Tim Kennedy, a former UFC fighter and eight-year Green Beret, reflects on his emotionally charged "fight for the troops" and the moral weight of violence against global atrocities like acid attacks. He details brutal Special Forces training—daily combat sports, firearms drills with legends like Hoist Gracie—and dismisses recovery trends, favoring cryotherapy (-300°F) and Regenikine over deep tissue massage. Criticizing UFC’s 12-to-6 elbow ban as arbitrary, they debate athletic enhancement, from TRT’s abrupt discontinuation to genetic engineering risks, warning it could render current doping policies obsolete. Kennedy’s ambivalence about human evolution clashes with Rogan’s nostalgia for hardship, proposing mandatory school martial arts programs to curb bullying. With a five-year window to fight at 170 lbs, Kennedy weighs career longevity against extreme sparring—like his Bisping clash, where he pushed through a hairline fracture—to prepare for real combat, leaving everything in the cage despite risks like Lawler’s measured approach. Rogan urges Kennedy to launch his own podcast, blending military grit and MMA realism with sponsors like Onnit and 1-800-Flowers. [Automatically generated summary]
This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast...
I fucking said it.
I said my own name.
I hate doing that.
The podcast.
It's very douchey when someone says their own name.
Unless you really have to.
Like someone asks you what your name is.
And you go, my name's Joe Rogan.
Then, it's okay.
But if you say it...
I'm just trying to not be as douchey as possible, folks.
It's hard.
It's very hard.
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That's O-N-N-I-T. Official sponsor of Tim Kennedy.
We've got to figure out a way to sponsor fighters actually in the UFC. The UFC has a muscle farm monopoly right now.
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I have to answer this.
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If you eat hemp, you will not test positive for marijuana.
Hemp does not have any THC in it.
But again, if you eat poppy seed bagels, you will test positive for heroin.
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Hemp Force, we use the finest available protein powder that we can buy, which we have to buy from Canada, because the laws are fucking goofy in America, and we're not allowed to grow hemp.
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Hopefully, the laws have been changed, and hopefully soon we will be able to support farmers and buy our own...
Well, we're supporting Canadian farmers, but...
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Tim Kennedy is here.
Let's cue the music.
Why fuck around?
unidentified
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
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You couldn't ask for a better environment to do that first interview.
When the UFC fight for the troops, to do it, and to do it after that spectacular knockout.
That was intense, man.
It wasn't just intense because you won.
What was really intense for me is, and I've always experienced this in these fights for the troops.
First of all, it's great to be able to go to them and put on these fights and have them in these hangers and these tight environments.
Just the appreciation and the respect that everybody has for the fighters is really intense.
You, first of all, you being a veteran and you being unabashed in your love for soldiers and your respect for your fellow military members, when you got on top of that cage and after, you know, they were cheering and you were yelling out to all those people that you loved them.
I mean, this is all off camera, man.
We'd cut to commercial.
And you're on top of the cage and you're just yelling at all those people, letting them know that you love them.
Well, I remember important things, and that was a deep moment.
I wrote a thing a long time ago about one of the fights for the troops about the national anthem, and I recorded it.
I filmed it on my phone when someone was singing the national anthem, and you turn around, and I was filming the crowd while it was all going on, And the feeling in the air, the electricity in the air of hearing the national anthem while you're around active duty soldiers who are in a war currently,
have had friends, had loved ones die, have experienced firefights, have been there, have come back, and now they're here in time off, getting to enjoy a fight, and everyone's standing up, and there's electricity.
I don't understand the whole realm outside of what you can physically see, but there's no way to describe moments like that Where you're surrounded by these heroes, these selfless freaking superstars of humanity.
And, you know, they bleed in every sense of the word for their country.
And then the national anthem come on, or the flag goes up, and you see them all.
And there's this energy there that just can't be described.
You know, that's the really intense aspect of it, is that there's a lot of resistance and blowback towards war and towards the military-industrial complex and towards...
Pat Tillman is a perfect example of a guy who is a real hero, in my opinion.
A guy who saw what was going on and said, you know what, fuck this NFL career.
I don't need millions of dollars.
What I need to do is do what's right, and I need to fight for my country.
He goes over there, and then when he gets there...
He experiences chaos and nonsense, and he's super vocal about it, as is his brother.
And that's, to me, a perfect example of that there is no black and white.
There's a lot of...
There's real heroes.
There's people that have heroic intent, and there's people that have...
Heroic ideals, and they really do love and respect the idea of freedom, but they get thrust into a situation where everything is completely out of control and chaotic, and a guy like Pat Tillman was very vocal about it.
I've been into my war my whole entire life with, you know, uncles that fought in World War II or in Vietnam, you know, grandparents that fought in World War II.
Um, but with that Position of being anti-war, I don't think you should be able to be anti-war unless you understand at a fundamental level how awful and horrible war is not.
That doesn't mean that you have to go and serve, but, um, it's necessary.
You know, it's, um, I wouldn't wish what I've seen in my life on my worst enemy.
There's no way I'd want...
The people I hate to have to see what a little girl looks like once she's had acid throw on her because she tried to go to school.
I want that on my worst enemy.
But there's people that do those things.
There's people that go and kidnap 300 girls in school this week because they were going to school.
Those people have to answer to somebody and the only people they would answer to are guys like me or guys that are better than me that are still doing it.
And it's a necessary evil.
You fight fire with fire.
You fight evil with just a more violent, better version of evil.
But in a lot of respects, there's no other options.
In some situations, there are no other options unless you let evil overwhelm an area or evil overwhelm a group of innocent people.
There's almost no options.
And to deny the existence of evil is...
Completely fucking ridiculous.
Especially if you just look at human history.
Look at human history from recorded times, from the beginning when people started writing things down, people always did awful shit if they could get away with it.
Yeah, it's very tricky because the people that flew the planes are already dead, right?
But the idea that there's a faction of the world that's planning things along these lines and it's willing to go to such extreme lengths When you see shit like that happen in the world and you see it from a perspective of an outsider versus seeing it from a perspective of someone who's actually there and in the military, what is the difference?
What is the feeling like?
Once you became active duty, once you're there, what is the difference in your perspective?
Fanatical religious fundamentalists that are willing to die is terrifying for a good reason.
It's one of the worst aspects of human beings is that we can talk people into believing in some completely ridiculous shit and talk them into believing in so much so that they're willing to kill themselves.
The other problem with human beings is that Once a guy gets that far, once a human, man, woman, whatever, is that far gone, how do you bring him back?
So do you guys, when they set up training for you, whether it's physical martial arts training or fitness training, is there instructors who set a program for you?
You know, Hoist Gracie came, you know, and trained us countless times.
You know, Greg Jackson comes out still.
You know, guys like Greg Thompson, you know, he's a Hoist Black Belt.
He's there permanently.
So, there's permanent fixtures at the Special Forces installations that train guys on a daily basis, and they have relationships to bring in experts.
Obviously, What you do in a house once you blow a door in when you're going inside on a kill-capture mission is different than you're going to do in the cage.
So it has to be guys that can adapt whatever they're teaching or know what their limitations are.
Greg Jackson doesn't go in there and try to teach knife fighting.
He knows what his left and right limits are, but he's one of the best, so he comes in and gives the best instruction that he can to try to provide tools for guys to be better at what they do.
I mean, I would love it if Mike Winkerjohn and Greg Jackson, you know, let's say we're in Austin, Texas, you know, or LA or, you know, San Luis Obispo, but they're in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
So that's where I go.
If they're in Idaho, that's where I would go, but that's where they are.
Justin Lake was my strength and conditioning coach.
He's like my brother on a whole bunch of different levels.
He married my wife's sister.
We used to go to college together.
We used to hang out with the same girls together.
Yeah.
And then we enlisted together, he went to Special Forces, went to 7th Group together, went to Afghanistan together, and then he married my sister-in-law.
He knows what, like where Greg wants you to paint the best version of yourself.
Winklejohn doesn't have that kind of responsive approach to you.
He knows what you need to do to be better.
You know, and he says, this is what you should do to be better.
And this is what we're going to drill it relentlessly until you are.
You know, Greg's like, alright, I want to see you develop this.
Let me give you some tools so you can implement this in your fighting style and it's going to be adaptive to every single different athlete that he has.
Where Winklejohn's like, no, this is what you need to do and this is how we're going to do it.
Big John told me that they were having this meeting with the Athletic Commission, and they had seen karate-breaking demonstrations on ESPN at 2 o'clock in the morning.
The north-south, you know, 69 position for knees to the head on the ground.
That's the only position I could think, you know, like, obviously the limitation is you still can't strike to the top of the head or the back of the head with a knee.
And that, under that premise, then it doesn't really matter where you need somebody from because you can't hurt them any worse than you could in any other way with any other strike from any other position.
Yeah, and also, I don't like this thing that guys are doing where they drop one hand down to avoid being kneed in the head, and they pick it up and they drop it down.
Yeah, when I asked him about the elbows in tight, like fighting Glover against the cage like that, I knew, I just had a fucking feeling that he was improvising that.
I was like, is this something you planned out?
I was like, no, I just felt it.
He was winding up and I just felt like I could get away with that.
John is always doing that thing where he's extending his hands and, you know, guys trying to move forward, they wind up running into his fingers all the time.
Yeah, it would be, you can't touch me, and I'm going to keep hitting you, and you're going to not know what to do, and then either you're going to get choked unconscious or beat the fuck up.
Yeah, the Peruvian necktie, you know, the Tony D'Souza, which you very rarely see.
I mean, C.B. Dalloway is probably the only...
I think...
I don't even know if D'Souza's ever pulled it off inside the octagon, but C.B. Dalloway's pulled it off.
There's a few guys that use that Peruvian necktie.
And then there's a few chokes that...
You see them once, and then you never see them again.
It's a fascinating thing where you're watching all this stuff evolve right in front of your eyes.
How do you manage your training when it comes to working on new techniques, adding new things to your arsenal, and then still just the conditioning, the sparring, the day-to-day drilling that you have to do?
Time management, like a good athlete, you know, I do things in like ratios, percentages of, okay, I want to develop or give a certain percentage of time to getting better.
So I'm going to, you know, let's say I have 10 classes a week.
Just an easy round number.
In those 10 classes, you know, like I want...
I want two or three of them to be exclusively focused on drilling new techniques.
You know, then I want two or three of them to be maintenance of things that I do well and want to continue to do well.
And there's just grappling, like in a one-week 10 class setting and then you know two or three of them are hard grappling, rolling, sparring type sessions.
You know the other ones like maybe a floater of I'm teaching or I'm working with just you know a handful of black belts trying to create new stuff.
You know so like it's equally proportionate to staying good, challenging myself physically, and developing new technique and learning.
They punch liquid nitrogen gas in there, so up to about your chin, down to like negative 300 degrees.
So you're breathing, the gas is coming up to your chin, and the largest organ in your body is your skin.
So it's very responsive.
It can absorb quickly.
People take drugs that way.
It's very responsive.
So it gets exposed to negative 300 degrees.
The first thing it does is take blood from the extremities and rushes it to the vital life-sustaining organs of your body, your brain, your heart, and your lungs.
So, all the blood goes from your extremities to your core, and then you're there for like 2-3 minutes, and it's super crazy, because if you have an injury like a hurt knee or a hurt hand, where you have extra fluid there, it gets super cold there, because you have more fluid there, and more fluid is conductive, and it gets colder faster.
So you can feel these injuries on your body get crazy cold.
And then you hop out, three minutes up, you get out of the chamber, and then your body responds to being in 80 degrees.
And all the blood rushes back out to the extremities.
So you get this huge infusion of good, healthy blood back out to these injuries and back out to your extremities.
It's a rush.
It feels like you just drank like five cups of coffee and you're like amped.
It's just this weird, tingly, fantastic sensation.
Trying to treat an injury, you know, you have, you have rest, ice, compression, elevation, you know, when, when you're trying to work on recovery without injury, you want circulation.
So you want good, healthy blood going to muscles that you've just fatigued to increase recovery and response time.
So like if you just like simple terms, if I went and did like a big squat and deadlift workout for the day, right?
My legs and back and butt are going to be sore.
Um, You know, those extremities, it's vascular region.
So go hop in the cryo chamber.
All the blood that's sitting there In that area, in my legs, in my back, in my butt, all rush to my brain and lungs and heart.
Then I get out and all sorts of great new fantastic blood goes back to my legs, back and butt.
So I get a great huge infusion of good healthy blood back out to my extremities to increase recovery time because I'm just increasing circulation.
I believe the tenets, the foundations of being a healthy, recovering athlete, good sleep, good food, good sex, you have to have those.
If you're doing those things, then your body's going to...
Adapt to whatever the workload of volume that you're putting out so I have a crazy volume like guys that come and train with me They're like this is normal.
Yeah, this is normal.
Like this is what I do normally But I just have a very healthy foundation of a lifestyle You know like where I don't really drink.
I don't ever smoke You know like I train every single day two three times a day like this is my body is adaptive to that and then everything else the supporting structure of eating well, you know having awesome supplements You know having everything just to make my body Respond properly to training.
So heart rate monitor, right, during the workout knows my resting metabolic rate is key.
You have to know what that is.
And once you know what that is, kind of in between workouts, you...
Know cumulatively in a day what you've burnt.
And then you just add during the workouts, you know, if I work out two or three times that day, you know, if I'm doing a 90-minute strength and conditioning session, you know, I'm going to burn anywhere between 12 to 1600 calories in that session, you know, from warm-up to cool-down.
You know, like, last night I had a two-hour jujitsu session, you know, like, and it smashed afterwards, you know, like...
I know kind of what my heart rate was at during the entire time and two hours.
That's going to be another 1,500 calories that I'm putting on top of what I burnt in that day.
So I get a snapshot that I burnt 5,500 to 6,000 calories.
Apparently inflammation and I found out about it from a physical therapist that gluten and inflammation, they're like, people say, oh, you know, you're not really gluten sensitive.
Most people aren't.
I mean, you can eat gluten and you'd be fine.
But the reality is, it does cause some inflammation.
Yeah, there's very few people who have experienced that, haven't said that it's something special.
When you cook an animal that you actually hunted, shot, butchered, cut up, put in your freezer, or eat it in camp, which is even better, when you're eating it a couple hours after it died, this is an amazing connection that...
People will poo-poo that.
It's not important.
Oh, you're just using that as an excuse to go out and shoot animals.
People find that impossibly contradictory, but it's not.
The other thing that people don't want to admit is that if you do not shoot these animals, they're going to continue to fuck, they're going to continue to procreate, and then how are you going to control the population?
Because you have two options.
Either you can hunt them or you can bring in wolves.
First, my experience, I was like a prepubescent kid when Catalina Island off the coast here of California.
Somebody accidentally introduced a hog to Catalina.
And it mated and boned with maybe one or two other wild hogs that were there that created this feral, big-ass hog.
That made a whole bunch of shit tons of more hogs.
And then started destroying the entire island.
So they brought in hunters to get rid of these hogs that were destroying the entire ecosystem of the island.
And...
And that happens on a much more, that's the micro example on a tiny little island with a tiny little animal.
But if you look at the big picture of, you know, like, Deer in the south, or hogs from Florida to Texas, or the python that was introduced in the Everglades, they have to be hunted to maintain the balance of harmony in the ecosystem.
The ecosystem will crash if it's not done.
So you either, like you said, give a predator, and that predator has serious problems that come along with it, or you have the hunter that does it properly, and then you have the benefits that come along with it, which is a proper ecosystem.
You could, from Texas to Florida, you could bring in every hunter in the nation and have them kill ten pigs apiece and it wouldn't even dent the population of wild hogs in the southeast.
It is like taking a shot glass and tossing it into the ocean.
I mean, it's the most ridiculous thing you've ever seen in your life.
And they're just...
And they're catching these pigs running, headshots where they're tumbling while they're running, and there's something barbaric and fucked up about it, but they're taking that food and they're feeding hungry people, they have Hunters for the Hungry, they give the wild pork, which is excellent meat, they give it to hungry families, and it's really, really, really delicious food, and it's important too, but...
Then there's that thing where people are like, well, that's fucked up, man.
That's not really hunting.
They're shooting.
Well, they're not really hunting.
They're eradicating these problematic, delicious animals.
You know, the Hamptons, the luxury area outside of Long Island where all these rich folks...
No, I don't know what's going on.
They have so many deer up there that they're bringing in snipers.
They're bringing in snipers in the middle of the night, and the town has proposed to give these deer birth control, to somehow or another give them food, put food out that has birth control in it, which, by the way, the male deer are going to...
So you're going to make bitches out of the male deer.
The male deer are going to run around, I think I'm fucking pregnant.
You know, if you go back throughout history and you find some of the animals that were just really enormous just a few hundred million years ago and they've somehow shrunk down to a manageable size.
Yeah, like if bees.
If bees are the size of horses, we'd have real problems.
I get the idea of wanting to eat fresh vegetables and it's healthy for you.
I get it.
But the finite nature of life itself, it seems to me it's so silly that you think that somehow or another you not killing animals is somehow going to balance things out.
Or you not being a part of killing animals is going to balance.
They're killing each other.
Do you know that?
Like there's a war going on.
All the animals are involved in it, including humans.
We're just so far ahead we forgot it's a war.
And we have POW camps that we set up in cities.
We call them zoos.
And that's what that is.
They didn't ask to be there.
We capture those motherfuckers and we put them...
And they're in these weird things where we don't let them interact with the other animals in the zoo.
We block them off in their own little apartments so we could stare at them while we eat popcorn.
The weird part about the SeaWorlds and the zoos of our life is that I love when people are like, oh, did you see the movie Blackfish?
It's so horrible.
I'm going to boycott SeaWorld.
You're like...
Have you ever given a cent to marine biology or the preservation of marine wildlife?
No, but you're going to boycott SeaWorld.
How much money have they given in the research and preservation of marine wildlife?
Oh yeah, a thousand times more than you.
It's the same with the zoos.
You know, like, I don't like zoos.
I think it's horrible that the animals are there, but they do more in research and understanding wildlife and the preservation of wildlife than almost everyone that goes there and then or doesn't go there and complains about it.
And so it's just like this, again, shades of gray.
We don't even understand how smart they are because they can't alter their environment.
So we don't think of them as being smart because they don't have thumbs, they don't pick things up, because they can move in 3D all around the ocean.
They can fucking dive and swim and move around and they have these pods, they stay together, they have families, they have dialects, they have languages.
They're so intelligent That we're just now starting to understand that they have variations in the way they speak, depending upon what geographic location they're at.
They're really fucking smart.
Like, human-type smart.
And just because they're different from us, and they don't build houses, doesn't mean they're not smart.
So, to me, it's like slavery.
It's like, just because, you know, we have donated so much money into slavery research, but you're still fucking slave owners, you cunts!
You know, the reason why there needs to be slavery research I just think that anything smart shouldn't be in captivity.
One of the best documentaries that he did was when he went to Africa and went to these hunting camps.
They have these high fence hunting camps where they take these animals and they put them in these huge enclosures and they let people hunt them.
The irony is these animals are, there's higher populations, they're healthier, there's more of them.
Animals that were on the verge of extinction are now, there's many, many, many of them, but they're hunted.
So it's like people have this weird sort of like, well, yeah, the animals are healthier, the populations are healthier, but the reason being is because people can pay to go kill them.
Whoa.
But it's just another example of the world not being so clear-cut.
And, in a sense, that sort of mirrors What's going on when it comes to wildlife in America.
More money has been spent by hunters to conserve wetlands, to preserve wildlife habitat for elk, to preserve areas where deer live and to establish clear protocols as far as how many animals Can be sustained in any given location and keep the populations healthy.
Which is like this ironic contrast to the first 10 years of my life where, like, I didn't think what I was shooting was beautiful because they're evil fuckers.
Now, as a sportsman, a hunter, I love these animals.
And everybody's going to meet by the campfire and go, look, this motherfucker is just ruining our life.
He doesn't hunt.
He eats all our food.
He fucks our women when we're not there.
He beats our kids.
We've got to kill this guy.
And out of a certain number, there's going to be this one that comes up.
And then when you deal with seven billion, it's like, whoa, how does...
How does that ever become manageable?
I mean, do human beings have to evolve past what we are right now?
Do we have to reach some new stage?
Yeah, I hope so too.
Well, you would know better than anybody what the horrors of war are.
So would you think that someone who has experienced that would have a better perspective about what's necessary and what's not necessary when it comes to Sort of just managing peace?
You know, there's no, like, nirvonic moment where you have, like, this clear sight of, you know, what...
An understanding of what's necessary and what's not, how people should be or how people shouldn't be.
Like, if anything, you know, as six years as a door kicker, assaulter, and then four years as a Halo sniper guy, I've seen death, like, from a foot away and from a mile away.
So there's no range of death I haven't seen.
So if anything, I value life more, I think.
I hate war more.
I think it's horrible and disgusting.
But without a doubt, I think it's absolutely necessary.
And needed to such a level that I can't even imagine what this world would be like.
Had we not been involved to the degree that we've been involved in for the past 12 years, trying to eradicate this fanatic group of psychopaths.
So, I don't want to think about what the world would be like.
But, you know, I don't want my nieces and my nephews or my kids to ever have to do what I did.
Or see what I saw.
So, I don't know.
Like...
I hope we never have to invade a country.
I remember we were talking about Syria.
You're like, are we going to go over there?
I was like, God, no!
There's no need.
There's no resource.
There's no necessary element for us to be involved in.
But the preservation of human life, isn't that needed?
It's a confusing lie, too, because it's like, wait a minute, wait a minute, this has actually happened?
When you find out about the Gulf of Tonkin or Operation Northwoods, that there have been these moments in time where people have tried to figure out a way to lie in order to drag people into war, a war that otherwise the public wouldn't support.
It's dark.
It's dark.
It's a very weird aspect of society.
Not only that exists, but that's ignored.
It's ignored and almost brushed under the table when you start talking about war and about policy.
This is something that people don't want to acknowledge, that we have been duped by the military-industrial complex in the past, and that it is actually standard operational procedure.
They will come up with different ways in order to get people to support war, and one of them is the lie.
Yeah.
When guys come back, the big one is PTSD. That's the hardest aspect, it seems, to integrate back into a normal society with normal life and normal jobs and normal...
Just the things that we all just deal with on a regular basis, for some folks, it becomes almost unbearable.
What is the difference between people that integrate smoothly and people that have an incredibly difficult time?
You know, from that incredibly difficult time to smoothly are all scales, you know, and the biggest or the factors are the degrees of coping mechanisms that an individual has.
I have a very strong family, you know, like an amazing wife, fantastic father and mother, they're still married, amazing brother and sister, great, like, so family unit, very supportive.
I'm very fit, I'm very healthy, I'm well educated, I was well trained.
These are all different mechanisms to deal with stress.
Everybody deals with stress differently, but the foundation of how you deal with stress, you have to have these fundamental elements to be able to do it.
The more of them that you have, the more stress you can deal with.
So a guy like me that was a ranger, sniper, Green Beret, like, killed lots of dudes, can come back and sleep well at night.
You know, yeah, I had to adjust.
There are things that, you know, like, I had moments where a guy smoking a clove that maybe just ate at an Indian restaurant, so I'm having some sensory to, like, how he smells, listening to...
You know, music from that culture that I just spent six, you know, six months with.
You know, like, I'm like, I want to shoot this person.
When you hear about stories where guys snap, and there have been several over the course of these two wars, and one of the big ones was a decorated guy wound up killing a bunch of civilians, and it made...
You made a lot of the rounds on these talk shows where people try to discuss PTSD and traumatic events and that this guy was having real problems and reporting having real problems before all this happened and they kept sending him back over there.
Do you relate to that and you try to figure it out for yourself?
When you see these stories in the news, how do they hit you?
We have a lot of things in place where, you know, FRG, the Family Readiness Group, is there for your family.
So when you're coming back, your family has an understanding of what you've experienced or how to deal with you.
You know, like, you're not...
Hey, Saturday you're going to be coaching kids softball.
Saturday night we're going to mom and dad's.
They're not overwhelming you with American life, which is normal to everybody else unless you've been in a plywood building for 12 months and now you're back surrounded with thousands of people that you have no idea.
It's weird.
So, the military has done a way better job of trying to reintegrate soldiers back into, you know, normal life.
But then you have a lot of great organizations that are veteran-started.
And these guys really get it.
You know, like, Brian Stan is a great example, Hire Heroes.
You know, he's involved with getting these guys back to work.
Veterans Outdoors, like a Make-Wish Foundation for wounded guys.
So if you have a serious physical ailment from battle, whether it's internal or physical, they'll give you these crazy things just to be like, hey, things are okay.
You're still surrounded by friends.
Let's get you reconnected to a community that you're involved with and do something fun at the same time.
So there's a lot of different ways.
Like the worst thing, though, is when they start throwing pills at these guys.
You know, the pharmaceutical approach, where it's like, alright, let's put you on an antidepressant and hope for the best.
Yeah, and that sort of brings up what we were talking about before, where it's the...
The discussion of TRT when it comes to mixed martial arts training, testosterone replacement therapy, for folks who don't know this debate, they're not mixed martial arts fans, and there's probably a lot of people listening to this that aren't, For a long time, over a year, two years, whatever it was, you were allowed to get prescribed testosterone.
And Brennan Schaub said it best.
We were discussing it on the podcast.
He said that there's youth.
And with youth, you have elevated hormone levels, but you have a lack of experience, you have a lack of knowledge.
And then as you get older, you get wiser, you get smarter, you have more knowledge, but the body just does not respond the way it used to.
Eve Edwards was talking to him and he was saying, you know, man, he's like 37 now.
He's like, I know so much now, but my body just doesn't listen.
It just doesn't do what it did when I was 20 and I didn't know as much.
I love that guy.
I love Eve.
He's a great guy.
But there's that nature balance that is sort of stopped and it's placed with injections of testosterone.
And then you're introducing this weird element into...
One of the most dangerous sports competitions the world has ever known.
Mixed martial arts.
One of the most...
There's more on the line as far as your emotions, your physical body is at risk.
There's always...
And you're sort of...
You're changing nature.
You're making it so that these old wise people now are juiced to the gills and they can train 17 hours a fucking day and it gets real weird.
It gets real weird when that's, for a while, was accepted by athletic commissions.
Through testosterone, which is what guys have been able to do for the past couple of years.
It's dangerous.
If it was golf, I wouldn't care.
If it's baseball and Sammy Sosa, Mark McGuire era, I don't really care.
But we're in a sport where we're Hitting each other in the face and choking each other unconscious.
We do not need the advantage of taking the years of experience of doing martial arts for, you know, 20 some odd years, and then giving us bodies of 20 year olds.
The physicality, the recovery, the responsiveness.
It's horrible, but guys have been doing it.
And now we're at this juncture where we're now saying, okay, it's not okay.
You can't have an athletic commission allow you to do it.
So does that mean that guys are going to do it on the side and do it orally because they know when they're going to get tested or now they're not being monitored, so they're just going to do it whenever and however they want?
It's weird because there were a few guys that were on it for several years and they were being very successful while they were on it and then all of a sudden it gets pulled away.
So what do they do?
Do they try to bring their body up to natural levels?
You know, for like a, I don't know, let's say a hypothetical 37-year-old that's been on testosterone for four or five years, and then he can't have it anymore.
It's going to take that guy a long time, if ever, to be able to naturally produce testosterone.
I'm not a doctor, but having been a professional athlete for 13 years, I've never seen somebody that was so responsive to testosterone like he was and then come clean and try to be an athlete like they were when they were using performance-enhancing drugs afterwards and just miraculously...
Being as good as they were when they were on it.
It has never happened.
I can't think of a single sport, a single sportsman in history where they got popped, they were watched closely, and then performed as well after that point.
Yeah, I completely agree with you that it's so different than baseball and all these other things.
What I don't like about the baseball steroid controversy is that a young kid who's coming up who wants to play baseball almost has to do it in order to compete.
So when there's a guy like Mark McGuire who's juiced to the gills, crushing the ball out of the stadium, a young guy coming up that wants to be like Mark McGuire Most likely, unless you have incredible genetics, you're just a genetic specimen, just a weird freak of nature, some guy who's just extreme mesomorph, you're probably not going to ever be able to do that.
Yeah, that to me sucks, that a young guy has to risk his endocrine system and put it in it, but there's such a big difference between that and a combat sport.
Joe Silva's about to throw an offer my way, let's say, to fight in 10 weeks.
He knows he's going to throw an offer my way.
Before he throws the offer my way, a guy from the Athletic Commission in the respective state that I'm going to be fighting in shows up and says, hey, pee in the cup.
That's how you're going to get a fair, equal system.
Not where you tell a guy in Brazil, hey, you need to come up here and take a drug test.
And he's like, oh yeah, man, I'll be there in like four days.
No, dude.
Athletic Commission guy shows up randomly, And right there, peanut of the cup.
And when you catch someone, I think it should be more than nine months.
And I think in this day and age, you should let everybody know, hey, look, we're going to cut you.
You're not going to fight for this organization anymore.
And let them know and then just say, this is the rule.
This is where we're at right now.
So everyone's been served notice.
Everyone knows what the repercussions are of this illegal activity that puts people in jeopardy.
My real concern is medical science is not going to stop.
Medical science and the innovative...
The way guys are going to cheat.
Not just cheat, but just the things that they're going to come up with to change the human body.
Just restorative capabilities of new advancements and new techniques.
You could say that getting in that cryo chamber.
If you can do that cryo chamber and another guy can't do that cryo chamber, do you have an advantage?
Is it an unfair advantage?
Where do you draw the line?
Should you be able to take creatine?
Well, creatine's legal.
Doesn't that increase muscle power and It does.
It increases your ability to work harder.
It's like, where is the line?
Can you take tribulus?
Can you take, you know, on its T-plus?
We're having great results with that T-plus stuff where guys are showing these 50% increases in rates of lifting and their rate of progress over people that are not taking it and double-blind placebos.
Like, when does it become legal and when does it become cheating?
When is it like a nice supplement and when is it a performance-enhancing drug?
You know, when you're using a supplement, we'll just call them all supplements, we'll just even remove performance-enhancing drugs from the discussion, just a supplement that does In the short term, great benefits.
In the long term, big damage.
When you have WWE stars that are dying at 41 from heart attacks, and lo and behold, they've been doing steroids for 12 years, it's tragic, it's sad, but not surprising.
Yeah, it becomes like a thing where there's things that you can take that elevate your body's natural production of testosterone, and they can enhance your body's production.
But what they don't do is introduce synthetic versions of it that shut down your endocrine system.
What they don't do is give you these hyperhuman levels that are causing you to grow tits.
You know, there's...
There's got to be like a comfortable medium between eating healthy, having benefits like the cryo chamber and all these different things that do enhance recovery, but don't put you and your body in danger.
Don't burn you out in the short term.
You know, to give you, like, the rest of your life, you're fucked.
You know, from 35 on, your body's just devastated.
You know, it's not going to be a line drawn in the sand.
You know, that line needs to be able to be moved.
You know, it needs to have, you know, commissions and medical professionals that can adjust and adapt to what's happening, you know, with the growth of science.
You know, like, there's a reason why we're breaking records at every Olympics.
We're getting better.
You know, like, with the human body, how to make it perform better.
Um...
Having people that are smarter than me figure out where those lines are and move them.
But that line has to be there.
It can be a mobile line that they move from year to year, but that line has to be there.
My concern is what's really going to happen in the future, which happens with almost anything that involves human innovation.
Like if you look back at the cell phones of the 1990s where they had these fucking giant bricks and they'd hold them up to the head and wrap videos.
Now you can go anywhere in the world in a third world country in an impoverished neighborhood and people have these really small Incredibly complex cell phones that are just these magical devices that allow you to interface with the entire knowledge base of the world.
And they're everywhere.
I wonder what's going to happen when you have the kind of technology that they're working on right now, genetic engineering, at a cellular level where they're able to change people.
I mean, I'm sure you're aware of the myostatin inhibitors, like these things that they've demonstrated in Whippets, these dogs.
Just because of breeding, just a mistake in breeding, they've produced these super hyper-muscular dogs that have double the muscle, and cows as well.
Have you ever seen those images?
It's incredible, right?
Well, people are being born, just born with it.
A kid in Germany was born just a genetic mistake or a benefit to him.
Well, they're going to be able to figure that out with a pill or with a shot.
And your fucking mailman's going to have it.
Your mailman's going to look like the Hulk.
And when that happens, when it's everywhere, what do we do with athletes?
If we don't get hit by an asteroid or invaded by aliens or blow each other up with nukes, it's common.
They're not going to stop.
There's eggheads that are in laboratories right now that are constantly working on new shit.
And that's what they do.
And that's what humans do.
We push the boundaries of innovation.
We always have.
It's part of what makes us human.
It's why we're on a podcast right now talking to a microphone that neither you nor I could have ever figured out on our own.
It's just a part of the program.
And They're gonna figure out something, man.
They're gonna inject you with nanobots or some sort of a new chemical that allows your body to work like Spider-Man.
I mean, you're gonna fucking climb walls.
You're gonna have incredible balance.
They're gonna figure out a way to stop traumatic brain injury by re-engineering the human mind.
There's gonna be a lot of crazy shit.
It might not be in our lifetimes, but our children's children, for sure, are gonna experience human beings that no one has ever experienced in the entire...
But I'm also glad that I saw the world before a lot of shit was there.
Like, my kids are going to grow up in a world...
I have a 17-year-old, and she doesn't have any idea what life was like before the internet.
She has no idea.
The internet's always been there.
If she has a question, oh, there's the answer.
I grew up, I was retarded when I was her age.
And I put it in her head every day.
I go, let me tell you, if you met me, if I was 17 and you were 17, you would think, oh my god, this is the dumbest fucking guy that's ever walked the face of the earth.
And he thinks he's so smart.
I was an idiot!
I knew how to throw kicks, and I knew which Stephen King books I liked.
That's it!
I knew the right combination of words to say to get a girl to fuck me.
Sometimes, that's it.
That's all I knew.
I was a moron.
Like, what a 17-year-old knows today, as opposed to what they knew when I was...
Now, the future is going to be even crazier than that, but at least I got a perspective.
I got to see what it was like to grow up, where you didn't know...
If you called someone and they weren't home, they just weren't fucking home.
You know?
I remember when answer machines were invented, where people were like, holy shit!
Well, I remember when internet searches first came about, too.
When you would first find...
I got a great story.
There was...
We don't even need to say the name of the organization, but a buddy of mine used to be co-owner of a small mixed martial arts organization.
And this was in the late 90s.
And they were just starting to...
Promote fighters through the internet, and they were just starting to do bios where they would research a guy through the internet.
Well, they researched this guy and they find out that a guy with the exact same name won something called the Hungriest Butt Contest.
So their gladiator, their heavyweight, their Adonis, 6'4", shredded man with his penthouse pet girlfriend that he would parade around at all these events also had done gay porn.
And so they pull down the picture.
They download some pictures.
And my friend described it as like, you see click, click, click, click, click, click.
You know how those pictures would slowly show up on a 56K modem?
It would, like, you would get the top of it, and it would slowly start to pan down.
And as it pans down, well, that looks like his hair.
Click, click, click.
That looks like it could be his forehead.
Click, click.
Well, that's his eyes.
Click, click, click.
That's a dick in his mouth.
Oh, my God.
And there's a dick in his ass.
Oh, my God.
And there's two guys using him, like, Chinese finger handcuffs.
And they're like, whoa.
And so this dude had no idea that that was even possible to internet.
People have a problem with folks that have strong opinions or controversial opinions.
A lot of those.
Well, you know, you should.
I think anybody who's paying attention to the world and sees all the contradictory information that we're receiving, sees the chaos, just sees how fucked our political system is, our financial system, if you don't have strong opinions.
If you don't have controversial opinions, you're not paying attention.
But it's a tool, it's a mechanism that serves no other purpose.
A car can get you from point A to point B, so why do they need a gun if the only thing it does is kill?
I could say the same thing about a tractor if I wanted to.
If I wanted to make a killer tractor, the only thing that it's designed for is to kill because I put spikes on its wheels and it doesn't excavate anything besides human souls.
It is a way that they can do it easily, and that is an issue.
But it's also, why does a person have the ability to do that?
And how come so little effort and so little emphasis is on what causes a person to be able to disconnect or to be able to have so much hate and anger in their heart that they can kill a bunch of school children?
That they can use a gun to shoot up a mall.
Why isn't that the subject of discussion?
And why is it always the tool for madness?
It's not the madness itself.
It's the tool of madness.
But that same tool could be used by anyone else to do a million other things.
It's a bad analogy, but it's one that I always use with marijuana.
People go, oh, you could ruin your life if you smoke pot.
You could...
You could also take a hammer and hit yourself in the dick.
You know, should we make hammers illegal?
Because a hammer is just a tool.
If you take marijuana and just enjoy it and you don't hurt anybody, should that person be penalized because someone decided to just wake and bake every day and then fucking go into debt and wind up...
Humans are the problem.
And human weakness and a lack of character and all sorts of chemical imbalances.
Or the culture and the structure around the person that led them to subsequently make these horrific decisions and actions that they use, whatever tool, don't care what it is, gun, knife, everything up to that point is what we should, the emphasis of trying to understand or prevent and acknowledge and research should be done.
Not take away, you know...
Whatever it was that was the end conclusion, it's all the things up to that point that are important, that nobody pays attention to, nobody cares about.
That's what's ridiculous about any sort of control, gun control, knife control, bow and arrow control debate.
It's not that.
It's what constitutes—what makes a human being capable of horrific things.
And I think you're uniquely qualified for a bunch of reasons.
One, because you have a family.
You know what it's like to raise a person.
And two, you've seen the consequences of human beings when they're in this environment that is totally fucked— From the jump and you see these religious fanatics and you see fundamentalism, you see chaos and a land that's just overrun with it.
And it's, again, it's a sort of contradictory thing that through combat and through, you know, especially through martial arts, I think the deepest bond of commitment that I've ever experienced, outside of my family, is the friends that I've trained with and people that I've competed with.
That have just, you see them, you know who the fuck they are.
When you see a guy break in training, when you see a guy You know, with 30 seconds to go in the round, put his hands down on his knees and just take deep breaths and step away.
And then you see the coach go, get back in there!
And you see him suck it up and, you know, there's the guys who suck it up and there's the guys who don't.
And you see the difference.
You see who they are.
You see their soul.
And you learn about people that way in a way that a lot of folks don't ever get a chance to learn even about themselves.
Like when you're making a sword, you know, the folding process of heating it up and pounding out the impurities and folding it again and pounding out the impurities.
Like the hotter the fire, the more bad stuff gets cooked out.
Yeah.
That's the same with people.
You put them in a room that's hot, put them in a gi that's hot, around a whole bunch of other dudes that are trying to choke each other out and kill you.
You get glimpses of the depth and hardness of somebody's character and soul.
And it's these awesome snapshots.
And even kids, down at the youngest level, putting them into competitions of martial arts, you see the exact same thing.
You see the development of this character and of somebody's soul as they get tougher and...
Deeper, you know, as a human.
And in these snapshots, you get a clear glimpse of who that person is.
The really remarkable ones that are the ones that could or have access to all of that and then choose not to, or on the total flip side, the guys that have access to none of that and challenge themselves and put themselves through hardships, the Aldos.
They have nothing, and just through hard work, determination, they become something.
Those are two complete polar opposites of a human that I adore.
Yes.
In the military, you see these guys, you're like this Ivy League, super rich, you're enlisted.
Why are you here?
You could have done anything.
They're like, I wanted to be here.
I love you.
You're amazing.
And then the flip side, the Puerto Rican that his parents swam over here or on some horrible boat.
And, you know, they're one generation removed and they have, like, they put themselves through college or maybe they, like, joined the military so they could go to college and they're at this exact same point of their life as this rich yuppie guy that are just there because they want to see how far they can push themselves.
Yeah, human beings are just, we are just a mass of potential.
And it's awesome to see someone rise through adversity and reach a potential that elevates us all.
Because when you see someone reach their potential or reach a very high level of anything, it changes the way you look at what's possible.
When you see a guy who gets up at 6 o'clock in the morning, the alarm clock goes off, And he just fucking hits those hills and starts running and he does it every morning before work.
You want to absorb a little bit of that guy's strength and that feeling that you get from being around that guy.
It's empowering.
Or you're one of those guys that diminishes that and tries to squash it because you're insecure and you want to tweet Tim Kennedy, you fucking bitch and fuck you and fuck the military, man.
There's folks like that, too.
I think that strength is the best antidote for a lot of the weaknesses that we find in our society that we consider to be strength, like bullies.
People say, what's the best solution to bullies?
Teach them how to fight.
Teach them all how to fight.
Everyone.
I think that is a core problem with men.
Men have a giant fear hanging over their head all day long, and that is being dominated by other men.
You know, I mean, what led me to martial arts 100% was I was scared of dudes kicking my ass.
So I got into martial arts as a very young kid because of that.
And I think that the more kids, if we had programs in school where we taught martial arts to kids in class, You would have so few instances of bullying.
I think the dramatic decrease in bullying and the respect that people have for each other would change.
The respect that people have for themselves.
A bully cannot respect themselves.
They just can't.
Unless there's some sort of a complete sociopath, you're not going to be happy with yourself if you pick on someone smaller than you.
You're doing it because you're insecure.
But if you weren't insecure or you were less insecure or you had some sort of sense of personal sovereignty because of training, you would have less of this inclination to do something shitty to someone like that.
And also the great feeling of accomplishment that you get when you learn that you can control yourself.
When you feel yourself improving, you feel your character improving, and you have a difficult situation and you navigate it successfully, and you go, oh, I'm a better person now than I was when I was...
Whatever.
When I was young and stupid.
And that's just one of those things where everybody wants to be comfortable.
Everybody wants to look towards their golden age and everybody wants to retire and sit on the couch and put your feet up.
That's horseshit.
That's not...
You only can experience that and enjoy it if you've earned it.
No one wants to earn it.
The earning it is the most important part of your life.
Well, that's why I think guys like you are important, man.
I think you set a great example on that.
I think you set a great example with your words.
I think you set a great example with your actions.
It's one of the reasons why I've been wanting to talk to you on the podcast.
You're a very inspirational guy, in my opinion.
I think the way you talk about things and the way you express yourself, it's admirable and I think it helps people.
It sets a very high standard and I think setting a high standard is one of the key things that young men and I'm sure young women as well need in life.
You know, this idea that you're going to be this enlightened Kwai Chang Kang character like in the TV show.
You got to take a leak?
Go ahead, head on.
I saw you drinking that gigantic smart water.
There's dudes who have bladders like mine who could just power through a three-hour podcast.
And then there's guys like Tim Kennedy.
You know, it's cool.
It's like, you know, we all learn.
We just, we show.
We show that there's higher levels.
My fucking bladder, bro.
It's like a duffel bag that you can carry guns in.
It's large and it's durable and it gets dirty and filled with liquid.
But don't worry about it.
I can hang in there.
What I was saying to Tim that's important is...
I think everybody has this idea that there's some guy out there that's like Jet Li, that's like a perfect person, some character.
The beauty really is in the imperfection.
The beauty is in knowing that we're all just these weird, flawed creatures that are trying to figure out.
It's not even that we're flawed, it's just that we're dealing with an impossible amount of variables that we're constantly navigating.
This idea that you should have gotten it right.
It's not what it is.
The idea is that you learn from what you get wrong, and then that thing you don't do the same way next time.
You say, you know what, I made a mistake the last time I was in a similar situation.
Now I know that, and so now I'm going to power through with the knowledge that I've accumulated in my life from my past mistakes.
That's a huge factor about being a person.
A huge factor is that we're all learning from each other and I said a lot of cool shit when you were gone.
But learning and learning from each other is the whole reason why it's great to have inspirational people to draw from and I think that now There's never been a time like this where you could just go on YouTube and you could be inspired for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
You could watch videos of guys pushing through things.
Guys are doing fucking 100 mile ultra marathons and just seeing people talk about the things that inspire them and what pushes them.
There's never been a time like this where inspiration is available everywhere you look.
I think it's amazing to see a guy that has nothing do something remarkable.
Not the underdog, but that has no resources.
There's this guy in Austin, Texas.
He runs this running group called the Gilbert Gazelles.
The Hutu, when the genocide was occurring, he has these burns on his body because his family was murdered and he was piled into this pile of bodies and set on fire.
And once the militias left from the Hutu and Tutus, he got up and started running.
Then he went to the NCAA and started running there.
And then he went to the Olympics.
And now he runs.
He's an inspirational dude in Austin that just...
Tells people to run.
And he's one of the most remarkable human beings.
And there's tons of people out there that are so amazing and remarkable.
And if you just look, you can find them.
I love latching on to people like that and just trying to get into what's in there.
I don't want to say steal it, but I want some of that.
We surround ourselves with inspirational people and we become inspired.
Surround yourself with negative cunts and your life is going to be a wreck.
A lot of people don't realize that and they just try to work through these negative cunts in their life.
You've got to cut them off, man.
You've got to cut them off and keep moving because they will hold you back.
There are crabs in that bucket, and when you try to reach the top of that bucket, they will latch ahold of your little crab legs and drag you down with them.
When the guy's on top of you dropping bombs and you're starting to see sparks and the elevator doors closing, do you think tapping the strikes is a bad idea?
I don't think this is a problem with tapping and strikes, but I respect your viewpoint.
I know what you're saying, and I think you probably have to have that sort of mentality to be an elite-level competitor in something like MMA, where it's not even an option in your head.
These guys don't tap.
Look at fucking War Machine.
He just gets choked out.
There's a lot of guys that just say, I will never tap.
Before you go to Special Forces Selection, there's this phase for guys off the street called SOPSI, Special Operations Preparation Course.
The only thing that is isn't a tritter.
They take like 400 dudes, and they end up sending 80 of them to selection.
The other 320 at some point either got broke or quit.
I remember seeing the gong that you go up and hit and it's like so longingly looking at that thing being like that's the smart thing to do like you know you have blisters in your feet that you've injected stuff into so that you can't so like your skin like glues back to what portion it separated itself from you know like you've lost 20 pounds in the course of 30 days and you're looking at that gong and you're like a smart person would go and hit that gong And I watch guys go up and do it,
and I was like, that's a smart person, probably.
I just didn't have it in me.
So, maybe I'm dumb.
I think that's my take.
I'm either, like, too dumb.
There's a balance there, and I think we're kind of agreeing with each other from different perspectives.
He was fighting at 170, he fought Kevin Burns, and I saw him like, two months later, he was 230. I go, what the fuck are you eating?
He's a house!
He was bigger than Fedor.
I mean, he was on Inside MMA with Fedor, and he was towering over him.
Wider, thicker, you're like...
What is going on?
And then finally he gets his shit together, decides to come back as a light heavyweight and dominate Phil Davis at 205. And you're like, okay, this kid was obviously past the point of diminishing returns.
He was diminishing his own ability to perform by cutting so much weight.
I treat the annual cycle of fight camp, post-fight camp, pre-fight camp, fight camp, fight.
If you look at an NFL player, they have that pre-season where they're trying to get their body strong and healthy so that when they go into the season, they have everything that they need to perform during that season.
So my pre-fight camp right now, where I'm lifting a lot of weights, doing a high volume of work, where I'm working on...
My sparring stuff now is a lot more drill oriented.
I'm not burning tons of calories, grappling or boxing or sparring, kickboxing.
I'm lifting a lot of weights, so my body's responsibly getting healthy, big and strong again.
I'm getting my technique better.
So when I move into that fight camp, I have this mold of clay that's totally healthy that can be shaped into what needs to be shaped to be executed for a particular fight.
So when you think about like 220 and a guy like Rumble Johnson who used to weigh somewhere around that even heavier and get down to 170. It's crazy talk.
If you were going to get down to 170 if Robbie Lawler beat Johnny Hendricks...
How would you do that?
Would you cut out the weightlifting and start doing marathon running?
Yeah, I mean, if you look at a guy from, I'll go all the way down from like 155 to 205. You know, you have 55, 70, 85. You have four weight classes from 155 to 205. That's crazy.
And I think that, you know, a lot of people say that boxing is watered down by all the weight classes.
I think it's watered down by all the titles, but I don't think there's anything wrong with having a welterweight class at 147 and then a junior middleweight at 154 and then a middleweight at 160. The six pounds between 154 and 160 is fucking significant.
Six pounds is significant.
20 pounds is crazy.
And I just think that there's just a lot of fighters who are tweeners, like Diego Sanchez.
I think Diego should be fighting at 165. You know, I think when he gets to 155, I think he's too diminished.
If I jump out of an airplane, you know, into the water, you know, into the ocean with a whole bunch of sharks and go swim with them, like, people are going to tune into that.
If you don't enjoy and have fun in life and be able to laugh at yourself and put on a tutu and dance around like a beautiful fairy, butterfly, swan, both the black and white version, and be able to understand...
The transition, the metamorphosis from the black to white swan, it's a scary process.
So like POWs, MIA, Vietnam Vets, all of them, that song, the song was written by the lead singer about his father who disenchanted, they grew apart, and he kind of resented him for being in the war, and then he kind of had this revelation that he had to, he didn't have a choice.
So he wrote that song to reconnect with his father, who was a Vietnam vet.
So that song has a lot of meaning to me and my community, veterans.
When I walk out of that song, man, there's like...
I feel like there's nothing...
You could hit me with a freight train, and I wouldn't care.
I'd grab the portions of my body and try to keep fighting.
I'm not sure it's them, because they have to get rights to use that music in the production, and I have no idea how...
You know, legally that occurs.
So sometimes they have a list of what you're allowed to do.
You know, there are some fight promotions where like, alright, you know, submit your song that you want to walk out to two weeks before and we'll see if it's approved or if we can get approval.
You know, it's, I don't know, I have no idea how it works, but thank God I can walk out to Rooster because I'd be really sad if I couldn't.
I'm glad that you have an exit strategy because there are a lot of fighters that don't and the saddest thing to me is a guy who looks at fighting as everything.
Like that is all they're capable of, that is all they're ever going to be capable of.
They don't know what to do next and they get out of it and they have this thing.
Where they're diminished.
Like, you could see their aura is diminished.
You know, if you believe in auras.
But whoever they are, like, seems less when you're around them than who they were when they were competing.
And I've seen it so many times that it just drives me fucking nuts, man.
It just drives me nuts.
I almost want to grab them in the middle when they're peaking and go, listen, man, this is beautiful, but it ain't gonna last.
You gotta have something else.
You gotta have something that you have as much passion for as you do this.
Maybe that's one area where you have an advantage and you've been in so many life-or-death struggles, firefights, being deployed overseas, seeing life and death, and your perspective is far broader than a person who's just been an athlete.
Just been an athlete that has just sought glory and believes that that is the end-all be-all.
Just take 10. Blow 220. Yeah, it is crazy when you see those stories, but it's almost like the hubris that allows you to be a combat athlete in a lot of ways.
This idea that I'm different.
Or like your idea that you're going to fucking parachute into sharks, you're going to be fine.
I'll be fine.
I'm not like that poor fuck that was triathlon training off the coast of San Diego and got bitten in half in front of his friends.
I mean, we've established that you think you have a five-year window.
I know you don't want to give up the number, but you already did.
Do you look at that and say, well, if I do get to a title shot at 185, how much time would I have left to work myself up to a title shot at 170, or would I regroup and try again at 185 if I wasn't successful the first attempt?
Do you have those thoughts in your head, or do you just think about next fight?
I mean, it got interesting, and I was very happy that you guys sort of sorted it out inside the Octagon, and you both gave each other a lot of respect, but god damn, there was a lot going back and forth between you two.
He's also, like, you gotta give it up for him for mental toughness.
Just not even considering retiring, the fact that he's fucked his eye up, had two eye surgeries, not even, it's just, it's just a thing, I'm gonna pull aside, get back in the gym, you know, work on me striking, you know.
You see little cuts, a little bit of blood, a little bit of sweat in the fight.
That's nothing.
You know, like, leading up to my 25-minute fight with Michael Bisping, like, my sparring partners were, like, Bob McDaniel and Carlos Condit when they were peaking for their fights.
And then they moved on, and then, you know, I had Jon Jones, myself, like, this room full of dudes that are...
The best in the world.
And if we're sparring two times a week for six, seven, eight weeks, you know, like leading up to that fight, you know, and like we're hitting each other just as hard there as we are in the cage, you know, because you have to...
Push yourself as far as you can in training so that the best element of who you and what you are occurs in the cage.
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All right, we will be back this weekend.
Most likely, Brendan Shaw, Brian Count, and I are going to do a podcast simultaneously while the UFC is on on Saturday night.
And I think I have a podcast with Aubrey this weekend too.