Kevin Ross, a Bellator kickboxer and renaissance artist, reveals how a 250-pound sandbag reshaped his shin conditioning—daily controlled pain over hard sparring—to mirror Thailand’s brutal Muay Thai training culture. His 1998 debut against a 30-fight veteran in Utah, lost after nine months of sobriety and discipline, ignited resilience despite childhood trauma, including molestation by his stepmother at age 14 and years of alcoholism. Ross critiques superficial success narratives, arguing real growth comes from adversity, not wealth (studies show $80K+ income doesn’t boost happiness) or fabricated motivation. With Rogan, he explores generational trauma’s DNA imprint, comparing human chaos to a "spaceship flying through the atmosphere," yet finds purpose in art and connection. Their discussion underscores how struggle—physical or psychological—forges authenticity over empty ambition. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.