How UFC Star Ben Askren Cheated Death

Ben Askren is a former Olympic wrestler and former MMA champion. What is it like to come face-to-face with death and make it back? Ben went from being on top of the world to needing a double lung transplant just to survive. What actually happened to him, what did he endure during his recovery, and how did the experience reshape his perspective on life? Expect to learn what actually happened to Ben these past 18 months, how low his health went, the biggest lessons Ben has held onto over the last year, what Ben thought about when he was that close to death, how surviving and recovering changed his thoughts on faith and fatherhood, and much more… - Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get up to 70% off during Gymshark's Summer Sale at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com - 0:00 The Crazy Story Behind Ben’s Double Lung Transplant 5:01 What Happened After Ben Blacked Out? 8:27 How Do You Breathe Without Lungs? 10:38 The Hidden Danger of Necrotising Pneumonia 12:27 The Long Road Back to Health 17:30 Waking Up to a Second Chance at Life 21:35 How to Stay Strong Through Illness 26:40 How Near-Death Changed Ben’s Priorities 33:29 Has Ben’s Definition of Success Changed? 37:26 Why Wrestlers Are Mentally Different 41:44 Talent vs Hard Work: What Brings You Success? 48:24 How to Stop the Pressure Getting to You 57:38 Choose Your Own Legacy 01:04:01 Where to Find Ben - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Welcome back to life, dude.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Well, I've been I've been living again for quite a while now. June 28th was actually the day I got the transplant last year, so coming up on a year for that. I think I believe I woke up on July 2nd or somewhere around there, or you know, like came to in my own mind. So yeah, it's their process, but I'm here, I'm getting better and life's pretty good.

• 0:28Chris Williamson?

  So one year ago from now, you were really in the shit.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Well, I just made a post yesterday because on June 6th, which was two days ago, Saturday, I got inducted into the National Resilience Hall of Fame. And when I went home or went back to the hotel with my wife, I said, didn't I get airlifted June 6th last year? So last year on June 6th, I was in Vegas and I went at first first hospital, second hospital. And then we got some friends that came out that were one was the doctor and one was the nurse. They said, you ain't good, he's not going to make it to this hospital. We need to get him back to Milwaukee because they have a good, it's called CBICU, cardiovascular intensive care unit. And they they got me a flight, they put me on a plane, took me all the way back. And I said to my wife, well, why was that such a bad day? Because I don't remember, I was sleeping. And she said, to transport me, they had to fully paralyze my body.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  And then when I got back to Milwaukee, they put me on ECMO. And with ECMO, there's, I think there's only like a 40% chance you come off ECMO. A lot of people go on it, don't come off it. So they were hoping I wouldn't have to do that. I did have to do that. So June 6th last year, although I don't remember any, it was quite eventful.

• 1:32Chris Williamson?

  And then this year you got to celebrate. So it's, you know, it's full circle. For the people who don't know what we're talking about, could you, could you explain what's happened over the last 12 months?

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, May, May 28th last year, 2025, I went to the hospital. I actually went to the hospital on the day before also. May 27th, my back was hurting, just a back pain. I thought it was a back spasm and that was it, you know? And on May 27th, I tested, everything was normal, did all the vitals. And and I told my wife, see, I told you, I was just a back spasm. And the doctor gave me medicine for a back spasm. And I went back to the hotel, we were at the Bitcoin conference. And it got worse and the medicine did not work at all, which that's never happened. I've had, you know, a handful of other back spasms in my life and the medicine's really good. It just got worse and worse and worse. And then you're up most of the night trying to make it feel better.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  And when I woke up in the morning, so sometime in the night, I'd finally fallen asleep. When I woke up in the morning, it was a little bit later and she had been videotaping me sleeping. And she'd sent it to a few of her doctor friends and they said, you need to get him to the hospital as soon as you can. So when I woke up.

• 2:42Chris Williamson?

  What was, what was happening while you were sleeping?

• 2:44Speaker 01

  I was like super like, super fast and hard breathing. Right? Um, and so when I woke up, my mom was like, hey, we're, we're going to the hospital. And I said, dude, you may be going, you may be possibly, I said, I'm not going back to the hospital, damn it. Um, you know, I, I got stuff I want to do today. I don't want to go to the hospital. And she's like, no, you gotta go to the hospital. So eventually they convinced me to go to the hospital. And it was the same place as the day before. We went there and I remember walking in, in the waiting room and then that's it. I don't remember anything. I woke up in July 2nd. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know why I was there. I don't remember anything. I was asleep for, I want to say it's 30, I think it was 37 days, I believe.

• 3:24Chris Williamson?

  Do you, you transported from kind of being a bit irritated that you were back at the same hospital for what you thought might be a back spasm for the second time and your wife being a little bit overbearing?

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:36Chris Williamson?

  To now it's July and what the fuck am I, oh, and I'm in a totally different, I'm in a totally different hospital now.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Well, I woke up and it was, uh, you know, I say wake up. I was awake sometimes, but I, I, uh, to my recollection, I don't, I don't recall any, any of it, nothing. And so the, when I, when I like wake up the first time or when I come to some type of cognitive understanding of what's going on.

• 3:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Um, it was, it was the middle of the night. It was dark. I obviously quickly realized I was in a hospital and I started thinking like, how did I end up here? Why am I here? I didn't remember going in there. It was, how am I here? And why am I here? And then I couldn't speak at all. And so I, I don't even recall how it happened, but for some way I, you know, signaled to the nurse, like, why am I here? What am I doing? And they told me I had a double lung transplant and you know, again, I couldn't talk and it was like, okay, why do I have a double lung transplant? I have, I don't know. I have no idea what, how that would happen. I'm totally healthy. I've never smoked. I've never done anything. Um, and then eventually my wife came in the morning, whatever the, you know, the next morning or whatever.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  And she had documented everything. So it was like a day by day journal of, you know, June 2nd, this happened, June 4th, this happened. And I had to read through it and I was like, oh my God. Life like, how did this ever happen? Um, and yeah, so that was kind of my recollection of waking up and kind of figure out what was going on.

• 5:01Chris Williamson?

  So retrospectively, I, I know that you weren't awake to be able to work out this from a first person view.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:08Chris Williamson?

  You go into the waiting room and then what happens from there?

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Um, well, so I had a staph infection on my elbow. Um, I don't know if you've ever got one or not, but you know, sometimes like I, I, all my life I've only had to get on an I, uh, antibiotic a singular time. Um, you know, you get a cut, you get a little infected, you put some antibacterial on there, you wash, you shower, you clean it up and it goes away. And that was what happened to me. I had a little infection on my elbow. I washed, I showered, I soaked it, I had a bacterial. And within a couple of days it was gone and I didn't think much of it, you know? And then I made no connection, but about four days later, my, my back was, started hurting and I thought, okay, this is the back spasm. And everyone always said, you would do it differently.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  And I said, no, I wouldn't. Whoever could guess, oh yeah, my back hurts because my body's eating my lungs from the inside. Like no one's ever heard of that. That's totally ridiculous. So the staph got into my blood and it turned into a, a necrotic, called Necrotising pneumonia in which, uh, my body was essentially eating my lungs from the inside out. That was what the back pain was. So I dealt with that for about, I think five days before I ended up in the hospital. And then when I was in the hospital, it was like really bad, like sepsis and Necrotising pneumonia. Um, and yeah, so they, they tried doing all they could to kind of like stay my lungs and, and keep me alive. And at some point it became the only way I was going to stay alive was to

• 6:36Speaker 01

  have a, uh, lung transplant, which, you know, again, I wasn't awake for any of this. Um, and so I believe I was in the Milwaukee hospital for about three weeks before that happened. And then I got the lung transplant and, uh, I think I was still kind of like unconscious for about six more days after that. And then I woke up and there I was.

• 6:57Chris Williamson?

  Fuck me. Why'd you get, why'd you get lungs?

• 7:01Speaker 01

  That's what I said. Um, I don't know. I actually wrote to donor family. The donor family has not responded.

• 7:10Chris Williamson?

  Is it two from the same person?

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:14Chris Williamson?

  But you can't, you can't mix and match two lungs.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Oh, I actually think you can. Uh, no, I know you can because I talked to a guy in the hospital about it. You know, and that's where, um, you think about life and you think about gratitude and you never want to take anything for granted. And I always think about the people I meet in the hospital now. Uh, this is a while ago. I probably four months ago, but I was in for one of my kind of routine checkups and this, this guy comes up to me and you know, I'm, I'm waiting to go inside the, you know, to meet the doctors. And so a lot of this similar type people in the similar areas. So he had a lung transplant. And you know, I think, okay, I was, I was unconscious for 36 days. I was in the hospital for, I think it was 73 total or something, which is quite a long time. And it wasn't fun. But then this guy was in the hospital for nine months.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  And he was sick and he got a double lung transplant. And then almost immediately, one of the two lungs rejected. I don't know why or how. I'm not a medical doctor. I can't tell you what happened. And he got a different lung from a different person. And he is now living with two new lungs from two different people. So I always, I always try to reflect on, yes, my situation was tough, but it could always be tougher. And at the end of the day, I could always not be here. So I'm quite grateful for what happened.

• 8:27Chris Williamson?

  Where do they, how do the lungs come out?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  It cuts you right, I don't know if you guys can see this, but right there.

• 8:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  It splits you right in half. Yeah.

• 8:36Chris Williamson?

  So they're not taking it from like under, they're not reaching under the rib cage and pulling it down. Are they cracking the rib cage open?

• 8:42Speaker 01

  You know, you know what, Chris? I've never had the balls to go look exactly how they do it.

• 8:47Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  No, I don't want to.

• 8:48Chris Williamson?

  You just didn't want to know?

• 8:50Speaker 01

  I don't, it's called the, well, I mean, you can go, go look it up. If you want, it's called the clam selling clam shell incision is what it's called. Um, I could see exactly where I've been cut. I know what it feels like. Um, but no, I, I've never had the balls to, uh, go look up and see exactly how they open you up.

• 9:07Chris Williamson?

  I guess.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  I feel like that'll gross me out a little too much.

• 9:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe I suppose so. I guess what's crazy is like, they're gonna have, they have to reattach. It's like, it's like basically plumbing. It's human plumbing. You're like reattaching or even A C, A C ducting, maybe more accurately. It's like, oh, there's a pipe that comes down. We've got to get rid of this pipe. That pipe needs to be reconnected.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:27Chris Williamson?

  I mean, I don't know how, again, if you haven't done your research, you haven't done your research. I want to know how, when you're removing somebody's lungs, I need to know how they keep you breathing. Cause you need oxygen to keep you fucking going. But there's, there has to be a moment when there's no lungs or there's a moment.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  There does.

• 9:45Chris Williamson?

  There's a moment when there's four lungs. There's one of two choices. They either attach both at the same time and swat, switch one out.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know what? I don't know the answer to this. I should know the answer. I do know, I'll tell you, this is gross. They said, the doctor did say it was the worst lung transplant she's ever seen because some of my tissue died. It had like, uh, essentially she had like stick like glue to the walls of my ribs and stuff like that. So they had to like really scrape all the old lungs off the inside of my chest cavity.

• 10:17Chris Williamson?

  Cause they would kind of decomposing inside of you.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  That's, that's what she said. So she said it was, uh, it was one of the worst that they'd ever seen. Uh, it took, I don't remember what the time was now, cause I was half unconscious for a lot of the first time I was awake. But she said it took them quite a while to actually clear it out and then, you know, get the new ones in. So you know what? I don't know how I was breathing at that point in time.

• 10:38Chris Williamson?

  Do people have any idea where this comes from? Is it just randomly onset? Is it a virus? Do you get it by?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:45Chris Williamson?

  Being on mats or what?

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Well, I think I got the original, the original staph infection, but to the point I made earlier, like it cleared up and it was no big deal. And it wasn't like I had the flu or I was sick or I was coughing or none, none of these things whatsoever. Um, and you know, the Kyle Busch thing that happened, that was a couple of weeks back. It was weird. It was almost to the day of when mine happened the year prior. Um, sounded very, very similar to what I, what I went through. And, uh, you know, I have not grilled the doctor really, really hard on why, why exactly did this happen? How did this happen or, or that kind of stuff? I guess I woke up and I said, well, this is my new reality. How do, how do I get better? So I grilled him a lot on how, how do I get better? But I haven't grilled him on how did it happen?

• 11:34Chris Williamson?

  That's really interesting mindset.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  I. Yeah.

• 11:37Chris Williamson?

  I guess it's, it, it's really only important for you to understand what happened insofar as it informs what you can do now to improve.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, uh, You know what happened was I think probably something that's extreme, extremely rare. You know, I guess I could go back and ask him and honestly, part of me thinks and this is just me judging from what my wife said, because my wife was obviously awake and talking to them all and she did a great job of trying to connect everyone that could possibly help me.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  But it was one of those things where they were having a hard time figuring out how I got that sick. You know, she brought up the cut on my elbow. She knew about that. But then they were asking all kinds of different questions on, well, was he doing this or was he doing that? Like they, I think they thought, hey, this doesn't make sense either, you know, or also.

• 12:27Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Okay. So you wake up, you come around. What next?

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Man, so the first, uh, you know, it's really funny. You think you're, you're like fully conscious, if you will, once I woke up. And you know, now I look back on the first, I don't know, we'll say, we'll say 10 days to two weeks. And I was like, holy shit, I was out of my mind. I mean, now I feel like there's this one, two or three day period where I very vividly remember. I do remember some things that for sure happened because I went back and I crossed with people that were there and I said, hey, did this actually happen? But then, um, like I thought I got transported to this hospital that was on the lake, like half mile from my house. And there's no hospital there. That didn't exist. That was only in my mind for multiple days. Uh, and I know I kept threatening.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  I kept threatening the nurses that I was gonna walk home because I was just on the road.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Right. I couldn't even walk. I couldn't walk, you know, it's like the thought of

• 13:27Chris Williamson?

  It's a lie. It's a lie from every different direction.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the, you know, that the first couple of weeks, like, um, you know, I think I was on so many drugs. I did get off pain meds relatively quick. But, um, it's been the rest of the stuff I was on and then they call it like delirium because you don't sleep enough in the, you know, in the hospital. Um, yeah, I had so many wild thoughts. Um, you know, positive thing, I had a lot of friends visiting me. And so that's like, I know some of those things that I thought happened did happen because I said, hey, were you, were you there when X, Y, or Z happened? And they said, yeah. So I had a lot of friends visiting me. My wife visited me almost every day. My mom visited a lot. My dad. Um, yeah, just kind of like. Waking up and figuring out how to do everything again, because I couldn't walk, I couldn't feed myself. You know, it's the long list of things you, I mean, I pretty much couldn't do anything by myself.

• 14:14Chris Williamson?

  What was the lowest point that your health got to when you woke up? Was it immediate? And was it relatively uphill from there?

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, yeah, I didn't really have anything hugely negative. I guess right before I woke up. So right after a day or two, right? Um, so not right before, like minute wise. Um, I guess I spiked really bad fever and they didn't know why, and that was scary to everyone, including my wife. Uh, but what, as I woke up, um.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, everything was like, I guess it moved in a positive direction, probably not nearly as fast as I thought. Uh, you know, a lot of lung transplant patients, they're on the list for a long time and their condition is not necessarily like immediately like scrubbing. Like eventually it would kill them, but it might take many years. So they're actually in kind of like a lot better shape than I was where I was like near, very near death. I lost like sixty pounds, for example, of, you know, muscle while I was, yeah, muscle, uh, body weight. But I'm mostly muscle, uh, while I was in the hospital. Um, so when I woke up, it did mostly get better. There was a lot of things like, I don't know if you know what chest tubes are, but it took me forever to get my chest tube out. I was the first lung transplant patient that they sent home with a chest tube in.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Because I was like, you gotta let me go, you gotta let me go. And then, uh, yeah, unfortunately got infected. I ended up back in the hospital for two weeks. Um, I don't think of any fault of my own. I think it just happened and, you know, then I got stuck there again for a while. But, uh, yeah, it was a process, been a long time. Um, I didn't start walking on my own for, I think it was roughly two months. Um, you know, and then even at that point, like, you know, walking on my own meant like I go four steps and I'm holding on to a counter and then I go, you know, three more steps, you know, it's like, it's not really, I'm not like getting around. Um, yeah, and there was just a process and it was like, once I became more capable, it's like, okay, today I want to try to walk for eight minutes. Walking for eight minutes is my goal. And then, once I got to hang it out, then it's ten minutes, there's twelve minutes.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  And then I, you know, kind of keep building up and then it's okay, now I'm going to try to do some squats, which was. You know, in the beginning, I couldn't get myself off the toilet. I had to have really have someone help me get up. Um, yeah, so that was the process and uh it's still a process where I'm I'm actually getting better. I feel like still quite a rapid rate and I'm

• 16:32Speaker 01

  eleven, over eleven months out.

• 16:33Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:35Chris Williamson?

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• 17:18Chris Williamson?

  of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. What was your main emotion when you came back around, once you were a little bit less delirious?

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, probably flabbergall. And I still think about it sometimes. Still, I wake up and think a lot, like, how did that happen? Like, I have a lung transplant? Like, I never smoked anything in my life. Like, how does someone like me end up with a lung transplant? So I think, like, uh, that would probably be the main emotion of like, how did this happen? This is nuts. Um, and then probably the second one after that would be like, okay, what have I got to do? Because again, this is my new reality. I can't change it. So I might as well make the best of it. So what is it that I need to do? And I probably spent, you know, I can't tell you how many hours since I spent eleven months researching, what do I do about this problem? What do I do about that problem? And just kind of like-

• 18:17Chris Williamson?

  Heavy, heavy ChatGPT user.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  For real. ChatGPT, if you ask my question, uh, you get a lot of information and then I usually use the information. I bounce off my doctor and I say, hey, here's what I'm gathering. What do you think about this? And ChatGPT's right, I will probably say- Seventy, eighty percent of the time, like it's, it's pretty good. You know, there's a few things where it kind of really gets it wrong. Um, so I always obviously cross reference first.

• 18:43Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Okay. So I, you know, the flabbergasted thing is so funny. I've got this, I've always had this thought in my mind. Like I've come off a, a moped in Bali. I've been in a couple of like pretty big car accidents, like a few things, a sort of shock, kinetic insight or whatever. And you're right. One of the main emotions is surprise. Like this isn't, this can't be, this can't be happening. And I was thinking to myself, I wonder how many people have died, you know, from, from something horrendous or accidental. Someone got shot, you know, in crossfire, somebody got shot.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:19Chris Williamson?

  And they just feel the thing go through them and they look down and they're like, have I been, oh, surely I haven't been for, and that's it. And your last thought isn't.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:28Chris Williamson?

  You know, the, the movie lying on the ground, looking up, telling your last rites, explaining your insights from like, it's just, did I get fucking shot? Holy shit. And then it's done. And it's the same with you. It's either the, the main insight, the main amount, was it, you come back around and were you fearing for your, do you see the, the beauty of existence? It's, I, I was largely, uh, fucking surprised, dude. That was my main, my main sensation.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  I, I would say that, you know, how, like, why am I here? How did this happen? And surprised with it? And, uh, that was kind of like me piecing it together for the first, you know, handful of days. And then the other one was what happened while I was asleep. Right? Like I've been asleep for thirty seven days.

• 20:16Chris Williamson?

  What's the Bitcoin price at, please? What's the Bitcoin?

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Ah, it was, it was good at that point in time. I actually missed a whole bunch of really, really important wrestling events in, uh, late May and early June. Uh, you know, so there was, you know, catching up on all that. Cause I was not awake for a single day of June. Um, and then, you know, going through the kind of order of events of what happened to me and, and, and there was, there was a bunch of really amazing things like, um, Yeah, there's so many people supported either through prayer or helping my family in some ways shape or form or meals. Cause you know, my wife is then obviously there's not a father in the household because I'm in the hospital. Uh, my wife is spending a large portion of her time at the hospital with me. Um, so you know, my kids are all on summer break. It's not even like they go to school.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  So, you know, who, who's going to take care of them? Who can help out with them? So usually my wife, my mom, my dad would kind of like, uh, alternate who's at the hospital, but then we had a whole bunch of friends and family helping out with our kids and stuff. And, uh, we tried to keep it as normal as possible for them. You know, you don't want them at home thinking every day, hey, my dad might die. Like you don't want that. So we, you know, we tried to tell them, hey, well, not I didn't do shit. Uh, my wife tried to tell them, hey, he's sick and he's at the hospital and you know, kind of leave it a little bit vague and open ended like that.

• 21:35Chris Williamson?

  So I guess, you know, you look across at somebody that's had a career as an athlete that, that's over, overcome lots of challenges and difficulty and training sessions from being a kid, being a teenager, to a young athlete, to a veteran athlete in all these different sports, wrestling and MMA and ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, boxing.

• 21:55Chris Williamson?

  How much of that were you able to draw on when it came to recovery and resilience?

• 22:02Speaker 01

  All of it. A hundred percent. I mean, um, you know, because the, the main thing is, I mean, it's been, I said, it's been eleven months. I probably felt really good for, for a handful of those days, you know? Like, you know, even today, uh, I'll just say today, I'm eleven months out. I'm having a pretty good day. But you know, for a while before the show, actually, um, you know, it was like my breathing just wasn't as good. Sometimes I don't know if it's the allergies or I don't know what the issue is. It just feels weird sometimes, you know? Um, and then obviously earlier on, it was, it was a lot more things than that. It wasn't, wasn't only that. So the amount of days I've felt really good since then has been very limited. And so it's, you know, even on the days where you don't feel good, are you going to get up and do something?

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Because you just sit on the couch, you're, you're not going to get better. And so even on the days you don't feel good, maybe you're not going to do as much as you had planned, but you're still going to do something. And that's kind of, you know, where, where I was at for a long time. And you know, now it's like, I feel mostly pretty good. There's, you know, there'll be a little something here and there pretty much every single day, but it's like, okay, well, if I don't feel good at. 10 a.m. I'm gonna go get my workout at 2 p.m. or you know, like I'm but I am gonna work out. I am gonna train and I'm gonna do my breathing exercises and I'm gonna, you know, this handful of other medical things that I have to do. I'm gonna do them every day. I'm not gonna miss it. Um, so I've been very disciplined and regimented in that. And obviously that came from my, my life as

• 23:27Speaker 01

  an athlete, uh, being very disciplined, very regimented in that. Uh, it just crossed over kind of exactly.

• 23:33Chris Williamson?

  What did your weight get down to? What was the smallest, the lowest weight?

• 23:36Speaker 01

  The lowest was one, one thirty eight. So it's like skin and bones.

• 23:40Chris Williamson?

  And what did you fight at?

• 23:42Speaker 01

  I fought at one seventy, but I was, uh, I got, I'll be, I got into TRT. So I got a little bit bigger. My normal walking weight was probably, uh, you know, when, when I was fighting one eighty five ish, plus or minus a few pounds. And then as I retired, I was probably go one ninety five ish, somewhere, somewhere in there. So.

• 24:00Chris Williamson?

  That's part of fifty percent. That's part of fifty percent.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, uh, yeah, quite, quite, quite the drawdown to weight. Um, and it was just like, I mean, I don't, I don't, my wife has pictures. Skin, skin and bones really is kind of what I was.

• 24:14Chris Williamson?

  Is that because you're not moving and not consuming any calories other than what they need to keep you alive? Is that why?

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Uh, I, I think they're not move. I, you know, I never looked all the way to this. I got some good guesses. Number one, you're not moving. I mean, I told you, like, they literally paralyzed me, but there was other times when, um, I would wake up and I would just like, I don't recall this, but I would not be happy about that. But I'm off all of my arms, you know, I try to like move and then that would, uh, spike my heart rate and then that would cause my breathing capacity and I remember my, uh, what do you call it? Oxygenation or whatever. That's a drop, right? And that was really problematic. So I guess for a while they even had me strapped down. So I couldn't really move at all. Um, yeah. So that was kind of the, that was kind of the deal with that. So, uh, and then I do believe prednisone, which I'm still on, and so I'll be on for the rest of my life, probably,

• 25:05Speaker 01

  unfortunately. Um, I believe that has some, uh, some capacity of where it eats your muscles a little bit.

• 25:13Chris Williamson?

  What's that do? That's a

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Penicillin?

• 25:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  It's some, I don't know exactly which part of the immunosuppression it is, but it's an immunosuppressant. So with a, with a transplant patient, um, your body will see the, uh, transplanted organ as a foreign body and it will attack it. So they need to essentially tamp down your immune system kind of permanently.

• 25:33Chris Williamson?

  Which is why flight for you and being in different places is more dangerous because you don't have an immune. If you had an immune system that could protect you from getting sick, it would also be the same immune system that would attack your new lungs.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Yep, a hundred percent. So I, you know, I try to stay out of areas where there's a lot of people where I don't like have, I don't think so control of the area or what's my surroundings are. Unfortunately, I wear a mask a lot, which is, you know, that's kind of

• 25:57Chris Williamson?

  COVID again, baby.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  I made fun of the mask people for sure and now I'm a mask, I'm a mask person. Yes. That's, that's no good. Um.

• 26:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it is getting better. I'm, I'm coming down like, uh, the levels of immunosuppression you're on. As you get further out and you get healthier, they, they do come down quite a bit. So you, you kind of hit a bounce back. So I've gotten the, you know, for example, last couple of weeks I've gotten, uh, lower on my, you guys will have post-conizol and tachrylymas. I mean, that's fun talking about medicine, but I come down on those a little bit. So, uh, that means, you know, my energy and my indigestion go up. And I think, uh, you know, my, my year anniversary is coming up in about three weeks and I'll, I'll be, I'll hopefully get to down even a little more potentially.

• 26:40Chris Williamson?

  Unreal. Okay. What, um, I'm interested in what matters to you more or less now than it did before?

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  You know what? I, I, I said this, uh, you know, if I would have died, uh, when I went to the hospital, nurse, I walked in hospital, I don't remember anything. If I would have died there, which I came, came pretty close to, um, I had a great life. Like I really got to do what I love for, uh, for a living and coaching wrestling or in the wrestling academies. I think it's very meaningful work and that you're helping the next generation of young person, not only get better wrestling, but get better at life. Um, I love my wife. I have a great family. So I was really lucky in that I was, it didn't take me to die to figure out that, oh, I have a bunch of misguided priorities. Like I think my priorities were, were pretty good. I was pretty, you know, reflectively, because I can reflect on, hey, if I would have died,

• 27:38Speaker 01

  what do I think about what I had done to that point? Um. So I felt really good about that. I do think I became maybe more patient, have more gratitude for sure. And that's, you know, I don't think I was a category, maybe I was lacking in prior, but I think maybe more still even more strongly. I became a Christian, which I would say prior I was kind of Christian adjacent, like I went to church for 16 years or so. But you know, it didn't kind of click all the way.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  So that would be, you know, a prior big change, I would say. So kind of those things, but I was, I was proud of the life I was living prior to this. And I think all the positive things have just been kind of ramped up. And I think, I guess, I think one other one that I would mention there is, you know, I invested in some businesses. And I like all the people who are running them, but it, if it took my time, even if it was just, hey, I meet, I meet with the founder once a month or whatever. If it took my time and I wasn't like passionate about it, I said, I asked a few different people like, hey, can I get out like? I'll make a deal, whatever, you know, whatever you feel is fair, give me what's fair. And I just, I just want to take a few more things off of my plate.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  And I, I kind of feel strongly about that. And you know, I get some offers to do things now and I'm just like, is this what I really, really, really 100% what I do with my life? Is this worth the time with my kids and my family? And if the answer is no, then I generally choose not to do it.

• 29:08Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen Peaky Blinders, the series?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  No, I haven't, but I, I know a bunch of my wrestlers are really big fans of this. So I've heard references, but I've never watched it.

• 29:16Chris Williamson?

  Really cool BBC series and in it, the main guy and his brother, they nearly die at the Battle of the Somme in World War One. And the, I think they're called clay kickers. So they dig tunnels to try and get into the enemy trench from underneath as opposed to going over the top. And sometimes they, the two tunnels cross over each other and then they have fights inside of the fucking tunnels. It's crazy. And um.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 29:45Chris Williamson?

  He uh, him and his brother basically nearly died at the Battle of the Somme. And they've got this line where they, they sort of turn to each other and say, everything after that was extra. Everything after that was extra. And it kind of sounds like that's how you see this period now that I was, I was happy. I mean, I didn't want to die. It would have been optimal for me to have not died and I'm glad that I didn't. But had I have done, I'd lived a pretty good life up until then. But even though I'd lived a pretty good life, there's still some adjustments that I want to make in order to learn the lessons about prioritizing my time and what I was going to miss most now that I've got, now that this is extra.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, uh, yeah, that's true. That's pretty accurate with uh, with how I feel and how I view it. And I want to make the most of the extra. And you know what? The statistics on lung transplants. Now, I don't necessarily know that they apply to me for a variety of reasons, which we can go, go through if you'd like to. It's kind of boring. But uh, the median life expectancy is only six and a half years, uh, which isn't long. I don't think that's going to apply to me fully because a lot of them are older, unhealthy people.

• 30:52Chris Williamson?

  An ex-professional athlete who didn't get it because he was smoking and was like in the midst of some of the best fucking health of his life.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah. So you see, you get it. So uh, they actually, the longest living person post double lung transplant is 38 years. So that's kind of my goal. Uh, it's 39, at least 39.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  But yeah, everything now is extra and it's kind of reformatting me. So the number one thing I, I love to do is my brother and I have wrestling academies. We have nine of them now in the city of Wisconsin, but the very favorite part of that is actually coaching the athletes. Um, and so, you know, that's the thing I want to spend the most time on uh, from a work perspective. Um, and then obviously, you know, with my, my family and doing that type of thing. And it's one of those that was weird because.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  I never really thought twice about, but you know, part of the wrestling academy thing is you travel on a lot of weekends sometimes to go coach kids and I honestly, it's this weird thing because I love it and I miss it a lot. And, um, but then it's like, well, I realized how much I was kind of missing at home or when my wife had to be, you know, especially a single mother, I go to a big tournament. Now, it's not saying I'm never going to do that again. I am going to do it. I'll probably just do it a little bit less than I had previously. Um, so to make sure I'm around for more of my kid's stuff. And then obviously now my daughter's 13 and she really likes wrestling. So there's going to be a probably a good opportunity for me to spend a bunch of time with her too bad. Um, but yeah, so definitely not going to waste

• 32:22Speaker 01

  my time on things that that I don't love and that I'm not really passionate about. Um, and that's kind of quite the biggest thing.

• 32:29Chris Williamson?

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• 33:10Chris Williamson?

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• 33:29Speaker 02

  Has your definition of success changed?

• 33:32Speaker 01

  Since that? Um, you know, I would think about this a lot, actually, because I don't know if you saw or heard, but I'm wrestling next month. Um, and the reason I was wrestling was they told me, so I actually worked for RAF. And it's going tremendously well, and one of my life goals, and this is something where it's like, I'm not going to work for RAF forever. Um, because it's not the one thing I want to do, but one of my life goals was to start a legitimate professional wrestling organization in America. That could run on its own and give athletes the opportunity to compete at professionals. RAF is doing freaking amazing job. I mean, they're, they're doing better, I should say, we are doing better than I ever could imagine this quickly. Fascinating. Um, but when they told me they're coming to my hometown on my birthday.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Something.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  I'm right. It's like, okay. I gotta get out there and I gotta, I gotta make it happen. Um, and so that's kind of been a really big driver for me. And a big part of it is me helping other people and I, I listen, I get messages. Pretty much every single day on Instagram at this point of, hey, your journey has inspired me. Um, and I think I was giving. Sorry, I'm giving a very long winded answer, but I think that's okay on this podcast.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  So your journey inspired me. I've been saying the same things for 15 years. But I think, you know, when I'm on top, right? So I'm winning MMA titles and, um, we got the best wrestling academy in America. I think people, it resonates to a one way. And then they see you dying and on your deathbed and trying to climb out of this hole. And you're saying the exact same things. I think it resonates and motivates in a different type of way, not, this guy doesn't just talk about it, this guy is about it, right? He, he understands what is, what adversity is, he understands what hardship is, and when he had met adversity and hardship. He reacted the exact same way that he said he would. So I'm not just talking about it, I am about it. Um, so me being able to climb my way out of this hole and live a, I will say relatively normal life.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  You know, this never, it's never gonna be all the way back to normal, but as close to normal as possible. Um, I think that's very inspiring for people and, uh, the, so then my thought on that was, uh, I don't know how you feel about this guy. He's very controversial, but RFK, um, if we thumbs up or thumbs down.

• 35:52Chris Williamson?

  Um, I I've been to dinner with him. He was a nice guy. Like, he's got some, he's got some wacky beliefs, but he's also managed to get the food pyramid to be the right way around for the first time in fucking history. You know, it's, it's same as everybody.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  So I would think, well, one of the things I think about him is this guy has an immense amount of courage and fearlessness. And I say this to people, I say, think about if you grew up and you watched your father be murdered and you watched your uncle be murdered. And you still had the courage to put yourself in the light of fire, right? Because there's a lot of people who don't like him right now. And you, you watched that happen to your father and your, your uncle, and you still were willing to have the courage to do that. That, that's amazing. I don't, I don't care what you think about the rest of what he says, that is, that's very powerful. And he always references, uh, Sisyphus, right? Where the guy rolls the boulder up the hill only for it to roll down every single day. And then he starts over and then, you know, the kind of message of it to me is that

• 36:48Speaker 01

  there's something very powerful in just showing up and having a great attitude and working hard every single day. Even if you're maybe not going to get the fruits of your labors at the end of it, right? Because every day the boulder rolls back down and he shows up and he works again every single day. And for most people, um, they're not going to end up without any fruits of their labor, right? Uh, so, you know, they roll the boulder up the hill. It's generally going to go somewhere and they may not get every single thing they want in life, but they're gonna, if you do that, you wake up with a great attitude, you work pretty hard every day, you're going to end up with a pretty good life that you're pretty proud of. So I think about that a lot.

• 37:26Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think wrestling produces such mentally tough people compared to a lot of other sports?

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Uh, I think it's the best. Uh, I think it's, uh, I speak on this topic a lot. And I may be biased because I run wrestling academies, but I think there is no greater impact on a child's life than wrestling. I think wrestling is a microcosm of life. Um, I think there's a few qualities that maybe you don't get from wrestling, but most of them you do. Um, and that is you are going to have hardship, you are going to have sacrifice. If you're going to lead any type of meaningful life, it's not going to be sunshine and rainbows. It's harder at a time. And so, um, you know, going to wrestling, it's. A level of humility, because you're never gonna be the best one in the room. And if you're the best one in that room, you're gonna go find another room that you're not the best in.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  And it's not like, hey, you're not the best, go sit on the bench, you can go watch everyone else. It's like, no, you're not the best. Now you're gonna get your face rubbed in the mat by someone who's better than you and they're gonna force you to be humble. Um, so I think, you know, uh, hard work, discipline, perseverance, because you're inevitably gonna get knocked down and have times of hardship and adversity. Um, uh, self-reliance is a big one. It's only you out there. There's no one else to save you. There's no team. There's no nothing else. Humility, uh, I did, I did think all these qualities, uh, can make a really, really well-rounded human being.

• 38:49Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 38:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I mean, I look at a lot of other combat sports, a lot of other sports in general, and everybody learns something, especially the consistency.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 39:00Chris Williamson?

  The routine, but maybe it's a selection effect. Maybe it's just the, the sorts of parents that put their kids in or the sorts of young guys and girls that decide that they're gonna go into wrestling. They just, whatever it is about making that decision, select for a particular cohort of people that are kind of stubborn and routineized and insane. But I don't know, there's, I look at, look at even the UFC, which is, you know.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  I can speak to that for sure. I'll tell, I'll tell you now for sure, because I obviously trained at a mixed martial arts gym for a long time. Uh, and we run wrestling academy. The expectation of the parent coming into those two different places is totally different, right? So the expectation of a parent coming into Ask My Wrestling Academy is, hey, I want my kid to learn how to wrestle. I want them to learn some discipline and some hard work and get a little tougher. And you know what? If they do really well, maybe they'll win us a title or get a college scholarship or something to that effect. And in MMA gym, so many times it's like, oh, my kid, he's really tough and scrappy. He's gonna be the next star on TV and make a whole bunch of money. Um, and so, right, the expectation of the two different parents doing the two different things is, is immense. Um, and I, I think that's probably, uh, a big part of this, what I would guess.

• 40:13Chris Williamson?

  What would be your advice to a parent hoping to make their child's fame and fortune by getting them to do MMA?

• 40:21Speaker 01

  That is about the worst job you could. I mean, I tell, I tell everyone that MMA is, is an awful job. Um, you do it, you do it in my, this is my estimation. I did it cause I wanted to fight people because I like fighting people because I love to combat. That's why I did it. But if I wanted to have a real profession and real job, I for sure would have been something else. Um, I always walk through someone, if you say, Chris came to me and said, hey Ben, I want to be an MMA fighter. What do you think about that? I say, number one, it's dumb. Here's why, Chris, you're gonna start training. You're probably not gonna take a fight for a year. Okay, good, then you take an amateur fight. Your amateur fight, that's gonna take you probably two years to get through. Okay, once you become a pro, now you're gonna have, say, two to three years of low level, uh, professional fight.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Okay, if that's six years goes perfect, now you're gonna sign to UFC. And your first year in the UFC, if you win all your fights, this is, this is seven years of perfection. Nothing went wrong in seven years. You're gonna make like $80,000. Okay, but of the $8,000, you gotta pay your gym, you gotta pay your manager, you gotta pay taxes. So you're, you're walking home with, I don't know, 35, $40,000 at that point. And well, if you don't live in California, if you live in California, you're walking up like $27,000. That's not a good job. Um, so, you know, I've, I've only ever recommended two people and it's went relatively well for them because I saw they had a small amygdala and it was a little different. They wanted to fight people.

• 41:44Chris Williamson?

  How, how much of your success do you think came from talent?

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Zero, I don't believe it exists.

• 41:52Chris Williamson?

  You don't believe that talent exists?

• 41:54Speaker 01

  I do not, and this is, you know what, this is hilarious. I'm thankful my wife, I, my wife is off, uh, you know, we're, we're in Kansas City. We came here after I got inducted to the Hall of Fame in Oklahoma, in Kansas City. My wife has a 104 year old grandfather, so we're visiting him. Uh, so they're actually playing bingo with him right now, my, my, my kids.

• 42:11Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  I know, great, right? Yeah, so I my main argument of life is is the talent one. I do I do not think it exists. I think obviously human bodies have predispositions to certain things and there are certain sports which are very predisposed. But when I think about talent, I think of the ability to do a complex task really, really well. I don't think you could do a complex task really, really well without a high level of training. And one of the things before we argue this, I don't know if you're arguing or not, but one of the things I always argue prior is if we were to test talent, we would need to test talent out of the womb. When they pop out of their mom, we need to test it. Because I always say, hey, if I give you two kids coming to Ask a Wrestling Academy.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  One kid has been sitting on a couch playing video games, his parents feeding him snacks all day, never teaching him discipline. He's a roly poly. Listen, he needs some wrestling. We're gonna take care of him. We're gonna give him what he needs. But he's starting way over there. If you have another seven year old who's never wrestled, they both both are there wrestling, but he's got older brothers. They tried to beat him up. He his parents have a very active lifestyle. They're outside, they're hiking, they're climbing trees, he's biking, he's playing games with his brother. He's not sitting inside. They have healthy nutritious food. These are two seven year olds. Neither of them wrestle. But they are worlds apart right now. From from jump, you know, so that's kind of how I like to think about it. So we could debate if you'd like to.

• 43:41Chris Williamson?

  No, I look, I I think that especially in the sport of wrestling, perhaps something that you begin with so early on in life. I mean, look. Some people are literally built differently to others. Some people will respond to training in different sorts of ways. When you really start to ask what is involved in talent and if you were to think about something like desire to train as a kind of talent, some people just really like wrestling.

• 44:09Chris Williamson?

  They enjoy the idea of that. Other people might enjoy something really short. They might enjoy something that's less aggressive. Right? They might be a world champion classical musicianist, right? Classical pianist or violinist or something like that. I don't think that if you just give those two people, even with their desire to work hard and their stubbornness and all the rest of this. If you don't have the desire. So it's an interesting question. Is desire to train part of talent, right? People have a disposition.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  I would say, I would say yes. I say yes. That's been, that, that, that argument's been proven by the sled dogs. Do you know this one?

• 44:45Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  The, the Iditarod sled dogs, right? They, they run that big race across Alaska.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  So they, they breed, obviously breed the dogs and the dogs that they can have a baby like every year or something. So they don't breed the fastest ones and they don't breed the strongest ones. They breed the ones with the most desire to keep running. And so to your point, there's, but so, so what I would say, what I would say to that is it, and so again, like a hundred meter dash or something. It's a really, really simple skill. Like that is not a very complex task, but a complex task. There's likely a multitude of things that it's going to take to be world class at that. So you're going to have to have, you know, work ethic, perseverance, the desire to work to your point. Right? Some level of intellect helps, some level of hand eye coordination helps. Like, you know, there's just going to be this really large basket of,

• 45:35Speaker 01

  hey, you need X amount of this skill set, but which ones do you need? Like in wrestling, for example, I was incredibly slow twitch muscle fiber. My, my fastest ever four yard dash was like a five day, like I am, I am incredibly slow. But I found a way to make it work. There's also wrestlers who are incredibly explosive and fast to find a way to make that work. So, you know, like of this basket of things that you can have, you may need, I will say 20 of 25, but you don't need every one. And you could kind of pick and choose from them. So, yeah, I, I, I think it's an interesting topic. I, so obviously I would absolutely, I would say people obviously

• 46:15Speaker 01

  predisposed to being born differently, but I, I also think the early period in life is often neglected. There's another, you guys, you know about the Polgar sisters? Yo, man, we are so the pole guard, I've been lucky. Let me make sure I'm pretty sure I'm hard to run this. Uh, let me make sure. So this guy, uh, yep, I'm correct. Okay. So this guy, he said, I don't think talent exists and I'm going to prove it. You know how he's going to prove it? He puts an ad out and he says, I need a wife who wants to help me make babies to be chess champions. Uh, and he finds, and he finds one, right? So he finds a wife to agree to these terms that, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna procreate and then my kids are gonna be chess champions. So he, he called his shot. He says it before he even has kids, he says,

• 47:00Speaker 01

  and his, his three girls, I want to say were the three of the five highest rated players of all time. So he called it before he appropriated.

• 47:09Chris Williamson?

  Jesus Christ. Okay. Well, yeah, if you, if you can pick the pocket before you pot the eight, uh, that's, that's fair play. Jared, have you ever considered that you might have a drinking problem? I don't consider a lot, Chris. Well, you drank an entire case of Athletic Brewing Co. last night. But they're non-alcoholic. And that's not a problem? Sorry, man. I, I just kept chugging, waiting for the regret to creep in. Never happened. See, most people like Jared don't want to change what they drink. They just don't want the next day to be a complete write-off. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Co. They make the best NA brews on the planet.

• 47:52Chris Williamson?

  You can find Athletic Brewing Co.'s best-selling lineup at grocery or liquor stores near you, or best option, get a full variety pack of four flavors shipped direct to your door. Right now, get 15% off your first online order by going to the link in the description below, or heading to athleticbrewing.com/modernd wisdom, using the code MODERNDWISDOM at checkout. That's athleticbrewing.com/modernd wisdom, a modern wisdom, a checkout. Near beer. Terms and conditions apply. Athletic Brewing Company, fit for all times. Bottoms up.

• 48:24Chris Williamson?

  So I I'm interested, like, looking back at your um, at your career, you went undefeated for eighty seven matches in a row?

• 48:31Speaker 01

  My last, this is my last two years in college, yes.

• 48:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What, what goes through your mind when you're on a streak like that? Like, do you get increasingly more scared of losing it? A pressure sort of over the top of of things like that?

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Don't think about it. If you did, if you did, you're gonna lose it. Um, you know, so I actually, I I wrote two, I've written two books now. Uh, with assistance, of course, because I am not a great writer. Uh, one is about my life, one is about my sports psychology ideas. But my junior senior year, I actually tried writing um, another book, uh, which is about, so I I saw it was about, it would have been my first book, right? Never published because I didn't think it turned out good enough. But I worked with this sports psychology PhD, and one of the things we did, we sent a questionnaire to every division one NCAA champion in the past fifty years. So at that point, it was nineteen fifty six to oh six, it was a fifty year window. Um, because I, as I said, you know, I know what I think, but I want more good opinions. So we sent that this questionnaire, I think it was like twelve questions.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Um, and one of the questions, which was, this was really enlightening to me because at that point, I already had one NCAA title, I was going on my second. And one of the questions was, when did you go from good to great? And we were looking for some form of my training change, I got a new coach, I had a new mindset, just something, like, what made this happen? And, you know, when did it happen for you specifically? And it was really funny because that, the question was simple. The question was, we want this. And we got something totally different, and it was the most, it was a question that was answered the most similarly of any questions, right? So if we got a hundred questionnaire, a hundred twenty questionnaires back.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  You know, it's, they're all a bit into questions, so you're gonna get things that are, you know, across the gamut of what's going on. So many of them said, "Your question assumes I was great. I never reached greatness, but..." Right? So there were all these people who were, and if you want to look at wrestling, a Division I NCAA champion is like in the 99.999 percentile. Like, you know, we're talking like 1 of 100,000. There's roughly a million people wrestling in America today. There's 10 NCAA champions, 1 in 100,000 approximately or something. So if you're going to label greatness, they're clearly in it. And they all were saying, not all, okay, not all, a very large percentage saying some form of, "I'm not great. I was never great."

• 50:52Speaker 01

  And so as we read through those answers, it struck me, "Okay, well, I wouldn't NCAA title. So by my own definition, I would be great. I've never even thought about it. I never thought, I never considered it. All I was thinking about was, how do I get better? How do I beat this next person as badly as possible?" And so it's one of those things where I realized the power was in not thinking about it. Like, to just be focused on the task ahead of you, as opposed to, and you know, like, one of the things that I get annoyed about is if people say, "What is your legacy?" My legacy is not determined by me. My legacy will be determined by what all the other people think about me. I'm going to focus on every single day what I think I need to do to get better, and what I need to do is

• 51:35Speaker 01

  for what's best in my life, and whatever they want to think of me, they think of me. So that's kind of how all these people are thinking. It's like, I've just focused on getting better, and I'm not worried about being great, as you would call it. And I think that's like really, really powerful.

• 51:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's fascinating. I guess the obsession to just be riven by always wanting to improve is exactly why those people are separated out from the pack. You could probably ask, you know what would be interesting? Would be to ask people who didn't become NCAA champions, but were maybe in the top 2% and ask them when they think they became great. And they might be more likely to answer, "Oh, I became great at this point." Perhaps the lack of thinking that you're great is what actually induces greatness.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  I mean, that's all, I'm sure you've heard the phrase, "Oh, man, rest in peace, my old coach Duke Grupich should say this. If you're, if you're green, you're growing." Oh, what was this phrase? It was essentially, "If you're green, you're growing." So if you have a white belt mentality. Dang, I can't believe I just forgot what he said all the time. Oh, my goodness. Essentially, if you're you're green, you're growing, like if you if you believe you're white belt and you're open to knowledge and learning people, you're going to continue to get better. But when when you think you know it all, or you're good enough, then you're going to start declining. And so, you know, with our wrestling academy now, we've been open for fifteen years, and especially the early days before we were as influential. Because now a lot of times we have kids from the time they're real little, five, six, seven

• 53:07Speaker 01

  years old. But previously, we saw certain kids say, oh, I won a sectional title. I'm I'm I don't need to listen to you. I'm really good. I want a sectional title, or I want a state title. I'm really, really good. But, you know, we talk about state title, then state champion. These are, these are, they're not even in the same ballpark. So yeah, I would a hundred percent agree with, once people think they made it, or that they think they know everything, or know enough, or they can't be helped, then generally, there's some type of either plateauing feature or decline that happens in their skill or ability.

• 53:40Chris Williamson?

  People, I think, even have a sense of this when they look at the trajectory of a any, any person that's on a pursuit's life. The difference between being someone who has fallen off, and someone that never made it, is kind of fascinating to me. There's a, obviously, the person who fell off by virtue of having fallen, it means that at some point, they were up pretty high.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:06Chris Williamson?

  There is a kind of additional disparagement of, oh, you had it and you lost it, as opposed to you never even got it, even though, like, objectively, you did better, but were so seduced, and we are, were so enamored and enthralled by the prospect of momentum and and potential, that if the direction of travel is declining, if it's going from you were great to now you're less great than you were, as opposed to you were average, and then you became better than average, and then you kind of stopped. Like,

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:45Chris Williamson?

  In some ways, yeah, the the person who never made it but didn't get a chance to fall off is in a preferable position sometimes.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Man, that that's one where I would just say you should kind of ignore everyone else. Uh, because I agree, you know, so many times people use term washed up. To your point, that means at some point they had to be significantly better than they currently are. But time's undefeated. No one's been great forever. And so, uh, you know, I, I did retire. I retired for the first time in 2017. I never got to fight the better guys. So I said, if I ever do, I'll come back out of retirement. I unretired 2018. Then I hit issues. So I retired relatively quickly again after that. Um, but I always, you know, if someone wants to continue to fighting, which, uh, listen, I'm not. Fighting is a very tough sport. So let's go to football. If a Aaron Rodgers or Tom Brady, if they want to continue to compete.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  Like what's wrong with them continuing to try to? Yeah, they're not going to be as good at 43 as they were at 28 or 32 or something, obviously. But who cares? Like they're still, they're still elite enough to be in one of the top 32 positions in the NFL, right? That you gotta be top 32 quarterbacks to play on the field. If you're not, you're not going to be on the field. Um, so I, that's something where it's like, well, that's an opinion of other people. And if you want to keep playing football or whatever sport it is, where you're doing, then by all means, like have at it.

• 56:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Well, I, you're kind of on that. I suppose you were nearly, you, you were undefeated for almost a decade, right? Pretty much, almost a decade. But many casual fans remember you for one five second knockout. Yeah. What's that taught you about reputation?

• 56:22Speaker 01

  I ignored it in the first place and I continue to ignore it. So, um, yeah, I just know, I never thought too much about it. I mean, for me, I love to compete and I wanted to prove I was the best. And that's why I, you know, I retired and I said, the only one coming back out is if I get to fight someone ranked higher than me. So, um, you know, I, when I was fighting through the Bellator and won championship days, um, I fought a fair amount of highly ranked guys. Jay Haran was fairly highly ranked. I fought him. That was Lima. Um, there was kind of a handful, but I, I never got to fight anyone who was in the top five. And so I was like, I think I got stuck at six.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  So when I came out, you know, I retired, I said, well, I'm only, I only want to fight someone better than that. I don't want to fight anyone worse than me because I want to try to prove I'm number one. And so, you know, right away was Robbie Waller, who was, I don't know if he was number two or number three in the world at that point in time. But yeah, and that was one where I think a lot of people, and some people did advise me, well, don't do this. If you lose, people will think differently about you. And I said, I don't give a damn what people think about me. I never started MMA to care about what people thought about me. I started MMA to see if I could be the best in the world at it. And that's what I, that's what I want to do. And that's what I'm gonna do. And I, I didn't get there. I got pretty freaking close. Um, but no, I'm not ashamed about that at all.

• 57:39Chris Williamson?

  I, I kind of been, as I was thinking, watching your journey, seeing that first video you posted, which was like inspiring and harrowing in equal parts.

• 57:49Chris Williamson?

  You have this opportunity for your life to be defined by a variety of different situations. You had the opportunity for your career to be defined by being a NCAA champion and eighty-seven undefeated fights in a row. You had the opportunity to be defined by being only the sixth best in the world in one championship and not pivoting on to something else. You had the opportunity to be defined by the fastest knockout, the opportunity to be defined by boxing Jake Paul, the opportunity now to be defined by being the guy that overcame death and got two new lungs and then went back and wrestled within the space of only a year. Each of these junctures, you, the world is sort of offering you this opportunity to make your life about a thing.

• 58:34Chris Williamson?

  And I, it seems to me like you're continuing to like stick your middle finger up at the handshake.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's how life is about. Like legacy is defined by other people if they want to. And if they don't want to think about me, I don't, I don't really care. I hope they have a great life and I'm gonna continue to live life the way I want to and as full as I can. And, um, you know, I, I, I don't know if people cautiously think this about me, but I think there are a lot of people who, I don't know if it may inspired, might be the right word by. How not bashful I am towards that. Like, I'm gonna take a chance. If you offer me a chance, I'm gonna take a chance all, every time. And I'm gonna tell you, I don't need any, give it to me in life. All I need is an opportunity. If you give me, give me an opportunity, I'm gonna take it. And am I gonna win every time? No, I'm not.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Or any of us can win every time? No, we're not. And, you know, there's a, there's actually this really good book. Have you ever, have you read, I don't know if you, uh, how you feel about this guy, but I, I like him and that. Got to meet him and he's very cool. His name's Josh Metcalf. He wrote Chop Wood Carry Water. Um, really good, really good book. Um, and then, but then it was funny, cause he's written a handful of books. Most notable one was Chop Wood Carry Water. But then he wrote a book called Finish Empty. And it was life from a deathbed perspective. And it came out right around the time I was died. And so, uh, I got to read it with literally a deathbed perspective. Cause I woke up, I wanna say it was me, you know, I don't know, I don't know the exact date it came out.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  I got it maybe a month and a half to two months after everything went down, you know? And one of the, one of the really amazing quotes, uh, that it just sticks in my head. So I better get it right, is, uh, the point of life is not to arrive safely at death.

• 1:00:24Chris Williamson?

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• 1:01:03Chris Williamson?

  Best of all, they offer a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it for 29 days. And if you don't love it, they'll give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. You've got this line, "The point of life is not to arrive safely at death. Stop worrying about things and get to action."

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there's another good one. There's another really good one there. Worrying is like a rocking chair. You can move all day, but you ain't going anywhere. Right? So stop worrying about things. Go make it happen. And that's kind of, that's kind of how I lived my life prior to this. And now it's even like, dude, I'm, yeah, that's how I'm gonna do it. And you know, like I said, I take my medicine every day. I wear my mask when I have to. I'm trying not to be reckless with my livelihood. My plan is to be the longest living double lung transplant person ever. That is my goal.

• 1:02:10Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what the record is?

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  38 years. So I'm going 39, baby.

• 1:02:14Chris Williamson?

  Wow. And how old would you, how old would you be?

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  I'd be 80. So, you know, um, yeah, that would be, uh, that'd be, that'd be a good, good life. And, you know, I honestly, I figure if I make it like 15, 20 more years, there's gonna be some new technology. They're, they're already starting to build organs with your own stem cells, I believe is what they're doing. And so that would also get me off the immunosuppressants because those over.

• 1:02:40Chris Williamson?

  So you're suggesting that you would get another lung transplant?

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:02:45Chris Williamson?

  You'd be, you'd be down for that? You'd go through it again?

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, because the immunosuppressants are, they're a decent portion of the reason why life expectancy is not that high, because when you kill your immune system, you cause a whole bunch of other problems, right? And so I don't know that, you know, they're, they are, they're literally building organs with stem cells and your, your own DNA. They're probably not very good at it yet.

• 1:03:12Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I get the sense if, if there's a list of people that they want to test this on as a good case study, I reckon an ex-professional athlete is probably pretty high up. And I don't know how many ex-professional athletes at your level have had, like, how many, no one's gonna be, I'll volunteer, I'll volunteer to have the lung transplant from my real ones to my. Fake real ones.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  Fake real ones.

• 1:03:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  Well, I told my doctor, Chris, I told my doctor, I said, hey, man, one of my doctors is pretty young and he's, I'll say progressive, like you could tell he wants to make it happen and he wants to make, you know, life better for all the lung transplant patients. And I said, hey, man, you got any ideas that you think are going to work? Run them by me because you're not going to find anyone more disciplined and I'm down for it. If you think it's going to help me live longer, I will, I will run that protocol. So you just let me know.

• 1:04:00Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, yeah. Dude, you're, you're an inspiration, man. You always were, but this is, it's another level. So I'm, I'm really, really happy that you're still here. I'm really happy that you're doing this. Good luck with the, the fight. I'm going to be watching. I'm going to be watching and enjoying.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:04:14Chris Williamson?

  What else have you got going on? Where should people go to keep up to date with all of the things?

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  Oh, man. Uh, you know, I don't post on social media that much anymore. Well, it's Instagram and Twitter and this is my real name. Uh, it's not Twitter anymore. It's called X. Sorry. Uh, I, I, but I actually, I have a movie coming out this fall also. Um, about this, this can be exciting. I don't know exactly when it's coming out yet. Uh, so my wife's, one of their family friends in high school, uh, was a movie producer and he was watching my stuff last summer and he said, that looks amazing. Um, you, would you guys be open to it? My, my wife had filmed so much stuff while I was in the hospital. And, uh, he shopped it around and the, the Henrys, I don't know if you know them, um, at Novo Studios picked it up. And so we've done

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  a whole bunch of filming on it and I, I think it's going to be great. And I hope it's really inspiring to, for people to lead a life where just like I said, they're, they're fearless. They live the life that they want to live, not the one that they're afraid what other people are going to think of them. So they don't do things, they don't take chances. Um, and to live their life as fully as possible. So that's kind of what I'm hoping to inspire people with.

• 1:05:22Chris Williamson?

  Unreal, man. Unreal, dude. Let's keep in touch. I'm excited to see what you do next. And let's, uh, let's talk when the documentary comes out.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  Awesome. I love it. Thanks so much, man.

• 1:05:32Chris Williamson?

  Appreciate you, dude. Catch you later on.

• 1:05:34Speaker 02

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