Mark Bell's Power Project - MBPP EP 698- Lance Palmer, The Product Of A Great Father: 2x Champion Still Chasing More!

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

Lance Palmer is an American professional mixed martial artist and former collegiate wrestler. He currently competes in the featherweight division of Professional Fighters League, where he was crowned the tournament champion twice, earning him a million dollars EACH time. Follow Lance on IG: https://www.instagram.com/lancepalmer/ Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/ Code POWERPROJET for 20% off Vivo Barefoot shoes! ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements! ➢https://eatlegendary.com Use Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢https://verticaldiet.com/ Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% off your first order! ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori! ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #LancePalmer #PFL #MMA #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

How's it going? You guys probably have watched a lot of Mark's lifting videos and some of my lifting videos, and you've probably noticed that our shorts never go past our knees. Nope. There's a reason for that. Y'all got to show those quads off, baby. And the shorts that we're always wearing are from a company called Viori. That's called V-U-O-R-I. But Viori has amazing clothes for the gym that we wear, but also outside the gym. So you can wear them to dinner parties, for the gym that we wear, but also outside the gym. So you can wear them to dinner parties, dates, gatherings, all that good stuff.

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That's V-U-O-R-I dot com slash Power Project to receive 20% off your first order. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. You were just telling us a little bit about your dad. And I've heard a lot about your background and the way you grew up and i think you and your brother were pretty much just beating the shit out of each other and but your dad was also like kind of training you guys from a very young age what did that look like was he like working out in the garage or something you guys could just kind of joined him or what was the process like well it basically started with us doing 30 push-ups together in his bedroom like we would get up in the morning do 30 push-ups together in his bedroom.

Like we would get up in the morning, do 30 push-ups together, and that was kind of it. And that was kind of where my working out for life started. Like there's not a day that goes by that I'm not doing some sort of training, and that was kind of the start of it was I was probably seven years old or so because I started karate when I was five, but it wasn't like something our whole family was involved in, like wrestling. Cobra Kai shit, right? Oh, yeah.

It was like I thought karate was going to be so cool, and then it was just like I'm doing like this routine in a pajama suit with a colored belt on. And I was just like, there's no like competition for me here. Like it was like a judging thing. Like just like my wife with her bikini stuff. Like I hate that type of judging. It's like so subjective.

And so that started at a young age of my hate for that. So I was like, I was turning nine years old and we were already doing these workouts together just because my brother was wrestling he started when he was five he's three years younger than me and I was like man wrestling seems cool you like have this mano y mano type thing where you step on the line and they step on the line and the winner gets their hand raised there's no like i mean there's bad calls here and there but there's no like judging you have to make it happen and so that was kind of that was kind of how our family became a wrestling family was we started working out together and the this was

before we had a basement gym or anything it was just on the carpet my parents bedroom 30 push-ups and it turned into 50 push-ups, and then it turned into one of those pull-up bars between the doorway with, you know, we were doing, you know, 10 push-ups, then 30, or 10 pull-ups, 30 push-ups, 50 sit-ups, and then got to the point where, you know, we were 12 years old doing, you know, 20 push-ups or pull-ups at a time with ankle weights on and then 200, you know, sets of 200 on the push-ups or pull-ups at a time with ankle weights on and then 200 sets of 200 on the push-ups. So we were doing – the workouts got to the point where it's like you can only do so many push-ups to where we started transferring

everything into weightlifting. And we knew that the weightlifting thing, there was like a stigma at a young age of like, oh, you shouldn't have your kids lifting weights. It'll stunt their growth. It's like, my mom's 4'11". not gonna i'm not gonna be i'm not gonna be six feet tall anyways so it was at that point we got into you know he got some stuff in the basement we had an airdyne bike a treadmill um some dumbbells and then like a dick sporting goodsing Goods weightlifting bench with a leg extension on the end and all that. And we just ran with it, and that was kind of the fast version of getting from doing 30 push-ups a day

to 200 pull-ups and 2,000 push-ups and 200 sit-ups. You say 2,000 push-ups? Did you hear that right? Yeah, we would do 10 sets of 200. So we would hit 200 and then do our 100 sit-ups and then go back to pull-ups. Why do I feel so weak now? Yeah, but when you're 70 pounds as a kid, like... But you're still a kid, though. You still have to be strong, yeah.

There's no doubt. What did your dad do to kind of, like, get you guys going with that? 10 sets of 200s. Yeah, that's bananas. But like initially, like the 30 push-ups in the bedroom, like what did he do to, I'll say invite you guys in to do that? Into his bedroom. Just because I'm thinking like getting kids motivated,

it's kind of tough sometimes, you know? And so like I'm just curious what he did back then to get you guys going i think it was more of just something that we could feel together as a family as part of just like hey come in here like he'd be in he'd be shaving every morning and blasting music on his radio in the bedroom and uh we would all just hang out in there kind of just mess around beat each other up anyway so like, hey, let's do some push-ups. And I don't know, at that age, like, I think it's cool to see how many push-ups you can do. You don't think of it as a workout.

I think when you're taught something as you have to do this and you have to do that, it becomes a job at an early age. And then you're like, well, I don't really like this job, so I'm not going to do it. And that's where kids, I feel feel start to fizzle out whereas he gave us that welcoming like hey let's do some push-ups let's see how many you can do and then it's a competition because i have two younger brothers i'm like i i'm not going to let him do more push-ups than me and then it turns into like he just sits back and watches and now everybody's like

you know my brother and i are competing for national titles at 12 years old different divisions different weight classes but it's that brotherly competition of like hey we're we're both going to get better together but we're competing against each other in a certain way so like when you guys competed like even what guys must have killed people, right? I mean, my brother was the best kid in the country from seven years old all the way up through high school. Yeah, in wrestling. There were kids that were like... So the Trinity Award is an award that you get for winning a national tournament in November

and then the big tournament in Tulsa, Oklahoma in January, then another one in Reno, Nevada at the end of the year. They're all run by the same company, but that was the biggest. If you're doing the World of Wrestling tournaments and you're winning all three, you win this big giant eagle statue thing that's like a it's called the trinity award and he won that either six or seven times i can't remember but he was like the he was the the kid that all the other kids his age looked up to like he was the guy like there's kids who are olympic champs now like david taylor and all these other kids that looked up to my brother because he was the kid that was doing what no

other kid could do at that age how'd your brother do in wrestling like progressing to high school and college he was a four-time state champ in high school and then i think like if we if we take a step back and go all the way back to the beginning of when we started competing at a high level, I was always the wrestler who was self-motivated and driven. And I could go, my dad could say, hey, I want you to do 100 stairs, 10 minutes of 30-30 sprints on the bike, pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups after you get home from school or whatever it is before we go to practice and i can go down i could do every single rep do everything i needed to do push myself at the same time whereas he would he'd go he'd do like 17 push pull-ups in a set and then do like maybe 182 push-ups and then 75 stairs and like it was always like my dad had to be on him all the time of like why are you being lazy or why do you have like just do the amount that we're doing what why

do you have to cheat on everything i have a question about that to maybe both of you guys because it seems that you you were very self-motivated with wrestling like you clearly loved it. You enjoyed it for yourself. What happened with your brother kind of reminds me of when I played instruments and piano as a kid. My mom started me in piano when I was like five. And I got really good at it. But every time that I would have to do it, she had to make me.

So it wasn't like I was going to the piano at 5 a.m. because I wanted yeah it's like my mom was like you're gonna play the fucking piano you know what i mean and then at a certain point she gave me the choice if you want to continue you can i just said no yeah as an adult i regret it yeah i wish i kept it going with it but um it's like you know as a kid it's like it makes you wonder should you start your kid doing something at a really young age like should you push them if they don't want to do it because you too like you should push your kids yeah but how much is too much yeah well i guess an even better example of that is my youngest brother because he was he won the reno nationals which is that third leg of that thing. He won that one time when he was eight or

nine years old. And he was super talented too. But he was just like, Dad, can I just go to the tournaments? I don't really want to go to practice during the week. And my dad was like, well, your brothers have to go to practice to be able to compete on the weekend. And like the tournaments are what was fun for us. But we knew that the training during the week is what made you better and made you progress through these tournaments and so my youngest brother Jordan he was not a fan of practice and so like the beginning of the year he'd be like yeah I want to wrestle this year and my dad would buy him new wrestling shoes but he just wanted new wrestling shoes you'd be like well I don't really want to practice I just want to go to the tournaments

and my dad was like well you can't really do that like if you're going to wrestle you're going to wrestle if you're not you're not that's fine and it's fine if you don't want to but you have to either do what your brothers are doing or it's just it's not fair to them or you so he didn't wrestle for the longest time and then he went to the same high school as us which is number one or two in the country almost every year in wrestling as a high school and you're never going to start on that team if you're not wrestling every day for your entire life basically and so he kind of regrets that now because he didn't have that scholarship to college or have the the accolades of high school wrestling or whatever it is and there's a lot of,

uh, family stuff that has gone on because of his regret of that. And kind of like, um, held a grudge towards my parents for not making him. So there's both sides to making your kid do it and like not making them or like telling them not to do it if they don't want to do it all in so it's a hard thing my son's been playing some basketball that's just outside our house he's 18 yeah and uh

he's like man he's like i wish i played basketball and i just like stared at him i'm like you you played basketball yeah i played basketball for like two years you know and he he didn't want to do it any longer and i think it is hard to try to find that you know find that i guess uh exact uh kind of emotion or the exact intention rather to kind of hit with your kids i'm not sure if you should push them or i think exposure is important for sure you know having them uh exposed to as many different things as possible and having them make their own choice yeah but i don't you know we've seen it work out really well for a lot of people where a parent does push them in a direction that does work yeah you guys gotta check out and see his bicep right now it's like it's tripping look at that that's that mind bullet dude it's

the mind bullet also that's why he's so jacked he doesn't have to do anything his muscles flex oh it's from that machine he got hooked to yeah he's still flexing i'm sorry it was distracting me and i just like everyone else has to see this shit imagine what his penis is doing right now right there's not much to look at but there's a pump penis pump that is true yep do you have a penis pump no i wish god we gotta we can make that happen heck Heck yeah. You think we're joking. No, we're not. Self-motivation, that would be a terrible idea for me because I'll be so motivated.

I would never leave my room. I'd just be pumping that thing until I have no blood left in my head. Ten cents to 200. Exactly. I'd take a look like this shaker cup right here. My wife's going to have to buy me bigger shorts. That's right. Or tighter. Yeah, that's true.

I don't know if you can get much tighter than these. I tried. What you guys were mentioning about the motivating a kid thing, I don't have a kid yet. But it just seems like you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. Because you don't want to get into a situation where the kid's older and they resent you for not pushing them to do something. But then some kids, you push them too hard, they resent you for pushing them too hard.

Well, that's kind of, we have both situations. My middle brother, he was the best wrestler out of all of us, technique-wise and ability-wise. He kind of fizzled out after high school because of, one, when you go to college, you don't have your parents there to say hey you need to get up get on the bike or you know get a run in before school or do this or that or you know whatever it is you don't have that anymore and I wasn't able to do that they let him live with me because I was a senior and he was a freshman coming in at Ohio State and it was he had a couple injuries and he hurt his back and stuff like that.

But I think in reality, that's a way for somebody to kind of be okay with giving themselves a way out. Like, oh, well, I got injured, I did this or that. But we've trained at a high level our whole life, so we've always had injuries that you can work through. If you really want something, you'll find a way to fix that or work through it to get back to where you were. And he was one of the best wrestlers to come through high school in Ohio ever.

And he was a four-time state champ, and he did really well. He was one of the number one recruits in the country. So the way that it happened once he got to college as a freshman, and I was competing. It was my senior season, so I was trying to win a national title, and I'm traveling every week with the team to wrestle, and he's at home, or he's in Columbus going to school and doing his thing, but I wasn't able to give him what my dad did

and push him to be able to do that except at practice. So I think there's a lot there's two ways to go about it though is like he kind of resents my dad sometimes for you know pushing pushing him or you know not doing certain things once he got to college of like you know keeping up with what he's doing but that's not my dad's job like when you're 18 years old or 19 years old with a kid already like he already my brother had a kid at 19 when he was a freshman in college so it's like that's another thing like is the focus factor all goes away once you have all these different things going on where you're not just a college kid trying to pursue a goal so i think when we got to that point where we're at now which is

like everybody's families are fucked up in a way i feel but i'm able to like i have all this stuff going on in my family where i got my brother who was like i looked up to him and he was younger than me because his wrestling was so good and that's where the competition between us was always like he would win tournaments that i would take third or second just because he was always he was just that good for his age and weight like it was one of those things where i was like man he's winning all these like i looked up to him but my motivation and my discipline and everything else was at a level above where i was able to kind of make up for that little bit of like technique that I wasn't as good at or you know the strength and

conditioning part of it I went super hard in that to make up for some of the technical aspects but then my youngest brother he doesn't even talk to my parents anymore because he feels that you know they didn't do enough for him but it's like that's not their fault you know it's like being the oldest brother i'm like the mediator for the entire family so i have to put up with everybody's bullshit whether i like it or not but i feel like i feel that way with a lot of people i don't know if it's just something that people come to me to confide in me about or whatever it is and i've always been that way even in like high school and stuff like that but i feel like knowing all the situations of the

different people in my family it's it kind of is one of those things where you're never gonna you're never gonna be perfect as a parent like whether you push them super hard whether you kind of push them or whether you don't care at all you're like hey you can do whatever sport you want as long as you enjoy it it's like in a way that the child depending on the child they don't want to hear that they want to hear i have your full support let's go to practice together let's like there's kids in wrestling that their parents would drop them off at practice, and they'd be at the bar down the street for two hours and come back and pick them up.

And they had no clue what their kid did all practice long. Or if their kid was messing around at practice, they had no idea. And there was a lot of people like that when we were growing up. And my dad was very extreme. There's kids nowadays that would never like man your dad was like that and it's like there's still parents and referees in ohio that are like dwayne palmer like what ways was he extreme just he was at practice with his wrestling shoes on like walking around on us all the time like you know you need to be you need to be paying

attention when he's teaching you need to yeah like doing extra like he was always about doing the extra like get your sprints in after practice or um making sure you're getting your workouts and your lifts in when we're at home and not skipping things or you know getting your cardio in on the bike sprints or treadmill sprints like it was always, that was what he, having us at a young age, he was 17 when I was born. So that was kind of like his, I mean, we were close. We grew up together, basically. Do you think a lot of that had to do with kind of like where you guys grew up?

Like the area that you grew up in maybe your dad just wanted he just like maybe uh to a fault like wanted the best for you guys 100 especially with having me at such a young age i feel that he didn't get that um like the early adulthood like being able to like he still went out and did his thing and was still able to you know party and do whatever but you don't have that freedom once you have a kid i mean you could have that freedom if you just leave your kid and you know or never around but he he loved us and wanted to wanted the best for us he wanted us to have a full ride to college because he didn't get to go to college because he had to take care of us. Like there's a lot of things that I feel that he felt obligated, but he also loved wrestling.

Like he even talks about it today. Like he loves the sport. He never took a sport super serious and he kind of resents his parents for not being as involved in a sport for him because he has that similar mentality to my my middle brother who like he could be really good at it but just didn't have the discipline or the self-motivation so he needed somebody to like hey get your ass moving we need to get to practice with this and that but his parents were never like that so i think it was a little bit of both like he never felt that from his parents so he wanted to give that to us in a way. But he's a very intense person too, so he comes off as super extreme compared to most other parents, I guess.

Do you think maybe your brother was also resentful? Not necessarily because you didn't push him into wrestling, but because wrestling is a wrestling household. And then you're the odd man out if you're not wrestling, right? I think so. Hard to get that same time in and everything. Yeah, and he's obviously being the youngest. He's more of a mama's boy. So him and my mom would like.

That's me. Yeah, like they'd be baking cakes and like hanging out at home or like going out to the mall and stuff on weekends when we're out of town. Baking cake? Come on, what is he doing out for? We'd be cutting weight or like have to diet a little bit for a tournament and they'd be like making full-on cakes at the house my dad would be like rita what the fuck are you doing these guys got to make weight and he's like well she'd be like well jordan doesn't so they'd be like baking and cooking and like just like like they and that's what hits my mom the hardest, is like they spent a lot of time together throughout Jordan's entire life

because he didn't wrestle after nine years old. So the whole situation with them not talking to my parents, that bothers her a lot more than him just because they had more of a bond than anyone else. Like he was the mama's boy, and then Colin was daddy's boy and i was just i'm the oldest so i'm kind of in between both so it's one of those things where you see it from the outside and you're like what do you what are you resentful about or why are you why do you have this hate or anger towards our parents when they just did what they thought was best. Like no parent is going to be perfect.

So if you push somebody too hard or not hard enough, that doesn't give them the right to be resentful down the road when they didn't feel like they accomplished what they wanted, like through that age group, I guess. I don't know. It's go ahead. I know you mentioned that you looked up to your middle brother because he was

so fucking talented. Yeah. But I'm curious, why do you think you were so self-motivated as a kid? Like, why were you able to like that? Obviously transition into the later in life. But I'm wondering how what aspects of what maybe your dad did or what you saw would allow a parent to help their child become self-motivated to do something? I think a lot of it comes from my independence from a long age or a young age, just always knowing what to do on my own. You go to practice, you listen to your coach,

you work hard. I think it's just that's how we were ingrained but I took it as I can do this I don't need somebody to tell me every step of the way I just need you know I need guidance obviously but I don't need somebody to babysit me and write down every single thing that I need to do for the day or you know it's kind of I think it's just my personality type maybe that I've always kind of had that where my youngest brother is kind of like that with the independence now but always growing up he was the mama's boy so I think maybe it's just kind of in our genetics a little bit to kind of be independent enough to where you know what you need to do on your own and you don't really need somebody else but I was I was more like for a young kid i was always like yeah i got it i can do this or that and like

i would ride my bike down to baseball practice at the end of the road you know just i could do my own thing i didn't need my parents to always you know do things for me i guess i think it comes down to like brain chemistry and then also like so maybe your serotonin and all that different shit is like slightly different yeah than your brothers and then also uh just belief in yourself there's something some like it just hit you differently you know we hear stories all the time of this happened to my wife her dad died when she was 10 and it impacted the family differently everyone had differently. All four kids had their dad die. He died on the same day.

He was no longer there for all of them. But it was different ages for each one of them. So you could imagine if you're 13, that would have a way different impact than if you're 9 or if you're 6. Different grieving processes and ways that you're going to go about it. Different grieving processes and ways that you're going to go about it. And off of that note, on a different note, is that's kind of how I feel with the situations in my family that go on, like with my dad's drug addiction or my youngest brother not speaking to my parents. Like, I handle that way differently than my brother my other brother does or my parents do and like with grief like you're saying like my grandma passed my dad's mom passed away last july and he handles grief way different than a lot of us and he's like well you guys just don't

feel you know you guys you know you guys don't you know, that same love or feel the same way. It's like, no, people just grieve differently. I loved my grandma. They lived next door to us since I was five years old. So, like, she was like a second mom. She babysat us after school when my parents were at work. Like, the list goes on. She would take us to tournaments and practices when my dad was out of town for work.

So, I think people just handle things differently or they're just wired differently to have, like there's certain things that don't bother me that really bother my dad. And then there's things that bother me like crazy that my brother doesn't care about. Like my brother doesn't, my middle brother literally is like super easygoing.

Like he doesn't care about anything like having a crazy girlfriend like he thinks it's funny everybody else would be like get this bitch out of my life like like there's just different things like everybody's still with this girl right now oh yeah that's that's a whole other podcast we could go if he listens to this he'll he knows oh he she knows too. She knows, too. Trust me. But that's just I feel like that's how people are. Everybody's wired a different way of how they grieve and how they process different events that either something can either happen to you and you can be like, oh, I'm being attacked. Or it's how you get.

How are you going to respond to the way this has happened because it's not you know things can happen to you and you're like oh i got the worst luck or i've that's like how my dad is is like everything is bad luck or everybody's out to get them where it's like no it's just some unfortunate events and you know that's the way it goes and you can choose how you react to anything that happens and it always seems like for that, that's the way it goes. And you can choose how you react to anything that happens. And it always seems like for that person, that's like, oh, it's always bad luck. Everything. Yeah.

It's like. But then you attract that. That's exactly what I was getting at. You know, it's like I have a buddy of mine who's always like breaking shit. He's like, dude, that's just the way that always happens. That's such bad luck. And I'm like, well, keep telling yourself that it's going to keep coming true. A hundred percent.

It's crazy. And then what I was going to ask you, kind of going back a little bit to your independence and self-motivation, do you think you would have been able to achieve that without sports and wrestling? Just achieving independence in general? Yeah, and just becoming the man who you are. I think in a certain way, but becoming the man who you are i think in a certain way but not the man i am i think wrestling is such a unique sport and it puts you in places that you would never go mentally um without that type of push or without the highs and lows and the roller coaster of the

sport i mean sports are very similar from a mindset aspect uh but when you see some of the best athletes in the world in different sports they have that that mentality in their sport but i feel like wrestling is the thing where you have to you have to be a better version of yourself after wrestling just because of the discipline involved the things that you have to push yourself through uh not wanting to go to train every day and because it's not like it's not like other sports like a combat sport like that is where there's never an easy day like even if you're the best wrestler in the room that practice is still going to be hard if you push yourself it's kind of like an airdyne bike i always i always revert back to

an airdyne because an airdyne bike always sucks but even when you get in better and better shape it still sucks because you're just doing higher rpms like the bike never gets any easier i don't care how good a shape you're in it's still gonna suck yeah fuck that bike yeah so it's like that bike in itself in a way is like what molded me today because things like that that you don't want to do after practice getting on that airdyne bike and hitting 30 30 sprints you know for 10 minutes and then you know doing extra drills or getting up early in the morning to go do your lift before school. So you don't feel like crap after practice to go and do it that night. All those things that you don't want to do at the time are kind of, I think what molded

me as a person today, even outside of sports. You know, you were talking about the way that people perceive problems and perceive things and even maybe perceive stress. And Mark always talks about interpretation. You know, some people, when they're having a hard workout, their interpretation is like, oh, God, I'm so weak and this is so hard. And when something bad happens to them, their interpretation is, oh, why me? Why does this happen to me? I really do believe. And I'm curious too. Okay, so you're very self-motivated,

but your ability to interpret stress and bad things, et cetera, it seems that you had really good skills for taking everything that could, most would perceive and interpret as negative, and instead flip them and make them into a positive, like this stress is actually going to strengthen me, right? Did you have models for that? Like in terms of the skill of that interpretation, did anybody in your life model that for you?

Or you think you just were like that? I think I just had to figure out the best way for myself to handle the stress and use it as a positive. And maybe it's just me being more of a positive person because my dad chooses to, and the reason I keep using this analogy with my dad is because I always looked up to my dad, but also there's a lot of things

that I don't want to do that he's done. I'd rather learn from his mistakes than make them myself. So using that is his negativity, or sometimes he comes off as negative and then, you know, uses an excuse or somebody else caused this. So like there's a cause and effect, but it's never him doing it when in reality is you can choose how you want to feel about something and I think that handling the stress the way that I do and the mindset that I have is like fighting is super high stress especially when

it's paying your bills and you're in fight camp or you're fighting through an injury and you're focusing on an opponent that's super tough and you don't want to lose the fight you want to go out and have a great performance there's so much high stress for you know 10 weeks before a fight that I'm like man I've done this my whole life like every every week in the big 10 you're wrestling one of the top guys in the country and if you lose your ranking goes down or your seating goes down for big 10s or nationals and like if i you know i have to on tuesday i'm in a communications class and then saturday i'm wrestling in the big 10 finals i think a lot of that stuff is like how you choose to deal with stress because i've had teammates and friends who

man if something happens if something happens, if something happens to them, it's like the end of the world. Like, oh, you know, I just, it's the, I don't like to use this word, but it's the victim mentality of, you know, poor me or why me or, you know, it, this always happens to me. It's like, yeah, because you attract that energy. And so even in a negative scenario i try to take the positive out of it like last year losing two fights in a row was man it was i could have said man that was the worst year of my life but in february we had my daughter and i was like that was the best year of my life even though things didn't go my way in my job it wasn't like i lost my grandma

but i had a daughter so like we give and take everything is a give and take but it it's how you choose to navigate through life because i could i could sit around all day and say oh you know um two weeks after my daughter was born my dad went to rehab for drug addiction. And I was in fight camp at the time. And I just wasn't focused. Like, no, I lost those fights. And whether it was preparation or focus or whatever, that doesn't take away from the fact that those guys went out there and did a better job than me that night. And I can use excuses all day long with that.

Like, oh, my grandma passed away. I wasn't focused on the second fight. So, yeah, I can use those as excuses, but I don't like to do that. I just like to say, yeah, they did a great job. They beat me that night. They were better than me that night. Yeah, 100% wasn't focused on those fights. But there's things, there's ways to go about it. Like I had the second half of the

year i like we talked earlier i won uh nogi worlds for jiu-jitsu at brown belt and i got promoted to black belt and went on vacation with my wife and daughter after my second fight and you know just things like that and you go through you go through this whole process of like you can overthink the crap out of everything and then you're just in a miserable position or you can just say hey this is how i'm going to deal with a negative scenario and i'm going to choose to take the positive things out of that and use the rest as a learning experience and i i've kind of always done that through wrestling too because if you lose a wrestling match in a tournament you have to wrestle you know maybe an hour later or 30

minutes later you can't be dwelling on that match or the next guy is going to beat you and he may be worse than the other guy but if you're not focused on that you have to focus on what's right in front of you and that's that's more of a thing of like being in the present and living presently instead of in the past or the future because the things you worry about in the future, 99% of the time it's not going to happen. So there's no reason to worry about it. Just focus on being present. Things in the past you don't have to be okay with,

but you have to move past it. There's nothing you can do to change what happened yesterday or the day before. Sounds to me like you're just a really incredible student if you kind of break it down from a lot of the things that you're saying. Because you mixed and matched stuff from your youngest brother who was an awesome wrestler. You took really good traits from your dad. And I think – is your dad like a loose cannon? Like, is he? Yeah.

So my brother was the same way. Okay. I learned everything from my oldest brother. And obviously, my brother Chris had a huge impact on my life with lifting and all those other things, too. But just watching my brother, my oldest brother, he was just ahead of a lot of the other kids when he was young, playing baseball and football. And he was just amazing. So I loved those traits. And I was like, wow, he's really good.

He's really aggressive. But then he was really aggressive when he really shouldn't have been. And he had things like that where he would just get really, really angry about the smallest thing. And he was bipolar. angry about the smallest the smallest thing and he was bipolar and so i think uh i saw that at a young age and i was it just it gave me just a different perspective on life in general because i think a lot of times we tend to overreact to just about everything something real small will happen i mean a comment on instagram will throw you off track and you don't even know the person yeah i mean it's it's really you know it's strange what we get kind of caught up in

nowadays but i learned a lot from that it seemed like that you've learned a lot from the people that are around you and i'd imagine the wrestling coaches and stuff that you've that i mean it must have been some great mentors along the way i was going to say too is you could kill all three of us with with workouts you know you could you could really like break us off right you could just fuck us up well if we have the if we have the resilience to go through that time and time again we won't just get sore from it we won't just get the shit beat out of us from it we'll start to learn about ourselves and the different exercise and different movements and the different we'll continue to get better at those exercises

and over a period of time, we'll be able to adopt them. They'll be able to be part of our habits and the stress of them is going to lower. So it's a great way, those kinds of things like wrestling and stuff like that, I think are a great way to kind of jog your mind around the block and exercise your mind because you can't have a sound mind without a sound body and you can't have a sound body without a sound mind but how do you train how do you train your mind you i think it has to be done through some sort of physical activity i agree and i think a lot of that goes back to what i said about wrestling before was there's things, there's days where you're just like nothing left physically after a practice or you have a bad day in practice and say,

you give up a takedown or you give up points against a teammate or partner who this guy shouldn't be taking me down and it pisses you off. But you can either take that negatively or positively, but either way well not either way if if i take it positively it's going to harden me mentally and it's going to just build the building blocks of my mentality if i take it in a negative way i feel like that's going to hurt me mentally because that it's not toughening me up. And it's not always about being tough, but being able to handle stress, there is a toughness to it.

And I think the the threshold of stress that you can handle is all from the things that you've endured in the past up to that point. So like the way that my dad doesn't grieve very well or compared to myself or the way that people handle certain situations, if you just blow up about everything and then you're like, oh, I'm sorry. You know, I didn't I didn't mean to do that where you could have just taken a second to like everybody blows up at some point. But take a second to like think it over and be like, man, do I really need to get that worked up about this situation? Like you mentioned the comment section of your Instagram page or whatever it is. It's like, you could literally be miserable all day, every day. If you went and read every negative comment and took it seriously and, or just if you didn't take some sort of motivation from it. So I think I agree that your stress threshold gets a lot higher the more that your body and your mind have gone through some sort of stress. And you've taken that and helped yourself grow from it instead of using it as the victim mentality.

You know, on that note of your stress threshold, something that I wish I really was able to do when I was younger was wrestling or jujitsu. Because I played soccer for like 15 years. I played a few other different sports. But when I started doing jujitsu at 23, the consistent, like I was getting my ass beat every day, not just by my people, but people that were just much smaller than me. Yeah. And it was, i actually was like i thought that was really cool because i'm like okay there's something here but the other thing that was kind of happening was like wow i'm i'm getting beat up every day this guy could have

choked me out but i tapped like i could there's a weird thing of someone having your almost like your life is in their hands yeah you know and you your life is in their hands. Yeah. You know? And you shake. Your consciousness is in their hands. Consciousness is in their hands. You shake hands and you get your ass beat again, over and over and over again. The cool thing is that you've been doing that type of hard work, that combat,

since you were young. And I wonder, do you, I don't even know, since it's just something normal for you, like, by doing that from childhood, how do you think that shaped your outlook on life and the things that you do? Because that's different from soccer. That's different from lifting weights. That's different from basketball. It's combat.

And my experience with that, I'm like, damn, kids should be doing this. For sure. kids should be doing this for sure i think it's it changes the way maybe sometimes in a bad way because sometimes my wife is like you know the the affection or the not that i don't love her but i don't show that i love her as much just because it's like mentally i'm like oh yeah you know i love you we've been together for 12 years, whatever. Like, you know, but like expressing that still is. Come on, you need confirmation every day. Yeah, I'm like, we already have a kid. Like, we already have my seed.

Yeah, exactly. Like, I already gave you a second seed. So it's like, what's the end? And like, if we argue, I don't I'm not somebody who gets super emotional. Like, I'll get pissed, but I'm not going to be like, oh, babe, I'm sorry. You know, like, that's just not who I am. But I do think that that comes from just being like, okay, you need to be tough in this scenario. Like, my dad, if we would lose a wrestling match, do not cry on the mat if you lose a match.

It's not the end of the world. do not cry on the mat if you lose a match it's not the end of the world you can go cry in the back or like have your emotions to yourself but don't show others that you're weak or what like not saying crying is weak but he would say you know you need to handle it handle it on your own terms uh but don't throw a fit don't throw a temper tantrum don't be you know there there's just different ways to go about it and i think he has helped be professional about it yeah i agree and like even losing a fight like i could go off and you know get mad and be pissed at everybody else or say my coaches didn't help me with this during camp or this or that what went wrong but really it's on me so i have to be the one to own it and move on from it and i think that i think

that is that's something that's kind of been my mentality is always like i have to own it but i also think that in certain situations like my daughter's one year old like if she falls down i'm like you're okay get up like i'm not I'm still like, I have a soft spot for her, but like, I think I'm just so used to being hardened from everything that it's just like, this doesn't bother me. This like, that's not, that's not something you need to cry about. Or that's not something which can come off as not emotional sometimes like with the wife or whatever. But I think it's just the way that I've been like I've trained my mind to be after a certain amount of time and it I can't really I can't really speak for people who have PTSD like from the Marines and stuff but I would almost think that it's like it kind of wipes away some of your emotion because you've been through some like certain things that are way up here in your life mentally that you've had to deal with or physically or whatever that you just choose whether you need to be emotional

or not for that situation and I think that has kind of been something whether it's good or bad I don't know but it's something that has kind of taught me like you know if I don't get this sponsorship or if I don't if this deal doesn't get done for my next fight contract or like, it doesn't, it doesn't make me like go sit in my room and cry. Like I'm like, okay, well there's gotta be another Avenue. Like there's always, there's always a yes answer. It just may not be that same path to get to it. And that's kind of where I take the, attitude from now i think uh my son was born in february so he's one years old too oh nice so we're right there date uh one two one two one oh wow so first sorry yeah because that's the only way i can remember it is you know two one two one

that's cool but um and it's funny because like i know exactly what you're saying like oh you fell on you fell down you're okay yeah but like how do you I know exactly what you're saying. Like, oh, you fell down, you're okay. Yeah. But how do you balance how much you're going to coddle your daughter? Because there is that. You're like, ah, you're fine. Don't cry, whatever, shake it off. And then there's, oh, he's reaching for that oven that's still hot.

Yeah. Do I let him learn? Exactly. You know what I mean? And I'll be honest with you, it crushes me if like he even like whimpers you know like i want to fix everything for him but i know that that's not good like well good bad whatever but i just know that like i just don't want him to be a sissy exactly so like for yourself and you know based on your experience with your dad and everything

like i mean can you find a balance with that i think you can 100 but i also think like we talked about before not every kid is the same so you really i think you have to know your know your child and obviously there is some uh like nature versus nurture in that like whether they're going to be tough or not going to be tough i think there is some sort of predisposition with genetics and the way they think or whether they do have like my dad is bipolar depression and everything else so my grandparents had him on medication since he was five and that definitely has fucked him up with the drug addiction stuff because he's been on something since he was a little kid.

So he may not know how to think on his own to a certain extent. So I think there's always like, is my kid going to be a wimp? But also it's like, okay, I never grew up in a household full of girls. So I don't want to be too tough on her because girls are more sensitive in like an emotional manner and she could be tough physically like I would love it if she was like a gymnast or did something cool physically but I still want I want her to have that female emotion and not just be like like me like heart like a hardened person by the time she's like five like i still wanted to be like a little girl and like daddy's girl and stuff like your daughter never smiles yeah dude

she's like but it's funny because when i facetime with her when i'm out of town or when when i come home from like say i come home from this she's just got the biggest smile ever. But like, she's literally like so serious all the time. And my wife is like, dude, she has every genetic of you besides the eyelashes. I'm just like, I don't know. It's just, so it's gotta be genetic at some point. Cause she does act a lot like me already. How did your dad know anything about training or did he not know anything about training? And he was just like, I'm just just gonna make my kids work their faces off he learned from basically every coach that he could get five minutes with and that was something that i've always kind of taken from him is like man if you just get a couple minutes with somebody and you try and get a little bit of information from

what they do and how they've become successful or how their kids are successful or how their wrestlers are successful. And he just did that with almost every coach that we ever learned from. And to be honest, the weightlifting and working out part of it, that was all him. Like he just kind of did what he thought was best and what was going to get us in the best shape and get us the strongest and that's something i commend him for because he was always like a bodybuilding type of lifter like not really not like a functional training or like dynamic anything like that or even power lifting he never did like olympic lifts with us until i got into

high school and started doing it at my school so like the the strength and conditioning part of it was all he would literally have a booklet like that we would write down every every weight that we used and how many reps we got it for all the way through every single week and he would try and get us a little bit stronger you know obviously not every week you're going to be getting stronger but he would try and get us stronger as fast as possible with the right technique and it was always like chin above the bar push up all the way down um no half reps on anything or he wouldn't count them and that was kind of like the fight him and my brother always had

because my brother would be like, that was 20. And he's like, that was 19. I got the clicker right here. Like he would click. Like it was every day. He's a drill sergeant, man. Oh, yeah. And it was like we'd be down in the basement and we would drill.

And he would, in that notebook, we'd have every single technique we learned from Jeff Jordan's camp or Ken Cherto's camp or Eric Burnett or Jeff Leonard like every single move that we ever did at a wrestling camp or at a practice was written down in these booklets and he still has them to this day just like handwritten we'd go in the basement we had a little mat space when we were younger and I was probably only five pounds bigger than my brother throughout our whole like youth so we would drill together and he would basically like that's what he thought was going to work best for us and we saw results and i think we just took it and ran with it did your dad ever like read or go to seminars on uh like personal development or something like that

like what like uh what do you think made him, like, it sounded like he, like, figured out, like, a really good, like, regimen. Yeah, and it wasn't from, like, he never went to any seminars or anything for development or, you know, athletes or things like that. It was mainly just how are my kids reacting to what we're doing? Are they gaining strength strength are they the best condition wrestler when they step on the mat at the highest level of you know youth wrestling in the nation like that's our measuring stick was the kids we wrestled all over the country

and there was a very small group of people who did similar things like that but you could see the difference of our happiness versus these other kids like their parents were trying to mimic what my dad did but they didn't realize like we would go out and ride our dirt bikes and go have fun go get wings at hooters and like at hooters i swear how old were you guys? Like 10. Hey. My dad hooked us up. He was cool. So it was like, I think it was just like trial and error basically, but there wasn't very much error. It was mainly I know what I'm doing with my kids,

and we had a very open relationship. It was never just like we did and never said. Like it was always how do you guys feel today are you sore you're tired like he knew whether you're being a pussy or you were actually hurt or there was a and we were tough kids I mean that was just like he trained us and ingrained us that way because I can be I can honestly say that he's not that way and maybe he wanted to train us that way since he wasn't I don't know but that's I think that's where a lot of the mental toughness comes from is him trying to teach us to compensate for his own I don't really know I mean that's

something that I can only guess yeah and then did you guys just specialize in wrestling or were you still competing in other sports? I was actually, my best sport was actually baseball and I wanted to go to Arizona State for baseball and I played baseball. I was a left-handed pitcher. I played all the way through eighth grade and once I got into high school, the season started basically the week after the wrestling state tournament for baseball, like preseason baseball. And my high school wrestling coach, after I had won my first state title, he said, you're not allowed to do another sport. You don't need to throw your shoulder out, this or that.

And so we basically played other sports all the way up until high school. Football, soccer. My youngest brother played hockey for a long time. And I think that helped a lot with our my dad thought of it this way but we still had fun with it was like soccer you're running back and forth the entire fall so you're getting your body primed and ready for wrestling season without even knowing it and so I think there there was a lot of like a multi-sport athlete i think is always what like the dream is for a parent's kid like i would love my daughter to play a bunch of different sports even if she doesn't follow up like through her older years like high school and stuff like that it will teach

her all different aspects of just athleticism in general hand-eye coordination foot coordination if you're playing soccer. There's so many different things that you can learn from different sports without being pushed to the max like we were with wrestling. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. I think that's a beautiful way to look at it to be like, okay, this is your main sport. We're going to do all these other ones as just to train for that sport. But also for the kids that maybe don't love sports or they don't i don't know they're just not interested in it you're gonna be like hey you don't even have

to take it serious yeah you know i mean as far as like the wins and like losses or whatever just work hard have fun with it don't worry about the stressful side of things of like you know starting or whatever like just kick ass like that's all we need you to do because we're gonna have fun over here on the main thing yeah i think that's great yeah and i think it was we never had even a conversation of like hey i want you guys to stay in shape in the off season so i need you doing baseball or track or whatever it was just like hey do you want to try track this year like maybe do because your your mile time is pretty good maybe you do the 400 or something like that just like you know if you're doing if you're doing uh you know you're we're doing short

sprints all the time on the treadmill maybe you'll like the 100 meter dash or whatever it is and it was one of those things you just kind of like now that i think of it like he was always trying to get us like hey why don't you go do track because he's going to be doing sprints at practice. It gives me a mental break as a father from having to push him, but he's still being pushed by somebody outside of wrestling. So that's how I interpret it now as being a father is I want my daughter to be able to, one, have fun if she is going to do a sport or do many sports I don't

want her to be in a sport and be like you know some of these parents obviously these girls are like 15 in the olympics for gymnastics but they've been pushed very hard to get to that point I also want her to have fun and and enjoy it because I did enjoy wrestling I still enjoy wrestling or else I wouldn't be around the sport so I think enjoying it as you go through it, you're always going to have the highs and lows, the roller coaster of life. But going through it and having more highs than lows, whether it's having fun or victories or whatever it is,

I still remember days when we would have great games on the baseball team at the regional level and I would be I'd be so mad because they wouldn't put me in at pitcher to close the game and I was in center field and it was just like I still remember stuff like that because of how political it was but that's why my dad would never get involved in other sports he was just like I'm your dad I'll help you with wrestling like and that's kind of what drew me more to wrestling was my control over victory or losing or a starting spot or not was that one-on-one. And I think that's kind of what drew me away was the politics involved in other sports. But I did enjoy playing other sports all growing up.

Power Project family, how's it going? I want to tell you guys about the legendary Tasty Pastry. And we've talked about Ben and Jerry's and snacks and stuff on the podcast, but those can go against your goals. They can be too calorically dense and they can really make you crave more bad foods. But the crazy thing about the legendary Tasty Pastry is that it's 20 grams of protein and five grams of net carbs and 180 calories. And they taste amazing. You guys need to check them out. They have tons of flavors carbs and 180 calories and they taste amazing you guys need

to check them out they have tons of flavors andrew how can they get it yeah and the other thing they pass the kid test kids love these things as well head over to eat legendary.com and at checkout enter promo code power project to save 20 off all the tasty pastries all the nut butters all the almonds everything again eat legendary.com links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes let's get back to the podcast an aspect of what you mentioned in terms of wrestling is something i didn't actually realize and i was thinking about it like you mentioned that in a tournament you could lose a match but you have to do a match right after that most other sports you lose a game or you lose a match in a tournament your team's out and you go deal with that but you

have to like delete that you have to learn how to deal with literally something that hurts you so much, but then go and perform again with that feeling. And what it made me think about was I made a video years ago and I named it emotions make you weak just to trigger people. But the whole thing I was trying to say was like, a man especially emotional volatility like meaning that like if you have your emotions going all over the place it's okay for you to feel a certain thing but you shouldn't react with an emotional response to things like you feel it always like as men we should we should feel shit okay we're not cold but we shouldn't act based on that because especially as men um you get angry about something and you act

on your anger that's especially dangerous for us yeah that's why when men are have a high percentage of suicide yeah like you know like it's it's it's not okay for that to happen but one thing that i i realized when you were talking is a i'm wondering you know as a as a kid doing all the physical activity you did um do we deal doing all the physical activity you did, dealing with all those losses, and you definitely had other experiences, but I think that physical activity and sport and having to learn how to deal with that stuff really helps a man or a boy be able to have a level of equanimity

as they get older. And it's hard to say because not every man has equanimity that played sports. We know a lot of kids that played sports that are just as men, they're still fucking wild. But I do also know a lot of athletes that matured as they got older and they are individuals who are very good at dealing with emotion. The interesting thing with you and your wife, I've gotten this. I got the same thing from my ex and my current girlfriend, too.

She's like, you know, I wish you would share your emotions with me. I'm like, I do. It's just, I'm just chill. It sounds hilarious when they say that, though, because you're like, okay, whatever. You're just like, you know what I mean? You're just like, we're not two chicks hanging out talking about our feelings. I get a relationship is supposed to be like give and take, and you're supposed to let them know how you feel,

but she knows that's not me, and we're 12 years in, and she still feels that way. I think on the flip side, we treat them like they're our homies sometimes. Hey, did you see the ass on that girl over there i didn't mean to say that like dude why are you so upset like i don't get it yeah but one thing with you saying that it makes me wonder you know like like i'm chill mark's pretty chill like like even andrew we're all like we deal with shit we have emotions but we don't act on that right but it makes me wonder when we're dealing with women who want that from us, how then do we...

Because we don't want to leave them thinking that we're just cold all the time. We're just good at dealing with shit. But how can we bridge that gap? Do we just communicate our emotions more? I don't know. I think it's the effort. I don't think they really want us to communicate our emotions more? I don't know. I think it's the effort. I don't think they really want us to communicate our emotions more. I think they just want the effort of, I'm involved in this relationship.

I'm giving you more of myself and opening myself up to you more. Because this is a constant thing for me because i'm so to myself anyways even with her that and with all my traveling for training camps and stuff like that it's still like i don't just knock on the door you can keep going it's still like one of those things where i'm you know she knows that i don't open up about a lot of things. Even just like, you never tell me about your life, about my fight stuff, or if I have a fight date yet or a new contract deal or whatever it is. That's just how I am. And some guys are like that.

You don't feel the need to say something until it's 100%. Guys can gossip with guys and like just it's just guy talk locker room talk but if you don't tell your wife or your girlfriend something that she hears you say to one of your buddies oh you never told me that how can you never tell me anything how can you never open up it's like just and why is it turned into a generalization all the time yeah you never like no i do yeah it's like i just choose what i feel is important to tell you and what's not and it's not like i'm holding anything back from you it's just i don't feel the need it's not that i'm not comfortable

telling you i just don't feel like it's at a point where i need to tell you yeah because she gets the ultra like micro filtered stuff a hundred percent And then everyone else kind of gets the bullshit. Yeah, she gets the watered-down version of like, that's not that big of a deal, but I'll be on the phone with my buddy like, that motherfucker. And then she's like, well, you never tell. I'm like, yeah, but it's really not for you to get involved. If it's something like just any situation, I'm like, well, it's something like you know just any situation i'm like well it's not that

important or i don't want to i don't want to you know bore you or burden you with you know this bs that i may have to deal with with my you know my manager or somebody else like it's just women don't forget shit either so if you complain to them about a friend or something yeah they remember that shit oh yeah they hold it too like why are you still hanging out with that fucking guy? 100%. It's a weird, I mean, that's just how females are, but yeah, my wife will remember

what I did in Sacramento in 2012 at like three in the morning on this date, and I'm just like, I have no clue what you're talking about. I don't remember that. What were your emotions like when you got a million bucks in the bank? Oh man.

Well, it's... Is that like a... So it was a fight, right? And then you got a million dollars for the victory of that fight? Or was it a tournament? So the PFL works in a tournament structure where you have two regular season bouts. And that's your regular fight contract, like your regular promotional agreement.

You get paid your regular amounts for those two fights. So you'll have like a fight purse and a win bonus, basically is usually how people structure their contracts. So after those two, you qualify, depending on your points for winning or finishing or whatever, qualify for the playoffs which used to be an eight-person bracket where you'd fight the quarterfinals and the semifinals in one night and then if you won that you fight in the finals for the big check in the belt for that season

but the million dollars comes from the actual tournament so the eight-man bracket so basically you win those two fights in one night you get a hundred thousand dollars and then you show up for the finals you get another hundred thousand and then after you pass the drug test if you win you get the other 800 as a wire like after the new like because it was always new year's eve at first so like january 13th or whatever you'd see a giant wire in your account so it was always New Year's Eve at first. So like January 13th or whatever, you'd see a giant wire in your account. So it was, the first season was, it was crazy because it was 20, so 2018 New Year's Eve, I win the tournament.

So I won the two fights in one night in New Orleans in October and then the finals on New Year's Eve at MSG. After I won that fight fight it was such a like an accomplished feeling because you go through this whole season instead of like fighting is weird because you only fight once in a while like once every few months but with this season it's like a wrestling season kind of which was perfect for my style of fighting anyways where you fight in June then you fight in June, then you fight in July,

and then you do the two fights in one night in October, then you fight again the last day of the year. So it was kind of like, man, I'm getting back into this groove of fighting a lot more, which is nice because that's what I did in wrestling. You could wrestle eight matches in one day if you're wrestling at a national tournament. So it kind of felt that I was groomed for that already. But after the finals that night, you just have like an accomplished feeling. It was like, yeah, man, this is awesome. I just finished winning a million bucks. But it was also like I just won this belt.

I was just the best guy out of this entire bracket of guys at my weight from all over the world who were top guys who weren't with the UFC or Bellator or 1FC so it's an accomplished feeling of being able to say like hey I beat these five guys within six months to win this amount of money but it's a lifetime's worth of work like we had talked about earlier it's starting it wrestling at nine years old. That's just the first culmination of all those years of hard work actually paying off in my bank account. It's a little weird too, right?

Because you never started it for that. No. When I started wrestling at nine, it was because I liked watching it. I would go watch my younger brother wrestle at practice, and I was like, dude, karate's boring. I want to go wrestle and throw these kids on their heads. It never was anything. Monetary was never there.

The idea of wrestling in college or Olympic level, that was never there when I first started. It was more just like, man, this looks like fun. And then it just blossomed into being hard work and dedication and accomplishing a lot of things i set out to accomplish and then a monetary value behind it once i started fighting how did olympic love like i didn't know you competed the olympics how'd that go i didn't compete at olympic level after, I thought about going into, basically, you would do the world team trials, or whatever year it is, I guess. If it's an Olympic year, it'd be Olympic trials. the ability to jump into the mini tournament,

which is like the tournament the day before the Olympic trials, and then if you win that mini tournament, you're put in the bracket for all the guys who are already on the circuit. So at that point, right when I graduated college, I was going to start wrestling, and then I got a phone call from Uriah Faber, and he was like, hey, man know we watched your career in college and you know you did really well and he was really good at recruiting wrestlers like Chad Mendez, TJ Dillashaw like the wrestling background was always his favorite thing to watch and I was like yeah man

I you know I talked to Coleman about it because Mark Coleman's an Ohio State alum also and he was always in the room when I was in college so it was always a thing like, hey, you have a great attitude and your intensity in wrestling and everything would be perfect for fighting. I was like, this, I mean, Coleman's crazy. I don't know what he's talking about. I didn't go out and get in bar fights in college or anything like that. Had my fair share of scuffles but not like that wasn't my thing like i just didn't go out and try and beat people up and so like when uriah called me i was like yeah

i'll come check it out and i went to uh i actually went to sacramento for his fight against jose aldo um i think it was that sleep train back then so we uh you know i went to his fight and i was like and there was the fight where aldo just beat the crap out of his leg, and he couldn't even walk after the fight for a couple weeks. And Mendes fought on that card, and I think he had a submission or knockout. And I was like, man, seeing the highest and lowest of both of their emotions after their fights, I was like, this is just like wrestling. Obviously, I have a lot of

technique to learn i have a lot that i can um you know years and years worth of stuff to be really good at this but i think i can do it because my mentality is there and so that's kind of how i got the start in fighting was after that fight i was like yeah man i'll i want to move out here and get moving and that was basically how i got from wrestling to that instead of the olympic level what year was that 2010 2010 yeah so uh i'm i'm really curious about this how old are you too 35 35 35 all right so you started that in 2010 okay so you were 23 um 23 i think so yeah so how long did it take you, like,

you had a big wrestling background, so it wasn't like you really had to work on, like, you worked on it, but not that much. How long did it take you to become a really proficient fighter with boxing, jujitsu, all these other martial arts,

and, in your opinion, what do you think, because there's so many different types of martial arts, there's kickboxing, fucking Muay Thai, whatever, what are the most important martial arts to be proficient in to maybe be a good fighter?

I would say the answer to your first question is for a wrestler, most of the time, boxing is the hardest thing to figure out because you're going from a bent-over stance so nobody can touch your legs to more of a i would say adapted boxing stance because you're still you're in a wider stance for mma but you're still a little lower than you would be as a boxer learning that and learning the rhythm and footwork because i'm a left-handed person and I'm a left leg lead in wrestling

but I'm a southpaw fighter so my stance is opposite in fighting so getting used to being opposite leg forward from what I do for wrestling and there's a lot of things that changed up and boxing is still something I'm improving at but it's that was probably the hardest one to get used to for me was not throwing the punches, but just being in position after I throw punches or setting up my shots for my takedowns off of certain punches. And all the things that go into that for MMA is different from just boxing. Like I could hit mitts for days, you know what I mean? But setting up an actual shot on a guy

in MMA distance which is different from boxing distance in boxing you could stand in a phone booth and trade and defend and move whereas MMA the distance is so long you could throw one punch or fake a shot and the guy's all the way across the cage because of the different distance. So I would say boxing was probably the hardest thing to adapt to, and 2015 or 16 was like the first real fight where I felt comfortable that, okay, if I don't get a takedown or I can't take this guy down, I'm comfortable with striking and setting it up a different way. I don't remember the second question. Well, I was getting so do we have the most

to focus on yeah well like what do you think are the most like top three or four important martial arts that a young fighter should probably try to become proficient and to be a good mixed martial artist i would say wrestling is definitely number one and you see it even not even just the russian guys but they're they're really good at sambo and wrestling and uh like catch wrestling and stuff like that those guys and like even american wrestling like a lot of the champs in the ufc maybe like three or four i think right now had a wrestling background or there was one time where there was like four or five champs that were all like went back when Velasquez and John Jones and Cejudo and all them they were all champs at once and Khabib like you saw the elite level of wrestling and even a guy like GSP who didn't

have a wrestling background he was a guy who used his wrestling a lot in fights to win the fights even though his striking was great his wrestling and jiu-jitsu were what would win him the fights at the highest level so i would say wrestling is definitely the best thing to be able to control where the fight goes because if you don't have wrestling and you get hurt on your feet with a punch or a kick you don't have the ability to take someone down. Whereas if you're wrestling, you can control that and you can prevent getting hurt on your feet if you can take the guy down before he gets to you or vice versa. So I think that's one of the biggest,

I would say wrestling is the biggest thing. And that's not because I'm a wrestler or an advocate for wrestling. That's just if you watch the history of the sport and how it's grown with guys like Randleman and coleman and mark kerr like those guys all had heavy hands but they were all wrestling backgrounds yeah i mean you can even just look at the fight i didn't watch the fight last night but everything i read was that uh colby just took him down and like he had his way with um he did it all yeah like if it was prison he definitely would have definitely would have hooked them up. So if somebody lives in this area and they need their lawn maintenance,

is it a possibility that you'll show up? Definitely. Yep. So Primescapes is my landscape and snow removal company. Wouldn't that be weird? I actually get a good amount of business off of my Instagram account, though. You're out there riding a lawnmower and shit? Oh, yeah.

One of my buddies from high school, he was like, hey, man, do you still have that landscape business? And I was like, yeah, do you need something done? He's like, yeah, I actually bought a property, and there's no house there yet. It just needs mowed twice a month. And then he met me out there the first time. He's like, I'll meet your there because i was like okay and then i was the one that showed up and he's like dude there's no way you fucking mow lawns you're a millionaire and i'm like yeah but it like the money isn't why it doesn't multiply on top of itself either doesn't just sit there and stack up well that's what i mean like like it's it's not a thing where, for me, this is a tangent,

but this is always a thing that I have to go over with people. The money comes and goes. You can always make more money, and you can always spend a lot of money, but that's not why. I'm not just going to stop my life because I've made good money so far. I'm only 35 years old, too. There's a lot more money to be made, whether it's in fighting or elsewhere.

That's just the mentality I've always had is just hustle, go get it, blue collar work ethic. That's kind of just how I am. So people think it's funny, too, is like snow season. I'm out there for, we had one storm that I was out 24 hours straight plowing and salting my

properties that I have for snow season. And it's like, they're like, man, you need to get some guys to do it. And I'm like, guys don't do it as good as I do it. Cause nobody cares about your business as much as you, like your employees aren't going to care about your business. Like you care about your business. So I'll lose these accounts. Like, obviously I'll get to this point, so I'll lose these accounts. Obviously, I'll get to this point, but I'll lose these accounts if people are out there doing a lazy job. So even if someone else is doing the work,

I'm still going to have to be in my regular car going around to these properties to make sure it's done right. I'm not the type of guy who can just not care what's going on with my business when I'm not there. So with that kid, he was like, man, he's like, that's hilarious. He's like, I've known him since high school.

He was our heavyweight on the team. And he was just like, man, he's like, you've always had that work ethic. I know that, but it's just funny. You don't mind to go out and mow lawns and throw mulch and do patios and stuff like that. I've always been that way and i don't i don't think it's going to change a million bucks turns into like six hundred thousand dollars too right like the government right with the taxes 500 after the strip club yeah what did you do with the money

was there any sort of big celebration of any kind or were you just chill with it sort of i think the after the first season the first thing was just refinancing the house putting a little more money down because my wife and i never owned a house before the house we live in now so it was like the fha where you know you have half your mortgage goes to mortgage insurance or pmi or whatever and you're, I'm barely paying this house off. I'm going to pay for an $800,000 home when this house is only 350 grand. So you're like that whole thing set in of like, man, I have this money. Like it's not a, you know, it's, it's still an,

it's not an expense to put a hundred down on the house, but it'll get me out of this loan and refinance. And so the refi was the first thing we did. We changed over to a 15 year and put some more money down to get rid of the PMI and just put ourselves in a little better place with that. Cause I just wasn't comfortable knowing that I'm putting $1,200 a month down on this house for the next 30 years. And it's just mortgage insurance. Like it was so, it was, and I mean, that's, I get it. That's how the, you know, banks make money. But I just, I was like, man, we're in a good spot. We're comfortable.

Let's, let's do this. And, um, you know, do a couple of things to the house. So that was kind of the first things I did, but, um, actually before the finals fight, cause it's new year's Eve. So you don't know if you're going to win or lose the fight. You're confident you're going to win, but you never know. It could be a total of $200,000 for the tournament or a million, whether you win or lose that fight. So that's a big toss-up. It's a big change. So my CPA was like, let's go over all your expenses.

What do you have? What are we doing so far with this? Because that other $800,000 is going to come off a $19,000 anyways. You're not going to get that until January. So we start going over everything. He's like, I think you should buy a vehicle. And I was like, oh, my God, my wife's going to kill me. She was already, like, I like to play with cars.

That's my thing is doing stuff. And at the time, I had a play with cars. Like that's my thing is like doing stuff. And I had, uh, at the time I had like a, a Dodge Ram and it was lifted and I was just like, you know, small dick energy. And I was like, man, this truck is sick. Uh, and I was, I was like, if I buy a vehicle, cause I trained in Vegas in 18 too. And I was like, if I buy a vehicle out here and don't tell my wife, she's going to snap. Like, even though our money's kind of separate, even though, you know, we pay for things together, I was like, I can't do it. He's like, he's like, you can, you know, it doesn't have to be crazy expensive, but you know, buy an SUV or a vehicle that we could write off 98 or 99% of the, the expense of

it for this, this year. And I was like, all right. So I start looking things up and uh i'm like man i really like i was looking at the mercedes suv it wasn't the g wagon it was you know one next to that a v8 whatever twin turbo amg i was like man i'm not really a guy who like should be driving a mercedes i just i didn't feel comfortable with it because then my wife knows zero about cars but she knows that a mercedes just looks super. So I was like, if I spend a hundred thousand on this thing, like she's just going to snap. She's going to have, so I'm looking through

other SUVs. And this was the first year of the Jeep track Hawk, which is a Hellcat powered grand Cherokee. And I was like, I was like, dude, this is the the car this is the vehicle like I'm not I'm not telling her about it I'm just gonna go I'm gonna put the down payment get the vehicle I think it's a powerhouse right you step on the gas and oh it's insane and launched out of a cannon yeah and that was like even stocked their 700 horsepower but mine was like before like it's like 1050 horsepower now like it's insane because I just can't leave my cars alone. So that was the first purchase I made. And this was before all the money came after that fight.

But he was explaining to me, he's like, hey, man, you can always sell it in the new year. Like if things don't work out or you don't feel comfortable with the payment or whatever. So I was like, all right, whatever. I'm cool with it. So my wife comes out to visit in Vegas. This was like two weeks before my fight. I had temp tags on the car still like driving. I was, she's like, man, this is nice. This is your rental. I'm like, yeah, this is my rental car. She's like, she gets out, opens the back. She's like, that's a fucking temp tag. Did you buy this car without telling me you bought a car? And I was like, yeah, but my CPA told me this is the right thing to do.

We're going to be able to write it off. Don't worry, it's going to save us money on taxes, this and that. She was so pissed. She literally got back to my apartment that night, went to bed, facing the other way, all pissed off. I was like, oh my God, here we go. She's like, I just wish you would have told me that you were doing it, made you know a part of it this and that I was like all right here we go like this is years every every day it's something else that I didn't tell her so I was like oh god

but a vehicle a hundred thousand dollar vehicle is like it's a little more than just not telling me something so I was like all right I get it I get it, I get it. So I apologized, everything like that. So I would say that that was probably the first purchase kind of anticipating or knowing that I was going to have a big paycheck coming in. But that was more, honestly, that was more for a tax purpose thing. And I ended up loving the vehicle so much. So it was cool.

But I'm a car guy. If I went broke, it would just be because I had like 10 cars. What other cars you got? I had a Dodge Hellcat Redeye Widebody. That was one of my purchases after we did the refinance. And I had that car for two or three years. And then last year, I sold it and i bought a lamborghini huracan and that was uh like that was my dream car so i did uh it's a huracan evo and that was

one of my like since i was a little kid like the diablos and kuntosh like those were my cars i had posters up on the wall what kind of reaction you get like because i think uh little kids are fascinated i mean people are fascinated by lambos anyway but little kids are like in total awe of it right oh yeah i mean if you like just driving it down the street or stopping at a light like it's funny because you think like oh man the cars bring the girls the money brings the girls but you got dudes like yeah dude that thing's sick like just like lifting. Exactly. That's exactly it. And my wife's like, she doesn't understand vehicles at all, but she's like, everybody just stares at us when we drive this thing. I'm like, yeah, because it's a sick vehicle that you don't see every day

unless you live in L.A. or Rodeo Drive or something crazy. So it's just fun. But for me, I got it because it was always it was always a dream car of mine like the Aventador would be cool but I'm I'm more of a fan of the smaller car anyway but it was one of those things I was like man this is I've accomplished a good amount and I'm not done yet so this isn't something I'm gonna hang my hat on but it's a vehicle that I love and something that I love to drive and I've always loved cars in general. So that was something that after the first season,

she was like, please don't buy that car because she wasn't, she wanted us to be like comfortable before I bought that car. So I already had the SUV and I was like, all right, I'll, you know, if I win it again,

I'm going to buy this car. And so after the 2019 season, I was like, hey, remember we had that talk and I won. So I'm going to buy this car now. So you won a million bucks twice. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. So that was, it was cool though.

Both seasons were a lot of fun. It's changed now with COVID, but the first two seasons were you have your two regular season fights, and then you have the two fights in one night. But now they shortened the roster to where there's only four people that make the playoff. And it kind of takes away from that pride, like the old pride fighting days of where you fight more than once in a night. I thought that was so cool. That was like the main reason I liked PFL so much aside from making a lot of money, but the actual competition and the competitor in me was like, man, that's sick. Like you can tell people that you beat two dudes up in one night, like an hour apart from each other. And like, that's what i really liked pfl about in the first

two seasons then after covid they changed a lot of it to where it's it's a lot smaller of a roster and then only you know the the semi-final fights you fight those in one night so you only fight once in the playoffs then once for the final but it's I mean, the format of it is great. It's different from the UFC. It's different from Bellator because Bellator does their Grand Prix tournament, but it's just when we did the two fights in one night, nobody else was doing that in MMA. So that's what really drew me to it in the beginning. How does one make the roster, and how old is PFL?

This season will be with covid year so 2020 we we didn't fight they basically um shut it down for the year last year so this is this will be season four so they've had three seasons and they just re-signed with espn for the next two years i I believe. So it's growing slowly, but I feel like it's something that's going to have to take a long time to build. And there's a lot of moving parts, but there are guys like Kevin Hart, Wiz Khalifa that were all investing in this over the last couple of years. So it's definitely grown a lot, but getting in in pfl my way of getting in was it used to be called world series of fighting and it was on nbc sports network and i was a two-time champ in that and i was the defending champ when they changed the name and were bought out by another company and

i was like oh man because we had times where we wouldn't fight for like eight months at a time with World Series of Fighting because it was just like they were trying to get funding all the time and they were just trying to grow too quickly, I think. But everybody involved with it, like on the production side

and the CEO and everybody else was really good people. They just needed some sort of backing. So PFL was the name they came up with in the end of 2017 with an estimated start date of 2018. And this was the year that my wife and I had moved back here from Sacramento. So I was like, man, I love fighting, but I don't know how this organization is going to go. I'm not sure.

Like, nobody really knew what to expect. Or if you were even going to get paid a million dollars at the end of the year. So I was like one of the Renaissance men who was just like, fuck it, let's go. Like, I love fighting. I'm already not making any money. So if they don't pay us, what's the worst case scenario? I could win a belt and not get paid. Like, that was really my thought at that time.

And now that I think back, I'm like, God, that was so stupid to think that way. It's all I cared about was fighting, though. It wasn't about like making a million dollars at the time. It was more of just because at that level of my career, I was just like, man, I just want to get to the UFC. Like that was always my goal. And it still is. Yeah, it still is my goal. It's just this is my last just want to get to the UFC. That was always my goal. And it still is.

Yeah, it still is my goal. It's just this is my last year on contract with PFL. And obviously the money has been great. And they take care of me. And they pay me very well. So it's like people are like, man, I would never want to go to the UFC if I was getting paid that. But the potential in the UFC, like you see these guys like masvidal getting pay-per-view money and you know all these guys making good money who aren't champs so the idea of it is you know everybody's like man the ufc doesn't pay their fighters this and then it's like

yeah they're a few billion dollar company and yeah some of their fighters don't make a lot of money but if you win and you're always winning and you're the champ or become the champ or you're a guy who everyone wants to watch fight, the money's going to be there. So it's always like people always kind of discredit the UFC for just that, but it could be like that anywhere. If people don't want to watch you fight, they're not going to pay for you to be on their roster. So you have to be somebody who's exciting or somebody who is winning all your fights or at least making it entertaining because the UFC treats it as an entertainment industry.

And PFL has kind of taken to that a little bit with the season and making it more exciting for people to watch and stuff like that. But when it comes down to it, it's still a fight. You're still fighting and it's still a career. I pay my bills mainly from my fight career. And that's what helped me build my landscape business and buy equipment to get started with that. And it's helped me invest money know, invest money and do things, you know, do other things outside of fighting. But when it comes down to it, like this is my career. So I

have to do what's going to make me the most money for my family and for generational wealth. And everybody wants generational wealth and it's getting harder and harder just because the, you know, everything's inflating faster than we can even think so generational wealth isn't just oh i want a million dollars i'm going to retire like everybody was asking me if i was going to retire after i won the first season i was like man this is just the beginning like i'm before this million dollars i had no i had no idea of yeah maybe i'll be done after this season like that never crossed my mind even after the second season it wasn't like it was no i want to i want to keep winning i want to i want to keep winning keep winning and get myself into the ufc of where i originally had the plan of going with

all my buddies who trained in sacramento when i started fighting like that was always the goal it still is the goal but right now is winning this season of PFL and getting back on that horse and and getting back on top where I want to be and then going from there did making multiple millions I mean I know no fighter would ever say if it did but I I'm curious, you were always self-motivated. And sometimes you see with fighters, when they start making money, they start to go down because they don't have the drive anymore, right? How do you think, has making that amount of money affected you at all?

I mean, I would assume not, since you're actually going out and mowing lawns still. But how do you think it's changed you, if it has? I think the only thing it changed for me was the comfort of, man, I better fight soon because the money I made on that last fight isn't going to last me my whole life. I used to live basically fight to fight. I was living with Joseph Benavidez at the time and I was basically making like, I don't know, maybe 30,000 or 40,000 to fight somewhere in there. But that's before paying coaches, paying the gym, your entire fight camp of like buying groceries and, you know, paying for body work and hyperbaric chamber and everything that goes into it. It's like, you're maybe stuck with half of that before taxes. So then when you look at that part of it, you're like, okay, well, I have all these write-offs, but you're still going to pay taxes. They're not going to let you get away with not paying anything unless you're a billionaire.

So getting back to that point is like, at that point, I'm like, man, I was fighting fight to fight, like living fight to fight with my income. So now it just puts us in a more comfortable spot of like, okay, I can put this amount of money into this index fund, or I can buy this piece of property, or I can be a lender with a backdoor IRA and do real estate lending. As long as that money is back in the account before the end of the calendar year, you don't get taxed. Learning the game of money is honestly the only thing that has really changed for me. Because I grew up in a middle class. My parents did everything they could to give us the best lives, but we were not very wealthy by any means. And it was one of those things where I don't ever want to be in that position. And then once you make that kind of money, it's like,

I don't want to ever go back to that position that I was in. And yeah, you could sell all the nice things that you bought. Like I could sell my car at any point and get a few hundred thousand dollars back, or I could do whatever it is, but it's like, just keep working hard, keep accelerating your life, keep doing the things. Then if something, you know, drastic happens where, okay, well I have this thing in the garage that is worth as much as the house. I can sell this and be okay for a while if something happens. But that's not really the mentality that I went about with it. I think it's kind of like a devil's advocate thing, though,

because when you have it and you can spend more money than you spent before, it's kind of like you have to elevate. You're elevating your way of life without really like you're not doing it just for likes on social media you're just doing it because like hey we have more money to do more things and if you're not keeping up with that in your fight career then you're not going to have much money for very long so that's kind of I think that helps with my motivation more than hinder it because it's like the fear of going back to that old life of, which was great. It was very simple life, but I would much rather be on the phone with a guy going over the lending

options, you know, for a hard loan that I'm doing for them or, you know, figuring out how many patio jobs I can sell this summer and things like that are just fun for me. And it's created like winning these fights has created that for me. So I don't really want to take it for granted. A million dollars can disappear super fast. I don't think people realize that like when you make more money, you'll probably spend a little bit more money. And then in that you know you get a million dollars it turns into like you know six hundred thousand dollars because of taxes yeah and then each year you know you're living a little bit more of an expensive life so the average person listening is like well that should last you know 20 years but it might actually only last you about five years yeah uh just due to like yeah just you just you might help out a family member

i mean there's a lot of things that you may do in that in that time period 100 and that's what i was going to get to next is when you make when you start making that kind of money you have people with their hand out in your family and others but it's like sometimes people are, they'll say they're happy for you, but then it's more of like they're like not really on your team, even though they're your family. And you're like, you know, it's not that they want to see you fail, but if you're not giving all your money away to your family members, they're like, oh, he's a selfish, you know, this and that. It's like, no, it's just I put myself in this position to be able to help my family and to be able to hopefully put my daughter through college or my son or, you know, whatever we have next is like, that's what I want to be able to do.

I don't want to just give all my money away because like you're saying, that money goes super fast and it's not like that million dollar check is just everything that you have. Like you have taxes, you're saying, that money goes super fast, and it's not like that million-dollar check is just everything that you have. You have taxes, you have coaches, you have everything else that comes out of that first. It's a lot of freaking money, but in the grand scheme of life, it's not. Over the years, over the decades and decades, unless you have that in some account making compound interest,

it's really, you know, it's not a lot of money. Right, and I think for a lot of people, they're kind of like in debt where they have credit cards pay off or refinance a house. So anybody listening to this at this moment, if we were to give you like 100,000 bucks, a lot of it would be spent,

like probably 70 80 percent of it just on kind of catching back up exactly hopefully you don't use it just to get more debt well that's that is something that a lot of people do though they say a lot of people that win the lottery who are like lower middle class they're dirt poor again you know four or five years later because they were never taught how to manage that money when they do make it so that's the other thing is like once you make that money you have to have the right people around you that are for you and on your team not people that are just trying to you know bleed you dry yeah i forgot to ask you about um worlds winning worlds have you ever competed in that and why if not um i never competed like

in jujitsu yeah yeah um this year this last year was the first year i've ever competed in a tournament for jujitsu and it was mainly because worlds or adccs were always during like a fight camp of mine or right before a fight or right after so the timing was just always terrible but this year since last year I lost both my fights in a row in the regular season so I was done until this upcoming fight so I was like what I got nothing going on I might as well just stay training and have like a goal to focus on I I like to have an end goal. Like, it gives me more motivation for myself to be in the gym training and learning. So if it's not a fight, it's, you know, this jiu-jitsu tournament. Or if it's with my other business, it's selling more patio jobs or

just, you know, building that up or whatever it is. It always has to be like some short-term, some mid-term, and some long-term goals in there to keep me motivated. I think that's one thing that's helped me a lot is if it's not something right now, there's something I'm doing for a longer goal or a more long-term goal. Instead of just like, oh man, I got nothing to do today. There's always something you could be doing if you set goals, whether they're long-term or short-term goals. And doing the Worlds was one thing that was always a goal of mine, but with fighting being so, like, you never really know your schedule

until you have a fight scheduled. So I could never be like, hey, I'm going to do Worlds next year. Like I would never have a clue if I could do it or not until probably a couple months out. So I was training for it, and I was a brown belt for like five years before that. So I was like, man, it would be cool to win these worlds because it was no gi. So win these no gi worlds and get my black belt maybe. And I signed up for the tournament,

like didn't tell anybody I was doing it. And then Dustin Akbari, he was like, hey man, you should go to Worlds this year. I was like, well, I signed up for it actually. I registered already. He's like, no way. He's like, that's awesome. He's like, I'm coming, I'll be there for it.

And he's basically been like, he's been a great friend to me over the years, but he's a guy I met in Sacramento at Alpha Male, and he was one of Uriah's first phenom pupils as an athlete. And Dustin's jiu-jitsu is insane, and I've learned a lot of my jiu-jitsu from him. So he's like, dude, if you win this tournament, I'll give you your black belt. And I was like, yeah, right, whatever.

Because I haven't trained with him in a few years since I moved back, but we stay in touch. And so I do the Worlds. It was like 162 or whatever. I don't really know. I think that was the weight I weighed in at. But you weigh in right before you go out for your first match. And so I'm out there getting warmed up, and I'm, like, super nervous.

Like, because this is new to me. I've competed at a high level in all different things but it's a new sport. Well, it's not new to me but it's a new competition to me because I didn't even know the point scoring for jiu-jitsu. For points, I knew it. I hate you, bro.

Like in fighting, you know I've got to choke this guy out or beat him, be better than him the whole fight. Whereas jiu-jitsu is like wrestling where you have points. If you don't submit the guy, you have to pass guard or mount or take the back. You have to have both hooks in, all these little things. I'm like, dude, I have no idea. So for two weeks before the tournament, I'm trying to figure out what am i gonna do like how am i gonna score points what am what am i good at how am i gonna get you know out of everybody's gonna want to go close guard won't

say no i wrestle and that's why i didn't really like try and post about it or anything on social media because i didn't want people competing against me in a different way because usually in IBJJF rules once you touch they can sit to their butt and kind of pull guard and then you don't get a takedown if you take them down or get on top so I was like I'm just gonna have to blast through these guys like early on from a distance and so they can't touch and sit so that was like my main game plan at first. Like, okay, well, I'm going to get two points off my takedowns and then I'm going to try and pass guard or do whatever. But it just worked out.

Like my very first match was 2-0 and I wasn't ranked. I wasn't ranked because the guy was the number one seed and I took him out in the first round of the tournament. That's frustrating. Yeah, so he was so pissed but he like he knew who I was because he follows fighting got it but he was like like you don't know until like the week before who's in your bracket or anything and I don't know who any of these guys are and so after the match he's like man I'm a really big fan he's like I'm so mad that

I was on you know even on your side of the bracket let alone first match and like he knew exactly what to do once i took him down he just stayed tight and closed guard i couldn't pass or anything like and that was my hardest match of the whole tournament but it taught me after that it's like this is what these like jujitsu guys are going to try and do to me once i take them down so I have to try and pass on the takedown and get to side control or half guard at least right away but it was it was awesome it was literally like my brain was moving so fast learning the entire time throughout the process of the training camp for it and then at the tournament because I'm watching all these other matches like my buddy Dante who I was telling you about, he was at the, like they have,

I think it was like 77 kilos or whatever was that weight class, and it was the open division. So it's like all the top, top guys at that weight class in the world. He's a black belt, yeah? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, and his division was all open, black belt, 77. Like those guys are heavy hitters.

They're really tough. And so I was watching all their matches in between mine because I'm like, this is the highest level of jiu-jitsu that you're going to see at no gi in the world. And I was like, man, it's – so I learned a lot during that tournament. Aside from myself being able to win and be able to put up a lot of points on the board and have it. I had a one finish out of my four matches. I had a rear naked choke and it was cool because I had a little bit of everything. Like I went against the number one seed, had a really close one. I had one where I scored nine points and won nine zero. And then I had one where I got

a finish and I kind of did a little bit of everything through each one, and it was just fun. So it was something different. It got my mind off of a lot of negative things throughout the year, and it was a way to get myself back in a positive mindset, competitively at least. Making weight for all these fights and all these matches and stuff that you had over the years, doing all these different diets and stuff, you must have some sort of poop story for us there's gotta be like some sort of slam where

something squirted out of the not in a well actually in a match i've never had anything happen like this is more i have a i have a bunch of poop stories but none of them are really related to sports but so the only thing that i can really say like that i was close to shitting my pants in a wrestling match was this i had it was in high school i remember it clear as day because i had blue gatorade like the glacier freeze i think it's called oh this story's gonna get good and i drank like and this was for some reason this was a bad weight cut it wasn't a lot of weight but it was just like the weight wouldn't come off the last couple pounds that day.

And so after school, well, actually it was during school, it was during like my phys ed, I went to the wrestling room, cut some weight for that hour. And I was like, man, I only lost 0.2 in that hour. Like usually an hour is like eight pounds, something like that. And I'm like, man, I don't know if i'm gonna make weight and i'm just so i'm like draining myself to like go back in the wrestling room after school like just have to wrestle with plastics on and sweats and just try and like squeeze it out of me like wring myself out and so i'm like all right i made weight i'm good i weigh in you wrestle um

back then you would wrestle like two hours after you weighed in for the dual meet. So I made weight and I start eating. I always had a good diet of things that I would eat right after. I'd have some sort of carb that was a quick carb, like a banana or something. And just because you can't fill yourself up and then try to wrestle, you're going to feel like shit. So I was eating a banana, and then I was drinking this Glacier Freeze, and I would always put it in the freezer the night before and then get it out in the morning so it was like a slushie. And so I slammed this thing down, like brain freeze and all,

like my mouth's all blue and dry and caught mouth, and I'm just like sitting there feeling good. And then the next thing you know, I'm like, oh, my God, my stomach. Like it literally hit me instantly, and I'm just like sitting there feeling good and then next thing you know I'm like oh my god my stomach like it literally hit me instantly and I was like this slushie's literally gonna shoot out my ass how it came in like it was like the worst feeling ever like so I'm I'm like trying to go to the bathroom it's not there yet it's like that knot up high where I'm like oh my god dude I like this has to come out because i'm not going to shit my pants on the mat like i'll forfeit this match before i go out there and so and it was a dual meet so it's not like a tournament or anything so i'm getting my singlet

on i'm putting my socks like i always had like an ocd like i wore two pairs of socks on each one each uh foot like had the nike sign one above each other like had my own routine for everything and i'm like racing through this routine i'm like oh god dude i'm gonna shit my pants like this is this is tough and the guy i was gonna wrestle wasn't good but it was like i would have had i wanted to go out and get a pin right away or else i was just gonna shit everywhere and so like i'm not even warming up for this like one i i had I had a pretty, like, hard workout to cut the weight. So I'm like, all right, that was only a couple hours ago. My body's still warm.

I'm okay. Maybe I'll stretch a little bit and, like, feel all right. But, you know, like, before you got to shit, like, you're pinching your buttcheeks, walking around stiff-legged. Like, my coach is like, is everything good? You all right? I'm like, yeah, I just warmed up earlier. Like, I didn't tell him I had to shit because he's just like, you'd get shit.

Like, they would give you shit for it. Like, why don't you go to the bathroom then? What the fuck are you doing standing here? Like, you need to get warmed up, get ready for the match. So I'm just like, no, I'm good, I'm good. I'll just stretch. Like, I'm just walking around doing this, like, on the mat. And then they do the, like, all the intros and we all go to the middle, shake hands.

I think I was the fourth or fifth match of that dual meet. Because at some point in high school, they started pulling a weight out of a hat where they would start. Because people wouldn't stay for heavy weights back then. You get to the big guys, and they're just holding each other up for six minutes. And they're just like, all right, whatever. So people would leave. So they always pulled out of a hat instead. And so I'm like, oh, God, I'm like, like, I'm just waiting.

I'm like, I'm the fourth match. Like, I couldn't even think about the match because I had to shit so bad. I was more worried about shitting my pants than actually wrestling. And I was like, if I have to exert too much, I'm going to fucking squeeze some cheese during this match and i was like this is gonna be this is gonna be miserable and so i'm like barely warming up and my coach always will like slap you in the like he'll slap you on the face and then slap you on the ass as you go out and i was like i go up to him like dude don't slap me on the ass when i go out there because i'm gonna shit my pants and he's like what do you mean you're gonna shit your pants i'm like i don't know what on the ass when I go out there because I'm going to shit my pants. And he's like, what do you mean you're going to shit your pants? I'm like, I don't know what happened after the weigh-in.

I ate the same thing as normal, but it's literally like I'm going to have butt piss in the middle of the mat if you slap me on the way out there. And he's like, shut up, fucker, get out there. He's one of those guys that just call you a pussy for no reason. So I'm like, oh, God. I waddle out to the mat go to the front uh or the head table tell them my name go in i ended up wrestling this kid the entire match like it goes to like 30

seconds left and i finally get the tech fall which is 15 point uh sudden victory or whatever and so i'm like literally i'm like at the on the verge the whole time. Like it probably took so long cause I was afraid to exert like heavy energy. Cause like if I flex once I'm going to shit myself. So I literally like get my hand raised, run all the way in the back. My dad, cause he, in high school he was super involved.

He was like coming and trying to find me in the locker room. And like right as my pants come to, or my singlet comes down, I shit all over the back of the wall. I couldn't even make it on the toilet. I was like, if this would have happened on the mat, this could have gone viral on social media. It looked like antifreeze.

Oh, yeah. It was literally blue shit. And I was like, it's unbelievable how it didn't even digest at all. And usually that blue Gatorade was my go-to for every weigh-in. I would weigh in twice a week most of the time for matches or tournaments. But that one time was, like, that was the time where he was, like, all right, fucker. You messed around this week with your weight a little bit. I'm going to make you pay.

And it just, like, not, I couldn't even sit down. I shit everywhere. Like, I just stood there and started wiping my ass to get out of the stall because and then my dad he's walking he's like what the fuck was that and i was like i told him i didn't tell him before because he would get more anxiety for the matches than we would and like i was like dude i had that gatorade gave me the shits this time and he was like that's weird you drink that every time i'm yeah, I don't know what it was, but something happened. And I literally barely made my singlet down before I shit on the wall.

And he's like, like my dad's a sick bastard. He's like, he's got some nasty shit stories too. But that he was like, oh my God. He's like, it smells like somebody died in here. Like it was just the weirdest shit ever. But I was lucky enough to be able to hold it all the way through that match. And then after that, I was afraid to drink Gatorade for a while. I would just sip on it after weigh-ins because I was like, dude.

I would wait like 30 minutes, and then if I didn't feel that in my stomach, I'd be like, okay. Yeah, it was just like a freak thing that time, but it was nasty. In wrestling, did you ever oil check cats? I got oil checked before. It was really on purpose, like during the match, too. So the ref gave me a point for it. But it's like I just got fingered in the ass by all this dude in front of this whole crowd of people. Like, you think a point really makes me feel better?

I was like, if there wasn't a singlet and underwear, this dude would have had shit on his fingers. Like, a point doesn't do anything for me here. It'd be great if he just walked off the mat. Like, I'd quit. Yeah, I'd be like, dude. I can handle a lot, but that was too much. Yeah, it'd just change your whole mentality about life.

You're like, wow, that was really strange. Guys, YouTube oil checking. You'll know what he's talking about. Just laughing you're like ah the ref is like damn he got a finger in his eye hey dude let's call it even i'll give you a point the least i can do is give you a point here you kind of do flip the guy over by his butt cheeks though right yeah but like the butt drag is like a move where it's like a go behind from that position and some guys like i was never i was always like grab, the back of the thigh and pull yourself around to the ankle.

Like, there's guys that literally, like, right in your ass, like four fingers, like, pulling your butt cheek around. I'm like, dude, I don't even do this in bed, and this dude's grabbing me all the time. Yeah, some dudes don't care. Like, you'll see, like, still shots from guys wrestling and it's like like holding the dude's ass crack you ever wrestle a guy who's pitching a tent yeah but it's usually from it's usually because they're so shriveled from cutting weight that

it's just like a button it just sticks straight out i'm not gonna mention you're like you're like what the fuck is that yeah i'm like dude this, dude, this guy's going to poke me in the eye if I fucking shoot a blast double on him. I can't name any names, but in college, I started dating my wife my senior year of college. So she was super new to wrestling at that point. She had no clue about anything. She would just sit there and watch while my dad's fucking swearing

and elbowing everybody next to him she was like got to the point where she couldn't sit next to him even now for my fights but she's she's like call this one kid button because his dick looked like a button in the singlet and i was like dude if i ever said that to this kid oh man like it would ruin his life demoralizing yeah because like just to know that some dude's girlfriend was calling him button cause his dick looked hilarious. He's just a grower. Yeah. I'm sure he makes up for it.

He wasn't a little guy either. That's what's the best part is. So it was like, I was like, dude, that'd be so demoralizing. I can't like, I can't let him know.

I got to live with this burden instead of telling him till the end of, till my last days on earth. You better not cross or you're going to ruin his life. Exactly. If you have a son, do you think you're going to kind of train him the same way your dad trained you? Are you going to do that with your daughter at all, you think? Well, yesterday I got this question, actually, because I was helping my brother run that wrestling camp. But there's a, we don't have any monetary affiliation, but there's a documentary about my family called Pinned.

It's a pinned movie. And it was my senior year of high school, my brother's freshman year of high school. Just like the entire year, they documented everything, like going to feed the animals in the morning and then going to school and practice and in the car on the way to the gym after practice to lift and everything else. And in that movie, they interviewed me in our basement next to my other three. Yeah, because it was before the state tournament.

It was next to my three state titles. They're like, well, have you been pushed by your dad? Would you want your kids to wrestle and I was like honestly I wouldn't because I wouldn't want to have to live through the stress again like of my kids like being stressed that they're not succeeding or they're not doing this or that and that was real for me at the time so people always ask me they're like why did you feel that way did you feel like you were pushed too hard or whatever? And I'm like, I didn't feel like I was pushed harder than normal. Like, that was normal for our family.

Like, that's the relationship that we had together. And I just don't feel like I would want to go through that same. Like, my dad is a wreck. Every time I wrestled, every time I fight, like, the dude's sweating bullets. Like, he's miserable. Like, I can't be around him before my matches or fights because he gets me nervous. I'm like, dude, I've trained plenty for this fight. If I lose, it's because I lose.

It's not because I'm not ready. He's the type of guy who's so anxious all the time. He's like, I don't want to be like that when my kid competes. But I know that I will even even if, like, if I have a son and he wrestles, even if he doesn't wrestle, if it's baseball or football, like, I'm going to be nervous watching him, whatever sport it is, so I said no at that time, but if he's serious about wrestling or is interested in it, I'm 100% going to be with him, but i don't know like i'm afraid that i'm gonna be like one of those psycho dads just because like that's how i was raised and i know that's how like that

worked for me so i don't want to be like that towards my kid if that's what they choose but i don't know i my wife thinks that i'd be the same way as my dad because we do have a lot of similar traits, but I try and take a lot of the good traits from my mom also. So I'm like a little balance of both, but my wife's like, you're going to be a psycho. We take my daughter to this place called The Little Gym, and she doesn't even walk yet. She crawls around in there. I'm like, this is silly, but I do it to make her happy, I guess. And so we're going there.

I love taking her there. It's fun. But I don't know if she gets anything out of it besides interaction with other people. Because it's like 12 to 18 months or whatever, kids in there. And the parents run around with the kids holding them. Some kids walk on their own. But there's, like, the pommel horse and, like, the beam and stuff. And I walk around it.

And, like, I'm like, dude, when she's able to actually do this for a sport, like, I'm going to be a psychopath. Yeah. And I'm, like, scared about that because I don't want to push her away from it. So maybe I'll be one of those dads who, like, doesn't talk at all, just go to practice, sit there, and hold it until after. But I don't want to be the dad who's yelling in the car after, like, you didn't do this. So I might just let my wife take that role. Unless the kid comes to me and is like, hey, I want to do this or that.

Or they ask me a question, then 100%, yeah, let's do it. I'm in. But I don't want to be overbearing, but I don't want my kids to be pussies. It's a hard middle spot, though. I think since you're so aware, like you're so self-aware of what you don't want to do, that you're probably not going to end up that way. You'll catch yourself.

Yeah. Again, I'm not a parent, but it just seems like you'll catch yourself. I think with other things, I catch myself, too. And I'm like, nope, I already said I don't want to be that way you'll catch yourself yeah again i'm not a parent but it just seems like you'll catch yourself i think with other things i catch myself too and i'm like nope i already said i don't want to be that way like but i know it's in my dna so i have to like be aware of it and conscious of it when it does happen you have a fight uh planned out april 28th um with pfl we don't have a location or opponents yet because i don't think they – I think after next week is when they release the actual roster. So I'm excited to get back in there. Last year didn't go my way as far as wins,

but I'm excited to get back in there and compete again. And I'm in a good place mentally. So that was the hard part about last year. Aside from my daughter being born, there was a lot of negativity, and it was just hard to separate that from my career. So it's been a good time period in between that of getting back to how I felt when I was training and enjoying it and just loving the sport more and not taking all this other outside stuff

and bringing it to practice with me. So compartmentalizing to make things more enjoyable, I guess. Yeah, thank you so much for your time today. Great stories and good to hear about your upbringing and all the different stuff you share with us today. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Andrew, take us on out of here, buddy. Absolutely. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Andrew, take us on out of here, buddy. Absolutely. Thank you, everybody, for checking out today's episode. We sincerely appreciate it. Make sure you guys like today's episode and drop us a comment down below on anything that you found interesting. And if you're on iTunes or Spotify or whatever podcast platform you're on, don't be shy. Come over to YouTube, find the episode episode and drop us a comment on what you guys thought about today's episode as well uh follow the podcast at mark bell's power project

on instagram at mb power project on tiktok and twitter my instagram and twitter is at i am andrew z and sema where you at like andrew said don't lurk around leave a fucking comment and see my ending on your screen youtube and see my yin yangyang on TikTok and Twitter. Lance, where can people find you? Lance Palmer on Instagram, Lance Palmer MMA on Facebook, and at Lance Palmer on Twitter. But don't leave me some weird comment on Twitter. I usually don't respond. And what about your landscaping business?

What if somebody needs some of that? That's Primescapes Ohio on Instagram and Primescapes LLC on Facebook. and PrimescapesLLC on Facebook. Or you could just reach out to my page directly. But either way, we're getting down in the grass. I'm at Mark Smelly Bell. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength.

Catch you guys later.