Justin Levy (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, BuiltUnstoppable.com) woke up one day and everything was normal. Then, he had a seizure that changed his world. Here’s how he rebuilt himself again.
TAMAR: Hi, everybody. Today, I am Episode 33. I didn’t actually say this, but you’re my first male in the podcast. Yes. I, in the context of recruiting for my podcast, have mostly focused on Twitter, and I focused on LinkedIn before, I had really an audience there because I kind of coming back out of being quiet. I’ve been trying to recruit diverse people, and of course, got a lot more traction in a woman’s running group and a women founders’ group. So yes, you heard a male laugh there. So, everybody, I would like to welcome Justin Levy, an old friend. He’s giving a chance all of the guys should do that, too. Thank you so much, Justin, for coming.
01:07
JUSTIN LEVY: Thanks for having me. It’s good to see you and thanks for having me as the first male.
01:14
TAMAR: Yeah, listen. I appreciate your taking a gamble on me. But at the same time, Justin, way back we have literally like known each other for like, you say 13 years, maybe 14,15 or at least , online and then we met again synched up, and I’m looking at my camera now. It’s like we’re looking at each other, we’re Skyping, sometimes I do it with video, sometimes don’t. I’m trying to realize no one’s watching this because it’s just strictly audio. But anyway, Justin, we go way back to a tech world. So, Justin is from my past life. But he’s been an amazing me. He has an amazing story and amazing trajectory. I don’t know how to say it. So, introduce yourself. Where are you? What are you doing these days? Talk about it.
02:14
JUSTIN LEVY: Yeah. So, to get to where I am, I guess we can dial back to what’s happened over the years. It’s kind of two parts. But professionally, I started in social media before it was really anything called social media, had not been formed as a formal industry. It wasn’t every media person have Twitter handles, on the bottom thirds on TV or anything of that nature. And there was a small group of us across the country. I don’t really know that number. But it was a small group. And I lived in Boston at the time. And certainly, Boston was one of the hotspots for social as it matured and I started helping a friend of mine, he was actually the best man at my wedding. And one of the things that was happening with him was that he was the executive chef at this small Argentinian Steakhouse, actually go on to win Best Steakhouse in Western Mass for five years in a row. But the opportunity came about for him to buy the restaurant because the former owner wanted to sell it off. So, his father helped them buy it. But he really didn’t have time to run the business side as well as focus on being the chef. He was the executive chef; he had a couple chefs that worked for him. But the business side was certainly lacking and losing money. So, I offered to come in and help him with the marketing. When I started to look at it, I just realized that there’s this opportunity to try this thing called social. And this was back in the day when you had to text replies the Twitter because there is no mobile app. And even Twitter and Facebook and YouTube really weren’t the massive footholds that they are today, there is a wall.
04:32
TAMAR: Let me interrupt you. Do you remember when I wrote a book on social media marketing in 2009 and I remember having you in there and the urgency didn’t stay cast. I totally forgot about that. That totally blew my mind. See, Justin, I go so far back that we forget most of these things, or I forget most of these things. I don’t know if you do. But yes. So, this is how far dated we’re talking about. Social media was not really the thing. But that Steakhouse was kick ass.
04:55
JUSTIN LEVY: Yeah, thank you. And so, with social we began. We looked at it really three different ways. I focus on it three or four different ways. One, like most restaurants still do, was a PDF of the menu, right. So, it wasn’t updated for SEO, it wasn’t focused on all the things that can drive eyeballs to it. So, I hired some friends to help redesign the website, make it dynamic, make it geared towards SEO. So, we did that high quality photos the whole night, because what’s better than phenomenal steaks being cooked over wood fired grill, there’s not much else. And then I started off domain blog and the reason why I did that was because the blog I really thought was on domain would give this impression that it would just be about the specials or anything like that. So that attracted foodies both as writers and as visitors. And then I did go out and grab the Twitter and Facebook handles for the business. But the main area we focused on was YouTube so that we could teach people how to do things. So, one of the ideas was how to fire roast onions, or how to buy a side of beef from Costco, know how to trim it down yourself into the different cuts. And as we started to do that, all of a sudden, we saw revenue start to rise. And foot traffic and things of that nature started to go up. And it started to attract eyeballs. So, we had some media from places like Fox News and Boston Globe. And like you said, your book, and also it caught the attention of someone named Chris Brogan, who just celebrated the 10th anniversary of his book called Trust Agents that he wrote with Julien Smith.
TAMAR: Just being present time not like 10 years ago.
07:26
JUSTIN LEVY: Yes, exactly. This is present as of 2020. But back then it came out, it was one of the first books truly focused on social digital communities, things of that nature. And it was out there long with Charlene Lee and some of those other folk.
07:47
TAMAR: Yeah. Oh, my book was dated before that, though, because it was doing 11 years. A little crazy. Yeah, because it came with my kid.
08:00
JUSTIN LEVY: Yeah. Yeah. It seems like a lot of things were timed with your kid because I know you and Gary Vaynerchuk. Both side a kid about the same time.
08:07
TAMAR: At the same time. Yep.
08:09
JUSTIN LEVY: So, all of this started to happen around at once. Chris and I had a conversation one night following a long car ride to IBM from Jeff Pulver conference. And we talked about what the future could be for social media because of the launch of his book and he was also writing blog posts, published three to four posts a day, he was a writing maniac.
TAMAR: Right.
JUSTIN LEVY: And his blog was up there, in the kind of top 50 Top 100 type blog ranks with huge fight Seth Godin for number two, number three, number two, number three on a daily basis. And so, we talked about what social could be because the attention he was getting was having brands come out of the woodwork and want him to work with them. He wasn’t in that situation because of his full time job. So, he got those owners to really bankroll him. And we launched this agency, and I was the first employee. And we had the time and had the kind of honor to work with big brands over a few years. And those were Citrix, AMD, Pepsi Cola, Microsoft, Dell, you name it, we got to work with them. And the first client was Citrix. Eventually, I would have had a conversation with Citrix that if I ever want to leave and come to the brand side that they would create a role for me within one of their divisions. That conversation happened. I came in, they created that role to lead social. A bit of time pass. On the corporate entity, realized that they wanted social at a global scale. They created a role for me and I was promoted up out of that division. And I would grow it from not having a budget line to being a four or five person team, I had two agencies, anything globally that touched social my team worked on. And that included the corporate blog, somehow we obtained responsibility for the Wikipedia page, because when you’ve asked who’s responsible for those things, somehow get told that it’s now yours. And then I’d move on, and spent that summer when I left doing some consulting, and then I went and had some time at service now for the past close to a year-and-a-half before I left there, and am during 2020 caught in the one of the worst economies we’ve seen. So yeah, that’s been the kind of trajectory of my formal career, I guess you could say.
11:16
TAMAR: Yeah. So, you want to talk about how we are looking to get Justin, a kick ass corporate social, doesn’t have to be corporate social role. So, he is on the market right now. Because we are COVID inflicted, everybody is at a very, very difficult time. I’m putting it out there. I hope you’re okay with that. Yeah, but you never know who’s listening even though today we’re in July. I mean, Justin is kick ass, right? He is kick ass. In fact, if you listen to this story he’s about to share, you will know this is the guy you want. So, I wish I could do it. But you know, when you’re a bootstrapped startup, it’s only so much I can do. I want to put all the friends everywhere, but you for sure.
12:11
JUSTIN LEVY: Well, thank you. So, I can talk about my story in a minute. But as far as a full time gig, if you look at what my skill set is, it’s helping companies beat a small or certainly Fortune 500 as I’ve worked in scale social media globally, and I have experience across everything from quote unquote, basic social media to blogs, communities, governance, global, understanding what global means because global is not the same, different regions approach social media differently. So that’s really where I am as far as a full time job and what my experience holds. But I have an interesting story to tell. Certainly, whenever you want to jump into that.
13:15
TAMAR: Okay, this is your life story. We’re not talking about gig job here.
JUSTIN LEVY: Okay.
TAMAR: So, let’s talk about that. Because Justin, like I said, I’ve known Justin since the OG days. For those people who want to know what is OG, it’s Original Gangster. Sorry, I will make sure you know, SEO means search engine optimization, just for all the newbies and listeners who are coming from different walks of life, including not using Google for whatever reason, somebody tried to get my Instagram account this morning.
JUSTIN LEVY: It was funny.
TAMAR: Yes, it was funny. I tweeted about it. They’re like, my name is Tamar too and whatever I said to them, I’m entitled to it. It’s my name. I’m probably older than you. And then they’re like, you’re so rude. I’m like, really the pot calling the kettle black. And they’re like, I don’t know what that means. Like, I don’t know why I’m engaging. I’m like, Are you 12? So, you can use Google? She’s like, I don’t know what Google is. So, for those people who don’t know what Google is, please by all means, you could always look at it look it up but listen, I want to make sure I accommodate anybody out there. If you’re like her who wants my username TAMAR and Instagram, I apologize. But no, I have the trademark and thus, I have the entitlement and the birth certificate to put on top of that too. But yeah, all right. So, let’s move into your story, obviously the Common Scents podcast, we talked about careers. We talked about the rising above adversity and, like I said, I’ve known Justin for such a long time and I’ve seen he had faced adversity very unexpectedly. And I guess this is where he’s going to share that story. So, go for it.
15:01
JUSTIN LEVY: Yeah. So, I have certainly faced adversity my entire life. And I can touch on that after talking about what’s happening most recently, over the past few years, and that’s what a lot of people who follow me have heard about this. But actually, coming up on six years as of August 10 of this year, I was sitting on my couch, one Sunday night. And my wife was meal preparing for the week. And I had my first grand mal seizure, I had never had anything like that, had never been unhealthy, in any sense, regularly worked out, and I know, you want to talk about that, and had my first grand mal seizure, nowadays, they have started to call it the kind of medical term tonic-clonic seizure, but most people know, that’s Grandma, the next memory I have of it, and for me, everyone kind of experiences it differently. But for me, my arms came up on my side and kind of almost 90 degree angle, and I couldn’t talk. And with every next breath I took, I couldn’t talk more, I tell people it’s like you’re drowning. And I hear every one round me here, the periphery, of my wife screaming. But that was about it. I went unconscious, as is fairly standard for when you have a seizure of that magnitude. And the next memory I have is waking up in the back of an ambulance and see my wife, hysterically crying, and all the lights outside the ambulance and police officers and other medical and fire personnel. And when you come out of those type of seizures, what happens is that it takes a while and there’s these various stages for your body to return to semi-normal. And so, you can’t talk at first, you understand what’s being asked of you, so I think that one of the questions was, who’s the current president, and at that time, it was President Obama. But I couldn’t say it, I knew it, but I couldn’t say it. And then, I could start to meld that in, you come back, you come out of this. And as I came out of it, I told the paramedic that I couldn’t lift my hands off of my knees, or I could only lift them about six inches. He told me that was kind of completely normal, because it’s essentially an electrical storm that happens in your brain and throughout your body. So, I was transported to the hospital. When I got to the ER, I had another grand mal seizure when they pulled me out of the hospital bed from the ambulance’s stretcher. And that night, I spent pretty much the entire night out of it for sure. It was a million in one pain medications and IBS and God knows what else happened. But I know that I was going for scans and x rays and MRIs and everything to figure out what was going on. As you fast track, they thought that my shoulders had just been dissociated. It was found later that first week that I had completely destroyed my shoulders. And when I say destroyed, it was to the point that on Wednesday of that first week, my orthopedic surgeon had said never able to lift weights again. And I ended up having two separate surgeries, one on that Friday, one on that next Monday, one for each shoulder, and on Friday, it was to repair my right shoulder. And so, both shoulders, I had shattered the humerus in both the rotator cuff and balls. I had lost so much bone that they had to use donor bone along with what they call anchors and fiber wire to stitch back internally my shoulders and then I had partial tears, that upper sections of my biceps on both arms. So, I had essentially the same surgery on Friday and Monday between both shoulders, except on Monday, they had to insert two screws in my left arm because the injury was a bit more severe. I was staying in the hospital for 12 days recovering from that, sent home, started what would be four months of physical therapy to recover from my shoulders. And then on September 11 of 2010, I had brain surgery. My tumor was sitting on a motor skills path, just in front of the speech pathways of my brain. So, a few months after that, I started a year of chemotherapy. So that’s kind of the arc of everything. Of course, there’s more things that have happened since then. I’ve had a total of seven seizures. Since then, I have to see a neurologist, neuro oncologist for the rest of my life, including two MRIs per year and blood tests every year. Things of that nature, numb, have the fun of taking 10 pills a day to help keep my seizures at bay. But that’s really the crux of it all. I had launched in what people know, and were able to follow that, as it stands now, we’ll see what the future holds for social networks is that most people only show the popular areas of their life. They don’t want to show the more vulnerable, we’re seeing a lot actually more vulnerableness with COVID people certainly sharing that their significant others or what have you are sick or passed away. And certainly, that’s us, we feel sorry for them. But from that very first night, for 545 days straight to my very last day of chemo, I never missed publishing something as an update. It sometimes was a 25 word post, sometimes it was a 1500 word post. And whenever I had major surgeries or major anything happened, I had to have some blood work done. And when I had my staples out, stitches out, I always took the pictures and shared them. So, people have the updates. And for the first I don’t even know a month or so, all I could do to communicate was taped on my phone with my phone, because that’s the heaviest object I could lift at that time. So that’s kind of the real story arc of that period of time. Certainly, my story of adversity goes way beyond that and backwards to grow off, but that’s what most people know.
23:23
TAMAR: Okay, so first of all, I still remember that story. And when you blogged about that, that first time about six years ago, I remember the details that you were sharing that I’m like, oh my God, like I had the chills because for me it’s like I read it yesterday but your obviously happened to you. It’s just a crazy story. I almost want to know your adversity from when you were younger. Sure, we have enough time in the podcast for that because I want to go into what you’re doing now and how you’re taking care of yourself, but maybe the short version of it.
23:59
JUSTIN LEVY: Yeah, the short version is that I grew up and certainly people can read this.
TAMAR: I think I read it. Yeah.
24:09
JUSTIN LEVY: yeah, it’s not the form we plug it but I write about this on my blog builtunstoppable.com. I grew up around domestic violence and in poverty. Below the poverty line. I grew up as you kind of fast forward through that. I lost both my parents on my senior year of high school. My dad died in October of my senior and then my mom passed away in March. And then, certainly I got to the point of having my seizures and some other things have happened between here and there. So, certainly there’s been many points of my life where similar stories have had to come into place, have chosen one path or the other.
25:12
TAMAR: Right, right. Yeah, I remember that too. I think I knew your story. But just following Justin on social, learning about how unstoppable he is because truly, you are unstoppable. It’s an inspiration. And being open, a lot of people don’t get super vulnerable, like, I’m starting to do that as well. And because I’m inspired by people like you who are sharing something that a lot of people don’t, there’s really like people don’t, either people who don’t understand medical stuff, they’re like, I’m going to the hospital, I’m getting a zit removed, all of a sudden give me a prayer. And then there’s other people who will share their medical stuff without giving any context. Like I have a friend who last month texted me, another friend of mine texted me, she’s been saying, pray for me, pray for me, pray for me, I’m near death. And all of a sudden, a week later, she’s all better. So, my other friend texted me, our mutual friend. She’s like, what happened to this person? I’m like, I don’t know, I’m not going to ask her. But like you leave, things are very cryptic. And then somebody gets very vulnerable. And it’s like the way you tell the story, and the fact that you share that story a really long time ago, but I still remember it. Like, that’s how humans should relate to humans. Be open about your struggles and be open about your story. Because people are like, I want to be defined as the story but you’re not defining yourself in the story, define yourself as somebody who had something and is built unstoppable. Let’s talk about the present. So, let’s move into the present. I mean, you just started your own. So, the reason why Justin and I synced up also is because he does have his own podcast, he is starting his own, he just recently started his own thing. So hopefully, in due time, I’ll get there. But I’m only working with him on my side now. But you are unstoppable. So, tell me a little bit about that, and how you were able to get back your strength to do the things that you’re doing now, because that is also truly inspirational.
27:24
JUSTIN LEVY: So, before my seizures happened, and everything with that, I’ve worked out for the majority of my life that I’m very dedicated to it. Leading up to my seizures, I exercised six days a week, I eat six meals a day very kind of weighed out, in particular. And the reason I see it as kind of Catch 22 sorry, with my seizures, because the reason why I hurt my shoulder so bad was because of my fitness level. And that’s what I’ve been told by my orthopedic surgeon. Because I had so much upper body strength, I actually dislocated my shoulders backwards, and then just that amount of shaking on my shoulders, just they couldn’t stand it. So eventually they shattered. Because most people when they have a seizure of that magnitude, they flail or they fall and that’s what causes injury. My arms came up to my sides, and there’s just so much pressure put on my upper body. So, it was kept wanting to win that my fitness hurt me, but my fitness is what helped me to recover quickly and my knowledge and what have you. So, when my doctor told me I would never be able to lift the weights again, I’m stubborn and want to prove him wrong. So, I had a knowledge about something called Spartan Race. The founder’s name is Joe De Sena. At that point, it was pretty early on and Spartan races kind of history. He had started it, I think a couple years prior to that. Years later, it’s a pretty big deal.
TAMAR: Yeah.
JUSTIN LEVY: And they’re all over the world and you have all sorts of levels that you can run. And I had set my sight on , competed in one before I got the clearance to live life 12 months later. And so, the next one that was coming up in my area was one month before my last appointment with my doctor, and so I worked out for a year to get my focus on. And people asked me how could you do that even if your arms were in slings or what have you. And I just focused on always moving one step further. So today, I could run one flight of stairs at my apartment at a time, I ran one flight. Tomorrow, I could walk six steps further, eventually moving up and up and up, right. So, I was able to run that race, and everything was miserable about it.
30:52
JUSTIN LEVY: I failed a bunch of exercises, because I didn’t have the upper body strength or experience to do some of them the way that they needed to be done. But I got through it. And one of the things about sparring is that their tagline is, “you’ll know when you cross the finish line.” Second, I cross the finish line got my first medal I was hooked. And I’ve completed. Now, I don’t know the number without checking, I just know that I have a drawer full of T shirts. So, I know that I’ve accomplished a lot of them, but probably 12 or 15 including competed in 2017 in the Spartan World Championships. And that was at Squaw Valley out here in California, where we currently live. And that was 18 and a half miles I think of elevation, kind of rising and falling between 10,000 feet and had about 40 obstacles including my 45 degrees swim, swimming in a 45 degree water. It took me and a couple other people that I ran it with eight-and-a-half hours to complete. So, if I’ve done that, certainly, I’m back to working out, full strength, though I don’t have full shoulder mobility. So, there’s certain things I can’t do, or I can’t do as heavy as I was doing pre seizures. And I’ve also sent all this complete or part of it, not really a completion in a goal completeness, and go events which are essentially paramilitary tightening events where you focus on fitness, while you’re wearing rucksack on your back, they can go anywhere from four to 24 plus hours. And all of them are done with some active or former member of US Special Forces. So, I’ve had the opportunity to do several of those as well. So, that’s kind of my focus on fitness and where I was beforehand and where I am now.
33:28
TAMAR: Do you consider that your major self-care, especially now?
JUSTIN LEVY: I think that there certainly are three main tenets to self-care, and fitness is one. And nothing changes about this, it’s that and what personal trainers and magazines have told people for forever.
TAMAR: Right.
JUSTIN LEVY: But it’s certainly fitness and in being present in your workouts, it’s healthy eating. So healthy eating, doesn’t mean have to weigh out all your food and not have any fat or not have any carbs or whatever the diet is that you’re following. It could be keto Atkins, anything out there, but it’s being healthy making healthy choices. So certainly, on my fair share of sweets or fast food or whatever I want occasionally, but that’s an occasional claim. And then I have to put a huge focus on sound sleep. And that’s why my weekly newsletter, you’ll see at least one article around sleep that’s been published out there. And it’s because you’ll read all the time that 60 hours is what we should get out as a society, most of us don’t. But to hold back my seizures, I need minimum of six hours of sleep. And if I break under that it greatly increases the likelihood of a seizure. And I think with sleep, a lot of people just think about it as crashing in their bed, turn off their lights and going to bed. Getting proper sleep goes a lot deeper than just things like blue light, which is TV and phones and slowing down the activity in your brains for not looking at an email right before bed or engaging with news or anything like that. There’s a lot more to it than just crawl in bed and sleep.
35:56
TAMAR: Yeah. Yeah. Do you use any sleeping trackers and all that stuff? Like the Ōura Ring nowadays? That’s a big thing. The Whoop, I’m wearing a Whoop right now.
36:07
JUSTIN LEVY: I don’t really have a good reason for why. I don’t, honestly.
TAMAR: You need not have a good reason why you do. I’m just like, yeah.
36:17
JUSTIN LEVY: Yeah. I actually used to use my Apple Watch to do it. But then I was finding that I wouldn’t remember to charge it after that. And I used overnight to charge it.
36:32
TAMAR: Right. So, I’ll tell you. I just got this book two weeks ago. And the thing is, you were 24/7. Actually, I’m charging the batteries on it right now.
JUSTIN LEVY: Yeah.
TAMAR: You never have to take off the batteries on it right now. I didn’t realize that because I was trying to figure out how to remove it. This thing that is waterproof, you put the battery on and then you take its slides off. So, I’m going to show it to him, everybody. But you go like that.
JUSTIN LEVY: Oh, that’s cool.
TAMAR: Yeah. So, you don’t have to do anything. The Ōura Ring, you probably have to remember to charge it. But this thing, it charges in about 90 minutes.
37:07
JUSTIN LEVY: Yeah, I know of people that have that.
37:09
TAMAR: I feel for somebody who’s in endurance training, whatever you would consider yourself this is for. I wanted to get the Ōura. But this the Whoops. So, if anybody’s interested in this, I’m going to deviate just for a second. The Ōura ring is $299, one fee. That’s it, you get an app, it’s really cool. You get to learn about your sleeping skills. I’ve done some research and I really wanted to get it. But I didn’t want to pay 299 because sometimes I know it goes down and the price goes down right now, they have a partnership with the NFL thanks to COVID and their pricing, they decided they’re not going to haggle on their pricing, they’re going to keep it strict. They said forget it. And someone had said to me, you should check out the Whoop it’s for athletes. But this is like a $30 strap. But there’s an $18 or $24 monthly membership. So, it’s different. It’s a different form factor once on your wrist, once on your finger. Ultimately, the data is relatively similar, but it depends on what you prefer. I happen to tell you that I would probably have preferred the ring. But again, I didn’t want to do that I’ll wait. And I didn’t want to wait on the loop. So, I’m wearing it on my right arm because I wear my Garmin watch on my left arm. And I will tell you the first four days of putting it on because I’m not used to wearing anything on my right arm was really, really, annoying. But now, just like an extension of where I am. And I don’t take it off because I don’t need to because I can just put the battery on it.
JUSTIN LEVY: Yeah.
TAMAR: So, no reason to pursue it. But at the same time, it was cool. I did some extensive research. I wanted to do one over the other. Maybe I will get the original in time. Maybe I won’t. But what’s cool about it is that it knows what your recovery level is based on your shape. And it told me last night, I got three hours and 20 not last night, the night before I got three hours and 29 minutes. And you should have gotten like seven hours and 44 minutes. And it tells you how much strain your body can take based on your heart rate variability. And I don’t know if I believe it because yesterday I got no sleep and I worked out more than I ever had. I ran for miles. And then I worked out for 45 minutes, and I was dripping like crazy. But I’m still trying to calibrate that stuff because I still knew it. But that being said, it tells me what I could potentially tolerate. And I think for you, just going back to it, it kind of tells you how much sleep you would need based on optimal performance. And a friend of mine, actually from college, he’s in the group, the only person I know and he’s like, I think I have COVID because his variation, not very substantially based on his respiratory rate, which is just interesting stuff. But yeah, I don’t want to go too much on that. But I want to potentially leave with one last question for you. And the question is based on everything that you know in your life, where you stand today, where you sit today. If you could give a younger version of Justin some advice, what would you tell him?
40:14
JUSTIN LEVY: It’s actually quite interesting because the last question for me in a way that I asked everybody, what does being built unstoppable mean to you?
TAMAR: So, actually you don’t want to tell me that I want to think of. That’s what I always look for that pause.
JUSTIN LEVY: But yeah, it’s interesting because you have a standard question as well. Yeah, one of the pieces of advice that I would give an earlier version of myself is to stay the course and to focus on the current, continuing to develop resilience and endurance. And the reason why I say that is because growing up the way that I did, I had to have that, right. But for someone that maybe not had grown up the way I did, even though that this would have been an earlier version of myself, I truly believe in those areas, you have to choose the right path. And I think so many people in our society have the path defined or laid out for them, and they choose the wrong path because it seems likely, almost the easier path. So, whether that’s you live in poverty, and you choose to go into the gang lifestyle, or you are on a lot of drugs, medications and you choose to become addicted to them, I very easily could have gone down that path with my pain meds coming out of my surgeries. I was bedridden for a long time so I could have chosen to become 500 pounds, get used to watching binge on TV and eat and fast food like I was at that point. You choose the right path; you have to have that resilience to do it. You have to build up your endurance, both mentally, physically and emotionally. And I’d also say that you need to be a voracious reader of everything that you can. When I was first injured, I’ve read my whole life. But when I was first injured, or I wanted to understand what have I could take to get back to life, and what was going to be the new normal for me. And I didn’t know if I’ll be able to lift heavy, I would have to focus on yoga. I didn’t know what was going to be, but it would be self-serving. So, I read books like crazy. And every fitness book I could read, I got my hands on anything that this book recommended. I pick up that next book and read it. Because that was really hard for me to do. So, I developed this whole baseline of information to go in whatever the next direction was, if I had to choose.
43:35
TAMAR: Right, cool, cool. Yeah, I’m trying to think what would I even answer a built in support question? We’re just going to have to wait. But it’s amazing. I mean, you’ve gone really, really far. And I mean, you’ve surpassed all the expectations, but you knew you had the belief. And that’s why I think you completely embody that built unstoppable mindset.
JUSTIN LEVY: Thank you.
44:00
TAMAR: Amazing, amazing stuff. And I mean, I just have to say thank you. It’s been really an honor. And I mean, Justin and I ended up talking for 45 minutes before this podcast started because we’re old friends catching up. I wish I could keep doing it. But we got it. We got 45 minutes of this podcast, so I got to say it was good. So, thank you,
44:26
JUSTIN LEVY: Of course, thank you.
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