Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Cleared Hot Episode 92 - Seeking Adversity with Kisa and Travis Davison

Episode Date: August 5, 2019

Adversity is everywhere in life.  You can choose to isolate yourself in an attempt to avoid it, or you can face it and learn to overcome.  This is a simple/unavoidable choice for most adults, but our children require the example and environment that their parents create.  I believe that physical challenges create the most powerful teaching tools in this area for kids, and one great mechanism is BJJ.  Kisa and Travis Davison are the owners of SBG (Straight Blast Gym) Montana, which has a thriving program designed specifically for children.  Check out Growing Gorillas for more information, then do the right thing and get your kids/young adults involved!  

What is going on, everyone? Episode 91 is brought to you by On It. If you've listened to the podcast, you probably know what On It is. If you haven't listened to the podcast and you're not aware of what On It is, you need to get on it. You see what I did there? It is a total human optimization platform. They have supplements. They have nutrition.

They have fitness apparel, fitness gear. they have content, audio, video, written word, a variety of things. If you go to Onitonit.com slash hot, you're going to land at the cleared hot landing page. And it's going to show on that front page some products that I use. Quickly, Alphabrain is Neutropic. Use it occasionally. I'd say more than occasionally. I don't try to use it every day, though, because I do notice a difference and I want it to work when I wanted to.

For me, I find it's, I have better word recovery. If I'm trying to figure out a way to describe something or talk in a particular way, it helps me grab those words out of the Ethernet of my brain. Underneath that, the total human packs, day and nighttime, vitamins, minerals, everything you're going to need in a day and a night pack. MCT oil, some really good oil supplementation, pure, premium MCT oil with some alloric acid in there. Put it in your coffee, start small, don't go crazy. And as always.

I don't want anybody to buy anything in the hopes that they are supporting me or the podcast. What I would rather you do before you spend a dime is dial in your life and focus on your lifestyle and the macro portion of your life. You are training your diet and your recovery. Then after you've done that, if you want to dive into the micro, which in my opinion at least is what the supplementation is, and you want to support the podcast. and only then, don't do this before you do that, go to onto.com slash hot and go to town. You're going to get up to 10% off when you check out

if you start your searching of the website from audit.com slash hot. They're an awesome organization. I was using their stuff and buying it full price for years before they reached out to me before I had a relationship and I can't recommend them highly enough. And that's it on the business side of the house for episode 91. My guest today are a husband and wife dynamic duo. That's what I'm going to call.

I'll probably pay for that later. They are the co-owners of SBG Montana, which is the Jiu-Jitsu gym that I train at, or I try to train at every single day that I'm home. SBG stands for Straight Blast Gym. And it is, SBG Montana specifically, is one of three in the Flathead Valley. I feel like I'm incredibly fortunate to have landed somewhere

that has three amazing gyms that I can travel around. The coaches there are unbelievable. And the reason we wanted to sit down today, or the reason I wanted to sit down with them today, is that a topic that comes up often in jiu-jitsu, for me at least, or I hear people talking about it, and it seems to be a resonating or resounding theme, is adversity.

And we talk about this a little bit on the episode, but I've been at Jiu-Jitsu for, I think, 13 months now, so a year in one month. And here's what I can tell you so far. It's not comfortable very often. You're going to be in positions that are compromising, and other people are going to be trying to basically choke you to death. There's no personal space whatsoever, and for some people, that takes more time to get used to than others.

You're going to fail, probably more likely than you succeed. And all of those things, those three things I just talked about, would fall for me into the category of adversity. And that is why we, Travis and Kesa and I sat down to talk. Specifically, adversity when it comes to kids and the value of adversity and seeking adversity as opposed to shying away from it and trying to round or nerf the corners of the world, which doesn't happen in the real world.

It only happens in a controlled environment. And at some point you have to leave that controlled environment and you're going to kick square in the teeth. if you think that the rest of the world is going to respect their boundaries that you have been raised in. Now, all of that was my personal opinion. Feel free to disagree with it if you want to.

One of the things I love about SBG and specifically the SBG gems in the valley, the Flathead Valley where I live, is they have an amazing kids program designed around adversity and not running from adversity, tackling adversity. And I'm just going to shut up at this point

because Kisa and Travis do a much better job talking about the program, why they created it, the impacts they've seen in their own kids. And we talk about a lot more than just children's adversity as well. We talk about, you know, it's easy, I think, in the world of social media to portray only the highlights, and I've talked about this before, where if life is a sine wave,

you only talk about the peaks and you kind of disregard the valleys, I really appreciate people who are willing to sit down and talk about both sides. of the coin, the good and the bad. As far as my life goes, there's equal, if not more bad, than good. And I think the difference is some people are just not willing to address that, especially in a public forum. And again, I'm going to shut up and let them talk. Episode 91 with Kesa and Travis Davison. Enjoy. Get to red smoke. Okay, Kappa. Where would you like to start, Kesa, on your very first

podcast ever. Well, I'm going to take another sip of coffee. Let's start there. Good. Dudley would approve. He's crushing you right now, Travis. He's up by at least four. Yeah, but then we have next week.

I got something special next week. What's next week? I'm going out to Proctor to do a podcast with Frankl and possibly my brother. And I forgot to tell you that Philippe's coming in, too. So it's going to be Dudley's dead. Dudley's dead. Yes. But Dudley's, he's number one.

in return guest. I think, I know what we want to talk about. I think we should start with how you guys met and your journey through Jiu-Jitsu. Start out.

Okay, let's do it. I don't think that's a good idea. I'll even let you tell the story. Because here's the thing, right? Obviously, it was, it was a fairy tale. Everything just fell in together. There was no struggle, no hardship

whatsoever. Tell us a story. of how perfect it was, of creating the gym and how... Oh, okay, we'll fast forward to that part. You can tell whatever story that you would like to tell. Once upon a time, a long time ago, and a land far away. This is how all good stories start, by the way. I met...

Well, he wasn't that handsome. Still not. When I was talking about my boyfriend at the time. Oh, that's messed up. I was dating this guy named Chris. Yep. who introduced me to Travis, and in fact insisted that because he didn't want to go

to see the Reverend Horton Heat one night, he said, well, you should call Travis, because I'm sure Travis is going to that show. And then we got married, had four kids, and here we are. Perfect. She left a couple. I was going to say, did you want to fill in any of the gaps, Travis?

We would take up the whole podcast if we were to tell the actual story, but I'll go. tell a little bit of it because I know we're going to talk about adversity and kids and all of that. And obviously everybody's life is filled with adversity. And I think the story of how we or how you guys ended up here and creating the gym and the move, all that stuff is awesome. And it ties. So I'll kind of skip over the relationship stuff then because it's a cool story. It's kind of soared. But I don't think it's important for what we're talking about. So ultimately what happened is Keese and I met.

I was just graduated college in Eugene, Oregon. She had graduated from KU and was... Rock Chalk Jayhawks. Moving to Eugene, her boyfriend that she mentioned, Chris, was doing undergraduate research in the same lab as me. Because your degree is in biology, right? Correct, yeah. We worked in physiological ecology together,

working on pitcher-pont mosquitoes and pupation in pitcher-pond mosquitoes based on circadian rhythms. and it was anyways. So many questions. Here's the thing is, so I... Can you to see Travis in a lab coat? I quickly discovered that academia was not for me. I had been accepted to get my Ph.D.

at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. I'm just going to say that if you had a master's, right? No, I got a bachelor's degree from the University of Oregon, and then I was going straight into a Ph.D. program at the University of Virginia. I'm not going to say that that's quickly realizing that academia is not for you. Well, yeah, I was a slow learner, but you eventually realized for me in high school, my first day of high school, I realized that academia is not for me. It was like, that was quickly. You learn faster than I do.

Maybe at some things. Yeah. And Keese and I met, and the funny thing was, did a full 180, so I went from a full ride scholarship and stipend to working graveyard at Chevron, pumping gas, and Tats. to apprenticeship. Kese and I moved to Portland. We got married. Kesa, within the first month of marriage, got pregnant with our first child, Ted. At that point, I was sweeping out houses on construction sites for $8 an hour. We were living in an apartment, and Kisa was doing a temp. She started out as a temp through, I remember the name of the company. GST. GST. The telecom company. Before that, I was in education.

And when I was at the, after KU, I was at the University of North Carolina working on a literacy grant through AmeriCorps. So I had a background in education. So we had Ted. I'd worked my way up from sweeping out houses to a superintendent where I was actually running the entire job site. So I was a big step up. And Kisa had landed a full-time job. at New Edge Networks in Vancouver, Washington, and I think that was doing DSL startup company.

And the first kind of real significant trial, I think either one of us faced in our lives was with our son, because he started having seizures as a baby. And I still remember vividly going into OHSU and meeting Dr. Shimmer. shock and on our very first visit, he comes back into the room. And we had been led to think that it was maybe not that big of a deal when we were in Grant's past when it started happening. And he comes

back into the room and pretty much tells us in a deadpan voice and face, well, best case scenario, he's going to be severely mentally retarded. Worst case scenario, he's going to die. Wow. He was six months old and he's our first and we'd been married for six months well no uh 15 months yeah 15 months but um yeah so that was man talk about uh just gut wrenching i didn't know how to deal with it we were young too at the time i mean we were 26 years old and um 25 um that basically ultimately the the the stress and and the things that came with that that diagnosis led to our first real strife in our relationship as well, which if you look at the research on parents of special needs, children, the separation rate is...

80% divorce rate. 80%? Is it really? It's actually not surprising because as you're talking through that, I can just imagine being a parent, getting that information, you have zero control over it, but you're 100% committed. And then the battle that could occur from the stress of dealing with. with that. And being as young as we were and as early in our marriage as we were also, we had never really been in that situation like Travis said where I didn't know how he was

going to react to adversity and he didn't know how I was going to react. And Travis bawled up and shut all communications off and I went like manic haywire. Everything was clean. Everything was organized. There were notebooks. There were dividers. It's true story. And honestly, it was an extreme example of who we are. Yeah. Personality-wise, I mean, it came out like her, her anal retentive, just super organized, reading everything she could possibly read about it.

And then my just complete isolation, martyr, whatever. Deal with it all on your own. Put all the weight on your shoulders. Yeah, make it harder on myself on purpose by making everybody else's life miserable. and this is I'm only laughing because it's 20 years later but when we were in the hospital we had to do like a 48-hour EEG and Ted had to be monitored so he's remember he's six months old he's a baby he's just learned to sit up and I remember I went to the bathroom and I came back in and Travis was sitting holding him crying and Ted was laughing like happy Travis was crying and I grabbed dead from him was like what is wrong with you Why are you crying? First of all, we both know I don't cry. Well, you've said you cry in the shower so nobody can tell.

I think I cry in the shower, but I'm not even sure. So. You must have been just sweating heavily out of your eyes. There was a lot going on at the time. One of the significant things that happened is we would have to get a steroid from France because it wasn't FDA approved yet. Of course it wasn't. It came from the human pituitary gland.

A-C-T-H. And it was an intermuscular injection. Fortunately, I had eight years as a vet tech where I was doing injections and things like that because we had to do it at home. And so twice a day, we'd hold down our six-month-old baby, and the stuff looked like honey. Like it was a very thick solution that you kept in the fridge. Super viscous. Yep.

And, you know, for people who don't know, intermuscular injections versus, like, subcutaneous are painful, right? because you're sticking the needle into the muscle and you've got to push all that in there. So that was not enjoyable every morning and every night to hold down your son and inject him like that. 29 days. But the good news is that on day nine of that 29-day treatment course, the seizure stopped. You're seizure free for 10 months? Long enough for us to decide to have another baby.

Which turned into two. So I'm halfway through a pregnancy with twins. Ted starts having seizures again. With a vengeance. It was awful. It was awful. And the significant part of that was, one, he says pregnant with twins. But two, when the seizures came back the second time, he started going backwards in his development.

So at that point, he was talking and walking. He had a full, in addition to his verbal vocabulary, he actually had a full. sign language vocabulary that we had started when he was six months old because we didn't know. You know, when our neurologist is saying there's an 80% chance of severe mental retardation, you know, we don't know why the seizures are happening, but you should go to whatever lengths to just prepare for the worst case scenario. And so he actually started to lose his ability to speak and walk. And so we're actually watching him regress, which, I mean, that was awful. And then, you know, Kies is on bed rest towards the end of the pregnancy. He's on the ketogenic

diet, which everybody's familiar with now. But back then, he was on the ketogenic diet for seizure control. Nowadays, it's like one of the hip diets, you know, changing all the time. I do keto now, but also with sugar. Yeah. It's sweet. I'm on the paleo-carb diet. Same, yeah. Keto, but also with carbs and processes. food. It's fine. It's fine. I'm sure. M&Ms? So we had a scale at home and I had to weigh out all his meals. He was in daycare at the time because I was working full time and she was on bed rest and man, it was just every day was a challenge to the point where I look back at that phase of our life and honestly I can't even remember most of it because it was just such a blur.

You guys were in the trenches. The ironic part of that was that Remember how we dealt with it the first time, right? Travis went into isolation. I went into hyper-organized control mode. And then when they happened the second time, I couldn't get out of bed. I was allowed one hour out of 24 hours out of bed, total. So I had to be horizontal the whole time because at that point I was only 26 weeks pregnant. And they wanted to at least wait until I was, well, they wanted me at 38, but that wasn't going to happen.

And so this guy who wants to be in isolation, now he's. he's got to be the hyper-organized control mode. And it was by circumstance that we couldn't go to our old evil ways of managing stress. Yeah, and I should, you know, in full disclosure, too, mentioned we left out a big piece the first time he started having seizures, which is we pretty much were going to get a divorce. I think the conversation already started. I know Keyes had already met with an attorney. I basically told her no.

With his arms crossed over his chest. And we spent a few thousand dollars on marriage counseling. And honestly, I think that was probably one of the biggest factors in us than being able to have a healthy relationship going forward. But I think had we not spent that time with that counselor and really put the work in up front, because people don't know. Marriage is...

It's hard. It's super hard. Is it okay? This is the internet. Okay. You can say whatever you want. You can say whatever you want. Yes.

I don't cuss. So it does... I don't cuss on the podcast because I don't cuss in real life, but... Yeah, me neither. So, yeah, with that, you know, she's ready to move out. And, you know, it was a disaster. You guys were still in your mid to late 20s at that point? Oh, that was the 26 when we were...

26. Yeah, we got married at 24. at 25, divorce number one at 26, the twins at 27. Yep. Divorce number two at 28. Joe at 29. Are you picking up a pattern here? The twins were something else too, right?

Because they were premature and it's the weirdest thing because when you have a baby, normally you cross your fingers and hope they sleep through the night. When you have premature twins, you're instructed that you have to wake them up every three hours. Really? Oh, every two. Every two hours for the first month. And feed them.

Oh. So that sounds amazing. It was. As Kesa makes the poke herself in the eye motion. You don't have a sound effect for that? I don't. I'll get one. Yeah.

So yeah, that was another challenge was the twins. And then, you know, baby Joe was an accident. Oh, don't say that. It was a happy mistake. Actually, I was... Unplanned, perhaps. Well, the unplanned pregnancy happened before Baby Jo.

And I was 14 weeks, 15 weeks along and had a miscarriage. And my OB, Dr. Singh, bless her heart, she said, listen, no sex, no baths, no tampons, three weeks. That's all I got to do, three weeks. I said, okay, no problem. For her. No problem for her. Nine days later. One time. We had sex one time. And that's baby Joe. So. Yeah. Failure to follow instructions. FFI. I finally learned my lesson after the vasectomy when they also told me no sex for two weeks or whatever it was.

Yeah. And I was like, yeah, I got this. Oh, boy. I think it was like day three or four. I couldn't help myself. and just for anyone out there listening to this who hasn't yet had a service announcement but might be thinking about getting one get it it's great however it feels like a hangover in your balls if you don't follow directions it will be the worst experience of your life a hangover in your balls yep you know that kind of throbbing headache yeah that lasts all day that's the one i mean i I'm fortunate not to get hangovers, but I can imagine.

And so in parallel with all that, so we've got four babies now. So we have four kids under four. And wasn't there a move somewhere in here as well? So that's coming. And they're all in diapers. They're all on formula. We're just, both of us are just working our butts off. We started our own business at this point.

Because that seems like a smart thing to do. Yeah, because you know, that's how you get rich. Yes, I believe that's it's a one-step strategy. Start business, get rich. Yeah. So we started Nitis Homes in Camus, Washington, and things were going great for a while, and it felt like everything was growing, and it was too quick, and we weren't, you know, being vigilant and doing...

We were 29. We weren't capable of doing all the things within the business that needed to be done, and we weren't smart enough then to hire people. to do the things that we couldn't do. Ultimately, that business went out of business. Which is extremely common. And... Well, and it also coincided with the big housing bubble.

Back in probably the 06 to 08 range. Yeah. And so we felt like failures again. And this was the kind of the third divorce period, because now Joe's a baby and we're both kind of depressed. angry. I think we're blaming each other a little bit. A lot for the failure. It was most of your fault. I mean, because we were working together, right? And that's the, that's the other. So we're married. We start a business together. It's a bunch of silly stuff. Ultimately, that's what led to us

coming to Montana. At that point is when we, I went back to work for my dad. And Kesa started selling real estate. Well, she was already selling real estate, but she made that her focus. And then we had an offer to come to Montana and build a subdivision in Evergreen. And Kesa could list all the homes. And I would get a percentage of profits. And I got a comfortable salary and a truck and a gas card and insurance for my kids. And we're like, yes. Let's go to Montana.

And nobody knows us here. So there's no embarrassment. We walk into a supplier. They're like, oh, yeah, you're the guy who went out of business. Now, let's backtrack a little bit. Because, I mean, failure is embarrassing, and there's a lot of shame wrapped up in that, especially when there's fun. For some people there is.

Others will fail, and they skip the shame part, which is why I think they repeat their mistakes over and over again. For sure. They don't have that reflection period where it hurts to the point where they don't want to leave their house. So they just wake up and say, oh, screw it. I'll just do the same thing again. And it's when there's money involved and money.

that you owe people involved, then for us that was probably the most shameful part of it. We always make good on our word. And then to know that we couldn't, that we, you know, we were so strapped. And I think also being at that age, it's hard to see much farther than today in the future. So when we moved to Montana, actually when we shut down Nitis homes, we had almost half a million in debt. And by the time we moved to Montana, we had paid it down to where we had 21,000. I think was left. And we had to go, you know, that was the part that was so hard and what you're talking about

with the reflection, there was no way for us to avoid it because basically what happened was we had homes that were almost complete that were spec homes that were for sale. And we were relying on the sales of those homes to make good on our debt. Well, as subs and suppliers, they have lien rights on these projects. So I basically had to drive and sit down. on in person face to face with these guys and say, look, I'm going to pay you what I owe you, but trust me, please don't lean this job. The only thing they had left would be to put a lien on that house to ensure that they

eventually got paid. But if they did that, Kese and I wouldn't be able to sell the house and we wouldn't be able to pay them ourselves. And nobody leaned any of our projects. Except. No, that wasn't a lien. That was, we had one supplier. And it was for like the smallest amount of like 4,800.

dollars or something. I could just say it is because it went out of bit. Almega. Omega. Almega doors and windows. And they sent us to collections. And so we had, we had that.

So I dealt with a collections company when we moved here, got them paid off. But it was sitting down with like my excavator, sitting down with my lumber supply person, and basically just asking them for mercy. You know? And that was. really, really hard. And fortunately for us, they, they had faith in us. They trusted our word,

and we were able to pay them all off. And it was a long process. So it wasn't, it was not something where we could be like, okay, bankruptcy, done, and let's go start something else. Yeah, put it in your rearview mirror and just plant your flag somewhere else. No, yeah. It wasn't, unfortunately, it wasn't that easy or fortunately. Fortunately, and part of that was because it was the excavator. So it was him and we know his kids and we know his wife and we know these these individuals who own these companies. And the last thing we wanted to do was to screw them because of our bad decision. So we learned a lot from that. I'm glad it's over with.

And so we got up here and thought fresh start, you know, the hardest part for me and I think Kisa as well because she had a really close yoga instructor and Camas, Paul. and that became, that got her through the depression of, the outlet. Yes. And for me, of course, I had Jiu-Jitsu and I had Matt Thornton and my brother and my circle of friends. Were you doing Jiu-Jitsu all through the story that you guys have told so far? He was. I wasn't yet.

Yes. You're resistant, though. Well. We'll get to your resistance later. But she was doing yoga in place of, where I was doing Jiu-Jitsu, she was doing yoga. Now, not on the same scale because that was another divorce that almost. almost, you know, there's a whole other story about how much time I spent at the gym back then and away from the house and stuff. 32 hours a week, but who's counting?

Well, I saw a good meme the other day that said, Jiu-Jitsu is just involuntary yoga. So they're tied. Yeah. It's true. It's the subtle art of folding clothes while people are still in them. Exactly. Which makes it more powerful than yoga. Yoga, you have, oh, here we go.

Yoga, it's hard, like, physically hard for sure. It's physically hard and mentally hard. You can achieve the same place, but in jujitsu you have no choice. Like what you just said is why jiu-jitsu, it's easier to get into Zen with jiu-sitsu because when I jump on top of you, you can't help but stop thinking about your grocery list. In yoga, they say, okay, quiet the fluctuations of your mind. And it's like, unless somebody's trying to kill me, I can't quiet my mind. And so jiu-suitzzi for me was way easier because I,

there was no space in my head for an hour while, you know, choking or being choked. Your toughest opponent is always you. And in yoga, that's the only thing you have. That is your only opponent. So it makes it a little bit more difficult. Well, my lack of flexibility would also be an adversary. Yeah. That, and it's really embarrassing when there's like a 70-year-old lady in there crushing handstands,

and I'm shaking and sweating. That's not cool. That's actually my favorite part as an instructor. So then we get to Montana and everything's good. We got a sweet deal. We're building things back up. We've paid everybody off. We finally are back to kind of liking each other again.

Kids are doing great. I had started teaching jiu-jitsu on the side. You know, I got a little circle of buddies. And we're having UFC parties at the house, just like the good old days in Portland. And then 2008, the market finally actually falls apart, completely falls apart. So we get a phone call the Tuesday before Thanksgiving that he's lost his job,

all of the benefits, the salary, everything. And I'm not selling anything. It's the debt of winter in Montana. And I'm new to town. There's no relationships. We're not building any houses in the subdivision. We moved here not knowing anybody. I didn't even know Montana existed.

Like what they said Calispell? I was like, what the heck is Cala Spell? Two years ago, July 1st, we crossed the border. I didn't know anybody either. Well, we knew one person, Jamie's aunt, who was the head of the human resources for the school district. Other than that, I was like, hey, Montana, what's up? Go to the grocery store and get all friendly with the checkout ladies just to have conversations. I did.

You don't do that. That's what I did. I made a lot of grocery store trips just to have conversations with adults. Yeah, so needless to say the scariest part is having four children. So I think at the time we moved here, Joe was five. four, the twins were six and Ted was eight. Close, but not those all wrong. Correct me, please.

Joe had just turned four. The twins were five, almost six, and Ted was seven, almost eight. Well, I almost got it right. And so when we lost the health insurance, that was the most significant thing, because Ted's medical bills, like the year he had brain surgery is $100,000, you know. And we go through. It was more than that. But, yeah.

But, I mean, we, what do we average a year with Ted's medical expenses? Well, our whole family now, it's 32 to 34,000 a year is what we pay for medical. Between insurance premiums, medications, deductibles, co-insurance, and then all the stuff that's not covered. That's insane. Yep. And the most significant thing was we had him on a drug at the time that was working, it was vagabotrin. Again, coming out of Canada. Right?

Was not FDA approved. And the prescription was $200 a month, and it's not covered. So that was significant. Just fine. When you have, you're like, okay, well, just add $200 more to our budget. Oh, wait, we don't have any income. Yeah, when one of the tables and the Excel spreadsheet goes to zero, rapidly changes things for sure. Yeah.

And I don't remember. She keeps track of the numbers better than I do, but what was my unemployment? Uh, now you put me on the spot. $864. A month. A month for a family. No, no, no. Twice, twice a month.

Okay. So, $1,700 a month for six people. Yeah. It's still under, or it's right out 20,000 a year. Yeah. You can't make that work. Yep. I don't care how resourceful you are at that point.

Montana has a great kids insurance program. So the kids, I quickly put the kids on. Chip, right? Yeah, Healthy Montana kids. It just, it's a great program. but when you've got a kid like Ted who has this complicated medical situation, it just requires a lot of paperwork and a lot of phone calls. I mean, it was a, it's taking, managing Ted's health is a part-time job for me.

Just still, to this day, he's 19, and it always has been. But the scariest part was how on earth are we going to put food on the table? We have nothing. We know no one. It's the dead of winter. It's the middle of a recession. There's zero money in our savings account. there's zero money in our bank account.

The last, you know, we definitely weren't going to ask anybody for anything. Like, we're adults. We have four kids. We got to sort this shit out ourselves. So? Yeah, so that, I still remember because we were, we were renting a house in the subdivision that we were building and selling it. We were very fortunate that the developers there were still friends with,

and they've always kind of been there for Keese and I. And we're sitting in the office. And we looked at each other and basically the conversation was, well, what do you want to do? Because the conversation was we could go back to school. Like I had talked about maybe going back to school and becoming a teacher, you know, like a science teacher or something along these lines. We couldn't build houses anymore. The real estate market was pretty much dead. And Kisa had been teaching yoga classes up at the summit and a few other places in town just as a hobby as I was doing the jiu-jitsu.

and we said, well, we could build houses or we could teach jiu-jitsu and yoga. And so we opted to teach jiu-jitsu and yoga. And we took a very small loan from the developer that I was talking about. He loaned us $2,000. Yep. My dad loaned $1,300 and some change to buy yoga props. Yep. And that was it.

Yeah. We had unemployment. I orchestrated a high-level meeting at Moose's pizzas, where I corralled 10 of the people that I had corralled into putting on geese and rolling with me so I could continue to do jiu-jitsu. And I proposed, okay, guys, if you can each pay this much a month, we can rent this 750-square-foot cinder-block building. on First Avenue.

Or if you'd like to pay in full, for one low handsome price of, I can't remember what it was. It was a year. It was $1,000 or something. And two of the people there wrote us checks for $1,000 and something and these were young kids. Ryan A.C.

Who still works here. He was. Zach Dixon. Was he 19, 18? When we met him, yeah. Yeah. And then Zach the Dick Dixon, who, unfortunately,

You really, I don't think have had a chance to meet, but he's quite a character. Okay. It's a piece of work. And we took that money and then the few people that were willing to pay a membership and we started and we had no idea what we were doing at all. No idea. And zero idea how to run a gym. I could teach jiu-jitsu and she could teach yoga. But that's like being a really good cook and saying, you know what, I'm going to open a restaurant.

the two things are not the same. Yeah, you don't know how to source the groceries or make a menu or, yeah, there's a difference between coaching and the business side. I encountered that when I opened that CrossFit Gym and Coronado. Yeah. I have no problem teaching people how to move a weight from A to B and no interest in doing a spreadsheet from A to B to Z and all. Like, why do I have to have insurance?

Just don't hurt yourself. What is this taxes stuff? I don't like any of these. Yeah, so. Yeah, there's a lot of, uh, unknown things until you put your your toes into that pond. And we, you know,

we were very fortunate. We, we had the right people coming into our life and, lots of help from, from people and, and a lot of hard work on our part. I mean, I remember we maxed out credit cards.

We, we were on trips learning the business, where we would go to different seminars and buying different products from people, you know, trying to educate ourselves. on how to run a successful gym so that we could feed our kids. And we'd be on a trip and all of a sudden be like, oh, my gosh, we need this.

Kese had get on the phone with the credit card company and like, can we extend our limit like $2,500? We'd gladly pay you on Tuesday for a hamburger today. So we maxed it out. And, you know, it worked. You know, it's a funny thing. When you invest time, effort, and money into learning something, it actually pays off eventually, but it's not overnight. You know, it's been, it'll be 11 years this December.

Safe to say, too, that your earlier experiences and all that adversity, you guys dealt with the bankruptcy. I mean, those are all lessons learned, too. That enables you to feel comfortable. Backtrack, we did not file bankruptcy. Fine. Yes, we have never filed bankruptcy. We're very proud of that, as you should be.

How about this? The adversity that you had dealt with earlier before the move to Montana, and that experience that you gain makes you more comfortable when you encounter it again willingly. Because like, okay, I've been through this before. It's going to suck, but I know I can navigate my way out of it. Well, yeah. And Kesa probably more so than myself because I think women are better. Are better.

They are for sure. Just period. They are for sure, not an emotional control. As men, our role in the world is so much simpler than. yours as a woman. Like what what you guys contribute to life is so much bigger than what we

what we do. That's how he tries to get into my pants all the time. What he's saying is true. I agree. I mean it's just you know it's like with the dogs you know you the the females are the one you know and what I was getting at though before I get before I was trying to get your pants was

the kids somebody's alarm going off somewhere. It's just a bomb. I like it. It'll eventually stop. We're fine. I think so. That's a sound effect. Yeah. The kids were I think the biggest factor in us getting

through everything. Where is that from? It's one of our stopwatches that has an alarm set. Does it ever go off or do you have to push a button? Well, you might want to find that. I don't know. Somebody should clean this area. There it is. I found it. That's not it. it's perfect from this area this area what it was it see back from a brief intermission for sure

no i can easily edit that out um but uh having the four kids you know having children that um are really your your only purpose in life at that point and and from the moment you have a child i think they your life has to revolve around them that's now your role in life is being a parent to that child and in our case for children. Which is something I think, I mean, we interface with hundreds of parents on a daily, weekly basis and parents who have their kids enrolled in our programs and parents who don't have their kids or maybe come and test them out. And it's easy to see in a brief conversation, I can tell 30 seconds into a conversation with a parent,

are they devoted to that child or is that child an appendage to their life? And it, I mean, Travis makes it sound really simple, but it's actually, I think, a really big step for a human being to take and to decide that they're going to put another human being as a priority. As, I mean, as a rule, we're just selfish creatures. We have to, you know, conserve our own energy and our own thought, energy, physical energy to keep ourselves alive. and then to ask someone to do that, no, no, no, put yourself to the side,

and now you're going to focus on this child. It's a tough step for people to take. What are the things that you hear people say that allow you to be able to make that determination, whether they're the priority or the appendage? I hear it a lot in parents who want their children to behave a specific sort of way, rather than learning who their child is as an individual and figuring out how can I help my child navigate best through these general rules of life.

Yeah. I mean, you know, we all have kind of, we have agreements as a society. Okay, we're going to do this. We're not going to do that. But. I don't agree with some of those agreements as a side note. Like not killing people randomly. I don't.

It's not random. I don't. I'm not saying, you know. I have never killed people randomly. I think that that's a general rule that I think we can all agree on, right? Yeah. Sometimes. But it's, you know, parents will often feel embarrassed.

for their child's behavior, and that tells me that that parent is too entwined with that child. We see it a lot in kids who are on the autism spectrum, too. Parents are embarrassed for what their child is doing or how their child's behaving, and all of us as coaches, we just are like, no, this has nothing to do with you, actually. We're here for your child. Yeah, and even in a more extreme case, it might not even be a child that has behavior issues or is on the autism spectrum, but you know, there's a class of 15, 20 kids,

and us as the coach is on the mat with the kids aren't really even noticing it because we're looking at all 20 kids as a group, and those parents are only looking at one out of 20. And so everything that that one out of 20 does even remotely wrong, they're picking up on. Whereas the rest of society, not just the coaches, but the other parents in the lobby,

they're not even noticing because they're doing the same thing with their own child. So my favorite is when a parent will say, well, it just doesn't really seem like, you know, little Johnny's paying attention for the entire class period. Well, yeah, he's five and he's a boy. And five-year-old boys, if I can get them to pay attention for 50% of the time, then that's fantastic. And when it looks like they're not paying attention, they actually are paying attention. They're just picking up on information differently than we do as adults. Well, I'm in my 40s, and I can't pay attention the whole time. It's not like it.

But you've learned how to kind of mask your inattentiveness, whereas... I hope so. Well, most of the time. Whereas kids, they don't. They don't know those rules yet, and so they're still learning them. But I feel like we got off on a tangent. No, tangents are good. I'm assuming when you started the gym, was there a kids program initially, or were you focusing

specifically on adults? Because it can't be the same for a young child as it is for somebody in their 20s, 30s, 40s. Well, funny thing. We thought it was. So we opened up a kids program that there were four kids. Ted, Stella, Ricky, Joe were our first four students. Awesome. They were voluntold, I suspect. Often. Often. Yeah. Yeah. And they, our curriculum was pretty much whatever Travis was teaching the adults that week, he was just teaching the kids the same thing. And we threw in some games. We actually lose Gutierrez, years and years ago filmed a couple of DVDs, play is the way.

And the whole concept is, you know, we're just primates and we learn by playing. So let's work these games in to the curriculum. And it breaks up the time, but you also get gross body movements, you know, a lot of... It hides the skills you're looking for in an entertaining fashion for the kids. For sure. And it exists in the animal kingdom too, right?

So if you look across the board at, you know, puppies, kittens, you name it, they're learning to hunt through play. As they're young, they're learning all these important skills, but it's all disguised as play. And I don't know if it's necessarily even disguised. Maybe that's just their brains are being wired, and that's maybe the best way to make those neuro pathways is through play. So we had the adult curriculum with some games, basically. And it was really quickly that word got out that we had this martial arts program for kids. And pretty soon, actually it was shortly after we opened that we had a couple of other non-Davidson's join the class. And Travis said, we need to buy you a ghee.

You need to put a ghee on and learn jiu-jitsu. I was like, okay. Yeah, that's so that was. To you? Yeah. Well, yeah, I needed an assistant. You know. Because he actually didn't like kids.

Your kids are other people's kids. Because I love my kids. I also sometimes struggle with other people's kids. So let's back up for a second. I didn't want any kids. Period. Period. I convinced him.

Let's just have one. And then she convinced me let's just have two. That turned into three. And then. Joe. you know but in addition to that where I was learning jiu-jitsu with Matt Thornton at SBG in Portland Oregon there was no kids program so he was running a martial arts school well an MMA gym back then exclusively for adults correct which is super great but if you're

trying to grow a business if you're trying to create world champions you can't start with 26-year-olds. I mean, look at all sports across the board. I mean, they start wrestling in football at four and five. Yeah, they're peaking in their late 20s, early 30s. Correct, yeah. So Matt and Matt would admit this. You know, you can get them on the podcast and tell them, hey, Travis said you were a terrible business mentor.

And he'll say, yeah, you're right, I was back then. So I didn't have the best blueprint for how to run a successful martial arts school. I didn't have any blueprint for running a kids program because the gym I trained at even have one. And so at the time, Kese and I had enrolled Ted and then Ricky and Stella with Mel Locke in Camus Washington, who had a kid's jiu-jitsu program. Because I knew that jiu-jitsu was important for children. I just couldn't take my kids to the same place as me. It wasn't available. And so we were taking our children to a separate school at the time that we lived there, because I wanted them in there. Yeah, you saw the value of it. Yeah. And so we're paying to have our kids learn

jiu-jitsu from somebody else. And when we moved here, obviously I wanted to continue doing jiu-jitsu, and I wanted our kids to be able to continue doing jiu-jitsu. They had already competed when we were living in Oregon. So it's not as if they had just barely gotten into jiu-sitsu. They knew what it was about and they liked it. Oh, Ted, the world revolved around jiu-jitsu for Ted. And it turns out it ended up being really one of the best therapies that he could have ever done

for neurological purposes, learning left-right coordination, just body awareness. There's a lot of... Spatial awareness, all those tactile sensation, tactile feedback, all that. Sensory integration development. Actually, there was one of the neurosurgery team at UCLA where he had his brain surgery five years ago, they said, oh, yeah, you know, no doubt his involvement in Jiu-Jitsu for starting at age five was for sure why he's so high-functioning compared to what his brain scans say he should be.

I watched him three days ago pick up a grown man who was in his... He was in a grown man's closed guard and then I looked over and they were just... He was standing and the other person was hanging off him and I said, Mother of God, I'm never rolling with his head. He's strong. He's struck.

Yes, I saw that firsthand. So what would you... I see the value in it as well with my own kids. What would you guys describe the value is for children. Why you decided to create, aside from the business perspective, because obviously I think you're correct,

if you want to grow a flourishing business in the future, you might want to start with the generation that's going to grow through it. And then I would add to that probably a women's program because the moms are going to probably be the ones that are dropping the kids off, get everybody involved. When we started the kids program

and I can see, like this is not going to go very far if we've just got an adult curriculum and a bunch of games. Like that's not a curriculum for kids. And my thought was always, look, I want to take all the benefits of sports, team sports, individual sports, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, plus the community involvement of like a church group or a church organization. And I don't want to drive my kids all around town to do all these things and enroll them in a million different things throughout the year.

Seven separate activities. Yeah. Times four with four different. kids. I just want an all-encompassing child development program, and we're going to help kids develop into better human beings through jiu-jitsu. And that's exactly what we did. And there was a lot of trial and error. Yeah. And eventually we ended up having to break up age groups, and you have to, you know, pay attention to a five-year-old is very different than a nine-year-old when it comes to not only their ability and skill capacity in learning jiu-jitsu, but also how do they do team?

How do they learn? What kind of mentorship do they need? What kind of games do they need? How long is their attention span? At what point do we need to ask them to start becoming leaders and not just followers? So the program that we've put together over the better course of the last 10 years is that. It's a child development program. The benefits are not, I mean, there's some very obvious physical benefits that we all even get as adults. Learning how to hip heist was one of the hardest things. I think it took me three years to figure out how. to switch my hips. I just was not very good at that. And there's a lot of physical sensory integration that we talked about.

But then on top of it, learning how to deal with anxiety, learning how to deal with the stresses of life, learning how to deal with assholes, in any group of 20 plus kids, there's... At least 19 assholes. I was going to say more like two or three, but you're probably right. Depending on their age, It could be 20 out of 20.

Yeah. Now you're talking the teens. Yeah, that's specifically what I was referencing. Yeah, you don't have to beat around the bush on that. We all know what you're talking about. The teams are the worst. But that's a life skill, right? Yep.

You can't just shelter your children from having to deal with bad people in life. You had to teach them how to be resilient and to also still stand their ground and drive forward regardless of what else is going on around them. Some people take the opposite approach with that. And I mean... It's awful. If I had a magic wand, that would be one of the things that I could change about people's perception is not to shield and shelter their kids and to expose them to appropriately, obviously, age-appropriate,

maybe task-appropriate or person-appropriate, but avoiding adversity is not going to get you anywhere. That's called bad parenting. Yeah. Well, because eventually... And eventually bad adulting. And that's the problem. And, you know, if you are sheltered from that and taught... that your feelings are primary over everything and that your desires are primary

by then you enter into the real world in air quotes and you'll rapidly find out that the rest of the world gives no shits about any of those things and you're going to get crushed because you don't have that adversity already developed right and i mean we run into it a lot also where kids are they come they're they're training in the program everything's great puppy dogs and rainbows and then something happens they either get a new belt there's a new new new little assholes enrolled in their class. Mom and dad are fighting at home. Grandma and grandpa move in.

Like name the challenge in their life. And suddenly, they start to become really anxious about coming to class. That I don't want to go. I have a stomachache. I don't want to go. You see these signs of anxiety and kids are the same across the board. And then the parents come in and say, well, you know, little Sally just doesn't like Jiu-Jitsu anymore.

And I'm thinking, bullshit. but Sally loves jujitsu. And she's just having a tough time. So let's all work together to help her through. Yeah, that's where you have to actually parent and make, at some point, make the decisions and get in the car. The worst parents come in and they say, well, I don't want to force her to do something she doesn't want to do. That's my favorite, right? That's my favorite.

Because I never get to have these interactions. I don't get to talk to parents, really. but if I could, I'd be like, so she eats ice cream every night then? Like, don't you force her to eat her vegetables? You tell her no one she wants cake for breakfast. Yeah. If I allowed my kids to not go to school every day that they didn't want to go to school, they would never attend school.

Right, but why do you make them eat vegetables or shower or brush their teeth? Because you know it's good for them. So whether they want to do it in that moment is not the point. And back to what you were saying with becoming an adult who then gets crushed in the real world, that's going to happen too. Because guess what? When you're supposed to be at work, you're supposed to be at work. Yeah.

You know, I get it. You don't want to wake up at five tomorrow morning, but you don't have a choice. And so just follow through and children learning that, okay, I've got to do this anyways. It's the right thing to do, and I'm going to do it. And that's a big piece of it, too. And what we cheat our kids out of when we succumb to that kind of, if you just look at for the surface, they have a stomach ache, they don't want to go. They're crying, they don't want to go.

If something happened, they don't want to go. Okay, fine, we won't go. That's not the actual issue. The issue is usually something else. Maybe they are having bad interactions with another child on that. Okay, let's deal with it. Yeah. Maybe they are, you know, having a reaction to whatever fighting is going on

in the house. All right, let's deal with it. And so easily, bad parents will just say, oh, it's the thing they don't want to do that's the problem. And I can tell you hands down, it is not our program. Because our program across the world, not just in our Montana gyms,

but across the world where this program has been implemented, the program is solid. The coaches are solid. The curriculum is solid. The games are solid. The jiu-jitsu is solid. Now we have to help kids stay involved. and learning how to deal with

it's so I feel like this is really gets thrown out a lot around a lot these days learning how to deal with adversity but the next step I want people to take in this thought process

it's not just the adversity of the situation it's everything that's going on in your head that makes that situation adverse so not just the stress of the situation but the stressors that you're putting on yourself in your mind So typically when kids break down, it's because they feel a sense of insecurity. Is it insecurity because they're not sure our mom and dad divorcing?

Is it insecurity because they don't know what's next? Is it insecurity? I had two spider monkeys yesterday have meltdowns because they looked at the counter and couldn't see the parent that brought them. And I said, it's okay. You know, they're going to be back. We do this every Monday and Wednesday. Hold my hand.

And so me as a coach being able to help them through that and to see them, through to a period of success. See, you did it. Okay, now you can do it next time. It's huge. And you guys have been at this a while, too. I'm assuming you've seen people. How old are spider monkeys?

Five to seven. You're a saint for doing that teaching. That's, I can give you a spider monkey story from yesterday because I, Kisida's spiders up in whitefish on Mondays and Wednesdays, and I do spiders here in CalSpell on Mondays and Wednesdays. Fiders are actually the best age group. It is the best age group. I have to agree with that.

They're still really cute and snotty. They're old enough that they have some coordination. They're not like the micro monkeys where their heads so big that they get going. And it's like, whoop. Like watching a micro monkey do a breakfall is painful, right? Because everything's head first. It's just mostly a full. They're just top-heavy.

Their heads bounce off the mat. But, no, the five- and six-year-olds are great. their personality i mean you can see the personalities at that age just they just beam out of the kid and um i had this one kid i won't mention her name but um she is notorious for when she loses right which there's 10 kids in class there's a good chance that she's not going to be the one kid that wins the game every single time she throws the biggest fit it's beautiful like she she runs into the wall, bashes her head into the wall.

These are padded walls, by the way, people. It's not exposed brick or concrete. And so she's got, what's awesome about it is she's gotten progressively better, right? To the point where the other kids expect it, they see it, they know her. My assistant coach, Kate in there,

she sees it. We make eye content, like, here it goes, here it goes. It's so great. And I'm bad about making jokes that go above the five-year-old's heads, but my assistant coach is Git. And so I'm like, yep. And again, I guess say her name.

I want it really bad. But I was saying, well, see, we got to figure this out in here because when the boy that you want to go out says, no, it won't be great if you smash your head into the restaurant wall. And, you know, if you don't get accepted to the college that you want, you know, running into a wall is not going to fix that either. And so yesterday, she got out. and we were plane ship to shore and I sent her to the wall and she did it she went to the wall

she sat down and I was like awesome and I even told the other kids I'm like see she's getting better and I said you know what you're back in today free life because you actually didn't throw a fit today and that's just a really small small milestone but that can have an incredible impact on the rest of her life but it's it's it's hugely rewarding for me like it's the job of coaching kids is so powerful and little things like that that happen every week for me are awesome. Like to watch a kid who struggles with her temper and is a poor loser or sore loser. Watching and helping them work through that is awesome. Well, you guys have been at it long enough to see children to include your own go from very young to,

I mean, your kids are essentially age-wise, functioning adults. Like I said, in my 40s and I don't think I'm a functioning adult, so they're largely ahead of me. But it has to be rewarding and fulfilling to see them go through that journey as well. I mean, the impact that it has had on their life. For sure. Like, Gus is a good example. Little Gus, sweet little Gus. He's not little.

No, that's my point. As I bet he started, you say that because he started out little. Yeah. He was one of the first ones, I think he was, what was he? Six or seven when he started? Yeah, I think so. And I have to assume that you guys get feedback from the parents, too, on the impact that it has in their life.

For sure. What kind of stuff do you guys usually hear from them? I have one that sticks out in my mind, but we get a lot of them. In fact, we just got one when we sent out our surveys this year. But we had one kid. He was probably at the time, and maybe still was the most difficult child that I've ever dealt with.

parents were very intelligent people. His father was a doctor. And he was an only child. And they were older parents too. Yeah, older. And so like the little girl that I was speaking about, he was a sore loser as well. But in a very malicious and he was one of those kids where if you turned your back

or if he thought the coaches weren't looking, he would maybe pinch a kid or, you know, know, just do something. Kick him. A little bully behavior. Yes, yes. But behind your back sort of thing. And, you know, the coaches would even, oh, you know, and, and, but anyways, he stayed in the program for years and he got better and better. It was a lot slower than it was with, with this, this five-year-old that I was just speaking of was a very long process.

But it was, you would see the gradual improvement. And I remember one day his grandpa, because his grandpa used to come in all the time. and his grandpa came in and to my face with tears in his eyes and his grandpa was a well-to-do person in the community and he he said thank you so much you saved my grandson's life and I was just like whoa like it's one thing to have a parent say you know you've you've helped my kids so much they're so much more confident or they're so much more helpful around the house or they're not picking on their sister anymore like that's all fine and dandy but to have a grandpa come up and and with tears in their eyes tell you that you saved their

grandson's life that's big it's powerful yeah so and that again that's back to what we were talking about before how hard it is for us when when parents do come in and say you know they just don't want to come today like no no no you're thinking about this moment this day we're thinking about the next five years yeah you know we we we We have, and maybe it is because we've been at this a long time, and our kids are now teenagers that we're less caught up in the day-to-day struggles, and we are looking more long-term. Well, your perspective is different. You have more laps around the sun than, you know, small child. When I'm thinking about the five-year-olds, you know, five, six, seven-year-olds in my Spider-Monkeys class as, okay, what kind of teenagers do I want to interact with?

What kind of adults do I want to interact with? You know, if this person's going to be working at the bank, you know, and I'm going to have a, business relationship with them. How do I want them to be dealing with me as an adult? Okay, now I got to put these pieces into place here on them out when they're five. Yeah, and that's the, that's the thing, too, we remind our coaches all the time as well when they get, you know, it's, it's hard. I mean, it is, teachers know what we're talking about, daycares know what we're talking. Working with large groups of children every single day is challenging. It's tough. It's not, that's not an easy job. It's very rewarding. And if you can continue to remind yourself that the work you're doing,

is going to have a lifetime's worth of impact. But I joked a lot with Kese in the beginning because we had our four kids and we're here in this small valley. And it's kind of like we're controlling the aquarium. So it's like, okay, what kind of kids do I want my kids interacting with? When my kids go to a house party as a teenager, which they would, you know, just like all kids. They just did a couple weeks ago. What kind of teenagers? I never did as a child because that was perfect.

what kind of teens are going to be at that party? When my daughter goes on a date, what kind of manners is the boyfriend going to have? Well, in a weird sort of way, we can actually have a huge impact on that by instilling values and life skills in these five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve-year-olds over the next few years because these are the same kids that my kids end up going to high school with. Yeah. And so that's that's also been very satisfying to know that we're having an impact on the community as a whole, not just individual children, but the actual environment that they're running into in the high schools and things like that. Which it's, I mean, that's what we're living through right now because our kids are all in high school. We've got two who graduated now, two still left in high school.

And the groups of kids that they run around with, we either. know because they've trained with this or, you know, somehow, because it is such a small community. And we can see the impact. Little Gus is at my house all the damn time. Oh, yeah. You were in class when I was joking about the fact that that kid was drinking all my milk and eating all my eggs. Yeah. He'd come to my house. I'd eat in the morning after swim practice. I'd come downstairs and he'd make himself like six eggs. I remember being that age. There wasn't enough eggs. I would eat all the eggs. I was doing water polo practice in the morning and then in evening and all the food in between and before and after.

Yeah, that's our house right now. I can't go to the grocery store often enough. What do you think the impact was on your own children? I mean, does it make you more confident as parents releasing them into the wild for lack of a better turn because of the experience that they've already had and the fact that they are not going to shirk away from that adversity? Yeah, I mean, I'll let, I'll talk about just one and then maybe like Kisa say what what she thinks about the other three.

What are you going to talk about? I was just going to mention Ricky. You know, our middle son, Stella's twin brother. I was really reluctant. He's 17, and we had some coaching, open, opportunities open up. And they were adult classes. And, you know, we charge good money for what we do here. You know, we're not cheap.

Yeah. Nor should you be. And, you know, Kesa was like, well, you should have. Ricky teach those classes. And my knee-jerk reaction as a dad and business owner was, no, he's only 17. Like he can't, he can't teach the adult classes. These people are paying good money and they're not going to want a teenager teaching them. And then one of my other coaches too, Coach Leah was like, he's the best, he's the best coach you have. Like, let him do it. And I reluctantly did it. And it was amazing because I got text messages from like Mike and stuff going,

you should be so proud of your son. Like he commands the room. He is so confident. He knows what he's talking about. He's a fantastic coach. And that's when it hit me. I was like, oh, my gosh. Like he's a, how many 17-year-old boys?

Because he's a boy. He's not a man. And how many of them could go into a room of 10 or 12 grown men? and teach them how to fight and speak with authority. I mean, that to me was 100% because he grew up doing jujitsu. He grew up in the gym. He grew up learning the life skills that are important to us. He, you know, competed multiple times a year for 10 years plus.

He's been training since he was 5 and he'll be 18 in November. So, I mean, that's longer than almost everybody has been training. Yeah. So. Which means he's willingly and repetitively seeking discomfort, seeking adversity. Yeah. Every time it rolls with me, it's guaranteed discomfort. I'll smash his face.

Familiar with that also? Because I have about a year to two years left of doing that. So I'm going to enjoy it while I can. Yeah. I know John Frankl always talks about how. He's such a great training partner for the young kids and the teenagers because he knows one of these days, you know, they're going to be in a position to either grant him mercy or not. And I was like, fuck that. I will beat their ass as well.

I still can. It's different when they're your own. I was going to say, as a parent, there's a part of you that just, it's like, I need to beat your ass now. I can't beat. I can't beat any of them anymore. Two years ago. Chris Hatter imparted some wisdom, too. I hear smart things all the time.

I just necessarily follow them. He's like, be nice to the blue belts because they will be black belts one day. Yeah. So. I'm not. But, you know, I could say things. I could, I have stories about Joe and Stella and Ted as well as far as the impact that not just jujitsu, but the environment, the gym environment, the traveling, the competing. Man, competing is huge.

Yeah. The life skills. I mean, we write a new life skill every month. So we have the ability to really do so much more with the kids than just teach them a functional martial art. Yeah, Casey, can you break down the program on how it's structured? Or tell me more about your kids, too. Well, I'll talk about my kids all day long.

Those are my four favorite people in the whole world. But the program itself, what we finally decided to put together was, again, it's a child development program. And we're just using jiu-jitsu and actually yoga as well as a vehicle and MMA to teach the kids how to become human beings, decent human beings. So the explorers part of the program is just kind of an entry-level foundations. It's where you get your fundamentals over and over and over again. It's a 30-week curriculum that repeats, repeats, repeats. And it's all, it's what SBG is based on, which is just fundamentals.

Yeah. And then beyond that, once they get into leadership team, then we start teaching, how to be good coaches, how to be good teachers, how to take care of themselves, responsibility for their own lifestyle, and then there's also a community service component, how to be good community leaders. That curriculum is about a two-year curriculum, because within that curriculum, they're still attending the fundamentals, the explorers-level classes, but they're also starting to work on those four areas in their chevrons. They're learning how to spar their learning how to

they just get a little bit more involved in the actual sport of juditsu then by the time they get to our submission samurai those are our competition kids our goal is always to have everybody in submission samurai some kids take a longer path to get there some kids were ready to put sub-sami

out of the gate because they're just natural-born competitors the submission samurai they do all the same things the leadership team does all the same classes at the explorers level goes to but now they're more involved in the actual strategy of competition. They also have an opportunity to become assistant coaches. So chimpanzees, our 7, 8, 9-year-olds, are assisting with the micro-monkeys

or the spider monkeys. Juniors and teens are assisting with those younger age groups as well. That is probably my favorite part of the program because now they have a job. We pay them monkey bucks. They have to fill out time cards. They have to learn how to be coached. They have to show up on time, dressed out. They have to actually be leaders. So we have some kids. One girl in particular, I'm thinking of up in Whitefish, she's a, has always been a phenomenal competitor, but she's also been very self-absorbed. So when she's in a class, oh, I know how to do this.

So she totally screws off and disrupts the whole class. When we made her an assistant coach, that's completely changed her whole attitude. She's still a screw off about half of the time. Well, she's still a kid. Yeah, she's still a kid. So, but now as an assistant coach, she's really learning the art of Jiu-Jitsu more because she's focused on how to teach spider monkeys. She's my assistant. And she's also learning how important it is to have classroom management and to interact as a team.

So it's such a phenomenal program. I'm, on one hand, I'm really proud of what we've built. And on the other hand, I'm always kind of in awe because just to see it take this life of its own has been phenomenal. I think one of the things that you didn't mention that is a huge component of what we do here that's different than what most martial arts programs is the life skill component. And that for sure is what separates us from like high school sports or even, you know, five and six year old soccer players or whatever. All this extracurricular activity is great as far as they're going to get the physical exercise. they're going to, you know, learn about competition, winning, losing, hopefully, although I'm hearing that a lot of sports that don't even keep score at the younger ages, which makes zero sense to me. But what they're not getting is a life skill every month. Like, okay, this month we're working on courage. Well, what is courage? You know, we're teaching them about teamwork or humility and respect, responsibility, all these important life skills that, you know, when you're in school, you're learning math or you're learning English. or, but where do you learn the really important stuff, right?

And the. Hopefully from your parents, but I don't, I see a lack of that more than an abundance of it most often. And some of that is parents, I think, not having a framework to learn from. So the life skills are technically for the children, but the parents are definitely involved in that life skills. My favorite one is actually this month, because I think, We touch on, it's not, some of our life skills are very basic respect, but the one for this month is loyalty.

And we don't talk about loyalty very much as a community because, you know, God forbid we divide and God forbid we disagree with each other. God forbid we stick to the people who have helped us. And that's the life skill. Loyalty is caring for those people who have cared for you, caring for the people who have made you who are today. and those are interesting conversations to have with five-year-olds. Yeah. You know? Yeah, I can imagine.

Especially when you say, okay, who can name loyalty? And they say, okay, you know, I pick on you little Johnny. We're going to go to my grandma's house and eat hot dogs later on. Okay, but let's go back to loyalty. I can see that being an answer. Yeah. You get some funny ones in Montana, too. I mean, there was a cougar in my yard today.

Respect. Yeah. Exactly. But that's our goal is to deal with the tough stuff. So deal with the tears when they're happening. Deal with the bullies when they're in your face. Deal with the hard questions of who do I stick next to. What does loyalty actually mean? And how does that look for me as a six-year-old? Yeah. And those life skills that we write every month, there's a story to illustrate the life skill. And it's age appropriate. So there's two levels there because obviously the teenagers don't, you know, their story is going to read much different than a five and six-year-old is going to read.

The teen stories are based on historical figures. Yeah. So we pick someone out. So loyalty, we had to find, I said, okay, I want the loyalty historical figure to be someone in sports. But this sports person can't, so they have to have been loyal to their team, even when they made it big, they had to stick with the same team. And no criminal record. Do you know how hard that was to find the sports finger? Even just saying loyal to your team, given the fact that people are traded and, you know,

that move around, that would be difficult in and of itself. Add the criminal record. It's a layer of complexity. So John Elway was who we came up with. I'm not a golf fan, so. That's football done. I'm aware of that. Haven't you figured out that sarcasm is my favorite weapon?

Pass your guard. You're just, you're not going to pass my guard. You're throwing them softballs. You really are. How long did it take you to fall in love with the jujitsu? And don't lie to me. I started jujitsu ten and a half years ago, and I fell in love with it.

After I competed at Master's Worlds, I was a purple belt. That was two years ago. So eight and a half years of grinding before you truly fell in love with it. Yep. But I continued to show up, and I continued to work through the injuries, the adversities, the stress, the managing, the juggling of everything that I have to juggle just to

show up to be on the mat. I continue to do that because I knew from watching my kids and other people's kids and adults that I would be a better person if I just stuck with it. That sounds like our relationship. It's tough from an outside perspective that I would be a better person if I stayed married to you? No, just that it took you 18 years to fall in love with it. full disclosure we just celebrated our 20th anniversary and at our 15th anniversary that wasn't our 15th I don't know is either 18th or 15th anniversary my gift to Travis was that I finally officially changed my name that's a really long time I just wasn't sure decade and a half yeah waffling on that one well you know what though I think a mistake that people often make is they would see you on the

with your brown belt and you're smiling and they see only that and it's easy because maybe they don't know you or they see SBG here in Calispell or and they just they see only that they don't see the work that it took to get there and I look back in my own life I got out of the military and had to reinvent myself and figure out what the hell I was going to do and then I didn't like that job so I quit and went making six figures overnight to zero and sat there with myself and said, shit, how do I do this? And then did another job and didn't want to do that one anymore. So I reinvented myself again and again and again.

For sure. And people will sit there and say, oh, well, you're successful. How'd you do it? And I just shake my head. Like, man, first off, not that successful. And secondly, I'm managing the catastrophes and the mistakes and the errors in three quarters of my days or shit shows, but you have to just grind it into dust and come out on the other end.

Again, it's perspective. It's, you know, what are you actually looking at? What's right in front of you or where you're headed? You know, Stella, so she's our only daughter, one of the twins, and people look at her. She's a phenomenal athlete. I was going to say savage, but yeah, she is savage. She is an amazing human being. I mean, she really is.

She's. Straight A student. Well, not anymore. But. She got a B? She got a B. A couple Bs. a high-level competitive judo career.

She teaches, you know, she teaches micromonkeys. So three- and four-year-olds. And she'll have a class of 15, 16 of those three- and four-year-olds with maybe one assistant. Full disclosure, there's not enough money in the world for me to do that. Well, it would take a lot to untie you after they were done with you. Not many of them would survive. They are vicious human beings. They have strength in numbers.

They'll break you down over time. Full buds instructor and the parents would not like that at that age. But people don't know this, but when she, so cell started juditsu at five and she'd been competing for a couple years and at about seven or eight, she spent an entire year every competition we went to, and I think we went to six that year, she had a full, full mental breakdown mat side every fucking match. Full nuclear. Like stomachache, crying.

prior, before or after she rolled? Before. So the second, they called her name. Stella, step up over here, stomachache, tears. Just anxiety-based? Yeah, anxiety, competition, anxiety. Just performance anxiety. She loves jiu-jitsu.

She loves competing, but she couldn't control it. And after the competition was done, because, you know, being the good mother I am, I would give her a hug and a kiss and say, sweetie, you're going to be just fine. Shove her onto the mat. And I would pull Leah or Amanda, not us, but another coach over and say, please coach her.

And we would leave so that she could be there. And she would start the match. And we'd give the ref like a side eye, like do not stop that match just because she's crying. She's fine. She's going to live. And that's what it took. It took a full year of that. And afterwards, I would say, do you not want to compete?

Like, what's your story? No, I love it. I don't know. I just stand on the mat. I don't know. but the fact that we had not only that environment for her to work through this this performance anxiety and she's high strong she's a little bit like me a lot like you things have to be just a certain way and just so and god forbid anyone step out

of line um so her being able to to work through that and for us to have this language of jiu jitsu and the opportunity of competition to work through that is 100% why she is such a phenomenal 17 year old now. She's awesome. But side note on how she's not awesome and how she's like Kisa, she meal preps, right? She's always like watching her way, getting ready for tournaments.

And so she does her own grocery shopping. She eats separate food from the rest of the family. She puts stuff in tuppers. And then she has the audacity to leave notes on her Tupperware. In the fridge, in my fridge, mind you. Right? And it'd be like, do not touch this. it's Stella's or fight me, bro, or, you know, all of those things immediately in time.

If you put, do not touch this on there, it's like, does that say touch that? My favorite one was, it was maybe a year ago. And I'm glad this is the interweb so I can really, full disclosure, show the whole world what Stella's really all about. When she was doing those notes, it was don't touch. Stella's mine, fuck you. That was my favorite one was fuck you. I was like, Stella.

Right out of the gate. Yeah. Like no warm up or nothing. No. And I think that was like steak that she had sliced and directed to you. It was her favorite meal for sure. Yeah. She has a whiteboard too.

And then she keeps all these posted notes for herself, right? Like motivational notes and things like that. And what was the one? Drink water, you dehydrated bitch. Yeah. Drink water, you dehydrated bitch. Positive self-talk. I mean, an affirmation.

I can really. I'm sure all the parents listening to this are going to be. Oh, yeah. I want to enroll my kids. that their coach I have a son who's 18 months from being that age. And I can tell you he doesn't meal prep.

He doesn't put stuff. Does he get up at 5 in the morning every morning? No. It's because he has a Y chromosome and not two X's. Potentially. But what I'm saying is though is, I mean, Stella could go into the world right now

and she's fine. Totally. Self-sufficient. My oldest son, he would probably be okay, but they would be on a different trajectory. His trajectory would probably be a lower one towards the distance horizon, whereas I think hers is on a steeper curve because she's so self-sufficient. I mean, it's something to be said from... Some of that's just personality.

For sure. Right? But some of that is also from crying for a year on the mat and dealing with your anxiety. Yep. And at a young age, seeking something that's uncomfortable, you know, again, I haven't been doing jujitsu that long, but I mean, I can talk about a little bit. There's a component of not having your own personal space, which can be uncomfortable for people. You have to get through that. There's a component you're going to lose.

That's why I'm so relieved when parents bring their daughters in because I know, okay, we've got this kid for at minimum a year, hopefully for the next seven to ten years, so that this little girl can learn how to not panic when someone's on top of her. For sure. How to not panic when she's pinned against a wall or to the mat, how to not panic when someone is breathing and sweating on you. and how to escape.

And then... I can't think of any more powerful skill, and I think it's the most important for women and girls. And I think the one part of that that's overlooked, and I agree 100% with that, but when they get done with that, when they get comfortable being on bottom, when they get comfortable being pushed up against the wall,

when they get comfortable having people sweat in their face, they walk down the hallway different. Oh, you can sense it too. Oh, yeah. People, like, they move out of the way. Yeah. And that, to me, is really... really the most powerful thing that jiu-jitsu teaches, not just the young girls, but the boys,

the men, all of us is it, it grounds us in who we really are. It shows us who we really are, what we're really capable of, what we can handle and what we can't handle. And we just carry ourselves differently after that. And there's a portion, there has to be, I mean, I've watched some Grey's Anatomy, so I'm basically a doctor. Pretty much. But there has to be some portion of the mammalian brain that can sense that because you can tell somebody who needs, knows how to handle themselves. Or I get it from Stella, too. I've rolled with her a few times, and I slapped her hand the first time and fist bump,

and she immediately assumed this posture. I was like, oh, no. And came at me with a pace that I don't know that I was prepared for at the time. It was unbelievable. She's 5-3, 5-4. But you can see it in the way she walks. Oh, yeah. You can see it in the way that she interacts not only with kids, but adults.

And there's just something in your brain that picks that up in a predator, because predators, maybe they have whatever it is in their brain. and they're more receptive because they're not looking for her. No. They're looking for people that don't exude that. Yes. They're just like in the wild, they're looking for the young one or the weak one or the injured one. They're looking for the one that has something a little off.

You're going to pick the one off on the fringe of the herd. But let's take the exact opposite end of the spectrum, Joe. Joe hates Jiu-Jitsu. He hates it. He hates it with a passion. And how long has he done it for? Since he was five. And actually, I guess he's 16 now.

So when he was 14, we let him start to fizzle out. 14. He's never liked Jiu-Ditsu. So from 5 to 14, we dragged his scrawny little red-headed ass onto the mat, and he was a nightmare. I mean, there were so many times that he was either just laying like a starfish flat on his back, refusing to do anything. Starfish guard.

Yeah. Or he would come at someone with a fury and, end up, you know, in tears. And Leah would have to, like, scoop him up a pile of tears off the mat. Or Gus, coach Gus, who's in Missoula now, once had him said, okay, Joe, you can do five minutes. Five minutes of burpees. And Joe was done with that.

And they had this, like, stare down. And Gus was like, all right, fine, keep going. Joe was like, fine. So he did burpees for an hour. That's going to leave a mark. He was in tears afterwards. But even Joe, who hates Jiu-Jitsu, who I just asked him last night, like, what have you gotten out of training? Nothing.

What a great teenage boy answer. He carries- Absolutely nothing. He carries himself completely differently than his friends do. And the crowd he runs around with isn't necessarily sports. Some of them are wrestlers, some of them are soccer players, but it's different. And so even though he's, we had to drag him, it was against his will. Yeah. You know, so many times, countless times I would sit him down and say, listen, I'm your parent.

I'm telling you this is what you're going to do because of these reasons. If you can string together activities that are going to fulfill these checkboxes for me, then fine, you can quit. Yeah. So you want to go play soccer and be in Boy Scouts? And what church do you want to go to? You know, how are you going to get your life skills? So it was, you know, then he would sulk. I would turn around.

He would probably flip me off and then I would drag him back on with the mat. Definitely, he was slipping you off. Yeah. At least in his head. Yeah. So I guess as a coach, it's, I know I'm a good parent because of, it was not easy to get all my kids to show up and to do this child development that we felt was important for them to do.

But we made them do it anyway. And we stuck with them. through the adversity. We stuck with them through all the fits, through the injuries. Ted, after his brain surgery five years ago, he couldn't, he started Jiu-Jitsu, but then he ended up getting a VNS implanted,

and he couldn't do Jiu-N-S implanted, and that was heartbreaking. So, okay, how are you going to stay involved with the community? How are you going to continue to get this? All right, fine, you're in boxing classes. And it was just a few months ago. He told us that he wants his VNS taken out, It hasn't really done anything for seizure control.

He still has seizures every day. But he wants the VNS taken out because he wants to earn his black belt. And that was. That's why you're seeing him pick up grown men. What belt does he know? He's a white belt. He's a white belt. Adult or kid?

Adults. Well, he's 19 now. So he was, I think, orange belt. He had brain surgery. So he'll pick it back up pretty quick. And he's strong and watch your feet. Oh, for sure. It's his, he's got two game plans.

Double leg, mount, arm bar. That's the game plan he developed from Mel Locke when he was five. And then his newest one is, uh, pull, no, is he double leg? No, he pulls guard and then go straight to a foot lock. Interesting. Don't let him grab your feet. Tap early, tap often. I saw him catch Coach Leah's foot.

Not going to be good. People have been coming after my feet for a while. Well, the harder it is to pass your guard. the more people are going to attack your feet. I refuse to be one of those people. I will only attack the feet of people who I can pass their guard readily. Well, it seems, and again,

you guys know my experience level, it seems bizarre to have your full game plan to be, I need to grab a portion of your body and fall backwards onto the ground. It's counter to everything we know that's true about fighting. I was going to say, if you do that in a bar

and the person has a friend, your face is going to get football punted through the uprights. It's only ever get on top. stay on top. Yeah. I mean, I understand why they do it. I understand in the competitive setting,

but I think, I don't know, one of the way I look at it, it's like, I'll get to that last. I'd rather actually have the practical application. That's a better way to go. Because the odds of me ever doing that in an environment that is not padded is less than zero. I would be happy if you were in my guard

and you decided to attack my foot. That would make me happy. You're like, thank God he's not on top anymore. Travis doesn't, well, let me get on top. I almost swept him yesterday. He did, it was close. You'll never do it again. Probably not.

I don't know. No, it's going to get worse, not better for me. That's the problem with being the coach. It's like I can either be a really bad coach and make sure that none of you guys ever have success with me. Or I can swallow my pride, teach you everything I know, point out mistakes you're making when you're making. making them and say, this would have worked if you would have done that. And then eventually take my lumps like I have with... That makes you a good coach.

So many people. In fact, Ryan Robinson caught me in a knee bar the other day. He uses all the tape. He has to. He needs a tape sponsor. Absolutely right. He also uses everything that he has access to. I don't think it's fair that he's a physical therapist because I was wrong with him the other day.

and he was trying to get my knee too. I'm like, I don't like your knowledge of joints. I don't like your knowledge of anatomy and physiology. I feel like it's a disadvantage for me. Between the tape and your knowledge, you're freaking me out a little bit. I'm going to go in the corner and just reconsider my life choices for a bit. It's much better. No, it's, I wish, I think it would make such a difference for people to seek adversity.

At least in my experience, anecdotally from what I've seen, the people, the difference between success. and not being successful is the ability to just keep going when things suck. And as parents, so it's one thing to seek adversity as athletes or as individuals, but as parents, that's where I think it becomes a little bit more difficult because we don't want parenting to be difficult, right? We're always looking for ways for parenting to be easy. And by putting our kids in situations where they have some adversity, we as a result also have adversity as parents.

And that's where, as coaches, we try to help the parents along through that as well. But too many parents avoid the tough stuff as parents. They avoid the conversations. They avoid the experiences. They avoid. People in general do that. If you look around, if you give the human being a choice, almost always they're going to take the path of least resistance.

I saw this in my old job. I would pick a high ground position. And I would view everything, like one of the key. tenants early on was always approached from a position that people wouldn't expect you to approach from. So if it's a sheer rock face or there's a briar patch, get into the sheer rock face and crawl through the briar patch. But overseas, you'd sit on a high ground and 99 people out of 100 who have the desire to kill you are going to come down the path, the goat trail in the wide open, where they easily could have gone and taken some more time and come through a conceal

but they don't do it. And their life is literally riding on it, and they'll take the pass of least resistance. That's crazy. And it doesn't work out well for them. But it's simple stuff, too. Like, when the kids were young, I would say,

hey, let's pack the kids up and go out for pizza. I mean, just terror would Travis's face would just go white. He would say, what? No, I don't, let's just order in. Like, no, let's take them to a restaurant. And he was just mortified. He just, he wouldn't want to do that. I wanted my kids to be perfect, you know.

And so the thought of going to a restaurant with, you know, babies, basically, it was just like horrifying because I knew we'd be at a table and they'd be spilling stuff and loud and food. It was always a path of destruction. And what I realized in hindsight, and thank God for Kesa, and this is, you know, if it was me raising the kids by themselves, it would have looked a lot different. and I'm not saying it would have been better. I think that's true for any men. Specifically, if the men were completely in charge,

it would look substantially different, very likely not better. But I now realize in hindsight, you know, they have to have that opportunity. Like, they're not going to get to the place that you want them to be at. They don't get a skip. You know, they have to be taught. They have to be shown. So how do you do that?

You can't keep them in the house and shelter them all the time, you know, and then expect them to go out to a restaurant as an adult and have manners. Yeah. Or be able to socialize. But I guess my point in all that is that it was hard for us as parents. That is a challenge as parents. The kids could care less. They're like, woohoo, restaurant.

I can just bill shit all over the place and color on the walls. Who's this person that brings me more lemonade? Yes, exactly. But for parents, that is, that's adversity. Taking the kids on trips together. Oh, man. It's easy to talk. You want to stress me out?

Yeah. Oh, we can't go because fill in the blank. It's too many tickets. Right. No, I know. That's one of the easiest ones that even in myself. The March before, Ted had brain surgery in May of 14. And in March of 14, we had.

It was Good Friday. Oh, sorry. Yeah, April of 14. But in March, we decided to take the kids to watch. I decided that we would take the kids to Ireland. Go see John Kavanaugh. You know how long that plane ride is? That's a long plane ride.

It's a couple hours, right? One or two? It was. And there's probably a couple plane rides to get to the long plane. Oh, yeah. And with four kids. So they were 14, 12, and 10. And then, of course, Joe was 10 at the time.

He developed a cough like halfway through the middle of the night on the plane. Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, he developed. I'm glad they had those little bottles full of elixir because I would not have made that. That was bad stuff. But anyway, that was a tough trip. It was expensive. Yep. It was exhausting to manage everything.

It was, but it was important to us to do that before Ted had brain surgery because we didn't know. Yeah. Are we going to be able to take a trip like this? Like, no, you have to take, you have to live life to its fullest. It's what I loved about your free-range American motto when you explain. that to me is we have all these freedoms we have these opportunities as parents we have these beautiful children these wonderful families what are we going to do sit at home no let's go see the world yeah let's get out there and when we don't know how to do things or we run up against challenges all right

let's buckle down and figure it out together and that's that's what we've really tried to do not only as our family as the davisans but also as the gym yeah as the larger spiggy community and what we've What we've tried to do with that growing gorillas with our kids' curriculum is to lay out a really clear plan for anybody to pick it up and to implement it with their kids, their kids program, their families, all their athletes. So where can people find more information on that? GrowingGurlis.com. Yep.

And Kesey gets more of the credit for that than I do, just like with the kids, because that was really her brainchild and her pooling everything. together. I mean, she, she put in all the hard work, and that's been years. It's been, it's been really fun, too. And recently, you know, we were, we actually purchased our life skills program from someone else, but recently, um, my sister's a writer. And I sat down with her and said, look, you know, let's do these, let's do these life skills together. And she's, to be able to see her, so she's my baby sister. And I was nine when she was born. So I helped raise her for many of those years. And now to, it's almost like we've gone back in time and we're

talking about some of these life skills that in essence I was working with her on when she was a baby. And I didn't even realize it at the time. Okay, how do I help my baby sister become, you know, a cool adult that I want to hang out with? It's a family affair. You almost got it right with her. She's close. She's really funny She can be Sometimes I think it's true of everybody

Nobody's funny all the time I don't know My brother's pretty funny He is funny He is funny He is funny My brother's pretty funny To you all the time

People keep telling me That I need to get him To tell some stories next week To tip the hat a little bit Travis and Ricky And a special guest Will also be on Yeah

Next week It's gonna be a good one Because Two special guests Right From a special location too from a special location well i said rickie and Travis i can't tell the additional special guest yeah but i think i think there's going to be two additional special

guests i only have four headsets yeah there's going to be people watching but we could also do two podcasts now we we will not be doing two podcasts we will have we will be having we will be having people wishing and hoping that they had the opportunity to be on the podcast that's what makes it. Gotcha. That's what makes it cool. Even better. It's exclusive.

I like it. What else do you guys want to add? I mean, for all of the, what I don't want people to think is that it was easy for us or that we think that it's simple. You know, because I think sometimes in this kind of a conversation it can come across as if, oh, you suck, we're great. And that's not the case. If anything, I would hope.

that people realize that, oh, it has not been easy for them. This was their, you know, it's hard and they struggle and it's okay to have issues and to work through them. I'm basically back to what you're saying with adversity. We've dealt with it. We'll continue to deal with it. That's part of life. It's not okay if those things happen.

You should expect them to happen. You should prepare yourself for them to happen. Yeah. And no one's going to save you. Yeah. And you should prepare your kids. to experience that because you're not going to be able to protect them. Maybe for a little while you can shelter them,

but eventually they're going to have to deal with it. And just like with the five-year-old girl, let's have them deal with it in a fun, safe way through competition, through losing it games, so that when they do hit those big stumbling blocks, like, oh, you know, divorce or death in the family, or I didn't get into the college I wanted to get into, or I lost my job or something that is much bigger than losing a game of ship to shore,

they've got the skill set and the mindset and the attitude to say, okay, reset, this is okay. Last time I faced adversity, I came out better for it. So this time, same thing. Head down and get through it. Life is hard. It never gets easier. We just have to get smarter and stronger and more resilient and we have to keep going. that's all I got.

That is all I have for you this week, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for tuning in. First and foremost, the podcast apparel is back in stock, and finally shipping again. Full disclosure, I am an idiot, and anybody who knows me directly would probably shake their head and laugh at that because I am, in fact, an idiot. I had an error in the number of items for sale,

basically a discrepancy between inventory and actual inventory on hand. But it's back. So if you want to support the podcast by flying the flag and telling people about it, please do that. Go to clearedhotpodcast.com. Click, clip, click on the shop tab and go to town. Get a t-shirt or don't. It's up to you.

What else? If you could help me spread the word, that would be amazing. Tell somebody about the podcast. Recommend it to somebody for me. And lastly, if you haven't done it, do me a favor. Go to iTunes and write a review. Whatever the review that you want to have a podcast. there. If you think the podcast suck, write down, hey, Andy, I think your podcast sucks and post it,

and I'll take a look at it. If you have some advice or suggestions for things you think I can do better, let me know. I'll do the best that I can. And that's it. Talk to you next week. Have a very good four-person podcast coming up for Monday and a return guest coming up the week after that, an author, if you will. And that's it. Talk to you later.