Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 69 - Matt “The Immortal” Brown

Episode Date: June 12, 2018

Matt “The Immortal” Brown is a UFC fighter in the Welterweight division and is currently ranked #15 in the official UFC Welterweight rankings. Straight out of Ohio, has worked with Louie Simmons at Westside Barbell and has an amazing story about overcoming drug addiction. Rewatch the live stream: https://youtu.be/yI-p1qf25Og ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Stitcher Here: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play here: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud Here: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

So you're gay at the age of 10. That's probably not right. Somebody called me gay at the age of 10. He's dead now. He ain't around anymore. He's dead. He's goddamn dead. All right, Mark, we're live.

What? You didn't even give me a chance to prep and stuff. I was supposed to. You know, there's something I forgot to mention. I've been, I've been forgetting to mention this on this podcast and I've been, I've been saying that I was going to mention it all the time. And then I stopped mentioning it all the time and I stopped mentioning it a bunch because it just happens so much, but no one ever talks about getting laid and I think people should. So I got some this morning.

Yeah. That's all I got to say. That's should. So I got some this morning. Yeah. That's all I got to say. That's it. I just got to get out there. Yeah. My old lady, she does, she does her job.

You know, I know it's weird for these guys to hear cause that's, that's the other boss figure there, but you know, my advice to the women out there, if you don't want your guys scrolling and you don't want your guys checking through and sliding in other people's DMS and do your work, make your guy tired.

So we're about to have the best podcast ever. Yeah, we're about to have the best podcast ever. Make your guy so tired that he can't, he doesn't have enough strength to do this. I can literally suck the life out of him. The problem is when you get laid first day of the morning, then you have no motivation for the rest of the day. I accomplished everything that I need in my life. And now that's all we're supposed to do. Yeah. in my life. That's all we're supposed to do. That's what we're here to reproduce.

Mark's going to go take a nap. Yeah, exactly. So it might be the worst podcast ever. Yeah, you never know. I might snooze right through it. Like Tim is, I don't really fucking care anymore. Whatever. I got laid. I'm done for the day. Matt, because like Tim is, he's like, I don't really fucking care anymore. Whatever. I got laid. I'm done for the day.

Matt, you said that you might have some questions for me, so feel free to fire them out as we go. If something pops up in your head, you don't have to feel like

you're on the hot seat for questions all the time, but you can throw some my way if you want. So, just go for it whenever the mood hits you. Who's your favorite guest you've ever had on the podcast uh you've had some great guests yeah um we've had some we

had some we've had a lot of really great guests um i've always liked ed cone a lot he's been uh like an idol of mine strongest powerlifter that ever lived, in my opinion. In your opinion? Yeah. That's objective, right? Yeah. I think it's, maybe it's everybody's opinion. I don't know.

He was a strong bastard. Is the powerlifting objective though, right? It's not really. Yeah, I think so. Like either you lifted more weight than that guy or not, right? Well, there's weight classes, you know? Yeah. There's always the weight class thing, just like you guys have. Who who's the best i don't know yeah you said strongest or best all right yeah i mean he could be the best but not necessarily strongest yeah he he was both

he was he was kind of both now what about dave hoff i haven't have i haven't had a dave hoff on the podcast but dave hoff is a bad mama jama for sure he's dominated the sport for a long time um i i do think that i do think that dave hoff would have had a hard time continuing continuing his victories if uh uh if the guy from big iron gym didn't die uh rick husey he was a great coach and mentor to uh sean frankel and sean frankel i don't know how much you remember powerlifting um before you got into going to west side barbell but sean frankel was very very dominant and he was a lighter weight class so he was hard he was hard to beat at some of those cash meets and uh he used to beat up on a young

on a young on a young d on a young, on a young Dave Hoff, but, uh, it would have been great to see those two battle, uh, had, had that, uh, rivalry kind of continued. Uh, but yeah, Dave Hoff is unbelievable. I think Dave Hoff has benched like over a thousand pounds. He's, uh, squatted over 1200 pounds. Some of it's been controversial. Uh, I think he's done.

His 1200 pound squat was really controversial, right? Yeah. I think he's done like a 3010 total or something. He's got the. He's got the highest total in history, right? I think he still has the highest total. Yeah. I think he still has the highest total.

I mean, you know, the thing that people get that unfortunately gets lost when there's controversy like that, it's just how good people are. And the same thing happens in fighting, right? Like somebody gets nabbed because they took a performance enhancing drug or somebody, you know, who knows the health, these fighters get into all kinds of different things and all kinds of different things happen. But sometimes people lose sight of, Hey, these are, these are real world people with some problems, with some issues, and a lot of these guys are going to sometimes, in the UFC,

you're not supposed to take performance-enhancing drugs, but even guys that fight for a living and learn different ways to destroy each other still have insecurities and still think they need to reach for something that maybe the other guy is uh is not taking right sometimes just you know i think people and people lose sight of the fact that it's a sport it's a competition and uh how can people not get caught up in some of that shit sometimes right yeah it's absolutely true you know and a lot of that's where our identity gets based on what we do in competition.

And that's something I personally struggled with for a long time. I don't know if I struggled, but getting away from that I struggled with because the losses would hurt so bad because that's who I was. And you feel very insecure and like you're nothing, and you're not for weeks or months at a time. Like, you know, I couldn't even face people because I lost, you know. And then once I had kids, that actually is probably what helped me the most learning. You know, I can't be that person.

I have to be more well-rounded. And I can't just, my identity can't be just who i am in the octagon because um you're gonna lose no matter what it's really rare for anybody to be undefeated yeah extremely rare um i mean mighty mouse johnson i would say is like he lost one yeah he's he's uh kind of the cream of the crop right now wouldn't you kind of say like with the amount of victories he's had uh the streak he's been on as a champion and stuff. Um, but yeah, he, he's got a loss. He might have more than one loss.

It's so debatable, right? That's where, you know, fighting is a lot more subjective, right? Because, um, um, you know, the tough part is his competition is clearly not been what like GSPs was or what John Jones was or, you know, what does he weigh? One 30, uh, one 130 125 weight class 125 pounds yeah and he's not even like i would say he's small or optimal size for that weight class yeah a lot of the guys in that weight are a lot bigger than him for sure cutting a lot more weight than him he doesn't have a hard weight cut to make 125 so when he did lose which was the dominant cruise at 135 i mean he was outsized on top of you know fighting a world-class guy yeah and uh yeah dominant cruise is a it was is a great fighter you know in his

own right the competition level the ufc is has has risen quite a bit and you know joe rogan i think has been uh an integral part of uh teaching and expanding like because of the way that he announces the fights a lot of times people wouldn't even know what people were doing on the ground they used to boo it right and then he would explain like what was actually happening what was transpiring and then people got more into it people got more excited about people being able to reverse moves and what's your favorite like obviously you're a huge fan of some of the brawls but what's your favorite technical bout you've ever seen technical bout um where you're just like fuck man these guys are just going back and forth and being able to reverse each other's shit and all that kind of stuff that's a good question

um well i'd probably have to think about that to be honest um gotta dig dig deep into the archives how about your favorite fight period um gosh there's so many of them even for that uh you just switched my mind completely around. I hate, I mean, I'd have to say some of my own fights, but I guess that's kind of where I'm at these days is I pay so little attention to what other people do anymore. I think it was a mistake that I'd made in the past was watching what they do. Now I'm injured.

I'm out for probably like a year. I've really turned the focus inward a lot more where now I've probably watched my highlight video 30, 40 times. I mean, I have five or 10 of them on YouTube. So I've watched each of them and I'm constantly watching it over and over and reminding myself how good I really am. And I want that to be, um, those highlights. I want to be my, uh, uh, consistent, uh, performances and not just highlights. Yeah. And you, uh, you trained at Westside barbell, like, uh, that's kind of unconventional for MMA. I mean, even there's some people, uh, in MMA that don't really, I mean, I know more people are getting into weights, but there's

some guys that still don't really have a lot of value on strength training and things like that. What has that done for you going to Westside Barbell? Well, it certainly fixed a lot of weaknesses that I had. And I was strength trained long before that too. I mean, I've been part of strength training. So you're already bought into it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was strength training long before that too. I mean, I've been part of strength training. So you're already bought into it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was a personal trainer before I was even in the UFC. And I was doing circuits before they were cool, so to speak, like around 2001 or 2002 or whatever.

But, yeah, I believe in strength training. So the technique I've always believed is one thing that is a time thing like you technique is just only going to come with time no matter how much um uh you know you you practice it it's only going to be a time thing right right you can only do so many reps in a day right i can only throw a jab so many times i can my my body my mind's only going to absorb so much. With the strength training, of course, that's a time thing too, but it's something that I can control very objectively,

and I can see the improvement, and I can translate that directly into performance and, of course, injury prevention and things like that. Do you think some fighters lose sight of the fact that it's an actual fight? Sometimes things get a little too technical. Yeah, I guess. I mean, you probably have to give a specific example to get deeper into that.

Sometimes you just don't know you don't always see the aggression in it and that could be you know for a number of reasons like maybe the guy just got clipped with something that you didn't like when you watch it on tv you're not able to see all the nuances and i've never been inside the cage so i don't know what it's like but i would imagine that uh you know like kind of that saying that mike tyson has everyone has a plan to get punched in the face type thing that's certainly one part but there's also uh i mean i've always said you know cage fighting the the most beautiful thing about cage fighting the thing that i love the most about it is it's really just an expression of ourself when we get in that cage and you see a lot of guys are

you know they're safer personalities or softer personalities and doesn't necessarily make them a bad fighter but that's how they they end up fighting in the cage and that doesn't mean they're going to fight like that every single time uh but you fight long enough and you fight often enough then eventually you're going to see who you truly are and that's the first thing i always tell any amateur that ever wants to fight me or or hopefully they don't want to fight me because they're getting an ass kick. But any amateur that asks me for advice on how to be a great fighter or whatever, and the first thing I tell them is know yourself. Know who you are because you better be very secure with that person because eventually if you decide to make a career out of this

and you do it often enough, that person is going to be exposed in out of this and you, you do it often enough, everybody, you're going to, that person is going to be exposed in front of millions of people. Yeah. We had a Jay Cutler on the podcast yesterday and he mentioned the same exact thing. You know, you go out in front of people and you're going to, and you're going to pose. And if you're not confident in yourself, you're not confident the way you look and the shape that you're in. Everyone's going to see it. You're going to be exposed in front of everybody, and they're going to know that you're not as confident in yourself as you probably should be.

Yeah, and, again, a very objective sport like that, they're going to see, oh, he slacked off on his lats or he slacked off on his training. They see exactly what you put in and what came out of it. And what we do is more of an art form, right? That's why they call it martial arts. And when you're expressing your art, it's more of the depth of who you are as a person that really gets exposed. And, again, I think a lot of people aren't comfortable with that.

They're not secure with themselves or they're not confident in themselves. Maybe they don't have pride. They're not proud of themselves. There's certain things that there may be just not... Weaknesses that they just don't want other people to see. But now you're in the wrong sport

because eventually it's going to get seen. And this is where you see a lot of guys... I don't know how many guys I've heard. You're like, oh, I just see but now you're in the wrong sport because eventually it's gonna get seen and this Way you see a lot of guys. I don't know how many guys I've heard you like I just want to get one fight in the UFC That's because they don't want to get exposed. They don't want people to see who they really are They want people to see that they got to the UFC But they don't want people to see who they truly are Which is what when you see someone like I think that's where a lot of the pressure comes from. When you see someone like a GSP, where he talks a lot,

just listen to him on Rogan the other day, where he talked a lot about the pressure that was on him all the time. A lot of that pressure is because people see deep inside your soul every time you're in that cage. And that's a, I mean, that's something hard to deal with. Not easy for anybody.

Yeah. He, yeah. And he stepped away from it for a little bit um you mentioned uh identity and uh you know you mentioned uh you know trying to not have it the fighting define you too much um but it's everywhere though it's not you know it's all over tv uh people talk about it all the time and the second that someone knows your ufc fighter they're going to ask you about this fight um it's all over social media you see it ever you see it everywhere so how do you

how do you kind of uh avoid it i guess well i don't avoid it i mean i embrace it um what i i guess more what i'm getting is like when like we're all going to lose at some point right but that doesn't mean that you're a loser right and? And, you know, we're going to have our failures and our struggles, and that doesn't mean that you're a weak person. Sounds like a loser's mentality, to be honest with you. If I'm just being honest. Well, damn it. Just fucked up my whole speech.

Yeah, so, you know, I mean, that's what they always say. You know, failure is really accepting the defeat, right? So, you know, it's something. Yeah, I mean, I can't say it better. You know, you're not a loser because you lost. Right. You know, you're just, I'm sure it's the same power lifting, right? Like, you know, you missed a lift.

That doesn't mean you're a weak person. Right. Right. Like, you're still, you know, that means that you did something wrong missed the lift. That doesn't mean you're a weak person, right? Right. Like you're still, you know, that, that means that, uh, you did something wrong along the way. Uh, you, you know, you found one wrong way and, and now it's, you got to get back on the horse, dust yourself off, jump back on and let's figure out the right way this time. How do you build confidence? You were mentioning confidence as well. So what's, what's a way for Matt Brown has Matt Brown, or how did you build confidence

in the beginning you know now it's kind of different you kind of have a snowball effect it's a little easier to ride the momentum but when you were younger i don't think it gets any easier i would argue that for sure because the problem a lot of people say that man you've had so many fights it you know must feel like second nature by now but but the truth of the matter is the more fights you have the tougher the guys you fight, too. So it doesn't get any easier by any means. It only gets harder. But the confidence really comes from the training, number one.

And number two, I guess kind of like we were talking about yesterday, you know, I talk about having a direction and knowing where you want to go and knowing why you want to get there. When you have all these things in line and you have everything, your mind very clear on your path, then you don't even have to worry about things like motivation and discipline and things like that. They just come naturally. Where did the nickname The Immortal come from? Oh, that was, well, as most people know, you know, I died from a heroin overdose and I was brought back. What do you mean you died? Well, I guess it's sort of. I don't think anybody else in this room knows what it's like to die.

And people listening. Well, I mean, I guess it's kind of uh subjective like that you know the doctors told me or the nurse or whatever told me that um you know i was probably dead they didn't say like you know they weren't like checking my heart like oh he's dead bring it back right but they're like you know you're you're pretty close right did you feel anything anything happened in particular to to you that you remember? There's two things I remember. When rapers showed up? The two things I remember was I was hallucinating.

I remember my friend was driving me to the hospital because she could tell that I was just too far. But I remember just being so happy and kind of floating along. And I think i was sort of hallucinating um and then i remember being in a lot of pain like i remember uh because i guess they shot me with a narcan or whatever and i just remember being a lot of pain i was like holy shit and you know my whole body just hurting real bad and uh i said know, the nurses told me, you know, you're pretty much on your way out and you probably would have been dead if you hadn't been brought.

What were you dying from? The heroin. It was from an overdose? Yeah, yeah. And I'd only done heroin maybe five to ten times at most. Like I wasn't like an addict or anything, but what I've been told was probably what happened is I probably did the, the same dose that I'd done other times,

but it was probably just a more potent product at the same dose. Um, you know, it's not like we're going to professional doctors and getting, were you into a lot of other drugs? Yeah. So, yeah,

yeah. You know, the heroin was kind of, um, I don't know, secondary. Like, I wasn't really into downers so much as, like, meth and coke and stuff like that. That was, I was addicted to meth, was probably the only, like, true, truly hardcore addiction. How did some of that happen? Is that, is that, are you byproduct of your environment somewhat? How did some of that happen?

Is that, is that, uh, are you byproduct of your environment somewhat? Like, uh, did you kind of run with the wrong crowd and there's other people doing it in your area and stuff? Cause you said you grew up in a really small town in Ohio, right? Yeah. I think it was a combination, uh, of all the above. I think it was a lot of different things. Um, man, um, gosh, so many things, uh, you know, growing in a very small town and just not really having that direction. That's why I talk about the direction so much. That's how people get off the path so much. They don't know where they're going. They had no idea. So this is the way I always say is like, uh, I was, I was trying to find myself and when,

and I hate that term because when you're trying to find yourself, that road could take you anywhere. Right. Um, that's why I always say, stop trying to find yourself and start to define yourself. So rather than, you know, you can live your life by design. You don't have to go searching for yourself and that could take you down any crazy path and i think that's really what was happening with me because um as i was searching for myself so to speak um i found a lot of fucking troubled people that were that i related to and uh and it just one thing led to another and more than anything i would chalk it up to

being naive and not really understanding how severe the problem was um thinking i'll just play around with that i'll try oh that was fun let's do it again rather than you know like this is some serious shit they could you know know, not, not understanding, uh, how severe it can truly be, which I, you know, I think you understand pretty well. And, uh, um, you know, it just, it just, it wasn't that I was brought up like a, like in, uh, is a lot of people I see, uh, that end up in these sort of situations, they come from very, very bad situations to start with. Very bad homes. I didn't have that. I mean, maybe I was abused some.

Maybe I was bullied. And, you know, maybe there was problems. But it wasn't anything that I shouldn't have been able to overcome as just a strong human being. But I was a weak person. And that was my escape, and that was my way to kind of say, fuck you to the world. Would you say that getting addicted to drugs was your fault? Or would you say it's half your fault, half maybe not your fault? I don't like placing blame on anyone for anything in my life other than myself.

Yeah, so you just take complete control, complete blame over it. Yeah. How were you able to get yourself out of any of that? I mean, nearly died from heroin. You were on cocaine. You were on crystal meth. Well, meth was the only one that was really hard to get away from. And I went to jail and that was how I got out of that addiction.

Jail sobered you up. It did. A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and I just got out of jail realizing like, damn, like, you know, I was addicted to that shit. You know, I didn't realize it at the time. Um, I, you know, I didn't realize how much I was doing it and didn't realize how much I needed it. Uh, went to jail and, you know, was just fucking, you know, my mind going crazy about it you know i wasn't having like shakes

or anything like that or cold sweats or anything but i mean i was certainly um you know just geeking for it all the time you know and and it was really you know damaging my mind but it only lasted for probably about a week and then then i was fine and was able to get over it and i just walked out of jail saying you know i'm just not gonna go down that road again. Um, the heroin, I think I was really pretty lucky with that because, uh, um, I was such a fucking dumb young kid. It's unreal how dumb I was when I look back. Cause I remember leaving the hospital, like nobody was even there to pick me up or anything. And, um, I, I leave and I'm walking around and I around i'm like man i want to go get shit faced you know and but i was like i'm not doing that shit again you know and that was you you nearly died and no one came no and then and no

one walked out no one came when you were and how old are you uh 22 why didn't anybody come i didn't have any friends yeah a lot of so maybe the people that you were like running with that you thought were your your boys and stuff like that maybe absolutely were not my friends yeah and what about your parents i could not call my parents i had no my parents didn't even find out about that when my dad passed away so he never even heard about it Well, my mom says that he did know about it, but I never told him, and they never brought it up to me. You saw it be too painful to tell your parents or something? Of course, yeah.

I didn't want them to know how deep I really was in that world. And I think that was sort of a— They didn't know you were in jail either? No, they knew I was in jail, yeah. Um, cause I'd call them from jail. Like I got something lonely. Come on, someone talk to me. I've gotten some phone calls from there before.

Yeah. Um, I would say that that's sort of, uh, that was certainly a problem in my, uh, uh, family.

And I haven't really talked about this or brought it up much, but when I look back, that was certainly the way that I was raised. You know, it wasn't really, there wasn't really a lot of communication. It was, and I think that probably would have went a long way to making me feel more comfortable with my family, but I was really disengaged with my family but i was i was really um disengaged with my family just communication in general in general yeah because it was you know my i just had come from a very conservative small town family and they were like you know my dad was was very uh blunt and straightforward and you know it wasn't like like oh you have a problem we should try to fix it it's like

fuck your problem, you know? Like, be a man, right? And, I mean, I certainly carry some of that with me today, but I try to be a little bit more intelligent about it. But it was, you know, the old school, like, 50s style, you know, like, he thought he was going to beat it out of me, you know? And a lot of stuff just made me want to do it worse, and that was probably what led me down that road. And I think communication in my younger days, probably, I mean, again,

I always like to blame it on myself, but I, I, I, at least when I do it with my own kids, you know, I, I tried to implement that more than like, look, I'm going to talk to you about whatever your problem is. And, and hopefully that keeps them away from the roads that i went down uh your your parents they didn't really know much about the uh the drug situation and they knew because i was in a small town yeah so they heard they just didn't know how deep yeah well for one that they may not have known how deep but they certainly didn't know how to handle it again my my dad was just you know know, he just basically disowned me more or less. Right.

What do you think would happen? Like, I see, I think a lot of times these barriers, and I don't know your parents, but I think a lot of times these barriers are kind of made up in some way. Like, you think if you went to your parents and said, I'm hooked on drugs really bad. I really need help or I'm going to die or end up in jail. You think they would turn their back on you? Well, the problem is I actually did come to them more than once like that. And then I fucked them. Yeah. You know, so I would use that, um, uh, you know, I would use that. Now this was, you know, I'm talking before, I guess I was really that deep. You know, by the time I'm like 19, 20,

they're like, look, you're on your own now. You know, we did all we could. But when I was, you know, 14, 15, you know, I was kind of like, you know, maybe scared to talk to them about it too much. But I'm like, look, you know, I'm, you know, I've run away from home, whatever, you know, come back a few days later and be like, hey, I have these problems.

You know, these people want to do this and this and and i will you know you know okay we'll help you and then i go do the same thing next week right and and it was basically again you know because because you know um again i hate blaming on anyone but myself it was certainly me but the you know their way of handling it wasn't really helpful to me. Their way of handling it was a kind of a hard ass way, you know, the 1950s style, you know? Right. Yeah. You know, the reason why all these things are so important to like uncover and to understand is because everyone comes from a different spot and people are, people are really hungry to figure out, you know, how, how can I be successful? You know, how do I, how can I be an entrepreneur? How can I make money or, uh, how can I be happy?

Right. And it's like, well, I can't fucking tell you any of those things. I don't know where you're coming from. You know, if I don't, cause everyone has a different starting point. And I've learned that probably through the gym more so than anything, because sometimes you have somebody come through and, uh, they'll go to deadlift 135 pounds and, uh, they shake and they, they're out of control and they can't figure out a way to, um, you can just undo that a little bit and you'll be able to adjust that upward. It might take you a second, but that's okay. But we'll, you know, we'll see people that will, that will, uh, you know, be incredibly weak.

Sometimes we'll have other people that come in off the street, and for whatever reason, that person's just gifted. They're stronger than shit. They got good genetics. We're all just starting out in different spots. For sure. I think it's really important for people to understand because I can't, I or you,

you can't really give somebody a recipe and say, hey, man, this is going to help you in this way. You can give general stuff, but you can't really give like a full on recipe. I do think there, you know, the, the, the saying is, you know, principles are few methods or many, right? So we may not be able to prescribe a method to them, but the principles they can still abide by. And the first key principle I think is that, you know, your past does not have to have

to be indicative of your future. And that's something I had to teach myself because coming from a small town and just my whole history as a whole, I had to tell myself, that doesn't have to be who I'm going to be in the future just because that's what I did in the past. And I can really change this. And that was when I found the martial arts and I found combat sports and fighting.

If I would have based it off of where I came from, then I certainly wouldn't be where I'm at today. But again, that's where I go back to it all the time, having direction. And direction may be hard for some people to find, something that gives them the motivation. But you need to find, um, you know, something that, that gives them the motivation and. But you need to find something, right?

Like you need to, you know, um, you have to have, you have to have some sort of activity, I believe. Like, I don't think if there's, if there's not an activity, I don't think you can pull yourself from the depths of some of the places that you pulled yourself from, whether that's you like to write or paint or read or hike or like, it just doesn't really matter what it is. Right. It just has to be something that you love. That's exactly right. And, and finding that again, you know, it can be difficult. Um,

but I think people will try to over complicate that too. I mean, it doesn't have a lot of people, you know, we're kind of taught by society, you know, and I think it's, it's changing a lot, but like, I was taught like, this is what you're going to be. society, and I think it's changing a lot. But I was taught this is what you're going to be. And I was like, fuck that. I just don't want to be that. I want to be anything else except for that. And I think there's a lot of that where there's sort of a we feel limited and kind of pigeonholed.

And you have to be this, or you have to be this, or you have to be this. You have to go to college, or you have to be this or you have to be this you have to go to college or you have to do i think it's you know i think that that kind of paradigm is shifting where you know especially with the social media and everything now we see how big the world really is and how many we see people um like there's people that make a living off traveling you know or like hiking or something right like you can really you know, or like hiking or something, right? Like you can really, you know, do whatever you want. So, you know, all you gotta do say, look, this is what I want to do. And then, and then after that you can pave the road. And so that's like, you know, the, the four, there's always like four pieces to every life that I always put together in my, in my own head. And

it's kind of how I describe it is like, you have to have a direction that's your GPS. So like, you know, your, your end goal, like beginning with the end in mind, uh, you have the road that you take to get there. Then you have the driver and you have the car, the driver's the mind and the car is the body, um, the roads you can build yourself, but you have to have that end goal. Otherwise, like it doesn't matter how fast your car is. It doesn't matter how good the driver is. If you don't know where you're going, who knows where you're going to go. When you were coming out of this situation and sobering up and trying to change your life and even having a near-death experience, are you somebody that believes in God? No.

Did you maybe lose faith somewhere along the way, or you never believed in God, period? I was brought up in a very ultra-Christian home, went to church at least once a week, maybe more. But even as a teenager, I was already questioning it, and I think that's just the logical side of me. And I don't have anything against. I totally understand when people believe in a God or whatever it is that they believe in. I just like for them to accept that it is a belief. Belief doesn't make anything true. So feel free to believe whatever you want. I'm just the type of person, just knowing myself, I don't believe in anything.

I'm a very objective, pragmatic person. And I'm just like, so, you know, I just look at it like, you know, I don't care what anybody believes. I'm just, I try to just see exactly what is. What attracted you to fighting? Oh, man. Now you're getting real deep. fighting oh man now you're getting real deep uh the fact that i could die in there so actually before i even uh got into combat sports i tried to join the military so this was like um i can't remember this was before or after the overdose so So you try to put all the life together.

You know, it was like 15, 17 years ago. But either way, yeah, it was, you know, when the 9-11 happened, I went straight down to the recruiting office. Yeah, shortly after, I mean, within the week. And I said, give me a fucking M-16, put me on the front lines, let's go. And I don't know what i don't know you know what's so crazy about me that attracted me like i just i i always loved the idea of you know matt brown the m16 i'm getting the fuck out of this building i mean that was like literally

exactly what i said to him you know but my criminal record uh wouldn't allow me at the time because i had that should that should uh make them want to have you go over there more i know right well well they like you're crazy you can't and then they should be like oh yeah you're crazy perfect check right i did about six months of of trying to get in the military it was a very i remember it was a very very down point in my life when they finally turned me down because i had duis i i think the final straw was, remember Special K, the rave drug? I got busted with that. So I think that was the final straw because that was sort of,

it was a controlled substance at that time. What was your favorite drug? Cocaine by far, or meth. What did that do to you? I have no experience with any of that stuff. With the uppers? What does it do to you? I have no experience with any of that stuff. With the uppers? What does it do to you? How do you explain that?

I mean, just euphoric as a motherfucker. I mean, just, you know, you have the energy to do anything. I feel like I feel immortal. Yeah. I mean, that's really how you feel. Like, you could literally do anything. You could kill anybody for anything. You know, like, you're unstoppable. That's how I feel. You did end literally do anything. You could kill anybody for anything. You know,

like you're unstoppable. That's how I feel. You did end up in the military though, right? No, no. Okay. No,

they, they turned me down. And then what, what, uh, started to happen after that? Yeah. Yeah.

You know, I remember being a recruiting, like I had to write letters for six months. Like, I mean, I did everything I could. and that was actually, um,

I ended up going to jail right after that too because uh that okay now I remember so yeah so I got turned down from the military and I was I was still on probation and I was about to be getting off probation which was going to be like when they were going to let me go in the military and I think I just kind of partied for a little while and then I got uh my probation got rev. And that's when I got sentenced. That was the longest that I ever did in jail. I was kind of funny. I got sentenced to six months.

And then like three and a half, four months in, they called me. And they said, Matt Brown, pack your bags. I was like, what? All right, cool. And the next day, we didn't have cell phones back then. So the next day I called my probation officer from a pay phone. I said, hey, am I still on probation? Because, you know, I didn't serve out my whole sentence. She's like, well, according to our my computer here, you're still in jail. She's like, you need to see the judge. So the next day I went to see the judge and the judge is like, oh, yeah, we we messed up.

But since you came to us, we're going to let you go. So I got lucky. Honor policy. Yeah. Did you have like a mentor? Was there any, was there anything or, or anyone that helped pull you out of it? Like, did you get attracted to fighting at that time and you got motivated and you started exercising or was there anything that in particular, other than you just saying, I'm not going back and doing that shit if anything i had bad mentors um again i defined my own path

and i set my own path and i said there's nothing that's going to stop me and i'm either going to die doing this or or i'm going to succeed doing it and fortunately i've done pretty well you weren't successful getting into the military and then what was the transition uh after that like what how'd you find how'd you find fighting or was that before that well the fighting um yeah it was was certainly after that um i went to a fight i just signed up they i was telling you a story yesterday so people can watch every if you want to hear the whole story i'll shorten it up here um you know i just signed up and fought that night i was on coke and i ended up winning and then uh one thing led to another and i was like yeah didn't

you mention that um we we can tell that retell the story here because it's on two different like youtube channels it's sort of weird you can get into more depth on here you know if you want yeah yeah yeah but um basically like you went to a fight, and you weren't scheduled to fight, though, right? You just went with a friend. Yeah, I just went to watch, and we were doing coke and stuff before we even went. His name was Fat Joe. I wonder if he was related to Fat Dan. Either that or he's a rapper now.

I'm just joking. Either that or he's a rapper now. Okay, so I go to the fight. I think he was supposed to fight Wes Sims that day, and I think Wes was the one that didn't show up. I don't remember exactly. Was Fat Joe a pretty good fighter? No. He's pretty fat.

Like more than Big Gutsy. He'd be a good power lifter. Probably would have yeah I mean okay so anyway yeah so I get there and again it was like

something you'd see in the movies I mean there's people there betting and smoking cigars and there wasn't an athletic commission back then and

so you know the guy's like hey man I was like hey man how'd you sign up how how does that work and he's like well you just go over there and you pay him 30 bucks and you sign up so i went i just went over and i was like i was like how do we do this and and he's like well we need someone to

fight the champion you want to fight the champion i was like fuck yeah i'll be a champion all right and uh and how much fighting experience did you have prior to this only in the streets yeah just you know whatever kind of so no training or anything like no i mean like we did like some backyard i'd watch i watched the ken shamrock dvd which i actually did like we i'd sit there get, like we'd have these parties and, and, and I was, we'd watch,

you know, UFC and pride and stuff. And at one time a guy brought over the Ken Shamrock DVD, we put it in, or it's probably VHS back then actually. Yeah. And we would sit there on the floor and actually practice like heel hooks and stuff.

And I mean, I had no idea, you know, about anything, but, uh, yeah. So,

and, and I was that guy a lot of times. I mean, I always like wanted to be in shape. I didn't really understand it, but, you know, so I would get a, that's one thing I always liked about Coke and meth as meth specifically was, you know, I would take that and be drunker than shit. And I would just go run for a mile, two miles, uh, go do pushups stuff on the bike trails or the, the, the streets and stuff that run. And I'd come back and, um, exercise in a bottle. Exactly. Yeah. And I, you know, I'd come back and a lot of times, you know, I'd be pumped up cause I was kind of always like watching my back,

right. Because these people that I was hanging out with, I knew how they were, you know, I was trying to rip you off and stuff. So I'd make sure that, you know, at least in my mind, that I was, you know, getting in shape and being strong because I always knew a fight could happen any minute. Like, we all love fighting, you know, small town hillbilly guys, right? And a lot of times, yeah, you know, I'd come back and, you know, and we would fight, you know, and I'd be pumped up and ready to fight. And that was a pretty common story.

And you never know if you come back and, you know, a dude's messing with your girl or whatever, right? Yeah, yeah. It's such a common story um you never know if you come back and you know dude's messing with your girl whatever right yeah yeah it's such a common story right um so so anyway yeah so um i signed up paid 30 bucks and uh walked down the street bought a mouthpiece and a cup uh come back uh there's a restaurant across the street uh use the microwave to boil the mouthpiece come back to the fight uh and uh this is all logical thought for you you're like i gotta sign up for this fight and uh walk into the restaurant hey can i use your microwave this is a it was very logical to me at the time surprisingly yeah well what did they say when you walked in like hey can i borrow a microwave

uh yeah i don't remember but um I don't remember specifically what they said. Like, man, that guy sure is pacing back and forth really fast. I don't remember them thinking it was strange or anything. But it's funny because, you know, it's like, oh, safety first. I've got to get this mouthpiece to fight a champion, even though I've never fought. Pretty much, yeah. I've got to protect.

Well, come foul later, he was a tough man champion, was why they were calling him champion. I guess he wasn't really the champion of that, it pretty much gonna protect well come final later he was tough man champion was what why they were they were calling him champion he he i guess he wasn't really the champion of that but he'd won the tough man competition which a lot of people like we did around there you remember the tough yeah yeah so a lot of people were doing that and that was kind of like who's the toughest man in town right uh that's how we would gauge uh i, I've actually competed in that before. And I was on, uh, like whatever channel it was on, it was on FX and they did, uh, pro football players against, uh, professional wrestlers, which it was like all just like, uh, you know, it was all second

rate pro pro football players and second rate, uh, professional wrestlers, of course, but it's almost like a celebrity uh boxing match right yeah yeah yeah they they had uh the honky tonk man was our like coach i don't know if you remember the second right right he was like yeah well but yeah he didn't he didn't fight but uh okay what happened was uh my team we won we won more fights and so uh i won my fight and a couple other guys won their fight and then we just picked the guy to like fight in the championship round, but it was, it was fun. I fought in the Joe, Joe Lewis arena in front of like 5,000 people. Uh, it was pretty, it was pretty cool.

And I was able to, I was able to knock my guy out and knocked him out, knocked him out of the ring. Um, it was funny. Detroit, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It was, uh, a really weird experience i just remember like when i watch uh any sort of fights on tv when somebody you know when somebody can kind of like go for the kill i'm always like this guy's a pussy why doesn't he just go for it and that's all i could think about in this fight because i started to get really tired even though it was like a a three round I think it was like a yeah I think it was only like a minute each you know each round so it was absolutely pathetic you just get gas thrown haymakers

but yeah I was like fuck it I gotta go all in and I ended up knocking the guy out of the ring and it was cool what year was that it was um it had to be like 2002 or something like that. Around the same time I was there.

Yeah, it's really hard to find any of that shit. But Lawrence Taylor was one of the representatives on the show. And it was a lot of fun. It was cool. That's my fighting career right there. 1-0. Hey, at least you know what it feels like to walk in there, man. Yeah.

I think everybody should do that once in their life man yeah feeling yeah i mean you know in the tough man competition too you're fairly protected the gloves are fairly big we had headgear yeah you know it's way different than having somebody fucking kick you in having somebody kick you in the face that was so that's one of the few things I still remember about that first fight was just how vulnerable you are. Like your shirt's off, you know? Yeah. And these gloves are so small.

And you're just like, well, I hope this dude can't hit as hard as I think he can. Yeah. What did you do in that fight? Do you remember any of it? Yeah, yeah. I actually ran out

and fucking punched him right away and he shot in on me and you know which was completely unexpected right because in the back with like the one guy who was fighting later that i kind of became friends with and he was like kind of showing me how to fight a little bit he's like this is how you throw a jab he's like i'm sure he showed me completely wrong but right um yeah he told me he's like man this guy's a tough man guy he's like so you gotta take him down i was like i ain't fucking doing that man i ain't no pussy you know and uh yeah so anyway so i ran out i was like you know i'm gonna prove all these people wrong so i went out and i hit him and you know as hard as i feel like i hit him it probably you know it's

like this or something but right um you know so he shot in tries to take me down and i tried a schoolyard head choke, which was now called a guillotine, but I didn't know what it was. I was like, I'm gonna squeeze this son of a bitch. And, uh, he tapped out like right away. He claimed that he had a calf cramp, you know, but he was, he was, I was choking. He's a fucking liar. Yeah. He was a liar.

Calf cramp. Yeah. That's a bunch of bullshit. No rematch, huh? No rematch. Half cramp. Yeah. That's a bunch of bullshit.

No rematch, huh? No rematch. And then, so the, you know, I did, so now another kid that was in the crowd, he was like, he said he wanted to fight me, right? Oh, shit. So I was like, all right, you know, let's do it. And so I fought him later that night and he pieced me up pretty good. Like, you know, went to a decision. I lost, but it was like, you know, kind of could have went either way, you know.

It was only kickboxing, though. Either way, you know, like my confidence was sky high. People coming out of the crowd. Yeah. We need more of this. So, you know, at this point, my confidence is sky high, right? And then, you know i come back and i did that at a fairgrounds where they um mark coleman was actually put on the show and i remember

him and him and random and were there and uh this was in like the you know i guess the show arena of like the horses or the pigs or something and like we literally warmed up on the dirt and stall you know so i come out and um uh beat that guy pretty easily like he was just a complete fool i mean i had you know like a skinny kid probably not my weight class i think they might set him up you know just uh you know just to get his ass kicked and then the third time then i did what they call sanshout kickboxing which i didn't know what that term meant so i come out and you know i think i thought it was muay thai because um you know i knew what you know kickboxing was so i thought it was kickboxing and that's what they told me dude by the way so i come out and um

you know dude comes out takes me down this is sans San Chavez kickboxing with takedowns, right? You get points based on how big you throw them. So, like, if you just take them down, it's like a point. If their feet go over their head, then it's like five points, right? So the referee will call it out one to five, right? Anyway, so he comes out, takes me down, you know, and I'm looking at the ref. You know, I was like, man, what the fuck is that? We didn't do a takedown this morning.

It's not MMA, right? You know, and he's like we're gonna fight right comes out takes me down again now I'm pissed I'm like this is bullshit so I come out

the third time and I actually have the VHS of this I have to put it up on I just found it the other day I have to put it up on YouTube or something but you know

so I come out like a wrestling stance and bang fucking kicks me in my head and I'm like what in the fuck is going on here what are the rules tell me the rules so so anyway so the rest of the fight you know come out i'm just getting my ass

i was set up pretty badly actually uh i know the guy now his name is scotty mclean he was 12 and 3 at the time um you know he kicked my ass really bad um but that was when I realized how tough I was. But then I also realized that I needed to go to a real gym. And I realized that I had some talent. Because after the fight, everybody, I was actually trying to rush off because I had to go work, third shift. But everybody was like, dude, you did great. You did awesome.

When are you coming back? And I'm like, what are you talking about? I got my ass kicked, right? great. Like, you did awesome. Like, when are you coming back? And I'm like, what are you talking about? I got my ass kicked, right? So I left and went to work. And then the next day, I was like, okay, I need to find a real gym. And I just started looking around. And I found a place called Bo Kimley's Martial Arts or some shit like that. And so I go there.

And that's where I met my friend Dorian Price, who is still my coach today, still probably my best friend. He lives over in Thailand and he'll come back only for my camps. He doesn't come back and train anyone else, only comes back and trains me. So that's where my real Thai style comes from is Dorian. He goes over, he learns the real Thai system. He lives like a fucking savage up there in the jungles. He sleeps on mats in the Thai camps with insects and reptiles. Literally lives the life that they live and has no desire to do much beyond that. Now he's getting into commentating and stuff.

He's older and he's retiring any day now. He's retired like five times, but know retiring any any day now he's very tired like five times but probably officially retiring any day now and uh yeah so the rest kind of history you know but you have to learn learn a lot of other stuff i mean you know take there's a lot that goes into being especially like a ufc fighter on that level because you can get you know an arm bar you know someone can get a hold of your ankle or whatever if you don't know like jiu-jitsu and other stuff too right yeah so initially like I just wanted to do Muay Thai like when Dorian introduced me to it and I was like I'm just going to be a Muay Thai fighter but then in Ohio you know the scene just wasn't there uh it's not really in America at all but the scene wasn't

there where you can make literally any money at all you weren't allowed to use elbows and me and dory were both uh big elbow fighters so we're like kevin ross told us some really horrifying stories about being like dropped off in the middle of nowhere and fucking fighting and just really wild shit in china right yeah we were like what the hell yeah sounded horrifying yeah yeah Yeah. Yeah, so, and then, you know, that's when I was really getting a lot heavier into the strength training and learning that side of things. Because basically by this point, this is when I decided I'm dedicating my life to this way. This is the path i'm i'm taking and i i looked at every aspect that i could um in terms of uh you know muay thai jiu jitsu i mean like i said initially i want to do muay thai but you know i found out real quick there wasn't any money in it there wasn't really a scene nothing

like that so um you know the idea of going thailand was pretty crazy to me so you know i was like you go do that dory and you can come tell me what you think uh you know so that's why you know i started uh wanting to do uh mma and then i met you know one thing kind of led to another you know and i met guys that were good fighters and um again you know i immediately just dove completely deep into it. I bought every book I could possibly imagine. Every job that I had, I would keep it just long enough so I could pay my rent so that I could go train again. There was many days where I didn't have money for food. There was many days that I was sure I was getting kicked out of my apartment.

And then when I finally decided I was going to go pro, it was really because I needed rent money. And I was like, you know, I'm fighting for free. I could be paying my rent money with this. I didn't really have at that time. I wasn't really like like I'm going to get to the UFC. I was just like, I'm going to be a fighter, and I'm going to dedicate my life to this. And I don't really care what comes of it, but it's going to be better than what I was doing before. How did this turn into you being in the UFC? Well, let's see.

So, again, I kind of dedicated my life to it. And then I eventually got, again, I was working these jobs just so I could pay my rent and so I could make it, maybe have to pay my travel to get to a fight. It wasn't really paying for anything. And I did this for a few years. And that was when I finally got an opportunity in New York City to be a personal trainer. And I didn't really understand what that meant. But to me, I was like, oh, I get to be in a gym all day.

So I'll be able to train. It was a crunch fitness is what it was. And back then, especially that location was really big on, you know, the boxing too, right? So I was like, man, I'll get to train all day, right? And that's all i have to do i didn't i guess i didn't put two and two together and realize like you also have to train other people and that's kind of exhausting but either way so i was up there you know and and i was training people all day and i was training myself a lot and uh i didn't i didn't actually realize

how expensive new York City was. Because at the time, the girl that I lived with there, not my current wife, but the one before, we just lived with her family. And that was, you know, so how we were able to get by. Well, anyway, after about a year of being there, the tryouts for the Ultimate Fighter were over in Newark. And I went over there and did the tryouts, and they brought me on the show. And what was that process like, getting on the show? I mean, there's probably thousands and thousands of people that try out, right? There wasn't that many.

I mean, this was a while back. This was right when it first really kind of started going over that tipping point, I think. And that's when things were really getting big. This was 2007 was when I went to the tryout. Yeah. And then 2008 was when I was on the show in January 2008. So 10-year anniversary this year. And do you have to win to get a contract?

Is that the way the show works? No. So initially, that was kind of the idea. and do you have to win to get a contract is that the way the show works no no so initially that was kind of the idea and then dana was like you know seeing how much talent came out of it and he gave other guys uh contracts also and then it eventually just became where the winner gets the biggest and best contract right and every and if you show a promise then he'll potentially give you a contract too so i got offered a contract another special just like eight and eight and um back then most guys were coming into the ufc at like three and three or four and four so i thought i was pretty hot shit you know to get yeah double what most guys coming in were getting but but i also had to fight on the show for pennies so

you know i think i made like two or three3,000 total. Oh, sure. So. A lot goes into all this training, you know? I know that you know, Andy Galpin. I know that you work a lot on your nutrition and your cardio and stuff. How is, you know, a scientific approach been applied to some of what you're doing? Well, I think I try to take everything that can be scientific and objective and learn as much about it as I can so that when I get the advice from those who have dedicated their lives to each specific discipline, like a nutritionist or a strength coach or whatever, so I can really

interpret that information with some sort of knowledge. So that's the first thing that I've always tried to, the reason that I've always tried to educate myself on. But I really, so it's sort of like, you know, I'm the CEO of the business and I'm hiring people to advise me, right? So when I'm hiring people to advise me, I want to know that I have the best advisors. And the way to do that is I have to have some understanding of myself. But I can't know nutrition as well as my nutritionist i can't know strength as well as my strength coach i can't i can't know jujitsu as well as my jujitsu coach right so uh that's why you know so my my philosophy has always been know enough about it that i know how to get the right

person in there for me um is it frustrating to you um you are utilizing anabolics, utilizing PEDs to get ahead, and you think there's other people in the sport perhaps not going that route because they know it's on's it's not it's the it's on the banned substance list yeah i mean that's that's kind of a long subject we could certainly dive into i mean the way i look at it is i think everything should be legal in terms of i mean now you kind of get into like a political thing too i mean i think it should just be legal from a government point of view and then if an organization wants to ban it or not that's their prerogative. Right. And they can do it the way they want. But I think humans should be allowed to put whatever they want in their body.

And that's again, that starts with, you know, the overall society, my overall society view. You know, I'm a big believer in freedom. Now, when you get deeper into you know so the ufc says it's illegal you can't take that um that's where the issues come up because now it's now what happens is certain guys are able to take it but um as i've spoken about before the reason is because the repercussions and the consequences are not severe enough to deter them away from doing it. And that's why I've advocated for a lifetime ban. I'm happy right now with the, they do like a four year ban.

And I think it's two years initially, but you know, that's a good start. I mean, I think it should at least be as severe enough, like a four years at least, you know, to really deter someone. The sport might pass you by, right? In those four years, right? Yeah. And you have to understand that risk. And, um, again, it's not that I have something against the substance itself, but if we're going to make it illegal, we have to make it illegal. Right. Yeah. You got to have a strong stance on, otherwise people are still going to figure out a way around all the, um, around all the testing with, with your style of fighting, how do you determine when to make like a change?

Because you're, you're known as like a brawler. That's, that's what people get excited about. That's kind of why they want to see you fight. But sometimes it, it, uh, it just probably doesn't make sense to stand there and take all these shots, right? Yeah. Well, I hope I don't take too many shots. You know, a lot of people call me a brawler a technical brawler is probably what i'm known more as and and uh i think that the real reason for that is because like you know i i will push

the brawl uh to what i do and i do it in a technical way. It's not just a wild brawl. Like, I use technique to get it to what I want it to be. And, you know, I mean, there's a lot to that. You know, it's not as simple as just going in there and swinging punches. I mean, I really have to get the fight to where I want it to be, and that's really the key to a fight. have to get the fight to where I want it to be and that's really the key to a fight and I made a lot of mistakes trying to where I've gotten away from that in the past and nowadays that's why I think I'm gonna be such a good coach right I've been doing some coaching over at Muscle Farm and you know we have a great program to be building there and and the part of

the reason I think I'm I'll bring another aspect to that is because I've made these mistakes. You know, I've done the things right and I've done the things wrong. And I guess like what we were talking about before, we see people that do it right and they win 10 fights and then they lose one. And all of a sudden they change everything. And that's a mistake, too, because, you know, statistically, you know, you know, that's less than 10% that, you know, that, that was a mistake. So, you know, you have to look at it, uh, objectively and, and see, uh, what's working and what's not. How do you get back?

Uh, you know, you said you're going to be out for probably a year, got a knee, got an ankle thing going on. Um, it's going to take you some time. How you how do you get back in in the hunt um well i guess i could look at a lot a lot of different ways i mean first and foremost you know i'm not even looking at uh beyond right now the recovery right now I'm looking at the day-to-day, and I'm looking at doing the best that I can in the moment. And right now that's not fighting, so I'm trying to give to others. Again, you know what I'm doing at MusclePharm,

where I'm helping others and building a great team there, trying to bring that up. So I really try to focus on what i can do in the moment now now when i come back it's going to be a different story and and are you just dying to punch somebody in the face um i wouldn't mind andrew any takers well he was saying he wouldn't he wouldn't punch anybody because all the little bones in the in the in the fist right but what you know elbow yeah it's the one elbow, right? Elbow and knee or kick.

So if you want to elbow Smokey, go ahead. Elbow first and foremost. That's, you know, same in a fight. That's Mariel's move, too. That's what she does. She does the elbow. Elbow straight to the back. That's good technique.

You know, like you're wearing a soft glove. Why do you want to hit him with something soft when you hit him with something hard, right? Yeah. You know, like you're wearing a soft glove. Why do you want to hit them with something soft when you hit them with something hard? Yeah. You know, it's the same, you know, if I, why would I, you know, throw a small projectile like this when I have a, you know, entire leg I could throw at you.

Right. It doesn't really make any sense. Has this, has the injury and the setback, has it been devastating to you? No, no, not at all. Again, I've been doing, you know, tons of stuff with MusclePharm, man, and they've really stepped up and helped me. And, you know, I got to throw out a big shout out to them. You've been with tons of stuff with MusclePharm, man, and they've really stepped up and helped me. I got to throw out a big shout-out to them. You've been with them for a while, right? Yeah, I've been sponsored by them for a while,

but now at this point they've really helped me during this downtime, given me a lot of direction and helped me for what I'm going to do after fighting, which is going to be coaching people. I'm the type of guy, for the rest of my life. I want to be in the trenches. I don't want to just be that coach that, you know, just telling people what to do or trying to guide them, you know, some philosophical bullshit. Like I want to be in the trenches with them and learning at the same time that I'm sharing my experience and my knowledge with them. that I'm sharing my experience and my knowledge with them. And again, you know, MusclePharm has given me a great opportunity to do that and a great platform to do that on.

We have a lot of great fighters there that I'm learning just as much from as they're learning from me. And Joe Schilling, Mickey Gall, Alan Joe Bond, and, you know, Bamba. You know, we got a bunch of great guys there and great knowledge just being passed around. And to me, again, I dedicated my life to this path years ago. And whether that means I'm competing or whether I'm helping others, you know, it doesn't really mean a lot to me. And that's a big difference, I think, with because I understand why I'm going to make such a good coach is because I understand what it feels like to walk in there.

So I've only done one full camp all the way through. I've helped tons of guys, you know, with coaching. But with Jesse Taylor, he did the Ultimate Fighter finale, and we did the – I did his entire camp top to bottom. I did the program design. I did the – I brought in the Spartan partners, brought them to different places. And so basically left it to where he didn't have to think at all about what we're doing day to day. And when he stepped in that cage, see, I even misstepped and said, when we stepped in that cage,

because that's the way, that's the big difference, I think, is because I've been in there so many times that I understand what it feels like. And when he stepped in that cage, I stepped in there with him. The only difference was, you know, when he gave me a hug, our bodies split, but our spirit stayed in one place and walked right in there with him. Is your wife supportive of your fighting? Yeah, of course. course yeah she loves it and um you know she's been uh right there by my side since uh day one well not day one but you know at least in the ufc very early on yeah she's seen a lot of the ups and downs and

uh what about uh family systems do uh some family members go to your fights and things like that? Yeah, the last time I fought in Cincinnati, I think, you know, close to my home, more people came to that than my family reunion. Oh, shit. Yeah, my family loves it. You know, I mean, my family's all country boys. We come from Kentucky. So, yeah, they're all, you know, hillbillies love fighting.

That's for sure. So you were able to reconnect with your family, or are you talking about your immediate family now? Yeah, well, my immediate family, and then I come to find I have a much larger family than before I was in the UFC, too. That's a little weird right yeah so like so a funny story the first time that uh when i was on the ultimate fighter uh my family reunion i went to and i was thinking you know like all my close family that i'd seen at the family union for

you know however many 20 years or whatever it was going to be cool you know and you know get the show off a little bit well ended up like they every one of them had called all their friends it was like hey my cousin's gonna be here whatever they ended up having a line at my family union and me signing autographs wow that's cool man it's kind of cool but at the same time i was like man i'm not even get to hang out with my real family yeah uh what was it like training in cuba ah ah cuba it was fucking amazing man like one of the greatest experiences of my life yeah what uh not just in terms of the training and the things i learned there but just from a societal perspective and learning uh man seeing

these kids come up and the conditions they come up in i can show you guys pictures they're just blow your mind man some of the the the training rooms that they come up in like like yo romero you know i visit his hometown um because the guy that i went there with uh one of my coaches his uh one of his best friends he grew up in cuba so one of his best friends grew up right next to Yo Romero. We went over there to a called Pinar del Rio. They showed me the training room, and it's just

a dirt floor. When mats get really wet, they start breaking up, and they kind of have little balls. They would sweep that up, and they would have a mat then with all those little balls swept up into a mat. I was like, that's why they have such good takedown defense right but the room wasn't no bigger than this room here and there's dirt floor i can show you the pictures man raggedy old thing and

uh we that was the first time i'd ever rode a donkey in my life we rode a donkey out to cockfights in the forest, which I guess is illegal there too. Right. So, like, I'm doing something illegal in Cuba. And I'm like, dude, I don't know, man. I don't want to go to jail in Cuba. But how many people have got to do that in their life? Right. What was the motivation for wanting to train over there?

Well, again, my coach, you know, he he was from there so that was a cool thing and really just to experience a completely different uh style of training uh you know what a lot of the cuban training comes from is from the russian style of training and you know i wanted to um you know kind of learn that style and i wanted to have a complete focus on just wrestling. So I went there and we lived with the wrestling team for six weeks and we did nothing but wrestle. I boxed like two or three times, went over to the Olympic boxing guys. But I mean, we literally lived wrestling for almost two months.

Damn. You got months. Damn. You got kids. Three. Holy shit. You have twin boys. Twin boys, seven years old, two-year-old daughter. Damn. Damn.

Love them. How do you split your time up? Especially while you were fighting. Right now it might be a little different because you might have more downtime. How do you balance everything out? You don't. It's hard, man. Like while you were fighting, you know, right now it might be a little different because you might have more downtime. How do you balance everything out? You don't.

It's hard, man. That's the hard part. You know, the fighting part seems so hard as a human, as a father and a husband, and still being able to dedicate 24 hours a day to fighting because that's really what it is. And, you know, trying to keep up with all the people that don't have families that are able to dedicate that. So, you know, like anything,'s a yin and yang and you can make it, uh, what you want it to be. And I just turned it into a positive thing. And I used my kids as inspiration and, um, you know, I come home and they relax me as crazy as they are, as much as they want to jump on me and punch me and kick me and, and all this.

They know some of the moves. absolutely do yeah yeah actually i just saw my i guess it was on my story but they were so it's gone now but i was showing my my kid practicing his elbows the other day so i have one that you know he's ultra athletic uh he does gymnastics that's really like his thing right now and and he's a the smartest kid I've ever met in my life. He's in, like, all the gifted and talented programs and all that. And then my other one, he's very creative, and he plays the drums. He shows videos, like, me and him jamming. Like, I play guitar, you know. So he plays, like, full songs now at seven years old.

So I'm blessed, man. I have some very talented kids and hopefully, you know, well, hopefully, you know, I'm going to guide them to keep them on the right path and not let them stray. Yeah. And you would, you would be the first one to know, right? Yeah. You'd be able to see it. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Exactly. And again, you know, it's all about, you know, just having a communication with them and, you know, being their friend and, you know, I don't have to always be their dad. That's, I think, where I think I see a lot of parents making mistakes. It's like they always want to be the dad.

It becomes almost like an ego thing. And, you know, their son, you know, can't test them, whatever. And, like, I let my kids talk back to me and, you know, to a certain extent. They understand respect and, you know, they say sir and things like that. But on the same token, if they disagree and they think I'm wrong, they're allowed to speak up. So, you know, I think there's a fine balance there. What is martial arts and fitness? What has it done for you?

Saved my life. I'd be dead right now for sure. Or in prison. Right. You know, there's no doubt about it so is there something like something inside of you that that wants to you know has a desire to really like push forward or you know in mma training uh a lot of times you get uh um you get pushed to your limit like cardiovascularly and uh is there something in you that like really enjoys some of that stuff oh absolutely there's

there's nothing i like more than finding my breaking point because i see that breaking point today it's not going to be there tomorrow tomorrow it's going to be a little bit further yeah i'm gonna push that edge a little bit closer and and that's about knowing yourself and understanding yourself i believe and um you know we I find that breaking point all the time because it's there. I mean, we're humans. It exists. People say they can't be broken, whatever, bullshit. They absolutely can't.

It's a form of therapy for you in a way. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And again, for me, it's all about that direction, man. When I find the, I know where I want it to end. I have the end in mind before I get started. So whatever obstacles are along that road, don't bother me.

That's exactly what I see them as, is just an obstacle that's just going to build me stronger. So when I get there, it's even better. How are you managing stress? Depends on what kind of stress. Just eating it. Yeah. It depends on what kind of stress. I mean, you know, the family stress is certainly, you know, the hardest one to deal with, right? Like kids have something new every day that could possibly stress you out. You know, living with another human being, no matter how much you love them,

can be a difficult thing. The number one thing is, I do a lot of meditation, visualization, and stuff like that. I guess, again, when I have that direction in mind, and I have that tunnel vision, everything on the side is just another obstacle.

And I'm able to let it bounce off of me and deal with it appropriately. I mean, there's a certain way to deal with every situation. And I just try to deal with it the way that I see best so that I can stay on the path that I'm on. With meditation, do you listen to music or do you just relax completely by yourself? What does it look like for you? You know, I practice a few different forms of meditation. I've been doing it so long that, you know, it gets sort of monotonous if you try to just do the same way all the time. You know, YouTube actually has a lot of great resources these days.

I have a guy that I actually hired to do hypnosis. It's like fighthypnosis.com, I think, is what he's at. Hopefully he didn't change it. But his name is Josh, and he's a great guy. So, you know, he'd do a lot of guided meditations and visualizations. But also, I mean, I just do it myself. One of the best resources specifically for combat sports is called gold medal mental workout and i got this from a judo medalist probably 10 years ago before i was even in the ufc and i've been using it ever

since and it's an amazing uh program it's sort of it's an eastern european program uh we go over this book uh red gold have you We go over this book, Red Gold. Have you ever heard of this book? No. Amazing book written by a Russian sports psychologist. And he has a lot of, I just kind of got through it recently. And it has a lot of new things that I've never tried. So I'm trying some of these things now, like putting ping pong balls,

cutting them in half, putting them over your eyes, and then listening to music or doing things like having a speaker on this side, a speaker on this side, two different musics playing and having to focus on one at a time. So being able to control your channels and direct your energy toward one or the other right away. A lot of little techniques. That'd be hard. It's very hard. But the more you do it you can actually feel the difference in your brain being able to do it um and and that's really just about

being able to switch those channels right going from being a being the savage killer in the gym then coming home and and say hey how you doing baby you know and and you know not where i used to come home still be that savage killer you know, slam the door or give me some fucking food, you know, and be that guy. You know, that's not used towards relationships. Come to find out. So, yeah, you know, man, I could go on all day about different styles. You know, meditation, I see is a very vast word. Most people just think of it as, you know, doing like yoga or, you know, visualizing or, you know, just sitting and going, um, things like that.

That's just one style and one aspect of mindfulness that I try to practice a lot more than just that. Again, I've been doing it for so long, like it gets very monotonous and boring. What are these 21 steps you got going? Yeah, I'm not sure. I don't know. I can see it written here. Yeah, I've seen that. It says immortal wisdom.

21 steps and motivation. Maybe we wrote something. Yeah, I'm not sure where the 21 steps came from. But immortal wisdom is the blog that I'm going sure where the 21 steps came from, but Immortal Wisdom is the blog that I'm going to be starting up on my website that I haven't really done it yet.

See, so what happens, so I've read, you know, hundreds of books and I have a huge... This is why I don't read because so many people come on the show and they read books for me.

Yeah, just give you all the cliff notes. Yeah, they're like, hey man, you ever read this? And I'll say, no, what does it say? And tell me all about it.

And then you go and tell everybody, dude, you guys got to check out this book. But then the problem is their interpretation may not be your interpretation. They might fuck it all up.

Yeah. So I have a pretty good library of books and basically what I've done is- It's actually called the library. Library. Your microphone keeps going down. Like this is- Does that happen to you a lot? You got to up yeah i'm sorry does that happen a lot or just

and then it just kind of goes flaccid like that keep cranking kind of a yeah there you go you're good got blue punches to the head or something now i'm not gonna be able to unlock that yeah all right so anyway yeah so I have a pretty good library of books. What I've been doing for years, I think I was just telling you, you know, like super training, like I've read it a bunch of times, but, you know, sitting there reading it and trying to apply it is very difficult. Yeah, it's really hard. So what I've learned to do is I take a book and then I take the notes and then I consolidate

that book into what really applies towards me in my life. And I've done this with so many books now that I have so many writings that I've put together that like, man, you know, this is actually helping me a lot. Maybe I could share it with some people. So that's where Immortal Wisdom has come about. And I just haven't actually released a blog yet, because really what happens if anybody has ever written written which i'm sure you've done a lot of writing you know the problem is you know you have to write 10 pages to get one and yeah making time for it yeah and it's all you know yeah i have the time i guess you know i make the time but the you know it turns you end up throwing most away and it's never good enough and and that's sort of something that i i guess i have to um stop and say look it's good enough and it caused you it caused you to write a lot more because you start saying something and you're

like oh then people aren't going to understand it and you gotta yeah you're like oh shit yeah yeah yeah yeah and that's part of just the right i guess you just have to accept what it is and maybe expand on later or something so i'm learning all that and just trying to be a better writer. I do, you know, like I think I have a good amount of knowledge and I think I have a lot to share. So, you know, it's important to me to get out there and it helps me understand it more when I write it down or when I share with others. Do people ask you a lot about addiction? Like when people hit you up on Instagram and different things yeah i get lots of questions about that absolutely yeah because there's so many people that have problems

or know somebody that has a problem what do you where do you advise somebody to even just start that has a problem yeah you know that's one of the i guess one of the problems with social media is everybody like ask these questions looking for quick fixes and um i get a lot of questions about the uh uh you know fighting and about addiction and and other things and it's so hard to you know because you can't really just say one quick thing about it you gotta yeah it's very hard and and like the last thing you i want to give them something but at the same time like if i give them the wrong thing maybe it doesn't apply to them. Maybe I just fucked it up and made it worse, right?

So I try to be very careful. I try to tread very lightly and try to be general about something that really could be something very specific. How does somebody just know that they have a problem? Yeah, that's a good question. They have to kind of find that out for themselves, huh? Yeah. Again, you know know it's a to uh you know trying to give a general answer to a very narrow question i mean yeah it's like uh too too precise right i think so i mean you know i think you could probably uh

weigh in on that as much as i could i mean yeah i mean you know like people ask like how do i get started in power lifting what you say go fucking lift a weight yeah yeah you know if someone asks you know how how do i get out of addiction we? We say, go fucking lift a weight. You know, if someone asks, you know, how do I get out of addiction? We're like, well, put it down. I mean, you know, but that's way too oversimplified and that can just make it worse. Like, oh, that's his best answer. Right. So it's a very tough question. And I've gotten into some long conversations with people asking them questions like, you know, really trying to help them and then most of the time you come to find when you do dig deeper they either they don't really want to quit or they were just wanting to

talk you know some sort of ulterior motive a lot of times and then when you do get that person that actually is listening and cares you know it does make it worth it though yeah that's that's pretty awesome um doing the west side barbell stuff doing doing the box squats and speed bench, did some of those things translate over well for you in MMA? Did you find your hands were faster and feet were faster and more powerful and more explosive? Absolutely. And I've talked about it a million times. You know, all the stuff at Westside,

we absolutely helped me physically get better, stronger, faster. But more than anything, man, is that culture, is that lifestyle and that feeling. Crazy bastards. Yeah, crazy bastards for sure. But, man, just the intensity. And this is something, you know, again, I want to bring to my coaching is that intensity. And so there's like a whole side of sports psychology that isn't really brought into. So basically what we end up having, I think, especially in MMA, I can't speak as much on like powerlifting or other sports.

But certainly in MMA, we have all these coaches that do different programming. We have a jiu-jitsu coach, a strength coach, a boxing coach, and they each have their own program design or no program design, which is also all too uncommon. Then you have a sports psychologist, and it really usually, like the sports psychologist and the nutritionist are just really completely on the side, right? And they may be prescribing something that really doesn't align with, you know, what they're doing in the gym.

Maybe not everybody's like a cohesive unit. There's no synergy cohesiveness at all. And then even when there is, again, you know, you have guys that are, that are, you know, stubborn about their programming, right? And so to me, the one thing, like, at Westside was that they brought a certain psychology every day that Louie brought. They brought the strength training every day. They brought a lifestyle, a culture that really carried over

into all other aspects. And it was pretty easy to get the buy-in from the other coaches to be on that same program and and my coach tom berry the i worked with at westside who was kind of louis right hand man he would come to me to come with me to pretty much all of my training see what we're doing and see how you know he could add or take away from that. And a lot of what we did was, I think, so we were constantly evolving it. And one of the things that we did pretty much right away was take the training days down to, like, less than 45 minutes of actual training and, you know, five-minute rounds and a lot more recovery days, even like the

dynamic days, but sometimes we're, you know, I might feel like we're doing dynamic, but we're really kind of doing a recovery and dynamic together. You know, the two can kind of work hand in hand. Um, so, you know, there was a lot of, uh, evolution and they're still evolving it and getting better all the time. But I think that was one of the things. So like, you know, what I want to bring as a head coach, you what i'm bringing to muscle farm right now right you know as a coaching these guys is you know we have a beautiful facility we have like an awesome recovery uh that we're getting put in with the cryo and everything but also you know i want to be that guy that's like you know there's a psychological aspect to everything you're doing

too and there's a um you know this also plays a role in your nutrition too and this plays a role in your strength training and when you're doing your strength training you can add a psychological aspect to it rather than you know just do this training whatever and then you go home and now you talk to your sports psychologist and he's like, hey, how was your training or whatever, right? It's just too separated. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I've heard, we had a friend of mine on the show, James Smith, and he kind of felt that that's a problem with coaching in all sports is that the strength coach isn't communicating well with the defensive

line coach and the defensive coach and the head coach and so on. And so the principles are scattered and some of the philosophy is a little different. The philosophy at Westside is all kind of the same, you know? Yeah, exactly. It's intense all the time. Get after it all the time. Yeah. Yeah, and I think they've actually probably added more recovery and, yeah, I mean, mainly so that the intensity during the, you know, the training sessions can be brought up.

So now they do more recovery too, right? And, yeah, I mean, that's exactly it. You know, you have all these different programs, and you're basically almost confusing the athlete. I think that's where injuries come in. Right. And, again, I mean, I think there's a, you know, everybody talks about, like, you know, the psychological, the mental part is 80% or 90%, right, which is complete bullshit, right,

that it's just as important, like it's 50-50 or 100-100, really. There's 90%, right? Which is complete bullshit, right? It's just as important, like, it's, you know, 50-50 or 100-100, really. There's 100%, right? Your mind needs to be 100% and your body needs to be 100%, not, you know, not anything less, right? There's an optimal to each thing. And so I get sick of hearing that kind of stuff. And that's where, you know, people, they get biased towards their own thing, right? Like, the psychologist is going to tell you, yeah, yeah, mental is, you know, 90% of it, right? And the strength guy is going to be like, dude, you fucking, you need to get stronger, you know? Well, why can't the two be one, right?

And the same, you know, every day when we're training, you know, if you're training half-ass every day mentally, then when you go in a fight, I don't care how much sports psychology you did, I don't care how much visualization you did and everything, if you have the habit and your nervous system has been attuned to training half-ass, then when you go in the cage, you're going to fight half-ass. So the key is maintaining that balance all the time, right? So that's why renewal is such an important thing. How do you make good habits? Because it's got to be difficult, you know, to do it time and time again, especially when you go through like a training camp. Yeah, again, the renewal is the number one thing, right?

So that when I do step on the mats, I can, you know, bring myself up to the level that I need to be at on a daily basis. And I've noticed as the older I get, you know, the shorter my training sessions need to be and the more renewal that I do need, especially with having a family and everything. And, um, need to split things up, maybe have like, uh, uh, more workouts that are, that are shorter in length. So you might do two or three workouts that are that are shorter yeah in length so you might do two or three workouts that are 40 minutes or something like that that's exactly it yeah a lot of people don't know that louis simmons is uh you know he's obviously he's a strength guru but people don't

know that he knows a lot about conditioning he knows a lot about he's been a huge fight fan uh for a long time at west side were they able to improve some of your conditioning as well? For sure. I mean, I had really good conditioning before I went there, and I think that was probably my strong point. So, you know, Westside's all about finding the weakness, exploiting it, and fixing it, right? So I wouldn't say that, you know,

most of the conditioning comes from the mats mats anyway but i would say more like the strength endurance type stuff uh came up or where like body parts would start breaking down you know during training and they would be able to uh uh extrapolate those out and see what those are and uh but more than anything i mean you know when you uh are stronger like you guys said strength is never a weakness yeah and you know when you're stronger you know, when you are stronger, like you said, strength is never a weakness. Yeah. And, you know, when you're stronger, you know, your body parts are going to fail less often and they're not going to compensate as much. So, you know, we created a lot better symmetries and a lot better functional movement patterns and things like that. What's your philosophy on conditioning?

So what's your philosophy on conditioning? Like, do you feel that it needs to come from road work or do you feel it just needs to come from a kind of ferocious appetite and training to kind of keep keep pushing hard? Both. I mean, there's I think everything can add a little bit more icing onto the cake, but we have to start with our cake. Right. Make sure that we have a good cake, and there's a ton of things that will add icing onto that. Like an ice cream cake. That's the only good cake that there is, ice cream cake, in my opinion. You know what? Now that you mention it, I think I'm with you on that. Cake is just bread with sugar spread all over it. I never really thought of it, but I think you're right.

They're just too expensive. Fuck cake. Cold stones, like 50 bucks for one of those little fucking cakes. Yeah, those are pricey, but they're delicious. They are, yeah. I might have to go get one tonight. So, you know, so the, again, that's all icing on the cake. That, uh, is really,

that's what I guess too many people, I'm sure you see this in powerlifting all the time. Everybody's worried about that 1% when they don't have the foundation that would take them 20%. Right. This is such a, a common thing. Um, you know,

I mean, I always say like, you know, there's a thousand ways to skin a cat, but they all require sharp blade so like let's first sharpen the blade right and then we'll worry about skin in the cat all right and that's where i think so many people fuck up you know they want they ask me these detailed questions you know we're talking about social media the questions i get you know these

people ask the funniest questions like man how do i get my cardio up like well you know i don't fucking know like what do you do now you know why is get my cardio up like well you know i don't fucking know like what do you do now you know why is your cardio not already good um you know and i do think you know road work is a good fundamental base i think uh um but it probably the number one thing right is is efficiency of movement and that goes with uh training you know hitting pads and having a good coach yeah if you're throwing shit punches and you're just, you know, really crappy at takedowns, you're going to be exhausted trying a couple of takedowns, right?

Exactly, yeah. And that comes from efficiency and movement and being comfortable in those bad positions and things like that. And then, you know, the problem and the reason, you know, I'm big on like road work or see. So like a lot of people are. So, OK, I don't want to take away like steady state, like road work type stuff. It's probably fine to do that. The way I prefer to do is like once you just go punch a bag for 45 minutes, keep your heart rate up the same.

But work, you know, on that efficiency of movement for 45 minutes, which is something that I think is a better answer than going and banging your joints for 45 minutes or an hour or whatever it is that you do. But on the same token, right, there's, you know, that monotony is going to, and this again, by having a good coach, right, that monotony of hitting a bag for 45 minutes could be problematic if you're not able to maintain your focus that whole time, which is a long time to maintain your focus. So in that case, yeah, go swim, go run, go ride your bike, you know, and that way, you know, you're still getting the benefit, but you're not here destroying the movement, right? Because if you throw the punch for 45 minutes wrong, then, you know, you're really creating some bad motor patterns. Whereas

I'd rather you throw it right for 10 minutes and now go run, you know, and get get that uh blood volume and things like that that that you'll get from that steady state conditioning the aerobic capacity as well as getting out and uh so you know i think it's very dependent on the individual and this is again where um i think i'll bring a lot as being a head coach because i understand the efficiency of movement but i also understand okay when that movement starts breaking down now you got to do something else. Or, you know, we want to do it, you know, until it breaks down and then a little bit more. But, you know, that's where now your mind comes in, right?

Because the reason the movement's breaking down is probably because your mind. The saying that one of my coaches, Mark Montoya, would say is like, you know, when you feel like you're at the very end you probably have about 40 percent left still you know you might think you're at the end but you still have a lot more left you barely went past half of your true capacity yeah um so you know so that's where the mental aspect comes in because really your mind's this is where i tell people like stop listening to your mind so much right people got to understand the human body's designed to kind of conserve energy like we're not really designed to like have this crazy energy output we're designed to have some fact but once you start getting fatigued your body's like okay this doesn't make sense anymore let's abandon this you're sweating a lot you're tired your

legs are tight you know and the body's meant to adapt to things too right that's true that's what it's built for is adaptation so you know we have to create the stressor to get that adaptation out of it and that's why i said you know go a little bit more and that's where you know your mind really comes in and again i mean that's where they have an advantage over most coaches just understand things like that where you know it's really your mind that's breaking down it's not your body and i think and that's one of the things you know i it's really your mind is breaking down. It's not your body. And I think, and that's one of the things that, you know, I think, uh, really came from West side. Like you're realizing how much you can do when you go to West side, you don't, you don't realize how much weight you can lift until you're at West side. And I tell everybody this, you know, the, your PR is going

to go up the first day you walk in there. And I don't know if, I don't know if they got, you know, fucking, you know, a ghost in there that are helping or spirits or whatever but uh that you know there's something in the air there that did they put you in any powerlifting gear at all like louis no i never did any gear yeah he's a huge huge fan of uh like even just for uh i've seen people in there before that don't compete that he'll sometimes have them in like squat briefs or whatever yeah i think we kind of talked about it before but that's good you're still you know you still you you're you're still able to get a lot out of the training without the equipment doing everything and and you know as much as i went there i mean i i was always um as much as i learned from louis i've always been

uh it's good and bad you know i've always been the type of person like i kind of tell him like look this is you know i'm doing this or i'm doing this too right like i would push back a lot and i would question everything and be very skeptical and and like everything there's a pro and a con to that and sometimes it would cause problems and you know i argue with louis about a lot of things and yeah um you know louis not someone you really want to argue with louis about a lot of things and yeah um you know louis not someone you really want to argue with like he doesn't really put up with that very well but i guess i wouldn't argue i'd you know be very respectful but it's just ask the question and then you know maybe i disagree but um you know but that was one of the things i just was

never really about right that kind of thing ultimately you're the one getting in the cage right yeah that's exactly i'm the ceo yeah you got to protect your joints got to protect uh the integrity of your body and you can't go messing it up on some uh weird ultra wide deadlift with bands or something like that right but we did a lot of sumo deadlifting i don't know what ultra wide would be but we just certainly did a lot of sumo deadine made my hips way stronger yeah got my glute activation up a lot building up that building up that ass yeah peach yeah are you reading anything right now yep what you got um right now i'm rereading the book musashi you guys know about this book i do not oh man we don't know we don't know about no books

so you know the book of five rings right i'm not much of a book reader all right so uh you know i'm off the team so that so basically you know okay you know i'm sure you guys know about the art of war there's yeah so there's basically the art of war and there's the book of five rings those are the two kind of classical uh asian philosophy books um the book of five rings was written by maimota musashi in the late 1600s or the second half of the century at least um actually maybe the first half whatever but in the 16th i guess that'd be the 17th century 1600s um yeah how work? Fucking butchering this shit, God damn it. But, so anyway,

so, you know, that was, the Book of Five Rings was his instructional, so to speak, on swordsmanship. So a lot of the people in that day,

there's sort of the trifecta of samurai books. There's Hagakiri, The Unfettered Mind, and Book of Five Rings. And then, there's a bunch more too. I believe that's the trifecta

that, you know, is kind of the most famous. Well, anyway, of five rings and then uh there's a bunch more too i believe that's the trifecta that um um you know is kind of the most famous well anyway those are kind of more about um the zen philosophy and how that applies to swordsmanship which were a lot of the guys that would practice like buddhism and stuff and and they and also practice swordsmanship well mayaamoto Musashi was more the guy that actually put it to practical use, so his book is more about how to win specifically. Very, very powerful book. Probably my favorite book ever. When you read stuff like that, do you take notes kind of thing,

or are you just kind of just a mental note? I've read and listened to the book, if I've read it so many times, that I probably would take notes, but I just don't feel it. It's not that complicated of a book. It's not very long and everything. And now the book Musashi, the one that I'm rereading right now is the story of his life which is

probably, there's probably a lot of fiction in it but all the characters are real and there's some historical evidence of some facts in there but it is written, written by a guy, I believe he lived after Musashi. So, you know, it's not like historical fact by any means, but one of the best stories I've ever read in my life. And if anybody does want to kind of delve into it, the episode 100 of Jocko's podcast, he did it with Tim Ferriss and

they covered the book Musashi very intensely and that was what got me to reread the book because I read it probably four or five years ago when uh Louis was telling me about Musashi and he's kind of he would use a lot of Musashi stories and his kind of philosophies and I reread it because Tim Ferriss I guess had lived in Japan and so he kind of gave a different perspective like you know how the Japanese see it. It's sort of like the Gone with the Wind of Japan, where everybody over there knows the story. Everybody loves the story. Hearing that perspective from him and Jocko, I reread it, and it's got a deeper meaning to it. Got any more questions over there, buddy?

Yeah. Yeah, oftentimes when someone has a drug addiction, they'll kind of roll that over into a different addiction or a different vice. That's what I did. Was it just fighting, or what was it? P-break, be right back. Nope, I dedicated my life solely to the martial arts and fighting, combat yeah and that's it i mean there wasn't that's 100% what i'm addicted to and it drives my wife crazy but you know i i told her long ago this is what i'm doing and i'm not looking back and again i'll die doing it or i'll succeed greatly doing it

what can you tell me about what happened here the ultimate fighter so you know they edit that shit pretty good right yeah well i'm not saying i didn't like that guy but so that actually it all kind of happened within i think it was like the first week on the show oh shit excuse me and so like my only interaction with him before that was already negative. I forget. Like, we'd played chess or something. He was just kind of a douchebag to me. And I was like, whatever. All right. You know, I want to fight you.

Right? Oh, there it is. And me and Forrest had talked that I was going to be fighting him next. And then this was the actual day that me and Forrest had talked that I'm going to be fighting him next. So, I'm already looking at him as an enemy. Sizing him up. Yeah. So I'm already, you know, like, all right, you're next, motherfucker, right?

And then he played his prank on me. So what did he do? Just put lime juice in my dip. So the one thing, like, kind of people don't know is that well first i quit chewing like five four three i don't know a few years ago yeah um well anyway um you know so he he did that prank and uh i forget what i was getting at but you know he did that and i was uh you know i was already seeing him as enemy you know i mean so i was like all right you're next motherfucker you know, I was already seeing him as enemy, you know what I mean? So I was like, all right, you're next motherfucker. Do you remember who that was?

Jeremy May. Oh, okay. Oh shit. Yeah. Yeah. So I said, you know,

he was already my enemy before we'd even got to that point. So it wasn't like, uh, it's no big deal. Yeah. I mean, so yeah, as I was to say, it was like a lot of my friends did that,

put lime juice in my dip, like all the time after time after that right but it's my friends doing it you know what i mean so and i didn't even care it was kind of funny but uh you know at that point in time like you know he's my enemy that's doing that shit yeah and and being there was like the first week in the house i kind of wanted to let it be known like i'm not the guy you're gonna fuck with right you know it's like you're with a bunch of lions right like i'm not going to be the sheep in that in that place yeah toughest fight um douglas lima which was before the ufc he's he was well he just lost to uh i think askren or somebody uh koreshkov maybe or something. He was the Bellator champion. Tough bastard?

Well, yeah, I mean, he was a tough guy, but he kicked my leg harder than I've ever been kicked in my life. And more times than I've ever been kicked in my life. And kind of, yeah, yeah, some bitches kicked it hard. I mean, I didn't walk for two, three weeks after that fight, but somehow I pulled out and won. Like, I don't even know how I wear it. Is this the fight? Why are you guys fighting in the dark?

I don't know. Why are you wearing a G-string? That's the real question. And why are you not wearing one right now? See him kick it out of the leg. Yeah, it doesn't look so bad on there, but, you know, it hurt like a son of a bitch, you know. Oh, he's very ferocious with his...

So I was brought in to this fight. I trained like a week for this fight. Not even a week. I think it was less than that. I was brought in basically as a sacrificial lamb. He was like a prodigy at that time. He was the champion down that organization. In Atlanta, he was an Atlanta guy.

My friend was fighting on this. They asked me. I just happened to be going with him to corner him. They asked me if I wanted to fight. And I was like, yeah, why not? It was the main event. In this fight, how long have you been fighting for? It's professional, so I don't know, to be honest.

Three years, something like that? Yeah, I'm not even sure. It looks like you're... Certainly green. Yeah, but it looks like you're very calm. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, it looks like you're pretty calm, even though he was throwing some heat at you.

It looks like you're still concentrating on what you need to do. Yeah, it didn't bother me, I guess. I mean... Who's your favorite fighter? Vanderlei Silva. What'd you like about vanderlei his tenacity and fucking the intensity that he brought into the cage and you know yeah like you know we were talking about earlier you know the uh vanderlei is my favorite fighter my most watched fighter is gsp my most the guy i study the most even though you know we're polar opposites you know

his philosophy is different than mine i don't agree with a lot of his you know we're polar opposites you know his philosophy is different than mine i don't agree with a lot of his philosophy when we're um you know our fighting styles are completely different i'm you know not not nearly as safe as him and things like that but yeah so but i i love how uh his mental game what i love about him was that you know when like when he lost the match he usually came back and beat him. You know, it was a mental lapse. He lost to Matt. Sarah came back and beat him, another mental lapse.

And overcoming things like that gave me a lot of respect for him. Yeah, that's a big deal. How do you, you know, haveged avenged any losses that you've had um i've only had two rematches one i uh i beat the guy the first and second time and the other guy i lost to the first and second time yeah yeah yeah i mean it's tough like you know getting getting in the ring with somebody that uh you know in in like football or something you can blame other players on the field and say, oh, you know, they got lucky. They got a better quarterback or like you can make up all kinds of excuses.

But in this, it's really hard to have an excuse. You can't say that you were banged up in your fight camp because everyone's always banged up. There's not really not a lot you can say, right? Yeah. You know, the whole banged up thing, you know, it's kind of an old school thing too right um everybody you say that and i've learned um i've made the mistake you know again a million times of being way too banged up for my fights and i've lost certainly lost fights that way and uh you know i don't think that's so true anymore man i don't think that's necessary i don't think you need to be so banged up i i think you can go in very healthy because the one thing that i've learned is is

better to be under trained than over trained that's he goes for sure in power lifting too yeah you know the oh we lift way too heavy way too often yeah yeah it's definitely the case and you know you know you can um yeah you can push yourself beyond things when you're overtrained. When you're overtrained, your physiologically limit, your physiologically comes down. Yeah. So that's something I learned. Again, that's why I think I'll be a better coach than anybody else ever.

What are you most proud of? My kids and family, for sure. In fighting, what are you most proud of? I think you're going to do that. You know, I don't really think too much about what I've done. But, you know, I'm always all about, you know about what am I going to do, not what have I done. So I try not to dwell on that too much. If I had to, if you're going to put me on the spot and force me to give an answer, I'd say my longevity, which is just in the past couple of years, I never had a surgery until like two years ago.

Never had a serious injury. I didn't back out of a fight due to injury until, you know, I think around like two years ago. That was, you know, when I first had to get surgery and stuff. We got to figure out the deal with this ankle, right? Absolutely. Yeah, it's fucking killing me, man. I'm going to see the ortho next week and get this done, you know, cause sad surgery on my knee and my fucking ankles hurt me worse than my

knee. Yeah. You have to have her boy, uh, go to the, the in between rounds. So it was actually probably the best part of the whole thing. I thought our boy Kelly's direct come and check it out.

Yeah. Kelly, what's up, man? I emailed Julie a bunch of times. Yeah. Where are you at Kelly? Yeah. Come help. I'll be man? I emailed Julie a bunch of times. Yeah, where are you at, Kelly? Yeah.

Come help us out. I'll be here until tomorrow morning. Favorite TV show? I hate TV. Favorite movie? 300. Yeah, 300. There's no other movie.

300 is pretty legit. I don't watch movies either. Go to the in-between rounds. Let's see. No, in-between the first and second round. My bad. Because it ends after. It's hard to scrub through.

But do you have a. Go to like five minutes or something. Oh, there we go. Yeah, right around there somewhere. Like 20 seconds left. He got on top of him pretty good there. That's pretty. Yeah.

Pretty good. We're just winging like pretty good there. That's pretty good. We're just winging. This is a tough fight. His leg kicks are serious. I've been leg kicked by a lot of people. No one kicked my leg the way that he did. Really, I won this fight. This is certainly a better fight.

This is one of them where I certainly beat a better guy because of my mentality. I was bound and determined again i mean i go back to it a thousand times all about the direction but i knew what i wanted i knew that i will you know i was gonna i was willing to do anything to win this fight and he wasn't yeah your uh your habits can oftentimes uh become you know part of part of your character if you practice them long enough, right? Absolutely. And if you have a direction, you have a certain path that you want to go, then all the habits and all your thoughts have to be directed towards that direction that you want to go in over and over again. Do you have a, a goal when we can expect to see you

back in the octagon? No, again, you know, I'm playing it by ear. I'm taking it one step at a time. Right now my goal is to get this knee to where I can make that choice then. You know, one thing at a time. I put all my eggs in a single basket at a time. So I've been drinking a bunch of coffee. I really got to take a dump do you have any poop stories from fighting i guess i guess you can't really

see so much there it's dark but yeah i was oh i guess the sound's not on too but you're talking shit yeah i was just screaming see so like right there uh you know the time hadn't come in yet and i walked over to his corner. You see how he walked out of his corner? Oh, shit. That was me, like, already in his corner because, you know, I was like, let's fucking go. You know, let's start now.

And you see the referee pushing back. So that was, you know, that was, in my opinion, like that was the mental breaking point for him in this fight. Yeah. In between rounds, I walked over to his corner, and I was like, I was just telling him, like, I'm going to fuck you up this round. And I could barely even walk myself. But I'm doing everything I can to not show my knee about to buckle out.

And I'm just telling him, dude, I'm going to fucking kill you this round, bro. This is the end of it here. And see, now he's starting to get desperate. Right. But it's just mental, man. It's just a mental game, you know, my high-level wrestling skills. Yeah, the mental aspect of this stuff is just crazy. Yeah, and, you know, again, I hate hearing people say, you know,

it's 90% mental, you know. It's 100% mental and 100% physical. Yeah, you got to be prepared. Yeah, you got to be prepared yeah you gotta be ready man for all sides we uh we've seen a lot in lifting you know the more that someone gets psyched up and the more they mess around with like what music's on and the more they they're really just trying to talk themselves into doing something that they have kind of lost some belief in themselves about you know they're kind of searching for some of this external stuff.

And it's like, hey, man, there's nothing there. Dude, that was Musashi's. You're not going to pull anything out of the sky that's going to help you. That's Musashi's best quote. I have it written where I write. I have it hanging right there on the wall. It says, there's nothing outside of yourself that's going to make you bigger, better, faster, stronger, richer.

Everything is within. There you go. That's something from the 1600s. You know what I mean? This guy knew that shit back then, you know? That's 100% true. Yeah. Anything else over there, Andrew?

I was just trying to get a poop story. Oh, yeah, yeah, poop story. Man, I was thinking all night of a poop story, and I was like, well, so I was FaceTiming my daughter and my wife and everything last night and i was like hey i was like i know you got some good poop stories you know oh you're gonna show me three kids well i was gonna show you a picture but the first thing you know so my daughter was you know two years old she goes i poop on the living room floor

i was like i was like hey colleen is my wife, Colleen, did she poop on the floor? She's like, yeah, about a couple months ago. It's like we need to maybe not do that anymore, right? Fortunately, we have hardwood floors. Lay down some newspapers. You said that your wall got pooped on too. I wish I could find the picture. I mean, it's a splatter. It looks like someone took a spatula and put it on the wall i mean it's but but the whole pattern i mean it's bigger than a shotgun

pattern i mean it's like at least like 24 30 inches you know because the changing table was facing the wall and you know i'll have to do some forensic on forensics on that and see you know how the breakdown yeah i think they need to do like a, uh, MRI scan on my son. Yeah. He'd be like, are you okay little guy? What happened? My, uh, my mom bought my son a, uh, this, this like duck and we made the mistake of having the duck at the end of the changing table.

And like, I had like a little feet up and I'm like, change his diaper or whatever. And he just, he just nailed it. Right. So it was only on like the duck a little bit. So I ended up cleaning it off and I was like, all right, I'm going to move the duck. And so I took it and I moved it a couple of feet. I'm like, that should be safe right there. I was wrong.

It got demolished. Like the next time I changed it and I'm like, that should be safe right there. I was wrong. It got demolished. Like the next time I changed it and I'm like, okay, that thing's going in the garbage. You can't, nothing, nothing else I can do with the duck. I can't move it far enough away to save its, uh, save its life anymore. Oh man. What's up with your, what's up with your, uh, wheelbarrow? Oh yeah. Yeah.

Your war, your war wagon. Yeah. The war wagon. So yeah, we sell those men and the, you know, that's what, um, is one of the. Like a war wagon yeah the war wagon so yeah we sell those man and you know that's what um it's like a war wagon vehicle too yeah like i'm kind of picturing like an a-team type thing with uh you know with a machine gun on the top i can you know if anybody has a special request i will mount a machine gun and they are on there and there you go to town man so the war wagon is a piece of fitness equipment basically yeah and you know i'm sure you remember from

west side we used to do the wheelbarrows all the time carry them around the block and when we're doing that man i realized like this is one of the hardest fucking best full body just everything workouts i've ever done in my life man and but nobody's making them yeah your grip your uh your traps your you know mid and upper back trying to trying to hold your posture i remember louis was always big about um you know whether he had you do like a yoke walk or whether he had you carry like a wheel barrel he's real big on posture and being able to maintain your posture yep and i'll tell you for me when i first started doing them where i would feel it the most was like my feet ankles and uh and hips yeah a lot

of stability right yeah and it made me realize like i was weak there and i guess i probably didn't end up doing enough work on my ankle being that, you know, I, I ended up tearing those ligaments, but we certainly worked on my hips a lot. I got the glutes hips a lot stronger. Right. Cause that's where my limiting factor was when we'd be carrying that wheelbarrow around. And to me, that's, you know, the beautiful thing about it is it really exposes what your weakness is. You know, some people, it is a trap. Some people, it is their trap. Some people it is their grip.

Some people, you know, it's their buys or tries start giving out, you know, just trying to carry it like that. And it's, you know, so we have a lot of attachments for it too. We have D handles, prowler handles. So like the one, I guess, kind of proprietary thing about it is the handle is replaceable. So you can take a handle out and put a different one in there. I'm actually working on putting a brake on it so that we can add resistance towards pushing it forward.

Oh, cool. Because what we used to do at Westside was we would have the green wheelbarrow. I'm sure you remember, right? The tire would get flat, right? So it'd be harder to push forward too. And that's something we don't have yet for mine, you know getting that that hamstring glute activation a lot more because now you have to push it forward yeah and you know it's not you're not able to really lose your posture as much where you're hunching over to push it forward you kind of still need to stand up straight to

push it forward awesome man you got any questions for me good i had a thousand you know until we're on camera yeah they yeah they leak out leak out of your head yeah yeah um god damn son of a son of a i mean well that's why you're the interviewer no yeah probably i tried to do a podcast for a while and i was like be talking to people like i'm just not good at it, man. It's not good. Lose sight of where you're at. Well, you know, it's like anything else. You're not going to start out great at it.

I sucked at it. You know, like if you showed me some moves and combinations and stuff, I would be awful at it. It would take. Well, you said you're going to do some jujitsu. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm going to mess around with some stuff. What about Muay Thai? Yeah. Why not? Yeah. Do some man shit. Why not? Throw some elbows at people right yeah yeah we'll give you some hammers and that'll bring your uh conditioning work up condition work up too and and your strength that you guys use tendo units much uh we we uh or gym aware and yeah we haven't used anything like that in a long time we had had that, uh, in the past, but, uh, I'm curious about that because I've really been looking into the velocity based

training lately. I just bought Brian Mann's book and, um, I'm really curious as to why it's not more utilized than it is. Yeah. You would want to look at, uh, there's a guy named Greg Knuckles. Uh, Greg Knuckles is really into the science of lifting and nutrition um and then there's also uh mike to sheer is a power lifter that that meticulously like writes down and follows uh and tracks you know the velocity of his lift and and all the different things i think i think because so many people over the years have had results without it. I think that people are just like, ah, why bother? Right.

But maybe people are missing out. Maybe they are missing out on some things. Maybe they're not doing something that could be more optimal. I always wonder because of that, especially in powerlifting, you're always looking for that one more, 1% more, right? You always got to, you know, you guys, you kind of figure out where your, your max is going to be. And then, you know, you need to get another two pounds on that onto that or five pounds. And if, um, you know, if you're lifting outside of the zone that you're training, even if it's only a couple reps and that's a couple wasted reps, right. Yeah, no, it could make a big, it could make a couple wasted reps right yeah no it could make a big it could

make a big difference but yeah like i said i you know for me like um i don't ever use like apps or anything like that do you mess around with stuff like that i do for your training and yeah i have uh um well since especially since i've been in my downtime i've been playing around with a lot of different methods like i've done the kanji method for a long time and I even have an app for that. Um, but I've been playing around with like the Chico method, um, uh, the German volume training.

And, you know, it's, it's a lot easier for me. There's a few apps that just make it so easy. Tracking their sleep and tracking their food. Oh yeah. I do all that too.

Um, you know, and I do the readiness level stuff. I use the Morpheus with Joel. Yeah. Um, uh, also, you know, still do his bio level stuff i use the morpheus with joel yeah um i also you know still do his bioforce hrv training uh readiness uh checks in the morning and then i use my fitness pal for to track my macros um the sleep i mean i sleep pretty damn good you know i would i started using this product called som sleep s-o-m um you know, I started using this product called SomSleep, S-O-M.

You know, and you could definitely, you know, check that out. I'll get you some of that. I'll send out to you. So, you know, it's got some melatonin and a couple other things, some L-theanine and stuff. Yeah, I've heard of that before. So it's just a supplement. Yeah, yeah, it's just a supplement that you just down a can before you go to sleep. Oh, it's a drink.

Yeah, it's a drink, you know, a small drink. So, you know, because i have a problem where i have to get up and pee every night but that one actually doesn't really uh bother me too much i pee all the time throughout the night it's it's annoying and i i kind of i don't know why but i i like always forget about it so like i'm thirstier at the end of the day and i tend to like when i get home and i got time to think about it i'll plow through some like water because you know i spent the day here training or doing whatever and then the same see i do the opposite i drink a shit ton in the mornings and then as it gets later in the day i start trying to get off of it so i don't wake up and pee even i still end up waking up peeing two or three times so so yeah so my before bed uh kind of stack is i do the some sleep and then i take a little bit

of extra magnesium and then i take a cbd oil i use saving grace cbd oil which is by far the best product i've ever used i mean right in terms of cbd it's done more for me than anything else i've had tons of them sent to me and that one is just blowing all the others out of the water. So I use those. And then the Psalm Sleep, by the way, use the code immortal, get 10% off. Oh, there you go. So that's my sleep regimen. But yeah, like you said, so I use the MyFitnessPal.

And then really the nice thing about the apps for tracking my training is that it's, you know, I can, you know, not bring a notebook or whatever to my training, right? Like to write it down, like these apps that I have, I can show them to you, you know, you know, I'm right here on my front page, you know. Cool. You know, they're real simple. Like I have all these different ones. Oh, yeah. Five by five, the Chico, the German volume, Wendler, Texas method, small off. But I said, I've done the conjugate method, um, you know, the West side system for the vast majority.

And then since I've been injured, I've been kind of playing around with other ones, uh, mainly like just to get my upper body, you know, because my lower body right now is really just in limbo and I'm doing a specific rehab for it. When you're, uh, training, um, I mean, obviously like everyone wants to get stronger, but is it, is there a real emphasis on it or, uh, is it more important for you just to, just to do the exercises to kind of keep strength? Because I mean, I guess like, uh, you know, you trying for a 405 bench or something's not really the goal i know i know exactly what you're getting and really again i think it's really

dependent on the person i don't like to over generalize that you know and i take uh i just one of the things i want to do with the team and muscle farm right like so i take a guy maybe maybe strength is his weakness okay then yeah he needs to go do some like kevin like kevin hart in uh in that movie he's like come on man how is weakness my strength yeah jumanji yeah it shows up on the screen well you know look some people yeah that you know their flexibility is their strength right and that you know maybe that is due to a weakness too but um but then even on that like you have some guys that are more elastic you have some guys that are more elastic, you have some guys that are more like strong, strong, right? So maybe a, a, a guy that's just, you know, stiff, strong, you know,

maybe like a, you know, more of a grappler type, just a stiff, strong guy. Maybe he could use like a Nick Curson type that's going to do tons of plyos and, and, you know, really get his elasticity up and his reactive strength up where, whereas maybe a guy who is more elastic, maybe he could use more of a west side system that's going to bring up his max strength and absolute strength. And I think, in my opinion, there's not a one-size-fits-all for everyone.

I think everybody is a huge variable in what people need. It's all about what's going to translate to you getting a better performance. It's not about, you know, subscribing to any specific system. And for me, the conjugate system is really, we can apply the conjugate principles towards any system though, right? And so that's really where I think that plays the biggest role, but we, um, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the West side system is going to help someone the most, even though I think for the vast majority of people, it will, because I mean, their principles are so sound. Yeah. There's probably like a very few people that it's not really going to help. Having some downtime and being injured, like

how do things work out financially? That's got to be tough, right? Yeah, it sucks. Do you only get paid when you fight? Mm-hmm. I'm doing a lot of things to try to expand myself with the equipment business. I need to start my damn blog. I sell shirts on TheImmortalStore.com.

Shameless plug. Go there. Buy a shirt. Rather than the immortal store.com shameless plug go there buy a shirt and rather than making it go fund me right right there and just yeah you know i'm not asking you to give me any money get something in return um you know i do work with muscle farm you know they help me out a lot so um you know so a lot of different things man man. And in UFC, you don't get a salary. You just get paid when you fight. Exactly, yeah. Yep, exactly.

The nice thing about the UFC is it's a platform that magnifies who you are. And fortunately, I'm not a dumb person, and I'm able to get out there. I'm doing a lot of seminars now. Cool. I'm traveling around, teaching a lot of people as much as I can, and trying to get my name out there as much I'm doing a lot of seminars now. I'm traveling around, you know, teaching a lot of people as much as I can and trying to, you know, get my name out there as much as I can and doing things like this, you know, where this might've had a hard time finding the time to do something like this. But now with this injury, you know, I got to find the silver lining. I got to look at the positives and see what I can get out of it. It may end up being a good thing, you know,

it doesn't necessarily have to be a negative thing. Right. Yeah. i think it's awesome they have such a positive perspective when i was asking about it yesterday because i think for a lot of people being out for like a year would be devastating to them absolutely it's cool you kept a positive spin on it absolutely and again you know that all goes back to my direction like i know what i want like this is my path and this is what i'm doing and and ultimately you know i want this path to inspire others. And the last thing I'm going to do, I mean, I'm, I'm human as anybody I've had my down days. I mean, there's days where I'm like, fuck man, what am I going to do? How am I going to get through this? Right. Um, but you know, I got kids, man. And that's the number one thing in my life. And, uh, I need to show them that look, whatever happens, you keep

pushing forward. You know, you get knocked off the horse, you dust yourself off, you get back up on that horse. You know. Who has the belt in your weight class? Tyrone Woodley. But for instance, you know, like I got knocked out by cowboys. The only time I've been knocked out in my life, you know, and I've never been knocked out in my life. I thought I'd go my whole life without getting knocked out. I mean, I've never been knocked out in training.

I've never been, you know, seriously even rocked in training. I have a hard head. I'm lucky. I thought I'd go my whole life without getting knocked out. I mean, I've never been knocked out in training. I've never been, you know, seriously even rocked in training. I have a hard head. I'm lucky. I've been taking some serious shots, but you know, that was a time where I was really, really down on myself, but I had to show my kids, like, look, that's not the end of the world. That's not who I am. So I had to come back and get

another fight. It's not necessarily who you are. It's just what you do. Yeah, yeah. You know, and like I've explained to them, know seven-year-old kids ask some some really tough questions dad why'd you get knocked out you're like oh yeah because the ufc is really hard best people in the world yeah i mean they say stuff like dad why haven't you ever had the belt i'm like well yeah i've been trying buddy. Yeah, so funny stuff I got. But the number one thing I teach is like, look, when they say they go out and they play a football game

or they did some wrestling tournaments last year, the number one thing is attitude and effort. So there's two things you can always control no matter what. It's the attitude that you have going into something and the effort that you put in. Whether you win or lose has nothing else to do. You can't change anything else. So if I don't have the right attitude and I don't put out the right effort, then I'm being a hypocrite.

Where can people find you? What's your social media? All over the place, man. Everywhere. I'm everywhere, bitch. I am the immortal. And then Matthew Immortal Brown on Facebook. Everybody knows where to find me.

Google me. Google's our God. There you go. All right. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never a strength. Catch you guys later. I was just getting started.

Damn.