Mike Tyson: From Street Fights to World Champion | E168

0:00Whoever believes a lot of fame and money is going to make them happy, they never had any fame or money. Whenever you're prepared to be the best in the world at anything, you have to be prepared for disappointment. Because you're going to be disappointed, you're going to be discouraged. You have to prepare that's going to happen and not to give up. Never give up. Fights to your last breath. Never, never, never give up. Success comes in many forms. Success is not drinking with you, not cheating on your wife. Success has so many different perspectives.

0:29Randall Kaplan:What's your advice to all the successful people out there who don't spend enough time with their kids? Whatever you do with your kids is going to pay off. If you spend a lot of time with them, that's different. Good stuff is going to happen to you. It's just about what you want to put that time in and what you want to get out of from that time. You don't have to win all your fights, but you've got to fight them all. That's what I learned. You don't have to win them all, but you do have to fight them all. Listen, this is what I learned from Rodney. Without no test, there's no testimony. You can't talk about your life.

0:56You've never lived it.

1:14Randall Kaplan:my guest today is mike tyson mike is the former heavyweight boxing champion of the world one of the greatest boxers of all time and one of the most recognized sports personalities in the world When he was 20 years old, four months, and 22 days old, he became the youngest boxer ever to win a heavyweight title, and he was the first heavyweight boxer to simultaneously hold the WBA, WBC, and IBF titles. He finished his professional career with a 50-6 record with a knockout to win percentage of 88%, and is a member of the International Boxing Hall of Fame. In addition to his incredible boxing career, Mike has appeared in dozens of movies and TV shows and is the creator and actor of the one-man hit Broadway show, The Undisputed Truth, and is the author of a best-selling book of the same name.

1:59Randall Kaplan:Mike is also a successful entrepreneur. He's the founder of two companies, including Tyson 2.0, and he is a dedicated philanthropist through his Mike Tyson Cares Foundation and his support of other charities, including the Make-A-Wish Foundation and the Special Olympics. Mike, it's an incredible pleasure to have you on my show. Welcome to In Search of Excellence. Pleasure to be here, my friend. I always start my podcast with family because our family helps shape our personality, our values, and the preparation for our future. You had a crazy life. Yeah. Could be crazy, yeah. So you had a crazy childhood growing up.

2:28Randall Kaplan:Your dad was a pimp. Yes. And your mother was a drug addict and helped with him in the sex industry. And when you were one year old, your parents used alcohol and drugs sometimes to put you to sleep. Absolutely. Marijuana. Marijuana at one years old. So take us through the first five years of your life. I think a lot of us remember what we were like in kindergarten. We're going to get into your later childhood right after that. But through five years old, did you realize what kind of life you were living? I had a really middle-class life when I was five years old. My life comes across like I started in the pits of Brownsville.

3:07Maybe I let people want to believe it, but that's really not what happened. I remember us living in the Brownstone, and we had, his name was Arthur. He was our landlord. He lived there, a Jewish older man. And I had a really decent life until I guess my mother, she made a bad business decision with a man and lost all of her money and stuff. And then I think that's when we moved to Brownstone, and then life became so much challenging then.

3:33Randall Kaplan:It was a high-crime neighborhood. Big time, high-crime, high-drugs, high everything. It's everything. than just a city in Brooklyn, even now. But you just don't want to be there if you don't know anyone. When you were younger, you were bullied. Big time, yes. Big time. You had a lisp. Yes. You had bad acne. Yes. You have a high-pitched voice. Overweight. And you were chubby. Yeah. So tell us. And I wore glasses. And you wore glasses. Yeah. So an unattractive kid, and that's the kind of kid that people bully. So how did being bullied influence your future? What were you thinking at the time? A lot of bullies, and this happened to me when I was bullied.

4:13Randall Kaplan:I said, I don't want to be bullied anymore, and I'm going to make it in life. It helped motivate me to be successful in life. I never thought that. I used to thought that I'm going to try to avoid these guys all my life. I never knew that they don't go anywhere. You can't escape these guys unless you confront them. That's what I learned at a young age. You can't run from them. You got to confront them. How old were you when you were bullied for the first time? as early I can meet as conscious I'm in as far as intermingling with people like going and seeing people at schools yeah probably eight years old when I started getting involved with school they always picked on me in school kicked the shit out of me it's hard to believe that someone kicked the shit out of you no listen when I see these mean bad savage guys in the streets I understand I get it I get something to happen and returning to those people and at that point would you come home crying to your mom?

5:05Randall Kaplan:All the time. What would your mom tell you? Don't worry. It's going to stop. You don't have to fight them back now. You can do it. My mother, yes, was nonviolent. She didn't believe in fighting and stuff. She believed in taking care, making sure the kids avoid reality, life. But it wasn't like that. You had to confront your demons. Right. 20 % of kids in high school between the ages of 13 and 18 are bullied. It's a national pandemic. By the time I'm 13, I'm never bullied again. And everybody's, all the tough guys are my buddies. They're one of my friends. And by the time I was 13, I knew all the gang's guys.

5:39Everybody knew me. We all robbed together. And that's just how the life was. Right. It was like a bizarro world. Like all the bad was really good. And all the good was really bad. The respectable people were bad. And the criminal guys were good. And that's how it was in that world. If you weren't involved with crime, you weren't our friend. You're the enemy. And that's how it was.

6:01Randall Kaplan:You're listening to part one of my incredible interview with Mike Tyson, the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time. Be sure to check out part two next week. Now, without further ado, here's part one of my incredible interview with Mike. At some point, you're 10 years old. Yeah. And you love pigeons. You were an unhappy kid. Pigeon was the first thing that you loved in life. A hundred percent. Listen, I've gotten involved with pigeons from being bullied. I'm walking, because, you know, in my school, you have lunch and you have breakfast. So I go and I eat breakfast, and then I leave the school, walk around the school, kill time until lunchtime comes, which is probably 11 to 12 o 'clock.

6:37So I go there, I eat lunch, and then I wait until school is over, then I can go back home. One time I had eaten lunch, and after that process of eating lunch, I was walking around the school as I normally does, and I saw three guys. And then they started to sell me and say, hey, you have any money? I said, no. And they said, if I find any money, I'm going to kick your, you know what? and let them check me. And he said, yo, you want to fly with us? And I had no idea what flying meant. And so he said, I said, yeah. Because I was scared. And so I climbed this fence. And he said, give me those milk crates.

7:10I'm throwing them milk crates. I don't know why he wants these milk crates, this tough kind of street guy. We're taking these milk crates in this abandoned building. I'm getting really nervous. I don't know these guys. And they're trying to get me in this abandoned building. He said, get up there. And I was scared. I went up this day at the second, third floor. And I climbed to the roof. And they went up first, and then I started passing them the crate. Then I went up there, and I saw this little Cooper box with a little fence, net fence. I saw birds. I was like, wow, these guys like birds? I thought these guys were really horrible.

7:44I thought these guys like birds. These kind of guys like birds? And I was impressed with those kind of guys because nobody messed with those guys. Their brothers were tough, and they always got respect in the street. And so I was there. I don't know. They'd go to the store for me. Give me some tea. Give me some food. Give me some cake, milk, this. The birds were, I didn't know at the time, but the birds they had was really out of condition. So they fly for like 10 minutes. Then they land on somebody. Go over their shoulder. You scare the birds on the roof. I'm going to fly the birds. If they come on the roof, you scare them off.

8:11And so that's the stuff I did for them. And so after they kept me captured and the school was over, they let me go home. And I definitely, you know, that whole day, I was just thinking about these birds and these guys. And so the next day come, I go eat breakfast and I go to the coop that they had me at. And as soon as I come to the coop, they see me from the roof and they start throwing bricks at me. Try to steal our birds, mother effing this and that. And I said, no, I just came by to know if any of your guys need me to do anything, go to the store for you or something. And from that day on, I was stuck with birds.

8:45Randall Kaplan:But then you had a neighbor and a bully and he did something really bad to the birds. No, no. Once I started getting involved, this is a year now. A year has passed. Now I am robbing people for the money to buy birds and bird feed. And I had my birds hidden in an abandoned building that my family happened to live in. And I showed somebody the birds that I bought with the money that I had stolen. And he went back and told those guys I had a bunch of birds. And he set me up to get robbed by the birds. And so those guys came in the room and tried to snatch my birds. And my mother came up. Hey, Austin, what you're doing?

9:22and then they ran. But one guy ran. Before he ran, he took a bird and put it under his shirt and took off, ran between my mother. And I was chasing him. I don't know why I was chasing him. I don't know why. He started saying, hey, please give me my bird. And he stopped and said, oh, the words he said, I can't even tell you. He said to me. But he said, you want this bird? You're fat. And I took the bird. He hit me with the bird's body, then hit me with the head. And one of the guys that used to bully me too, He always bullied me too, but he said, you better fight him. He was mad, even though that was his friend that did that.

9:58He felt a little bit of being assaulted by me ripping the birds. They love birds too. He took the bird, hit me with the body, hit me with the head. He called me fat and stupid and all that stuff, and I fought him.

10:09Randall Kaplan:There's blood on your shirt? On my face. Yeah, your face. Just splattered all over the place. Yeah, because when he took the head, the blood is shooting and hit me with the bird. It's traumatic even to see it. and then it pisses you off again. That's the first time I ever saw that. And it was the first time I snatched the bird head off. It was my first time. And so my friend told me to fight him. And it was sloppy. But I started fighting him. And I kind of dropped him and he fell on the floor. Not necessarily in the face, but it slipped. But it looked like I hit him. And the guys that came there to rob my bird, they all started applauding, clapping, laughing.

10:44The guy was bigger than you? Yeah. He was like 14, 13.

10:48Randall Kaplan:And you were 10? Probably 10, 11, yeah. And what was the feeling when you hit a guy for the first time? I couldn't wait to go home and tell people that I had a fight, but they knew they'd seen the fight. People started coming around, and everybody started talking, wow, man, you did this, you did that, man, you kicked such and such. And then I used to start watching my friend's box, playing around, and that's when I wanted to be that kind of tough guy, know how to fight the kind of guy in the streets, nobody mess with me. I could wear my jewelry, my fancy clothes, and they wanted to take them from me.

11:18Randall Kaplan:Did the bullying stop after that first fight? Absolutely, but then the bullying started with me. I started bullying people. That was the norm. You were bullied and then you became a bully. Yeah, that's what happened to bullied people. Hurt people hurt people. And so at that point you started getting in more fights and beating people up? Tons of fights, man. I must have had three fights a day. You would start them? Huh? You would start the fight? Well, if I'm on the bus and I'm trying to pickpocket you, and I don't know if you have a friend with you on the bus or a family member, and the family member sees me, but you don't.

11:50The Phantom Man just comes up and hits you. Boom. He's in your pocket. And he explains to his partner, he's in your pocket. And so I'm fighting on the bus. I'm getting my butt kicked on the bus because they jumped me. And they kicked me. I'm only like 12, 13, but I'm a big kid. I look like this at 13. And I'm fighting both of them. And so I get off the bus, but I snatch his chain before I get off the bus, stuff like that. And we were just very notorious. So we would get on the bus or something, a train, and the conductor would say, the bus driver, hey, everyone, Some young people got on the bus, and they're jostling, they're pickpockets, watch your pockets.

12:25When we get on the bus, we're so, wow, he said that, so we get off the bus. And it was just a struggle every day. Sometimes I go out with three friends, four friends, early in the morning, start robbing and stealing. Some of them might get killed. We all don't come home together. That's just our life as really poor kids in New York City.

12:42Randall Kaplan:What was the first time you committed a crime? You said you were pickpocketing people. And what made you do it? because that was the norm for everyone I was hanging around. These kids, they live in these low-income houses, but they dress. You'd think these guys are from prep school. They got the glasses. They got the colligans. They got the diamond watches. They was up on all the fashion designs of the day. They wore clothes, Jordache, and all that stuff. They were just into the dressing scene, and I wanted to be like that because one day I went hanging out with them because I'm flying the birds.

13:19I'm on the roof with the birds. And you get bird shit on you because you're cleaning the bird coop. You get tar on you because you're trying to tar the coop so you know rain or snow would get involved. And you look like a mess. You look shit on your face. And they say, come on, we're going to the center, the jam. I was too young. I didn't understand you had to wash, first go home and wash and do all that stuff, then come out. I used to stay dirty and funky all day because everybody liked them when we was on the roof and we were looking dirty, people would come by all hugging. Hey, we're going out tonight.

13:50I didn't know you had to go home, change, get fly. And I went to the center where they were jamming, and they saw me, and they all started laughing. And I started crying. I didn't know about it. I had to take a shower and dress and get the feathers out my hair. I had no idea about that kind of lifestyle hygiene. And after that, that never happened again. I always went shopping with the best clothes, I was just so, what was that? I was so self-conscious about my appearance.

14:22Randall Kaplan:I hope you're enjoying this video so far, but before we jump back in, I wanna know if you've ever thought about what you need to do to reach a nice level of success in your life. Over the last 25 years, I've been an advisor to more than 50 companies. I've invested nearly 100, including Google, Lyft, and Seagate. And I also co-founded a company that today is worth more than$15 billion. I've been incredibly blessed in my journey, And at this stage of my life, I want to give back. I want to share the lessons I've learned so you can reach incredible success way faster than I did. In my own journey, I've learned that having the right mentor is a massive advantage to achieving our goals.

14:55Randall Kaplan:I'm hugely passionate about mentoring others. I'm looking for a few hungry entrepreneurs who are excited to take action on their journey to incredible future success. So if that's you, I've got an opportunity. In the description of this video, there's a link where you can apply to work with me. All you need to do is answer a few simple questions, and if you're a good fit, my team will reach out so we can build a game plan together. All right, now let's get back to the video.

15:19Randall Kaplan:So, how old were you the first time you robbed somebody, and then did the crime keep... Probably 11. 11? Yeah, but I got away. I got arrested a lot, but I got away a lot, too. A lot of people say, the kid let him go. Right. So, by the time you're 13 years old, you were arrested 37 times. Probably more. I just put 37 hours down and probably more. So I would get arrested a lot, but they would let me go, the cops too. Why? Why would they let you go? Well, I was a kid. You know what I mean? First, they thought I was a tough guy because I was big. And then they saw my age, I'm 20, 12, and they said, and they would let me go.

15:54It's not like it is nowadays. You can get 10 years old. Cops will lock you up, might kill you. And it's just a whole different story. Right. And sometimes they bring me to my mother. My mother would just assault me right in front of them. And they would just laugh. The cops would just laugh. I'd just laugh. My mother kicked my butt.

16:10Randall Kaplan:I mean, I was wondering about your mom. What would she say when you came home with the jewelry that she knows you didn't earn or pay for? Yeah, she wanted some too. And I would come with their money. I would get money because I would steal money from my friends too in the house. I used to be really, I don't know, an incorrigible young kid. I had no respect for anybody. I would steal anybody's money. nobody's pain meant anything to me because that's what I've learned on the streets. Everybody else means nothing if it doesn't have anything to do with your survival. So most parents, when they come home, they know their kid's a crime.

16:46I say we cut off welfare. We have no way of getting any kind of money. Right. You know what I mean? If you sell your bodies in. But maybe you get too old to do that too. So you have no money. You're not on welfare because you got men in your house and everybody's watching these men coming in and out of your house. and your son, he's 12 years old, but he comes home with$5 ,000 or$1 ,500, something like that, and you're not going to take any money when he says, hey, ma, look at this or something like this. And when my mother took some of the money, and I would come back later and say, hey, ma, you owe me what,$500,$200, whatever like that.

17:21She said, you owe me your life. You're not going to get nothing back. And I understood that back then. That's just the way it is. I never understood family. I didn't know I used to think everybody was just criminals. That's the world I come from. Everybody is trying to hustle.

17:35Randall Kaplan:No one had a nice family that you said, one day I want to be like that or emulate, I wish I had what they had? Yeah, but they had received everything they had from crime. So how was I going to get that? By the only means, I'm known by watching the people that have what I want receive that. Does that make sense? Yes. And so that's what I wanted to do. How did they get in? Because people, they knew they were criminals, but people used to always love them, hug them. The bigger criminal you were, the more respected you were. And that's what we wanted to in the neighborhood, respect. And if you weren't wearing these fancy clothes and fancy shoes and driving your moped or your motorbike or your car even, you're not going to get any respect.

18:13Randall Kaplan:So what were your goals at that point? Was it to become a professional criminal and just be a king? Yeah, that's all I wanted to do was robbing still. That was it. And did you ever think that at some point it's going to come to an end and you may spend your life in prison or you didn't care? Well, that's what my friends were doing. We were all doing it. That's what we were doing, spending all my life. I had friends just recently come out of jail, 40 years, 38 years. They'd been locked up when they were locked up with me. When I was 12, 13 years old, they were locked up with me, but they stayed on the path of crime, and I went on the path of sports and redeemed myself in that perspective.

18:51Randall Kaplan:So you were sent to a juvie home when you were 13. No, no, this is when it gets interesting. I'm in the holding facility in the Bronx called Spoffett Juvenile Facility. And so one day we come to the auditorium. The auditorium is bigger than this. But we come here, and they turn the lights on. They play the movie The Greatest, the story of Muhammad Ali. The movie was over. They turned off the light, and Muhammad Ali comes in. Everybody goes berserk. I say right off the bat, I say, I want to be like him, in my mind, subconsciously. So a month or so go by. I get transferred to try-on school for boys.

19:30And so I get transferred there, and I get in trouble. And I don't know, probably a month or two months while I'm there, I get in trouble, fight. I don't know. I don't want to say stabbing, but just fight. And so I went from that dorm, which was a nice dorm, and then I go to Blairwood, I guess. Elwood. I go to Elwood College. I don't know what cottage is for the guys that have to be escorted all the time. They're really violent. They may be there for murder, you know, juveniles. And so they call it the lockup cottage because when you leave the cottage, you always have to have your handcuffs. It wasn't like the other ones.

20:09You can go free, go walk around. We always had to have supervision and handcuffs. And so I went there and I met this gentleman named Bobby Stewart. it. So I was saying, wow, I hear Bobby Stewart with a box and everybody talks about him. And then he came to my door and knocked on the door. I heard you want to see me. What do you want? How do you know who I am? And he was just a tough, rough guy. I'm like, wow, I thought he was going to be nice because I wanted the kids. But he wasn't nice. He wasn't nice. I said, I want to be a fighter. He said, everybody wants to be a fighter. Show me you want to be a fighter and show some respect to people because I wasn't that I was disrespectful to everyone.