Raw Truths From The Brink Of Death - Ben Askren - #1116

0:00Welcome back to life, dude. Well, I've been living again for quite a while now. June 28th was actually the day I got to transplant last year. So coming up on a year for that. I believe I woke up on July 2nd or somewhere around there. I 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. So one year ago from now, you were really in the shit. Well, I just made a post yesterday because on June 6th, which was two days ago, Saturday, I got inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. And when I went home, I went back to the hotel with my wife.

0:41I said, did I get airlifted June 6th last year? So last year on June 6th, I was in Vegas and I went to the first hospital, second hospital. And then we had some friends that came out that were, one was a doctor and one was a nurse. And I said, he's not going to make it to this hospital. we need to get him back to milwaukee because they have a good uh it's called cbicu uh cardiovascular intensive care unit and they they got me a flight they put me on a plane uh took my way back and i said to my wife well why was that such a bad day because i don't remember i was sleeping as she said the transport me they had to fully paralyze my body um 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'd come off ECMO.

1:24A lot of people go on it, don't come off it. They were hoping I wouldn't have to do that. I did have to do that. June 6th last year, although I don't remember it, it was quite eventful. Then this year, you got to celebrate. It's full circle. For the people who don't know what we're talking about, could you explain what's happened over the last 12 months? Yeah. Well, May 28th last year, 2025, I went to the hospital. I actually went to the hospital on the day before also So May 27th, my back was hurting, just a back pain. I thought it was a back spasm. That was it. And on May 27th, I tested. Everything was normal.

2:01I did all the vitals. 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 a handful of other back spasms in my life. And the medicine's really good. And it just got worse and worse and worse. And then, you know, I was up most of the night trying to make it feel better. And when I woke up in the morning, so sometime in the middle of the night, I'd finally fall asleep. When I woke up in the morning, it was a little bit later, and she had been videotaping me sleeping.

2:35And she had sent it to a few of our doctor friends, and they said, you need to get him to the hospital as soon as you can. So when I woke up— What was happening while you were sleeping? I was, like, super, like, super fast and hard breathing. Right? um and so when i woke up my mother's like hey we're going to the hospital i said dude you made me go you make me go to the hospital i said i'm not going back to the hospital damn it um you know 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 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.

3:18I don't remember anything. I was asleep for, I want to say, I think it was 37 days, I believe. So 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. Yes. 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. Well, I woke up and it was, uh what you know i say wake up i was awake sometimes but i i to my recollection i don't recall any any of it nothing and so that 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 yeah 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 into this it was how am i here and why am I here?

4:11And then I couldn't speak at all. And so 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, Um, and then eventually my wife came in the morning, whatever that, you know, the next morning or whatever, 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.

4:50I had to read through it and I was like, oh my God, what? Like, how did this ever happen? Um, and yeah, so that was kind of my recollection of waking up and kind of figuring out what was going on. so retrospectively i know that you weren't awake to be able to work out this from a first person view yeah you go into the waiting room and then what happens from there 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 in all my life i've only had to get on an 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.

5:31And that was what happened to me. I had a little infection on my elbow. I washed, I showered, I soaked it, I added bacterial. And within a couple of days, it was gone and I didn't think much of it. And then I made no connection, but about four days later, my back was started hurting and I thought, okay, this is the back spasm. And everyone always said, you would do it differently. 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. No one's ever heard of that. That's totally ridiculous. So the staph got into my blood and it turned into a necrotizing pneumonia in which my body was essentially eating my lungs from the inside out.

6:13That 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 a really bad like sepsis and necrotizing pneumonia. And yeah, so they tried doing all they could to kind of like stay in my lungs and keep me alive. And at some point it became the only way I was going to stay alive was to have a lung transplant, which, you know, again, I wasn't awake for any of this. 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 I think I was still kind of unconscious for about six more days after that.

6:54and then I woke up and there I was. Fuck me. Where do you get lungs from? That's what I said.

7:05I don't know. I actually wrote the donor family. The donor family has not responded. Is it two from the same person? Yeah. You can't mix and match two lungs. Oh, I actually think you can. No, I know you can because I talked to a guy in the hospital about it. And, you know, that's where you think about life and you think about gratitude and you never want to take anything over granted. And I always think about the people I meet in the hospital now. This is a while ago. Probably four months ago, but I was in for one of my kind of routine checkups. And this guy comes up to me and, you know, I'm waiting to go inside to meet the doctors.

7:42And so a lot of the same similar type people in a similar area. So he had a lung transplant. And, you know, I think, OK, 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 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 see 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.

8:16So 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. Where do they, how do the lungs come out? It cuts you right on. I don't know if you guys can see this, but right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It splits you right in half. Yeah. 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? You know, you know what, Chris? I've never had the balls to go look exactly how they do it No way No I don't want to You just didn't want to know It's called the

8:55Clam shell incision Is what it's called I can see exactly where I've been cut I know what it feels like But no I've never had the balls To go look up and see exactly How they open you up I feel like that will gross me out a little too much Yeah 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 human ac ac ducting maybe more accurately it's like oh there's a pipe that comes down we got to get rid of this pipe that pipe needs to be reconnected yeah i mean i don't know how again if you haven't done your research i 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 because you need uh 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 there's a moment when there's four lungs there's one of two choices they either attach both at the same time and switch one out 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 uh worst lung transplant she's ever seen because so many 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 but they had to like really scrape all the old ones off the inside of my chest cavity because they were kind of decomposing inside of you 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 i don't remember what the time was now because 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 bleeding at that point in time.

10:38Do people have any idea where this comes from? Is it just randomly onsets? Is it a virus? Do you get it by being on mats or what? Well, I think I got 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 of these things whatsoever. And, you know, the Kyle Busch thing that happened, that was a couple of weeks back and 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 i 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 that's really interesting mindset.

11:37I guess it's really only important for you to understand what happened insofar as it informs what you can do now to improve. What happened was I think probably something that's extremely rare. I could go back and ask him. 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 time trying to connect everyone that could possibly help me um 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 of 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 also okay so you wake up you come around what next man so the first 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 get 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 cross-referred with people that were there and i hey, did this actually happen?

13:01But then I thought I got transported to this hospital that was on the lake half a mile from my house, and there's no hospital there. That didn't exist. That was only in my mind for multiple days. And I know I kept threatening the nurses that I was going to walk home because I was just on the road. I couldn't even walk. I couldn't walk. It's a lie from every different direction. yeah so you know that the first couple weeks like um you know i think i was on so many drugs i did get out pain meds relatively quick but um it's been the rest of stuff i was on and then they call it like delirium because you don't sleep enough in the hot you know in the hospital um yeah i had so many wild thoughts um you know positive thing had a lot of friends visiting me so that's like i know some of the things that i thought happened did happen because i said hey 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 what was the lowest point that your health got to when you woke up was it immediate and was it relatively uphill from there 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?

14:30So not right before, like minute-wise. I guess I spiked a really bad fever and they didn't know why and that was scary to everyone, including my wife. But as I woke up, yeah, everything was like, I guess it moved in a positive direction, probably not nearly as fast as I thought. 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 scurrying. 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 depth.

15:05I lost like 60 pounds, for example, of, you know, muscle while I was muscle, body weight, but mostly muscle while I was in the hospital. 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 tubes out. I was the first lung transplant patient that they sent home with a chest tube in. I was like, you got to let me go. You got to let me go. And then, yeah, unfortunately I got infected. I ended up back in the hospital for two weeks. I don't think of any fault of my own. I think it just happened.

15:37And, you know, then I got stuck there again for a while. But yeah, it was a process. It took a long time. 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 met like i go four steps and i'm holding onto 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 hey today i want to try to walk for eight minutes walking for eight minutes is my goal and then once i got the hang of that then it's 10 minutes there's 12 minutes and then i you know kind of keep building up and then it's okay now i'm gonna try to do some squats, which was, you know, in the beginning, I couldn't get myself off the toilet.

16:19I had to have, literally 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 11, over 11 months out. Yeah. Most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts their performance, which is why for the last five years I've started pretty much every morning with Element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. This orange salt in a cold glass of water is like a sweet, salty, orangey nectar, and I really tell the difference when I take it versus when I don't.

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17:25That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. What was your main emotion when you came back around once you were a little bit less delirious? yeah probably labrigal i mean i still think about sometimes still i wake up and think about 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 am i gonna 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've probably spent you know I can't tell you how many hours since I spent 11 months researching what do I do about this problem what do I do about that problem and just kind of like heavy heavy chat GPT user for real chat GPT 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

18:3470, 80 % of the time, it's pretty good. There's a few things where it kind of really gets it wrong. So I always cross-reference first. Okay, so the flabbergasted thing is so funny. I've always had this thought in my mind. I've come off a moped in Bali. I've been in a couple of pretty big car accidents. A few things, a sort of shock, kinetic incident 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.

19:16Someone got shot, you know, crossfire, somebody got shot 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, 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 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 sensation i would say that you know why am I here?

20:02How did this happen? And the prize of it. And that was kind of like me piecing it together for the first handful of days. And then the other one was, what happened while I was asleep? I've been asleep for 37 days. What's the Bitcoin price that, please? What's the Bitcoin price that? It was good at that point in time. I actually missed a whole bunch of really, really important wrestling events in late May and early June. And, 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 there was a bunch of really amazing things like, um, so many people supported, um, either through prayer or helping my family in some way, shape or form or meals.

20:50Cause 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 so you know my kids are all on summer break it's not even like they go to school so you know who's gonna 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 i tell him hey well not i didn't do shit um my wife i tell him 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 so i guess you know you look across at somebody that's had a career as an athlete that's over overcome lots of challenges and difficulty in training sessions from being a kid to being a teenager to a young athlete to a veteran athlete in all these different sports and wrestling and mma and boxing how much of that were you able to draw on when it came to recovery and resilience all of it 100 i mean um you know because the main thing is i mean it's been 11 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 11 months out i'm having a pretty good day but you know for a while before the show actually 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 it just feels weird sometimes you know and then obviously earlier on it was a lot more things than that it 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 because you just sit on the couch 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.

22:55And that's kind of, you know, 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, OK, well, if I don't feel good at 10 a.m., I'm going to go get my workout at 2 p.m. You know, like I am going to work out. I'm going to train and I'm going to do my breathing exercises. And, you know, this handful of other medical things that I do. I'm going to do them every day I'm not going to miss it so I've been very disciplined and regimented in that and obviously that came from my life as an athlete being very disciplined and regimented in that it just crossed over kind of exactly.

23:33What did your weight get down to? What was the smallest, the lowest weight? The lowest was 138 so it's like skin and bones And what did you fight at? I fought at 170 but I was, I got a TRT so I got a little bit bigger my normal walking weight was probably uh you know what when i was fighting 185 ish plus or minus a few pounds and then as i retired i was probably 195 ish somewhere somewhere in there so that's part of 50 percent best part of 50 percent yeah yeah so uh yeah quite quite quite the drawdown in weight um and it was just like i said i mean i don't i don't think my wife has pictures skin and bones really is kind of what i was is that because you're not moving and not consuming any calories other than what they need to keep you alive is that why um i think they're not moving well you know i've 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 fact i'm not 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 don't know what they call oxygenation or whatever that's a drop right and that was really problematic so I guess for a while they even have 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 don't feel for the rest of my life probably unfortunately um I believe that has some uh some capacity of where it eats your muscles a little bit what's that do that's a head in its own yeah it's something i don't know exactly which part of the immunosuppression it is but it's an immunosuppressant so with uh 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 which is why flight for you and being in different places is more dangerous because you don't have an immune so 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.

25:46Yep. 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 control of the area or what my surroundings are. Unfortunately, I wear a mask a lot, which is, you know, COVID again, baby. I make fun of the mask people for sure. And I'm a mask person. yeah that's that's no good um yeah 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 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 weeks i've gotten uh lower on my you guys are posaconazole and tacrolimus 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 indiscretion go up.

26:31And I think, you know, my year anniversary is coming up in about three weeks and I'll hopefully get to go down even a little more potentially. Unreal. Okay, I'm interested in what matters to you more or less now than it did before. Yeah. You know what? I said this, you know, if I would have died when I went to the hospital, Marissa, walking to the hospital, I don't remember anything. If I would have died there, which I came pretty close to, I had a great life. I really got to do what I love for a living and coaching wrestling around the wrestling academies. I think it's very meaningful work in that you're helping the next generation of young person not only get better at wrestling, but get better at life.

27:19I love my wife. I have a great family. I was really lucky in that it didn't take me to die to figure out that, oh, I have a priorities like i think my priorities were were pretty good i was pretty you know reflectively i can reflect on hey if i would have died 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 um more patient um 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 um i became a christian which uh i would say prior i was kind of christian adjacent like i went to church for 16 years or so but just you know it didn't kind of click all the way um so that would be you know probably a 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.

28:24And 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 if it took my time, even if it was just, hey, I meet with the founder once a month or whatever. If it took my time and I wasn't passionate about it, I asked a few different people like, hey, can I get out? I'll make a deal, whatever you feel is fair. Give me what's fair. and I just want to take a few more things off of my plate. And I kind of feel strongly about that. You know, I get some offers to do things now and I'm just like, is this what I really, really, really 100 % want to do with my life?

29:01Is this worth the time with my kids and my family? And if the answer is no, then I generally choose not to do it. Have you seen Peaky Blinders, the series? No, I haven't, but I know. Blunch of Butter Vows is a really big fan of it, so I've heard references, but I've never watched it. Really cool BBC series. and uh 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 uh 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 that's crazy he uh him and his brother basically nearly died at the battle of the psalm 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 yeah no uh yeah that's true that's pretty actor 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 um i don't think that's going to apply to me fully because a lot of them are older unhealthy people i mean 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 yes yeah so you see you get it so uh they actually the longest living person at post double lung transplant is 38 years so that's kind of my goal uh it's 39 at least 39 um but yeah everything now is extra and it's kind of reformatted me so the number one thing i i love to do is my brother and i have wrestling academies um we have nine of them now in the state 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.

31:37And it's one of those that was weird because I never really thought twice about, but 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. 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, if 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. So to make sure I'm around for more of my kids' stuff.

32:11And then obviously, now my daughter's 13 and she really likes wrestling. So there's going to be a good opportunity for me to spend a bunch of time with her too bad. But yeah, so definitely not going to waste my time on things that I don't love and that I'm not really passionate about. And that's kind of probably the biggest thing. This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. If you're going to spend an hour in the gym, you might as well look hot and feel comfortable while you're doing it. Gymshark makes the best men's and women's training gear on the planet. And here is something I realized a few years into training.

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33:16Right now, you can get 10 % off everything by going to the link in the description below or heading to gym.sh slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom10 at checkout. That's gym.sh slash modernwisdom at modernwisdom10 at checkout. Has your definition of success changed since that? Um, you know, I've been thinking about this a lot, actually, because I don't know if you saw or heard, but I'm, 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.

33:52Um, 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 professional. RAF is doing a freaking amazing job. I mean, they're doing better. I should say we are doing better than I ever could imagine this quickly. It's fascinating. But when they told me they're coming to my hometown on my birthday, something. I'm right. It's like, okay, I got to get out there and I got to make it happen. And so that's kind of been a really big driver for me.