Ben Askren and Joe Rogan dissect his UFC exclusion, blaming Dana White’s personal bias (stemming from a 2013 steroid debate), UFC’s strategic Bellator boycott, and Askren’s unorthodox wrestling-based MMA dominance—undefeated in Bellator (18-0) and 1FC despite critics calling it "unappealing." They contrast MMA’s chaotic weight-cutting culture with college wrestling’s disciplined, year-round training, arguing that relentless skill development, not PEDs or flashy guard work, defines true champions. Askren’s unfulfilled GSP fight and Khabib’s predicted Ferguson victory underscore how grit over gimmicks still wins in combat sports. [Automatically generated summary]
You are the number one guy that I'm most disappointed never fought in the UFC. Yeah, I always get, whenever you talk about me, I get like 15 texts like, hey, Joe's talking about you now, and they'll send me clips or whatever, so I obviously appreciate that.
But yeah, I never really got to fight those top guys, and it was for reasons beyond my control.
And Bjorn had a terrible reputation, but I had a decent relationship with him.
I never butted heads too bad.
So every day, they said, Bjorn, let me go.
I'm not coming back.
And so everyone says, well, Bellator didn't want to re-sign me.
Well, that's not true at all.
Every day, it's Bjorn, let me go.
Bjorn, let me go.
Because, you know, I love challenges.
What I love more than anything in the world is to challenge myself.
If you look at my wrestling career, that's what it's all about.
Taking the next best thing every single time.
And so, yeah, so finally in, and all this time, you know, Dana in the UFC is saying, we want Ben Askren, we want Ben Askren.
I'm ranked number seven in the world or what, you know, somewhere around there, 12 and 0. And so I remember I was going to the Asian food store because I was going to make some tonka soup.
And Bjorn calls me and said, you're released.
Full, you're released.
You can go.
I appreciate that.
So, Friday morning, it's Thursday night.
Friday morning, it's in November sometime, maybe mid-November.
Morning, they fax over the release.
My management faxes it to UFC headquarters.
And all of a sudden, that afternoon, there's a little scrum where everyone's asking Dana questions.
And then Dana says, we're not interested in Ben Askren.
And I said, wait, what just happened there?
Because for the last three months they were saying, we're interested, we're interested, we're interested.
Now I finally produced this full release from Bellator that I got, and now they're not interested.
And so I said, wow, I just got caught in the middle of this.
Marlon Marais, Justin Gagey, both those guys came from champs over there to the UFC. I think the relationship is very hazy between the old World Series of Fighting and the UFC because there was also people that went the other way, right?
Andrei Lovsky gets...
Drop from the UFC, goes to World Series, Anthony Johnson, boom, all these people.
So they say, one fight, one fight.
World Series are fighting.
We will pay.
Zufa will pay you.
But you do one fight.
I say, well, that's effed up, but okay.
I said, I don't think anyone's going to go for it, but I'll do it.
So I leave, and about six hours later, I got a phone call that says that deal is no longer available.
But that was, you know, when Dana is wrong in an argument, and he's got this huge army that follows him, and he said, I'd rather, I think his quote was bad, because I'd rather watch flies fucked than Ben Askren fight, you know?
Number two, my fighting style is not highly attractive.
But I also think that's a little bit of fake news because if you look at George St. Pierre's the Consistently, now obviously McGregor has trumped him, but only a couple of times.
But if you look at consistent bases, George St. Pierre is the number one draw of all time.
He heavily relied on takedowns and ground and pound.
I mean, he didn't have a finish in like five years or something.
And Stipe took the shots, used great movement, used striking of his own, but most importantly, after a while, got his wrestling going.
And then once he got Ngannou to the ground, Ngannou didn't have any answers.
He didn't know what to do.
What you've been able to do to guys like Douglas Lima, who just fought Rory McDonald for the Bellator title, Korosh Goff, who's another fantastic fighter who has beaten a lot of really top-flight guys, you're able to use your wrestling and completely nullify all their striking and offense.
And that's a huge part of fighting.
Fighting is not what's exciting for people to watch.
Fighting is what actually works.
And what you've been able to do time and time again is take these guys who look like world beaters and completely nullify their offense, take them to the ground, and beat the shit out of them.
And so, you know, we can get back to the UFC thing later.
But so, yeah, I mean, when I started fighting, right, it was just like, hey, let's go fight.
I didn't really make coaching.
And so I didn't move to Duke's until...
Duke Rufus.
Duke Rufus, yes, until 2010, I think.
So I started, no, no, 2011, I'm sorry, because I was in Arizona.
I was coaching for Arizona State University.
But when I moved there, I know, hey, there's a lot of elite strikers in this gym.
I said, but I'm never going to be an elite striker.
But if no one can hit me, they can't beat me.
They're not gonna outlast me.
They're not gonna outcrapple me.
They're not gonna beat me.
If they can't knock me out, they're not gonna beat me.
Plain and simple.
So my whole goal was, how do I not get hit?
I don't need to be a great striker hitting people.
I just need to not get hit.
If you can't knock me out, I'm going to eventually get you on the ground and I'm going to beat your ass, right?
And so that was kind of my whole goal when I got in MMA. How do I not get knocked out, right?
And so you said, obviously, I found a really good way to do that and it added a lot of longevity to my career where I wasn't taking damage that a lot of other people...
We're taking.
And I think there's also a lot of other things to being a really high-level wrestler that, you know, besides, obviously, you can control where the fight happens, right?
But there's a lot of other things that high-level wrestling provides us, right, that came from that world that other disciplines don't get.
You know, a lot of competition.
We compete thousands of times, right?
How to get our mind right.
These wrestlers are just strong.
I mean, there's just a different strength.
Actually, I got to go work out with Jordan Burroughs last week, who's a mid-time world champ.
And it's like, you forget how strong wrestlers are.
Like, you grab them, and you're like, good God, this guy is like...
You know, I don't feel that from MMA people.
I grab him, and I'm like, oh my...
Everywhere.
It's like there's nowhere he's weak.
Very, very disciplined, right?
Because wrestlers, like, we've been in the system from youth wrestling to high school wrestling to college wrestling where we're under, you know, coaches and have a very strict training plan and understand how to put a training regimen together where a lot of other martial arts don't have that kind of structured system.
So I think there's a lot of advantages that we as wrestlers have when we come into mixed martial arts.
And if I could add to that, the intention is pure.
It's pure for competition because there's no financial reward.
It's not a bunch of people that are getting into wrestling because they want to get rich.
It's a bunch of people that really want to prove that they're the best.
And so you have so many top-flight guys that are incredibly mentally strong feeding off of each other, knowing that they're going to be competing against each other, and almost no financial possibilities except for coaching.
Well, yeah, there's, I mean, now, so, 2018 to 20, 2008, when I was wrestling, and then when I decided to make that jump to MMA, there is a lot better financial structure for senior-level athletes.
Now, none of them are getting rich, and there's only about a dozen of them making, like, a decent living, right?
It's a crazy story of Dave and Mark Schultz and this millionaire, billionaire, crazy guy who wound up shooting Dave Schultz and was this weirdo guy that was running this camp and these guys kind of got stuck Yeah, because, I mean, and that's, 96 was when Schultz got shot, right?
Yeah, well, especially when you look at the football teams that are getting literally billions and billions of dollars every year.
And these athletes are ruining their lives.
I mean, you have football players that maybe play one, two seasons, if they're lucky, they get their back blown out, their legs get blown out, and then they never have an NFL career.
And meanwhile, the university has made tons of money off of them.
Yeah, and to make that even worse, because I actually had a whole podcast about this argument with someone, and we're on the same side of this, but to make it even worse, if you're an NCAA athlete, Joe, you can't even make money off your own image and likeness.
So, not only will they not pay you anything, which I think we can debate and argue on that, but the fact that they can't make money off their own image and likeness, it should be criminal for that to happen.
Number three, I think, obviously, stealing a key piece away from Bellator was important to them.
Right.
And then number four, I think they thought I really had the ability to be their champion, and if someone can be a Bellator champion and make this transition directly to UFC and then be the UFC champion, you know, remember this is when they're going on, Bellator's now on Spike now, that Bellator would use that to say, look, we're the same.
He was a champion here, he's a champion there.
So I think those four things are...
And hey, I've never got to sit down face to face with Dana and say, why was there no offer?
You know, like when Anthony Pettis was the champ, and I'm helping coach him, or Tyron was, I haven't had more than five words with Dana in passing, right?
And so it would be really interesting to me to sit down and say, tell me for real, because I have my assumptions.
On what the deal was, but I don't really know.
And then if I have to add number five, number five is I think he got the idea that I would never be a yes man, which I'm not going to be, never would be, where Dana really kind of likes the yes man champion.
You see, he's got some heat with Tyron, he's got some heat with Stipe, as we saw on Saturday night, and Dana really struggles with the personalities that won't cater to what he wants to happen.
So I'm really into sports psychology, and I want someone to write this book because no one's ever written it.
But I think there's this, I call it the hypocritical elite athlete.
So there's two sides to every coin, right?
And if you're a really elite athlete, you need both sides of those coins.
And I'll give you a great example because this is kind of what you're talking about.
There's these guys who are ultra-elite preparers.
They eat right.
They sleep right.
They train right.
They do everything right.
But then if one little thing goes wrong, it messes with them.
If they don't get the right food or their weight cuts bad, they start panicking.
And then on the opposite side of the coin, there's these cowboys.
And they're just like, I'm not going to eat right.
I'm not going to sleep right.
I'm not going to do anything right.
But when I step in the cage, I'm going to fight my ass off.
And nothing's going to bother me.
Right?
And so you need both sides of those coins to make it whole.
And so you want someone, ideally, who does everything right, but at the same time when something goes wrong or their toe hurts or whatever, they can just say, well, it doesn't really matter.
I'm going to go compete anyways.
Right?
You want to have both sides of those.
That's why I think a lot of the UFC fighters are more on the cowboy side of it.
Like, well, I'm not really going to do a lot of things right, but I'm just going to go, I'm a fighter, I'm just going to go fight.
No, and so I actually started going to graduate school for sports psychology.
I got nine of the 36 credits done.
And then I actually got a scholarship to go further and get it paid for.
But I was traveling so much.
That was 2007-08 when I was trying to make the Olympic team and I was gone all the time.
And then once I was out of school for a year, I was just like, there's no freaking way.
I'm not going to go.
I'm not going to sit in a classroom.
I'm not going to freaking write papers.
I'll still study sports psych on my own.
Actually, every Monday, I do something called the Mental Monday on one of my Facebook pages.
People message me questions, and I talk about the mental aspect, because you're right, there aren't enough people that talk about it.
In wrestling, there's actually this company that's being highly successful called Wrestling Mindset, and they have a training program for athletes' minds, because there's nothing out there.
Well, they're starting to expand into different disciplines.
But you're right.
I think there's these general principles of sports psych which can kind of go into any domain, right?
And you're 100% correct that every single individual is different, right?
Like for me, I'm an overthinker, right?
I'm obsessive.
I'll do something over and over and over and over again.
And so like when I was 14, I was at this big national tournament and I was obsessing about who I'd have to wrestle and all this stuff and it wore me out mentally and I got my ass kicked, right?
And my coach said, hey, I was that person many, many years ago and it helped me just talk about fishing, right?
Because I don't want to think about what I'm going to do.
I'm not one of those guys.
Because if I think about it too much, I'll obsess.
And so ever since age 15, I've always taught myself and trained myself to not think about the competition within Like, you know, six hours, right?
So maybe the day before I can think about it, a couple days before I can think about it.
But like, even when I'm in MMA locker room, I'm not thinking about my fight.
My mind's off of it.
Because if I'm not, if I don't understand what my strategy is going to be by six hours before, and I haven't trained myself by six hours before, I'm fucked.
I'm already fucked.
What am I going to do?
Six hours!
I'm going to come up with a brilliant strategy in six hours, you know?
I intentionally fly people to my fights who are just my friends, who have no intention of telling me what to do MMA-wise, and just want to bullshit backstage.
I think it's a huge part of the sport and it's overlooked because the sport is not just, and I think this is true with every sport, the sport's not just the movements that you make, it's what's going on inside the machine.
the manager of the body is the mind and if the manager is like poorly formed and the structure is all out of whack and you you have like whenever a problem comes up you fall right into a pit all these things should be addressed and you should develop this mindset and develop the ability to manage your mindset at a i think at a young age i think it's it's really critical yeah no i totally agree and you know i think i think one interesting thing which i don't know if it's going to happen mm or not we'll see right
there's very few people who came from a wrestling background that are head coaches of mma teams right who came from this very very structured environment of say college wrestling it's like you go to i went to i remember my first training camp i went to american top team in florida and i show up it's 11 o'clock but i'm like practice, show up at 11 o'clock.
Where's everyone at?
Right?
And then we start at 11.45, like 45 minutes late.
And then so the next day I'm like, well, am I supposed to show up at 11.45 or should I show up at 11?
Because if we say 11.45, I can show up at 11.30.
So I show up at 11.30 and then they start at 11.20.
You know, like what the hell?
Whereas in college wrestling, if you're a minute late, you're going to get punished in college wrestling, right?
So I'm very curious to see the day where there is an MMA team that is very structured, like a college wrestling team would be.
I think it would be very effective towards performance for athletes.
But then again, you are going to have—it's a different structure because college wrestlers are poor, right?
Where you're going to have a bunch of MMA fighters who get rich and then say, well, I don't want to do what you're saying right now.
How are you going to make them, right?
They're the one paying your paycheck.
So it does become an interesting circumstance, but I think if there was someone who ran a highly structured mixed martial arts team, as structured as a college team, I think they would have a gigantic amount of success.
I think their guys would get a lot better, a lot faster.
And I think you'd see a really interesting dynamic develop between the high-level athletes and the coaches.
Yeah, and it's really hard in fighting because, I mean, even your highest level camps, how many, say Bellator and UFC, how many high level MMA fights do they have per year?
I was doing jiu-jitsu a handful of times a week, and then I was doing conditioning.
After that fight, my wrestling—well, and then actually I went to—my brother was living in New York at the time.
My brother's also an NCAA champ.
Went to visit him for Thanksgiving, and he whooped my ass.
And I'm like— I freaking suck at wrestling.
I went cold turkey, so it's like, okay, I don't need to wrestle every day to be great at wrestling anymore, but I need to wrestle once a week, twice a week, with high-level competition.
So at that point in time, and for pretty much the rest of my career, I would go to one of the local colleges.
Once a week or twice a week, just to keep my skills sharp.
And so I think that was the biggest mistake I made in the Haran fight.
I didn't wrestle at all prior to it.
But Jay Haran was good.
He was also a Division I college wrestler.
He knew what he was doing also.
But I think if I had to pinpoint one thing, that would be it.
But then even when people train it, these strikers, the hell of those strikers...
They don't want to do it right.
Like I said, when I go to Dukes, when I started at Dukes, and it went down to four times a week where we were striking, right?
But in the beginning, it was six or seven sessions a week I'm striking, right?
And so I'm immersed in that culture.
I have to learn.
You can't not learn when you're doing it six or seven times a week.
But these strikers, they want to do one wrestling practice a week, two wrestling practices a week.
Well, if you're here and they're here, how are you going to catch them by doing one practice a week?
It's freaking impossible!
I mean, if I got to be in charge of an MMA guy's camp, and I don't know, I coach wrestling, I love coaching the kids, I don't know if I ever want to coach MMA people, I would consider for someone like High Level, But you've got to immerse yourself.
You literally have to take three months and freaking wrestle every single day.
Well, there was a recent study that came out just a few days ago that said that it's repeated sub-concussive hits that are causing CTE, not concussions.
Yeah, but the study that made me really question the CTE phenomenon was they did that study where they studied a whole bunch of professional football players, and it was like 100%, it was like 99% have CTE, right?
But then they studied people who had played football for any length of time.
Any length of time.
And it was still like 80% of the people.
And it's like, well...
F, I can't live my life in a bubble.
How can 80% of people who have ever played football, I mean, how many American males, what percentage of American males walking around at 40 years old today played some level of football?
It's like, gotta be 80%.
So you're telling me 70% of Americans walking around with CTE are American males?
No, but you've got to think there's got to be some kind of low threshold because otherwise, 40 years down the road, if everybody played football and everyone who played football has CTE, everyone's going to be walking around like...
So that one study said it was something around 80% of anyone who ever played any level of football for any length of time, for any length of time, has CTE. That means like, I mean, if we take the American population, at least 80% of American men played football at some point in their life.
Like, if you have it, you are many times more likely to develop CTE. But then also, and then, so the other thing that I would, is out of curiosity to me when they do the CT studies, especially with, they're doing, you know, after death with these football players, right, that were, so now if they're dying, they're probably played in the 60s, 70s, 80s.
Is it a mitigating factor or is it going to create this crazy storm of brain damage that you're going freaking running into people like this, then you're doing steroids, then you're freaking drinking a pack of beer, then you're doing some cocaine.
And so they give these people fentanyl patches, and then they're taking Oxycontins too, and who knows what else they're taking.
Oh my gosh.
I mean, I feel terrible for someone who has bad pain, like, you know, from a broken hip or something like that, but Jesus Christ, take the pain rather than death.
Seriously.
Take CBD. You could take CBD. It doesn't even have a psychoactive effect and has radical pain-reducing properties to it.
For like a couple people, it's probably the right career path.
For a majority of people, probably not a great career path.
But so, you know, how do you feel about it when you think that, I mean, you're obviously saying, and I'm on the fence, but you're saying I think a lot of these people are getting CTE, clearly.
They are.
How do you feel about, you know, being involved with it?
Because that's like, in my future, I could probably coach some MMA, but I struggle with it because it's like...
Well, should I really recommend this person do MMA or should I not?
Because are they going to end up fucked up and not be able to take care of their kids or where?
It was about people like him and how it almost always ends up very poorly because you need this bigger rush and this bigger rush and this bigger rush.
It was talking about big wave surfers and the flying suit and all this.
It was talking about the psychology behind it and how...
Like, it ends up poorly very, very, very often because these people need bigger rushes and more challenges, and then they end up fucking themselves up.
I would never encourage anyone to do that, but for him, I mean, he's a retired Navy SEAL, and this is just another level of psychotic shit that he can do to fill his time with.
I mean, I was watching this video the other day of those guys doing the ramp with the skateboard, and the guy got to the top of the ramp and didn't catch it right and fell like 100 feet.
Yeah, but so if you look at like the original X Games stuff and then you go to like the X Games today, it's a different world.
It's totally different events, so much more extreme because it has to be this advance, advance, advance, advance, but then all of a sudden people are getting effed up.
And that's what I think what you were saying about shaming.
They try to shame you into being less racist or shame, but you're not doing that.
If you're pretending someone's racist when you know they're not, or if you're pretending that someone is a sexist or homophobic or whatever, when you know that you're just, people are, they're ignoring nuance.
I mean, all of his weird issues that came up and his book deal falling apart, a lot of that had to do with conversations I had with him.
Now you get a chance to see how the guy actually thinks.
I don't think there's anything wrong with the way he thinks.
I think he's a provocateur.
I mean, it's not how I think, but I think that everybody has this perspective on who he is that is exaggerated because of this public persona that he does to be outrageous.
It's making it more extreme because they want to say that one thing that's totally effing crazy that'll catch a headline somewhere.
Right?
And so they have these beliefs, but then they kind of go beyond them because it is a show and because they will make more money if they get more followers or more people clicking on their articles or their videos or whatever.
Yeah, so I think there's obviously those people who are on right the way, one side of it.
So if you go a spectrum for me, right?
There's the American who's drinking Diet Coke and eating frozen pizza and listening to whatever CBS says.
And then on the total opposite of the spectrum, there's the group that thinks every single thing that ever happens in America is a planned conspiracy by the New World Order.
So I think as an intelligent individual, we look at situations independently and say, well, there's some sketchy things there, not sketchy things there.
That's probably true, right?
And kind of independently think about stuff by ourselves.
And I think CBS or NBC or, you know, name your news source, they're run by people.
And if they weren't there, they only have access to a certain amount of information.
And sometimes they get bad information.
And sometimes they don't necessarily know.
I don't know how much of it is a part of some grand conspiracy rather than how much of it is a part of the chaos of these moments, the lack of information and people drawing conclusions.
And then also witnesses on the scene.
When people are on the scene of something that's crazy, they give all sorts of weird accounts.
And they're just, they're filled with adrenaline.
They don't know how to handle the situation.
People, you know, people don't handle chaotic events very well.
I think you're supposed to be able to track them, like have some sort of a—whether it's intimate or personal relationship with these people, know them.
Especially if you think about commentating on fights, I have to pay attention to these guys and what they're doing and their career.
And there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them.
But now I get to see you once a year, twice a year maybe.
I can't keep up with you.
Dude, it's super challenging.
I totally agree.
And now Max and I run the Wrestling Academies, my brother.
We have three in Wisconsin.
And it's like, this fall was my first where I full-time worked at one.
And so now I'm really immersed in the one academy, whereas I was kind of loosely keeping track of all three.
But now that I'm kind of totally immersed in the one, I find it a lot harder to keep track of what's going on at the other two, where I was kind of better at it before when I wasn't so immersed in one.
I mean, the nicest MMA facility I've ever been to.
They actually just opened their fourth location just in Singapore.
Singapore is a city-state, right?
It's six million people on a really, really small island.
But some of their academies are only a mile or two apart.
Like, they're not far apart, but the population density is such that, you know, listen, they start classes at, I think it's 6 a.m., and they end classes at 11 p.m., and you can freaking stop in any time of day, and there will be a class there that's full with Muay Thai or Jiu-Jitsu, whatever, you name it, it'll be going on.
But obviously, so Singapore is one of the most wealthy countries on the planet, so you have to take that into account.
Pretty much everyone that lives there has a decent amount of wealth.
Singapore is a fascinating country.
I was there 15 times or whatever, so I got kind of immersed in the culture, and then I ended up reading the books about Lee Kuan Yew, the guy who started the country.
So there was a whole bunch of those Asian countries that got independence in the 1950s and 60s.
And Singapore, I believe, was founded in 1965. It could be off by one year there, maybe.
But, you know, a lot of those countries are not doing super well economically.
And Singapore is like this freaking standout country who's like top five world per person wealth.
So they really do a lot of kind of, it's kind of like self-tracking, right?
And so every month a bunch of your check comes out to, you know, like we would pay taxes, right?
A bunch of money comes out of their check.
So they can spend, this is fascinating, they spend their money on three things.
It goes into this fund, right?
Education, healthcare, and housing.
Okay?
And so if you want cheaper of any one of those, if you want the cheapest form of it, right, it's very government subsidized.
And it comes out of your fund, right?
So only a little bit of money comes out.
If you want the nicest healthcare or the nicest housing, then it's only a tiny percent government subsidized.
So the more expensive the stuff gets, whether it's education or housing or healthcare, the less subsidized it gets, and the cheaper it gets, the more subsidized it gets.
And so everyone kind of, you know, they pay into this fund, so everyone has this personal fund that they can use, and then, you know, into those three things.
And so I think a lot of people have, I think they feel like they have more control over their lives, and, you know, obviously it is very strict regulations and laws, but from what I've seen, and I've spent a lot of time there, everyone seems pretty happy.
Well, in his defense, it was MMA from a long time ago.
And it wasn't really the same as MMA now.
And he's turned the corner, and now he supports MMA. But also, you've got Budweiser and Bud Light are sponsors now of MMA. But that's a real problem with politicians.
This is another thing where you have a gigantic tragedy, and because of a gigantic tragedy, there's a lot of people that draw these conclusions based on witness testimony and things that are happening.
But I think you have to realize that any time there's something that happens, people start looking for all these different Correlating factors, right?
You start saying, well, hey, look, there was local tests that were being done.
They were looking out for planes that were potentially going to fly into buildings.
They knew this was going to happen in advance.
But if you talk to anybody that is in intelligence, they're dealing with that shit every day.
The rovers on Mars, that's the most interesting, because they're sending these really high-resolution photos of the surface of Mars, and they're running tests and checking for biological life.
It's really, really interesting stuff.
But between 69 and 72, when they did all this stuff, the technology back then was nothing compared to what they have now in terms of calculations and computers.
And it's also, there's unquestionably some stuff that, whether it was images or video, that was faked.
Gemini 15 is the big one because there's a photo of Michael Collins.
It shows him in deep space and they use it as a press release saying that he was on a spacewalk when it was really an image of him from a test run where there was all this stuff in the background and he was on this harness and they just blacked out the background and tried to sell it as him being in space.
But I do know that these are the people that were the head engineers and the people that designed it.
Wernher von Braun himself was saying how impossible it was just years before they did the moon landing and years before Operation Paperclip that it was impossible to go to the moon or how ridiculously impossible it would be.
But technology advanced from then to when 1969 happened to when they did it.
I stopped saying that we never went to the moon because I really don't know what the fuck I'm talking about.
And that's a big part of understanding these conspiracies.
Well, maybe they have one of those clicker buttons they could have with their big gloves on and they, you know, they put the thing out and then they click it and then boom, Snapchat, Wi-Fi on the moon.
Well, that's what they said, well, it was that they did it remotely.
That's how they captured the video of the lunar module leaving the surface of the moon and panned up and watched it go, that they did all that remotely.
Well, there's ones like that, and then there's also ones where they fall down.
It looks like they're getting yanked up by wires.
I think it's entirely possible that some of that stuff was faked.
But I think it's way more likely that they actually went to the moon than they didn't.
But it's way sexier to think that they faked the whole thing.
It's fun.
It's fun to think they faked the whole thing.
That everybody was quiet about it.
And, you know, Neil Armstrong gave this real cryptic speech on the 25th anniversary of the moon mission saying that, you know, there are hidden truths.
What is the exact quote that he said?
Um...
Some of the great truths that could be revealed, removing some of truth's hidden layers.
In 1994, Neil Armstrong made a rare public appearance and held back tears as he spoke these brief cryptic remarks before the next generation of taxpayers as they toured the White House.
unidentified
Today we have with us a group of students among America's best.
To you we say we've only completed a beginning.
We leave you much that is undone.
There are great ideas undiscovered.
Breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truth's protective layers.
Now we go back to MMA, because that's what these freaking folk-style wrestlings, the next generation of MMA, because you have to turn to your base to get up.
And so, you know, people actually going back to their base, right, which has been, it's been a no-no forever in MMA. You don't go back to your base because you expose your back.
And so, third round, there's this accumulation of leg kicks, and all of a sudden, Rory's leg is really effed up from getting kicked a handful of times.
Again, me as a top guy, I would rather be in half guard than full guard.
I'm going to land a lot of damage from half guard.
If you're in half guard, you're going to be trying to work, and you're going to get yourself tired, and you're very unlikely to sweep me.
So I think half guard is better than full guard, but I think eventually where people are going to have to get to is they're going to have to actually get up.
You're going to have to get up, and putting your feet on someone's hips and kicking them is no longer a great solution.
It works every once in a while, but it's not like you can do that every single time.
And you would think he's one of those guys that's on PDs by looking at him, but then when you look at him, like, he won a world title in 98, 99, somewhere in there.
He looks the same at age 18 or 19. That's 40. Yeah, it's incredible, because then you think, like, well, if he is on PDs, it had to be prior to age 18, because he looks the same.
And his parents are tiny, you know, his parents are like 5'5", 5'7", and then he's six foot, whatever the fuck he is, and a gorilla of a man.
And I always wondered, like, one day in the future, whether it's five years from now or 30 years from now, they're going to be genetically manipulated people.
And it's like, you had the hint that they were likely cheating, you know, but then as someone who competed against them, man, that's a tough pill to swallow.
I mean, now it's like, well shit, I guess I should have been one way or the other, but to know that you were a leg down, and like going into MMA, now, in MMA I knew everyone was cheating, for sure, right?
So I'm gonna fight them whether they're cheating or not.
So you piss hydrated, get on the scale, literally moments later, like you go in the bathroom, you piss, they test the specific gravity, you go get on the scale, right?
So essentially, everyone moved up one weight class.
Every one of their champions bumped up a weight class.
So, like, over there I fight 185, but, you know, it's essentially welterweight.
They even call it welterweight, because it's the same thing, because I can't cut any water weight.
So I was the welterweight champion, and I was still the welterweight champion.
They just moved the weight class.
It's different.
So there's the day of the fight, the day before the fight, two days before the fight.
If you make the two days before the fight, if you make both the weight and the hydration, you do not have to weight test or hydration test on the last day.
It's fantastic because Fight Week then, instead of making this...
When I would fight 170, I would be 183 to 185 to start my water weight cut.
I would cut the water weight to 170 or 171, depending on...
Title or non-title.
And then I would hydrate back up.
So now I don't have to do that dehydration process.
I'm literally the exact same size I was prior.
And, you know, media obligations during the week are obviously a lot easier because I'm not worried about cutting my weight or I'm not feeling miserable or whatever.
And it's a lot safer.
And then so if someone misses...
If someone misses, obviously they're fined, the same as in America, if you miss what you're fined.
If you miss hydration, so say, Joe, you're 185, and you weighed in 185, but you're dehydrated.
You didn't really make it, right?
You have to get hydrated and make weight.
So if you miss weight, so it's the last day you haven't made it, you have to keep drinking until you piss hydrated, and then whatever you weigh there is what you weigh.
I think I felt, you know, honestly, for me, I know they said those studies that you don't really fully hydrate.
I believe it was 36 to 48 hours after.
Man, I've always felt fine.
And so when I graduated college, the weight class in the United States for the Olympic stuff was 163. I would weigh roughly 175 on a day-to-day basis and then water cut down to 163. And then when I was fighting at 170, I would be between 183 and 185 and water cut down to 170. So my water weight cut was very, very similar every single time.
And I was disciplined in that manner.
I didn't want to be fluctuating.
And so my goal was actually...
To get down to my target weight six weeks prior to competition, right?
So I'm walking around 183 to 185 six weeks prior.
So I'm the same exact person every single day.
Whereas I think the part that a lot of these people F up, and it's because they're not disciplined enough, is they try to descend while they're training, right?
So, you know, maybe I get up to 195, which is, that's a small bump.
Some of these guys are really undisciplined.
They get way, way, way, way overweight, right?
And so during that last six weeks or even the last couple weeks, they're trying to bring that body weight down, right?
And so in my mind, there's two ways to lose weight.
You can diet and lose body weight, right?
Fat, mass, whatever.
And then there's the water weight, where we're sweating and we're taking that out of us, right?
Those are the two ways.
And so I think a lot of guys, and I don't know if you've ever cut weight, Joe, but for me, it was in college.
In the summers, I'd get really fat.
And then I'd bring my weight down in the fall and you'd feel it.
When you're losing more calories than you're taking in, it's like this weird feeling in your body and you feel like shit all the time.
And so I think a lot of fighters are doing that really close to when they're fighting.
And so now the water weight cut makes you feel terrible.
And now they're cutting everything out calorically also.
Jiu-Jitsu schools, can you name where there's literally 40 black belts?
I mean, it's been born out through high school wrestling.
You go to all these national tournaments and state tournaments, you find out who the best are.
The best of the best get recruited, and they go to these institutions to train with the other best of the best of the best.
And then in addition to that, the post-collegiate guys who are trying to make the world teams and Olympic teams, they're sticking around training, so you have this melting pot of Freaking really great wrestlers that are training with each other every single day for five to, you know, plus five years if you're going to world championships, right?
I'll go to jiu-jitsu classes sometimes, and they'll literally go over two techniques, you drill it twice, and then the rest of the class is just people rolling.
It drives me insane, Joe, because I come from this wrestling background, and then I also like sports psych and the study of high performance is like, that's what I love.
I love studying people who are the best in their field at whatever they do.
And we know, without a shadow of a doubt, just saying go for five minutes is not the most effective way to train some more.
Does not happen.
So in wrestling, there's a whole bunch of different...
Some days you might do matches.
Some days you might do a 30-minute go.
Some days you might do groups of three women to go.
Some days you might do situations.
I start on the single leg.
I start on the high crotch.
I start on front lock, right?
And so there's...
All these different scenarios that we might try.
I mean, if I'm coaching my academy, right, and we're working on it, we drill front headlocks, or we call mantis position, we grab both armpits and bounce and go.
If we're drilling that, We don't just say, okay, now go five minutes.
Because how many tries are they going to get at going in the mantis position that are the front headlock?
Maybe one, maybe two, but essentially most people of you say go for five minutes.
They are not disciplined enough to make themselves do new skills.
They revert to whatever they do best.
And then they just do it over and over and over and over again, right?
And so if I want a kid to be good at a front headlock, which if you're going to wrestle at a high level, you need a good front headlock, period.
Factual.
You have to have it.
I'm going to put him in there 50 times in that practice.
He's gonna get it over and over and over and over and maybe the next day it's single legs and then maybe next day it's double legs, right?
And then maybe some days you say, hey, go for 10 minutes, go wrestle, right?
Because you want to change it up a little bit.
But saying go for five minutes every single day is very much not the most effective way to do it and it's so insanely frustrating for me to have that happen at almost every jiu-jitsu school on the planet.
Eddie Bravo's talked about this a lot, and one of the things that he says is that jiu-jitsu is so fun to roll that people just want to get to the rolling part real quick.
It's funny because in a lot of ways it's like what you were talking about earlier, the two sides of the coin of a fighter being a wild person who doesn't care, the cowboy, and then the other guy who's like super systematic, everything's controlled.
Yeah, you almost have to have everything.
And the fighters that have those really strong attributes just have to be aware that those attributes are strengthened even further by technique.
But then when you go into a competition, you can't have that same mindset thinking, I don't know, I need to ask.
And so kids who have just the beginner's mind, they're great in practice, but then they go into a match and they're like, Coach, what should I do here?
What should I do?
What should I do?
It's like, just...
Go wrestle!
You don't wrestle!
But then, kids are coming to practice like, I know it all.
And so, on my Facebook, every Monday I do this Mental Monday, and then I usually repeat it or something fairly similar to the kids in practice.
But I also think it's a lot, you know, I think competition is where you get your really, really good teachable moments, because that's when kids care the most.
And so, like, the kid I was talking about, when he loses, because he didn't want to listen to me, I could say, well, look at this.
This is a great example.
You know, I said with, I did this, I do private lessons with this fourth and fifth grader, they're brothers, and And like five weeks in a row, you're doing this wrong, you're doing this wrong, you're doing this wrong, you're doing this wrong.
They don't want to listen, right?
Then they have a match last week, they do it wrong, and it didn't cost them the match, but it almost cost them the match.
And now I can say, every single time I say you're doing this wrong, I can say, remember that time in that match when you got put on your back because you did it wrong and you refused to listen to me?
So I think that matches create great teachable moments, you know, like, hey, remember when you wilted under the pressure because you weren't tough enough?
Well, you need to practice a little harder so you get used to that pressure.
Remember when the referee made a bad call and you flipped out because he made a bad call and then you didn't think about, well, I still have to wrestle the rest of this match.
So there's all these teachable moments within competition where you can point to something very clearly and say, well look at this and see how this affected you and see how you would have been more successful.
So I think for a mental aspect it comes a lot more on a one-on-one basis.
And sometimes I'll use it in front of the whole team.
I don't like really picking on people.
Every once in a while I will.
So I think this competition provides a lot of teachable moments for athletes to see, well, am I stronger here?
What do I need to work on?
Because, again, you can't say one mental aspect makes a guy successful.
It's this conglomeration of many, many, many mental aspects that will make you highly successful.
I mean, at the college level, are we talking about?
Because we do no strength and conditioning.
And I recommend kids do it on their own.
And if I had 12 hours a week with them, I would do that, but we don't.
We don't have that ability to.
I think it's important.
I think it's really important.
I don't think it trumps especially knowledge.
And then if kids wrestle really hard against each other, and Cale had that one saying, like, wrestling is the best strength and conditioning.
I can't remember what he said.
If you wrestle really hard against each other, you're going to develop those things.
And it's like, I think people, when I grab people or squeeze people, they're like, oh my god, I've never felt anything like it.
And I think that comes from, that doesn't come, if you put me in a weight room, I can do nothing abnormal.
I am not abnormally strong in any exercise.
I'm actually, like on a division one college team, I'm significantly less strong than most people, right?
But then when they wrestle me, they're like, holy shit, I never felt anything like that.
And I think it's because a lot of those things that I do are very, very, very wrestling specific.
And I develop that strength because when I grab someone in practice, I freaking grab them as hard as I can.
When I squeeze them, I squeeze them as hard as I can.
And so now from doing that thousands of times, I've developed that squeeze or that strength.
And so I think strength conditioning is important, but I don't think it trumps doing other stuff.
And if I had all the time in the world, and these kids didn't have to go to high school or middle school, I'd probably put them through some, but, you know, we don't have that luxury.
So I had a personal trainer since I moved to Milwaukee.
And then I actually helped him open up a CrossFit gym.
And it wouldn't be, not specifically CrossFit workouts, but kind of that type of work.
Nothing slow where I'm doing three sets of ten, then two sets of eight.
You know, nothing slow like that.
Potentially, you know, one or two days we might do like a slower start and then, but you know, I think fighting, you need to be very highly active.
You need to be in really good shape.
You need to be able to move a lot of things really fast.
So kind of CrossFit-type stuff I think is probably the right direction to go.
And now, when I go back to college programs, besides the heavyweights, the in-season stuff for college programs is mostly higher-paced stuff, which I think is very relevant to both wrestling and fighting.
So when I said that, I just meant that we were moving at a high pace through a lot of stuff, and it would be like he would tell me, hey, do sled pushes, do this, do that, do that, do that.
I was having some success because when you're fatter, there's not many people to compete against, right?
Right.
Anyway, so I lost 30 pounds in sixth grade, so I stopped drinking soda.
I had this whole list of stuff.
I just cut out.
That's amazing you had that discipline at 11. Yeah, I know.
So now when I look at kids, I think the mental maturity is huge in long-term success, being able to see the future and make decisions on what you want to do at that young age.
So I lost 30 pounds, and so now I've slowly started reintroducing a lot of stuff.
And I just figured, like, so I tried a couple supplements in college, and I never felt anything from them.
Like, I didn't feel any different, you know?
And so I'm like, I didn't feel anything.
Why am I going to go take that?
I don't need to take it.
And then, so, then obviously I became like this anti-PED crusader.
You know, by chance.
And so then it's like, well, now I really can't take anything.
Because if I go take something and I pop hot because these idiots are putting something in the supplement that shouldn't be there, I'm going to look like a total asshole.
Like, we're eating salads and, you know, I'm not eating cake and ice cream and pizza and that kind of stuff.
And we're eating healthy food at my house, you know, but I'm not measuring the grams of this or grams of that.
So I really think one of my, and this has been proven by science, that you only have a certain amount of time every single day to have a high amount of mental focus on stuff.
And so I think, like, my training is more important than focusing on nutrition and stuff.
I want to really, like, really zone in really high-level focus when I'm training and stuff.
And so I think if I worry about all this other stuff, it'll take my focus away from that.
Right or wrong, that's kind of how I thought about it.
And it is, if you look at, so we talked about Singapore being so fantastic and having a really high GDP. A lot of the countries over there, Indonesia, Manila, you know, Manila, Philippines, they don't have huge high GDPs, right?
I mean, they're not super wealthy countries.
And so when we think about, you know, how much it costs to buy a lot of the steroids that are They're not readily available in America.
They're just not as available.
And so I think they do have a point.
And if you look at their athletes, there's not a lot of athletes that look like Yo Romero.
Now, Yo Romero's probably not using, like I pointed out earlier.
Yeah, that one Russian guy that I fought in April of 16, he was freaking enormous.
And, you know, the other thing that I think a lot of MMA people are using...
Some type of, oh my gosh, I'm blanking.
What gives you endurance?
EPO. EPO, that type of stuff, because if you watch a college wrestling match, how tired people get in seven minutes, and then we're fighting 25 minutes and you're not going to get tired, that's not normal.
Yeah, we were both graduating in 2007. How does that work?
I felt like he was betting against myself.
They paid you $100,000 a year for seven years.
They got 50% of your career earnings.
And I said, my thought was, well, if I ever make it really big, I'm going to make a million dollars a fight, and I'm going to pay them back in one fight.
It would be like hedging your bet against yourself, and I don't ever bet against myself.
It's like they have to have some sort of a reason to put out that investment, and it's a big bet whether or not you're going to be able to be a superstar.
It's interesting, and I think there's probably somewhere in there with, you know, I know a few managers where you go pick out, it's pretty proven that high-level college wrestlers are going to make really damn good fighters.
That's pretty proven.
So going to try to find a couple every year, spending some money on them, and then getting a percentage of their earnings, that's probably a pretty, I don't want to say a safe bet for the people putting out the money, but it's...
You know, Team Takedown had Jake Rothschalt, who was an amazing wrestler, and for whatever reason, he just didn't transition great to fighting, right?
He was good, but he wasn't great.
And it was like, for as good of a wrestler as he was, he probably thought he was going to be a little better.
When we talk about how good Jake was, he still made the UFC. He still won some fights.
He wasn't a bad fighter, but he was a three-time NCAA champ.
So you expect him, hey, he'll probably go challenge for a UFC title.
In his case, I don't know what the factor was.
But there's not a lot of outliers like that where they're a really high-level wrestler and then they don't have any success in MMA. That's really unique.
I've looked at it from striking, from if you see really high-level kickboxers.
Some have a style that would readily translate to MMA and some are fantastic kickboxers like maybe Peter Ertz is a good example or Ernesto Husper.
I wouldn't really think that they would translate that well to MMA. Whereas Mirko Krokop, who might have been like a slight notch below them in terms of kickboxing, translates perfectly to MMA because he's so explosive and quick.
You know, one of the other things I think benefits us wrestlers is the fact that jiu-jitsu people are stuck on doing jiu-jitsu the jiu-jitsu way, right?
Strikers are stuck on striking.
When we come into MMA, we know we can't win a match just by wrestling, right?
So we know.
We know.
I gotta add striking.
I gotta add jujitsu.
And I'm open to that idea.
Right?
I'm open to those ideas that I have to add those things into my arsenal where some jujitsu guys are like, well, I'm just gonna submit them.
I mean, you can literally not name me, Joe, a jujitsu guy or a striking guy.
Well, maybe Jose Aldo, who has developed high-level wrestling, but you can name a lot of wrestlers who have developed high-level something else, right?
I mean, when you see the crossover, like John Jones was a wrestler.
He can strike with pretty much anyone on the planet, right?
I mean, Stipe Miocic was a wrestler.
He can pretty much strike with anyone on the planet.
I mean, so you have these wrestlers who are becoming high-level at these other skills, but you don't have a lot of...
Other skills becoming high-level at wrestling.
And for me, I think it's the stubbornness of people who come from those other backgrounds are too stubborn to want to work a lot in wrestling, whereas wrestlers are like, okay, teach me how to strike.
Yeah, I think it's a recognition of what's important.
Like, George St. Pierre is a perfect example of a guy who started off with a Kyokushin background, didn't wrestle in college or high school, became a fantastic wrestler at MMA. Yeah, he's good.
Yeah, and just figured it out and realized what a critical skill it is, too.
Jose Aldo would be like, he wasn't an offensive wrestler, but he would be like, he was so ridiculously hard to take down.
I mean, fantastic takedown defense.
So there's a handful, but there's not a lot.
But then if you go to wrestlers going the opposite direction into jiu-jitsu or striking, you can name quite a few that were able to do those things really well.
Even like Anthony Pettis who got a lot of submissions from guard.
A lot of that was transitions off of, I body kick Benson Harrison, I body kick Benson Harrison, Benson Harrison hates getting body kicked, so he dives in for a takedown and gets armbarred, right?
Or Gil Melendez getting guillotine choke because he got jacked a few times, right?
So there's a handful of those, but just strictly like, I take you down, you're in guard, then I submit you.
Yeah, I mean, and so it was one of those where he probably just like, it was like okay for him to make it be difficult and he just got just a little bit too big.
I think the best course of action is strip Conor, let Khabib and Tony fight it out, and then if Conor wants to come back, give him a title shot, and that's going to happen, whatever.
I don't think I'd go back to the collegiate level.
That's obviously always an option.
For the four years I coached college wrestling, I loved it.
And then it was like, hey, I won the Bellator title.
I was making a lot of money.
I should probably try to be good at this instead of just doing it halfway.
And so I did that.
And then we opened the wrestling schools.
And now it's going a little.
And I really enjoy that a lot.
And there's positives and negatives.
I love coaching at the highest level, being able to talk at the highest level to the college guys.
So I missed that part a little bit.
But then obviously if you go work for an institution like that, there's going to be a lot of bureaucracy and I worry about that.
I don't like that.
I love owning my own business and having my own freedom and not having to worry about what I tweet or what I say or have anyone tell me what to do or where to be or where to dress.
So I love that freedom.
Obviously then running your own business has its own challenges also.
But I think I will coach wrestling for the rest of my life.
Whether I fight once more or whether I don't fight once more, I'll probably cook dressing for the rest of my life.