EP #165: Futureproof Your Body: The Simple Science of Foundational Health with Scott Maracaccio, Co-Founder & CEO of Myo

Welcome back to another episode of Everyday Endorphins, a mental health podcast focused on the importance of finding joy and happiness in daily living. I'm your host, Stella Steffanopolis, and this week I got to explore the concept of preventative care and really taking a hold of your own health and well-being with Scott Marcoccio, who is the co-founder and CEO of Mayo. Mayo is a modern physical therapy designed to future-proof your body. Through expert one-on-one care they use full body awareness and proactive insights to intercept injury, reduce pain, and improve your everyday. So this idea of future-proofing your body was very foreign to me until I started going to Mayo and joined their creator program, which has been such an incredible opportunity to get to utilize the space, the services, and really reconnect to my body from a physical therapy perspective. In this episode, you'll hear Scott share a little bit about the founding story of Mayo, really what inspired the brand, how he's taken this concept of physical therapy, and re-imagined it into a lifestyle and a brand. We talk a lot about some of the biggest lessons he's learned around running a business and scaling a company, and we dive deep into the Mayo methodology. What it means for people to actually feel more equipped to understand their bodies, how Scott envisions people can embody this philosophy and really think differently about pain and prevention. And of course, Scott shares his perspective on joy and happiness and what brings him endorphins. I'm really excited for you to dive into this episode, and if you're in New York City and would like to check out the Mayo experience for yourself, you can use the code Stella50 for $50 off of your first session at Mayo. Hi Scott, thank you so much for coming on to Everyday Endorphins. It is so great to have you here. Thank you. Yeah, I found to be here. So we were just talking a little bit about our own backgrounds and my entry point into Mayo, but for those who are listening and who have no idea how I even got exposed to Mayo and everything that you are doing, I had the opportunity to come into the space about a month, month and a half ago and experience firsthand this really interesting and innovative take on physical therapy. I got exposed to Mayo through other ship. We love Robbie and the team. So shout out to other ship and it's so amazing to be in the wellness space and connected to such like-minded individuals who are pushing the needle on what it means to take care of ourselves from a physical mental, minimal perspective. So really excited to have you here today. And would love to start out by having you talk a little bit about the inspiration for the brand and where this all started for you. Yeah, so I had no intentions to start this company. It sort of found me and I think a lot of founders start this way, which is very organic how it came to be. So my story is that injury made back pretty badly in my early 20s was doing dumb things in the gym as many of us do. For a few years became like really connoisseur of therapy unfortunately. So I became really acquainted seeing physios and chiro's and massage therapists and osteopaths and I was learning a lot about my own body in the pathway, but through that experience realized just what a terrible experience the average person has at therapy. Now first of all, everyone was telling me something different. It was going on with my body. So I had oftentimes not only different answers, but opposing answers. Someone saying it's coming from your hip, it's coming from your back, it's coming from all these places. Two, I found that just like the yeah, the sense of confidence of like, wow, I might have got some real relief from a session, but then the next day I'm in worse pain or it's something's gone wrong. So it was until my co-founder Vin who has become just this incredible sort of celebrity physical therapist kind of 10 years in, but when I met him, I was working out of a, actually a two bedroom condo in downtown Toronto and a mutual friend had connected us. I started going to see him as a client and I just fell in love both with him and his vision for the world, but he actually got me real results within three sessions. I was out of pain. I started to come and see him every single week. At the time, he had one little clinic in Toronto after, you know, just a few months of me going regularly. He had asked me if I could support him on the business a little bit and Vin is this incredible kind of promoter, networker, clinician, but when it comes to kind of the operating side of the business, that was all fairly new to him. And, you know, I didn't necessarily have a much longer set of experience. I was 25 years old at the time when we started my own, but I sort of saw the opportunity to do something interesting. So I ended up investing in the first clinic. I thought it was going to be one location and you know, this nice little side business. And then long story short, Vin started blowing up on social media. So when I met him, he had a few thousand followers on Instagram. Today he's got like over half a million, but in the early days, it was just like treat this calisthenics influencer and all this anyone from 3000 to 6000 and he treated this other influencer and it was really, you know, from 2015 to 2018 was an incredible time to be a content marketer on Instagram because the algorithm was rewarding educational content and just at an incredible clip. At some point, during 2017 and 2018, we're getting over like 30 million impressions a week on Instagram alone. So it was a really interesting story. I've just swear we started the business. We thought it was going to be more of like an education platform doing certifications for clinicians. Vin's passion at this time was like, how do you, how do you educate and inspire the world to take care of their bodies? And you know, he had come from working six or seven years in the physical therapy space prior to me meeting him and he was pretty disillusioned because most physical therapists, when they come into school, if they don't want to work in the hospital setting, there's really only two options today. So one is working for these mom and pop clinics, which it's a very fragmented industry. So you have an opportunity to be in the community and get great mentorship, but there's not really any career trajectory. And then the other option is working for these like private equity backed insurance mills where it's so much less about the individual client or patient coming in. It's much more about like how many insurance units can you bill in any given day. So in those insurance mills, you're seeing sometimes 30 to 40 people per day. You only get about 10 or 15 minutes with any individual client or patient. So it creates this huge burnout effect rare. We call it compassion fatigue where, you know, clinicians really want to do the best work and help people, but the system actually stops them from doing that. So when I intersected with Vin, he was completely disillusioned. It was almost readily the industry, which is why he started leading into content marketing and wanted more just the kind of education guy. But then one thing led to another. And as he blew up online, we started doing some trips down to New York to LA. We met some incredible people from equinox and soul cycle and berries. And this was really in the peak of boutique fitness blowing up before COVID. And we started just have this aha moment of like, wow, wouldn't be interesting if you took all these playbooks that are working really well for boutique fitness around hospitality and brand and experience and culture and actually bring those playbooks into the therapy category, which is incredibly sleepy. There's been no innovation. There's no sort of like brand first thinking. It's very stuck in traditional healthcare. You're walking almost any clinic and it's white walls and anatomy posters and there's not really a nod to aesthetics. It's, you know, Swiss balls scattered everywhere and equipment. So we just took an approach of like, how do we actually build a brand around this such that we can speak to a younger consumer that we already saw because that was us that our generation just is much more willing to spend on preventive healthcare. So that's the quick background. Wow. I love it. I have lots of follow up thoughts and questions. But to your point around like bringing this experiential element to traditional physical therapy, you know, it's so true. I think there's such a bad like rap on physical therapy or you know, I have friends that'll talk about, oh, I have to go to PT because of this injury and it's a drag. It's a chore. I don't want to be there. I'll have to do these exercises. It feels like a burden to their lifestyle when it. So we've done the consumer insights position though, where that comes up is grudge purchase. Like, people, they begrudge going, they go because they want to outcome, but they absolutely hate the experience of going. Exactly. And when we think about kind of the aesthetics and how do we create a welcoming environment where people are excited to be in that space, it's probably creating kind of an atmosphere where you're evoking like an emotional response out of that person where they're more inclined to want to take care of themselves because they're getting such a positive experience while they're there. So instead of kind of their resistant to going, it's instead it's turning that resistance to excitement and getting them like really excited to take care of their bodies and, you know, going back to your own personal narrative around having that back pain in your 20s and trying all these different methods, but nothing working, but then finally meeting Vin and within three sessions like really helping to improve your back. Where was the difference for you? Like, what did you see be done differently that actually helped you get to the outcome that you were looking was like Vin doing some sort of like a magical thing like what was going on there that for you helped. Yeah, so it's less less than modality. So I'm not putting down physio or chiro massage, but it's more the application of such. So a lot of all-called legacy of traditional PT is very much like if you have a shoulder issue and you come in, we're going to only be able to touch your shoulder for a billing insurance and more broadly like most people don't have the time to like truly do a full body assessment. So on the other side of the spectrum and like one thing that's a huge differentiator for my out is we're really looking at the full body as a global system first. So even our logo, those little triangles, that's the it's called the Tensegrity model. So that's from Buckham and Mr. Fuller, this like incredible architect, the core of that idea is like everything is connected to everything else, right? And that's how our body works, right? Before we started the call you're sharing about how you had some IT band issues and like ultimately as a clinician, we shouldn't just be looking at your IT band. We need to be looking upstream downstream, like truly where is the root cause of that? And I think the traditional system is pretty broken because it doesn't actually allow for enough time for like a real comprehensive full body assessment. Nor is the training whether inside of like the traditional education or like a lot of the kind of fall in membership actually trained to that level. So there was just like this like global holistic way that Vinn almost came from the other angles and said, let's watch you walk. Let's what's happening with the ribcage, how's your shoulder impacting through the ribcage, into your spine, into your lower back, what's going with your hips, what's going on with your arches. So there was kind of this center point of like looking at me as an entire system and human. And then beyond that, right, it's like how's your stress, how's your sleep, how's your hydration, like all these things that feed into chronic pain in particular, that I think that the best analogy I think about is like the traditional, the traditional kind of legacy PT experience is almost like you are a car coming in for a spark plug change. And the clinician treats you as a mechanic does, which is like, okay, you can do seven degrees this way and 32 degrees this way. And we're going to, you know, make sure you can get to like clinically indicated best range of motion. But we are so much more than that, right? We are these like living, breathing organisms. And I think that's just philosophically what was different as I felt like a human being in, you know, Vince treatment. And he was really kind of meeting me there versus like traditional PT is very much like patient and the authoritative doctor who just has all the answers. And that's kind of core to one of our biggest insights we've had is every single session we want someone leaving with an aha moment about the body, right? So it's not about us being authoritative clinical professionals that we have all the answers is ultimately how do we work with you in partnership to actually help you understand your body. So have our vision for the companies. How do we have every human be empowered with the clarity and confidence to take care of the bodies and those those two things are really intentional. The clarity is you actually understand what's going on and the confidence that you can take action on it. You don't have to wait for somebody else that's not you to help you along the way. Right. Exactly. And when we have more confidence over what we should be doing to take care of ourselves, I feel like we're more inclined to take that action because we know exactly what we need to do. Sometimes there's like this paralysis of decision or action because we don't even know where to start. And then it's like this negative spiral that we can get into and where we we're not showing up for ourselves and in the healthiest ways to support our bodies. And I feel like what you're describing about the traditional PT experience is also really representative in the way we think traditionally about just like the doctor patient relationship. It's like you come in with an issue and the doctor is just looking to like fix that problem, but they're not getting to the root cause. And it sounds a lot like myos adopted like more eastern philosophy and methodology around integrative care and like really getting to that root cause and understanding that the body is like this very inter connected system. I didn't even realize that there was meaning behind the actual logo and symbol of myo, which I think is brilliant because it's another way to kind of communicate that core principle and message of the brand. I would love to kind of hear a little bit more about this concept of future proofing because I think that when I came into the space and I got to do my first session, I learned a little bit about it then and then also through being onboarded as part of the creator community, I've been kind of trying to educate myself on this idea of future proofing, but I would love to hear from you what that term means and how people can start to think about taking care of their bodies from a more preventative perspective rather than like, I have this issue now I need to react and treat the issue. Yeah, look, I think future proof came pretty early in the company's sort of evolution. I think a few years in we started like talking about this all the time like future proofing your body and what it meant at the time was really about like, what are you doing today to set yourself up for a better tomorrow? Right? And that's every little action whether it's going to sleep earlier, whether it's eating better, whether it's saying hydrated, whether it's cutting down an alcoholic, those are all to me like future proofing behaviors, but when it came to future proofing your body, one thing we talk about a lot is like injury avoidance and surgery avoidance in a big way because we have this crazy epidemic, especially in the US around later in life surgeries for lower back, neck, the amount of dollars that are spent on musculoskeletal issues in the US alone are actually more than diabetes, cancer, heart disease, it is astounding and unfortunately like people aren't really doing anything about it other than getting surgeries earlier and earlier because we're now sitting on these devices, we're moving less post-COVID, there's just like a lot of these societal and technological factors that are actually driving us to almost age physically in ways that aren't very empowering. So you know future proof tests is a container because ultimately like why I'm future proofing like I have a three year old and a 10 month old daughter like I want to do a lot of things with them in my life and in the world and they're a huge motivator for me to be able to like stay limber and strong and be able to do all the things I want. Other people depending on their stage of life they may be you know want to do bigger hikes or want to do a marathon like whatever the case is. So ultimately future proof is about unlocking what what do you love to do today and how long do you want to keep doing that for. So it's about aging gracefully and being able to like sort of move with full mobility, power, purpose to the full extent of your body and I think over time it just really became this like sticky concept. So even our treatment methodology recently re-banned to our future proof method which is again sort of like our five phase framework for how we help someone educate, sorry, help someone understand their body to a point where they have more autonomy and confidence to be able to take care of it over the long term. Yeah I love that and so when we were talking before getting on the line here you know I shared a little bit about my experience and when I went in you know I've never actually really had many injuries like I've knock on what I've never broken a bone. I've been pretty okay I'm also a yoga instructor so I've got pretty good mobility which is great I think and you know I I'm generally very fit and healthy I like to stay active but I was telling my clinician that when I was in high school and I was on rowing team I had this issue with my IT band and I had been to like do PT a little bit in high school just to kind of mitigate that issue then and it never really presented itself again didn't act up it will only really show itself when I go for runs or if I'm like running not properly or whatever it is like it's kind of random whenever this issue decides to act up again and I thought I took care of the problem and then it just surfaced again recently so it was perfect timing to be introduced to my own but for someone who is like generally healthy and like baseline okay you know it was good mobility strength all the things you know you never really know when your body can change or something can happen and so I'm just curious to hear like from most of the people that come into my own are seen by different clinicians is it to help with an ongoing injury or is it to better understand their bodies and prevent any future type of injury where do you see that range occur? So I think what you're speaking to is really like actually the consumer shift that we see underway right now which is actually people recognizing there's a lot going on in the surface before something truly like gets injured or you have an issue and I think the best analogy is actually looking at the dental industry so in the mid-1900s people's teeth falling out in middle age was actually pretty commonplace people didn't actually take care of their teeth very well there wasn't a lot of education people didn't really understand like what preventive care looked like and then over a few generations of really successful educating by the dental industry people understood today that we floss every day we brush twice a day I'm teaching my daughters this like as society adapts to certain behaviors and having a nice smile is all of a sudden like a you know it's important thing in societies as is I think more and more like having good posture and being generally healthy so the dental industry is interesting because the average person today understands here's how I take my teeth I go and see my dental hygienist a few times a year right just because you get your teeth cleaned like of course you're gonna use your teeth so you probably have to come back again and it's exactly like our bodies like of course you come in for therapy and you're feeling better and you walk out but you are you know nobody is perfect we all have compensations and sort of tendencies of how we like to move based on the millions of different things that have input into our system over the years so all of us effectively are moving around getting our bodies dirty so to speak I mean if we're not unwinding some of that and sort of restoring it back to our more natural alignment or natural posture over time those compensations lead into susceptibility to injury and then those actually become injuries and then once you have injuries there's a whole other cascade of other things that you start compensating so it's kind of this you know the self-fulfilling prophecy that injured people get more injured right the domino effect at that point exactly you know when you have multiple cavities like you're more prone to get this stuff going on if you're just not taking care of your teeth so you know it's not a crazy complicated concept to understand but from a behavioral standpoint I don't think the world is really in there in terms of actually understanding there are things you can do so I think the biggest shift we see with my eye is like the traditional industry or even the way we society thinks about it is like if I'm injured I should go if I have a surgery or I have a car accident or something major I should go and see a physical therapist but otherwise like you know why would I need to go I'm healthy and on the other side you have kind of massage therapy as almost like this luxury self-care like maybe my back's tight and I'll go but more people look at it is like it's kind of like a once in a while self-care thing so for the my like our clients are this huge middle group that aren't injured enough to go to a traditional PT aren't really getting fixed or kind of feel permanent relief from massage but they might have something going on and it might be hey my knee's been bothering me at various class the last three weeks or my next like feeling really locked out like there's there's usually something going on which we'll call dysfunction that gets somebody to come in the door to my out and then we start to that's our opportunity to educate them on really the dental hygienist model like let's get you out of pain and get you sort of restored and then after that what is the right cadence for you based on your goals and what's going with your body to come back to see your clinician on a regular basis to make sure a you're continue to learn about your body be you have an accountability partner and then see you're getting great quality care that's right for you the dental hygienist models a really great analogy to draw because you're exactly right like people just don't really have that education or understanding around like how to actually take care of their teeth in our bodies I mean we're using them every day or bodies are under a ton of stress now especially just being in a very corporate environment like a lot of people sit at their desk all day we're hunched over my palms is really not that great. It could definitely be improved. And so these are things we don't actively think about. And I think the unfortunate reality is like, we often kind of overlook a lot of the kind of fundamentals to our health and our well-being, until there's a problem. And once there's a problem, we're like, oh, we have to address this now. So being reactive rather than proactive, right? And to that line of thinking, I'd love to hear what you would like people to start to think about when it comes to the future of pain and prevention. How do you want people to think differently about these concepts or how they see themselves engaging with pain in their bodies and how to prevent that? Yeah, so we're fortunate we get to get exposed to all things longevity right now. And it's such a way. I look at businesses like Prinuvo or Superpower who I'm an investor in or Function Health. It's so interesting because pre-COVID, these businesses almost couldn't exist because the consumer willingness to spend wasn't quite there. So I just think the cultural consciousness has shifted majorly the last two or three years as evidenced by Peter Tia, Andrew Huberman, Brian Johnson. There's just been really this wave of longevity sort of going from very early adopters, the early biohacker types to truly people who are into health can kind of speak fluently about all these things now. So I have mixed feelings about some of these things because I think there's a lot of things that are very cool, but it's almost like icing on the cake. Like there are some fundamental things we should be doing for our body. And I think a lot of people are so focused on the cutting edge of optimization when they're sleeping five hours a night or they're actually not doing regular strength training just like all these basics. So the end of the day, I think real foundational health is simple and it's about the choices that we make. And I actually don't think you need to be spending a ton of money on your body or spending in some cases millions of dollars a year on yourself. So I think the basics are sound. And ultimately our goal is not to have somebody come every single day to my out. Like if somebody's coming once a month or once a quarter, like that is a great relationship for us. And ultimately what we want to do is be supportive guides, coaches, and clinical authorities to help support those individuals on their journey. So my sense is most people over complicate, I would say, there's actually two people. One is a lot of people just don't educate themselves on just the basics that they could feel so much better or be living a much better life, especially when it comes to pain and sort of managing that. And by the way, sometimes many of us have chronic pain issues that we may never live without pain. And that's okay. Pain is not the enemy pain is just a signal. And our body's telling us something, right? That is really just like the way it gives us messages. So ultimately if you do have pain, it's like, how do you get comfortable with that and have a better sense of underlying? Like what can you actually do to manage that and you know, live a full happy life despite some of these physical limitations? And then on the other hand, I think there is, and I definitely have a lot of these on my network. People that are so obsessive with optimizing every single thing in their life that they sort of lose the script, which is, I think so much of life is actually just being a like saver the moment. And you know, I look at people that wear wop and aura and like all these wearables and their lighting machines almost tell them how they feel versus remembering like we have such strong intuition to actually check in with ourselves of like, well, how's my body? Should I push today? How's this feeling? How am I feeling warming up? So it's interesting. I feel like sometimes people that go too far into kind of the cutting edge of longevity and biohacking, they become very fragile in a way. They need their absolute optimized sleeping environment, their eight sleep, their sleep mask, everything. And I think having kids for me has just gotten you way more comfortable with like the volatility of like, nothing is perfect. Everything's all over the place all the time. - The lesson for Pair and Hood, part two podcast. (laughs) - Yeah. - I'm glad you bring up these like two ends of the spectrum because I feel like sometimes I also oscillate and it's difficult because, you know, I do agree with you. Health really comes back to those foundational principles. Like, are you sleeping enough? Are you feeling your body with like proper nutrition? Are you getting in movement? And are you laughing and spending time with people that make you feel good? Like how is, how is the quality of your relationships and your friendships in life? And it really is, I think that simple, right? And it's like once we have that baseline, we can then go from there to different tweaks in our lifestyle to, let's say, optimize our well-being. But then to your point, you have the people like really on the other end of this spectrum who are so obsessed with needing all these gadgets and tools and whatever to like be healthy. But the more you do that, I feel like the further away you get from really like what true well-being is. 'Cause we can't like hyper fixate or control every single little thing, you know, that we put in our bodies where we surround in our environment. And I like to think back to like the generations before me and like way back in time where we didn't have access to this type of advanced technology. And people were healthy and happy. I mean, you think about the blue zones as well. Like what are they doing to live longer lives? And I believe that the research really points to our relationships. I think that's really what the driving factor is to a sense of well-being and life satisfaction and possibly longevity. But you know, I don't have an order ring. And a lot of my friends do. I've thought about wanting to get it. But I'm afraid that like, you know, do I actually need this device to tell me if I slept well? Like I can pretty much get the sentence when I am not feeling rested. So it's like to what degree is leaning into all of this advanced technology and like biohacking and all the advanced analytics actually moving the needle towards making us healthier and happier. And maybe a more philosophical question. And well, I think that's the heart of it, which is like it's a personal choice, right? It sort of depends on like how you want you to find health for yourself. Like all things being equal, I would much rather people lean into wearables and get obsessed about the health and really enjoy it versus like not care at all because I think that leads to a healthier world. But yeah, like last year, for example, I moved to Costa Rica for most of the year. So I've like lived in a blue zone and I can tell you like, I think it's all marketing in general, but. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, that's a whole other conversation. But I think that it's easy to like paint the backwards narrative like of course, like the world was so simple decades ago or a hundred years ago or 20 years ago and like there's a lot of challenges with like infectious disease and other things. But really since 1900 and like a child mortality has come down and everything like the world's been a healthy place. I think the thing we're dealing with today is the world is manic, right? We have so much inputs where a lot of people subconsciously are just seeking more and more control because life feels very out of control. From a societal level, whether you look at politics or everything going on the world. So I think it's a little bit of a symptom of that as well. Like there is a tamping down of anxiety when you feel like you've got some control in life and like the reality is we have no control. But the perception of, oh wow, like I have moved my woopscorp or I've been able to like track my macros and all that stuff. And you know, for me like my personal story is I lost my mom when I was quite young in my early teens and I really got into fitness when I was 15 or 16 and like I look back now why I got so obsessed with the first three or four years was it's the first time I really felt a sense of control over my life and I could weigh my chicken breast and feel like okay, I've gained two pounds in the last two weeks and here's exactly how I'm progressing towards these goals. Like it really helps you get a bit of an anchor in life, I would say. And that's I think that's helpful. You know, everyone's had different points of life with mental health and their own journey. So at certain points of time, I think that's very helpful and at certain points in time, like I think there's such a freedom to let and go and not being so consumed with just being like so quantified in a sense and being able to do a little bit more embodied with your experience. - Right, I think that's well said, it's probably better to lean towards the end of this spectrum where you're seeking control using, you know, wearables and getting really excited by this concept of, okay, I can dictate the outcome of my health rather than just not caring about it at all, but it's also a matter of like, well, how do we dance alongside the reality of life and that everything is basically uncertain and like there really is only so much we can control which is basically nothing. So it's like how do we walk that fine line and learn to adapt as things change around us? And it's funny that you bring up parenthood 'cause I feel like that's actually such a good example of like learning how to relinquish control and just do your best every day to like keep your kids healthy and happy and safe when dealing with children is a very hard thing and raising kids is not an easy feat. Not that I'm speaking from personal experience because I don't have any children, but I'm thinking back to like just being a kid and now as I'm 25, which is the age, I guess you started my, oh, my brain is exploding, I'm thinking about my parents and raising me as, you know, when I was a kid and probably all the sacrifices they had to make and what it's like dealing with the uncertainty of raising a child, but I digress. I would love to go back to what you brought up in your kind of founding story, interest into the health and wellness world and then also when you were introduced to Vinn. So I know we're kind of jumping back to the beginning of this interview, but you mentioned that you kind of came in as more of that like business minded, operationally focused guy in this partnership as you were building myo together. What informed your interest in business and entrepreneurship had you been working in the business world prior? What kind of led you into the space of starting a company and becoming an entrepreneur? - Yeah, I never really had like a business for say before, but you know, when I was 15 or 16, you used to do a lot of like internet marketing, building websites, I used to be like super addicted to world of work craft and used to buy and sell accounts and skipped a lot of university to do that. Men in the most personal training and just have these like little side things and I think we can call it efficiently, but ultimately like I definitely want to take like be short as path A to B and like I have a very high drive like autonomy and personal freedom and I've never been a great employee. I've been fired multiple times in my life and just tend to win someone else's putting structure rules and I think that they make no sense. I get overly rebellious and it's just this emotional reaction I tend to have. I'm very allergic to overly structured things or obligations being put on me. So when pulling your daughter's become teenagers, yeah, I mean, my three-year-olds already already there, but she can't fire me. So that's okay. But yeah, just like, I don't know, there's no like grand plan to become an entrepreneur or anything. It was almost like I went into it expecting we were gonna have this little side business and I still had at the time I was working for a European Telecom business and was enjoying it a lot and enjoying the owner of the company was like becoming a great mentor to me. So actually learned quite a bit for the few years prior to starting my out from him about kind of all things business trademarks, negotiating agreements, a lot of sales stuff. So I think that, you know, I felt it was almost like there was the right puzzle pieces in place and my out was like the opportunity that sort of showed up. And I think in hindsight, like up to 10 years of building my out, I actually think there are certain architects of entrepreneurs. I think everyone needs a zero to one person to start the company. Then you sort of have like this one to 10 once you have some product market fit. How do you actually get it to like some reasonable scale? And then you're kind of in the the 10 to 100 phase, like how do you actually like truly scale it to something meaningful? And I think Vin was this like incredible zero to one partner. And I'm actually not zero to one. I've been fortunate to invest in like other ship and super power. I'm really close with Robbie from other ship, for example. And like he's another example of like the zero to one archetype, which is like from scratch, he can get people just on fire about an idea and like bring the audience. And to me, the single most important thing for these zero to one entrepreneurs is how do you have people pull out their wallets and pay for not only pay for something, but then tell everyone how great the experience was. And I think both Vin and Robbie are actually pretty parallel in that sense. It's like they are incredible at both of those things, like getting people to care, getting people to feel like, wow, I am on like the cutting edge of a movement. So I actually don't think my sweet spot zero to one actually think, you know, these later stages, I'm like, I feel like I'm becoming a much better CEO and it's both a time in thing, having done it and made a lot of mistakes. I can't remember where I read this, but it's really stuck with me, which is I think there's a lot of people that can be born as founders, but nobody is born as a CEO. Right. I think there are natural things as a founder or in other words, like a zero to one type person that you might have it. You might just have this charisma and the ability to like convince, persuade, inspire. But as a CEO, you sort of have to just make a ton of mistakes because otherwise you just can't truly get the wisdom and the discernment to understand like when to make certain decisions, when not to, when to whether it's to hire to fire to raise capital, like all these decisions that inevitably you will make thousands of mistakes and like the whole goal is just like, don't die, like don't kill the company. So how do you navigate this reality that you're going to make a ton of mistakes? How do you keep things afloat and how do you stay aligned to that broader vision that ideally getting everyone rallied around within the company? How do you keep that strong when maybe you feel a bit uncertain at times because you're human and that's what you do? The raw truth is just incredibly painful and challenging, like probably for the first like six to seven years of Maya was sort of just swinging from like wild depression to wild anxiety and back and forth again, like and it just sucks. It really is like I think people that do well in the CEO seat or entrepreneur seat are like like a bit of pain or for whatever reason, have an attraction to it because it's not gets more fun like now like the companies doing great and we've got a big team and everything but I think the first like three to seven years for most companies are just brutal and I think a lot of you know there's a survivorship bias whether it's on LinkedIn or magazines or anything we see all these companies that are raising all these big rounds and doing great and getting lots of press and you don't see the 99 other companies that go to fail and then what's been crazy last three or four years because I've been super close to you know dozens of stories of companies that have raised 30, 50, 100, 200 million dollars of capital and end up just heading a wall either having to close or just like get stuck and the founder gets fired like it's it's always like you know the story's not done until the story's done and I think as a younger founder entrepreneur it's so easy to get so delusional about like what success looks like from these curated press articles and like the storytelling online and LinkedIn and social but so much I think of the like how you stick it out over a decade plus is actually just like you know for me like I journal a ton and I'm always like coaching myself through I've you know work with an executive coach that I've probably done north of 200 sessions with as you started like really leaning to CEO journey it exposes you emotionally on so many levels like how you actually show up to communicate to have hard conversations to make top decisions like if you have to move somebody off of the team like that's that's an emotional one and I just think like being a CEO is like a whole human job like you will get exposed on every level of like how you're showing up how you're communicating so I love it in the sense of like I don't think there's a better arena for personal growth like I think actually pulling out and trying stuff and seeing how you react to everything that the world will throw at you is incredibly interesting just from a personal growth and self-actualization standpoint but it's not a path I would actually recommend for most people because I think it's yeah filled with like a lot of pain and introspection and challenges yeah I mean you bring up really good point and it reminds me of they say that life imitates art like I made a TikTok few weeks a month whatever recently about how entrepreneurship actually imitates life because when you're in the in like the driver's seat in your building and you have a vision and you're working towards the school but you're the only one that's like technically holding yourself accountable to doing it and you take it upon yourself to want to build and to communicate and to put something out into the world that takes a lot of time and energy and effort and now especially as social media as a platform to be leveraged to gain awareness and brand awareness and community you know like to put yourself out there and to be vulnerable is a very hard thing to do and it pushes you I think to be a better person and it shows you how you show up in certain situations so it really is kind of such a an intense environment that's kind of like an accelerator to personal growth to your point and you know it's something that I'm kind of reconciling with as I continue to build the podcast and also just build more of a brand around everyday endorphins so you know I mentioned this earlier but I love getting to talk to founders because I think it's really encouraging to get to hear other people's stories and how they've navigated the uncertainty and ambiguity and remain very steadfast in that like broader mission and I do think you you need to develop like a sense of almost like delusional self-belief because that's what will propel you to at least in my own experience like to keep going even if you've quote unquote failed or didn't succeed in the way that you wanted to you know when you think back to being 25 and like just starting would you have imagined my growing to where it is today and from this point onwards like where are those aspirations where do you hope to be in the next five 10 15 years I mean definitely not I think my early goals was like if like it makes the past income and travel internationally just be a digital moment and read my books that was like success to me but I think the thing I've like really learned on the journey just like the power of compounding I'm still unwrap in some programming around this which is I think a lot of young entrepreneurs get really programmed you have to make it work within like three years four years five years and unfortunately for whatever reason like the bulk of a lot of like the press and podcasts everything we like hear it's so much about like the venture capital world which is like a very small amount of the capital against investment businesses that's typically a very fast growing tech startups so we get very warped as a kind of collective of entrepreneurs think you have how fast these businesses take how fast you can grow them but you when you look at like I'm Microsoft or Amazon or Google like these businesses that truly like you know we can't imagine life without them now like they were taking you know 25 30 years to like really come into their full fruition so you know I look at Whole Foods and Starbucks is too like personal kind of inspiring journeys for me I'm just looking at like those businesses took you know multiple decades to truly reach what they are today so I don't set long-term goals generally or tend to like just enjoy it so I don't necessarily like in 10 years I want to be here but I think just following the trajectory like my I was definitely pacing to be sort of like a one-of-one brand like we will be the first global brand of therapy you know you will expect to see us in six or seven countries over the next five years we're a continuous expanded New York LA good to some other cities but ultimately like the core of what we're trying to do is just sort of shift the world's thinking so our mission right now that we think about and talk about internally is like how do we raise body IQ around the world and what that means ultimately is like how do we help people truly understand themselves and their bodies and you know if something goes wrong whether one to improve like how do they what's the path to do that so it's fun last year alone I think we did over 250,000 one-on-one sessions so you know the impact is real like we're having a positive impact on like every single community so the fulfillment's already there I think it's more I'll continue to find like new challenges both for myself and for our team to keep growing this but that's amazing I am so happy to now be in your orbit and to get to experience my own very stoked that you guys have expanded to New York and to now be a part of the creator program is really exciting for me and finding ways to marry kind of the message that I'm promoting with my platform on focusing on things in life at Spark Joy and myos messaging on increasing like body IQ and understanding what it means to really like take a hold of your own well-being and get excited to do that there's a lot of synergy there and I'm really excited to see kind of how myos going to continue to evolve and expand and all the positive impact that you all are making on everyone yeah and you know to that point you know the whole message of the show is around happiness and focusing on the things in life that really do spark joy so I'll leave you with a few final questions in this area so the first is how do you define happiness and how has that definition evolved over the course of your life and just through entrepreneurship as well you know North America has I think an interesting program their programming, their happiness, which is so much tie to success and money and all these things. When you start to get some of that, especially when you start to be around people that have not only won that game, but won it 100 times over, whether it's people worth hundreds of millions or billions, and you realize everyone is managing through the same thing, which ultimately our relationship with ourselves. Do we love ourselves? Do we validate ourselves? Do we acknowledge ourselves? All these things that as kids, we're learned to externalize, and as adults, we learned actually have to start to internalize again. For me, personally, I think Navall, Robacon has this great quote, which is like retirement is when, you know, when today is complete and it's on right and you're not sort of chasing a imagined tomorrow, like you're quote, retired. I think about that a lot. My daughter who's three years old, when she's jumping in her bed at midnight, it's so easy to be like, "Oh, I have to wake up early, we have to work, all this stuff," but more and more I'm saying, "Wow, I only get this for a few more years." These are like the happiest, like most, savory moments of my life, and I will never get these moments back. So, I think so much is about just being like present in the moment and realizing how short and transient all of these moments are. And life will have many, many chapters and different seasons and sort of be able to just be in each one of them. So I think more broadly though, from a happiness perspective, I think like ignoring a lot of things. So actually don't have an Instagram, like I deleted that three or four years ago, like I don't have TikTok, I have no social media, because I don't want societal programming of like telling me, "Pay attention to this or pay attention to that." I think attention is the most precious resource we have, especially in modern days. So I think about that a lot in terms of daily meditation, long walks without my phone, time in nature, just like simple stuff. So I tend to just really enjoy my family time, my friends, and not get so caught up in like some imagined future 10 years from now because ultimately, when you really look at the people that have unlimited money, it's like, "They don't, their days don't feel different. They have more help, they have more support." But like at the end of the day, we're all looking for meaning, happiness, connection, community, health, wellbeing, and being able to have that freedom. And I think ultimately that's like the underscored entrepreneurship one I love is like the complete flexibility and freedom. I'm in Toronto right now with my family for a month and a half. We're going to head back to LA last year, we spent most of the year in Costa Rica. I actually had my second daughter in Costa Rica, which is a really cool experience. But like having these beautiful tapestries of life of like so many different shared experiences with people I love, like that to me is like the root of happiness. I love, well, see you kind of drop back what I had mentioned earlier around how so much of the research and positive psychology points to the strength of our relationships that really influence our wellbeing. And that's kind of the common denominator of what I hear across all my interviews and really like that more deep understanding and perspective on like what it means to actually be happy. And on my own personal reflections, I like to have a plan. I like to know exactly when things are happening. Then I get humbled by life because I make the plan and then life happens and the plan does not happen as I expect for it to. And so I've noticed for myself like the moments I'm happiest or when I actually am present to your point, I'm not over engineering what's going to happen in three hours in three days in three months. It's because you never know really what can unfold. It's like how do you really enjoy where you're at currently? And that is hard for humans because we like, you know, we crave comfort, familiarity, we crave control. Some of us more than others like myself. So it's been kind of this lifelong challenge for me and something that I'm working towards is cultivating more presence and life too. But I think these are also great reminders to journal and to spend time in nature and to really kind of prioritize being around the people that you love. You definitely won't get those years back. So enjoy it now while you have it. The one thing I'd say just to react to that is I actually, it gets way easier as you get older. Like it's so hard in your 20s because you really are turning chart your course for all these open decisions and actually found like my life happiness and just general anxiety went down massive. Happiness went out, anxiety went down when first I got married, you know, all of a sudden like I'm just building this life with this person. I don't have to like spend all this energy. Other things than once we had our girls like all of a sudden just like all of these potential paths just like narrowed down to like this path. And I actually think commitment is like the single biggest life hack in a sense for happiness. I think a lot of us avoid it for way too long. I actually think that it is such a fun experience like build a lifelong term either with a partner or friends or whatever. So it gets easier as you get older for sure. Yeah, that's a great point. I think that the 20s are just like it's a very challenging decade because it's like you're starting adulthood at this point. So you're kind of like a kid in the world of adulthood and you're trying to figure it out and there's maybe like a paralysis of choice because there's so many potential paths that you could go down. So that's kind of the phase of life I'm in right now, but I'm trying to see it through a lens of like excitement rather than like anxiety around having decision fatigue over should I do this or should I do that, but it can feel very overwhelming for sure. It will. I mean, we have a ton of people in their 20s and early 30s in our team like I always tell people in the 20s like it's just going to be a shit show. You're going to be super anxious for the next five years, six years. That's fine, but like the goal is to get a bunch of different experiences like say yes to a bunch of different things because that is going to teach you more quickly than anything else of like what you like, what you don't like, who you like, who you don't like, like all these things that then inform a little bit more of a direction in your 30s. But you know, my 20s, I thought I was not enjoy aging, but as I'm getting older, I actually find it like so it's just so fulfilling because I've said like all your past decisions start to compound over time and you start to like really have a sense of yourself and it's just hard to do in your 20s. You haven't seen enough and you haven't experienced enough. Exactly. And like I honestly, I'm excited for my 30s. I'm turning 26 next month in September. So I guess now it's like mid to late 20, like I'm closer to 30 than I am 20. So we're getting there. But I'm personally excited for like when things are a bit more settled and there's a bit more commitment in all areas of my life. So I am excited to age, hopefully gracefully with the help of increasing my body IQ. So to tie it back and make it all full circle. Clearly it's, you know, so inspiring what you're doing and I'm so excited to kind of be a part of the journey and be a part of the community here in New York. And the final question that I'll leave you with, you kind of already answered it. But aside from journaling, spending time with family, in nature, all the things, what is something that brings you a bit of endorphins every day? Is it like a practice, a ritual, something that just lights you up? Just playing with my daughters. I think they're just like, you just pick them up and they're trying to wrestle you and I know we just have such a good time and I think at these moments you're so sacred so that's like the ultimate for now. But I love it. I love it. Well, Scott, thank you so much. Such a pleasure having you on the podcast. I will share links to where people can connect with you and my own and get involved in the show notes and in the episode. So everyone who's listening, you can go check there to get in touch with Scott and to go experience my over yourself. It is a fun time and a very welcoming environment. I can attest to that. So thank you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of Everyday Endorphins. If you liked what you heard, make sure to follow along, stay plugged into the community. You can do that through a variety of ways. Follow the podcast on Spotify, Apple, or ever you stream your shows. We connect it on Instagram at Everyday Endorphins, find us on TikTok and subscribe to my substack, which is also Everyday Endorphins. But on the substack, I get to explore some of my own personal musings on what it means to lead a joyful and happy and fulfilling life. Reminder to keep spreading endorphins and focus on the things in life that bring you joy. Until next time.