Over a thousand contacts in my phone.

Josh asked me how many I could actually call at 2 in the morning when life is falling apart.

Not for support. Not for a pep talk. To actually help me out of a real problem.

Five. And I had to think hard to get there.

I asked a room full of men in their 40s and 50s the same question. Name one friend you could call at 2am. Most of them could not name one.

That is the part nobody says out loud. The most successful men I know are the loneliest men I know. More money, more responsibility, fewer people to call.

Guys like me and Josh, we got handed a brotherhood at 18. We never had to build one. The Marine Corps gave us the values, the code, the men. Then you get out and nobody hands you anything ever again.

So most men just white knuckle the steering wheel. Cows flying past the window. Somebody asks how you are doing and you say fine.
You are not fine. You are salty. Stressed, angry, lonely, tired, yearning for more.

Comment RECLAIM if that hit and I will send you the free six session coaching series we ran inside The Agoge.

Happy 6th Birthday - To our world-traveling, strong, badass stuntman, actor, producer, cowboy, jiujistu @radginganinja

Now a kid that owns a dirt bike 😝

Thank You, God for the best gift we’ve ever received… our children.

The most significant promotion you will ever get in jiu jitsu is white belt.

Nobody throws a party for it. Nobody films it. There is no stripe, no ceremony, no line of guys whipping you with belts. You just walk in the door and put the thing on.

And that is exactly why it counts more than the rest of them.

Every belt after white is earned with skill. White belt is earned with courage. It takes courage to walk into a room where you know nothing, in front of people who will beat you for years before you get good, and choose it anyway.

I am too old. I missed my window. I am not in shape enough yet. I will start after the holidays.

Those are not reasons. Those are a life you are choosing without admitting you chose it.

Courage is not the absence of all that. It is putting the belt on while you still feel it.

Congratulations to the men who did. You already did the hardest part.

You did not lose your identity. You lost the container it was living in.

The uniform. The badge. The title. The company. The marriage. Whatever you poured yourself into for fourteen years and then watched get taken from you.

When it went, it felt like you went with it.
September 16, 2012. I walked out of MARSOC headquarters, heard the door shut behind me, and twelve years of who I was stayed on the other side of it.

Four years later I was 240 pounds at thirty percent body fat. Bankrupt. Ninety percent of my network gone. And I was still trying to rebuild the container instead of looking at the man.
Here is what I had backwards.

Identity is who you are. Purpose is what you are doing about it this chapter.

Most men try to solve purpose first. They go hunting for the next mission to pour themselves into so they can stop feeling like nobody. That is exactly why purpose feels so heavy. You are asking it to carry your entire identity.

Get the first one right and the second one stops being so heavy.

The container burned. You did not.

So answer it honestly. What is worth building now, after everything you thought it was built on is gone?

I built Reclaim the Man Within for the man sitting in that question. It is free and it starts exactly where you are standing right now.

Comment RECLAIM and I will send you the link.

My wife has filed a formal complaint against this body wash. I want the record to show I did nothing wrong.

Statement of facts, as sworn before nobody in particular.

Eleven days on the trail. Came home looking like a wanted poster left out in the rain. Went to the wash house, used Deadwood, put on a clean shirt, and sat down at my own supper table like a civilized man in a lawless county.

She walked past me once. Stopped. Walked back. Leaned in about four inches off my collar and asked what that was.

I told her. Calabrian bergamot and mandarin orange up front, bright as a cold morning. Eucalyptus and Mediterranean cypress behind it, cold and green off the water. Siberian fir underneath, then sandalwood, blonde cedar, and a cashmere musk that sits on a man for the better part of a day whether he asks it to or not.

She said do not use this on Saturdays.

I asked why Saturdays. She said because I have things to do on Tuesdays and I cannot have you smelling like a national park while I am doing them.

Complaint noted. Complaint dismissed. I use it on Saturdays.

Deadwood. Shampoo, conditioner, body wash. 100 percent organic, made in America. Live @johnnyslicks 9am on our app, 10am site wide. Aug 1!

Consider yourself warned about Saturdays.

Nobody respects you because your word means nothing.

Not your wife. Not your kids. Not your team.
You told them things were changing. You’ve told them that before.

A man’s authority doesn’t come from his volume or his title. It comes from the distance between what he says and what he does. Close that distance and you don’t have to demand anything. Leave it open and you’ll fight for scraps of respect in your own home for the rest of your life.

That’s what tension actually is. It’s the receipt for a promise you didn’t keep.

Stop trying to win the argument. Start building the track record.

Comment RECLAIM and I’ll send you the first step.

I’ve been the guy with no track record.

Broke. Fat. Marriage gone. Standing in my own house explaining how things were going to be different now, while everyone in the room had already stopped believing me.

They weren’t wrong. I’d said it before.

Here’s what nobody tells you. When you have no track record, your vision doesn’t inspire people, it irritates them. You bring an idea to the table and tension shows up before you finish the sentence. Not because they don’t want you to win. Because they’ve been burned by the last version of you.

You don’t fix that with a better speech. You fix it by becoming a man whose word is worth something, then living that way long enough that it’s not a claim anymore, it’s just what people expect from you.

That takes longer than 30 days. It’s not a challenge. It’s a rebuild of who you are and what your rules are.

Do it, and the tension goes away without a single conversation. Then the only question left is whether you and your wife actually want the same life. That one’s worth talking about.

Comment RECLAIM and I’ll send you the first step.

Thirteen men filled out a form before they came to @theagoge Brotherhood Retreat. Nobody was going to read it back to them.

The two lowest scores on that form were tied. Belief in themselves, and brotherhood. Both at fifty percent.

Think about what that means. Half of these guys could not name the thing standing in their way, and half of them had nobody to call.

They were not in crisis. That’s the part people miss. They had careers and marriages and kids and service records. They were functioning. They were just doing all of it alone, and they had been for years.

Then we asked them what the worst day of their life was.

One of them said he’d been asked plenty of times what he was struggling with. Never that.

I’m not going to tell you what got said after that. What happens in that room stays in that room, and if that ever stops being true the whole thing is worthless.

Eight of them have sent their debriefs back so far. Belief went from fifty to ninety-seven. Brotherhood, fifty to ninety-seven. Leading at home, fifty-four to ninety-seven.

And marriage went from fifty-two to eighty-one, which is the number I actually trust the most. Because a weekend does not fix a marriage. It just tells you the truth about it and hands the work back to you.

If any of this sounds like your last few years, start with Reclaim The Man Within. It’s free. It’s the part you can do on your own, before you’re ready to do it in a room full of men.

Comment Reclaim and I’ll send you the free series

Most companies try to build culture with pizza parties, team building exercises, and motivational posters.

We choke each other.

Every week our team voluntarily steps onto the mats. We sweat together. We struggle together. We fail in front of each other. Then we get up and do it again.

Jiu jitsu has a way of stripping away ego. It builds trust because everyone is vulnerable. It teaches respect because everyone taps. It creates accountability because excuses don’t work when someone is trying to choke you.

That bond doesn’t stay on the mats.

It carries over into the warehouse, the office, and every conversation we have. People communicate better. They support each other more. They solve problems faster. They show up with a better attitude because they aren’t just coworkers. They are teammates.

Culture isn’t built in a conference room.

It’s built through shared hardship.

That is why morale at @johnnyslicks is different. Our team is happier. More positive. More engaged. People are genuinely excited to come to work because they know they get to train with people they respect.

You don’t build a great culture by making work easier.

You build it by doing hard things together.

The most dangerous place to get medical advice is a gym floor.

The guy who read one Reddit thread will tell you TRT blows out your heart, makes you infertile for good, and turns you into a meathead. He is wrong on all three, and his confidence is costing good men their health.

What the clinical data actually says: properly managed TRT does not raise your heart attack risk. It does not permanently shut you down, fertility is manageable with the right protocol. And it is not for stage bodybuilders, it is for fathers, veterans, cops, and business owners who are done running on empty.

Swipe through. Then stop guessing.

Comment PROTOCOL and I’ll send you our symptom quiz. It shows you which peptides and TRT products could fit based on your symptoms, then you confirm with bloodwork and our physicians.

Also, massive thank you to Pete Hegseth @secwar for what he is going for DOW members integrating to TRT and optimizing our service members readiness. It will create ripples that will save so many lives. 👊🏼🙏🏻

You wake up. Push through the day. Take care of everyone who counts on you. Crash. Repeat. Most days are fine. None of them are alive.

You used to have edge. You do not know exactly when it left. You just know the man you swore you would be at 25, at 35, is not the man in the mirror.

Other men have asked for help. You have not. You are going to figure it out on your own. You have been saying that for years.

The men in these reviews said it too. One was 347 pounds. He is down 160 and standing on a podium. Another booked a call at chapter four because he could not put it down.

I built a free six week series for exactly this. It is what the book was built on. Same framework. It costs you nothing.

Comment RECLAIM and I will send you the free series.

The book is on Amazon.

The most dangerous lie a man believes is that he needs permission to be who he already knows he is meant to be.

You are the last person who can tell you what is actually wrong with your life.

A man in collapse cannot give an honest report on the collapse. He lists the symptoms. The marriage that went cold. The forty pounds. The business that stalled. The drinking he does not talk about. Every one of them real. None of them the root.

So he attacks what he can see and wonders why nothing holds. Because the thing actually running his life is buried under all of it, and he stopped calling it a wound a long time ago.

Here is the part that should put steel back in your spine. The bend is not the death of the design. Whatever the last few years did to you, they did not erase the man you were built to be. They buried him. The direction bent. The design held.

Which means it can bend back.

But you cannot see the warp from inside the warp. That is why you do not do this alone.

This is not my opinion. The research is on the last slide.

If you are the man who let it all slide and finally decided to stop, comment RECLAIM and I’ll send you the free 6-week coaching series. We start with the root, not the symptoms.

You think taking care of yourself is selfish. You have it backwards.

The selfish move is checking out early. Dying at 55 and leaving your wife, your kids, and the grandkids who needed you. That’s selfish.

Your kid does not become what you preach. He becomes what you tolerate in yourself. If you carry the weight, you are handing it to him. You are setting the standard whether you mean to or not.

So be selfish. Take care of your body. Set the standard your son will live by.

The man who leads his family starts by leading himself.

Comment RECLAIM and I’ll send you the free series to start becoming that man again.

Deep sea with the boys. Days like this are the whole point.

There’s something different about watching your son step into an arena where you can’t do it for him.

You can’t take the nerves away.
You can’t fight the battle.
You can’t save him when things get hard.

All you can do is prepare him, believe in him, and watch.

Last weekend, I watched Dimitri compete IBJJF for the first time.

I didn’t see a little boy looking for an easy way out. I saw a young man who listened, stayed composed, trusted his training, and kept moving forward.

That’s what made me proud.

The medals are great. The wins are exciting. But what meant the most was seeing his confidence grow with every match.

Respect.
Discipline.
Courage.
Humility.

Those aren’t things you can lecture into a child. They have to be lived, practiced, and earned.

Watching Dimitri excel wasn’t about proving he’s special.

It was a reminder that when you consistently invest in your kids your time, your attention, your standards they’ll eventually show you what they’re capable of.

I’m proud of who he’s becoming, and I can’t wait to see where this journey takes him.

Do you get to beat up your boss at your job? If not you should switch jobs. Were always hiring at @johnnyslicks

Wash your ass! #afteraction

You think low testosterone is about how you look. It is not. You think it is about how you feel. It is bigger than that too.

Low T is about every person attached to you.

Most men measure it in the mirror. Am I softer. Am I more tired. Am I not the man I used to be. All of that is real, but it is the smallest part of the story. The real cost shows up in the people who never asked for the watered down version of you.

The wife who got a roommate instead of a husband. The kids who got a dad with no patience left by 6pm. The business that stalled out because the man running it lost the drive to run it.

I know because I lived it. I got tested at 240 when I was 32. My marriage had gone quiet, my body had quit on me, and the fog was so thick I could not make a decision to save my life. I blamed stress. I blamed age. I blamed everything but the one number I had never checked.

Your hormones do not just live in your body. They live in your marriage, your work, and your kids.

None of the five signs in this post prove you are low. Every one of them is worth a blood panel you have been putting off. This is not vanity. It is the people counting on you.

Comment CORE and I will send you the link to get your bloodwork started.

Nobody did this to me.

I wanted to believe someone did. The economy. Who was president. Bad luck. The people who let me down. Anything but the man in the mirror.

The truth was quieter and worse… I made every decision that put me there. I ignored the warning signs for months. I spent what I did not have. I trusted what I should not have.

Bankruptcy. The divorce. Watching my kids load into someone else’s car. I spent a long time blaming the world for a life I built with my own hands.

The day I stopped looking for someone to blame was the day I got my power back. When you blame, you hand the keys to your life to someone else. When you own it, you take them back.

If you built the mess, you can build the way out. That is not a punishment. That is freedom.

So I am putting it on the table. I am running a free coaching series called Reclaim the Man. The exact steps I used to take my life back, marriage, money, body, and the respect of my own kids.

Comment or DM RECLAIM and I will send you the first session.

2014 Gun in my pocket. South end of an island. I had convinced myself my daughters would be better off without the version of me they had inherited.

The waves got loud enough to cut through what was in my head, and I remembered both of them running on a beach a couple years before. Chasing the surf. Turning around to let the waves chase them back. Laughing.

That memory put the gun back in my pocket. I walked back to my truck. I drove home.

I almost stopped being their father that night. I am sitting here a decade later, with both of them still in my life, with a wife I built a real marriage with, with businesses I built from zero, because of a single image my brain handed me on a beach when it had every reason to fail me.

Father’s Day is in 17 days. The book about the climb back is live for pre-sale today. Reclaim the Man Within. A Marine Raider’s framework for men done drifting. $9.99.

If you are closer to that beach than you would say out loud, this is for you.

Comment PRESALE and I’ll dm you the link.

Last month or so has been a wild busy ride.

I gave people too much grace, and it almost cost me everything I have built.

When I got out of the military I was intense. I held a standard and I was, for all intents and purposes, hard to be around. Over the years I sanded that down. I told myself I was becoming more understanding, more patient, more human. Somewhere in there I overcorrected and gave the hard edge away completely.

Here is what nobody tells you about too much grace. You start carrying burdens that were never yours. You let complacency live inside your business and your home. You cover for incompetence and call it being human. And one day the weight of all of it crashes down on the world you spent years building.

I saw it clearly last week, and not in my own room. I went to @matthewpvincent s @notdeadyet_life retreat as a student, not a leader. Hat off. Nobody’s problems on my shoulders. For once I was just present. And in that stillness, during breathwork, the truth surfaced. I have been running on half of myself.

Matt and I have been friends over ten years for one reason. We are both addicted to the same thing, becoming better men and serving the people around us. It took sitting in his circle and rolling on his mats to find the piece of me I had left behind.

The work now is integration. Capable, dangerous, and still full of empathy, but holding a standard high enough that the people around me actually get to grow.

Brotherhood is not a product I sell. It is a thing I need.

NOT DEAD YET.

“We do it right, or we don’t do it at all.”

That was the line @jonnybernthal kept coming back to on The Punisher: One Last Kill.

He didn’t want a body count. He wanted the wreckage. The transition home that nobody warns you about. The part where the mission ends and you’re still standing there with the weight. He wanted to share that pain. The reality of it. Not some flashy Hollywood thing.

So he brought in real operators. Men who’ve actually carried the gear, run the missions, and lived with what comes after. He told me parts of it came from my book.

I came on three ways. Consulting Producer. Technical Consultant. And on screen, playing a version of the life I actually lived.

Fatherless. Running with a gang. Felonies at 13. Juvenile detention. Fighting to earn a Marine Corps contract. MARSOC. Bankruptcy. Faith crisis. Divorce. Losing my kids. Getting them back. I wrote Excommunicated Warrior because I had to.

Now pieces of that story sit inside a Marvel special on Disney+.

Comment BOOK and I’ll send you the link.

Four brown belts. Four different age groups. Four different weight classes. They threw us all in an absolute bracket and made us figure it out.

I want to thank these three men.

Because they showed up.

There’s no competition without competitors. No iron sharpening iron without another piece of iron willing to take the hit. Every time I stepped on that mat this weekend, it was because another man decided he was going to stop wondering if he could do it and find out.

That’s rare now. Most men talk. Most men post. Most men have an opinion about every fight they’ve never been in. The number of men willing to put their name on a bracket, get on a scale, and walk out under the lights keeps shrinking.

To the three brown belts who shared that podium with me, thank you. To every competitor at every level who showed up this weekend, thank you. You are the reason this sport still has a soul.

The sideline dads and the armchair quarterbacks don’t build anything. You do.

Keep showing up.

What an amazing last 3 Years!

Tonight May 12, 9pm EST @thepunisher One Last Kill is on @disneyplus

@jonnybernthal gave everything he had to make this for you guys. Burned political capital and fought for it to be the way it is all the way to we yelled cut at the final moment.

He knew what we wanted and he knew what the people wanted out of The Punisher.

From the emotion, to the violence, to the tactics he wanted it to feel real. And have piece of the veteran community to be apart of it.

Get ready for a fucking roller coaster of an emotional ride.

And to the stunt team….. damn you guys are cool as shit. Thank you!

#propweapon⚠️⚠️

@laurenmark_photography

Holy shit, where do I even start.
 
Thank you for giving me a second chance at being a father. Not once, but twice.
 
Thank you for being the glue that holds this family together when everything else is pulling in a hundred directions.
 
Thank you for raising our kids with values and morals, for teaching them how to be warriors with grace and compassion for others.
 
Thank you for every adventure we’ve had, and every one still ahead of us.
 
Happy Mother’s Day to one of the best to ever do it. I’m so damn thankful for you.
 
Happy Mother’s Day to the baddest of the baddest.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I have a stressful life.
 
Three businesses. Four kids, two of them grown. A wife who deserves an actual partner, not a roommate. A PhD program. And every personal, financial, and operational fire that comes with all of it.
 
It would be the easiest thing in the world for me to say I’m too busy. Too stressed. Too tired. Too much on my plate.
 
I still train jiujitsu four days a week. I still lift three. I eat right. I show up.
 
Yesterday my son Dimitri and I both took gold.
 
The throwback photos in this carousel, he was a baby and I was a white belt. Now he’s competing next to me and I’m a brown belt. That didn’t happen because I sat on the sidelines and yelled at him to try harder.
 
It happened because he watched me do the hard thing for over a decade.
 
Sideline dads breed sideline sons. You cannot tell your kid to push through discomfort while you sit on the couch with a gut hanging over your belt. They don’t hear what you say. They watch what you do.
 
So here’s the challenge.
 
Stop being a sideline dad. Get on the mat. Get in the gym. Get in the fight. Whatever the arena is for your family, get in it.
 
Do as I do. Not as I say.