Jan. 22, 2020 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:32:10
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Kevin Ross, bringer of gifts! | ||
| What's so good, man? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How you doing? | |
| Good to see you, brother. | ||
| Thank you very much for that bag. | ||
| Oh, you're very welcome. | ||
| It's very cool. | ||
| People, I'll let you know, Kevin brought a giant heavy bag filled with sand that has to weigh north of 200 pounds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| I think it's about 250. Yeah, it was a lot of fun getting that in my car by myself. | ||
| Is that your preferred method for conditioning your shins? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| You know, the thing with shin conditioning, a lot of people do. | ||
| You know, they smack themselves in the shin with bottles and kind of stupid things like that. | ||
| But you're not really creating... | ||
| What you need to, which is overall conditioning, overall strengthening of the bone. | ||
| All you're really doing is deadening little spots in your nerves, but that's the worst thing you can do without strengthening your bones. | ||
| You're deadening the nerves, but not strengthening the bone overall. | ||
| And if you're not doing that, You're going to think your bone's a lot stronger than it is, but it can't handle the impact. | ||
| So with a sandbag, you're covering much more surface area and applying it in a realistic situation where you're able to throw kicks repeatedly at this thing. | ||
| And what you really want to do is do it to a degree that it's... | ||
| Causing a certain amount of pain, but you're able to do this daily with repetition because that's how you continually develop, just like getting stronger at anything. | ||
| It doesn't happen overnight. | ||
| You've got to just do this every day, just at the end of your session, knock out a few kicks, and then again tomorrow and again the next day, and you slowly and steadily are able to go harder and harder and develop the strength and conditioning in your shins. | ||
| So the idea is that you're making like these little tiny micro fractures, right? | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| And yeah, like I said, you want to be able to cover a good surface area so you're hitting it all kind of at once as opposed to like little spots, which is what happens when you just whack it with a bat or something like that. | ||
| My experience with whacking it with a bat is everybody kind of quits. | ||
| You're like, hey, I'm going to condition my shins. | ||
| And then they just go, what the fuck am I doing? | ||
| And they stop doing it. | ||
| Well, the thing too with when you're able to kick like that is you can kind of slowly build up. | ||
| You know, you start a little bit lightly and develop a little bit stronger. | ||
| And you kind of create a little bit of a crease. | ||
| And, you know, as you get going, you... | ||
| Your brain can kind of wrap itself around it a little bit better and then you start going harder and harder and by the end of your 5-10 minute session, you're putting some serious weight into that and you're not noticing it as much. | ||
| Yeah, we were talking about your knee, that you had a fracture in your knee that you didn't realize you had. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| The thing that disturbs me maybe the most in kickboxing, and I've only seen it a few times, is when someone checks a kick and their leg snaps in half. | ||
| Like Tyrone Spong when he fought Gokhan Saki. | ||
| Or Anderson Silva when he fought Chris Weidman, same thing. | ||
| That snap of when the shin gives out. | ||
| Can you prevent that from doing this? | ||
| Obviously, it's one of those just freak things that happens. | ||
| You know, clearly with those guys, you can have the most conditioned shins in the world, but you catch them the wrong way at the wrong time. | ||
| They can happen, and it's rare, but it does happen, and it doesn't really matter how long you've been doing this, how strong your shins are. | ||
| Sometimes things just break. | ||
| I always wonder how many guys have little breaks and they don't know about it, too. | ||
| Probably a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A lot, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, they said that's what happened with Anderson. | ||
| That Anderson threw a kick and he broke it before that. | ||
| Like he felt something was wrong and then when he threw that second kick and it snapped in half. | ||
| That's why it did that. | ||
| Yeah, that makes sense. | ||
| Well, Weidman was checking it perfect. | ||
| He was checking it right at the top of his knee. | ||
| Yeah, and that's a big thing with fighting. | ||
| A lot of people tend to... | ||
| Just blindly pick their shin up as opposed to paying attention to where it is on your shin that it's hitting. | ||
| Just like when you're kicking, you need to pay attention to what piece of your leg you're hitting with, which piece of your shin you're checking with, and the higher up on your shin it is, the harder it's going to be. | ||
| orthodox and throwing that inside leg kick, you're coming upwards at an angle, which tends to be like low on your foot or your ankle, and then you're checking with high up by your knee. | ||
| So you have the smallest part of your shin connecting with the hardest part of somebody else's. | ||
| And with that, that's just the one that tends to do that. | ||
| Yeah, it's a... | ||
| Shin-on-shin contact is such a brutal thing. | ||
| Like, I think everybody should experience it once. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, just crack. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Aye! | |
| That... | ||
| Yeah, and you know, the funny thing is, it doesn't matter how long you've done this for, we watch these fights and assume that they don't feel pain and that it doesn't bother them. | ||
| But even guys with hundreds and hundreds of fights, you see them the next day and they're gimping around pretty good. | ||
| You know, we have this idea in our brains that eventually you're going to get to a point when you just don't feel pain and it doesn't bother you. | ||
| Eventually you realize that never happens. | ||
| And it's better to get that out of your head now. | ||
| Muay Thai and kickboxing and anything that's bone on bone, it's going to be painful. | ||
| And that's part of the art of it. | ||
| You learn how to place your kicks better and pay attention to what you're doing. | ||
| And yeah, of course, you develop your shin conditioning and that kind of thing. | ||
| But it always hurts. | ||
| It's always going to hurt. | ||
| It's such a brutally effective way to fight, and it's so interesting that Thailand perfected that. | ||
| I've always been fascinated by that. | ||
| When you think about the entire world, it's an enormous world, and people have been fighting in this enormous world from the beginning of time. | ||
| And this one island, they said, hey, I got an idea. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's a cultural thing over there. | ||
| You know, it's part of their upbringing. | ||
| It's like baseball over here or soccer in other parts of the world where everybody kind of does it to one extent or the other. | ||
| And, you know, clearly if you're doing this from a time you're a child, Particularly when it's a job like it is for them over there. | ||
| It's more than just for fun. | ||
| It's not for fun. | ||
| It's like, this is how I survive. | ||
| It's this or working in the fields. | ||
| And that completely changes their mentality about it. | ||
| And that's why when you go there, it's like obviously the skill for sure, but the mentality and the reasons for doing this, it's so different. | ||
| It's so different. | ||
| Yeah, and they start so young and they're basically sent to these camps and they start fighting like, you know, before they're like 10 years old. | ||
| Oftentimes they start fighting. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of these kids, you know, their families send them to these camps and that's where they're raised. | ||
| You know, they're raised in a gym to be fighters and to work for the gyms. | ||
| I mean, that's really what they're doing is they're working. | ||
| You know, they're getting money to send back to their families and They're not doing this for fun. | ||
| They're not doing this as a hobby. | ||
| I've always been fascinated by the way that tie spar as well because I think it's really interesting that given that they do fight so often and their livelihood depends on it and that it is not a game they've really figured out a bunch of things and one of the things they figured out is Hit the pads hard, hit the bag hard, spar light. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's give and take to everything that we do and we're trying to maximize our learning and minimize the damage or the risk of injury that we're taking. | ||
| We have the opposite approach here in America. | ||
| We just beat the shit out of each other, and that's good. | ||
| That's how you're going to get better. | ||
| But you don't really develop when you're going hard like that. | ||
| You're learning how to be tough, and you're learning how to take damage, and you're learning how to be in the fire like that, which is important. | ||
| But you're not really developing. | ||
| When you're playing, when you're practicing, when you're not thinking about getting injured or knocked out, you're able to... | ||
| Learn and apply new things and new techniques and practice things that you normally wouldn't. | ||
| It's like when you're worried about getting hurt, you're only going to focus on the things that you're really good at. | ||
| You're not going to try these different approaches and that's what really limits a lot of our development. | ||
| You see a lot of fighters, their ability kind of levels off to a certain degree and they don't continually develop as their careers go on and they also don't It doesn't last very long either because of the amount of damage their bodies and their brains are taking. | ||
| Each one of us only has a finite number of shots to the head we can take and shots of the body we can take. | ||
| Do you want to use those in the gym or do you want to use those in the ring? | ||
| I think it's really about finding a good balance between that. | ||
| In the beginning, all I did was just go crazy and spar super hard six days a week leading all the way up to the fight. | ||
| Six days a week, you were sparring hard, really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, the smallest guy I had to work with coming up was probably 20 pounds bigger than me. | ||
| And in a lot of ways, this helped me develop and gain a lot of strength and confidence and ability to... | ||
| Take that kind of punishment, but it also did a lot of detrimental things, a lot of stupid injuries, a lot of damage. | ||
| And over the years, I've come to develop and get more onto the Thai approach of things and practice and playing and finding when the time to go hard is and when the time to learn and develop is and what's counterproductive and what isn't. | ||
| How do you make that distinction? | ||
| Like, how do you know when's the time to go hard? | ||
| You don't. | ||
| You don't really. | ||
| I mean, everything that we do is a process of trial and error, you know, and I think once you kind of understand that you can think clearly and apply the things you need to in the midst of that firefight, which, you know, is really what shuts a lot of people down in the beginning. | ||
| They can't process the information that's happening because it's so intense and And that is why it's important to kind of have that and have that fight-like scenario in the gym. | ||
| But once you've done that and you've had the experience and all of that, I think it's so much more beneficial to start going towards the other direction, especially if you want to stay in this sport for A good amount of time and not take unnecessary damage for really no purpose whatsoever. | ||
| To me, it should be the exception and not the rule. | ||
| Have those hard training sessions in once in a while, especially if you can get work in with people that you're not used to, because obviously when you fight, you don't know what they're really doing in there. | ||
| It's like working with a stranger. | ||
| In the gym, we know each other so well that we tend to Just work on those things and not practice. | ||
| But that's how we develop. | ||
| And if we're not doing that, we're really limiting ourselves. | ||
| It's got to be difficult to find the right balance in terms of what gym you're training at. | ||
| Where are you training at these days? | ||
| I'm down in San Diego now. | ||
| I moved down there two years ago at the boxing club. | ||
| Oh, is that Artem? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, Shoroshkin. | ||
| Levin's place? | ||
| Yeah, and Levin is there too. | ||
| Artem, Shoroshkin, the small Artem, we met almost 15 years ago. | ||
| He was actually the janitor at this gym. | ||
| Had just moved from Russia and now he owns three of them and is this amazing gym owner and business person, which is just an unbelievably fascinating story that he has and an inspirational thing and But yeah, that's where I'm at now, and I kind of bounce back between San Diego and out here. | ||
| Gina lives out here, so I kind of go back and forth. | ||
| Now that place is, it's called the Boxing Club, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's Muay Thai. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's another gym out here called Boxing Works, which is the one I train out in Torrance, and same thing, it's a Muay Thai gym, and both these gyms are Muay Thai and kickboxing related, yet they're boxing. | ||
| Why do they call it Boxing Works? | ||
| Is it just to get people to join? | ||
| I don't really know. | ||
| You know, I don't really know why that happened or how that happened. | ||
| But yeah, it's kind of ironic that both those places are seemingly boxing gyms and they're not at all. | ||
| What made you make the move down there? | ||
| A lot of things. | ||
| I'd always planned on ending up in San Diego. | ||
| I mean, that's the one place. | ||
| I love it down there. | ||
| Yeah, and I've lived all over this country since, you know, I've moved all over the place since I was a little kid, and San Diego was just where I always planned I'd be one day. | ||
| I didn't think I'd move down there until I was done fighting. | ||
| But through the process of a lot of things and, you know, transitions in my life, it just kind of was the right time to go. | ||
| It's the perfect balance. | ||
| Because it's like a city, but it's not a big city. | ||
| And it's got a lot of beauty. | ||
| Like, there's beautiful hills and the ocean is beautiful. | ||
| But it's not that crowded. | ||
| It's like, it's alright. | ||
| I shouldn't even be talking about it. | ||
| I don't want people to move there. | ||
| Once you go there, it's tough to want to be anywhere else. | ||
| The energy that's there, the way that people are, you have all those things that are in other cities, but everything that's perfect in one place, it's very unique in that sense. | ||
| I think there's a lot of positive aspects to the military presence there, too. | ||
| Because I think there's so many disciplined people down there. | ||
| There's a lot of health-conscious, fitness-oriented, and disciplined people. | ||
| Because of the fact there's such a giant military presence down there, there's so many people that are involved in the military, and so many people that are involved in the military have a lot of discipline, train a lot, are interested in martial arts in particular. | ||
| I think it flavors that community. | ||
| Yeah, it's a wonderful place. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Yeah, don't go there. | ||
| The problem is the fucking drive. | ||
| Woo, that drive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Woo, every time I work in San Diego, I leave here at like 8 in the morning. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, just like, if I have to work there at night, I'm like, let me just fucking get it out of the way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Get that four-hour drive out of the way early. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, like for me, if I leave at around 10, 10.30, I can usually get there in about two hours before traffic hits, but there's this really short window of time, but if you miss it, It's a rough one. | ||
| Yeah, my friend Bill Burr takes a helicopter down there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he's been taking helicopter lessons. | ||
| We should all get some helicopters and it'll be a lot easier to get around. | ||
| Well, he doesn't have his own, but he takes lessons. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, you know, he just hires one and he'll actually fly. | ||
| And he has a co-pilot who's like, you know, flight instructor, explains everything to him, make sure he's doing everything right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then you're down there in an hour. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Have you ever been in a helicopter? | ||
| I haven't. | ||
| They kind of freak me out a little bit. | ||
| They just seem so sketchy. | ||
| They're sketchy. | ||
| But if they're well-maintained, like anything else, he took me up in one and we flew over Van Nuys. | ||
| It was crazy flying over Malibu because we did it right after the fires. | ||
| So you got to see all the houses that were burnt to the ground. | ||
| Nuts, man. | ||
| And like Point Doom. | ||
| So these just huge estates that are probably worth $25 million just burnt to the fucking ground. | ||
| And so many of them, man. | ||
| Malibu lost like 600 structures. | ||
| That's wild, man. | ||
| It's hard to wrap your brain around the damage that was done. | ||
| And then I saw this scale which showed what the California fires are and what the Australian fires are. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| And that's just... | ||
| My friend Tom is there right now and he said they had to divert his plane. | ||
| He was supposed to fly into Melbourne and they diverted it to Sydney because they couldn't fly through the smoke. | ||
| 70% of the country is covered in smoke. | ||
| And a good percentage of those fires were started by people just fucking around like throwing cigarettes into the bush. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They said half a billion animals are dead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jeez. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| That's terrible. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| And they said that the koala bear, like, so much of their habitat is destroyed. | ||
| They're in, like, grave danger. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, like, it's something about, like, 80% of their range has been destroyed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jeez. | |
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| You know, koala bears only eat, like... | ||
| I think they only eat eucalyptus trees. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's all they eat, which is kind of fucked up. | ||
| They found what works. | ||
| Yeah, they're into one thing. | ||
| It's like a dude who only eats blueberries. | ||
| You know, like, bro, what if they run out of blueberries? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I don't think they can eat other things. | ||
| I think that's like their digestive system has evolved to eat eucalyptus leaves. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's horrible. | ||
| It's fucked up, man. | ||
| When you look at the map of where the fires are, it's crazy. | ||
| It's like if we had multiple states, like Texas, Wyoming, Nevada, all on fire at the same time. | ||
| That's what it's like over there. | ||
| Yeah, it's hard to wrap your mind around it. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Have you ever been when there's a fire here? | ||
| Not close enough to really feel like that, but around and even just them in the general area, I mean, you realize how quickly they can spread and just take over everything. | ||
| It's so devastating. | ||
| I've been evacuated three times from where I live, and this last one, the houses across the street from my house burnt to the ground. | ||
| And then two houses down, one of those houses burnt down. | ||
| On my block, ten houses are gone. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, it's fucking nuts, man. | ||
| I went to walk the dog today, and we're walking by these just empty lots where these people used to live. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Brightside, nobody died. | ||
| Hopefully, everybody had insurance. | ||
| But it's just humbling when you see it coming, because everybody's like, the firefighters are doing their best. | ||
| They're dumping water. | ||
| They're doing their best to create fire breaks and everything they can, but there's nothing they can do. | ||
| It's so big. | ||
| I mean, it was so big. | ||
| It was just coming over the top of the mountain. | ||
| You looked all the way to the left and all the way to the right, just nothing but fire. | ||
| And these guys are just constantly circling over and dropping water down and doing their best, but it's like, it was crazy. | ||
| And that was nothing compared to up north, north in California. | ||
| North in California, people died on the fucking highway. | ||
| They couldn't get out of the way of it. | ||
| That was terrible, man. | ||
| That was so bad. | ||
| You know, I was up there probably about five years ago when these were going on and they were just popping up everywhere and there were some that were pretty close to the gym and I'm having to like watch and see where they're at because they were close to the apartments we lived in. | ||
| I'm like, we might have to like get out of here because they just pop all over the place and they hop from one place to the other with the wind and everything. | ||
| Henry Cejudo almost burnt to death. | ||
| You know the story about him? | ||
| He had to jump out the window barefoot, burnt the fuck out of his feet. | ||
| Like, he didn't even know what was going on. | ||
| He was sleeping. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, he's waking up. | ||
| He's like, what is happening? | ||
| And he looks out the window, and everything's on fire. | ||
| It got to him that quickly. | ||
| Scary shit, man. | ||
| But it's, you know, it's fucked up about it. | ||
| But we all had to go to, like, me and my neighbors and some friends of mine. | ||
| We all picked a hotel in town. | ||
| We all went together. | ||
| But there's like a weird camaraderie about when shit like that goes down where everybody was happy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's horrible that those things kind of happen and they really make you realize, like, what is important in life. | ||
| And, you know, it's the same thing, like, when you travel overseas and go to third world countries, like, they seem to have a very good understanding of what life should and is about. | ||
| And then we come here, we have everything. | ||
| Everyone has everything and everyone's complaining about everything and we're miserable and we're spoiled and that mentality is so unfortunate. | ||
| It's like the more you have, the more you have to complain about and forget what is important in this life. | ||
| It's weird that it takes something like that to jar you. | ||
| You should be able to learn from that and then carry that lesson. | ||
| But that lesson is like sand in your fingers, man. | ||
| How quickly after 9 or 11 or things like that, how long does it last? | ||
| And such a traumatic thing like that. | ||
| We have a week or two of, oh, America, let's get together and let's take care and love each other. | ||
| And then I forgot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, to make an analogy with martial arts, one of the reasons why I enjoy being around martial artists and why most of my friends, a good percentage of my friends are martial artists, I feel like training all the time and getting humbled, particularly in jujitsu, because you can get tapped out a lot and you just train and you get tapped out and you keep going. | ||
| It's not like getting knocked out. | ||
| It's not like, you know, you can only get... | ||
| Cracked in the head so many times in sparring, but you develop this kind of humility that is... | ||
| Everybody kind of understands it, and there's this feeling that you get where you understand... | ||
| When someone's trying to kill you all the time, like on a regular basis, some dude's trying to choke the fucking breath out of you, and someone's got their arm wrapped around your neck, like... | ||
| The rest of the world seems easier, you know? | ||
| And I almost feel like human beings are engineered through evolution. | ||
| We've sort of been designed through natural selection to learn how to survive difficult things. | ||
| And when the difficult things don't exist, we make things that aren't difficult, difficult. | ||
| Yeah, very much so. | ||
| For me, I feel that training and martial arts and fighting and all these things, it clears the static and the noise out of your life and it allows you to focus on the things that are important and not be so distracted by fluff and nothingness. | ||
| Even a day or two of not training, I feel that stuff seeping back in. | ||
| It's substantial. | ||
| I don't know how everyone's not running around shooting each other because just a few days of not doing this, I'm like, I want to kill somebody because I allow just the stresses of nothing to get it there. | ||
| To make this sound more consistent, just push that a little bit further, just because you're doing one of those cigarette things like, hello, I don't have a voice. | ||
| All right, how about that? | ||
| That's perfect. | ||
| How much longer do you think you're going to compete? | ||
| I have no idea, man. | ||
| How old are you now? | ||
| I'll be 40 this year. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the magic number. | ||
| You know, since the day I started, you know, I didn't start until I was 23. Yeah. | ||
| So let's tell your story because it's a fascinating story because I love a guy whose life is fucked up and then he figures something out and then becomes a role model. | ||
| And in a lot of ways, that's what you've done. | ||
| Yeah, it's a long story and I'm actually in the process of writing my autobiography right now, which I've been working on pretty consistently for the last five years. | ||
| Something that, you know, I really was doing it for myself in a lot of ways to have an understanding of the things that I've been through and the things that I've learned and processed and Acquired over these years, which is, you know, | ||
| in a lot of ways, it's been extremely rewarding doing all this, but it's also been very difficult, very painful and emotional going back through all these things that happened to me in my childhood and my upbringing and things that I'm, even to this day, I'm still trying to process and understand a lot of. | ||
| And, um... | ||
| Where were we going with my story? | ||
| Well, your story of not starting until you're 23, and before that, too much partying. | ||
| Yeah, so... | ||
| To summarize a lot of this, you know, I grew up in a lot of different places, moved around a lot. | ||
| You know, my parents split up very early. | ||
| Me, my mother, and three, four brothers, sisters, you know, we basically lived in somebody's basement in the beginning. | ||
| And we're living on welfare and bouncing around from place to place and so much of that. | ||
| Shut me down emotionally. | ||
| When I was a kid, from what I'm told, I have really not much recollection of my childhood because I've blocked so much of this out. | ||
| That's why it's been really difficult for me to write this book because I don't really have many memories. | ||
| I have almost no memories of that time in my life where I felt like a child, that carefreeness of childhood. | ||
| I've had to talk to siblings and friends from back then and Look through photo albums and slowly things start coming together and you know that that's why a lot of this has been really therapeutic but I always loved fighting. | ||
| I always loved boxing and was very intrigued by it and martial arts you know Bruce Lee was always a hero of mine and But I hated violence coming up. | ||
| I hated it, but I was intrigued by it. | ||
| A really good friend of mine, we lived in Colorado for about a year or two, he would get into fights on a weekly basis in school, and I was fascinated by it. | ||
| I'm like, wow, you're so brave and so strong. | ||
| I felt like such a weak, I was very allowed weakness to overtake me throughout the events of my life. | ||
| I was very shy. | ||
| I didn't talk. | ||
| I was always athletic and that kind of thing. | ||
| But as far as confrontation and that, it just shut me down. | ||
| And I didn't like it. | ||
| It upset me a lot. | ||
| People would be angry with me. | ||
| So I had this strange dynamic where I was drawn to fighting and I was drawn to violence in one way, but I also hated it a lot and was scared by it. | ||
| Um, but, but over the years, you know, I thought about, I was like, oh, maybe I'll try boxing one day and that'd be really cool. | ||
| You know, I was fascinated watching two people in the ring and, and all these people are watching and they're there with each other, regardless of their skill level. | ||
| And then, you know, just thinking about what, what it must be like in there to do that, you know? | ||
| And, um, It fascinated me. | ||
| But again, like I said, I love martial arts, so I wanted to be able to kick people. | ||
| I wanted to be able to elbow people and knee people. | ||
| And I never saw any fighting that was like that, you know, as I was coming up. | ||
| I mean, you'd see taekwondo and karate and a lot of points sparring and that kind of thing and forms. | ||
| And, you know, even that I thought was fascinating, but I wanted to fight like boxers did. | ||
| And I just never really saw anything like that. | ||
| And one day, 94, this is right when we moved to Vegas, I was watching ESPN at like 2 in the morning, and they used to have Thai fights on once in a while. | ||
| And this fight came on. | ||
| I got this next fight is a Muay Thai fight between so and so. | ||
| And when that started, I was immediately hooked. | ||
| It hit something in me that just like lit me on fire. | ||
| I was like, this is everything that I've been looking for. | ||
| This is something so different. | ||
| And it just spoke to my soul. | ||
| And it fascinated me. | ||
| And I was like, if I am ever going to do this, that's going to be it. | ||
| It's going to be Muay Thai. | ||
| But... | ||
| You know, for various reasons. | ||
| It scared me. | ||
| One, I didn't know how I'd be able to afford it. | ||
| I didn't know if my parents would even let me. | ||
| And, you know, coming up the way I did, I was partying and drinking all the time. | ||
| Even at that, I mean, I started drinking when I was like 12 years old. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And by the time I was probably 18, I was physically dependent alcoholic. | ||
| I had to drink every day in order to keep my nerves from shaking. | ||
| My hands would tremor. | ||
| How much were you drinking? | ||
| A lot. | ||
| A lot. | ||
| Every day I would drink. | ||
| Every day I would drink. | ||
| All day? | ||
| Throughout the day, a little bit. | ||
| At night, I would just be pounding 40s. | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| Constantly. | ||
| And that's all that I did. | ||
| That's all me and my friends did. | ||
| We would just drink. | ||
| We would drink every day. | ||
| How did you wean yourself off that? | ||
| Starting Muay Thai is what did it. | ||
| As I said, I learned about it in 94. Over the years, every once in a while, I'd see a fight and I'd be like, oh, I want to do this so bad. | ||
| In 98, I actually started calling around gyms in Vegas. | ||
| I was like, oh, maybe I'm going to find a place to do this. | ||
| For me, it was one of those things where if I'm going to do it, I want to do it right, and I want to do it to fight. | ||
| And if I'm going to do it to fight, what is the fastest way to get there? | ||
| And I was like, I need to take one-on-one lessons. | ||
| I wanted to learn from a Thai. | ||
| And that was not to say Americans or anybody else can't teach it, but I was like, if you're going to learn it, you might as well learn it from the source. | ||
| And the only place... | ||
| In Vegas that taught Muay Thai, one of the only places that even taught Muay Thai and definitely the only place that had Thai instructors was Master Toddy's gym. | ||
| And I called the gym, you know, went down and talked to one of the instructors. | ||
| And when he let me know how expensive it was going to be, I was like, there's just no way. | ||
| There's no way I'm going to be able to do this. | ||
| And for me, I also knew that if I am going to go after this, I'm going to need to stop drinking, stop partying, completely alter my entire existence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm probably going to lose all my friends. | |
| Everyone's going to laugh at me. | ||
| I didn't even know how serious I took myself. | ||
| I laugh at me when I say this. | ||
| And if you knew me back then, you'd probably laugh too. | ||
| Like, what do you mean you're going to fight? | ||
| Are you stupid? | ||
| That's the stupidest thing I could ever think of. | ||
| And one of my best friends, Mo, he... | ||
| For whatever reason, this one night we were up on the roof drinking and smoking weed, and we got to talking just about life, and he was actually born with a heart defect. | ||
| I can't remember the exact name of the disease that he had, but he was in hospitals his whole life. | ||
| He was eventually going to need to get a heart transplant, and... | ||
| He's like, what do you want to do with your life? | ||
| I looked at him like he was asking me what I wanted to do when I got to the moon. | ||
| I'm like, what do you mean what I want to do with my life? | ||
| I was like, well, I always wanted to fight and expecting him to laugh at me about this. | ||
| He was like, well, why don't you? | ||
| Why don't you do it? | ||
| I told him, well, I feel old already. | ||
| I was 18 at the time. | ||
| I already felt ancient then. | ||
| And I told him all my reasons and all my fears and doubts and all these things. | ||
| He's like, you know what, man? | ||
| He's like, if anybody can do it, you can. | ||
| He's like, I think you should. | ||
| And that always stuck with me. | ||
| I was like, maybe I can. | ||
| And in that moment, I felt very motivated and wanted to do it. | ||
| But by continuing to drink and all these other things, I just suppressed it into the back of my mind. | ||
| And then about a year later, he was in the hospital and he needed to get a heart transplant. | ||
| He was basically at that point and was like, you're going to be here until you get one or you're going to die. | ||
| And I don't think any of us realized how serious it was or maybe we just didn't want to. | ||
| He ended up passing away while he was waiting for the transplant. | ||
| That just obviously devastated me to no end. | ||
| And through that night, through my drunken coping, I was like, I'm going to do this. | ||
| I'm going to go after this dream. | ||
| You know, my friend, he didn't even get a chance to fail at a dream, and I'm too... | ||
| Scared to even try for no reason. | ||
| Just out of fear. | ||
| That's literally my only reason not to do this. | ||
| Other than, you know, financial and all those other surface things. | ||
| But it really just boiled down to fear. | ||
| And I was like, you know what? | ||
| I'm going to go after this for him. | ||
| You know, he didn't get a chance to live. | ||
| I'm going to live for the both of us. | ||
| But, you know, unfortunately, his death sent me even harder down that downward spiral of alcohol and depression. | ||
| And... | ||
| Three years later, I just had a realization one day. | ||
| I was like, if he was still alive, he'd beat the fuck out of me for wasting my life. | ||
| I've been wasting my life for 21 years because I'm afraid. | ||
| I'm afraid. | ||
| I'm too afraid to fail. | ||
| I'm too afraid of all these stupid reasons that all of us give ourselves in order to make ourselves feel better about not going after things. | ||
| But really, they're just that. | ||
| They're just excuses. | ||
| They're just things that make you feel better. | ||
| And they're bullshit. | ||
| They're all bullshit. | ||
| Almost every excuse we have is total bullshit because there's people with those excuses and with all those reasons and more, and they do it. | ||
| Like, what is your excuse? | ||
| And it just smacked me in the face one day. | ||
| And I was at that point when I could not ignore it any longer. | ||
| And this was going into 2003. So I was like... | ||
| I made it my New Year's resolution to do this. | ||
| One night I was sitting down with my father and he'd get into these long talks with me because I was always very quiet and he'd take me off to the side and his way to kind of Talk to me and get to know me better. | ||
| And he's like, so, why don't you tell me something you've never told anybody? | ||
| You know, I'm like, what do you mean? | ||
| Like, I killed somebody when I was little? | ||
| I'm like racking my brain what I could possibly tell him. | ||
| And, you know, that kept playing in my mind. | ||
| You want to fight? | ||
| And very, like, quietly, he's like, I want to fight one day. | ||
| And he's like, what? | ||
| He's like, I want to fight. | ||
| And he's like, what do you mean you want to fight? | ||
| And, you know, I told him and he's like, Well, why don't you? | ||
| And I told him all these reasons. | ||
| He's like, well, I cannot help you with all of your fears and doubts and this, but look, I'll make a deal with you. | ||
| If you quit drinking and dedicate yourself to this, I'll take care of all the financial things in order to let you do this. | ||
| I was like, he's like, we got a deal? | ||
| I was like, all right, yeah. | ||
| And he's like, points down, I was drinking a 40 at the time. | ||
| He's like, what about that drink in your hand? | ||
| And I was like... | ||
| Well, I was going to start tomorrow, so maybe I can finish this. | ||
| But I understood even at that age, you can't put things off like that. | ||
| If you're serious about it, you're going to do it now. | ||
| So I dumped out the rest of the 40 and the sink he had in there, and two days later I got into the gym. | ||
| Was it hard to wean yourself off the alcohol, though, if you were physically dependent on it? | ||
| It was both extremely difficult, yet I was so focused on this goal that none of those I had to overcome so much, not just the physical dependence on alcohol, but my lifestyle. | ||
| I changed so many things. | ||
| But I'd been putting this off for so long that I knew there was no time for me to waste. | ||
| I was so focused on this. | ||
| Once I made that switch in my mind, I'm going to go after this and there's nothing that's going to stop me. | ||
| I've wasted so many years already. | ||
| That everything I'm doing is going to be playing catch-up. | ||
| There's no way for me to get to... | ||
| I'd look at Sanchai and guys like that and I'd be like, I'm never going to get there. | ||
| So everything that I do has to be... | ||
| To get me closer to this goal. | ||
| And I can't allow, you know, my physical dependency or my doubts or any of these things slow me down because everything I'm doing, I have to play catch up, you know? | ||
| And, um... | ||
| Having that focus allowed me to overcome all of those physical and emotional and mental challenges. | ||
| And of course, that's not to say it was easy. | ||
| It was extremely difficult. | ||
| It was extremely difficult, but it was... | ||
| You got two choices. | ||
| You can allow these things to slow you down and hinder you and weaken you. | ||
| Or you can say, I'm going to go forward anyway. | ||
| It doesn't matter how afraid I am. | ||
| It doesn't matter how hurt I am. | ||
| It doesn't matter how tired I am. | ||
| This is what I want. | ||
| And I'm going to put everything that I have into this. | ||
| So that way... | ||
| When I'm done, when my life is over, when I can't do this anymore, I can look back and have no regrets that I didn't allow these things to slow me down. | ||
| I didn't allow the excuses that we all have hinder me and keep me from doing this. | ||
| Because one day we're going to wake up and realize we could have gone after these things. | ||
| And we didn't because of X, Y, and Z, but really those things aren't. | ||
| Aren't anything, you know? | ||
| Do you stop and think about those moments when you first started? | ||
| Because that's a profound life shift. | ||
| To go from being a guy who's kind of aimless and partying a lot, but knowing that you should do something with your life, to finally doing something. | ||
| What was it like when you finally started training? | ||
| What did it feel like? | ||
| Had you done anything athletic before that? | ||
| I was always athletic my whole life. | ||
| I was always really good at sports. | ||
| I hated the team aspect of things though. | ||
| I despised being on a team of any kind. | ||
| I love playing sports for the love of it. | ||
| You know, but anytime I was on, like, a team, I just hated it. | ||
| I despised it. | ||
| And, you know, by the time I was, like, I think 12, I completely turned my back on anything team-related. | ||
| Because I felt, to me, it felt like it just ruined all the beautiful things about the physicality of athletics. | ||
| You know, it put this... | ||
| It hindered me in a lot of ways. | ||
| And having to rely on other people was always a big thing. | ||
| It doesn't matter how hard I work because this person might not have worked at all. | ||
| And that's why I was so drawn to fighting because even though you do have a team, of course, it really is. | ||
| Everything is on you, the good and the bad. | ||
| There's nothing you can point to all these other things, but it's really just you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So yeah, I think back and I look back to that time... | ||
| What was the first day like? | ||
| It was... | ||
| Do you remember? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I do. | ||
| So I started out just doing private lessons. | ||
| I didn't even start doing classes until maybe six months to a year. | ||
| So I was doing private lessons on a daily basis. | ||
| My trainer, Master Chan, who's one of Tati's original instructors... | ||
| He had me in the gym at like 6am. | ||
| So this is January in Vegas, which is brutally cold, which not a lot of people realize. | ||
| And their gym had no heat. | ||
| All the windows were like broken, so there's no insulation or anything. | ||
| I was so excited, so nervous, and obviously I wanted to do really well and perform, and everything was so new that I didn't really have a lot... | ||
| I couldn't even really process it, so there wasn't a lot of... | ||
| There wasn't really a lot of thought that was going into it. | ||
| I was just excited. | ||
| I was just constantly excited and motivated and wanted to... | ||
| My whole goal was to fight. | ||
| You know, I was like, I want to fight, even if it's only one time. | ||
| So everything I did was with that mentality. | ||
| You know, I was like, I want to get better. | ||
| I want to get better. | ||
| I want to do everything that I can at every moment. | ||
| And I put every ounce of myself into every second of the day was geared towards this. | ||
| You know, I was singularly focused on this goal. | ||
| Can you remember the first day? | ||
| Can you remember the first day of footwork and holding your hands up? | ||
| The first day he has me up in the ring. | ||
| It must have been maybe the second or third day because... | ||
| I know there was other people there. | ||
| Maybe they were just hitting the bag and stuff. | ||
| So there was a couple of the other pro fighters there. | ||
| Or other. | ||
| They were pro fighters. | ||
| I was nobody. | ||
| And I'm up in the ring. | ||
| And so this is day one. | ||
| He's like, Shadowbox. | ||
| I've never done anything fighting related. | ||
| I'm like, What do you mean? | ||
| Like, I don't even know what that is. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like, what do you mean shadowbox? | ||
| So, like, so much of my, everything in my career has been, like, thrown into the deep end, can you swim kind of thing, and, like, this forced learning curve. | ||
| You know, I didn't get babied into anything. | ||
| You know, it's like... | ||
| All right, Shadowbox, go ahead. | ||
| And all these fighters are staring at me, watching me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing, but whatever. | |
| It was traumatic in a lot of ways, but having to confront that and face that, particularly me, because I'm naturally a very... | ||
| Shy person, a person that doesn't speak ever to anybody. | ||
| I mean, even now, you know, I'm still very quiet. | ||
| But if you knew me back then, I was basically a mute, you know, and I had no interaction with especially strangers and people I didn't know. | ||
| And even the ones that I do, I'd still barely even communicate with. | ||
| So all of this was so foreign to me. | ||
| This was like an alternate universe that I was in. | ||
| And yeah, it was so scary. | ||
| But it was like... | ||
| You don't have a choice. | ||
| Get up there and do it or get the fuck out of here. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So there wasn't time for me to really think about it or even be really nervous about it. | ||
| I was like, do it. | ||
| Shadowbox. | ||
| And this instructor, he barely spoke English, so it's not like I can say, hey, well, I don't really know what I'm doing and maybe you can show me some things. | ||
| Just go. | ||
| That's very much a Thai approach. | ||
| It's like, just do it. | ||
| I'm not going to tell you how. | ||
| I'm not going to explain the steps. | ||
| Just go kick the bag or hit it. | ||
| Just do it. | ||
| Yeah, it was scary. | ||
| But then once you got some momentum... | ||
| Once you had a couple of weeks under your belt and this started becoming a real normal part of your life, what was that feeling like where you realized, like, hey, I'm fucking actually doing this. | ||
| This is actually happening. | ||
| Well, every day I was taking significant jumps. | ||
| I mean, as I said, I've always been naturally athletic, so I was picking this up, like, quick, really quick. | ||
| I mean, even within a few weeks, people thought I'd been doing it for years. | ||
| And a lot of that does come from my physicality, but my drive to do it and to have my sights set so high that I was taking these quantum leaps every single day. | ||
| So, over the weeks and over the months, it really felt like I was like, oh, I'm on track. | ||
| I'm on the path I should be on. | ||
| I'm going to be amazing at this. | ||
| This is great. | ||
| I'm natural at this. | ||
| I'm going to be a champion one day. | ||
| I'm going to just be crushing people. | ||
| Everything was pointing in that direction with my development and eventually going into the classes and sparring and all those kinds of things. | ||
| It was always like, when do I get to fight? | ||
| When do I get to fight? | ||
| When do I get to fight? | ||
| I think it was nine months in, I finally got... | ||
| I got to fight, and I was like, oh, this is it. | ||
| This is my moment. | ||
| I'm going to go out there. | ||
| I'm going to crush this dude, and then I'm going to be on my way to the big time. | ||
| Even back then, there's no big time. | ||
| This was before YouTube. | ||
| This was before anyone even knew what Muay Thai was. | ||
| You had to tell everybody you did kickboxing, basically, which just crushed my soul every time. | ||
| Every time I say, well, it's like kickboxing. | ||
| And, you know, for Muay Thai people to have to say that, it's devastating. | ||
| It's like someone say, well, it's like karate. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| No disrespect to any of these other arts, but to say that it's that in order to help people. | ||
| Most of the time I would just say, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like kickboxing. | ||
| Instead of having to explain to them what it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so nine months in, there was going to be a fight in Salt Lake City, Utah, and a bunch of the other people at the gym were fighting as well, and we were all going to go up there and compete. | ||
| Is this an amateur fight? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Headgear? | ||
| No. | ||
| Yes, headgear, but the funny thing was we had headgear, but we didn't have shin guards. | ||
| We had eight-ounce gloves, and we had knees to the head, which was a trip. | ||
| Anyway, I was like, oh yeah, great, we get to fight. | ||
| I was so excited, and my pops and Gina, and we drove up there. | ||
| Like I said, I really felt like I was on my way, but when we got there, Um, the guy that I was originally supposed to fight, I don't remember if he backed out or it was just that he was closer in weight to somebody else. | ||
| Um, you know, and that was kind of the thing back then. | ||
| We would just show up at places and be like, you gotta fight for me or don't you? | ||
| And, um, they didn't. | ||
| And, um, I was like, oh my God, I was devastated. | ||
| I was devastated. | ||
| I'm like, I did all this work. | ||
| I was so ready. | ||
| And, Now I don't have a fight, and my trainer's like, well, is there somebody else you can get? | ||
| And so the promoter, you know, he's calling around, calling around, and finally he's like, well, there's one guy that's going to take it, but he outweighs you by 20 pounds, and he's had about 30 fights already. | ||
| I was like, let's do it. | ||
| I don't give a fuck, man. | ||
| I was like, I didn't do all this for nothing, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| And again, that was just our mentality. | ||
| The way that we came up and the people that we came up under was, you fight anytime, anywhere, anyone, any style, any weight, it doesn't matter. | ||
| So yeah, I didn't even really think about it as far as that goes. | ||
| I get to fight, that's fucking awesome, man. | ||
| I felt confident in a way, but it's also that you have no idea what you're really doing. | ||
| You can train your whole life, but if you've never fought, you don't know anything. | ||
| You have no concept of what it's like to be in there. | ||
| You have the hardest sparring in the world with a complete stranger, and it's night and day between a real fight and sparring. | ||
| Yeah, you want to feel confident going in there, but you have no concept of what it is. | ||
| So it's really just fake. | ||
| It's fake confidence. | ||
| I got a fucking crush, man. | ||
| So I got there and I have no concept of pacing myself or anything. | ||
| So I'm sprinting at this guy. | ||
| And in 30 seconds, I was just done. | ||
| I couldn't breathe. | ||
| I couldn't think. | ||
| I could barely even see. | ||
| It felt like I was underwater. | ||
| And it was the worst thing in the world because nothing this guy was doing was hurting me. | ||
| And every time he'd hit me, the whole crowd was like, oh! | ||
| And And all I wanted to do was just say, this isn't bothering me. | ||
| This isn't hurting. | ||
| I wanted to tell everybody, this isn't hurting me. | ||
| I can't breathe. | ||
| All I'm really trying to do is not pass out right now. | ||
| Physically, I couldn't do anything. | ||
| I was able to last for a while and do a couple decent things in there, but by the third round, he was just battering me, kneeing me in the face, and he just kept clenching me up and just kneeing the piss out of me, and there was nothing I could do, and they finally stopped it in the third round. | ||
| I was devastated, man. | ||
| I was devastated. | ||
| I remember walking back to the locker room, everyone in the crowd was cheering for me, like, oh, that was awesome, man. | ||
| Like, good job, good job. | ||
| I'm like, what is wrong with these people? | ||
| That wasn't good. | ||
| That was so terrible. | ||
| That was terrible. | ||
| And I was laying in the back and bleeding all over the place, and my opponent comes in. | ||
| He's like, dude, that was your first fight? | ||
| I was like, yeah. | ||
| He's like, man. | ||
| I hate to see you in like a year or two. | ||
| He's like, that was amazing. | ||
| That really stuck with me. | ||
| That one that he said that and also just the impact I saw that you could have on people. | ||
| That it's not necessarily about whether you win or lose. | ||
| It's what you show in there. | ||
| It's the heart that you show. | ||
| It's the spirit that you show. | ||
| And, you know, I had like a day or two when I was like, maybe this just isn't for me. | ||
| You know, I thought that I was going to be so good at this. | ||
| I thought that I was just going to like skyrocket to the top. | ||
| And I got crushed, man. | ||
| I didn't even make it out of the fight. | ||
| And like, maybe this isn't for me. | ||
| But I was forced to face that day one. | ||
| Like, do you want to do this regardless of how good you are, regardless of you win? | ||
| If you can't win and maybe you can't be the best in the world, do you still want to do this? | ||
| Yeah, I fucking do. | ||
| I love this so much. | ||
| And me having to face that so early on was... | ||
| It's extremely significant. | ||
| I thought so many of the people I trained with would go on these undefeated streaks, like 10, 15, 20 fights, but inevitably you will lose. | ||
| And if you haven't had to confront that early on, eventually you do. | ||
| Most of those people never fought again. | ||
| Or just like crushed them mentally where they weren't able to overcome it. | ||
| But I had to deal with it the first day and overcome it and be like, you know what? | ||
| That doesn't matter. | ||
| I'm going to bust my ass in the gym and make sure that never happens again. | ||
| And I went on to win like 19, 20 fights in a row from there. | ||
| And that was really... | ||
| A significant moment in my career where I had to confront the reality of this. | ||
| So much of fighting is a perfect metaphor for things in life. | ||
| If you really want something, you can't always focus on... | ||
| What the results are, or the immediate results, like winning and losing and all of these things. | ||
| So much of that is just on the surface, ego level of things. | ||
| And when you break it all down, why are you doing this? | ||
| I'm doing this because I love it. | ||
| I'm doing this to improve myself. | ||
| I'm doing this because it's what keeps me healthy mentally, physically, spiritually, and all of these things. | ||
| And that's the most important thing. | ||
| Yes, it was an extreme motivator to be better and not to let that happen to me again, but... | ||
| It really made things clear to me early on, like, what's important here. | ||
| Also, just to get over that, it's so psychologically important that you, like you were saying, you just kept getting sort of tossed to the wolves. | ||
| Everything you did was difficult. | ||
| It was almost symbolic of your journey that you were forced to fight someone who had 30 fights and 20 pounds heavier when you had no experience. | ||
| Trusting the process is... | ||
| You really only trust the process if it's difficult. | ||
| You know, that whole expression, trust the process. | ||
| Well, if you're fucking everybody up, what do you mean trust the process? | ||
| You're out there just fucking everybody up. | ||
| Of course I'm trusting the process. | ||
| I'm the man, right? | ||
| But when you get your ass handed to you, and then you have to rebuild, and you have to realize, well, there's a series of variables that you're encountering. | ||
| variables in speed and in aggressiveness and in styles and in trickery and some people are better than others at figuring you out and some people have a style that's tailor-made to defeat your style and it's good when that does happen yeah and not just to trust the process but to uh appreciate the journey yeah yeah and sometimes people they just want success well we all want success yeah of course we all want we always want things to be good | ||
| it's it's kind of that same mentality of you know like you want to give your kids what you never had but a lot of times when you do that you end up with a spoiled brat who has no concept of work ethic and what it really takes and And you're hindering them even more so than you were because you had to confront all these things. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| And it's unfortunate that so many things that you would think would help us or really hurt us in the end. | ||
| And it needs to be difficult. | ||
| It needs to be a struggle. | ||
| And of course, you want... | ||
| The harder you have to work in the long run, the stronger you're going to be, the better you're going to be, the more independent you're going to be, the more self-sufficient you're going to be. | ||
| And all of these things are going to better you. | ||
| So then in a lot of ways, it's like maybe I should make my kid's life hell and then he's going to be really strong and he's going to be an entrepreneur and he's going to change the world. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, it's hard. | ||
| I have children. | ||
| It's tricky. | ||
| You don't want them to have a hard life, but you do. | ||
| One of the most difficult things, too, is we're all on our own journey, and what's beneficial for one is detrimental to somebody else. | ||
| Yeah, it's good to have advice. | ||
| It's good to have somebody that believes in you, but that's not necessarily going to help you just because sometimes that might end up hurting you. | ||
| Having people that do believe in you and telling you how great you are and opening doors for you and all of these things. | ||
| In many ways, those things can be extremely detrimental and you don't develop the things that you inevitably will need. | ||
| In the long run. | ||
| And there's no one way to get anywhere. | ||
| It's so complex and there's so many variations of things that apply to success in anything. | ||
| I have one favorite day in the weather in Los Angeles. | ||
| The weather in Los Angeles is perfect, right? | ||
| It's just so often it's like 80 degrees and sunny. | ||
| It's like 90% of the time 80 degrees and sunny. | ||
| Me and my friend Brian and my friend Steve Rinella, we filmed this television show called Meat Eater and went on a hunting trip in Prince of Wales Island in Alaska, where it's the rainiest part in North America. | ||
| It's so fucking rainy. | ||
| You think you're going to stay dry in your tent? | ||
| But there's no such thing as dry. | ||
| And I realized this one of the first nights, I had to get up and take a piss in the middle of the night, and I had a headlamp, and I turned my headlamp on, and inside my tent was like it was raining, because there was so much mist. | ||
| There was moisture, like so much moisture, that turning on the headlamp was like you were doing it in fog, like everything was wet. | ||
| My sleeping bag was wet. | ||
| My clothes were wet. | ||
| And I was like, oh, you don't get dry. | ||
| There's no dry. | ||
| We had one day where we had a fire. | ||
| One day we figured out how to start a fire. | ||
| Actually using Fritos is a pro tip. | ||
| Fritos are made with some fucking crazy toxic grease that they work great as lighter fuel. | ||
| If you light them, they stay lit for a long time. | ||
| And then we're taking the inside of logs and using that wood and wood that was maybe under the bottom of other wood so it didn't get as wet. | ||
| We slowly put a fire together. | ||
| Anyway, I was there for six, seven days. | ||
| We got back to LA, and it was 80 and sunny. | ||
| And the feeling of that sun, I was like, this is the same sun I always experience. | ||
| But it's always just, you know, it's normal. | ||
| It's no big deal. | ||
| It's just California weather. | ||
| Another day in paradise, but not that day. | ||
| That day, I was like, fuck. | ||
| Fuck, this is amazing. | ||
| I was driving on the street. | ||
| My face felt good. | ||
| Like, everything, it felt good. | ||
| And I called my friend Steve up. | ||
| I go, dude, I've never been happier. | ||
| Like, this is like the happiest day I've ever experienced. | ||
| And I think it's because we were suffering in just cold and rain for seven days. | ||
| You're like, you need that. | ||
| Because if you just have these goddamn sunny days, you're like, everybody out here in California, you just spoiled baby. | ||
| Well, it's like the, uh, if everybody's winning, nobody's winning, nobody's losing. | ||
| So if you don't have the good and the bad, you don't even understand, you can't appreciate the good or what the bad can be, the helpful things that it does. | ||
| And yeah, we don't want that, but those are the things that help you grow. | ||
| And those are the things that we inevitably need. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um, you know, I, uh, I hate to. | |
| Well, I don't hate to because I want to do this. | ||
| I'm going to toss a little hand grenade at you and see what you want to do with it here. | ||
| But I've been thinking about this a lot lately and wanting to communicate my story and these things that have happened to me. | ||
| And then this opportunity came up and this opportunity to reach a lot of people. | ||
| There's that quote that says, be the person that you needed when you were younger. | ||
| You know, and Gina has that on her wall and it stares me in the face every day and I realize that I now am the person that I needed when I was younger and if somebody would have opened up their mouth and let me know that I wasn't alone and that I wasn't so isolated and so many horrible things that we all deal with is because we feel isolation. | ||
| We don't think anyone could understand and we don't think that Anyone else is going through these things. | ||
| And if we did, just that knowledge of not being alone would be so significant. | ||
| But when I was 14 years old, I was molested by my stepmother. | ||
| And this went on for well over a year, close to two years. | ||
| It was obviously detrimental to me and these are things that I'm just now finally starting to be able to understand. | ||
| Realize what happened to me and realize how young I was at the time. | ||
| When I meet a 14-year-old kid, you're a fucking baby. | ||
| You're a baby. | ||
| It's like when we think about ourselves when we were younger, at least myself, I still feel the same I did when I was younger. | ||
| I was just little. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But you don't really understand how little you were until you have a little 12, 14-year-old kid standing next to you. | ||
| How could that happen? | ||
| I saw a study that said one in six males are abused by the time they're 18, which means every one of us probably knows somebody that this has happened to. | ||
| And to think how... | ||
| Devastating it is to women, but to men, it's such a different thing because it's almost viewed, well, when it happens from a woman, it's almost viewed as a good thing. | ||
| It's a positive thing. | ||
| I wish that happened to me when I was a kid. | ||
| I want to be molested. | ||
| We're not able to really understand it and understand the damage that it does. | ||
| If I wouldn't have felt so alone and so isolated at the time, I don't necessarily know if things would have changed, but I definitely would have Wouldn't have felt so alone. | ||
| You know, it wouldn't have felt like there's nobody in the world that could possibly understand this. | ||
| There's nobody that... | ||
| Who can I talk to about this? | ||
| You know, like, I can't talk to my friends. | ||
| A couple of my friends knew. | ||
| They thought it was the coolest shit ever. | ||
| You know, they were like, I want that. | ||
| I want that bad. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| Well, it was your stepmom, too, which is... | ||
| Dude, it was... | ||
| So confusing. | ||
| I was very conflicted by it. | ||
| I couldn't understand it at all. | ||
| And then to have this person mentally manipulating me and making like Oh, it's not a big deal. | ||
| It's almost like it's a good thing. | ||
| There's nothing wrong. | ||
| I'm not a stranger. | ||
| As I said, I started drinking when I was 12. This really just derailed me so much and made me internalize and put up these barriers and walls around me and things that, like I said, I'm only even just at this age starting to understand, like, the negative... | ||
| Habits that this created in me of distrust and of negativity and of having to be alone and not trust people and so many things like that. | ||
| Gene is probably the only person that I've ever talked to in depth about this. | ||
| I mean, a couple of people in my family know and almost none of my friends know. | ||
| I've never spoken to this to anybody. | ||
| I try to go to a therapist once and talk about this, but I started realizing this therapist is getting more out of our interaction than I am. | ||
| He's an overweight person that needs help. | ||
| Self-confidence help. | ||
| I'm like, oh, geez, man. | ||
| Like, who can I fucking talk to about this? | ||
| And, you know, maybe I can't talk to anybody, but I am in a position to where I can... | ||
| Reach out and let other people know that they're not the only ones going through this. | ||
| That has been weighing on me so much lately, especially over the last few years. | ||
| I'm like, you are in a position to be able, even if it only helps one person, you can. | ||
| You just don't know how to. | ||
| I'm like, well, I could write about it or I could do a video blog or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. | |
| How can I do this? | ||
| Should I do this? | ||
| I don't know if that's a good thing. | ||
| It's not like I'm a psychologist or someone that can help with this. | ||
| But I just felt like I need to express this and communicate this. | ||
| Maybe it can do some good for even one person. | ||
| If I didn't, that would haunt me forever. | ||
| I had an experience when I was 13 with a girl who lived up the street who was 21 a couple times. | ||
| But it was very different than your experience. | ||
| It was... | ||
| I mean, I'm ashamed to say it. | ||
| It was kind of fun. | ||
| You know, it was different. | ||
| I couldn't believe it. | ||
| It was very weird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it definitely, like... | ||
| Kind of screwed up my idea of what boy-girl interaction was. | ||
| I didn't go from, like, 13-year-olds, most of the time, they're like, you want a kiss? | ||
| I don't know, do you? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| To, you know, this girl grabbing my dick and pulling her tits out. | ||
| She was a woman, you know, she was 21. Yeah. | ||
| It didn't... | ||
| It didn't hurt me, like, your story. | ||
| Like, your story hurts. | ||
| Like, it sounds like you were betrayed and you were... | ||
| And also, the fact that it was your stepmom, I mean... | ||
| With me, it was like, what the fuck was that all about? | ||
| And I didn't tell anybody. | ||
| I didn't tell anybody for like fucking years and years later. | ||
| I probably didn't tell anyone until I was in my 20s. | ||
| And I think I probably told a girlfriend when I was in my 20s. | ||
| And she was like, when was the first time you ever fooled around? | ||
| I was like, well... | ||
| Because that was really the first time I had ever fooled around with anyone, was this 21-year-old woman. | ||
| It was the same thing for me. | ||
| I didn't even kiss a girl until I was, I don't know, 12, 13, late. | ||
| Because I was such a shy person. | ||
| So I went from just kissing to that. | ||
| There was no in-between. | ||
| I think the same with me. | ||
| I don't even think I kissed. | ||
| I think I kissed her. | ||
| I think she was the first person I kissed. | ||
| To just have your innocence ripped away like that and to be thrust into this adult thing. | ||
| Obviously, the situation was that much worse. | ||
| My stepmom and it being molested. | ||
| It's such a different thing than A woman are being raped, forcefully raped. | ||
| Oh, it's way different, yeah. | ||
| But psychologically and emotionally, you know, it's devastating. | ||
| It is obviously a rape. | ||
| And you were living with her as well? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The whole thing's terrible. | ||
| And you said it went on for a year? | ||
| Longer than a year. | ||
| It was probably close to two years. | ||
| How did it stop? | ||
| I stopped it, actually. | ||
| You know, this was something, you know, I never felt right about this. | ||
| I was very conflicted by it, you know, and I was like, this definitely isn't a good thing, but I don't know. | ||
| I definitely didn't understand how bad of a thing it was, you know. | ||
| And again, she was very manipulative. | ||
| And anytime I would kind of bring that subject up, like, yeah, I don't think this is okay. | ||
| This feels wrong. | ||
| And she'd be like, no, no. | ||
| And find this way to rationalize it or make it okay. | ||
| But as time went on, I was just like, this is bad. | ||
| How old was she? | ||
| She was probably 30, young 30s. | ||
| That was another thing. | ||
| Once I got to that age and then I saw a 14-year-old, I'm like, what the fuck? | ||
| I couldn't even conceptualize how twisted this person was until I got that age. | ||
| How could you look at a baby, a child, and do that? | ||
| How could you do that? | ||
| You know the expression, hurt people hurt people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And unfortunately, a lot of that for me helps you rationalize it and make it like, oh, well, she's fucked up. | ||
| And even my father, after he found out, he kept this lady around for a while. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| After he found out? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they kind of split up and divorced, but they kind of worked together still. | ||
| And, you know, he kept her around for quite some time. | ||
| And, you know, that alone was extremely damaging to me. | ||
| A betrayal. | ||
| Such a betrayal and such a traumatic thing that I didn't even really... | ||
| Understand how damaging that was after the fact until really till recently, you know, because I myself would rationalize it. | ||
| Well, you know, he didn't want to like, like be an asshole and like send her off and like she was an alcoholic. | ||
| And, you know, he's just trying to make this horrible situation okay for all of us. | ||
| And, you know, I didn't really think about how fucked up he was in the whole situation and how much more damaging it was in the long run to me by not having my father protect me. | ||
| Like, if this happened to my child, I would fucking murder a woman that did this, you know? | ||
| I certainly wouldn't keep her around, and I certainly wouldn't just handle it the way that he did. | ||
| It magnified the damage that much more so because of the way that it was handled. | ||
| To not be taken care of by adults, by not being taken care of by my father, By the people around me that were supposed to love me and take care of me. | ||
| And they did the exact opposite. | ||
| Like, they fucked my world up, you know? | ||
| And I put band-aids of alcohol on it my whole life, you know? | ||
| And I understand, like, why I did that and why it was... | ||
| I mean, I really was... | ||
| Trying to kill myself, really. | ||
| I mean, when you look at it, that's what I was doing. | ||
| I was just doing a long process of it, you know, and that's what we do. | ||
| It's like, we don't want to take a gun and kill ourselves, but I don't want to really live, and I want to check out of this place. | ||
| The sooner the better. | ||
| So I'm going to do everything in my power to make it happen. | ||
| And that way I can't say I killed myself, but I was killing myself every day and putting myself in situations that were extremely dangerous and detrimental and damaging. | ||
| And that's what I was doing. | ||
| Half of my life I was Just destroyed. | ||
| I'm trying to use this second part of my life to make up for that, make up for the damage that was done and to try to Turn a horrible situation and a negative situation, something that I could easily point to and allow, destroy my life, which is what I was doing, and trying to do the opposite. | ||
| Again, with the fight approach, it's like you have a loss, you have a horrible thing happen, you have an injury, what are you going to do with it? | ||
| Are you going to let it destroy you and break you and never do this again and be depressed and bitch and complain and whine about it? | ||
| We're going to say, yeah, shitty things happen to all of us. | ||
| Fucked up things happen and we all have the excuse to let it destroy our lives and to use it to make ourselves feel better about drinking and drugs and just being an asshole. | ||
| We all have reasons to be dicks and we all have reasons to take it out on other people. | ||
| But that doesn't mean that you should, and that doesn't mean that you don't still have a choice. | ||
| It's that victim mentality. | ||
| And this is something that I just started understanding, because, you know, that term victim mentality, I'm like, yeah, well, I'm a fucking victim. | ||
| But what victim mentality really is, is feeling like you don't have a role to play. | ||
| From that point. | ||
| Yeah, you might not have been able to control these terrible things that have happened to you, but you do have control over what you do from there. | ||
| You have control over whether you use that to go into a more positive light or you use that to drastically damage you and, you know, be this burden that you carry. | ||
| Well, sometimes I think When someone like you goes through something like this and comes out on the other end, what you can do by talking about this can set a path for so many people to understand that, | ||
| you know, someone looks at you, you know, they see you fighting on television and they see you on the internet and, you know, successful Muay Thai fighter and, you know, you look cool, you have this beautiful girlfriend, everything seems so positive. | ||
| When you're a young kid and your life is shit, like mine was, clearly like yours was, you look at these people like they're nothing like you. | ||
| They're aliens. | ||
| They're some different thing. | ||
| The world's opened up to them so easily, and they're better than you. | ||
| When someone hears you talk about your experience, the alcoholism, the abuse, the isolation, the feeling like a loser, and all the things that are so relatable to so many people, when you can talk about this, you're setting a map That other people can follow. | ||
| And this is something that's so important in culture and in human beings. | ||
| We're all part of some strange evolution of the human race. | ||
| And the things that our grandparents went through were likely unfucking believably horrific. | ||
| The things their grandparents went through were probably magnitudes worse. | ||
| And this is just how human beings have gone from being monkeys To being what we are now, and it's happening very rapidly. | ||
| And one of the things that accelerates this understanding of consequences and of the ability to rise to the occasion and overcome obstacles and to be able to use adversity as a tool to better yourself is someone like you. | ||
| What you're doing right now is very, very beneficial to so many people. | ||
| Millions of people are listening to this right now. | ||
| And so many of them, this is going to resonate with them. | ||
| They're going to say, oh, this guy who is this fucking badass kickboxer, excuse me, Muay Thai, right? | ||
| Badass dude who's this, like, you know, like, people admire you. | ||
| And to hear this is so, it's so powerful. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| I'm so glad you said it. | ||
| I'm so glad you talked all of it from the beginning, you know, your earlier struggles to this, because this is medicine for people, man. | ||
| There's a lot of people that are hearing this right now, and they're going, I can do it too. | ||
| I can do it too. | ||
| Yeah, and that's always been a motivational thing for me, to try to be honest with the things that I deal with, the ups and the downs, and to show my losses, to show my injuries, to be vocal about the doubts that I have, that I still have, that I still deal with. | ||
| It's easy to look at these people in the spotlight and be like, They don't deal with fear. | ||
| They don't deal with pain. | ||
| They don't deal with doubts. | ||
| They don't deal with feeling like they're inadequate. | ||
| I think it was a clip or something you were talking about the imposter syndrome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Amazing you seemingly are on the outside to all of these people. | ||
| Like, we're all just human beings. | ||
| We are all just individuals that have made choices and have steered our lives in certain directions. | ||
| But it's almost like when you make it to a point, it's like, oh, they don't deal with this anymore. | ||
| I deal with the exact same fears, doubts, and all of these things that I dealt with day one. | ||
| To this day, I still deal with them. | ||
| Those same questions, they've never gone away, ever gone away. | ||
| You learn how to handle them better, and you get strengthened by them, but they don't necessarily disappear. | ||
| And a lot of times they can get worse over the years because now you're in a position where you're expected to be a certain way. | ||
| People have expectations of you. | ||
| You're supposed to be this superhuman being or you're supposed to be extremely confident or you're supposed to only put on A-plus performances and you're not allowed to fail. | ||
| You're not allowed to be human anymore. | ||
| And when we can We've humanized these things and it lets people realize that they can do it too. | ||
| We're not necessarily made up of anything different than anybody else. | ||
| We've just gone through a process of learning and developing and diving off of cliffs that we didn't know where they were going. | ||
| That's what we all have to do. | ||
| The people in these spotlights, they're just human beings. | ||
| The more that you meet them and read about their stories and You know, that's why I love reading autobiographies. | ||
| It's like, geez, the things these people have had to overcome, they weren't handed anything. | ||
| More than anything, it was more devastating and detrimental, and they've had to overcome more than you could possibly imagine. | ||
| And it wasn't just given to them. | ||
| They had to work and strive and struggle and fail, fail over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, until they got to where they got to. | ||
| And still do. | ||
| They still do. | ||
| They still fail constantly. | ||
| We all fail constantly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, failure is a gift. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| Once you make that switch, once you understand it, you can view these losses or these things that happen or these struggles as... | ||
| I always view them as challenges. | ||
| Be like, are you going to quit? | ||
| Are you going to give up? | ||
| I always view when I'm tired in the ring or on a workout, I'm like... | ||
| You want to quit? | ||
| I'm like, fuck you, man. | ||
| I view that voice in your head. | ||
| That devil that's looming over your shoulders. | ||
| You're going to quit. | ||
| You're a failure. | ||
| I'm like, you know what? | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| I'm not quitting. | ||
| I'm never going to quit. | ||
| I'm never going to stop. | ||
| And there's nothing you can do. | ||
| So keep talking, but I'm going forward. | ||
| Is there a time will you ever get past that and you understand that you're never gonna quit and instead just concentrate on the task at hand? | ||
| Or do you think that that that voice that you're duking it out with that you take that motherfucker to the grave You definitely take it to the grave. | ||
| I think we feel like we get farther away from it and we get stronger and we get more confident, but you never get farther away from it. | ||
| I compare it to my alcoholism. | ||
| It's like I could go 10 years without ever drinking again, but all it takes is one bad day. | ||
| We are all one bad day of suffering. | ||
| Being in the worst situations ever. | ||
| And that's why it's so important to, you know, you look at people on the streets and things like that, but like, you know how easy that can happen? | ||
| Like how many bad days or bad situations would it take to turn a successful person into that? | ||
| Not a lot. | ||
| Like we're all just balancing on this very delicate thing that, um, It seems like we're all strong and safe and all this, but when the power goes out, the world's going to go to hell like that. | ||
| We just pretend like it's not because that's how we get through the day. | ||
| To your point is... | ||
| I don't think we're ever any farther away from those things that held us back before. | ||
| We get stronger and we learn how to process them and we understand it more and we understand the series of things that will take us down that road or get us farther away from it, but it's just right there. | ||
| No matter how much we learn and develop, I think sometimes that makes it even more scarier. | ||
| It's like the higher you get, the farther you have to fall. | ||
| And the more you can be aware of that, that you're never going to get farther away from it. | ||
| You always need to be diligent, that you always need to... | ||
| Do things that are going to steer you in a more positive way. | ||
| I think that is the goal to not falling back on that. | ||
| I think the worst thing that we can do is have this belief that we're past it. | ||
| It's never going to happen again. | ||
| I'm not an alcoholic anymore. | ||
| I'm not a drug addict anymore. | ||
| I'm not depressed anymore. | ||
| That's what's helped me. | ||
| I did think one day I would be so far away from it that it would never be a thought anymore, but by knowing that it's always right there, that keeps me sharp. | ||
| It's like you need that thing to keep you at your best, or else we start to get lazy. | ||
| It's that same concept of having people that push you in the gym or in life or etc. | ||
| If you don't have somebody pushing you, you can only ever push yourself so hard. | ||
| You might think you're pushing yourself really hard, but you don't really have a basis for where that is. | ||
| So like for myself, I always run my sprints on a treadmill because a treadmill doesn't lie. | ||
| This is how fast you're going, and this is how long you're doing it. | ||
| Now, you can go out on the street and say, I was going as fast as humanly possible, but you're always going to hold yourself back a little bit. | ||
| That's just the way we are as human beings, that safety net that we have ingrained in us to not go over that edge. | ||
| But if you're not pushing that edge, you're not developing, and you're always holding yourself back a little bit, a little bit, and no matter how hard you think you're going or how honest you think you're being, unless you Have somebody. | ||
| It's so important to have people in your lives that keep you in that sharpened state, that question you, that push you. | ||
| For me, Gina's always been that way for me. | ||
| That person is like, she's not going to look at me and let me bullshit, keep me honest, sometimes to an extreme extent. | ||
| I'm like, give me a little bit of a break here. | ||
| It's like that person that... | ||
| That pushes you. | ||
| And it's uncomfortable to be pushed. | ||
| You don't want to be pushed. | ||
| I want to relax. | ||
| I don't want to sit on the beach and drink beers and do all these things. | ||
| But is that going to help me get to a better place in my life, a better place in my mind, in my heart? | ||
| No, that's going to allow me to just be a lazy piece of shit and just drift off and die and be no benefit to myself or anyone else for that matter. | ||
| So as uncomfortable as it is to be pushed and as uncomfortable as it is to be pressured and to want to excel, we all need those things. | ||
| You're either improving or you're declining. | ||
| I think that's such an important thing to keep in mind. | ||
| It's only one or the other. | ||
| There is no in the middle. | ||
| It's like the concept of balance. | ||
| You never find balance. | ||
| Because once you find it, you lose it. | ||
| You're always jumping on both sides of this line, too much or too little. | ||
| You're either going too fast or too slow. | ||
| And we're trying to find that perfect balance of everything. | ||
| And you'll never can find it. | ||
| But knowing that you never can find it forces you to be diligent about all these things and to constantly be trying to find it. | ||
| And the more you try to find that, the more you're going to develop and learn ways that aren't the right way and then finding what does work. | ||
| It's like trying to find your calling and your passion in life. | ||
| It's like you don't have to necessarily know what that is, but Whittle it down by, what don't you want to do? | ||
| What do you hate? | ||
| Don't even look like what you like. | ||
| What do you hate? | ||
| I don't want to do this, I don't want to do this, I don't want to do this. | ||
| I learned very early on at a young age, I do not want to go down this path that I see everybody on. | ||
| Go to school, get a job, have kids, get married, retire, die. | ||
| I I don't want that. | ||
| I don't know what I do want. | ||
| I just know that, to me, I don't want anything to do with that, and I'm going to go in the exact opposite direction. | ||
| Whatever that is, as long as I'm far away from that, that's where I'm going to be. | ||
| Well, it's one of the benefits of being an outsider. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| When you're an outsider and you see all these people that are supposedly doing the right thing, but living in these sort of empty... | ||
| meaningless lives that they don't enjoy particularly that they don't enjoy you know and then you know when I was a kid I I always looked at normal people living normal lives I could never relate I never understood it you know I also grew up from a broken home and we were also on welfare and you know the whole deal because I think a lot of motivated people come from a place of despair when they're younger and I always had this thought in my head that one day I would make it one day I'm gonna make it | ||
| I'm gonna make it and then one day I realized and I don't know when I realized it probably when like on paper I'd already made it I realized, oh, there's no such place. | ||
| This is not real. | ||
| You can't ever... | ||
| You don't make it. | ||
| No one makes it. | ||
| Every day, you have to be trying to do better. | ||
| First of all, there's no perfect human. | ||
| Let's accept that. | ||
| You're always going to be flawed. | ||
| You're always going to be subject to fits of rage and envy and all the things that you wish that you would never have in your mind. | ||
| So you've got to constantly be working to make sure that that never happens. | ||
| You constantly be working to make sure that you're always evaluating your perspective on life and always looking at things. | ||
| Meditate. | ||
| Constantly meditate. | ||
| Make sure that you approach life with a learned perspective. | ||
| Like you're a better person than you were the day before. | ||
| And whatever you're trying to do, whether it's fighting or whether you have an art form that you practice, whatever it is that you're doing, You're trying to do better every day and you never, even if you accomplish some amazing work of art, that's just that day. | ||
| The next day you got to go back to work. | ||
| Like if you have a world championship fight and you've trained for eight weeks and you win by knockout and the spectacular result and you're very happy with the result, you got a day or two to relax. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You've got a day or two, and then you're like, fuck, okay, now what? | ||
| Well, now you've got to get back to work. | ||
| And if you think that there's some place, like a movie, where you're holding hands with your loved ones and the fucking sunset's going on and the credits roll, that's horseshit. | ||
| And we have this idea in our head that there's this place that you can get to where you've... | ||
| Air quotes, made it. | ||
| And I'm here to tell you, that motherfucker doesn't exist. | ||
| I mean, obviously I'm not the most successful person in the world, but on paper, I've accomplished a lot of shit, and it doesn't mean a goddamn thing. | ||
| Every fucking day, every fucking day I get up and I'm like, alright, I've got to figure out how to do this, I've got to work on this new bit. | ||
| Okay, I got this podcast today. | ||
| I got to be on point. | ||
| Let me think about this. | ||
| Let me read this book. | ||
| Let me, you know, whatever the subject is. | ||
| Let me get into it. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| If you don't, you're going to feel like shit. | ||
| Yeah, it's that destination mentality. | ||
| Yeah, there's no destination. | ||
| It's just a journey. | ||
| You're never going to get there. | ||
| It doesn't exist. | ||
| There's nowhere to go. | ||
| There's nowhere to go. | ||
| As soon as you get there, you're like, geez, I'm just as far away from that thing that I thought because as you develop, the things that you think you want develop too. | ||
| Like, oh, one day I'm going to be rich, but the richer you get, the richer you want to become. | ||
| Well, then you start filling up your life with these meaningless destinations, right? | ||
| Which are material objects. | ||
| Like, I want a fucking yacht, bitch. | ||
| I want a jet. | ||
| And you're like, I want a bigger jet. | ||
| Tom's got a fucking jet, but I want a big jet. | ||
| I want a show. | ||
| I'll pull my jet up beside his jet. | ||
| Let him know, motherfucker, there's levels to this game. | ||
| And that's what people do. | ||
| They fill their lives up with meaningless possessions. | ||
| And they still aren't happy. | ||
| Use it as a band-aid to cover up what is the real thing here. | ||
| Do you know how many really successful people I know that are fucking medicated to shit? | ||
| All of them. | ||
| A lot of them. | ||
| More so than the people that aren't in a lot of ways. | ||
| The people that struggle, they're on a better medication. | ||
| For real. | ||
| The struggle of a hard-working person that can get done with a day of hard work and have a feeling of accomplishment and then go home to your family and get going again, knowing you have to get up in the morning and do it again, knowing you don't have enough money to buy a yacht, but knowing you have enough money to put food on the table and there's a satisfaction to be able to provide that, that's a better medicine. | ||
| Well, that's the thing with why it's so important and vital to travel and go to these third world countries. | ||
| These people literally have nothing and are inviting perfect strangers into their homes and giving them things that they do not even have themselves. | ||
| Like, why are these people so happy? | ||
| Why are they so at peace? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because they understand what's important. | ||
| It's not this materialistic thing. | ||
| And that's not to say that materials are bad, but we view them as these objects of success. | ||
| And I've made it, and things are perfect in my life. | ||
| And they do the exact opposite in a lot of ways. | ||
| If you don't have a... | ||
| Good grasp of what's really important in this life. | ||
| And unfortunately, a lot of times we need everything taken away for us to really understand what those things really are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can appreciate some things. | ||
| You can appreciate a nice car or a nice house. | ||
| But if you get really caught up in them, you are trying to fill up a bucket with a hole in it. | ||
| And it's never going to fill up. | ||
| You're always just going to look for bigger and bigger things to try to fill that bucket up. | ||
| And you're going to feel... | ||
| Full of anxiety all the time, chasing that. | ||
| And there's no real satisfaction. | ||
| That's why, you know, when you look at, one of the things that people look at, when you look at people that are extremely materialistic, that, you know, wear the most fancy jewelry and drive the most fancy cars and the biggest houses, we always think they're shallow. | ||
| Always. | ||
| I mean, isn't that funny? | ||
| Like, the thing that you would look at in terms of, like, markers for success. | ||
| Markers is like... | ||
| Material things are the big ones, right? | ||
| They're the big markers for success. | ||
| The big house. | ||
| That's the big one, right? | ||
| Big ass fucking mansion. | ||
| Look at this mansion. | ||
| Big everything. | ||
| Big fucking rock on its finger. | ||
| Big chain. | ||
| Big this, big that. | ||
| There's nothing there. | ||
| There's nothing there. | ||
| And so ingrained in us from the time that we're born. | ||
| Because it's hard to get. | ||
| That's why it's a trick. | ||
| It's one of those things that's hard to get, so you think you want to get it. | ||
| Because there's a lot of things that are hard to get that are worth getting. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean, becoming a great fighter is hard, but it's worth doing. | ||
| Because once you do do it, and you realize, like, there's an expression that I've used before, but my Taekwondo instructor said to me when I was a little boy, he said, martial arts are a vehicle for developing your human potential. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I remember that. | ||
| I'm like, oh, shit. | ||
| And I've used that many times, explained it to people. | ||
| But that is the benefit of getting good at a martial art. | ||
| You go through this difficult thing, and then through that, you reap all these personality rewards. | ||
| You reap these character rewards. | ||
| You reap this understanding of what you're capable of. | ||
| If you... | ||
| Are capable of making it through a brutal camp and getting up in the morning when you know you don't want to, that alarm clock goes off and you're like, I don't want to fucking run. | ||
| But you do it. | ||
| You go out and run and you do it every day and you get through it and then you're successful. | ||
| And you realize that you have this incredible endurance because of the discipline that you put in. | ||
| You realize that you have this incredible skill and this understanding of how to fight correctly because of all the time and the hours and the focus. | ||
| You're a better person because of that, right? | ||
| That's a real goal. | ||
| But that yacht... | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, I'm gonna work 16 hours a day so I can get a bigger yacht. | ||
| And then, you know, I need a house with bigger windows. | ||
| There's a nonsense to that. | ||
| Like, look, I'm not saying if you can afford a nice house Get a fucking nice house. | ||
| It's great to have a nice house. | ||
| What I'm saying is it's not the end. | ||
| It's you. | ||
| You are the project. | ||
| Your mind is the project. | ||
| How you treat people is the project. | ||
| The way you are with your family and your friends and your loved ones and the people you communicate with, get better at that. | ||
| That's the goal in this life. | ||
| The goal in this life is how we treat each other. | ||
| I know, and I wish these were things that were taught. | ||
| No, no, no, no, it's better. | ||
| It's better that you didn't learn it that way. | ||
| Because you had to figure it out yourself. | ||
| Yes, because you had to figure it out yourself, and because you can explain it to people. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| You, in particular, that you can explain it to people, having gone through this horrific adversity, and come out on the other end with a message. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so other people that are going through some tough shit, you've got the medicine. | ||
| The medicine is your, you've actually experienced it. | ||
| And, you know, it's a map. | ||
| It's a map of the territory. | ||
| It's not a fucking pill that you can take and all of a sudden everything's going to be better. | ||
| But what it is is a map of the territory and a knowledge. | ||
| Hey, you can get through these woods and on the other side there's a beautiful green meadow and there's a lake and it's really nice. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| You know, I think that was one of the benefits of the way I grew up, which was really hard and horrible, but I got to see firsthand both sides of money. | ||
| You know, I went from living in a basement with five other people and living on welfare to living with my father in a mansion. | ||
| And it's like... | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| All this money and all this stuff is just emptiness and meaningless and it doesn't necessarily equate to real happiness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, it doesn't. | |
| And like, why are we all chasing this so hard? | ||
| And I got to see that firsthand very, very early on. | ||
| I was like, I don't want this at all. | ||
| Well, it's a trick. | ||
| It's like the same reason why people love to play video games. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because they're difficult. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| But there's no real reward, unless you're a professional video game player and you make a living doing it. | ||
| There's no real reward. | ||
| You just get better at it and you get some sort of a sense of satisfaction. | ||
| I mean, there's something to be gained from it. | ||
| In fact, some video games they've actually shown can increase your cognitive performance and other things, similar to the way chess does. | ||
| But the trap is that they're hard to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| So when we see things that are difficult, human beings are sort of puzzle and problem-solving oriented. | ||
| We see puzzles we want to solve, and we see mysteries we want to find out. | ||
| That's why everybody's into, like, Bigfoot and UFOs and shit, because it's a mystery. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, what is it? | |
| What do you think it is? | ||
| Like, we have a natural inclination to try to solve things like that. | ||
| And we think that because... | ||
| In life, look, if you try to solve where the food is, you survive. | ||
| That's what made us alive. | ||
| That's why our DNA has been passed down for all these hundreds of thousands of years. | ||
| Because our ancestors figured out where the food is. | ||
| They figured out how to drill a hole in the ice and fish. | ||
| They figured out how to survive. | ||
| This is why things that are difficult to do are attractive to us. | ||
| But we have to be able to differentiate between things that are difficult and meaningful and things that are difficult and bullshit. | ||
| You know Brian Callen? | ||
| My friend Brian Callen said something to me once when we were really young. | ||
| And it was the perfect thing. | ||
| We were both in our 20s. | ||
| And he said, all you want is enough money so you don't have to worry about what something costs when you go to a restaurant. | ||
| He's like, everything else is bullshit. | ||
| I was like, you're right. | ||
| That feeling of being able to have enough money to just get a nice meal at a restaurant and not sweat it. | ||
| Everything else is gravy. | ||
| They've done countless studies on this. | ||
| Once your basic human needs are met, you have food, shelter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everything from that point on doesn't correlate to any kind of happiness and in many ways is the exact opposite. | ||
| You know, creates more stress and all of these things. | ||
| Like how much do you really need? | ||
| And the more you think you need, the more problems you're creating and the more distractions you are from the important things in life and developing as a human being. | ||
| You know, you're developing all these materialistic things, but you're not developing yourself emotionally and mentally and spiritually. | ||
| And yeah, like just as soon as you realize that and be like, why am I, what is the purpose of what it is that I am chasing? | ||
| Yeah, I think the study was like, they said $80,000. | ||
| Like, everything over $80,000, you really don't experience any much more. | ||
| Before that, you get into like $40,000, $30,000. | ||
| Well, now you're struggling. | ||
| It's hard to feed yourself. | ||
| It's a weight on your shoulders. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| But once you hit a certain number, it's like, you're going to be alright. | ||
| Yeah, you're not going to be on the street. | ||
| Yeah, you're living. | ||
| I remember I lived in this apartment, this kind of shitty apartment, and then I moved to a better apartment. | ||
| And then I was sitting in this better apartment, and I was like, I'm kind of used to this. | ||
| Like, I'm used to this. | ||
| Like, this is just home now. | ||
| There's a feeling when you get when you're home. | ||
| Like, alright, I'm home. | ||
| Now I'm in this other apartment. | ||
| It just costs more money. | ||
| You know, like, okay. | ||
| I remember thinking that, like, is this better? | ||
| I mean, I guess it's better, but it costs twice as much. | ||
| Like, now I gotta fucking think about how I'm gonna pay for this bitch. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, yeah, I think about, like, when I had, like, $5 in the bank, or when I had $5,000 in the bank, like, did I feel different? | ||
| I didn't feel different at all. | ||
| No. | ||
| You know, I might have felt different, like, when I go out to eat and the check comes, like, how am I gonna pay for this? | ||
| Kind of thing. | ||
| But emotionally, I didn't feel any different whatsoever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And yeah, I think that's such an important lesson for all of us to learn. | ||
| And the sooner you figure those things out, the better. | ||
| Like so many things in life we figure out so late, if ever. | ||
| When we're kids, we look at adults, our parents, those in authority, and we think, oh, they got it figured out. | ||
| You had a really good joke about this, about thinking... | ||
| The older you get, the more you understand life and how things are going on. | ||
| But the older you get, nobody knows what the fuck is going on and everyone's out here just winging it. | ||
| Like, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. | ||
| I'm just kind of trying my best. | ||
| But I'm like, oh, maybe I should look to my parents for advice. | ||
| Like, geez, they're really just adult kids. | ||
| Like, they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. | ||
| Yeah, the bit was, do you remember when you thought that grown-ups were real? | ||
| They don't exist. | ||
| Like, I used to think that one day, I was crying, I was young, I was so upset. | ||
| One day I'm gonna be a grown-up, and everything's gonna make sense. | ||
| And then one day, you're at the supermarket, and the guy goes, paper or plastic, sir? | ||
| And you're like, sir? | ||
| I'm a sir? | ||
| Am I a grown-up? | ||
| Fuck, this is it? | ||
| And then you realize no one knows any more than you about what this is all about. | ||
| You might have more data in your head. | ||
| You might have more experience. | ||
| You might be a brain surgeon. | ||
| You might know how to build rockets. | ||
| You might be smarter than me. | ||
| But you don't have any fucking idea what this is. | ||
| No one does. | ||
| You cannot. | ||
| I like to think there are really no facts. | ||
| Everything is a theory because... | ||
| We could all be asleep in a dream right now, or hooked up to a machine. | ||
| Nobody knows that for sure, so how can you possibly say anything is factual? | ||
| You can say things are factual with the information that's in front of you, but that information might be bullshit. | ||
| And ten years from now, we might have a completely different perspective on things that we're doing now that we think are right, and this is the way life is, this is the way the world is. | ||
| Ten years ago, people had a very different approach to things. | ||
| What we can say is, as far as we know, this is the case. | ||
| And this is what we know is repeatable. | ||
| If you do this, if you put two bricks on top of two bricks, you have four bricks. | ||
| We're pretty sure. | ||
| But maybe not. | ||
| But we might be in a dream. | ||
| Yeah, like we could all be wrong. | ||
| And that's why I think it's so stupid to judge other people's beliefs and be like, Oh, your way is the right way. | ||
| You got it figured out. | ||
| Everybody else is crazy, but you think it... | ||
| I'm like, don't you think that they think the exact same thing you do? | ||
| Well, there's a problem today, and there's a lot of people out there giving advice. | ||
| And this is what's interesting. | ||
| Sometimes advice, it resonates, and then you get older and wiser, and you realize that advice is really fucking stupid. | ||
| Because you have... | ||
| There's people that are giving advice, and there's a lot of value in motivating people, right? | ||
| When someone's a legitimately motivational person, whether it's Wim Hof, the Iceman, or someone who's really done some things, there's something about them that their inspiration is fuel. | ||
| It really does something to you. | ||
| But then there's a lot of people out there that are just saying shit because they think it's going to be motivating to other people and it sounds like horseshit. | ||
| And it only tricks dummies. | ||
| And that stuff is painfully prevalent. | ||
| There's so much of it. | ||
| There's so many people out there that are trying to offer advice and they're trying to motivate people. | ||
| But then you go, hey man, what have you experienced? | ||
| They've had a placid, dull life filled with non-accomplishments. | ||
| Their biggest accomplishment is tricking people into thinking they're a good motivational speaker. | ||
| Like the get-rich-quick thing. | ||
| Oh, there's so many of those! | ||
| This is how they've gotten rich. | ||
| Sure, yeah. | ||
| Dude, I was watching a documentary on one of those guys, one of these internet guys who rents houses and rents cars and tries to pretend he's this big baller and spends all this money and ran a bunch of scam dating sites and all these different things. | ||
| And I'm like, wow, this is... | ||
| This pursuit is odd. | ||
| It's a fucking odd thing. | ||
| This pursuit of tricking people into thinking that you're more knowledgeable than you actually are. | ||
| What resonates with people is like what you were talking about from the beginning of this podcast. | ||
| When you're talking about your life and how you felt... | ||
| And your own real legitimate experiences and the feelings of inadequacy and then the finding the light at the end of the tunnel and all these different things that are just, you're relaying your life's lessons and experiences. | ||
| Those are extremely valuable for people. | ||
| Those are extremely valuable. | ||
| But because people know they're extremely valuable, there's a lot of bullshitters out there that are trying to concoct these things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And trick you and like, this is how I got this mansion. | ||
| You can get this mansion too. | ||
| You can make... | ||
| I'm going to show you here on a whiteboard. | ||
| This is what you can do. | ||
| And like, they're just horse shitting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But there's money in that. | ||
| And so there's a lot of them. | ||
| There's like, they pop up all the time. | ||
| I get emails from them. | ||
| I get fucking Instagram messages. | ||
| I see them like, hey, I want to come on your show and motivate people. | ||
| I'm really about motivating people. | ||
| Like, bro, you're 22. The fuck are you motivating? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You ain't motivating shit. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Go move to Nepal for a year. | ||
| Yeah, and it's also such a tricky thing. | ||
| Even for myself, it's like, of course I want to motivate people. | ||
| I want to help people. | ||
| But you can start drifting into that, now I'm a motivational speaker. | ||
| Now I'm not being honest. | ||
| Now I'm not communicating the full spectrum of the things that I'm dealing with and going through. | ||
| I'm only going to focus on this positive thing. | ||
| Like, oh, just do this, this, and this. | ||
| And you're going to go the right way. | ||
| And oftentimes it's because they don't have someone in their life, like the way you were describing Gina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Someone who's, hey, fuckface. | ||
| You're being an asshole. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Pull your head out of your ass. | ||
| You have to have someone in your life that's raw with you, that's real with you. | ||
| And for me, it's my friends. | ||
| It's definitely my wife. | ||
| She doesn't bullshit me about anything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Those people are a giant in your life. | ||
| You gotta have people that check you. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They have to know you, too. | ||
| They have to know you. | ||
| You can't hide anything from them. | ||
| A lot of us tend to have these, what would the word be? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| These people in our lives, they're only there because you're doing something for them. | ||
| Yeah, but those people aren't pushing you. | ||
| They're yes men. | ||
| Yeah, they're parasites. | ||
| They're parasites. | ||
| It's not a real relationship. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's not a relationship you're going to grow through. | ||
| That's a relationship that's going to make you feel good. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And in a lot of ways. | ||
| And yeah, that's fun and comfortable. | ||
| But if that person can't get to the core of you and really be like, when you tell me something, I know it's truth because you have no other reason to say bullshit to me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You don't. | ||
| You don't need anything from me. | ||
| That's giant for people. | ||
| This is one thing that I've seen many times with celebrities. | ||
| When they go off the rails and they don't hang out with other people like them. | ||
| So they don't have real friends. | ||
| They have these employees and it gets real sketchy. | ||
| And everyone that they talk to and interact with needs something from them and they assume this position of authority. | ||
| Where no one can question them. | ||
| No one can call bullshit. | ||
| You've got to have peers. | ||
| It's very important. | ||
| If you don't have the respect and the friendship of your peers, man, you're adrift. | ||
| You're not tethered. | ||
| You're out there in orbit just fucking floating around. | ||
| You're another dimension. | ||
| Yeah, not good. | ||
| It's easy to get there, too. | ||
| Very easy. | ||
| Much easier. | ||
| Especially for successful people. | ||
| People start kissing your ass. | ||
| Yeah, I'm like, oh, this is nice. | ||
| I don't need to deal with this bullshit. | ||
| I'm going to have these people around me that make me feel good and say yes to me and bring me all the things that I want and give me no stress. | ||
| When I meet people like that, I go, you should do jujitsu. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Go get choked. | ||
| They'll tell you the truth. | ||
| That's such an important thing. | ||
| Anything physical like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is extremely, I think, vital for everyone. | ||
| I mean, particularly kids coming up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Putting kids into athletics and martial arts. | ||
| Fuck yeah. | ||
| And if you don't like martial arts, look, you can't fake a marathon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 26.2 needs to be run. | ||
| You need to go left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, until you hit the fucking finish line. | ||
| Period. | ||
| End of discussion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| If you don't do that, you don't get there. | ||
| You can't fake it. | ||
| You can fake a lot of shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's a lot of shit you could fake, but moving your body, you can't really fake that. | ||
| You've got to do it. | ||
| A 90-minute yoga class is 90 fucking minutes. | ||
| It's hot as shit, and you're in there sweating your balls off, and you've got to get to the end. | ||
| You've got to get to the end. | ||
| It's a small thing. | ||
| That's a small thing. | ||
| Life is a big thing. | ||
| But these small things that you can do, they'll help you understand what's necessary to get through the big things. | ||
| It's all macro and micro. | ||
| It's all connected in some strange way. | ||
| I'm glad you talked about all this stuff, man. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All of it from the beginning, you know, and then leading up to the thing with your stepmom. | ||
| People, you know, people need to hear from a guy like you that looks like, you know, you're a cool cat. | ||
| You got your shit together. | ||
| Well, you know, it would have been very easy for me just to come on here and ask the bullshit about fighting and that kind of thing. | ||
| We can do that too, though. | ||
| Yeah, we can definitely do that. | ||
| You know, it's important for me just to be honest with all the aspects of my life and to not start drifting into that, just this surface, you know, this is who I am and, you know. | ||
| Image. | ||
| Image mentality and, yeah, I'm very aware of not wanting to be there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And trying to always express myself honestly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a trap. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| The image thing is a trap. | ||
| It's not bad to look good, but to concentrate on your image above truth and honesty is a real trap. | ||
| I think fighters fall into that category a lot because fighting is so fucking... | ||
| It's so perilous. | ||
| You don't know what the future holds. | ||
| You have no idea. | ||
| Every time you train, you can tear an ACL. You really have no idea. | ||
| And you're relying on your tissue to feed yourself, right? | ||
| Your tissue and your cells and physical motion and action, that's what you do for a living. | ||
| It's so perilous. | ||
| There's so many things that could go wrong. | ||
| When you think about an actual fight itself, I think back to this past weekend with Cowboy and Connor, and looking at Cowboy, the weight of the moment in his eyes, you could see him warming up, and he talked about it. | ||
| There's this video that they played before the fight. | ||
| Which he goes through all of the nervousness that he experiences before he fights. | ||
| Goes through all the faking it and smiling and pretending he's cool. | ||
| And meanwhile inside he's freaking the fuck out and all that stuff. | ||
| That adds to this need to make everything look great. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, we want to be viewed as superhuman. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and none of us are. | ||
| No. | ||
| My favorite piece on that was Mike Tyson in his Prime. | ||
| Remember Mike Tyson, that documentary where he talked about his mindset, walking to the ring? | ||
| I was afraid. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| About not losing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then I'm a god. | ||
| Yeah, once again, I'm a god. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That gives me fucking goosebumps every time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Because he would just put himself into this state of mind. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| You know, Custom Auto used to hypnotize him when he was 13? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I didn't know about that until he was on the podcast. | ||
| I don't even know if he ever talked about it. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| But he was talking about how when he was a kid, like this guy, he went from being this really, you know, poor kid who was abandoned, no love, a constant crime and terrible poverty around him. | ||
| To all of a sudden, he's getting all this love for doing this one thing, for smashing people. | ||
| And he found himself with one of the greatest boxing minds that's ever lived in Customato, who's explaining to him fear and motivation, all these different things. | ||
| And he's hypnotizing him. | ||
| So he's hypnotizing this 13-year-old kid to smash people and saying, you don't exist, only the task exists. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And so then when he gets into the ring, he's just fucking steamrolling people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like it was almost like a science project. | ||
| Like Custom Auto found at the end of his rope, right? | ||
| He's old man about to die. | ||
| He's been through great champions like Floyd Patterson and he trained all these great fighters. | ||
| And now he's got the greatest one he's ever seen. | ||
| But he's a dying man. | ||
| And this kid's 13. And this kid is just... | ||
| He was 190 pounds when he was 13. Teddy Atlas said he would bring him to these smokers and no one would believe it. | ||
| They would go, how old is that kid? | ||
| He goes, he's 13. He was like, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| And he's like, okay, how old do you think he is? | ||
| He's like 16. All right, he's 16. Put him in there with a 16-year-old and he would smash some 16-year-old. | ||
| He was just built insane. | ||
| He just had insane genetics. | ||
| And then on top of that, he had the greatest mind ever when it comes to motivation and understanding and fear and boxing. | ||
| A guy who studied it his entire life and he's a hypnotist. | ||
| And he's hypnotizing this young 13-year-old kid to smash people. | ||
| And the results? | ||
| Youngest ever heavyweight champion and one of the scariest fucking fighters in the history of sport. | ||
| There he is. | ||
| In the Catskills. | ||
| I mean, that's also raised in isolation in the fucking Catskills up in the mountains. | ||
| Fuck, what a story. | ||
| It's a goddamn movie. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, and then you think about how amazing that was for him as an athlete, but how detrimental that was to him as a human being and all the things he's had to... | ||
| Develop so much later in life and like, yeah, you understand like why he was fucking nuts. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, like you expect these people to be normal when they're doing this thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Why do we expect that? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like you want these people to be these amazing athletes and these savages and these things, but then when they're human beings on the outside, it's like, oh, well, that's a piece of shit. | ||
| Like you can't have it. | ||
| It's difficult to have it both ways. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, it's also human beings are so incredibly nuanced. | ||
| And when someone does a thing wrong, we want their whole to be wrong. | ||
| Everything who they are. | ||
| We want a one or a zero. | ||
| We want a black or a white. | ||
| And particularly when you're dealing with people like fighters that are dealing with this insane amount of pressure and this incredible emotional rollercoaster ride. | ||
| And then on top of that, why did they become fighters in the first place? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Almost all of them. | ||
| I mean, let's just be real generous and say 75%. | ||
| 75% of them came from a fucked up childhood. | ||
| There's 25% of them maybe that just really enjoy competition. | ||
| But 75% came from a feeling of deficit. | ||
| 75% came from a fuck you, I'm going to show you. | ||
| They came from this thing. | ||
| And people that come from that thing, they're not... | ||
| The most balanced folks, they're going to make mistakes, you know? | ||
| And compassion and understanding and the ability to forgive, those are some of the most important aspects of community and of friendship and of the human race. | ||
| We have to be able to be compassionate towards people that have experienced a different life than we have. | ||
| And we have to be able to forgive people when they fuck up. | ||
| And we can't just write them off. | ||
| And that's one of the weirder things about today with this whole cancel culture shit. | ||
| Like people just want to decide, you know, like based on a tweet someone said or something someone did. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| You're canceled forever. | ||
| Get out! | ||
| Kill them! | ||
| Death! | ||
| Off with their head! | ||
| It's almost like there's too many of us. | ||
| It's almost like people in traffic. | ||
| We don't value each other because there's so many people that we just have an overwhelming abundance of human beings. | ||
| You can cancel somebody and you don't even think about them. | ||
| Get rid of them! | ||
| Who's next? | ||
| It's so much easier for us to be judgmental and have a voice and to say, you're wrong. | ||
| I'm justified in the way I am because I've never done that. | ||
| So I'm a good person and you're a bad person. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because we don't want to look inside and be like, we're all fucked up. | ||
| We all do horrible things. | ||
| We all do really awful things to each other and these people are in the spotlight. | ||
| So it's easy to point at them and make yourself feel better about the things that you haven't done or justified in your actions. | ||
| But we're all fucked up and we all make mistakes and we all need some sympathy and love and we all need these things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're all human. | ||
| Humans need love. | ||
| We need sympathy. | ||
| We need understanding. | ||
| And we need to be able to say, I'm sorry. | ||
| And we need other people to be able to accept that. | ||
| We need to be able to communicate with each other. | ||
| And also, cancel culture, I think, is born out of social media because it's the most bizarre way to communicate ever. | ||
| A one-way text message to the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That everybody's going to see. | ||
| That everybody sees. | ||
| That you don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And then also, people are sending these... | ||
| You know, really disingenuous ones just hoping that people like them more because of the things they're saying, which is like a sport now. | ||
| It's like, let's see how many likes I can get. | ||
| Ooh, I got ding, ding, ding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I got a thousand likes. | |
| And then you feel justified in your opinions. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| And then that becomes who you are. | ||
| I'm an activist. | ||
| Bitch, you're just complaining to the void. | ||
| Just screaming out into the world. | ||
| That's, you know, we're living through strange times, man. | ||
| Well, it's the cancel culture and I view it as the team culture of everything is what's, I think, one of the more detrimental things to humanity is you're either on this side or that side and our side's right, your side's wrong. | ||
| Most of us are somewhere in the middle. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But we can't have an in-the-middle conversation because it's you're with them or you're with us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I want to know how people think if I disagree with them. | ||
| I like talking to people I disagree with. | ||
| Well, that's what I, you know, that's really one thing I really love about your show is your ability to communicate with people, even the ones that you obviously don't agree with, but you're able to talk to them and to hear their points of view and not be like, oh, you're a fucking idiot. | ||
| Like, even if you're nuts, like, and talk to them. | ||
| And that is something that is so missing today is our ability to communicate with people that don't agree with us. | ||
| Like, just because you have a different opinion than me doesn't mean we can't meet in the middle somewhere or learn from each other or, you know, a big thing for me coming up was we can learn from everyone, even if it's what not to do. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| That is so vital in everything. | ||
| But for me in training, it was like, yeah, this person doesn't know what the fuck they're doing, but maybe one day I'm going to face somebody like that, so maybe I should kind of get a little grasp of their mentality, and that just applies to life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe you don't agree with their thought process, but you can at least understand it and know what it is you do and don't like. | ||
| Know what your beliefs are. | ||
| You've got to take a step outside of your beliefs to understand, is that even what you believe or is it just the way you were raised and the way you grew up? | ||
| Do you really believe these things? | ||
| Have you ever taken a step outside of them or listened to somebody else's It's hard because you don't get that many conversations with people where you disagree with them and it's not confrontational. | ||
| Usually they're confrontational or you're confrontational. | ||
| So it always starts off on the bad foot. | ||
| I've learned how to do it from doing this podcast and one of the most surprising things about doing this podcast is I've learned how to talk to people better. | ||
| I didn't think that was a thing. | ||
| I thought I just was talking to people. | ||
| But then I realized somewhere along the way, not only are people listening, but sometimes I'm annoying. | ||
| How do I do this where I'm less annoying? | ||
| And in learning how to do things that are less annoying, I've become a more compassionate conversationalist. | ||
| I understand how to talk to people better. | ||
| I apply it to my whole life now. | ||
| I've gotten better at it, and I see people who are bad at it. | ||
| It's so frustrating. | ||
| Like, I have some really smart friends, and, you know, I talk to them, and they just fucking interrupt each other, and they interrupt you, and they don't let anybody talk. | ||
| They're not listening. | ||
| They're just waiting for their time to talk, and it's so strange. | ||
| They're not able to ever consider other people's opinions. | ||
| They think that everyone but them is wrong, and it's... | ||
| It's basically like, you know how it is when you see a YouTube video where people have no idea how to fight and you see them fight? | ||
| You know that thing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course I do. | |
| That is so crazy. | ||
| To this day, I'm like, I've been doing martial arts my whole life. | ||
| I don't want to fight anybody, but I see people fight and they have no idea how to fight. | ||
| I imagine myself, if I was in a street fight with this guy, I would be like, why are you doing this, man? | ||
| This is so crazy. | ||
| You don't know what you're doing. | ||
| Hey! | ||
| You're crazy. | ||
| You're going to get killed. | ||
| You're lucky I'm nice. | ||
| But that's the same way with conversation. | ||
| There's a lot of people out there having conversations that have no idea how to talk. | ||
| They're not even really listening to you. | ||
| They're just like, why are you doing that? | ||
| Why are you arguing? | ||
| You're in a conversation. | ||
| You don't even know how to have one. | ||
| You're not listening. | ||
| You're just talking. | ||
| You're just using someone like a wall that you're throwing a fucking tennis ball off of. | ||
| It's bizarre. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Well, you had a good statement on this, and I think it was your last special where it was like, you have two idiots in a room, it's the more confident one that they listen to. | ||
| And it's that concept of just say more words and have more opinions and you don't have to think, just be loud and make a lot of noise. | ||
| It's a game. | ||
| They're trying to checkmate you. | ||
| Instead of having a communication and conversation, they're trying to socially dominate you. | ||
| Look, I used to do it, for sure. | ||
| I mean, I think it's a learned thing. | ||
| People do it to you and you go, man, I gotta fucking kick my ass in that conversation. | ||
| I'm gonna get better at kicking people's ass. | ||
| And then you get better at sort of bulldogging people or talking over them or talking loud or having these sentences that maybe you can pull out of your ass every now and then to shut people down. | ||
| It sounds good. | ||
| And it becomes a sport instead of what it really should be, which is sharing ideas and communicating with people. | ||
| I mean, if you're really into the sport of just debating people and shutting people down and insulting people, okay, good for you. | ||
| But people don't like listening to that that much. | ||
| What people like listening to, from my experience, is someone actually talking to someone, someone actually expressing their thoughts, and then the other person considering their thoughts and either agreeing or disagreeing. | ||
| But people are so happy when you can do that without real conflict. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've had some people on that just five years ago, I would have just said, you fucking moron. | ||
| I would have screamed at them. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| You're an idiot. | ||
| Go fuck yourself. | ||
| Jump off a bridge. | ||
| But instead of doing that, I'd be like, okay. | ||
| Why do you think that? | ||
| And tell me what about this. | ||
| And here's what I think. | ||
| Let me tell you what I think. | ||
| You tell me what you think. | ||
| But to be able to do that in a non-snarky way, like, oh yeah, you think that? | ||
| Tell me more. | ||
| That's how you get the best out of people, though. | ||
| That's how you understand who they really are. | ||
| Yeah, and it's so valuable. | ||
| So valuable. | ||
| For me, it's just for me. | ||
| I know it's valuable for people that are listening, but just for me as a human, for my own education, it's been everything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| I've learned more from talking to people on this podcast, both from talking to scholars and scientists and really intelligent people and morons. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I've learned a lot from talking to morons. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just the awkwardness in the way they process thoughts and the way they view the world and the way they've chosen to communicate. | ||
| You learn from that. | ||
| Just like you're saying, sparring with someone who has terrible habits. | ||
| You go, oh, look at this guy. | ||
| What the fuck are you doing, man? | ||
| But you learn. | ||
| You can learn from people. | ||
| Well, I think that's something that really separates you from a lot of people. | ||
| Yeah, there's shows where people are very opinionated and loud and, you know, people like that and that kind of thing. | ||
| But your ability to communicate and to bring out conversation regardless of what the subject matter is makes it very intriguing. | ||
| And you can learn a lot regardless of who the guest is. | ||
| You learn so much from these people because of the way you're able to communicate with them, the way you're able to Bring out conversation and get in-depth with all of these subjects. | ||
| Well, I'm genuinely curious about most things. | ||
| And I'm genuinely curious about the way I think. | ||
| I'm like, why do I think that way? | ||
| So if someone thinks different than me, I'm genuinely curious. | ||
| Like, why do you think? | ||
| There's an instinct to go, nah, you're fucking wrong. | ||
| I'm right. | ||
| But I just go, oh, I know what that is. | ||
| That's a trick. | ||
| Don't do that. | ||
| That's dumb. | ||
| Don't think that way. | ||
| Just try to find out. | ||
| This is not a game. | ||
| It's not a contest. | ||
| Find out why this person thinks this way. | ||
| And it's better for everybody. | ||
| But it's just a lost talent. | ||
| And I didn't even know it was a thing until I started doing podcasts. | ||
| It just took me a while. | ||
| Podcasts are like anything else, for me at least. | ||
| As I'm doing it, I'm trying to get better at it, and I realize, oh, I used to not be as good. | ||
| I never listen to my podcasts, but if I did listen to the old ones from the beginning, I'd probably be like, ugh! | ||
| Fucking terrible. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| You know, plus most of them I was high out of my fucking mind. | ||
| I don't even know half what I was talking about while I was saying it. | ||
| I was ruining conversations left and right. | ||
| But these conversations for me are like, it's like going to school. | ||
| It's like every day. | ||
| I'm going to school about humans. | ||
| You know, going to school about whatever the subject they're talking to me about, but also going to school about how, you know, the more people you talk to, especially like this, no cell phones, we're wearing headphones. | ||
| And one of the reasons why I like headphones is because your voice is in my ear. | ||
| You're not over there. | ||
| You're right here, man. | ||
| We're locked in. | ||
| And this is exactly the same way that other people are going to hear it, which is a very unusual way to hear a conversation. | ||
| You don't think about it that way, but most of the time when you hear a conversation, your voice is louder because it's closer, and they're over there. | ||
| And you're talking to each other, and maybe you check your phone, or maybe you're distracted by other noises, but when you're wearing headphones, you don't hear anything else. | ||
| So you're locked in. | ||
| And when else would you and I, and we're friends, I've known you for years, when will we be able to sit down like this? | ||
| For hours! | ||
| Just across from each other, staring at each other's eyes, just talking. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I never thought about that with the headphones. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's big. | |
| Yeah, that's interesting. | ||
| It keeps you from talking over each other too much, too. | ||
| Because conversations are improvisational, right? | ||
| You have a dance partner. | ||
| You don't want to step on each other's toes. | ||
| But you do it occasionally so you get better at it. | ||
| And for more than two people, it's mandatory. | ||
| Like when you have three or four people on a podcast, you cannot do it without headphones or it's just talking over each other. | ||
| I learned that doing those fight companions. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Because everyone's drunk. | ||
| And then they have the headphones on. | ||
| It sort of at least calms some of the overtalk. | ||
| Yeah, that makes sense. | ||
| Yeah, it's a journey, man, like everything else. | ||
| Like everything else, it's a journey. | ||
| I mean, if you're doing it right, your relationships, being a parent, being a comedian, being a fighter, being a doctor, I'm sure, if you're concentrating on it, you get better at it. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I think just the understanding of it's a constant balancing act, it's a constant development. | ||
| The sooner you come to terms and understand that, the better off you're going to be. | ||
| But we get locked into these... | ||
| These ways of thinking, these ways of living. | ||
| You're that way until you die, a lot of people are. | ||
| And to constantly be questioning yourself and to be searching. | ||
| I feel like I'm a seeker. | ||
| I'm seeking different ways to do things, different ways to think, different perspectives on situations, particularly ones I might be stuck on. | ||
| Like, this is the way I think, this is what I believe. | ||
| I want to explore what my beliefs and feelings and viewpoints are. | ||
| Yeah, I think that is how you gain a better understanding of what this thing is. | ||
| What this thing we're experiencing is. | ||
| Yeah, which nobody knows what the hell it is. | ||
| Nobody knows what it is. | ||
| Yeah, I just got... | ||
| I mean, there's some scientists that are... | ||
| Trying to... | ||
| They've written a book about it, but they're trying to come on the podcast to lay out all of the reasons why this is a simulation. | ||
| And I'm going over some of their work, and I'm like, this is fucking so crazy. | ||
| Because if they're right... | ||
| Like, what are we doing? | ||
| Are we playing a video game? | ||
| Maybe we are. | ||
| Maybe we are. | ||
| And then there's the thought that maybe that is what life is, period. | ||
| And that this idea of like, oh, one day we're going to create an artificial environment that we exist in that's going to be indistinguishable from the real world that we exist in now. | ||
| Maybe... | ||
| It's always that. | ||
| Maybe it's been that from the beginning and evolution is actually a part of this long game. | ||
| And that this cycling of life and life and death and all these things is just a part of this insanely long progressive game. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Blow your mind up the more you think about it. | ||
| You know, who can say that that's not the case? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nobody can. | ||
| No. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| And the more you think about it, you might check out of reality to a degree. | ||
| So it's a scary thing. | ||
| I'm also genuinely curious as to other people's perspectives. | ||
| I love reading people's takes on current events, takes on people. | ||
| And takes on movies and music. | ||
| Because I disagree with so many of them. | ||
| And I go, how is this person viewing the world? | ||
| I would like to be them for a short period of time. | ||
| If I knew for a fact, I can come back and be me again. | ||
| I want to see. | ||
| What are you seeing? | ||
| Are you in pain all the time? | ||
| Why are you mad at stuff? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Is it an emotional thing? | ||
| Or is your mind just wired different? | ||
| We're all assuming that water tastes the same to you as it does to me. | ||
| Everybody knows sunshine feels good. | ||
| But does it feel the same? | ||
| I don't know what your sunshine feels like. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I think about that a lot. | ||
| One thought I have is like, this is white. | ||
| We both say it's white, but maybe this looks completely different to you. | ||
| Maybe this white looks like yellow, but we call it the same thing because we agree. | ||
| And that's like so much of reality is just something we all agree upon until we don't, until we change our minds. | ||
| But there's so many people that see and feel and think that Very different things. | ||
| And we look at them as crazy because the majority of us say that's not the way we see or feel things. | ||
| But all anything is is an agreeance upon what this thing is. | ||
| And is that what makes things real? | ||
| That we agree that it's real? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's a trick. | ||
| I don't know either. | ||
| Well, I mean, think about other things that people have tastes for. | ||
| Like food, for example. | ||
| There's people that enjoy certain flavors, like spicy foods, for example. | ||
| And there's other people that fucking hate it. | ||
| My wife's mom, she can't have anything with any pepper or anything. | ||
| Anything even remotely hot. | ||
| She's like, oh, it's too hot. | ||
| Everything is too hot. | ||
| And I can't make things hot enough. | ||
| I'm We're good to go. | ||
| Like my good friend Alonzo Bowden, hilarious comedian, loves jazz, goes on jazz cruises, does stand-up on these cruises. | ||
| I try, man. | ||
| I try to listen to it. | ||
| I get some of it. | ||
| It's kind of cool. | ||
| But if I had to choose between jazz and other music, I'm like, get the fuck out. | ||
| If it was one music that I could just wipe off the face of the planet? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That would be it. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| It probably would be like dumb country songs. | ||
| But outside of dumb country songs, I don't know what they're experiencing. | ||
| What is it about it that's resonating? | ||
| Why do some people go bonkers for some movies and other people think they suck? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One thing that always trips me out is I think about, like, people we view as lunatics. | ||
| I'm like, what if they are seeing reality and we have blinders on, you know, because when you take into account what a finite percentage of what's really out there that we're able to see with our perception, you know, compared to, like, x-rays and gamma rays and all of these things, like... | ||
| We have such a tiny filter on everything that's really going on out there. | ||
| We don't really see shit compared to what's really there. | ||
| And maybe these whacked out people are just seeing more of what's happening. | ||
| And that's what makes them nuts because they're like... | ||
| You're not seeing all these demons flying around and all these colors. | ||
| We have a filter on that so we can process information and it keeps us sane. | ||
| But what's really going on out there? | ||
| When you think about how small an amount of acid you need to take to completely perturb the way you view the world, I think McKenna described this. | ||
| Terence McKenna described acid. | ||
| That the potency of acid is like, it's literally like, in terms of like the amount that you need in order to have an effect, he made an analogy like an ant deconstructing the entire Empire State Building in a matter of seconds. | ||
| Like, that's how potent it is in terms of volume. | ||
| You don't need a couple drops of acid in a huge human body, and you're tripping balls for seven hours. | ||
| You know... | ||
| That's a chemical disruption of this very delicate ecosystem. | ||
| So if your neurochemistry is off in any way, up or down, sideways, screwy, you got too much of this or too much of that, which we know is the case with everything, right? | ||
| Like some people are born with bad eyesight. | ||
| Some people are born deaf. | ||
| Some people are born and they have problems processing pain. | ||
| They don't feel pain correctly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Some people are born, they must have an imbalance of the chemicals that are floating around inside your head. | ||
| And their view of the world is radically different than ours. | ||
| And also those chemicals can shift depending on, for your personal experience, like life, abuse. | ||
| Children that are abused, their chemicals in their head as they're developing are off. | ||
| They're different. | ||
| Their brains are different. | ||
| They process life different because of abuse. | ||
| People that have experienced extreme trauma, extreme violence when they're young, PTSD, they're processing things differently than people that have not. | ||
| Yeah, what's even crazier about that is I read a book called It Didn't Start With You, and it talks about how these things are passed on generationally, from like, trauma your grandparents had is passed on to you through your DNA, and it changes us. | ||
| Like, how much is passed on to us that we have no control over? | ||
| That alters the way we feel things, the way we see things, all of these experiences that people have that just get passed down like that without any outside influence just through that process of being born. | ||
| Do you have any children? | ||
| No. | ||
| When you have children, you see it in a really weird way. | ||
| My middle daughter, my 11-year-old, is an obsessive. | ||
| She obsesses on things and tries to get better at them, or you try to tell her, hey, time to go to bed. | ||
| She's doing backflips in her room and shit. | ||
| Stop. | ||
| Stop. | ||
| Go to bed. | ||
| You've got to go to bed. | ||
| But that's me. | ||
| And I always thought I was fucked up. | ||
| I was like... | ||
| I thought I was doing this, and I probably was, my whole life to try to show that I had value. | ||
| Because I felt like I was ignored, and I didn't know my dad, and I always felt like an outsider and a loser. | ||
| And I always felt like I would throw myself into things to show that I had value. | ||
| And I would get really good at things to show that I had value. | ||
| And this obsession was like me trying to escape the existential angst of my existence and just the constant anxiety and this feeling of inadequacy. | ||
| Trying to escape it by being obsessed with things, but also trying to prove through getting good at things that I have value. | ||
| Because the first time I ever felt like I was worth anything was when I started getting good at martial arts. | ||
| And then people started respecting me. | ||
| I have a thing that people think I'm good at. | ||
| That I'm good at this thing, that became my identity. | ||
| And I just threw myself into that. | ||
| But my daughter's grown up with none of that. | ||
| She's all loved and she's all smiley and happy and she's not depressed. | ||
| She gets a lot of hugs and she has friends, but she's a fucking psycho. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, you got that for me. | ||
| Like, you got my crazy gene, but you got it without all the fucked up parts. | ||
| Like, you're not sad. | ||
| You got it without the sad thing. | ||
| You just want to get good at stuff. | ||
| Like, a happiness to it. | ||
| And also a feminine happiness to it. | ||
| Instead of a masculine, like, I just want to smash. | ||
| That's all I wanted to do. | ||
| I just want to smash things. | ||
| Because I was angry. | ||
| She's not angry. | ||
| So it's weird to see this obsessive, like, completely obsessive behavior in terms of, like, trying to get better at things. | ||
| And she accelerates it. | ||
| She excels at so many different things that she gets good at. | ||
| She gets good at things and they become her whole life, like, all day long. | ||
| Obsessive. | ||
| Like, it's really weird. | ||
| But in a happy way. | ||
| And so it's strange genetically. | ||
| You know, and you've met my dog, Marshall. | ||
| The fucking nicest dog in the world, right? | ||
| He's so nice. | ||
| That's a genetic thing. | ||
| That dog is a golden retriever. | ||
| And when you come over to him and he starts whining and he's so happy and he wants to get pet, he runs and grabs a toy, always. | ||
| He always wants to bring you something. | ||
| I didn't teach him that. | ||
| I found him for three years. | ||
| I found him since he was a little tiny baby. | ||
| He was like six weeks old when I got him. | ||
| Never had a rough day in his life. | ||
| Every day's been fun. | ||
| But he's learned through his DNA that he's supposed to retrieve things and bring them over and that you are happier when he brings things over because that's the DNA that's in his system. | ||
| He didn't learn it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This is literally inside of him from the box. | ||
| Like, right out of the box, look at the ingredients. | ||
| Oh, he likes to bring you things. | ||
| Because his ancestors brought you things. | ||
| His ancestors brought other people things, and they were rewarded for it. | ||
| And they said, oh, they give me treats, and they like me more when I bring things. | ||
| So I'm going to just keep... | ||
| You shoot a duck out of the sky, and they get that duck and bring it over, and everybody gets happy. | ||
| So it's in him. | ||
| I don't think we understand. | ||
| What DNA actually is, or whatever the fuck. | ||
| DNA's just a name, right? | ||
| The components of the lifeform that are passed when two lifeforms breed and they make another one. | ||
| I don't think we really understand it. | ||
| I think we have a rudimentary understanding of the chemistry involved, but in terms of, like, personality, and in terms of, like, the thoughts that are in our heads, like, I was reading something by Rupert Sheldrick, and he was talking about why children are afraid of monsters. | ||
| He's like, children that grow up in the city are afraid of monsters. | ||
| They're not afraid of, like, gunshots and car accidents, things that are really scary. | ||
| They're afraid of monsters. | ||
| Because our ancient ancestors were eaten by cats. | ||
| They were eaten. | ||
| And by wolves and those kind of things. | ||
| We're afraid of fangs and things in the dark. | ||
| When you can't see them coming, you can't protect yourself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| It's in there. | ||
| It's in the DNA. Yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's so much stuff like that that just we don't understand anything. | ||
| Have you ever met someone that has like a legit phobia, like a phidia phobia or arachnophobia, like fear of snakes or spiders? | ||
| I know that I have. | ||
| I'm trying to think of who that was, but yeah, it's like, where did that come from? | ||
| It's DNA, man. | ||
| I guarantee. | ||
| I've seen it on Fear Factor. | ||
| We had a few people that had a legit fear of snakes and spiders. | ||
| They're like, oh my God, oh my God. | ||
| You see, their whole body was shaking and they were trying, like, hey, this isn't even fucking poisonous. | ||
| These are just snakes. | ||
| But there's something about snakes, like someone they love, or someone in their ancestry, or someone survived a snake attack. | ||
| Something. | ||
| There's something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, so much of that is realizing how little control we have over everything, like how we raise our children, or how we interact with people, and what does and doesn't affect us. | ||
| The fact that any of this works in any remote way is insanity. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| We think it makes sense because it's normal to us, but we really take a step back and think about it. | ||
| This is nuts. | ||
| Everything is nuts. | ||
| This life is nuts and sitting here with you is nuts. | ||
| You were talking about some of the people you've met through this and you're like, how did I get here? | ||
| What is this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I feel that way too. | |
| What the fuck is going on? | ||
| What did I do to get here? | ||
| This is weird. | ||
| What did I do to get here? | ||
| I think I really believe in some strange way that this thing made me do this. | ||
| That this podcast, almost like the universe, made me do this. | ||
| It sounds so pretentious, but I'm just being honest. | ||
| I feel almost like this thing has a life of its own and a mind of its own, and it tricked me. | ||
| It tricked me, and it played on my obsessive mind. | ||
| Just keep doing it. | ||
| Keep doing it. | ||
| Maybe you get better at this. | ||
| Hey, keep doing it. | ||
| Bring on other people. | ||
| Keep doing it. | ||
| Keep doing it. | ||
| And through this, untold millions of people have been exposed. | ||
| We've had three billion downloads. | ||
| Over the course of 10 years. | ||
| So I don't know how many people that is, how many individuals, but it's a fuckload. | ||
| So all of these different people have come on and expressed all these different ideas, and so many different people are hearing them in their earbuds, whether in traffic or when they're at the gym, and all these ideas percolate. | ||
| Inside people's brains and that it gives them different perspectives and that it makes them maybe explore things. | ||
| Maybe I'm going to try jujitsu. | ||
| Maybe I'm going to try yoga. | ||
| Maybe I'm going to try eating better. | ||
| Maybe I'm going to try doing this. | ||
| And through all that, you see a shift in the culture of the human beings that have been... | ||
| That have been affected by all these people's conversations. | ||
| And for me, it feels like I'm getting sucked into being here. | ||
| I'm like, okay. | ||
| And then also me getting better at it is just me. | ||
| It's like it showing me how to extract better information, get out of my fucking way, don't ruin it, and make it better for the people that are listening. | ||
| It's really what it feels like. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| I know, it's crazy! | ||
| Even saying it sounds like hippie bullshit. | ||
| Well, and you think about why are we attracted to certain things, certain people, certain... | ||
| Sometimes we're attracted to people that doesn't make any fucking sense. | ||
| Everything you do and say and make me feel is like Everything opposite of what I really want, but I'm attracted to you. | ||
| These things bring a certain thing out of me, develop me in a certain way where nobody else could do that. | ||
| This person does that for me for some reason, or this action, this sport, this thing. | ||
| Why am I drawn to that? | ||
| I shouldn't be. | ||
| It's fucking horrible. | ||
| It hurts. | ||
| All these things that doesn't make any sense at all. | ||
| But nothing makes any sense at all. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| I think that's why it's so vital to follow your heart and follow the things you feel because everything else, nobody knows what the fuck is going on. | ||
| Nobody can tell you what you should do or shouldn't do to be successful or to be happy or to be all these things. | ||
| You've got to listen to what's inside of you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you could be wrong. | ||
| You could listen to what's inside of you, and you could be wrong, but you have to learn how to, like, decipher that voice better. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, I've been wrong about things that I thought I wanted, and then you go, oh, okay, this is why I was wrong. | ||
| I was delusional, or I was kidding myself. | ||
| Or fixated on the wrong thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or I was thinking that this thing was going to bring me some sort of peace. | ||
| So it was going to bring me some sort of... | ||
| some sort of... | ||
| Just normalcy, you know, and then it doesn't happen. | ||
| So you go, all right, well, I guess there is no normalcy. | ||
| Nothing is normal. | ||
| Everything's crazy. | ||
| We're all nuts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nobody knows what's going on. | ||
| All those things, that should be a t-shirt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Nothing is normal. | ||
| Everything is crazy. | ||
| No one knows what's going on. | ||
| No one knows what's going on at all. | ||
| The sooner we realize that, the better we'll be. | ||
| Like, we're all in the loony bin. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It will definitely be easier. | ||
| That's why I'm always scared of drugs that make people confident. | ||
| My favorite drug is marijuana, because it does the opposite of making me confident. | ||
| It makes me paranoid. | ||
| It makes me compassionate, and it makes me also like, oh, and Geez, this is crazy. | ||
| That's why I like it. | ||
| I like it because I think the drugs that make you... | ||
| We should all be a little less confident. | ||
| We need each other a lot more than we like to pretend, and this life is like this temporary thing that we're going through. | ||
| We have a certain amount of heartbeats, and then who knows? | ||
| The lights go out, and hopefully we go to a better place, but... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, I think the thing it does, too, is it strips that veil away. | ||
| Like, that veil of feeling like everything's in balance and normal and, you know, life is, like, this is life. | ||
| Like, life is fucking weird, man. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| Super weird. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Super. | |
| We distract ourselves with normalcy and habits. | ||
| But take a step back and, like, this is nuts. | ||
| This is all nuts. | ||
| And we pretend like it's normal and it's cool and everyone's, like, in agreeance that, like, we all know what's going on. | ||
| I don't know what the fuck's going on. | ||
| We're all living in a spaceship flying through the atmosphere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're all tripping balls over here. | ||
| We're just all doing it so it feels normal. | ||
| But we can find some moments of comfort and happiness in the chaos, and that's what we're all seeking. | ||
| We're all seeking these moments of comfort and happiness and camaraderie and friendship. | ||
| We're all seeking love, too. | ||
| We're all seeking good feelings. | ||
| But you gotta get through the shitty ones to even appreciate the good feelings. | ||
| It's a catch-22. | ||
| But just understand that. | ||
| You need the good and the bad. | ||
| You don't know what good is unless you have bad. | ||
| It has to be that way. | ||
| So, we're getting towards 3 o'clock here. | ||
| We're almost going to wrap this thing up. | ||
| What are you doing now in terms of your career? | ||
| You're still fighting for Bellator? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Bellator Kickboxing, which I'm very thankful that they have that still. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I'm a gigantic fan of kickboxing in Muay Thai, and it's always perplexed me why it hasn't caught hold in America more than it has. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is something we could talk about for hours. | ||
| Yeah, I'm very thankful that Paramount Network is still invested. | ||
| Yeah, huge shout-out to Scott Coker. | ||
| Scott Coker! | ||
| Most amazing promoters. | ||
| Shout-out to Scott! | ||
| They got that big fight this weekend with Julie Budd and Cyborg, which is cool. | ||
| But yeah, I'm still fighting for them. | ||
| I don't have anything on the books right now. | ||
| I'm waiting like I always have been since the beginning of time. | ||
| You know, it's something you think is going to change. | ||
| Eventually, I'm going to have all these fights lined up. | ||
| I've never known when the next one is, and certainly not when the next one is after that. | ||
| But... | ||
| Yeah, I'm hoping something will come up and, you know, as far as how long I'm going to keep doing this, I don't know, man. | ||
| I could be done today. | ||
| Maybe I'll decide I don't want to fucking do this shit anymore. | ||
| But I think I've always had a healthy understanding of that, like... | ||
| Fighting is what I do, and I will always be a fighter, but this isn't it for me. | ||
| I have so many things that I do in my life. | ||
| I'm a writer. | ||
| Like I said, I'm working on my autobiography right now. | ||
| I've written two books so far. | ||
| I'm an artist. | ||
| I paint. | ||
| I draw. | ||
| I play the piano a little bit. | ||
| I speak. | ||
| I'm a renaissance man. | ||
| Do you think you'll be more invested in art when you're done? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You know, I think I'll definitely have more time to do it, you know, as far as how much I'll do it as a career. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You know, for me, art has always been something that I do it because I love to do it. | ||
| If it starts becoming a job where it's like you need to do this or you need to do that, I think that would make me lose a lot of love for it. | ||
| Yeah, like most things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think you can get through that without it becoming a job. | ||
| I think that's a perspective. | ||
| Because at the end of the day, it's still art. | ||
| Just because you have to do it for a job, what does that mean? | ||
| Just do it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| If you think, oh, I have to do art now, now it's a job. | ||
| It's like the expression, marrying your mistress. | ||
| Well, I think you can just do art, you know? | ||
| Just be obsessed with it like you are if it's not a job. | ||
| And then the other parts just sort of take care of itself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, everything I do, I feel, is artistic expressions, you know, my fighting, my actual art, my writings, and those kinds of things. | ||
| But... | ||
| I don't think I'll ever be stuck on a job or one thing because I'm just too interested in too many different things. | ||
| I think I'll always be balancing many different aspects and certain times I'll be more focused on one thing like my fighting. | ||
| Obviously, that's a very finite timeline on that. | ||
| But once that's done, you know, it's going to shift. | ||
| And I think it will always be that way to one extent or another. | ||
| I will always be doing a multitude of things and exploring and developing and learning. | ||
| And yeah, like I said, I'm a seeker. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Well, when you're done and you want to do something else, come back in here and talk to us and tell us what's up. | ||
| I would love to, man. | ||
| This has been really great. | ||
| My pleasure, brother. | ||
| Always. | ||
| I appreciate you, man. | ||
| Thank you, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I appreciate you. | |
| Kevin Ross, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Goodbye. | ||
| That was great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, man. |
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