From Bullied to Confident

Pete opens by asking Levi Frank what his life would look like if martial arts had never entered it, and the answer arrives without hedging: no confidence, no self-belief, no drive to do anything. Training gave him the drive, and — his phrasing — kept him in line and away from the bad things in life. The pull itself was ordinary enough. His parents watched UFC, he saw it on the TV and wanted to know what it was. The push was less pleasant: bullying at school, and an older brother who, as he puts it carefully, didn't treat him as well.

The person who turned that into something durable was Professor Darien Cobon, and Levi is unambiguous about it — he didn't just teach him martial arts, he changed how Levi sees the world. The idea he keeps returning to is no false sense of security: he can walk into a building knowing he's trained and can keep himself safe, and that certainty isn't bravado, it's the arithmetic of information plus work. It travels. It shows up in how he is around his family, and in a quieter win he's honest about — he still overthinks, just nowhere near as much as he used to. Pete adds a line Darien once gave him off-air: everybody ruminates on the terrible things that could happen, so what if you ruminated on the extraordinary ones instead.

On competition, Levi doesn't equivocate — it's a necessity, one hundred percent, because it puts everything you've trained into the test. What convinces him isn't the winning; it's watching people come back from a first competition different every single time, mentally as much as technically, regardless of the result. His own best example is his fourth or fifth amateur MMA fight. At weigh-ins Darien told him the guy was really good, a striker; Levi had been wanting a striker. On fight day Darien called the opening — he's gonna come out with something flying — and out came a giant flying teep. Levi parried it, got backed to the cage, worked the counter-defend-counter pattern, and dropped him with a cross. Then he walked him down and smiled at him, and the guy smiled back. They traded. He got the takedown, landed in half guard, and heard Darien's voice through the noise: take your time, transition, be careful, use your strikes to move. He did exactly that, got to mount, and the referee stopped it. His reaction afterward was less triumph than disbelief — there's no way I did this.

The most telling turn comes when Pete asks him to compare that violence to the schoolyard kind, and the answer reframes the whole episode. Now he teaches kids MMA at Momentum, which he says fills his soul, and he describes watching people — not just kids — arrive and then be unrecognizable a year later: weight, skill, and above all confidence, plus how quickly they start wanting to compete. Pete brings in Ryron Gracie's image of the adult lion letting the cub believe it landed a real bite, and Clay Cox's line about raising lions, which is more or less what Levi describes doing. And the nickname? Super Billy Gilly. Because he loves the guillotine.