169: Nate Pontious' Journey From Combat Veteran To Texas Rancher

27:34Nick Bare:You like the consistency and the way you feel better than the need for variation. I mean, and there is some variation there. The format is the same, but there is like, for example, ground chicken, cauliflower, apples, and black rice is a completely different meal than white rice, beef, pears, and asparagus. Yeah. same format, but incredibly different eating experience for me. See, I think I could eat the same meal, every meal, every day, beef and rice. It's one of those meals that I still every day after eating it for 10 years, I still get just excited about it every single day as I did 10 years ago.

28:26Nick Bare:And I've never been able to resonate with that pushback and response of, I just like, I need some variation today. I need something different. I like the feeling of consistency. I like the predictability of knowing how a meal makes me feel and perform and digest and taste. And I think it's a bigger issue with a lot of people that constantly need variation in their life to find fulfillment and joy and happiness and a little bit of a win. and for me, I just, I've never resonated with that. Eating is strictly business. Yeah. It's fuel. Yeah, I agree with that. So let's go back a little bit because you haven't been ranching your whole life.

29:13When did you occupy the ranch,

29:17Nick Bare:the property you're on right now? Five years ago. Okay. How old are you now? 35. Okay, so am I. so you went right into the Marine Corps after graduating high school you were 18 so that was 2009 it was yeah same as me yep how soon after enlisting the Marine Corps were you deployed overseas within two years and you were an infantryman what was that experience like for you and was it everything you hoped it would have been going overseas fighting in combat yes and no um i mean i'm sure you can relate better than anybody um you know seeing what happened in 9-11 and the second grade like from that moment on i had it made up in my mind that all i wanted to do in my life was go and fight bad guys so i didn't know what that was going to look like but yeah when I turned 18 it just turned out that the Marine Corps infantry was going to afford me that that ability to go and and fight bad guys and so I got to go do that and it was great and all and then it's not until really after after everything that you you have after the dust is settled really that you like start to think about the things that you did over there and like how if the shoe was on the other foot maybe all of the experiences that you had you you had those for a reason I start to think about you know just living out on my farm with my family now and like the way that we used to just roll up on these houses and these families and just take over like we we certainly weren't winning any hearts and minds and we just couldn't understand why we were losing so badly over there and it was exactly why I think about somebody rolling up on my farm and doing those sorts of things to my family.

31:23I was like, no wonder we got this sort of responses that we got and why it felt like we were constantly moving backwards in Afghanistan. But I'm glad I joined. A lot of who I am now is due to those experiences and how the Marine Corps like molded and shaped me for better and for worse.

31:50Nick Bare:It's character defining years for sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Similar in the way you described, you know, now having the perspective of being older, wiser, having a family, someone coming on your property and, you know, force of violence towards your family. I think of sometimes when I'm driving down the road, you have an 18-year-old kid who's in a Honda Civic and a expanded muffler and going 30 miles per hour over the speed limit, racing by you. And I got my kids in the backseat. I used to once be that 18-year-old driving a Honda Civic like an idiot. But with perspective and age and wisdom, things shift, you know, and you grow.

32:40Nick Bare:And I find myself now two hands on the wheel driving down the highway, yelling at this kid that's driving by me. Yeah, I got a family with me, man. But it's so amazing how like these years provide wisdom and characters refined and we grow. And like, I can only imagine if the 18-year-old yourself could see what you're doing now. And I've heard you talk about on podcasts before how your demeanor has changed, how your approach to life has changed, how you're calmer and more patient now in this life that you're living compared to where you were when you were 18, going overseas, fighting bad guys. there's not really a question there, but just this observation of, it's pretty beautiful in the way that we grow and develop and mature through all of these life experiences to get us out of certain situations, circumstances, and mindsets that we once were captive towards.

33:55Nick Bare:You resonate with that? Oh, I do. And having kids will open that door wide open. you have a daughter now right i do she's a little bit younger than your than your boy how's that been for you well i mean like you just said prior to her the only tool i really had in my toolbox to solving problems was a hammer anything gotten put in front of me it just took a hammer and just started smashing everything just violently and once she came along it like it forced me to get in my toolbox and and figure out different tools like i don't need to use a hammer for problems that require a paintbrush and so she's forced me i don't want to say force force isn't the right word but she's taught you she's taught me she's been the catalyst for me lightening my grip on on things and becoming softer instead of constantly looking forward to the next thing what's the next thing what's the next thing i'm more i'm more present in in these moments with her because you know really the that's the only thing that we have so that's been it's been really great i thought I thought, you know, it's funny also looking back in hindsight, like I thought that Rami and I both thought that we wanted a little boy first and now I can't think of anything different.

35:34And it's actually funny how you were talking about how your little boy just hauled off and threw a toy and busted your nose. It's like I think of myself as a little boy and he would probably be just like that. I couldn't be happier to have a little girl. Yeah, when we found out we were pregnant with our first,

35:52Nick Bare:my wife was hoping for a little boy at first. I was indifferent. And our first was a girl. She'll be four this summer, completely softened me, completely. I mean, before having a daughter, it was years before I cried. Now the wrong song comes on the radio and I cry. I'm like the softest man ever now from her, but I've seen such differences of raising my daughter and my son similarities, but I feel this different responsibility of what I need to teach my son compared to what I need to teach my daughter. But it's got to feel really good knowing that you're building this life on this property so close and in tune with nature and the food that you're raising and consuming with your family and the experience and the opportunities you're providing your daughter and potentially future kids and family as a whole, that's what they get to grow up surrounded by.

37:03Nick Bare:That's amazing.

37:08Yeah, like you were saying, experience kind of shapes a whole new perspective. And I've just kind of found myself in a place where I'm seeking after things that money can't really buy. And it seems like this farm life has a lot more of those sorts of things. She's going to get to grow up with an incredible amount of freedom to explore and experience life and death on the farm. And I just think of all the good lessons that I could teach her about, you know, just how watermelon is going to taste so much better when you've been working hard, sweating out in the sun all day, as opposed to just sitting inside in the air conditioning.

37:57I'm excited for all those things. Yeah.

38:01Nick Bare:Some of the best watermelon I've ever had was from the farmer's market last summer. These big black seeds in it. You got to eat around the seeds and spit them out. But man, it was like Texas grown farmer's market. Oh, it hits different out here. Watermelon hits so different compared to, you know, sometimes you get that store-bought stuff and you're trying pieces until you get the one that's actually sweet. Everything else tastes like water. Now this watermelon was like every single bite was sweet and gold. you grow watermelon on your property it's hard to grow much out here with the lack of rain that we have i've got a small i've got a small little orchard with some peaches and figs and apples that are impossible to keep alive i've got asparagus and broccoli and lettuces and some tomatoes and small stuff like that, but it's really hard to grow things out here.

39:03It's tough, tough climate. I believe it.

39:08Nick Bare:You grew up in a farming ranching family, didn't you? I grew up in a very agrarian rural town in central Illinois. Family was kind of commercial farmers raised hogs and cattle and grew hay and everything and the whole agribusiness model never appealed to me in fact i i was in all the agriculture classes in high school ffa was a really big thing in my high school and i could my agriculture teacher in high school if you were to ask him back then who is the least likely student that you would pick that you ever taught to go into farming, he 100 % would have said me, 100%. I couldn't care less about cows or crops or anything, just didn't interest me.

40:02And it wasn't until I started getting exposed to being able to influence the quality and the nutrient density of your own food and using my own physical fitness to make all of that happen that really started to like click and get me fired up. Like there is this new way of like regenerative farming where you raise higher quality nutrient dense food. And that's something that got me really fired up.

40:36Nick Bare:When I watch your content online, you and your families, your wife does a excellent job of behind the scenes of you as the rancher farmer of the property. I love it. I'm always showing my wife, like this is the life I want to live. But tell me, is it actually the life I want to live or is it how much more work, how hard is it for all the people who, maybe myself included, want to live this homestead life, who want to have a farm, have a ranch, have animals, have property, have all the responsibility that comes with it. How different is it actually doing it than the perception of doing it? I mean, if you want to talk about endurance and endurance athletes and endurance sports, it's like, I think it takes incredible endurance to just year over year, day after day, after day, after day, doing the same monotonous tasks with the simple aim of just keeping your animals alive and then you're going to have animals dying all the time and then you have to just continue to show up and do it.

41:56It is a lot of work. I've traded a lot of the physical exertion and effort that I used to put into the gym, slinging barbells and kettlebells and chasing numbers on a Concept2 screen. And I've just taken it and shifted it into moving infrastructure around the farm, moving animals around, walking a lot. And I enjoy it. I enjoy the day-to-day of interacting with the animals, seeing the land improve just a tiny, tiny little bit every day. Nothing is, if you're into any, if you want any sort of gratification, not even remotely immediate, farming is not for you. Like I've been at it for going on six years now and I'm only just, I feel like just now starting to like get over a little hump.

43:00And that might only last me like another month and I'm going to have a huge curveball thrown at me. I just know it. But it's really worth it. There's a lot of tangible results. It's all right there. You can feel it. You can touch it. You can see. You can interact with it every single day. You're getting the feedback from the land, the animals, the nourishment that you're putting your physical effort into. So it's worth it. It's very worthwhile effort, but it is all day every day. like coming in for the podcast this morning i had to kind of back plan a little bit get out earlier in the pouring rain move all my chicken coops collect up all the eggs move my wet sheep in the rain it doesn't matter what's going on doesn't matter if it's hot or cold animals don't care like there's work to be done and

43:54yeah

43:58it's not a very glamorous life that my wife portrays it as my wife's not showing the dead animals that I'm throwing on the back of the Can-Am and stuff like that because that is stuff you have to deal with too but it's worthwhile I'll say that what are these

44:17Nick Bare:these small wins you experience It's, I understand it's delayed gratification, but you have a long day. What are some examples of these things that happen? We're like, all right, this is why I'm doing this. This is what keeps me going. Well, in about two or three days after this rain, I'm going to look out into my pastures and I'm going to see a lot of my efforts come to fruition. all of my movement of my chicken coops across my pasture these tiny little movements that start to make a big impact day over day like all the areas that my pigs destructed and impacted i'm going to start to have fresh new forage growing up and then i'm going to get to move my cattle on there and they're going to get to eat that they're going to get to eat all of the fresh forage that i planted and it finally rained and that came up.

45:16And that takes months and months and months of repetition to make happen. And I get like, the small wins are like the excitement of my animals racing onto a fresh salad bar that I essentially curated with my own creativity and physical effort. Creativity in the maneuvering of my animals and their impact on the land and my planting of these different forages for my animals to now consume and get healthy on.

45:49Nick Bare:I can resonate with that from a completely different business. If I compare my work to say what you just described with your work, I always tell the team here, there's certain things you have to build that you can't buy. And you have to build it and deposit into it, potentially for years and years and years until it pays off. An example of that being, we hosted this ultra marathon on the ranch last summer that I was telling you about. And it went completely viral. It blew up. And all these other brands after that tried to run back that same playbook. They did the same race in their state or country with very small positives coming out of it.

46:39Nick Bare:Like it did not even make a spark on the map. And everyone came to us saying, what did you guys do differently? We didn't do anything different. It's just that we've been building into this for years and years and years. We've been telling the story. We've been preparing the brand for a moment for when the situation was just right, all these things aligned, it worked because we built it. We didn't go buy it. And that's like the delayed gratification that I can relate to of there's just work you got to put in knowing that at some point it might pay off or it might not, but you believe in the process and what you're doing, but you can't go buy that.

47:26Nick Bare:Like you can't bottle it up and go buy it in a store. It has to be built over a long period of time. And that's for me, what's so rewarding about the build and the process. and you probably i mean this the thing about it was starting out with this event you didn't start out with the end result in mind like you were starting out with the vision of just just focusing on running this really good event you weren't focused on the profitability or the success of it that just happened as a byproduct of everything that you built up to just get it started and going yeah whereas a lot of these people who tried to just turn key and do exactly what you did they were like well they did it really well they were successful and they're really profitable so if we do it just like this we're going to get the same result doesn't work that way no so after you you transition out of the military came back from overseas i understand you were living in la working a bunch of different jobs.

48:31Nick Bare:And this is when you started competing in CrossFit at a elite level and dedicate a lot of your life to training and fitness and performance. And I've listened to a few of your podcast episodes talking about these stories in this chapter of your life. So as much as you want to share or talk about, feel free to. but I think one of my favorite stories was, and you shared it on multiple podcasts, it's when you were homeless and you were going to this diner that was close to a fashion school. And this just reinforces your love and passion about food and fueling your body. And this diner would serve these massive portions and all these skinny fashion model students would come in and order these big plates of greens and potatoes and eggs and meat and veggies and they barely touch their food.

49:33Nick Bare:You come in, buy a 75 cent coffee and then ask for their scraps and eat that. What was that phase of life like as a whole? Coming back from these combat deployments with the Marine Corps and of all places going into LA and being exposed to that life. So that I'll start by saying that that chapter of my life, just to paint the whole picture, I was riding a bicycle. A bicycle was my transportation getting out of the Marine Corps. I'd actually gotten a DUI shortly after my combat deployment and shortly before getting out. I was just kind of a wandering aimless drunk on a bicycle that was moderately enthusiastic about competing at a high level in fitness.

50:31And whenever you're in the military, all your chow is taken care of. You got a chow hauler, MRE is always taken care of. So I was like trying to set up shop of like figuring out where I was going to be getting my food from, riding a bicycle around, half drunk all the time, homeless. And yeah, I just, I had seen this diner that slang these massive portions of food and these skinny fashion girls never ate all their food. So I just started swinging in there and getting some extra food to keep in my backpack. I guess to just paint the catalyst from drunk, bicycle riding, scrap trash eating Nate's beard to competing at a moderately high level in CrossFit.

51:17I don't want to say CrossFit was like a saving grace for me by any means because I, quite frankly, I hated the culture. I hated CrossFit. Like I hated the CrossFit Kool-Aid. I really just, I liked the aspect of exercise as a competition. and I'd kind of like fostered this deep appreciation for training hard in the Marine Corps because I was a scrawny, weak dude that just couldn't do the things that were required of me in the Marine Corps. So I got really into the physicality of doing the things that I needed to do to get strong enough to do my job as an infantryman. I saw the recon guys doing kipping pull-ups and thrusters with barbells and all the cool stuff.

52:09And I thought that'd be really neat to chase after. So that kind of became my focus. I quit drinking, got my diet under control, and started using CrossFit as just my main focus in life. I I still to this day can't really explain why I wanted to compete professionally in it, but I'm glad that I chose that because at least it gave me a target to start aiming at and getting my life moving in the right direction, quitting booze and eating right, training hard, and all of those little things just kind of started to seep into every area of my life. I was no longer this just like aimlessly wandering trunk.

52:59I was focused on anything that I put my mind to. And that carried over into having multiple side hustles at one time, which was a great thing for living in the city. You can really, really hustle. There's a lot of opportunity there. Why LA? Well, that's funny. I mean, we've established that where I came from in rural Illinois, I had no interest in farming, didn't want to go back there and be a farmer. I had fostered this appreciation for fitness in the Marine Corps. I thought I wanted to do something with fitness. But to be honest with you, I was pretty fresh off of deployment. The Marine Corps, I don't know about the Army, but the Marine Corps doesn't really, didn't at the time do a good job of like transitioning guys out.

53:51It's just kind of like, well, turn in your gear. Here's your paperwork. Congratulations. You're a civilian now. I'm like, okay, I guess I'm going to go to Los Angeles. There's, I'd seen Venice Beach and I was homeless for a while, but, you know, coming from the infantry, being homeless on Venice Beach is not that bad. Really, the weather was fantastic. There's free showers and you just got to find some food. So that's, that's what landed me in, in LA.

54:20Nick Bare:I think the military as a whole has to find some sort of solution for better transition programs. Well, it's like you did your job. You did what we needed of you. It's like, and to be honest, they give you, you got to figure out how to use the skills. That's the thing. You get a lot of good skills there. You got to figure out how to use them and transition them into the civilian world. Take some time. They're there. Yeah. I saw a lot of my guys because I was a platoon leader and I saw a lot of my guys struggle with the transition out well and this is something I've spent a good deal of time thinking about and being that you're in the you're in the infantry as well right yep yeah I feel like the infantry guys we have the hardest time with that civilian transition because if you think about it the types of guys who the infantry appeals to, we're not the high honors stud athletes.

55:27We're kind of like the misfits, the knuckleheads. We don't really have any other options. So we find ourselves in the infantry. The infantry kind of forces us to kind of be this best version of ourselves. And then we go and become a civilian again, and we've become the best version of ourselves and we no longer have like a mission or a purpose that's going to demand us to be the best version of ourselves anymore you got to like find that new thing to become the best version of yourself and whenever guys can't find that they just and i did that i slipped into just being drunk enough to where my ears would be low enough that i didn't really have any ambitions but i was also just kind of numb to everything until I found something to go all in on.

56:18What was it, and maybe CrossFit was part of that, that facilitated that structure back into your

56:24Nick Bare:life? Because it feels like even today, you are a man that is a creature of habit and structure, just like me. A lot of that, like I said, there are some great things that you can take from the military i think i think that a lot of that comes from how the marine corps rewired my brain i'm just like i'm a creature of of habit i mean you think about going through basic training and boot camp it's like you go from being this like slow lackadaisical like just human and they turn you into this like accelerated creature of like violence and habit and routine and a lot of that is just really kind of stuck for me and i've i've tried to figure out ways to to harness it and use it in in a positive because there have been times that you know it has become a negative like being too like forcing everything like trying to be too structured or too rigid it's like you got to find that balance.

57:33Yeah.

57:36Nick Bare:I have a question and I'm trying to figure out how to ask this, that it makes sense. I'm trying to relate my journey of military entrepreneur. In the military, you have, especially inventory, you're in a platoon, all these like-minded guys who are on a purpose and a mission to accomplish this one thing. There's a lot of alignment. And then you transition out and you're alone and you don't have the accountability of these guys anymore. You don't have the structure. You don't have the discipline. You don't have the brotherhood that you once had. Do you ever miss that? Because as someone who is really operating alone on your property, doing a lot of these things, solo.

58:31Nick Bare:What does a community of other men look like in your life right now? And do you ever miss having that?

58:41Man, I don't think so. As crazy as it sounds, I've never, I've spent a lot of time, you know, wondering and thinking about this, about myself. I'm just not really like a like a brotherhood type of guy those were not really the things that i miss most about the marine corps like yeah obviously we had some tight bonds and like going through all those austere conditions and tough times you know we were very close and we had each other's back but i'm just not i'm not that guy like i'm i don't need a crew to assemble and like go out and train hard and get motivated. Like, I don't want to say I'm self-motivated, but even just as a kid, the types of, I was very rebellious and the types of people that I looked up to.

59:39I'm Dennis Rodman. I liked the lone wolf. I went to the rodeos and all the other kids would be going crazy for the bull rider. They'd won his autograph and everything. I was hyper-focused on these rodeo clowns, the bullfighting rodeo clowns, the oddballs, the misfits, the loners. I just more kind of identify with that. And so the transition and being alone, loneliness has never really been a thing for me. I just needed to find my own personal mission to get on. I didn't need a brotherhood to facilitate that. And I actually used a lot of the opposite of that. I built this like group of dudes that I trained with.

1:00:32I don't want to say that I hated them, but all I wanted to do was just prove them wrong all the time. I was just such a vengeful, just hate. I had so much hate in me. And like I would win these competitions and I would like win some money. And I was never happy because I was never doing anything for myself. All I was doing was like, I just wanted to prove everybody wrong. I was just very vengeful. what kind of softened your heart

1:01:01well I kind of hit I kind of hit some some rock bottom after after I competed at CrossFit Games regionals as an individual it was like that was something that like I built up in my mind as like being the biggest thing for like six years I built to being able to compete there and so when it was all over and I had $37 in my bank account and I went to, I was in Del Mar and I went to the train station to buy a$27 train ticket to get me back to LA. It's like, well, I've got$10 in my bank account. I accomplished my goal that I've set out of doing with all these ups and downs over the years. And I came to find that I was just kind of like filling a void of like all of this unresolved stuff that I didn't want to deal with from the Marine Corps.

1:01:54like I went from just being drunk and numb to like going hyper focused on this one target of competing professionally and crossfit and then I got there and it's like okay here's all these things now that you've buried under the rug right in front of you it's time to deal with them and I didn't I didn't deal with them I I went on and I found another void to fill I started boxing competitive boxing at the amateur level and so I put those problems off for a couple more years until I met my now wife and those problems surfaced with her in our relationship, which led to her and I splitting apart. It's like, here's all your problems again.

1:02:36It's time to deal with them. And it wasn't until then that I dealt with my problems from the Marine Corps.

1:02:44Nick Bare:Yeah, us as men are really good with that of putting all of our problems off and using a different void to just glance over them. I mean, for me, performance and building my business and working and grinding and going from prep to prep to prep to race, race, race was just that same thing. It's like, this is a way for me to justify my problems where I can put all my energy into these things to avoid what I'm actually supposed to be facing. How has your view, perspective, and relationship with fitness changed over the years? What does training mean to you now compared to what it did? I mean, back in the day, I'm stating this sort of figuratively.

1:03:45If you were to tell me, if you take this pill, you'll add five pounds to your back squat and you're going to take 10 years off your life. Without a question, I would do it. I was that driven to just getting better. It's like I would do anything to get better and I would sacrifice everything down the line just to get better. Now, as a matter of fact, the first year that I lived out here at 30, for whatever reason, I thought 30 in terms of physical performance, I thought 30 meant that I was over the hill. Like I was done and I have this just immense fear that I have peaked physically and it's not, I can deal with peaking physically in my mid twenties, but I think what irks me the most about it is the fact that I didn't recognize it.

1:04:39I didn't acknowledge the state that I was in.

1:04:45Just recognize I am in peak physical condition right now. Just take a moment and recognize that. I was always, like you said, focused on the next, next thing. And so when I turned 30 out here, I decided that for whatever reason on my birthday, I was going to do 30 birthday miles. 30 birthday miles of just run one mile, bike a mile, ski a mile, row a mile. My 31st birthday, I did the same. 32nd birthday, I did the same. 33rd, 34th, 35th, first year I had a daughter, I decided to add on comprehensive blood work. That's something I never gave a crap about in the past. If my overall health was going to suffer, but my performance was going to benefit, no questions asked, performance always wins.

1:05:33But now it's like I'm finding that balance of training, farming, not being stressed all the time, and overall health so that I don't become a liability for my daughter in the future. So that's how my fitness and health has sort of changed. I would say I'm far healthier now, physically capable, not so much as I used to be, but I'll take that trade off any day as I'm sure you would.

1:06:06Nick Bare:Absolutely. I mean, it's a sign of maturity. For a long time, I rooted my entire identity in training and performance. where I would go crush myself in the gym on runs for multiple hours a day to have no energy for anything else that day. Yeah, you get home, you have to sit on the couch. You're a zombie around the family because you spent that whole day training. And I got to a point where I was like, what am I doing this for? I love training. I will always love training. I love being healthy. But I also am viewing the value of health over performance now compared to the way I used to look at it, where I would rather have all the energy in the world come 8, 9 p.m.

1:07:01than have run 20 miles at 4 a.m. that same morning to then be a zombie later. it's like you're finding this perfect little balance of enough fitness to keep you showing up for your family and doing all the things that are important but whenever you're doing so much fitness that it's negatively impacting you in other areas of your life like that's that's where you have to draw the line especially being a rancher well and that's so that's the thing i I had a couple instances kind of early on where I actually, I got Rabdo whenever I was competing professionally in CrossFit. And so when that happens, it's kind of like you flip a circuit breaker.

1:07:45Whenever you flip a circuit or whenever you blow a circuit breaker, that fuse becomes a little bit weaker. And so you become more susceptible to being a repeat offender of Rabdo. And like I got, I hadn't done CrossFit in years and years and years. I still have all the skills. I can still do all this stuff. And I got invited to go out and do MRF, which is the Memorial Day workout where you do freaking a mile run and a hundred pull-ups and 200 push-ups, 300 squats and a mile run in a plate carrier. I probably hadn't done a pull-up in six years. I don't know what I was thinking, but I just, I went and jammed through a MRF.

1:08:21And then like not eight hours later, I'm peeing dark brown Coca-Cola and I can't straighten my arms. I'm like, damn it. I got freaked. I like accidentally got rhabdo despite like being very aware of how that happens. And then I'm out there doing all the farm chores. And because my arms are so blown up, you can't straighten your arms. I was leading my horse. I'm leading this 1200 pound thoroughbred with my bent arms like this. She steps on my foot, breaks two of my toes. So now I'm out here doing all my farm chores with rhabdo and broken feet. it's like okay my my my drive to go and like perform like an idiot has negatively impacted my ability to to show up on the farm so i'm like kind of finding this happy medium of training to stay fit enough and strong enough to do all of the things necessary on the farm but not just

1:09:18Nick Bare:wearing myself out see that's where i would love to get to at some point in my life in terms of what the rhythms of my day look like. Where based on my current role and job, I spend a lot of time in meetings, Zoom calls, computer. And I'm not saying I necessarily want to have a farmer ranch in the future, which sounds attractive, but I want to be outside more. I want to be physically performing on a regular basis. and I was just listening to a Mark Sisson podcast this morning. Mark Sisson is 71, 72 years old, great shape. And he was talking about the - He's like an ideal. It's so impressive. But he was talking about the minimal effective dose of exercise to be able to live the life and perform and function to actually utilize his fitness within his life, not just in the gym, training, running.

1:10:23Nick Bare:And I thought that was so important and necessary. And it becomes even more obvious to me the older I get, the older my kids get. But as I visualize what I want to be doing with my body in my day for my work in the future, it's being outside. It's using my hands. It's using my body to work, not just train. yeah i mean a lot of farm work it's it's basically you're just replicating that the gym is basically replicating all of the manual labor that goes into running a farm like i don't i don't need to push sleds or pull sleds or anything i've got 1200 pound chicken coops that i push i got six of those that i push twice a day i'm chasing sheep around i'm walking like 25 30 000 steps a day around the farm and you know you don't need to spend so much time in the gym whenever you create a lifestyle that affords you that ability i guess which is what you're you're craving right now i'm i am craving it and that like i think i live vicariously through you i think it would be this regenerative movement in farming is wicked cool because like I think that like these hybrid athletes would make such awesome farmers just just shift your mindset about like what productivity and progress looks like in the gym and like shift it to like productivity and progress on like land animals and food man that'd be so cool like oh I ran, you know, three mile or five miles in 16 or 17 minutes and then back squatted 500 and bench press 315.

1:12:13Like take that. And like, I produced 800 pounds of beef and regenerated this 10 acre field and raised, you know, 24 eggs a week. Like that's pretty cool.

1:12:26Nick Bare:I feel like that's what I'm getting called to it it gives me steph told me it's my wife before coming on this podcast like i know when you're done with this conversation you're gonna go try to buy a ranch or farm somewhere let's have a conversation before you do it's like all right i uh i promise you well and it's just so appealing with your with your kids now i don't know what your house is like now but just can your kids just go out the door whenever they want like by themselves not really I mean, that's the awesome part. It's like, Ophelia, she's opening doors now. It's like, she went out the door.

1:13:04Oh, well. She's like wandering around the yard, picking up chicken eggs. You have that freedom.

1:13:11Nick Bare:That's wicked cool. Yeah, we have these friends who live on property out by dripping. and when we're with them, we realize how different our lifestyle is compared to theirs because they have young kids who they let just walk out the back door and walk all over the property. And we're like, hey, are you gonna like go walk with them and make sure they're okay? No, they're okay. But for us, I mean, we have streets right out in front of our doors and we have like access to neighbors right next door and we feel like we have to constantly be watching our kids to make sure they're safe and okay. But when with these friends, this other family, their kids are half a mile into the woods and they don't think anything and they're three, four years old.

1:14:03Nick Bare:So it just shows us the difference of how they're raising their family versus ours. Makes us think and question what should the future look like for us? I think you'd make a tremendous farmer. My grandpa would be very proud, very happy. Chicken farming. I'm not doing any chicken farming. When you took over the property that you're currently on, what was the condition of it compared to what it is today? That's a good question. So the property that we got was an old Longhorn working ranch. so to be honest it probably spent 20 to 30 years just being like overstocked and overgrazed the soil was very compacted there was not a heck of a lot of good forage available and I just immediately got cattle and threw them out there on the pasture my cattle were just not really performing that well I couldn't figure out why they were not eating the forage that was available because it was just, I know now that it was just such crummy forage.

1:15:18And so I had to kind of learn that cattle were not quite the option for that moment. I had to kind of take a step back, look at the land that I was afforded and get creative with how I was going to utilize it the best as possible. And I didn't start out thinking that I was going to be a regenerative farmer. I started out thinking, I want to raise some beef and some eggs would be cool too. and so just starting out with that end like that end goal as my focus of like I want to raise beef I found was the worst thing possible like I needed to focus on what the land needed first I needed to start restoring the land first and that required me focusing on the soil and learning how the soil worked and learning how to grow plants because in order to grow my own beef or lamb I needed to grow plants for them to eat.

1:16:15Pigs were an excellent, creative way for me to radically start improving the landscape. So you think about all of these destructive tendencies of pigs, like the rooting, the wallowing, everything. Conventional farming would have you go out and just like spraying chemicals all over these weeds and like ripping up the ground, to tearing everything up to get rid of them. Regenerative farming, I started harnessing the pig's destructive ability to rip up the soil, get rid of all the nasty invasive plants that my cattle wouldn't eat. And I would just move them around the pasture and plant new forage behind them so I can get new grasses growing for them to graze in the future.

1:17:05I'm trying to figure out where I'm going with this, But I guess to say the property was not in great shape. It has become in great shape over the years just through these regenerative principles of using all these diverse animal species on the land and letting them all give and take and give and take. We've got some of the best forage on our pastures around us right now because of it. And it's taken years to do that. Was it intimidating when you first took over the property?

1:17:39intimidating. I wouldn't say intimidating. I mean, around us, there are a lot of pretty old school ranchers. And I'm this grungy, tattooed LA dude showing up trying to be a farmer.

1:17:57I didn't start out thinking I wanted to be a regenerative farmer. I started out just wanted to raise some food. And I came to find that the best way to keep animals alive and healthy was to do it in this regenerative fashion and move them around and plant new forages behind them so that they had good fresh salad bars to eat. That's all. I heard you describing on a podcast

1:18:21Nick Bare:kind of just the trial and error and learning of regenerative agriculture. And you were describing how there's within certain wet grasses, there's bacteria or pathogens. And you obviously didn't want to use chemicals on your property. So you were finding that putting certain animals on those pastures prior to others, eating those pathogens to remove them. That whole concept blew my mind. These are things that I didn't actually think that people would find interesting. But yeah, Yeah, I guess the way that I try to simply explain it is like if you look at like the African Sahara and like all of the different diversity of animals that are grazing and moving and pooping and everything across that, you don't see all these animals just turning up and dying from these parasites in the grass that they're eating.

1:19:23And why is that? It's because there's such a diverse array of all these animals that are neutralizing all of these different things. So in the natural world, you have turkeys and deer and bison and all of these things that are interacting. In farming world, you use chicken, cattle, equine, sheep, hogs. They all give and take something differently from the soil, from the land to benefit it and keep it in this cycle. cycle. So like there are certain parasites that if you just continually graze, I would say mother nature abhors uniformity. So if you just take sheep or cows and put them on a pasture and leave them on a pasture and have them eat the same grass over and over again, they will get sick and die because there's a certain parasite that they will continually eat that will eat them from the inside and kill them.

1:20:22Put some equine in there. The equine eat that parasite, neutralize it completely. And then the cattle eat the parasite that'll kill equine and they both benefit each other, if that makes sense. And then like my chickens, they're like the big sanitation crew. All of that manure that's left behind on the pasture, oh, they go crazy for it because flies get up in there. They lay their eggs and maggots and everything that chickens go through there. They scratch it. They peck it. They work it into the soil and they eat everything out of it. And then I don't have a fly problem with my sheep or cattle because my chickens are eating all of that and eating good.

1:21:02Nick Bare:Well, that's why I asked, were you intimidating when you first took over the property? Because my thought process is, all right, I got to keep these. This is life or death. Yeah. Keep these things alive. well it and like where i'm at now i never would have thought that i got there from the start it's one little thing at a time i mean it's kind of like when you started lifting weights you probably started you know doing some bicep curls you never thought like i'm gonna you know become this icon of a hybrid athlete you just you were just lifting weights i never thought that i would wind up with this very complex ecosystem on my farm.

1:21:40I just like put some cows out in my pasture, bought a Stetson hat and changed my Instagram bio to rancher and then had a lot of trial and error over the years and kind of evolved into this. That's amazing.

1:21:56Nick Bare:What's the vision of the ranch for 10 years from now? I always have a really, really hard time answering that. I mean, I don't know. 10 years from now, I don't know if I'm going to be slowing down and Ophelia's going to have to start taking over more of the farm. I hope I can hold on as long as I can and keep running it. Just so long as my wife can eat ribeye and filet and my daughter can get nourished properly on all the protein that we raise on the farm every day. That's success and happiness in a whole for me. And I'm physically healthy enough to keep up with running it, which I don't show any signs of slowing down yet.

1:22:45Nick Bare:Yeah. How much of your diet and your family's diet comes from stuff you guys raise and grow? I mean, all of our pork, beef, venison, eggs, all grown or all raised by me. And then the chicken that we get are from some good friends that I barter my beef with. Yeah. I set out to be able to produce and provide like all of our protein. And then sell some of the excess. Where do you primarily sell it at? Right now we're at Radius. There's a burrito truck in Dripping Springs that also buys a lot of my stuff that sells. And I have a good deal of just private customers in the area that I sell to as well individually, which I think I prefer doing that.

1:23:43But it's more fulfilling for me to have good relationships with the people that are enjoying the products that I'm raising. Because I really don't produce that much meat at the end of the day.

1:23:58Nick Bare:See, I'm naturally an introvert. I would assume you are too. I am. And my cup is filled when I'm by myself, quiet time, just thinking. I don't get as much of that as I'd like on a daily basis. That's one of the reasons, it's probably the only reason I run, to be honest, is because that is like my alone time where I can actually do some deep thinking. All the time that you spend on the property by yourself, what are you thinking about? What are you working on? What are you going through? A lot of the time, I'm just letting my mind go just kind of blank, to be honest with you. I'm just really letting my mind go blank and just be in that present moment with the animals and the land.

1:24:58I've become a lot more aware and in tune with the seasons that way. I guess that's a lot of my time meditating. It's like when I'm way out 100 acres in the pasture moving sheep. I'm not really, I don't really have to be in a hurry. I don't have anywhere to be. Like this is the only thing I have to do so I can kind of take my time and just look at all these different plants and flowers coming up. There's a bird species that I've never seen before. What's this flower that's starting to bud on this tree? Like these are the things that I'm thinking about. What's the pace of life here compared to LA?

1:25:39Nick Bare:Oh man. Can you even compare it? I mean, I'm still working a lot. Obviously, it's just slower, grounded, and focused. I had like eight different jobs at any one given time in LA, and I would just be white knuckling around on my motorcycle all the time. my jaws were just always just really tight and tense and sore from just like clenching my jaw um just a lot more grounded for the most part yeah yeah sounds nice it's it's not bad i know you do a lot of reading you do a lot of your reading in the morning were you ever in a phase of life where you were obsessed with this self-help space no i will say that like my initial i i think that self-help books are just rote and banal they're they all just repeat themselves yeah i'm not i've never been big on self-help culture like when i first started picking up books it was just because i was I was curious about the human condition coming out of the military as I'm sure you were like I just I was curious Why I viewed the world that I the way that I did and I wanted to find some answers I started out with like the Robert green and the jordan peterson and then started diving into like The deeper philosophical questions of the meaning of life and why is there war and all this stuff and my reading nowadays is completely different but i've never gone through a self-help phase ever i think i've read every self-help book i possibly could really and i can tell you they all pretty much say the same thing yeah and i finally reached a point after listening and reading all of them i was like you know man i don't have to listen or read any of these ever again because I know exactly what they're all going to say.

1:27:53Nick Bare:I think I was reading C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters a few months ago and you responded to my story. It's a good one. In regards to that one, I've been reading a lot of C.S. Lewis recently and that's where a lot of my reading and learning has shifted towards away from the self-help space and more deeper introspective topics. Individualism. I've enjoyed it. And they're harder reads too. Well, your wife just wrote a children's book. And that's been something that's been kind of on my mind. And like, I've read that book multiple, multiple times. And like writing a children's book is so freaking hard.

1:28:43Like the concept of it. So like I'm wrapping my head around it. um did she did she come from a writing background she she always loved writing

1:28:52Nick Bare:um and she loves working on that project because you get to work with an illustrator and a team well it's it's it's got such deep meaningful messaging baked into it as such like a simple level and that's a really really hard deceivingly hard thing to do to like paint that picture in an appealing way to little kids. And I mean, right now with AI and like all these like cartoons and stuff, like I feel like it's really easy for the kids' brains just get rotted watching that stuff. And so like we're really trying to incorporate books like that with like good, strong, meaningful messages for Opie. Yeah.

1:29:42I read a lot of books to the kids. my daughter loves books

1:29:46Nick Bare:and there are certain ones where I'm like this one's a little too long this one's a little dry and then there's ones Charlie picks out I'm like I will reread this one over and over and over again but yeah we read to chart with not so much with Nico I think because Nico unfortunately it's like the second child treatment sometimes but Charlie being our first we read so many books to her and her vocabulary and her sophistication is very impressive. And I hope and think we can attribute that to all the reading we did with her as she was younger. Now we just gotta get her to live on some property. She'd make a good little farm hand.

1:30:37Oh, she would love it.

1:30:39Nick Bare:But when we go to this farmer's market in Austin every once in a while, the Barton Creek one, and they have this little petting zoo with some baby goats there. That's the only reason we drive. It's 35 minutes for us, but Charlie just wants to see the little baby goats. We'll go there and we'll get our sourdough and a bunch of other stuff, but our typical farmer's market is Wolf Ranch in the Georgetown area. well I got all the animals she could ever want to pet she'd love it guys can come out and feed the pulp sometime and bottle feed a lamb all the fun stuff well Nate I appreciate it brother like I said I'm living vicariously through you right now and me and a bunch of the team we love following your guys content in what you're doing, why you're doing it.

1:31:37Nick Bare:Thank you for the meat. That's going to be dinner tonight. I'm looking forward to that and the eggs. But I just love what you're doing right now and what you're learning and what you guys are sharing. And it's just cool to watch through a screen and now have finally met in person. I appreciate you having me on. To be honest, I told my wife it was going to be really weird getting asked questions by you being somebody that I've, I don't want to say somewhat because I've looked up to you in the fitness space. So this is cool. Maybe we can trade days one day. I'll come do a Nick Bear day and then you do a Nate day.

1:32:22Dude, I'm all about it. Let's do it. Yeah. All right, brother. I appreciate you. Thank you.

1:32:34You