Charlie "The Spaniard" Brenneman

Charlie Brenneman, former UFC fighter turned professional speaker, joins Evan and Joshua for a conversation that moves from fighting to prisons to parenting to Spain and back again. Charlie grew up a scared, insecure kid in small-town Pennsylvania who hated fighting, developed nervous ticks from the anxiety of it, and then spent the better part of a decade training alongside future UFC champions before becoming one himself with a record of 19 and 8. Now he speaks in schools, prisons, military bases, and corporate settings, chasing the same thread through all of it: extending a hand to the person who needs it most, the way he once needed it. The episode closes on travel as the antidote to ignorance, a journal he’s been secretly writing to each of his kids, and what it means to him to pursue rather than possess an extraordinary life.