From Addiction to Elite Sales Communicator | Brian Burton on Mastering Communication & Personal Transformation

In this episode of the Successful Life Podcast, host Corey Berrier sits down with Brian Burton—general manager at Benjamin Franklin Plumbing, founder of Blue Collar Closer, and host of the Waste No Day Podcast.

Brian shares his journey from a struggling technician to becoming a high-level communicator and sales leader in the home services industry. This conversation dives deep into sales psychology, communication mastery, and the mindset required to increase closing rates without manipulation.

The episode also explores Brian’s powerful story of overcoming opioid addiction and alcohol dependency, offering insight into discipline, recovery, and personal accountability. Learn how communication, consistency, and self-awareness can transform both your career and your life.

Whether you’re in sales, home services, or personal development, this episode delivers practical strategies to improve your communication skills, build trust with clients, and elevate your performance.

Blue Collar Closer https://bluecollarcloser.com

Waste No Day Podcast https://wastenoday.com

https:newpathemployment.com

 https://www.audible.com/pd/9-Simple-Steps-to-Sell-More-ht-Audiobook/B0D4SJYD4Q?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=library_overflow

https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Steps-Sell-More-Stereotypes-ebook/dp/B0BRNSFYG6/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1OSB7HX6FQMHS&keywords=corey+berrier&qid=1674232549&sprefix=%2Caps%2C93&sr=8-1

 https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreysalescoach/

Transcript

Corey Berrier 0:30

Welcome to the Successful Life Podcast. I'm your host, Corey Berrier, and I'm here with my friend Brian Burton. What's up, brother? What's happening, Corey? Good to be back on the Successful Life. Dude, good for you to be back, man. I always enjoy, I've always enjoyed talking to you about whatever sales of some of our past in life. And but before we begin, you wear a bunch of different hats. So you just might as well go ahead and tell everybody a little bit about who you are. If you don't know, already know, which they probably do.

Brian Burton 1:05

So yeah, I'm uh devoted husband, father of four, uh general manager at the Benjamin Franklin Plumbing in Scottsdale, Arizona, founder of blue collar closer.com, which is our classroom course-based community-driven sales, online sales training. Host of the Waste Snow Day podcast. And uh that's it. Yeah, that's about it. Do some speaking, do some on-site trainings around the country, and well, that's about me. I was a third-generation plumber who looked into working at a Ken Goodrich company in 2004, and then sorry about that, and then learned the sales aspect of being a technician. So something that I was opposed to for sure at the time, and didn't really want any part of, but Ken, like he does, had great people with him at the time, and his general manager, Lance Fernandez, who would become my first real mentor in life, gave me a little conversation about what it means to be a professional salesperson. And I liked what he had to say about it, and I pivoted in that moment and decided to just become as high-level a communicator as I possibly could, and took that with me everywhere I went since and have still pursued that. I actually this year in 2026, I'm doing 52 audiobooks. And I made the list early, but I I keep changing the list as I'm going along, especially if I start a book and I get two chapters in and I'm like, I'm not freaking listening to this whole thing. I don't know why. I do this often, usually with Mel Robbins stuff, but I'll hear two chapters and I'll go, how is this person this popular? And then that one just goes in the uh trash can, so to speak. And then I'll change the book up, but I'm doing a book a week. And 26, and I bet 30 of them will be on communication and sales and negotiation and figuring out how to become a higher-level communicator myself in at work, at home, with friendships and in every capacity and with my kids. And then I'll now at this point in my career where I'm at, I'll take as much as I can and then turn it into a home services, put it in a home services package, and then spit it back out to everybody I contact or communicate with on social media and in my businesses. So yeah, I was obsessed with that and have kept that obsession for 22 years now. And uh yeah, now I get invited on shows like this to talk about how to make higher-level communicators out of guys like me, right? Home service techs, plumbers, HVAC, electricians, garage door guys, you name it.

Corey Berrier 4:50

So, do you think how do you think this is just pure speculation, but you at that point you needed an opportunity, if I'm not mistaken. You they took a or they rolled the dice on you, you roll the dice on them. If I remember correctly, you took a commission-only job when you really needed you needed a paycheck, and you had to explain that to your wife, and yeah, that was fine. They also took a gamble on you not being a salesperson.

Brian Burton 5:22

Yeah, he didn't make it seem like he was gambling on me at the time. Because I thought he he put way too much effort into me. Now I'm a plumber, I knew how to plumb already, so that was a leg up, but he's talking about communicators and upselling and being someone who sees the system as a whole, not just walks in with looking through the paper towel roller at the toilet flapper and not seeing anything else in the system. And I wasn't doing any of these things, but he said I've got it. He's like, We can polish you up and turn you into something, I have no doubt. But yeah, he's definitely took a chance at me. I was sagging, I spoke in slang, I was a week removed from Southwest Detroit and hanging around all my jerk-off gangbanger buddies, and I spoke like that and I dressed like that, and I acted like that. So looking back 22 years ago, I'm not sure I would have hired me. I tend to be a decent judge of talent, but I don't know, man. I there's certain things I'm just not gonna put up with, and one of them is slang. Now he was pretty, Lance was pretty good about beating that out of me, but yeah, it was a roll of the dice. But yeah, we needed paycheck stat. And I ran to three companies that day to fill out apps, and I came home and I told my wife I found the place we're going. She's like, awesome. What's the hourly? First thing I'm like, that's the best part. They don't have one, like, what yeah. I'd made $32,000 gross income before tax income in 2003. And one thing that Lance had said to me about moving to this performance pay model, he said, he asked me, he said, what percentage of the things you recommended last year do you think that your clients actually went with? And I was like, I don't know, like 50. And he kind of smirked because he's just, it wasn't that high. And I was thinking, like, it probably wasn't that high. Because I was at a I was at a $70 an hour drain company in the Detroit area before I moved, making, I don't know, I don't remember what per hour, $16 an hour or something. No, less than that, because I worked a lot overtime and made 32 G's, so probably 14. But I would go to these homes and they would have two feet of raw sewage in their basement, and I would say $70 for the first hour, and then $70 for each additional, and people would call me a thief and a highway robber, and I should be wearing a ski mask, and they'd kick me out. And that happened more times than I can count. So, yeah, maybe 30%, but I told him probably 50%. And he's like, imagine this. Imagine you get, say, 10% of everything you sell and install. 10%, right? But instead of selling 50% of the things you recommended, you sold more like 90, 80, 90% of the things you recommended. How much different would your paycheck have looked last year? And I'm like, like a lot different, right? Especially on the jobs where I'd go to clear the sewer line and end up digging it up and repairing the sewer line. There's a lot of money in that. And I got about 14 bucks an hour or whatever. And then he showed me their pricing, which was it was not $70 an hour, that's for sure. And he said, This is what I would ask you to do. Don't recommend anything you you aren't recommending currently. I don't want you recommending things that don't need to be done. I don't want you recommending things you don't believe in. Just keep doing what you're doing. I'm gonna teach you to communicate in such a way that whatever you feel in here about the product or service is what's gonna come out of here. And the client is gonna feel and see what you feel and see because that's the level that you're gonna be able to communicate what's inside. And right now, that's not what you do because naturally we don't do that. We need to be trained to do that. We do all kinds of things with our face, with our hands, with our body language, with our tonality. That does not convey the message that's in our heads, it gives off the opposite vibe. And here's how you know when you're doing that, all the stars aligned on this job, and the clients, I think we're gonna get other quotes, and there's no reason for it. That is something about your body language, your tonality, or your face, most likely, made her feel like she cannot 100% trust you. Now, she couldn't even say that out loud, she couldn't articulate that because she doesn't know she's feeling it. But that's what happened. Some unconscious trigger went off, and you made her feel a certain way, and you don't even know it happened, right? And you could have Rilla going or whatever, and Rilla doesn't even know what happened, but it's like the I had a buddy who was terrified of dogs when we were a kid, when we were kids, and we could walk by these long chain leak fences, usually, like me and my twin brother, and the dogs would run with us and play with us. We could even reach over and pet them. But when this kid was with us, the dogs were super aggressive, they'd hair stand up, they'd be biting at the fence, and we would always say, Yeah, it's crazy, dogs really do hate Nick. But I know I would realize later, now I know as I grew up, they don't hate Nick. He puts off this fear-based energy, anxiety, and all the dog knows is there's something up with Nick. Yeah, and I'm not gonna trust Nick in my yard, near my family, or near me. And so they get a little aggressive and just say, you stay on your side of the fence. Our customers are the exact same way, we're the exact same way. These little emotional triggers tell us pull back, and we pull back. And it sounds like I'm getting three other estimates, somebody else might be cheaper. I just want to take the weekend and go over our options. Dude, if they loved you and they love the product and they could afford, they're doing it. Yeah, that's all there is to it. They're doing it. So you're getting a lot of that kind of objection, just know, and this is a great thing to know, as much as it hurts our feelings. It's my fault, it's just me. And I need to likely I need to get in a place where I can role play presenting, asking for the business, overcoming objections with someone monitoring my speech, my tone, how I'm using my hands and my face, and explaining to me when I'm doing things that make a client pull back, like saying a lot. Now that's one you can pick up with a recording software because it shrinks your credibility every time we do it. People can't tell the difference between me thinking too slowly and just pausing for saying for that reason, or me trying to make up the answers as I go. And if you give someone a 50-50 on whether they should trust you and they don't know you, they're gonna go with not when it comes to their them spending money. So we can't put them in that position. So we do these in blue-collar clothes, or we do Monday and Wednesday evening role play, and everybody gets in there and does their role play, and we do the same thing here in the Ben Franklin, and in here we have a bell. And if you say ding, somebody rings the bell. If you say sign, buy any of the cortisol-producing sales jargon words, we hit the bell, you gotta start over. If you get your hands in your pockets or behind your back, or you fold your arms like you're trying to cover your vital organs, or you do this and try to cover your jugular, like it's all subconscious, and you don't know you're doing it or why you're doing it. But we know that if I put you up in front of 20 guys in the training room and you role play for your first time ever, you're nervous. So your body sends a quiet signal to your brain to cover your vital organs. Not because you think Todd, who you're role-playing with, is gonna stick you with his box cutter. But when we're nervous, we have certain tells. And one of those tells is to cover the jugular, cover the vital organs, hide the palms of our hands, don't let these be seen. Not because we're lying, that's the hard part. Because we're uncomfortable. But the challenge is the client doesn't know the difference between you look uncomfortable because this is a weird scenario being in someone else's kitchen, and you look uncomfortable because you're lying through your teeth and you're trying to rip me off. But again, if we give them a 50-50 and it involves their money, they're gonna lean toward I don't trust you.

Corey Berrier 16:20

That's right. I'm working with guys in recovery right now for job interviews for it using those exact things. These are because if you're at a job interview and you're doing any of those things, the employer can pick up on that. So, Brian, I want to shift for a second and talk about you went through your season of addiction. And I'm I know you well enough to know two seasons of addiction to walk us through what happened there and uh how you got to the other side of that because you don't participate in a 12-step program, from what I understand, right? I don't believe.

Brian Burton 17:04

Yeah, and it's not I wouldn't say it's that I don't recommend it, I just never did it.

Corey Berrier 17:11

Yeah, and it's okay. Like, it's not a good idea.

Brian Burton 17:13

If I could I would take the 12-step program over the 14 months live-in facility any day if it would work, but yeah, I when I help guys get into recovery from the position I'm in now, it's usually either go to a facility or get in a 12-step program, get in get some accountability, get a sponsor. But yeah, in my case, I was 21. I had a knee surgery, I had knee two knee surgeries in 11 months. And the doc back in 2001, I don't know, there wasn't really an opioid crisis, so it just kept increasing my dose of uh hydrocodone and oxycodone for 11 months until it was just a staple of my personality. What's funny is uh you asked me if I want to talk about my struggles with addiction, and I was like, I I wait, I didn't even answer you right away, and then when I did, I like I wouldn't be opposed to it. It was like non-committal. Because I, you know, there's part of you that's just like I I have to see myself in that light again and just relive what a piece of work I was twice. And as I was thinking about it, I was replaying. I remember having this conversation with myself one day where I'm at this is like right before I went to rehab in lost when I was in Las Vegas working for Ken Govrich, and I was like having a conversation with some regular guys like Ken and a couple of the techs of ours who weren't addicts, there were several of us, and I remember just looking at it being like, how do you live like without some opiates and why? It just because it just seems lame. Meanwhile, nothing could be lamer than that life where it's I had like three modes of being trying to get a hold of some, have them and killing the dope sickness, or and then the other part, which was like had too much and haven't slept for several nights, or took some somas to be able to sleep and nodded in front of my wife and kids. No aspect of addiction is the good part, you just live you're one of three avenues of a piece of crap. So it was like 10 years, and then at the end it got so bad. If I couldn't find oxies, I was taking like 60 Viking a day. And I knew I'm not gonna be alive a whole lot longer, so I came clean to my wife about how bad it had gotten, and she was just like, What? Like the lies, and my stepdad had gone through a program called Teen Challenge in Pennsylvania, where he kicked an 18-year crack addiction through this program. So I had never done anything except just quit cold turkey, got dope sick for a couple days, found it and got right back on it. I remember I was telling the the team here recently you want to know what my training sounds like in the morning, you guys we run a horrible day the day before. I'm like, I was out selling you guys dope sick. Like, how sad are you? And I meant it. Like, I remember I'd go to these calls and I would run my GoPro process like on a plumbing maintenance call, and I would just run the process, like I'm not foregoing the process, but I'm dope sick and I don't want to be here and I don't want to do any work. I just want to run the call and get home. And uh I would sell a big job, like because the process works, right? And I'd be like, but I'm like, I gotta put in 8,000 worth of water treatment and emergency shutoff valves. I'm like, hey, Mrs. Burton would be happy, but I never got an installer, so if it's just me having to do it all now, and I'm like cramped up and cold sweat, and just uh just the worst possible mindset. But funny enough, even then, I would get to work and I'd get my one corded headphone in, man, and I'd be listening to my audiobooks. I'd be listening to Influence or Brian Tracy book or something. Even in the worst part of time, I'm still like learning, trying to get better, just taking advantage of the minutes. But yeah, it got two of Out of control, and I was at the point where nothing would make me not dope sick, and I was chasing it with everything I could find, including alcohol. Talked to my mom, stepdad. I flew out to Pennsylvania and slept on their couch for a few weeks waiting to get into the facility. And the crazy part was I got clean on their couch. But I felt even while I was there, if somebody set a bottle of oxycottons on the table, I would go take them. Like I just eat them right in front of everybody. So I knew I still needed to go get help. Yeah, I went into the facility. The first part was four months, and you spend four months in there, they call it induction, and it's just breaking you. It's like taking your ego and making you like a freaking five-year-old again, and you had to you have to adhere to all these crazy rules, and you're getting yelled at by guys that are like seven years younger than you and have never accomplished a thing except getting clean, which it's not nothing, but at that time I was like, so what? What else have you done? Oh, you're not a plumber? Okay, then you're nothing to me. Yeah. So went through there, and then my wife came out to visit me for the graduation and said, if I'll go through the second part, the 10-month, she'll bring the kids and move into my mom's basement there in Pennsylvania and freaking wait. But she wanted me to graduate, she wanted me to get all the way through. So that's what we did. Then we came out. I came out of the rehab there. Man, I was on fire. Like I couldn't be stopped. I was running every call that came through weekends. The only the only time I wouldn't run a call was church, but that team, they're believers and they were cool with me saying I want calls on Sunday, but I want to take the family to church first. So your first call on a Sunday was a 12 to 2 window. So we got out of church at 11:45. I brought a uniform, had my truck parked in the church parking lot, kissed the kids, kissed the wife. I'm heading to calls. And we bought our first house like a year out of rehab. And when I got out, man, we had a 520 credit score or something. She was just taking out credit cards to pay bills, and so we fixed that. Got a house. More than anything, just to put things right and fix things and pay her back. And then like 2020, that would have been 2013, I think, that I got out. And 20, maybe 2019. I just started casually drinking with some buddies. And it didn't happen right away, but I had never had a problem with drinking. So I should be fine. If there's anybody out there with that, you won't be fine. You're either fine or you're not. The substance makes no difference. Like, yeah, I could I I get addicted to floss sticks. Like I have a floss stick in my pocket at all times. That's just my nature. So if there's anything that can harm me, it just needs to stay away from me because I'll go in head first. That's who I am. So yeah, and before too long, I was drinking a fifth to a half gallon of Tito's a day, a fifth usually on weekdays, and then on Saturdays and Sundays, I'd drink up to a handle a day and just blackout drunk all the time. Just have long stretches of the year of 2020 where I have no memory of it. And I just became a just a piece of crap in general, just a horrible dude to be around. Just drama and still maintained my role at um the company I was at pretty well. But it was like running the GoPro system on a sales call. It's just my systems work, right? So the things that I just show up and do every day are systematized, and they just they do what they do. So it was almost luck that I was able to maintain that role. We built them a bonfire and shot the 22s and played games with them, and then put them a movie on, and then the three of us dudes were watching college football at night, and these guys were like, I'm crashing at I don't know, 12, one o'clock. And I just stayed up in the living room polishing off the I think they had Captain Morgan's, and I just drank it all. Like whatever was there, I drank it all. And finally passed out, but I don't drink dark liquor, so I had a freaking massive hangover when I woke up, despite all I drank. Tying in the dark liquor gave me a massive hangover, and I was driving the girls back home. I was like an hour and a half home. And they were in the third row of my explorer playing, like in their booster seats or whatever. They were playing and laughing, but their squeaks were like making my head pound. I said, I was just like, girls, I'll turn some music on if we can just be a little quieter because dad has a headache. And I didn't yell or anything, but I could I just looked in the mirror and I could see them. They were just like pouty now, like they felt like they got in trouble. And for whatever reason, that just hit me like a cinder block. My brother and I grew up in Detroit with no dad. There was a man who impregnated mom, but he lived like 15 minutes away and raised another family and never came to see us, never checked on us, never sent any money, just pretended we didn't exist. So that had that left an impact on how the kind of dad I wanted to be. Yeah, my brother wanted to be. And for some reason, all of that hit me as I was looking in that rear view mirror. I pulled over into a gas station, like started crying my eyes out in the gas station bathroom, and I just decided right there that I was gonna go through the DTs, the withdrawals. I think it was Sunday, we were driving home, and I believe I took either Monday and Tuesday or Tuesday and Wednesday off of work and went through it, went through the withdrawals and didn't consult a doctor, which I know is not a good plan because it's uh it's I think it's the only lethal withdrawal is severe alcohol withdrawal. But yeah, I was shaky. I was shaky all if I wasn't drinking, I was shaking at any point in twenty in late 2020. If I was not physically drinking, my hands were shaken. But yeah, so it was a rough few days, and I told my friends and co-workers. I didn't just tell them, I started 75 hard when I got back to work. So I said 75 days, what all the rules are 10 pages of a book, gallon of water, two workouts a day, one outside, no alcohol. There was a couple other ones I had in there, but what I could tell my friends was the progress pick. Oh, yeah, and progress pick, yeah. So I told all my boys like 75 days. I'm out, I'm not drinking, I'm not doing anything. And they like I hoped, they learned how to hang out without me. So and just like that, I was done. And they're great dudes in my neighborhood, and that were my boys, they're so much fun to hang out with, but it it always revolves around high octane IPAs or liquor, always, and I just couldn't be around it anymore. And the longer I went of being sober, the less I even wanted to sit around in lawn chairs at the campfire behind my house, kicking it, like I wanted to build something, and I got my mojo back, and I just wanted to be part of making change and building something and impacting lives and creating so it wasn't a big loss for me. But yeah, every time I wanted a drink, I just thought about like C.S. Lewis wrote about, I think it was in mere Christianity, where he's just like, you're not you're never just doing something, right? We're walking on this timeline of a hundred-mile walk or whatever. And it's not we never just like step out of line and get back in. When we do something, we turn in a direction. And I looked at the direction I was heading where I just almost made my daughters cry back there, and just and I thought about where that timeline ends up five years from now. The amount I was drinking, there wasn't gonna be a five years from now. My my liver should have been, I shouldn't have a liver twice over by now. But as I projected that out in my mind, I just thought it's not leading anywhere good, and I'm becoming a worse and worse human being in every capacity as I'm doing this to myself. So I just stopped. Yeah, I didn't even really tell anybody that I was quitting drinking, other than my wife. I just said, I'm done, I'm not gonna drink again. And I'm not sure I realized how over it in me she was at the time, but her indifference to me even saying that was like, so what? And I'm not like you had never heard me say that before. I'm not a guy who's saying that and then not doing it. I'm just like, I'm drinking because I like to and I want to, and if you don't like it too bad, and that's that I work my ass off, and I'm still handling all my responsibilities, and whatever else addicts tell ourselves to feel better about what pieces of crap we are. I had all those, but yeah. So when I said that, she was just like, I hope so. And then she had the same kind of thing. We're over the next it almost felt like three-month chunks. Like every three months, as I got further away from my last drink, my personality changed a little bit. I became a different dude, and I felt like that went on for a couple of years. Think you and I talked about that before offline, where I was a different human being, like way more so with alcohol than opiates. Opiates, I don't feel like my personality was that much different. But with alcohol, that just not me. I'm not the same human being. Or I heard somebody posted recently on Facebook saying alcohol doesn't make you anything, it just brings out what you already are. And I was like, maybe because you could take ecstasy, and it's gonna bring out a completely different trigger to you. You take alcohol, and what it's bringing out is so maybe, but it's like your worst possible attributes, worst possible attribute, like the ones you wouldn't want your worst enemy to see in you, and for sure, for me, one thing I felt like it always did was it brought fear, hatred, and trauma response back to me from stuff that happened when I was a kid. I became very fear-based, I became very everyone's out to get me, so therefore I'm out to get everyone and keep people at bay and be way too aggressive, and yeah, and maybe, maybe stuff that's already in being brought out, but it's definitely not the good stuff, all the bad stuff. I don't need that, I'm fine socially. I'm like a drunk guy socially most of the time, anyway. It just yeah, it just it pushes me too far in that way. But yeah, um, the longer I got out, the more my personality changed back into something that I liked and something that my wife liked, and the more capacity I had for emotions, like being able to feel my kids and have conversations with them where I could understand the depth of their emotions and where this is coming from, and that's not me when I'm in addiction. I just don't have the capacity for that, and I'll even say like caffeine even can do that, where there were times where I was like pre-workout in the morning, uh sugar-free Red Bulls all through the day, and like a big thing of coffee late afternoon, early evening. And I remembered just feeling like edgy, and everyone's out to get me, and I'm pissed off at the world and whiny. And I remembered getting off of the caffeine after the brutal headaches for a couple days, and then starting to have my regular old emotions back. Wait, what happened? And then enjoying things again, and uh and I realized caffeine's an addiction, like anything else, it's just not it. This the consequences aren't as severe, but it it effs with your personality, it changes your personality, and not in a good way. There are easier ways to get more energy, yeah, that's right, going to sleep on time, right? Yeah, working out, yeah, that's right, 100%.

Corey Berrier 39:03

That's interesting. Dr.

Brian Burton 39:04

Drew, the addiction medicine specialist, always says there's no such thing as a free lunch in nature. And if you're taking something to give you energy, it's going to come out of somewhere. And I think it really a lot of it comes from our emotional intelligence. I think we exhaust that part of ourselves when we're artificially propping up our energy level for the day. Yeah, I don't know. We didn't I don't need to go off on energy drinks and caffeine, but that's a good point.

Corey Berrier 39:38

It's a stimulant. I still drink caffeine, I still use nicotine pouches, probably about like you drink, like we both drank. It's if something makes me feel a little bit different, I'm I like it. Fortunately, I think that they're the lesser of the evils. Of course, I would say that because I still use them. Yeah, it is what it is, and I'm not looking to clear this time soon, but leave you alone there.

Brian Burton 40:06

At the end of the day, just you're like you've got the same one as me. We have one substance in our back pocket that we can break out anytime that changes our personality, changes our mood, relieves the stress, and doesn't actually affect us in a negative way. And that's the gym.

Corey Berrier 40:27

Yeah, 100%.

Brian Burton 40:29

But it's not a free lunch because you gotta get up early. In my case, get up at 3 45 at the door of the gym by 4 30 when it opens, usually fogging it. Hello, and get in there, and you gotta lift heavy weight and you gotta wait on benches, and you gotta deal with crowds of high schoolers that are in the way taking pictures of each other. Like all these things are like there's a price to be paid for all this stuff, but on the front end, which is where it's supposed to be, not on the back end, because I think I'm getting a free mood bump or energy stimulant. And I still take a pre-workout, maybe like three, try not to do more than three days a week, but never two days in a row, because that's when I get the headaches if I take it two days in a row and then don't have it. But yeah, for the most part, my my only real drug these days is that is to get into the gym. Do you use creatine? I do, yeah. We talked about this before. You weren't a fan, yeah.

Corey Berrier 41:36

I wasn't a fan. Guess what?

Brian Burton 41:38

Like, bro, you're like, bro, what is it like 1998? You're on creatine?

Corey Berrier 41:41

I'm like, I didn't wrong. I was totally wrong about it. Totally wrong. I knew, I knew, yeah, totally wrong. I it's really crazy when you when I have a when I have a when I wear an aura ring, and when it tells me I I had a shitty night's sleep, I can add five or ten more grams of creatine, and I don't really feel that sleep deprivation. It's weird, it's really weird. Yeah, there's a lot of things.

Brian Burton 42:13

I've seen uh yeah, I've seen Dr. Ronda something or other talking about the fact that creatine can protect your brain from sleep deprivation because sleep deprivation is actually extremely hard on the brain. But yeah, I don't I just take it because I know it's just one of those things like my perfect aminos, it's just part of my routine.

Corey Berrier 42:40

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I yeah, I definitely have to follow my sword with creatine. I really think it it does make a big difference for me anyway.

Brian Burton 42:52

Yeah, you were saying, like, you're like, yeah, you got probably like that belly fat you can't lose. That's creatine. And I was looking, I was like, huh.

Corey Berrier 43:00

Yeah.

Brian Burton 43:01

Maybe if I get off this stuff, we I'll lose that. But I do remember specifically when I got out of rehab because I was lifting weights every morning and then jogging six miles every evening almost the whole time I was in rehab. And I remembered coming out, and everybody talked about creatine like it was the best thing in the world, in there, and these guys were all not all, but the majority of these guys were ex-cons that I was in with, and they were yoked. And I got out and I got on creatine, and I remember seeing the difference in the mirror within a couple months, like my muscles were just rounder and fuller, and I remember my tricep being there even when I hadn't just worked out, which is something I my body I struggle with. I look great with a pump, but then I feel like when I haven't just worked out, I don't look like I've ever lifted a weight. But creatine, I thought, changed that, and I was just thinking about getting it off, getting off it when we were talking, and I was like, I don't want to go back to that flat, yeah, yeah, dude.

Corey Berrier 44:12

Yeah, don't listen to me. I don't know shit. Until you do something yourself, it's like I gotta find out for myself before I can buy in, but I'm bought in. I believe it's very beneficial. For sure. Yeah, the the science is there, yeah. 100%.

Brian Burton 44:34

Dude, I know we're gonna say this though if I move to 15 grams a day, which I was for a little while, blood pressure spikes really. Yeah, and there's very little, there's very little research to to back up the fact that it's real, but I've done it five different times and changed nothing about my diet, which at times is fairly dialed in, or my energy expenditure level or lifts or anything, but adding another five grams of creatine in the evening, I'll feel fuller and I'll gain a little strength, but I my blood pressure will go up. Interesting. Which I think it just has to be the little bit of extracellular water retention.

Corey Berrier 45:26

Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I don't have a lot of water retention from it, surprisingly. And I that was something I also thought for sure that would come along with it. Now I also use Thorn Brand, which is third-party test. It's it's the it's a good one, whatever. Maybe that has something to do with it. I don't know.

Brian Burton 45:46

Yeah, I don't know. I don't typically, and even if I go to 15, I'm not like visibly retaining more water, yeah, but my blood pressure definitely goes up, and my muscles look and feel fuller, but I think it's just there's a line of how much my cells are retaining, yeah, where it just squeezes my blood vessels a little bit.

Corey Berrier 46:11

Yeah, that makes sense. Look, I know we're getting close on time. Brian, where can where can people find you? Where can they get a hold of the blue collar closer? Just can you just let everybody know where they can find all the things that you are dealing with or working in?

Brian Burton 46:30

Yeah, the easiest way is just shoot me a text 279-2 closer. Next to that, blue collar closer.com, waste no day.com. We're doing three or four boot camps a year around the country. And then yeah, blue collar closer.com is the easiest. If you're in blue collar closer, you got access to me all day. Very active in there, and it's the one place other than my cell phone that you can reach out to me, and it's guaranteed to be me answering at this point. Because I don't know if I'm getting pretty big, bro.

Corey Berrier 47:07

So I can only imagine. You've done really well. I'm uh really proud of you, man. Thanks, buddy. Appreciate it. Yeah, man, for sure. Brian, I appreciate you, my man. As always, it's been a pleasure talking with you. Great seeing you, and uh appreciate you, man. Yeah, let's do it again. Good to see you, buddy. You too, brother. Thank you.