Heavyweight boxer turned writer Ed Latimore joins Peter McGraw to talk about his new book, Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business—a raw meditation on violence, discipline, ego, addiction, and growth. Onwards!
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Listen to Episode #262 here
Lessons from the Hurt Business
I met my guest on Twitter, now X, though we’ve never spoken, so here’s our chance. I invited him on the show to talk about living a remarkable life through the lens of his life as a Professional Heavyweight Boxer, Amateur National Champion Boxer, and Bestselling Author. He hails from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and his latest book, which tells the story of growing up in a public housing project, boxing, and getting sober, is called Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business: Boxing and the Art of Life. Welcome, Ed Latimore.
Peter, how are you? Happy to be here.
I know it’s great to actually get a chance to meet you. I feel like I know you, obviously from reading your book, and then from being connected on social media, and one of the things I really like about you is you speak your mind.
Intellectual Honesty and Disagreeability on the Internet
I try to. I’ve gotten better at it over the years. I actually made a tweet about this idea related about how I consider it a personal responsibility of mine to if I see something that is logically inaccurate and is being used to push an idea, that I have to address it, and so downstream of intellectual honesty as I call it, comes emotional honesty.
The problem is I think a lot of people use the idea of emotional honesty to justify wanton cruelty, and I don’t ever want to do that. As I said in the post actually that I’m referencing, I don’t care how someone lives their life and what they feel, how they feel about something, I can’t say anything about that. When I see things that are just factually incorrect or are arguably riddled with logical fallacies, then I have to approach and say something about that. It helps that I naturally am probably a little more confrontational and disagreeable. At least in real life, so the internet is not a real place.
It’s not a boxing ring, really.
It’s this place. There’s that whole meme going around right now. Touch grass. I think a lot more people need to do that and remember that this place is engineered to get as much of your time and attention as possible. When you work backwards from that, you realize that the best way to do that based on our psychology and how our brains work is to amplify and perpetuate not necessarily negative but usually negative stances and ideas because those are going to generate the most clicks and shares and views. If you spend most of your time online, you start to believe that that’s the world we live in.
Before we talk about touching gloves, I want to point out a quote that I enjoy from a fellow disagreeable author named Nassim Taleb.
I just argued with this guy.
There you go. Am I surprised? You both have that that ability. He has a saying that I think is in line with your stance, which is if you see fraud and you don’t say fraud, you’re a fraud. He wants people to do what you’re doing, which is to point out the inaccuracies, the hypocrisies, the fraud literally and figuratively on the internet and beyond. Thank you for that. I would say the one difference between the two of you is that you often have a sense of levity in how you approach this.
What is the goal at the end of the day? The goal at the end of the day is to get people to reconsider their position, to go, “Maybe that was incorrect. Let me think about this correctly now.” I can tell you that the worst way to do that is to attack people for what they think. There are all kinds of ways to deal with incorrect thinking or an incorrect approach.
One of the worst ways by far is to antagonize. Second to antagonism, very close, is to do it in a public fashion where a person is made to be embarrassed. The internet gives you the space to do both of those if you so choose, and that just doesn’t work out for people to do that. You end up making more enemies and making people double down if for no other reason than because they can’t concede to somebody who treated them that way.
It’s very difficult to be intellectually courageous, and it’s even more difficult to have intellectual humility. I think this idea of having to save face is very difficult for people to say, “I’m wrong.” It’s very difficult for people to say I’ve changed my opinion because of what you said. It feels very zero-sum, win-loss. The nature of debate, there’s a winner, there’s a loser, and you dig in.
This is why in the way I approach all discussions, you have to be so careful if you want to change things, if you want to actually make a difference because you have to be able to attack the idea. You can’t attack the person, which is why I don’t attack how people feel about things. When you attack the person, now you’re putting them under attack.
I know that’s redundant, but what’s key there is that they’re defending themselves. There’s already a degree of association like personal investment into an idea, so you can’t get away from that entirely, but you can minimize that to the point where you can make actual ground if you attack the idea.
There may be a better way, but I know that attacking the person is the worst way or at least is way worse than anything that I try to do, which is, “Okay, here’s an incorrect idea. Here’s why this idea is incorrect.” Rather, without even calling the idea incorrect, let’s explain the correct way to think about this. This is a lot like what I’ve learned in dealing with people. It’s a lot easier, especially with raising kids, this is my latest experience here and one of the things that I figured out, looking back at my mom too.
It is so easy to just discipline and to discipline in a way that is pure negative feedback whether that’s physical or emotional. That will stop the problem short-term, but most likely not, but it will make you feel like you did something. It takes a lot more energy and a lot more discipline and a lot more self-development and awareness in yourself to teach why it was a problem that someone did something and then offer them a way to correct and course correct for the future. Just yelling at a person, just expressing your displeasure with their level of intellectual ability, that does not make them do anything but think you’re a snob and then double down on your stance.
Yeah, I understand. I agree. You mentioned touching grass, I mentioned touching gloves, our buddy Nassim Taleb talks about skin in the game. When you move away from the internet and the debates on the internet and into the ring, this is a world where there are actually real consequences and real wins and losses. I’ve been fascinated by boxing ever since I watched Rocky as a young boy. One of my earliest solo podcast episodes was about boxing. Actually, I sat in a ring and talked to a boxer and coach.
It was a very fun experience. I’ve started boxing. I’m about a little bit more than a year into my “boxing career.” I’ve started late at 55. You also started late at 22, which by boxing standards is ancient. What made you walk into a gym that most of the people at age 22 are already starting to slow down, and what do you think this says about the upside of starting “too late?”
The Decision to Start Boxing Late
The reason I started boxing is I wasn’t doing anything really constructive with my life. I had graduated from high school, I had tried college, failed miserably, and I was just hanging out drinking a lot and I think I was working at Starbucks. I had developed this disdain for college and I would talk about it to anybody who would listen. I’d just say, “College is pointless. You don’t need to do it. It’s expensive, it’s overpriced,” whatever.
That’s an opinion I hold still now. The difference is I have a degree in Physics. No one can say anything to me about that. At that point, I did not. I was just a bum. One of the people I mentioned this to or talked to a lot about was my girlfriend’s mother at the time who happened to be a professor of biology at the University of Pittsburgh, and you can imagine how well that went over. She was patient longer than she probably should have been.
One day, she finally snapped and was like, “Okay, let’s pretend you’re right, that college is a waste of time. Why don’t you tell us what you’ve done with your life for the past four years besides show up here and eat my food,” because that’s how I was surviving. I wasn’t making enough money to eat. Strictly buy groceries, it was a rough time, and then she threw me out. I had to think about this because she was right. I was not doing anything and I needed to start putting some sweat equity in somewhere in my life.
I needed to start building a skill. I actually asked myself. I was like, “If I die today, what would people say I did? I had played a little football in college. That’s what I’d done. I’m 22 now. What’s going on?” YouTube had just come out and for whatever reason, I was watching fights on there. I have no idea why or how, but I said, “That looks like something I can try. Let’s go give it a shot.” I found a gym and I started my amateur career. When I started boxing, I said to myself, “I’m not going to quit unless I get injured.”
Talk about skin in the game.
Yeah or like I get beat up so badly, they’re like, “Bro, you can’t fight anymore,” which has happened. I know a guy, great guy, but he just kept getting knocked out, knocked out bad, and finally, the commission was like, “No.” The commission’s pretty liberal at the amateur level. They’re pretty liberal at all levels, since in the pro game, there’s money and in the amateurs, it’s really a matter of your local LBC or Local Boxing Club and their people who decide. They finally like look, “We cannot let you fight. Go fight somewhere else. You can’t fight in this LBC.” That’s how it started.
That was your standard. Your standard was, “I can’t do this, like physically can’t do this because I’m not good enough.”
Yeah, pretty much. That was it. I’m really happy I stuck with that and I approached it that way because it takes a long time to get good at anything. Part of being good at something or getting good at something is being bad at it. I tell guys all the time when they ask me, they message me and ask how they should start boxing and what they should do and I’m like, “First, go to a gym for a year and get some fights,” because it’ll take about a year for you to realize a few things that are really important.
I think the most important thing is whether you like this enough or not to justify what it’s going to take out of you, especially as an amateur where there’s no accolade, there’s no money, there’s nothing. You end up investing a lot of time, not a lot of money, but it will cost you. You got to buy gear, you got to get to fights. You there’s opportunity cost, if you get serious like I did as an amateur, you’re going to end up selecting your job or how you make a living to fit your schedule.
Sometimes, that means you’re not going to take opportunities that could pay more or work hours that are available. You’re going to some places just going to not hire you because you’re not going to be available to match that schedule. You need to put about a year in before all this because the last thing you want to do in something like amateur boxing for sure is burn all the bridges. Burn all the boats, they say, and just figure this out. That’s romantic sounding. It’s just not going to be what happens.
Was there an advantage to you starting later or was it all disadvantage?
The Upside of Starting Later: Physical Strength and Experience
I never actually thought about that. Definitely not a disadvantage. If I had started when I was fourteen, the big advantage would be that I wouldn’t have to work, I’d be living at home, and so I could devote more of my time to boxing. I’d be in school, but that would be the biggest difference. That’s really the only disadvantage, I’ll say. In terms of advantages, not necessarily because I was older but just as a function of time and other things I had done, I had come into the sport already with physical strength.
Boxing, by nature of what it takes to train, is fairly catabolic. At the very least, you’re not really going to put on the muscle to go up in weight and be stronger, which is why when there are champions in multiple weight classes, they go up. That’s a pretty big deal to go up and keep going up because the strength doesn’t carry. I had enough time to build myself and be strong prior to that from playing football and stuff that that I didn’t have to worry about being physically strong enough to compete. It doesn’t really matter until you’re in a heavyweight and I was a heavyweight so that’s how it worked out.
How much did you weigh when you walked into the gym and how much did you weigh when you fought?
Decision to Step Away from Boxing and Life Transitions
My weight is fluctuated I wouldn’t say a big amount throughout my career but a noticeable amount. Most of my amateur career, I was in the 230 to 240 range. I’m 240, tops. There was a pretty big moment in my career where I ended up out in California with this program and they actually weighed and measured body fat and I trained full time. At that point in my amateur career, I was like 215. I went away. I came back to Pittsburgh finished out my amateur career and then my first pro fight on boxrec, I was 231. I know that. Ultimately, when I get into great fighting shape and was moving around strong, 215 is where I settled at. I was 215 in my last fight, when I just fought in July 2025.
I want to talk to you about that because you had a trainer tell you that you were too smart to box. Is this right? A couple of heavyweight contenders said the same thing, and so you did stop. What caused you to stop? Was it that? You then came back at 40. You made a comeback at 40. Talk about Rocky. The whole Rocky franchise, is him coming back. Why and why? Why leave, why come back?
Okay, so in the leaving part, it’s really a combination of two things that happened. The fight I lost on TV, that was in 2016. I fought one more time that year and I fought to a draw. I said, “I need to rest and step away,” because when I lost that fight I lost the money that I was getting from my sponsor and the money they were paying me for fighting, which was enough to live on. Now that was gone. I had taken that semester off from school. I was smack in the middle of school.
School also was paying me because it was part of the assistance you get as a guardsman in the school. When I took that year off all of 2017, my body got a chance to heal. I was back. I was like, “Cool, I’m going to come back and fight again.” I was almost done with school, everything was going great. The beginning of 2018, that’s when I get back in the gym. I think I took a picture. I was in the gym just symbolically January 1st and then I was in there like 3 days a week then 4, getting ready to get in shape.
I went and sparred with a guy I wasn’t supposed to spar with yet because in my head I’m thinking, “I’m sharp, I’m good, I’m strong enough too,” because I had put on a good bit of strength. For whatever reason, I just failed to consider that this guy, even though I was overall better, he had been fighting continuously for the past eighteen months that I had been off. His timing was just sharper and he hit me with a shot that broke my orbital. I’ve actually had the same injury in the other eye but he broke it. This one didn’t require surgery.
That caused me to miss out on a fight that I was set to do in New Zealand and when my coach found out because he didn’t know I went spar with the guy, he was he was livid, but then that’s when he said, “Look at what’s going on in your life. You don’t really need to do this anymore.” What was going on in your life at that point, that was May 2018, I had just graduated. I had a degree in Physics, I went back and earned that thing. My internet presence was really taking off.
I think it was the first month I made more than $10,000 online from sales. It was like $33,000, if I remember correctly. I was just like, “You’re right. There are other things I want to do and I know what it’s going to take to get back to the level of where it makes difference. I know what my limitations are, I’m not going to be able to become a skilled enough to be the heavyweight that I need to be to fight and compete. Let’s just let’s just go away. Maybe I’ll come back maybe I won’t.”
My wife is involved in travel and so there are all kinds of trips that I could go on and go do and see, but I wasn’t because of training and school. Now that all that was gone, I just wanted to live life and have and do some of the things that I’d never been able to do. That was back in 2018. Jump up to 2025 where I just fought. Really, the story of me coming back starts like two years earlier because I had started coaching at a friend’s gym and the way my brain works, I wanted to make sure that everything I was teaching was sound.
I really started to revisit everything that I thought I knew about boxing and everything I thought I could do. I started to realize that one of my big weaknesses was no one ever really taught me the mechanics of certain things. There are two aspects to everything, the strategic ideas and the tactical ideas. The overall plan for fighting and then how you implement those plans. I understood the strategy but the tactical stuff really gave me fits because it’s a thing you just have to learn over time, how to throw out a punch. Some people can teach and some people can’t and then my aptitude for it as well.
I start putting this together and when and one of the ways that I started figuring out how to move correctly was watching guys that moved correctly. Videos. YouTube was an incredible resource. I started making predictions on fights that people thought would be close or people weren’t sure, and I’m like, “I don’t know what you’re looking at. Here’s what I think and here’s why.”
Of course, not a lot of people in boxing think like me in general and so me explaining this, they don’t get it, but I’m right. There were four pretty close fights or close in prediction that people couldn’t decide and I was like, “I don’t know what you’re looking at. It’s going to be that.” Not just who’s going to win, who’s going to lose but how they’re going to win and lose. I said, “All right, I understand what I’m doing here.”
I got my book deal as well and I said this book is about boxing, let me try some stuff. Maybe it makes sense to go back and box because I was looking at ways to promote a book. The only thing that came up like my book was David Goggins’s book. One of the things that David Goggins did and still does, he continued to compete in a sport to center that Can’t Hurt Me centered around. I said, “That’s a good idea.”
I started with this health program called Rebel Health Alliance. They’re one of the concierge medicine services to come up and I had never done this. I’m just good friends with the guy who’s founded the company. I said, “Let’s try this out.” I got an audience. We work something out. I got to try the service for free. I discovered through a host of things related to dealing with my PCP, and that was a whole challenge, but dealing with the Rebel Health team that one, I needed to be on an inhaler, that I had achieved what I’d achieved cardiovascularly with basically a shot engine.
Two, I effectively have hypothyroidism and my body’s not great at converting T4 into T3. I think I got that right. That’s the metabolically active hormone, which was one of the reasons, by the way, I decided to stay at heavyweight. I’m like, “No matter what I do, I can’t get my weight down below 220.” I get on these medications and I’m telling you, I had no idea. You can go check out my profile picture. I’ve trained harder than I did for that fight in in July 2025.
I trained way harder throughout my career than I did for that one. I had fewer responsibilities. I didn’t have a family, I didn’t have effectively a job. You can see it in that picture. I’ve got veins in my abs. I didn’t even realize it until I looked. My coach had made a comment about it one day, and I was like, “I got my health fixed.”
Within 10 days of starting levothyroxine, which is artificial T3, I dropped. I could not get below 220, for the life of me. You can see in my pictures, I wasn’t an unfit guy at 225. I dropped down to 215 like it was nothing. This just gets me to normal. In fact, it didn’t even get me to normal. It just fixed something that wasn’t there to get to normal, I had to supplement with something else called selenium, which that is just a supplement you can buy at your grocery store.
Return to Boxing Driven by Health Optimization, Knowledge, and Purpose
Having that knowledge, I said, “I did all of what I achieved with suboptimal health. What can I do now?” Especially with all the knowledge I have with how to move and how to train, and let’s fix my body. Let’s see what can happen. It wasn’t easy getting back, but it wasn’t hard for the reasons people think. The two difficult things. One is as I have a son now. Even though we both work at home, part of what works for us working at home is that it’s a tradeoff.
We don’t really have any help. Her sisters live in different areas. My sister lives here, but she just wasn’t able to always come. Things really worked out with her job, and we ended up with a babysitter that comes. It really worked out to where I was able to get the training in. There was a time period I say 2 years because I had the idea like about 6 months in, and then we got wiped out with like COVID back to back. He was not sleeping. It’s impossible to train. That was the big challenge number one.
Number two, I took so much time off that my coach is watching me sparring get in there, and he tried to tell me. He’s like, “You might have neurological damage.” He showed me like how my leg was moving. He said, “I’ve been doing this for a long time. I know what I’m looking at.” I’m like, “I’m not doubting that, Tom, but hear me out. Maybe, just maybe, I have not been in the ring for almost a decade and I’m in there sparring with a guy.”
He’s got a guy fighting for a title in a co-main event. That’s who I was sparring with when he showed me that video. I’m like, “I’m going to look like trash against this dude.” He realized I was serious. First, he didn’t think I was serious. He thought I was just coming around. I said, “Give me a month and then tell me what you think,” because I was getting it. I just needed time. He said, “Okay,” because if I didn’t have Tom’s blessing, I could go train with someone else, but I’m not going to do that because he’s my coach.
He’s also my friend. On top of that, I trust his judgment more than I trust anyone else’s. I needed him behind me because he’s in the book. It doesn’t make sense for me to do this without one reason about promoting the book if he’s not training me. He tried to remind me, he was like, “There’s all these tests you got to take now.” I can’t remember what the age is, but I’m way over it.
Normally, you just got to get blood test and clear, but I had to get a neurological exam and a stress test echocardiogram, I passed those, because of my age. It was a lot of stuff, but it was worth it because it reminded me that I went in there. It’s not like I went in there and beat some world beater. The commissions are funny. They can see I have not fought in nine years. The commissions got to approve the opponent. You can’t just throw anybody in there.
On the one hand, they’re looking at me as a guy that had a record of 13-1-1 and a national amateur champion. Clearly, this guy knows what he’s doing. On the other hand, he hasn’t been in the ring for 9 years and he’s 40. The promoter’s going back and forth, like, “I know what you guys are looking at just on paper, but let’s consider everything.”
PA, the state where I fought, they’re not going to let me fight some can as a tune-up. They’re going to like make sure the fighter is competitive. We found a happy middle ground, which I think ended up working out great. I beat the guy and I beat him with a body shot in the first round, which is pretty significant. That just confirmed what I was understanding about the movement and how to train.
I have two comments hearing you talk. The first one is as a new boxer, not a fighter, I haven’t fought. I’ve done a little sparring, very light, it’s so difficult to throw a good punch. It’s so difficult. It’s like one of those things where I actually got a little video of myself and I was like, “My cross is terrible.” I actually went and saw a coach just to work on throwing my right cross. If all I work on is my jab cross for the next year, that might be enough. It’s like that difficult.
The second thing is that I was an athlete and I coached athletes, and one of the things that happens especially among professional athletes is there’s two slopes. There’s an athleticism slope, which goes down with age, and then there’s an experience slope that goes up with age, typically. Not always, but if you’re on a growth path, if you’re focused on mastery. There’s like a sweet spot where those two things cross. It’s a different age for different sports. It’s like basketball it’s like age 30-ish thing. Probably boxing is something like 24 or something.
It depends on the weight class. My coach says for heavyweights, they don’t mature until like 35.
Is that late? Okay. What you were able to do is you had this growth. You had this experience curve, going up and probably enhanced by your coaching. You were able to reverse the athleticism curve because you recognized that you had some deficiencies and were able to correct them.
Not only that, but we’re just talking about the deficiencies. One of the things I was acutely aware of is that I’m 40. I’m checking my blood and making sure everything is working out great. I really became a hormonal specialist of sorts because I needed to figure out how to have an optimal testosterone, but I can’t take anything that that’s going to TRT, testosterone, all those replacements, peptides. No, you can’t use those.
You can’t also but in my research, I was like, “What can I do?” DHEA, so master hormone, DHEAS. Can’t take that either. That’s against the rules. It’s not like my levels were subpar, but I wanted them to be optimal. I just kept digging, kept studying. I’m like, “Do you mean there’s no supplement that improves DHEA?” You can try ashwagandha if you’re stressed and that’s why it’s low, but other than that, no.
I read about pregnenolone, and I said, “This makes perfect sense.” I don’t even remember how I discovered that. I think I was just trying to reverse engineer. I think that’s what I was trying to do. I was like, “What’s upstream of DHEA? Pregnenolone. I can take that. That’s legal.” You got to get a blood test to make sure you’re your levels are good, but I did that and sure enough, DHEAS is like I’m in my twenties. Testosterone is like I’m in my twenties. Everything is like you can do a lot. I didn’t have this knowledge and this technology might not even have existed even nine years ago.
Probably not. I think there’s a lot of people working on these ideas now.
Yeah, because as fast as something comes out, that’s as quickly as WADA goes, the world anti-doping agency, not so sure about that. This stuff they’re sure about. I took it and it really made a difference. Between that just like a general supplement regimen, like for example, a lot of guys don’t know about is trimethylglycine, which is incredible for keeping yourself strong and also lowering inflammation as well. It’s like creatine, but better, but no one ever talks about it.
Yeah, it’s funny. I think hearing you talk about this reveals the complexities of optimal, I think that’s a good word. How do you walk into the ring both in optimal mindset, optimally physically, optimal skill level, and how it clearly becomes like full time to do this. I like that writing the book was part of the impetus for you to start training again and to step into the ring and obviously congratulations on it going well, especially well.
I enjoyed the book in part because I’m a little bit familiar with this style of book because I wrote one like that. I wrote a book called Shtick to Business, which is about what people in business could learn from comedians. It’s like a translation book. There’s a bunch of these books out there. There’s like a rock and roll one, there’s like a gambling one. You take something that’s very difficult and then you translate the lessons from that world into well-being into some other domain, and it’s a fresh perspective.
Your book lays out twelve lessons. I want to talk about some of these lessons. They’re often very personal and obviously related to boxing. Do you have one that stands out to you as I don’t like to say favorite because they’re all your favorites, but is there one that stands out to you that that you want to talk about?
The harder you work, the luckier you get. If there’s one thing that continues to amaze me in my life, it is doing a good job. It doesn’t matter what it is, just do a good job and don’t be an asshole. That opens up opportunities for you that you don’t even know exist and they will show up or they will put you in a position to take advantage of them.
This is such a hard way to think because I have a buddy, I mention him in the book, Cam. He always asks because he’s on the speaking circuit now, he’s like, “What did the book do for you? What did it bring you?” I’m like, “You really can’t measure it that way because it’s not deterministic like that.” It’s not you do this, this happens immediately, this can be measured because of that. If you take actions, they open up opportunities. Now you have to seize them, but there are tons of opportunities that I wouldn’t be able to seize if it wasn’t for this book being written.
It’s like in the book the story I talk about with or that chapter, which is getting that fight against Dominic Breazeale, which opened up me getting sent out to Los Angeles to train. I had no control over who I drew in the national tournament. I just knew that if I don’t train, whoever it is, they’re going to beat me. I didn’t want to be beaten, so I put my best forth foot forward. It’s like the relationships I’ve built online too.
The funny thing about the book, the backstory about the book and how I got the deal, I don’t know if you remember, but you were one of the authors I talked to when I was trying to secure a deal. The way I got my deal with the book is I didn’t get an agent he queried the letter. I just asked every author I knew and because I treat people with respect and try and do well, they were more than willing to help.
There are some pretty big names amongst the people that I asked, and there were people who have become big names since then and they’ve gone on to help me with stuff and open up opportunities. One of the people I asked was this cat named Financial Samurai. Sam Dogen, I think, is his name. It always cracked me up that he’s the Financial Samurai and he’s Asian. I think that’s hilarious. He created that name himself, so I didn’t throw that on there.
I got put in touch with him because this other guy, Jimmy Soni, who wrote the book The Founders about PayPal, is friends with the guy who does my website. He’s only friends with him because he saw me promote my website. I’m talking to Jimmy on the phone, and Jimmy says, “I know you really want a book deal, but you don’t discount self-publishing. Here’s this great article written by Sam Dogen about this.” I read the article, and then I shared it and I just tagged Sam.
Sam he was following me. I didn’t know he followed me. I said, “This is a great article, thank you. It helped me in my journey.” He goes, “If you want to ever ask me any questions, I’ll be happy to get on a call.” We got on a call one day, Valentine’s Day, actually, I just happen to remember that. We got on a call, and I’m telling him my plan. He’s like, “That sounds good. Let me put you in touch with my agent.” I said, “All right, thank you.” I hear what people got to go through to get agents. I say, “Thank you.”
I get an email the next day, and I’m reading it. I look at the signature and I’m like, “I thought he said he was going to introduce me to his agent.” It turns out who he introduced me to, because Sam doesn’t have an agent, who he introduced me to was the acquiring editor at Penguin. I started talking to Noah Schwartzberg, and then Noah’s really excited about the project, apparently everyone at Penguin was.
He sends me an email back. He goes, “I just want to let you know we’re really excited, but we really think you need an agent. I have a guy you should talk to.” He introduces me to Howard Yoon. Howard is excited to work with me. He’s interested. Howard disappears right after I get the book deal. I’m like, “I heard this is what agents do, whatever.”
He comes out of nowhere four months later. He’s like, “I just want to let I know I’ve been off the grid right now but and then there’s a link. I was dealing with this. I’m still representing you, don’t worry about that. Just know that if you need anything, let me know.” I click on the link, and it’s an announcement that his firm is merging with William Morris Endeavor. I didn’t even know what that meant.
For people who don’t know, it’s a big deal.
The “Hard Work = Luck” Philosophy and Book Deal Story
I had to message my friends out in Hollywood. I was like, “What does this mean? I knew you guys are in the business.” When I looked him up, I was like, “Is this like a movie thing?” No. All of these things happened. The publisher’s interested because I’ve got this following. It’s not just the following. The way Noah explained it to me, he goes, “If every person with a social media following could get a book deal, we’d have a lot more book deals and there’s already a lot.” Apparently, they got burned back when Facebook first came out with these pages and people had like 100,000 followers, but it didn’t translate into sales.
What he told me is, “What we do now is something a bit more a bit more complex. We look at how many people have mentioned you, we call up people who you have showed up next to and see what they think of you.” For example, apparently, he messaged Ryan Holiday, and he was like, “I see you let him guest post on your blog. What do you think about this guy?” Ryan gave a glowing endorsement and said that helps. James Clear mentioned something that I put on Twitter years ago. People always mention it and it’s in his book, so they talk to James, and James is enthusiastic about me too. All of this comes together. All of this starts because I’m taking care of what I can take care of. I’m working hard.
I do like this idea, you highlight how people’s intuition is that luck and hard work are independent of each other. You’re saying that the hard work is a driver and what often appears lucky is the consequence of that.
I’ll put it even like this. I think luck is a function of hard work because if you’re not doing anything, my brain, this is the first time I ever like thought of it and put it this way. Maybe I’ll make a tweet or an essay about it later. If you are sitting there doing nothing, nothing good or bad can happen to you. You’ll just get chipped away by the blinds of life, so to speak, in the poker game of life, bills and food are the blinds of life, you’ll just get chipped away and then maybe you get homeless, put out the game or you go to work. Either way, you’re just maintaining an existence and not imposing your will on anything external.
Something funny happens when you start trying to do anything. You are probably, keyword there, going to mess up and fail. That’s okay because probably is like a probability. There’s no guarantees. You can just do what you do. Now if you keep doing that and keep doing that, not only are you talking about the things that you put into place that you will probably succeed at or not, but you’re also putting into things that are orders of effects higher that you can’t see, but they’re happening behind the scenes.
Maybe they’re not happening actively, but you’re laying the groundwork. It’s really cool to see. That’s one of the things. While I’m not a guy that says it’s never too late to start, obviously, you have to also realize that your life is where you’re at at the moment. Wherever you’re at is a reflection or the outcome of everything that you’ve done. All the people I have an article about the red flags in men, and one of the things I say is that if you if you date a guy that’s 30 and he doesn’t have any close male friends, that’s a red flag.
You got to ask yourself, how has this guy been on the planet three decades and there’s nobody he goes, “That’s my close friend.” You should figure out why because he probably messed somebody over or he might be a little socially awkward, that kind of thing. That’s just an example, but I bring that up to say that the older you get, it’s not so much that you need to have a bunch of money or a bunch of success, but there are certain things that should have compounded over time. Someone should be able to look at you and go, “That’s what’s going on.” If you’re getting an entry level job at 40, okay, why? There might be a good reason. You’re switching industries and you’ll show that. If it’s because you were in jail for the last 25 years, that’s a different story.
Yes. I do like this idea that hard work does often translate into predictable results. You go into the gym, you do the reps, you’re going to get stronger. That’s very easy to predict, it’s mathematical. The luck thing is the hard work’s necessary but not sufficient. It’s not guaranteed that things are going to break your way, but you increase the odds of that. Related to this idea, I want to talk about something that you mention in your book and actually, Arnold Schwarzenegger also mentions in his most recent book, and this is about selling, about self-promotion.
The Necessity of Self-Promotion/Selling in Boxing
I think that you’re very good at selling yourself, not in a cringey way. Arnold is very good at it. He used to say that that making the movie is half the work, and then promoting the movie is the other half of the work. A lot of people find the selling part of life uncomfortable. I do, at times. I like to make stuff, I don’t like to sell stuff. Was there something about boxing in particular that helped you with this or is there another lesson with regard to learning to self-promote in a way that feels comfortable but is also effective?
You cannot survive in boxing if you do not know how to sell yourself. Either explicitly in terms of selling tickets to cover your opponent’s purse and selling yourself to get sponsorships, all these things matter because boxing is this weird thing where there really is no money. Not until you get to the point where you’re on a network or something with media distribution or sales media or subscriptions now, but it used to be media.
That’s why HBO Boxing and Showtime, they were all in the game because they’ve got this pool of cash that comes in consistently and they have reach so they can promote and move but only the best fighters. What you got to do at the club level, you have to sell tickets. You can’t sustain a show otherwise. Either sell tickets or get a sponsor. That’s it. As an amateur where you’re not being paid, you still have to sell.
Selling is not just here give me some money. Selling is like how can I convince you to take an action or initiate a transfer of energy, time or money, any resource, to benefit me? If I’m on an amateur card, I got to get people to come pay for those cards. That’s how the amateur program pays. They have these shows, how it supports itself, and then they raise this money. That’s how they pay for the ring and the refs and the space. All that has a cause. Just because the fighters don’t get anything doesn’t mean there’s no cause.
If I can’t do that, if I can’t convince my friends to come and spend money, then I start looking a little less attractive to an amateur card. If I don’t make nice with the people who run these programs, why are they going to put me on their card? There’s the selling as people think of selling like, “Come buy this thing,” and then there’s the selling like, “I need you to invest time and energy into me. I need you to like me to help me out make moves. I need you to buy into the Ed Latimore person.”
I would say if I was uncomfortable with it before boxing, no discomfort whatever after, because that is the only way, like there is no other way. In fact, I always say that boxing is like the worst of both a 9:00 to 5:00 and entrepreneurship and artistry. It’s just the worst. It doesn’t take anything good from entrepreneurship. It takes all the bad, which is the uncertainty. It doesn’t take the consistent payday from a 9:00 to 5:00. No, just the restraint and the daily schedule grind, and it doesn’t take the creative freedom that you get from being an artist. No, it just builds up this incredible crushing self-doubt that is necessary for to be good.
Do you have a boxing nickname?
It used to be Black Magic. I grew out of that.
I’m reading the Bob Dylan biography, Chronicles: Volume One, and he talks about Pretty Boy Floyd. He has a great line where he says, “That name tells a story.” you think about it, even your nickname is a point of sale, so to speak. You want to go see Pretty Boy Floyd. Who doesn’t? What is Sugar Ray Leonard? These names, Hitman Hearns. These names create giants. We want to see giants fight in this way.
Yeah. Everything has an aesthetic to it. A lot of people, especially people who have excelled in things that are apparently not dependent on aesthetic, they tend to scoff at anything that relies on the exchange of the thought. That’s how we’ll put it. Not the exchange of the product what you made, but how do you get people to go, “That product, that person, these things.” It’s funny, this also tends to correlate with people who have a lot of difficulty in certain aspects of dating because what is dating but a selling process to another person.
Especially online, especially swiping.
If you’re not willing to play the game, some people go, “I’m above that,” above going on a date or dressing nice for a guy. It’s like, “Somebody else won’t be above that,” and dating is very much a zero-sum game. The people who do embrace the uncertainty of these things and they go, “This is just as important.” It’s just as important to be a well-groomed man as it is to be a good man in the hunt for a spouse or whatever. The people who accept that tend to do better. That’s just part of reality.
Many things, I think, follow that. As we start to wind down here, I want to hit three areas a little bit rapid-fire. The first one is I want to talk about pain and discomfort. I always read a lot, but I’ve been reading a lot lately and I just finished a book called The Comfort Crisis. It’s by Michael Easter. It’s an outstanding book. I actually wrote him a note thanking him for writing that book. I thought it was so good.
He makes a very compelling case of how our lives in modernity are too easy or at least they’re too easy in the wrong ways. The thing about it is there’s nothing easy about boxing. There’s nothing easy about it. It’s an incredible workout. It’s painful, like you literally are getting hit in the face, you said you’ve broken your face twice. Most people, though, are very adept in modernity at avoiding discomfort. We can live at 72 degrees. We can sleep in soft beds, we’re never hungry. We may exercise, but only to the point of mild discomfort. You argue that pain is a great teacher, both at boxing and beyond. How so?
Pain as a Negative Feedback Mechanism for Growth
There are two kinds of feedback. There’s negative feedback and positive feedback, or constructive and deconstructive. Each has its place. Praise versus punishment. One thing that negative feedback does that positive feedback cannot do, negative feedback tells you what not to do again. Sometimes, that matters a lot more. I liken it to like right now, my kid is three. He went through this phase where he was hitting my wife.
I just jumped up, took him away, and held him in another room and she’s like, “What are you doing?” I was like, “Look, we can argue with him later, or we can teach him later why that’s wrong, but right now, he needs to know he cannot do that. We need to stop that immediately.” it’s painful for him is like being taken away from his mom and being put in a room by himself.
Not by himself. I sat in there with him. He wasn’t at the point where I could leave him in the room by himself. The point is, if you don’t ever experience the pain of your poor decisions, you are likely going to continue making those poor decisions. You may get away with it once or twice, maybe a few times, but eventually, you will deal with the consequences. For me, it is not just from boxing. Boxing just happens to be a really great metaphor for this.
I’ve seen the effects in real life of people who, when they’re young, there’s no discipline at home, there’s no, “You can’t do this, you can’t do that,” and then the legal system had to be the negative feedback. That’s their first time really getting it. It can’t happen that way. That’s what pain is for me. Pain is just another one of those negative feedback mechanisms that has its place.
Now I tell people you don’t go seeking pain for pain’s sake just to say, “It hurts.” No, some stuff is going to hurt, some of it’s not. Just because it hurts, that can’t be a reason to not do it. That’s the best way to put it. I think as if you just look at pain as like any other feeling, then you can gauge what really matters. I think it ends up being this cap on our growth. This hurts, so I won’t do it.
When almost everything that is going to expand your abilities and capabilities and enjoy your life, yeah, there’s going to be some initial pain. I’m in the middle of writing an essay right now. I don’t want to write this essay. I do want to write this essay, I’m the one that reached out to them to see if let me write it. Would I rather be doing something else right now that’s easier, that’s more comfortable? Certainly. When I make it through the essay, then it continues to lay down that hard work luck thing later.
I like that use the word growth. It’s something that I have been focused on lately, which is recognizing that if you want to grow, like for example, you want to grow your muscles, you have to be uncomfortable working out. If you want to grow your intellect, you’re going to be uncomfortable reading things that are going to be challenging, etc. Comfort is a great inhibitor of growth. I certainly agree.
Let’s talk about alcohol for a moment. It’s hard to tell your story without talking about drinking. You mentioned drinking at the outset when you were 22. You also mentioned being a guardsman, being in the army. It was there that you started to embrace sobriety. The answer is why, how, and how has it turned out?
Achieving Sobriety and Dealing with Emotional Guilt
The why is just it was ruining my life big time. Making too many stupid decisions. I felt like I got lucky, I felt like I was stretching the limits of what my friends were tolerating. I couldn’t stand the person that I saw in the mirror. There was a lot that. I haven’t thought about this in a long time actually, about what sustained me in my early sobriety. Going back to that same mentality I had about boxing, which was the only thing that will make me stop is that I get injured.
I said if I want people to take me seriously and ever have any chance at ever redeeming myself and having this mean something, then it can’t be one of those things where I’m like, “It was a rough night. I’m going to stop drinking for a few days.” It can’t be like, “All right, I stopped drinking for a month. Let me get back to it.”
No, I’ve got to stick with it. Not only that, but if I see my commitment, it’s the only way I get to know if am I a bad person or is it really the alcohol? Here’s what I learn. People will forgive a lot of stuff if you don’t do it again and you can present a compelling reason why you did it even if it was technically under your control. There are a lot of people who have forgiven me for me being the guy who I was drinking, but that’s only because I stopped drinking.
Was there an incident where it was the final?
Tons, but the big ones that really sit in my heart is the driving under the influence. I’m fortunate that nobody ever got hurt, I never got hurt, I don’t have a record. Luck. There’s that probability thing, but that’s the big one that sits in my heart. There’s like making inappropriate moves on the girls that were dating from dating, my friends, who ended up like being wives. I’m like, “I can’t let that happen.” my relationship was just starting and I didn’t want that to be ruined by alcohol. If it was going to be ruined, I wanted to be ruined because I’m a bad guy, not because of this thing I can control.
Your process, it was painful, I assume?
Not as painful as one might think. I got really fortunate in. When I quit, I was extremely busy. I couldn’t go out to drink if I wanted to go out to drink. Sure, I thought about it. I thought about just bucking it all and going to celebrate, but no, I was very busy. When I finally had a little bit of time, I looked at the person that I had become and really, because I was sharing online, how people started to look at me and see me as this person who did this, and I had no interest in going back.
To your credit, you do strike me as someone who, when he puts his mind to something, manages to accomplish it. Again, through the hard work, through creativity, through the support system that you’ve developed, and I think that’s really a credit to you. In part because very few people, I think, who have had alcohol problems would tell the same story. They would often say, “It was incredibly difficult and I was unprepared for it and everything.” I think that’s great.
There was one thing I was unprepared for.
What’s that?
I was unprepared for the guilt. That’s actually what motivated me to write a book that came out before Hard Lessons. It’s Sober Letters to my Drunken Self because no one prepared me. Do you know what everyone told me? Everyone told me I’d have to change my friends and where I hang out, all that stuff. No one talked about just the emotional turmoil.
I also know that part of that is one of the things that has happened to me over the past several years as an adult is I really developed what I call a heavy moral compass. There are things that I’m probably hard on myself for because I view them through the lens of how I see the world now. I wish someone had told me about that, but I would still have to go through it. I wrote the book to motivate people on that, to help people navigate that space, but that is something I wasn’t prepared for.
Congratulations on doing it. Anybody who reads this show knows my stance on alcohol, which is that on balance for the average person, especially as you get older, it does more harm than good. Something you’ve alluded to earlier in the episode, and I want to finish with, is fatherhood. Everyone talks about how difficult it is to be a parent, how revealing it is, especially about one’s weaknesses.
One of the great benefits is the perspective that it can give you, and you talked about how it made you understand, and my sister has talked to me about this my sister’s a parent also like you, unlike me, how it made her understand and appreciate her parent, her mother in this case, and now in your case, also your mom. How it has led you to be more forgiving. How so?
I look at the situation in my life. I very much love my wife. There are no accidents when you’re with somebody ten years, but there are certainly unplanned events, and he was an unplanned event. He is the best unplanned event, I think, that has ever happened to me. If I win the lottery one day, we’ll see but it’s awesome. One of the reasons why it’s so great is there are a lot of stressors that we don’t have to deal with, decisions we don’t have to make.
We’re not a rich couple by any means, but we both work from home and do pretty okay. For example, all of my friends have their kids in daycare. We never had to do that. My sister’s here right now with my son, for example, because my sister’s starting to come over. We have our babysitter that comes. Eventually, we did start finding a school to put him into that he likes, two days a week in the morning. All these things, unstressful.
If one of us gets sick and we need groceries, the other one can go do it. Most of the time, she just Instacarts. That’s the world we live in. It’s still stressful. There’s both of us. We don’t have any of the financial strain that my parents had. I think my mom had to deal with all of that, in a very different world without the technology to just figure these things out.
There’s no Instacart in 1990.
It’s a different world. It made me really think and reflect. I put all the responsibility on the person because forgiveness is not about making you feel better about what they did. That’s not what it is. It’s understanding so you don’t carry an unnecessary grudge. Having my son and him being here, I really understand a lot more.
That doesn’t make it okay, but I realize that it wasn’t a personal attack. Was it a moral failing? Possibly. I think about the things that she went through and how she had to deal with it. I talked to my wife about this one day and I was like, “It’s crazy because my mom my dad and my mom didn’t get along, but my sister and I have the same father and we are three and a half years apart.” I’m sitting here like, “You didn’t get along but you got two kids together.” I get it if my sister and I had different dads, I’d be like, “Okay, because that dude’s crazy,” but no.
Anna said something really interesting. She said, “Your mom probably fell for something stupid your dad said.” I was like, “Okay. I never thought about that,” but it really put my mom in a perspective. It also put my dad in a perspective, and that has been a bit more of a challenge. I hadn’t thought about my dad for a long time. My dad died when I was eighteen. For most of that time, I did not think about my dad.
I had my kid, and I’m sitting here holding my kid, he’s crying one night, seems like 6 or 7 months, and I just remember thinking. I was like, “Man, this sucks, but I wouldn’t rather be anywhere else in the world. This is great.” it got me thinking, it got me wondering, “Why weren’t you around?” I knew my dad, but he moved to Philadelphia outside of Pittsburgh. I probably saw him once, maybe twice a year, and he did he made no effort to protect us from some of the things that we were exposed to and went through and suffered through.
I tell the story in the book about the guy my mom was dating who beat my sister bad and beat us bad. I can only reach two conclusions about my father’s response on this, which was nothing. Either he was not involved enough to know that his kids were suffering, or he didn’t care enough to do anything about it. It bugs me for different reasons.
I work through that with my dad, but I think the words I use in the book sum this up, I’m like he didn’t hurt me but he didn’t help me either. He just was this guy. I couldn’t imagine just being a guy to my kids. I couldn’t do it. Overall, my perspectives have changed. I never held anything against my dad. My mom used to always wonder why that is and I’m like, “You’re the one I remember dealing with daily, not my dad.”
It’s almost flipped entirely that I can understand my mom’s stress and situation, especially the more I learn about the rest of my family on her side. Now my dad is like the one where I go, “What the heck?” I understand two people not working out, but I don’t understand moving away. If he was in Philadelphia balling, I’d be like, “Okay, that’s a job you had to go for. I can work with that,” but it wasn’t that.
First, thank you for your vulnerability here. Do you feel like when it comes to forgiveness, you’ve made more strides with your mother than your father at this stage?
Tons more. Largely because with my mom, I was already starting at a high point or an incensed point and I was coming down. I’ve come down quite a lot. In fact, when I think about everything, I can’t be angry. It’s just not like it’s not a sensible response. With my dad, it was the other way around. I did not really think about him much, and then I started to think about it a lot more when I became a father and I compared how I look at this.
I’ve always held parenthood in a very high esteem and was very tough on parents just psychologically on my own. That’s the standard I apply and the standard I apply to both my parents. It’s been hard for me to understand and to make sense of my dad. One of the things that helped, I don’t remember if I got this information before the book came out. I think I did. I think it was in the epilogue.
I met my uncle for breakfast, my dad’s brother, and I found out when my dad was four, his mom died of pneumonia, and their dad bounced. He was raised, I think, by either an aunt or his grandparents, one of the other. I don’t know what he had to go through, what he had to deal with afterwards as a result of that, but that’s rough.
With that said, I don’t understand how he could go through that and still be like, “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to do the same thing,” but maybe in his world, the involvement he had in my life was a drastic improvement over the involvement his father had in his life. I think about these things. Fortunately, and this will sound weird and I’m not going to try and sugarcoat it, I think the audience and you’ll know what I mean, fortunately, they’re both dead.
I don’t have to think about this stuff, and I don’t have to deal with it daily. When my mom was alive, there was a lot of daily friction because my mom was still the person that was the product of all of that, all the things she went through and growing up, and that person heavily clashed with me. A lot of stuff was taken out on me. Not just growing up, but as an adult. The difference is an adult I can just go, “Okay, I’m going to leave, I’ll see you tomorrow.” there was that. My dad, though, I have no idea how he’d respond to me as an adult, because he never really got to see me as one.
As I said, thank you for your vulnerability, for sharing that and for writing this book and sharing your story and some lessons to help people see the world a little differently. We’re all on a path trying to improve ourselves, and it’s great to actually get to talk to you rather than just read your writing. Thank you, again, for spending time with us.
I really appreciate you having me on. It means quite a lot, for real.
Great. Cheers.
Important Links
- Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business: Boxing and the Art of Life
- Ed Latimore
- Can’t Hurt Me
- Shtick to Business
- The Founders
- Chronicles: Volume One
- The Comfort Crisis
- Sober Letters to my Drunken Self
- Ed Latimore on X
About Ed Latimore
Ed Latimore is a professional heavyweight boxer, amateur national champion boxer, and bestselling author from Pittsburgh, PA. His latest book, “Hard Lessons From The Hurt Business: Boxing And The Art of Life,” tells his story of growing up in public housing projects, boxing, and getting sober.