The Pomp Podcast - #1110 Ben Askren | Olympian On UFC, Sterioids & Jake Paul

Episode Date: October 26, 2022

Ben Askren is an Olympic gold medalist, MMA fighter, and author of the brand new book "Funky". In this conversation, we discuss his fight with Jake Paul, PED usage in professional sports, the future of wrestling, the wrestling academy that Ben has built, and the business behind combat sports. ======================= Arculus is the next generation crypto & NFT cold storage wallet that combines one of the world’s strongest security protocols with the easiest to use form factor and app. Arculus requires 3-Factor Authentication to ensure only you have access to your digital assets – something you know – a PIN, something you have – the Arculus Key Card, and biometrics. Learn more and buy it now on getarculus.com. Use promo code POMP to save 15%. Remember, with Arculus, it’s your keys, your crypto. ======================= The Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. Even better? Eight Sleep recently launched the next generation of the Pod. The new Pod 3 enables more accurate sleep and health tracking with double the amount of sensors, delivering you the best sleep experience on Earth. Go to eightsleep.com/pomp ======================= Valour (formerly DeFi Technologies) represents what’s next in the digital economy -- providing simplified, trusted access to crypto, decentralized finance and Web 3.0 investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant, and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols, through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. Currently listed on U.S. (OTC: DEFTF) and Canadian (NEO:DEFI) exchanges. For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit our website at valour.com ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit https://compassmining.io/ to start mining bitcoin today! ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp =======================

what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there now let's kick this thing off ben askren is an olympic gold medalist an mma fighter and the author of a brand new book called funky in this conversation ben and i cover a lot everything from his fight with jake paul to peds where the sport of wrestling is headed the business behind combat sports and much much more. I really enjoyed this conversation with Ben. I hope you guys enjoyed as well. Once you get done listening, get on Twitter and let us know what you liked, what you didn't like, what you agreed with and what you didn't agree with. We love the feedback. All right, let's get in this episode

with Ben. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got Ben here with me. You got a fascinating life. And I thought a great way to kind of understand what the hell you've been through is to start off first talking about just excellence. Like I feel like a lot of the things that you've done in your life, you've tried to be

the best at it. Talk like what does excellence mean to you? And why has that been such a focus for you yeah uh i mean and it's kind of the way i think about things like if i'm gonna try to do something i might as well try to be the best at it i don't really see any reason not to you know i've never even make a good argument like why should you just do something and like do it average uh but it's also perhaps because i'm very obsessive about things you know um so i mean obviously like later in my life i learned disc golf you know and um i started playing and i just got obsessed with it right and i'm like okay i want to go play a tournament i'll see if i'm actually good or not and then i played this tournament and i sucked and i'm like oh wait

if i can throw good but i can't putt worth a damn so it's like okay i need to go buy a basket and put in my front yard you know and then i obsessively putt and i got to the point where i you know i went on the pro level i wasn't good but i took second the amateur nationals you know so i was like really high level at that and so yeah i just don't see a reason not to do things really well and maybe it's because i'm super obsessive and people other people are like kind of all over the place but that's just my personality why do you like disc golf like i've seen the videos i know you've got funky farms you played yet huh i played once or twice when i was in high school okay and like it was kind of a thing that people did uh one time like

yeah i'd done it and then they never did it again what disc golf actually during 2020 corona disc golf just freaking took off in popularity um because people wanted to be outside and then they could stay far away from other people you know so disc golf like kind of blew up and uh You know, there's guys getting million-dollar contracts now for some sponsors on a yearly basis. Really? Yeah, yeah. So Paul McBeth got – you should have him down here.

He's – or your brother, right? Your brother talks more sports. He's out of Jacksonville now, but he got a million-dollar-a-year contract from Discraft, who sponsors me also. For me, I think – you know what I think it really is, is the immediate feedback. So you take this disc, right, and once you get good, each one of them does something a little different.

And then you get to envision the way it's going to fly. and then you rip it and you get to try to watch it fly the way you wanted to fly and when you get something good like what you envision in your head it's like oh that was awesome is it literally golf but with discs like for the most part it's there's par there's putting like the whole thing yes but you're just throwing rather than yeah so you know i have a really simple argument for disc golf over golf do you want to hear it yeah okay number one golf takes too damn long i don't know if you ever played anything holds a golf have you my my brothers and i usually go uh not every friday but many fridays it takes like five hours yeah it's a all afternoon activity okay like five

hours so disc golf you know if you got a group probably hour hour and a half to pay how difficult the course is not going to take super long number two generally in most places it's free now right there's some pay to play but it's not that much as like in parks and stuff um number three if you want a disc golf set generally i would recommend you start with like say three or four discs uh that's going to run you say we'll say 60 bucks to 80 bucks somewhere in there maybe you can get like one golf club for that right yes and then the last one someone busy like you uh or like me you don't need tea times right so you just show up and play like if you thought hey you know you thought this podcast is going to last an hour and it'll last two hours well if you miss your tea

time you're screwed right but disc golf you just go and play that's my arguments that's actually pretty strong argument i think the hard part is just uh people got to get good at throwing the disc yeah uh well i think so i think if you if you have someone that's relatively knowledgeable to get like a base level would be probably easier than golf i would think just because um to get really good now that's going to take a lot right but to get just understand how to throw it straight a couple hundred feet like i you you're an athlete right i could take you out the park and in 20 30 minutes i would have you throwing it a couple hundred feet straight relatively straight you know yeah you could not do that with a golf club yes golf yeah i golfed for a few years when i was

like really young and then my parents said hey you gotta pay for it i'm like all right i'm out yeah you're like seventh grade or eighth grade and then they're like are you gonna pay now i'm like all right i'm done with that when i want to talk about combat sports in general one of the things that's fascinating to me is like you had this illustrious wrestling career yeah uh but you can't punch people right it's just straight wrestling is that frustrating i've always watching wrestling and i'm like if you're actually mad or competitive or whatever you're in a fight but kind of not in the fight like how did you think about that or is it just second nature because you've just been trained so much that you can't like that's not a thing you

do yeah i i would say it's a little bit second nature but wrestling is actually funny i just read this uh the last book everybody was called meditations by marcus aurelius and it's funny because wrestling is mentioned so many times probably six to eight times and so wrestling is like it's such within the human condition to like grab someone and try to manipulate them or take them down um no i mean when so okay when i started wrestling there was no mma right i mean literally literally didn't exist i started wrestling probably 1991 i was well i've been seven years old and the first very first mma competition in 1993 wow you know and then i remember watching some early ones like my dad got the the vhs tape and then uh what'd you think uh i was fascinated i

really was i so i remember like part of me even at i think i would have been nine or ten years old i thought like oh my god some of these dudes are so stupid i i just i actually talk about the book i have this vivid memory my dad brought the homeless tape and was like hey let's watch this fighting thing you know because in the beginning it wasn't like hey this is MMA it was like hey let's see who wins I mean this is the beginning of MMA who let's see who wins does a wrestler win does a jiu-jitsu guy win does a boxer win like what what wins when all these things happen you know genius idea it really is because really everyone wanted to know because and then you know what we found out was most uh like taekwondo and karate were kind of a little bit bullcrap I

mean there's there's some things we can take but not that much um so I remember watching it and i i wish i remembered exactly what ufc it was i don't probably one two three four five something really early you know and there was this one guy and he was talking about how tough he was because he punches this bag of cement essentially it was like a block of cement with some duct tape around the guy was just you know like sticking it with it i'm like oh my god what the hell is wrong with this guy this is so ridiculous like how's he good at fighting by punching a block of concrete you know that's like my simple 10 10 year old thought um but i was intrigued by it and then it kind of went away for a while i mean you're right you don't remember the history of mma but

everyone started banning it i think by the end it was only legal in like four states or something because the first thing they were promoting the first tagline was uh eight men enter one man leaves like you know like this notion that someone's gonna die right yeah and uh great marketing for the consumer probably not so great for the regulators and the licensing yes i think i think actually only one person's ever died in 30 years of regulated mixed martial awards and this is all bare knuckle when it first started it was yeah i mean and if you watched early mma well it was kind of like whatever you wanted so like some guys wore geese some guy was wore wrestling shoes uh there's this one guy really famous fight guy named art jimerson he was

a boxer and he wore one boxing glove and one bare hand you know so like um you know there were some really like hilarious things back in the day there was a sumo wrestler who wore his out you know it's kind of his outfit um so you kind of saw a little bit everything back there back then and then um yeah so it went away and kind of because it got banned everywhere you know when there was no no one would distribute it and then you know obviously Zufa buys it in 2002 so if you were watching MMA so that was kind of my high school time period it was like you were really like having to dig deep to go find some VHS tape somewhere and I remember we we always enjoyed it because I think the wrestlers came in um maybe like late 90s ish so there's a guy named like mark coleman kevin

randleman guys who had high success in wrestling started doing really well in mixed martial arts so that was you know like i said in the beginning it was like which discipline is better you know every discipline and mixed martial arts every martial arts wants to have pride in their discipline and so when wrestlers started doing really well it was like oh that's really awesome but it was still like this thing that's like yeah over here when the wrestlers started to do well how much of it was like the wrestlers were just taking people down and they didn't know how to like defend against getting taken down versus the wrestlers had gotten good at punching and kicking and like other, uh,

kind of components of the, uh, I would say those, those guys that I mentioned, um, you know, one of the things with wrestlers, they work really hard, especially, I would say compared to the other martial arts, even currently, they still work really hard. Right. And so they had a ton of success and they, they picked up other things relatively quickly. Um, so i'd say those guys kind of work a little bit good everywhere but yes obviously uh mark coleman uh and he's still around i just i'm coaching at uh the most recent ufc he made the term ground

and pound right so i i don't remember you know the exact he's i'm gonna take him to ground i'm gonna pound him right so you just take him down and they just keep punching him and i i believe for a while head butts were still legal so one of the things that grabbed the head and you know they would they would well because you can cut people really easily right here with this part your head and what and what i it used to be bare knuckle uh headbutting but also couldn't you kick people when they were on the ground like uh they were like standing up or something that was in pride i don't remember when they banned that in america but then well the other one was nut shots were legal for a while and there's this one famous one where this dude elbows him in the nuts and it

kind of you know ends the fight um yeah so it was like really really limited rule set and then when zufa took over i think they were like how do we work with the regulars that's kind of like the crypto industry huh yeah like yeah we work through it and some people like no way but then most people realize it's probably going to be a little bit better when we do yeah um and and so what they basically did was they just created clear rules that put gloves on people they like cleaned it up to a degree but still kept the like gladiator slash like eight you know two people go in one comes out type mentality it just was in this new rule framework which cleaned it up and allowed for the distribution yeah yeah exactly and you know they obviously did a lot of other things really

well um and then you know so they bought it in 2002 and did all of those things and most of the things there's a few that are really stupid most of the things were really smart like uh kicking to the head of a grounded opponent it's really dumb because the only time you would ever actually do that is generally when they're knocked out right you hit them they fall down and then you kick them also it's like well why is that necessary you know but say like uh a 12 to 6 elbow something that's banned it's like you do like this right so your elbow goes from 12 to 6 straight down and it was because some dumbass karate guy said you could kill someone doing an elbow like that you know what i'm saying could you well okay listen why can you go like this right well i'm

not going i'm going at an angle or like this where i'm going like this but i can't do this it's just it's preposterous right why that one thing is bad or you know another one that's so wait the referee i didn't know this the referee is sitting there and trying to determine did you go 12 to 6 or did you go like one to seven yeah yeah so you cannot go straight you can't go straight down like this with an elbow yeah and it's but how do they see that it's dumb well i mean john jones uh i think he's only ever lost one fight and it was because of dq and it was because of that he did yeah he 12 to 6 elbows uh matt hamill i believe um yeah so um yeah but it's a really stupid rule but then there's another one like kneeing to the head of a grounded opponent

so in one championship where i fought in asia you can you can do that and like in my take it's a really good fighting technique because what what you want for mixed martial in my opinion you want fighting to emulate real life with some of the bullshit taking like an eye gouge or uh hitting the nuts you know like throwing sand yeah so like if you're holding someone in front headlock and wrestling so i have you your head in your arm i'm holding you down i can't strike you because i'm using my hands to hold you right but if i have my knees now i can actually knee you and i can cause damage and you're in a you're in a compromised position which you are in a compromised position right and uh so you know there's certain things that are probably still illegal that you

could probably make legal and make it a little more realistic of a fight but yeah they did a really good job and then obviously then the ultimate fighter was like 2005 and that this sport explodes that's when it explodes yeah so they had the reality show component of the people were into and then you know they had the forrest griffin stephen bonner which was in the season finale that everyone kind of even if you don't know mixed martial arts you kind of remember that because it's just these two dudes just freaking throwing down and uh yeah so then after that boom it took off and then honestly during corona when dana had the balls to to keep everything going you know he's one of the first postports to start up again actually right here in florida in

jacksonville um they kind of hit another like boom and kind of went up again yeah the thing that's fascinating to me is you said wrestlers work hard sometimes even harder than uh other uh disciplines and the ufc when people see this they're like these guys are in shape they're obviously working hard uh and uh they're going in there and they are just absolutely destroying each other right in many of these fights but i think back to like high school you always knew the wrestler was because there was two things that they would do well actually three things one they all smelled horribly right two is uh i remember there was a couple of guys that would walk around like these cups they were always spitting in the cups i'm like what are you spitting the cup for like we're

trying to cut weight because i want you just like go like work out or whatever yeah but like that we can talk about why they were doing that but that and then the third thing was they all hung out together and just no one messed with them right like like nobody really messed with the football team no one would mess with like most of the sports but like for whatever reason the wrestlers like you never just knew you're like i kind of sort of know how to fight and like let's just like leave them over there and like not screw with them uh but like talk about spitting in the cup like in high school it was such a ridiculous thing right people would be like why are they doing that and then when you start to learn about it you're like oh wait a second like they don't

want to do this they have no this shouldn't be spinning okay all right explain well that would be okay so uh where do i start well yeah first let me step back first so when you don't mess with wrestlers because it like you said you actually said it earlier it is a little bit like a fight yeah it's a physical confrontation you can't there's a few things you can't do but it's kind of a fight in school you aren't gonna uh eye gouge someone or like you know like try to kill them yeah so like actually most school fights maybe there's a couple punches done but they end up wrestling so like i think that's one of the main reasons yeah so i think one of the things you know max and i uh so we own five wrestling academies in wisconsin and we we really

push back and i think all almost all of america is i don't say we're there yet but we're close with the weight cutting is not beneficial okay so i have theories on historically why people think cutting weight is is good for you or um good for it was a good for your success um but you know over the course of a high school wrestling season an athlete will have to make weight somewhere around 20 times right between dual meets and tournaments and all this stuff and so if you're really focused on losing weight and spitting a cup and doing all these other things um you're not going to be focused on getting better at wrestling you're not going to enjoy it nearly as much because um even if you're tough cutting weight sucks even when you're an adult

cutting weight sucks um these guys look miserable i mean cutting weight's miserable just generally speaking and explain for a second like what goes into cutting weight like when someone's serious what are all the things well so okay so i was good generally high school i would advise kids cut almost no almost no weight right um you know so if you weigh 170 pounds and the weight class is well let's just do if you're 173 and the weight class is 170 the next one's up 183 like for someone that big to lose three pounds it's like really minimal like maybe eat a little less that day and maybe you get a workout in and boom you're 170 you know but if you were say wild wrestle 160 well that's kind of a long ways away it's 13 pounds um now for like a ufc fighter now

they're going to only make weight so i said in high school season you probably make weight 20 times ufc guy's going to make weight three to four times per year right it did additionally it's going to be a day before weigh-in right so high school wrestling college wrestling it's a one hour way you weigh in and then an hour later the competition begins oh wow yeah yeah so meaning so if you're cutting a lot of water weight you're not going to compete well yeah right you're just not going you're dehydrated you feel like crap yes and yeah so so like it's just a really bad why do they do that uh well i got i have my historical reason if you want to think so of course but no for um for for fighting it makes sense because yes in a 24 hour ish period you

can feel significantly better than what you did right that makes sense to me yeah there's a lot of guys and and actually as an adult adult male specifically i mean females lose weight but not nearly as rapidly um sweating i mean i can i i and i'm not on probably the high end of the spectrum i can sweat five to seven pounds in an hour right put some warm clothes on get it going and weight comes off like that you know for real what get it going what would you do uh well so i mean well okay so the key is to not work too hard if i'm cutting weight don't work too hard right so i'll get it i'll work hard for about 15 to 20 minutes i'll start sweating hard and then i don't got to work that hard i don't overwork myself like what do you do in that 15 to 20 minutes i'm fascinated

by the cutting it might be it might be running right it might be hitting mitts um i know like fighting so it's like it's like normal things it's not some crazy thing where you got like a trash bag on and you're like you want it you want to get your heart rate up okay that's that's one where high school kids like so high school the spitting the cup it's like just they're being wimps they don't want to go work out it's ridiculous interesting so like if i ever saw my kids doing that i'd be like stop this is ridiculous just go freaking work out like you know i'm saying stop spitting the cup because all they're trying to do is just get and you're not going to lose barely any weight you're going to lose like over the course of if you spit for a

couple hours you might lose like half a pound or three you're not gonna lose anything it's just ridiculous you know so just like stop dude you look you look preposterous i mean honestly if you want me to go like deep down in the human psyche yeah those kids probably want attention from other kids about the plight of what they're doing right in hindsight that is what it appeared to be for sure it is like i'm a wrestler this is part of the wrestling culture i want a little bit of attention i want people to know how tough this is that's i mean that's human beings like they want attention for specific things unfortunately so um well okay so my historical thought process on why people cut weight i don't think i've ever said this on air i've talked i've

talked to other people about this is um right uh we know correlation and causation aren't the same thing okay well way back when we go far enough back in wrestling um the toughest people won the matches because there wasn't there wasn't a lot of moves it was kind of just like who's the toughest is probably going to win because they're stronger and they're meaner and etc etc because there's not a high level of technique or thought process or all the things and so then the toughest people can also probably cut the most weight because they're the toughest you know so whether whether or not they would have cut the most weight they probably were going to win because they were the toughest and so then a lot of people then correlated those things oh that guy cut a lot

of weight and he won i have to cut a lot of weight in order to win also interesting you know and so i think it was like highly correlational and not causational because even like um you know in current era you know a guy like jordan burroughs who you know he's one of the best ever but he in the olympics wrestles at 74 kilograms which is 163 pounds well he went up um and challenged it on full wrestling he challenged this guy named david taylor who's the world champ at 86 they're both from america 86 kilograms which is 20 what 22 pounds i'm messing up the kilos like i think it's 22 pounds higher and he lost but it was four it was four to four right so i don't want to explain why it's not tied but it's four to four meaning that like those guys are kind of far apart weight

wise but wrestling is wrestling if you're really good at wrestling a few pounds doesn't really matter all that much you know if you're highly skilled you're highly skilled you can wrestle someone who's a few pounds bigger than you and it's fine how big of a jump was it so you're uh this illustrious wrestling career college olympics and then you go out to asia yeah and when you're in asia like how big of a leap is it to go from wrestling to actually like fighting in the cage um not for me it wasn't that big at all um yeah i don't know i just always like i mean it's one of the big reasons why i did mma i mean there's a couple right one of them was there's no money wrestling at that point in time um i just kind of liked fighting i you know i enjoyed watching it

obviously even in the early days i was watching it when it wasn't popular when tough came out then i watched it a lot my college buddies watched a lot a few of them ended up fighting and having a lot of success uh but i always just liked fighting you know and so for me it wasn't really all that different i i just kind of always enjoyed and still do enjoy combat yeah uh do you guys get a lot of fights in college i did not um that's not saying other people didn't but yeah i i was generally kind of even-tempered i actually never i still have never drank um so i was the one kind of watching out for everybody else or like you know if they got a fight then i'm like all right you gotta go we gotta get you out of here you know i was

want to take care of everyone so no i generally didn't get in any fights um probably just because i didn't get angry all that much and you know obviously if especially if you're a wrestler and you get a fight there's probably a lot of negative things that can happen to you also yeah of course um so as you kind of go through your career uh what was asia like and we've talked about this before but like one of the things as i've learned more and more about ufc mma and like the history of a lot of this stuff uh it seems like most of america was like completely unaware of what was happening in asia and now there's maybe a little bit more awareness between the two um well yeah i mean one championship specifically they signed that uh it's an amazon prime video deal right so

they're on amazon prime i don't know if it's once a month or i don't know exactly what the cadence is well actually um japan specifically so one championship's not singapore but they do they have cards kind of everywhere um but japan specifically had this organization called pride uh which was i don't recall when it was founded probably somewhere in the mid mid to late 90s and they were kind of i don't know if you'd say the best but we would always see viral clips in the u.s like you wouldn't see anything and then you just see this clip and you'd be like yo i don't know where that person came from but like that was crazy yeah well so they i mean they had you could definitely argue they had a better roster than the ufc for a while for a while there

the ufc actually ended up buying them along with a few other organizations but um i mean i mean one of the things that was hilarious about pride was that they they not only allowed peds they encourage peds what yes so i have you know i've had some friends and they said you know they would say they would go over there to fight and the owners you know it would say specifically on the contract we do not test for peds right or steroids or anything but they would say hey um you're looking a little soft you need anything is there anything we can get you really yeah yeah so i mean And some of these guys were, like, almost larger than life in that sense, you know. And then, you know, most of them came to the UFC and had a relatively similar amount of success.

There was a few that came over. And especially when USADA started testing in the UFC, you know, there's some of them you could look at their records and they were like this. It's almost insane to me. I would think that I've never taken them, but I would think if I did take them, they would have a small boost on my performance. maybe i get a little stronger a little better endurance um but some of these dudes they literally were like world champ level and then they were like one in seven and you're like wait you think peds can have that big of an impact oh yeah for sure i mean the most obvious case the one that like is uh yeah let's get some names well it's almost indisputable and listen i cannot prove

that well actually i think he got busted in the early days so i can't prove this idea but a guy like vitor belfort if you i don't know can we pull pictures on the screen no i love that whether we need a screen back here so i pull so you guys can see these but like i mean he is like oh my god like you look at him like you're like holy crap and then he go usada comes in and you see a picture of him you're like wait is that the same guy i wish you could see a picture right now so you could see that the difference between the two bodies yeah and it's just like and but there's a handful of people who you you don't know that they took anything like there's no proof i actually think he did test positive at some point um do you think the sport would be better off if people

just were allowed to no no no uh well i guess you say that like it's a no-brainer but i feel like there's a lot of people who would argue it would be better off if they well i mean better off if you're if you're saying strictly for my or your entertainment i think you have an argument okay if you think of like the but the athletes in this work because a lot of this stuff there's not really much long-term data on the effect effects of it right and then there's also not long-term effects on um and you know this is one of the reasons i i don't say i got out but you know i stopped sparring for a while because this is like there's no super long-term data on like cte and brain trauma and stuff like that and so now if you're telling me well i'm gonna let you take a whole

bunch of steroids and get better at giving people brain trauma you know like i don't know it feels like a really dangerous do a lot of fighters talk about the brain stuff uh not really no i mean so for me um i i watched concussion it was actually i was actually flying to a fight in asia i watched concussion i don't know it's kind of sketchy and you got one or you watched no no i watched the movie remember the movie that came out oh yeah yeah so um so the movie came out and i watched oh man and i'm you know i'm like you know what i'm gonna still keep fighting i literally stopped sparring that was 2016 and i didn't spar anymore because i'm like well why am i taking all this brain trauma and practice like that's just unnecessary so i'm like well i'm still gonna

fight but so i did like a lot of pad work and i'm the simulated stuff in practice um but then you know i kept reading up on it and i'm very i'm very skeptical because there was a study that came out later on cte that i thought was just completely preposterous and it said 99 of people who played football for more than one year have cte uh which is everything like well that's like 94 of american males above the age of 40 uh and then i said but then it said this was the one that really put me off it said 87 of people who played only one year of football still developed it and you're like wait okay so that's gonna be like everybody so basically if you just get hit in the head at all ever yeah so that was i'm like okay because obviously if you put the threshold low enough

yeah you know you can get a bunch of you can make these results that look really damning and you put a bunch of people over the threshold by putting the threshold low and so i think i think the jury's probably still out on that and then you know um where my brain goes is too is uh lots of times these people who maybe you find a cage for a living or if you put nfl in like 70s and 80s and 90s because it's where a lot of these tests run it's like you probably had um a really high threshold for risk and a lot of you probably doing peds they're probably doing uh lorenz taylor was taking cocaine during the game recreational drugs right late night partying yeah so it's like how do all these factors all mix together in this so that's still the wildest sports story of all time

I don't care what There's nothing that Anyone will ever tell me That is more wild What John Jones said he was Was doing what? Cocaine Before the match?

Uh I don't think it was Actually before I think it was like a day One day before Yeah I think I'm pretty sure he came out And said that

Did he get busted ever for it? He got busted for cocaine Yeah Yeah but like Like because he did it Fought and then got tested Right after the fight Or it was like

During like This is why I wish I wish we had a screen We could bring up here Okay John Jones Definitely got busted for it Yeah I don't

When it was I wanted Well so okay So I think it was during a fight because with usada they have some they have a substance list that is in competition right so there's some substances they'll test for out of competition right so if i come to the gym and you're training uh i'll test you for this list and they just show up and they're like let's go yeah just go pee pee or blood right or both oh got it yeah but in competition there's some other

ones that are get added to the list right so and i think i'm pretty sure cocaine is one of them or other recreation and our guy this is a dumb question but our guys like ducking them like yo they're here john jones he's coming up a lot yeah the big story is john jones hid under the cage the one time when you saw to look for him yeah i mean you gotta like literally of course of course someone did that right like like if they're there and you think there's a risk of getting busted then yeah i mean it's like human nature like dude go like go in the closet go under the cage whatever and so and tell them i'm not here like is that like a are we surprised that someone did that you get you get three whereabouts it's called whereabouts failures so with usada

um i haven't been in the pool for a couple years so actually i actually and i piloted in 2019 i piloted this thing where they were it was connected to your phone so they could see where you were at which i thought that was tremendous because otherwise you got to fill stuff out right and then if i say i feel you liked it that they knew where you were yeah yeah because i didn't want them to be like i mean okay because when i was in usada in when i was training for the olympics i mean at that point in time this is 2007-8 you had to fill out paperwork and fax it right and so you had to do your schedule three months at a time so if i told you um hey i was going to be here from uh what time i get here 10 30 10 30 to 12 30 or whatever right and so i put that on my

schedule well first of all how am i in my schedule three months at a time yeah okay but if i did put on my schedule and then you said hey actually can we go at noon right and they showed up here at 10 30 i would have an hour to show up otherwise i'm gonna get a whereabouts failure interesting right and so now what now in in current landscape with email and text it's man you gotta be you kind of gotta be trying to miss a whole bunch of them yeah but back then it was like you had to you know if i want to change something i'm gonna have to fax paperwork somewhere like well i gotta go find a fax machine you know i'm saying yeah it's kind of pain in the butt this episode is brought to you by arculus arculus is the next generation crypto and nft cold storage wallet that combines one of

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That's V-A-L-O-U-R dot com. and so when they show up uh i recently saw i'm gonna mess it up costa no i think it was a uh i don't want to say names because i'm going to mess it up but i came across an nfl player an nba player uh i think the nba player and he said it was for the olympics you want to play in the olympics and he used a uh uh fake dick and uh for the uh so this is this was the question i think he was talking to shannon uh i think it was shannon sharp i think uh and basically uh he had a fake one and he went in uh to go pee and he said they didn't look and he just used the fake one and you know he made it look like he was peeing but he had the fake one and uh it was clean uh pee

and he he made it and i think he went to the olympics uh but i've always wondered because like in college they 100 are not letting anything go yeah like no you saw this is generally supposed to you know not to get too profane on these cameras but you're supposed to like pull your pull your thing down here and then you lift your shirt up here you know so you're so they can see exposed yeah so they can see that there's none of that stuff going on is there a lot of peds in college you think or not uh i mean they they test relatively frequently there was actually unfortunately there was just in wrestling there was two d3 kids that won nationals one at one 87 last year and one heavyweight who i believe got busted so uh yeah i know right uh but in

i'm sure there are but how many kids actually get busted it's it's really not i feel like it's easier to trick people in college than it is at the ufc uh um which is like like the the pool of athletes is so much bigger right you have yeah every wrestling team at every college sure sure yeah the group of people who are trying to figure that out is probably so much smaller than uh like on like on a per you know drug tester to like uh uh wrestler basis compared to the ufc and also they kind of know like who's in who's out who are we paying attention to who are we not who's coming up with a fight you know like you can almost like start to back into like what would the cycling but the other thing in mma is there's also way more money in it right and so um when

there's way more money and you have resources to figure things out so i think there's probably i me okay so if you look at you can go back and you and you saw his website and see who's failed and like the amount of wrestlers that have failed something since like 2008 it's like a really small number like there have been failures but not a lot and you know so they're testing you got three styles wrestling men's women's and greco um and they're testing probably the top five or six people per weight class um so it's not quite as many as ufc but it's it's it's an amount yeah but you saw your you started in ufc you're seeing kind of a lot of failures you know so you just kind of extrapolate that and say well this may be we're failing there's

probably a lot of people who are also doing it either getting away with it or maybe they have better methods of doing it where they know they can pass tests because if you watch i mean you probably watch icarus right like they knew how to beat the tests yeah i also think there's just a lot in other countries specifically there's a lot of just pay pay the like i'm not even gonna take test yeah you just pay someone off and uh well in icarus they were helping the the russian anti-doping so like usada is actually trying to catch us like they are not trying to help us rusada was helping them figure out how to pass the test while still taking the substances yeah so that was that movie was wild wild i don't know if you remember that yeah yeah well the part that

it uh was the filmmaker is like taking drugs over like zoom or whatever right and he's like And his point was like, this is crazy how much more performance I get out of my body by doing this. And he's like, no shit. No wonder they're all trying to take this stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know what I thought was fascinating about that part of it was he actually didn't do that much better in the race. So his numbers were all way better. It was like power output or whatever it was were way better.

But then when it actually came to doing the race, so the one year he did the race clean, and then the next year he doped, he didn't do that much better in the actual race. I found that part to be really fascinating, and I know the movie took a different turn because of who that guy, Rodchenko, ended up being. But I wish they would have discussed more about the second year and why his performance wasn't that good, despite his numbers and everything being way, way up. All I know is Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds aren't hitting 75 home runs or whatever. But wasn't everyone in that era doing something? Of course, but the whole point is it's kind of like Aaron Judge, right? like they they see the numbers and they're like yeah we get what the real the real record no no no he just hit uh 60 second home run right and so there's still this like yeah we know what the

record is but also there's like uh uh the purist still appeal to the 61 right and so i think that there is this uh very weird recognition of okay somebody did at one point hit over 70 but also So, like, asterisk, whatever. But weren't the pitchers doping, too? That was because I was kind of a baseball fan. So, if they're doping, they're harder to hit, too. So, it's kind of like an equivalency. My favorite is that they've gone back and forth on, like, the stuff that they put on their hats.

Like, the slick stuff or whatever. And then you've got, like, the tar on the bat. Like, all this stuff. So, it's like, look, where's the line? And if you think about, you know, there's a world where athletes used to smoke cigarettes. eat hot dogs like do all the stuff in the dugout right yes and then somebody was like i'm gonna stop smoking cigarettes but i'm still gonna drink beer and eat hot dogs and somebody else was like i'm gonna stop drinking beer and eating hot dogs and like somebody was like i'm gonna go for a run

so it was like i'm gonna lift weights and like it's like like there has been this progression right like babe ruth looks like an average you know 50 year old male today and he's out here hitting bombs right but what about in the in the 70s in baseball so i used to love all sports and i really read a lot of biographies they had these things i can't remember what they're called now like greenies maybe where they were like they were like uppers there was some type of amphetamine that there was like anyone could grab in in the dug or sorry in the in the locker room but like okay so you do that that's not allowed let's say right but like gatorade's allowed yeah right and now again gatorade is focused on helping you recover yeah right electrolytes like the whole

thing so it's like we have made decisions as to what's allowed and what's not and i know before everyone freak sounds like they're talking about steroids and gatorade right but like punk doesn't know the difference but like when you look at this there is a world where uh medicine and technology is going to continue to like what if somebody says you know what i'm gonna do i'm gonna put a chip in my brain that's yeah like is that gonna be allowed i don't want to discuss who is it on someone was on lex talking about that and it kind of freaked me out a little bit but like what was his name are we going to allow athletes like is there going to be a a brain-enhanced division and a non-brain-enhanced division?

Oh, man, yeah. That's going to be weird. Right? Like, what's better, taking PEDs or putting a brain in your chip or putting a chip in your brain, and, like, do you get faster reaction time from the chip? Yeah. I don't know.

I actually got this theory on the specifically anabolic steroids and PEDs. Okay. Because I think you're right. I think there is, you know, it's maybe tougher than people want to admit to draw the line of where we're going to draw the line of what you can but i think the really negative connotation is towards steroids because they don't necessarily have those in a lot of other countries it's american-centric specifically is because everyone associated the communists with using the steroids right and it was the cold war and so anything

they're doing is is really is really bad you know the east germans and the russians and ccp yeah so um yeah those dudes did look stacked well they were given to women too remember it really messed them up it was bad it was not good can you imagine that being your job well there was a bunch of i believe there's a bunch of women's records yeah i hope i'm right on this i wish i need someone to fact check me right now i'm saying all these things i believe there's a whole bunch of women's records from the era in track and field that still haven't been beaten really because they because they were using such uh you know so many performance enhancers and then obviously it started having really negative effects on their just everyday life so they backed off on it yeah

yeah i do wonder how many people in business take peds like jeff bezos he's doing something he's my guy's doing something no he's obviously he may just be working out but that's what it's like okay listen all right so you asked me earlier like about peds in mma and when you're trying to cause harm to another person i think there's probably for me the line is a lot more clear if you're talking about baseball i'm trying to hit a ball like i don't give a damn what you're you know i really don't because it's less about you're hurting other people and it's more just what you choose to do with your own body yeah so that you know that would be more like i don't care quite as much i mean you still have the competitive nature of like

if you and i are trying to make a major league team and you're taking it now do i feel like i have to take it in order to you know see if that thing uh but we're talking about like i uh how my big house basil 50 60 something like that uh he wants to take some of these things like whatever yeah like okay you're not competing with anyone just go do it yeah yeah there are any doing something right obviously uh and it could literally part of what i'm always like careful of is like it could just be like hormone optimization yeah or it could be like he's getting injected with things right and maybe those are the same thing maybe those are two different programs whatever uh but also it goes back to is there a problem with it right like

if you go to okay uh so i invested in a company they do um uh testosterone enhancement right and uh i've been scared shitless i haven't taken the product or anything because i'm like i don't know what are you scared of i just don't know enough i don't i don't know the science right but like it's fascinating to me that they've done a bunch of work that people who are using these people are not like joe blow on the street at like you know gold's gym who are like oh let me just get whatever the guy next to me has these are super educated you know high income people who've done the work usually under a doctor who's recommending whatever and a lot of the benefits they talk about are not like get washboard abs get massive biceps it's like mental clarity higher energy like things

that people are like sure yo i would like that like i drink six cup of coffee a day because i'm trying to you know get clarity right so like it does feel like we focus on the physical attributes but there are mood energy clarity you know mental clarity whatever that i think most people are actually okay with maybe oh yeah yeah i don't care about it jeff bezos or a business person doing whatever they're doing and i think um i think there's probably at this point more than say 10 15 20 years ago uh money going into that right there's a lot of people who want to figure out yeah how do i feel as good as possible as long as possible um i was just listening there's that guy rogan uh brigham bueller kind of talking about that what was he saying uh well he was

talking about which i almost i freaking tried to do it twice and i failed but stem cells i was gonna go to columbia really yeah in 2020 um uh or was it 21 what is it stem cell they have so explain what like what's the purpose of it uh so my i have some so it's not like they're terrible my shoulders kind of like doesn't you know loss of range of motion my hips not this the the so i had surgery on this one this one's not that great um my brother has some neck issues and some back issues so uh and i just heard really positive um things like they take your stem cells no no no it's called uh so i believe so there's two ways to pronounce mesenchymal or mesenchymal okay um and they're supposed to be like really really good for your body's regeneration um and i was

gonna go one time and i can't remember what something happened and the second year they told me i had to get vaccinated and i said i'm uh it forced me to do nothing right i'm out right the columbia government said we're gonna hit you up with stem cells but you also said i'm out so i might go back at some point i don't know but he was on stem cells and their positive effect he was also talking about um for his for his self um he was overweight and trying to get in shape and he couldn't figure out why and so he took a big blood panel and uh his testosterone was really really low and once he got that back up to like i guess normal levels like everything started getting a lot better so i think there's gonna be a lot of a lot of research going into like

health and wellness and how do we feel as good as possible as long as possible you you saw the dana white thing where he said he got the blood panel done and he lost like 30 pounds or whatever yeah it feels like that was the single greatest ad for anything in the world yeah it's just guys it's just like you know this changed my life yeah absolutely i mean i uh this is like totally off topic but i was just thinking i actually almost went like instagram live just to talk sometimes i feel like i don't know if you ever do this but it's like you just need to talk about something And so you just want to talk and you want people to hear you and like, you don't really care about that.

What did you want to talk about? How fat everyone was in Las Vegas. I was just there a couple of days ago. Really? It felt like, oh my God, why is everyone so fat? Like average people. Just walking around. Like, bro, do you understand you live in America?

I know. I know. And I watch this. The average American is fat. I understand. But it seemed like, I don't know what was hitting me, but it seemed like extra fat. And it was like, how, how do you people not realize this is having such negative long term effects on your body on your mind and all of these things you know and so yeah and then you

know just coupled with a couple of those podcasts it's like i think people are just so um not all people because i think i think highly successful people are really into the health right now i'm like figuring out how do i do this best how do i take care of myself how do i age well um but there's a lot of america who's just like jamming whatever fast food food's kind of unhealthy whatever medicine my doctor gives me i'm taking that whether you know i'm saying like it's like i think there's a lot of americans who probably cure their health problems by losing 70 pounds and just working out on a daily basis here's this isn't as much of a hot take today as it probably was five years ago maybe even 10 years ago uh i think that a lot not all but a lot of the mental

health issues in america are due to bad diet bad uh exercise habits like all the like health stuff and i recently had a guy he's a uh heart surgeon he came on he was talking about the relationship between metabolic health and mental health and so like we love to talk about the mental health stuff right as a society and i think it's more so entered the like lexicon and kind of culture or whatever uh and i think it's well documented that people are unhealthy but there isn't like this connection and so it's again even it was 10 10 of people who have a mental health challenge obstacle or problem if they could simply eat better and work out and that would cure that or or maybe even just mitigate it to some degree like that seems like a thing we should go do tomorrow yeah

right absolutely but that's not the thing that gets told it's like take this medicine do this like yeah i don't know why well i was so not man i you're you're not so you're taking me right down the path of like all the different instagram lives i thought about doing i actually just mental monday so i do one a week and i was actually just probably gonna do this one i had a different one planned for today but i was probably gonna just put this one in the place because i've read these two books recently they both what are the books uh it was meditation but marcus aurelius oh my gosh i'm forgetting the name of the second one what was it about um it's about uh it's that damn journalist who does the undercover journalism what's his damn name

um uh project veritas what's his name i don't know the guy's name uh o'keefe o'keefe yeah james o'keefe yes him his book i don't recall what the name of the book is right now but he was talking about man those are really on you're going for like the full bar but it was uh you know it was about um doing hard things and then so with my daughter i talked about i genuinely think the mental health stuff in america is because we have we have too much times in our lives are too easy yes boredom oh yeah i'm like dude you're out like like think about america 100 years ago and you're a farmer and you're out working in the fields all day you ain't got much time to think about how you feel like now you just gotta keep picking the corn or whatever you know like your life is hard or

you know instead of driving somewhere you know you gotta walk somewhere right i mean like life is just hard and you're worried about how do i get done with my day and how do the things and you know i'm sure the world is much better today than it was 100 years ago but there's something to be said there and then so then to pair that with the books it's like what i was thinking was because i was thinking about my athletes and you know because a lot of talks go to my athletes and it's on the wrestling page is why do so many people want the easy way you know and when we think about positive things when you think about like what you look up to and what inspires you You always think about that person who did that hard thing, who overcame that adversity, who has this amazing story, and you are inspired by them.

And you're like, wow, you know, that person, he freaking grinded it out. It was so amazing what they did, you know? But then a lot of people are like, what's the easiest way I can do this? It's like, no, like, that's not what you should want. You should accept that it's going to be hard. If you want something great, you got to accept that it's going to be hard. And you got to be totally okay with that. and you gotta grind i mean that's so i i did give a book talk at the bike clinic convention last

week and um you have a chapter on attitude which is like exactly what uh i i feel like it's just knowing that the hard stuff is the good stuff for you yeah but it's so okay so it's like anything really good is going to take you so many years of hard work you know i talk about like when i was 15 and it was so i thought there's a couple things but it's like that was completely delusional but i decided i wanted to go to the olympics um and given where my success was at that point in time there's probably no good basis for that i just figured out that's what i was going to do um but that's it was eight years away eight years you know and there are so many points along that journey where it's like you hit this adversity and you think like shit am i really

gonna make it you know like i i had i ended up being really good in high school but then i go to college and like i you know i say the funny thing you played football uh and that's i don't want i don't pick on you but it's kind of easy because if you're okay if you're not if you're not good in football they're like hey man like you go stand over there and like hang out for a little bit if you're not good in wrestling you're getting your face rubbed in the mat you know like if you're not the starter if you're not the guy you're getting beat up on by the guy every day there's no go sitting on the sidelines you're getting face rubbed in the mat so it's like it's very humbling and so you know like my freshman year i went to college and it's like

i'm getting my ass kicked like every single day it's like dude i want to go to olympics i was really good in high school i'm literally getting my ass kicked every day you know and why didn't you quit because i yeah i mean so honestly that was probably for my wrestling journey that was the the part where i most said am i can i really do this you know can i really do this this is what i want to achieve can i really do this and you know that was where you know the scrambling came on all the stuff but it was just like yeah you got to make that decision like no i'm gonna keep going i'm gonna come back the next day i'm gonna fight i'm not gonna get too discouraged and you know yeah obviously there's a few points along that journey where you're like dude i don't know

if i can do this like i suck i get my ass kicked every day but you just keep coming back you know and then eventually there's something that happened well i could tell you i can tell you know i didn't put this in the book but i could tell you exactly what happened for me um you're curious you want to know yeah of course good i got my ass kicked all fall in the restroom so i go to college i got my ass kicked all fall uh i don't know why i didn't put this in the book i probably should put this in there um and i lost a whole bunch of matches i only lost i lost eight matches in high school in my four years of my actual college for my non-register year i only lost eight matches in that fall i lost 10 matches wow you know so it's like i'm getting my ass kicked

in the room every day and i'm losing the guys who like aren't really that good and so i'm like you know having this like can i really be good like am i really ever gonna be able to do this and i went back and it was a non-recognition of the improvement i was making because when i left me and my high school coach were very competitive like i was starting to get the better of him a little bit but he was probably still beating me more often than not i went back four months later right so you leave in august i came back in for christmas break and like he couldn't score me like i really yeah and it was like oh and then for me it was like there was it was this mental hurt of like oh my god i actually got a lot better i got a lot better i didn't realize it because i'm

getting my ass kicked in the room every day and i'm losing these matches the college guys but holy moly i got a lot better you know it was in a click for me and i'm like okay you know and then i still had so i still had a few kind of like maybe maybe a handful of months till i really started like getting a lot better but it was like it clicked for me that day what's fascinating about this uh robert green's got a book mastery that i recently read and uh and one of the big things is like everyone thinks mastery is just genius or like a stroke of luck or whatever and he goes through example after example after example including things like you know albert einstein's uh brother runs like a publishing shop and so he gets to understand i'm sorry ben

franklin's brother runs a uh publishing shop whatever charles darwin goes on this like seven your journey around the world he's collecting specimens from all these different places and he like realizes like oh shit maybe there's like evolution right or whatever uh but it also talks about like the grind right it's like these people usually start out and they have no mastery and they go through the apprenticeship phase like whatever but he talks about this like essentially decades-long journey to build the mastery and so you saying like i want to go to the olympics like i'm not that good right now but eight years from now it's like pretty much you know you overlay you that to his theory it almost plays out perfectly because you have to do every single

day for hours a day and just build up the skill sets until you get to a point where you're like yo i can actually do this yeah so there's no the notion that uh we should desire something that's easy it's it's such a flawed notion right um if you get it easy everyone can have it you know if it's easy then everyone's gonna get it like we we shouldn't want the things are easy we should strive for the things that are hard um yeah so you know that and then like i go with awa now who that's asking wrestling academy my brother and i uh and actually my high school coach started it and you know we're 11 years in now and we've made like insane strides but it's like at no point was that easy you know it wasn't easy what's the hardest part about building that

business um well first of all i didn't i actually you know what's so funny i just met at the homecoming game in mizzou i met the dean of the business school and it was like i wish i would taking a business class i took zero i took zero you know so i mean for starters i i had to learn a lot of lessons the hard way because i didn't know what the hell i was doing you know so you and your brother just get together one day you know like you'll listen to wrestling academy well okay so he he had some serious injury issues as i kind of said with the stem cell thing um he had some serious injury issues after college and he went and just coached uh for this family out of out of actually in new york out of college and then it wasn't enough time you know there was

was like it can't occupy his day so he's like what else do i do so i'll start a wrestling academy to kind of go along with that so he started wrestling academy out there and then our high school coach was you know the high school associations have really strict regulations on how much they can coach and stuff he kind of always wanted to coach you around so like hey why don't we start this and we'll you know it'll go year round so you can coach all the time and then and then incidentally i also moved back to milwaukee because i wanted to train at rufus and so and then max then moved back from new york a couple years later so um we've been building ever since but yeah i mean so the business aspect was first of like how do we how do we do this you just like literally go

get a building and you're like yeah hey i'll give you a stupid one and it's like if i would have been more seasoned i probably would have been like go f yourself but we were opening uh our first academy and the building inspector says actually you need this size of uh air conditioner or something like that so we we bought a twenty thousand dollar uh air conditioner because they said we needed it you know i'm saying and it's like i don't know like my a couple of buildings don't have any air conditioning at all like there's no way we actually needed that like he freaking pulled it over yeah it was probably it was probably honestly it was probably the building owner and uh the city supervisor working or whatever's working together to kind of maybe

make something nicer because we thought we could take that with us when we leave you know can't uh cannot so um yeah so there's something stupid like that you know where it's like that kind of play this in the beginning um and then i mean i don't want to know if i want to go into the wrestling business too much but um is it a good business no no i love it i love it so i'm gonna do it forever but like uh you know it's you obviously have like mostly fixed cost uh we talk about the wrestling academy stuff and you know the rent and and the salaries and stuff like that but um you know any joe schmo and there's a lot of them think they can start one and they can if they're compelling enough they can convince a few people that they know what the hell they're

talking about you know so if if you do that and then three other people do that and they pull you know each pull 10 kids and convince those 10 kids they know what the hell they're talking about this this happens right but that's that's 40 kids that we don't have in our academy now and um you know eventually their gig is going to be up because people realize they're not really very good at coaching yep but who knows maybe that's two years or three years or four years down the road and so you kind of have these like mom and pop shops kind of like opening up a lot and it you know the the barrier to entry for something like that is really low you should just go wrestle them okay fine you can open up if you could beat me

right uh in the book by the way i have to call this out because there's not very many books I read that have this, uh, you have a quote from yourself at the attitude chapter. It says every fighter is only as good as their last performance. You have a great performance. Everyone thinks you're the champ. You look like shit. Everyone tells you you suck. And she says me like, first of all, quoting yourself is awesome. Uh, but like, I do think social media, like that is a perfect example, right? When things are going well, it's like, everyone loves you when things are not going well. I've literally seen people who I thought was like that person's best friend is now like dunking on them oh really on so on social of course but like what you realize is like they

actually weren't best friends you just thought they were or like the perception was they were close friends or whatever yeah um but obviously not yeah and so it feels like social media exasperates just like the human condition right and and so you do see people uh fall in and out of favor very quickly and i wonder how that plays into whether it's wrestlers or other types of kids who are growing up and like i don't know when i was a kid like we didn't have twitter yeah right we didn't have a lot of this stuff we had aol instant messenger but that was it i think we're at the same age so i remember that yeah like that was pretty much it and so yeah you could talk to your friends but like the most like social signaling you could really do there was like

your away message right or like you're like like maybe your handle or you know you're like a name or whatever but like can you imagine growing up now and have tiktok and instagram i'm like so me and my wife are uh my wife's trying to spear this thing where we're um uh a lot of the families at school agree to not give our kids uh social media cell phones until eighth grade interesting yeah and i think it's great i support her in that and i think it's great so all the kids if none of them have it then none of them want it correct that would be the thing because that's why a lot i mean that's why a lot of people give the reason why they're giving their kids phones is because their friends have it and they're not getting invited or whatever yeah but um i think i think

i mean to your point i think social media is a lot for adults to handle um i mean for real though so i learned early on so my and it's in the book i talk about this um when i was 15 years old i was a sophomore in high school um i was headed towards the state tournament okay and someone tells me so it's the last weekend's sectionals and i kill everyone and i was really good that year uh from a state perspective and they say hey there's these forums and everyone's talking about you okay what's forum i don't know what that is you know like this is 2000 year 2000 so i didn't know what that was so okay i'll go send me the address i'll check it out whatever so i go there and all these people are talking about me and you know i was 15 so i'm like no i'm gonna kick his ass and

i'm gonna kick his ass oh it's like the competitors are in there no not the competitors other people talking about these other dudes were gonna beat me at the state tournament you know like uh and so i'm like nope i'm gonna whoop him i'm gonna whoop him and and all of a sudden it became really talked about and then the next week i went whooped him you know and then i went back on the forums i partying on all these dudes you know you're like right you're actually right oh yeah i was partying on so hard but uh but then so then i realized like it's mostly adults you know and then so then i started like diving into like the next two years i would just try to torture these people like with just doing different stuff to make them angry and i realized like how easy it was to manipulate

group think and how group think moves what would you do to like piss oh like all kinds of like okay one time i was walking on the street and i saw this person a blow pig i'm like hey give me 20 i'll give you 20 bucks can i have that and they're like sure a boiled pig a blown up pig it was like uh you know like yeah i don't even know i don't even know why but anyway so i took you to the tournament you know uh my hair growing out people really hated that um because wrestlers are supposed to have hair like you you know look like i look like a wrestler yeah you look like a wrestler well you need some more ears but yeah um and then i carried a boom box around right just all kinds i put an x on the mat where i was gonna pin someone a few times you know wait wait hold on

on the mat you went out there before the match and put an x like in tape or something yeah tape tape a little x and that's where i'm gonna pin them and then would you do it yeah and you gotta imagine that people even in the stands for like this fucking cocky dude right but like if you do it then like yeah i mean no they're still mad of course they're still mad about it yeah so you but you so you realize at a young age i was able to realize like how just like groupthink works and how and you know how favor goes to and against you it's obviously i mean crypto we we saw this right it was insane in the last year or whatever with uh the bear market hitting and to me it's like whatever like i'll be in here the next cycle

and the next cycle i can't get over i can't get over you putting an x on the mat and then pinning someone there yeah that was well so someone else allegedly i guess there's no video of this because the guy's older but there's this guy who actually the pinning trophy i won the i won the best pinner in college twice and the trophy is the shallows award so it's named after this guy named wade shallows the legend is he did it right so i heard about him doing it and i'm like i'm gonna do that too so i did it a few different times and then yeah you got the pin award yeah and then i got then well then it was many years later but yeah yeah did you ever do it in college uh i don't think i ever did in college yeah i feel like that's like uh do it in high school you can get

away with a lot of stuff in college i probably should have done it in college yeah i'd be pretty impressive imagine if you went to the olympic match and went out and just did it that would be awesome huh this episode is brought to you by eight sleep good sleep is the ultimate game changer and the eight sleep pod is the ultimate sleep machine the pod is the only sleep technology that dynamically cools and heats each side of the bed to maintain the optimal sleeping temperature for what your body needs with the pod you can start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees fahrenheit or as hot as 110 degrees fahrenheit what is the result clinical data shows that eight sleep users experience up to 19% increase in recovery, 32% improvement in sleep quality, and up to 34%

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Go download the FTX app today and use referral code POMP. This episode is brought to you by lmax digital the number one institutional crypto exchange they offer clients the deepest pool of liquidity and they have a hundred percent uptime track record through all the volatility spikes lmax groups liquidity relationships and ultra low latency technology means that lmax digital is the market leading solution for institutions across crypto trading and custodial services lmax digital secure liquid and trusted go learn more at lmax digital.com slash pomp again that's lmax digital.com slash pomp okay i do feel like the olympics are uh uh a little bit crazier like because you have like the countries like the national respect and like all that kind of stuff

so if you pulled off that type of thing like it's like an international incident right now you'd be a legend oh 100 yeah for sure right the um uh i always like the uh the track uh the 4x100 or whatever where the guy's got like sunglasses on and stuff and you're just like dude that guy don't fuck like he's gonna run as fast as he can and let's go america right like america always win that one of course i'm not okay but but also to be fair uh uh across all of track and field like that's really where i think a lot of people got busted uh for years and years and oh my god for years it was happening right there was uh i'm not going to use names but there was uh well did they actually get busted or no i went to high school in north carolina okay in uh in raleigh and uh

our high school track was one of the nicer tracks uh and so a bunch of these olympic athletes would come and they would train at the track so you like go out there and like i'm talking about like the top olympic sprinters would be there sometimes and you could like walk out of class and be like that is like they're fast right like but like this is real and uh a bunch of them got busted uh over the following years and uh you know someone came back or whatever but i remember thinking just like dude sure like if they did it they did it whatever but like i saw them out there working their asses off right of course they do both uh right but like i think the narrative had swung so much of just like steroid use versus like i don't know man i'd look outside the classroom

and i'd see them up there running and like they looked like they were sweating yeah well that was like that's like to me that was like the tour de france yeah like i know lance like a lot of kind of negative things came out about him yeah but it was like that race i don't care what you use them mugs still rode 150 miles a day or something crazy like it's crazy you know so and then obviously all of them in that one again these are these are not combat athletes right all of them are on it just across the board like 100 they're all using so it's like whatever i'll you know you're pedaling a bicycle pedaling a bicycle like but that's where i always go like how much time and effort goes into preventing it versus just like dude just be like free game you can take

whatever you want who who can do it yeah i mean with something like that i mean 2 000 miles of bicycling or whatever just let let them take whatever they want probably were i mean at that point in time yeah just let them take whatever they want and see what happens as long as it's not a sport where you could literally kill somebody or hurt somebody yeah uh what if that i mean i wonder if there's and i don't know anything about the pds but there's probably some level of some substance there that you could take so much you would probably kill yourself right well what i don't know what i actually think would be more interesting is just like legalized it's kind of like the the war on drugs right like like dude if they make weed legal my guess is that they're

going to have less problems with it yeah right so same thing here is just like just make it legal and say whatever you do you have to do under a doctor's supervision yeah we'll provide the doctors that's interesting right like like would it increase the safety of what they're already gonna try to do anyways probably definitely i don't know somebody would get mad because i'm not an expert in uh pd usage in the cycling industry so that's that's one funny thing about um you know podcasts these days is um obviously like you and i we say have a high level knowledge in certain aspects of our lives right but it's not like we're experts about experts about everything but so then certain people say like well if you're not an expert you can't talk about that it's like

well why can't i you go have conversations on the couch with your buddies about whatever the hell you want by the way have you seen the experts talk about some of this stuff like they're not exactly the smartest experts are like four pounds like why can't we talk about something like this is just two dudes having a conversation like i'm sure you're gonna get mad at you oh you'll see i mean i see it with like especially you know who gets it the worst which i'm sure he ignores it oh yeah you know but it's like because i heard the best description somebody was like joe rogan is sitting in a room with google trying to figure shit out and that's what everyone else is trying to do too right like like that's why he is so he has access to really smart people because of who

he is yeah but so it's like yeah i don't understand it's not like it's not like joe rogan ever ever ever says i know everything you have to listen to me of course he never says that he says the opposite he's just a dude trying to figure things out and it's like every dude when they go to the bar or they're sitting on the couch of their buddies they talk about something like they have some level of expertise and it's just people having conversations trying to figure out information of course so when people do it on when you know they're like pop doesn't know shit about bicycle racing why is he talking about bicycle well i could ride a bike so i'm i'm further along than some people right i mean that's how i think though right it's just like

i don't know what the answer is but uh it's interesting to think about yeah i agree one of the uh things i i thought would be interesting to hear your perspective on uh we talked about brain computer chips going in the athletes do you ever think that we'll see humans fight machines who is this i gotta look this up now who was the one that it totally freaked me out uh because he was talking about chips in the brain it wasn't bellagio it was on lex though i'm gonna look and somebody was talking about it was relatively recently okay he was talking about uh uh what is that term that they use for when uh singularity yes that the singularity totally oh ray kurzweil oh yeah ray kurzweil yeah yeah famous yeah yeah oh he's super famous he basically came up with

the singularity concept yes it was freaking me out but for those that don't know singularity is the merging of the human and the machines together but you know the most obvious to me and i i don't even know why i mean it is too stupid for them to even discuss but it's like okay if i put them in my brain how come someone can't hack it right i'm asked right why can't they say go murder that guy or or just shut off just shut off you know like if they put if i let someone put something on my brain like surely there's some nefarious things that can happen i forget the netflix series uh in the series um it's it's like the political drama series that was like super popular it's one of like the first ones that netflix did i don't watch any tvs popular

so it's like maybe things eight homeland eight years ago no homeland was good though um it was like that but it was uh all about uh american politics and and this guy was trying to become president or became oh it was how's how's the car my wife watched that one yeah so uh i'm pretty sure it's that one uh one of the characters has a um a pacemaker and they like think it's going to be hacked or it gets hacked or something and i'm like yo i'm out like i am i am so out but the problem is that like if you need a pacemaker like there's not any other option right so like in that situation fine yeah yeah but like the brain implant same thing but like i forget for a second would you do it someone says you can do it right now i would one my biggest concern would actually

be the safety of it like i'm a i'm actually pretty conservative when it comes a lot of the stuff like perfect example right is i invested in the uh testosterone enhancement thing but jacked like Chef Bezos, come on. No, no, no, I'm good. Maybe in a few years. Yeah, wait until, like, my testosterone falls off a cliff and then for sure. But what about humans and machines going into a cage and fighting each other? Well, I just think, I mean, I think it's preposterous because it probably wouldn't take much to make a machine win, right?

Because how are you actually going to kill the machine? Do you know what I'm saying? But, like, this becomes part of the game, right? It would seem so easy for the machine to win. You know what I'm saying? because like say i'm gonna leg kick you well it's gonna hurt you right well am i gonna leg kick a steel leg of a machine like that's gonna hurt me not it but like this is where like you could see if the public had the option of watching they 100 are watching that man i don't know so i think this

is like uh what was that one show and someone told me this still existed oh battle bots oh yeah yeah someone told me it still existed really i don't really watch a lot of tv so i'm not i'm not certain And they told me this, where they tried to create the machines that would destroy each other, you know. But that's not that interesting to me. Well, okay. So I was going to say, I don't think it's that interesting. But so I think there's something about like the human body and everyone knows we all have one, right? We all have one body.

And so to see what someone else can do with their human body, like fascinates us, whether it's running fast like the 100 or fighting or trying to hit home runs, because there's a part of us that we can all kind of feel what that would feel like. and if it was like a robot it would just be weird i think but like part of me wants to know like can we kick the machine's ass or not no you don't think so hell no someone's gonna find out come on i think i'm not fighting that robot all right so right now would you fight a boston dynamics boston dynamics robot is ben askren gonna fight the boston dynamics robot could you beat the robot probably not because how am i gonna hurt it i think right now you could beat it how about What, am I going to pull some wires out or something? Like, how do I hurt it?

You'd have to figure it out. This sounds like a terrible proposition. Right? But, like, that's my whole thing is, like, right now, I think you actually could beat it. Yes, it'd be athletic, whatever, but, like, you could still beat it. At some point, it'll get where, no, you couldn't. I feel like, I mean. In a wrestling match, you could beat the robot right now.

Well, in wrestling matches, I don't have to hurt it. I would just have to score points. That's what I'm saying. but i mean because this is this is i know nothing about robots but i'm just just thinking like surely you could make the robot be like 10 times as strong as me sure so then how am i gonna like do anything to it scramble i don't know i don't know anything about wrestling right but like if it's strong but slow like what i'm saying is like right now i think that the robots are not in a place where like they are dexterous and agile and like all these things

you would need to actually be good at wrestling so you can still beat them now at some point i agree you won't be able to but right now i bet you still so i had this discussion with lex when i was on his podcast about uh him and dan and her were talking about grappling robots and um and then how you could put ai and then make them simulate wrestling matches like they've done this with chess right and they simulate all different things that could happen and i thought that would be fascinating with wrestling was wrestling at this point um and i think jiu-jitsu is also about more expert wrestling it's still evolving at a really rapid rate and so if you could have robots wrestle you could they could they could um move it at a more rapid rate even than what we're doing right

now um but you know like i know like i don't know a lot of robots i've seen some of those videos and they are they are still a little bit clunky like they don't move super well but i was i was thinking it's kind of like speaks to how advanced the human brain is like if i just when i shoot a single leg right there's so many stimuli if we're wrestling each other for you to understand all at the same time right how much force am i shooting with how much speed am i shooting with exactly where am i going what where's my uh where is the pressure being angled at am i trying to sweep behind you am i trying to go into you right like and so you're kind of reading all those at one and then you're making an adjustment to your body and then if i'm high level right i'm making an adjustment

with my body and so for a robot who can't like walk or jump or do things all that well you know having all those stimuli be understood it's obviously uh magnitude is more complex than a game of chess right chess is like there's no timing component to it for example right you just have uh rules of where they can move there's no pressure component to like am i putting pressure like here or is it here or you know like where on your leg is the pressure happening you know so um yeah no i would be fascinated for wrestling robots someday but it still feels like even if they didn't know the moves they would still just be so powerful that you're not gonna be able to do things with them yeah you also boxed yes jake paul only once yeah one time uh why did why'd you

do it um because they asked me if i wanted to and was it just like this will be fun well okay so first um you know i see the highlight of him and uh nate robinson and i what was your reaction when you saw the highlight first uh they both suck right that was it i think i tweeted so i don't know they have to go see what i tweeted to make sure i'm not lying that's that's something to that effect you know um and i was uh at this point this is why i i don't get mad about very much anything but i'm kind of annoyed people don't give me any leeway for this like at this point it was that was three months or two months after my hip surgery like i was supposed to be non-weight bearing for three months you know yeah i got fat as shit because i enjoy eating and i didn't get

to work out because i can't put any weight on my leg you know and so then they call me and like hey would you really want to fight him and i'm like uh i don't know i kind of like fighting like i don't know he probably sucks i'll probably beat him up sure you know like why not so you went into it a hundred percent thinking that you had a shot to beat him yeah absolutely i thought he wasn't very good and unfortunately i was wrong um but yeah no so okay so first um my doctor had said uh you have to wait a year to do any like real live activity or wrestling or whatever and so i'm like well i can't do it because i gotta wait a year like i haven't done it i haven't literally haven't done anything i haven't i haven't i haven't ran i haven't rode a bike i haven't

lifted weights i haven't done anything you know yep um so then i saw this dude john wayne parr who's a kickboxing world champ he was kicking a bag and he just had to have the same surgery i did and i was like wait like how does he get to kick a bag this is bullshit so i messaged him like hey you just had that same surgery i did why are you kicking a bag already because he was like i want to say he's like four months out or something you know and i was just away a year uh and i think i was on i was on like three months or whatever you know and so he said to me back he said well my doctor said three months i can do whatever the hell i after three months i do whatever i want so wait this is bullshit like why is my doctor making me wait a year so i called my doctor

something like i called my doctor i'm like hey man why do i gotta wait a year and he's like cuz that's what you that's that's the recovery time you need i'm like well how come this dude's kicking i saw him kicking a bag and it's only been three months his doctor said that's cool and he's like well that guy he actually knew the doctor he's like oh that guy's got because there's not a ton of people who do this specific surgery right he's like oh that guy's got a higher fail rate than me i said all right what's your fail rate for your hips he's like one in 998 one in 998 i'm like i'll take my okay i'll take my chances so then i started training all right and so uh when you go and you're doing the way in doing all the stuff and everything uh

are you guys cool or are you guys like talking shit and i would just say i was kind of indifferent to him you know kind of like i was trying to taunt him um of course it's like entertainment aspect to it uh well just kind of also just get in his head you know like i mean kind of what i figured about him is that he hadn't really been in very many real fights you know and there's something to it um you know a lot of people get nervous when they fight and make mistakes and stuff like that so that was kind of where i was at so i mean i i did have a good three-month training camp um you know obviously so prior to that i have a hip surgery i was out and then prior to that i had been retired for uh 10 months or something so i hadn't i've been doing a lot of

wrestling i was in the wrestling room a lot but no striking or no other type of mixed martial arts uh but i did a three good three month training camp um felt pretty good i lost a lot even though i didn't look like great physically i had lost a lot of weight from where where i started right because i had no i didn't know nothing for almost four months with my hip um yeah and unfortunately like he just ended up being a lot better than i thought i mean he beat tyrant and tyrant's significantly better box than me and now you know he's fighting arison silva this weekend and he's um you think he can win well i mean when you actually when you when you put this out it might be done already so um yeah i mean well the odds makers say it's close right it's uh it's not like

there's a one's a huge favor they're relatively close which alone like that's kind of surprising just to start right because it's almost a jake paul win just for the odds maker to think it's close yeah because if i would say i was gonna be anderson silver in boxing you'd say like that's funny you know like it's just not it's not what i ever did i mean all of my striking mixed martial was more like how do i make contact with you and then get you on the ground and then beat you up from there that was everything i always did so um yeah i knew i knew i wasn't very good at boxing um i just thought he also wasn't very good at boxing you know and then the one thing i kept coming back to because this water's gone dang uh a lot of a lot of people said like you know what

if you lose it's like well i don't really ever care what the public thinks yeah but when i was in high school um not not every friday night but once in a while we had some boxing goes my basement and if we didn't have anything fun to do a bunch of dudes would come over and we'd be like you versus you you versus you and we always thought that was a blast like we always thought that was a fun friday night so i'm like okay if when i'm in my 30s they're gonna pay me a whole bunch of money to do something that i literally did for fun and thought was a fun friday night when i was 17 like i'd have to be an idiot to just not do this yeah like yeah let's go i mean i kind of like that mentality right so when you go and uh he hits you you're down yeah you get up you

realize like i lost yeah the next time i think i saw you on the video feed was you and amy going through the tunnel laughing and i was like all right they seem good yeah people were upset at me for that one why okay so first of all the ref i told the ref like dude i'm fine like i got knocked down but like i'm okay i can fight now and he just said no and i'm like that's bullshit you know so you know but i'm like well i guess i didn't really care anyways whatever i'm fucking out of here and i just left you know um which actually i don't think i was supposed to leave but then you know it didn't occur to me as a fact it was just like i guess i lost i don't want to be here anymore i'm gonna leave um and then my wife you know as i'm leaving my wife is right there and

it's okay so the other thing is it's in a football stadium you know and there's no one there so you know our walk to get out of there is like 100 meters but um I mean I didn't really care to prove I was a great boxer I was hoping I was a better boxer than him yeah the idea um and but my wife at that point said something like hey did you realize Justin Bieber just opened for you and you're the main event you know something like that right it was like I mean the whole week was just wild like you know there's justin bieber and then there was snoop dogg and then it was just kind of like it was it was very circus like the whole the whole thing you know um and then it was like all right hey let's go get my money and let's like get out of here and i'll go back to

coaching wrestling do people know how much you got paid yeah i mean i made uh close to a million dollars between all the sponsorships and everything else yeah i mean not terrible not for something that i would consider a fun friday night when i was 17 yeah so like do you think that that i'll just call it like the youtuber boxing world which i would argue uh jake has escaped he's no longer being hey you go fight a youtuber you whatever like now he's got like yeah real competition right however you want to measure that um do you think that like youtuber entertainment boxing stuff has like legs to it yeah i mean other people are trying i mean so yes the circus thing um i mean i guess his last fight didn't say i mean okay there's rumors i'm not certain his last

fight wasn't selling that well and that some people said that's why it was canceled this fight um which uh i don't want to put this up but it's happening october 29th some people are saying it's not selling that well um the whole shtick is over type thing so i i don't know like i think he's actually kind of good at boxing and i guess we'll see how far he takes it um can other people do it i'm not i'm not sold i think he's a very unique person yeah to be able to do this right yeah and like i've talked about it specifically of just like there's if you think in society in general the ability to like reinvent yourself over and over again so like kim kardashian is probably the like epitome of this right really i don't pay any attention to her sex tape reality tv star

entrepreneur criminal justice reform i personally believe okay governor president what 100 oh my god kim kardashian's president in our life did so let me ask you this because i okay i don't know anything about kim i i know i so i know the sex tape i know the reality show i didn't watch it at all um which the sex tape for the reality i actually have never seen either one um but entrepreneur did she actually do all of those things because there's obviously a lot of people who lend their name to stuff and and they and they're at least smart enough to find really smart people to run their projects yeah there's something to be said for that for sure right but like did she actually start those like i am i am personally running asking wrestling academy me and

my brother and my high school coach right um and so i'm actually like running those things she's running it yeah so all right i didn't know but the the reason why i say with pretty high confidence like she's really involved in this stuff yeah there's multiple things that she's done where like you can see it's like the same playbook over and over again okay and it's working but then i heard uh or watched uh her and david letterman letterman's got a like a show on netflix or whatever right and uh he interviews her i was blown away i was like man she's like way more articulate than people would probably give her credit for okay uh and the way and look she's got media training she got all this stuff so you gotta strip that away uh but like it's very easy

to see like that could be the leader of a business you know up there talking saying these things whatever and you're just like okay like yeah there's more to this and then you also have to forget or not forget like she brings marketing power where like you post on instagram right there's a lot of there's a lot of founders who are trying to like build twitter audiences so they could like get people to buy their product she shows up and she's like uh yeah we can sell stuff well and then between her and her siblings and everyone else kind of like in that um what you call it like universe or yeah you know they have yeah they cross promote stuff they like you know i mean like it's like there's like things there for sure yeah that uh that they can do

interesting no we say reinvent yourself you know i i think about is uh steve jobs i mean you know like when you start reading about him um like just that he went and kind of like saved pixar for example he became a billionaire off pixar first yeah i mean that's kind of wild like you know like most people don't think of when they think of pixar they don't think of steve jobs but he was highly influential and bringing that business back and then putting the effort in necessary to to get them to the next level you know and then you think about like okay what he did with apple but then like he made um itunes you know for example like who put music on a phone it was kind of him you know yeah so you think like that's kind of who i think about i think like

like constantly reinventing themselves and making new ideas is and i think he actually almost doesn't get enough credit as he should for all different things it is crazy yeah right and and i think the reinvention like uh with jake as an example his brother also like wwe star now wwe dude he i watched uh like a highlight reel of uh maybe wrestlemania or whatever one of the events was he's athletic yeah like the guy's doing backflips off of you know the ropes and stuff he was a pretty good wrestler in high school jake wasn't a very good wrestler but logan was got it yeah is that like a uh thing that the wrestling community talks about uh a little bit probably not like are they are they the most successful wrestlers of last like 20 years uh that's a great

question we got brock lesnar jake's supposed to made 50 million dollars last year allegedly i never believe those numbers ever well because i know i've seen mine right i've seen mine i know what my net worth is right yeah and i've seen some that said i saw one said 20 million and i thought i wish right and i saw one that said half a million and i thought no way you know that's not true at all you know so it's like somewhere between those numbers so i've seen by you know you see those online and you're like oh well they're not true i i know they're not true of me yeah and i know i i don't even know where they got the information i think they just like made guesses by knowing a few of my purses or something so that so that's one the other thing

is uh the business list i think they asked for verification but it's like a little uh kind of crazy because uh they could ask you like what's the value of the business and if they don't know the full breakdown they estimate right um what i'll say is uh the numbers are probably closer than we would guess okay uh based on some conversations i've had yeah um so let's just say that they are he kind of scammed an nft and crypto market too so however he did it he's been does that make him the most successful wrestler no oh no um who made more money than him well i if we denote that money is the only way to success but yeah there's a few of those crypto and nft project he backed for kind of what is going on like who let him do that type of thing you know

i mean almost it almost makes me you know how it makes me feel is like if he was really worth that much money why would he be backing that you know i'm saying it's not like a bitcoin or you know or even a reputable company like some of the ones he backed were like wait like what is even going on here yeah yeah who would you say is the actual most successful wrestler like money accomplishments like like when you say like hey this is the representative of the wrestling community on like a global scale like is there somebody who you think most of the community is like yeah this is what you can do with wrestling and after wrestling it's a great question um yeah i don't know i don't know i mean i don't

i mean so obviously like you have like a jim jordan who is you know really high up in the uh shoot is he congress or senate i'm blanking right now i don't remember um yeah so that would be one i know people kind of think about a lot um and then there's a handful of other successful business people but i don't think anyone really has that conversation about like who's i mean i think people just think like in wrestling like keel sanderson like you know he's coached nine national championship teams now uh people think like a lot about him and probably like the guys who have done it well in mma like uh henry cejudo or daniel cormier um those type of people right there's been a lot of wrestling champions in mixed martial arts but who's the best mma journalist

chuck minnenhall of course who would you say for chuck minnenhall really he helped me write my book yeah no he's great um obviously ariel does a great job uh i think there's there's quite i think ariel's been uh disrupted why is that have you not seen andrew schultz is out there saying he's the greatest mma journalist of all time andrew schultz does that where did he say this i didn't see this he like makes these videos every time there's a big ufc and he like comments about whatever's going on he like he said something and people all start freaking out and saying like you're not an mma journalist so he's the some the greatest one of all time oh that's hilarious

And so now him and Helwani are in competition with each other. Oh, nice. I like him, so I'll let him have it. Well, Helwani is actually pretty interesting because he's been able to do this for a long time now. He's been doing it for a long time, since the very beginning. Right? Yeah, really, really early years.

And he also, what, he was with one of the organizations? Well, he's with ESPN now. ESPN. I believe now he's off, kind of just independent a little bit. I mean, like, talk about winning, right? Yeah, absolutely. Basically was able to get himself in a position where he was the brand. someone can do it on their own terms is is huge yeah it's kind of like askren wrestling academy

i'm trying i'm trying to do as much as i can on my own i mean i always think about you know from a monetary perspective obviously there's people who are significantly wealthier than me uh but one of the things i really love about my life is that like i don't have a boss like no one tells me what to do i don't fear anyone's approval or whatever uh and that's a really good position to be in i think there's even a lot of like really successful people who are like worried about what their boss is gonna say or they know they can't do or can't do and i'm in a position where i'm like if i want to do that i'm gonna do it and if i don't want to do it i'm not gonna do it and that's it the only life that i'm like man i think i'd really struggle to be happy like there's a lot

of shit i probably could do and be like okay uh and like find happiness in it but the like nine to five suit and tie go sit in a cubicle if that's your thing more power to you but like that's the one i think i i'd have a tough time yeah the other one i mean now is um and obviously you know i'm here in miami so i'm traveling a little bit but the other one is like when you start having a family um this is actually i hadn't traveled for like four months without my family which was pretty wild because usually it had it's a little more than that but someone who had had to travel a ton with their family like i think that would be really hard like and i think that'd be somewhere you would like really question your life of like yeah i'm making a lot of money having

a ton of success but i barely ever could see my family yeah like is that really what i want is it worth it yeah exactly where uh where can we send people to get the book uh so it's available barnes and noble amazon um funky my defiant path through the wild world of combat sports the title is a tongue twister so i struggled with it i know i messed it up twice when i was recording the audiobook the audiobook was i don't know if you've done an audiobook yet you maybe you will i just want to i just want to share everyone who's watching that that was ben when i when i was going through the book i saw this and i was like bro what i never knew that's what uh what you look like in college no that one was in high school i have this high school uh yep i have a

similar my junior of college i think was my other time where it was like at the uh apex afro um yeah the so i did the audiobook that was like oh man that was hard that was hard well because you got to read and so okay you and i are speaking on a podcast right yeah if i were to mess up a word i would just keep going yeah right yeah where if i gotta read every single word and get it word for word yeah and i miss like an and or a the or i gotta start over some the whole thing well the just go back a paragraph or wherever you know do you have someone there being like oh you messed up go back um most of the time you know you knew there was only a couple times where they said like hey you missed that you know but then so uh being the hard part for me is i had to slow down

significantly when i talk you know so like i you know if i'm talking like this i would have to really like and this blah blah blah you know i'm saying it was like it was just yeah so it was a challenge the only thing i ask people if you're going to do an audiobook not to do i i love learning from them but ray dalio for changing world order he reads the first like chapter or two and then he rug pulls you i love it he says i'm too busy i love that shit he's like i'm too busy so uh so-and-so's gonna take over what yeah like either don't record any of it or record the whole thing but the like you buy the audiobook you start listening and then he literally like a chapter and it's like all right this other guy's gonna read i loved it i'm like yeah he

probably is too busy of course he's too busy but i was like dude what no did he did he do the first chapter was it was it only the intro because i know i think you're right because i think i think i was thinking it would have made more sense if he would have just done like the intro yeah yeah and not the first chapter also but it felt like he was going to do the audiobook and then decided not to do it at some point well i don't blame him because i did one it was freaking hard yeah and his book's very long he's very long and then he has a couple too because i think i think once i listened to the first one i think i listened to like a couple more and i think he did something similar uh where he read the if i remember he did the first part and then not the rest

Yeah, no, I love that. That was a really good book, too. He's out here just tricking people. Yes. All right, where can we send people to find you on the internet? I really just use Twitter. Obviously, I'm on Instagram, but I don't really love Instagram. I really love Twitter, so it's at Ben Askren.

All right, I appreciate it. We'll definitely do it again in the future. All right, thanks, man. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered.

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