May 4, 2011 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:58:35
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Mr. Sandhagen, we're up. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Thanks for being here, man. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So what are you telling me, Jamie? | ||
| There's a UFO yesterday? | ||
| Yeah, NFL popular quarterback for the Cleveland Browns, former number one pick and Heisman winner. | ||
| I think he lives in Austin in the offseason, and he saw a potential UFO last night, he says. | ||
| He says, Could have been a drone. | ||
| Could have been some kids. | ||
| He's a football player? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are we going to believe him because he's famous? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the only reason. | ||
| He just got a lot of attention as well. | ||
| Well, he's famous, so you listen to his Twitter, I guess. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| Have you ever seen anything crazy? | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| I... I don't think crazy. | ||
| When I'm up in the mountains sometimes camping or whatever, I feel like some shooting stars and some stars fall, which actually now that I'm saying it might be a little bit crazy. | ||
| So maybe I have seen some shit. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| Everybody wants to think they did, right? | ||
| I want to think I've seen some crazy, but I definitely haven't. | ||
| I thought I did when I was a kid, but now I think I was probably lying. | ||
| When I think about it, when I was a kid I was probably full of shit. | ||
| I probably wanted it, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| I probably saw a military jet, and I thought, and I wanted it to be something cool. | ||
| I remember the first time I ever saw a stealth bomber. | ||
| We were filming Fear Factor, and it was over in Palmdale, which is near Edwards Air Force Base. | ||
| If I didn't know what that was, I would 100% think that was from another planet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, when you see the thing, black wing flying overhead, it's pretty badass. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I don't think I would, you know... | ||
| I think that my brain would just immediately be like, ah, something can explain that. | ||
| Well, that's the problem with anything like that. | ||
| The idea that you're looking at something from another planet is so... | ||
| It's so outside of what you see every day. | ||
| You don't know where to put it. | ||
| It's getting less outside though, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's getting less outside, which is weird. | ||
| It seems like it is. | ||
| What's up with the... | ||
| Because I remember you saying something about it on the podcast. | ||
| What's up with that bill that passed that said that they have to release whatever information they have to release about... | ||
| It's the COVID relief bill. | ||
| And inside the COVID relief bill, they gave... | ||
| I think it was the CIA. They gave the Central Intelligence Agency 180 days or something like that. | ||
| To release all the information that they have about UFOs. | ||
| Where are we at on that? | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| It's a good question. | ||
| What day are we on? | ||
| They don't have to release shit. | ||
| They can say that and go, oh, this is what we got. | ||
| We got a blurry picture. | ||
| Get the fuck out of my office. | ||
| Yeah, we're not going to know anything. | ||
| Yeah, the idea that they're going to tell these senators and all these elected people what they know, they're not telling them shit. | ||
| Unless the aliens told them that they have 180 days to tell everyone. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Right now you're talking. | ||
| If Trump didn't tell everybody, we're not going to know. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think... | |
| I remember when Chris Rock was talking about Obama, and he was talking about Obama. | ||
| People were disappointed in Obama's first administration. | ||
| And he said, you've got to wait until the second term, and that's when you do some really gangster shit. | ||
| And Obama didn't do any gangster shit in the second term. | ||
| But... | ||
| If Trump got elected again in 2024, because you can only do it twice. | ||
| If he got elected again in 2024, maybe he would tell us. | ||
| Recount the votes. | ||
| Maybe get on TV and that's the first shit he talks about right away. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here's what the article is. | |
| Included as a committee comment on the Intelligence Authorization Act, the committee directs the Director of the National Intelligence in consultation with the Secretary of Defense to Why can't they just say UFOs? | ||
| Unidentified aerial phenomenon. | ||
| What's the difference? | ||
| Unidentified flying object? | ||
| They got tired of using that? | ||
| So they changed it to UAP? Why they gotta fuck with us? | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| UAP. Words change all the time. | ||
| They have to. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| Well, listen, man, let's get to you. | ||
| You've been on a fucking tear lately, son. | ||
| You really have. | ||
| It's super impressive. | ||
| The Marlon Marais KO, the Frankie Edgar KO. You have looked fucking sensational. | ||
| I figured some shit out. | ||
| Yeah, what did you figure out? | ||
| Well, it's a lot, I think, but... | ||
| It might be a bit of a long-winded answer. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| I love a long-winded answer. | ||
| There's a lot of steps that I think had to take place, but I think the first thing is I had to realize that you can't just walk into a cage and be flat as fuck and expect to compete with the best guys in the world. | ||
| So how were you flat? | ||
| Like you weren't warmed up? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Well, that's what, you know, I don't know. | ||
| Maybe it was a warm up a little bit. | ||
| Maybe that had something to do with it. | ||
| But I think that there's just a level of intensity that you have to be in. | ||
| If me and someone else are going to stand in a locked cage and we have to, you know, beat each other up really badly. | ||
| You have to be at a certain level of intensity for that. | ||
| And how were you previously approaching it? | ||
| So previously, I didn't have... | ||
| Okay, so let's go back to maybe before the Sterling fight, because after the Sterling fight is when I learned a lot of stuff. | ||
| So... | ||
| Before, I didn't need to do a lot in order to get at that level of intensity. | ||
| I don't really know why that is, but it didn't take a lot in me in order for me to get to that performance level. | ||
| Again, Sterling, for whatever reason, and I don't want to make up any excuses or anything. | ||
| I almost said Alistair because we were just talking about him. | ||
| Aljamain was better than me on the night, and that's why I lost. | ||
| But for whatever reason, man, in the back, I was just really flat. | ||
| Do you think you got too comfortable? | ||
| I think I was too comfortable. | ||
| I think I underestimated them. | ||
| I think that it was during the COVID times and I wasn't using as many training partners. | ||
| Sparring sessions weren't nearly what they used to be in a team gathering. | ||
| It was like I had two or three training partners and that's who I went in and sparred with at a separate time. | ||
| Maybe that had something to do with it too. | ||
| Purposeful? | ||
| Or is that all that was available because people weren't training as much because of COVID? How did you... | ||
| Yeah, so that was like March or April. | ||
| So that was like when everything was really hot with COVID. So yeah, it was just because all the gyms were shut down. | ||
| Everyone was being really safe because everyone was kind of like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, however they were feeling about COVID. And so I think maybe that had something to do with it, too. | ||
| But regardless, you know, he earned that win. | ||
| And when I went into that fight, it wasn't a matter of... | ||
| Because you hear guys say all the time, or at least I try to listen to as many interviews as I can and just kind of watch the demeanors of people when they walk into the cage. | ||
| And you hear guys say... | ||
| You just see that people are competing at different intensity levels all the time. | ||
| Some people go in and they're like this, you know, and they're ready to go and then other people walk in like they just woke up from a nap. | ||
| And so I try to learn by just watching and on that night I felt really relaxed and I felt really comfortable and really present. | ||
| And I realize that that's not where I need to be in order for me to be able to compete at my highest level. | ||
| Did it have anything to do with the fact there was no crowd? | ||
| Was that unusual for you to compete in front of no crowd? | ||
| Did it feel different? | ||
| I would say there was a lot of really unusual things happening. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| To be completely honest with you and candid, I think I just underestimated Aljamain a lot. | ||
| I didn't really take too much into consideration that he has I don't know how many UFC fights. | ||
| The guy has been under the UFC lights a lot of time and that makes a big difference. | ||
| And that was a huge mistake on my part. | ||
| And I think that it led to the mentality that I went into that fight with. | ||
| And I remember when I was in the cage feeling really relaxed, I remember when Sterling walked in the cage. | ||
| And his intensity was at the highest that you could probably imagine. | ||
| Because you feel the energy of people. | ||
| When you're in a space that you're ready to fight someone, I think that you read body language better. | ||
| I think that you read people's energy a little bit better. | ||
| When I was reading his energy, I was like, wow, that is way more intense than where I am right now. | ||
| Yeah, he's about to fight in just a couple days, Piotr Jan, for the Bantamweight title. | ||
| What are your thoughts on that? | ||
| Yeah, I've obviously thought about it a lot because I've been asked about it a lot. | ||
| I keep going back and forth, but I've been watching the Embeddeds. | ||
| I've been watching both of their trainings and stuff, their countdowns. | ||
| And I don't know why, but after watching those, I really have a lot of confidence that Sterling's going to win. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I do. | ||
| Maybe because I'm biased as shit because Sterling beat me. | ||
| Not only that, but also because Jan is doing a lot of calling out of TJ, and I think that that's kind of lame, you know? | ||
| Do you think he's doing that just because TJ's a big name? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, TJ's the biggest name in the division, you know, for now. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| It's kind of an interesting spot in the sport, too, right now. | ||
| We're kind of playing, you know, and this is just the way that things are. | ||
| I'm not trying to complain about it, but it seems like it's a lot of, you know, the fame game a little bit. | ||
| Like, if you fight someone really popular and you beat that person, that ranks higher than beating someone who's ranked higher or someone who's, you know... | ||
| And that's the game that we're in, and that's completely fine, and I know that I'm not one of those famous people. | ||
| You're on your way, son. | ||
| I'm on my way. | ||
| I need to keep whooping people's asses. | ||
| And I've been knowing that for a long time, where I'm like, man, like... | ||
| Eventually this shit will start getting going. | ||
| I know how good I am. | ||
| I've been training for a really long time. | ||
| I've been in the room with some really good guys. | ||
| I'm like, okay, this shit just has to get going. | ||
| I'll just trust the process, whatever. | ||
| The last two have definitely really clicked. | ||
| But going back to the point of... | ||
| Where I was in that fight, I actually learned a lot from Sterling. | ||
| I learned that when someone walks into the cage and they have that level of intensity, it can be... | ||
| Intimidating, you know, if you're not at that point. | ||
| And I kind of, you know, afterwards I was asking one of my military buddies because how much realer can it get than like actually, you know, having to kill someone, you know? | ||
| And I remember asking my military buddy and I was like, man, how do you guys deal with that level of intensity? | ||
| And he was like, man... | ||
| When you're standing on the other side of that door and you're about to kick in that door, you need to understand that it's either you or it's them when you kick that door down. | ||
| And now when I walk into the cage, it's right when I walk in, right from the bell, it's like it's either me or it's that person when I kick down that door. | ||
| Do you think there is a level of intensity that's sustainable in a three-round fight versus a level of intensity that's sustainable in a five-round fight? | ||
| Or do you think it's just a matter of preparation? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Have you ever fought a five-rounder outside of the UFC? No, no. | ||
| My first five-rounder was scheduled for Marais. | ||
| So no, I've never had a five-round fight. | ||
| Was that your first wheel kick KO? Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That caught a lot of people off guard. | ||
| Yeah, that was maybe the first time I've ever thrown that kick, you know, in a fight at least. | ||
| Marlon's listening to this going, poha! | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| That was pretty wild. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The quarantine helped me with that one, though. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| That's all that I did in the quarantine is fucking hit the bob in my basement. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, I just practiced over and over again. | ||
| Bob's good for wheel kicks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's one of the best things for wheel Dude, Bob's good for a lot of shit. | ||
| Knees to the face. | ||
| Bob's good for everything. | ||
| I was thinking he just needs a leg kick shield type of thing on that base. | ||
| I think they have one. | ||
| Go to Century Martial Arts Bob is this... | ||
| They gave me one for my old gym. | ||
| I had one in my gym at home in my old house in California. | ||
| I don't have one out here, but I liked it. | ||
| It's good for combinations because it's so realistic. | ||
| It really feels like a... | ||
| And the head moves good. | ||
| You could really crack the head and you get a good... | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Bob, so is there a padded base for it? | ||
| What's that there? | ||
| I feel like I saw something like that. | ||
| No? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Okay, so that's Bob with a bunch of shit on him, so you could leg kick him. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| That's pretty dope. | ||
| So that's like an outfit that Bob wears. | ||
| Oh, see, you know what I was going to say, too? | ||
| You know what I was going to say, too, is they need to put some type of hand guard positioning things. | ||
| I hope that those things can move, because that would be cool, too, because that's one thing that's really important in fighting. | ||
| Is that Hackelman? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Haha, my man. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| That's fucking cool. | ||
| So you actually can practice that. | ||
| That's very cool. | ||
| I like that even better than the regular Bob. | ||
| Okay, so that's not an outfit he wears. | ||
| That's the whole Bob. | ||
| Oh, Jamie. | ||
| Order one of those. | ||
| Right away. | ||
| We gotta get one of them. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| So you were practicing wheel kicks and stuff like that on Bob. | ||
| Did you have a traditional martial arts background at all? | ||
| I did Taekwondo when I was really young. | ||
| Is that where you learned that? | ||
| No. | ||
| I had always wanted to be good at those, like spinning back kicks, spinning wheel kicks. | ||
| But I would just do some shit and just, you know, like I didn't know the technical way of doing that, you know? | ||
| So when I would be in a fight and I would throw it, it was just like bullshit, you know? | ||
| And now I can actually feel like I can do it. | ||
| But you know what helped me a lot is, well, one, my coach Christian Allen, who has obviously been helping me a lot with it too. | ||
| And then two, I've been going down to Ryan Hall's gym a decent amount at 50-50. | ||
| And do you know Tan Lee? | ||
| No. | ||
| Ton Lee, he's the 155 champ in one fighting championship. | ||
| Yeah, he just beat that Martin Wing guy. | ||
| So Ton Lee and Ryan are down there, and they do a lot of spinning back kicks, wheel kicks, and all of that. | ||
| They helped me a lot with that, too. | ||
| There's one guy in 1FC that has a nasty spinning back kick. | ||
| I don't know if that's him. | ||
| I don't think he throws a ton in his fights. | ||
| There's one guy who just keeps flattening people with spinning back kicks in the body. | ||
| It's like getting hit by a car if someone's got a good one. | ||
| I mean, I have a frame where I'm not going to knock anyone out bad with my upper body and stuff, but man, your legs are like big-ass parts of your body. | ||
| You don't need to throw them very hard in order for it to really, really score. | ||
| Yeah, this guy. | ||
| Let me see that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Show that one. | |
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Kevin Bellington. | ||
| Yeah, he's a 25er. | ||
| He just fought... | ||
| That dude's got a good one. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| He throws it very quick, too. | ||
| And he's always got his hips loaded up, like he's looking for it all the way. | ||
|
unidentified
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Boom! | |
| Look at that. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| It's just like, what kick is like that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, there's so few kicks that have that kind of power. | ||
| Yeah, and if you can't get your feet out of the way of that, and you just want to use your elbow, you're definitely way big time opening up your head for a wheel kick, too. | ||
| So do you have a guy that, you said Christian Allen? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's your striker? | ||
| Yeah, he's got a bunch of black belts. | ||
| I don't really know what they're all in. | ||
| Me and Christian have been together since the first day that I walked into high-altitude martial arts. | ||
| Do you consider your stand-up style, is it Muay Thai-based? | ||
| Is it a hybrid? | ||
| What do you think of it as? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So, I think it's probably a compilation of everything. | ||
| One, I think Christian has a very creative mind. | ||
| And it's not super, you know, like we don't hang on to any one type of traditional martial arts over the other or whatever. | ||
| We just, you know, try to take as much good as we can from each one. | ||
| But I know in my experience, I used to love watching old school K1 fights. | ||
| Those were like my all-time favorite fights to watch. | ||
| So, I think when it started, it was kind of a hybrid of me watching a lot of the WEC, specifically like Dominic Cruz. | ||
| I thought his style was dope, you know, like all of the footwork and stuff. | ||
| Watching that, watching Christian and having Christian teach me, and then watching like a lot of really solid K1 guys, like Andy Sauer was one of my favorite fighters. | ||
| I gotta go train with him a couple times in Holland. | ||
| Oh, that's awesome. | ||
| Oh, it was sick. | ||
| He's such a nice guy, too. | ||
| Yeah, seems like a really nice guy. | ||
| He did a lot of training with Aldo, right? | ||
| He went down to Brazil. | ||
| He was training with Jose quite a bit. | ||
| So, let's get back to this mindset thing. | ||
| What did you do to change how you ramp up, how you get into the octagon? | ||
| Like, did you just decide to be at 10 the moment you stepped through the door? | ||
| Is it a mental thing? | ||
| It's practice. | ||
| It's something that's controllable that I think, or at least in my experience of my past, it's something that's told to you that isn't controllable. | ||
| You either have it or you don't. | ||
| I don't believe that shit. | ||
| It's practice. | ||
| It's a lot of... | ||
| So I'll practice before sparring. | ||
| So every time I go into sparring now, before I leave the house, for about 20 minutes, I'll sit and visualize all of the techniques that I'm trying to work. | ||
| And I'll see it from a third person's point of view. | ||
| So that's how they say that you're supposed to learn techniques the best, is you visualize yourself doing them and not a first person view. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know, to be honest. | ||
| But you're supposed to use the first-person view when you're actually trying to generate the emotions that you'll be feeling before a fight, which makes sense. | ||
| But third-person view if you want to learn something or visualize being successful at it. | ||
| That's strange because I would think you would want to see it the way you're going to do it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| Do you have a mental coach that you work with? | ||
| Yeah, so I've used a sports psychologist, Joey Fritz, for about probably five or six years now, I would say. | ||
| How often do you meet with him? | ||
| Once every week in camp. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And a lot of it, I think in the beginning when you're working with a sports psych, it's just putting out a lot of fires. | ||
| Like, hey, this is stressing me out. | ||
| Hey, I'm really scared about this. | ||
| Hey, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I would say that that's kind of what it was for me in the beginning, which was super helpful because then I could start really enjoying it. | ||
| And then now, in the last year or so, we've been really hammering down on some like, hey, what's going to make me a better performer instead of what's going to bring me into the fight with a lot less fear and anxiety and stuff like that. | ||
| So yeah, I've been doing that for a while now. | ||
| How long are these sessions? | ||
| It depends on the week. | ||
| You know, sometimes there's more things to bring up than others. | ||
| And I'm pretty self-sustainable. | ||
| So whatever he gives me, you know, like I'm doing. | ||
| So it doesn't require like too much practice or too much checking in other than that. | ||
| So, you know 30 45 minutes sometimes. | ||
| So did you come to him and say hey when I had this Aljamain Sterling fight I went in I felt kind of flat. | ||
| He was kind of pumped up and I was like, oh Yeah. | ||
| And, yeah, so he's, everyone's different, right? | ||
| Like, I was watching, I think maybe it was on here, or an interview with Dustin Poirier, and he was saying that before he went and fought McGregor, he felt that way, where he was feeling really flat, and this and that, and I remember him saying that his striking coach, who had a bunch of kickboxing fights, was telling him, like, hey man, like, that's normal, like, As I was listening to that, I was like, that works for Dustin, and that's good, but that doesn't work for me. | ||
| I can't go in that flat and still do a good job. | ||
| That's a really important point, right? | ||
| It's like every fighter has to figure out what process works best for them, and it's going to be different for a wrestler versus a striker, a tall guy versus a short guy, a guy who's fast versus a guy who's got a lot of cardio. | ||
| It's really going to depend entirely on your style and who you are as a human. | ||
| Yeah, it changes a lot, and I think that that's why experience is a huge thing that people overlook a lot. | ||
| I overlooked it definitely before I fought Sterling. | ||
| Sterling's gone through a lot of those processes. | ||
| You can tell. | ||
| And now that I've gone through that process, I feel like I'm a completely different fighter. | ||
| Sterling looks so big in that fight. | ||
| I don't know how much weight he cuts, but my god, for a 135, that dude is huge. | ||
| I think that that's another reason, too, that he's going to do well against Jan. | ||
| Well, his wrestling is super solid and his jiu-jitsu is... | ||
| I mean, he comes from a Henzo Gracie lineage. | ||
| He's a Matt Serra black belt. | ||
| I was very impressed, unfortunately for you, in that fight with his jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, my God. | ||
| Yeah, he's good. | ||
| He's like real deal good too, you know, not like a, oh, I'm a good MMA grappler. | ||
| It's like, no, like that dude's like a really good grappler. | ||
| Yeah, you can tell. | ||
| Well, he's, you know, he's very respected in jujitsu, you know, in terms of like the guys who train with him, guys who know how good he is, guys, you know, high level black belts. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think Jan's at the level of grappling that Sterling's at, but also I don't know how big Jan is either. | ||
| He doesn't look like a huge 35er. | ||
| He's real strong. | ||
| Yeah, he looks real strong. | ||
| And he's a predator. | ||
| That guy is always moving forward and he puts a lot of pressure on you. | ||
| Aljamain has this crazy style, you know, if the fight turns into a striking contest where he's utilizing a lot of movement, a lot of movement. | ||
| That's something he and I talked about on the podcast, like he needs a lot of cardio to fight that way. | ||
| And what's interesting about Piotr is that he is really good at picking his moments and pacing himself and then slowly but surely accelerating the pressure. | ||
| You saw that in the Aldo fight. | ||
| I think he stopped Jose in the fourth round. | ||
| But that was what was happening. | ||
| You could see Aldo was starting to wilt. | ||
| You know, Aldo is a sprinter and it's hard for him for whatever reason to maintain endurance over the course of a long fight. | ||
| And that's been the case throughout his entire career. | ||
| I mean, you go to the Mark Hominick fight. | ||
| Or a Ricardo Lamas fight, I think it was, where at the end of the fifth round, Lamas was on top, beating him up. | ||
| And he won the decision because he was beating Lamas up for most of the fight. | ||
| Pretty sure it was Lamas. | ||
| I want to say it's hominic. | ||
| Maybe it was the case in both of those fights. | ||
| But the point is, he's had issues with his cardio in his career before because he's super jacked and everything he does is super fast. | ||
| A lot of exploding... | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of X factors in that too because Jan's style is super efficient as far as energy goes. | ||
| He's super comfortable just keeping a guard up and getting hit. | ||
| And that's not easy to be comfortable there, especially when you're wearing little gloves. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which he's very, very comfortable being there, which I think helps him. | ||
| With Sterling, he's been really outspoken about, I'm going to wrestle this guy for 25 minutes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which also is really interesting to me too because I have seen that in Sterling's fights too where he's gotten tired in three round fights. | ||
| And just to think that he's going to wrestle a guy for 25 minutes, wrestling is the hardest part. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| The other thing about, people forget, Jose Aldo's high-level black belt. | ||
| Jose Aldo beat Cabrinha in a straight-up jiu-jitsu tournament. | ||
| And Aldo couldn't do shit with Piotr when it came to the ground. | ||
| Piotr was on top. | ||
| Aldo never really got a good position for any length of time in a grappling situation with him. | ||
| The guy's fucking strong. | ||
| You saw that in the Uriah Faber fight. | ||
| He just bullied him around. | ||
| He's very physically strong. | ||
| And again, just really smart when he applies pressure. | ||
| And over a five-round fight, he's been into the deep waters of the fourth championship rounds. | ||
| I'm curious. | ||
| Very curious. | ||
| Curious. | ||
| But curious to see if he can stop that shot. | ||
| Because if Aljamain gets him, and gets him while he's fresh, and while they're both fairly dry, he could be in real trouble. | ||
| Because Aljamain knows how to close the show. | ||
| Yep, yep. | ||
| He does. | ||
| Great fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great fight. | |
| Yeah, it is a great fight. | ||
| Great fight. | ||
| Yeah, it's gonna be super entertaining. | ||
| That whole card is gonna be super entertaining. | ||
| It's so crazy to me how stacked the 135-pound division is and how shallow the 125-pound division is. | ||
| 10 pounds. | ||
| It's the only weight class in the UFC where the 10-pound difference is all... | ||
| I mean, you got Figueredo and Brandon Moreno. | ||
| You got some good fighters at 125. You got some good fighters. | ||
| But you don't have like... | ||
| A who's who, a murderer's row of contenders like you do at 35. At 35, you've got so many killers. | ||
| And Henry Cejudo's always threatening to come back again. | ||
| That's probably the big name, right, in the 135-pound division, if you want to make some money. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, yeah, if he's being serious, who knows what that guy's doing. | ||
| I will say though, I'll give him some credit, I think he's getting better at being cringy. | ||
| I think he's getting better at it, man. | ||
| When he first came out with that shit, I was like, man, this guy needs to stop. | ||
| I was like, this guy's not going to have anything that he can do after this. | ||
| Well, if you talk to him in person, he's so personable and likable and friendly and smart. | ||
| That you gotta know he's having fun. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| And then it's an act. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, listen man, the guy can fucking fight. | ||
| He can fight fucking too. | ||
| I watched the Dominic Cruz fight again yesterday in the gym and I was like, man, that was a fucking hell of a performance. | ||
| Hell of a performance. | ||
| Do you feel like, because, I mean, you get to watch these shows live, are you reading the guy's demeanors when they're walking out and when they're walking into the cage and are you really trying to read them and be like, are they ready, are they not ready? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| Not at a championship level. | ||
| Championship level, basically everybody's ready. | ||
| You do see some extra nerves with people. | ||
| I felt like there's a heightened amount of nerves for Gilbert Burns. | ||
| I felt like, you know, because it's just this big moment. | ||
| And, you know, obviously performed really good out of the gate, but seemed to slow down early in the first round and then was pretty tired in the second round. | ||
| His mouth was open. | ||
| And I think it might have been an adrenaline dump. | ||
| It might have had something to do with it. | ||
| And I think that's a big factor. | ||
| Like here he is, all of a sudden, this is the dream. | ||
| You know, it's actually happening. | ||
| You've been thinking about it for years and years and years and all those days of training. | ||
| Every time you're tired and you're doing rounds in the bag or you're hitting the mitts, you're like, one day I'm going to be the fucking champion and all this is going to be worth it. | ||
| And then that day's here. | ||
| And that's a big moment for people. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| But Usman has been there. | ||
| He's been in that moment many times and he looked cool as a cucumber. | ||
| He just looked composed. | ||
| And even when he got hurt, that was the big thing. | ||
| When Usman got hurt and rocked, total composure. | ||
| Even while hurt. | ||
| No sense of panic, nothing at all. | ||
| He's like, okay, okay, okay. | ||
| Usman's a hell of a competitor, man. | ||
| Dude, when I watch guys compete, he's up there, Cejudo's up there, where I'm just like, yep, these guys, they know how to turn it on. | ||
| They don't have any quit or loser in them. | ||
| There's none. | ||
| There's zero. | ||
| There's no that feeling of being in a fight and like... | ||
| Oh, he's getting a little ahead. | ||
| He's getting a little ahead. | ||
| It's always like, I got this shit. | ||
| I got this shit. | ||
| No self-doubt. | ||
| A great example that also is if you look at the Tyron Woodley fight. | ||
| This is his first fight for the title, right? | ||
| I mean, this is the big one. | ||
| He's fighting Tyron Woodley. | ||
| Tyron Woodley's super dominant. | ||
| And he looked like the champ. | ||
| He looked like the champ, like he was defending the title. | ||
| Just put a fucking show on. | ||
| Dominated, you know? | ||
| I mean, he had a rough goal at the top too though, right? | ||
| Like Usman was, I mean, from my knowledge, I don't know too well, but to my knowledge, he was like begging for that shot for a long time. | ||
| He was fighting the top guys, top guys over and over and over again. | ||
| And actually, you know, Usman's been training with us a little bit too. | ||
| And while I'm not super close with him, I'm super close to one of his main training partners, Carrington Banks. | ||
| And Carrington was telling me that he watched Usman go through the same thing that I feel like I was going through for a little bit too, where it's like, man, you just got to keep winning. | ||
| Trust the process. | ||
| How old are you now? | ||
| 28. Perfect. | ||
| It's the perfect time to be a top contender, right? | ||
| That's like you're in your prime, but you've got a lot of room. | ||
| You've got a lot of room to keep getting better and keep growing. | ||
| I think I have a lot of room to get better, you know, which is a really good feeling. | ||
| I really started feeling like that when I went out, like I said, to train with Ryan Hall. | ||
| Like that guy really changed a lot of things in my brain about how to look at combat sports and how to... | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh man. | ||
| How so? | ||
| Dude, if there's one... | ||
| I'll butcher everything because he's just such an intelligent guy. | ||
| Super smart guy. | ||
| Super smart guy, but I think almost above him being smart is he's just so thoughtful, man. | ||
| With his game, he's just so thoughtful in the amount of... | ||
| You know, just thinking and, hey, can they do this? | ||
| Can they do this? | ||
| Can they do this? | ||
| Okay, I have an answer for this, this, and this. | ||
| Like, the guy has an answer for almost everything. | ||
| And I think that the way that he views things and the advice that he gives to me is just like so fundamental and like... | ||
| It just makes so much sense. | ||
| So an example of that would be, I have terrible posture usually. | ||
| Like it's getting a little bit better, but like before it was like this, like hunched over, I had neck issues, shoulders issues, back issues and all of that. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Same thing, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you have good shoulders. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I always used to sit like this and I used to stand like this and then I realized I was like, you're fucking my back up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like you start getting pains back here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So I try to, as much, these chairs help a lot. | ||
| Yeah, these are nice chairs. | ||
| Yeah, these are dope. | ||
| They're really comfortable. | ||
| How did you fix it? | ||
| Just being aware of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| Being really aware of it, do it all the time. | ||
| That never worked for me. | ||
| No? | ||
| No, I had to, like, strengthen some shit, you know? | ||
| I think I was just too weak in a lot of areas, so I had to strengthen some stuff, but... | ||
| Ryan taught me, and it's super simple, but it makes a huge difference. | ||
| It's like, hey man, you can't be strong like this. | ||
| No one goes up to a squat rack and does this. | ||
| You squat like this. | ||
| And he's like, when you're grappling, you need to know when you need to be like this and when you need to be foldy and bendy and I'm longer and when to tangle people up and when not to tangle people up. | ||
| And You can't be strong like this. | ||
| So he was like, you need to fix that shit right away. | ||
| And that's just one of the examples. | ||
| I try not to talk too highly of him because I feel like I don't want to seem like I have a dude crush on the guy. | ||
| But you do a little? | ||
| Yeah, I wish I was him. | ||
| I wish I was him. | ||
| He's on the Lex Friedman podcast. | ||
| He did an episode and he was really good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like surprisingly intelligent. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, to be honest, I think he hides a lot of it, too. | ||
| You know, like I listened to that podcast and I was like, yeah, he's just being a little bit humble. | ||
| But I feel like this dude is just like, you know. | ||
| Well, you know, the really great jujitsu guys are all really smart. | ||
| You can be physical, you know, you can explode and be fast and be strong and hold people down. | ||
| But to really understand the game, it's like I said, like someone said to Eddie Bravo, they were talking about jujitsu being like chess. | ||
| He's like... | ||
| He goes, chess pieces can only move one way. | ||
| He goes like, you have a rook, you go that way. | ||
| You've got a queen, you can do this. | ||
| A knight can do that. | ||
| He's like, your body can do so much shit. | ||
| It's so much more complicated than chess. | ||
| Plus, you get tired and you get nervous. | ||
| Plus, you can't breathe when someone's got you in a body triangle. | ||
| There's all those other factors. | ||
| Plus, you have to prepare your game pieces. | ||
| Your game pieces have to be in shape. | ||
| It's not like you just show up... | ||
| I don't want to be fat with a cigarette and a cup of coffee in the park and play chess. | ||
| No, your body has to be prepared. | ||
| You have to be well rested. | ||
| You have to have endurance. | ||
| I mean, and you have to be ready. | ||
| I think that one thing that separates jiu-jitsu and all the combat sports versus like football and maybe not football, but basketball, tennis, you know, all of those other ones is no one walks into a basketball game and is like, I might get knocked out tonight. | ||
| No one walks in with that extra anxiety. | ||
| While jiu-jitsu, you might not get knocked out, it's also like, this guy might rip my knee off. | ||
| Or this guy might choke me out unconscious in front of a bunch of people. | ||
| That's another really interesting part about combat sports, I think, too. | ||
| It's that extra level, and I think that's what makes it so different. | ||
| It's that extra level of... | ||
| Man, you have to worry about getting hurt. | ||
| In what world do you usually ever have to worry about getting hurt? | ||
| Really getting hurt. | ||
| Really getting hurt. | ||
| I remember when Husamar and Paul Harris would fight, everybody was so terrified of that guy. | ||
| Because he wouldn't let go. | ||
| Because he would hold onto heel hooks. | ||
| So not only was... | ||
| I mean, the dude was like 5'7". | ||
| 200 and whatever the fuck pounds he was before he cut down to 185. Just so stacked and so strong. | ||
| When he would get a hold of people, you could see it in their eyes. | ||
| They were like, Jesus Christ. | ||
| And then he would dive on your fucking leg and heel hook you. | ||
| And then he had this habit of holding on to submissions. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To the point where, you know, they kicked him out of the UFC for it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, who the fuck gets kicked out of the UFC for being successful? | ||
| Paul Harris. | ||
| He was the only guy. | ||
| Where he held on so many times. | ||
| They're like, dude, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| Yeah, he was getting ready to fight. | ||
| Or when Nate Marquardt, because High Altitude used to be Nate Marquardt's gym. | ||
| That's when I was training with all those guys, too. | ||
| And, you know, when Nate was going to fight Paul Harris outside. | ||
| Well, Nate did something really smart. | ||
| Nate got really sweaty before that fight. | ||
| So he came in super sweaty. | ||
| And I remember Paul Harris went for a leg, and Nate pulled his leg out. | ||
| And Paul Harris pointed his leg, trying to say that it was greased up. | ||
| And they actually checked his leg. | ||
| It wasn't greased up. | ||
| It was just sweaty. | ||
| How do you sweaty up your legs? | ||
| If you put on a warm-up thing, if you put on one of them plastic track suits or one of them sweat suits, those sauna suits, like a rubber suit, you could get super slippery. | ||
| If you do that right before you go into the octagon, you can get real fucking slippery. | ||
| Yeah, I guess you're right. | ||
| Eat a lot of butter, too, maybe. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Well, that was the unscrupulous fighters in the past. | ||
| One thing they used to do was the night before the fight, they would bathe in mineral oil. | ||
| So they would lie in a bath and they would fill the bathtub up with mineral oil and water. | ||
| And so your whole body is covered in water. | ||
| And you take a shower, but you're still sleek and slick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And so you're not technically greased up, but as soon as you start getting sweaty, you are so hard to hold on to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Is that legal still? | ||
| I don't think it is. | ||
| I don't know, though. | ||
| It doesn't sound illegal. | ||
| You could take Abilene and rub it all over you like a lot of guys do before they train. | ||
| But you could do that and wash it off. | ||
| And even when you wash it off, you're still kind of slick. | ||
| I guarantee you people do it. | ||
| I don't know if Vander Lee Silva did it, but I know people accused him of doing it. | ||
| Vander Lee Silva, I think, put Vic's vapor rub all over his chest, too, and so he would grab guys and pull them in, and they'd get fucking Vic's vapor rub in their eyes and shit mixed with the sweat. | ||
| You ever rolled with anyone that has rubbed their bodies down with tile oil? | ||
| No, like tile liniment? | ||
| No. | ||
| That sucks. | ||
| That stuff's not good to get in your eyes. | ||
| Because you kind of smell it, and then you're just like, why are my eyes burning? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then you just... | ||
| I don't remember who accused Vanderlei of doing that. | ||
| I don't know if it was even accurate. | ||
| I think it was one of his early UFC fights that he won with knees, and he grabbed the guy and pulled him into him. | ||
| But it might be an excuse. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| But I would imagine somewhere along the line, people have used every single way to get away from a grappler. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Make yourself more slippery. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| People can get pretty creative in the ways that they can get advantages. | ||
| Yeah, because even if you're not using, like, legitimate grease, right? | ||
| You're not putting Vaseline on. | ||
| What if you're just using, like, body moisturizer? | ||
| And you're putting a lot of it on, then you dry it off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then they touch you, and it's like, well, I mean, it doesn't have... | ||
| How do they know if you have grease on? | ||
| Nah, I've never been grease checked. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| That's kind of crazy. | ||
| That's actually a thing, you know, like, I'll make sure that I'm using chapstick and stuff for the couple of weeks leading into a fight and make sure that I'm, like, moisturizing my face and stuff leading up to a fight because, I mean, I get real dry skin just because I'm so pasty. | ||
| You know, I go out into the sun for five minutes and everything's cracking. | ||
| That's another thing too, right? | ||
| The Vaseline that they put on your face to prevent cuts and things along those lines. | ||
| That shit gets all over the place everywhere when you start sweating. | ||
| I've seen guys do the, you know, like... | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Anderson Silva. | ||
| That was a thing with Anderson Silva. | ||
| It was a big controversy back in the day, where one of Anderson Silva's fights, they vaselined up his face, and then he takes his face, rubs his fingers, and he starts doing this. | ||
| He put the vaseline on his body, and everybody's like, what the fuck? | ||
| It was a big controversy. | ||
| Now I'm just remembering this. | ||
| Can't hate on guys for trying to get little advantages like that. | ||
| I almost appreciate it. | ||
| Actually, on the way over here, the driver was a really big boxing fan. | ||
| And he was just talking about Tyson biting people's ears and Evander Holyfield. | ||
| Just how dirty old school boxing used to be. | ||
| And it's like, I can appreciate that. | ||
| I can appreciate that mentality. | ||
| One was a crazy one because it seemed like Tyson wanted to get out of the fight. | ||
| But it also seemed like he was angry because Evander did leave with his head and Tyson was getting cut. | ||
| Because Evander would put his head down and plow forward and throw. | ||
| And I think Tyson felt like he was trying to headbutt him. | ||
| Probably was. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| They're trying to have a third fight together. | ||
| See that? | ||
| Evander called him out on his Instagram yesterday. | ||
| Yesterday? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He looks good, man. | ||
| He looks good. | ||
| He's hitting the mitts. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'll probably watch it. | ||
| The thing is, they've got to make it a real fight. | ||
| It seemed like the Roy Jones Jr. fight. | ||
| I don't want to make any speculation because I looked forward to that fight. | ||
| I was excited about it. | ||
| Two legends. | ||
| But it seemed like there might have been an agreement to not hit each other too hard in the head. | ||
| It seems like a lot of Tyson's big bombs were at Roy's body. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or maybe it was just like an unwritten thing where they're like, you know, like, hey man. | ||
| Yeah, let's just make some money here and not get any more brain damage. | ||
| Especially Roy. | ||
| I mean, he's a 168-pound champion, won at 175, and he did beat John Ruiz at heavyweight, but he wasn't a legitimate heavyweight. | ||
| He was just so fast and so skilled that he could beat the heavyweight champion. | ||
| But he's not heavyweight like Mike Tyson is a heavyweight. | ||
| Mike Tyson is a fucking heavyweight. | ||
| One of the greatest heavyweight knockout artists the world has ever known. | ||
| It's a different thing. | ||
| He went in that fight looking dense, bro. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He looked good. | |
| He looked dense. | ||
| He looked good. | ||
| Yeah, he looked good. | ||
| I don't know what kind of drug test they gave them. | ||
| They said they gave them tests. | ||
| But I would say, listen, we don't need any tests. | ||
| Let's cut the shits. | ||
| We were just talking about Overeem not being in the UFC anymore. | ||
| I say send that dude to 1FC and let him juice to the gills. | ||
| Let's get back to the old ways. | ||
| Let's see what's up. | ||
| I want to see the Overeem that fought Brock Lesnar. | ||
| I want to see that show up again where everybody knows. | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| I hope he fights somewhere if he wants to. | ||
| If he wants to. | ||
| He's what, 38, 39? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, that guy's been in the game a long, long time. | |
| How many times can you get out of bed and still want to do it? | ||
| He apparently still does, which is crazy. | ||
| And you look at that guy's accolades. | ||
| I mean, there's very few human beings in combat sports that have the accolades that guy has. | ||
| First of all, won the Abu Dhabi European trials. | ||
| Crazy, right? | ||
| So he wins European Abu Dhabis as a pro MMA fighter. | ||
| Became the dream heavyweight champion. | ||
| Became the Strikeforce heavyweight champion. | ||
| Won the K-1 Grand Prix. | ||
| I mean, what the fuck, man? | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| If you look at all the things that guy's accomplished in combat sports. | ||
| Yeah, and I mean, we were talking about him a little bit before, but he's... | ||
| I was so impressed with just how eager he was to learn, you know, because he's been training with us for about the last year at Elevation. | ||
| I was just like, damn man, this guy's still like, he's so capable of learning too. | ||
| You know, like you kind of see fighters get a little bit older and you're like, it's wired, you know, they're wired. | ||
| They're not trying to learn. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And he was just like so capable of learning. | ||
| I thought that that was really cool. | ||
| That's the real question. | ||
| What stops someone from getting better? | ||
| Is it age and injuries or is it inspiration? | ||
| Do they look at it like a young guy? | ||
| Because young fighters who are just starting to enter into their prime, they're constantly trying to add new things to their game. | ||
| They're working with different people. | ||
| They're constantly trying to improve because they don't feel like they're there yet. | ||
| And then some guys that have been there before, they've fought for the title, they've fought top contenders, and then you see this kind of pattern emerges, where they basically do the same thing, they fight the same way, and they're kind of protecting themselves from certain injuries that they have that might be chronic, and they don't grow and learn. | ||
| And you always wonder, is that because of the injuries and the age, or is that just because of the attitude as well? | ||
| I think it'd be hard, man. | ||
| I think it'd be hard being that and accomplishing everything that you've wanted to accomplish and then still getting there. | ||
| I could only imagine. | ||
| I don't know because I haven't accomplished all the shit that I want to accomplish. | ||
| I imagine that it's really similar to... | ||
| Just stringing some really good fights together and then being like, I got this. | ||
| And then this is what I need to do. | ||
| I don't need to do any more. | ||
| And then that'd be it. | ||
| I felt that demon creep up on me a couple of times too. | ||
| The demon of complacency. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The demon of... | ||
| You're doing good, man. | ||
| Just, you know, you don't got to do anything else. | ||
| Take that guy. | ||
| That guy's an asshole. | ||
| Yeah, fuck that guy. | ||
| That guy will keep you from greatness. | ||
| Yeah, he will. | ||
| I try to remind myself just all the time, like, it's only going to get harder, you know? | ||
| Like, it's only going to get harder, and you got to be okay with that. | ||
| Well, it's interesting if you look historically at the evolution of MMA, the difference between MMA in 1993 and MMA today in 2021 is almost unrecognizable. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of the same techniques are applied, but the level is so fucking high now. | ||
| Sometimes you see guys making their debut, and I'll just be like, this is crazy! | ||
| These guys are so good! | ||
| And they're making their debut! | ||
| There's a 14-year-old out there who's going to whoop my ass one day. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| Who's going to whoop my ass. | ||
| Where was that video from that I posted that we pulled up the other day that was that little girl who was six years old? | ||
| Whose page was that on? | ||
| Was she like punching the tree? | ||
| No, I've seen that girl. | ||
| That girl was savage too. | ||
| Yeah, that girl's scary. | ||
| That girl's a little older, but this girl was tiny. | ||
| And she was... | ||
| Who's Instagram was it? | ||
| Do you remember? | ||
| It was someone that we know. | ||
| Anyway, she was hitting the pads, and they had a balance ball, and she was using that for leg kicks because she was so small. | ||
| The guy was leaning on that, holding the pads for her, and then she would leg kick the ball. | ||
| Fucking perfect technique. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| At six. | ||
| I mean, perfect. | ||
| Everything was just crisp and fast. | ||
| And you're like, my God. | ||
| Remember who it was? | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| It was someone we know. | ||
| Had it on their page. | ||
| I don't know how you can get kids that coordinated that young. | ||
| Some of them just have it, dude. | ||
| You think? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Some kids are coordinated. | ||
| I have one daughter that's really coordinated and super, super athletic and one daughter who doesn't give a fuck. | ||
| She likes to play sports and she plays lacrosse and basketball. | ||
| She likes sports and she does it. | ||
| She's not obsessed the way my other daughter is. | ||
| My other daughter's obsessed with technique and she does gymnastics and she can do all kinds of crazy shit and backflips and roundoffs and handsprings. | ||
| Just a different type of spirit, huh? | ||
| It's just weird. | ||
| Yeah, it's weird, huh? | ||
| One of them really loves art. | ||
| Some kids are just... | ||
| I think some of it is genetic, for sure. | ||
| If you get super athletes and they have kids, you take two super athletes and they breed and they make a super athlete baby, that's logical. | ||
| But sometimes you have kids that their parents are normal and they come out and they're just freaks. | ||
| My parents were super normal. | ||
| Not that I'm a freak athlete or anything, but my parents were super normal. | ||
| We took my mom to Topgolf one time. | ||
| I was like, what are you kidding me? | ||
| She couldn't figure it out? | ||
| Bro, I was like, that's not even... | ||
| I was like, in your head, I know you've seen someone swing a golf club. | ||
| Like, that's not what... | ||
| That's what you think you're doing with this? | ||
| She's like chopping it. | ||
| She's like trying to chop the ball in half, dude. | ||
| I was like, what are you doing? | ||
| It's funny people that have never done anything like athletics. | ||
| It's funny watching them as adults try to do stuff. | ||
| I remember there's been a few guys coming to jiu-jitsu that had really never done anything. | ||
| They just decided, I'm going to just fucking try this. | ||
| And you'd see them trying to move their body, and they'd have a big belly and little small arms, and you're like, man, you've got a long road to go, but... | ||
| Kudos to you for just... | ||
| Because if you're an athlete, say if you're a guy who wrestled or maybe you did a lot of CrossFit or something, and then you enter into a Jiu-Jitsu class, well, hey, you got a lot of tools to work with. | ||
| You got a body that you're accustomed to moving around, you understand what it's like to push yourself. | ||
| But if you're a person who's never done anything, and then all of a sudden here you are with a gi on and someone's grabbing you and you're like, or you don't know what to do, that's a brave person to take that step. | ||
| It's a dangerous person. | ||
| Dangerous person to train with? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's a dangerous person. | ||
| They don't know where their hand is in space, bro. | ||
| They're trying to grab you here and they're like putting their fingers in your mouth. | ||
| That can happen too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| That can happen too. | ||
| But yeah, man... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think jiu-jitsu is so good for like, because I'll teach the kids program at High Altitude Martial Arts to kickboxing, but like, man, like, I see a lot of adults, bro, they're just not familiar with the way that their body can move, you know? | ||
| Like, I sometimes imagine, I'm like, man, like... | ||
| Have you done anything like full throttle? | ||
| Like how many people you think haven't done shit full throttle? | ||
| A lot. | ||
| A lot. | ||
| If you walk into an office building and just wander through the hallway, like most people are not doing a goddamn thing with themselves. | ||
| Or if they did, it was like when they were kids. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's kind of sad. | ||
| You have one body. | ||
| You should know how to use it. | ||
| You should move it around a little bit, at least. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| It's like having a car that you never drive. | ||
| You just leave it in the garage. | ||
| A lot of people do that, too. | ||
| A lot of people do that, too. | ||
| It's interesting to see the progression, though, of the sport. | ||
| There's no real sport from 1993 that's unrecognizable like MMA is. | ||
| I can't think of one. | ||
| Basketball wasn't too much different. | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| That's the Jordan days. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You take Jordan out of, you know, the 1990s and put him in 2021, he could fucking compete with anybody. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, the elites of then were... | ||
| But the sport of MMA, it's just totally different. | ||
| It's so different. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In every way. | ||
| It's evolving really quick, and I think probably a lot of it, man, is because, you know, like, you become a coach in MMA because you were probably a fighter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And, uh... | ||
| When something I think is so early on, you don't even know how to teach those people. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| If I'm in 1993 and someone's like, hey, we're doing no rules fighting and I'm a wrestler, I'm going to teach them all the shit that I know about wrestling. | ||
| I'm not going to weave out all of the things that are actually efficient for an actual fist fight. | ||
| I'm just going to teach them everything that I know about wrestling. | ||
| Now you don't have coaches that do that. | ||
| Now you have coaches that are like... | ||
| This is what's good for fighting. | ||
| This is what's good for fighting. | ||
| That filter is happening still. | ||
| I think that's why guys are getting so good so fast. | ||
| I would imagine even kids learning wrestling. | ||
| They know submissions. | ||
| Young kids that are learning wrestling. | ||
| Someone's going to show them. | ||
| Hey man, if you do this right here and then grab it like that. | ||
| You can fuck somebody up. | ||
| They're already doing grappling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They must learn submissions. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I follow a couple of Instagram wrestling pages and stuff. | ||
| And to me, it's super interesting. | ||
| I mean, because wrestling definitely has influenced the jiu-jitsu world. | ||
| But it's interesting to me to watch it go the other direction. | ||
| Where you're seeing people like... | ||
| I forget what I was watching. | ||
| But a guy jumps for a flying triangle. | ||
| But, like, controls the guy's arm in a way where he can roll the guy, you know? | ||
| In a wrestling match? | ||
| In a wrestling match. | ||
| He jumped for a flying triangle in a wrestling match? | ||
| Yeah, and the arm is stuck in, and he controls his arm, so when he jumps, he controls the arm and just rolls it through. | ||
| Boom, and pins the guy. | ||
| And it's like... | ||
| Are you allowed to do that? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| You can fly and triangle a guy in a wrestling match? | ||
| I mean, you can't choke him. | ||
| I don't think you can lock your legs. | ||
| You can hold it. | ||
| I mean, you can roll him and pin him with it, right? | ||
| And then a lot of the leg scrambling that I'm seeing from wrestlers, maybe they got it from jiu-jitsu or maybe jiu-jitsu got it from them, but I'm seeing a lot of similarities in the way that people tangle themselves and scrambles on the legs and stuff. | ||
| That's super interesting just to watch the two grappling worlds kind of mesh into one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, the guillotine, not the guillotine like this one, but the guillotine in wrestling, or they would call it guillotine, became the twister in jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Is that what they call it? | ||
| The guillotine in wrestling versus the guillotine? | ||
| Well, it's like... | ||
| They're like, no, it's a guillotine. | ||
| I remember guys calling it the guillotine. | ||
| But it's a position where you would hold a guy for a pin, and then Eddie Bravo turned it into the twister. | ||
| The twister comes from this sort of similar leg entanglement that a lot of guys were using in wrestling. | ||
| The banana split type of position. | ||
| Do you know the twister? | ||
| When you're in the back, like say if you're holding someone's back, you lock down on the left leg, you wrap their right arm around your neck, so you baseball bat their right arm, You wrap it around your head, grab the top of their head, and it's a terrible spine lock. | ||
| But it came from pinning someone that way. | ||
| So if you can get to the side of them and lock a hold of one leg and lean on them, you can get to a point where the guy's both shoulders are touching the mat. | ||
| And it's a good control position. | ||
| That's where Eddie got that from? | ||
| Yeah, he got up from wrestling. | ||
| Oh, that's awesome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's awesome. | |
| Eddie was a wrestler, but he wasn't strong when he was a kid, so he's a leg rider. | ||
| A lot of guys who are not physically strong as wrestlers become leg riders. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so he, when he got into jiu-jitsu, did a lot of leg transition stuff. | ||
| One of his big things, when I first met him, he was... | ||
| Either a blue belt or a purple belt. | ||
| I think he was a purple belt. | ||
| And he was doing a lot of, like, toe holds. | ||
| He was catching a lot of people in toe holds. | ||
| So he would kind of use his legs. | ||
| His upper body wasn't strong. | ||
| And that motherfucker, when he met me, never lifted weights. | ||
| I'm like, dude, I'm going to lift. | ||
| Come lift me. | ||
| He's like, fuck that. | ||
| He's like, I want to go get a burrito. | ||
| And he would just, like, get high. | ||
| He'd never lifted weights at all. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, until, like... | ||
| Deep into our friendship, like a year or two, and then he started lifting weights. | ||
| He had to trust you first. | ||
| Well, he just had to realize, like, you know, if you want to compete against guys who are physically stronger than you, it helps. | ||
| It just helps a lot to be strong. | ||
| It helps a lot. | ||
| I mean, I was looking at a couple pictures of me just from a couple years ago. | ||
| Because before that, I was always like, man, lifting just makes me tired for training. | ||
| I'm not going to lift hard, you know? | ||
| But I don't have that built. | ||
| Like I said, with the posture and adding in strength so that I can be posturally strong and my hips are strong so that I'm not hunched over and I'm not all twisted up because everything's kind of strong. | ||
| I used to be very averse to wanting to lift. | ||
| But dude, I swear my cardio has probably got two or three times as better just because I started lifting so much because now it's not as much effort to get someone off of me. | ||
| Oh, that makes sense. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I might be the only example of that just because I'm the only guy kind of built like me in the division. | ||
| Everyone else might need to, you know, go on a couple trail runs or something instead. | ||
| You're so tall for 135. That's such an advantage. | ||
| It's such an advantage, yeah. | ||
| That length and reach is when you're trying to get a hold of someone and they can hit you literally six inches before you can get to them. | ||
| That's a big advantage. | ||
| I get to do what I want until they do something about it. | ||
| I get to do what I want until they do something about it. | ||
| So what exercises did you do to improve your posture? | ||
| A lot of carrying stuff. | ||
| Farmer's carries? | ||
| Yeah, farmer carries with shoulders back. | ||
| Honestly, a lot of focusing on it when you're lifting too. | ||
| But a lot of strengthening the hips makes all of this strong too. | ||
| The weaker your hips are, the more twisted you are, the more you're like this. | ||
| A ton of hip stuff, man. | ||
| Hip strength, everyone wants to have a really nice set of abs and all of this, but hip strength, I think, is the thing that will keep me good all the way up until I'm done training on Saturday. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hip flexors. | ||
| That's a muscle that so few people work out. | ||
| And there's this guy that I follow on Instagram that's become very popular. | ||
| Jamie actually turned me on to him. | ||
| Knees over toes guy. | ||
| I saw him with Mark Bell. | ||
| Yeah, he was training with Mark Bell. | ||
| But I started implementing a lot of what he does in my training routine, and I actually got one of those monkey feet things, if you don't know what that is. | ||
| It's a thing that you strap onto your shoe, and you can attach a dumbbell to it. | ||
| So you lift... | ||
| So, like, you know, for, like, hip flexors, to get them strong, it's kind of hard to do. | ||
| But if you want to be a strong runner or if you want to throw hard knees, like, that's really where the muscle comes from. | ||
| If you think about, like, throwing a hard knee, a lot of that is... | ||
| And also with kicks. | ||
| If you think about roundhouse kicks, like... | ||
| I've been kicking since I was a little kid, so I've got pretty decent hip flexor muscles, but I don't do an exercise to work them other than this stuff. | ||
| Maybe lunges work them a little bit, but using this monkey foot thing, you can actually lift weights with your hip flexors as you're lifting your knee up, and that's all that muscle. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| See if you can find like a video of him doing it. | ||
| But this guy has some really interesting perspective. | ||
| A really interesting perspective on strengthening all the muscles around your knee. | ||
| And he calls it knee over toes guy because traditionally, if you talk to someone, they'd say, hey, don't ever have your knee over your toes because it puts a lot of pressure on your knee. | ||
| It's bad for your knee. | ||
| And his idea is, no, build up to where you can have your knee over your toes easily. | ||
| And if you look at his Instagram, he does a lot of crazy Crazy shit. | ||
| Like where he jumps and lands with knees over toes and goes all the way down to the ground and then can spring back up. | ||
| Like this shit. | ||
| And this is a guy that's had like multiple leg surgeries. | ||
| And so look how he lands. | ||
| And he does a lot. | ||
| His Instagram, it's knees over toes guy is his Instagram. | ||
| But he's definitely got that monkey foot thing in there somewhere, Jamie. | ||
| He's doing the tib thing. | ||
| Scroll up. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| That's good, too. | ||
| But scroll up to that one where he's leaning back. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| Yeah, watch this. | ||
| This is a crazy strength in his legs. | ||
| Look, he goes all the way back, which is hard to do already, and then pops all the way forward. | ||
| That's fucking hard to do, man. | ||
| And that is all those muscles that we're talking about here. | ||
| That's like hamstrings, though. | ||
| A lot of that is hamstrings, too, I think. | ||
| Yeah, because we'll do a similar thing. | ||
| I obviously can't do it as good as that guy, but yeah, hamstrings, glutes, bro. | ||
| The glutes are super important. | ||
| And you see that pose that he's got in the middle there, Jamie? | ||
| Yeah, that one with the arrow. | ||
| So that's showing the... | ||
| What happened there? | ||
| That's showing the optimal position to strengthen, like to have that sort of, what do they call it, a split squat where you have that crazy angle where your knee is hanging way over your toes and obviously you build up to it slowly. | ||
| Like he's got Miriam Nakamoto. | ||
| Do you know who she is? | ||
| Yeah, multiple time world kickboxing champion, world Muay Thai champion, my friend Miriam. | ||
| Shout out to Miriam. | ||
| She's a beast and she has a pretty significant knee injury that she's trying to Recover from and she got a bunch of stem cells and shit shot in there. | ||
| But she's now doing a lot of this guy's program to strengthen all the muscles around it. | ||
| But see how he's into doing a lot of stuff that puts you in that position. | ||
| And, I mean, the dude can fucking... | ||
| do some crazy shit athletically, but he also uses all these examples of different athletes that have incredible explosive power with their legs, and they use these kind of exercises, and they're strong in these positions. | ||
| So he shows this split squat, which is really hard to do, man. | ||
| It's really hard to get down like that with that knee hanging way out over your toes and get all the way down so your back knee touches the ground and then pull yourself back up. | ||
| But he calls it dense strength. | ||
| You're strengthening all your tendons and all the muscles to stabilize the knee and put the knee in a good position. | ||
| For kicking things, man, and for grappling, I think a lot of guys could benefit from it. | ||
| Look how flexible the fucking dude is. | ||
| Look at that picture right there. | ||
| He does a lot of stuff on slant boards. | ||
| If you go to that one, the video that we were just on, Jamie, of him doing a full split. | ||
| Yeah, that one. | ||
| So he does a lot of stuff on slant boards. | ||
| It's like a slant board, which is good for stretching your calves out. | ||
| And I started doing this because of him, too. | ||
| And drop all the way down with a barbell and go all the way down to the floor. | ||
| And it's just tremendous hamstring stretch, but also strengthening. | ||
| And you see the kind of flexibility that this guy has because of it. | ||
| I mean, if you can scoot that... | ||
| The dude can go all the way down to a full split. | ||
| And look at that, he's doing a Zurcher squat grip, like where you put it in the crux of your elbow with weights. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know why he's showing someone getting slammed into a triangle. | |
| I guess. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Picking him up? | |
| I don't know. | ||
| You'd have to listen to him. | ||
| But a lot of great exercises. | ||
| So you can find that monkey foot thing. | ||
| He's got that in there somewhere. | ||
| I've definitely seen it on his page, but the video might not be up or it's been somewhere else. | ||
| The only thing I could find was that tibia thing, which is a very close thing too, but it's a different... | ||
| That's a different thing, but that's pretty dope too. | ||
| That's a bar where you put your feet into it and you put plates on the end of it and it works those muscles on the tibia. | ||
| And, you know, you just flex the foot up and down. | ||
| So it's like there's all these different ways you can strengthen these muscle groups that you don't fit. | ||
| Like, there's no direct way to strengthen them, like, individually that you think of. | ||
| When you think of doing squats, you know, you're strengthening them sort of. | ||
| But, you know, they're just kind of coming along for the ride, getting stronger. | ||
| Whereas this is Iceland. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's the monkey feet thing. | ||
| Dang, those are crazy looking. | ||
| It's dope, dude. | ||
| It's really dope. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Because what I'll do is I'll, like, hold on to, like, a chin-up bar like this. | ||
| And then I'll just do these fucking leg lifts with my... | ||
| And you can do leg curls with it. | ||
| You can do leg lifts. | ||
| But I feel like for a guy like you who already has a... | ||
| Fucking nasty flying knee that would make your knee even scarier. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, you know that knee you landed on Frankie was crazy I was by myself watching TV and I screamed out loud You know it was one of those oh Yeah, and that's a common thing in my house people like are you okay? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm like watching the fights Yeah, that was a nasty one. | |
| Dude, it was so perfect. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it was. | |
| You timed it so perfect. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he wasn't doing any of the hitting the brakes, you know? | ||
| Everything he was doing was just forward, forward, forward. | ||
| He threw, you know, he threw a kick forward. | ||
| He threw a combination forward. | ||
| And I was like, oh, this guy's not hitting the brakes at all, you know? | ||
| And I was like... | ||
| Just throw something into that space that he was going to step into. | ||
| He couldn't have been more perfect. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was right before he threw a punch. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| So two wicked KOs in a row like that over two top guys. | ||
| Like, you must be feeling right now that you're on, like, a whole new level. | ||
| Yeah, I'm trying not to feel too good, you know? | ||
| Because that demon, you know, that demon will tell you, hey, you're good enough, man. | ||
| You know, you're good enough, ride it out. | ||
| Yeah, I do feel good, though, man. | ||
| I feel like I think it's been noticeable, the demeanor that I go into the cage with. | ||
| It's noticeable in my brain, too. | ||
| Like, when I'm walking into the cage, I'm ready, you know, to hurt someone. | ||
| And I'm ready to... | ||
| I'm ready to snap and get that 10 weeks of thinking about it out of me. | ||
| But yeah, man, I'm super happy with it, man. | ||
| I feel like it's its own ability to figure out where you best perform. | ||
| And you don't learn that unless you have a loss or you get lucky and you get to win a fight. | ||
| But I had to lose and... | ||
| That's how you learn that stuff. | ||
| I really feel, man, when I'm in the back in that space, I feel 100% completely untouchable. | ||
| That's something that is very, very different than when I was fighting before. | ||
| Like, I'm walking into the cage now feeling 100% untouchable. | ||
| And you attribute this to the work with the mental coach as well as just you realizing that you were flat in the Aljamain fight? | ||
| Yep, yep. | ||
| And just realizing where I do best, you know? | ||
| Just realizing where I do best, like, uh... | ||
| I would love to, because I'm a calm dude, like I'm a relaxed guy, like I don't get too high or too low about anything, like it'd be nice if I could perform at that level, you know, but that's not the case for me. | ||
| So I need to really, and that's why I do it before sparring, is I'll make sure no matter how tired I am, regardless of what's going on, you know, if I'm injured, if I'm, you know, overtrained, whatever it is, when it's sparring day, I'm making sure that I get myself to that same place. | ||
| Obviously not intense enough to where I'm going to hurt my training partners, but I'm making sure that I can replicate that headspace regardless of the situation. | ||
| Yeah, you said something after the fight when you were talking to Laura Sanko. | ||
| Is that what you were talking to? | ||
| No, it was Andrea... | ||
| Whoever it was. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That person. | ||
| You said some people go in there and they're looking to compete. | ||
| They like to compete. | ||
| And that's what they're doing. | ||
| You go there. | ||
| You're trying to hurt people. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| That's what I'm doing now. | ||
| It was really uncomfortable for me because I like Hinduism. | ||
| I like Eastern philosophy. | ||
| I like the idea of Buddhism and being really peaceful and having a Zen mind and not wanting anything and being really free from all the suffering of the world and trying to get there. | ||
| And that was kind of my philosophy, you know, up until I was choked out by Sterling and opened up my eyes and I hear him running around and celebrating and I was like, fuck that, you know? | ||
| Fuck that. | ||
| Everyone that I go into a fight now with, I'm really trying to hurt, you know? | ||
| Like, I want to be the guy that's running around the cage and they're opening up their eyes, you know? | ||
| And I didn't, you know, it's a different type of space to be in and it takes a lot of practice, especially for someone like me who isn't, you know, naturally like that. | ||
| But, you know, that's the game that we're in and that's what I'm trying to do now. | ||
| How important is a loss sometimes? | ||
| Super important. | ||
| It's a reminder. | ||
| And like you said, I was just too comfortable. | ||
| I was too laid back. | ||
| I needed to remember how dangerous this sport is. | ||
| And that's one of the main things I took from that loss is that we're not playing soccer. | ||
| Don't walk into that fight not ready to go. | ||
| It's also a lesson, right? | ||
| Failure is so good for you. | ||
| Because when you fail, it sucks and it feels terrible. | ||
| But if you needed motivation, well, there it is. | ||
| That's the best form of motivation. | ||
| People would love to get motivation in a totally positive way where it's elective. | ||
| I've decided to be motivated. | ||
| I'm going to be positive. | ||
| And that's wonderful. | ||
| But my goodness, the injection that you get from a loss or from just straight up failure where you're like, oh, my God, I'm a loser. | ||
| loser. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, the feeling. | ||
| It's so bad. | ||
| You're literally the same person you were before that moment. | ||
| But now you fucking hate yourself. | ||
| You hate everything. | ||
| You feel terrible. | ||
| You can't sleep. | ||
| You get up to take a piss and you can't stop thinking about it. | ||
| Like, fuck. | ||
| You just feel so. | ||
| But that feeling is worth a fucking billion dollars. | ||
| It's so valuable. | ||
| I wish I could win fights and feel like I lost every single time. | ||
| I wish I had that type of superpower. | ||
| I wish I could do that. | ||
| Do you think you could talk yourself into that feeling? | ||
| The feeling that you got after the Aljamain fight, can you think you can bring yourself back to that state? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If I sit and think about it long enough, which I sometimes, you know, like, and not because of that fight, but just all of the shitty things, like you said, that happen after a loss, man. | ||
| Like, all the shitty conversations you have to have with people. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Like, the shitty looks you get from people. | ||
| What do you think went wrong? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hey man, you'll get it next time. | ||
| It's like, no man, this is my existence, bro. | ||
| You'll get it next time. | ||
| Yeah, non-competitors that want to talk to you about your losses. | ||
| No, I hate it. | ||
| Look on the bright side. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You got your health. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In that moment, there's no bright side. | ||
| And that's something that every athlete, I think, has to come to grips with. | ||
| During losses... | ||
| There's no upside. | ||
| Look, sometimes you're the hammer, sometimes you're the nail, and you don't get the good without the bad. | ||
| The reason why the good is so fucking amazing is because you felt the bad. | ||
| If you're just this guy who just stormed your way to the top with no adversity whatsoever, you probably wouldn't enjoy it as much. | ||
| No. | ||
| And that emotional pain, I think, is worse than physical pain. | ||
| And I remember after the first time I lost, I had like my own existential crisis a little bit where I had to, you know, Venture off and really question like who I was as a person where I where I was putting a lot of my identity just because that shit hurts so bad man and uh I remember like If I keep doing this It might happen again, | ||
| you know and I had to I had to like sit with that a little bit and I was like And you might not even get what you want out of this and then I was like damn and then I had to sit with that and then I was like But I'm really grateful for that because that was the real moment in my life where I was like, martial arts is my path. | ||
| That's what I'm doing. | ||
| I remember having the very lucid thought of when I was having those feelings of this could happen again. | ||
| You might not ever get into the UFC. You could be doing this and win some, lose some, and be a loser until you're 35, 40. And in my head, I was like... | ||
| Okay, you know, I'll sleep in a box. | ||
| I'll be a loser. | ||
| You know, as long as I get to do this with my life, like, I'll be that loser. | ||
| And kind of since then, that's when I was like, oh, I actually love this, you know? | ||
| I actually love this shit. | ||
| Okay, that feels good. | ||
| What was the thought process that let you come to grips with it? | ||
| Did you have like an aha moment? | ||
| I spent a lot of, I spent probably like every weekend or every other weekend in the mountains for about, you want my coffee? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| You want my coffee? | ||
| No, there's more coffee. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay, okay. | |
| Oh, there it is. | ||
| You're so nice. | ||
| You're so nice. | ||
| My coffee's almost like, you can have my coffee. | ||
| No, look here. | ||
| You want more? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We've got plenty. | |
| We can make more. | ||
| Black Rifle gives us bags of this stuff. | ||
| It's pretty good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Black Rifle coffee is the shit. | ||
| I spent probably every other weekend or every weekend in the mountains hiking 14ers or just camping for about, you know, probably six months and just like really... | ||
| Uh, as, you know, corny as it might sound, you know, like, facing my ego, looking at, like, a lot of my identities and looking at, like, where I was placing my attachment in my life and, uh, and, you know, after kind of the six months of that and a lot of, like, experiences and stuff like that, uh, you know, I feel like I found my spirit and I feel like, uh, Yeah, that's kind of how I handled that situation. | ||
| What is it about going into the woods, into the mountains, what is it about that that helps you? | ||
| I think one is that it reminds you how little you are. | ||
| It's good to be reminded that you're little. | ||
| It's also not good to think that what we're doing is not important because what we're doing is still important. | ||
| The relationships that we're building, the love that we're given and receiving is still super important, even though we're kind of a dumb species that's not going to be around for probably too much longer. | ||
| I really love that feeling. | ||
| I love the feeling of just taking a breath and being like, You know, I'm here with no one else. | ||
| There's, you know, it's just me and this and it's just here. | ||
| And that's like one special feeling that I feel like I never really experienced before. | ||
| I took all of that time. | ||
| And then I think too, it's just, you know, when you sit by yourself and you go to the mountains and you hike or I know that you like hunting. | ||
| I don't know if you go by yourself or what it is. | ||
| When you're by yourself, man, an hour can feel like a really long time. | ||
| And you kind of realize like... | ||
| There's a lot of shit happening in my head, man. | ||
| There's a lot of things happening. | ||
| There's a lot of voices happening in my head. | ||
| And when you just kind of sit and you listen to them and you kind of separate yourself from them sometimes and then question some of them sometimes, I think that you learn a lot of shit about what's going on in there that I don't think we know is going on in there when we're glued to the TV or we're glued to our phones and stuff like that. | ||
| Yeah, giving yourself a moment in the woods, there's a lot that's going on there. | ||
| One of the things that's going on is that the woods didn't even know you were alive. | ||
| Before you walked into this mountain, before you walked up this hill, You'd never walked there before. | ||
| These trees, these animals have no idea you're a thing. | ||
| They don't give a fuck about you. | ||
| They're just trying to... | ||
| They're surviving. | ||
| The trees are trying to get moisture and light and the animals are trying to get food and they're trying to stay alive and not be eaten. | ||
| And as you're walking there and you look over like... | ||
| Especially if you get to a mountain... | ||
| And you can look into a valley and see more mountains in the distance. | ||
| You realize, like, you could die here and things would just keep going on and you're totally insignificant. | ||
| But in your insulated little world, you look at yourself as being the center of the universe, you know, because you're the center of your own mind and your own ego. | ||
| And there's nothing other than, like, I've always said that that's one of the reasons why people that live in mountain towns and people that live by the ocean are so chill. | ||
| Because there's something about it that just lets you know, hey, motherfucker, look out there. | ||
| Look at all that water. | ||
| You ain't shit, bitch. | ||
| Just relax. | ||
| You're in their home. | ||
| When you're walking around, you're in their home. | ||
| It's also stunningly beautiful. | ||
| Like Colorado, when I lived there briefly and when I would drive up into the mountains above Boulder, I remember thinking, man, if this was a painting, it would be worth so much money. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Because it would be so... | ||
| The way art makes you feel is... | ||
| Like, I love art. | ||
| I love seeing something cool. | ||
| It gives you a nice feeling. | ||
| But it pales in comparison to nature's greatest art. | ||
| When you over... | ||
| Like, when the sun is peeking through the clouds in the perfect way and you see the green of the trees and the white snow caps and just... | ||
| Fuck, it's beautiful. | ||
| It's so beautiful. | ||
| Art that can capture that is like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So beautiful too, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's, you know, someone's trying to, you know, they're trying to take whatever that feeling is and you see something incredibly beautiful and then put it into something and give people that awe-inspiring feeling when you're looking at it. | ||
| But to me, nothing does it like nature itself. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| No way, man. | ||
| It's like a... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you can't really describe it. | ||
| Actually, you know, like, we bitch a lot, being Coloradans. | ||
| Like, we bitch a lot about how many people are, like, moving to Colorado. | ||
| We bitch a lot. | ||
| Man, like, the 14ers are so packed now. | ||
| Like, at least the close ones, you know? | ||
| Like, the ones that you don't actually... | ||
| When you say the 14ers... | ||
| So, they're 14,000 feet. | ||
| There's, like, 58 of them or something in Colorado. | ||
| And it's, like, a big thing to, like, hike all of them, you know? | ||
| I've done about, I think, like, 28 or 29 of them. | ||
| I haven't done, like, the scary-ass ones. | ||
| I've tried some of the scary ones and I'm just like, I don't know if that shit's for me, man. | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| I'll wait till I accomplish my goals until I do something risky. | ||
| So they're just 14ers or whatever. | ||
| A lot of people travel to do them. | ||
| Most of the time when I'm hiking and doing them, it's people from out of state. | ||
| Then I'm like, oh yeah, people really, really care about doing these or whatever. | ||
| Anyways, we bitch about I think it's great. | ||
| Think of anything or watch anything or any of that. | ||
| Never for me. | ||
| I don't ever have to do that unless it's intentional. | ||
| It used to not be intentional. | ||
| It used to be just the way things were. | ||
| Yeah, Colorado's experiencing a mass migration there the same way Texas is. | ||
| It's like a lot of the places that suck, like California right now, people are just like, why am I here when I can be there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| New York too, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I have an uncle in New York and he was like, dude, the city is a ghost town. | ||
| Yeah, we just had a guy here yesterday, Hamilton Morris, was explaining how grim it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then you start to think about New York and you're like, why would anyone ever do that? | ||
| No. | ||
| Why would anyone ever stack themselves in a building that's just layered up and just live in one of the stacks of them? | ||
| Well, when everything was going great, it's exciting. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| I have friends that are comics that love living in New York because you live in an apartment, you hop in an Uber, you drive to this club, you go to that club, you're hanging around, there's all this stuff to do, there's all these restaurants, let's go to this bar and that bar and everything's hopping and bam, bam, fuck you! | ||
| There's all this energy. | ||
| There's something happening constantly. | ||
| I always like visiting. | ||
| I don't like living like that. | ||
| I like birds chirping and shit. | ||
| I'm not interested in all that honk honk, fuck you. | ||
| I don't want to hear that every day. | ||
| Austin's a lot like Denver, actually. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dude, super like it. | ||
| We were just walking up the street just yesterday and where the Capitol building is in comparison to the road with all of the shops and all of that stuff. | ||
| I was like, this is exactly like Denver. | ||
| It's similar. | ||
| It's small. | ||
| It's smaller than Denver. | ||
| For sure, smaller. | ||
| But it's a good size. | ||
| I love it here. | ||
| It's a good size. | ||
| It's not too big. | ||
| It's not too small. | ||
| Although, a lot of people are moving here. | ||
| It's kind of crazy. | ||
| Are you kind of out of the city, on some land? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| See, I'm trying to get some land in Colorado. | ||
| Well, ultimately, I want to get a ranch out here. | ||
| I think that's the move, is to be really out of the city. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Would you have some animals? | ||
| Tim Kennedy has a fucking helicopter. | ||
| He flies all over the place in a helicopter. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, that crazy asshole. | ||
| He wanted to come visit me. | ||
| He goes, can I land a helicopter at your house? | ||
| I go, no! | ||
| No, you can't bring a fucking helicopter to my house. | ||
| First of all, I don't think there's a spot for it. | ||
| And second of all, the neighbors are probably already weirded out by me. | ||
| Fucking helicopters landed next door. | ||
| Does he drive it himself? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Is it big? | ||
| How many people? | ||
| He takes it to the range. | ||
| There's a gun range out here. | ||
| And he told me he does that. | ||
| But they told me when I went there. | ||
| They're like, if you hear a helicopter, that's Tim Kennedy. | ||
| I'm like, really? | ||
| He comes here all the time? | ||
| With his fucking helicopter. | ||
| So he'll take the helicopter, land it there, and then he'll take like an Uber to the Onnit gym or wherever he's training, the Roka gym. | ||
| Yeah, he's a maniac. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Just loads the helicopter up with guns. | ||
| He just does whatever the fuck he wants with that thing. | ||
| You don't have to go on a road. | ||
| You go up, and then you go that way, and that way. | ||
| You don't need a permit or anything? | ||
| Yeah, there's Tim. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| He's just fucking flying around. | ||
| He knows how to do it. | ||
| I mean, he's got a license. | ||
| But because of the fact that he has this helicopter, he can just take it anywhere he wants to go. | ||
| I wouldn't be surprised if that's like a thing in 10 years where everyone kind of, you know, or maybe not everyone, but a lot of people have their own helicopter. | ||
| Well, that was what it was invented for, you know. | ||
| It was invented to be a flying car. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The idea of a helicopter, they thought when they first created it, was going to be like a flying car and everyone would have a helicopter instead of a car. | ||
| You should get Elon Musk on that, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're going to have to go faster. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're going to have to make it electric. | |
| Just spaceships? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just a bunch of blades. | ||
| Not one big one. | ||
| Four small ones. | ||
| We can park in a small area. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If we get some really super genius dude who's really into helicopters, yeah, that would be pretty badass. | ||
| The day will come. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| GM showed this video at CES last month. | ||
| Oh, what is that? | ||
| It's obviously not real yet, but this is their concept for what it will be like. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bro. | |
| Yeah, and that way it's all contained. | ||
| That's not real? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Why isn't it real? | ||
| Come on, GM. It doesn't actually work yet. | ||
| Don't fuck with me. | ||
| Dude, imagine getting an accident in one of those. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's the shit. | |
| Or if they have one, then that's not the video of it. | ||
| Just pull a cord and a parachute pops out. | ||
| How hard is that? | ||
| Bro, that looks fucking amazing. | ||
| I need that now. | ||
| Yeah, that looks awesome. | ||
| We need to get Elon on this. | ||
| Like, come on. | ||
| Tell me we can't have a Tesla one of those. | ||
| That actually could work. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Fuck yeah! | ||
| You think we can land on the roof here? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Why not? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why not? | |
| Talk to Tim. | ||
| They probably have restrictions, like there's certain areas where you're not allowed to land. | ||
| But Bill Burr flies helicopters. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Does he? | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And he took me up in a flight. | ||
| We went all around downtown LA. It's really weird. | ||
| Like, you just kind of can go where you want. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Once you're up in the air, you're just like, we're going to go here, then we're going to go there. | ||
| Because it's not high enough to where it interferes with plane flight. | ||
| You're just hovering over buildings. | ||
| But as we were flying over downtown LA, you realize a lot of these buildings, these big-ass buildings, have X's on the roof where people land helicopters. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Yeah, I hear that they're cheaper to do that. | ||
| This is available now and has FAA approval, but you cannot buy one yet. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| How do you get one then? | ||
| It's a car that turns into a plane. | ||
| It's available, but you can't buy one. | ||
| Oh, those are its wings? | ||
| No, it's been approved. | ||
| Oh, that looks whack. | ||
| Yeah, you need a runway for that. | ||
| We want something without a runway. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not going to do that. | ||
| That looks whack. | ||
| I'd rather have the helicopter. | ||
| I want that other thing, man. | ||
| That four helicopter jammy that GM is making. | ||
| So it's like vertical takeoff. | ||
| You need no space. | ||
| That's why. | ||
| That's what's up. | ||
| Yeah, this is nonsense. | ||
| This is silly. | ||
| Just pick a fucking thing. | ||
| Either get a car or a plane. | ||
| The future of personal transportation. | ||
| Listen, bro. | ||
| Stop pouring all your money into this nonsense. | ||
| No one's buying that fucking thing. | ||
| Buy Bitcoin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Get out of here. | |
| Dogecoin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How do you say it? | |
| Is it Doge? | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I don't know any of that stuff. | ||
| How do you say it? | ||
| I'm pretty sure it's Doge. | ||
| Doge? | ||
| Doge coin? | ||
| It's a little French. | ||
| Yeah, it's worth a lot of money. | ||
| The guy who created it apparently is blown away. | ||
| Like, he created it as a lark. | ||
| 100% was a joke. | ||
| And now it's actually valuable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not a joke. | |
| It's worth like a dollar a coin now, right? | ||
| Not quite. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Not quite? | ||
| Maybe about five cents. | ||
| Oh! | ||
| I thought Elon got it up to a dollar a coin. | ||
| It was about up to 10 cents a coin, I think. | ||
| From down to like... | ||
| It was under a penny. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| And it got very... | ||
| So now it's 10 cents a coin? | ||
| Honestly, I have no idea. | ||
| The world is very weird over that crypto space with forks and all sorts of things. | ||
| Forks? | ||
| What's a fork? | ||
| Like a fork in the road. | ||
| When it starts going this way, the developers all are like, yep, we're following the fork. | ||
| They're saying that Bitcoin is one day going to reach a million dollars a coin. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Seriously? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's at 50k right now, which has been floating around. | ||
|
unidentified
|
50k? | |
| To get one coin? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, to own a whole coin, but that's like, you can break it into pieces. | ||
| They're called Satoshis, and you only need a couple of those to do some stuff with. | ||
| Are you going to start buying more Bitcoin? | ||
| I don't know what you're talking about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Clearly. | ||
| Clearly he's buying Bitcoin. | ||
| Scooping it up. | ||
| I am not a financial advisor. | ||
| We had this gentleman on the podcast the other day, his name is Taylor Russell, and he made this movie called Silk Road. | ||
| It's about Ross Albrecht, who's the guy who created that Silk Road website. | ||
| Do you know what that is? | ||
| Silk Road is a website that I guess is apparently still up, but Ross is in jail for literally two life sentences. | ||
| Plus 40 years without the possibility of parole because you created this online marketplace where you could buy any drug you wanted. | ||
| You can buy LSD, mushrooms, and then it's all anonymous and encrypted and they could send it to your house and have it... | ||
| And the way they were paying for everything was Bitcoin. | ||
| And the dude had made so much money. | ||
| He'd made millions of dollars in Bitcoin at the time when he was arrested, but years and years ago. | ||
| What was it like 2014 or something? | ||
| So, if that, today, the amount of Bitcoin, it would be worth, what was it, $15 billion? | ||
| It's a lot. | ||
| We looked at what they seized recently. | ||
| The US seized a billion dollars, which in the time, since they seized it, it's now worth like over $3.5 billion. | ||
| So, he'd be worth a fuckload of money. | ||
| Yeah, man, he was dealing drugs on the internet. | ||
| He wasn't doing it, though. | ||
| He was providing a portal where people can deal the drugs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, it's a questionable little situation. | ||
| But, you know, if it's grown adults buying and selling... | ||
| Colorado has legal mushrooms now, right? | ||
| They're... | ||
| Decriminalized? | ||
| Yeah, they're decriminalized. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is like, what, the step right before it happens? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You think that they'll be legal soon? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| A couple years? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because I think there's... | ||
| You know, the UFC is doing studies on fighters with psilocybin. | ||
| Because psilocybin has a property called neurogenesis. | ||
| And this is Hamilton Morris, who was a podcast guest yesterday. | ||
| He's the best guy to listen to talk about that because he's a genius. | ||
| And he went into depth about what it can do. | ||
| And one of the properties of psilocybin and psilocybin mushrooms in particular is it literally helps regrow brain tissue. | ||
| It helps regrow neurons. | ||
| It's one of the only things that they've found that can do that. | ||
| So they're starting to do studies with psilocybin at John Hopkins University and fighters. | ||
| And UFC is involved in this. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What, like a micro-dose every day or something? | ||
| I don't know how they're doing that. | ||
| Yeah, they're probably still experimenting. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not sure what the protocol is. | ||
| And maybe they're taking fighters that have been retired and are like, hey, I'm experiencing some difficulties. | ||
| And then they're getting them on larger doses and therapeutic doses and helping heal them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If it heals them, then great. | ||
| Dude, if they could figure out a way to make it so that all of the damage that someone takes from fighting is reversible, that would be phenomenal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Imagine how far that could go, too, with Alzheimer's and... | ||
| I'm sure like a million different things. | ||
| Yeah, a million different things. | ||
| Do you have an idea in your head when you want to get out of the game? | ||
| I have an idea. | ||
| I think it's probably when I enter into that, like, alright, I did everything phase. | ||
| I would like to get out then. | ||
| But also, like, I really, I don't know, man. | ||
| Like, I really would like to ask Aldo, and I'd like to ask Cruz, you know, because both of those guys I see as guys that are just, like, they're obviously in it because they love it. | ||
| You know, Ream, too. | ||
| You know, Overeem, too, where it's just, like, you've been doing it for so long. | ||
| You did kind of everything that there is to do in the sport. | ||
| Like, why are you still doing it? | ||
| And, I mean, my guess is the answer is that they love it. | ||
| A lot of them still love it. | ||
| I think it's also how much money they get. | ||
| It's also where else can you get that type of paycheck in one night, of course. | ||
| What do you think Alistair was getting? | ||
| Do you know what he was getting to show? | ||
| No, probably over half. | ||
| Over half a million. | ||
| Yeah, somewhere probably in that range, right? | ||
| That'd be my guess. | ||
| Which is crazy. | ||
| Is that what he's getting? | ||
| A little more. | ||
| A little more? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How much more? | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| $750 to show. | ||
| Yeah, you can't get that anywhere else. | ||
| So every time you fight, you get $750,000 and he fights a lot. | ||
| And if you win, you get $1.5 million. | ||
| Now think about it. | ||
| Dustin made $1.2 to fight Conor. | ||
| And he's like, hey, I want some more fucking money. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like they're putting together the rematch. | ||
| I mean, he's making some money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, are they? | |
| Have you had any of this? | ||
| Dustin's Hot Sauce? | ||
| No, I want some, though. | ||
| Fucking damn good, son. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is it? | |
| Well, here, bro. | ||
| I got you covered, son. | ||
| Have yourself a bottle of Dustin Poirier's hot sauce. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I love that, dude. | ||
| Is it super spicy? | ||
| No. | ||
| Do you like spicy? | ||
| I like super spicy. | ||
| It's spicy enough. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's very good. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| But it's delicious. | ||
| It's HeatNist.com. | ||
| HeatNist.com. | ||
| And that money couldn't be spent on a nicer guy. | ||
| Did you imagine that that fight was going to go like that? | ||
| I didn't know what was going to happen. | ||
| When I looked at that fight, I was like, I think Dustin is on... | ||
| First of all, he's on a hell of a roll. | ||
| You look at what he has accomplished... | ||
| But he had a war with Dan Hooker right before that. | ||
| Like a crazy five round back and forth. | ||
| It could have been anybody's fight at any moment. | ||
| Kind of a fight. | ||
| For five fucking rounds. | ||
| And before that he had lost to Khabib. | ||
| But put Khabib in real danger. | ||
| Had Khabib in a nasty guillotine. | ||
| Fought a long hard fight with Khabib. | ||
| It's like, hmm, that guy's been active. | ||
| And you look at the who's who of the guys he's beaten. | ||
| Knocked out Justin Gagey. | ||
| You look at the guys he's... | ||
| Eddie Alvarez. | ||
| He's got a good resume. | ||
| Fucking incredible. | ||
| And over the last few years, for sure, he's grown into his frame. | ||
| And he's a big 155 now. | ||
| Whereas when he fought Conor, he was killing himself to make 145. I remember, yeah, 190. Yeah. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| And the guy's got awesome hands, you know, and I didn't think it was going to go that way, though. | ||
| That low calf kick has changed the fucking game. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's changed the game. | ||
| Gotta get your ass out of the way of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think it's going to improve everyone's footwork way more. | ||
| It's that too, but some guys have figured out a way to check it. | ||
| And a good example of that is Pedro Munoz. | ||
| You know, Pedro Munoz is in his last fight against... | ||
| Rivera? | ||
| Frankie Rivera. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jimmy. | ||
| Jimmy Rivera, sorry. | ||
| Jimmy Rivera. | ||
| Jimmy Rivera... | ||
| Jim Rivera is a guy who's known to throw a lot of calf kicks. | ||
| He fucked up Uriah Faber with a calf kick. | ||
| That was a big weapon that he was using a lot in that fight. | ||
| And if you look at that fight, and I watched it pretty closely, because I watched it twice... | ||
| Pedro Munoz fucked up Jimmy's leg with the calf kick but checked a lot of the calf kicks that Jimmy was throwing. | ||
| And if you see, when he checked it, he didn't just lift his leg out. | ||
| He turned it all the way out. | ||
| So his foot was completely sideways out. | ||
| So as Jimmy's throwing the calf kick, his foot is completely out and taking it right on the shin. | ||
| So he's not taking it on the meat of the calf at all. | ||
| Whereas Jimmy took a lot of those from Pedro on the calf itself. | ||
| Is he... | ||
| Is he putting them... | ||
| I didn't get to watch the fight. | ||
| I only watched the third round. | ||
| I forget what I was doing for one or two. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was a great fight. | |
| Yeah, that's what I heard. | ||
| You think that it put him too far out of position, though, checking like that? | ||
| It didn't. | ||
| It didn't with him, no. | ||
| No, I mean, he knew it was coming, and I'm sure he prepared for it. | ||
| See, the thing is, an American top team... | ||
| First of all, you've got this giant stable of top-tier talent, but also you've got guys who are fighting in championship fights. | ||
| You've got a lot of really good coaches... | ||
| And they're right at the cutting edge of the techniques that are used the most in the UFC. And everybody's trying to figure out a solution. | ||
| I got a text message from Kieran Fitzgibbons, the coach at CSA. He goes, look, I can tell people how to check this thing. | ||
| The idea you can't check it is fucking nonsense. | ||
| He's getting pissed. | ||
| But it's that. | ||
| That's how you check it. | ||
| You've got to turn the foot out. | ||
| You just can't take it like this. | ||
| If your foot is facing forward and you take it, you only have a few of those and you're damaged. | ||
| Yeah, it's what? | ||
| Four or five of them and then you're pretty compromised? | ||
| How about Khabib? | ||
| Khabib took a shitload of them against Justin and just kept charging at them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe that's why he charged at him, though, too. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I think you recognize that. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I kind of noticed that in Conor, too, in the Poirier fight, where I was like, I saw that his leg was hurt, and I was like, he's got to start going after him, because there's no way he can go three more rounds like this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, also with Conor... | ||
| He's southpaw to southpaw, right? | ||
| So he's got that heavy front leg. | ||
| He puts a lot of weight on the front leg. | ||
| Connor does a lot of this, where he leans in on that front leg. | ||
| It's much harder to get the leg up, much harder to move it, much harder to check. | ||
| And with Dustin being a southpaw as well, it just opens it up to that kick. | ||
| It's right there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're nasty. | ||
| I think you should get your ass out of the way, though. | ||
| Move the leg. | ||
| Move the leg. | ||
| Well, you're a guy who moves a lot. | ||
| You're a very fleet of foot. | ||
| Do you practice a lot of calf kicks in training? | ||
| Like people throwing them on me or throwing them? | ||
| Well, I guess both. | ||
| Yeah, we do them. | ||
| Do you ever use that calf guard? | ||
| You ever see that thing? | ||
| Uh-uh. | ||
| It's a new thing that guys have come up with just to protect yourself from calf kicks. | ||
| Very smart. | ||
| Go to the calf guard. | ||
| I know they have an Instagram page. | ||
| It's like a shin guard except for your calf? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Oh, that's very smart. | ||
| It's a thick, heavy pad. | ||
| It's like a tie pad. | ||
| That's attached to the outside of your calf. | ||
| So you can blast someone. | ||
| So you can do drills and blast someone with a calf kick and not fucking cripple them. | ||
| That's going to be funny. | ||
| People are going to get so good at attacking with all the parts of their body, like their shoulders. | ||
|
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You're going to start looking like the Sentry Bob. | |
| Everyone's going to go strapped in in one of those suits. | ||
| When you saw that fight with Connor and Cowboy, did you start practicing shoulders? | ||
| Did you think about that? | ||
| Tim Means was doing those a long time ago. | ||
| Dirty Bird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've seen him do that a long time ago. | ||
| It's really funny because you watch... | ||
| A technique can be part of the system and then it's not until someone that's a really high caliber fighter uses the technique that people start to get on board with it. | ||
| Tim Means was using those for a really long time. | ||
| I mean, calf kicks have been around for a really long time. | ||
| Now everyone's kind of like... | ||
| And I was kind of thinking back, and you might know this, but who was it that made those really, really popular shows? | ||
| Benson Henderson was the first guy I ever saw throw him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or one of the first guys I ever saw throw him. | ||
| There has to be someone recently, though, in the last couple of years where there was a fight where it was like, this is the fight where now everyone's bought into this idea. | ||
| Because I think as far as... | ||
| If I'm a fighter watching, I think it's really easy to get confidence when you're like, oh, this guy's one of the best guys in the world and he's doing this. | ||
| I need to do that. | ||
| But when you see someone who's maybe two or three fights into their professional career and they're doing something the same, you're like, eh, maybe it's good. | ||
| Maybe it's not. | ||
| Maybe it's not. | ||
| So I try to watch for all of those things early because I think that there's just as much to be learned from those really, really high-level, championship-level fighters as there are on the day one debut UFC fighters episode. | ||
| I think that there's just as much. | ||
| I wonder what's out there that we haven't found yet. | ||
| I know there's a lot of shit. | ||
| You want to know how I know? | ||
| So here's the calf guard. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Oh, that's cool. | ||
| Pretty dope, right? | ||
| So you can fucking dig in. | ||
| A lot of dudes are going to get torn ACLs from this thing. | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Because if you let guys like a Francis Ngannou type character tee off on your calf like that. | ||
| Pretty smart though. | ||
| Smart to have that thing where you can practice it and really dig in. | ||
| But that's the thing. | ||
| There's so much room for innovation in this sport. | ||
| People are always finding some new ways to do things. | ||
| It's exciting. | ||
| I think last year, too, I don't know, you tell me, but it feels like the sport, I mean, obviously it's gotten bigger, but man, it feels weird to not have fights on Saturday to watch. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For me, at least. | ||
| Yeah, because they're on almost every weekend. | ||
| They're on almost every single weekend. | ||
| That's the beautiful thing about the UFC's ESPN deal. | ||
| Yeah, they've been crushing it, man. | ||
| Dana White's been crushing it. | ||
| They crank out fights. | ||
| Dude, when there's not a fight on Saturday, I don't know what I'm doing on Saturdays anymore. | ||
|
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I know. | |
| It's weird. | ||
| I think it's like that for a lot of people, too, where that's ingrained in us just washing our hands and all of that shit. | ||
| Well, this weekend is bonkers. | ||
| This weekend is a bonkers card. | ||
| It's so good. | ||
| There's fights on the undercard that people forgot about. | ||
| Cruz and Casey. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| And then Dober against Islam. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's going to be sick. | ||
| That's going to be great. | ||
| So let's look at this. | ||
| Who's Song Yudong fighting? | ||
| Oh yeah, Benavid too. | ||
| Kyler Phillips. | ||
| I think he was scheduled to fight a Sun Towers something first. | ||
| That's a good fight, man. | ||
| Askar Oskarov? | ||
| That guy's good. | ||
| Yeah, he's good too. | ||
| That's a good fight. | ||
| Look, they're all ranked guys. | ||
| The entire undercard is top 15 guys almost. | ||
| No, this is one of those super cards. | ||
| It legitimately is. | ||
| Because if you go to the main card, like Jesus Luizus, I don't know what to think about that main event, man. | ||
| Blachowicz and Adesanya is such a good fight. | ||
| Yeah, did you hear Israel was saying, like, maybe he'd be 200 pounds? | ||
| Yeah, he said he might be 193. He said, don't be surprised by the way, 193. What do you think of that? | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I don't know either, bro. | ||
| I mean, it's the laws of nature, bro. | ||
| The bigger animal usually wins, right? | ||
| He's so good, though. | ||
| Yeah, he's so good. | ||
| He's such a virtuoso. | ||
| His striking is at such a high level, man. | ||
| And he said he's not going to fuck with his body and put on a lot of extra weight. | ||
| He said that shit slows you down and makes you tired easier. | ||
| And he says, I'm fine where I'm at. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, we'll find out if he's right. | ||
| If he's right, man, it's going to change a lot of people's thinking about weight classes. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I guess what's the alternative? | ||
| He just starts eating more and then he's like heavier. | ||
| Well, you got to think if you really, it's more than that, right? | ||
| You'd want to lift weights. | ||
| You don't want to just eat more. | ||
| If he's coming from the Palo Costa fight, it's not that long ago. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, how much stronger can you get in like four months though? | ||
| If you're going to go up to light heavyweight from where you're at, if you're a 185-er and you wanted to go up to 205, like a legit 205, you really want to probably get to like 220. Dude, that's a big gap. | ||
| 20 pounds is a big gap. | ||
| It's the biggest gap in the sport, other than heavyweight. | ||
| I think there should be a weight class every 10 pounds. | ||
| Every 5, you mean? | ||
| Oh, you're talking about in the heavier ones. | ||
| Oh, I think that there should be one almost every 5. It's not a bad idea. | ||
| Especially if we're going to start doing, you know, champ champ stuff. | ||
| You know, I think that it's not a bad idea to kind of maybe adopt some of that stuff in boxing and kind of, you know, why not make it every five pounds and then make, you know, two title fights every card? | ||
| Isn't it weird, though, that the UFC has the names of the weight classes that exist in boxing, but a totally different weight? | ||
| Yeah, very confusing. | ||
| Like, welterweight in boxing is 147. Walter Waite in the UFC is 170. That's a fucking giant difference, man. | ||
| Yeah, that's why I just always call them by their weights. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I always say 135, 45 because I don't even know a lot of them. | ||
| I think that's the right way to do it, honestly. | ||
| Like, call someone the 170-pound champion. | ||
| I mean, welterweight. | ||
| Like, what does that even mean? | ||
| What is a welter? | ||
| That is a really fascinating fight. | ||
| Because I'll tell you what, that Blachowicz guy, you can't zig when you should have zagged with that dude. | ||
| He hits so fucking hard. | ||
| When he knocked out Dominic Reyes like that, I was like, oh my goodness. | ||
| Even before that, you had to know, too. | ||
| Because even Dom's demeanor kind of changed, where it was like... | ||
| Ooh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Don't get hit by that. | ||
| Well, he was getting those left kicks to the body, and he had Bohovich's footprint on his ribcage. | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| It was fucking brutal. | ||
| Like, this huge black and red bruise on his ribcage. | ||
| I was like, fuck, this guy's getting crushed. | ||
| I mean, he's just a heavy bodyguard. | ||
| Bone-dense dude. | ||
|
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Yep. | |
| He looks dense, bro. | ||
| He looks like he hits hard. | ||
| But yeah, man, Israel's just so damn good. | ||
| Israel is virtuoso. | ||
| He really is. | ||
| He's a master. | ||
| A master striker. | ||
| I think he's intelligent enough to have thought of all the things that Blakovic is going to try to do. | ||
| It's a question, right? | ||
| It's like... | ||
| If the guy's coming at you and he's much larger and there's much more danger in him hitting you, what do you do differently than you would do it for a 185-pound fighter? | ||
| Like Paulo Costa. | ||
| Paulo Costa is a... | ||
| He's a destroyer, but he's a guy who beats guys up and then takes them and puts them away. | ||
| He doesn't KO anybody with one shot. | ||
| This guy KOs light heavyweights with one shot. | ||
| I mean, he puts people in another dimension when he punches them. | ||
| He hits fucking... | ||
| When he hit Rockhold, when he KOs Rockhold and Rockhold's laying his back like, what the fuck? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can see. | ||
| One punch. | ||
| That's all it takes. | ||
|
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Boom! | |
| Boom! | ||
| Especially in that littler cage, too. | ||
| That 25 foot cage, those guys are big, man. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| Yeah, it's a littler cage. | ||
| Hard to get away. | ||
| It's a difference, too. | ||
| You think if it's a circle, five feet less, there's a lot less room. | ||
| This becomes less. | ||
| And by the way, there's no one in the Apex Center. | ||
| Why can't you get a full-size cage in there? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| You got plenty of room. | ||
| There's no crowd. | ||
| We can afford it. | ||
| Yeah, what the fuck? | ||
| Adesanya is the heavy favorite with an implied win probability of 71.43%, despite Blachowicz 27-8 being the incumbent champ in the higher weight class. | ||
| A $10 bet on Adesanya to win would return a profit of just $4. | ||
| That's really surprising. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Well, he's that good. | ||
| I mean, he is that good. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| I get it. | ||
| But I think it's a dangerous fight. | ||
| Because there's moments where you're there. | ||
| There's moments when you're there. | ||
| And he's been hit. | ||
| I mean, he's been hit by Calvin Gastelum. | ||
| He's been hit by guys. | ||
| He got hit with a big shot from Yoel Romero when Romero was standing straight at him. | ||
| He absorbed it, and he was fine, but... | ||
| I think that Blachowicz guy carries a lot of real fucking danger in his fists. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's exciting. | ||
| Yeah, it's super exciting. | ||
| That's what you want to see, man. | ||
| Plus, the balls of him to go up to 205 and not even gain weight. | ||
| The balls! | ||
| And then talk about going to heavyweight, too. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| And, you know, he's talking about fighting Jon Jones, but he said recently that he doesn't want to fight Jon without a crowd. | ||
| He said he wants to wait until the crowd, so maybe around December. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| Listen, man, plenty of time to build that motherfucker up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That fight. | ||
| And then, you've got to think, by December, who knows what's happening in the heavyweight division, right? | ||
| Because we have Stipe versus Francis Ngannou, which is a crazy rematch. | ||
| When is that? | ||
| That's real soon. | ||
| It's March, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| April? | ||
|
unidentified
|
March time. | |
| 27. That's just a couple of weeks. | ||
| So you have that. | ||
| Derek Lewis, who just knocked Curtis out with one shot, that's a crazy entrance because he's beaten Francis Ngannou in a decision. | ||
| So you've got to wonder what happens right after Francis and Stipe. | ||
| If Stipe wins, does Stipe retire? | ||
| I mean, if Stipe wins, he beats Francis a second time. | ||
| Man, on paper, hard to say that guy's not the GOAT. Lost the title, regained it, defended the title more than anyone ever. | ||
| Stipe's a sleeper, man. | ||
| He's a sleeper, bro. | ||
| I don't know because I don't follow a ton, but why isn't he up there? | ||
| I feel like I hear a lot of stuff about Ngannou, but I hear a lot of stuff about Stipe. | ||
| Same thing with the first fight. | ||
| In the first fight, people felt the same way. | ||
| You know, everybody was thinking about Ngannou because he puts people into orbit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah, he's got that physique and that look and everything to him too. | ||
| But he KOs people so badly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| When he KOs them, they're so fucked. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, if you look at the fight with Alistair, when he caught him with that vicious shovel hook... | ||
| I mean, my God. | ||
| Yeah, that was pretty... | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| It's like one of the worst KOs I've ever seen. | ||
| Yeah, watching that is hard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the thing about Stipe is he's so close. | ||
| But also, they're going to be fighting that little cage, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a Vegas fight, too. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| Ooh, that's different. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because Stipe's got to get away from him. | ||
| And then also, Ngannou's going to get away from Stipe taking him down. | ||
| That's different, too. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting in the smaller cage. | ||
| I would like to see some stats on how the fights are in the 25-foot cage versus the 30-foot one. | ||
| Right, if there's more finishes. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's got to be some stats that they'll come up with. | ||
| Yeah, I bet. | ||
| If Stipe does win, I wonder if he's going to retire or I wonder if he waits around for John. | ||
| Because if he wins and then John comes up and fights him at heavyweight, holy shit, what a super fight that would be. | ||
| If Stipe could beat John... | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if John beats Stipe. | ||
|
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Woo! | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So many fights. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They need to add in another weight class in between. | ||
| 225 you think? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Something. | ||
| All of them I think need to have a weight class in between. | ||
| It's like there's too much now. | ||
| It's too much. | ||
| There's too many really exciting fights. | ||
| And the idea of the title getting held up for a year or a year and a half, that's a long-ass time, man. | ||
| Well, again, that brings us to Saturday Night as well with Amanda Nunes. | ||
| Because Amanda, she's holding two titles and defending them both simultaneously. | ||
| That's crazy, bro. | ||
| And, like, where's the real competition for her? | ||
| Like, there's no one person that stands out as being like, wow, I can't wait for Amanda to fight this person. | ||
| No, she fucking nuked Cyborg, and then everybody's like, Jesus. | ||
| And then every fight since then has been, you know, like, she's had some good fights, she's had some tough fights, but... | ||
| There's no one that stands out. | ||
| Jermaine Durand to me was a real threat standing up. | ||
| Jermaine is a vicious striker. | ||
| But it's not like people are calling for this Megan fight. | ||
| It's just that Megan is, in terms of who's available at 145, she's the best UFC contender. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that's a tough position, huh? | ||
| Tough position, too. | ||
| What's interesting in that weight class is Kayla Harrison, the judo champ that's fighting for PFL. Yeah. | ||
| Because she's a fucking tank. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a real 145. See when she flexes, dude? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I hear she has issues making 45. Or not issues, but I hear that 45 is a cut for her. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I bet it is. | ||
| I bet it is. | ||
| She looks like Drew Dober. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bro. | |
| Bro, come on. | ||
| That's Drew Dover. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She's jacked! | |
| Have you seen Dover's legs? | ||
| Oh, they're ridiculous. | ||
| Tree trunks. | ||
| Yeah, he's like a hippopotamus. | ||
| Yeah, but go back to that picture again. | ||
| Come on, son. | ||
| Look at the arms on her. | ||
| I'd be proud of those arms. | ||
| If I had arms like that, I would never stop flexing. | ||
| I'd just walk around like that everywhere. | ||
| That's how I carry my groceries. | ||
| I do not know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How tall is she, young Jamie? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| You think the day will ever come where we'll do a lot of cross-promotional stuff? | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| Or I hope she just jumps ship and joins the UFC because the UFC needs a legit 145-pound threat to Amanda Nunes. | ||
| I mean, after she knocked out Cyborg, there's been no real clamoring of someone for her to fight. | ||
| She's got people to fight in both Bantamweight and in Featherweight where people are willing to fight her. | ||
| But there's no one that really stands out. | ||
| Yeah, something needs to happen. | ||
| Who do you think the winner of Jan and Sterling should fight? | ||
| Maybe this Sanhagen kid that's been killing it lately. | ||
| I mean, who else? | ||
| There's Pedro Munoz. | ||
| He KO'd Cody Garbrandt, right? | ||
| And Cody's back in it after KO'ing his son Sal. | ||
| Cody wants TJ. Everybody wants TJ because there's a lot of money in fighting TJ. So there's a lot of fights for them. | ||
| You know, I think you. | ||
| That's what I would say. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Particularly based on those last two fights. | ||
| And if Aljamain wins, holy shit what a fight that is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, you guys fighting again a rematch for the title. | ||
| I think the division needs like a good trilogy. | ||
| You know? | ||
| What a cool trilogy. | ||
| When was the last time we had like a cool trilogy in the UFC? Right? | ||
| I guess it's going to be Poirier and McGregor probably next. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It seems like they're going to do that. | ||
| But they've got to pay Dustin. | ||
| Man can't live off hot sauce money alone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He needs that cheddar. | ||
| I mean, listen, if Khabib's not going to fight for the title, and you're not going to have an interim title, if Khabib's going to fight for the title again, I want Oliveira. | ||
| Because I feel like if anyone's going to fight for the actual title, I feel like, as a purist, Charles Oliveira has looked sensational. | ||
| You look at what he did to Tony Ferguson. | ||
| You look at what he did to Kevin Lee. | ||
| You're like, this guy is on fire right now. | ||
| His technique is so sharp. | ||
| He's so good. | ||
| I want to see Oliveira fight for the title. | ||
| But if it's not for the title, if it's just a big-ass, money, five-round fight, okay. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| You do a rematch. | ||
| Because you're not holding anything up, right? | ||
| But you gotta have a title fight eventually. | ||
| Yeah, you gotta. | ||
| You gotta. | ||
| I think Dana does not want Khabib to retire. | ||
| And he doesn't want to take the title away from him and then have him come back again for the title. | ||
| He wants him to fight again for the title. | ||
| But I just don't know if he's going to be able to convince Khabib. | ||
| Khabib, he drives a fucking Toyota truck, dude. | ||
| That guy doesn't need shit. | ||
| He lives in the same house he's always lived in. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| I don't know him. | ||
| I would really love to get to know that guy because I'm sure that he has like a ton of lessons, you know, to teach people. | ||
| But yeah, man, I get that feel where he's in it for the love, bro. | ||
| He's in it to maul, bro. | ||
| That's like one of my favorite lines of all time. | ||
| I just want to, or did he say smash or maul? | ||
| I just want to smash. | ||
| I just want to maul people. | ||
| That's all that I want to do. | ||
| Yeah, I'm on board with that. | ||
| He had one of the best quotes ever about Conor. | ||
| I want to change his face. | ||
| Change his face. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| See, yeah. | ||
| Learn it. | ||
| Like, for me, as a fighter kind of coming up... | ||
| I watch people talk like that and Tyson's one of my favorite people to talk or listen to talk also and then Kobe Bryant is a good one but like all of those guys where it's just like borderline like a little psychotic you know like borderline like wow these guys are probably fantasizing about like hurting their opponents for weeks you know oh yeah Tyson most certainly did Do you ever see that documentary on Tyson where he goes into depth about his thought process going from walking from | ||
| the dressing room, walking to the ring, and then stepping into the ring, the transformation that his mind makes? | ||
| I saw a video of it where he's like, and I'm looking at him, and I'm looking at him, and I'm waiting for him. | ||
| Find that, Jamie. | ||
| Find that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pull that up. | |
| I love it. | ||
| I love that Tyson's so open about talking about stuff like that because, I mean, I promised my mom and Erica that I would keep it, like, fairly at a low level of intensity with my, like, detail and description of, like, what goes on in my mind, too. | ||
|
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|
Why? | |
| Because it is, because it is a lot, it's, like, a lot of violent stuff like that. | ||
| So, talking on here about that? | ||
| Yeah, because I don't... | ||
| They don't want you to talk about that? | ||
| Yeah, they don't want me to sound like a fucking nutball, man. | ||
| Like a, you know? | ||
| And who knows, you know, like... | ||
| Who knows, bro? | ||
| I don't want someone to frame me later, you know? | ||
| So your mom and your girlfriend sat you down, and they go, let's have a talk. | ||
| Yeah, because I've, you know, in the past, I've brought up, like, yeah, you know, like, I just would really like to, and I, you know, I got memed for this, but, you know, I was ready to rip his heart open, or rip his chest open and start eating his heart, you know? | ||
| Like, just saying weird shit like that, it's like, my mom and girlfriend were like, please, for God's sake, just don't say anything. | ||
| Don't say that, because then the neighbors want to talk to us about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But no, man, I think that like, I don't know how many other people are on that level of like thinking, but you know, it's definitely something that I've adopted. | ||
| And I think that it's like really, a really good survival tool for this sport. | ||
| Like having a mind like that is a super good survival technique. | ||
| Is it because when the shit goes down and you're in the middle of the firefight, you're maintaining that mindset rather than trying to gather it up while it's a fight for your life? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you just have to be ready to do it, man. | ||
| You have to be ready to really, really harm someone. | ||
| If you get someone in a heel hook, you have to be ready to break it. | ||
| It's not training. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| It's not like you're going in and it's like, I maybe have this, I maybe don't, whatever, I'll let go because I don't want to hurt this person. | ||
| It's like, no, if I get that sucker, I better be ready to wrench on it. | ||
| You have to be prepared for that level of violence. | ||
| And I think that you don't really get to prepare for that unless you've done a lot of hard thinking about it. | ||
| When Curtis and Derek Lewis fought, and Derek KO'd him with that uppercut and then blasted him when he was out a couple of times, and then he's like, hey, that's Herb Dean's fault. | ||
| Like, he's right. | ||
| He is right. | ||
| He's right. | ||
| I mean, a lot of people were saying, hey, maybe he shouldn't have hit him when he was out like that. | ||
| And then he's like, what if he rises up like The Undertaker? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, man, I used to look at guys like that and be like, that guy's an asshole. | ||
| But now I get it. | ||
| Now I get it. | ||
| Everyone has to be different when you're in that cage. | ||
| It's a different set of cultural rules. | ||
| You're not operating in the same mentality that you are when you're walking... | ||
| To the supermarket. | ||
| Yeah, or walking up and down the Austin Strip. | ||
| Like, that's not where you have to be in your head when you walk into a cage, and people aren't going to understand that. | ||
| I didn't understand that for a really long time, where it was like, even someone like Cody Garbrandt and McGregor, like, you watch how they act, and sometimes you're like, man, that guy's, like, really arrogant, like this and that, and it's like, that's what he's doing because we're in, like, we're in a different set of cultural rules, you know? | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Play this. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, I've seen this. | ||
| You get volume on this? | ||
| I thought you were talking about the one where he's voicing it over, correct? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm having a real hard time finding it for some reason. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, I'm just finding the most intense Mike Tyson walkout, but it's just the one from the Spanx fight. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| I want to hear it. | ||
| The one from the Spanx fight. | ||
| He looks like demonic. | ||
| He said he had gonorrhea when he went there. | ||
| He had gonorrhea while he knocked out Michael's face. | ||
| Which is so crazy. | ||
| If you can find it, you can find it. | ||
| If not, don't worry about it. | ||
| But when he walks through, he's like, and then when I walk through the ropes, I'm a god. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That just gives you goosebumps, man. | ||
| I totally think that that's what he thinks, too. | ||
| Man, when I walk into the cage, like I said, when I feel untouchable now, that's how I feel. | ||
| Do it from the beginning. | ||
| Take it from the beginning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Fuck no. | |
| As soon as I come into the ring... | ||
| No, from the beginning. | ||
| No, stop it. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| Oh, here it is. | ||
| While I'm in the dressing room, five minutes before I come out, my gloves are laced up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm breaking my gloves down. | |
| I'm pushing the lever on the back of my gloves. | ||
| I'm breaking the middle of the gloves where my knuckle could pierce through the leg. | ||
| I feel my knuckle piercing against the tight leather gloves on the Everlast boxing gloves. | ||
| When I come out, I have supreme confidence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm scared to death. | |
| I'm totally afraid. | ||
| I'm afraid of everything. | ||
| I'm afraid of losing. | ||
| I'm afraid of being humiliated. | ||
| But I'm totally confident. | ||
| The closer I get to the ring, the more confidence I get. | ||
| The closer, the more confidence I get. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The closer, the more confidence I get. | |
| All during my training, I've been afraid of this man. | ||
| I thought this man might be capable of beating me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've dreamed of him beating me. | |
| But I always stayed afraid of him. | ||
| But the closer I get to the ring, I'm more confident. | ||
| Once I'm in the ring, I'm a god. | ||
| No one could beat me. | ||
| I walk around the ring, but I never take my eyes off my opponent. | ||
| I keep my eyes on him, even if he's ready and pumping. | ||
| He can't wait to get his hands on me as well. | ||
| I keep my eyes on him, I keep my eyes on him, I keep my eyes on him. | ||
| Then once I see a chink in his arm, boom! | ||
| One of his eyes may move, and then I know I have him. | ||
| Then when he comes to the center of the ring, Jesus. | ||
|
unidentified
|
During the fight I'm supremely confident. | |
| I'm moving my head, he's throwing punches. | ||
| I'm making a miss and I'm countering. | ||
| I'm hitting him to the body, I'm punching real hard. | ||
| And I'm punching him, when I'm punching him, I know he's not able to take my punches. | ||
|
unidentified
|
One, two, three punches. | |
| I'm throwing him punches in bunches. | ||
| He goes down, he's out. | ||
| I'm victorious. | ||
| Mike Tyson, greatest fighter ever lived. | ||
| Yeah, bro. | ||
| That's how you learn how to be intense, man. | ||
| He's so fun to listen to talk. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| He's so fun to listen to talk. | ||
| When I got him fired up, last time I was talking to him, he started talking about Conquerors. | ||
| He started talking about Genghis Khan, and he realized how much he studied those people. | ||
| I read a lot about those people also. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I like studying war strategy, and he brought up Napoleon and all of those guys. | ||
| Yep, I'm... | ||
| I like to read when I'm in camp. | ||
| Like, I'll read, like, as much, you know, war strategy and shit on war and stuff on combat and psychology of combat and all of that stuff. | ||
| I'll read that stuff because I really believe, man, like, you can really program that in your brain, you know? | ||
| So, like, the first 30, 40 minutes of my day when I'm in training camp and outside, but I'm just reading different things when I'm outside of training camp is, like, war stuff, man, because you can really program. | ||
| I think you can program yourself to not only, like... | ||
| It's important in performance, man, but fighting is so much bigger than just what's happening in the cage, man. | ||
| It's a place. | ||
| It's a certain environment. | ||
| It's a certain place that you need to put yourself in that just is where you need to be, in my opinion, to be at the level that I'm competing at now. | ||
| So when you say war books, what kind of books are you reading? | ||
| I'm really enjoying Robert Greene's The 33 Strategies of War, which kind of just covers like a lot of, you know, each chapter is a different strategy of war. | ||
| And I'll read each chapter and, you know, sit and kind of think about like, okay, how can I use this in my arena? | ||
| You know, because not a lot of it is just on the actual combat part. | ||
| What we're doing, man, because I get a lot of praise or compliments on how technical I am. | ||
| I could give a shit less how technical I am. | ||
| I could care less about how good of a striker I am. | ||
| I could care less about how skilled I am or any of that. | ||
| What I want to be is a master of war. | ||
| That extends way past technical part. | ||
| That extends into the level of intensity that you're bringing in when you walk into a fight. | ||
| It extends into how you're living each day in day life and how your relationships go. | ||
| And, uh, it's, it's way outside the cage, man. | ||
| So, for me, in camp, I'm not a very fun guy to be around, you know, like, because I'm programming myself in order to, you know, be as war-minded as possible. | ||
| And that, you know, like I said, that shit don't work in real life. | ||
| So, uh, I'm trying to find nice balance in it, but, uh, It's just different, man. | ||
| When you're reading those things, I feel it in my bones, man. | ||
| I'm just a different person. | ||
| The way I see things, the way I view things is just geared towards how do I get what I want through all of these things. | ||
| And this is something that you're programming your mind to think like. | ||
| Yep, definitely. | ||
| It's just something where – I mean books are just brain food and I spend my first 30 or 45 minutes of every day reading something like that because I think it gets me in that gear. | ||
| It gets me – It just gets me in that war brain like you see with Tyson. | ||
| It gets me going in that direction. | ||
| And it's kind of a peaking process as camp kind of goes through. | ||
| In the beginning, obviously, it doesn't need to be too intense. | ||
| Around like four or five weeks out, it's pretty intense. | ||
| About three weeks away, I don't really care too much about what else is happening in life or in the world or whatever. | ||
| It's solely like that night. | ||
| And then two weeks away is a little bit more intense. | ||
| One week away, my entire... | ||
| Fight week, I don't do anything. | ||
| I do my media, but I literally just lay in bed and I imagine how I want the fight to go. | ||
| What's going to go right? | ||
| What's going to go wrong? | ||
| When things start to go wrong, how am I going to react to that? | ||
| It's literally just me laying in bed. | ||
| Every once in a while, I'll go hang out with my corners. | ||
| I'll watch TV, something stupid, for an hour with them. | ||
| I'll go back to my room. | ||
| I'll do the same thing again. | ||
| It's this peaking process that you... | ||
| That I never knew anything about until I started kind of like gearing my mind for war and talking with people and talking with my sports psychologist and all of that. | ||
| It's a peaking process, man. | ||
| So that when I walk into the arena that night, now, you know, now that I feel like I'm a new fighter, I'm ready to flip the switch like this. | ||
| You know, like when I'm getting my hands taped, I'm sitting there and I'm like, Let me put my hands on someone. | ||
| And I think that that's from the reading of the books, from the peaking process, from the visualizations, from having thoughts of wanting to really put your hands on someone to put it nicely and laying in bed and not thinking about anything else except for how dominant you're going to be in this fight. | ||
| It's a whole new thing for me now, man. | ||
| In the last couple of fights, it's for sure flourished. | ||
| So before that, on the week of the fight, how would you, in your previous fights, how would you handle the week of the fight? | ||
| Distract myself. | ||
| I see that all the time with fighters too, is they'll try to distract themselves as much as possible. | ||
| And if you don't give yourself time, whether it's a week before, 10 weeks before, whatever, if you don't give yourself time to sit with those thoughts that are happening inside your head, they're going to come out. | ||
| And they're going to come out 10 minutes before the fight, 15 minutes before the fight, and you're not going to have time to deal with those. | ||
| In my belief. | ||
| So I don't try to distract myself. | ||
| I sit there and I watch everything that's happening in my brain and I'll say, okay, yeah, that's good. | ||
| I don't really want that idea. | ||
| I don't want that thought in there. | ||
| So let's not, you know, you don't have any business being here. | ||
| Like one, I think, really good example is the morning I woke up to fight Frankie. | ||
| And I've had this happen in the past too and I didn't know how to deal with it. | ||
| I just didn't feel like fighting. | ||
| I don't know if it's because of the moment or because I think after doing a lot of thinking about it, I think it's that my Eastern way of thinking about things where it's like no desire, no attachment, no this. | ||
| It wants to make your life feel really small. | ||
| It wants you to have goals that are this big because anything this big you're going to have to suffer that much more for. | ||
| That's in me. | ||
| I did a lot of time programming that in me, but the day of the fight isn't for that. | ||
| The day of the fight is for me to be wired in on getting the job done. | ||
| That morning of the fight, I just didn't feel like fighting. | ||
| I think it's just because I tried to make it little. | ||
| You try to tell yourself all kinds of things like, if you lose, nothing really changes. | ||
| Blah, blah, blah. | ||
| You start making excuses for yourself. | ||
| And I think that that's why I try to make things small. | ||
| But I remember I was writing in my journal that morning because I couldn't get the thought out of my head. | ||
| I couldn't get it out where I was like, man, I got to fight later. | ||
| Like, that's a really intense thing. | ||
| Like, I don't know if... | ||
| I don't really feel like doing that. | ||
| And then I started writing in my journal. | ||
| And it's just another demon in your head that wants to make your life this big. | ||
| When really, like... | ||
| We're not made to be this big. | ||
| We're made to do what we want with our lives. | ||
| And that little demon in there, fuck that guy. | ||
| Fuck that guy. | ||
| And I really believe if I tried to distract myself that whole day and not think about that, that demon would have popped up and been like, hey, guess what, bitch? | ||
| We're happening 10-15 minutes before the fight. | ||
| You're feeling small. | ||
| And like, I don't do that anymore. | ||
| I sit there in bed and I just think and I watch my thoughts and I just make sure that I'm 100% geared and ready to go. | ||
| Wow, that's heavy. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| That's going to be some kid's version of that Mike Tyson speech right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just like a little bit more of a nasally voice. | |
| A little bit paler skin. | ||
| But it's also like, you know, you're talking about some real shit. | ||
| Like the little mind games that your head plays on you. | ||
| Where your head's like, ah, it doesn't matter if you win or lose. | ||
| It's no big deal. | ||
| Your head tries to diminish the moment. | ||
| Because confronting the reality of what you're about to do, it's so difficult to do that you can be crippled just by the anxiety of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's easier to be small than it is to be big. | ||
| I used to name my egos. | ||
| I used to name them because I would watch them and it'd be like similar shit popping up over and over again. | ||
| So I used to just name all of the voices so that I didn't attach myself to me. | ||
| The one that would get pissed off a lot, I would name him Samson. | ||
| So whenever I would catch myself being really angry, I'd be like... | ||
| Nah, not today, Samson. | ||
| Maybe a little bit later, like maybe during practice. | ||
| But right now, not right now. | ||
| And then I'd have Charlie. | ||
| Charlie wanted to go out all the time and he wanted to have fun and he didn't want to train hard. | ||
| And I named Charlie and I told Charlie to go away a bunch of times. | ||
| And I had a bunch of names for all of these little demons inside of my head that I would just have to tell to fuck off sometimes. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You named them. | ||
| It makes it easier that way. | ||
| Because then you're not identifying that it's me that's thinking this. | ||
| It's just some stupid person. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| It helped me a lot. | ||
| It helped me a lot. | ||
| How do you know who's who? | ||
| Any thought is someone. | ||
| I think even the good thoughts are the ones that are the most dangerous because they're the ones that you want to have, but they might not be the healthiest because they can get greedy and they can get hungry. | ||
| For example, I want shit. | ||
| I don't like nice things. | ||
| I'm not big on all of that stuff, but I want to set myself up and my future family up with a good life. | ||
| And sometimes that voice even gets a little bit greedy where it's like, I'm looking for things to invest in. | ||
| I'm looking for, you know, how much more can I get on my next contract, this and that. | ||
| And I haven't named that one because that's kind of a new one because now I'm actually making some money. | ||
| But I haven't named that one. | ||
| But even that one, I'll be like, not today, man. | ||
| We're a little bit too close to the fight. | ||
| I don't need to be stressing about where I'm investing my money. | ||
| Right now, it's just about, you know, taking care of business. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, when you say that the good ideas, they can be a problem, too. | ||
| The good thoughts. | ||
| The good thoughts, yeah. | ||
| I see people do that all the time. | ||
| So, for example, I think that when you interview a fighter and you hear them not acknowledge anything that their opponent does well, I think that that's, you know, you... | ||
| That's a good thought that can sabotage you later. | ||
| So if I'm like, okay, well, Sterling's a really good grappler, but he can't strike. | ||
| It's like, that's not true. | ||
| He can strike, but me telling myself that is a good thought for me. | ||
| It maybe makes me a little bit less anxious, but is it true? | ||
| No. | ||
| So why am I telling myself that good thing? | ||
| It's only so that I can get a little bit less stressed, but it's not a good thing because it's not true. | ||
| Right, that makes sense. | ||
| It's those good ones, man, the good ones. | ||
| Like, for example, I'm on a roll right now. | ||
| Like, I knock Frankie out. | ||
| It's hard for me sometimes to not feel like the man right now, a little bit. | ||
| Like, my ego wants to feel like the man. | ||
| But it's like, nah, man, not today. | ||
| You know, not today. | ||
| We got training today. | ||
| But you should feel a little bit like the man. | ||
| Should you? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Just a touch. | ||
| Well, should. | ||
| I mean, I definitely do, so that's not an issue. | ||
| There you go, though. | ||
| Well, you're admitting it. | ||
| There's something to it. | ||
| It's like you're recognizing and acknowledging that all this hard work and even these mindsets that you put yourself in where you do grapple with reality, it's working. | ||
| It's clearly working in two big fights in a row. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But also I think that that little voice that makes you feel like the man, if he gets, just like any voice, if it gets carried away, it's going to lead to me not doing what I need to do in order for me to keep excelling and keep doing better and better. | ||
| And I think that... | ||
| It's easy to ride a nice wave. | ||
| Like we were talking about earlier, when you lose, you never want that to happen again. | ||
| But when you're winning, you're kind of coasting. | ||
| You're doing good. | ||
| It's not easy to make a change when you're winning. | ||
| But changes still need to happen when you're winning. | ||
| That's the problem, right? | ||
| When everything's going great, then things are kind of comfortable. | ||
| And when things are comfortable, you're not growing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it feels good. | ||
| It feels good to be comfortable. | ||
| But it's not good. | ||
| It's not good to be comfortable. | ||
| Especially in this sport. | ||
| You'll get fucked up in this sport if you get too comfortable. | ||
| I think it's probably in almost anything that's difficult. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Comfort is probably a bad idea. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| All the time, man. | ||
| And maybe I have an issue of taking a breath, smelling the flowers, because I want to win a world title. | ||
| I want to reign as the champ for a really long time. | ||
| That's why I have my heart set on. | ||
| So it's really hard for me to just pause and be like, all right, cool. | ||
| I just had a really great knockout against Frankie. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| That's really hard for me to do. | ||
| I know that it's important, but... | ||
| Nah, man. | ||
| I want a world title really bad. | ||
| So you are sitting here waiting on the results of this Saturday, and you're likely in the running. | ||
| There's just a couple other people that are in the running. | ||
| There's Pedro Munoz. | ||
| There's, again, we talked about... | ||
| There's no way TJ's going to come back and get a direct shot at the title, especially after getting popped for EPO. So he's going to have to beat at least one person, probably a couple people. | ||
| Um, where do you see the division right now? | ||
| When you look at that, like, you are likely one of the next guys in line for the title. | ||
| Would you be willing to fight one more time for the title? | ||
| Are you going to hold out for a title shot? | ||
| Like, what's your thoughts? | ||
| I don't like the idea of holding out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um... | |
| No, it would be, you know, if they give me the title shot, great. | ||
| If I have to win another one, I'm cool with that too. | ||
| You know, I want it to be for a number one contender spot, and I feel like the only people that are really in that conversation is probably Garbrandt and probably TJ. But even Garbrandt, right, who has one victory after losing three in a row. | ||
| And then, I mean, even TJ coming back from a two-year suspension. | ||
| It's like, you know, should he even? | ||
| So at this point, I really think that I'm the man. | ||
| You know, like, I'm the guy that should be getting called out. | ||
| What's your ranking right now? | ||
| Two. | ||
| I've been two since I beat Marlon. | ||
| Yeah, Sterling's one. | ||
| And then when I beat Marlon, I became two. | ||
| I stayed number two when I beat Frankie. | ||
| So it's got to be you next. | ||
| I mean, as a purist, that's how I look at it. | ||
| As a purist, yeah. | ||
| And then where's Pedro? | ||
| Pedro Munoz. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Where's he still? | |
| I think he was maybe 7 or 8 before Rivera. | ||
| And after the Rivera fight, where's he at? | ||
| Okay, so Rob Font. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Rob Font's a bad motherfucker, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, yeah. | |
| Rob Font was good. | ||
| God damn, what a stacked division. | ||
| What a stacked division. | ||
| And Jose's still number 5. Interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What a fucking division, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, for me, I'm definitely open, man. | ||
| I mean, the UFC has been talking about doing a me and TJ fight. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I'm on board with that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know why it wasn't really him in February. | ||
| Because he was off of his suspension. | ||
| I was the number two guy in February. | ||
| I don't really know why it was him in February. | ||
| Anyways, man, I think that I should be either next for the title or given someone like the UFC has been talking about me and TJ, I'm open to that fight also. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So there's TJ, there's Cody, there's Rob Font. | ||
| Rob Font looks like a goddamn assassin now too. | ||
| He's very good. | ||
| So many good fighters, man. | ||
| What a crazy division. | ||
| People are so good. | ||
| There's so many good guys. | ||
| You can kind of forget about Rob Font until you see the rankings and you're like, Jack, Jesus. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He'll be one of those guys, though. | ||
| He'll be like a me. | ||
| He just needs two good finishes over these top guys. | ||
| Who did he just KO? He just KO'd Marlon. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So he's already got one. | ||
| He just needs... | ||
| Yeah, Marlon. | ||
| Imagine going back to the first round of that Cejudo fight. | ||
| Marlon looked like a fucking world beater. | ||
| Looked like he was going to be the man. | ||
| Looks like the man. | ||
| You know, he's chiseled. | ||
| Guy's built like a Greek god. | ||
| Yeah, we were watching. | ||
| Me and my coach, Christian, we were watching that fight somewhere. | ||
| And, uh... | ||
| It was him and Cejudo that were fighting, and I forget when this was. | ||
| It must have not been too long ago, but Christian goes, yeah, man, you win that fight. | ||
| And I was like, what? | ||
| I was like, you said that with so much confidence, you know? | ||
| And I think that I can probably beat anyone, but I wouldn't answer that question with that much confidence if I was him, you know? | ||
| Why do you think you have so much confidence in you? | ||
| I think, you know, for me, like I said, I try to... | ||
| I don't know if I try to keep my confidence low, but I try to remind myself that I'm not where I want to be. | ||
| I don't want those good voices coming in too much. | ||
| I don't need them. | ||
| They don't help me at times. | ||
| They help me at other times, but I think that I don't really care to be too confident. | ||
| I think I care to be really good and... | ||
| And that's what I care about. | ||
| So I don't really see myself as a... | ||
| Like a phenomenal fighter, to be honest. | ||
| Like, I know that that's, comparatively, I probably am one of the best. | ||
| But in my head, I'm like, I have a picture of what a perfect fighter of me looks like, and I'm nowhere near that person. | ||
| And I compare myself to that person. | ||
| I don't compare myself to the other people in the division. | ||
| To me, I compare myself to that perfect fighter that I have in my own head. | ||
| Do you have a favorite fighter from the past that you like watching? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dude, I used to be a huge fan of all those WEC guys. | ||
| Max Roni, Cruz, Faber, Aldo, of course. | ||
| Aldo is one of my favorites. | ||
| All of those guys from the past. | ||
| My probably all-time favorite fighter, though, is Andy Sauer. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| I mean, as far as kickboxing goes, definitely one of my favorite fighters. | ||
| So I went out in 2014 when I was still an amateur. | ||
| I was on the U.S. team for the WKA team. | ||
| And we went and competed. | ||
| And afterwards, because I used to train with Dwayne Ludwig also a little bit, I was like, hey, Dwayne, do you think I could go train with Andy for a couple weeks? | ||
| And he was like, yeah, yeah, we'll set it up. | ||
| And he actually did set it up. | ||
| And then, like, here I am after I fought in the WKAs, like, a couple days later, like, staying at Andy's neighbor's house, getting picked up by him at the little train station or however I got there. | ||
| And I was like, this guy really picked me up from the train station, you know? | ||
| Like, I was 20, 22 years old. | ||
| And I was like, damn, this guy is awesome, you know? | ||
| And he was, like, my favorite fighter of all time. | ||
| That was, like, one of my favorite moments in my whole life is, like, seeing him pick me up in this, like, ugly-ass van. | ||
| I was like, this guy, is this really happening, you know? | ||
| That's pretty dope. | ||
| Yeah, it was dope. | ||
| I wish kickboxing was more popular today. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I do, too. | ||
| It was huge, K1 days. | ||
| Yeah, in Japan. | ||
| Yeah, I was a little bit too young, but I'm sure you really, really appreciated that, huh? | ||
| Oh, man, I can only imagine. | ||
| Yeah, to me, it's a bummer that Glory never really caught on. | ||
| I mean, I still watch the events, but, you know, you gotta buy it through some fucking janky app. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Like, last time it barely worked. | ||
| You had to do it online, and it was annoying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like, I want it to be on pay-per-view, like regular TV, like, you know, like the UFC is. | ||
| I hate all those apps, bro. | ||
| We gotta do some of it. | ||
| Consolidate the apps, man. | ||
| Consolidate, at least the fighting ones. | ||
| This was on Fight, F-I-T-E. Yeah, I know that one. | ||
| There should be more of a demand for high-level Muay Thai and high-level kickboxing. | ||
| Like, I don't get it. | ||
| It's so exciting. | ||
| One does an okay job. | ||
| Yeah, they do a good job. | ||
| One puts on some badass fights. | ||
| Yeah, they do. | ||
| I don't know how well they're paying their guys, but they put on some badass fights. | ||
| They pay them well. | ||
| They got Nikki Holtzkin is going to fight John Wayne Parr. | ||
| Oh, sick. | ||
| After John Wayne Parr got a fake hip. | ||
| Seriously? | ||
| Yeah, he got his hip replaced. | ||
| He's got his hip resurfaced. | ||
| They completely resurfaced his hip and now he's throwing kicks again and everything. | ||
| You can get your hip replaced now and fight. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| I know. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, the cap of his hip was so worn out. | ||
| He sent me the medical list of all the shit that was wrong with his hip. | ||
| And you're like, oh my god, it was like torn labrum, torn this, torn that, arthritis, cartilage damage, like everything's all fucked up in there. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Just from years, you know, John is heavy with the left leg, throws a lot of left leg kicks, he just wore his shit out. | ||
| It was just completely torn apart. | ||
| Is he the guy that took the picture on Instagram of like all of the cuts on his face? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Lead cards announced for all one on TNT events. | ||
| So it's on TNT? Yeah. | ||
| Starting in April, they're going to have four cards that says kickboxing. | ||
| Is that kickboxing? | ||
| Kickboxing? | ||
| Maybe it's all of it, I guess. | ||
| I typed in kickboxing and I put it on the whole. | ||
| Well, they are doing some kickboxing with small gloves, and that's the fight with Nikki Holtzkin. | ||
| What do you think of that? | ||
| You like that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why not? | |
| I like it. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| At first, I was like, this is weird, but I mean, why not? | ||
| If they're not poking each other in the eyes every 10 seconds, then why not? | ||
| So, what is this? | ||
| Flyweight World Championship, Marais vs. | ||
| Johnson. | ||
| How do they both have belts? | ||
| I don't watch one enough to know what's going on. | ||
| I know Mighty Mouse. | ||
| Mighty Mouse is still the fucking man. | ||
| Out of all the people that I've ever watched fight, he's one of the best examples of martial arts excellence that I've ever seen. | ||
| He's the GOAT, in my opinion, for me. | ||
| Technically, yeah. | ||
| And even just achievements-wise, like what he was able to do when he was at the top of his game. | ||
| And just how he's winning, too. | ||
| He's just crushing people when he wins. | ||
| Yeah, who the fuck did he slam and go... | ||
| For the armbar. | ||
| Yeah, who is it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um... | |
| God damn it. | ||
| I see him. | ||
| I see his face. | ||
| He picked him up, slammed him, and threw him right into an armbar. | ||
| I'm like, Jesus Christ. | ||
| At that point, he was just showing off. | ||
| And he told me he does that all the time in training. | ||
| Ray Bork. | ||
| Ray Bork. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm like, my God. | ||
| Imagine having that level of confidence. | ||
| We're just like, I'm going to do this shit in this fight against some of the best guys in the world. | ||
| In the Cejudo fight, it's like, yeah, Cejudo beat him, but... | ||
| He didn't beat him enough for like, you can't, like, why are you leaving? | ||
| I thought so too. | ||
| I thought so too. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I guess he got a really great offer at 1FC and the UFC said, go ahead. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I think the UFC is in this weird position with the flyweight where they're not 100% on board. | ||
| And Davidson Figueredo is a great champion right now, so they're excited about that. | ||
| And he was supposed to fight Cody. | ||
| Cody says he can make 125, so it's not a problem. | ||
| I believe it. | ||
| I think so too. | ||
| I fought on the same card as Cody. | ||
| He looks like he doesn't, you know, deplete himself too much. | ||
| No, I don't think he does. | ||
| You said it's not going to be much of a problem. | ||
| That's exciting. | ||
| If Cody can get down there and fight Figueiredo, that's a big fight. | ||
| But they're doing the Brandon Moreno rematch with Davis and Figueiredo, so Cody's going to stay at 35 for now. | ||
| That's something that the flyweight division needs though. | ||
| When TJ went down, I don't think TJ really could make that. | ||
| He made the weight, but he really almost killed himself. | ||
| I fought on the same card and his face did not look like a face that should be fighting the next day. | ||
| He looked like a guy who just got out of a fucking concentration camp. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He looked terrible. | ||
| He looked like a guy who, like, was starving in the woods, and they found him. | ||
| Like, they rescued him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Yeah, like a little leathery. | ||
| Well, it just looks like everything was just sunken in. | ||
| There was nothing left of him. | ||
| It's just a terrible thing to do to your body, and then 24 hours later, you rehydrate and have a cage fight. | ||
| And for him, it was such a depletion that it wasn't even just dehydrating. | ||
| He said he went into anemia. | ||
| He was anemic. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons why he took EPO. Maybe that's an excuse. | ||
| But, you know, he said he couldn't get out of bed. | ||
| And meanwhile, he's supposed to be training for the biggest fight of his life. | ||
| If you can't get out of bed, you probably shouldn't be fighting in that weight class. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Especially against a beast like Cejudo. | ||
| Cejudo's a savage. | ||
| He's a savage, bro. | ||
| He really is. | ||
| He's one of those guys, and that's why I asked you earlier about you try to read people's demeanors when they walk into the cage. | ||
| He's one guy that I walk into the cage and I'm like, this guy's done this a million times. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, he's done it a million times through his Olympic career and just fighting in general. | ||
| I was like, Yeah, this guy's been there. | ||
| And he's another guy too where a loss turned him into who he is. | ||
| That loss to Mighty Mouse. | ||
| Mighty Mouse stopped him. | ||
| He realized, okay, I just got to the top of the mountain. | ||
| This dude really is the fucking man. | ||
| I have another level to achieve. | ||
| Now I have to get better. | ||
| You need him sometimes, man. | ||
| They hurt, but you need him sometimes. | ||
| It is really interesting that the mind, like, there's no clear, you can't just go, well, this is the work that you have to do, this is the mindset that you have to put in. | ||
| No, it's like a constant wrestling match with your consciousness. | ||
| Constant wrestling match with seeking comfort and avoiding injury and avoiding, I don't want to be tired, I don't want to push myself. | ||
| It's this constant battle of you trying to get control of your emotions and your mind and your body. | ||
| Yeah, it's non-stop, man. | ||
| Especially when you're losing... | ||
| Bro, like, I swear for 10 weeks, or I guess so I do 10-week camps, for 9 weeks, every single day I'm sore, and every single day I'm like, today is probably going to suck a little bit, you know, for 9 weeks. | ||
| And then that last week I tried to taper, and even then I'm like losing weight and having a sweat and stuff, so it's even shitty then. | ||
| And then I wake up on the fight and I'm like, okay, whew, I finally feel like an athlete, you know? | ||
| What do you weigh right now? | ||
| I'm probably, I'm a little bit bigger right now, so I'm probably a little under 160. Whoa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like 58. I would guess that I'm probably 58. I don't check when I'm out of camp. | ||
| But in camp, I'm probably, you know, training good and like eating still what I want. | ||
| I'm probably about 53. And so how hard does that cut? | ||
| I try to get to 148 a week before and then I just lose the last 13. So really I'm going from 53 of like being in good shape and eating okay, losing five pounds and then cutting that last 13 that week. | ||
| And are you depleting, are you doing that water load thing where you drink a lot of water? | ||
| Yeah, so I'll do the trifecta meals. | ||
| The UFC sends out trifecta meals to me for that camp. | ||
| And then, yeah, so nine days away. | ||
| So I guess the golden rule now, and who knows, is probably different for everyone, but you're supposed to do... | ||
| A pound of water for every pound that you have to lose when you're 10 days away. | ||
| So if I'm 14 pounds heavy then I have to lose each gallon I think is 8 pounds. | ||
| So I'm drinking about a little bit over a gallon and a half because that would be about 14 pounds 10 days away in water. | ||
| That way I can flush through all of that water is going in me so I have it to lose. | ||
| Do you have a weight cutting coach? | ||
| I used to work with this woman named Laylee. | ||
| She's the one that got me on that. | ||
| When I worked with her, those were the smoothest, easiest cuts that I've ever had. | ||
| Now I'm using Trifecta, but I'm still doing a lot of the things that Laylee taught me in those years. | ||
| And so Trifecta, do they give you the meals based on your weight class, the calorie output, where you're at in your training? | ||
| Like how do you know? | ||
| No, it takes some tapering or tampering. | ||
| Like I have to do – sometimes I can eat a little bit more and sometimes I can't some weeks and I just cut the portion. | ||
| I give it to the dogs if I'm a little bit heavier and I need to do that. | ||
| Just based on the scale? | ||
| Just based on the scale, yep. | ||
| And I'm pretty good at like going to bed and being like, I'll probably weigh this tomorrow just depending on like how hungry or how hard I've worked out that day. | ||
| So I've got it down pretty good. | ||
| You know, honestly, I think that the reload is the most important part or maybe not most important part because I don't cut an incredible amount of weight. | ||
| It's not like I'm doing 20 in a week or whatever, but... | ||
| I think it's really underrated how you put the weight back on and what you're putting in your body. | ||
| And the UFC does a really good job of giving us all of our shakes and stuff after the weight cuts so that we're actually feeling good when we walk into the cage. | ||
| That is very nice that the UFC provides all that. | ||
| What is your process? | ||
| You weigh in. | ||
| You're good. | ||
| You weigh in. | ||
| They give you three drinks. | ||
| Two in shaker bottles. | ||
| One in a two liter thing. | ||
| It's like a bunch of sugar. | ||
| I'm forgetting the name of the sugar supplement, but it's pretty much just like a sugar that gets absorbed by your muscles a lot quicker. | ||
| It has that, it has obviously some electrolytes, some aminos, and then some other stuff that I'm not sure about. | ||
| They give you a list, but I'm blanking on it now. | ||
| Is that in shake one? | ||
| Shake two is something a little bit different and then they give you that bottle of water with pretty much similar things. | ||
| So it's a lot of amino acids, obviously a lot of electrolytes and a lot of sugar because your muscles are full of sugar. | ||
| You don't want to just, you know, it's not about pounding a bunch of water. | ||
| It's about pounding a bunch of water that's going to go back into your muscles of what your muscles need. | ||
| And they provide this to all the athletes? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Wow. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Yeah, it's cool too. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| I feel good going into the fights. | ||
| The guy Charles that works there is just a really knowledgeable and easy guy to work with. | ||
| He really... | ||
| Tells you exactly what to do and it's easy when a scientist is telling you exactly what to do because before, it's like, should I eat pizza instead of drink this gallon of water? | ||
| And it's like, I'm definitely choosing the pizza. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| The UFC's Performance Institute, what they've done by setting that place up is pretty extraordinary. | ||
| To have a place where fighters can choose to go down there and do their camps. | ||
| You have world-class coaches and people that understand strength and conditioning and recovery and all these different ways to keep your body fit and healthy for a fight. | ||
| And then also to analyze where your weight cuts at, where your body fat's at, what's your VO2 max. | ||
| Having one A one-stop shop with a big, giant, state-of-the-art facility they developed is really fucking incredible. | ||
| Yeah, all of that stuff. | ||
| All of that stuff with the rings and the bands and stuff that measure your heart rate and stuff. | ||
| I think it's just going to make athletes get this much better, man. | ||
| Talking about the evolution of the sport, especially in the sport of fighting, I don't think that we've seen too much actual scientific stuff. | ||
| Because there's probably just not as much money as the NFL and the NBA and athletics and other areas. | ||
| And the players of those sports have a lot more money to spend on those types of things. | ||
| But I think that we're going to start to see money get dumped into the sport of MMA. And then we're going to really start understanding the science of cutting weight and how to put muscle on and what type of muscle to put on and all of that jazz. | ||
| Now, did you ever rehydrate with IVs before they had an IV ban? | ||
| I did once and it didn't really... | ||
| It was like when I was an amateur too. | ||
| It was okay. | ||
| Do you think that rehydrating orally is just as good or better? | ||
| I mean, I've only done the IV once, so I guess I can only speak to that one experience. | ||
| But, I mean, I don't ever feel like I'm dehydrated when I walk into the cage, you know? | ||
| Like, I'm usually walking in at, like, now 51 or 52, where before it was, like, 47, 48, just because I wasn't doing all of the posture stuff and, you know, getting certain things strong. | ||
| But now I'm walking in at, like, yeah, 51, 52. Yeah. | ||
| What would you think about a fight with no weight cuts? | ||
| I'm okay with it. | ||
| Do you think that we're ever going to get to a point where people stop doing that, where they can figure out a way to stop fighters from cutting weight? | ||
| I think when the sport gets mainstream enough, I think it's going to. | ||
| Because I think that there's going to be a lot of... | ||
| Eventually, man, as much as I hate to say it, like... | ||
| I mean, it's already happened, but some guys, you know, they have to pull out of fights because they're cutting weight and fainting and all of that stuff. | ||
| You know, eventually, if the sport is going to be, you know, on the level of the NFL and all of that, I think it's going to be where they have to kind of take that out or else it's going to be too brutal for, like, the common audience to watch. | ||
| Didn't it just happen with Bobby Green? | ||
| Didn't he just pull out of a fight because of a weight cut? | ||
| I think he blacked out the weight cut. | ||
| I'm pretty sure. | ||
| Is that why the Munoz and Rivera fight got cancelled the first time? | ||
| Because that time that they fought last wasn't their first time scheduled. | ||
| I think it was before. | ||
| Well, they fought once before. | ||
| They fought in like 2000... | ||
| 16 or something? | ||
| Yeah, I think that they were scheduled, though, a couple weeks before this last fight that they had, and I think it was, maybe, you know, I'm not sure, but I think it was maybe a scenario. | ||
| But yeah, man, that stuff happens, you know, like, you can't be passing out, cutting weight. | ||
| That's too brutal for people. | ||
| If we want, like, the mass population watching, I think that that's probably a little too brutal. | ||
| It seems like something, to me it seems like almost it's one thing they've been doing this way for so long that they just keep doing it. | ||
| Whereas if they came along today and there was a blank slate and they said, alright, do you think it's a good idea if the fighters just dehydrate the fuck out of themselves 24 hours before they fight? | ||
| You'd be like... | ||
| That's dumb. | ||
| Why would I do that? | ||
| Why would they do that? | ||
| That's terrible. | ||
| They're about to fight. | ||
| They're working to get their body in optimum condition. | ||
| It's one of the worst things you could do to yourself is dehydrate yourself. | ||
| Your body's like, what, 60-something percent water? | ||
| Why the fuck would you do that? | ||
| That's a dumb idea. | ||
| Oh, it's just spitballing. | ||
| Just throwing some ideas around. | ||
| Yeah, it's just the way that we do things. | ||
| Yeah, people go, what are you saying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shut up. | |
| Imagine the world if we did that with everything. | ||
| And when people miss weight, that sucks, man. | ||
| There's a lot of statistics, too, on the person that misses weight is oftentimes the winner of that fight. | ||
| I, to be honest, think that they should take a point from people that miss weight. | ||
| That's not a bad idea, but it's almost like you should not let him fight. | ||
| Or not let him fight at all. | ||
| Yeah, I think, you know, it's one thing it's an undercard fight, but like for a championship fight, I almost think you should send him home. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is crazy to say. | ||
| I know it's stupid, but look at Luke Rockhold and Yoel Romero. | ||
| Yoel Romero and Luke Rockhold are fighting for the title, right? | ||
| Luke Rockhold makes way, Yoel doesn't. | ||
| Yoel knocks out Luke Rockhold, doesn't win the title. | ||
| I'd be pissed if I'm Luke. | ||
| Bro. | ||
| Super pissed. | ||
| This has happened before. | ||
| It's not the only time that's happened. | ||
| That happened with Davis and Figueiredo and Benavidez the first time they fought. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Figueiredo doesn't make the weight. | ||
| KOs Benavidez, doesn't win the title. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah, it'd be hard to get rid of, though. | ||
| It'd be really hard to get rid of. | ||
| I think there's a way. | ||
| I mean, they do hydration tests with high school wrestling and college wrestling. | ||
| It can be done. | ||
| It's just, it would have to be... | ||
| First of all, you'd have to give people way more options in terms of weight classes, and I think that's something we were speaking about earlier. | ||
| I really think you have to have at least every 10 pounds, and you might be right every 5 pounds, but there's this idea that that would somehow or another water down the sport, like... | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| I don't think that's true. | ||
| Look at Canelo Alvarez. | ||
| Look how he keeps going up in weight and beating these guys and winning titles all the way up to light heavyweight. | ||
| Knocks out Kovalev at light heavyweight and comes back down. | ||
| Fights at 68. I believe he was 52 when he fought Mayweather. | ||
| He fights all sorts of different weight classes. | ||
| Yeah, I will say I think that there is this huge emphasis on having to fight in one weight class and to be the biggest guy in the weight class. | ||
| I don't think that that's super important. | ||
| I fought 145 for most of my professional career, but when I got into the UFC, I was like, okay, I'll lose the weight for that amount of money. | ||
| I won't lose it for a couple grand and whatever promotion I was fighting in before, but it's like... | ||
| I don't think it's too huge of a thing, you know? | ||
| And I think that, you know, we're starting to see that now where it's like, no, like, you can jump up a weight class and still do really well because it's not a huge deal. | ||
| But we're going to find out this weekend. | ||
| Because if Adesanya really does weigh at 193, and let me tell you something, man. | ||
| If he could stop Blachowicz at light heavyweight and become champ champ and he doesn't even gain weight, Jesus, Luizus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if anybody could do it. | ||
| He might be the fucking man. | ||
| Yeah, he's crazy enough to do it. | ||
| He's so good, man. | ||
| Yeah, he's so good. | ||
| He's so good. | ||
| That Paulo Costa fight, what an eye-opener that was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He said what he was going to do and then he did it, you know? | ||
| He's like, I'm going to make this guy look stupid. | ||
| Did you see the thing where Paulo Costa, and I might be wrong, I don't really want, this would be kind of bad to get wrong. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was true? | ||
| Yeah, it's true. | ||
| He drank a whole bottle of wine. | ||
| He even took a picture with the wine, like he had a built-in excuse. | ||
| Look at me with wine. | ||
| Yeah, it's so ridiculous. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| He said he had leg cramps, he couldn't sleep, and he had a glass of wine, and that didn't do it, so he drank another glass, that didn't do it, then he drank the whole bottle. | ||
| So he said when he fought, he was probably drunk. | ||
| Look, he's come up with so many excuses for that fight, it's crazy. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| You have one idea of who Paulo Costa is. | ||
| His whole career is just smashing people. | ||
| Walks down Yoel Romero. | ||
| Who the fuck walks down Yoel Romero and beats his ass like that? | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| The way he did it and beat... | ||
| All these guys coming up from... | ||
| Johnny Hendricks was fat, and he's really 170, and he had no business being at 185 in the first place. | ||
| But the fact that Paulo Costa just smashed him that way, and just was smashing everybody. | ||
| And you thought, man, this guy's a real threat. | ||
| This is a big challenge for Adesanya. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, he just shut him up. | ||
| Shut down. | ||
| Shut him down. | ||
| Like, he just completely outclassed him. | ||
| Yeah, that was one of those where I was like, oh, I wasn't expecting that to happen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I thought it was going to be a good fight. | ||
| Yeah, I did too. | ||
| I thought Costa's really durable. | ||
| He's really tough. | ||
| He's going to, you know, it's going to be a blood and guts battle. | ||
| But then, you know, when I saw him enter into the octagon with those cupping marks all over his calves, I was like, that's not good. | ||
| What's happening there? | ||
| Do you do that cup and stuff? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| No. | ||
| Not to the point where it's bruising like that. | ||
| I mean, a lot of people do it. | ||
| I've never tried it. | ||
| Some people swear by it, too, and I'm like, I don't know, giving yourself bruises. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| People swear by a lot of wacky shit. | ||
| People swear by chiropractors. | ||
| They swear by a lot of wacky shit. | ||
| Do you get any of that massage stuff? | ||
| Yeah, massage. | ||
| Is that The Rock? | ||
| Look at it. | ||
| Oh, my goodness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's First time. | |
| Yeah, that guy's got to be sore all the time. | ||
| Boy, they've fucked his back up. | ||
| Do you ever get... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wonder what he thinks. | |
| Do you ever get muscle activation done? | ||
| Have you tried that? | ||
| No. | ||
| That's pretty good stuff. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| So it's like the idea, so I go to a place called Rock Solid Physical Therapy, and it's this place where muscle activation is like the type of therapy that it is, but the idea is it's like, okay, if my shoulder is sore, it's because something in there isn't firing. | ||
| And there's something in there. | ||
| I don't need to massage the shit out of the one spot that's hurt. | ||
| I need to wake up the other things that are having to compensate for the... | ||
| Or this spot is compensating for the other spots. | ||
| So when I go in, it's like, alright, my shoulder's sore. | ||
| They'll work on my back. | ||
| They'll work on my chest. | ||
| Because those areas aren't waking up and aren't firing. | ||
| And then this is what's having to really overcompensate. | ||
| And that's why it's really sore. | ||
| And that's been like a... | ||
| I've been going to them for about six years and getting that done about every single week, and that, I think, is the reason that I don't really ever get hurt. | ||
| I can't think of a really big injury that I've gotten that hasn't been a broken bone or something in a really long time. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Yeah, it's cool. | ||
| It's a good idea, too. | ||
| It makes total sense. | ||
| If this hurts, it's because it's overcompensating, so it's something else that needs to be... | ||
| The body is like a whole system. | ||
| It's a whole wiring, and the whole thing needs to be taken care of, not just the one spot that hurts. | ||
| Makes sense. | ||
| And there are a lot of times injuries where people are, like, a lot of times you have back pain and you really don't realize that it's because your hamstrings are tight. | ||
| And that it's pulling, your whole, your thing is all kind of crunched up. | ||
| And if you can stretch your hamstrings out, it actually alleviates some tension in your back. | ||
| And you're like, oh, wow, that's weird. | ||
| Every time I've hurt my knees, it's been because my glutes and my hips are really tight. | ||
| Which makes total sense because if my hips can't do the circles that they're meant to be, this joint is going to have to... | ||
| If it only has this much motion, this thing has to compensate for it some way. | ||
| I think... | ||
| I think so much of the time when guys get hurt, it's just because they're sore in one area or one area isn't firing and they need to compensate in some area. | ||
| And they do that for X amount of time and then that area ends up getting injured because it's just tired from compensating. | ||
| Makes sense. | ||
| There's probably something to it, at least. | ||
| When you have a big fight, so say if this fight happens this weekend, Jan wins or Sterling wins, and they say, okay, you're next. | ||
| How much... | ||
| You like 10 weeks, right? | ||
| Do... | ||
| Do you have someone who schedules everything? | ||
| Do you do some of it based on your own intuition? | ||
| Like, in terms of, like, how much strength and conditioning work? | ||
| How much sparring? | ||
| When do you hit mitts? | ||
| When do you spar? | ||
| When do you roll? | ||
| How do you do that? | ||
| Yeah, so here's the nice thing about, I think, where I'm in a really unique position, where I don't think maybe a lot of fighters are, is that I've been with the same, pretty much the same set of coaches for 12 years now. | ||
| You know, so... | ||
| I can have an open conversation about things and not have to feel like I'm being a bitch or I'm being whiny or whatever. | ||
| I don't think a lot of people... | ||
| If I'm someone's new coach and they're complaining all the time about being tired and needing to rest on this day or whatever day, I'm probably going to think that that person's just being whiny. | ||
| But with my set of coaches, because we've been around for so long and a lot of them I would consider my best friends, I can kind of have that open dialogue of like, hey man, I think that we need to pick it up on this day and we need to do less on this day. | ||
| And they're like, yeah, okay, we trust you to be able to do that. | ||
| And like I said, man, I'm like a really self-sufficient guy. | ||
| I don't blame anyone and I don't expect anyone to be the cause of my success or my failure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, honestly, I take a lot of that into my own way, and I think that working with Christian Allen has kind of helped me with that a lot, too, because Christian Allen, he never really told me exactly what to do. | ||
| He kind of let me find my own way, which I know a lot of people don't like, and at times, you know, I didn't really like, if I'm being completely honest, but... | ||
| It also did help me become really, really self-sufficient. | ||
| And so a lot of me putting together my camp is me putting it together. | ||
| But kind of to answer your question a little bit more is it's like when I'm setting up my practices for each day, I don't ever miss any of those practices. | ||
| Even if I'm dead tired, I'll still go in. | ||
| I'll just do less. | ||
| Maybe I'll drill or I'll do something different, but I'm not going to miss that day of practice. | ||
| And if I have to, you know, because I need to, I'm just rescheduling it for a different day. | ||
| So I do set my own schedule, but every practice gets made because I think that that makes the mind strong. | ||
| But if I am a little bit tired or if it's a weird week or whatever, I'm stressed out or whatever is happening in my life and I need to go a little bit slower on a day, I will do that. | ||
| When you say, like, if you're tired, do you monitor your heart rate? | ||
| Do you wear a whoop strap? | ||
| I used to until it kept telling me the same thing over and over again. | ||
| What was it telling you? | ||
| It was telling me that I wake up a lot during the night and that I get, like, moderate sleep. | ||
| And it was that every single night with the exception of, like, a few things, you know? | ||
| But you know what I did learn from those things is just how incredibly important sleep is. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| I never valued sleep as the thing that's going to make me feel rested and actually recovered the next day. | ||
| I thought it was like, oh, I need to foam roll more. | ||
| Oh, I need to do massage more. | ||
| Oh, I should go lighter or whatever. | ||
| Dude, if I can clock 9 to 11 hours of sleep, then I'm good. | ||
| I'm in the green. | ||
| Regardless of how hard I worked out the day before, I'm good after that amount of sleep. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Dustin said he stopped wearing a whoop strap for the same reason. | ||
| He said, because he'd wake up and say, oh, you need more sleep. | ||
| He was like, well, this shit gotta get done. | ||
| So I don't know what the fuck you're telling me. | ||
| He's like, you know, you're not fully recovered? | ||
| Well, I don't give a fuck. | ||
| I gotta go to work. | ||
| Yeah, there's also days like that, too, where it's like, you'll be in a red, and it's like, So what? | ||
| So what? | ||
| Time to go to work. | ||
| Yeah, sometimes I feel great and I'll check it. | ||
| It's in the yellow. | ||
| I was like, what? | ||
| Come on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yellow? | |
| I feel good. | ||
| Do you notice that when you're doing the actual workout, though, that you actually are in, like, a yellow? | ||
| It depends on how much coffee I drink. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and that's another thing is that there's so many other factors to everything, too, where it's like... | ||
| Yeah, maybe I had a good workout because I was in the green, but also maybe I had a good workout because I didn't do that much the day before. | ||
| I did have a lot of coffee or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, I got fired up. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| There's so many variables with the human body, whether or not you're getting massages, whether or not you're doing ice baths, whether or not you're doing sauna. | ||
| There's so many different things that can help you recover and help your body bounce back. | ||
| It's a lot of... | ||
| There's a lot you can do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a lot you can do to keep your body healthy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Now, when you say that you kind of set your own schedule, do you set your own schedule in terms of strength and conditioning as well? | ||
| Give me a typical week. | ||
| When you're starting your camp, how many days a week will you do strength and conditioning? | ||
| How many days a week will you do kickboxing? | ||
| Do you do MMA sparring a lot, or do you separate jiu-jitsu sparring from kickboxing sparring? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So every day, Monday through Friday, there's a team practice at one o'clock. | ||
| So we do that. | ||
| So Monday is wrestling. | ||
| Tuesday is sparring. | ||
| Wednesday is wrestling, drilling. | ||
| Thursday is MMA. And then Friday is sparring again. | ||
| And then Saturday, I kind of depend on how the week goes. | ||
| I'll either drill for a couple hours or I'll train hard for a couple hours. | ||
| So it's 1 o'clock every day, pretty much. | ||
| No matter what. | ||
| And then Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we do strength and conditioning in the morning at the same place Gaethje goes, Lando Performance. | ||
| I'll do that with Aaron, who's really been taking good care of me. | ||
| He's the guy that was like, hey man, we should put on a couple more pounds of muscle. | ||
| I think it's going to make you feel a little bit better. | ||
| And I was like, okay, we will. | ||
| And it actually did make my cardio and conditioning go way, way up. | ||
| I'll do that with... | ||
| Aaron, Nate, and Wrigley, and with the team usually, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. | ||
| And then at night, I'll go in on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I'll go on a run. | ||
| So it's at night for those other days. | ||
| And then Thursday morning, I'll do a mitt session. | ||
| So I guess that was kind of a lot of information, but... | ||
| So when you say at night, so you're doing the team practice at 1 p.m. | ||
| And then what time do you come back in? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like 6 or 7? | |
| So I teach the kids program at 5 o'clock. | ||
| And then, yeah, I'll go in and I'll train at 6. And like I said, depending on how the day went, that's a class that I run myself. | ||
| So it's like, okay, how's everyone feeling? | ||
| If everyone looks like, you know, they just woke up from a nap, it's like, all right, we're drilling today. | ||
| And then if it's like everyone's been, yeah, okay, yeah, let's train, then like we'll train a little bit harder on those days. | ||
| So, in terms of weightlifting, do you try to take the strength and conditioning sessions and not have them on a day we spar? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Monday is our heavy lifting day because I think Monday you're the most rested. | ||
| I think your body's more capable of obviously lifting more weights the more rested you are. | ||
| Wednesday is more of a metabolic day, so like a conditioning day. | ||
| And I only do those really in the last three or four weeks of camp because Aaron kind of puts me through more of a strength building stuff because that's more important for my body type. | ||
| And then Friday is just recovery. | ||
| So Friday when we spar on the same day, it's just like a 45-minute session. | ||
| We just get our blood moving. | ||
| We get everything loose so that we can spar well on Friday. | ||
| And do you take two days off on the weekend? | ||
| Do you take Saturday and Sunday off? | ||
| No, I only take Sunday off. | ||
| What do you do on Saturday? | ||
| Saturday is 9 o'clock. | ||
| I have a small guy group. | ||
| Again, a class that I'll run. | ||
| I'll look at everyone like, hey, how's everyone feeling? | ||
| If sparring wasn't very hard on Friday, then Saturday we'll train a little bit harder. | ||
| I'll do that Friday. | ||
| Or, I'm sorry, Saturday. | ||
| And then I'll have Christian come in and hold mitts for me on Saturday. | ||
| And he usually does that Thursday morning for me as well. | ||
| So do you do two a day every day or Saturday one? | ||
| Yeah, it's Saturday is two. | ||
| If I have some weight to lose, I'll also run on Saturday also. | ||
| But Monday and Tuesday, I think, are the only two days. | ||
| And then everything else is three. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| But like I said, man, I just drill a lot. | ||
| This is such a technical sport, man. | ||
| I used to like running more. | ||
| I used to like lifting more. | ||
| But I find that I'm just doing better when I'm focusing on the technical aspects of the sport and not as much about the, am I going on a run just to go on a run? | ||
| Or am I going on a run because it's actually helping? | ||
| And can I actually get this help in a different area? | ||
| Because I used to really enjoy doing trail runs. | ||
| And, like, I had to kind of cut those because I just wasn't able to train as hard and, like, learn as much and drill as much. | ||
| So I had to cut the run because I think it's more important that I'm actually learning and getting better and drilling. | ||
| Just from being tired from the trail run? | ||
| Yep, yep, yep. | ||
| Because those things will zap you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what about other recovery modalities? | ||
| Are you using ice baths? | ||
| Are you doing the sauna? | ||
| Yeah, so I do the sauna twice a week also. | ||
| Because actually the UFC also recommended this to me also. | ||
| So I guess you can train your body to get used to heat and it can get used to how much you're flushing out as long as obviously you're putting it back in you. | ||
| So I'll do a sauna session two days a week and then I'll do... | ||
| What temp do you go in? | ||
| It's not that hot, bro. | ||
| It's kind of a piece of shit sauna that I bought for myself. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, it was like $300 or $400. | ||
| And it's not one that has your head sticking out. | ||
| It's a little bit bigger than that, so I can actually sit in the whole thing. | ||
| But it don't get that hot. | ||
| It probably gets to like $130. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| Yeah, but it's one of those infrared ones. | ||
| Oh, that's different. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I guess it pulls it from deeper inside your bones. | ||
| I don't know about all that. | ||
| I don't like the infrared ones, to be honest. | ||
| I like the steam ones the most. | ||
| Steam? | ||
| Why? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I like what it does to my skin. | ||
| No, I don't really know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It just feels a little bit better. | ||
| Those dry ones, bro, I feel like I'm just... | ||
| Cooking. | ||
| And breathing in people's feet humidity. | ||
| Yeah, but for yourself, you should get a dry sauna for your house if you can. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, I'm a big believer in the dry sauna. | ||
| There's so many benefits to it just outside of even getting your body accustomed to the heat for a sauna for cutting weight. | ||
| It just reduces inflammation to such a high degree. | ||
| It produces heat shock proteins. | ||
| Also, there's a study they did in Norway where people who did the sauna four days a week for, I believe it was 20 minutes at 170 degrees, I think is the protocol they used. | ||
| And they experienced a 40% decrease in all-cause mortality. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| That means 40% decrease in heart attack, stroke, cancer, everything. | ||
| Just with regular sauna use. | ||
| Did they say, is it from detoxing your body that much? | ||
| It's from the heat shock proteins. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| The heat shock proteins, what it's doing is it creates this radical anti-inflammatory response for the body because your body's freaking out. | ||
| Your body doesn't want to be in 170 degrees. | ||
| It's like, what is this shit? | ||
| And so because of that and you're sweating it out and struggling, your body produces these cytokines and it has an amazing effect just on health and wellness. | ||
| I fucking love it, man. | ||
| I do it every day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I have one in my house and it was one of the first things I did when I moved to Austin is get one and it took a couple months to get it and get it brought in and installed and everything like that and I was sweating it because I was like, God, I miss the sauna because I had one in my house in California and it's It's a game changer, man. | ||
| Dan Gable's a huge believer in it as well. | ||
| And I read him talking about the sauna, and he thinks that it's a secret weapon that the Russians and a lot of other athletes in other countries use on a regular basis. | ||
| And he wishes that American wrestlers adopted it. | ||
| So you do 170 for 20 minutes? | ||
| I do 185. I do 185 for 25 minutes, but I built up to it. | ||
| And I've been doing it for years, and I never get sick. | ||
| I mean, I fucking never get sick. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| I think it's phenomenal for your immune system. | ||
| How many days a week would you recommend to do it? | ||
| I do it every day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| I mean, I'll take a day off every now and again, but I definitely do it at least five days a week. | ||
| Yeah, every week. | ||
| If I'm home, I'm doing it five days a week. | ||
| And what, your body just gets used to bringing the water back in? | ||
| And I listen to books on tape. | ||
| It's my favorite way to do it. | ||
| So I'm in there for 25 minutes. | ||
| AirPods will survive. | ||
| Your phone won't. | ||
| So don't try to bring your phone in there. | ||
| My phone always dies. | ||
| But the AirPods don't die. | ||
| They're pretty fucking tough. | ||
| It's probably a long 25 minutes, huh? | ||
| The last five can suck a dick, bro. | ||
| The last five minutes are ruthless. | ||
| Oh, right away. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, when I get in there, the first thing I do is I scoop water and throw it on the rocks. | ||
| And so it's not just 185 degrees. | ||
| It's 185 degrees with high humidity. | ||
| So it's pretty rough. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So right away, I'm glistening. | ||
| And then within, you know, the first 10 minutes are not that bad. | ||
| You know, and then the next 10 minutes are getting rough and the last five minutes can really fucking suck. | ||
| It's crazy how quick it starts to suck, huh? | ||
| It sucks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But it's good. | |
| It's like, I need some suck. | ||
| You know, I don't get enough suck in my life. | ||
| We all do, man. | ||
| Everybody does. | ||
| We all do. | ||
| That struggle of sitting there, and I do a lot of deep breathing exercises, too. | ||
| I do like box breathing. | ||
| I do like five seconds in, hold five seconds, five seconds out. | ||
| Or sometimes I'll do longer deep breaths and longer slow breaths out. | ||
| But that's good, too, because you can get into kind of a trance when you do that. | ||
| And sometimes when I do that, I don't even realize how much time has passed because I'm just focusing on the breathing. | ||
| Just focusing on the breathing. | ||
| The time moves fast when you just focus on the breathing. | ||
| We used to do plank competitions. | ||
| Me and a bunch of the guys on the basketball team that I used to play with. | ||
| And I would just sit there, and I would just breathe. | ||
| And then next thing I would know, everyone's done. | ||
| And it'd be like three, four minutes later, and I'm just sitting there breathing, but... | ||
| You see that fucking Marine dude? | ||
| I think he's a Marine. | ||
| He won the world's plank competition. | ||
| It was some preposterous amount of time this motherfucker was planking for. | ||
| Like four days or something? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| It was probably days. | ||
| Eight plus hour plank. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| At 62, Marine veteran sets a Guinness World Record. | ||
| 62 years old, man. | ||
| That's a fucking old dude to be planking like that. | ||
| That guy's a savage. | ||
| That's all in your mind right there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's your fucking mind. | ||
| I mean, that is just your mind. | ||
| I mean, he obviously is fit. | ||
| He's obviously in very good shape for his age, but to be able to do that for eight fucking hours, especially while people are staring at you, that is boring as fuck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He did 75 push-ups when he was done. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| Guy's an animal. | ||
| Yeah, I love it. | ||
| I love seeing old animals like that. | ||
| Like, yes! | ||
| Keep going! | ||
| Keep fucking going! | ||
| That'd be Cam Haynes. | ||
| He'll be doing that when he's 80. I think that... | ||
| Having something like that as a regular basis just gets your body accustomed to just doing something that you don't want to do that sucks. | ||
| Because there's too many people that go through their life doing easy stuff all the time. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| You're just soft. | ||
| You're like a marshmallow. | ||
| So my one thing is I would wake up every Saturday morning and I would go do a trail run by Red Rocks in Colorado. | ||
| And I didn't care if it was snowing. | ||
| I didn't care if it was however. | ||
| And I'm more upset that I had to get rid of it because it started to suck, but then it became something that was like, oh, this is something that I really enjoy doing over and over and over again. | ||
| And it's like, yeah, even if it does suck, afterwards it just feels good. | ||
| I feel like you don't have to do a lot of things where afterwards you feel super rewarded. | ||
| Like you did it. | ||
| You made it through. | ||
| Yeah, like super rewarded. | ||
| Yeah, that moment where you just want to fucking quit. | ||
| Where your brain, and then you gotta shut the fuck up, pussy! | ||
| Shut up! | ||
| You gotta have these little battles in your mind. | ||
| There's so many people that go through life, they just don't have that at all. | ||
| So that the moment adversity rears its ugly head, you don't understand what to do with it. | ||
| You don't know what it is. | ||
| Like, how do I handle this? | ||
| Yeah, I think a lot of people, man, I think they've bought into the idea of happiness is the goal every single day. | ||
| Comfort. | ||
| Comfort. | ||
| Yeah, I guess that that's maybe a better word. | ||
| Fat shaming. | ||
| Don't fat shame me. | ||
| Yeah, stuff like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's uncomfortable. | |
| Yeah, stuff like that where it's like, man, like... | ||
| Being happy isn't my goal every day. | ||
| Maybe one day it will be the goal every day, but for now it's like, how much can I make today suck so that I can have that one little reward at the end of a training camp? | ||
| And it's a big-ass reward and it feels good. | ||
| Yeah, well for you it's the ultimate because you're literally, you're doing something first of all where you're putting your health in jeopardy. | ||
| You're doing one of the most dangerous sports that a person can compete in and you're putting everything on the line. | ||
| You're putting your health on the line. | ||
| You're putting your ego on the line. | ||
| You're putting your future on the line. | ||
| You're thinking about so many different things. | ||
| If you get KO'd or something like that, you're paying for it with your mind. | ||
| You're paying for it with your brain cells. | ||
| You're paying for it. | ||
| You get kicked in the liver. | ||
| You're paying for it with your internal organs are getting damaged. | ||
| It's a crazy way to live your life. | ||
| But the reward, like when you knocked out Frankie, like when you were running around going like that, you could see it in you. | ||
| You just fucking juiced up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I'm a level guy, man. | ||
| And, like, fighting is really the only thing that, like, or winning, I guess I should say, is the only thing where I'm just like, you know? | ||
| Like, it's worth it. | ||
| The life is worth it, you know? | ||
| The life is worth it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, listen, man, I'm a fan. | ||
| I appreciate you. | ||
| Appreciate you coming in here. | ||
| It was really cool to talk to you, and I'm super excited to see what happens for you. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Obviously, you know, this is like a big deal to me, and I'm really, really grateful that you asked me to do this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My pleasure. | |
| Big deal for me, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, brother. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. |
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