Hi Mike, good to have you on the podcast. My pleasure. So for everyone who doesn't know you, who doesn't know what you do, please tell us a little bit about yourself.

Sure, I'm Mike Cernich, I'm a journalist, author, filmmaker. I know people like Hardy from the

mindset world from way back of the day. That's actually where I'm, it's probably what I care most about even though I directly do it the least.

I feel like indirectly I do it every day because I show people what you can do if you apply

the bind step principles to your own life.

So let's dive deeper into your life story.

So I know you had a rough upbringing.

So could you please speak a little bit about that and maybe

for everyone who's going through

but we could share a lesson or two from your past.

Well, yeah, it's no secret. I grew up in a poor house. It's all relative now, of course. I've lived in Vietnam and going to Cambodia and other places.

So everything is relative, but social status is also relative.

So the way you feel is subjective and it's based on the relative status of other people.

That's something that isn't talked about often enough.

And we were objectively poor by American standards, well below the poverty level.

In the United States, there's a way to measure this.

There's a poverty level.

And we were, of course, below that, a family of six.

My dad was a couple years completely out of work and we were on food stamps and

when he had a job it was maybe $10,000 a year. Now granted that was I don't know 25 years ago but that that wasn't even

inflation adjusted that's not really any money. How could your family live on this there? I think that's like nothing right?

Right. Well luck in a lot of families had to figure that out. Luckily for us, my dad was very devout Christian. No, no smoking, no, no drinking, no, no vices. So, and we had grandparents who my grandfather was a state trooper and he had a pension and he had a family side business and so so grandma

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