UhI I immediately walked in and um you know i sometimes look at people and what they have and
you know i'm like oh here we go here we go again but you know i got a chance to know you
know know a little bit about your backstory where you come from and know that uh we have some
similar you know you know just like a mentality of of how to come up so it was nice absolutely man
i think what you put yourself through and i don't say this anyway i'm not i'm not saying that i can
say i've had the same experience at all right but i feel we've been wanting to challenge our minds
right in the same ways 100 and and that excites me that that desire that hunger
even though we chose different paths right i don't think i could have ever chosen your part
that we chose different paths but we were testing the same parts of ourselves right the mind is the
one thing that we don't test enough a lot of us are are so afraid of that of that test and that's
the real test that's where the real growth comes from is is the mind so absolutely man absolutely
so i've had a beautiful fortune of actually diving into this book this weekend great and i have to
say and i'm saying this honestly so i was just telling you this earlier 2017 to 2018 i read a
book a day i read 365 books in a year i made a video about the books i read and how i did that
and then 2018 to 2019 this year i read a book a week right and one of the things i've struggled
with recently and i'm saying this as a compliment to you right is that it is so hard to read a book
that isn't an article or isn't an instagram caption or isn't a short video because we
live in a world where constantly consuming content right when i picked up your book the thing i loved
about it is the amount of effort that you've been through to give us i'm sure this was suffering too
like writing this book the amount of effort that you've been through to actually give us
details right on your life and and i just want to start there about the process of writing the
book because i feel what you've done what a lot of authors have missed out on recently
is you've gone a step further right to really do self work to write the book so
in that book it's it's a raw very um humbling version of david goggins you know i went down
to the to the grassroots to the soil to the sewer of my life it's the it's the stuff that we want
to talk about it's the stuff that we don't want that person next to you in line knowing and i
had to have the courage to uh say it out loud to people and so i was able to really go back and
put so much detail into my story was we all have different things in our life that have scarred us
we want to act like those scars don't exist so those stars like you know if you go out and you
get cut that scar is going to be there on your arm you can go down and look at that cut and say
oh or or that scar and say oh that happened from you know i was in the kitchen or what happened
we have the same thing in our brain i have all these scars on my brain from growing up from you
know being abused from suffering through life from having a learning disability from stuttering from
having just a really bad childhood and so all those memories i had to cut open that scar
and go into it and that was a hard process for me to do not only was that a hard process for me
to do for me to have the courage to share that with people you know because i'm the so-called
toughest man on the planet so they think so for me to break open that shell and tell people hey
that wasn't always me you know it's it's hard to do you know it's hard to do so it was a tough
process yeah absolutely man i'm so glad you did peel that back yeah because it's so easy
to live that title oh yeah but when you break the fact that you had the courage to break down that
title right to actually lay it out it just it's gonna open up the door for so many more people
well i had to do it because you know throughout this journey i started becoming this new person
i started creating this new person people started seeing me as this amazing superhero
in the back of my mind i knew the real story and i was like man one day you have to really
share it i'm like man but do you have the courage you know like it's great to live right here i've
established this people think you're great just stay here don't go back let's not go back but the
only way you can help people out is let them know that this is possible so i had to go back and say
this is where i come from yeah and where i come from as hell absolutely and now when you go back
you talk about how your childhood was a nightmare right tell us about some of the defining moments
in your childhood that actually framed that experience to being a nightmare well my dad
was a person that um he was an alcoholic he was really big on being a powerful man and he had two
different sides of him he had a side that once you left our house so our house was the dungeon no one
knew what no one knew anything about what you know about the inside of that house the inside of that
house was was horrible it was evil you know like the evil monster came out to play but once he left
that house he was the nicest person on the planet so no one knew you know who this guy was so um the
scarring started happening inside the dungeon and my dad didn't really believe in us going to school
he had a family business and the family business was a skating rink and also a bar so my dad owned
it was called the vermillion room was the bar and the skating rink was called skate land so from the
time i was able to walk i was working that that that that that skating rink and i worked it from
like nine o'clock at night until like 12 o'clock in the morning pretty much that's what we did you
know i'm throwing i'm four years old scraping gum off the off the skating rink floor doing
stuff like that me and my brother my mom once the skating rink was shut down the bar would open up
the bar will be open from like midnight like four o'clock in the morning three o'clock in
the morning once that closed down we go upstairs and clean the bar so by the time you work like
this you know i'm a young kid it's time to go to school so most time we didn't go to school
so we missed school a lot but thank god for me i didn't like school anyway with learning
disability with a stutter you know i had white splotches all over my skin from being stressed out
hair you know passive hair falling out at a young age and once my dad got drunk that's when
the nightmare began and you know he'd get drunk he'd get violent and uh we got beatings quite
regularly you know probably at least once or twice a week and and the beatings weren't like hey i'm
gonna give you a weapon cause you did something wrong it was like hey i don't feel good today
and you get beat for that and my mom got a lot of beatings and it just trickled down to me my
brother so that that foundation of life that i didn't have that's how it started off for me
and this progressively got worse so when you have a horrible foundation it's like building a house
on a [ __ ] up foundation this is what you're gonna get you know any kind of uh earthquake
or something happen the house is going to go down sometimes you know don't even take an earthquake
it takes a little windstorm so that was me i was just a little windstorm away from breaking
yeah all the time a windstorm away from breaking but no one knew it i walked around like i was
a pillar of strength at a young age but that internal conversation you're having back here
is this weak little kid very afraid and uh i think that's what makes the book very powerful
because i take you there yes i take you to that spot of you know i'm super human now so you think
but a lot of people have a lot of problems that they can't overcome absolutely man and
that's i definitely felt when you were diving into that that i was reliving it with you
right and i think you do that so powerfully in the book because it's hard for people who haven't had
the same experience to envision it right but you made that possible but the other thing that you do
is i think you're highlighting something that is so huge for us that i genuinely feel that so many
of today's challenges that we all face as adults right are because of our childhood when did you
realize that your childhood was something that needed healing that needed transforming
as an adult when did that come when you were like i need to go back there to transform to to change
my experience it happened when i could never get over the hump i kept on feeling like i was getting
over the hump and then one little windstorm small little windstorm would come by and push me back to
scratch it's like why why am i not you know i'm you know i'm learning how to read now you know
i was a junior in high school and couldn't read that well a fourth grade reading level because i
would i would cheat on everything and i learned how to read i learned how to write i taught
myself all these things all these disciplines but whenever the first real big challenge would come
that little windstorm would push me back in the hole and i realized man i'm not i'm fixing
stuff on a surface level i'm all surface man i'm not going deep into the cellar of my mind
and fixing the foundation of my soul my soul is broken and but you know i knew i could fix it
but i was afraid to go back i was afraid to face the demons of my life you know because
you start lying you want anybody knowing this [ __ ] about you so so you start lying about who you're
not and start creating a person about who you want to be but it's not who you are so that's when i
started realizing man i'm never going to get over the hurdle i'm always live on a surface level
until i go deep deep into the sewer of my mind to figure out and face all of these different demons
that's hard it's hard we all like social media we all like everybody to see us for who we want to be
that's why we post beautiful things about us that's not that's not going to fix you so i
realized that and that's when i started going back so i was about um i was about 24 years old
and i went from 175 to almost 300 pounds and um that's when i sat down on my couch and realized
we got to go back and it started with me going back to my father so we we left when i was
eight years old we went to a small town in brazil indiana there's about five to ten black families
in a town of eight thousand to ten thousand people and um there was a big hub of klansmen that lived
in center point indiana and i talked about that in the book so the clan marched in the 4th of
july parade in 1995 in indiana so when you come from a messed up foundation like i did in buffalo
new york where my dad beat me senseless and now i have that messed up foundation and now i'm here
being the only black person i call it the only in my book being the only black person my mom's
working three jobs we're live in a seven dollar a month place she's never at home so it's not
like i had some mentors coming in to help me you know they're trying to put me in these different
group places for like having some shrink talk to me and these eight nine kids and one kid sitting
this house on fire another kid's peening in the trash can another kid had a helmet on banging
his head up against the wall and i'm looking at this at eight years old you know and i'm gonna
get back to your question that you're asking but these are the things i had to go back and relive
you know i'm 24 years old now and i have to go back to all these things that no one knew about me
in this group place where i'm in this place where these people are crazy and they think i'm crazy