If you do the work, something's going to happen. If you keep pushing, you will get there. I do believe that now. I've seen so many people come from nothing to something. I've seen all my buddies like climb and fall and then climb again. You just have to keep going and you learn that perseverance from training from putting yourself in hard positions and knowing, okay, this sucks, but I can get out of it. This sucks. I know this is, I'm not good now, but I will get good. You start as a white belt.

You get to your blackbone.

Then you get the blackbone.

You really... positions and knowing, okay, this sucks, but I can get out of it. This sucks. I know this is, I'm not good now, but I will get good. Now you start as a white belt, you get to your black belt, and then you get to

black belt and you realize there's way better black belts. You know, you're like, okay, so what does that do? You kind of start over again. And that, what life is, right? You get to a certain level success and you're like, oh man, and then you see, oh my God, there's these guys that are even

higher than me. And it's like, you know that it doesn't stop and you don't get complacent

because there's always something to learn. Having that white belt mentality, I think it's so good. And, you know, you become a dad. Then it's like, oh, man, I got a lot to learn. I don't know everything. So then you want to learn more about that. You want to be the best of that. I think the pursuit of excellence that you learn from martial arts

applies to everything, if you choose to.

A single theme is too narrow for great minds

and daring hearts.

Get ready to enter the Lionheart with your host, Warren Stunning.

Brother Eddie, thank you so much for taking the time.

I'd be watching us for months and months of all the cool stuff you're doing through boxing

and boxing and martial arts as a tool for personal development. you're doing through boxing. And I know we really both share that enthusiasm for using boxing

and martial arts as a tool for personal development. Exactly. Yeah, man. Thank you so much for having me.

I really appreciate it. Any, can we maybe start a little bit with your background and how you came to

only gym you have? Because I'm going to tell you, before Jiu-Jitsu, boxing was my big passion.

And coaches that I knew from Chicago, from the Chicago scene, like a lot of them were kind of down on their luck. They didn't really have, none of them had their own gyms. They were all kind of always, like, struggling to make a paycheck. A lot of them had, you know, their body, a lot of them were older, too. And, you know, their joints are messed up from years of holding pads, and they're these grizzled boxing trainers. And here you are in L.A., this cool-looking, suave, relative to a young guy, but you've been doing this a long time. And I've got to be honest, I look at some of your training videos, and I'm a little sad that I didn't have you as much. So that's a great job. I think you're doing.

Well, I appreciate it man it means a lot yeah you know I started I started in martial arts when I was very young so I did karate um it was like

traditional coconut island karate it was full contact this was you know early 80s early 80s, late 90s, sorry, early 90s, late 80s where, you know, karate was still karate. This is before, you know, the point system took over and they stopped sparring. This is when kids still sparred and we did full contact. And there was a lot of discipline. We trained hard. And, you know, I continued to train and kind of left it in my early team years

because I was playing sports at a high level.

I was playing soccer at a very high level.

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