July 6, 2011 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:23:28
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! | ||
| You got a cookbook? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's going on? | |
| Yeah, coming out with a fucking cookbook. | ||
| Are you a good cook? | ||
| Legitimately? | ||
| I see you cook on Instagram. | ||
| Looks like you're into it. | ||
| I am. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Food has always been a pretty big part of my life. | ||
| I grew up in a... | ||
| A family of cooks. | ||
| I actually consider myself probably the worst cook in my family. | ||
| Don't say that before you sell in your book. | ||
| I know, but I'm still pretty good. | ||
| My brother Dan and my other brother Michael are both phenomenal. | ||
| Your brother Dan has the nastiest guillotine finish I've ever seen in all my years of watching MMA. The one in the IFL where he had that dude pinned up against the cage. | ||
| It looks like his head... | ||
| It's gone. | ||
| It looks like it's disappeared. | ||
| Like his head is, it's like, the way it bends over, it's like, folks, it's like an elbow. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| It's sideways. | ||
| I didn't see that. | ||
| We were on the opposite side of the ring. | ||
| I didn't see that until the next day. | ||
| I was scrolling through some pictures on one of the forums, and I was like, holy shit! | ||
| Here, watch this here. | ||
| Let's see if they can show it from the beginning again, please. | ||
| Okay, here it is. | ||
| I'll show it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Folds him in half. | ||
| No, when he stands up, he's still fighting, like right there. | ||
| Like there. | ||
| What the fuck, man? | ||
|
unidentified
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It shouldn't work. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| How is that possible? | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| It looks like it's disconnected. | ||
| How is that possible that a neck can do that? | ||
| He's literally hearing his own heartbeat. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I'd be dead. | ||
| I think that's the craziest guillotine I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| Which is amazing, because think of how many guillotines you've seen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I've never seen anybody do that. | ||
| I mean, that's a wild guillotine. | ||
|
unidentified
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It is. | |
| The IFL was weird, because there was good fighters and good fights, but the concept was so goofy that people were like, what, there's a team? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And your team wins? | ||
| They were doing it like wrestling teams, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| It was kind of like, you could win your match, but your team could still lose, and there was team names, and there was... | ||
| I think other couple promotions have tried to do something similar, and it just doesn't seem to work in MMA. I don't like what the PFL does either, where they have point systems, and you get more points for finishes, and more points for this, and so you're ahead. | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| I can't pay attention to all that. | ||
| I think it's like they see how people are really into stats. | ||
| You know, like, rebounds, and he's got most assists, and this and that. | ||
| There's a lot of guys that are, like, numbers guys. | ||
| They can tell you, you know, this guy ran for this amount of yards, and this and that. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, they love those statistics. | ||
| But in MMA, that's just, like... | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, people just want to see us punching each other's heads in. | |
| That's really what it is. | ||
| Yeah, you're over-complicating what's essentially the purest sport. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's so pure. | ||
| I mean, you could show an MMA fight to someone who has no fucking idea what's going on, and they're going, oh my god. | ||
| You show them cricket, and they're like, why? | ||
| Yeah, what's the point? | ||
| What's the goal? | ||
| Why do you have a paddle? | ||
| What's happening here? | ||
| How's this work? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Why is he throwing the ball like that? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Or baseball. | ||
| Like, baseball's an American pastime. | ||
| But if it wasn't, and someone tried to invent it today, people would be like, get the fuck out of here with this game. | ||
| Too complicated. | ||
| It's just, what is going on here? | ||
| He's stealing bases? | ||
| He gets to steal bases? | ||
| Like, what's happening? | ||
|
unidentified
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You know? | |
| Why nine? | ||
| Why nine innings? | ||
| Why nine dudes? | ||
| And what's going on with the pitcher with his fingers? | ||
| What's he doing there? | ||
| The catcher and the pitcher communicating in some weird way? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How about when a guy, like, the catcher will stand away from the base and he'll intentionally walk him? | ||
| Like, what are you doing? | ||
| Like, what is this bullshit? | ||
| I guess it's, yeah. | ||
| You're cheating! | ||
| Strategy, right? | ||
| You're cheating! | ||
| Throw the fucking ball! | ||
| Throw it! | ||
| Try to strike him out, you fuck! | ||
| It's silly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I guess there's some silly stuff that happens in MMA, though. | ||
| What's the silliest thing you think? | ||
| I fell in love with it Watching the early days, watching Pride and the early days of the UFC where it was like... | ||
| Dudes were just going in there to beat the fuck out of whoever was across from them. | ||
| When I see a fighter try to game the clock, I understand why they're doing it because they want to win, right? | ||
| My whole goal is to not have the judges have any fucking say in it. | ||
| Because I got three... | ||
| ...schmucks. | ||
|
unidentified
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Questionable. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Questionable would probably be a better word. | ||
| They call them schmucks. | ||
| On the outside of the cage, that have zero experience in the martial arts, for the most part. | ||
| A lot of them. | ||
| A good percentage of them, unfortunately. | ||
| And yeah, they're picking who's going to win or lose. | ||
| And I get paid twice as much if they think that I win. | ||
| So... | ||
| I think that the purest part of the sport is when two fighters are just trying to beat the shit out of each other. | ||
| Undeniable. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I mean, there's some really good judges out there. | ||
| We should acknowledge that. | ||
| Because they don't get enough love because there's so many bad ones. | ||
| I feel like number one hardest job is fight. | ||
| Number two is referee. | ||
| The referee is the hardest job. | ||
| Because they can step in too soon and the guy jumps up. | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| The worst is when it's a submission. | ||
| When someone is fighting their way out of a submission and then the referee separates them. | ||
| And you're like, oh my god, what have you done? | ||
| And you can't restart it. | ||
| Well, they did before. | ||
| Remember Murillo Bustamante and Matt Lindland? | ||
| He had to tap him twice. | ||
| He caught Lin-Lin in an arm bar, and Lin-Lin's like, I didn't do that. | ||
|
unidentified
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I didn't do that. | |
| Which is like, you fucking definitely did. | ||
| You gotta make sure, yeah, like, let him rip you off of them. | ||
| There's only two times in the UFC that I can recall that a fight was restarted. | ||
| And there's that fight, and then there was another one that was actually not restarted, but redone. | ||
| Conan Silvera and Sakuraba. | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Big John McCarthy stopped the fight early. | ||
| Sakuraba dropped for a single, and he thought he was out cold. | ||
| And Sakuraba, he got hit with a punch and dropped down for a single, and they stopped the fight, and Sakuraba was like, what the fuck? | ||
| And they were in Japan. | ||
| So because it was UFC Japan, they're like, what are we doing here? | ||
| And it was actually proved to be a historic moment because then he came back and submitted Conan. | ||
| And everybody was like, what? | ||
| He submitted a black belt in jiu-jitsu? | ||
| Like, that was unheard of. | ||
| Like, you never thought that a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu could get submitted. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| So those are only two times that I know of where a fight was like. | ||
| But there's a lot of times where I think it should have been that way. | ||
| Where they should have probably let him continue. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| As a fighter, I feel like it's tough, because the ref is there so I can fight again. | ||
| I want to choose my way out. | ||
| Let me decide that it's enough, but I do appreciate that they're looking out for us, but like you said, it's not an easy job. | ||
| It's not an easy job at all. | ||
| My last fight, I thought it could have gotten stopped a little bit quicker, and that's probably because I haven't knocked a lot of guys out. | ||
| I knocked him down, and it was like, I threw one or two, they kind of hit glove, and then it was like, a second one just sunk in. | ||
| It's like, dude, that didn't need to happen, and then it's still going on. | ||
| So I was a little bit amped up, you know, post-fight, but... | ||
| It's a difficult spot. | ||
| It's the hardest spot other than fighter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, commentary's probably the easiest, because you're just kind of saying what's happening. | ||
| You don't really, you know... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You guys do a lot of fucking work. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's not that hard. | |
| It's not that hard. | ||
| The work I do, like, this weekend's a big event. | ||
| The work I do is fun. | ||
| Like, I'm watching fights. | ||
| Like, all week I'd be watching fights. | ||
| Like, there's some folks that I haven't seen fight before. | ||
| I'm gonna watch their fights. | ||
| I'm going to go back and look at their records and look at their history and stuff like that. | ||
| But I don't even consider it research. | ||
| I'm just excited. | ||
| I just think if it's fun. | ||
| If I was doing that on hockey or something that I don't really follow, then it would be work. | ||
| I'd have to write stuff down. | ||
| I'd have to really think about it. | ||
| But I'm looking forward to it. | ||
| So it's easy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I think fighting's easy. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| If anybody saw you and you said, like, this guy has some of the most fights in the history of the sport, like, in the history of the UFC, like, who fucking has more fights than you? | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| Nobody? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nobody? | ||
| Yeah, nobody. | ||
| How many fights do you have in the UFC? 39. But what's crazy is you don't look fucked up, you don't talk fucked up. | ||
| I try not to. | ||
| You don't at all! | ||
| Like if I introduced you to someone and I said, this young man has the most fights in the history of the most brutal combat sport in the world. | ||
| They'd be like, what? | ||
| You? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think I found the thing that I was kind of built to do because that's one of the things that People don't understand. | ||
| Like, I've never had surgery. | ||
| Like, knock on fucking wood. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Nothing? | ||
| Yeah, nope. | ||
| You know, the only bone that I've ever broken is, like, chipped my sinus when Dan Hooker kneed me. | ||
| Like, chipped the outside of my sinus. | ||
| That's the only bone I've ever broken. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And that just heals up on its own? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| There was nothing they could do for it. | ||
| But, like... | ||
| And I've been bouncing around outside the octagon, probably worse than I have been inside the octagon. | ||
| And it's like, shit, man. | ||
| Like, I was just kind of, like, built to take lumps, I guess. | ||
| I've got a fucking giant head for a 5'8 dude. | ||
| And I think that's helped me, you know, absorb some shots. | ||
| And then stylistically, yeah, I just try to, like... | ||
| I do sacrifice some power for trying to be protected. | ||
| Well, you're very smart defensively as, at the same time, you're hyper-aggressive, which is very interesting. | ||
| You know, it's a good combination of two things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you're also very good off your back, too. | ||
| It's like, the combination of all those things is like, you know, you can, there's not a place where you fight where I'm like, ooh, this is not his best. | ||
| Like, there's some guys that get taken down and you're like, he's kind of fucked here. | ||
| Like, you don't have, like, a spot like that, where you're in a bad position. | ||
| I try. | ||
| That's one of the exciting things about the sport is there's so much shit to do and to learn. | ||
| It makes it difficult on one side that you have to try to get in workouts for not only to be a good technical fighter, but a good athlete. | ||
| And then you're working on ground stuff, clinch stuff, wrestling, striking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So there's so many pieces to the pie that you gotta, like, stuff in there. | ||
| It's not like, hey, all I do is grab a ball and run. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| So, yeah, we have to, you know, find your strength and try to fight to your strength. | ||
| And I think that's an issue that sometimes fighters get away from is they, you know, they learn new things and then they don't fight to their strengths that, like, got them there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, I've done that in the past. | ||
| Right. | ||
| In what way? | ||
| When I fought Gray Maynard. | ||
| That was my third fight in the UFC. Tough dude, good wrestler, better wrestler than me. | ||
| Big step up. | ||
| But to that point, I really hadn't been doing... | ||
| Private striking training. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Before the UFC, yeah, I was taking Thai classes at night, like group classes. | ||
| Like a kickboxing class? | ||
| No, well, first six fights, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Yeah, my first six fights, I started out at a place called Planet Jiu-Jitsu. | ||
| Tiny... | ||
| A little bit bigger than this studio here, this room of the studio. | ||
| And yeah, I was taking like cardio kickboxing classes because I had never thrown a punch before and it was helping me, you know, but the ball had already started rolling so it was like, fuck it, like we're just gonna go. | ||
| Take me back to, like, what was your initial martial art? | ||
| What was the first thing you ever did? | ||
| Wrestling. | ||
| And that was in high school? | ||
| That was as soon as I could walk. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You know, my mom's side of the family... | ||
| Pretty fucking good wrestling locally. | ||
| And then one of my uncles was a two-time national champion for Lehigh. | ||
| He was actually an Olympic qualifier in 1980 when we boycotted Mike Frick. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, like, his wrestling career was done before I was born, but his younger brother, Jim, who's also my mom's younger brother, he wrestled at Lehigh as well. | ||
| Never quite made it to All-American status. | ||
| One of my first memories is watching him wrestling at Lehigh. | ||
| You know, I think I was like three or something like that. | ||
| And I remember it because he ended up breaking his ankle that match. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Yeah, as soon as I could walk, I was pretty much on the mats. | ||
| I wish I would have been a better wrestler, but I was a late bloomer physically and in the sport of wrestling too, I think. | ||
| And then you go from there to jiu-jitsu? | ||
| Yeah, so I wrestled through high school, one year at Virginia Tech. | ||
| That was a learning experience, you know, wrestling for a D1 program. | ||
| Like, I walked on late, and three weeks later was starting. | ||
| And wrestling at a weight class that I probably shouldn't have been wrestling at, too, 141s. | ||
| Too light? | ||
| Yeah, way too light. | ||
| They can't do anything about it now, but we snuck by the hydration test. | ||
| I carried a cup of my coach's pee down to the trainer's office. | ||
| I came on after all the hydration tests and all that stuff, so it was like, hey, this will work. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| You know, like I said, it was an experience wrestling in a room full of, you know, multiple-time state champs and stuff like that. | ||
| And, you know, it taught me a lot about kind of surrounding myself with people that support me because I didn't quite have that in the coaching staff. | ||
| And, yeah, I wrestled for a year, was pissed off because I didn't like, you know, the program and... | ||
| Came back, was working a little bit, and my brother and I, Dan, were messing around at work, working with our father, and finally decided to start training jiu-jitsu. | ||
| We walked into the first gym that we trained at in May of 2005. Came in, and we had been, like, fucking around, so we ended up, like, submitting some guys on the first day, and we told the coach, like, hey, like, we want to fight. | ||
| And he's like, alright, give me, like, two or three years. | ||
| And six months later, we were stepping into a ring for our first professional fight, because there was no amateur at the time. | ||
| No striking training. | ||
| Literally three months of striking training at a cardio kickboxing class. | ||
| So at that place that you were telling me about, Planet Jiu-Jitsu? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, yeah, it was a trip, you know? | ||
| Rolled the dice a little bit, you know? | ||
| Yeah, and then it was just like fight after fight. | ||
| I mean, in a year, I had six fights, basically, so... | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Well, that's the way to do it, right? | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| I think that's one of the biggest issues with local MMA right now is that they're making these fighters sign agreements, so you're kind of locked in. | ||
| How so? | ||
| Well, they're making fighters, like local promotions, local shows are making fighters fight exclusively for them. | ||
| Oh, that's terrible. | ||
| And then they're only putting on three cards a year. | ||
| That's fucking terrible. | ||
| They're doing that? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Oh, don't do that, guys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Don't sign that. | ||
| Don't sign that. | ||
| Whoever's listening, amateur fighters, guys coming up, don't sign that. | ||
| That will fuck you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those guys, that's unethical. | ||
| It is. | ||
| They should not do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because, you know, look, if you have a good promotion and you pay well and you put on a good show, people will fight for you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But if you want to say that a guy has to be exclusive on a small card and then he gets a call from 1FC or fucking Bellator or whoever... | ||
| A lot of them have, like, those, you know, the UFC clause where, like, if one of the big promotions call you, but the problem is, is like... | ||
| You should be able to fight for a bunch of small organizations. | ||
| You want to fight almost once a month if you could. | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| That's exactly it, you know? | ||
| Like, I have some guys that train with me that they don't get to fight as often as I feel they should. | ||
| Because of that, because of these contracts. | ||
| Yeah, they're like the two different roads you can take, you know? | ||
| You can't fucking be exclusive if you're a small company like that. | ||
| That is not, that's not ethical. | ||
| Especially if they're making like, you know, a thousand and a thousand, maybe, or a thousand bucks. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| They don't even have win bonuses. | ||
| But it's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It fucks your development up, because if you can get a fight in every two months, man, you'll get more comfortable with fighting. | ||
| You get more relaxed, because you do it a lot. | ||
| And when you do it a lot, it alleviates a lot of the tension and the pressure, because you could fight more to your potential. | ||
| And the more you fight to your potential, the more confidence you get, the more you make gains in training, you start adapting and growing and learning how to compete. | ||
| Have you ever with a company that's fucking you over in some shit? | ||
| I've met some great guys that run some small organizations, but I've met some guys that just think they're big time, and it's a real problem. | ||
| They act big time. | ||
| Yeah, and then one of the new ones, well, new, I mean, probably a few years old now, the idea is that they make these fighters have ticket quotas and stuff like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That drives me crazy, too. | |
| It's the worst. | ||
| It's the absolute worst. | ||
| Explain that to people who don't know what we're talking about. | ||
| So, in their bad agreement, they're gonna have to sell a certain amount of tickets in order to get their pay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, like, they'll have a, you know, 40-ticket minimum or whatever that they have to hit in order to get their full pay. | ||
| And then for everyone below that, they're docked, you know, from their win bonus or their show money. | ||
| That's a, yeah, it's a bullshit fucking move. | ||
| You kind of understand it, but it's like, hey, you're the promotion. | ||
| Your job is to promote the fight. | ||
| You're the one with the marketing knowledge and then this and then that and the dollars to put down for ads and flyers and shit like that. | ||
| If a fighter has the opportunity to sell a couple tickets and make a couple extra bucks, maybe, all right, great. | ||
| But, like, what happens, and this happened to a bunch of my training partners, and this has, like, kind of led to my, one of the things that led to me opening my gym a few years ago was we had seven guys on a local card, and all of a sudden there's a ticket quota. | ||
| After they signed? | ||
| Well, it was before they signed, but they didn't know that it was there. | ||
| So you had, like, a group of, you know, seven fighters. | ||
| So a gym, like, okay. | ||
| Like, one guy could have handled the quota. | ||
| Two guys, but, like, seven? | ||
| Like, then you're, like, trying to make sure that, you know, the training partners buy from this guy because he hasn't sold a bunch. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And yeah, it was a bullshit move that got put in there, but I don't think any of them... | ||
| Really hit it. | ||
| You know, they all got fucking docked a bit. | ||
| So it's like, you know, you're looking at a couple hundred tickets between the seven of them that they got to sell, you know, so that everybody can make the money that they were promised to make. | ||
| And obviously they have that with everyone on the card. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So that's how he's selling tickets. | ||
| That's his promotion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's double fucking the fighters. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really, like, if you want to say you're going to guarantee you $1,000 to fight and $1,000 to win, which I think is bullshit, by the way. | ||
| I don't like win bonuses. | ||
| I fucking hate it. | ||
| Especially with bad judging. | ||
| I fucking hate it. | ||
| When I see a controversial judgment and one guy... | ||
| Here's a good one. | ||
| Not necessarily controversial, but really close. | ||
| Some people think it's controversial. | ||
| Barbarina and Matt Brown last weekend. | ||
| Fucking real close fight. | ||
| The idea that Matt Brown is going to get paid half as much... | ||
| One judge thought he won, and two judges thought he didn't, and he's going to get half the money. | ||
| Fuck that. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I don't like that. | ||
| It's a weird model. | ||
| I like that London card. | ||
| It's like, everybody with a finish got a 50. That's a great idea. | ||
| That's a fucking great idea. | ||
| That's a great idea. | ||
| Before the fight, Garen fucking teed everybody's going out there looking for a finish. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And that's what I want to see. | ||
| Like, that's what I'm trying to do in the fight, you know, no matter what. | ||
| But, like, as a fan, I want to see aggressive fighters, not guys that are just trying to, you know, game the clock, win a couple points, and, you know, get the W because they – granted, they used effective octagon control, but, they used effective octagon control, but, like – I want to see finishes. | ||
| And that way you eliminate all the fighters that get fucked over by bad judging because then they don't miss half their purse. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because if you're missing half of your pay because of bad judging, that should stop. | ||
| That should stop. | ||
| I just don't like that, man. | ||
| I love the incentive, the finish incentive. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Keep that. | ||
| Keep that. | ||
| That'll maybe make guys fight more... | ||
| Well, you know people definitely fight more aggressively for fight of the night and performance of the night and all that stuff, but... | ||
| Keep the finish thing. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| That'll incentivize people. | ||
| But the win bonus, that's not incentivizing people. | ||
| Especially if it's a fucking close fight. | ||
| Matt Brown could not have fought any harder. | ||
| That was a war, man. | ||
| It was a crazy fight. | ||
| But the idea that he only gets half as much because of some subjective opinion on whether or not he did enough. | ||
| This is not taking anything away from Barbarina. | ||
| It was a great fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Real good fight. | ||
| And, you know, maybe I would go back and score it for him if I watched it and, you know, tried to score it. | ||
| But I remember thinking, God damn it, I hate that model. | ||
| I hate it. | ||
| Yeah, it's a, like I said, it's weird. | ||
| It only exists in MMA. It doesn't exist in boxing, right? | ||
| Have you heard of it in boxing? | ||
| No, I think it's all show money. | ||
| I mean, maybe on the lower end, but for what I understand, a majority of it is just, yeah, you get paid to fight. | ||
| Yeah, and if it is on the lower end, they probably copied MMA. Does 1FC have that? | ||
| Do they have a fight and win? | ||
| I wonder. | ||
| Never fought for them. | ||
| Yeah, it's unfortunate. | ||
| That's very unfortunate. | ||
| So you start off, you do a little bit, where did you start off with jiu-jitsu? | ||
| That place. | ||
| Same place, Planet Jiu Jitsu? | ||
| Cardio kickboxing. | ||
| Cardio kickboxing, Nogi Jiu Jitsu, Tiny Little Room. | ||
| Did they have any fighters yet? | ||
| Well, that's why we went there, because they had a couple of fighters. | ||
| It was the closest place that had an MMA team at the time. | ||
| So I signed to fight Frankie Edgar in November of 2006. And the gym was kind of like... | ||
| It was breathing its last breaths, you know? | ||
| People at the gym kind of knew it was going to go under. | ||
| And it did, like, three weeks before the fight. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| So it was like... | ||
| It was a shit show of a camp, you know? | ||
| Frankie was training with Team Rhino at the time, which was huge. | ||
| They had, like... | ||
| 60 fighters, something like that. | ||
| And I had, like, two 16-year-old blue belts and, like, a purple belt and another purple belt who was 305 and, like, I had Dan to train with for, like, Two weeks, he had cracked a rib, and then the first sparring session, I just hooked him to the body, and I was like, ah, fuck! | ||
| So he was out, so it was a shitty camp. | ||
| Great fight. | ||
| Frankie and I fucking, I've never seen the fight, but I had people coming up to me for years after that one, like, dude, that fight with Frankie was crazy. | ||
| Did you watch your fights afterwards? | ||
| Not usually. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How come? | |
| I don't know. | ||
| Like, I remember the good and the bad, you know? | ||
| And it's like, I should. | ||
| But, like, I'm focusing on, like, what's next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And just trying to get myself better and work on those things. | ||
| I let my coaches kind of peel that stuff apart. | ||
| Do you watch tape on other guys, on opponents? | ||
| Occasionally. | ||
| Usually just to see them fight, you know? | ||
| But, like, I'm not trying to break things down. | ||
| Because I... Kind of what happened in that fight with Gray is that like I expect him to throw overhands and like looping punches and he came out and he just fed me straight rights and it was like you know I had been working with a boxing coach for a couple weeks and next thing you know I'm trying to like slip and move and it's like that's not me but I've been doing it for a couple weeks so I kind of picked it up and yeah he broke my nose pretty early in the fight and then continued to hit it and Yeah, | ||
| it was a good learning experience. | ||
| Well, he's an example of a guy who had wars and then the wheels fell off. | ||
| Why do you think you have been able to fight the way you fight and not have the wheels fall off? | ||
| Fuck if I know. | ||
| Really? | ||
| There's no... | ||
| Luck. | ||
| Like I said, I think I'm kind of... | ||
| I'm built to get roughed up. | ||
| Built to get, you know, into the mix. | ||
| Just durable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, like... | ||
| And then there's definitely a portion of that that is, like, skill set. | ||
| Like, I... I try to not get hit. | ||
| If you keep your hand up, if I throw a left and my right is glued to my face, I'm probably losing a little bit of power than if I loop that left over and drop my right hand. | ||
| But then if my opponent throws a counter, I'm more protected. | ||
| And that's what I'm trying to do. | ||
| Like, I'm trying to land good shots and hit people hard, but be protected at the same time because I also consider myself a bit of a counterpuncher. | ||
| So, like, I'm looking for somebody to throw something at me so that I can, you know, snap something at them. | ||
| And, yeah, I just... | ||
| I don't fucking know. | ||
| It's kind of crazy, though, if you really think about it, because we all know guys that... | ||
| How do I put this charitably? | ||
| They should have stopped a long time ago and they kept going. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, we all know them. | ||
| Like, we see them backstage and we're like, oof. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, there was guys at a certain point in time where I'd see that they were on the card and I would just, like, raise my eyebrows and take a deep breath. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, because you know, like, they probably shouldn't be doing this anymore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you see the opponent and you're like... | ||
| That's what's scary, right? | ||
| And then you see them... | ||
| A lot of times they'll leave and they'll go to other organizations and they're like, oh boy. | ||
| They were already having problems and now they're... | ||
| It's a business that's unforgiving and there's no... | ||
| When the brain goes, when the chin goes, there's no return. | ||
| I've never seen anybody where their chin went and then they made a comeback and all of a sudden it's back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Who do you? | ||
| No, I have not. | ||
| I haven't either. | ||
| Like I said, it's super unforgiving. | ||
| I'm not the type that I'm going to try to tell people what to do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I'd like other fighters to try to make good decisions about it. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| I don't consider fighting super dangerous. | ||
| I think there's a lot more other sports and types of entertainment out there that are a lot more fucking dangerous than what we do. | ||
| But, like, over the long haul, this shit, you know, it adds up. | ||
| But, yeah, like, I hate the idea of, like, telling somebody, like, hey, you know, you need to hang them up. | ||
| What would you do, though, if you were coaching a fighter and you realized that they're having problems, you see... | ||
| Telltale signs and slurring words and things along those lines. | ||
| I think in that position as the coach, it's your responsibility to have that conversation with somebody. | ||
| And they might not take it well. | ||
| But coaches have a very important job. | ||
| And that is to protect their athlete. | ||
| You're not only trying to make somebody better, but you're trying to protect them. | ||
| And like... | ||
| Unfortunately, in this sport and the way that it is, it's like sometimes a coach has fucking 30 athletes, you know, and a lot of times they're, hey, they're all here on sparring day. | ||
| So it's like... | ||
| It's hard to pick out, like, who's having a bad day? | ||
| Like, who's not on today that maybe we should just, you know, go hit the bag today. | ||
| We'll do a conditioning workout, something like that. | ||
| But no, it's hard sparring day, so that's what we're geared up for. | ||
| That's what everybody's, you know, they got a stiffy on hard sparring day because it's the fun day. | ||
| And you got to make the differentiation between a bad day and your skills are eroding. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And like that's one of the things that I can definitely attribute to my ability to be still sticking around here at just about 40 fights. | ||
| How old are you now? | ||
| 38. Wow. | ||
| Is that I open my own place and, dude, being able to train with a good group of guys that I trust and not have a fucking target on my back is awesome. | ||
| And when did you open up your own place? | ||
| End of 2014. Tell everybody what that is. | ||
| Well, actually, I ended up selling it. | ||
| Did you really? | ||
| Yeah, so I opened up Miller Brothers MMA in 2014. Is it still called Miller Brothers MMA? No, no. | ||
| That would be weird. | ||
| Yeah, it would be weird, wouldn't it? | ||
| I sold it to one of the guys who worked for me and one of my training partners. | ||
| How come you sold it? | ||
| Because COVID was a pain in the ass, obviously. | ||
| And it was going to get to that point where in order to get it at least back to where it was, I would have had to be there teaching classes all the time and stuff like that. | ||
| And I was like, you know what? | ||
| I'm going to fight as hard as I can for as long as I can. | ||
| I put it out in the air that I want to fight at USC 300. | ||
| And I think the best way to get to that point is to just focus on fighting and not be teaching classes. | ||
| That's the goal? | ||
| 300? | ||
| That's the goal, yeah. | ||
| We're at, what, 270... | ||
| What's this weekend? | ||
| 273? | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| No. | ||
| So I think, like, it should be about two years from... | ||
| So you want to hit 40? | ||
| What? | ||
| Years old. | ||
| Well, yeah, I'll probably be, like, pushing 41, yeah, I think. | ||
| It's gonna be tough, yeah. | ||
| I can slow my pace down. | ||
| I can slow my pace down. | ||
| In terms of the amount of fights you have? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I like to fight shit. | ||
| I'd love to fight four times a year. | ||
| But, you know, three times a year is pretty good. | ||
| When I get those, like, eight-month layoffs, I fucking hate it. | ||
| So where are you training now? | ||
| So I'm training still at the same place. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do they call it now? | ||
| Sussex County MMA. Yeah. | ||
| So still the same group of guys. | ||
|
unidentified
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But you don't have to think about bills and bullshit. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| You know, whatever the hell it was, like... | ||
| $7,500 a month to keep the lights on and the rent paid and all the utilities. | ||
| So it's nice to just be a fighter again. | ||
| There's a side of me that I enjoy teaching to a degree. | ||
| I enjoy teaching self-defense a little bit more than I like teaching jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Why so? | ||
| Jiu-Jitsu has got a couple different parts of it. | ||
| You've got the sporty side. | ||
| Everybody's motivation is different. | ||
| If I'm teaching somebody how to defend themselves, that's like, hey man, it's fucking hardcore. | ||
| I get to be an asshole. | ||
| If it's Jiu-Jitsu, then it's like, oh, well, I got a bad knee. | ||
| I don't want to do takedowns today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it's like, shut the fuck up. | |
| Every fight starts on its feet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, like, oh, but you're training so that you can go pull guard at a, you know, at a competition, like, or whatever, you know? | ||
| Like, I think jiu-jitsu's for everybody. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| But I just find that my personality type aligns more with, like, you know, some Rex Kwando type stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know? | |
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Did you ever think at any point in your career of relocating and going to a big camp, like American Top Team or something? | ||
| I did. | ||
| I did. | ||
| My brother and I were training at AMA Fight Club in New Jersey, and there was some bullshit. | ||
| We had a great group of guys, and that's kind of why I opened the place. | ||
| It was like, do I open my own place or do I go to ATT or something like that? | ||
| And, honestly, I feel like having my own spot, it saved me. | ||
| If I was in one of those big gyms, like, late 2015, early 2016, when I was sick with Lyme, I don't think I would have fucking made it, honestly. | ||
| How come? | ||
| Like, the attitude is different, right? | ||
| When you've got a big group of fighters, there's definitely ego, and it's not gonna... | ||
| That doesn't go away, right? | ||
| But... | ||
| There are plenty of sessions where it was like... | ||
| I was kind of... | ||
| I literally defend myself sometimes. | ||
| Some of our sparring days were fucking insane. | ||
| Like I said, a fantastic group of guys. | ||
| My brother and I and Charlie Brenneman. | ||
| We had... | ||
| Jamie Varner came for a bit. | ||
| Brian McLaughlin. | ||
| Rafael Olvera, Tractor, fought in the UFC for a bit. | ||
| Like, the best. | ||
| Like, the best fucking group of good fighters, but also good people that were looking out for each other. | ||
| I mean, we pushed each other, but we were looking out. | ||
| You know, injuries happen and, you know, like, you push the shit out of each other and it's gonna happen, but when it's like, next thing you know you've got some, you know, some Russian or something like that that doesn't speak a lick of English and you're, like, trying to... | ||
| Tell them, hey, I'm fighting in a main event next week. | ||
| Don't stomp my knee, please. | ||
| And then it happens. | ||
| And then it happens again. | ||
| And then it happens again. | ||
| It gets stressful. | ||
| And I've heard some of the other fighters that have left some of the big gyms talk about some of the same stuff where it's like, you know, because obviously the gym is looking for as many people as they can because it's a revolving door. | ||
| But you have to realize where the specific athletes are. | ||
| Like I said, good day or bad day. | ||
| And that's one of the things that I've realized over the years is it's like, man, as a 26-year-old, shit, there were fucking no bad days, really. | ||
| It's like one a year where I felt kind of sluggish. | ||
| Where now it's like, okay, I listen to myself a bit more. | ||
| Where you have to have a coach that can do that, too. | ||
| Because as a fighter, I feel like if I'm asked of something, I'm gonna do it, you know? | ||
| And there are times where, like, my coach is gonna be like, nah, nah, we're good. | ||
| Like, we only do the extra round, the extra two rounds. | ||
| Like, you got it in today, and you're healthy. | ||
| Like, that's what we need. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I have a lot of admiration for some of the coaches at those big gyms, but I feel like what MMA is and how the teams are is kind of one of our detriments at the same time. | ||
| I think there's way too many like... | ||
| Like, you know, gym wars. | ||
| I think that they've toned that shit down. | ||
| You know, talking to other fighters and stuff like that, I feel like it doesn't happen nearly as often as it used to. | ||
| But it's still... | ||
| You got two alphas, you know... | ||
| Banging heads and like if you look at boxing and the model they have, it's usually just a small, you know, couple coaches and you pull professional sparring partners in and stuff like that. | ||
| So it's like it's focused around the fighter. | ||
| Now granted, the pace, the pay is completely different and there's so much, there's so much So many differences between MMA and boxing, but I feel like that small, tight-knit group is good. | ||
| There's obviously a benefit to having all sorts of bodies and styles and all that stuff, but... | ||
| There's been some guys that have gotten very far with small gyms. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Stipe, right? | ||
| Like, Stipe's gym. | ||
| It's not a small gym, but it's not, like, known as being a place where people move there and train there specifically because of that. | ||
| Oliveira. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Charles Oliveira's gym is not known as being a hotbed gym. | ||
| There's two schools of thought, right? | ||
| There's a school of thought where you're better off in this giant ocean filled with sharks, and then the other school of thought is you're better off with specialized individual attention that's on you and your skill set. | ||
| I think the latter is... | ||
| Look at Demetrius Johnson and GSP. GSP wasn't going to fucking... | ||
| Open mat at henzo's like he's doing specific training for a specific opponent and same thing with Dimitri shot like he's not going with just every Everybody or like the new the next killer, but those two examples are examples of like elite coaches Yeah, yeah for us a hobby and Matt Hume, you know those those two guys are like hugely respected. | ||
| Yeah veteran coaches. | ||
| Yeah The The, like, you know, shark among shark thing is, like I said, it's great to have that there. | ||
| And there are times where, like, you need that little bit of a push. | ||
| But, man, I've seen so many fighters through the years that I've trained with that they could hang in the UFC, but they didn't make it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| For various reasons. | ||
| For various reasons and... | ||
| Personal life stuff is probably a big thing, but a lot of times what ends up happening is that personal life stuff finds its way to the training mat. | ||
| And then a couple of bad days of training, and it's like, fuck this. | ||
| The guy that I used to pick him apart is beating the shit out of me. | ||
| Fuck it. | ||
| I'm done. | ||
| It's hard when you're young to have that vision, too, because if you are getting picked apart... | ||
| The idea that you're banking your future on this. | ||
| Maybe you could go and be a fireman. | ||
| Maybe you can go and do this. | ||
| You might have other options and things you've been thinking about. | ||
| And then you keep getting lit up in the gym and you're like, what am I doing? | ||
| I'm not going to win a world title. | ||
| What am I doing? | ||
| And you just give up. | ||
| Bad confidence or bad relationship. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bad relationships, that's a big one. | |
| I knew this one guy that right before his fights, his girl would start big drama with him. | ||
| Right before his fights, like the night of the fight, she would leave the hotel, storm out, go down the bar and drink, and it was like, Oh, my God. | ||
| And his coaches would be going crazy to control this lady. | ||
| And he's fucking the night before his big fight, and she's down at the bar in the hotel, in the casino, and he's like, what the fuck, man? | ||
| But it's like there's certain people Male or female that need exorbitant amounts of attention. | ||
| And when they feel like you're paying attention to you and this one goal, that fight takes away from them. | ||
| They're vampires. | ||
| And they're like, I'm not getting enough blood. | ||
| I'm going to have to go downstairs and get some other blood. | ||
| I mean, this really, right? | ||
| We know people like that, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We do. | |
| We do, right? | ||
| Seen them plenty of times. | ||
| Plenty of times. | ||
| It's horrible because you want to tell the guy, like, you've got to get out. | ||
| Get out now. | ||
| Get out now and run. | ||
| Change your phone number and throw that old phone in the ocean. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here, man. | ||
| Move out in the middle of the night. | ||
| Don't let her know where you're going. | ||
| You gotta go, man. | ||
| You gotta go. | ||
| It's like, I mean, my wife and I, Angel, she's shit. | ||
| She bet on me, you know? | ||
| Like, I mean, we're a team. | ||
| And I wouldn't be still fighting today without her, you know? | ||
| Like... | ||
| It's been a long road, Well, most guys like you that are super successful over long periods of time do have a steady relationship because it takes that factor out of the equation. | ||
| I think for fighting, it's very important. | ||
| I mean, you look at all these fighters that are elite and have done really well for long periods of time. | ||
| A lot of them are married. | ||
| A lot of them have families. | ||
| Because that's a stable home life. | ||
| Gives them comfort and security, like relaxes them. | ||
| The guys that are out chasing tail all night long, like... | ||
| And dealing with 50 different DMs that you're juggling back and forth. | ||
| Those guys are crazy. | ||
| You only have so much bandwidth in your life. | ||
| I don't understand how they do it. | ||
| They don't do it well. | ||
| No one does it well. | ||
| There might be a couple exceptions to that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe. | |
| For a little while. | ||
| I've heard some stories. | ||
| But it's like guys who drink a lot, who also train, and then they get to a point where you're partying a couple of days before the fight, and you still pull it off. | ||
| Yeah, you're pulling it off, but you're not hitting your full potential. | ||
| There's no fucking way. | ||
| And if you fight somebody like you, the thing is, it's like, if you're an elite fighter, and you can drink, and you can party, and you can still win, what if you fight someone like you, who's not drinking, not partying, sleeping well, getting all their recovery in, and is doing all the disciplined things that you need to be at, they're gonna edge you. | ||
| Or they might knock you out. | ||
| They might catch you. | ||
| They might catch you, because even though you're a bad motherfucker, there's a lot of bad motherfuckers. | ||
| There's a lot. | ||
| And everybody's got an off switch. | ||
| Everybody can make a mistake. | ||
| Everybody can get submitted. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Plenty of jiu-jitsu black belt. | ||
| You throw strikes into the mix have been choked out. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| When Rodolfo Vieira got submitted, remember Hernandez caught him in a guillotine and were like, no fucking way! | ||
| That tells you right there, that guy is a gorilla. | ||
| I mean, he is fucking jacked in an elite Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt. | ||
| For him to get submitted? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Anybody can get submitted. | ||
| Jaco Ray got submitted, remember? | ||
| I mean, people get submitted. | ||
| Got his arm broke. | ||
| Got his arm broke, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, he's just no joke, man. | ||
| That guy's terrifying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just, we're humans, you know? | ||
| The body's not designed for this. | ||
| So speaking of we're humans, like, tell me about this Lyme disease thing, man, because I'm terrified of Lyme disease. | ||
| Yeah, it's a bitch. | ||
| So I, like 2015, I started feeling like shit, you know? | ||
| And it was like joint pain. | ||
| I was getting some like neuropathy. | ||
| I'd sit on the floor with my kids and my legs would fall asleep or, you know, like just positional shit. | ||
| And it's like I fucked my neck up in 2014, like 10 days before I fought Yancey Medeiros. | ||
| So I was like, okay, my neck's banged up. | ||
| Like bulging disc? | ||
| I don't even really know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You didn't get an MRI? No, I didn't get an MRI. It was 10 days before the fight. | |
| It was the most unspectacular thing. | ||
| It was like a whiplash injury. | ||
| I was sparring Mickey Golf when he was like 22, 21, and he threw like a hook and I just clinched a body lock and my head hit his chest. | ||
| And it just tweaked to my left. | ||
| And I felt it. | ||
| I have it on video. | ||
| And it's like, I shrugged my shoulders, moved my head around. | ||
| It was the last round of the day. | ||
| I was like, alright, this is going to hurt later, but we're going to get through it. | ||
| I only got to that fight because of a chiropractor and his magic fingers and some Graston. | ||
| But... | ||
| So, like, a lot of the symptoms that I was getting from the Lyme, I attributed to being a fighter. | ||
| Like, my knees hurt. | ||
| Well, of course they fucking hurt. | ||
| Like, you know, I mean, to the point where I'd be 45 minutes into a training session and have to get up like an old man, push on my knees and stuff like that. | ||
| It's getting, you know, numbness and tingling. | ||
| I was getting, like, brain fog. | ||
| And it was pretty good. | ||
| I'd kind of, like, go into a room sometimes and, like, go to, like, clean up and just kind of get lost. | ||
| So... | ||
| Before my fight at 196, it got so bad that I was contemplating retirement at UFC 200. I was like, I'm gonna get through 196, I'm gonna ask the fight on 200 to retire. | ||
| And you did not know you had Lyme? | ||
| Did not know I had Lyme disease. | ||
| Like I said, Nervous system was kind of shot. | ||
| Joints were swollen. | ||
| I'd get some twitching in my eye was mostly where I'd get it just for like days on end. | ||
| Very occasionally I would say the wrong word while I was speaking and not even anything close like just the complete wrong word would come out. | ||
| And you'd notice and you're like, what the fuck did I just say? | ||
| I hope they didn't notice. | ||
| So I was telling my doctor about this before my pre-fight physical, or during my pre-fight physical for 196, and he's like, you know, he's like, honestly, I think you have Lyme disease. | ||
| And I was like, all right. | ||
| So we ran some tests, tested me for Lyme. | ||
| To this day, I still don't test positive. | ||
| It's about 50% of the people that have Lyme test positive for it. | ||
| So he's like, if it's Lyme disease, and he's like, we ran some other tests. | ||
| There's some antibody that I had that showed an infection that they associate sometimes with Lyme. | ||
| So he's like, we're gonna put you on doxy, and he's like, if you do have Lyme disease, within a week, 10 days, he's like, you're gonna feel different. | ||
| What is it called, doxine? | ||
| Doxycycline. | ||
| Doxycycline. | ||
| So, like, I fight, uh, fight Diego, and that was the first time, like, I was, I was kind of out of it. | ||
| I could barely train for that fight. | ||
| Um, like, I would, I would miss training sessions, like, live grappling sessions, or sparring sessions, and, like, because I could barely get out of bed, or, like, uh, so I was, I, I would, I would get in maybe six sessions a week, um, you know, and kind of just focused on, like, alright, well, I'll just be in shape, you know, like, I could run on the treadmill, that's, The easiest thing for me to do at that point was to run on the treadmill, which is weird. | ||
| It's different than what most people experience. | ||
| Most people experience difficulty doing aerobic exercise and they can do anaerobic stuff. | ||
| I couldn't do anaerobic stuff. | ||
| If I lifted or did sprints, I'd be banged up for fucking days. | ||
| So, and that fight, like, I remember, like, when I fight, and I think it has to do something with the lights, too. | ||
| Like, I don't see the cage, like, beyond the cage. | ||
| I don't see anybody in the stands. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| I barely hear my fucking corner, for crying out loud. | ||
| So... | ||
| That fight, during the whole fight, I could see throughout in the stands. | ||
| I was so unfocused that it was a weird experience. | ||
| It's the only time this ever happened to me. | ||
| But I get out of the fight and get on some doxycycline the following week, and it was within a week or so, just like my doctor said, I started feeling way fucking better. | ||
| It took me a few years to figure out when exactly I got bit. | ||
| I had assumed that it was probably early 2015, and then after learning about the early symptoms of Lyme disease and pulling my head out of my ass and remembering the experience that I had in 2013, I'm pretty much 100% confident that I was bit in late May, early June of 2013. What makes you think that? | ||
| I had a period of time where I was like... | ||
| I basically had morning sickness. | ||
| I was extremely nauseous in the morning. | ||
| And like early Lyme, it's like flu-like symptoms and migraines and stuff like that. | ||
| So I had really bad nausea. | ||
| Like if I picked up my coffee cup and I... Was like breathing in, and I got a big whiff of my coffee, it would make me gag. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Or like brushing my teeth, the taste of the toothpaste would make me gag. | ||
| I had two kids in diapers at the time. | ||
| Every time bringing the friggin' garbage out, oh man, I'd be dry heaving the whole way down the driveway for like two weeks. | ||
| And I was like, my kids are in daycare. | ||
| I think my niece had, like, rotavirus or something at the time. | ||
| I was like, I got a stomach bug, like, whatever. | ||
| And then I got a series of migraines. | ||
| Like, right kind of as the nausea was dying down. | ||
| I got, I don't know, I think it was like seven migraines in ten days or something like that. | ||
| So... | ||
| I went to a neurologist and ENT, ran a bunch of tests. | ||
| They tested me for Lyme, tested negative. | ||
| They couldn't find anything. | ||
| So they're like, hey, we're going to kick the ball down the road a little bit, see if it comes back and figure out what we can do. | ||
| So I kind of forgot about that. | ||
| And after, you know, kind of educating myself on Lyme after I, you know, was diagnosed, I was like, maybe, you know, maybe that's when it was. | ||
| But it took a while to get over it because it was You know, just about three years that it had untreated. | ||
| You know, and the bacteria is a sneaky little bitch. | ||
| They call it the great imitator because it can give everybody completely different symptoms. | ||
| And it can pass the blood brain barrier and all this other shit, you know. | ||
| It also has a like a toxin in the cell wall of it. | ||
| So if you kill too much of it at one time or in a short period of time, you experience what's called like the Herxheimer reaction, which is basically you're being like poisoned by the death of the Lyme bacteria. | ||
| Yeah, it's a shitty... | ||
| It makes you, it's a fucking amazing thing because it's like, here's this little thing that, this little bacteria that when it dies, it makes you change what you're doing. | ||
| So that you don't like, it's a, getting over Lyme is especially like, like untreated for a while is a marathon. | ||
| And I'm not good at that shit. | ||
| Um, So, like, I was on doxycycline for six months. | ||
| You know, I ended up... | ||
| Six months? | ||
| Yeah, ended up... | ||
| That's an antibiotic? | ||
| Yeah, it's an antibiotic. | ||
| I was... | ||
| Six months? | ||
| I was shitting, like, four to five times before noon. | ||
| I mean, in 2016. So, leading up to, like... | ||
| I started to lose a little weight in 2015. But I used to walk just under a buck ninety. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| After that first six months on doxycycline, I was walking around at 163 pounds before the Tiago Alves fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa! | |
| Yeah, I lost a fuck ton of muscle. | ||
| And of course, it's like, oh, it's USADA. Jim's off the saws. | ||
| You know, it's like, no, I'm pooping so much. | ||
| Like, you have no idea. | ||
| Uh... | ||
| I just can't keep up with it. | ||
| But you were still fighting. | ||
| I was still fighting, yeah. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| But we're not even done, Joe. | ||
| So I was on it for six months, and I felt way better, you know, that was whatever it was, September, than I did in March. | ||
| So I was like, hey, Doc, do you think we can get off of the antibiotics? | ||
| And he's like, yeah, let's give it a try. | ||
| And it was about seven weeks, and then I started to feel like my symptoms were coming back. | ||
| And then me being an asshole, I'm like, no, no, they're not. | ||
| It's not the Lyme again. | ||
| So I kind of waited. | ||
| By the end of the year, it fucking kicked my ass. | ||
| Like, leading up into, what was that, 208, when I fought Dustin. | ||
| Like, that was the hardest couple weeks before a fight that I've ever had. | ||
| Like, I... Because I was trying to get back on the doxycycline. | ||
| I was trying to supplement even way better. | ||
| You're not supposed to take it within two hours before, two hours after supplements and stuff like that. | ||
| I don't like working out with food in my stomach. | ||
| And I can't take the doxy on an empty stomach because it makes my stomach upset. | ||
| Uh, so I was, like, trying to figure out, like, the best way to get back on it, and it just kept kicking my butt and kicking my butt. | ||
| Um, finally, like, I don't know, maybe two weeks before the fight, I started to kind of get it, get it dialed in. | ||
| Uh, and then, unfortunately, I was, like, fight week. | ||
| I was, uh, I was having a Herx, uh, reaction, and, and, uh, it was a really weird experience getting, uh, I was having, like, muscle tremors when I was cutting weight. | ||
| So, like, I was sitting there... | ||
| Oh, like, punching it? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Couldn't stop my arm from moving. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's gotta be freaky. | ||
| My vision was a little messed up, and I don't know if it was the lights or whatever, but, like, when I fought Dustin that night, like, to me, like, everything kind of had, like, a... | ||
| A yellow hue to it. | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| And I don't know if that was just my eyes being weird or what. | ||
| So this is the side effect of the virus exuding a poison? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, because I finally kind of figured it out right before that fight. | ||
| So then, 2017, I was still dealing with it. | ||
| It was difficult. | ||
| The first half of the year was pretty difficult. | ||
| And then through the summer, it started to get a lot better for me. | ||
| I changed my diet. | ||
| I started eating a lot better food. | ||
| When I first found out I had Lyme, we were trying to... | ||
| I kind of adhere to the Lyme diet. | ||
| The Lyme diet is basically a paleo. | ||
| It's an inflammatory disease, so avoiding alcohol, sugar, gluten, dairy, stuff like that. | ||
| But I also had a bunch of little kids, and it's like, well, if I'm making my food and trying to make their food so they're not eating mac and cheese, hot dogs, and chicken fingers every day, this is going to be really fucking hard. | ||
| I've never adhered to that diet specifically, but Totally eat a ton more whole foods and vegetables and shit like that now. | ||
| And definitely I drink way less. | ||
| So how did you kill the Lyme? | ||
| Is it 100% done or do you still have relapses? | ||
| I haven't had a relapse since, yeah, about 2017, yeah. | ||
| Oh, that's nice. | ||
| So five fucking years of freedom. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so you went through it for essentially like a solid four years? | ||
| A few years, yeah. | ||
| So it was, well, like, it took a while for it to start kicking my butt, you know? | ||
| Like I had that first instance in 2013 when I first got bit. | ||
| But then, like, I couldn't really tell anything, you know, But if you had gotten on antibiotics right then, you probably could have killed it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Three to four weeks is usually what doctors will prescribe. | ||
| And if you catch it early, you usually fare pretty well with it. | ||
| But like, yeah, it was, I mean, 2017, I didn't feel like I could start really like, excuse me, like pushing myself and sprinting and lifting again until like maybe April of 2018. Wow. | ||
| And then I was still on Doxy through that period of time, so I basically took it for about two years. | ||
| So I had a six-month period, like eight weeks off, well, a little more than eight weeks off, but a couple months off, and then basically two years. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's a lot. | ||
| It is a lot. | ||
| And what made me completely stop, I kind of had figured it like... | ||
| Figured out how to, you know, the diet and all that stuff, right? | ||
| With the meds and supplements. | ||
| And I ended up getting, the stomach bug was going around, so the last time that I took doxycycline was New Year's Eve 2018. I rung in the New Year, puking my brains out, and I was like, I can't do this anymore. | ||
| It was a bad one, and it's like, that's it. | ||
| I haven't taken doxycycline since. | ||
| Did you have to take probiotics while you were taking that to help your gut health? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What stuff did you take? | ||
| Um, I took a few over the years. | ||
| Yeah, a couple different brands. | ||
| I was trying to... | ||
| What about fermented foods, like kimchi and stuff like that? | ||
| Right after that, when I was sick with that stomach bug, yeah, it was kefir and yogurt. | ||
| That's all I ate for a couple weeks was anything fermented, sauerkraut, unpasteurized sauerkraut, kimchi and shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was a ball of gas, but... | |
| But, yeah, I felt like it kind of kick-started me into, like, a little bit repairing maybe some of the damage. | ||
| I don't know if I totally did, but, yeah, it was a long fucking road, you know? | ||
| And it's such a shitty thing, because it's like, since people don't always test positive for it, it's hard to get diagnosed with it. | ||
| And you have to, like... | ||
| I mean, some doctors don't... | ||
| They don't, like... | ||
| It's not that they don't understand. | ||
| It's that they don't necessarily appreciate what everybody's going through. | ||
| And there's, like, kind of two schools of thought with it. | ||
| There's a lot that say, hey, you know, it doesn't matter how long you've had it, three weeks of doctor cycling is going to kill it. | ||
| And then there's the other side that's like, no. | ||
| Like, it can be fucking stubborn. | ||
| You know, and it's... | ||
| For me, it was easy because I was the one fighting it. | ||
| Like, I'll fucking deal with anything, you know? | ||
| The scary part is, like, my kids. | ||
| Like, fuck, man. | ||
| Like, it... | ||
| I don't want them to have to deal with the bullshit. | ||
| I'm used to being in pain. | ||
| I'm used to being uncomfortable because I appreciate it. | ||
| Being a lifelong athlete, it's like, oh yeah, my knees are sore, my back is sore. | ||
| It's supposed to be like that because it means I went hard yesterday. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I've had the opportunity to meet a lot of people that have been super, like... | ||
| Super tough and, you know, elegantly fought this thing. | ||
| It's a shitty little thing, you know? | ||
| Ticks are assholes. | ||
| They're fucking everywhere, too. | ||
| It's so common on the East Coast. | ||
| I know so many people that have Lyme disease. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And do you know what Morgellons is? | ||
| You ever hear of that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Morgellons? | |
| No. | ||
| Morgellons is a disease that they don't even know if it's real. | ||
| And I had to interview these people once at a Morgellons conference, and it's very strange because they feel like they have fiber growing out of their body, and they start itching themselves, and they hallucinate. | ||
| But one of the people that I talked to was a doctor, and he also has Morgellons, and he said, but one thing that we all have in common is, he goes, most of these people also have Lyme disease. | ||
| The links between Lyme and ALS and some other stuff, it's fucking wild. | ||
| Oh, that makes sense, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's crazy. | |
| Because it's got neurological issues. | ||
| What he was saying is that it's neurotoxic. | ||
| In that when you say Lyme disease, like if a tick carries Lyme, the way he was describing it to me, it's not as if it's like you can isolate a compound and that compound is Lyme. | ||
| He said, depending on the tick, it could have a host of different toxins along with this one that we consider Lyme. | ||
| It's not one thing. | ||
| And he said the Lyme disease itself, like when people have Lyme, one of the symptoms is this neurotoxicity. | ||
| And that in neurotoxicity, he believes that it can trigger hallucinations. | ||
| So he was seeing things moving across his eyes. | ||
| He would look at himself in the mirror and he thought he saw a worm moving across his eyelids. | ||
| So these people, they start scratching themselves and they itch like little holes in their skin. | ||
| And then you get carpet fibers or dog hair or something on it, and you think you're growing hairs out of these fibers, and part of it is because you're kind of hallucinating. | ||
| This is very controversial. | ||
| I'm not sure if this is right or wrong, but it made sense when he was saying it that everybody who he knows who has it are a large percentage of them. | ||
| Of course, in your situation, you didn't even test positive for Lyme, but he was saying a lot of these people also have Lyme disease. | ||
| There are a lot of like, I know of a lot of like co-infections, right? | ||
| So the, I always hack up the name, it's like Boreali or whatever is the typical like Lyme bacteria. | ||
| But sometimes there are certain types of like mold. | ||
| That creates sensitivities, and, um, I mean, shit, you get, what is the Lone Star tick? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| With, uh, you get allergic to red meat. | ||
| Yeah, Alpha Gal. | ||
| My friend Evan has that. | ||
| Yeah, Evan Haver, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you know Evan. | ||
| Yeah, he was, uh, we were hunting together, and he couldn't eat red meat. | ||
| I was like, what are you saying? | ||
| Yeah, we've talked about it a little bit. | ||
| It sucks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fuck that. | ||
| I know that would be the worst. | ||
| That's 80% of my diet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, and he just, he shot a giant elk too. | ||
| So there's like 400 pounds of red meat that you can't eat. | ||
| I haven't asked him, like, what were your symptoms? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, could you tough that out? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I think it's bad. | ||
| I think it's pretty bad. | ||
| You get a little itchy? | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| It does your asshole prolapse. | ||
| One of my kids is allergic to dairy, but she'll take a lactate if she wants ice cream and just fart it out. | ||
| She had no idea why. | ||
| She was so farty. | ||
| Then we realized we had to run some tests. | ||
| She has a legitimate allergy to lactose. | ||
| My... | ||
| My oldest, when she was born, she was lactose intolerant, so she was just fussy. | ||
| We didn't figure it out until we put her on, even though I hate it, we put her on soy formula, and it was day and night. | ||
| All of a sudden, she's sleeping. | ||
| And then my youngest, he was lactose intolerant for, I don't know, Maybe the first year or so. | ||
| And then he kind of grew out of it. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| My middle daughter was like that too. | ||
| We gave her milk one time and she threw it up all over the place. | ||
| And I was like, that's interesting. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Formula with milk, like milk formula. | ||
| She couldn't tolerate it. | ||
| But breast milk, no problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then as she got older, it went away. | ||
| But now she just avoids it. | ||
| It's nice when your kids eat healthy. | ||
| My kids eat healthy, fortunately. | ||
| But man, it would be a trip when one of their friends would stay over and you'd have to feed them. | ||
| And they're like, what do you eat? | ||
| You don't eat that? | ||
| It's like, can you give me pasta with butter? | ||
| That's all you eat? | ||
| Okay, I'll... | ||
| We can definitely have pasta with butter, but I need you to know that there's nothing in there. | ||
| There's no protein in there. | ||
| There's no vitamins in there. | ||
| You're not getting any real food. | ||
| My kids are good. | ||
| They have their picky moment, except for Wyatt, my 10-year-old. | ||
| That kid will eat anything, and he will out-eat the both of us combined. | ||
| And he's like, you know... | ||
| I mean, he's a decently sized kid, but he's fucking strong as an ox. | ||
| He's not a huge kid, and he will eat like a man, and he always has. | ||
| He always has. | ||
| He's like four years old. | ||
| Isn't it weird how different they are? | ||
| Out of the box, personalities are different, everything's different. | ||
| Same household, same parents, same rules. | ||
| They come out of the womb different. | ||
| I mean, I used to think I was more skeptical of the nature, and I thought it was much more nurture with the way kids' personalities are formed. | ||
| But watching my own kids, they're so damn different from the jump. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So my oldest, like... | ||
| I didn't read any books. | ||
| I was like, it's a baby. | ||
| We're gonna figure it out, right? | ||
| Be cool with it. | ||
| How hard can it be? | ||
| When she was born... | ||
| She had, I don't know, probably three, four inch long black hair. | ||
| She had hair on her arms and legs. | ||
| When she was born? | ||
| Yeah, when she was born. | ||
| She had hair on her legs? | ||
| Yeah, like Popeye forearms and calves. | ||
| She was a little monkey. | ||
| She popped out and I was like, holy shit, I have a picture of her at a day old holding her head up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| She's laying on my chest. | ||
| I'm doing like the, you know, the skin to skin thing. | ||
| And my wife snapped it. | ||
| She like picks her head up and I'm like, what the fuck? | ||
| You know, the other three, like total newborn baby, like, you know, loose head and all that stuff. | ||
| And it was like a complete trip going from her who, I mean, as soon as she could stand, she could run and jump. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Like she was just, she was born at three months old. | ||
| It was like, it was crazy. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| Yeah, and she's shit. | ||
| So she'll be 12 in like a month and a half. | ||
| And she's as tall as I was when I was like 16. Wow. | ||
| Like, she's totally gonna be taller than me. | ||
| I mean, my dad is... | ||
| Well, was 6'4 before he squished all his discs. | ||
| How old is she now, though? | ||
| She's 12. Just about 12. That's usually when they hit periods, right? | ||
| 12, 13. We don't want to go over that. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| Believe me, I've been through it. | ||
| But when they do that, that's when they kind of stop growing. | ||
| Yeah, for girls. | ||
| Boys keep going. | ||
| Boys keep going until sometimes like 19. Yeah. | ||
| It's... | ||
| Yeah, it's wild, the difference. | ||
| So I got girl, boy, girl, boy. | ||
| Was your dad a wrestler as well? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| My dad, I think he wrestled like one or two years, but he... | ||
| He probably could have played football. | ||
| He was a big dude. | ||
| How did he smash his discs? | ||
| Carrying heavy shit. | ||
| My dad still is today, just in a different way, but growing up he was a cartoon character. | ||
| Like, I was looking through some pictures and I posted one a couple weeks ago. | ||
| He looks like fucking Mr. Incredible from the cartoon movie, you know, the Pixar stuff. | ||
| Like, his head is just fucking this giant block and, like, the one picture, I mean, he's got... | ||
| The 80s shirt, and it's like a v-neck or something, and it's just this big plume of fucking black chest hair coming out. | ||
| And it's like, dude, like, he was, yeah, he was 6'4", 240, like, just, it's towered above everybody. | ||
| And everybody always thought he was... | ||
| Everybody thought he was, like, bigger than that. | ||
| Like, it's okay. | ||
| You know, I've met plenty of people who are bigger than he was, but he had this, like, presence that he was, like, seven foot tall and, you know, 500 pounds. | ||
| Like, but yeah, he used to carry just stupid shit. | ||
| Did he get his discs fused? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| They're just still kind of... | ||
| That's a shit design. | ||
| The disc is a shit design because it's one of the things that goes in fighters and wrestlers and jiu-jitsu people more than anything. | ||
| Everyone I know that does jiu-jitsu has disc issues. | ||
| After a while, you just hit a point where something's wrong. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He definitely, like, exacerbated those issues. | ||
| Like, I've seen him... | ||
| So, used to do, like, residential framing, you know, the, like, skeleton of the house. | ||
| And this one builder that he used to work for, a guy was a little tiny Italian guy, was a bit of an asshole. | ||
| He wouldn't, like, backfill the houses to the foundation. | ||
| So, it was... | ||
| You had, like... | ||
| One spot to maybe bring lumber in to the foundation. | ||
| When we're doing the beams in the basement, you'd have this 40-foot beam that weighs 800 pounds, and you really don't have a good way to get it across the fucking To the other side. | ||
| So that motherfucker would cinch his tool belt tight, tall enough, his shoulder just fit right where the middle of the beam was, and he would pick that fucking shit up and walk across the stone, you know, three-quarter gravel stone basement, get to the other end, lean back a little bit, lift it up, and put it on the side. | ||
| 800 pounds? | ||
| 800 pounds, yeah. | ||
| He dragged 800 pounds? | ||
| He carried 800 pounds. | ||
| Carried? | ||
| Like, off the ground? | ||
| Off the ground. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| It is insane. | ||
| That sounds like one of the strongest humans that's ever lived. | ||
| He's got some stories. | ||
| How long is the beam? | ||
| 40 feet. | ||
| How is that possible? | ||
| So we weighed it. | ||
| So every foot weighed like 19 and just under 20 pounds. | ||
| So he's in the center of this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Bouncing on his shoulder. | ||
| 800 pounds? | ||
| Yeah, 800 pounds. | ||
| It's fucking wild. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| It's almost hard to believe. | ||
| It is hard to believe. | ||
| I've seen him almost die a few times, too, because he's doing stupid shit. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| There were a couple occasions where it's like, oh, fuck. | ||
| You know, like, he's not going to be moving. | ||
| We were raising a great room wall. | ||
| So it was a two by six wall. | ||
| And we had this machine, this rough terrain forklift. | ||
| And it was the biggest piece of shit. | ||
| Like, company colors were rust. | ||
| Like, that's... | ||
| We didn't have a shit ton of money growing up. | ||
| It saved so much time having this forklift. | ||
| So he buys this thing. | ||
| It had an old straight six from a... | ||
| I think it was a six. | ||
| It might have been a four. | ||
| From a Jeep that was... | ||
| Taken by the Nazis in World War II and actually had a swastika welded onto the case of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa! | |
| He found this thing in a junkyard. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was the biggest piece of shit, but it saved us so much time getting stuff up to the second floor and all that shit. | ||
| It got to a point where it would just constantly stall. | ||
| It had zero breaks. | ||
| He's lifting this wall. | ||
| And, uh, or going to lift this wall in, like, kind of position, and so we had it laid out. | ||
| So you got these 2x6s, and there's, like, the king stud, which runs up where the header is, you know, the big piece that, like, over the windows and fireplace, um, and, uh, and then, like, liners. | ||
| So it was, like, I think it was three. | ||
| I think it was three 2x6s. | ||
| Um, so he's driving. | ||
| It's got this tiny little cage, like, over top of it. | ||
| And it stalls, so the machine starts rolling backwards, and these two-by-sixes get caught on the back of the cage. | ||
| And, like, it's winding back, and my brothers and I are up on the second floor, and we start fucking screaming at them, because you see it just, like, winding up. | ||
| So he looks and he sees it and he throws his head down as hard as he can as the 2x6 slides off. | ||
| And it was like a Sammy Sosa 450-yard bomb. | ||
| Like, crack! | ||
| And it's like, I'm jumping off the second floor. | ||
| You know, my brothers are sliding down the studs to get down to the floor. | ||
| And he rolls out. | ||
| He rolls out and he, like, gets up. | ||
| The machine rolls into the woods. | ||
| And he's like, fuck it. | ||
| You know, he starts swearing. | ||
| He's like, Yosemite Sam, you know, bumps anything. | ||
| He starts swearing like a sailor. | ||
| And it's like... | ||
| You're standing up. | ||
| Like, what the fuck? | ||
| Like, you should be dead. | ||
| Like, you should literally... | ||
| Your brain should be, like, 20 feet that way. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, so he ended up, you know, the back of his head ended up swelling up pretty good, but he was okay, you know? | ||
| Concussion, but, like, okay. | ||
| You come from durable jeans. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, dude. | |
| Like, he actually got a... | ||
| An MRI a few years later. | ||
| And the doctor's like, you know, he's like, you know, your brain looks good and everything. | ||
| He's like, you know, one interesting thing is that for the size of your head, your brain is kind of small. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's like, so you're telling me I've got a BB in a boxcar? | |
| He's like, pretty much. | ||
| Wow, that's weird. | ||
| He's got Homer Simpsonitis, so it's like he's just got an extra thick layer of bone around his head. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Yeah, so there have been a couple others that were like, dude. | ||
| I saw him cut himself with a chainsaw once. | ||
| That was exciting. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's funny how some people are just born more durable. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Do you ever see when they examined Marvin Hagler's head? | ||
| No. | ||
| Marvin Hagler, who's one of the greatest boxers of all time, one of my favorite all-time boxers, Marvin had muscle on the outside of his head like headgear. | ||
| They said the size of the muscle outside of his head was far larger than a normal person, like unusually large, to the point where it's literally like he had a cushion on the side of his head. | ||
| So weird. | ||
| Well, he also had a tremendous chin anyway. | ||
| He was only knocked down once ever in his whole career, but it was a bullshit knockdown. | ||
| God, I forget it. | ||
| Juan Roldan. | ||
| I'm pretty sure it was Juan Roldan, but it was a fake knockdown. | ||
| It should have been a slip, and they called it a knockdown. | ||
| It's like, man. | ||
| It sucked, because you go and watch the punches he absorbed from... | ||
| Murderous knockout punchers like John the Beast Mugabe. | ||
| Tommy Hearns never goes down. | ||
| And this one slip, it was almost like the guy cuffed him in the back and kind of pushed him down. | ||
| But his head, he had built in these muscles right here, the mandible muscles. | ||
| They were extra thick. | ||
| That's the fucked up part is that my head is just as big around as my dad's. | ||
| And he's... | ||
| Eight inches taller than me, and it's like I could take my hat and plop it onto his head. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| If I didn't have a hunched over Quasimodo posture, I'd probably look like a lollipop. | ||
| But yeah, his head is super. | ||
| Do you ever go back and look at your career and go, man, what would have happened if I didn't have that fucking Lyme disease? | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| Just deal with it? | ||
| Yeah, just deal with it. | ||
| I'm not that type. | ||
| I'm good at what's right in front of me. | ||
| Like, going forward. | ||
| You know, I mean, even with the positive shit, you know, it's like, okay. | ||
| You gotta be that way if you're that way with the negative shit. | ||
| Yeah, like, okay, that's good. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| You know, like, oh, I won. | ||
| I won and I won a bonus and, you know, I made a bunch of money. | ||
| Great. | ||
| When's the next one? | ||
| Like, what's next? | ||
| You know, like, I've obviously, like, there are a couple fights where it's like, I'd like that one back. | ||
| But, you know, I don't have a time machine. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What is this booze you brought? | ||
| What is going on here? | ||
| Tell me about this. | ||
| You make your own booze now. | ||
| Well, I have it in a little bit. | ||
| These are actually, well, that is... | ||
| So this one right here is a coffee liqueur, like basically a cold brew, an alcoholic cold brew. | ||
| Like a Kahlua type deal? | ||
| It's less syrupy than Kahlua. | ||
| So I make one... | ||
| Crack that bitch open. | ||
| Let's find out what's up. | ||
| I make one. | ||
| They're better cold than they're not. | ||
| Well, maybe it's better to have it when it's not cold. | ||
| You see how good it really is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, yeah, so this... | ||
| Should we get ice cubes? | ||
| Or should we just drink it like this? | ||
| Let's try it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Let me try it. | ||
| Pour a little of that. | ||
| Let's see what's up. | ||
| So how did you learn how to do this? | ||
| I just read stuff. | ||
| And just started practicing? | ||
| Yeah, you know what? | ||
| Reading comprehension, it fucking works. | ||
| How does one learn how to make a coffee liqueur? | ||
| Cheers, sir. | ||
| Cheers. | ||
| So this one, I made up the recipe myself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| That's an acquired taste. | ||
| That is not that bad. | ||
| When I first make it, it's pretty hot. | ||
| When it's cold, like I said, it'll be... | ||
| It's not bad, though. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| It's got a... | ||
| It is like a liqueur. | ||
| I guess like a Kahlua-ish, but not... | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Essentially, this one's just like some cold brew with some other stuff in it and then some Everclear. | ||
| Is that what you add to it? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, because it's highly alcoholic and it doesn't affect the flavor. | ||
| Do you make your own Everclear? | ||
| No, no, I can't. | ||
| Oh, jeez! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus! | |
| No, that was an inadvertent cough. | ||
| I think I have allergies now. | ||
| That's the thing about moving to Austin is they say you develop allergies. | ||
| You got any allergies, Jamie? | ||
| Uh, yeah, sure. | ||
| Did you get them before you came here? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I had them. | |
| I lived in Ohio a long time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Had some weird stuff. | ||
| Starting to get, like, I'll get, like, runny nose and I think I'm sick, but then I work out and I feel great. | ||
| I'm like, hmm, I think this is a fucking allergy. | ||
| Because the pollen's in the air. | ||
| Like, I went out to my car. | ||
| I have a black truck. | ||
| It was covered with, like, yellow stuff. | ||
| Like, this is wild. | ||
| So much fucking pollen. | ||
| I got to like 26 before I experienced any allergies, and then I broke my nose and my septums mushed to the side, so now I have like a constant post-nasal drip, and it's like I experience a little bit of allergies. | ||
| When you retire, are you going to get that fixed? | ||
| I am. | ||
| After seeing Dudley's pictures, it's like, ugh. | ||
| Oh, I told him to do it. | ||
| I got mine done. | ||
| Man, it was the greatest fucking thing. | ||
| I fell down a flight of stairs when I was five. | ||
| And I think from then on, I've never had a nose. | ||
| My nose has been useless. | ||
| And then, obviously, all the years of combat sports. | ||
| And I broke it, I don't know how many times. | ||
| And then I got it fixed. | ||
| And when I got it fixed, it was all of a sudden like... | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I used to go to yoga class, and they'd go, breathe out of your nose. | ||
| And I'm like, that's not possible. | ||
| My nose doesn't work. | ||
| I had no nose. | ||
| And you could hear my voice back then. | ||
| It was a different voice. | ||
| It was a more nasally voice. | ||
| And it just changed everything. | ||
| It changed my cardio. | ||
| My cardio went up a solid 10%. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Like, immediately. | ||
| I was like, this is wild. | ||
| I was like, mouth breather. | ||
| I was a mouth breather. | ||
| There's a lot of people that are mouth breathers. | ||
| You know, like Justin Gaethje, you hear him talk. | ||
| Every time he talks, it sounds like this. | ||
| He's just stuffed up. | ||
| All the wars. | ||
| Because he can get scar tissue in there, too. | ||
| That's what I didn't understand, is that the way the doctor was describing it to me, he said, it's just like cauliflower ear. | ||
| And you get cauliflower ear, and you get all the blood pools, and it calcifies, and it becomes hard. | ||
| He goes, that shit happens on the inside of your nose. | ||
| He didn't say that shit, but he said, that happens on the inside of your nose as well. | ||
| I was like, really? | ||
| He's like, yeah, your nose is a disaster area. | ||
| He's like, you have like maybe one-eighth of one nostril. | ||
| He said, the rest of your nose is totally closed. | ||
| I was like, oh. | ||
| Because one side, on my left side I go, I could get a little. | ||
| And the right side was just junk, just garbage. | ||
| There's nothing going on on that side. | ||
| Funny thing about Cod Fire, so the only time I've ever seen that... | ||
| So when I fought Frankie, like, he's beaten me, you know? | ||
| So I go into the third round, and I'm like, I just gotta do something big. | ||
| So I rip a left high kick. | ||
| And, of course, I don't hit him in the temple. | ||
| I don't hit him in the chin. | ||
| I hit him, like, right across the cheekbone and the ear. | ||
| So his calcified cauliflower rips open and this chunk of like... | ||
| Rock. | ||
| Shit, yeah. | ||
| Goes flying over to the other side of the cage. | ||
| And like one of the state athletic guys like scoops it up. | ||
| They ended up, his old coach like took it and put it in formaldehyde and shit like that. | ||
| How big was the chunk? | ||
| I think it was like, you know, maybe the size of a nickel. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, that was right before tryouts for UFC, rather, Tough 5. So, like, I think it was like three weeks prior. | ||
| So, like, we go down there. | ||
| My eye is bloodshot red still. | ||
| And his freaking ear is as black as his mug. | ||
| It looks like it was going to fall off. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Cauliflower ear is so nasty. | ||
| There was one MMA fight in Japan. | ||
| I forget who was fighting, but a chunk fell off that was the size of a fucking silver dollar. | ||
| It was this giant chunk of this dude's ear fell off, and there was a photo of it on the canvas, and it was missing from his ear, and there was blood pouring out of the side of his head, because it's basically a rock. | ||
| You don't have much. | ||
| You don't have much cauliflower. | ||
| No, not too bad. | ||
| Not too bad. | ||
| Like Randy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Randy Couture, he's got goddamn gophers living in his ears. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, they're just huge lumps. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And that is a rock. | ||
| It's a calcified rock. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And Randy told me that he would rub it in guys' eyes. | ||
| Like, when he'd take guys down. | ||
| Like, he would, like, shove it into their eye socket. | ||
| And, like, it's basically a rock in your eye as he's taking you down. | ||
| Really a point of leverage. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Kind of makes sense, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I guess it's a... | ||
| I feel like it makes your ear a little more fragile. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It does. | |
| Right? | ||
| So, like, you might dig it into his eye and then rip your ear off. | ||
| Yeah, it does. | ||
| Jessica, I fought... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Man, who's the woman she fought? | ||
| Laura... | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| Yeah, you're asking about names. | ||
| I'm not good with names. | ||
| Pulled Jessica Eye's career up. | ||
| They stopped it. | ||
| They stopped the fight because her ear was hanging off. | ||
| Leslie Smith. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Why did I say Laura? | ||
| Leslie Smith. | ||
| So Jessica Eye hits her and it splatters and we see this hole. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| It's like basically hanging off. | ||
| Like, look at that. | ||
| There's a hole in her head. | ||
| And Leslie Smith's so tough, she didn't... | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| That's the splatter. | ||
| She did not want to stop the fight. | ||
| Didn't that happen to James Thompson, too, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But that was cauliflower. | ||
| Or his liquid pot. | ||
| Yeah, that was liquid. | ||
| It wasn't cauliflower yet. | ||
| And it popped and they stopped the fight. | ||
| And we're like, what are you doing? | ||
| You can't stop that. | ||
| It's funny what someone will stop and won't stop a fight for. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's another one. | ||
| The cage-side doctors, it's like you have to try to make a call. | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was bleeding pretty bad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's still, it's like, oh, well, you know what? | ||
| He could have stopped the fight for that. | ||
| Yeah, that's better. | ||
| He could have stopped the fight just for that. | ||
| It's like, it's a fucking referee. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| That's big damn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, that was a lot of blood coming out of his ear, but I think the punch that Kimbo hit him with was worth the knockout. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The ear thing is weird because that fucks with your hearing. | ||
| If you take your ear and you bend it over and listen to things like that, it sounds different. | ||
| And then you pop it open, boink, and now you hear everything. | ||
| That's how you're supposed to hear. | ||
| The ear is designed that way for a reason. | ||
| So I never wore headgear as a wrestler. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| You know, like I had to for matches, but at practice, I never wore it. | ||
| Never got caught fire. | ||
| I'm training for my first fight, and all of a sudden, it's like my right ear starts puffing up, you know? | ||
| So, I get through the fight, and it's like a golf ball, you know, on the side of my head. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| My brother, my oldest brother, is a veterinarian. | ||
| So at the time, he was in vet school down at UPenn. | ||
| So he was two hours away from us. | ||
| So he comes up for Thanksgiving, a weekend before Thanksgiving, and drains it. | ||
| He's also stitched me up a couple times on my parents' couch before some of those earlier fights when I got cut in training. | ||
| But the Athletic Commission doesn't need to know about that. | ||
| So he drains it. | ||
| It was like Wednesday night, drains it. | ||
| Thanksgiving, I'm fucking around with Dan, rolling around the floor, and he just goes and smushes it. | ||
| Like before his eyes, it swells right back up. | ||
| So when it swelled up, again, it covered the hole in my ear. | ||
| So a few days later, I ended up getting, like, a swimmer's ear infection. | ||
| And that was, like, top two most painful things, like, that have, I guess, lasted. | ||
| I'm sure that I've done some things that, like, hurt instantly, like, a lot more. | ||
| But, like, the whole side of my neck was swollen. | ||
| I go to a... | ||
| Urgent care. | ||
| And the guy, instead of like drawing it out and bolstering it and stuff like that, like you're supposed to do, he just lances it, cuts my ear open. | ||
| Oh Jesus. | ||
| Squeezes the shit out and like gauzes my ear to my head. | ||
| And I'm like, dude, like I've got a fucking infection in my ear. | ||
| I can't turn my head. | ||
| Didn't give me any antibiotics or anything like that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Like sends me out of there. | ||
| I'm like, you're a prick. | ||
| So I ended up going to, you know, a specialist. | ||
| I had fucking no money going to the specialist. | ||
| And he ended up doing it right, you know, putting a wick in there. | ||
| I couldn't hear anything for like three weeks. | ||
| I'd be driving to practice and Dan would be talking. | ||
| And all I could hear was the speaker on my left side, and he's having a conversation. | ||
| Nothing, absolutely nothing. | ||
| And then since then I've gotten a couple little ones, but when mine is swelled up and liquid, it's never hurt me. | ||
| A lot of people complain about the pain from that, but I've had them be bruised and sore. | ||
| But, like, never, like, the cauliflower, when it's growing, like, has hurt. | ||
| But that infection fucking... | ||
| That hurt, like, a bit. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| It's funny how vulnerable your ears are. | ||
| Like, your equilibrium gets all fucked up, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Actually, mine are still healing. | ||
| I was out in Utah last week at the Traeger event, and it was so loud. | ||
| Like, I kind of partially, like... | ||
| Blew my ear out a little bit at this party. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It was that loud? | ||
| It was that loud. | ||
| So for a few days, it's kind of going away, but like higher pitch noises sound like they're behind me. | ||
| Do you have a thing from gunshots? | ||
| No, because I wear my ear pro. | ||
| You always do? | ||
| Well, I mean, not when I'm like hunting or anything like that, but if I'm shooting. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I know a lot of guys that are hunters that have fucked up ears. | ||
| Especially guys who've been doing it a long time because they didn't realize back in the day that you get ear damage from gunshots. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, sometimes it's like, I don't wear anything like when I'm pheasant hunting. | ||
| And sometimes you shoot a decent amount of times, but the shotgun is not as bad. | ||
| Sometimes when I'm shooting, if I have to shoot, or I decide not have to shoot, I haven't had to shoot my rifle or one of my rifles or the handguns, but they're a little sharper sounding. | ||
| They fucking hurt. | ||
| Oh yeah, yeah. | ||
| I have a 9mm Remington Ultramag with a muzzle brake, and it sounds like... | ||
| I guess it's a 7mm. | ||
| Yeah, 7mm. | ||
| 7mm Remington Ultramag. | ||
| And it sounds like a fucking camera going off. | ||
| It sounds so goddamn loud. | ||
| And if I don't have earphones on, or headsets on, if I don't have something, You're fucked. | ||
| I would never hunt with that without some kind of plugs in. | ||
| Yeah, you better be taking one shot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, follow-up shot, you're going to go deaf. | |
| Just the other day, I was shooting with my son. | ||
| So I've got a.308 bolt gun, and I had him like... | ||
| You know, laying and prone, and we were shooting it at 200 yards. | ||
| And every time I'm sitting there, I got my binos up, and just the way the break was made, it's like throwing the gases kind of back. | ||
| It's like getting slapped. | ||
| And I kept flinching like a little bitch. | ||
| And I'm like, all right, he's going to pull the trigger. | ||
| Like, just don't flinch. | ||
| Like, keep your eyes on the target. | ||
| And every fucking time I kept like... | ||
| Blinking and fucking jarring myself. | ||
| I have a friend who was a guide and he lost his hearing because the guy had a muzzle break and the guy swung to take a shot. | ||
| I think it was at a pig. | ||
| I forgot what he said, but it was too close to his head. | ||
| It blew his fucking ears out. | ||
| No hearing now. | ||
| He wears hearing aids. | ||
| It's spooky. | ||
| It's like your ears, once they go, man. | ||
| It's like your chin. | ||
| There's just no thing you can put on your chin to make it tougher again. | ||
| Now that you're 38 and you're thinking of the future and you put out this cookbook, what do you see yourself doing when you transition out of your MMA career? | ||
| Uh, I'm not totally, like, like, I'm not committed to anything just yet, you know? | ||
| It's like, it's one of those things that I feel like, I feel like athletes in general, uh, fighters included, um, we need to look at the opportunity that we have. | ||
| Like, when you make it to the UFC or, like, a guy that's, you know, playing in the NFL, like, dude, like, you have to look like, look at it like, Tomorrow could be your last day, so we need to maximize this opportunity as much as you can. | ||
| And I feel like that's kind of something that I failed at, you know, when I was younger. | ||
| I do remember asking, you know, former management, like, hey, you know, like, I just made a bonus. | ||
| I want to do something. | ||
| I want to diversify. | ||
| I want to get into something else. | ||
| And it's like, nah, just focus on fighting right now. | ||
| It's like, well, fighting might not be here, you know, in a few months. | ||
| I could walk outside, step into a pothole and blow my knee out and, like, who the hell knows? | ||
| Or be training and, you know, get clipped with a knee in the head or something. | ||
| Like, plenty of my peers, their careers have gone from awesome to off, you know? | ||
| Like that. | ||
| So... | ||
| Yeah, so I've been trying to figure out exactly what it is. | ||
| The problem is that I've lived my entire adult life as a professional athlete, so I'm super fucking spoiled. | ||
| Now, while I would have liked to have made more money over the years and stuff like that, but that's neither here nor there, but I have freedom. | ||
| I have time. | ||
| So I'm trying to figure out what's going to give me At least some of the freedom that I have now to be able to make my schedule so I can spend time with my family, so I can do the things that I want to do. | ||
| The cookbook is that first step, I think. | ||
| I always knew that food was going to be a part of my life. | ||
| Because it's always been a family thing. | ||
| As a kid, no matter if we had football practice, wrestling practice, baseball, we always ate dinner together. | ||
| So I try to do that with my kids. | ||
| I love sharing. | ||
| I love sharing fucking food or any of the stupid booze that I make, the homebrew. | ||
| So it's like, how can I do that? | ||
| And I think the cookbook is the... | ||
| Well, I know the cookbook is that first step. | ||
| I sure as shit don't want to work in a kitchen, but I think like... | ||
| With this, the Fighters Cookbook, hopefully get people into realizing that they need to take a little control of their food, because I think it's been such a big thing in my ability to still be fighting today, and my getting over Lyme disease has been my diet. | ||
| sacrifice a lot for the convenience that we get, you know, living in America and, and it's easy as easy as pulling out your phone and going on Uber Eats and stuff like this or, you know, pulling into the drive through. | ||
| Um, but it's like, we don't, we don't pay for that convenience necessarily with our dollars. | ||
| Like we pay for it with our health. | ||
| Um, cause while, while there's a lot that goes into like the food science and all that bullshit and I'm not a fucking expert with it. | ||
| Um, I know what real food is and I know that I feel better when I'm eating real food, when I'm eating, you know, a deer or a bear or pheasant that I shot. | ||
| and some vegetables that I grew in my garden. | ||
| I just feel better. | ||
| I perform better. | ||
| But... | ||
| Yeah, so hopefully the book can kind of create a little bit of an environment and we can go from there. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You know, it's... | ||
| I sure as shit would like to shoot my bow and my, you know, my rifle for a living, but who the hell knows? | ||
| I've also, you know, I've spoken to Dudley and I've dipped my toe into, you know, I made a pilot for an outdoor show. | ||
| Man, I'm not a huge fan of, like, at least where it was on TV. You know, I know that there are athletes that go that direction. | ||
| What didn't you like about doing... | ||
| Well, it felt a lot like MMA. Back in the sponsorship days. | ||
| I have a couple companies that I consider myself friends with. | ||
| Josh Smith at Montana Knives. | ||
| I love the dude. | ||
| He's fucking awesome. | ||
| The Traeger people are great. | ||
| Vortex, great. | ||
| But like... | ||
| I hate the whole influencer sponsorship thing. | ||
| If it's natural, because it's like, hey, if we have a relationship and we're friends, it's great. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But man, I have a tough time with faking it, because that's the last thing that I want to do. | ||
| My attitude with... | ||
| I was never very good at social media. | ||
| And I'm still not very good at social media. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But... | |
| When I was diagnosed with Lyme, I feel like I made a change in the way that I approach it. | ||
| And it's like, hey, fuck it. | ||
| Like, I'm just gonna be me. | ||
| And I'm gonna show people who I am. | ||
| Because I feel like every fight that I've had since then has been a gift. | ||
| So it's like, you know... | ||
| I'm going to be honest, and I'm not going to portray some brand like myself, like make myself a brand and not really show who I am. | ||
| Now, granted, I probably swear too much on social media, but... | ||
| No, you don't. | ||
| If that's who you are... | ||
| It is who I am. | ||
| Then you don't. | ||
| But, like, yeah, it's... | ||
| It's tough, like, the whole, like, transitioning thing, going... | ||
| To an influencer. | ||
| Yeah, like, I... Yeah, it's a tricky world. | ||
| I have a tough time with it. | ||
| It's a world where a certain amount of bullshit is necessary. | ||
| Yeah, and I don't do that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't do it. | ||
| I, like... | ||
| It's just, like, it's who I am, and I'm not gonna change who I am. | ||
| Like, I'm not, like, in the world of jiu-jitsu and martial arts, like, loyalty is this thing that gets thrown out all the time, right? | ||
| I'm not loyal to people. | ||
| I'm loyal to principles, right? | ||
| Like, if you and I are similar, and we believe in the same things, and you're a good fucking person, and you treat people well, hey, man, we're gonna get along. | ||
| Like, but as soon as, like, Shady shit starts happening like I've I've walked away from Probably a lot of money, but a plenty of people Because they treated people like shit or they you know, but you know what you get out of that You get something that's so valuable. | ||
| Yeah, I get peace of mind is everything Yeah, if you're involved in like imagine if you're involved with like you're you're do you're running like you have some sort of a business And you and your partner in your office, you know that he's, like, doing something illegal. | ||
| Like, imagine being, like, Bernie Madoff's kid. | ||
| Like, they all worked with him, right? | ||
| One of them wound up committing suicide. | ||
| I mean, that's not an accident. | ||
| It's not a coincidence that that happened together. | ||
| Like, imagine being involved with someone who you know is not the way to do it. | ||
| Because you get to live with that. | ||
| You go to bed at night and you think... | ||
| To be able to go to bed with peace of mind, knowing I'm doing my best, I'm doing the right thing, I'm being ethical, I'm being a good person. | ||
| That's everything, man. | ||
| People can't do that. | ||
| They live in hell. | ||
| Even if they're making a shitload of money, even if their business is running well, if they're fucking people over, I don't know how they do it. | ||
| Neither do I. The guys that I have around me that have been around me for a long time, they're there for a reason. | ||
| You don't want to run a gym. | ||
| You done now with that? | ||
| I am done with that. | ||
| One of the reasons why I don't want to run the gym is because I don't want to have an anchor in New Jersey. | ||
| I got a lot of people that I love in New Jersey that are related by blood and that aren't. | ||
| But the last two years, it's just like, you know, there are better places. | ||
| Yeah, you're talking to a guy who bailed out of California for the same reason. | ||
| If you talked to me three years ago and said, you think you'll ever leave California, I'd be like, man, it's going to take a lot to get me away. | ||
| All my friends, the comedy store, jujitsu, all the things I like to do in California. | ||
| But then they're like, oh, well, we'll show you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The government was like, check this out. | ||
| And that's, like, New Jersey's, it's like mini California, you know? | ||
| It's close. | ||
| Now granted, I'm a firm believer on, like, you know, turn off the fucking TV, don't listen to the bullshit, and, you know, go talk to your neighbor, right? | ||
| Where I live, you know, I'm 20 minutes from Pennsylvania-ish, you know, maybe 30 from New York. | ||
| So I'm, like, in the northwest corner of the state. | ||
| And I live in this tiny little town that it's fucking awesome. | ||
| We bought a place right before, like, the pandemic hit and stuff like that, end of 2019. And it was, like... | ||
| Okay, if we're going to spend a little more time here until I'm done fighting, this is where we want to do it. | ||
| Surrounded by state land, it's great. | ||
| But yeah, you deal with all the bullshit, the cost of living, the bullshit politics. | ||
| I had to sign my kids up for private school because public school has to follow by some bullshit. | ||
| Stuff that our governor is pushing down the pipeline that mimics some of the bullshit that California has to deal with. | ||
| Like, there's a lot of things that I don't want my kids to have to learn at school. | ||
| Like what kind of stuff? | ||
| Well, a lot of the... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's say... | |
| You're making me fucking go off the deep end here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You don't have to. | |
| We're not even drunk. | ||
| All right. | ||
| We're not even drunk. | ||
| I'm an intellectual. | ||
| Florida's new thing. | ||
| You know, the whole fucking anti-grooming law. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So, I mean, why should fifth graders be taught about stuff like pleasure? | ||
| Well, it's not even fifth graders. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| Florida is even less. | ||
| Why is a math teacher in high school talking about sexuality? | ||
| So in New Jersey, they're kind of changing over the sex ed thing to start teaching kids about... | ||
| Essentially kink. | ||
| You know, like, what are you doing for fun with someone else? | ||
| And it's a slippery slope. | ||
| It's a, you know, an adult telling a child what they can do that feels good. | ||
| I've had the conversation with my kids about reproduction because we have farm animals. | ||
| We don't have a male pig. | ||
| We don't have a male goat. | ||
| We just have females, two pigs, four goats. | ||
| But we've had the roosters. | ||
| They're gone now. | ||
| And we had a male duck until recently because my one new dog is an asshole. | ||
| And they saw that corkscrew-looking thing dragging off the ground after he was on top of one of the other ducks. | ||
| So we've had conversations. | ||
| Explain that corkscrew thing because many people don't know that a duck's penis is very unusual. | ||
| Oh my god, it's fucking weird as shit. | ||
| It looks like a spiral noodle. | ||
| And it's like 12 inches long. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, it's huge. | ||
| Well, I mean, it's- For a duck. | ||
| Yeah, it's long. | ||
| It's not very thick, right? | ||
| I heard that girth is what matters. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It doesn't have a lot of girth. | |
| I wouldn't know either, but anyway. | ||
| So we've had those conversations, but it's like, that's about like, You know, making baby ducks, making baby humans. | ||
| The thing about these conversations in school is who's having them? | ||
| Are we talking about a sex ed teacher that has a degree in this and understands, has been educated in how to communicate sexuality and talk to kids? | ||
| Or are we talking about a history teacher? | ||
| That for some reason wants to talk about queer theory and wants to talk about sex and gay sex and all these different things. | ||
| I'm not opposed to people being whatever they want to be. | ||
| But I think there's many people that are teaching children all kinds of things that probably that's not their field of study. | ||
| And they might not be qualified to teach it. | ||
| And I don't necessarily want them to be the person that introduces my kid to the idea of, you know, whatever, fill in the blank about whatever sexual proclivity. | ||
| It doesn't seem like that's your business. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| I don't think it is either. | ||
| Especially not for a fucking first grader. | ||
| Dude, it's, yeah. | ||
| It's a weird world we live in. | ||
| That's not what they're interested in. | ||
| Kids, that's not what they care about. | ||
| So, I guess, like, with New Jersey, it's teaching them about, you know, anal stimulation and stuff like that. | ||
| Hey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, which, again, two consenting adults. | ||
| How old were these kids? | ||
| Were they teaching them this? | ||
| That's, like, fifth grade, so what? | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, 10, 11? | ||
| Fifth grade, they're teaching about anal stimulation. | ||
| Maybe just math. | ||
| Maybe just history. | ||
| It's just not their job. | ||
| I think it's their job to educate children in all sorts of ways, right? | ||
| You can teach them how to teach. | ||
| You can teach them history and sociology and all sorts of things. | ||
| But when you start... | ||
| Doing stuff like that. | ||
| It's like, why are you doing that? | ||
| What is this? | ||
| We never had that before. | ||
| This seems like something that... | ||
| I mean, some parents are never going to have those conversations with a kid, right? | ||
| Which is maybe not good either. | ||
| But who are the teachers? | ||
| What teachers qualify to do that? | ||
| I would want to know, who is this person talking to my child about anal stimulation? | ||
| Who are they? | ||
| Or even... | ||
| What is the conversation like? | ||
| Is it a skilled conversation? | ||
| Do they know what they're doing? | ||
| Or is this like some weird clunky shit where you're saying, try it, Billy. | ||
| Put your finger in your asshole. | ||
| It feels good. | ||
| Or even... | ||
| I don't think anybody's doing that. | ||
| Just like orgasms, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like, okay, it's a part of reproduction. | ||
| But do we need to go into like, hey man, some of them are fucking great. | ||
| Like, oh, if she tickles your balls, why? | ||
| Right, they're teaching eight-year-olds that. | ||
| We don't need to teach them what they can do for fun. | ||
| Or what they can do for pleasure. | ||
| If it's the creation of life. | ||
| Because, I mean, on the flip side, a lot of kids don't understand about death. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like, Having some animals and being a hunter, my kids kind of understand that like, hey, once the lights are out, the fucking lights are out. | ||
| But then it's also like, you need to have the other side of that where life begins. | ||
| But yeah, the stuff that you do for fun I don't need any teacher. | ||
| I don't need any adult teaching my kids that. | ||
| It's a complicated issue. | ||
| And I think rightly so. | ||
| A lot of parents are very sensitive about people teaching their children about these things. | ||
| And there's a lot of teachers that feel like they're saving the child because they are allowing the child to explore subjects that the parents don't explore at home. | ||
| And they feel like maybe there's a lot of queer kids or a lot of gay kids or trans kids. | ||
| That don't have these conversations with their parents and then the teacher could step in and help and that would be like a way where they could have like a safe discussion about these issues. | ||
| But then on the flip side they're trying to hide it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're trying to say, like, hey, you're not allowed to know what we're talking about. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's... | ||
| It's like, whoa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's not... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they're worried about parents complaining about stuff. | ||
| Well, you know, parents have a right to know what their children are being taught. | ||
| Because, listen, we all know that some teachers suck. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| We've experienced it. | ||
| I've had teachers that sucked. | ||
| You've had teachers that suck. | ||
| If you have a teacher that sucks and they're teaching you history... | ||
| The consequences are not grave. | ||
| If you have a teacher that sucks, and they're teaching you various things about alternative sexuality, alternative sexual practices, are you encouraging the children to try this? | ||
| Are you encouraging the kids to do this? | ||
| Are you encouraging the kids to have sex with each other? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| How is this conversation being handled? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| And that's where parents are very right to be concerned. | ||
| Because a lot of these people... | ||
| They're not qualified to have these conversations, and maybe the way they have these conversations are against your values as a parent. | ||
| You would not have that same kind of conversation in that way with your kid, and they think it's their right to do this, and it's not your right to know what they're teaching your kid. | ||
| Well, it depends on what the subject is. | ||
| If you're saying, do I have the right to tell you how to teach math if I'm not good at math? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| But when you're talking about things that aren't even your field of study... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, why? | ||
| It seems super complex. | ||
| If you want to talk to children, very young children, about sexuality, that seems like that should be something that you go to school specifically for, and then this curriculum is carefully analyzed with psychologists and sociologists and people who are experts in sexual reproduction. | ||
| They should have informed conversations of how to have these conversations. | ||
| If you're going to have a conversation like that, but you're just like a fucking... | ||
| A history teacher, and you want to talk about your husband, and you're a gay man, this is how me and my husband have sex with each other, and you're talking to a seven-year-old, like, hey, maybe this isn't the place for that. | ||
| It's not the place for you to talk about how you fucked your wife, either. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| I like it when my wife sticks my penis in her mouth. | ||
| Like, hey, hey, hey! | ||
| This is a fucking little kid who just wants to play games and hang out with their friends, and you're just supposed to be educating them. | ||
| But it's one of those things where it's... | ||
| The idea that you don't have any say in how your children are educated is bonkers. | ||
| It is. | ||
| That's bonkers. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And I've seen some of those fucking parent meetings where the Karens get up and start screaming at the board members and fucking ruin it for everybody. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| If you're a teacher and some crazy person who believes in QAnon and thinks there's fucking kids tied up in the basement somewhere of a pizza place, You know, I get it. | ||
| You don't want to talk to that person. | ||
| That person maybe shouldn't have the influence on how the school curriculum is run. | ||
| I get it, but you can't lump everybody into that thing. | ||
| And when there's something that makes people very uncomfortable, like all of a sudden a public school stepping in and dictating how sexual orientation and sex preferences and all that should be handled and discussed amongst seven-year-olds, I think I'm right to go, wait, wait, wait. | ||
| Who are you? | ||
| It's not like whether or not this subject should ever be breached with kids. | ||
| It's like, who's doing this? | ||
| And how good are you at this? | ||
| And I'm not supposed to know what you're teaching my kids? | ||
| And then they come home and go, mommy, what's a rim job? | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| What did you just say? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What the fuck is going on? | |
| You know? | ||
| Well. | ||
| It's like, hey. | ||
| It's different than tossing salad. | ||
| Is it, though? | ||
| I get it. | ||
| We're in a weird place as a culture. | ||
| We really are. | ||
| I'm not some right-wing nut, but I see the writing on the wall. | ||
| I don't like it. | ||
| I don't like this idea that parents don't have any say in how their children are being educated. | ||
| Who's to say this person who's teaching school is even good at it? | ||
| Oftentimes they're not good at it. | ||
| I mean, not that... | ||
| Listen, not all parents are fucking good parents, but... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Not all teachers are good teachers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| So, I mean, you're still seeing, to this day, teachers doing inappropriate things with their students. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, why are we, like... | ||
| Why are we trying to skirt the line of what they can get away with? | ||
| I just saw an article about some guy who got arrested because he was forcing boys to watch him masturbate. | ||
| A teacher. | ||
| Like, what the fuck, man? | ||
| It's like 13 boys. | ||
| He forced like 13 boys to watch him masturbate. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What? | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| You know, and then there's the other one that we don't care about is when hot teachers fuck kids. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the weird one. | ||
| When the hot woman has sex with like a 15-year-old boy, we're like, ah, he'll be fine. | ||
| But he won't. | ||
| Because we all were like, that would be cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It would probably be super confusing. | ||
| It would be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, a lot of it. | |
| I mean, that's, you know, there's a lot of those stories out there. | ||
| You can go find them in the news. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Doesn't usually wind up so well for the guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So New Jersey, you're thinking about where would you go? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's a smooth transition right there. | ||
| I want to go west. | ||
| I want to go to the mountains. | ||
| Montana, Utah, Idaho, maybe Colorado. | ||
| My wife is looking further, just straight south on the eastern side. | ||
| Western, North Carolina, South Carolina. | ||
| How old are your kids now? | ||
| 11, 10, 8 and 6. You can do it now. | ||
| Well, you know, listen. | ||
| Now's a good time. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Because, like, when they get into high school, it's hard to move. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That was our thought when we moved here. | ||
| It's like, get them in, and they made friends like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I moved to a new high school. | ||
| I moved to a new town when I was 14, and it was rough. | ||
| It was not that rough, but, I mean, it's hard. | ||
| You got to make friends. | ||
| It's like everybody grew up with everybody, and I come in, I'm the new kid. | ||
| It's uncomfortable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know? | ||
| So, yeah, we haven't figured it out yet. | ||
| I've got family and one of my coaches, mentors is down in North Carolina. | ||
| So, in that area, it'd be nice. | ||
| I fucking love Tennessee. | ||
| North Carolina's nice, too. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| They get some wicked storms, bro. | ||
| They do, yeah. | ||
| And it's like... | ||
| Like, it snows like two flakes and the whole state shuts down. | ||
| That's how it is here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Last year, everything shut down. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Well, that was a pretty rough one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Eh. | |
| I grew up in Boston. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| It's not rough. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| I have a 95 Land Cruiser. | ||
| It's, like, all built out. | ||
| And so I was like, yeehaw! | ||
| But it was cold for a while. | ||
| And yet, like, people don't... | ||
| It sucked for the people who lost their power. | ||
| People don't know how to winterize their house and stuff like that. | ||
| People lost their power. | ||
| That was a real problem. | ||
| That was bad about it. | ||
| But the roads were what people were complaining about. | ||
| I'm like, come on. | ||
| It ain't shit. | ||
| You just get used to it. | ||
| But it's also having the wrong vehicle is the big thing if you don't have a four-wheel drive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's true. | |
| We had some snow a couple weeks ago. | ||
| And there are people out... | ||
| I think, so on a 13 mile drive from my house to the gym, there were five cars that were like stranded? | ||
| And it's like, come on! | ||
| One, you knew this was coming, and it's like two, You should be used to this by now. | ||
| If I was living in a place like Jersey where it snows, there's not a fucking chance in hell I didn't have a four-wheel drive. | ||
| That would be my car. | ||
| When I lived in New York- They're trying to make it so you can only have 40 miles per gallon. | ||
| You have to have something that gets 40 miles per gallon. | ||
| Is that New Jersey? | ||
| Yeah, in a few years or whatever the hell it is. | ||
| Stupid shit. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, my truck gets like- 10? | ||
| 11 if I'm lucky. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why can't you pump your own gas there? | |
| I know. | ||
| It's weird, right? | ||
| It's weird. | ||
|
unidentified
|
New Jersey's got a weird law. | |
| I was like, what the fuck's going on? | ||
| You can't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| You can't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You don't trust anyone? | |
| You can. | ||
| I do it all the time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Well, why aren't you supposed to? | ||
| I think it was a liability thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're not supposed to. | ||
| But everywhere else was like, what was the issue? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, New Jersey is right next to New York. | ||
| You go to New York, you pump your own gas. | ||
| Pennsylvania? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't understand it. | |
| I think there's a couple other states that have a similar role. | ||
| No, I think Oregon is the only other state I believe that- Just Oregon? | ||
| Yeah, I believe so, that has certain stations that are full-serve. | ||
| Dude, I fucking never see full-serve gas stations. | ||
| When was the last time you saw a gas station where someone's pumping other people's gas? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ten years ago in New Jersey, I was like, what the fuck's going on here? | |
| It's weird, because it's like, you know, people are like, hey, get rid of it so that we can save money on gas, and it's like, you know, but PA has pretty fucking high, like, their gas tax is high, so the gas is kind of similar. | ||
| They would save money, like we would save money, um... | ||
| You know, if we got rid of it, but there are a lot of people that live in New Jersey that are like, I won't pump my own gas. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's so weird. | ||
| They just want to stay in their car? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Stay warm? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's so bizarre. | ||
| I used to work at a gas station and we used to pump people's gas, but that was in the 80s. | ||
| I wonder if it was even legal to pump your own gas back then. | ||
| I wonder if they had self-serve gas back then, because back then, I don't even know if people used credit cards. | ||
| I remember Growing up, there were pumps that were, there would be stations that were like, the ones closest are full, the ones everything else is self. | ||
| I've seen that in places. | ||
| There's like one in Ohio that I knew about. | ||
| Yeah, I've seen that in places, but it's been a long time. | ||
| But yeah, we used to pump people's gas. | ||
| And they would check your fluids and everything. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Pop the hood. | ||
| Clean your windshield. | ||
| Add washer fluid, all that jazz. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Clean your windshield. | ||
| It's not like a bum on the side of the highway. | ||
| Spitting on it with a piece of newspaper. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| There was a guy the other day that he was so dirty, and he had this bucket of water that I'm sure was as dirty as him, and he was trying to wash people's windshields. | ||
| Like, it's already clean. | ||
| What are you doing, man? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Poor guy. | ||
| There's other ways to make money. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Also, you see, I saw a guy the other day who was just standing there with a bucket. | ||
| He had a thick gold chain on, like a rapper gold chain, and a nice pair of sneakers, and it looked good. | ||
| It looks like he's all right. | ||
| It's like he's doing good. | ||
| And he's standing there at the stop side on the corner where the stoplight is with a bucket, just asking for money. | ||
| And then the light turns red, and he starts walking up to cars with the bucket, and some people were giving him money. | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| You do not look like a bum, sir. | ||
| You look like a man who's found another way to make money. | ||
| Just ask for it. | ||
| Which is tricky. | ||
| It is tricky. | ||
| So you'll go somewhere else, and then... | ||
| So you're just going to figure out what you want to do when you're done. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You know, I want freedom. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, I've kind of come to that point where it's like, no matter what I do, I kind of need to be able to do some of the stuff that I want. | ||
| You know, I... I finally got the opportunity to go elk hunting a couple years ago. | ||
| I haven't gotten one yet. | ||
| I've gone twice. | ||
| I've been fucking from me to Jamie away from one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| Didn't get a shot at it because it was still in the oak brush. | ||
| But... | ||
| I really want my kids to hear that. | ||
| Like, I want to be able to be somewhere where, like, okay, since, you know, elk season's in September, you're still going to have to be in school, but, like, we can go on the weekends. | ||
| Like, that's my... | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's... | ||
| Well, Montana's a good spot for that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So is Colorado. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| For now. | ||
| For now. | ||
| They're trying to bring in wolves to Colorado. | ||
| Ugh. | ||
| What a shit show. | ||
| The people's fascination with bringing in large predators is really interesting to me. | ||
| I don't understand why. | ||
| So they bring in the wolves, right? | ||
| They're willing to do that. | ||
| Like, okay, why don't you breed up a herd of three million bison and let them loose in the center of this country? | ||
| Well, you know there's talk about that. | ||
| Do you know about that? | ||
| Do you know about the American prairie? | ||
| What is it called? | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| What is the name that they use? | ||
| There's a group of people. | ||
| There's a fund. | ||
| They're buying up land, and they're reintroducing... | ||
| All sorts of bison, pronghorn, all sorts of... | ||
| And they're trying to make an enormous national park-type deal, but they're also opening it up. | ||
| American Prairie Foundation, that's it. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| And so they're buying up enormous chunks of land, but they're also going to have it open for hunting. | ||
| So this is not going to be like Yellowstone, where you have all these animals and they live in this very bizarre, protected sort of park area. | ||
| They're trying to sort of bring back this enormous swath of land and reintroduce all the kind of animals that live here probably at the turn of the 19th century. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| You introduce the wolves, and the wolves don't stay where you want them to stay. | ||
| They fucking go everywhere. | ||
| They eat cattle. | ||
| They fucking eat sheep. | ||
| They get into all sorts of trouble. | ||
| It's a complex issue. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And the problem is when people agree to bring the wolves in, they generally agree that there's a number that those wolves will get to. | ||
| This is what happened with Yellowstone. | ||
| They agree there's a number that those wolves can get to that's a sustainable population, and they'll open them up to management. | ||
| And what management means is hunting. | ||
| People will kill some of those wolves to keep the populations in check. | ||
| hit that number, then they move the goalposts, and they fight against that. | ||
| And the environmentalists, a lot of these animal rights groups, they have—they call themselves environmentalists, they're really animal rights activists. | ||
| They have lawsuits against these proposed hunting seasons, and they do that all the time. | ||
| That's a giant issue. | ||
| I think if they recognize— That needs to be taken into consideration whenever they make this sort of agreement to reintroduce wolves. | ||
| They have to look at what happened when they reintroduced the wolves into Yellowstone. | ||
| How many lawsuits were... | ||
| How many people fought against this idea of the hunting of the wolves? | ||
| Because I know they've had problems with them in other states. | ||
| Montana, they have wolf seasons in some places, and they never reach their quotas. | ||
| That's the thing they need to understand. | ||
| If someone says, We're going to release 100 wolf tags. | ||
| You're not going to kill 100 wolves. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| There's just not. | ||
| They're so smart. | ||
| They're so clever. | ||
| They're so fucking... | ||
| They're so adaptive. | ||
| If they get lucky, you kill a percentage of that. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You'd have to ask someone like Steve Rinella. | ||
| He would be able to tell you what the percentage of success is. | ||
| But it's definitely not 100%. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's similar to, like, Black Bears in New Jersey. | ||
| Oh, that's crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| New Jersey thing is crazy. | ||
| It's fucking wild. | ||
| So, in... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In, like, turn of 2000, we had the largest... | ||
| Per capita. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In the United States. | ||
| Yeah, in the fucking world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, that section of northwestern New Jersey, because it was only three counties had black bears, like, legitimately had black bears in New Jersey, and then it was New York, Pennsylvania, right in the tri-state corner. | ||
| And like, I started hunting them right when it opened. | ||
| I never saw a fucking bear during season because it was always during six day firearm, which is the second week of December. | ||
| And I fucking never saw them. | ||
| I'd see them before and I'd see them afterwards. | ||
| As soon as they hear the first bang bang, they're like, let's get the fuck out of here. | ||
| They're so tuned in. | ||
| Yeah, their nose is so fucking good. | ||
| And you managed them. | ||
| The first year that they opened it up, we got a decent amount. | ||
| And then they started to spread out. | ||
| And now they're in every county in the state. | ||
| And like me, I've got trail cam pictures of a sow with five cubs. | ||
| And what people don't get, the only reason a sow has five cubs is because her body feels like she can support them. | ||
| Because she's got plenty of fucking brows to eat. | ||
| You know, these... | ||
| The bears don't want to eat garbage and get into, you know, human shit, but they will. | ||
| And, like, a lot of the issues you have, too, is that people are like, oh, well, you know, we can just scare them off, shoot them with a rubber buckshot, you know, and that's what, like, the cops try to do when they come to a bear call. | ||
| And it's like, this bear doesn't have millions of acres to go, like a bear in Montana. | ||
| He can go 1,500 yards, if that. | ||
| And then he's in the next town over, or the next person's yard, or whatever. | ||
| And the reason that they're coming into people's Like, get busted into garages and stuff like that is because they're not the big bear. | ||
| Like, the big bear never does that shit. | ||
| The big bear eats whatever the fuck the big bear wants to eat, which is the blueberries and the raspberries and all sorts of- And cubs. | ||
| Yeah, and cubs. | ||
| And eats whatever the hell they want, and it's the little ones that come into, you know, where humans are and create- All the trouble. | ||
| And the thing is, is they know that that bear, the big bear, will kill them. | ||
| They don't necessarily know that we're gonna kill them. | ||
| So they're more willing to deal with us than they are with the big fucker that scared them away. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So like, I mean, yeah, they got rid of our bear hunt this last year. | ||
| You know, we're trying to get it back. | ||
| It's a shit show because it's like you've got the most populated state in the country and a giant fucking bear herd that... | ||
| I mean, you shouldn't see one. | ||
| You really shouldn't see them like... | ||
| In your yard. | ||
| In suburbs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you see them all the time. | ||
| You see them all the time. | ||
| Did you see that one in Far Rockaway where these two giant bears were in a brawl and there's a YouTube video? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's a fucking residential suburban neighborhood and you got like two 500 pound bears going to war fighting over trash cans. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what they fight over. | ||
| They fight over territory. | ||
| Like who can get the trash cans in this neighborhood? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's so dumb. | ||
| California almost killed it. | ||
| They almost killed it last year, but all the protests and all the people rallying against it, they backed off. | ||
| But they were trying to get rid of the bear hunt in California. | ||
| And it's a similar situation. | ||
| There's an overpopulation of bears. | ||
| And overpopulation of black bears is... | ||
| I understand that people have this thing about bears where Rinella calls them charismatic megafauna. | ||
| It really is what that is. | ||
| People grew up with teddy bears, right? | ||
| You grew up with Yogi the Bear on TV, but bears are predators, and they're also edible, and they taste good. | ||
| They do taste good. | ||
| Yeah, that's another thing. | ||
| People go, man, you don't eat bears. | ||
| Why would you kill a bear? | ||
| No, I fucking eat bear. | ||
| I've eaten them. | ||
| They're good. | ||
| Buy my cookbook. | ||
| There's a couple recipes. | ||
| Yeah, it tastes like a deer fucked a pig. | ||
| That's what a bear tastes like. | ||
| I feel like they taste a bit more like... | ||
| Bison, that's what I get. | ||
| A little beefy, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, like beefy, a little more irony than beef, but I've prepared them. | ||
| I made some sous vide for Thanksgiving the one year, so I cooked them in the water bath for a while at like 135 or whatever, and then took them out because trichinosis... | ||
| It dies at whatever the hell it is. | ||
| I think we got 137, and that's where I got it to, and left it there. | ||
| And then just hit them on the grill real quick, and you couldn't tell that they weren't beef. | ||
| It was a little tougher. | ||
| If you're going to do 35, I think it's over a prolonged period of time. | ||
| I didn't get trigonosis. | ||
| Yeah, it's not like if you throw it on the Traeger and get it to 135, you might get sick. | ||
| But also, freezing kills the trichinosis. | ||
| Not always. | ||
| Well, you got to put it in the deep freezer. | ||
| Yeah, but even then, some trichinosis, the trichinosis from cold areas does not die that way. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| Yeah, I think there's different strains of trichinosis. | ||
| Let's look this up, make sure I'm right, but I'm 99% sure I am, because this is something Renella told me. | ||
| Rinella said that there's strains of trichinosis that are southern strains, and those strains that if you do put them in the deep freeze, they'll die. | ||
| But then there's strains from Montana, Alaska. | ||
| Well, mine was a New Jersey bear. | ||
| Let's see here. | ||
| Freezing pork. | ||
| Yeah, but I guess it's similar. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| However, trichinella parasites in wild animal meat are not killed by freezing, even over a long period. | ||
| Freezing pork that is less than six inches thick for three weeks will kill parasites. | ||
| But freezing trichinella parasites in wild animals, that's interesting. | ||
| I wonder why that is. | ||
| Because if pork has... | ||
| One of the things they're saying recently is that you can kind of eat pork medium rare. | ||
| Yeah, well... | ||
| Where you used to... | ||
| Domestic pork. | ||
| Yeah, domestic pork because they're raised on concrete. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So here it is. | ||
| Does freezing kill trichinosis in bear meat? | ||
| Smoking, freezing, or curing gay meat does not kill all trichinella species. | ||
| Low temperature smoking will not kill trichinella either. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think from what I've read, you have to do it over a long period of time. | ||
| I don't think it's 135, buddy. | ||
| I think it was 137 or 127, something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's like 150. What the hell website was that? | |
| It was a government website that I went to. | ||
| Yeah, there it is right here. | ||
| It says, 160 is more than ample temperature to kill all forms of trichinosis. | ||
| That's instant. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It says, while freezing for at least 20 plus days is known to kill most forms of trichinosis, I cannot recommend this method as there are strains that are resistant to freezing. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I've heard. | ||
| And that's what... | ||
| Well, I hope that nothing eats me, because they might get trichinosis. | ||
| Well, if you had that, you would know. | ||
| Rinella had that. | ||
| His whole crew got it. | ||
| They ate bear. | ||
| They were hunting with Rourke, Denver, and they were in Alaska. | ||
| And they shot a bear, and they cooked it over the fire. | ||
| And I was watching the episode knowing that they had all gotten trichinosis. | ||
| It was raw as shit. | ||
| I was like, I wouldn't have eaten that. | ||
| But it was kind of rainy, and they had a shitty fire, and they just made do. | ||
| Like, yeah. | ||
| I think he's like secretly wanted to have trichinosis. | ||
| Yeah, I kind of secretly wanted to get it too. | ||
| Some people do, right? | ||
| My eyeballs are floating. | ||
| I need to run to the... | ||
| Oh, well, go ahead. | ||
| We'll just wrap this up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| It's already 4 o'clock. | ||
| So tell everybody, when is this book coming out? | ||
| So the book is shipping on April 16th. | ||
| April 16th, and it's called The Fighter's Cookbook? | ||
| The Fighter's Cookbook, because I've used... | ||
| I've used food to kind of fight old age and Lyme disease to be able to continue to fight. | ||
| And just to maintain health. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Like, the direction that we're going with some of the shit. | ||
| Like, I see some of this, like, lab-grown meat or this 3D-printed shit. | ||
| I mean, even, like, the... | ||
| Some of the farming methods that we're using, that we have been using for a long time, it's so fucked. | ||
| People have gotten into this rhythm of just eating for convenience. | ||
| Eating real food, it changed my life. | ||
| It's a tool, it's a medicine. | ||
| We need to take it seriously. | ||
| We'll let everybody know when the book comes out. | ||
| And to get you on social media, what's your Instagram? | ||
| JimMiller underscore 155. On everything? | ||
| On Twitter? | ||
| Yeah, I'm not on Twitter. | ||
| Yeah, good for you. | ||
| Yeah, you know what? | ||
| Elon Musk just bought a giant chunk of it. | ||
| Maybe he's going to fix it. | ||
| Hopefully, because when I heard that they fought to keep child porn on, there was a case where this kid got catfished. | ||
| And he was like 15. Somebody took his pictures that he took and sent to this person. | ||
| And they had him on Twitter and Twitter was like fighting him. | ||
| Because they wanted to keep them up. | ||
| You sure that's true? | ||
| That's 100% true? | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| That sounds insane. | ||
| It does sound insane. | ||
| That doesn't seem... | ||
| We need to find out if that's true, otherwise we're going to have to edit that out. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That seems that maybe... | ||
| There's one of those things where you get a weird... | ||
| Twitter refused to remove child porn because it didn't violate policies. | ||
| Yeah, copyright. | ||
| That's what the lawsuit says, and let's see what the actual case said. | ||
| You're going to have to hold your urine in for three more minutes here. | ||
| It says the teen, who's now 17, lives in Florida, identified only as John Doe, was between 13 and 14 years old when sex traffickers posing as a 16-year-old female classmate started chatting with him. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Doe, acting under duress, initially complied and sent videos of himself performing sex acts and was also told to include another child in his videos, which he did. | ||
| The suit claims eventually... | ||
| Doe blocked the traffickers and stopped harassing him, but at some point in 2019, the video surfaced on Twitter under two accounts that were known to share child sexual abuse material. | ||
| Over the next month, the videos were reported to Twitter at least three times. | ||
| First on December 25th, 2019, but the tech giant failed to do anything about it until a federal law enforcement officer got involved. | ||
| The suit states, Doe became aware of the tweets in January 2020 because they'd been viewed widely by his classmates. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Which subjected him to teasing harassment, vicious bullying, and led him to become suicidal. | ||
| court records show while those parents contacted the school and made police reports he followed a complaint with Twitter saying there were two tweets depicting child pornography of himself and they needed to be removed because they were illegal harmful and were in violation of the site's policies a support agent followed up and asked for a copy of Doe's ID so they could prove it was him and after the team complied there was no response for a week the | ||
| Around the same time, Doe's mother filed two complaints to Twitter reporting the same material, and for a week, she also received no response. | ||
| Finally, on January 28th, Twitter replied to Doe and said they wouldn't be taking down the material, which had already racked up over 187,000 views and 2,223 retweets. | ||
| Disgusting. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Thanks for reaching out. | ||
| We reviewed the content and didn't find a violation of our policies, so no action will be taken at this time. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| That's what I thought. | ||
| I haven't deleted my thing, but I don't want to go on there. | ||
| That's employees, man. | ||
| Twitter's a Wild West anyway. | ||
| I forget what fight it was. | ||
| It was like a 35-pounders. | ||
| The guy hits an arm bar, and his toe got caught in the cage. | ||
| I remember people like, Oh, he's grabbing the cage with his pinky toe. | ||
| It's like the last two toes. | ||
| And I'm like, he's not. | ||
| It got caught. | ||
| When you're pushing, your toes kind of curl. | ||
| It's the way it works. | ||
| People were fucking arguing with me. | ||
| And I'm like, have you ever fought? | ||
| Have you ever put your foot against a fence? | ||
| You haven't even grappled in a cage? | ||
| His armbar would have been better if his foot wasn't caught. | ||
| It would have been tighter. | ||
| He ended up finishing the armbar, but they're like, oh, you know, we use it. | ||
| I was like, no, he didn't use it. | ||
| Like, it was just fucking happenstance, and you fucking dumbasses are, you're on here because it's so toxic, and you're just fighting with me, a subject matter expert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, it might have been a 15-year-old kid on the other end of that. | ||
| It was like six or so people that I was just like, fuck this, I'm done. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Trolls! | |
| Stay away from the trolls, Jim Miller. | ||
| Listen, brother, I'm a fan. | ||
| I appreciate you very much as a fighter and as a person, and I wish you all the best. | ||
| I wish you all the best with your cookbook and your career until that UFC 300. Let's do it. | ||
| Then you're going to wrap it up. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| All right, brother. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Bye, everybody. |
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