane and I needed help and when I came back I wasn't wearing my uniform anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah, badges and the ribbons and and whatever. And so people would just blow by me in the store and bump into me and, um, and I couldn't do anything about that you know, yeah, damn yeah, it was brutal.
Speaker 2:It was definitely a a really scary and and and dark time um, so how you start to put yourself back together yeah, well, this program is how I how it it started.
Speaker 2:I had all I had maintained. I had control over my ability to still exercise through my injury and so I kept doing that. I swam a lot while I was in the army and then I started lifting weights when I was able to get out and when I came back home I had a great. I had a really solid friend from childhood that was like we're going to work out, we're going to go to the gym because I could do that and consistently we worked out for about another year and so bench pressing and doing everything that I could, that that didn't, that I wasn't limited by and I had.
Speaker 2:I have still currently a really wonderful relationship with my high school football coach and I went to go and visit him one day. I actually ran up to the school on my crutches I had. I bought, I got really expensive carbon fiber forearm crutches and had figured out a way to run on them and I was sitting there talking with him and he could tell that there was, there was, I was, I had, I had problems that I wasn't dealing with. A lot of the deployment darkness was, I was not processing through it. And so he said to another coach we need to get him back in the fold, we need to get him back around. And so he put me in the weight room with a couple of kids and nothing happened immediately.
Speaker 2:It was a slow burn over the next probably three years but like I found that I had the purpose again, I had that respect that I had had when I was in the military. I was doing something that mattered. I could talk to this to these students in a way that no other adult in their life could, because I was still very raw from from my own psychological challenges and I would talk to them about that stuff pretty openly. Like it felt like a very safe environment to be able to for me to process through it on my own. I mean, that was my first therapy was telling stories to the students in a way that made those stories have meaning.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then when I'm crutching into the weight room and benching 335, the kids are like what, what is going on? It was just the shock value. It immediately put them in a position where they were more willing to hear what I had to say and I very quickly recognized that it was really good for me that I could talk about a lot bigger things than lifting weights in the gym, and that how much they looked up to me forced me to have to take a look at some of my own problems. Because I was. I knew that they were, they were going to try and be like me, and so I didn't want to show them these fucked up behaviors that I had in, these fucked up coping skills, and so it was like it was the constant. So it was like it was the constant. It has been the constant kick in the ass to continue to address my own shit, so that I'm presenting to them positive habits that they can choose which ones they want to take and use them to find success in their own life.
Speaker 3:That's awesome, man Like. So you start your unofficial therapy with the kids, right? Do you find yourself going to therapy to like talk it through?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, yeah. So I, I'm a huge proponent of therapy. I've been. I've been in therapy for just under 10 years now, on and not on and off, changing from therapist to therapist. And the more that I understood, the more that I grasped, the more that I found the pieces in therapy that were really effective in my everyday life. I brought those practices into the weight room with me.
Speaker 2:So, beginning it was just weightlifting, and then it was weightlifting and meditation, because I found a lot of stability in that. And then it was weightlifting and meditation and me talking about some of the coping you know, not calling them coping skills, but talking about my own coping skills and then just everything just kept getting layered on to the point where now we are a social, emotional wellness curriculum that's disguised as a strength and conditioning program. It is the weight training and how much they can lift and in what shape they are is all secondary to them learning about themselves so that they can get success again, in whatever way they define success the soft skills that people need to transition from adolescence into adulthood, right To mature.
Speaker 3:I love it. So you're looking around. It's becoming more than fitness right Like, so you use that as the brand name. When do you form the organization? What are your first steps? What was your mission for creating it?
Speaker 2:So I I started informally at Mount Pleasant high school, which is the high school that I graduated from, and in about two years, I went from having three kids in the weight room to having 40 kids in the weight room, splitting them up day to day, and the school was. I was doing it underneath of the school, like as a part of Brandywine school district. I was a Brandywine school district employee and once we got to that kind of breaking point where I was like I need a bigger space, I need more equipment, I need this, I need that, the school district and I were like this isn't the best way for us to continue this relationship. You should, you should have your own thing, we'll have our own thing and we can work together. And so in in 2018, I, we incorporate, we incorporated and got our 501 C three.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, a friend of mine. Her name is Stacy Richardson. She went to Concord high school, which is another high school in our school district. She was really integral in helping me. Take there's just a lot of organization that is required to, yeah, non-profit and then to set foundation for the non-profit to be successful, and she just volunteered of her time to walk me through for All the steps, yeah, to get us to a place where we could be successful.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. So what was the mission? You are at the high school first, and then you're branching out to take on a bigger role in it. What'd you want the organization to do for the local community?
Speaker 2:Our mission statement was to equip people with the tools to build strong bodies, resilient minds and unbreakable spirits. That's our tagline, was I just want to give the students an opportunity to get out of the school, to come to an environment that where they know exactly what they're going to get. It might not always, it's definitely not always a nice environment. I'm not.
Speaker 2:I'm not always showing like a substitute teacher but they know exactly what they're going to get and I they. The rules are the same every single time and, yeah, they feel safe because the the environment is can, is consistent and they feel safe because I tell them a couple of stories about being in the military and they think, well, if something goes down like, Coach Moore's going to take care of it.
Speaker 3:I'm good, I'm cool, I'm good with this dude. That's just. That's hilarious, bro. That's lit. So now let's transition into the comp, right? How does Belafonte Brawl play in all this? Where does that start? At you at you said you're on year three of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So tell us the story of that. Where did that come from?
Speaker 2:So if you run a nonprofit, you've got to raise money, and grants is where the big money is. But you need to have fundraisers to have funds that are more flexible, where you can decide where you want those things to go. And this is. I don't know if you're familiar with the dynamics of Delaware, but everybody knows everybody and none of us really like to leave. We just stay here. So a person that I went to high school with found out what I was doing and thought it was cool and wanted to get involved. His name's nick totoro. He works really closely with justin to. I mean he puts on the whole event. I barely do anything.
Speaker 3:I just show up and talk and and this version shake hands, kiss, shake hands, kiss babies kind of thing as charming as I can possibly be, which is not that charming.
Speaker 2:I do it. Nick puts it all on and it was his idea to have the comp and he's really taken it and run with it and the only parameter that I gave him was that I want our competition to be fun, that I want our competition to be fun. If you are coming here and you're going to take it super seriously and really want to win and make other participants feel uncomfortable, this isn't a competition for you. The environment, the culture in the weight room for my students is that we have healthy competition and we're there to support one another. And I don't write scores down on the board when people are done. We don't even talk about it, nobody cares. It's about starting the workout, working hard and the workout being over and that's it. And that was the culture that I wanted to bring to that, to that competition, and Nick has done that.
Speaker 2:The first year we did it at Mount Pleasant High School, out on the track in the stadium, which was awesome I mean, there was no fans because it was our first year and I think we had like 15 teams or something and then last year we started doing it here on the property. We have an eight acre property here with a with a pool and a mid-sized gym, um, and he he really utilized the space really well and, uh, we got people involved that were gonna want to work hard and and have fun. And last year we did a student showcase where my high school students did a workout that I kind of catered it to them so that they could have some success. You know, no, no serious gymnastic moves or the Olympic lifts were stuff that they could all handle, but it was really cool to to show off what we are really there for, which is to raise money for this program that affects change. Yeah, that's really cool.
Speaker 3:I would really like to see that.
Speaker 2:That's dope. And then this last year we opened up the adaptive division because one of our since the students program had success. Since we got this property, more Than Fitness has expanded its services outside of just to high school students and the first expansion that we had was providing adapted crossfit, adapted fitness. I don't run those classes. There was a woman named Kirsten McCartney who's a doctor. Yeah, I know Kirsten McCartney who's a doctor?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I know, kirsten.
Speaker 2:Yes, kirsten started that program that's really cool and brought it to us, and then she didn't want to have to do that admin stuff and didn't really have time.
Speaker 2:She's a doctor, a physical therapy student, yeah, and I've had the infrastructure all ready to do it and the property that we have here has a history of serving people with disabilities, so it was a really good pairing and she's been running a really successful program and so we were having a competition.
Speaker 2:We have adapted athletes boom. We want to have an adaptive division. So we did that this this last year and it was really remarkable to see the one, the excitement from the non-adapted athletes to watch the adaptive athletes get after it and to hustle and and to see the adapted athletes having an opportunity to compete in a way that we tried to make as seamless as possible into already existing competition. And and nick and daryl whose last name I can't remember right now, which is embarrassing um, and kirsten and Justin and all the judges, all did a really good job of blending it in so that it didn't feel like we have this competition over here and then we have these adapted athletes over here doing this separate thing. It was just a competition that blended with our adapted athletes.
Speaker 3:Damn dude, that's really cool. It blended with our adapted athletes damn dude, that's really cool. Um, justin said the same thing that you said earlier too, that like everyone takes it serious and works hard but it's, it's a good time, you know, and that's the more the priority. You know said that almost exactly word for word. But yeah, man, that's, that's really sick about like having the adaptive part of the competition itself, because you hear a lot of feedback that that at even bigger crossing events like the games and wadapalooza, they feel like they're secondary. You know, like I mean, in wadapalooza the adaptive division goes at seven in the morning, before everyone, before anyone's even awake, you know.
Speaker 2:So that sucks yeah, and I think all of that, like all of that comes from like those events are meant to make money. Those events are meant to be successful. Those events have different missions. It's not about the athletes doing stuff that they never thought that they could do, and that is what I want our competition to be. There's no cash prize. There's no. You know, we get sponsors, but sometimes we post the sponsors on Instagram, sometimes we forget Maybe they'll get on this t-shirt, maybe they won't Like.
Speaker 2:The competition is about getting a bunch of people who want to work hard, who want to take risks, who want to push themselves to do that together, who want to push themselves to do that together. And the reason that that's the spirit of the competition is because that's the spirit of our program, of all of our, of the adapted program, of the students program, of the. We have an armor fit program, which is jujitsu. We're working on developing a veterans program, we have a summer pool program, and they all have that same, that same culture of let's get together and and and challenge each other and push each other to relentlessly pursue self-improvement that's really cool, bro.
Speaker 3:How many people do you have like on staff, like working on location?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I never really know. I used to. It was myself and Stacy for a long time, and then it was myself Lindsay Polakowski, who's another Delaware native I don't mess around, if you don't have a 302 phone number, you're probably not going to be allowed to work for me. Mess around, if you don't have a 302 phone number, you're probably not going to be allowed to work for them. But now we have there are three full-time employees, to include myself, and like six part-time employees during the school year who provide some type of programming Service. Yeah yeah, who provide some type of of programming. So nervous, yeah yeah.
Speaker 2:Kirsten, who runs the adapted program, is a part-time employee. Doug, who runs the excuse me the jujitsu program, is a part-time employee. Kayla, who helped to set to set this up, is a part-time employee in our community program, as well as helping me out with all the organizational stuff that I'm incapable of doing. I feel that there's about six of them. And then in the summer, which is when we open up our campus to a lot more people because of the central focus of the pool, we have about 35 seasonal employees and the majority of them are my high school students, yeah, that rotate in and out, stuff like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, shorter shifts, that's cool man. So tell us about, like, some favorite memories from the brawl you know over the past three years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so most of the time, my favorite memories are watching my students being able to get the feedback and the cheering in the crowd, because they only really ever get to see me get fired up about their successes or each other fired up about our their successes and that is nothing in comparison to when you have people you don't even really know. You know cheering for you and watching them be nervous and uncomfortable and then stepping up and using the stuff that they have been practicing for years in our gym, using it in front of people and then being able to see that switch click in their head. Like I prepared for something hard, I stepped up and was courageous enough to do something hard and I was successful. I think I can do that again. Yeah, that's cool. Watching that process through is one of them.
Speaker 2:The first year that we incorporated a swimming event, that was really awesome to have a pool part of a CrossFit competition and for it to be that I was, that I was managing. And then this last year, uh. So one of the athletes is a very dear friend of mine my my whole life really. Uh, his name is Artie Mays. He has cerebral palsy and I met him when I was 11 years old as a volunteer on this property. I've been a part of this property for 25 years. I was the volunteer that was assigned to help Arte get around and we developed this really strong relationship where sometimes he was the mentor he was really always the mentor and I was just helping him go around his life. He was older in high school and we continued this really wonderful relationship that has lasted 25 years and now he is an adaptive athlete and he was competing in that and there've been years where we have talked about his health and his ability to exercise and I have tried to help him to exercise.
Speaker 2:There's a an epidemic in the disabilities community that once you turn 21, all your services go away. So when you're 21, until you're 21, there's all these services. There's PT, there's OT, there's you can get signed up for this, you can do this, you can do that, you can do this, and then once you turn 21, those services just kind of disappear and people with with complex disabilities, they're, they just deteriorate because I get whatever the way that was like oh, this is just this special thing for our day to do over here, his own unique thing, and like maybe he's working hard, but who knows what I saw was him grinding, trying to work out that Right.
Speaker 2:All we needed to do was adjust a few things to put him in a position where he could work as hard as the non-adaptive athlete that was right next to him was a really powerful thing for me to see, because I don't, I don't, I can't speak for Arte, but I know for me. Five years ago, I w, I thought that that was not something that was possible for Arte to do, not because of his willingness, but because of the environment, the world that that we're in, because of the environment, the world that we're in. So to see that happen and to see him meet that opportunity with some real intensity and focus and wanting to grow, it was incredibly powerful.
Speaker 2:And for him to do it in the same building that used to be where we ate our lunch, and I've now converted it into a gym was just incredibly powerful.
Speaker 3:That's awesome, man, Just like you said the grind. That's universal, right, so you can appreciate that in others, no matter their ability. It's an amazing thing, a moment to be a part of. So what's next, bro? Like, what are you hungry for?
Speaker 2:So we we acquired this eight acre property we were in. It was like a two year process for us to get it. We leased it from the County, so the County owns it, but we are responsible for it. We have to financially take care of it, and there is a ton of potential here for growth and expansion.
Speaker 2:I'm bringing on other people whose passion are all those different areas like working with people in recovery, and I'm a veteran myself. I want to serve veterans, but I want to keep my focus on the students because that's where I've had success. So I want to find someone who can help to support me helping in a veteran's mission. So and we're going to I want to expand the space that we have. Right now, our biggest limiter to being able to run programs is that we only have one space. So I want to double, triple, quadruple the gym space that we have so we can be running concurrent programs, so we don't have to share the nights. We can all be using it at the same time.
Speaker 2:I see a need for high school students that need to get out of their living situation so that they can find more success. So I want to be able to build a residential either a part-time or full-time residential program here, whether that's a boarding school or an alternative school here, whether that's a boarding school or an alternative school. I'm still working out the details of that, but I see the need. I see their hunger to want to be here all of the time. I've been able to get some really positive role models around me that I mean. This is where I mean. This is where kids should be.
Speaker 2:They're surrounded by other people who are hungry, who are focusing, who are driving, and none of them are there because it's their job. They're not there because they have to teach some other curriculum. They're not like. Most teachers are struggling to even do that. What is being asked of them, let alone to develop these strong relationships like it is not. It's a rough time to be a teacher. It is very difficult to find success there, and the group of people that are suffering the most are the students. When I was in high school, my teachers had all this time for me. I mean second only to my dad. My football coach, who was also one of my teachers, is the most influential person in my life and we spent a lot of downtime just developing relationships, and that is just not available to teachers anymore.
Speaker 3:That's not possible. They're all being driven into the ground.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, they're being driven in the ground. So I want to fill that gap for developing those relationships, and not me as an individual, I want this organization to do it, yeah.
Speaker 3:I love that man and I think, on the boarding school thing, just like you were saying earlier, I don't know the exact ins and outs of like tax law and formulated this versus that, but like trade school kind of thing where they're getting scholarships, coming in and learning different like skills, you know, job and life skills while they're there. I don't know, those are the kind of things that they grant money for, you know.
Speaker 2:So all that. Seven years ago, I told a couple of people what my plan was to take this thing in the weight room and develop it into a social emotional wellness curriculum. Before the regular public was talking about social emotional wellness, People were like nah, I don't know. You know there's this, there's that, there's this, and now it's happening. So, like I'm just going to keep grinding, keep showing up.
Speaker 3:For sure You'll be saying this stuff right now and then, seven years from now, people will be like, oh, I guess he was saying that back then and I just didn't. Yeah, that's how it goes, you know, like I was talking to my friend the other day about it, like there's a difference between just like working and then like creating magic, you know, like having vision, like that is the huge difference between people. Because, like, hey, I want to do this. I say this out loud, it's nothing right now, but in time I can make it into something, you know.
Speaker 1:So that's amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah it's. I, uh, I do this work because I love it. It keeps me sane, it keeps me connected, it keeps me sober, it keeps me on top of my mental health. I it's a, it is a. I do it because, honestly, I feel like I don't even have a choice. I have to do it, and I'm blessed that, as a result of my injury, I retired from the army, so this is a volunteer job for me. I Right, because, because I believe in in it, because I love it.
Speaker 3:Through, like just accident injury. You found vision and commitment, you know, and what else can you really hope for in life besides those two things? That's awesome. Well, Jeremy, it's been a great episode. Man, Thanks for coming on and chatting with me. Bro, Do you have anything else to say to people at the end of the episode?
Speaker 2:No man, just just thanks for having me. It's as as big as my ego can can feel sometimes to me. I'm always still shocked when people give a shit about what I have. So it's, it's cool, thanks. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Hell yeah, dogs out there. Thanks for listening to here. It's been another episode of the hungry dog barbell podcast. Peace.