Have you been struggling with what’s what in this world of food allergies, veganism, keto, paleo, “doy” and gluten-free? Nutritional therapy practitioner, Nicola Burbank is a longtime friend from my sorority days at UNLV. She specializes in intuitive eating, which totally changed my life! “If it makes you feel like crap, don’t eat it.” Simple enough, right? Nicola sets the record straight. We get really personal about how mental health affects physical, and how she is teaching her daughter positive body image by educating and carefully choosing her words when it comes to food. This episode pertains to every single one of us so you’ll definitely want to listen!

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Listen to the podcast here:

Sustaining A Healthy Lifestyle: Intuitive Eating, Food Myths Debunked and How Mental Affects Physical With Nicola Burbank

I’ve got a special guest and longtime friend, Nicola Burbank. Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. I’m excited.

I am excited to have you. To tell a little bit of background to the readers, Nicola and I met at UNLV in college. We were in the Greek system together, which seems like a freaking lifetime ago. What were we even doing? How are we alive? I honestly don’t know. I want to ask you, being in nutrition, at that time when we were in college and eating Del Taco and now at all times, did it start rising up in you then or was it way later that you made the discovery that you shouldn’t be eating that stuff on an everyday basis?

I was such a mess that I thought feeling like crap was normal. I don’t think I put two and two together until later on in life. It was forced upon me when I had Willow. In college, it was fun but I was not in the right mindset to think that way yet.

You know logically that you shouldn’t eat fast food. I remember going to class. I had a 7:30 lab and I remember doing the walk of shame down Maryland Parkway in a titty top.

I’ve done that one too many times leaving the Sigma Chi house.

I’m walking into class with my sunglasses on and everyone’s like, “Are you alive?”

There’s this true story about me. It was blackout the night before at the Sigma Chi house. It was right when they were doing midterms or something. I went to the wrong class. I took the wrong test. It was an instructor I had. That’s why I didn’t pick up on it. I was like, “There’s my instructor.” I was like, “How do I not know a thing on this test?” The next day, he pulls me into his office and he’s like, “Why did you take this test?” I was confused. I was embarrassed. I had to beg my other professor to let me take the test.

Did you tell your other professor that you had taken a different test?

That’s dang good that I got to C on a test. I had no idea what I was doing. It was a C- probably but I passed. That was probably my lowest.

After college, you and I lost touch for a little bit. Tell me what went on in between there. I know you had Willow and you got married and all those wonderful life things that happened. Tell me a little bit about how your life changed when you had Willow.

After college, I moved to Arizona. I was working in Arizona. I met my husband. We got married and got pregnant and had Willow. At 25, it hit me that I had digestive issues. At 25 to 30, between that time, I was going through a relationship and getting married and then we had Willow at 30. When I had her, I didn’t bounce back. I had a great pregnancy most of the time but then, in the end, it was rough. We had induced labor that turned into an emergency C-section.

I did not bounce back. I felt worse than I was already feeling. The symptoms were noticeable. Digestively, embarrassing noticeable. I knew something was not right. I started going to doctors to try to figure out what was going on. Everyone kept saying, “Your labs are coming back normal. You’re fine. All is well.” I couldn’t agree with them. I was like, “Something is wrong.” I’m scared. It’s not healthy. I couldn’t get out of bed. I was almost depressed. I was not feeling good.

I jumped around jobs. I was in student services for colleges. I did mainly their educational teaching and counseling for the kids. I ended up at ASU. I was miserable. I hated it. I felt sick all the time. I decided to spend the time with Willow and work part-time. We both believe in spirituality and that the universe sends us things when we’re meant to be sent them. By the grace of God, I met Dr. Khavari. He owns TriMotus.

I started working for him. Right away, he’s like, “You have food allergies.” I’m like, “No.” He was like, “You always have a stuffy nose. You always complain about a sore throat. You always complain about bloating. Let me get you tested and let’s go down this path.” He opened up Pandora’s box, which then led to this spark in my eyes. I’ve always been that science-minded. Before I graduated with a degree in Psychology, I was pre-med. I love science. Science is my jam.

I started diving into my own health and looking at it from a functional medicine-holistic side. It led me into the world of nutrition and understanding how much food played a part in how we feel overall, how our skin looks, how our body looks and everything. That led me to here.

That’s why I’ve always loved talking to you about nutrition because you don’t come at it from the normal perspective. Normally, it’s like, “I want to lose weight. I want to look a certain way. I want to look like Kim Kardashian. I want to be a meathead and go to the gym every day.” You don’t come at it like that.

You taught me the term intuitive eating, which is something that I use all the time. I sound smart now when I say it because it fucking makes sense. It makes sense to eat intuitively for your body. If you put something in your body and you feel like shit, don’t fucking eat it. If it makes your body feel good and it makes you feel good then eat more of it. That makes so much sense to me even though we still sometimes do put the stuff in our body that still makes us feel like crap.

I had a handful of jelly beans for breakfast. Now I’m going to crash but I did. I had a protein shake with it. I’m like, “This will balance it out. It’s fine. No big deal.” I’m not saying I’m perfect. That was cool when you and I worked together. I was like, “I messed up.” You’re like, “You didn’t mess up at all. This is life.” I like that you talk about a sustainable way of life. It’s not just a diet or a fad. It’s a lifestyle.

I want to talk to you badly about this keto fad, no carbs and this myth that if you have pasta, you will forever be fat. If you have one grain of rice, you’re going to puff up like a balloon, which used to happen to me but that’s because I was not eating them correctly. Before we get into all of your other amazing things, can we go into a little bit talking about macro-based diets and not necessarily having to measure everything out all the time but that balance that you found?

You brought up a good point when you were talking about intuitive eating. The idea behind intuitive eating is that we have been, in society, pushed to more restrictive dieting, keto, paleo, all these restrictive, detailed types of diets. We then see people Yo-yo throughout their life. Maybe they could try keto then they move to paleo, now they’re doing carb cycling and the weight goes up and down. The idea behind intuitive eating is nothing is off the table. You do what makes you feel good.

I work with eating disorder clients. When we’re talking about binge eating, I’m like, “You have to be in that parasympathetic state and allow your body. If your body wants that then sit down in a calm state and enjoy every freaking bite of that ice cream and think how good it tastes.” That is a positive way to think about something as opposed to negative, which is like, “I’m eating all this ice cream. I’m such a bad person. I’m a horrible person.”

If we use that mindset, we’re less likely to not do something when we’re not restricted. If I told you, “You can’t have gluten,” all you want is gluten. If I say, “You can have gluten. This is what it probably does to your digestive tract because maybe you’re sensitive to gluten,” or whatever the case may be when I’m talking to the client. Now, the choice is theirs. Something happens magically when you allow somebody their own choice to then make and then they’re less likely to want it. It’s almost like a little reverse psychology.

That’s my approach with all my clients. Nothing is off the table. I do talk to people about bio-individual. My approach is cellular based on the individual’s data, lifestyle, maybe their ancestry or their hereditary disease, all those things. I can get as detailed as looking at people’s nutrigenomics, their DNA and how their DNA genetically looks. Some people are going to do better with more fats than carbs and others are doing better with more carbs than fats. We need all three macronutrients to work efficiently.

The three macronutrients are?

Carbs, fats and protein. This is how I explained it to clients. We have these three macronutrients, carbs, fats and proteins. Carbs are our preferred energy source in the sense that their only role is to give you energy. The reason why I say they’re important or explain it to clients not to be fearful of them is that we need them to be our little Energizer Bunny so that fat and protein can do their work at the cellular level.

Protein is a building block at the cellular level. I call fat the manager on staff. He communicates, “Cells, release this. Carbohydrates, do this. Protein, do that.” You have these three things needed to be ingested at the same time for all of this to occur synergistically. Portion amounts of carbs to fats will be different but you still need both of them.

I’m picturing fat with a little hard hat. That’s his boss.

Intuitive Eating: There are three macronutrients: carbs, fats, and proteins. Don’t be afraid to ingest them. They are your energizers so that fat and protein can do their work at the cellular level.

I do too every time.

Why are we like this?

That’s the image in my head.

I’ve seen women, my friends, do keto and lose a shit ton of weight. Is it sustainable for life?

It could be. To answer your question, potentially, keto could be sustainable. I do think it leads to insulin sensitivity and some other things. Let’s be honest. We’re not living like cavemen. We live in a modern world where there’s pizza on every corner and sugary drinks. The fact that you’re going to tell me you’re going to be strict keto for the rest of your life, it’s a hard way to live. Think about social life. We couldn’t go out and have sushi. We couldn’t go out and do stuff. My philosophy is let’s live the best life. I consider our bodies a vessel. Let’s treat our vessel the best way. Let’s find a balance. We don’t need to be restrictive. That’s negative.

We couldn’t even go get a smoothie if we’re on keto.

Not if you’re on true keto, which is a whole other topic. There’s too much.

People ask me, “Is keto sustainable?” I say no. You’re saying yes.

You could survive on a ketogenic diet. Ultimately, it would have to be a strict and correct keto diet. I would say no due to modern life.

Scientifically, if you can survive, would you be happy?

No. If you slipped up, you screw yourself. I have a lot of ex-keto clients that are now insulin sensitive, meaning we can’t throw carbs back into their diet.

It’s because they’ve restricted it in the past. That makes sense. This fascinates me. I was a binge eater. I haven’t in a long time since you and I worked together, thankfully. I was a binge eater in the middle of the night. Past 12:00, I was still up. I had all these ideas running through my head. I would pick through my whole pantry, pick through my whole fridge and then I would have three meals. I was like, “What happened?” I won’t talk from personal experience. I want you to explain it. How do you direct your clients that do that away from habits like that?

First and foremost, they’re under the care of a psychologist or psychiatrist. They’re working on their issues emotionally with that. You might relate to this. I did. The food component of it is when we have an eating disorder. We tend to not eat in the mornings and save all our calories because we know we’re going to then binge at night. It’s this tug of war that we have all day, week and years-long. What I generally do is position a nutrient-dense, strategic breakfast that they have to eat that keeps them well satiated.

I never agreed with breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I truly have changed my mind on that. It truly is. I don’t like the way America thinks it should be. I do think it’s important because if we satiate and we start off great, we’re going to make better choices. For example, if I start with a bowl of cereal, which is all refined carbohydrates, I spike my blood sugar, I’m hangry and I eat again. I’m then gravitating towards a sugary thing because my body wants sugar to raise my blood sugar. We have this cascade effect happen throughout the day. If I would have had that nutrient-dense smoothie, breakfast or whatever it might be, I’m less likely to do that and very much less likely to have a binge. I usually start there.

I do dabble a little bit into lifestyle, breathwork and those types of things. Bingeing and eating disorders is sympathetic. We’re going to fight or flight. Realistically, that’s irrational and not logical. I need to bring them down to a parasympathetic state that brings them to a conscious logical state. Generally, they then can snap out of it. They might start a binge and then they have to go do an exercise of breathwork and then they’re allowed as much as they want in that food that they’re bingeing on. They’re less likely to eat as much.

What about the opposite end of the spectrum like anorexia?

I don’t deal with a ton of anorexic clients. I deal with people that generally want to gain weight. Anorexia is hard because it’s a food fear almost.

That’s a lot of mental stuff.

The only thing nutritionally because it would be a tad bit out of my scope of practice would be to try to have healthy relationships with food. Working with them on understanding that a cookie isn’t going to make us gain a pound and that kind of stuff. That’s a hard one. That would probably be better for psychologists or psychiatrists to work one on one with.

It makes sense. For me, bingeing has some psychological in it. For me, it’s almost like a knee jerk, a reflex.

It’s an emotional reaction. It’s something you’re missing in life. For me, I realized my fear of abandonment was why I binge. I was loved as a kid but I wasn’t emotionally given that touch, feel love often enough as a kid that I used food as my emotional comfort. We have to pinpoint what that emotion is that makes them want to binge. From there, we work backward. It’s like, “Why did you feel that way?”

For me, I realized anytime somebody made me feel abandoned, I would eat. I had to think, “Why am I worried about being abandoned?” It went back and back into my childhood and then I determined I wasn’t emotionally given the things I needed to be able to feel safe. This then resulted in this unhealthy habit with food.

Are you hyper-aware with Willow about these things? I figured you would be.

It’s such a fine line with kids and this is what I see so much. Parents want their kids to eat the right foods and things like that. Don’t get me wrong. Willow eats donuts and processed foods. I do not restrict. I’m like, “You can have as much as you want,” type of parent. I want her to make her own choices. It’s not my mom’s fault or even her mom’s fault. I gained weight. I look fatter. “If you eat too much pasta, you’re going to gain weight.” I don’t want that for her. I tried never to talk about my weight too much. It sucks because I do a lot of anecdotal data. I’ll be weighing myself quite frequently and I’ll change my calorie intake for data for me to know how to better treat clients. I try my best not to say too much of that stuff up in front of her.

I know you let her eat what she wants to eat. I remember when you had your yes-day and the first thing she wanted was a sucker. I’m like, “Do you know who your mother is? I’m wondering.” I love her. She’s amazing. Do you ever try to educate her at all yet?

It’s important for kids to know why. If you think about a kid, as they grow, they need safety and they need to understand the plan. The first thing a kid will ask you is, “What are we doing today?” It’s not because they’re excited. They need to understand what is going to happen in their world so that they can take that in and then they get excited. The same thing with food, we want to make sure that we’re explaining why certain foods are good and why certain foods are bad but not in a negative form.

I wouldn’t say, “You can’t have mac and cheese because it’s overly processed. It’s going to make you fat.” I would say, “Mac and cheese are not as nutrient-dense as broccoli or a chicken or a berry. We have it in moderation like we have berries, chicken and broccoli in moderation.” It’s a little bit more positive and a why behind it. We’ll then talk about the minerals or micronutrients within foods or what protein does. I try to get a little bit sciency without being too crazy.

Intuitive Eating: When you have an eating disorder, you tend to not eat in the morning. This saves all your calories so that you binge eat at night. It’s a constant tug of war that you have to deal with.

Let’s say when you add the egg into her mac and cheese to add the protein, do you tell her about that?

Yes. She doesn’t know about it. There are things that I add. In her smoothie, I don’t tell her that there are super greens in there. She doesn’t care to know. I have her taste a lot of the recipes I create because I want to know. If she doesn’t like it then most people won’t like it. She’s open to trying new things but she also is a kid and wants Cheerios and doughnuts.

Do you explain to her why you put the egg in the pasta? Does she understand that?

Yes. It’s always important to teach kids everything and anything. If you’re walking down the street and they point out a homeless person, that’s a teachable moment in my opinion. We were in Boston and it was raining and there was a homeless man there and she goes, “What’s going on with him?” I was like, “He’s homeless.” She goes, “What does that mean?” I explained it to her and she goes, “Wow.” I go, “How does that make you feel?” She goes, “I feel sad for him. He’s wet.” I go, “Should we ask him if he would like our umbrella?” She says, “That’s a good idea.” I asked him and he said no. He didn’t want it. He was fine. He had a little poncho. He was good. She got to see that and that was such a teachable moment. Whereas the choice I could have made was, “It’s a homeless person.”

“Don’t look at him. Don’t worry about it.”

The best way to do it with kids is to make it teachable. Don’t make it about restricting or negative. It’s a moment of teaching. If they’re like, “I don’t want the broccoli,” then we talk about it. Sometimes what I’ll do is if she doesn’t finish her plate of food and then an hour later, she’s like, “I’m still hungry.” I always set that plate of food aside and then when she says, “I’m hungry.” I say, “Here’s your plate.” She’ll be like, “I want something else.” I’m like, “If you’re hungry, this is what we have. This is what you can eat.” That’s a better way than the way we were maybe raised, which was, “You better eat everything off your plate.” That’s forceful and negative.

You made a little empath. That’s what you did.

She’s such an empath. She can hear people crying in a store and she picks up on it. She’s uber-sensitive. She’s the kindest and sweetest soul that I want to keep in a bubble.

She’s smart. She’s your mini. She’s exactly like you. That’s wild. I want to talk about Your Happy Healthy Journey. First of all, I am proud of you. Your content is clean. It’s beautiful. It’s well presented. It’s basic enough where people can understand but also educational. Tell me what the inspiration was. You already have this job that takes a lot of your time. What inspired you to create Your Happy Healthy Journey and your brand?

Years ago, I had almost like an awakening, a come to Jesus, like, “You’re not happy with your life and you’re in a place that is going to hurt you. You’re going to get sick.” Through that process, I rediscovered myself. I don’t know if you feel this way but I didn’t know who I was as a woman or as a person until 34, 35. Maybe I’m a late boomer. I don’t know.

I started realizing I was all these things that weren’t me. I started peeling back the layers of that and came to realize I’m super unhappy. I’m not in a place where I want to be. I have all this success and I had the perfect marriage and all these things but I still wasn’t feeling fulfilled. In finding that, I also realized how much nutrition was my calling and my purpose. I truly feel that is why I’m here on this earth. It’s to educate and impact a large number of people through my words. I started looking into that.

I went back to school, got my certification as a nutritional therapy practitioner and then started Your Healthy Happy Journey. I was like, “I want to inspire other women not just through food because food is important but mental health is important.” It’s much like what you’re doing on your platform, which is freaking amazing. It’s that same thing.

We have to realize as women that we have much more to give than that submissive role. We can be that. We can be feminine but we also have this amazing voice and this amazing potential. I wanted to advocate for that for women. I said, “I might as well try to do this Instagram.” I know I’ve asked you a bazillion questions and you have been so sweet and generous to help me understand it. Watching you has helped me so much. I did it and I love every second of it. I want to cook more and more and do more things.

You’re helping so many people and you’ve helped me incredibly. My relationship with food has completely changed. I was able to help my sister, who was diagnosed with gestational diabetes. I know we spoke about it. My sister’s a healthy person. She’s not a sugar monster or anything. I know it sometimes happens with pregnancy. I was able to help guide her. At first, she was like, “The doctor said, ‘Don’t eat carbs.’” I’m like, “That doctor is an idiot.”

It happened to her where she had a plate of pasta for dinner and she crashed. She felt terrible. I was like, “It’s because your blood sugar went like this and you had nothing to balance it out.” She then listened to me and she went to a different doctor and they told her what you and I always discuss about the macronutrients. She’s like, “You’re right.” I’m like, “Who is this? Can I talk to my sister, please? I don’t know who you are.” It helped me help her.

Your message is spreading. Maybe she will have a friend with gestational diabetes and she’ll impart that knowledge. Your message is reaching women upon women. It’s cool to see your message spread like that. I have friends that talk to me all the time that are like, “Your friend, I follow her. It’s helped me so much. I love her recipes.” Your pickle chip recipe is so good. I loved it. I made my dip with low-fat sour cream and I put some ranch packet in it. It was very good.

They were all delicious. I was like, “Yes.”

The barbecue pork rinds worked out. It was fine. That’s all they had.

I was like, “That would work even better.”

It was fine. It’s important when you’re like, “Stop what you’re doing. You have to listen to this.” It’s quick. It’s not like you sit there for a minute and babble. You’re not like, “This will do this for you.” You get to the point. You’re like, “This is the recipe and it’s protein-packed.” You say all the things quickly in succession and I love that.

That means so much. Thank you.

I love it. You are also a chef. Speaking of all these recipes that you’re posting, how do you come up with these ideas? That’s what I’m curious about.

It’s crazy. I get asked this all the time. I don’t know if other chefs would say this too but it makes sense in our head. Everybody’s like, “How do you know that flavor will go with it?” I’m like, “I don’t know. It sounds like it would.” I don’t know how to explain it. I’ll dream. I dreamt about those fried pickles. I woke up and was like, “I have to make these.” I’ll get inspiration from eating out or something like that. If somebody’s like, “I want Thai.” I’m like, “My wheels are turning. Could I make Thai food?”

I wasn’t ever planning on putting out this much recipe content but I started realizing that most of the blog posts are great and healthy alternatives. They have good ingredients. Macronutriently, they’re not balanced. They would be pushing out these muffins that were extremely high carbohydrate and you see it. It’s like, “Look at this vegan peanut butter banana toast.” I’m like, “That’s going to spike somebody’s glucose so much.”

It is healthy ingredients. It’s still healthy but not the healthiest. It’s not productive to what our system needs to do well. I try to be thoughtful first on how does it affect the body cellularly and then the second is flavor. I was like, “I got to put this out there.” This is as important as what I have to say, it’s how we eat. I wanted as many recipes out to the public as possible so that there’s a balance at least. A lot of my stuff does have a lot of protein in it.

I would love to see you do a full-on cookbook. I feel like you already have the cover for it. You were craving pasta with garlic, butter and stuff. You made it with kelp noodles. I’ve never had them. Can you tell me about that alternative and why you chose kelp noodles? I know but the other people don’t know.

There are so many good alternatives to pasta. Kelp noodles have zero carbs. There are no carbs but they’re micronutrient-dense, meaning there’s a lot of minerals in it because it’s seaweed. I’m Italian so I am particular about my pasta. It gives me the closest thing to pasta. I grew up in Hawaii and I ate a lot of Asian noodles. It reminds me of Asian noodles and pasta at the same time. Maybe that’s where it happens.

It gets soft like a noodle and the creaminess can be created because it absorbs some of that too, whereas a Palmini noodle or pasta won’t and this kelp noodle would. All I did was some ghee because I don’t do butter. I do clarified butter and some garlic. Hemp seeds trick my mind at least. It makes it feel like cheese. I put a little bit of hemp seed, which is protein and fat-rich and some fat with the butter, garlic and the noodles. It was delicious that I ate the whole freaking bag in one sitting.

I always heard nutritional yeast was good for a cheese substitute.

Intuitive Eating: In order to live the best life, you have to have these priorities in this numerical order. Stress, sleep, and nutrition. Without one of them, nutrition doesn’t matter anymore.

My problem with this is 90% of the women I treat have dysbiosis, which you are familiar with. Dysbiosis is an overgrowth of bad bacteria to good bacteria. The problem is most women have dysbiosis with yeast bacteria. When we do something like that especially any of my clients that have BB and struggle with that stuff, they get more stuff down there. Personally, for someone who used to suffer from UTIs and yeast infections all the time, I avoid it. If you don’t have that then that’s a super good alternative.

Ghee is confusing to me because it is from butter but it’s not dairy.

They stole all the proteins. What’s cool about food and why I love food and nutrition so much. It’s just molecules. All those molecules interact with each other. It’s science. That’s my wheelhouse. All we’re doing is pulling out those proteins and then it becomes dairy-free.

You were talking about your stomach issues before and you did have allergies. Let’s talk about stress because that plays a huge role. As you know, for a whole month, I thought I had some sort of virus, infections and maybe even some parasites. Ultimately, I don’t have those anymore. It ended up being pure stress. It affected my gut health. What about you? Do you find that when you are going through a stressful period that you sometimes get those same symptoms even when you’re eating like you are? Is it resolved because you’re eating the way you’re eating?

That’s important to bring up. I always tell people that you can eat as clean as I eat. If your stress is not handled, you will be sick. I can’t fix that. There’s a big reason. Our digestive tract lives in parasympathetic, which is our relaxed state. Sympathetic, fight or flight, is where our oxidative stress lives.

If we live in a long period of stress because our body can’t come and talk to you, our only way to show there’s an issue is through putting symptoms in you, diarrhea, constipation, bloating, indigestion and all these things. What happens is, we see this then those systems, those organs maybe start to lose their function and then we see some disease occur.

When I talk to people, nutrition is what I do. To live the best life, you have to have these priorities in this numerical order, stress, sleep and then nutrition. Without the two, the nutrition doesn’t matter, in my opinion. I will probably piss off a lot of nutritionists. Don’t get me wrong. If you ate as clean as me, you would be doing yourself help. You’re not adding stress to the body. I could see their argument there. Truly, without stress being alleviated and without sleep being there, your sleep hygiene, there’s no way that you’re going to optimize your health. You will probably end up leading to disease, unfortunately, due to the way we eat nowadays.

Sometimes we can’t control our stress. Some of us have an anxiety disorder. We have depression. We have things in our lives that we can’t control. We have breakups, deaths in the family, our dog passes away or is in sick health. You and I both have been going through it with regard to our relationships. With your marriage, there’s been a little bit of rockiness. My relationship ended as you know. We’re happy about that.

To be real with our audience, you’ve had some days where you and I’ve been texting and you’re like, “Steph, I am not put together. I feel horrible.” Even the way that you live, even the fact that you work out almost every day, you are active, you have a beautiful daughter that you interact with and you have this wonderful career, all of those things and you still have those days.

It does affect your body. I separated from my husband, which was a hard decision to come to. I had to come to the realization that I failed. You could look at it that way. That’s the way in which we look at it. I don’t think of it that way. It was a hard pill to swallow. When I got married, I was like, “This is forever.” What I realized is that for the stress to not occur and to feel my best, I had to be unapologetically me. I had to put myself first and step into my power and say, “This is no longer serving me.” As soon as I did, everything changed. I was already feeling good but I felt lighter.

People used to be like, “You would walk in a room and I didn’t know if a shitstorm was coming through or what was happening. You’re fast-paced, all over the place and a mess.” I held it together well. On camera or behind the scenes, you wouldn’t have known what was going on but there’s some stuff going on. Now, I wake up and I’m at peace. It’s a different feeling.

It’s important for people to realize the first person that matters is you. I say this before Willow. My happiness matters before Willow. Now her health and safety matter first. If I’m not happy, I’m not a good mom. I was a good mom but I wasn’t as good of a mom as I am now. Before I would get frustrated and yell or get irritated easily and it was because I lived in this sympathetic state. I was unhappy in a situation and I didn’t know how to communicate that.

You were reacting.

I was living very reactive and it led me to a dark place. I’m thankful that I was mentally strong enough to not have those negative thoughts turn into actions. Now I see the other side of it and I’m like, “This is truly what feeling good feels like.” Now, people are like, “You’re different. You’re calm. You don’t react. I could call you a bitch right now and you’d probably be like, ‘That’s okay. I could understand why you feel that way.’”

“Thank you for sharing your feelings with me.”

I take them seriously but I’m parasympathetic now that it’s hard to get me up here anymore. I don’t feel it anymore and that comes with being at a place of peace.

When you’re co-parenting and when you’re with your husband now, are there times where you feel triggered?

Any person that has gone through a divorce knows that process especially with kids. In the beginning, when we were doing this transition, we always said that Willow comes first. In the beginning, there were a lot of triggers. I triggered him and he triggered me. We couldn’t figure out the balance. We have come to a good place where we come from a place of kindness and love. He is not a bad person. He is an amazing dad. I still love him. We’re not right for each other. Maybe down the road, I don’t know. That story is not told yet. It’s now coming from a place of calm and ease. With co-parenting, my strategy at first was, “We’re going to be the best friends.” That doesn’t work. There are people that do it and I applaud them.

For us, what works best is we have a structure, a schedule and we’re kind to each other. When Willow is here, I talk wonderful things about her dad. I’m sure he does the same when she’s with him. That’s where we draw the line. There’s not this engagement of trying to be besties or anything like that. It helps both of our healing processes. It wasn’t anything bad in the marriage. We both had issues within ourselves that we had to deal with.

For me, a big part of it was I’ve never been able to walk by myself and truly be unapologetically me. I’m living that right now. I’m discovering things about myself that I love, that I don’t like, that I want to change, that I want to work on. I lived in fear for so long. I played soccer. I was scared to go because, believe it or not, I’m quite shy when I don’t know people.

I meet a group of people that I had no idea about. I didn’t know where I was going. I’m a little bit type-A personality so I like to know everything. I had the best time of my life. I felt freaking alive and joyful. I’m getting to discover and determine who I want to be and if I want people in my life and what that looks like and setting boundaries. It’s similar to what you’re going through, too.

The biggest thing I want women and men to know is it’s okay to set boundaries and it’s okay to “have these failures.” I don’t think they’re failures. They’re learning experiences. That’s a part of life. Don’t live in misery because it’s consistent and it’s easy. Either way, stay or go or do whatever it is in your life but challenge yourself because the piece on the other side is quite fantastic.

This is a theme that has come up many times with some of my lady friends that I’ve been speaking with especially on the show. When you’re comfortable, you’re not growing. Now that you and I have put ourselves in the most uncomfortable positions of all time, we’re doing the most growth, which is interesting to me. When I’m uncomfortable, I’m like, “This is fine. On the other side, it’s going to be better.”

There’s one on TikTok that’s like, “Once you realize people are as fucked up as you are, you start looking at people differently.” It’s true. Once I took away the facade or fakeness of what I wanted people to think of me, I was like, “Here I am. I’m not for everybody. If you like me, let’s go. If you don’t, that’s cool, too,” everything changed and everything happened faster. I’ve gotten more clients. I’m building my business. I’m doing more content. I’m doing all these things because I’m in such a positive, high vibrational state.

Besides your clean eating and the way that you take care of yourself internally, how important has it been since your separation to continue with your routine with regards to fitness, wellness, mental health, your sauna time and things like that?

It was pivotable. It’s life or death for me. I was suicidal when we separated. The week I moved into my new place, my dad died. My ex and I were at our worst. It was dark. I’ve never felt that way. I truly understand why people take their lives now. If I didn’t have good eating and I didn’t have the outlet of going to the gym, lifting, sauna and meditating, I truly don’t know if I would be here. I was in a dark place.

You’re going to make me cry.

I’m good now.

I know you’re good. I don’t know what I would do without you. You’re important to me. This was good. This is some good stuff. This is probably the easiest show I’ve done, by the way. I have one more question for you but before I ask you, it’s the easiest and most flowy I’ve ever done. All of my other ones are good, too but they were all over the place with the questions. I interviewed this amazing travel couple. They’re beautiful. I wanted to ask them, “What are your travel tips for saving money?” I didn’t get to the travel part. We talked about them. We talked about relationships.

I don’t know if you saw on The Dodo, they have a viral video. It’s this puppy they rescued in Turkey that was covered in blue. It was antiseptic that a shepherd had sprayed on the dog but they saved this dog. Now it’s in the States being taken care of with a forever home with his family. They stayed in Turkey a month longer than they were supposed to, to take care of this dog and get the documents and get it back to the States.

The dog’s name is Blue. If you google The Dodo and dog blue or something, it’ll come up. One more question for you. I ask this of all of my guests. If you were to see twenty-year-old Nicola walking down Maryland Parkway, walking down the street, on-campus or whatever, you went up to her and you gave her a big hug. As you left her embrace, what is the one thing that you would say to twenty-year-old Nicola?

Don’t forget who you are. Don’t lose yourself.

I don’t even think I had me at twenty. I don’t even think I knew who I was.

We were in a position to be something we weren’t. Everybody in college, you would maybe agree with this, was scared of me. They were like, “Nicola speaks her mind.” As a person, I’m probably the biggest pushover, kindest, sweetest person. I hid that from the world because I was scared that I would get hurt that way. I built this big bad armor that was a lot tougher than I was. Now I’m living a life of my true self. I’m fine. I’m strong. You can’t hurt me. I am going to be kind. That would be that. Don’t lose yourself.

A lot of the AGDs were like that. They were strong women. Especially in our age group, they were strong-minded people. Jolie, for example. Everyone’s strong-minded like Iya. I love all of those girls. You and I have been talking for a while. Now I’m getting a lot of those college girls that we rushed with and stuff. They’re coming back and they’re talking to me and they’re giving me their accolades and their feedback on my material. I’m like, “Something’s working because these girls haven’t talked to me in a long time.”

You’re freaking killing it. Your content is needed for women. I’m your biggest fan, for sure.

I’m your biggest fan too. Nicola, thank you for taking the time to be here on The Luxury Dropout. We love having you. We’re going to have to do an update and see where your journey has taken you.

I love that. I love you.

I love you. Thank you. We will see you at the next one.

Important Links:

• Nicola Burbank
• TriMotus
• video – The Dodo viral video

About Nicole Burbank

Nicola Burbank is a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, she created Your Healthy Happy Journey as an outlet to spread positivity, motivation and educate people on all thing’s health and wellness. She is also a curator and chef creating well balanced macro nutrient dense recipes.  She believes Your healthy happy journey starts with you but sometimes after you decide to make the change you don’t know what to do and she wants to help guide you in all aspects of your life from Health and wellness to better organization & time efficiency to creating positive habits in your daily life.

We continue on Leon Walker‘s conversation with Stephanie Joplin about the red flags surrounding Narcissistic Personality Disorder. This time, the two delve into real-life experiences of manipulative partners, discussing how most of them are agents of gaslighting, selfishness, and control. Hear how narcissistic people confuse you with mere words, why they easily fall to cheating, and how they take advantage of your opposing traits. Stephanie also opens up about her past messy relationships, particularly when she experienced being love-bombed by a guy in the Marines and Army (who’s also a potential narcissist). Leon responds to this icky story by explaining how PTSD negatively impacts the way soldiers handle relationships, giving a peek at their unbelievably fragile feelings.

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Watch the episode here:

Listen to the podcast here:

Understanding Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Red Flags and When to Walk Away With Leon Walker, Part 2

Leon and Stephanie discuss the hot button topic of narcissism in romantic relationships. Stephanie reveals one of her biggest secrets.

I do want to put a disclaimer at the beginning of this show, letting you know that this is a trigger warning. You could possibly be triggered by something that I am saying, that Leon is saying. I don’t want to scare you away from it, but just in case you have experienced gaslighting, you’ve been with a narcissist, this could be triggering for you. Please, audience discretion is advised for this episode.

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People are afraid to hear those things and talk about that. That’s why when I do my videos, I’m like, “I know it’s going to be a trigger, but I’d rather trigger you in the video than you go out there and somebody put a trigger to your head.” You’ve got to tell that friend the truth. Try to give them the help. Paint a picture for them. That picture has to be ugly. Build them up with reassuring comments because a lot of times, they fall into this trap with these people because they have low self-esteem. They get isolated.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Don’t give people an ultimatum because they become hurt and angry, which puts them closer to the perpetrator.

It feels like, “They love me, I’m getting this attention.” They’re afraid to let go because it’s love bombing and sex bombing. It’s a mental game, it’s torture. They start to manipulate them. It goes over and over again, then you have a trauma bond. She doesn’t want to listen to you but she’ll listen to him. He’ll say, “I don’t see that girl, that girl is flirting with me anyways. She’s been looking at me too so you’re going to believe her over me?” She’ll go, “Maybe you’re right,” and she won’t go anywhere.

I will tell them the truth. Paint them an ugly picture of losing friends and losing family. You’ve got to make them see these things constantly over and over again, and then they’ll snap out of it. If not, they’ll keep going back to this person feeding them sins, lust and greed, making them feel happy, building their self-esteem, confidence up and feel secure.

Sometimes it’s difficult because if they don’t take your advice, which normally they won’t, eventually you give them an ultimatum. You’re like, “Either you stop talking to Leon or I’m not going to be your friend anymore,” and then they’re even more isolated.

They don’t feel close to that person too.

Would you recommend not giving them that ultimatum and ride it out with them? What would you say?

I wouldn’t give them an ultimatum because then they become hurt and angry. That will put some faults to the perpetrator. She would say, “Do you know what Stephanie told me? She can’t be my friend because I’m with you.” You’d go, “We don’t need her anyway.” She’ll go, “You’re right. I only see her once a week anyway, so we don’t need her.” He’ll start feeding more into her, “She doesn’t even call you at night time. She didn’t call you for your birthday.” She’ll start believing him more. I wouldn’t give them an ultimatum. I never do that. I try not to.

I have female friends and male friends that are going through that. A male friend of mine is going through it and I’m like, “I’ll be here for you.” This is what I do. When we’re together, me, my buddy and his mom are talking. I’ll talk to his mom about why I got out of my relationship about why I travel and do what I want to do in my freedom, but I’m talking about him but he doesn’t know it. I’ll do that. He’ll sit over there and go, “That’s a good idea.”

I would be talking to his mom and she’ll go, “Leon, that’s a good idea.” I’m talking to her but talking to him and getting to him indirectly. You have to stay around that person. Every now and then, go back and reach out to them but never give them an ultimatum because they’ll shut down. They will feel like, “Stephanie, my mom and dad are giving up on me. All I have is Jesse who’s beating my ass.” That will push them closer to that person. Don’t give an ultimatum. When you guys are out, talk around them about good things so they’ll go, “They’re listening.” I always talk to somebody else but I’m talking about them and they don’t know it.

I follow this woman, Michaela. Her tag is Mystic Michaela. She reads color auras. She has a podcast, and she talks about the fact that a narcissist’s love language is gaslighting. I thought that was an interesting concept. Let’s say I’m the receiver of the gaslighting. I’m like, “This guy went out and made up this whole lie to try to keep me. That means he loves me because he took the time to make up this web of lies and come up with something to excuse himself. That blows my mind a little bit.” What do you think about it?

That’s the vindictive part to mask or hide his insecurities because the thing about it is you’re going to find out. When you find out, I don’t give a crap anyway. I know that I’m screwed up. You happen to find out. You’re going to find out and approach me, we go find another person and keep doing it. That’s all we are going to do. I had an issue when I got caught in a lie and made up this grand scheme. I get busted and I walk away. I’m out.

You still try to make up this big lie. I feel that was your way of showing your love. Your love language to that person was to gaslight them.

All they’re doing is to impress you, knowing damn well that it’s not going to last.

They confuse you.

Here’s the trick with that. This is what narcissists do and this is what I did. Once she finds out, I’ll change the conversation and show her something that’s true that I did do. That’s being manipulative of us. It’s like, “I know I messed up but this is going to be even better than what I lied about.” They hear what you’re saying, “Leon, why did you lie?” I’m like, “Baby, I don’t know.” We do it again.

“I’m sorry, baby. You know I love you.”

That’s what happens. Now, you’ve got this grand scheme of what I’m lying about, but then you’ve got this, “This is amazing. You didn’t lie about this.” It’s a sickness. Most men don’t have to lie. Women all say, “You don’t have to lie. All you have to do is tell me the truth. Let me make my own decisions.” That’s not what we want to do. We don’t want you to make your decision, so I’m going to lie to you and I’m going to try to impress you. When you kiss me, I’m going to impress you with this thing over here, which is the truth. That is dangerous.

We laugh about it because we’re trying not to cry and say, “I’m trying not to cry.” I talked about this all the time and we talked about it before. Narcissism, gaslighting, these are all buzzwords. These are hot button words that people are saying and using in their everyday jargon. What is the difference between a narcissist and someone manipulative? What is the core difference between those two?

They’re the same, but a narcissist has plenty of other traits. Once they manipulate you, it goes to being seductive, then it goes to being covert, malignant, grandiose, and you’ve got all these other things. A manipulative person has narcissistic traits. A narcissistic person has all little tricks and traits. They master all of them.

Would you say that it’s a personality disorder as opposed to just a trait that they have?

Yes. It stems from childhood, what they didn’t get, they were left behind, they were lost, bullied, low self-esteem, no confidence, sent to an orphanage or foster care, not trusted, people didn’t believe in them, people gave up hope. It’s like, “I’m going to show these people. I’m going to prove to them that the whole time you have anger issues too.” I was the same way. I wasn’t a physically abusive person but I was verbally abusive. My way of hurting people and women is by using certain words. That felt good to me. I didn’t want to see somebody get their teeth knocked out or their nose broke.

How weird is it for me to say some things to a woman and drive her to want to commit suicide, and I’d be okay with that? I did that too, and a woman almost killed me and her in a car. I played all these games in her mind and I’m like, “I never slapped you.” She’s like, “Leon, you said this and I caught you with this girl. You lied. You dropped the girl off. You came over here and you tried to make love to me after you dropped her off.” I was sick, Stephanie. I had to tell myself that it’s okay to not be physically abusive, “You’re all right. You’re cool. You called her names and you put it down.” I made myself think that was okay. This is sick, if not more sick than being physically abusive because mentally, it was horrible.

Technically, you’re gaslighting yourself as a narcissist.

Pretty much. The thing is a lot of people don’t understand that because they fall into that trap. They don’t know that the narcissistic person is gaslighting themselves. I did that a lot. I did this to women. I said, “You shouldn’t mess with me because I’m no good.”

They then want you more. That would make me want you more. At that time, I’d be like, “Let me get him right away.”

“Let me try to prove him wrong. Let me fix him. Let me get him before anybody else gets him. I can help him. I can fix him.” A lot of times, they gaslight themselves. I did that and I got pretty good at it. That’s another dangerous thing to do. Later on, she’s like, “You didn’t.” I’m like, “I told you.”

“I told you that I wasn’t good to be with but you wanted to be with me.”

Some women think it’s funny. It’s like, “That is weird but for some reason, I’m attracted to that.” I’ve had women tell me that.

I get that. As someone who has been a victim of that, I 100% understand that. If I was in a vulnerable spot and you talk to me that way, I’d be like, “Let me send you a nude.” Why?

Another thing is narcissistic people are cocky. For instance, I would say, “I’m not crap but watch me get a girl. I’m a cheater. I’m a liar.” Who would expect a person to tell the truth like that about themselves and be telling the truth? That’s unbelievable.

You’re being ironic.

Ironic is a keyword. “How ironic is that? You’re telling me the truth about you but are you that person? No way.” I did that a lot.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: You got to make them see these things constantly over and over again, and then they’ll snap out of it. If not, they’ll keep going back to this person feeding their sins, lust, and greed.

I want to talk about love bombing. That’s important to talk about because it’s an epidemic now, especially during COVID because people are getting into what I would call long-distance relationships, sometimes even in the same city because they can’t see each other. Now, it’s getting a little bit better. Here in Houston, it’s starting to get worse.

It’s getting worse here too. We’ve got 100,000 cases in Illinois.

They have camps outside the hospitals because they’re full. There’s so much stuff going on. During COVID, people would have these long-distance type relationships, and I feel people wanted that closeness a lot so they would love bomb even. When you say love bomb to a man that doesn’t understand what narcissism, gaslighting or love bombing is, they think that is the old standby when you’re 18 years old or 17 years old, and you tell your 16-year-old girlfriend that you love them to sleep with them. That’s not the same thing. It’s not what I’m talking about. It might have nothing to do with sex at all. You want to feel that person’s love for you, but then you don’t want to commit to the relationship.

I don’t know if he has a Psychology degree, and I don’t even remember his name, but he’s one of those people who’s on Instagram giving advice about relationships. I got into an argument with him because someone asked a question, “I had a boyfriend and he told me that he loved me. Then he broke up with me two days later.” I was like, “That’s a love bomb.” He’s like, “You don’t have enough information to make that assumption.” I said, “Maybe not, but I do know that if somebody tells you that they love you and you’ve already been with them, no matter how long you’ve been with them if it’s been a week or a year, if that person tells you ‘I love you’ and walks away two days later, that to me is a love bomb.” It’s total manipulation.

He used the words that she wanted to hear. He did that to manipulate her. I agree with you.

All of his followers were coming for me. They were like, “You throw narcissism around. You use it too much.” I’m like, “I never said this guy was a narcissist. What I said was that is love-bombing to say “I love you” and then disappear.” That’s screwed up. To me, that is abusive.

Words are powerful and I knew that. I played a dangerous game of listening to a woman. Women like a man who listens. You all love a man who listens and makes eye contact. My thing was listening to see what I can learn about her, what she was missing, what she wasn’t getting, what she didn’t get from her dad, boyfriend, ex or whomever. I did the listening part so I could do what she wanted. I’m going to do the opposite of what she wasn’t getting. It’s a dangerous game to play. I did it and it’s a sickness. It’s all about being manipulative and being selfish.

I had this guy who was in the Marines and Army. He was doing contract work in Kabul. He was after me on Instagram for a solid year. We hadn’t met. He’s like, “Stephanie, you’re pretty.” I left him in the unread box. I was like, “I don’t care.” There was one night that I was particularly vulnerable. I had found out that a friend of mine had passed away or something like that. He reached out to me and his words were super kind and sweet. I ended up talking to him.

Over the course of four months, we were talking. Then after a month, he was saying, “I love you. I want to marry you. You’re the person that I was meant to be with. This is why I’ve found this Earth because of you.” It’s those beautiful words. Me, as a person who says their love language is words of affirmation, I’m gobbling it up.

He came back from his contract and we ended up meeting. He stayed with me for one night. Everything was fine but in my gut I was like, “Something’s off. Something’s going on.” I honestly don’t know if he was a narcissist. I’m going to talk to you about what I think it was, but you can correct me if I’m wrong. He wants to marry me, wants to go look at rings and all the crazy things.

He’s going pretty fast.

He was talking to my mother on Facebook about what they’re going to cook together. It’s that kind of thing. He’s talking to my sister a little bit. My sister is hesitant to talk to any guys that I date. She’s protective. He was even reaching out to her. He left the next day. I was at work and he didn’t tell me. He got on the road to go back to Dallas and left. After a couple of days, he ghosted.

I know he had PTSD, which I want to talk to you about because I know you understand. He has been through a lot in Kabul. He got blown up. His whole camp got blown up. He ended up getting a huge settlement out of it. He was physically sick. He was one of those people who wanted to be deployed constantly. He did not want to be home. I don’t want to make excuses for his behavior because I feel like this is me saying it’s okay that he did that to me, because it’s not. I see and I hear it a lot from people who date in the military. I know it’s not everyone and I don’t want to piss anyone off, but tell me what you think about that?

I served many years in the military. I deployed eleven times. I spent fifteen years on the sea. Half of my career was spent on the ship. We had to come back from deployment and decompress. The minimum I was going was six months. When we are away, we are detached. We had to shift our whole mindset to go from the loving boyfriend and husband to warfighter, to steaming it off the course of Iraq, to being up all night, twelve-hour shifts. Looking on the horizon, seeing bombs going off, worried about a ship coming in, shooting the missile, blowing the ship up and killing you.

We were like this for four months. We’ve deployed for six months, we spent four months in the Persian Gulf and we are not the same. When we come back, we don’t know what we’re coming back to. Some people come back to a house being empty. Some people come back to catch their spouse in bed with another man or woman. Some people come back to their grandmother or their father died, or one of their children drowned at the beach. We come back not knowing who we are, the kids have gotten older and the kids don’t remember us. The mom doesn’t trust us around the kid. We have to decompress. We even got anthrax shots. We took malaria pills and all types of stuff. We have a hard time reacclimating back into society.

When you’re out at sea for six months, when you’re in the Persian Gulf, Kabul and Afghanistan, nobody is telling you they love you. Now we have FaceTime and Zoom. Even now, you may not want to hear, “I love you. I can’t hear that now.” It’s like, “What do I do?” My girl, Toni, told me she loves me because we got mortars and bombs coming in. We got a ship over here. We got a small ship attack on the site. You get back to where it’s calmed down and you want to go to sleep, thinking about your girlfriend or boyfriend, husband, wife, your kids and whomever you’re with. It’s an emotional roller coaster that we can’t do anything about.

You get on that roller coaster when you deploy and you are on it for 6, 7, 8, 9 months or 1 year whether they’re in Afghanistan or they’re in Kabul, they’re over there for years. You’re like, “Let’s Facetime.” “I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to get mushed now because I’ve got to be on guard.” When you finally come back, you’re emotional. You want to love. You haven’t been loved. You want to hold somebody. You want to get married. You want to have a family because you’re getting older. You’re tired of the military. Some guys go, “Let me disappear because I’ve got to keep my job. I like Stephanie. She’s beautiful but I’m dealing with these emotions now.”

He was out. He wasn’t going to do contract work anymore. He’d spent over a decade in the military, so it’s not like he was new to it. He knew what it meant to come back from deployment, from overseas or back from seeing whatever he was seeing over there.

We don’t process it like that. I got deployed eleven times to the Middle East.

You’re not sitting there telling a woman you want to marry her when you get back.

We do that. You come back because you’re emotional. You haven’t been hugging a woman and you haven’t had sex. In most cases, when you’re in Afghanistan, you’re not around women.

What I’m saying is when you’re there, would you tell a woman, “When I get back, I want to marry you?”

I’ve done it. I wrote letters. We had to write letters. Think about it, you’re emotional and deprived. You haven’t held or kissed a woman. You are thirsty for that. It’s like when you get out of jail. They have pen pals. They get married in jail. It’s like your ex’s girl or whatever. It’s the same thing. Men get lonely too. That’s their way of saying, “I’m lonely.” They’re not going to say, “I’m lonely. I want to marry you. You’re beautiful.” When you see somebody and you deploy, it seems like everybody looks good. It’s like, “She’s beautiful. Maybe she doesn’t like me.” You then start showing me attention and it’s like, “She does like me.”

Maybe he didn’t have a relationship for two years or he screwed up all of his relationships. He wants to try with somebody else and see if he can still operate in a relationship. We tell women, “When we get back, we’re going to do this. We’re going to travel. We’re going to get married. I want to get engaged.” We talk about all these things. I did it too and then when you get back, it’s like, “I’m back.”

That makes me scared to talk to anyone who’s in the military now.

Don’t take me the wrong way. There are some good men in the military. Not all of them are like that. Most of them are pretty supportive and they provide and protect. We do have PTSD. For the most part, the men and women in the military are good. They are type-A personalities. Sometimes aggressive and some of them can be passive. Some are passive-aggressive. Some of them can be understanding, endearing, they’re listening and they communicate. When you move up in the military, you become a leader, so you have to work on your EMIQ, your emotional IQ, passion, compassion, empathy and courage. That transitions over to your relationship if you do it.

I never transitioned my EMIQ into any of my relationships. I was a provider. I love women. I want to protect and take care of her. A lot of people in the military that are senior leaders have a pretty high EMIQ. Some of them have a low IQ, some of them have a high IQ and a high EMIQ. That’s rare but it happens. There are some good military men and women that you can date.

What am I supposed to look out for if a guy approaches me and he’s in the military and wants to get to know me and talk to me? I am one of those people who doesn’t have a roster. I don’t have a bench. Once I’m talking to one guy, I want to focus on one person. Not that I’m saying, “We need to be boyfriend and girlfriend now.” That’s not what I meant. Personally, I don’t want to get to know five people at once. I want to get to know one person at once. If it doesn’t work out, then I go to the next person.

You know what marriage vows are whether you’ve been married or not. Most people do not talk about relationship vows. People never even heard of relation vows. What are relationship vows? It’s the same thing as marriage vows. You want to be the same way in a relationship as you are in your marriage. You want the same way, “Until death do us part. For sickness and health,” or wherever it goes. You want to talk about relationship vows. You want to talk about the components of a relationship. They say that there are ten. I learned these in therapy. You want to talk about his past. You want to tell him about your past.

I’ve dated and slept with a whole lot of women, sadly. Not one time in all my relationships has a woman asked me about my past. My dad was verbally abusive. My dad was an alcoholic. He’s a great man. He worked and he loved me to death. He loved my brothers and sisters. He loved my mom. My mother has an addictive personality. My dad’s personality was extreme. Nobody knew, “Leon, you have an addictive personality. You have an extreme personality.”

Not one woman asked me about my past. They never knew that my mother was a drug addict until I told them so. “Leon, what are you addicted to? What were you addicted to as a child? Why were you addicted to porn? Do you like older women? Do you like me? Do you like short hair? Do you like lipstick? What do you like?” We don’t talk about those things. The love language is important. You need to ask him about his love language. Ask him about his past life, his exes, why did they break up and how long?

These are interviews. You have to do it. We date, we go to dinner, we go to movies, we look at each other’s eyes, we hold hands, we flirt, I drop you off, get you the next day and we start over. Other things we don’t talk about are seasons and reasons. Stephanie, what season are you in? “I’ve been divorced for a while. I’m in my early 30s. I’m starting a podcast. My season now is great, my podcast and interviewing people. I want to travel here but I want to get a better microphone. My followers are up to 100,000. I want to get monetized on YouTube.” That’s your season.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Most people do not talk about relationship vows. Many never even heard of relation vows.

What can I do as Greg to bring better energy to your season? “Let’s go check for some microphones. Let’s go look for somebody who can edit your content. I found somebody.” We’re working together. You ask me, “Greg, what season are you in?” “I’m getting into fitness now. I want to lose 15 pounds. I want to compete. I want to run a marathon.” We’re understanding that I like what you do and you like what I do. Now, it’s not a problem. When I see you doing a podcast next Wednesday and I want to go to dinner, I’m like, “My girl told me that she’s doing a podcast next Wednesday. I’m going to go get her dinner while she’s on a podcast. When she’s done, we’ll go. Or as soon as she’s done, I’ll order her a fruit basket.”

The thing is it’s about understanding your partner, the season and why they’re in that season. Sometimes you’re coming out of the season because you lost a baby, you got divorced, your child support or alimony went up. That’s his season right there. The financial season is a little jacked up. Are you going to be able to work with him on that?

The thing is being open and honest upfront, “What does Stephanie like? Stephanie likes cantaloupe, kiwi, pink nail polish,” or whatever. You have to know your partner, the components of the relationship, what they like, what they dislike, their past, their mother and father’s past. If you have a son already, “When he comes over, would you allow me to discipline your son or daughter? Who’s going to do what chores in the house? Am I doing the garbage and the dishes? Are you doing the cooking and cleaning of the gutters? Who’s going to do the cars?” It’s the components of the relationship.

When we date, you date a person based on their looks and their status, car, house, job or whatever, but you don’t even know that person. You can tell a lot about a person about what they drive. They’ve got to have a BMW, Louis Vuitton bag, Birkin purses, a $10,000 diamond ring pear cut instead of something simple. Let’s go roller skating, let’s go to the park and feed the ducks. A lot of women don’t get those things because some men want to impress them with their money, their car and their house.

That’s why this show is called The Luxury Dropout because I used to concern myself with how many designer things I could accumulate, and it meant nothing.

That’s superficial. You can get a guy that graduated from UNLV, GPA, he’s a lawyer but he may not be anything. You’ve got another guy that went to let’s say Cleveland State or NYC. He’s got a decent car, a nice condo, great morals, character and integrity, and will make you feel beautiful. Whereas this guy is a graduate from UNLV, got drafted, is an MBA but he’s a jerk.

Most pro athletes are not great. Whenever I’m talking to someone that I care about, I always ask them, “How can I support you? How can I help you? What can I do to support you?” The bar is low now and men still can’t get over the bar. That’s what frustrates me because it’s the littlest thing. For example, I had this boyfriend who I broke up. He would leave me hanging until 4:00, 5:00, 6:00 on Saturday not knowing when or if we’re going to hang out. Me, being the person that I am, I was waiting, “When are you going to be off work?” He’s creating work to avoid real work, which is the relationship. He was leaving me in the wind.

How long were you dating?

It was for six months. Honestly, his mother was trying to get me to stay with him so she would make all kinds of excuses. It was a crap show. His father is a good guy but stern and throws money at everything. If there’s a problem, he would throw money at it to make it go away. He’s a generous guy. He has two other daughters with a different wife. The family is a little dysfunctional.

He didn’t know how to relate to you at all.

He didn’t know what gaslighting or a narcissist was. He got angry when I tried to show him the movie 50 Shades of Grey. He’s old-school like Italian mentality. He was like, “This guy is taking advantage of this girl because he has money.” I was like, “Why are you angry? It’s a movie. Are you okay?” He would act irrationally and he was weird about sex. Sometimes he’d be like, “Can we cuddle?” I’m like, “Yes. Are you all right?” It wasn’t anything to do with me.

Was he abused?

I don’t know. He would never tell me if he was. I have no idea.

He was closed off.

The thing is he’s a mommy’s boy in the sense that he doesn’t love his mommy like that but he talks to her every day. She goes over to his house, cleans his house and does his laundry.

That wasn’t going to last. That wasn’t going to work with you.

With me, it was like, “Can you order this for me off Amazon? Can you order Uber Eats for me? Can you order my groceries to be delivered?”

You’d have been more successful, which is negative, by being his mother.

The bar was so low that if you would let me know what we were doing by noon, I was like, “He loves me.” That is not even a thing. He’s back with his ex that terrorized our relationship, his baby momma. It was his fault too because he would lie to her and be like, “I’m not with anyone. What are you talking about? You’re crazy. Who’s Stephanie? I don’t know who that is.” He would gaslight the crap out of her. She was already crazy and went even crazier because she knew that he was lying.

I had to get a cease and desist against her and for my company. She still didn’t cease and desist. Four months later, she’s texting me and messaging me. She’s made up 50 different Instagram accounts asking me if I’m talking to him. I don’t respond but I’m like, “I’d rather eat broken glass than talk to that guy.” If I’m going to be in their life forever, poor them. That ghost of all this lying and craziness is always going to be there for them.

What messed her up is when she saw you. There isn’t any problem. She was done because what happens is he can say whatever he wants to her, “I don’t like her.” She looks at you and she sees you and you look better than her, taller than her. She can’t handle that. She’s going to do whatever she can to keep him away from you. She’ll be around until you find a man and go away.

He was like, “I would never want her. I don’t want her back. I know where I’m going to bury her body.” He’s being hyperbolic. He’s not legitimately going to kill her, but he’s telling me how much he hates her. His family hates her. The mom hates her. They have this whole drama where when she was moving out of the house when they’d broken up originally, she took footage of his mom going crazy because he was out of town.

She was trying to get her not to take all his stuff. It’s like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. She left hooks on the wall. She was screaming frantically. This girl posted the mom going frantic on Facebook for all the Italian community to see. Everybody hated her but now he’s going back to her because she’s a pick-me girl. She’s a, “Pick me. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll order your groceries. I’ll clean your house. I’ll wipe your ass.”

She is his mother. I talked about that in a book that I wrote before. I wrote a relationship book about men that look for their mother in the women that they’re dating. It can go 1 of 2 ways. They can look for a woman that acts as their mother and gives them everything, does everything, listens to him, makes sure that they’re right and doesn’t tell them that they’re wrong. They can find a woman that is nurturing, solid, strong, caring and they get used to that. They look for that in a woman. They look for those traits.

It can go either way. It can be where he wants a good woman or one that kisses his ass as his mother did. They do that. In my case, I lost my mother. I was always looking for a nurturing type of woman that could be there for me, listen to me, wouldn’t put me down, believed in me and gave me restoring confidence. That’s what I look for. I’m an independent guy. I’ve been independent since I was eleven. I don’t need you to do anything for me but if you want to, I’m fine with that. I don’t need you to wash my clothes. I can do that and I can fold. I clean up the house and do all those things. We look for that type of woman by emulating our mother, but it could be good and bad.

Talking about childhood, I know that you were born an empath. You have empathy. I had a great childhood. I thank God for that. I’m happy that I had the childhood I had. I was sheltered. Something that you said resonated with me when we were texting. You said, “Settling creates anger.” In those relationships, I didn’t get what my parents were embodying or taught me about. Can you talk a little bit about that?

You got it but the person that you’re with didn’t have that. You attract and select certain men. I’ve had all good women. I was always a bad person. My ex-wife had character, integrity and morals. She expected me to have that because she was taught that. When you meet a person like you who has character and integrity, morals and your parents are still together and they taught you all this stuff, you expect the world to be like that.

You get out there and it’s like, “You did what? How could you do that?” It’s foreign to you but people like me have been in the weeds, out here in the streets and dysfunctional as hell, that’s all I know. I look at you like you were square. You’ve been sheltered, “You don’t know anything, Stephanie. What’s wrong with you? You don’t have any street cred,” all that type of stuff. Those women are great women and they always meet the opposite.

They say, “Opposites attract.” They do but the opposite subtracts. A person that you’re meeting is going to drain the hell out of you. It’s going to take from you. You wind up being somebody that’s manipulative, vindictive, covert and all these traits, and then we make a fool out of you. You can settle with this guy because the sex is great and now you’re angry because he’s a piece of crap. You’re coming from this great family with these morals like my ex-wife and then she met me. I turned her life upside down. That’s what I say when you settle, you become angry and now you’re into it.

Women love quality time, and they love time and relationships. You guys don’t want to break it off so soon. It’s like, “We’re building on something.” Men are like, “We’re not building anything. I’m good. I’m out.” When you come from a family with morals, character, integrity and your parents working on their 35th or 40th-year anniversary, and you meet a guy like me whose parents got divorced years ago. My inner moral compass or my outer moral compass is all out of whack, spinning out of control, dysfunctional and disoriented, and then you meet me.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: A lot of women don’t get the real things that matter in a relationship because some men want to impress them with their money, their car, and their house.

If you meet a guy that’s like you, it’s going to be boring. It sounds weird but when you meet a guy who’s got character, integrity, is a Christian, a family man, his mother and father probably are married for 40 years, you go to church, they’ve got the nice house, car and everything is solid. I’ve met women to tell me, “I want someone living on the edge, somebody to take me out and go have fun. Let’s go drink, run the streets and get chased by the police.” Some women want a little bit of that.

Do you remember what happened to Bonnie and Clyde?

They got destroyed. Before they got caught, they were good. Some women want that edgy type of guy, rough around the edges, that bad boy type. Look at Whitney Houston. She had Bobby Brown, had a kid with Bob. She’s dead. Her daughter is dead. Her daughter’s boyfriend and her husband are dead. She was raised in the church and she sang in church. All of sudden, she meets him. Maybe she was doing drugs before him but when she met Bobby Brown it got worse.

Women with morals, integrity and character are great women to have, but then you meet that person, you get out here and you’re like, “My mom and dad didn’t tell me this.” It’s not that they didn’t tell you but they were raised like this and this is what they saw. This is what we believe. It’s all this other stuff. You’re not going to encounter that. Then you do and you’re like, “Crap.” The bar is so low now.

I would rather be alone the whole rest of my life than deal with it again. I’m tired. I’m exhausted. I’ve been dating for many years. I feel like it’s been a lifetime. I’m like, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

A lot of women feel that way and it’s getting worse. It’s not getting better. It’s more women than men. I know a lot of women who are professionals. It’s like, “Leon, what do I do? I’ve got a job. I’m a professional. I’ve got my own house, my own car and my credit score is 800.”

You literally described me.

You’re single. It’s baffling to me. I can’t imagine what you all are going through. You said, “I’ve done everything. I even lowered my standards.”

It’s funny because when men ask me, “Why are you single? What’s wrong with you?” That’s what they say. I’m like, “Nothing is wrong with me at all. I’m perfect.”

I see a lot of men that when they go into a relationship wanting longevity, and if they have staying power, they can have a good woman. These guys, from their 20s up to 45 years old, are still playing around. I was in a relationship but I wasn’t serious about it. I didn’t settle down. I always have great women in my life. I see women now and I’m like, “Why don’t you go talk to her?” They’re like, “No.” It’s horrible out here. The men that are single are not single really. They might not be in a relationship with one person but they’re probably in a relationship with 3 or 4 women. You won’t find out until it’s too late and you get heartbroken. Women are coming at you to pee in your car and all that stuff.

I’ll tell you a quick anecdote. I dated a Texans player a few years ago. He was married but separated. It was all over the news that he was separated, so I knew it was a legit separation. He and I were pretty close. We would go on trips and spend time together. We would hang out after his games all the time. He would get me tickets to sideline passes and all that stuff. Even over Christmas, we spent Christmas together. It wasn’t me making up a scenario in my head. We were dating.

I remember, all of a sudden, my ex-friend who worked for the Texans at the time, was like, “You can’t go on the sidelines anymore.” I’m like, “Why?” I couldn’t reach the guy. I won’t say his name and I don’t want to out him. I was like, “He’s probably busy.” It was during the Playoffs. This was when the Texans were doing something with themselves.

I was like, “It’s during the Playoffs so he’s busy. It’s fine.” She was like, “You can’t come on the sidelines because so and so’s wife says you can’t come anymore.” They’re trying to sue us. I’m like, “They’re separated.” Apparently, they had gotten back together and he forgot to tell me. When she found all our messages or whatever, he probably was, “She’s crazy. She’s obsessed with me. It’s nothing.” I don’t know what happened. I’m guessing.

They tried to get me kicked out of Texans games. This girl that was my friend was like, “Do you know how much Stephanie spends with us every year?” I was in clubs, season tickets, whatever. She was like, “She doesn’t come to the games for free. She pays for seats. He gives her sideline passes but she pays this much money every season. She has her PSLs.”

They were trying to kick you out of the whole stadium.

They had tried, so I couldn’t go to the sidelines anymore but they were also trying to kick me out of the games. This woman was threatening to sue them. I don’t know on what grounds. She was threatening to sue them because it was my fault or whatever. A couple of years later, he got traded to the Seahawks and he was messaging me again on Snapchat, the covert app. You know how it is.

He’s like, “I wanted to tell you that I’m so sorry how I treated you. It was super unfair. I should have been honest with you. I cared for you.” He didn’t love-bomb me ever so that was good but he was like, “I treated you like crap and I’m sorry.” I was like, “I appreciate that. How is your wife?” He’s like, “She’s in Los Angeles,” meaning they broke up. They don’t live together. He’s like, “Can I fly you out here?” I was like, “I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

He sends me $1,000 and he’s like, “Book yourself a first-class ticket. I’ll bring you to the game. We’ll have fun.” I was like, “I’ll think about it.” I booked a ticket. It gets to me two days before I’m supposed to leave and I’m not hearing from him. I had blocked his wife on Instagram since back then because I didn’t want her or her friends stalking me because they were coming on my page talking crap to me. I unblocked her and she’s way pregnant with his kid, and they are still together.

When men are doing that, they’re still trying to cheat. When a man is in that mindset, they have no fear.

Bold as hell.

Bodacious and bold. No fear. I was thinking about what I was doing and I was like, “How did I even have the heart to do that?” She is pregnant.

I was like, “I guess I’m not coming up?” He’s like, “Yeah, some stuff happened.” I was like, “I’m sure a lot of things happened.” Now they’re actually divorced, and I’ve seen it. I’m like, “They are divorced because he’s a cheater. He’s horrible.” I don’t know anything about her. She could have her own problems. She went through it, for sure. She has to be attached to him forever because they have a kid.

I think about all the things that I’ve done like that. I don’t know how I had the nerve, heart or mindset. It goes to show where I was. When men are doing that, there’s some sickness too because he blocked everything out, “What if I get caught? What if she finds out? I’ll make up a lie and she’ll be fine. She can stay. She’s not probably going anywhere.” He wanted you. She’s not going anywhere. In his mind, he’s like, “We’re going to get divorced three years from now. I’ll pay her. I want Stephanie.” That’s how they do it.

Pro athletes are off my list. We don’t play that game anymore. My mom says to me, “The more you have in common, the better it is.” I’m like, “I thought opposites attract.”

Opposites subtract.

I need to be with someone as learned as me that has done as much self-reflection and work as I have.

That’s why we talked earlier about how he needs to know what you like and what you’re doing. It’s a support thing. When you’re doing a podcast, “How can I help you with your podcast? How can we get your viewers to go from here to here? How can I help?” You say, “Maybe he wants to open a carwash or whatever. Let’s think of a name. Let’s get an LLC. Let’s get a sign. Let’s go look for land. Let’s go look for a lot.”

Your mother is right. I was with a woman for a long time and we had nothing in common. When you don’t have anything in common with anybody, you’re not compatible. There’s no chemistry. Being physical with each other sucks. You’re unhappy. You don’t listen. You take turns talking and don’t communicate. The more you have in common and the more you talk, you talk about seasons and reasons, love languages and relationship vows, you’ll be fine.

Loveship: Friendship, Courtship, Companionship, and Leadership for a healthy relation

Speaking of that, Leon, how can we support you? How can my readers support you?

I would like people to ask me questions. When I post a video, it starts off slow and sometimes it just goes. I asked to be here. God put me on this journey. I go in because women have questions that they want to know answers to. It takes me days to get through all of them. Sometimes, I won’t get through all of them. Support-wise, as far as asking questions, I don’t mind commenting. I’m cool with that but always ask questions because I like to help people. I try to get to all of the questions that I can. It may take me days and I may not get to all of them because then I post another video and that may post other questions. I enjoy it. Thank you, Steph, for having me. I enjoyed being here. You have a great show. It’s good.

In 2019, I did 37 interviews, radio, TV and podcasts. I was driving from Chicago to Cleveland because I’m from Cleveland. I had a PR, “You’ve got an interview in Cleveland on Wednesday 9:00. Can you get there?” I’m like, “Yes. This is about my first book.” I’m telling this because these older people have had these podcasts for years. You remind me of those good ones that were doing well. You engage with the questions. You need to stay right where you are with the show and look for some good people to interview because you’re doing a good job.

Thank you so much. I’ve been trying to get Ginger on my show. She’s the Loving Me After We. She reposted your video on her grid. That’s how I found you.

Is that on Instagram?

Yeah. I’ve been trying to get in touch with her to get her on my show. Maybe she’s looking for monetary opportunities and that’s why she’s not responding. I would love to speak to her because a lot of what she posts resonates with me. The fact that I found you through her means a lot to me because I’m happy to know you. I would love to continue our friendship.

You can always reach out to me if you have any questions. I would ask you to do this. If you meet a guy say, “Leon.” I do that for my female friends now and they’d be like, “No.” I make them think. I’m like, “He’s taking you to dinner?” She’ll go, “Yes.” I’m like, “Where is he taking you?” “We’re going to go to Hooters.” I said, “You better not. If he’s taking you to Larry’s, Gordon’s or Mike Ditka’s, better. He’ll get you a $100 tomahawk steak and he pays.”

It doesn’t have to be fancy but not Hooters.

Thoughtful but not Hooters. Hooters is for him, not for her.

Put some thought into it.

I said, “You let him take you to Hooters?” This is a friend of mine who’s retired in the Navy and she’s an entrepreneur. I said, “Let me talk to him.” Whenever you have any questions, Stephanie, because you know I’ll give you the truth, reach out and say, “What do you think?” I got you.

Thank you. I do have one more question for you. It’s something I asked every guest on my show. If you were walking down the street and you saw twenty-year-old Leon walking towards you, you gave him a big hug. After you left his embrace, what is one thing that you would tell twenty-year-old Leon?

At twenty, I had been in the Navy for two years. I would tell him to stop being promiscuous.

That’s a good one.

I was stationed in San Diego with palm trees and women. It took twenty minutes from Mexico, Tijuana, deploying to Australia, Singapore and Thailand. At twenty years old, I have been exposed to a lot of women and a lot of places. I would tell him to stop being so promiscuous. Meet a good woman and keep her.

That’s good advice.

When a man goes to the military, we get exposed to the world. They rolled out the red carpet to a nineteen-year-old little boy and he got to pay for nothing, women and liquor.

I feel like God put you on this path to get to where you are now.

I went through all that stuff. I got here and I got to continue to perform. That’s why I know women are like, “You’re triggering me.” I have women come up to me and I’m like, “I’m sorry.” The next thing you know, they’re like, “Okay, Leon.” When they come at me and I’ll be like, “Go ahead. Get it out. I get it.” I don’t meet them with fire or attitude because I know I’m a trigger. I remind you of your ex because your ex has a bald head, your ex had a beard or a big nose. I look like your ex. I get it. Go ahead and let me have it.

You do look mine, for real.

It’s been two other women who said that and I’m like, “I’m sorry. Let me apologize to him.”

You don’t trigger me at all. You empower me.

Thank you. I’m glad I can do that. Anytime you have any questions, reach out. I like helping women. I like helping men too because they have some issues with women that they don’t know what to do or how to handle. I talk to people every night. I got phone calls coming in at night. When that video went out, I wasn’t ready for anything viral like that.

That’s TikTok for you. There’s nothing like it.

Reach out. Let me know. You’re doing a great job. You made it fun and engaging. You ask some thought-provoking questions but you have a good show because I can see you going up and up.

Thank you. That means so much to me. I’m excited. I’ll talk to you soon.

Thank you. Bye.

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That’s it with this episode with Leon. I hope that you enjoyed that. To be honest, I feel like a different or changed person after that conversation. We probably could have talked for another hour. We spoke for two hours. It could have been more. Leon and I will continue to be friends. He even told me he was going to vet the guys that I want to date. I’d be happy to send over the resumes as they come rolling in.

What a great guy. To be able to talk so openly about his past, his discretions, his dark times, and be able to listen to me and to what happened to me as well is truly something special. I hope you bonded with him just like I did when you read this. I hope you’re going to take away something with you, a lesson learned, something that will appeal to you in the future and you will say, “I remember reading on The Luxury Dropout. Leon was talking with Stephanie, and this came up.” Also to be able to use it in your everyday conversation.

It’s an important topic to keep in the frame of your mind. If you’re watching on YouTube, please like, comment and subscribe. Let us know your thoughts. Have you been with a narcissist? Have you yourself been the narcissist and are also recovering? Are you in treatment or therapy? What are your takeaways? If you are listening on any streaming platforms, pls leave me five stars. I’d love the feedback from you. I’m glad that you’re here. That’s it for me. I love you, guys. Until next time.

About Leon Walker

Narcissistic Personality Disorder is more common than you think. Who knows, you may be in a relationship with a narcissist right now and simply not aware of it – or just afraid to admit it. For Episode 2, our guest is decorated Naval Veteran, author, and speaker Leon Walker. In this first part of his conversation with Stephanie Joplin, he talks about the manipulative telltale signs of NPD, pointing out why it is one of the main causes of domestic abuse and toxic relationships. This eye-opening episode is also not free from triggering topics, as Leon walks down memory lane to unravel his experiences with NPD. Listen as he dives deep on his many traumatic experiences, from being molested as a child, dealing with porn addiction, suffering from PTSD after his Navy service, and the many encounters with self-proclaimed empaths.

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Watch the episode here:

Listen to the podcast here:

Understanding Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Red Flags and When to Walk Away With Leon Walker, Part 1

Leon and Stephanie discuss the hot button topic of narcissism in romantic relationships. Stephanie reveals one of her biggest secrets.

I do want to put a disclaimer at the beginning of this show, letting you know that this is a trigger warning. You could possibly be triggered by something that I am saying, that Leon is saying. I don’t want to scare you away from it, but just in case you have experienced gaslighting, you’ve been with a narcissist, this could be triggering for you. Please, audience discretion is advised for this episode.

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I spoke with one of the most interesting guests you will probably ever come across on a show. He is a former narcissist. He is a recovering narcissist and has made a difference in many people’s lives by speaking out on platforms like TikTok and Instagram about the signs to look for, what to do if you are dating a narcissist, some of the red flags to look for when you’re out in the dating game, what to expect from a narcissist about gaslighting, all of these buzz words, hot button topics. What the difference is between someone who’s manipulating you and an actual narcissist.

We even go into some of my own personal experiences in dating, and actually my experience with dating a narcissist and how deep and dark that journey went. Let’s get right into it. This is a long episode, and debatable that it might need to be split up into two episodes because the content is that fire. Let’s go ahead and welcome Leon Walker to the show.

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Leon is a 32-year Navy veteran. He is a Command Master Chief. He is an author, motivational speaker, TikTok and Instagram legend. He is booming. I was excited to sit down with him and hash things out and get into the mind of a narcissist, and understand where these behaviors come from and how to protect myself and how to best approach the dating world nowadays. It’s not fun out here in these streets anymore. You’ll hear a lot of good information. This one is very important for all women and all men to read. No matter what you identify as, no matter who your partner is, even if you aren’t a great relationship, I highly recommend that you educate yourself.

Without further ado on this subject, it is truly fascinating, truly important, something that’s relatively new when it comes to psychology and relationships. I do think that taking this knowledge with you and being able to help a friend, hypothetically, it would be really important.

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I want to welcome a guest that I’ve been looking forward to speaking with. His name is Leon Walker. Leon, welcome to the show. I’m so pleased to have you.

I appreciate you having me.

We “met” on social media when one of the accounts that I follow posted one of your IGTVs. It was talking about how you were a reformed narcissist. It piqued my interest because narcissism is such a buzzword, even with the Gen Zers all the way through to the Millennials. I don’t know about the older generation than me. They don’t talk about it a lot. If I talk about narcissism with my parents, they’re like, “What are you talking about?” It is a hot-button topic. You honed in on a subject that’s triggering to a lot of people but also, they want to know more about it. Tell us the story about how you jumped online to start speaking about this.

Broken: A Memoir

What happened was I started posting on Instagram and Facebook back in 2016 talking about life. I started with fitness and things like that. I wrote my first book called Broken. It’s about my childhood because I was dysfunctional. I was molested, had addictions at a young age, and I lost my virginity by the time I was eight. I wrote a book about it, then I found a PR.

A friend of mine read my book and he’s like, “I know a PR. You need a PR.” I’m like, “I was just writing a book. I didn’t think about ever writing a book.” I did a book tour in 2019 and it started going from there. I stuck with the childhood dysfunction thing, being molested and all this stuff, which is a big deal as well. All of a sudden, I started talking about relationships in 2020.

I said, “Let me tell people what happened to me, who I was, why I was cheating, why I was lying, why I was deceptive, how I messed up all of my relationships and my marriage.” I posted a video about my narcissistic ways. I was afraid to talk about it. I’ve been talking on social media for years but this one was deep, but I had to face my truth. I had to face my issues. God put me on this journey. I tell people that there was a time when I didn’t believe in God and I was believing in the devil because he gave me what I thought I wanted in life.

It was making me sick. I wasn’t healing mentally and physically. Going back to my PTSD and all the other issues I had when I was retiring, I was seeing psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychologists and social workers but nobody was giving me answers but I knew something was wrong. By posting the videos, I knew that it started catching on. People want to know about these things. That’s when I was like, “I need to keep talking about this.” Because of me being a narcissistic guy or having narcissistic traits and never been diagnosed by medical officials because they misdiagnosed me, I had to read myself.

I had to look up and research. I was looking at all these categories, malignant, covert, seductive, vindictive, vulnerable, narcissistic. I’m like, “This is me but I’ve been hiding this stuff for years.” I was wondering why I was messing up all my relationships because I didn’t know what was wrong with me. They misdiagnosed me. The video is helping me and other people. The video is therapy for me because people are like, “How long have you been in therapy?” I was in therapy for seven months in 2015. My therapy is talking to you. My therapy is helping men and women daily. That helps me out. That’s where it started. It started growing and growing.

I know you’ve gotten a lot of support. Do you ever get any people trying to cancel you all the time or not really? Are they mostly support?

What happened was I haven’t had anybody try to cancel me but I have a few women who always say, “You triggered the hell out of me. You triggered me but I need to hear this.” There was one lady that had a platform. She’s saying that there are a lot of men out there who are in this narcissistic group who are doing certain things. I’m like, “I’m not one of those dudes.” I’ve been talking about narcissism for a long time but I haven’t. I’ve been living it, talking about relationships but I didn’t know why I was screwing them up. I haven’t had anybody try to cancel me yet. They’ve been responding but it hasn’t been brutal at all.

It’s such an important message, but you never know how people are going to respond especially men. I feel like men could come for you in a way and be like, “What are you talking about? This is all psychobabble.” People don’t believe in psychiatry. A lot of men don’t believe in psychiatry. Usually, those men need to do a lot of work on themselves.

When I talk about these things I’m talking about myself. There was a time where I would always preface my videos and say, “I’m talking about Leon,” because I would have guys like, “You’ve given up the man code,” then they unfollowed me, but I stopped caring about this. I don’t even say, “I’m talking about me.” I do and say, “I’m in character and this is what I’m talking about.” They’ll unfollow. I’ve had a lot of men reach out to me and say, “Thank you. This is helping me.”

That’s so nice to hear. I want to go back to the beginning and let everyone know that you spent 32 years in the Navy. Are you a commander in the Navy?

Command Master Chief.

That’s a pretty high rank if I’m not mistaken.

What happens is the highest you can go in the Navy is Command Master Chief. Master Chief is E-9, but there are three other levels from Command Master Chief. Force Master Chief, Fleet Master Chief and Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy, so the highest you can go is E-9.

Congratulations, that’s fantastic. Even before that, you talked about having a hard childhood. You and I have talked about your relationship with your mother being strained and how she self-medicated. She probably had some issues. You’re not sure what they were. She was a little absent in terms of not noticing that things were going on with you like your babysitter, for example. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Throughout my Navy career, I will talk a little bit about it because I was still embarrassed to say, “I was molested by my cousins,” first was when I was five. I was afraid to talk about losing my virginity at eight. I was afraid to talk about being addicted to porn at seven. I was afraid to talk about a male member of my family touching my private area.

The further I moved up in the Navy, there were other people like me who had those issues. I said, “Let me share a little bit with them and see how it works and how it helps them.” I started helping people when I was sharing my story. I then became more confident in telling my story and seeing how it’s helping people prevent them from committing suicide. I too had suicide ideations as a child when I was 11 or 12 years old.

Narcissistic people don’t like to lose. They have to win by any means necessary.

My mom didn’t know because I was afraid. When I did my book tour, I met a lot of people, a lot of psychotherapists and psychologists, and they want to know about my story. I started looking up. I started doing a lot of reading and research on child molestation, dysfunction, how divorce affects a child and things like that. This number could be different by now. I found out that 90% of the perpetrators are somebody you know or trust. This was in 2019.

The key thing was 80% of the cases go unreported. The people that I was interviewing with in the podcasts, TV shows or radio interviews, nobody knew. Even the psychotherapists didn’t know why 80% of the cases go unreported. My reasoning for not reporting and not telling on anybody is because first of all, I didn’t know how to report it. When my babysitter was molesting me, she helped me with my pain in my parents fighting and arguing. She helped me get over the fear of my father coming home drunk and beating my mother. My mother is shooting at my father trying to kill my father.

She helped me to master that pain and I suppressed it. She was giving me money, quarters, food, and she was having intercourse with me. I decided not to say anything because I didn’t want it to stop. Eighty percent of the cases go unreported because that child develops a relationship with the perpetrator. It can be because the child is not getting anything from their parents.

My parents are great, don’t get me wrong. Being bullied doesn’t have an outlet. My outlet was to be in love with my babysitter, that’s why I didn’t report it. A lot of young men and women don’t report it because of fear of retaliation, fear of the family not believing them, or fear of losing that person showing them what we think is love.

I know that a lot of people don’t report rape when they are in a relationship because they’re like, “He’s my boyfriend. She’s my girlfriend. We have sex all the time. Who’s going to believe me?” It’s the same idea. I understand that.

It’s not just kids but older adults that are in abusive relationships and are afraid to report. Sometimes, they don’t even believe that it’s happening to them. They don’t believe that they are abused.

We’ll have to touch on that a little bit later. I was telling you that I had a relationship with a narcissist and that’s exactly what happened to me. Please continue with your childhood.

My dad was always working. He worked at Ford. He was gone a lot but he was there. He provided. My mother was the one who has given the parties, the birthday parties and all that stuff. She was there. Between the 5th and 6th grades, my parents’ divorce started. When you’re going through a divorce, the male is asked to leave the home. He left, so there was no discipline in my household.

When my father left, probably 80% of the family income was going too. We didn’t have lights, water or gas during the divorce proceedings. We barely had food. I’m going through this thing where I’m addicted to porn, being molested, I’m hungry and angry. I have anger issues. I’m starting to steal. Everything was compounded by the time I was twelve years old, and being bullied by a male member of my family.

Once we lost our house in the sixth grade, my family was split up. That was the end for me because I was on my own. I was sent to live with a lady that I didn’t know. I got to know her. My mother and brother moved to a hotel. My sister was sent across Cleveland to live with another lady. By the time I was twelve years old, I was on my own. My mother eventually got us back when I was thirteen, but we were living in a one-bedroom apartment and there were four of us.

From 1st grade to the 6th grade, I wet the bed so much that I couldn’t sleep in the bed. I was put on the floor. I think that wasn’t abused. I couldn’t sleep in the bed because on the top bunk, I would always wet the bed and it was tripping down on my brothers, so they put me on the floor. Now I’m sleeping on a piece of carpet from probably the 1st grade to the 6th grade.

Was that anxiety-induced? Do you remember?

What happened was I started getting therapy in 2015. The social worker asked me a bunch of questions. I was in therapy for seven months, “Tell me about your childhood.” I started telling her and she said, “Do you realize that you were abused?” Even at 50, I didn’t process that I was abused. I had no idea. A symptom of abuse is bedwetting. That’s when I found out. I didn’t know, so I was wetting the bed.

I didn’t either. If you’re wetting the bed, do you remember a feeling of anxiety at all? Do you remember anything?

It went from peeing on the bed to peeing on myself when my father came home. Anxiety was there. I love my dad. I still love my dad. He died in 1999 as an alcoholic. When he would come home, I knew something was going to happen. Either I was going to get a spanking or he and my mom were going to fight. My anxiety levels were extremely high. It was all of that. It went from peeing on myself or peeing on the bed to just peeing because that was the only outlet. I had no control over it. I didn’t realize I was abused until I was 50.

I have generalized anxiety. I didn’t know what that was. It runs in my family. From kindergarten, I have a memory of being anxious. Now, I can define it as anxiety. I didn’t know what that was until I was maybe 30. I was like, “Why am I feeling this feeling in the pit of my stomach like I’ve got to go to the bathroom? My heart races. I feel like I want to rip my skin off of myself.” I read about it and I was like, “What is this?” Finally, it was anxiety.

A lot of things come with that. I stopped washing up. I stopped brushing my teeth. My teeth are turning green as a kid.

That’s depression.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Many young men and women don’t report rape because of fear of retaliation, fear of the family not believing, or fear of losing someone showing them what they think is love.

I didn’t know what to think about. I didn’t know about depression, anxiety, PTSD, abuse, none of that. I’m going through life. I joined the Navy later on and I’m still going through life like this. The only thing is I started washing up, brushing up my teeth and stop peeing on the bed, but I still had these issues from my childhood that I’d never got help with.

At the time, the stigma of having a “mental disability” or a mental problem made you cuckoo. “You’re crazy,” that’s the thinking of the older generations. I’m sure that if you had told your parents, “I have anxiety or I’m depressed,” they would have been like, “Get out of here.”

I’m glad you brought that up because when you get a chance, look up the USS Stark. When you pull it up, you’ll see a picture of a ship sinking and it’s on fire. I was 21 years old and I was on a fire team on another ship on the USS Reid. We had to go render assistance to USS Stark. We were in the Persian Gulf that time for four months. It got hit by two missiles. I’m telling you the story because as the leader on a fire team, you had to go fight a fire. It’s like we’re a firefighter. When we got there, we had to fight one fire. When you look at the picture, you’ll see the smoke coming from the ship. That’s the fire we put out, but there were 37 men who were burned to death.

Did you see that?

Yes. I had to walk around with a plastic bag and pick up fingers. You have no choice. I tell you this story because I had to go see a psychiatrist then. I was on that ship for twelve hours putting bodies in body bags, picking up fingers, feet, and peeling people off the deck that were burned to death. When we peel them off, a part of the arm will come off. We decided to peel them off and keep going. We put them in body bags and carry them. It became my norm. You can smell burnt flesh. Have you ever smelled burnt flesh before?

When I burned myself, yeah, but not dead burnt flesh.

This is a distinctive smell. After we left, they flew us back off from that ship. We caught a boat from that ship to my ship and towed that ship back into Bahrain. Finally, when I came back in San Diego, we had to go see a psychiatrist. I went to see a psychiatrist for two weeks and I stopped. It’s like, “Either we can continue seeing you and process you out of the Navy, or you can stay and keep taking medicine and try to remain in the Navy.” I said, “I’m not coming back,” and I left.

My thing was I didn’t want to keep going to see the psychologist because people would make fun of me. They will call me crazy. That’s when I knew something was wrong with me because I still have nightmares because of that. I have a bunch of pills that I take for sleeping disorders and nightmares. I didn’t know there was such a thing as taking pills for nightmares. I didn’t find out that I had this severe PTSD until 2015 when they misdiagnosed me with everything else. I didn’t want people to make fun of me for being cuckoo or crazy, so I stopped going to the psychiatrist and I kept this.

Especially being military too, not only the generation that you were in but the military specifically. You may get fun of. You get, “Come on. What is it?” It’s basically saying, “Are you even a man? What’s wrong with you?”

You hear those things. Maybe the type of person I was back then, and I’m still this way, outgoing, social, funny and making jokes. I was always joking with other people. Now, if I go back to the ship and they process me out, they will make fun of me because I’m crazy. I was losing my mind because even now, I have to sleep with the light on. I can’t sleep in darkness. I still have nightmares about that incident that happened in 1987.

I was in a car accident. Sometimes, I’m on the road and I panic about it, but that was a car accident. No one died. I can’t even imagine what that was like for you.

We had to see men stacked up on each other burnt. Facial features are burned off, even to the side of their neck. Arms snapped off and bone sticking out. At 21 years old, I wasn’t ready to see that. The thing about it is we got there and we’ve got to carry the bodies, pick up body parts, peel people off the deck, put them in the bag, take them off and ship. It was like handing off meat. We’re handing off bodies.

That’s someone’s husband or someone’s son.

One lady was there. She had come to Bahrain because her husband was retiring. He was going to fly back to California. I never got a chance to talk to him. He was one of the first bodies we found. He had been burned in his bed.

God rest his soul. I can’t imagine.

That’s why I didn’t continue seeing the psychiatrist because I didn’t want people to call me crazy.

I know you said you have this porn addiction. Were those magazines? What was that?

No. Those were straight-up movies like 8MM. A family member started showing me those movies. That warped my little mind. I started seeing men and women, black men and white women, black men and Asian women, Latina, everything. What that did to me was it looked at women as being docile and subservient to be dominated. That’s what I saw. I talked about this in my book Broken where my family member drilled a hole in my mother’s bedroom wall, which was adjacent to the bathroom.

My mother, father threw parties every Friday. We would watch the women come in there to undress, adjust their bras and use a restroom. I would sit there and look through it. I was 8 years old, 9 years old. I started seeing things at a young age that I shouldn’t have been seen, the body parts of developed women. Now, I’m seeing how women are looking at 30, 35 years old.

Narcissistic people pay attention to what you’re not getting and weren’t receiving.

Young girls my age couldn’t do anything for me because I saw well-developed women. Instead of being with these young girls and maybe riding a bicycle or playing sports, which I did, I looked at them and they couldn’t do anything for me because they weren’t fully developed. Now, I developed a sense of loving, liking and being attracted to older women. With the porn, I saw women as sex objects and just toys. It did start coming out because I had watched porn all through elementary school.

I didn’t have any in junior high school because we moved so the 8MM cameras were gone. However, once I get into the Navy, the images of the porn and what I saw came back to me because we deploy to go to Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Philippine Island, Hawaii, Hong Kong, now I’m seeing these women that I have access to and the porn came back to me. I looked at women as, “You’re just sex to me and nothing else.”

It’s like a way to cope.

That’s all it was. I was suppressing things. I was lusting for women. My cousins and babysitter had hurt me. I didn’t want to hurt women physically. I’m not a physical type of guy to hurt women but I was hurting them verbally. I was hurting them by dating them and leaving them. I was leading them on, I lied to and deceiving them. I use them as objects, as toys. That’s all I knew.

Did it turned you on to degrade them a little bit?

Yes. When I was a child, I saw women being degraded. They will be smiling and performing. I’m like, “This is what they do.”

“This is what they like.”

That coupled with losing my mom or my mom sent me to live with another lady. I had emotional issues dealing with emotional dysregulation and detachment issues. I didn’t want to love. I don’t want to hold, hug, cuddle or hold hands because I lost that nurturing from my mom. As I got older, I never regained that. I joined the military and I was like, “Why should I hug a woman in the Navy? Why should I hug a woman in Thailand?” I’m not. It’s just sex and that’s it. I’m not going to hold your hand. We’re not going to cuddle. That damaged me and my relationships because I never liked to cuddle, hold hands or hug. I didn’t want to hug because I was dealing with emotional detachment from my childhood from my mother giving me away.

Hand in hand with that, I want to talk about how oftentimes for me, specifically and I’ll speak for myself, I can’t speak for everybody. A lot of the times people will say that they’re the best sex of their lives was with the most toxic guy, the most narcissistic guy. That was what happened to me until I realized that it was because that was the only time I had his full attention. His full what I thought was love. He was touching me. He wasn’t a holding hands type of guy either.

We never connect like that. The reason why narcissistic people are so powered up sexually is that means they have power over you. Especially if you say, “I like this. I like that. My last boyfriend didn’t do this or didn’t do that.” Narcissistic people pay attention to what you’re not getting what you weren’t receiving, not from your ex but your parents or your dad. In our minds, we become better than your ex. In our minds, we become your dad. You don’t even realize because you’re being love-bombed and sex-bombed.

The narcissistic person when it comes to being seductive because they are seductive narcissists and they are vindictive narcissists, what they do is make their energy levels extremely high when we know that you need us for sexual purposes. We study. I studied women in porn to hurt women outside of porn. I studied women to understand their bodies better than they knew her body.

When I do that, I can control their mind. That’s what narcissistic people do. They study everything about you physically and mentally. They won’t tell you because they want to win. We want to win at any cost by any means necessary. Their highest level of energy and I call this the energy light zone when it’s a sexual thing. We’re not holding hands or cuddling, we want to please you sexually because that does please us, you definitely know that afterward that if you want to cuddle, that’s pleasing you. We don’t want to do that. Narcissistic people are selfish needless to say. It’s all about us, what we want and what you need and our ability to give you what you need just to control you.

It’s interesting what you said about control because I’m sober. Not that I’m an alcoholic or recovering. I don’t drink. I don’t do drugs. I don’t like the way it makes me feel. I also don’t like the taste of alcohol, for example. It’s not something I was ever into. Don’t get me wrong. I went to UNLV for college so I definitely drink not because I liked it but because I was peer pressured into it. When my ex and I were dating, oftentimes if there was a night where we were staying all night, he wouldn’t force it down my throat. He was like, “Come on. Do this.” There was this drug called GHB. It’s a roofie. He’s like, “It’ll relax you. It makes you relaxed.” I’m like, “Okay. I could try it.”

He would give it to me to make my inhibitions go away then he would have more control over me. I was not addicted to it but I almost got addicted to us having sex on it or being together on it because he was loving to me on it. It lowered his inhibitions and he was able to express more even if he didn’t mean it. He would be like, “I love you so much, Stephanie. You’re the one for me.” It was the drugs making you happy being on ecstasy or something.

Had you held on and told him, “No.” Sometimes he’d find other people.

He would have been pissed off.

They get mad because they don’t like to be defeated. They don’t like for you to tell them no. If they have to add a roofie or anything else or lie to you, they’re going to do whatever you need to do to feel like they are winning and have accomplished something.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Most narcissistic people are very complimented. They’ll tell you nice things. They’ll charm the hell out of you. They know what you want to hear.

He would do the domination kind of stuff in bed with the choking and things like that. I was okay with it. I consented to it. There was one time where I wasn’t consenting. He was in my home without my knowledge. He’d come inside hiding in my guest room. I came in and he was like, “Why aren’t you answering the phone?” As soon as I take the control away, he’s like, “That’s not okay.” He’s waiting for me in my home. For some reason, us fighting turned him on.

That’s the switch because now he triggered you. That controls the trigger. It’s making it intense and keeping intense. As sick as this may sound, after doing that they’re going to try to be very seductive. While the argument is going on, while you’re fighting, they get turned on. They start hugging and kissing you. Next thing you know, you’re having sex.

What happened was I didn’t want to have sex with him but my body was reacting to the whole relationship. My body wanted to have sex but my mind didn’t want to have sex. When he grabbed me and he started touching me, he’s like, “You’re turned on.” I’m like, “I don’t consent. I don’t want to have sex with you,” verbally but my body’s saying differently so he took that as a green light. I tried to record it on my phone. He threw the phone across the living room and he ended up choking me and having sex with me against my will.

Ultimately, I did go to the hospital and report it but funnily enough, the SBU detective was like, “You said you guys had sex the day before. You allowed him to choke you then so the marks on your neck could be from that.” I told that officer, “You’re the reason why people don’t report.” I told him that straight up.

He could be a narcissist too. I’m not saying a lot of people are like this but I’ve seen people like this. When you report it to a certain person and they see the marks, that can turn them on too.

Maybe, I don’t know.

When I was writing my book in 2016, it was graphic. I describe the scene with my babysitter. The publishing company told me to pull it out because pedophiles can read it and get turned on.

It’s important to the story.

I did the best I could to convey what I was trying to say. With self-reporting, those people can get turned on, too. There have been doctors that have touched women, that were raped or put them to sleep and touch them inappropriately. You have to be careful with that, too.

There is nothing exciting about a raped kid. Nothing at all. It is absolutely horrible. I’m like, “Please stop touching me now.” The funniest thing for me for going to the hospital to report, I was by myself because my sister was 8 or 7 months pregnant. I didn’t want to tell her and then my parents were obviously wrapped up in their own thing. I was like, “I’ll drive myself to the hospital.”

When I got there, I was walking up to the desk and I was like, “I have to tell them what happened to me. I have to say the words.” You don’t want to admit it to yourself because that’s your boyfriend but then you’re just like, “I have to say the word rape. I have to say that because otherwise, they don’t know the importance.”

You have to say those words like now, dealing with narcissistic people, you have to call yourself out. You have to say, “I’ve been abused. I’m being stupid. I’m being used. I’m being lied to.” If you don’t, you’ll keep going and think it’s okay. That’s the problem, definitely.

I’ve never talked about this publicly. People that are in my inside circle know but I want to put this out there and let people know that I was manipulated. He was seeing another girl on the side and I was like, “He’s not. She’s being crazy. This other girl’s making it up.” I remember he and I were in bed one time just laying there, this girl walks in the door and she’s like, “We had sex there earlier today.” I was like, “Whatever. You guys didn’t.” I got mad at him like, “Is she telling the truth? Did you guys have sex today?” He kicked me out.

This is the manipulate part of the way that I was. A manipulative narcissist will tell the truth and make you think that it’s a lie but it’s the truth. They hope that you think it’s a lie and they’ll laugh. I’ve done that a lot. I’ll go, “You’ll go sue somebody?” In my mind I’m saying, “I just warned you,” but I don’t say that.

Narcissistic people are very selfish. It’s all about them and what they want.

When I do it, when it comes out I’ll say, “I told you that two months ago.” She’ll go, “You did.” Now, you’re not going to get rid of me and be mad at me. You’re going to give me another chance because women like honesty. In my mind, I made you think that it was a joke or lie but it was the truth because of my facial expressions and the way I laughed about it when I told you. That’s a very manipulative and dangerous way to come across a woman that narcissistic people do.

I thought it was funny that he had cheated on me and then he kicked me out for asking if he cheated on me.

At the time, he didn’t answer the question because he knew that had he answered the question, you would have probably broken up with him or left. This thing is, “Let me kick around now because I win.” I tell people all the time, narcissistic people have to win by any means necessary. They don’t like to lose.

He kicks me out, I drive off and then he’s calling me to come back.

He’s not ready for you to defeat him. They’ll call you back because you left, you got away. They say a serial killer is somebody that kills three or more people. We never talked about serial cheaters. Somebody that cheats three or more times, 1 time, 2 times. I call myself a serial cheater because I related myself to a serial killer. I wasn’t killing females, I wasn’t hurting anybody but I was killing hopes and killing dreams for 3 or more people, probably 50 or 60 women.

We never talked about serial cheaters, which is what I was. People are like, “There’s no way.” How can I not be one? I’m being honest. I have nothing to hide. I don’t want to hold this back anymore. I was a serial cheater. The manipulative part of me could have been saying that to women before so that could be easy for me to seduce them. It was a tricky way of doing it and talking to them and getting what I wanted. “You’re so honest. Leon, it can’t be true.” It was true. We never talked about serial cheaters.

That’s true. I used to cheat when I was younger but I feel mine was because I had bad self-esteem. If I was with someone, I was like, “Men still don’t like me, I need to make sure they liked me.” That was my reason for cheating. I had bad self-confidence.

You wanted somebody to pay into you, to talk to you, compliment you and make you feel better. With this guy, he’s not doing that enough. It’s like, “You need to feed me. I’m vulnerable.” This guy, he’ll say, “You’re beautiful. You’re cute,” whatever. You’re lured to him and you leave the good guy but because you have self-esteem issues and it’s not their fault. I get that too.

My ex-husband, I’ve been divorced for many years. Before we got married, he’s like, “I’m the only one who’s going to love you. Who else will love you?” We were both so young. I got married when I was 22. I was a baby, in my opinion. I don’t blame him. I did mess up stuff too but what I think happened is because of that, that was in my head.

Anytime anyone would pay me attention, I didn’t cheat when we were married but before we were married, we were engaged and he cheated too. I don’t know what his reasons were. I can’t speak for him but I would want to look for any guy that was like, “You’re hot.” I’m like, “I am? I’m hot? Let’s go make out.”

As soon as you do that, that’s when he’ll start to abuse you, use you or maybe not. If he’s a narcissist type of guy and you fall for that, which a lot of women do, that’s when it starts. Most narcissistic people are very complimented. They’ll tell you nice things. They’ll charm the hell out of you. They know what you want to hear.

What I used to do is it was all in my conversation. I listened to what she was saying. If she didn’t think she looked good and she told me that, I told her that she looked good, she was hot, beautiful or pretty. I’m feeding her ego while she’s stroking my ego by being all in my face and listening to me and continuing the conversation. Next thing you know, we’re off and going into a hotel or in the woods, somewhere.

Anywhere. I remember with my narcissistic ex, wanting to please him sexually all the time. It’s like, “Let me do this for you.”

A lot of women do that.

I don’t know what the deal is but it’s not necessarily what you physically look like but it’s like a spell that a narcissist has.

It’s how they make you feel. In 1991, in February, I woke up that morning and said to my girlfriend, “I don’t like you. I don’t love you and I’m going to cheat all over the world.” I was 24 years old and so I did that. I was all over Japan, Thailand, Korea, Hong Kong.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Many women don’t ask about a man’s love language, and a lot of men don’t ask that. This leads to a relationship mismatch.

What did she say though?

I left that morning at about 7:00 and headed to the ship. She started crying, she hit me and I walked out. I was like, “I don’t like anymore.” I called back a month and a half later at 5:00 AM and a guy answered the phone in my apartment with my girl.

I bet you lost your crap.

I lost my mind. The first time I had cried and I don’t know how many years. We were in Japan at the time we pulled back into San Diego, May of ‘91. Normally, when a ship pulls in, the families are on the pier. The girlfriends, husband, wife, she wasn’t there. She came to see me hours later. Now, she took the control back from me. She started telling me what to do because she had her hair cut. She had on lip gloss, eyeliner, always looking good. I’m like, “You look good.” She’s like, “Don’t compliment me because they don’t mean anything.” Long story short. I wind up seeing a picture of this dude that she fell in love with and I call him an ugly guy but he had her.

He took her from me because he was doing the things that I wasn’t doing. He was holding her hand. He was complimenting her. He was hugging her. He was buying little gifts. I’m a provider for my girl but he was doing the little things that I wasn’t doing. He was telling her he liked her and he loved her. When I told her I didn’t like her and I didn’t love her, he did the opposite.

When I got older and got into my manipulative and narcissistic ways. I started remembering what I did to my girl and what he did to her to take her, I pushed her into his arms. I started being very manipulative too back in the ‘90s. I studied these traits. When he started doing the things that I wasn’t doing, he swooped her right off her feet and I was devastated. I lost my mind.

I bet you were so angry.

I still talk about this now when I talk to people about relationships, about not hurting your girl if she’s vulnerable because she tells me she’s vulnerable and I’m like, “I don’t care about you people.” When a woman tells you that, listen. You got to step your game up. You got to change something. You got to be more supportive of her, understand, listen and communicate. I wasn’t doing any of those things because I’m like, “We both look good. Sex is great.” That was it. I wasn’t doing anything else.

I could take her on a nice weekend and shower her with gifts but when it was time to be intimate or kissing her on the forehead, holding her hand, walking through the park or walking through the mall holding hands I’m like, “I’m good.” She was needing that so everything else I could do didn’t matter. The money, cars and the nice apartment didn’t matter. She didn’t feel like we were as a couple. She didn’t feel close to me because I kept a distance.

I’m an empath. Unfortunately, I trust a lot of different types of personalities. With my ex, he had no money. He had just gotten out of prison and I’ve known him for ten years. How we started even hanging out was he had an ankle monitor on and had to stay at home. I was like, “I’ll come to visit you.” It ended up escalating from there and I didn’t plan on it.

He didn’t have hardly any money except for the drugs that he was selling, allegedly. It was always me buying the things, doing the things and the gift-giving. Trying to fix him, help him, trying to get him job interviews and driving him to a job interview and things like that. Have you had any experience talking with people who are self-proclaimed empaths? What do you think about that?

I get a lot of women. Not inappropriate DMs but conversations about being an empath. Here’s the thing with them and with you being an empath. What you forget is that and I talked about this in the video I posted, it’s not that you attract these people. it’s that you select these people. What happens is where you get lost at, a lot of people including myself, I know now but years ago, I didn’t know what my love language was. Your love language is probably acts of service, communication, physical touch. It could be more. You meet people and women do not ask a man about his love languages. They don’t.

I do now. Before I didn’t.

If he says, “My love language is receiving gifts.” Probably selfish as hell.

9 out of 10 it’s physical touch, literally.

Physical touch and that’s for him, not for you.

That’s what he likes to receive.

If he stops there, you can believe that you’re not going to get much out of a relationship.

You’re in one box.

We talk about the seductive narcissist energy level is up when his love language is physical touch because that’s what he wants to do, what he wants from you, how he wants to control you. The physical touch goes into his narcissistic trait of being seductive and being manipulative. They all intertwine with each other. A lot of women never asked the man what his love languages are.

You have to know what the love languages are if you want to get together with somebody.

I do now so that’s a great conversation because you get to know a person either you’re compatible, you have energy and not compatible. You don’t have chemistry, you have chemistry, whatever but a lot of women don’t ask about a man’s love languages and a lot of men don’t ask that. What happens then is you have a relationship mismatch. You’re in it and he’s out of it. You’re all the way in and he’s halfway out. He’s never in.

I talked about the love languages, seasons and reasons and things like that. You have to know the love languages are if you’re going to get with this person. Empaths and I talked to the woman that called me or text me about that, I say, “Do you know what his love language is?” She’ll go, “No,” because you’re a giver. You’re a provider. You support, you protect and you’ve given this to a person who is pretty much a 35-year-old child. In the end, when he’s all running around and leaving, you give him everything and he doesn’t want to stay in a relationship and he’s treating you’re like, “What happened to me?” Women always say, “What did I do wrong? What’s wrong with me?”

Nothing. You’ve done nothing wrong.

This person that you chose, it’s not that you’re attracted to that person, you selected that person. You want to rehabilitate them, train them, nurture them back to good health and here you are. Your heart’s broken. You got wrinkles on your eyes, you got bags. You don’t think this can hurt anymore. You make yourself unhealthy. You’re eating garbage. You’re not working out. You’re drinking and smoking. All because this person that you selected, you tried to rehabilitate. I get that a lot. That’s one of the main things I get in my DMs about, “Why doesn’t he like me? Why doesn’t he love me?” He’s incapable of loving you.

I’m sure our readers now are feeling personally attacked by what you’re saying.

I get that. I am not trying to trigger anybody. I’m telling you all the real deal, the truth. When I first did that video, it’s like, “You trigger the hell out of me.” I’m like, “I can’t help it. I’m going to trigger you. Not on purpose but what I’m telling you is the truth but you cannot see it because everything I’ve done, a majority of women in this world have experienced.”

You need to be self-aware. I used to say my love language is words of affirmation but it is not. I thought it was because I love to hear all the sweet sticky stuff. That’s not my real love language I like quality time.

I talk about that too but a lot of the empaths contact me like, “What’s wrong with me, Leon? Why doesn’t he like me? Why did he go to this other woman and not me?” It’s not you. I did this. A lot of times I went to the other woman because it was a path of least resistance. She wasn’t going to stand up to me. She wasn’t going to say anything. I come and go as I please. I was never physically abusive but I was verbally abusive. Made and watch her cry then she apologized to me after I made her cry.

“I’m sorry that you didn’t,” I’m like, “Whatever. I’m out again. I’ll be back in three hours.” When I met a woman that didn’t take that from me, I was very uncomfortable. I didn’t like it. I was like, “I feel like a little boy. I don’t have any control.” The only thing they’re going to do is cheat. They’re going to go find somebody who’s going to stroke their ego, build them up and make them feel good. All because he met a woman that was good for him, good to him, strong, supportive and all of that but narcissistic people can handle that.

Why do you think that six cycles of toxicity is so addictive?

It’s because they give you a little bit of what you want and you’re like, “This feels good,” then they disappear. Your last boyfriend didn’t do it. We listen to what you say. We listen to what your last boyfriend or your ex-husband didn’t do. We listen to the fact that your dad wasn’t there. You don’t know how to do this. You want a daddy. You want to look up to a man. You want to take care of a man. Your father was gone. You feel he’s been absent all your life. You don’t know how to understand a man.

He’ll say, “This is what you need to do.” Now he’s teaching you because you want your dad to teach you but he couldn’t because he was gone. He died, he was in jail, he was on drugs but your mom is saying this and this. “Mom you chose my dad so how can you tell me?” Now you want to listen to this guy. They give you a little bit and make you feel good. They’ll stroke your ego. It’s playing on all of your emotions.

Are you talking about breadcrumbing? I’m talking about that cycle of, it’s super high-high and then it’s super low-low.

When it’s super high-high, that’s when he or she is at their best and then what happens is they feel themselves getting close to you then they move out of the way, you drop, fall and hit the ground.

Like your analogy with the amusement park.

There you go. The amusement park playground. That’s exactly what it is but then we’ll come back and get you so you feel like, “He’s still here. He does like me.” We hold you and pick you up then right when we feel we’re getting a little close to you and you get too comfortable, “I need to put you on a sliding board. I need to put you on a merry-go-round. I need to put you on the see-saw.”

I feel like I’m laughing so I don’t cry.

It always goes back to my childhood. Being emotionally detached, dealing with emotion dysregulation. Scared to love, to hold and to get close to you because, “My mom left me so you’re going to leave me one day.” I’ll get so close, draw you in and make you feel good to make me feel good. If I feel like I’m getting too comfortable or you’re getting too comfortable, you call me babe, you text me all day. “I’ve got to cut this stuff out. Get off the sliding board, fall on your ass. Get off the merry-go-round, bump your head. I’ll come back and save you. Let me hold you and nurse you back to health. Baby, I’m sorry,” and it starts all over again.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: It’s not that you attracted that person. You selected that person. Now you want to rehabilitate them.

It’s hard to see a friend go through that because I had a good friend and it was pretty well known that she was in a very abusive relationship. He tried to kill her. He’s serving prison time. It was this relationship of super high highs and low lows. Every time he would beat her ass, he would have the day after where he would take the day off work, stay home, take care of her, massage her feet, get her blankets, watch their favorite show and it was fine for a week. After that, he would bang her head against the dash of the car and knock her teeth out again. It was a cycle.

I saw something like that. This MMA fighter and that pretty girl.

That’s who it is.

I was like, “How do you hit a woman?” He beat her like a guy and he’s a trained killer.

She’s very tiny. She’s 5 feet, at the time she was 105 pounds and he was easily walking around 200, 210 pounds at the time.

He’s an MMA fighter. My sister and I talked about that like, “Did you see this?” I’m looking and I’m like, “Jesus.” It’s a vicious cycle. It’s a cat and mouse. They have fun with it and then when a narcissistic person becomes drained and participated in that, they’ll find a different person because a different person is starting over with new energy with them.

He found a wife from prison. He’s married and the woman has a kid and brings the kid to the prison to see him. My mind is like, “I can’t.”

I saw his name tattooed.

I don’t know what he did to cover it up but he had her last name across forever. I was called to testify in that trial. It was so crazy. Thankfully, they didn’t end up meeting me but I was going to be there to help, no matter what. Going back to what I was saying, I knew that he was doing that to her but she’s not the type that’s going to tell me, she’s just not. I knew he was verbally abusing her because I heard it myself firsthand. I was in the car with them when they would fight and he would talk so ugly to her.

When the district attorney’s like, “Did you ever see any bruising?” I’m like, “Yes but it could have been from a coffee table.” I don’t have a first-hand account of him physically hitting her because he hid it. That’s a whole different ballgame. My narcissistic relationship was different because he’d never hit me physically.

I’ve never hit any of my girlfriends either. I used to pride myself on saying, “I’m not taking her money. I’m the one who gives some,” but I was taking her heart.

What advice would you give to say a friend of a friend if they witnessed this cycle of abuse going on or if they feel any inkling? What advice would you give to that friend to talk to their friend about their partner? Is there anything you could say?

You have to give her examples of other people who’ve gone through this. You have to tell them about the end result, which could be death, mental health issues, rogue, being permanently scarred, somebody may throw acid in your face and make you look ugly so that nobody else can have you. You got to be real with them because they do those things. Cutting her hair or things that happened to your friend. As the end result, you got to paint a picture for people.

Important Links:

• Leon Walker
• Broken
• Video – Leon Walker’s Instagram
• @LeonRWalkerJr – Facebook
• @Iinspireone – Instagram
• LinkedIn – Leon Walker
• YouTube – Leon R. Walker Jr.

About Leon Walker Jr.

Command Master Chief Leon R. Walker Jr. hails from Cleveland, Ohio. He grew up in the inner city of Cleveland and East Cleveland where he struggled with numerous set-backs, downfalls, learning disabilities, addictions, lack of confidence, low self esteem, losing his home, and his parents divorce. Leon, through his trials and tribulations, became self-sufficient, driven, focused and wanted something out of life, so by the age of 13, he worked several jobs to take care of himself and help his family.

Leon ultimately graduated from Shaw High school in 1983 from a class of 466 students, however, of those 466 students, Leon was the only to take the military entrance exam (ASVAB) 5 times, he was also the only one to fail it, four times. He eventually passed the military entrance exam on his fifth try, by 1 point. He scored a 31(the minimum) out of (a maximum) of 99. That 1 point would change his life, forever. Leon attended boot camp at Naval Station Great Lakes (then Naval Training Center) in November 1983. He at-tended Seaman ATD (now Boatswain’s Mate “A” School) from January 14,1984 until March 14, 1984.

Upon completion of Seaman Apprentice training School, he reported aboard USS Reid (FFG 30) stationed in Long Beach, California in March 1984. The ship then changed homeport to San Diego. Master Chief Walker spent two years in deck division and became a Quartermaster (Ship Navigator) in 1985, without any formal schooling. He was promoted to E-4 and E-5 onboard USS Reid and completed numerous tours to the Persian Gulf.

In May 1987, while patrolling in the Persian Gulf, his ship was called to assist the USS Stark where his firefighting team fought fires then recovered and transferred 37 de-ceased Sailors that perished in the explosion from two missile attacks fired from an Iraqi aircraft, in the Persian Gulf.

In December 1987, Master Chief Walker was discharged from the Navy, and returned to Cleveland, Ohio where, after 72 days, he returned to the Navy.

In March 1988, Master Chief Walker reported aboard USS Mahlon S. Tisdale (FFG 27). In 1989, he was selected as Sailor of the Quarter, and Sailor of the Year, ranked #1 of over 80 other candidates. He spent four years onboard and was promoted Quarter-master First class (E-6) in December 1991.

In June 1992, Master Chief Walker reported to Navy Recruiting District Cleveland, Ohio, and in 1994 he was selected as Recruiter of the Quarter, and Recruiter of the Year, again, ranked #1 over 144 other candidates. After his four-year tour in Cleve-land, Ohio, Master Chief Walker reported aboard USS Carr (FFG-52) in 1996. Master Chief Walker spent four years onboard and was selected as USS CARR Sailor of the Quarter, and Sailor of the Year.

In addition, he was selected as DESTROYER SQUADRON 2 Sailor of the Year, Regional Support Group Sailor of the Year, and then, COMMANDER NAVAL SURACE FORCES ATLANTIC Sea Sailor of the Year where he was ranked #1 of 25,000 eligible Sailors. He was ATLANTIC FLEET SEA Sailor of the Year finalist in 2000, finishing #2 of over 100,000 other Sailors.

Upon completion of that tour, Master Chief Walker reported to Quartermas-ter/Signalman “A” school in Great Lakes as an Instructor. In 2000, he was selected for Chief. In 2001, Master Chief Walker became the Leading Chief Petty Officer of Sea-man Apprentice Training and Signalman “A” school. He Led 18 Instructors, that trained over 10,000 newly reported Sailors.

In April 2003, Master Chief Walker was selected for Senior Chief Petty Officer, that year, there was only 7 selected Navy-wide, out of 149 eligible candidates. Master chief Walker then reported to USS Kearsarge (LHD-3). In March 2004, Master Chief Walker attended the Air Force Senior enlisted Academy, and was selected as the Vice Presi-dent of over 400 Senior Enlisted Academy students. Upon completion of the 7 week course, he reported back to USS Kearsarge and served three years there. He was ranked #1 of 21 Senior Chief Petty Officers.

He was then selected for Master Chief in April 2006. That year, the Navy only promot-ed 2 Senior Chiefs out of 19 to Master Chief, Master Chief Walker was one of those se-lected. In October 2006, Master Chief Walker was selected to become a Recruit Divi-sion Commander (RDC/Drill Sergeant). He was selected to the Command Master Chief program in February of 2007, completed RDC school in April of 2007, where he led two divisions of recruits, comprised of 176 newly reported civilians, and in Sep-tember 2007 he accepted orders to USS Lassen DDG-82 homeported in Yokosuka, Japan where he led a crew of 300 Sailors.

Master Chief Walker served for two years onboard USS Lassen, and then reported as the Command Master Chief of Naval Station Great Lakes where they employed 10,000 Sailors and civilians. In 2010, Master Chief Walker, and his fellow Sailors started men-torship program at a local elementary school for various 5th graders, teaching them numerous life skills. In November of 2011, Master Chief Walker was informed that he was a match for an African American woman suffering from a form of cancer. In Janu-ary of 2012, Master Chief Walker was transferred to the local hospital in Washington DC, where he underwent a very painful, but extremely rewarding stem cell procedure, where the Doctors transferred 700 million stem cells from his body over a period of 6 days and into the body of the woman he was a match for.

Upon completion of his tour at Naval Station Great Lakes, he was selected as the Command Master Chief of Naval Service Training Command where they employed 42,203 Sailors and civilians. Master Chief Walker retired on August 7th of 2015, and in January of 2016, he was hired at the Chicago Military Entrance Processing Station where he managed 4 civilians and 4 Sailors processing 80-90 Sailors per month into the Navy. In July of 2016, now retired Master Chief Walker was selected as Civilian of the Quarter of over 80 other civilians, and In September of 2016, retired Master Chief Walker was hired as a Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps (military Instructor) NJROTC, where he was responsible for teaching, leading, mentoring, and grooming 120 high school juniors.

His awards include the Meritorious Service Medal (2) Navy and Marine Corps Com-mendation Medal (4), Navy Achievement Medal (2) and numerous other awards.

In retirement now, retired Command Master Chief, Leon R. Walker Jr is now a Motivational speaker and advisor on many topics to include:
• Developing mindset
• Relationships
• Mental toughness
• PTSD
• Child Abuse
• Domestic violence
• Health
• Overcoming Addictions
• Drive and Passion

In addition to being a speaker, Leon R. Walker Jr is an Author of three books and more following. His books that are in print are:
1. Broken, The Survival Instincts of a Child. Released in April 2018
2. Keeping kids safe from Porn, Released in November 2019
3. Loveship. Friendship, Courtship, Companionship, and Leadership for a healthy relationship. (To be released in December or January- 2020/2021.

His contact information is:

• Facebook: Leon R Walker Jr
• website: www.iinspireone.com
• Instagram:Iinspireone
• Linkedin: Leon R. Walker Jr
• Youtube: Leon R. Walker Jr
• Google: Leon R. Walker Jr

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Women in Broadcast Journalism: Against the Grain with Megan Olivi

Stephanie Sits Down With UFC On ESPN And NFL On FOX Sideline Reporter, Megan Olivi

What’s up fellow drop-outs? I have an amazing woman standing by me. She is one of my mentors in life. She is a person that I look to for grace, poise, how to react to drama, overcome obstacles, and work together in a relationship when you’re in a high-profile relationship where people are in your business a lot. I want to introduce you to Megan Olivi.

For those of you who don’t know, you have to know who she is. Her face is so recognizable and she’s Italian so ten points for Gryffindor. She’s a host and a reporter for UFC on ESPN. She’s a sideline reporter for NFL with Fox, and she’s been doing this for more than a decade. I watched one of your first interviews with Joseph for WEC. You’re like, “I’m here with Joseph ‘The Beefcake’ Benavidez.” I’m dying because you’re a baby. You know you’re assertive but you’re still like baby Megan and it’s cute.

You don’t work a day in your life if you follow your passion.

We hadn’t even been dating for a while at that point. The people who needed to know knew, but not the masses. I remember being so awkward. I don’t know why we thought it was important to hide it. It was weird and we met well before I was doing that for a living but I remember being like, “Okay.” We couldn’t hide it. Our smiles were so flirty. Yes, baby Megan.

She was so flirty. I was like, “He loves you.” I want to go back to the beginning. You grew up on the East Coast and then you went to college at Seton Hall, you went for your Master’s at Fordham, and you did that in two semesters.

I’m insane because basically, I lived in New York City, which is not cheap. I had a 300 square foot apartment, which is literally smaller than this hotel room. I lived on the fourth floor, with no elevator, no air conditioning. It was insane. I could barely afford it. It was so much money. I just knew that my education was going to be important to me in terms of what I wanted to do. I decided to go into broadcasting very late in my college career. I wanted to manage political campaigns, so I went for political science. I was gung-ho about that and I was always talking to whoever was around me about sports. They were like, “You should do that for a living.” “No, I’m not that vain.”

That’s for someone else.

I had this bad misconception that you must be unintelligent and it must be just based on your looks, or special friends and that kind of stuff. I felt like that wasn’t for me. As I learned about it, that preconceived notion was 100% on me. Once I learned about it, I was like, “This is that whole, you don’t work a day in your life and follow your passion.” While it was still very challenging, I was like, “There are a million people who want to do what I want to do and now they have a leg up because they have a degree and that they have years of training and that specific field they want to go into.” It was the end of my junior year. I was like, “I’m going to need to get my Master’s.” I was fortunate to get into all the schools I wanted to but Fordham was a Catholic University.

It’s a very prestigious university.

Women In Sports Broadcasting: One of the most exciting things to happen in an interview is when the person you’re talking to forgets where they are. They just spout something they are not supposed to say.

Thank you. I wanted to continue since I’ve gone to a Catholic school since I was in Nursery School, all the way through, so I was like, “We got to finish this out with the Jesuits.” I did it and they actually let me. I worked full time and they let me count my job, because it was in broadcasting, as a class. I never slept. It was crazy. I would sleep three hours a night and that’s how I was able to finish but I graduated with honors, I’m like, “What?”

“Excuse me, hair flip.” When you graduated, I know that you were offered a job and moved to Vegas, but what job was that?

It was with Heavy MMA. Essentially, my brother was a very accomplished wrestler, my grandfather was a boxer, and I was dating Joe.

Always be true to yourself and don’t take a shortcut.

Are you already dating Joe on the East Coast?

Yes, so we were kind of like long-distance dating. I wouldn’t say seriously dating on his end.

I’m sure he has your email address. It dates us a little bit.

We would skype all the time. We talk on the phone all the time. It’s challenging to live in New York when you don’t make a lot of money. The job offer in Las Vegas was for a little bit more money but for way less of a cost of living. It was closer to this guy I liked and I thought, “Give myself one year. If I don’t succeed in a year or I hate it, I can move back and go exactly back to the same position I’m in but let me try,” and I never moved back. I went to Vegas. It was with Heavy and I cut my teeth there.

Before the TV deal with the UFC, they did the official pre and post-show for pay per views got it. I was essentially hired to help co-host those pre and post-shows with a guy named Dave Farah, who I still love and adore and appreciate to this moment. That’s how I learned on the job. I was doing stuff in grad school and in internships, but it’s not the same when you’re interviewing Brock Lesnar while he’s going down a row of interviews and you’re just like, “Oh, fuck.” That’s where I cut my teeth and learned on the job. Some great moments and not great moments.

How did you meet Joe? Was it through MMA?

My two best friends and I went to Las Vegas when we graduated college and we ran into this group of guys in the lobby of Mandalay Bay. They were like, “Do you want to go to,” I want to say it was tryst or something. “Do you want to go?” We were 22 years old with no money. “Sure.” We went there because they were like, “We don’t have to pay to get in,” and whatever. We went and Joe is sober, he doesn’t drink and so we were chatting the whole night and then he was making me laugh quoting Will Ferrell. We ate hamburgers after. He’s like, “Do you want to go get food?” I’m like, “Yeah. Are you going to feed me? I’m in.” At the end of the night, he’s like, “Can I have your email?” “Sure.”

“Can I have your Aim?”

He had just gotten a computer and he said I seemed very professional.

He obviously had already been practicing MMA at that point in time. You came from a wrestling and boxing background with your family. Were you already into reporting MMA at the time?

No. He was already in the WEC. I remember him being stopped for autographs and I was like, “What?”

“Who that guy?”

He was with a few of his teammates, and one of those teammates was Urijah.

The Team Alpha Male was under at its inception, probably.

Exactly. We were like, “Maybe they’re surfers.”

It looks like it.

They were very tan. It was a weird thing. We’re like, “I don’t know what’s happening but it’s fine.” I remember him being stopped for autographs and I was like, “What are you doing?” To this moment, he’s very bashful about what he does. He’ll lie to people and be like, “I’m like a Spanish soap opera star,” or he’ll make stuff up. I was just like, “Wait, what?” It’s funny because I started going to WECs with Joe. That’s how people started to get to know me because I was doing work in broadcasting television and the internet mostly.

You only see the glimmer that people let you see on social media. Real conversations are so special andwhat really matters.

I was doing work in sports there and so people would be like, “You have experience on camera, you’re understanding this, and you’re associated with Joe. You must know what’s going on.” I got my foot in the door because I was going to these events with him. He’d be like, “There’s a WEC in Denver. Do you want to come?” He would fly me, then we would meet there and hang out and get to have great meals and, honestly, great laughs.

I remember watching Stepbrothers on a laptop because we wanted to watch it together. Just really wholesome stuff. That’s how I got introduced to the guys at Heavy and that’s how they brought me on. It was like, “We’ve seen her around. She’s young and willing to do the work. Let’s bring her in and see how it goes.”

That worked out really well for you. Talk about fate. I’ve heard how you met Joe but I didn’t know how you got to Vegas and that whole story.

Everyone just assumes we met in an interview. I’m like, “No, I already loved him when I interviewed him.”

I love it so much. I watch Megan all the time and even though we’re friends, when I see her reporting, I’m just like, “She’s my friend and she’s so good.” “That’s my friend.”

The goal is to make people proud. For me, at least in the way I was raised, it’s about wanting to make people proud and showing, like, “We did this the right way.” I’m not posting some crazy things on my Instagram or getting to stuff in a way that my dad would be like, “What are you doing?”

This is what I wanted to talk about. I’m glad you segued to that because I want to talk about this stigma of women in sports in quid pro quo. I suffered from that so much, and I have to tell you, you probably don’t know this about me, but I quit because I got bullied so relentlessly by the community here in Houston MMA. They were like, “She’s had sex with this guy, and this guy.”

Literally, Derrick Lewis walked me to my car when in downtown Houston, which is a little sketch, just walked me to my car after a weigh-in or something like that. He wasn’t fighting on the card, and the next morning, my editor called me for Legacy at the time for Legacy FC and he’s like, “Are you having sex with Derrick?” I’m like, “Excuse me?” Just out like that. He’s like, “I just want to know because I’m trying to protect you because people are talking.” I’m like, “Absolutely not. He walked me to my car because we’re in Downtown Houston,” but according to everyone else, we are sleeping together.

It’s definitely a difficult thing. I feel like I’m lucky at this point because everyone knows, especially all the fighters love and respect Joseph so much that they know that’s never the case with me. However, you still get those comments. Basically, what happens every time I interview someone, especially with a bigger fight, is that I either hate them or I must be sleeping with them. Every time I interview Conor, it’s like, “She was so much nicer to Dustin. They must have this thing going on.” It’s challenging for me and it used to be a lot more bothersome, now I’m just like, “Those are people who really don’t know.”

There’s a lot of things that could be improved upon in the MMA community. Especially behavior online. For the voices that matter, everybody’s like, “What?” It’s a challenging space and I would be lying if I didn’t say that there were days where you can let those voices with the random icon as their profile get to you, or say things where you’re like, “Why would you even think of that?” I don’t use Twitter anymore. It’s been years since I wrote a comment on a video because there’s nothing to come from that. It’s a challenging space and it’s a small community. It’s still a relatively new and young community. Unfortunately, that lends itself to not always a healthy community.

There’s a lot of fight fans but there are not very many educated fight fans. They just want to see the blood and the brawl and they don’t really know like the actual chess match that is MMA, because it is chess. Picking your moves and it’s hard because you’re not only moving your body, but you’re thinking so hard in your head. I can barely breathe and walk at the same time. How do these guys do this?

That’s why I’m proud to be a part of this broadcast because we have Jon Anik and Daniel Cormier and of course, Joe Rogan, but they have brought a new layer to what you’re watching if you’re at home and explain stuff. Especially when you have a guy who’s a two-time Olympian, a two-division world champion for the UFC in Daniel Cormier, where he can break things down in a fun way that people understand, they start to get a little bit more of that sport.

For me, storytelling end is like, “I’m not going to give the Xs and Os. It’s not that I can’t, it’s just that’s not my role.” To be able to tell the human side because oftentimes, we do this in all sports, we forget athletes are human beings. There’s a meme going around because of the Olympics and it’s a guy laying on the couch covered and chips. That was so bad. They must be so embarrassed. We do that with sports. I’m even guilty of it. I’ll be watching baseball and be like, “How the hell do you strike out like that?” It’s like, “Who am I?”

That’s important to do across all avenues of sports. Not that the viewer is not smart enough to remember that but sometimes you get so involved and wrapped up in a competition, just remind the viewer that these are human beings with real stories and they still have to go home regardless of the outcome and try to put it together for the next day. We’re trying to make those strides within our sport of MMA to make sure that fans have at least that and they maybe think twice before they have a negative thought, comment, post, or whatever it may be. It’s not going to stop it but it will lend itself to a little more detail of the story.

With the Conor and Dustin fight, it was evident that Conor had injured himself really early and people are so mad and people are like, “You did this on purpose to get the pay per view money.” Nobody’s injuring themselves on purpose. That is not a thing.

For us, it’s the worst thing you can possibly see. No matter what, that’s what you don’t want to see. Even though you know it’s a fight, you just don’t. It’s weird to know that an injury of that magnitude or of a Chris Weidman magnitude or something happens. I couldn’t even watch the replay. They kept playing it and I was like, “No, guys.” There’s a clip of me backstage that’s screaming because I couldn’t watch it.

I audibly screamed too. I forgot what card it was but I was at the Weidman-Silva 1.

I want to say it’s 148 but that might be Weidman-Silva 2.

It was when Weidman dethroned him and then the very next time I saw it, I was like, “Life’s not supposed to go that way.”

That yell will haunt my dreams.

We still have people like, Erin Andrews, Rachel Nichols, Jenn brown, and stuff like that, that are doing well in their industries, and taking the lead for women in sports journalism. Why don’t we see more of that still? Is it because women are hesitant or is it because there’s some sexism still going on? What do you think?

That’s a good question. First of all, I don’t know Rachel at all, but Erin and Jenn are absolutely wonderful. They’re as talented as they are kind and generous with their time which I absolutely love. It’s getting better but it’s about how many spots there are and how many opportunities there are. How can you separate yourself? Because that is a big one. What makes you different on the sidelines of X than all these other letters of the alphabet? They’ve all done a great job of separating themselves and being the leaders of the pack in terms of talent and innovation in their fields. That’s what it is.

Women In Sports Broadcasting: Sports reporting must remind viewers that athletes are human beings with real stories. They still have to go home regardless of the outcome.

There’s an incredible generation of women in sports. I get so many messages all the time from women who are in high school and college saying, “I want to do this.” They already have YouTube channels. They have a whole Instagram devoted to it. Who was doing that when we were in high school and college? None of us. There definitely is a positive trend. It’s relatively new and not that we don’t have supportive male colleagues, because we do. I have to say, I work with some of the best in the industries between MMA and NFL, and it’s great to hear. It’s just sometimes roles are limited.

We have women calling football now on Amazon. That’s relatively new because they didn’t have the opportunity. Not that they can do it, but it’s like, “Where’s that home for them?” As the world of broadcasting and communications grows, there are a lot more roles for women and I always like to say, “I have my job not because I’m a woman but because I’m the best one for it.” I don’t normally have that braggadocious thought about myself in any other regard.

I know that’s hard for you to say.

Exactly, but it’s been brought up to me a few times in these big scrims we do before pay per views. It’s like, “I wasn’t given this job and I certainly wasn’t allowed to stay just because of my gender.” It’s because like, “She’s really the best one for the job.” Like, “She’s earned this and this is how we go forward.” I like to that’s how the UFC operates. Every person who’s in their role is the best one for it. We hope that we see that direction and every other sport.

The young ladies who slide into your DMs and they’re asking you for advice, what kind of advice do you give them?

Number one, always be true to yourself and don’t take a shortcut. That is my absolute biggest thing. I’m not saying you have to get your Master’s. That works for me and I’m a big believer in education but it may be not for everybody. You will see people get ahead quicker than you because they take a route that maybe you won’t lay down at night feeling good about. For me, it’s been a long road. It’s still a long road like when I do football, I’m the lowest man on the totem pole but I’m working for it. There will never be a time where I ever feel upset or ashamed of how I behaved or how I got somewhere. It’s easy when you’re young to be like, “I need money. I don’t want to get coffee or do this like lame internet thing,” or whatever.

Because of social media, you see this glamorous world and you think it’s right at your fingertips. You see the tip of that iceberg and not all the work that goes on under it. When you see somebody making choices that have them skip the line a bit, it can be tempting to do that as well. I take a lot of pride in the fact that I’ve never even felt that temptation but I’ve also never made a choice that I didn’t feel good about. For young people in the industry, it can be something that’s kind of like, “Ugh.” Especially with the world of Instagram, you want to be able to get followers and likes. “I want to be able to go to that event,” or whatever it is, but it’s never worth it because I’ve seen lots of people come and go. You tell on yourself at the end of the day when you do that.

That’s very true. In terms of being shot sate and being shy in front of the camera, coming up with stuff to say on the fly, I always have lived by the fake it till you make it.

100% that’s my life motto.

I’m like, “Me too.”

If you’re super comfortable in front of the camera, to begin with, then it’s not about the person you’re interviewing. It’s about you, and that’s not the goal of somebody whose dream it is to interview an athlete or celebrity or whatever. It’s not supposed to be about me. I’m just the vessel to get the message out, I just fake it. Half the time, I am terrified. There are times when I’m doing a live hit, and maybe it’s my seventh memorized reported of the night and I forget, “I know I have to get to this destination. I want to mention this, but I forget the path I was going to take.” You just keep calm and go with it. It took a long time to perfect that art of, “Don’t panic at the moment,” but that’s what it is. Just fake it till you make it.

There have definitely been times where I blank out. My brain completely went away. I don’t know where that went.

It happens to the best of us. It’s also when you humanize it, people at home don’t think twice. “I do that all the time.” If you stutter, and you say, “Excuse me. I mean this.” Normally, it doesn’t even, it’s when you have that meltdown because you want to be perfect, that’s when people notice because there’s just no time you’re ever going to be perfect on live TV.

Practice makes perfect. I would get in front of the mirror, or if you have a camera at home.

Interview friends and families, reps, and practice intros. That was a big thing for me. I couldn’t practice a lot of interview stuff, but I could practice making sure I was introducing the person as best that I could. That’s a big thing, reps are king. If that means you do a little local YouTube show for a little while, who cares? Get the reps and get practice. Nobody is going to be like, “You can have this job ten years later because you were on YouTube to start.” I never did YouTube or whatever before I started doing MMA interviews. I just got literally thrown into it at a legacy fight one time. They’re like, “Here, interview this guy.” I’m like, “I don’t even know his name, but okay.”

You got that Italian-speaking charm. We can shake up a conversation with anybody, which is half the battle.

This is right at the beginning when I was like, “Who’s cute in the ring?” I was in my mid-20s. I didn’t know what I was doing.

Of course, you then start paying attention. You start getting into the fights, which I want to talk to you about getting into the end of the fights. I know that when Joseph fights that you go away and you say your prayers, when they interrupt you and you have to hide behind a truck. Not when Joseph’s fighting, but when your friends are fighting, when people you love are fighting, do you just stay silent and silently pray inside? You have to look at the fight, obviously. How do you handle that?

At this point, between Joseph and myself, there’s always someone I care about on the card. Whether you know them or not, for the amount of research we do, you know everyone’s story. Traditionally, to be an MMA fighter, you don’t have a perfect life. You didn’t come from this gorgeous, silver spoon situation. While there may be some who are the outlier to that rule, it’s a challenging thing. For me, I just pray all the time that nobody gets seriously injured and that whoever wins and whoever does not win, they’re still able to hold value in themselves, find confidence, and continue moving forward.

Unfortunately, it happens, obviously in team sports and in individual sports, but even more so in a fight. A lot of our athletes’ self-worth is determined by the outcome of what’s in the Octagon. For me, that’s so hard to see. They’re such wonderful human beings and you don’t want them to not feel the love, compassion, confidence, and self-worth that they should because of the outcome of a fight where 99.9% of the population will never be brave enough to do that, including myself. For me, I’m literally always praying that they’ll be okay and that whatever the outcomes, it’s God’s path that they never lose that feeling of they are loved and worthy. It’s hard when you see the way the world can treat people sometimes. It’s tough. That’s always my constant prayer.

As media, you’re not supposed to cheer. That was something that I had to I remember holding back from, if a friend of mine was fighting and he’s got a solid hook or whatever, I’d be like, “Yeah.” Do you sometimes catch yourself?

No, I’m so trained by it now. Even when I did watch Joe because I used to watch him for a long time, I’d be good about not showing emotion. I just hold my breath. Everybody knows somebody on the card and maybe feels closer towards one person than the other, but genuinely, we’re all pretty good about just wanting the best outcome for everybody. I don’t care who wins any fight except when Joe fights.

Speaking of prayer, what part do prayer and your relationship with God play not only in your work but in your personal life?

It’s everything. I am a devout Catholic. I grew up Catholic. I choose to be Catholic as an adult because I believe in the teachings of Jesus but also in the angels and the saints. I’m always praying to saints. I have prayer cards all over. I have statues all over my house. It’s Italian of me, but my relationship with God is everything.

There are days I’m mad at Him and there are days I’m thanking God for my life and everything in between that you can think of. I always feel comfort if I know we’re not in this alone. Joe and I pray together a lot. We pray together before and after he fights, and even when it doesn’t go his way, still we have something to be thankful for. I feel so blessed to have the life I do have. Even when things are good, you’re praying, grateful and like, “I know things are good. I recognize this,” and when things are bad, you’re like, “I know this isn’t forever but just help me get through it.”

I pray all day every day. I have this amazing app on my phone that I love called Hallow. This is not a plug for them. I have nothing to do with them, no sponsorship or anything but I love them. There are crazy novenas on there. You can listen to the gospel every day. It’s amazing. It’s so great, I do the rosary with them. There’s a daily prayer thing. In this modern world, it helps you ground yourself. I’ll walk my dog and listen to it. It’s important to me. I try not to ever shove it down anyone’s throat.

You never do but we’ve talked about it. You’ve sent me accounts to follow that have been helpful for me.

Leslie, she is amazing, too. That’s a great account.

I’m glad that you and I have that in common. It’s a huge factor to have in common with a friend.

It’s somewhat taboo sometimes, and you never want to make someone feel uncomfortable who maybe isn’t religious or thinks of your particular religion in a negative connotation. It is a part of who I am. I got into Columbia, which is Ivy League, but I wanted to go to Catholic. It’s a choice that I make to try and be the best version of myself.

Low key flex on Columbia. I know that you memorize a lot of what you say, which is incredible. I know you get asked a lot about acting. That’s a skill. For me, to memorize something, I remember in tenth grade when I had to memorize the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Old English. The way I remembered it, the way I could recite it was I had to lay on the floor covering my eyes, and then I could recite it because I could see the line. I would never be able to do that. I would have to be on the fly. Of course, you’ve had a lot of practice to do this, but when you do the big sit-downs with Conor and Dustin, the ones you did that’s probably most prevalent in people’s minds. Do you memorize all of your questions? Do you go in with more of a story, a flowy format for those? What do you do?

Interviews are totally different than how I do my report because everything I do is memorize. In the world of UFC, no teleprompters exist. For sit-down interviews, I do a tremendous amount of research. I would rather be like, “I didn’t use any of the eight hours of prep I did,” than be like, “I had no idea what he was talking about in reference to this.”

What I do is, as I’m doing research, I take notes on the things that I think are important or things I want to follow up on or whatever. I then make an outline of, in a perfect world, we sit down and I can ask him everything I want, this is the order of questioning I want to go in. There’s an art to it. It’s like making a road. You have to know that sometimes you might go left or right, and you’re no longer going straight, and how do you get back to those questions you have to ask?

I wouldn’t even say it’s memorizing because it’s the fact that you’ve learned all of this about the person or you want to make sure you’re giving them a platform to tell that story. I do come in with notes sometimes to make sure, especially should there be other factors in play. “Sponsorship needs this question. We need this question for countdown,” whatever. That’s a different animal. It’s about your study on the subject because if you have done the work and the research, sure, there might be a thing or two you’re not going to remember, but when they’re sitting across from you, you can just listen.

You don’t have to be worried about, “What is this referencing?” You can make sure that you know what’s going on. It’s a lot of prep work. It could be hours of prep for a ten-minute interview like it was for Dustin Poirier. I know Dustin well, but there’s still something to be learned. They’re still living their lives every day. It’s probably a whole entire day when you add up all the hours over the weeks that I did, and then we did a ten-minute interview, but it’s worth it. I didn’t feel like a second of that was wasted. It’s more about the work than memorization, but I do like to bring a notecard, especially if there are certain things I have to hit. I like to just have them so that I can go, “We forgot this,” or whatever, just to make sure we cover all of our bases.

Women In Sports Broadcasting: Being up for eight hours of a live broadcast is more draining than running miles because your body and brain don’t get a break.

I was interviewing @Compass.Couple on Instagram. It was funny because I wanted to ask them about travel tips because they literally have lived around the world. We didn’t even get there. We spoke for two hours and we didn’t even get there. After I hung up with them, I was like, “I didn’t ask them about travel tips.” We had so much else to talk about. I even had it bullet-pointed, and then for some reason, we just gabbed. When it got to the two-hour mark, they live in Bali. They’re fourteen hours ahead, but it was already 10:00 here, “We’re going to have to wrap it up.” They were so cool. You should check them out.

Look at you interviewing people in Bali. International stuff.

They are so sweet. They went to the same high school in Colorado. Same class. Same High School, never met, and then met up randomly in Amsterdam.

That’s fate. That’s like God being, “You guys missed each other.”

When they go back home, their family is two minutes away from one another. I know this because after I recorded the podcast, I was up. You get up because you have the energy. You have adrenaline going. After a night of fights, especially an exhilarating card, you’re just up. When you drive home, how do you unwind to close your eyes?

First, I get food. That’s number one.

What’s your go-to?

Usually, Roberto’s tacos. A hard shell. Joe’s either with me or I call him because he always watches the fights, but a lot of times, he’s with me. We dissect our nights because I’m all over the place. It probably only takes me an hour, I take off all my makeup and shower. Our days are so long. For instance, UFC 264, I got in the building at 10:00 AM, and I left the building at almost midnight. There are long days, and physically, they’re exhausting. You’re in heels, you’re running around an entire arena so I just get in bed and just chill. We usually watch a Netflix show or some episode of whatever we’re watching at that time, and then I’m out.

Because you get so overstimulated sometimes.

It is. It’s so much and the mental aspect for someone like me who also has to make sure I’m memorizing stuff when I’m going back and forth to interviews and other hits that we have, it’s a lot. The mental exhaustion is what’s tiring. Being up for eight hours of a live broadcast is more draining than running miles and miles because your body and brain don’t get a break.

I agree. It’s the smartest thing you ever did to get a double earpiece. You don’t hear anything.

One of our shows, it was in Australia, versus Robert Whittaker. I only had one and I missed cues because the arena was so loud. It was so crazy loud that I couldn’t hear the count. Finally, I was like, “Do you guys have a way to help this?” If you watch it back, I was late for several seconds, and not because I wasn’t paying attention. It’s because I genuinely couldn’t hear. Having doubles helps in an arena setting.

NFL games, it’s so helpful because they’re tremendously loud between the action on the field and the crowd. It does make people think I’m a bitch because they think I’m walking by without saying hi. They’re clear, so you can’t see them, but it’s the greatest thing of my life. I don’t know what I would do, I just got my wires replaced. People also don’t understand with live TV, your producers are constantly like, “We’re changing this. We’re doing this. Can you do this? What about this? Can you do that?” There’s a huge miscommunication if you can’t hear them or communicate with your talkback, that’s why I always have a mic on me. I always have my ears in because that’s like your telephone. That’s your cell phone, but it’s immediate.

Have you ever had an embarrassing moment on camera where you had something your teeth or dress was caught in your underwear?

Every time I watch, I’m like, “That’s embarrassing.” No, I can remember one time we filmed something. This was a few years ago. We filmed something by the Octagon because it was one of those weekends where we had multiple fights in a weekend. We had a weigh-in, and then a fight was starting immediately after. I filmed something from the way in that they were going to put at the beginning of the show. I don’t usually pre-tape stuff, but that was pre-taped because I needed a buffer zone to get to the fight. We filmed something and people texted me, they’re like, “For your next hit, you have lipstick on your chin.” I was like, “That was taped. Not one person told me about it.” I had bright red lipstick.

That’s one of my faults that I find that I do when I’m in front of the camera. I do this.

I’m constantly touching my hair.

I’m like, “Stop.” When I watch it, I’m like, “Stop it. Stop it.”

We all have them and I work hard to not do mine. I do touch my hair off. Before I go live, I’ll touch my head fifteen times. Is it straight?

It’s always the perfect haircut for you. You have such great fashion sense too. I watched the Mystic Hour. He did a great job interviewing you.

He’s good.

When I watched that, he was talking about your fashion and he showed some pictures of your Matador outfit. There was the Spice Girls. That was a cool segment that he did. I like that. Do you plan your outfit ahead?

Yeah, because the internet cares.

They care.

It is the most stressful part of my job, picking my outfits.

Do remember that green suit that I loved and you’re like, “Everyone hated it.”

On Arizona. They were like, “She’s sexy Gumby.” At least you’re sexy. We’ll take that take. It’s challenging. There’s also a lot of rules when you are on camera because of the way the camera picks certain things up, certain colors and patterns. There’s a lot of things that will look amazing in real life but will not translate on camera and vice versa. There are some things that look great on camera, and you’re like, “Why would you wear that in real life?”

It’s hard. It’s fun. My husband and I love fashion. He is so good. He’s the best. We’ll get a bunch of options, and then we’ll have a fashion show. That’s what I call it, like, “Time to the fashion show.” I try to always dress in a way people can buy the stuff because it’s a big thing for me. I see people on TV, and I want their outfit. When I’m like, “It’s $900 for that blazer.” No, thank you. I wore this purple suit. That’s from ASOS. It was $35 for the whole suit.

I loved it. Jared Leto then stole your look.

I saw them at the fight. I was going to show him the picture of the side by side of us, I was like, “No, he probably won’t be into that.”

He has longer hair than you. The other thing, I told you this. I don’t know how the heck you walk in those shoes all day. I have no idea. I would die.

It’s just become second nature. Everyone is taller than me. I’m only five feet tall. It becomes a thing. We are held to a standard. If people see us in the crowd, they don’t want us to be schlubs. I don’t want to misrepresent our brand in any way of like, “She’s walking around like a schlub.” I am always trying to make sure. I’m like, “What’s the most professional way I can carry myself throughout the evening?” That’s to keep my shoes on but even though I don’t want shoes sometimes.

I know you don’t like social media but you are an influencer. You are and so the things that you wear, people are going to want to know where you got it and how to get it. That’s awesome that you’re wearing things that are attainable.

The jacket I’m wearing would normally be expensive, but I got on clearance. That’s a big thing for me. I’m like, “No, I’m not paying full price for anything,” the real real. I get so much stuff there because also, the way we use fashion to be able to be good to the environment with it and stuff is great. Also, I’m not paying full price for something I’m probably going to wear one time because when I wear it again, I get called out. I’ve repeated a shirt before that I wore to interview Conor, and then I heard about it. That was literally four years ago, but okay.

Meanwhile, we’re wearing the same thing four days in a row out here in the real world. Okay.

I get weird about when I get off planes. I have to shower media at issue.

I do too. I heard you wore masks before it was cool. I didn’t say anything.

Because people are gross.

Women In Sports Broadcasting: You have to get those big interviews. You have to do them well and get something out of them that other people cannot.

People are disgusting. People will look at me crazy. Even when I worked in corporate hospitality, I remember when I was sick, I would wear a mask to work as a courtesy, and people would avoid me like the plague. That’s fine. That’s cool. Now, if you wear a mask, people want to sit next to us. You’re like, “Damn.”

I was talking to some of my colleagues. I was telling them how it used to be my Southwest trick. The reason I started wearing masks is we went and we had a show in Singapore. I landed and was deathly ill because we were on an airline that wasn’t super hygienic and germ-friendly. We saw the doctor there and she was like, “You need to wear a mask. That’s why we do this. It’s to help protect you, but it’s also to protect others should you be sick.”

That was ten years ago or so, and I always wore masks, but when I wore it on Southwest, where it’s open seating. If there was going to be an open middle seat, it was next to me because nobody wanted to sit next to the girl with a mask on. There must be something terribly wrong with her. Now, do I reverse it? Do I not wear a mask so no one will sit next to me? It used to be my little trick.

I want to ask you two MMA-related questions. One is, a lot of times people ask me, who are your favorite MMA fighters? It’s a typical question. I’m like, “That answers two folds,” because, for me, the two people that impacted MMA the most and my two favorite fighters are two different things. I always bring up Ronda and Conor. You and your interview in The Residency Podcast.

Those guys are great.

That was a great podcast, by the way.

You should check them out. They’re in Vegas. They’re the greatest.

They seem super cool.

They all have cool side gigs. One of the guys is unlocked. He’s a food account on Instagram for Vegas.

We love food. I remember you saying that your career changed with the Ronda revolution and with Conor. I specifically remember all of a sudden, my little underground MMA career and my love of MMA, all of my friends were talking about Conor McGregor like they were experts. Ronda, they hated her. They couldn’t believe she was such a bitch and all this stuff. I was like, “Do you know that she is playing her part so well that she has you thinking all these things?” It’s the same thing with Conor. I’m like, “That’s why Conor gets paid because he talks shit and he hypes up the fight.” That’s why they bring in the big bucks. I was glad to hear you say that they revolutionized MMA. Do you have any comments about those two?

My life changed when Ronda and I did an interview. I work for UFC. Sometimes there are things that I get the opportunity to do because I work for the organization. We had done a couple of interviews. I had interviewed her when she was at Tough Enough. We knew each other. I did some interviews and she enjoyed them and she told her team, “I’d like working with her.” Her agent ended up reaching out. He’s my agent. We’re a part of my team. We did all these interviews and I got to go to Saturday Night Live with her. I got to do all these things because she trusted me. There’s a lot to be said about conducting yourself in that way.

There’s a place for journalism that gets to the bottom of things and it has all that but that’s not the way I like to story tell. I like to make sure it’s in the athlete’s hands. She was good about knowing she had these massive fights in these high-profile spots and being like, “You all do the interview with Megan.” That matters. It matters especially to a young woman in the industry who, yes, was doing all the other interviews. When the superstar is willing to grant you that access, it was on me to not screw it up. I was lucky.

I saw Ronda and I had tears in my eyes. She’s cute and pregnant. I was like, “I love you.” We have this absolute admiration for one another that will never go away. The same with Conor, he did not need to always allow me access after he’s done hours and hours of work. The amount that stars like that go through every day, especially on a fight week is crazy. The amount of responsibilities and obligations is insane. He made a point to be like, “Yes, I’ll still do Megan’s interview.” It’s huge. Without those opportunities, I don’t know what my voice would look like in terms of how big or small it is.

You have to get those big interviews. You have to be able to then do them well and get something out of them that other people can’t. For Ronda and Conor to allow me to have that place in their lives is huge. It changed my life. People who don’t want to support my NFL colleagues, they don’t watch but they watch Conor, everybody said something to me. When I saw them, they were like, “We saw your interview before. We saw you during his fight.” It’s like, “I work every Saturday.” For them, they’re noticing and they’re Hall of Fame football players and they’re like, “That was cool.” It matters. I try to treat everybody equally, every person on our roster. It matters to people. It gave me opportunities and opened doors for me that maybe I wouldn’t have or wouldn’t have as soon and I owe them a lot.

I was at Ronda’s first UFC debut when she fought Liz. I made a point to be there because I love her since Strikeforce. I was like, “Dana said no women in UFC and here we are.” I had to be there because I was like, “This is a momentous occasion.” By the way, it was also Incidentally the last time I wore heels to a fight. That arena had no handrails.

I know exactly what you’re talking about.

It’s The Honda Center. It was Ronda at The Honda.

There are a ton of arenas like that. I’m always like, “I’m going to die. This is the time where I fall down the steps on air.”

Honestly, now I’m the girl who wears athleisure to a fight. I used to dress up and then I’m like, “Who’s going to see me?”

Social media allows you to see this glamorous world, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg and not all thework that goes on under it.

There are several different groupings of what people wear. One is like, “Fighters are going to see me in the crowd and would marry me.” There’s like, “I’m having a good time and I like to look cute.” There’s like, “I want to be comfortable.” There are three different layers of that.

Do you have any super memorable or vivid memories of certain fights that stand out to you? There’s a couple of fights that, to me, I’ll never forget. Do you have any moments like that?

Yes. Speaking about Conor McGregor, Conor versus José. Not even twenty seconds that it lasted. I did the world tour with them. I was a part of the lead-up. I remember we were standing in the arena and Conor knocked out José. I remember standing with some of my colleagues who worked in the PR department and then we looked at each other and they’re like, “Run.” We ran backstage because beers started flying. Everybody was stunned for 5 or 10 seconds and then there was a, “Go.” We went backstage. There are been some epic battles. I remember Shogun and Dan Henderson. That was in San Jose. I remember being like, “Holy crap.” I remember Anthony Pettis. I was cage side for the WEC Showtime Kick. I remember being like, “What did I see?”

To this day, it still is the most played highlight of all time.

Ronda’s arm-breaking. All of those things are burned into my brain. I always feel I should sit down and think about it and make a list but then I forget.

There are many times that I’ve been like, “What?” I ran around the living room by myself freaking out. There are some pretty showstopping moments. Honestly, there have been some moments where I’ve been disappointed that the fight didn’t go even to one round. I know that they don’t do it on purpose. I was in Vegas, where Derrick was fighting Roy Nelson on that card.

I remember I had a friend on the card named Mitch Clarke. Within the first fifteen seconds, something happened where his knee gave out. I don’t remember what happened. I ended up leaving the fight going with him to some crappy Vegas hospital. There was a bunch of other fighters there getting their injuries. It was such a letdown because I know he went to Jackson’s for his camp and spent so much time. After that. he was like, “I’m done.” I was like, “Don’t say that now. Wait a couple of weeks.”

It’s tough.

It’s hard.

It’s the highest highs and the lowest of the lows. Sometimes it’s out of the athlete’s control. Sometimes it’s this freak thing. You can have a bad day. We all have bad days but if you have a bad day in the Octagon, it’s there for everyone to see.

I have one more question for you. I ask everybody on this podcast this one question. If you were to be walking down the street and you see twenty-year-old Megan Olivi walking towards you and you’re like, “I’m going to go give her a big hug.” You embrace her and you look at her. What is the piece of advice or the one thing that you say to twenty-year-old Megan?

It will all work out. That’s the thing. Life is unpredictable. Work is unpredictable. Things are unpredictable. Marrying Joe and having that next to me means it will never be bad. When I was twenty, I was on and off with a high school sweetheart and things were crazy. I was feeling like a bad person for wanting to pursue this particular path. I remember thinking, “What if I’m making the wrong choice? Should I be doing this for myself? I should worry about other people.” That’s what I would tell myself, “It’s all going to be okay.”

Not that I’ve ever been cocky but I’ve always believed in myself. My parents always were like, “You can do whatever you want to do. You have to work super hard at it.” That was always there. I always felt like I owed other people instead of myself. That guilt would eat at me for a long time. It’s hard to be away from my parents and that’s a good thing I carry around a lot. In terms of when I was twenty, it was like, “It’s going to be okay. You have to do this for yourself.” A lot of times, I would make decisions based on other people’s happiness instead of my own and that wasn’t the move.

You have given us so much juicy information. I have loved having you on the podcast.

This is the best. Thanks for coming here. She came all the way to me. I’m here in some dingy hotel room.

It’s UFC 265 and it’s here in Houston. We got the opportunity to be together.

This is amazing.

It’s nice.

She came all the way down here. You’re doing what people dream of doing. You’re taking the risk and it’s scary. I know that everybody thinks they can do it or wants to do it but to do it and put it into practice is a different thing. I hope you’re proud of yourself and you know how much people can take from this because it’s not an easy thing to do and to put yourself in a vulnerable position and lay it all out there and say, “I’m going to try.” The hardest part is to make the decision to try and you’re killing it.

Thank you.

I can’t get over your podcast voice. Do you do voice-over work? You should.

Thank you so much.

I feel like you should sign up as a voice-over actor.

I might do that. Maybe I’ll do a 1-800 operator thing. I want to do something that’s going to help women our age from the 20s to 40s. I feel like there’s nobody to slip on the banana pill for you. I want to do that for other women. They don’t have to do that. They don’t have to go through those steps and they can get the information they need right from me and the source. They don’t have to go out and google and find things out for themselves.

To speak to people from all different walks of life helps because you don’t always get to interact with them. You only see the glimmer that people let you see on social media and that’s not in real life. To be able to have a real conversation and get that input is special and important.

What’s real life is we have no real light in this room. That’s why it’s a little grainy.

I haven’t washed my hair or put on makeup.

We’re going to make it work.

I’ll look glamorous you won’t know me because we have a makeup artist.

Even makeup artists, I wish I had one.

You don’t need one.

I put on makeup for Megan.

Thanks.

Thank you for reading. Megan, thank you again for being with me. I love you guys and I love you.

I love you.

We’ll see you at the next one.

Important Links:

• Megan Olivi – Instagram
• ESPN
• Heavy MMA
• Hallow
• @Compass.Couple – Instagram
• The Residency Podcast – YouTube
• http://Twitter.com/meganolivi

About Megan Olivi

Megan Olivi serves as a host and reporter for the UFC on ESPN. During the fight broadcasts, Megan can be seen reporting through the night, conducting interviews, and hosting from the desk. She also serves as a sidelines and feature reporter during football season for NFL on Fox. Olivi earned her Bachelors from Seton Hall University and her Masters from Fordham University. Raised on the east coast she now calls Las Vegas home with her husband Joseph and their dog Benny.

Luxury does not define you as a person. What matters is what is inside. Stephanie Joplin is The Luxury Dropout, and she is here to help you find what is most important. Stephanie talks about her vision for the podcast and teases us with what we can expect in the show. Listen in to the trailer and feel the excitement of more episodes to come.

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Watch the podcast here:

Listen to the podcast here:

A New Perspective: Getting Rich from the Inside Out with The Luxury Dropout

I want to take you back to a time when I surrounded and dressed myself with only luxury goods. If they weren’t luxury, I wouldn’t tell anyone about them. I truly felt that I had to be dressed in head-to-toe luxury to hide what was going on inside of me, which was depression, anxiety and feeling unfulfilled on the inside. I didn’t want to do the work. I didn’t want to work out. I didn’t want to eat properly. I didn’t want to learn about the inner workings of my brain, my digestive system, my mental health and my physical health. I didn’t want to go there because that seemed like too much work for me.

One day, it then hit me and you’ll learn all about that here in the show but things changed for me. I started to learn that you can have luxury goods but does it have to define you? Absolutely not. You are not defined by what you buy or what you wear on the outside. What you are defined by is what is in here and that’s where. That’s where I come in. I am determined to help my fellow ladies and men as well. Men are always welcome. I am determined to help discover and find themselves throughout the episodes of my blog.

The Luxury Dropout: Remember, it’s not about what you’re wearing. It’s about how you’re feeling, how you’re taking care of your body, how you’re taking care of your mind and your soul.

Every single one will be full of information. Even if the episode isn’t applicable to you, you’ll be able to take away at least one thing from each blog. We’ll be enriching you from the inside out and I’m going to be along for the ride with you. We are going to bring in my vibrant group of friends, celebrities, experts in their fields, business owners, lawyers, doctors, authors or anything you could think of. I’m going to bring you all of their expertise right to your computer screen. I’m here to make all the mistakes, so you don’t have to.

All you have to do is grab a snack, sit back and soak up all of the information that we are going to learn here together on the show. Remember, it’s not about what you’re wearing, it’s about how you’re feeling, how you’re taking care of your body, how you’re taking care of your mind and your soul. Any lifestyle experience that creates a step towards wellness, knowledge and empowerment, all of these make us rich from the inside out. I want all of those resources to be at your fingertips.

You are not defined by what you buy, by what you wear on the outside. What you are defined by is what is in your heart and mind.

I know it can feel overwhelming to figure out how to channel your inner strength with the absolute flood of information that comes through our timelines each day on social media. Let me be your guide towards a more empowered version of yourself here on the show. I’m your host, Stephanie Joplin and until we meet again, I’m wishing you all the love in the world. Stay safe. I will see you very soon.

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