Josh Thomson and Joe Rogan dissect MMA’s culture, from Stephen A. Smith’s controversial criticism of Donald Cerrone (broken orbital bone) to the emotional stakes of fights like Conor McGregor vs. Cowboy Cerrone. They praise Bellator’s underrated talent—Timothy Nastykin, Julia Budd (potential Cyborg rival)—and critique UFC’s cross-promotion failures, like Chuck Liddell vs. Wanderlei Silva. Thomson highlights Bellator’s rebranding under Scott Coker and the risks of cuts in shaved-headed fighters, while Rogan debates unified rules, bare-knuckle transitions (e.g., Dan Henderson), and weight-class anomalies like Jon Jones and Usman Galiev. Daniels’ 920-degree spin punch (January 25th fight) sparks debate on point-fighting vs. MMA adaptability, with Thomson defending McGregor’s legacy but dismissing his chances against Khabib Nurmagomedov’s wrestling and cardio. [Automatically generated summary]
And I love Gus, when he's talking basketball, I think he's got the energy and the voice that makes people like, oh wow, they're gripped to the TV. This, I can understand what Steve and Nate, but this is not what you want to release.
After you just called someone who's a pioneer in the sport, you basically called him a quitter.
My concern with him, though, was that, look, he's fine.
He just did the video.
I get it.
It's good that you're trying to learn the sport.
But I got to tell you, DC sent me this video, and he basically commented on it.
And I said, DC's trying to protect him.
I said, you cannot protect this guy.
Not from this.
You can't call someone like Cowboy Cerrone or any other top guy in any organization.
I don't care if it's UFC, Bellator, Juan, any of them.
All these, you cannot do that to these guys.
These guys lay it on the line every time.
We're not slapping a puck or hitting a baseball, okay?
We're really out there getting hurt.
And when someone calls you acquitted like that, you better be, I'm not saying he should be careful, like watch his back, but don't expect these fighters to be very courteous to you next time you walk in the hall.
And that's the issue that I think we come across here.
Fighters are very offensive when, they get offended when things like this.
Yeah, I agree with you 100% that he did learn something.
I learned something from him.
Somebody who'd taken that amount of time off.
And I'm going to say this, to be frank.
Obviously, I work for Bellator.
And I do a lot of work for them.
But the thing is, you can't have to give credit where credit is due.
I give credit to all the fighters.
It doesn't matter if you're in one.
Look, Eddie, to me, is one of the best 55-pounders to ever walk the face of the earth.
Conor McGregor, to me, I thought he did things in that fight against Khabib that no other guy has been able to do.
First off, he won a round.
That's something no one's ever...
People say, oh, well, Khabib took the round off.
Yeah, because maybe he tried to finish him at the end of the second, but the bottom line is, he still won the round.
And there's not only that, but there was a lot of times and opportunities where Khabib had a hard time getting the takedown.
We didn't see that against guys with wrestling backgrounds like Abel Trujillo and those other guys, where he was flinging around winning records basically for the most takedowns in one fight.
There's tons of things that Conor does that people overlook and underestimate because he's such a knockout artist and he's so good.
And his stance and his style and things like that, he brought this to the next level.
And you cannot discredit what he's done in the sport.
What I learned from that is that from somebody who can take 15 months off and come back and perform the way that he did against someone like Donald Cerrone, Absolutely amazing.
That's why you need guys like you doing post-fight commentary and discussing these things, not people who don't understand the sport and practice dick punches.
I would have preferred to talk to DC or Felder or you or anybody who understands the sport.
I don't think it's the right way to do it.
The one gentleman to my right, Michael...
Jamie, what is his last name?
He was great.
And Stephen Smith was very nice to me, too.
And he said he's gonna get into podcasts.
I have no problem with him as a human being.
I just think, look, I don't know jack shit about baseball.
I don't know jack shit about basketball.
I literally don't even know the rules.
I don't know when people foul people.
I'm not sure why.
I don't know what's happening.
I know MMA. I understand it.
So if you want to talk about MMA, I'd like to talk to MMA about someone else who knows MMA. Like you were saying though, I was listening to one of your podcasts the other day with Mike Baker.
And he said like, look, I don't agree with Bernie Sanders' policies.
But Bernie Sanders probably is a really nice guy.
It doesn't mean that I have to like what he does in front of the camera for him to call MMA. I don't have to like that.
I can still like him as a person.
That's where we need to make sure that we differentiate between the two things.
Like, look, he probably is a really good guy.
And I actually have met him.
I met him at the Floyd Mayweather and Connor fight.
And said hi.
He said, hey, how's it going?
Like, hey, what do you think?
And that was the conversation.
It was real quick, real brief, maybe two minutes.
But he seemed like a nice person at that time.
But when I was listening to him talk and calling Cerrone basically a quitter...
To me, I lost respect in the avenue that you're not supposed to be working in our sport.
And you need to make some sort of adjustment, whether it's dick punching or something else.
You need to figure it out.
I understand.
I get that it's a good idea for all people that have never covered the sport to try to get into it.
Maybe hold off on the videos like that for a while before you post them.
I like that he's trying and I'm gonna give him credit for that and I think like with Gus, there was a lot of rumblings about Gus Johnson in the very beginning, but we gave him a run for a while and I really like Gus.
He's a great person, always been great every time I've talked to him and met with him and worked with him side by side as well, calling fights with Strikeforce.
Great person, but his forte is basketball and for him, whatever his forte is, Stephen A. Smith, I think he may have to stick with that and I think I agree, they have to bring DC back in to work with you alongside him.
When you see what happened last night at Kansas and Kansas State or whatever, and they started throwing punches, it looked like a bunch of girls throwing windmills.
You know what I mean?
That's really the reality.
Now, if he wants to go out there and talk about it, go ahead and talk about it.
He can say all the things he wants, because these are college kids that can't fight, obviously.
We just saw.
But we're talking about professional athletes.
Their life has been around this craft, and now you're going to say things like that.
What happened is Connor had a spectacular performance.
Cowboy got caught off guard and he got finished quick.
That's what happened.
All the other stuff is unnecessary.
The emotional devastation of a 40-second KO like that is...
We have, as a respectful human being, you've got to leave all that other stuff alone.
All that shit talking.
If you want to say it in the gym to one of your homies and you're just hanging out and maybe one of them doesn't like Cowboy and someone talks trash and that's private and no one hears it, that's fine and good.
But when you want to do that publicly, you want to broadcast that and then also do it on ESPN, I think it's just short-sighted and I think it's foolish.
It means he's a massive star who can talk from his perch and no one can touch him, yet he chooses to try and learn the game so there's some weight to his opinion.
I told him, I said, look, just because Stephen A. Smith might be good for business in the ESPN business for you later on, I said, that doesn't mean you've got to tone that line, buddy.
I'd like to give him a hard time.
But look, DC's one of my best friends, man, and he's absolutely hilarious and just fun.
He likes to do this to stir the pot because like you were just saying with Stephen A., he likes to do this type of stuff so people keep talking.
DC likes to try me on shit like this.
unidentified
So we're here right now talking about DC and this whole situation.
And I'm sure he really does love Stephen A as a person.
Stephen A, he's a nice guy.
Like I said, I've met him a couple of times.
He's a nice guy.
But just to like, there's a style of broadcasting that sports radio and sports broadcasting that they do this kind of stuff.
But when it leaks over into fighting, fighting is just not a sport.
You can call it a sport.
It's kind of a sport, but it's It's sport in its highest sense of expression, where you're literally using your body to try to stop another man's body.
And as intense as it gets, and I think it deserves more respect.
That's just my opinion.
That's how I've always treated it.
When I talk about fighters, my concentration has always been to elevate.
My concentration has never been to demean someone.
There's something that they did that's illegal.
There's some sort of blatant foul that should be stopped or something that's really dangerous that they're doing that should be chastised.
But the sport, it's a higher level of consequence and risk, and it needs to be respected that way.
I listen to your show quite a bit, and I like a lot of what you had talked about before when you first got into comedy about talking about...
How some of the other comics was like kind of shit on other young comics kind of up and coming and when you came in it was like a different you try to just ingrain in people like hey I want to build you all of you guys up that are with me on the same set.
If we're doing the show and we're all on the same night let's all just fucking make each other look good.
I feel like Especially in fighting, whether it's boxing, MMA, anything along those lines, we gotta be elevating each other to make each other better.
Like, hey, this guy is good, this guy is good.
Without talking shit, because we, like yourself specifically, as well as like even myself and other guys that have shows and podcasts and start talking, we're on a different level of platform that can really kind of either make or break some people's careers.
It also...
Also, the sport is confidence.
MMA is a confident level.
Anytime you do wrestling, it's a one-on-one combative sport.
Anytime wrestling, MMA, confidence is key.
If my confidence is low, then that means that I'm probably not going to perform my best.
And when you take a loss, it goes lower and lower.
When you've got to hear it from fucking people that don't know the business, like this right here, it's just another thing added on.
And for other MMA guys to shit on other MMA guys...
All that does is tear them down even more and you could potentially, I'm not saying ruin their career, but you're not helping them get to their goals and their levels.
It's better if everyone shines and we all handle ourselves with a class and respect.
And I feel like we just, in general, need to hold ourselves to a higher standard if we're talking MMA and making sure that we showcase this guy as really good.
Like here, I'll give you an example.
All I do when I talk about Frank Yeager is talk about how such an amazing person, even when he has a bad performance, he's still one of the best to ever do the game and all the things that he's done from before in the past.
I say the same thing about BJ Penn.
Somebody who, look, he exploded on the scene.
I was training with him when he had that first run through Din Thomas, Uno, all those guys.
He was training at AKA. All the things that happen now, to me, those are just bumps in the row as fighters get older and they just don't know how to react.
This is it.
I don't know what's going on.
They need somebody to step in, not shit on them.
They need someone to step in and talk to them.
I text and talk to him all the time.
It's like, hey man, it might be time to move on.
It might be not.
Whatever the deal is.
But they're good people at heart.
I know them personally.
And we should just be talking in general about lifting these guys up to the next level.
And that's the way I think every sport should handle it.
The argument against that would be the massive success that Conor's had, shitting on people in press conferences and shitting on people and leading up to a fight and the fact that that's built up so much animosity but also so much attention.
Like the Aldo fight.
Dude, he made that fight by talking so much shit.
It's a big part of why that fight was so successful.
And it was also like some serious psychological warfare.
When Aldo went into that cage with Conor, you could see the weight of all that shit-talking was weighing heavy on him.
You could see it.
He probably hadn't slept.
He's probably really fucked up like that emotionally.
Because Aldo was super respected.
He was the fucking king.
He was the guy that had torn through the featherweight division for years.
And he had beaten everybody.
Beaten the best of the best.
And widely regarded as the greatest featherweight of all time.
And then all of a sudden, Conor's just shitting on him.
And shitting on him and shitting on him.
Tearing his picture apart.
Stealing his belt at press conferences.
And all that craziness.
It made the fight way bigger, but it also fucked with Jose physically and emotionally.
So when they actually fought, he had a diminished performance.
He was too emotional.
He lost his composure.
He rushed forward.
He tried to hit him before everything was set up, and he got cracked for it.
Yeah, I understand what you're saying in those terms, but when you're promoting a fight, promoting a fight, to me, is a separate thing.
Though I think Conor overstepped the boundary when he talked about Khabib and all the other family stuff, especially when he posted the picture with his wife.
That, to me, is...
I understand.
Chael's done it a couple times when he talked about Jenna Jameson and Tito and that whole situation.
There's moments, I think, where guys have stepped over the line.
But if I'm talking shit to you, taking your belt and doing those things, look, I'm marketing the fight.
That's a separate issue than doing what some guys do.
And I think, look, there's a difference between marketing the fight and then you realize when the fight's done, shaking hands and be like, okay, look, let's do it again.
And that to me, that's a fighter's mentality.
I want another crack at you, whether I won or I lost.
I want another crack at you.
It's okay to market the fight, but once the fight is done, shake your hand.
That's what this sport is about.
That's what fighting is about.
That's what it's always been about.
You know, from back in the days when guys were just...
Put up their dukes.
We'll fight each other, help you up off the ground, shake your hand, and move on.
And you could tell, look, Khabib's had more experience in terms of MMA. You know, like, Samba was basically just MMA with a gi top on and, you know, occasionally they wear shin guards.
With Ed, Ed was relatively new into the sport when they first started training.
And Ed was able to do a lot of good things to him.
And Khabib was able to do a lot of good things to him.
Without saying too much, both of them definitely benefit from their training together.
And that's what's great about our gym.
It's not a pissing match in our gym.
Like, sure, guys want to one-up each other when it comes to sparring, but...
I would say that Ed, he got the better of learning the most from that situation, whereas Khabib realized that his stuff works on the top caliber guys in the world.
Yeah, what people need to remember is that that camp was ran by Crazy Bob Cook, and Javier first, Javier, Crazy Bob Cook, but then also when they linked up with, when Bob Cook linked up with Zincon Entertainment, and the Zincon family is very into wrestling.
All three brothers were All-Americans at Fresno State, wrestled with Lorenzo Neal, who was a Professional football player in the NFL, but also wrestled at Fresno State, also an All-American.
Those guys all linked up, and they're big, big into wrestling.
So what they've done, like I literally could tell you this, is he would, the three brothers would, if I brought up to a wrestler right now that I'd never heard of, you probably never heard of, they could tell you all their stats.
They could tell you what they did in high school.
They could tell you what they did in college.
They could tell you how far they potentially will go in the Olympics.
Like, that's how much ingrained that they are into this.
So a lot of the reasons why we've gotten guys like Ed Ruth, Aaron Pico was signed with them when he first started his career, DC, you know, Deron Wynn, all these guys that have come, they've all come through because of Dwayne Zincon.
He's such a talented guy, and he's still very young, but there was so much hype on that kid right out of the gate, and they put him in against real tough competition right out of the gate.
Yeah, look, he had to fight tough competition right out of the gate.
There's a couple things.
What people need to understand is this, is if I'm going to pay you this amount of money because there's so much hype around you, then you're going to have to fight this level of guy.
Now the problem with what happened with him, he's not a 55 pounder, he's tiny.
So he could potentially make 35. Really?
Yeah, he's not a big guy.
So that's what people keep forgetting.
So when he wanted to stay at 55, we said, okay, we'll give it a go.
Let him get one or two fights in that position.
But no one wanted to fight him.
No one.
We were calling some of the best guys in Bellator.
At the time, they're like, no, we want to see a couple of fights in his first before we go throwing our names out there to fight this guy.
We'll see how he is.
You know what I mean?
And so, when that happened, and I'm not knocking them, that's smart on their part.
I mean, every top guy's going to be like, yeah, let's see what he is first and then we'll figure it out.
But then as soon as he lost to Zach Freeman, who was tall, long, lengthy, you know, good, decent submissions, not a world beater, but he was good.
Aaron got exposed in the first fight, got clipped, then jumped in on a double leg, got guillotine, was out.
Then he decided to make the loop down to 145, had a couple good performances.
He's got big dogs.
He's got big dogs in his hands.
He's got heavy hands, but he's a boxing base with wrestling background, which works If you've already been around guys that have done plenty of kickboxing, if you're just a boxing base, kicks come from angles you're not used to, like different from punches.
And so he just needed to get to a camp and stay focused on one area with one or two coaches that would groom him into that.
Now that he's at Jackson Wink, I think it's perfect for him because he's there with good, really, really good grapplers and really, really good guys.
And so with With Jackson there grooming him and telling him how the game plan...
Jackson's one of the best at game planning.
I mean, you can't deny that.
And the fact is, is that he just needed someone to get in there.
Now, I do know, like, he had a couple little issues.
Like, obviously, he really didn't go to high school.
I mean, like, as far as he was just traveling around and trying to become the best wrestler in the world.
I mean, at a young age, you know, he's...
He's winning everything.
It's hard when you take someone from school, put them into that type of thing, and they have success.
And they think they're going to continue to have success on a world-class level like in any sport.
And since he had such success at a young age, his dad and his family got really involved into doing that and pushing him in that direction.
And that's not always the best scenario and situation.
I think sometimes you need to have management.
And trainers guide you when you're talking about a sport that other people have no idea what's going on.
It doesn't work that way.
People think like, oh, I think family members, and I hear this all the time, and I can speak from experience, my family sometimes comes in and says, yeah, how come you don't make what Conor McGregor's making?
It's not the same.
I'm like, are you fucking kidding me?
Like, you know, like, those are, it's not the same.
Yeah, I don't, yeah, I'd have to explain everything.
And so when you have someone like Pico's parent, his dad and his, you know, his brother, I think, were kind of helping with management and trying to get sponsors and do this.
They were expecting people to like, you know, to bend over and be like, hey, you know, like, yeah, this is Aaron Pico and this and that because he's had such success at a young age and how good and talented he was in the gym.
But like Alvin Iverson said, man, we're talking about practice?
It doesn't, it's not the same thing.
Sure, he's great, but when the lights turn on and the fight happens and we're sparring in little gloves, not 16-ounce gloves, it changes.
And you also have to take into consideration that, yeah, he's had a tremendous amount of success in wrestling, and yes, he's got very good hands, but...
He has a small amount of MMA fights.
And this is MMA. That's the difference.
There is a difference.
And he's also a really young guy who's experienced some pretty high highs and pretty low lows very quickly.
I think guys need to be managed better.
And what I mean by that is the same way boxing handles it.
Boxing, you see guys get to 15, 16 and 0. When you see a guy like Khabib who's 28 and 0, you go, how the fuck?
No one gets there.
You got Jon Jones, who's essentially undefeated.
You know, the Matt Hamill fight, in my mind, he won that fight.
He crushed him.
I mean, there's never a moment in that fight where he's in doubt.
He just got disqualified.
And I don't even agree with the disqualification.
But he's a rarity.
It's him, and it's Khabib, and maybe there's a couple other guys that are like elite, high-level guys that are undefeated.
They're the outliers.
Most guys...
Get thrown to the wolves, like, really quickly.
But in boxing, you see that all the time.
Because managers slowly groom their fighters.
They go, okay, Josh, you know what, Josh?
You're a fucking great puncher, but, you know, your inside game maybe should be tested.
We got this tough Mexican dude who likes to fight inside, so we're going to match you up with him.
You should beat him.
But it's going to give you some seasoning, and they'll move you along that way.
Okay, we're going to try you against a long, lanky striker.
Sometimes you have problems with the jab, and this guy's got a significant reach advantage.
And then boxers, the boxing managers and coaches, they'll think about this shit for...
Days and weeks before they commit to a fight.
Whereas in the UFC, the UFC calls you up.
Hey, you want to fight Khabib on three days notice?
Yeah, there's a lot of these guys, they're so tough, they're almost too tough for their own good, and they're training on injuries and just pushing through the pain, and they're just chewing up the cartilage and tearing up the labrum.
And here's the thing, to go back to the Joe Silva thing, but then a lot of it is because conversations like that.
It's the conversations like, well, fine, we're just going to shelf you.
Well, these guys, when they get a call for a title, or they get a call for a fight on the main card, or their families are starving, or they're hungry, people think that everyone's making Conor McGregor money.
My whole family thought I was making Conor McGregor money.
Like, why are you not making that money?
And I'm like, you guys, I almost want to say, shut up.
I've been getting punched in the face for 20 years.
But look, what I wanted to talk to you about was you and Brendan had a talk and conversation about guys like Lima and other guys having competition with top guys.
I mean, Jon Jones has faced stiffer competition because there's stiffer competition in the light heavyweight division.
But the way Mighty Mouse was running through the division, the way Mighty Mouse would just not get hit, the expression of martial arts, in my opinion, when I watched him, I've never seen anybody more impressive.
I think they offered him a tremendous amount of money at one, and the flyweight division has never been a moneymaker for the UFC, and Henry Cejudo beat him in a very close decision, and I think they just came to a position where Mighty Mouse was like, look, I'm not going to make as much money in the next fight because I lost, but one FC is going to pay me X amount of times more than that.
And they gave him a huge contract, man.
Yeah.
And look, Chautry's amazing and what they're doing over at 1FC. I think it's great for everybody.
I think it's great for the sport.
I think it's great that the athletes have options.
I think the competition is great for the UFC. When you see someone rise and someone start smashing people over there and everybody goes, hey, that guy might be the best 170-pounder in the world, that's good for everybody.
I mean, he's elite in terms of, you know, he could fight anybody in the world that's his size.
That guy's a fucking animal, man.
For him to beat down Eddie Alvarez like that, you're talking about Eddie Alvarez, a guy who's notoriously one of the toughest fucking guys in the sport, period.
And that was a real wake-up call for a lot of people.
There's some guys over there.
Just because you don't know their name doesn't mean, like, look, when fucking Zabit came over here, people didn't know his name.
And then you see that guy fight, you're like, what the fuck?
Where'd you come from?
360 roundhouse kicks and crazy fucking scissor sweeps and taking people down, submitting them, head kicking them, doing everything.
There's hundreds of guys like that out there everywhere.
Sure, I think right now that's a market that needs to be tapped into across for every promotion.
But they're also in Asia somewhere.
They're also in other countries everywhere else.
I do know that there's a lot of top talented guys in Sweden and Switzerland that just never get to play because there's not an MMA market there really.
But they're great jiu-jitsu guys.
There's good MMA gyms out of all these places, especially in Italy and all these other places.
We're seeing talent come.
And when I heard that he was fighting, when I heard Eddie was fighting Nassouk, I was like, oh shit.
I said either Eddie's going to be able to get him down and get on top, because he does tend to fade a little bit.
Nassouk gets into the second and third round.
But if he can't get him down in that first round, I say he's going to get knocked out.
I love Eddie, but he got a little chinny at some points.
Not to the point where he gets knocked out, but he's always been rocked, comes back, and then fucks people up.
But this is a guy that I'd seen him just starch guys.
I mean, he fought this guy, what was his name, something full along, and there was talk and conversation about this guy was going to knock out Timothy.
I mean, it was almost like an Alistair Overeem type knockout, you know, when Ngannou snapped his head back.
And so when I see guys like him, and there's other guys that are in these organizations all around, like to me, Patricio Pitbull is probably the best 145-pounder in the world.
And I'm a big Max Holloway fan.
But I've talked about this before with Big John, is that styles make matchups.
And Big John has talked to me about being in the cage, roughing Max's fights, and he said Volkanovski will give him problems.
And sure enough, Volkanovski gave him problems.
He said, that will let me know how good Patricio Pitbull would do against Max Holloway.
The speed, the wrestling, the power, all those things Patricio has.
And to me, Patricio is better than Volkanovski just from what I can see, not from the max fight, but from a lead up to all the fights.
So I take guys like Lima, I take guys like Patricio who knocked out Michael Chandler at 155 pounds, I take those guys and I'll put those guys against, not just UFC guys, one guys, all these guys, all day long.
But the thing is, that was when UFC had first taken over Strikeforce, and I was sitting there cage-sized, and I'm thinking to myself, this is hands down the greatest MMA one-round fight I've ever seen in my life.
I trained with Frank for years and I'm like, I'm in his guard and he's like, come on Josh, get up, throw punches, do something, I'm gonna fucking sub you.
I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that.
And you're just like, shut up, man!
Shetler's wanna punch you harder and it makes you more tired.
Yeah, Frank was not the same guy when he fought Nick at that time, but let's be real, at that time, it was awesome to see somebody like Nick do that, because Nick, though, if you recall, at the end of the fight, he picks Frank up.
He's like, you're a fucking legend.
Do not sit down there like that.
You're a fucking legend.
And that's why people talk to me all the time about my fight with Nate, and I say, look, man, I have nothing but respect for both those guys.
Those guys are fucking Animals.
Not only the animals, but what I love is I love people.
We were talking about Big John being a good guy before we came on the show and Big John McCarthy.
And I said, absolutely.
And when I think of guys that are good guys, I think of guys that stick by their friends no matter what.
You got to remember that brawl that happened on CBS, right?
We were talking about that as well.
That brawl with Mayhem Miller, Jake Shields, Nick Diaz.
But guess what?
That whole scrap pack, they die for each other.
And you can't knock friendship like that.
And I look at those guys, and they're really good people.
From Gilbert Melendez, his wife Carrie, Nick and Nate, and Jake.
Jake's still one of my good, good buddies.
Gil is as well.
But even though I don't talk to Nate anymore, really.
But still, I have nothing but respect for those guys themselves.
They did it on their own, and they're fucking amazing.
I will buy their pay-per-view every single time they fight no matter what.
And, you know, Nick Diaz changed the game in terms of his elite cardio.
He did something that was a new thing.
And that new thing was, he's not going to hit you with 100% power.
He's going to hit you with 50%.
But he's going to hit you twice as much and you're never going to get to breathe.
And he's going to stay on top of you, and he's going to talk to you the whole time, so he's going to fuck with you psychologically, he's going to disrupt your breathing by constantly hitting you, and then once he realizes you're hurt, then he's digging into the body, then he's putting it on you.
And on top of that, black belt jiu-jitsu skills, really good wrestling takedown defense, fucking chin made of iron, and an unstoppable will.
Like, his will to beat you was just unstoppable.
When Nick was at the top in Strikeforce, to this day, I think he's one of the best fighters that's ever done it.
And I did a lot of research on him leading up to the fight.
I never really showed him any respect up until like, ah, he's just okay, he's a little sloppy, he's this, he's that.
But once I did the research on him leading up to our fight...
It impressed me.
What impressed me was, dude, the guy can take a shot, give a shot, the guy doesn't slow down, the guy doesn't care where the fight goes.
Anytime you have somebody who doesn't care where the fight goes, it changes the dynamic of how you approach him.
Because if you take him down, what does that matter?
He don't care.
Yeah, he's good with the darse.
He's good with the guillotine.
He's good with triangles.
He's good with all those.
He doesn't care.
So if he stays on the feet, guess what?
He keeps his distance and his range with his long-range push kicks and his jabs and his combinations.
He doesn't care where the fight goes.
Neither does Khabib.
But obviously, Khabib would like to keep the fight on the ground, press against the fence, doing work, what he's done, and continues to work and does what he does best.
Look, for me, I feel like the only way that Tony wins is by a cut.
I don't think that he can sub him.
Now, I'm not saying it can't happen.
We understand when cuts happen, you get a little more slippery, things slide in a lot faster.
No, not just that, but there was a moment there where he had wrist control.
So when I got into his guard, he grabbed my wrist, and I couldn't get my arm free, and then in the meantime, he's elbowing me in my head.
And I got two Mercedes-Benz cuts right here on the front of my forehead.
Okay?
So it was like right there, and then he cut me with a good elbow when I stepped in on one, but the two Mercedes-Benz cuts were from him with wrist control and him elbowing me from his guard.
If Khabib gets put into his guard, it could end up being a tough fight because cuts...
Cuts happen, and when they do happen, and you have a shaved head, there's nothing stopping them from flowing right into your eyes.
Your eyebrows are not going to stop all that blood.
And if you recall, remember the Joe Daddy Stevenson and Eads Edwards fights?
That shit was just squirting out.
There's an Adam Piccolotti fight as well in Bellator where he had cut the guy on the top of the head, and literally he gets a rear neck and chokes him, and you see blood go everywhere.
And I'm just thinking to myself, In a fight where you shave your head or your hair is always really short, it's not going to look good to the judges or to the doctor and things like that.
I mean, Brendan obviously has struck pay dirt with the fighter and the kid and below the belt and all the other shit that he does.
And in a lot of ways, and also stand-up, in a lot of ways he's opened up the door for a lot of fighters to follow that model.
And a lot of guys are doing podcasts now because of that.
I mean, Mike Bisping has a really good podcast with Luis Gomez.
And, you know, there's a lot of other fighters that are getting involved in setting up similar things, too.
But I think that's really important to say that they need some, like, you can't fight forever.
It's not possible.
So there's got to be something you're going to do for the rest of your life to make an income.
And when you're focused singularly on one thing, being the best fighter that you can be, it's very difficult to even imagine a future without fighting for a lot of these guys.
Well, the hardest thing, I feel like realistically the hardest thing is like you're trying to find something that supplemented the income that you were making.
I was making really good money.
Joe, it takes me a whole year now of work of all four of these other companies to make what I was making in one fight or a fight and a half.
It's like, ah, but...
You have to understand that there's a means to an end.
Like, if I just keep doing what I'm doing, you know, and one day I'll hop a man cave.
Like, Henzo Gracie is a huge school in New York City, makes a shit ton of money, and, you know, got there from his career in fighting and jiu-jitsu, and figured out how to make more money than he ever made in his entire fighting career every year just doing that.
But I think a majority of women, though, between that 32 to 36, 37, that could be their...
Whether it's the hot spot.
That's the hot spot.
I really believe.
Because, you know, look, there was a lot...
There was some girls that I knew that were ring girls and when they first started on they weren't as beautiful as they are now as they've gotten a little bit older.
The other thing as well is sometimes though they were pretty with natural looks when they started and now all of a sudden they've got so much work done they don't even look like the same person.
So there's two sides to that.
Just let your body mature before you go sticking that shit in your face.
And I'll bet you you're going to be beautiful no matter what.
You start putting that shit, you look like every other person that's on social media.
But it's such a great thing that they've done, and it's amazing that they hadn't done that before.
And now boxing has caught on.
I mean, boxing had it with George Foreman and a little bit with Roy Jones Jr., but for the most part, the people that are doing commentary, they were analysts, you know?
And, you know, you'd have, like, one fighter.
But the guys sitting around the table talking about what they think about these matchups and what they think could go down, that's very valuable insight to the fans, too.
It enhances the experience for the fans and provides...
George Foreman, to me, it was one of my favorites because he had the best line ever when he told Larry Merchant, you see fighting, you don't know fighting.
And that, to me, just let everyone know I'm going to put you in your place without actually throwing a punch.
You know what I mean?
And just let me know that fighters are meant to be in that position.
And so when you're saying guys like DC stepping up and doing what he's doing, I think he's amazing.
Yeah, he's fantastic.
I love doing what I do and I gotta tell you, I've been definitely blessed the fact that I owe a big majority of my career to Scott Coker because these are things that sure I had to audition for.
I still had to get out there and do what they asked me to do.
When it came down to the audition, you have to be able to nail it.
And I was lucky enough that they were like, you're good enough, we'll give you a try.
But I feel that the reason I think why it worked out so well is situations like this.
I had already started a podcast.
I was already comfortable being in front of the mic.
This is one of the things that I got from Brendan when I went on his show the first time on Big Brown Breakdown.
I'm like, you know, talk to me about how this whole thing did and how it all started for you.
And he goes, Josh, just look at this microphone as if it's a rep.
Every time you're in front of this microphone, it's a rep that you're getting for the shows that you're going to do.
And so when I get now in front of the microphone and I'm holding it there and I'm talking with Jay Glazer and Chael and whoever else, whatever fighters...
One of the hardest things to do is listen to what the hell they're saying.
This is why I admire what you do so well.
You're talking to me and I have to listen to you and you're listening to everything I say so you can come back with an answer.
Most people already have a question in their head they're going to ask and they don't care what you're going to say.
And so when you're talking to a fighter, they generally will...
Well, for me, I did it like this.
Well, you can't do that.
At that moment, you've got to make it about the fighter.
If you're only thinking about what you want to do to a person, then you're not thinking about what they're going to do to you.
You're going to get surprised.
You have to flow.
And the conversation is like a flow.
You have to be able to listen and you gotta be able to respond and if you're not listening, you're just talking at that person, the people at home are going, this is awkward and they don't like it.
He types it all up and the writing is so small that my normal eye can't read it.
He's got glasses on.
But he'll read it one time and then he'll recite the whole thing.
He's got a photographic memory.
Without a doubt, he's got a photographic memory.
I tell you not, he'll read it all...
And then when we do rehearsals for the shows, he does this walk down where he walks and introduces all of Bellator and like, hey, fans, everything, live.
Like on TV, live.
And he's not carrying his iPad or his phone or notes or anything.
He just recites it.
Word for word, verbatim, like he did in rehearsals every single time.
But everything I've ever heard, DC talks so highly of him.
He's like, dude, he's fucking one of the greatest guys.
Super nice guy.
And so...
Yeah, in the beginning, I was like, eh, you know, eh, you know.
But then as he started calling more fights, and as he started...
And I think when I started seeing some of the front camera angles that the UFC does for your guys' reaction, that's when I actually started really liking him.
He's just...
He loves it.
He loves it.
And those are things that you want to see from your guys.
Those are things that you want to see from people.
They love the sport and they're in it balls deep.
They want to know the sport.
I'm working with a guy right now over in the UK because I handle all the UK series for Bellator.
So I call the fights cage side there.
And so I work with this guy named Dave Farrar.
And he...
I kid you not, from the first day, we worked together, we meshed, and he was great.
And he was like, hey man, I don't know any of the submissions, I don't know this and all that.
I said, let me focus on that, you worry about selling, you know, boom, this shit happened, you know?
And so, after the very, we did the very first fight, and he tried to, he said something about a guillotine or something, and I was like, you, I said, don't, after the fight, I said, don't say that.
I said, he was on his back, it's a rear naked.
So it was just one of those situations.
But then after that, he never...
But he also went to a couple of jiu-jitsu gyms and started asking.
Didn't take class, but just started asking about what submission that was at.
So he could start kind of doing...
And he did his research.
Came back and had known what the guys were doing, how they had won fights, what it was.
So he's just...
Ever since we've done a show, he's progressively gotten better and better and better.
As an analyst, I had to realize that it's not about you anymore.
You're not that guy in the cage.
It's about the guys that are in that cage.
You've got to make them bigger than light.
You've got to make them feel, not just feel, but I've got to sell them to the world that this guy is the best guy.
And so when I have these conversations with you and when I'm on my podcast talking about guys like Patricio and Lima and MVP and Gegard Mousasi, those guys being as good as UFC and as good as 1FC guys, I say it because I mean it.
And I'm not going to try to push somebody on somebody that I don't believe that in.
I just truly think that there's guys all around the promotions, every promotion, that are the best, that are the best that we just haven't found.
There's probably some guy up in the fucking mountains in Dagestan who's the world-class best guy in the world, but he just can't find his way to a paved road.
You know what I mean?
So he's probably the best, but he just doesn't know how to get there.
It's no different than when we watch, have you ever watched American Idol?
Hey, how come you're not a star yet?
Because I don't know how the business works.
I don't know how to get in front of people that can make me a star.
That goes with all the fighters, too.
How do I get in the UFC? I don't know.
That's the thing.
You've got to find a way in.
And if they don't know how to get in, then they're stuck living in the woods somewhere and trying to...
And if they don't see that clear path, they might not have the same level of commitment, so they might slack off or find something else to do.
Very true.
We started about this because Brendan was saying that if you're not in the UFC, you're not shit.
I think that's a crazy perspective because when I look at, like we're talking about Lima, there are guys out there, I look at Lima and I go, he might be able to beat everybody.
I really believe that.
That guy's fucking terrifying.
The way he knocked out Michael Venom Page, I'm like, look, he might be able to beat everybody.
Let's not forget, when Roy left, he was still one of the top guys in the UFC. And just because, and look, I'm not trying to dig or dunk, but what Dana does very well is he develops the narrative and then the media runs with that narrative very well.
So before they even put pen to paper, Dana's already wrote the story for them because he's already gave them the narrative.
You and I were talking about it earlier with Connor.
Isn't it weird, though, that this is the only sport...
MMA is the only sport where you have these names of these organizations and they're more like boxing.
Nobody gives a fuck if it's a WBC title or the WBO title.
They don't care.
They care.
Is it Deontay Wilder?
Is he fighting?
I want to see him fight Tyson Fury.
I don't give a fuck if it's for the bubblegum title.
It doesn't mean anything to me.
But for MMA, for some reason, because the promotions become like the NFL or the NBA, it becomes the big thing.
We know there's world-class fighters everywhere.
It's not like basketball or football where the best guys are definitely playing in the NFL. There's so many different organizations, and I almost feel like fighters are hampered by names of these promotions.
I almost think we'd all be better off if it was just MMA. To call it the UFC, The problem with that is it's great because everybody knows there's a very high quality to the UFC events.
The production value is amazing.
There's so much attached to it and so much history.
But at the end of the day, it's about MMA fights.
That's what it's about.
And whether it's in Bellator or 1FC, it's about how good are these matchups, how good are the fighters, what am I going to see?
I believe it all started when credentials were taken away from top MMA media websites and saying, hey, we don't like what you say.
You're not going to get a credential to get in.
So then they replaced, they brought in...
The other media websites, or whatever it was, USA Today, or whatever it was, other media sites that came in and just said it's all about UFC. It wasn't a sport anymore.
It was a UFC brand, and we had the best fighters.
And once you took away SureDog's credentials, all the other people that were doing...
Companies at that time, they took those credentials away.
Now whoever came in was like, well shit, if they're going to do it to those big time MMA websites, they would do the same shit to me if I don't toe the line.
And that all of a sudden became like, fighters now, when you see them, it's all about UFC. It's not about anything that they're doing.
You as a fighter, I think, look, even though it's an individual sport, and sure, you guys should be pumping your organization, I get it.
But you should also be pumping you because after you're done, the UFC will be fine.
You need to worry about building your brand, whatever it is you do to make you big.
And I'm all for the organization.
The organization does a lot for fighters.
I'm not here to piss on any company or any organization.
They need to make sure, though, that they're doing what they can to make as much money as they possibly can.
To go back to the Strikeforce thing, I was making almost double what the guys were making in the top five in the UFC at the time.
Now, there was a lot of talk about backroom bonuses and this and that, but I was privy to a couple of those back-year bonuses when we got bought out, and I went over there.
They were not what I was making on the other side of the rope.
So just to give you an example, when I came over, they were like, oh wow, you're making that.
They were like, whoa, what do we got to do?
We only have one fight left.
And I was like, well, you got to match or at least beat it.
You know, like what I'm making now.
And the thought process was like, where the fuck am I going to go though, Josh?
You're kind of fucking stepping on your own dick here.
I couldn't really negotiate at the time, and I was just like, shit, all right, well, let's play this out.
So I took the least amount of fights I could possibly take, wondering if Bellator was going to be around long, and if Scott was going to stick with UFC, or if he was going to try to go do his own promotion again.
You know, a lot of my relationships come from people that have been around.
Coker, to me, is, I think...
One of the best guys, if not the best guy I've ever done business with.
I've learned a lot from watching him on how he approaches not just fighters, but the promotion itself.
The one thing I admire the most about him is that you don't need to shit on other people like the UFC or one to say that my organization is the best.
He takes that martial arts attitude and approach to a lot of things.
I've never heard him say bad things about Dana White.
Never in a private conversation.
I play golf with him a lot.
I have lunch with him a lot.
I've never once heard him say anything bad about Dana White or anybody else in the UFC. That's not his approach.
His approach is, I'm going to have fights.
I'm going to try to make my guys that are fighters as much money as I can.
And my organization is going to do something that we're going to do and let them do what they're going to do.
Look, I'm obsessed with Patricio too, but I feel like right now 145 in the UFC is so fucking talent stacked.
I'm comfortable with some of these matchups that I want to see.
I really am interested in seeing a rematch between Volkanovski and Max Holloway.
I think Max Holloway with just a few adjustments, checking those leg kicks and maybe a little bit more movement, he, you know, I think he can win that fight.
But I think Volkanovski with a few adjustments might be able to put on an even better performance and now that he's beaten the goat featherweight, I mean, who knows?
I mean, a lot of guys, you don't really see what they're capable of until they win the title and then you see the confidence take over.
I mean, I think cross-promotion with all the champions would be fantastic.
Because even though he's not getting rich, but he's also making sure that young and up-and-coming fighters have a way to get their name out there and still fight at a high level.
But that's like, so when Scott came in, he changed the logo to make it simple, like basically what Dana and Lorenzo and those guys did, basically made it simple like that.
Cyborg doesn't throw the straightest punches in the world.
You know, she throws a lot of hooks.
So if Julia can press her to the fence, get inside the clinch, make her that dirty, getting that dirty boxing, get rid of those loopy punches and be inside that pocket right there, then I think she's got a good chance.
I look at it, though, too, that Cyborg had been undefeated for so long.
Hadn't lost in so long.
That she's just like, I'm just going to walk through this chick.
And it just cost her.
I think her confidence was that none of these girls can hurt me.
I can beat her.
And when she got hit, I'm going to hit you back.
She was thinking she was going to impose her will like she did against everyone else.
And she's going to try to do the same thing to Julia Budd.
It's a matter of how Julia Bud responds.
And we're going to know, I think, in that first round whether Julia is going to rise to the occasion or if she's going to step back and let Cyborg dictate the pace like a lot of other girls have.
I think with Amanda, when she pushed Amanda back, Amanda hit her and Cyborg got rocked and Amanda pressed forward and she thought she was going to hit her back and it became this exchange.
It was a very sloppy fight, I think, from both sides.
But Amanda has big dogs and was able to land the clean, good punches.
You know, when I knew that Amanda Nunes was a fucking dangerous, dangerous fighter, it was, first of all, the first round went, well, you know, there's a lot of fights where you saw it.
You know, you started to see it with Kat Zingano.
The first round, she almost had Kat Zingano out, but then she faded, and then she got put away later in the fight, which just shows how tough Kat Zingano is.
And then when the Raquel Pennington fights an underlooked fight, because Raquel Pennington is as fucking tough as they come, that lady impresses the shit out of me.
And the fact that she was able to stop her and beat her down before she stopped her.
You realize she was on another level at that point in time.
But still, in the Cyborg fight, I had questions.
I was like, look what she did to Holly Holm.
Cyborg just bullied Holly Holm.
She was just on top of her, beating her down, and Holly is a phenomenal striker.
And I was like, man, but the difference is Amanda is her hands.
Holly has good power in her hands, excellent timing, good counters, but Amanda has legit one-shot knockout power.
I just would have liked to have seen them do a second fight, because I think that Cyborg would have fought a smarter fight, and it would have been a different outcome.
Yeah, she would have made the adjustments, not just made the adjustments, but we saw with Jermaine Deronomy when Jermaine fought her, that Amanda, as the fight goes on, she's not the same fighter.
They put out a video, Cyborg's boyfriend put out a video where she put words in Dana White's mouth, and they were fake.
They mistranslated it on purpose, willfully, and then she had to apologize for it, and then the UFC was like, get the fuck out of here, you can't do that.
The UFC doesn't have any vested interest in blowing up Bellator and making them bigger.
And Bellator would get bigger along the way.
But I think Julia Bott hangs with any 145-pounder in the UFC, and I would like to see her fight in the UFC. I would like to see cross-promotion with her as well.
I just feel like it's just one of those things where it's...
It hampers the fans, because the athletes, they're just not going to face each other.
We already saw a cross-promotion when UFC was basically asking, or I don't want to say begging, but they were trying to force the issue with Chuck Liddell fighting in Vanderlei.
When he fought Minotauro, I remember Eddie Bravo and I were watching it, and they showed Minotauro ready, and they turned to Bob Stout and be like, Jesus!
His head was here, and then his neck started right where his head crests.
Like, his neck went all the way to the edge of his shoulders.
Like, that is the biggest human being I've ever seen in my life.
And he swung for an armbar on me like in a minute.
I'm fucking almost got it.
I was like belly down trying to escape.
But had that fight been in any other organization, I probably would have lost.
Because I could hear Crazy Bob and Dave Camarillo yelling to me, Hey, push the feet off the face!
Because...
My arm was fully extended, he was belly down, I was belly down, and I'm like, I could hear my elbows going and I could just feel, you know when you feel the muscle kind of stretching and tearing a little bit?
And then I just started pushing and I could hear them crystal clear.
Get the feet off your face!
Get the feet off your face!
Dave Camarillo was like, in such like, can't believe this happened.
He almost started walking back to the fucking, back to the locker room thinking that I was going to tap because I was trying to reach for the feet.
And he's yelling, put the feet, put the, get the feet off your face.
So I was able to push and wiggle it out.
And when I wiggled it out, I swung around for the knee bar in the perfect position and was able to get the knee bar and the fight ended like that.
It's like, I don't know, minute 20, minute 30, something like that.
So, but it was one of those, you know, one of those things that they do in Japan where...
I wonder if you get used to that, and then if you go to fight in the UFC, it must be overwhelming for Japanese guys that are used to fighting over there with that total quiet, and they come to Vegas, and it's like, just bleed, guys, with the fucking...
It's such a crazy sport when you just think about the evolution of it.
I mean, you started your career, I mean, you really are a pioneer, but you started your career, like, you're like a second wave guy.
You're like, there was the first wave where no one knew what the fuck was going on, and then there was a second wave where guys were like complete martial artists that had a specialty background, yours being initially wrestling.
I don't know if you know, but after he lost to Frank, he went up and trained with Frank so Frank could teach him how to get in shape and be as in good a shape as Frank was for their fight.
So moving forward, Tito...
Frank was always thinking about himself at that time.
I don't know if much has changed.
But he basically just said, like, hey...
I want to make sure you're not beat for a long time because it continues to make me look good.
So he made sure that Tito understood how conditioning worked and he just trained him in his regimen.
The problem is I think the UFC feels like it would benefit Bellator, but it wouldn't benefit the UFC. Because the UFC can make many fights for Wonderboy.
Now, if Conor was to go and fight somebody else and have a dominant performance against someone like a Justin Gaethje and get him out of there or against Usman, then you make that fight and it'll do more numbers.
Yeah, and it's not enough to say that he could stop Khabib's wrestling.
That's the only concern.
People are going to talk about this.
But what I was trying to get at was the conversation with pay-per-views.
You do a year-end fight, or a once-a-year fight, or let's just say once a year.
It's easy to...
And you take the fights that fans want to see, or you have a board member of groups from each promotion that say, look, let's put this fight and this fight together, not our champions.
And I'll bet you that that one card does double or triple what the best pay-per-view ever has done.
I think the buzz and I also think the marketing dollars behind each promotion to help push it, they'll make it bigger than Conor and Khabib than anything.
Give them 161. So if you match guys, if you match guys, like you say, Islam versus Chandler, if you match guys like, you know, these other, you match some of the Gegard, because there was a lot of talk, because Gegard was winning when he left the UFC, came over to Bellator.
So you take guys like Gegard, you match them against, you know, somebody over in the UFC, and you're taking these top guys, MVP and Steven Thompson.
I think a stacked card like that Given the results from when we're talking about Japan, when they do their year-end show, is the number two in all of Japan for their TV viewerships.
It's just some astronomical amount of numbers.
I would imagine it'd be bigger than what Conor and Khabib did.
Speaking of dark horses, you got Calvin Cater at 145. He's the fucking dark horse at 145. When he was putting on Zabit in that third round, I was like, holy shit!
If this is a fourth and fifth round, he might stop him.
So he's got two flying knee knockouts in Bellator, and all the buzz around Henry Hoof's place is that some of the 55-pounders don't want to spar with him and train with him because he's fucking good.
He's fast, he's long, he's lanky, and he's extremely good.
Also, two people, the guy that's fighting Patricio, Pedro Cavallo, who trains at SBG with the Cardinals, he's someone who's fucking really good as well.
And I just look at these guys, and Adam Weischel, or Daniel Weischel, he's another guy that's like, he's such a technician, just doesn't fight the part, because people want to see high-flying, flying knee knockouts like Adam Borch does, but...
I said, not only do you, you're faster, you're a better wrestler than all these guys, and look, I got a lot of respect for Stipe and him and Stipe are friends, but I think wrestling-wise and fight-wise, he has a good chance to beat Stipe.
Only because of his ability with his wrestling, his cardio, and his pace.
The speed and everything, I think he could get in on him.
Yeah, I feel that way in 185. If you look at even boxing, 185 is one of the most gutted weight classes there are.
Occasionally you get the 205 guys.
I mean, like I said, Jon Jones is an anomaly.
You get those type of guys that come in.
But I also think that now that the money's gotten better, you're going to start seeing athletes that would have went to football and baseball and basketball, they're going to stop doing that and saying, hey...
These guys are making this much money.
Let me try and go over there.
Now when they're seeing million-dollar paydays in organizations like the PFL, you're like, fuck, I can make a million dollars?
Like, shit.
And I think you're going to start seeing some of those athletes that may be a benchwarmer in the NFL or may be a benchwarmer in baseball or having to go through the D-League process.
And I was really impressed with him in that fight because Volkov used to be Bellator champion, top of the food chain, heavyweight, big, long, tall guy, difficult to fuck with.
You know, it's like he knocked out Fabrizio Verdum, former heavyweight champion.
So, like, Volkov is very skillful and awkward as hell, man.
Well, I was impressed with his durability against Alistair and his patience and the fact that he landed that haymaker right hook with, like, what, 15 seconds to go or something?
I was wrestling at AKA, and I doubled in this guy, and he hit the ground first, and when his head bounced up and hit me in the mouth, I wasn't wearing a mouthpiece.
So my tooth came all the way through the front of my lip.
Yeah, and so he just hasn't been the same, but he's evolving, I think, with what the smaller guys are doing to exploit the heavier guys that just don't move as much.
I feel like that calf kick has changed the game.
The very first time I ever saw that thing being used was Masvidal.
Which is funny because when you take MMA and people need to remember what it stands for, and people for the longest time are like, oh, let's just wrestle and let's do Muay Thai.
It was like, okay, we'll do a little bit of boxing and some wrestling.
They never went outside that box.
And then guys like Stephen Thompson and Machida came in.
Now you see MVP. But when you see these guys, they're bringing in a different dynamic that works for them.
Now granted, they've been doing it their whole life.
So you're not going to be able to adapt everything that they do.
But you can steal a couple little things from them.
I don't know if you recall, but I was like the first guy that did that little...
I used to use my heel to your thigh in the clinch against the fence.
I did it to Eves Edwards.
And Eves is like, you're such an asshole.
He's like, I couldn't walk for a week.
You know, because I was just healing him.
Boom, boom, boom.
And that fight was only in the first round.
You know, and so you have things like that.
And then BJ Penn said with Matt Serra, Matt Serra kept punching him right in the hip bone.
He's like, and I kid you not, and BJ's like, for almost two weeks I couldn't walk.
He said I had to like limp because he had fucked up my hip.
Look, I'm John Fitch, one of my best friends, okay?
But to watch how he fought Rory McDonald, like, for the fans' sake, it's not a fun fight to watch.
Like, you grab the leg, and the guy, like, pushes out and limp legs out, and then you chase him on your hands and knees, and you're fishing for the legs.
It's just not a fun fight.
And also, too, it makes us look like we don't know what the fuck we're doing.
Yep, you're going to see them start sprawling, knee in the head, sprawling.
And then the other thing as well, look, if the wrestler is a good, obviously there are a lot of good wrestlers in the sport, but let's just say the knee misses and he's able to grab the leg.
Now he can get the takedown.
So there's benefits on both sides.
If the guy knees and it lands, the guy can get knocked out.
But if he knees and he misses and I grab a leg and I drive into you and take you down, now I'm on top fucking you up.
So there's different ways of looking at it.
Like when you sprawl, you want to get your hips back, get your legs back.
So when that happens, you've taken yourself out of the equation of really engaging in action.
Once you try to knee me in the head, now you're engaging back into the action where I can grab you and take you down.
What they look like, honestly, when I see pitch, when they're going to all look like, if you pull up a picture of hockey players before they wear masks, that's what they're going to look like.
Well, if you have a family, you have to think about what's after.
And you've got to find ways to...
And you also got to have someone that's there with you and is willing to be with you through it all, not just through you when you were making all the money.
That's another thing.
I think a lot of fighters attach themselves to the wrong spouse.
Oh, yeah.
Or they want to live that lifestyle at the time, whether it's beach parties or pool parties in Vegas or whatever it is.
But when that's done or when you're not the selfie king anymore with all the fans at the pool parties, What happens when you're actually calling to try and make reservations to get a table versus them calling you and saying, hey, we have a table here for you at the pool.
Things change, man, and you have to remember that.
And so when that changes, what are you going to do after that?
And it's not going to always be glamorous.
I think you've just got to come to reality that there's a ton of life after fighting.
It's almost like the organization should maybe have some sort of seminars for fighters to try to give them some sort of advice or give them some framework to think about how to pursue your life after fighting.
Yeah, I've talked to Chael about this a couple times.
I said, man, with Brendan, you know, with Chael, you guys, those two guys, I feel like people can say what they want about Brendan and Chael, but what they've done is they've done things to benefit themselves in a very positive light.
And I love being around people like that because even...
In just a casual conversation, you can learn a lot from them.
And I have had this...
Even with Big John, when he left being a ref to become an analyst, and it's just like all the...
Excuse me.
All the stories that I've heard from him while doing our show, it's just...
It's so much knowledge that he has from the sport, period.
From the way it was started, the way he got brought into it, to the fights that he's called and how it all went down.
And I know there's probably two sides to every story, but it's like at least you get to hear certain parts of what happened throughout the sport.
And I love hearing, I love absorbing all that.
And it's great to be surrounded by people like that.
You've got to remember, you're trying to make it about them, not about you.
That's one.
Two is you're trying to make them the most dynamic, the best fighter that's ever stopped in the cage, even though they're on the prelims of the prelims.
It doesn't matter.
That guy is the future champion.
So you have to find ways To highlight all the things that they do well and make them out to be like they are the best.
And they potentially could be the best, just not found yet.
I started doing one with John, and then Sammy and I kind of, Sammy was basically doing some stuff with his wife and family and stuff, so we just kind of decided to part ways, and I started working, started filming more with John.
Yeah, so we just FaceTime him in, and then my producer, we call him Podcast Dave, so he does...
He basically just like, he screenshots it and just saves it and then John also does it on his side and he sends him the video and then we record the audio and then John records the audio so he syncs up the audio to both so it matches.
I was telling him before you walked in, I said, hey, don't be surprised if I turn to you just because I want to be one of those other, like some of the other guests that just turn and go, hey, Jamie, pull this up.
I know they want to do him versus Khabib versus Conor, but Masvidal versus Conor would be fucking giant.
When they had all the fighters and they put a camera on them at the event, when they put that camera on Masvidal, the pop from the audience was fucking bonkers.
The real question, if he wants to make it to 55 again, some guys, especially when they get into their 30s, they just do better when they're not cutting as much weight.
And Conor's a thick dude.
He's probably walking around $1.85 or something like that.
And for him to get down to 70 is not that hard.
For him to get down to 55 is a long, laborious process.
Yeah, Dana said that he only walks around 170. Really?
Yeah, he said by the time he fights tonight, I was watching some of the press or stuff, he's like, he'd probably be 167. I'm 195 and I stand next to Connor.
It kind of, I think, is hindering, and you brought me up on this before, because I had heard through a lot of people in the UFC that they were talking and negotiating, trying to think about ways to bring in 165. Yes.
And you have too many tweeners, and why do we have a 15-pound gap for the 55 with all the talent that is there?
The guy that he fought in Japan, it was a last minute replacement because Benson Henderson got hurt.
So when Ben got taken off the card against Chandler, Japan was like, look, we need somebody else to step up.
We need another talented guy on there because now you're supplementing him with somebody else.
Benson, we need another big name.
So they brought in MVP and fought one of the Japanese guys.
And he stepped up on short notice to take that fight.
I tip my hat to him.
And he still made him look bad, finished him out.
The couple fights before that, look, these guys are asking for it, but his fight in Italy, that guy was a last minute replacement also, and that guy was 13-1.
Yeah, I think when guys feel like they've hit the top at whatever they're doing and there's nowhere else to go, let's go wherever we can to make as much money as we can.
He's always had a relationship with Scott Coker.
That's the other thing.
A lot of what you see from the guys, like Gegard came back to Coker, Cyborg's coming back to Coker, I went back.
There's a lot of guys that had fought in Strikeforce when they were relatively new.
There was a lot of talk that if Kane never left, that he was going to potentially go back to Coker as well.
Well, when Kane says his back's all fucked up, and I'm sure it is, but then you see him do the lucha libre, jumps up and scissors this guy's head and does fucking flips.
And so when you have to shoot on someone, I don't know how tall he is, a 5'7", 5'8".
But it's a lot harder to get low on someone like that and get the takedown on him.
So when I was telling Brent, I'm like, He's like, if he stands with him, he's going to get knocked out.
Well, who did the dropping in that fight?
You know, it was Khabib.
Khabib did the dropping because when you make someone fear your takedown that much, your natural reaction is to drop your hands real quick to try to get the underhooks.