Robin Black, an MMA analyst blending evolutionary biology and fight science, explores how minuscule 1-2% advantages in technique, conditioning, or psychology—like red’s perceived dominance or weight-cutting extremes—can swing bouts, citing Demetrius Johnson’s tactical precision and Jacare’s striking transformation post-surgery. Early UFC mismatches (e.g., 140 lbs vs. 175 lbs) and outdated "street fight" myths are debunked, with Rogan and Black praising adaptable fighters like George St. Pierre and Jon Jones for refining skills through pattern recognition, while critiquing brute-force reliance and commercialized fight scheduling. Black’s Fight Network podcast and sponsorships (LegalZoom, NatureBox, Onnit) highlight MMA’s shift toward research-driven combat, where marginal gains and sportsmanship now define elite performance. [Automatically generated summary]
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There's very few people in this life can say that they've gone from glam rock to expert MMA commentary and even fighting in MMA. Very few people other than you, Robin Black.
And like I said, as someone like me, who's also a huge fan of MMA and a huge fan of watching two people try to figure each other out in the most dangerous and the most high-stakes sport, I think, in the world.
Maybe not the most dangerous as far as, I mean, I guess maybe NASCAR is probably more dangerous, dangerous, but the high stakes of the human...
Hand-to-hand combat, to me.
There's so much on the line.
There's so much psychologically going on.
And there's so many little things.
I'm sure there's a lot that I'm missing if I watch basketball.
I'm sure there's a lot that I'm missing if you watch football.
But when it comes to striking and grappling and mixed martial arts, the variables are so gigantic.
And the different approaches to overcoming those variables are so gigantic.
So this guy goes, and he has researched the biochemistry that's happening in the brain.
At the moments where people feel like a surfer feels like at one with the wave, you know, where a free climber feels at one with the wall, there's actually biochemistry happening in the brain.
And there's four neurotransmitters that are released simultaneously.
And in that moment, there's all of these things that humans do better.
One of them is pattern recognition.
So when two guys are fighting, you can see patterns in how they move and predict outcomes, right?
Different guys get into it in different ways.
The bulk of the research is on action-adventure sports, like flipping motorcycles through the air five times and stuff.
Because those guys, if they are not in that state, they die.
So the level now, there's exponential growth in what people can now do in that state.
Because it's sort of a global experiment that men are pushing each other further and further.
I mean, everybody used to gather around to see Evel Knievel jump 10 buses.
Now, every day, 10 guys do that and flip four times while doing it.
So the level of what people are able to mentally accomplish.
So that's happening in fighting.
And I'm obsessed with science.
So what's going on physically is fascinating, what's going on psychologically, but the science is crazy.
And that's kind of where my research is going now.
If you could take an EEG and put it on their brain in the highest moments of combat, what's going on in there?
I wonder if you ever could do that, because if they were in that highest moment of combat and they had an EEG on their brain, would they be thinking the same?
Well, in theory, If all these people screaming and you sitting at the side of the cage and wearing your underpants getting punched in the face, if all that isn't distracting, a couple of things on your head, it's hard to say though.
I mean, the state, what you want to check with that EEG or something is the mental state, the biochemistry, the neurology happening in the brain.
And if they're not in that state, you can't do it.
But people have done it in other sports.
They've done it and looked at what's happening in the brain and there's something called...
Hypofrontalism, where actually less is happening in the front of your brain during these moments of perfect performance.
And that's what this book's about.
This guy is chemically analyzing the highest level of performance.
So to take that into fighting, these guys are operating at that level now.
The top guys, Carlos Condit.
Is operating at that level.
You know, he's operating in moments of pure flow.
And when these guys are in those moments, what's happening in that, that shit's fascinating.
Like to look at fights and look and see that these guys are operating in the highest level of human performance and in that state against each other, they're fighting each other.
I'm going to do a little breakdown on what's going on with pattern recognition in that state.
And imagine you and I are both in that state, and you know that I'm starting to recognize patterns.
You can lay traps for me by doing something called chunking, where you'll go one, two, three, four.
And I'll start to recognize that pattern and anticipate it, and you'll change one thing in that pattern and hit me.
So chunking, understanding that I'm predicting your patterns and using that against me, all of that kind of stuff just fascinates the shit out of me right now.
Well, that's always been a big thing about striking, about changing up the speed of your approach and also throwing feints in, pretending to go one way and going another.
There's all sorts of different things that people have done to try to offset pattern recognition.
It is totally fascinating stuff, and it's also the thing about achieving this flow state that's so maddening for people is that it just slips through your fingers.
It's there, and it's gone.
You achieve these brief moments where you've seen it in basketball games where a guy just feels like he can't miss.
He hits those three-pointers from the outside.
In pool, I play pool a lot, and there's these moments.
They're rare and fleeting, but when they come, it's like you can't miss.
Yeah, I would think so because when you're doing comedy, I've always described it as you're more like a passenger than you are like the pilot.
You're just kind of like doing it and sometimes words will come out of your mouth and you're like, I don't even know if I can take credit for those words because I guess it's not...
I know it's me.
It's coming out of my mouth.
I know it's my voice.
I know technically I created them.
I wrote them, but it's not really me that's doing it.
Well also when you lose and whenever you fail at something and you feel that awful feeling of failure the motivation that comes from that to never feel that again is Almost impossible to recreate without having experienced failure you find it in comedy I experienced it in fighting as well like that those moments where when it's over you just feel like such a hunk of shit that like when you're training from then on and Your intensity is so much higher,
because the stakes are higher, because you know that a brutal beatdown by somebody is such a horrible proposition, not just in the moment, but after that moment.
The thinking about the act, the thinking about it, the same as failing.
like I think failure as a person and especially as a man I think it's a huge part of life I think it's an important part of life and it's the people that stay on the couch and don't risk anything that you're that's trying to stay comfortable is one of the worst decisions you could ever make as a man trying to stay comfortable is a terrible terrible path because you're just gonna stay soft and weak and you're never gonna figure out anything you're never gonna accomplish shit I've got to do some pretty fun things I've I have a really good life.
And I got a killer wife and I live in Canada and I have fun and stuff.
And I really think the only two things that I ever had going for me was that I have a crazy good work ethic and I'm not afraid to look like an idiot.
I don't give a fuck.
I am not afraid to look like an idiot.
Failure sucks and it hurts you, but being not afraid to be made fun of or put down or looked at and laughed at and not give a shit about that, you'll try stuff.
You know, you'll go for things.
Like, you'll do stuff.
And, I mean, man, nobody ever had more haters than a guy who wore eye makeup and tried to go into the fight game.
Like, I mean, fucking everybody hated me.
Everybody in Canada.
Like, Anybody in the fight business.
And here I am fucking six years later.
All you can do is put your head down and try to do good work.
You can't do anything else.
You can't kiss anybody's ass.
I was talking to Eddie about this too.
You can't kiss anybody's ass.
You can't beg your way out of it.
You can't buy your way out of it.
If they hate you and they think you're a joke, The only answer is to just try to do great work.
I remember when I was competing the day of the competition, there was always moments where I was like, I got to stop doing this.
This is just too much stress.
This just feels terrible.
And then once I would win, I would go, this is the greatest feeling the world has ever known.
I feel sorry for people who don't know what this feels like.
To win a major Taekwondo tournament or something like that, it was just the craziest feeling.
You just felt like, wow, all that work paid off.
And that fuels you as a person to accomplish other things.
It gives you this understanding of focus and of motivation.
And discipline, and then if you apply all those things to anything, to writing, to whatever you're trying to do, to building a business, to whatever you're trying to do, you can accomplish things that you felt were insurmountable before.
The opposite of that, too, is in us, I think we all think if the zombie apocalypse happens tomorrow, I'll be the guy who rolls the car off my wife, picks her up, runs out of here, kills ten zombies on the way, gets on the helicopter, and gets out of there.
And losing makes you say, I'm not necessarily that guy who fucking flips the car, does that, jumps, kills ten zombies.
But then if you can come back and win, you go, you know what, if I'm at my best, if I'm focused, if I have my shit together, some of the time I can be that guy.
Well, it's also objective analysis of your own shortcomings and your own strengths.
And that comes in martial arts.
It's a huge factor in martial arts because especially when you're training.
When you're in the gym and you're sparring with, you know, if you've got a great gym, like you're training a 10th Planet Jiu-Jitsu or something like that, you've got...
Just a whole room filled with killers.
And everyone kind of knows the food chain.
Everyone knows where everybody stands.
And why does everyone know where everybody stands?
We know where everybody stands because we're tapping each other out on a regular basis.
And so, because of that, you're forced to really analyze your game.
Like, this motherfucker gets me in his guard.
I'm in trouble.
Like, I gotta stay out of this guy's guard.
I know this.
Why?
Because I've been caught.
I understand it.
Whereas, if you don't have any experience overcoming adversity, like, psh, nobody's catching me.
And then you get in there with somebody who just ragdolls you.
And you're like, what the fuck?
And your ideas of who you are change.
Because you have this distorted...
How many guys out there that have never fought have this crazy distorted perception of what they're capable of?
Guys really think that, but that's a lack of understanding of what that really is.
You can kind of see the willingness or the ability to go, there's trouble, I'm going to hit it with this fist.
That's in every guy.
So they don't understand that other guys have an understanding of physics, an understanding of where their body works, what happens when you hit somebody in the throat.
The natural instinct to roll away gives them your back.
All the most basic, they don't even understand that exists.
So they have the idea that if I hit that thing with this thing, I might be able to beat it.
You know and some fucking beast mounts you and starts pounding on you and you give you back and you're like and then after that's over You're so Devastated and defeated and who you your perceptions of who you were were so screwy Yeah, I can't tell you how many times I've had guys tell me that they would never lose if they fought Because my mentality they're always like this yo, bro.
Yeah, and he's training every day, and he's objective, and he's got a real balanced sense of who he is.
He's a real martial artist.
Yeah, that's a good point, that how soft we are is one of the reasons why it's so exciting to see someone compete in such a dangerous and volatile profession.
But the critics of MMA would say, well, the reason why we are so quote-unquote soft is that our race, the human race, is evolving.
And that we are moving towards a state where we no longer require physical conflict.
I think that martial arts is the key to that gap.
and this would seem like contradictory to someone who doesn't engage in martial arts, but I think that the realities of the biology, the realities of the body itself and the long history of combat that's ingrained in our genetics, our DNA has this long history of all our DNA has this long history of all these people before us that had to fight to stay alive, whether it's to fight off animals or fight off intruders.
And all this conflict is almost built into the system.
And one of the best ways, in my opinion, to ensure peace is to actually exercise out all of that conflict in the gym.
So that it doesn't exist in society.
It doesn't exist in the workplace.
It doesn't exist in friendships.
And it doesn't exist in the world at large.
It only exists in dojos.
It only exists in gyms.
And some of the nicest, most respectful people I have ever met have been killers, murderers.
I mean, in the gym, you know, in the cage, in boxing rings, kickboxers.
The nicest folks.
Because of the fact that they have no insecurities when it comes to that stuff.
Their focus when it comes to their martial arts is not about, you know, like...
It's not about going out and bullying people on the street or going out and picking fights.
No, their focus is in bettering their skills and in doing so and in training really hard, all your need to prove all that goes away.
I've seen MMA fighters that people don't know and they get into discussions with people and someone will get douchey with them and they'll smile and laugh like...
There's a famous story.
My friend Tate Fletcher fought on the Ultimate Fighter.
He's a black belt in jiu-jitsu.
He's a bad motherfucker.
He's a cool-ass dude, too.
Super nice.
If you're a friendly guy, Tate's going to be your best friend.
He's just the nicest guy ever.
But we were in the Hard Rock Hotel, and there was this big fucking kid, man.
He was like 6'6", maybe.
At least 6'4", 6'5".
And Tate's like 6'4".
So this guy was bigger than Tate.
And probably like a big...
He's probably college age, 23, 24, and he was just being a fucking drunk asshole to everybody and just walking around with his shirt off, this big giant kid, and he got to Tate's door and he said to Tate, like, hey man, that's my fucking room.
And Tate's like, no, I'm pretty sure it's my room.
He's like, I got my key right here, and I'm going to use the key.
And Tate goes, take it easy.
And Tate opens his door and goes inside.
And I had the room next to Tate, so I go inside my room.
And I hear bang, bang, bang.
I hear banging on Tate's door.
And we had our doors open.
Yeah, joining.
Yeah, the joining rooms.
And I stepped through Tate's door.
What the fuck's going on?
Is that that same guy?
And so Tate opens the guy.
He goes, don't you shut the door on me, bitch.
It was like some crazy...
Crazy moment where this guy was not just picking a fight, but going after Tate once he went into the room.
Tate goes, why don't you come over here and swing on me, man?
Come on.
Come on.
So Tate is standing in front of the dude, and the dude is like, oh shit, this is really happening.
And then Tate throws an inside leg kick, and then pulls guard.
Grabs the guy, pulls guard.
Before the guy even knows it, Tate hooks an omoplata...
He's on the side of the guy, and then security shows up.
So he's got this guy in an omoplata.
He's got his arm under his neck in an omoplata, and security shows up.
And they go, stop, stop, stop!
So I go, don't worry about it, man.
I go, it's fine.
He's just going to put him to sleep.
It's okay.
And the security guy goes...
Hey, you're that guy from Fear Factor.
And in that moment, in that moment where the security guys are completely going, holy shit, what are you doing here, man?
I go, this drunk guy's picking on my friend.
And when I said, like, don't worry, he's just going to put him to sleep, Tate said, and in his head he was like, alright, I guess I'm going to put him to sleep now.
He wasn't going to hit the guy.
He just decided, like, look, if I hit this guy, then it becomes this crazy assault, and there's marks on him.
So Tate just chokes, puts a rear naked choke on him, and sleeps him right there in the hallway.
His friends pick the guy up, and it's like a scene in a goddamn movie.
His friends pick the guy up, they put him in the elevator, the elevator door closes, and the guy vanishes.
And that's the frustrating thing when all of a sudden, you know, I come to town and my wife's here and her friends are like, what's the deal with this war machine and Christy Mack?
They don't know about any of this stuff.
They don't know about any of the good things about martial arts.
They don't know about any of the good things it does and makes people a better person.
They just come in and they're like, hey, some MMA fighter beat up a porn star.
Like, you know what I mean?
They don't know.
Like, they don't know that there's that side to it.
Typically in the gym, you don't get guys get that good that are animals like that.
They don't have enough.
They have too much ego to go, I'm not good at this, so I have to train that to get better.
So these guys come into a big gym, and they're new, and they're tough guys.
They're gone in a year.
They won't have the absence of ego enough to train things they're not good at and then they end up leaving.
So it's rare that somebody has to be very driven of like an animal style fighter type to get past that, to get to that level or just be genetically really superior or whatever.
It's rare that that style of person becomes a high-level MMA fighter.
I mean, I don't know what he's going to do, because he's been in jail twice now, and this is the third one, and a girl, a pretty little girl like that, she's tiny, man.
Actually, Joe Dirksen was at this party, and you were talking about guys that kind of are cool.
Dirksen works now in a prison, and he said guys will be like, I think I could beat you, and he'll be like, yeah, you probably could.
Joe doesn't give a shit.
But Jaren Villal's there, and he was saying, oh, I really liked your Demetrius Johnson break.
I'm like, thanks, man.
Whenever anybody likes those, it means a lot to me because I love doing them, right?
And so we're talking about it.
He goes, well, you know, tell me what else you saw.
And I'm having a beer and whatever.
And I said, why?
And he goes, well, I was reffing that one, so I looked at a lot of tape, too.
And I'm like, really?
That's cool, man.
He goes, yeah, me and Big John, him and John are very good friends.
They'll go on Skype and look at tape together.
So I'm like, wow, that's fucking cool that you do that.
And he goes, yeah, I saw a couple things.
You know one thing, he didn't say you missed, but he suggested, and it was fucking brilliant.
Like this referee that was reffing the main event picked up on this one that basically when the two guys, when Demetrius Johnson ends up kind of in that center zone, not quite in the clinch and not quite at, you know, in the pocket, kind of in that middle zone, he'll give you a little shove.
He's obsessed with analyzing fights and training fighters.
It's such a huge part of his daily thought process.
It's engrossing.
It's his whole being.
And that's why he's so goddamn good.
I sat down with him at lunch the day TJ fought Burrell.
And when TJ Dillashaw beat Hennenborough, who at the time was thought of as the best pound-for-pound fighter or one of the best pound-for-pound fighters in the world, TJ was a big underdog, and TJ went into that fight and dominated Hennenborough, knocked him out in the fifth round after dropping him in the first, dominating him for five rounds, and then stopped him.
But what was crazy was when I had lunch with Dwayne, Dwayne told me exactly what the plan was.
And then he went out and did it exactly that way.
A lot of switching stances.
A lot of capitalizing on Burrell loading up and standing flat-footed.
A lot of stepping to the outside and immediately countering.
And he did it over and over and over again.
And TJ's a sponge, man.
I had a chance to watch those two work out together.
And those two examples, when I looked at Matt Hume, he was better than everybody.
Him and Evan Tanner were better than everybody.
Just because they were fighting like today.
And you look back, Matt Hume was doing this kind of leg ride and side ride like wrestling position that Chris Weidman was teaching at a seminar I was at like two years ago.
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He was doing it in 1994. He had good Muay Thai too.
And then pro wrestling over there, these two guys, Funaki and Suzuki, went and said, we're going to take pro wrestling, which we love and everyone loves, and we're going to make it real.
And so when they made it real, that was pancreas.
So suddenly it's like wrestling was real, then it was fake, and now we're going to make it real again.
So there were things like rope escapes left in there as you transferred from fake to real again.
And they were so obsessed with the storylines because they were originally wrestling performers that most of the works involved them and involved them losing.
So in its own way, it was only there to create entertainment.
But it's a weird time in there.
Like for purists, and I fucking love the sport, you have to make sense of why that was for people so that they're not just...
It doesn't color MMA in a way.
But it was that moment where MMA and wrestling sort of touched each other in the early 90s.
I think it's one of the things I love about it the most.
People will talk, Jon Jones and Cormier are having all this heat.
And they ask me about it.
It's like, I don't care.
It's interesting.
But for me, the biggest thing about one of the – I always say the biggest thing because I also love the science.
I also love the brain chemistry.
I love the beauty of the dance, all of it.
But one of the things I'm most interested in is it's basically one global science experiment in real time using thousands and thousands and thousands of fights.
to distill down to the nugget of what's the best and it still is that every 500 fights the best coaches are going okay well that doesn't work anymore well we've added that that works and it's this ongoing distillation down to the purest way to beat other guys that changes slightly now Because of this sort of demand for entertainment from the audience and stuff that changes.
Like, you know, guys are rewarded more for standing now than certain things.
So that alters it.
But you take that out of it, and basically we just have thousands and thousands of contests all there to help us determine the research of how to be the best fighter ever.
Yeah, I have issue with that aspect of it, where the technical aspect of fights changes for it to be more entertaining.
I think it's not good.
I think it's not smart and I think it takes away from the purity of mixed martial arts expression.
Like, what is martial arts?
It's all about doing the very best thing in order to win a fight.
And if you put yourself more in danger so that the crowd roars and, you know, like, just drop your hands, duke it out.
I remember a guy who's a friend of mine wrote something on Twitter and he wrote, you know, fuck technical striking, you know, just stand in the center of the cage and let it bang.
And meanwhile, the guy who wrote that is all fucked up now.
He's got all sorts of physical problems.
He's had a bunch of fights.
He's all banged up.
It's like, no, don't think that.
Don't say that.
That is like, fuck thinking.
I'm just going to hit this with a hammer.
No, no.
You have to think.
That's the whole thing.
The whole thing is solving the puzzle.
And solving the puzzle in striking is about technical striking.
It doesn't mean no knockouts.
There's a lot of knockouts that come from tactical strikers.
It means doing it the right way, where you have the most amount of success, the least amount of risk, and you're doing things based on the amount of knowledge that's been accumulated over thousands of years of martial arts.
You're applying that in an intelligent way.
Johnson, Demetrius Johnson, in my opinion, is the best example of that.
That fucking guy does everything right.
Everything he does is perfect.
He doesn't rush anything.
You never see him slugging it out and fucking dropping his hands and like, come on, bitch, come on, bitch.
There's none of that stupidity.
It's all brilliant martial arts, and he's so exciting to watch.
Sometimes people say it's not as exciting because he's not finishing guys as much, but He fucking finished John Moraga in the fourth round of a fight that he was dominating.
Nick is obviously a very high-level martial artist when it comes to his technique and his experience, and he's obviously a very, very tough guy, but he's also in fucking phenomenal shape.
Nick Diaz has swam back from Alcatraz twice in the fucking Pacific Ocean outside San Francisco filled with sharks.
He swam back twice.
He's done triathlons.
He's done marathons.
I mean, he's a fucking beast when it comes to his physical conditioning.
And what he does is just puts up pace.
He just makes you run with him.
Like, come on, let's go.
We're going running.
We're going running.
And he starts throwing these punches that are like 50% speed.
And because I'm friends with all these guys that also do my job, there's no competition amongst each other.
I tried to get Jimmy Smith hired by the UFC. When Jimmy Smith's contract was going up with Bellator, I called Dana White and I said, Dude, this guy's the best.
Also, they would worry that who the fuck else is out there?
I mean, it's a really tough gig to have a person who's very passionate and very articulate, which Jimmy is both, and is really good at breaking down scenarios and situations and is legitimately passionate while the fight's going on, like you could see it.
And also, not afraid to call out bad refereeing, bad calls, bad judgments.
It's very important to him to be honest about the whole scene.
But it feels like in a lot of other sports, they have spent time to develop a certain percentage of the audience that is there because baseball does some crazy shit.
I don't know what happens in baseball, but there are guys that talk about how the field moves and what guys do when they're like with rosin and shit.
And in football, they talk about how the plays are called, what the subtleties are.
And you don't see that before and after in the UFC.
When someone is head straight up in the air and they don't move off the center line, that shit drives me crazy.
I watched it and I was like, fucking who's training you?
What's going on here?
And then you watch a guy like TJ Dillashaw so satisfying because he does all the right things, because he's constantly moving off the center line, because he's completely unpredictable.
Like when Dominic did a great, he did a great breakdown of what Franklin did wrong and where the errors were.
And he's done that for a bunch of different fights.
When we're talking about Dwayne Ludwig, when he's teaching, he'll say, you make no errors unless you're making them on purpose.
And what he means by that is if you, obviously, you show, well, this is here, the guy will throw a punch.
We want him to do that and we'll respond.
And there's a really wild, heavy case of it where you see...
I broke it down and if you even just look at the fight itself, you see it as soon as somebody mentions it, was Jacare versus Okami.
So Jacare, the whole fight...
All he's got in mind is the overhand right.
And the way for him to draw that out is, you know, how everybody, you know, when they talk about where the front foot goes, you know, against the southpaw, he's got his front foot intentionally inside, and he's offering a straight line to his chin for the straight left.
And Okami, you can see him seeing it and going, no, shit, he wants me to throw that.
Oh, shit, he's doing, he's ready to counter it.
And the hesitation on Okami is like, it's such a fascinating moment as a guy's going...
Look, I'm out here.
You can hit me with it.
And he's going, oh, he's telling me I can hit him with it, but he's got that right hand ready.
And just those moments to me are the fascinating shit.
Well, it's also even more fascinating when it comes to a guy like Jacare is because if you do engage, the real fear is that he's going to take you down.
So, there's always this thing, when you're striking with a guy who's such an elite grappler, it's like, this guy's trying to goad me into a slugfest, but I know that he's going to change levels and take me down at any moment, so you're always hesitant to really commit to shots and extend yourself, because if you extend yourself, it makes it much more difficult to defend and take down.
A guy like Okami is also, or a guy like Jacare rather, is also fascinating because he started out his career as one of the elite of the elite in grappling and really had bad striking in the beginning.
When he got knocked out by Makako, his striking was just very rudimentary, which wasn't very good, but now he's destroying guys with striking.
Like, he beat the fucking shit out of Yushin Okami with striking.
And, like, that's terrifying to people because now you take this guy who is this just phenomenal top 1% of all grapplers ever.
I mean, I think Jacare, like, out of elite jiu-jitsu guys, he's, like, top 1% ever.
But did you see when he got elbow surgery and they cleaned out his elbow?
Did you see that?
Oh, pull that up, Jamie.
Jacare elbow surgery pictures.
He had, before he fought Francis Carmont, he had, like, really bad, like...
Bone spurs and chips and shit inside of his elbow.
It was like, you know, all the years of elbowing people and also of getting armbarred, like, things break off inside your elbow and it becomes, like, crunchy and you're moving it around.
It's just all inflammation and tissue damage.
And look, we'll show it to you up on the big screen, but it's really fucking crazy.
Like, there's a cup of all the things that they remove from his elbow.
Like, one of the things that I did, I made some mistakes with my jiu-jitsu training.
And one of the mistakes that I made was for a long time, I didn't do any strength and conditioning equipment.
The strength and conditioning training, I did mostly just jiu-jitsu.
Like, for years and years, I would lift weights like maybe once a week or something like that.
I'd get a little lift in just to kind of maintain my strength and size.
But I didn't specifically like strengthen my core strengthen my spine strengthen certain areas and stretch Constantly stretch like you got to put as much time almost into that as you do in your jiu-jitsu training just to armor up your body just just to arm up your joints not So that you can overpower guys and like not concentrate on technique Which a lot of people do have a problem with like really strong like football players Big guys tend to try to muscle things.
The really technical guys are always the really small guys because they don't have the muscle-up option.
So their option is only to use the proper technique and leverage.
But strengthening your body is important just to prevent injuries.
Strengthening your hamstrings to prevent knee injuries.
Strengthening your quads to prevent knee injuries.
Strengthening your neck.
Strengthening your back.
Strengthening lower back.
Stretching.
A lot of guys slack off on that shit.
And I did too.
And I got some...
Some pretty serious back injuries because of that.
Because I wasn't strengthening those areas.
For the longest time, I very rarely worked my back.
I didn't do rows or any exercises specifically.
So having an issue with discs and stuff like that forced me to really concentrate on that.
It's a Filipino martial art, and it's very much like Taekwondo, but when they compete, they stick their hands in their belt, and it's all spin kicks and hook kicks and shit.
This one central area of Canada This Filipino master of it came there and he started a school.
He was a really good businessman.
So it ended up being in the whole world, if you looked at where Sikaran was taught, the Philippines, and there was a chunk, a little red dot in the middle of Canada because this guy was there and he had a bunch of schools and people studied, and a lot of Filipino population.
So I did a little of that.
Wow, that's crazy.
Sikaran's really cool.
Check it out.
I don't know how much there'll be of modern stuff on the internet, but it's basically a ton of round kicks, hook kicks, and spin kicks with your weight heavy on the back leg.
And very drunk, very fucked up through the whole era.
We would go and we...
Oh, man.
And I told Eddie this story.
I haven't told a lot of people this story, but people asked me about it.
My friends asked me about it recently.
But I was basically on tour, so I could do that for like 10, 12, 14 years.
Yeah.
We're touring England and the UK and Italy and a few places like that.
We did really well over there and I had a seizure from just doing so much drugs and drinking so much.
When I came back, the doctor said the vodka and Red Bull was actually the biggest The fact that I took a lot of speed over the three days without sleeping let me drink more vodka and red ball but basically as the sugar leaves your body it goes down and you get sick and when the alcohol then leaves your body it draws more sugar out and you have a hypoglycemic seizure.
So I'm laying on the couch I felt terrible for like 10 hours and then all of a sudden apparently I just yelled something and people came over and I felt this electricity shoot down my arms into my hands and they just locked up and I rolled back down my eyes rolled in my head I thought it was 10 seconds later and everyone was looking at me like I just got knocked out.
And then apparently it was like a minute or something.
And I went back and the doctor said, dude, you've got to get your life together.
In fact, my wife just told me this morning, unrelated, she was on the internet and she said, Toronto looking to ban alcohol and Red Bull served in bars.
I was talking to my friend Aubrey about this the other day.
There's this buddy that we know that makes these, they're called jambos, these organic edibles.
He uses honey instead of processed sugar, and they're really delicious.
They're super strong and you know Aubrey ate one and then went on this like two-hour stretching and like Rampage was like like using a lacrosse ball to roll out all the the tight tissue that makes just makes you really in tune it makes you feel like I like lifting weights on it because it makes me like feel like what my body's doing I feel like I can get like a sense a better a more in tune more sensitive and Yeah,
At Olympic lifts, say a clean or a snatch, you work forever on the little details to try to make yourself calm enough to be able to express yourself with the lift.
To be able to really put it all together.
You move one way wrong, you don't nail the lift.
You distribute your weight different in your feet, you don't nail the lift.
You don't drive and tie your hips together with the same time that you're supposed to go up on your toes and shrug, you don't hit the lift.
So it becomes this Ongoing work to try to make this thing better.
Anytime you're doing anything where you're pushing up from your toes from the ground and extending and lifting it up over your head and forcing your whole body to fucking power that up.
Everything.
Your whole chain, your core, your spine, everything.
Your shoulder, your delts, your quads, your toes.
Your toes are pushing.
That's why Steve Maxwell is a big proponent of lifting weights barefoot.
He thinks that, you know, when you have a, like, especially a spongy sort of like a running shoe on, where it's like a lot of give, that you're not feeling, you know, you're not engaging your toes, pushing off the ground.
Some of the force you're exerting, it would kind of absorb it a little bit.
I definitely, they, a lot of the Olympic lifters around where I go, I go to this place, Bang Fitness in Toronto, and it's just like, It's the best part of my week to go in there.
And most of the guys who Olympic lift just use the tiny, tiny, tiny shoe.
Well, I still am a huge fan of Mike Tyson, but one of the things that I used to always be fascinated about Tyson and people didn't comment on is the size of his fucking legs.
Like, that's where all the power was coming from.
He was, like, pushing off the floor, constantly, like, pushing off the floor, and just...
Everything was, like, thrusting from the bottom.
And when you see a guy punching, you assume, like, oh, it's his body, his upper body, his arms are throwing the punch...
But really, with a guy like Tyson, those vicious power punches, it was all coming from his ass.
From his toes down, pushing off, and all his quads and his upper body throwing it into it.
It's amazing how much of your full body is involved in techniques.
So these guys, at least maybe in your 30s and 40s, so a lot of these guys, you know, they either have a perfect, and I was going to say they have a perfect diet, but a lot of these guys celebrate the way that you deserve to celebrate after you fought a fight, and they don't have the perfect diet right after.
But that walking around weight creeps up a little bit, at least it did for me.
Well, the lighter weight guys, traditionally, those have been the guys that have the shortest careers.
The lighter weight guys, when they get into their 30s, it starts to drop off, whereas heavyweights, In their 30s, a lot of times they're just hitting their prime.
You know, like you could have a heavyweight...
Like, look, George Foreman won the heavyweight title at 45 years old.
46, actually.
And was the oldest heavyweight champion.
And was the oldest boxing champion until Bernard Hopkins recently.
It would be fascinating to get a real, one of these guys on the front end of anti-aging and human performance, that science, to figure out like, okay, a bodybuilder uses this much growth hormone.
A guy like, say, an actor on CSI maybe uses like this much, you know, like anti-aging.
How much is this 70, how much is Stallone using?
You know what I mean?
To get a sense of where the chemistry is happening.
Like, is this more?
Is this different?
Do you have the new shit that we don't know about?
Like, what's going on at the elite level?
Like, Stallone was, I don't, I mean, he's not an athlete, so it's not a big deal, but he was caught at an airport once with a whole bunch of...
No, it's essentially the people that are dictating the rules, the people that are writing the laws, their ignorance about understanding the effects on the human body that these substances have.
If it's done correctly...
And if it's done through proper medical supervision, it enhances the body.
And that's what people don't understand.
When you arrest a guy like Stallone, who's showing up with growth hormone, and he's, why don't you just let him take his shirt off and look, does he look bad?
And why is it okay that that old guy could go to the bar and just do shot after shot until his fucking liver collapses and no one stops that, but you have a problem with him bringing in boxes of human growth hormone.
Well, I think when it comes to growth hormone and testosterone and all these different things, where people have an issue is because the way it's played out in the public eye has been all about illegal use in sports.
It's been about all these people that are taking these things and cheating in sports.
So because our associations have been all about people getting unfair advantages in sports, people automatically assume that these substances are bad for you.
When you look at cigarettes, which are one of the worst things for you ever, no one's stopping that from being legal.
It's just there's a big difference between the way people look at...
There should be a big difference between the way people look at someone who's doing something that's a performance-enhancing drug that's allowing them to compete with an unfair advantage in a sport and doing it where if you're a guy like Sylvester Stallone and you're doing it to enhance your life and you're 70 years old or whatever and you're shredded, who gives a shit?
Well, what if there's an element of trying to keep a difference between the people at the top and the people at the bottom?
What if all the people at the bottom got testosterone?
That would be harder to manage them, harder to kind of keep them...
What do you mean?
The societal difference between the oppressed, the people who are kind of at the bottom of the food chain, the people who run shit, the kind of people who kind of monitor how the world kind of works, prefer to keep people watching TV, not really eating bad food, smoking cigarettes.
There's a direction to keeping some of society not super active.
And those people don't want those people to take performance-enhancing drugs.
They want them to smoke cigarettes and eat hamburgers and shit.
You know, that's a thing that gets thrown around a lot, that accusation gets thrown around that there's some sort of international cabal that's looking out to keep the proletariat down.
But not so much saying that there's some room somewhere where 20 guys are in there making decisions, just the feeling, the way that society kind of breaks itself up.
If these laws happen for this reason, it keeps these guys rich.
The way that society kind of divvies shit out, it just kind of ends up being that way.
I think it kind of ends up being that way more than anybody's trying to make it that way.
I think that what people have when it comes to testosterone and human growth hormone and anti-aging and all these, the stigmas that people have on whether it's the efficacy of them or the dangers of them, is a lot of it is based on sports.
A lot of it is based on all the negative press that we've heard about guys taking steroids in sports.
And then there's, you know, in MMA, there's this huge issue with testosterone replacement therapy, which was up until very recently legal.
Now, human growth hormone has always been illegal, but they were never testing for it until recently.
When Chael Sonnen got popped for human growth hormone, it was a big deal because it let everybody know, like, oh boy, these new tests.
Like, I had a conversation with Chael about it right after he got popped.
Well, turns out these new tests are really good.
And that's really what it was.
They're doing these tests that cost $45,000 per athlete.
And they're doing it, they have this, like, really intense chain of evidence where, like, the guy will show up at your house, take your blood, and it's like, you know, a fucking suitcase.
He's got chained to his wrist.
Like, it's one of those type of deals.
The guy travels with it to wherever the lab is.
Like, it's in his custody the entire time.
And they take the blood from your body, he signs off on it, and they bring it to the laboratory, and then the laboratory analyzes it.
And you're finding...
They're gonna find out a lot of guys are taking shit.
The Victor Conte guy who came along and came up with some different strategies for avoiding tests, some drugs that hadn't been detected yet that they found were effective.
They sort of manipulated the components of some various performance-enhancing drugs.
And that's where they got that stuff that they called the Clear that they were giving, allegedly, to Barry Bonds and a bunch of different people.
I had Conte on the podcast, and he sort of explained the whole process behind all that stuff.
Wow.
He's a fascinating cat because now he's kind of working hard to stop doping in sports, which is like really a weird position to take when that was your whole career was like juicing guys up.
it is very strange but i also don't know how i feel i mean these guys that were on the testosterone guys like vitor vitor is the poster boy right for test because if you've seen the photos of him now like pre and post it's really crazy dude yeah pull this photo of uh vitor uh pre and post trt because uh you know he's been saying you know i'm not on trt anymore now it's just tnt yeah and
And so then Chris Weidman posts, hold on, is this what happens when you replace TRT with TNT? And he shows a picture of TRT Vitor versus the recent Vitor who's off testosterone.
And he has shrunken.
I mean, he has really, like Luke Rockhold just said that he has a chicken neck now.
He's definitely going to hear about all these things that people are saying about him.
And it's interesting because people are saying, like on the underground, people are speculating, like, maybe this is going to make Vitor start using again.
And if he does start using again, then he's going to piss hot.
And it's also about, like, they're testing these guys.
Who's testing them?
Where are they testing them?
How are they being tested?
You know, is it going to come down to the UFC has to show up at the gym every day while a fighter's training and have them pee in a cup every day?
Yeah, good point.
What is the way to tell if a guy's taking anything?
Because the problem with urine tests especially, because guys would joke around about it.
They would say it's not even a drug test, it's an intelligence test.
If you test positive when they're testing your urine, you're a fucking idiot.
Because all this stuff, like oral testosterone is out of your system within 24 hours.
Human growth hormone is out of your system within 10 hours.
You can't even test, I don't think, human growth hormone without using blood.
I don't even think you can test in urine.
So these guys that were getting popped, they were just doing it completely wrong.
So now that there's this really stringent testing, you've got to think, well, guys are cheating in the Olympics.
It's like, okay, at 3 o'clock in the morning you set your alarm, you take this one at 3. You drink this many liters of something before you do that.
Yeah, they'll find a way.
Because the game is to try to win.
And try to win every little scenario.
And the doctor who's trying to fix this thing, he's got a game to try to win too.
People are motivated to try to do great things.
And this doctor's assignment in life, your assignment in life, well, you have 20, you know, you'll make people laugh and call fights and do a million things, but his is to beat drug tests.
This doctor, this one doctor here, his goal is to go out there, wake up tomorrow and fucking figure out how to win this contest of beating this test, you know?
Yeah, I'm really curious to see what's going to happen to these guys that were on testosterone replacement and now they're off.
Because Chael Sundin's retired, he's out of the business, but Vitor's still in it, and Vitor is one of the few guys from 1997, when he made his debut, that is at the elite level today in 2014 and is ready to fight for a title.
Yeah, well, these guys that get off of it, the thing is when you take testosterone, you put this artificial testosterone in your body, your body stops producing regular testosterone.
So if they had low tests before, it's even lower now because your body stops taking it.
You're injecting all this stuff into your system.
And, you know, he's only 37 years old.
It's a weird thing to have old man testosterone levels at 36, 37 years old, and then to have to face a fucking beast like Chris Weidman, knowing that Vitra Belfort, when he fought Michael Bisping, when he fought Luke Rockhold, when he fought Dan Henderson, all these guys, he was on this artificial stuff.
When he was at Fight Network, he had a couple hours to kill until he went to the airport, and he was hanging out, and Ramdeen started playing him in ping pong.
And Ramdeen was getting a slight better of him.
He fucking got dead serious.
I want a better paddle.
I'm not fucking around here.
Dead serious.
And he's like, I don't like to lose.
He's still having fun.
We're having a great time.
But he did not want to lose that game.
It was not in him to let this guy beat him at ping pong.
Once you're getting at this point where these guys are the top, top guys, They have to have all of it.
They have to have that quality.
They have to have that genetics.
They have to have those coaches.
They have to have that mental game or else there's just no way.
That's how good the whole level is now.
It's still getting better.
It's shocking.
Ellenberger had that fight with Rory and he's never been a shit talker.
And all of a sudden he was talking all kinds of shit on Twitter and stuff.
And when he got in there, it raised that pressure so high That, you know, it wasn't that I, like, I gotta beat this guy.
It was, I just can't lose bad to a guy I called a fruit stick on the internet.
And the pressure of it.
That's why when people are so excited about Jon Jones and Daniel Cormier, I'm like, this kind of, although it's great, I love that people are into a fight.
I love, like, that there'll be a million more people than normally watching a fight.
That's, I love that.
That's awesome.
But for me personally, I just want to see them fight.
They're going to fight whether they hate each other or not.
They're going to go in there and we're going to see 25 minutes or less of these two guys putting together their lifetime of everything to fight.
Whether or not that guy hates that guy isn't really all that relevant to me.
But when they fought each other on a stage, I hated that.
Stupid.
Like...
Two of the best athletes in the world, and that's the worst fight I've ever seen.
I don't want no part of that.
It's bad.
People are going, oh, you watch that show?
Oh, you work in that business?
Look at these idiots.
That's terrible.
But when they were talking about each other with a camera on, that's real, and there's so little real in the world.
You fucking win some...
Hip-hop award and you got to thank God and your fucking producer and you know I just feel so blessed and I want to thank the fans it's like fucking bullshit let me see what you say when there's when there's not everybody there yeah that's the thing about that getting John and Daniel well apparently that video was pulled Yeah.
There was more.
Apparently, when they said, guys, you're on the internet.
Yeah, these guys, so check that out on the internet.
These researchers, these sociologists go and they looked at hundreds or thousands of UFC weigh-ins and they found that guys who smiled lost an extremely large percentage of them.
I'll send it to you of what the impression of alpha male posturing, the effect that that has on fighting.
So guys will stand there and they'll project a certain posture.
There was research done at the University of Harvard, Harvard University, about alpha posture and what happens if you're interviewing me for a job and I have a certain posture and they talk to you after, you'll score me much higher of your opinion of me.
Also, yeah, and that affects your – when we go to fight, and like Uriah Faber has that a lot, and he projects a certain thing, and that will affect your performance.
But the science actually shows that it affects his performance as well because there's certain postures that when you do them, your testosterone raises a measurable amount and your cortisol drops a measurable amount significantly.
It's a Harvard research, and they did it to measure your biological responses to your own physical posture, but it also, there's an interpretation of the other guy.
So I broke that down, and then I took a piece of Donald Cerrone standing there looking over at Pettis.
And then I've superimposed what Cerrone said after.
And he said, I looked across the cage at him and I looked at him and I thought, dang, I pissed him off and he's coming hard.
And it was the worst performance he's ever had.
And he talks openly.
Cerrone's fascinating because Cerrone's a regular guy who deals with fear and uses it appropriately.
And he talked about looking over, and he literally said, I saw that guy, and he said, after, I knew I had to see a psychiatrist, like a sports psychiatrist, or a psychologist, because there's no way I should be about to fight a guy, and the things going through my mind is, oh man, I pissed him off.
Never should happen.
But it was, in part, the posture of Pettis that projected that on him.
I mean, I really wish they fought and everyone made an agreement to fight at what you weigh.
But everybody wants this advantage.
But the problem is when both guys are seeking an advantage and they both try to achieve that advantage, what you actually wind up happening is you have both guys that are fighting not to the best extent of their abilities.
And so instead, neither guy has an advantage and both guys are compromised.
Yeah, and it's also dangerous when it comes to combat sports.
The difference between wrestling, which is a combat sport, but it's not a contact sport in terms of concussive blows.
Where you're dealing with striking, there's a big difference.
Almost all of the instances of brain damage and death that occurred in boxing because of boxing matches were lighter weight fights.
Not brain damage, it's like accumulative.
The heavyweight guys, of course, got that as well, but In fights where guys like had bleeding on the brain and then wound up dying.
Almost all of them.
There was one recent one that was a heavyweight bout with Eric Perez, fought a Russian guy, and the guy had some swelling of the brain and his career is probably over.
That was a prolonged beating, an unusual situation.
Whereas like Boom Boom Mancini and Duck Kukim, that was a severe weight cut.
Gerald McClellan, severe weight cut.
A lot of fighters who wound up having horrible tragedies inside the ring, it was because they had depleted themselves, they dehydrated themselves, and then they got beat up.
Yeah, there's got to be a death in a high-level MMA one day, and you would guess that if there was dehydration in the brain, that would add to it, for sure.
The trick is that everything's that arms race we were talking about.
Everything is somebody looking for an advantage to win.
So we agree to do it, but then I'm lying and I actually cut 15 pounds and now I'm way bigger than you.
You know what I mean?
Until you find a way to make it have to happen or make something that both guys adhere to for some reason that's safe, this is the way they're going to do it.
Because BJ, although he dropped down to 145 pounds when he fought Frankie Edgar in his last fight, would not IV. And Dolce tried to get him to IV. He wouldn't do it.
But a lot of debate over in our office with a few friends and stuff about his place in the world.
Personally, I think B.J. Penn is one of the greats ever for a million reasons.
Certain people will say, well, his record says this or he never beat.
There's reasons that people argue it.
But I think the biggest thing is pure talent.
And one thing I think people sort of forget, you see a guy and you go to a guy's back and you trap his arm in there with the hook, that's a BJ Penn.
You take a guy on the fence and you turn your body sideways and you elbow him when you're defending the single, that's a BJ Penn.
Did we really see that at all before he fought Diego Sanchez?
When you got a guy in a triangle but he hides his arm over here and you pressure the straight arm bar against your face until he gives you the triangle, that's a BJ Penn.
There's all of these things that he did.
I don't know.
It's a weird one.
At the very least, he should be considered one of the most beloved fighters of all time.
What I think about BJ is that BJ, at his very best, was outside of his comfort zone.
He brought in Marinovich to do strength and conditioning, and he just got in this unbelievable condition.
And when he fought Diego Sanchez, he was probably at his best.
He was just a destroyer.
And he had incredible endurance.
I mean, he fought and he had the same pace deep into the fight that he did at the beginning of the fight.
And that's what plagued BJ. B.J.'s just extremely, extremely talented, extremely game, very aggressive, but didn't like to train hard, didn't like to push himself, didn't like to get outside.
I mean, you know, he'll dispute that.
Of course he trained hard, but did he train the way he trained when he was with the Marinovichs?
Like, you would talk about how he couldn't even hold his kid at night because he was so tired.
But that's what it takes to be at that kind of level, you know, and he didn't like that.
And when we're sort of on this hand saying absolutely one of the greats ever, and the other side of the debate, that's one of them, and another one was I think his Yeah.
Yeah.
was, see, he doesn't cut weight.
He's the smaller man and he's faster.
I'm going to go back up to 170 and I'll be the Frankie Edgar of 170.
You know what I mean?
Frankie Edgar at 155, him at 170 is theoretically his interpretation of the same approach.
I'm the smaller guy.
I'm the quicker guy.
Enough with this other bullshit.
I'm just better.
I'm going to beat guys.
And then he fought guys like Rory and fucking Nick Diaz and these monsters.
There's no way this 145-pounder should be in there with Rory McDonald just sizing his lettuces.
And if you've got a guy who's got those fantastic genetics and he is just engrossed in MMA, I mean, his body, his mind, his focus, he lives it, breathes it, eats it, sleeps it, gets up in the morning and thinks, how do I get better?
That guy's going to be better than you.
And also there's physical power, especially when it comes to striking.
Physical power when it comes to striking is something you're either born with or you're not.
Dominic Cruz is not born with it.
He breaks his hands all the time and his body's kind of fragile in a way.
He's got the mind for it.
Yes, but will he be able to beat a guy like Burrell?
Will he be able to beat the guys who have The genetics and have that physical power as well.
There's these guys that have that knockout power.
Anthony Rebel Johnson.
There's a God-given gift.
The world has given him a hand of cards and it is excellent.
And then you put him with Henry Hooft who has a God-given gift to take guys like that and make them better and now we're terrified.
It's fucking scary.
And man, the beauty of how he moves...
I trained with a guy, Evan Boris, who's a kickboxing coach who trained with Henry.
He was one of the guys carrying his bucket and learning from him.
And he's just as passionate.
Young guy up in Toronto.
And he tells me all, he gives me insight into how Henry thinks and tries to show me stuff through Henry's eyes.
So you feel like you're learning one step down from this master.
And so his thing is with a guy like Anthony Johnson is that Henry Hooft...
We'll say to him, you know, you gotta be ready.
If you are ready, you don't gotta get ready.
That's the essential, fundamental plan of Anthony Johnson, the way he stands and the way he moves, is at all times you're in a type of balance where you can deliver power.
Because you have power, and we just need to keep you in a spot where you can deliver it all the time.
So his takedown defense revolves around that, the way his footwork works revolves around that.
It's all built so that at any moment in time when you throw a punch, you're in the state to be able to smash with it because you have that gift.
Yeah, and also when you see a guy like Hooft or anyone who teaches that classic Dutch style of kickboxing, it's such a technical style and that style can be lost on someone who doesn't understand what's going on.
Is that every movement has a purpose.
Every technique has a purpose.
Every technique chains into another technique.
The left hook leads to the right low kick.
And all these techniques, they go together like bread and butter.
They're a part of a system.
And Dwayne Ludwig is the best at breaking down.
He's got books.
He was over at my house the other day, and he had all these books of detail, all his techniques, and how they intertwine together, and he has steps and levels, and he has a whole belt system based around these techniques.
I mean, he's spent countless hours analyzing and categorizing and putting all this stuff together.
And that's what's sort of lost on a lot of people that you illuminate very well with your breakdowns.
Fuck, you take one class with Eddie Bravo and your whole understanding of everything you think you know about Jiu Jitsu, the whole thing fucking falls apart.
It's so crazy.
That you sit there and it's like, these are positions people use.
You know, whatever, we'll take 10 or 15 of them.
And the guy goes, and in between, as you know, obviously, in between each of those, there's an entire universe of stuff to do.
In between the positions that people already know as positions, entire worlds, you know?
but incorporating other people's techniques into his style as well and just spent just like Dwayne countless hours analyzing positions and using them in the lab using them in the gym and using them with high-level guys and figuring out like a Guy in his gym will come up with some new variation on a specific technique And then they'll add it to the rotation and then the right they'll drill it and then they'll Some of them find a counter Yeah, I remember when I was there just that one time, and I had trained with Eddie.
Yeah, you have a gi black belt and a black belt in the air system.
Well, I started training in 96. And so when you were training in 96, and guys would say, oh, there's a purple belt coming through town, everybody was blown away back then, right?
No, no, not in 96. Well, there was a few purple belts.
I mean, I started out at Carlson Gracie's.
I took one class at Hickson's.
See, back then in 96, I didn't know that there was a difference between Carlson Gracie and Hickson Gracie.
It was just Gracie Jiu-Jitsu.
And the only reason why I went from Carlson's to Hickson's is that Hickson's was all the way across town.
Carlson's was much closer to me.
It was like a 20-minute difference in the drive, so I just started going to Carlson's.
And that was when Vitor had just made his debut against John Hess.
And they were actually calling him Victor Gracie.
And I even accidentally referred to him as Victor Gracie during one of the things that I did for the UFC in 1997. UFC 12, when I first started working for him.
You probably don't realize it because when you're in stuff, you don't...
Often people that are driven don't often pause to look and be proud of what they've done.
Maybe, hopefully you do that, but...
That you actually invented the idea of commentating this sport, which is very different than any other one.
And there's so many things that people think are just terms, but they're terms that you said.
Do you know what I mean?
Things that you said that are common, descriptive things, they think they've always existed, but they didn't exist before you said them in a lot of cases.
And that's really a wild thing, the influence in how people observe this great sport and how big an influence that is.
Well, I definitely don't think about it, but the difference between this sport and a lot of other sports is that this sport, the play-by-play guy is not the play-by-play guy.
The color guy is the guy who's the expert, the martial arts expert, essentially has to be the play-by-play guy as well because he has to break down the subtle nuances of positions to people that are watching at home, especially when it comes to the ground.
There's a big issue with explaining jujitsu to people that don't know jujitsu so they can enjoy it.
Because if someone doesn't know, like, why is that guy hurting?
You know, he transitioned into boxing so naturally because he was an actual play-by-play guy.
But the odd thing, and I'm a fucking full-on Mauro fan, and he had a huge influence in helping with a lot of stuff.
But because if you're a play-by-play guy and you're not really obsessed, if you're not deep into it, you will start to get certain things where you are missing out on stuff.
So he might say, you know, he's on his back.
Why doesn't he put the hooks in?
Well, he wants to ride heavy on the hip.
He doesn't want the hooks.
He wants to ride, you know.
And so you start to sort of project what you think is next.
And that's why when you do color, you're saying what is happening and what might happen.
Some form of it where you understand the psychology behind competing, rising to the occasion.
What's going on in that moment when you see a guy who's breaking.
You know, you can learn a lot by watching, but I think doing is really important and critical when it comes to breaking down jujitsu.
I've seen, like I was watching a Pride the other day, and someone, one of the guys, it wasn't boss, it was whoever he was doing it with, I think it was Quadros.
When I was talking about Pancrase, Boss was the other guy that it was like, he's walking in the ring, and you looked at that, and you didn't want to be in there with this guy.
You see the Boss in Pancrase, that would have been as terrifying a human being as anybody had ever seen.
The intensity, that's what I thought about him and Evan Tanner.
These guys were kind of competing, and then him and Evan Tanner came in there and they just It went crazy.
Like, they just put it on people.
Like, they put a level of hurt on people that would have been terrifying had you never seen that before.
Well, Boss was the first, like, really high-level striker in MMA. I feel like Boss was the first guy, if you watch his pank race fights, he was blasting guys with kicks.
Like, he hadn't seen anybody kick that hard before.
It was more about jiu-jitsu before then.
I mean, you had, like, Orlando Veet, who was, like, a high-level kickboxer, was in the early UFCs, but he was only, like, 165 pounds or something like that.
He was a small guy, and he got manhandled by grapplers, you know?
He fought, um, what was his fucking name?
The big judo black belt guy.
His name escapes me.
He wound up fighting, the same guy wound up fighting Marco Huas, and Marco Huas mounted him, and he tapped when Marco Huas mounted him.
Remember he fought Orlando V and got him in side control and blasted him with elbows?
He was in that judo side control, like holding the head there and just boom, elbowed him unconscious.
Yeah.
That was fascinating, man.
Yeah, Pardieu.
Fascinating, fascinating.
Just watching those guys, like, watching that sport evolve like that to, like, the beginnings were just people trying their style out and finding out that it didn't work at all.
Like, remember there was that ninja guy who fought Pat Smith?
Well, not only that, it's a crazy way of thinking.
This fight's scheduled for three rounds.
If the guy's exactly the skill level of you, it's going to take some time, man.
I don't know why he decides to do that.
I mean, he's one of those guys that really likes to put on a show, really likes to have an exciting fight.
And that's one of the things we were talking about earlier is these guys that sort of sacrifice technical style fighting in order to make things more exciting.
And the only way you find that is guys competing at their very best, like using all of your, like if guys played chess and they just said, you know, fuck all this strategy and shit, I'm just going to get gangster with my rook.
You know, I mean, that's really essentially the same sort of decision making.
It doesn't work that way.
It's all about using all of your talents, your mental talents, your emotional control, your endurance, all of those things.
Knowing when to push, when to back off, managing your energy during a fight.
Like, is that taking care of itself out of stress or out of fear or out of danger or because he pushed you?
I mean, you talked about one-rounders.
Kevin Randleman was, like, going to fight you for three minutes.
It was going to be the worst hell of three minutes that you've ever had in your life, but if you could get past it, you've got a chance of beating him now.
We talk about Hendrix and how he can close distance.
This guy even more so.
Yeah.
But what some, I think, athletic guys will try to do is make it not an endurance sport.
They'll make it a sport of sprints and comms and sprints and comms and sprints and comms.
And that would be the way to try to...
Be that athlete.
We haven't seen anyone make that work, but I think that's what guys are trying to do, is everything is a 30-second on and a 20-second recovery, and fight that way, and train that way, and train to recover that way.
But I can't think of anybody we've seen sort of make that really work yet, but I think that's how that level of athlete's trying to do it.
Well it's also, Chael Sonnen had a comment on MMA and about just the physical demands of the body.
He's like, the reality is that 25 minutes is too long.
He's like, it's too long to fight.
He goes, you can't fight at your best for 25 minutes.
So it all becomes about managing when you explode, when you go after the guy, when you...
You know, and for Chael to say that, especially, I mean, you think about his fight with Anderson Silva, was a crazy endurance test.
I mean, he just went after Anderson in that first fight for four and a half rounds, just full clip, took him down at will, just pushed the pace constantly.
That book I was telling you about that I'm in the process of reading, Rise of Superman, they talk about how some of these guys in these states, a lot of the analysis is guys in skateboards, the guy in the skateboard who jumped over the Great Wall of China, and guys who are flipping and downhill skiing and stuff, that they start to believe that gravity applies to them differently.
You know what I mean?
They start to take action as if gravity does not apply to them the same way.
I mean, look at this guy who jumps the fucking Great Wall of China on a skateboard.
Part of his belief when he's in a state to try this is he has to suspend reality to even fucking give that a go.
Because any normal person looks at that and go, there's no fucking way I can jump the Great Wall of China on a skateboard.
But this guy has to put himself into a state where that truth becomes not true.
He looks at how that also alters the brain chemistry and those times where people are at one with something where they've actually, in some ways, reality is just that thing we each have.
And yours is different now.
Yours is different in the moments where you bring this brain chemistry together in a state of flow.
And when you're in that state, your reality is different.
And if your reality is different, maybe the fuck you can jump the Great Wall of China.
But they, I mean, you hesitate for one second, you die.
And that's the same with those flippin' motorcycles, same with free climbing, fuckin' mount, whatever.
You create a state where if you do not believe for one moment, you're dead.
Not, well, shit, I lost a fight.
Or, oh, man, that cost me some money.
Death.
Death.
And these guys, you know, and some of them will say, I could spend months learning how to spend 20 minutes of yoga to get a taste of that state for a second, or I can put myself on a rock face and have it for three hours out of necessity.
And that's what some fighters are doing.
I mean, all the top guys are operating in that state.
I mean, it's essentially like putting your focus into something and taking that something, whatever it is, to the highest level that's possible.
And the mind is a big part of it.
He was talking about how when you're rock climbing, I had him on the podcast, he was talking about rock climbing that when you're doing it, you're really pretty chill.
He goes, you don't really feel crazy unless something's really wrong.
He goes, most of the time everything is really calm and really chill and you just sort of zen and you're just, this is what you're doing and you're just going through it and you're...
Putting the powder in your hands, you're sticking your hands in cracks, and you're just pulling yourself up.
He goes, then you kind of get to the top.
Yeah, for hours.
Yeah.
And doing shit that, in his case, doing shit that no one else does.
There was a piece that they did in one of those television shows where they talked about Alex where this guy who was also a free climber was like, look, it's not a matter of if he's going to fall.
It's a matter of when he's going to fall and he's going to die when he does.
And, you know, this guy's kind of freaking the fuck out.
But then he talked to Alex about it.
He's like, man, maybe not.
I don't know if he's going to fall.
This motherfucker might just keep doing that.
I mean, he's a guy, Alex Honnold, that's what he does.
He lives in his van.
I mean, he's got a van with all these drawers in it.
The genetics and the obsession must come together in the perfect storm.
Because if you're competing and you have the same amount of obsession as some Jon Jones character, Fuck, that guy's just too goddamn strong, too big.
You see guys get in there with John, and then when John locks up with him and then sends him flying through the air, they realize, oh, there's another level to this thing.
When he almost took off Teixeira's arm, that must have been fucking terrifying.
He's been in there with Chuck Liddell and every great fighter at 205 pounds over the last 10 years of not losing and training every day, and this guy does this to him?
Tears his shoulder apart in the first round with some new move that he had been thinking about doing.
John had just been thinking about it.
John is so brilliant in his ability to improvise in the heat of battle.
Like, he saw that Glover was loading up, so he decided to stand, like, right on top of him, and then he would anticipate, he would feel him loading up, and then avoid those shots and counter with elbows in tight.
And he was fucking Glover up in the place where Glover thought that he was going to dominate.
And he went in there, and the things that he never even planned to use, but a lifetime of Greco-Roman playing in there, I thought, oh, shit, I win this position.
One of the most important aspects of that fight is that he faced a guy, first of all, with the same sort of physical advantages that he has, a guy with a really long reach, a guy who was an excellent striker, a better, smoother, more efficient striker than he is.
I love hearing stories from guys that were around in the early days when they're like, yeah, we drove nine hours because they said we were going to have an MMA fight and we got there and they said, well, your opponent's not here.
You got this guy.
And it's like, I weigh 140. He's 175. They're like, close enough.
And there's people out there that are also still teaching, you know, what we do works on the streets.
The streets are very different.
What you do is a sport.
That nonsense drives me fucking bananas.
I was on the Opie and Anthony show and they used to have this guy that did their security.
He was this fucking fake karate guy.
And he would always talk about street techniques.
What we're doing is all about street defense.
And I go, let me tell you something, dude.
What works on train killers is the best shit.
All this nonsense about street techniques, like you're going to do that and do this and that's going to work better and you're going to fucking death touch somebody in their solar plexus and go after their pressure points.
Bullshit.
It's all nonsense, you know?
And if you try to bite somebody, let me tell you something.
If a guy gets on top of you and mounts you and you just bit him, he's gonna fucking kill you.
But you should always prepare for a trained fighter.
And that's the difference between, like, the street systems versus real MMA. Like, real MMA is the stuff that works.
It's the best application the human body has when it comes to using your body in a combat sports scenario.
It's the best.
That's the reason why you don't see Kung Fu in MMA. I mean...
Roy Nelson jokingly calls himself a kung fu fighter, and I know he has actually done some kung fu training, but the reality is Roy's throwing a fucking heavy overhand right, and he's got a black belt in jiu-jitsu to back it up.
And if, I mean, hey, if for whatever reason you like wearing a kung fu outfit and doing all this stuff, it makes you feel good, fuck it, go train it, for sure.
But don't try to tell professional athletes and people who analyze it all day every day that this thing is going to be the thing.
Because why the fuck isn't George St. Pierre using it?
George used to – he told me one time that he just – he said it.
I'm sure it happens to you a lot too.
That people will come up to him and say, hey, George, you do really good, man.
Hey, we should train together.
I have Kung Fu Studio down the street.
And they would literally, I could teach you some shit.
And really, literally believe that when they're talking to the greatest fighter in the world at the time, that they got some secret shit back on St. Denis Street in Quebec, in Montreal, that he could teach George St. Pierre.
Yeah, well, that was a weird moment because John Donaher, who's a friend of mine, was talking, and we were out to eat after a fight, me, him, and Eddie, and he said, do you guys know any good Taekwondo guys?
George wants to work on the mechanics of his spinning back kick.
And I said, this is going to sound so stupid, but I have to say it, I have a great spinning back kick.
My spinning back kick, I really know how to do it better than anybody.
And you say that, and people go, get the fuck out of here.
That's true, but so many people have ridiculous egos.
And I'm not going to name any names, but I know a lot of guys that are involved in the same sort of thing that I'm involved in.
They'll tell you that they're great.
And then you train with him, you're like, oh fucking Christ, I'm wasting my time.
So I had this moment where I was like, tell George if he wants to train.
And then Eddie told him like, dude, seriously, you got to see this guy kick.
And I'm like, this sounds so stupid.
Like no one's going to believe me.
And so then George showed up.
So I was hoping, you know, when George showed up, like that he wasn't like, okay, come on, show me.
You know, this is stupid.
Why am I wasting my time?
Well, once I kicked the bag once.
And then he went, oh, shit.
Like, this is real.
And then you could see, like, he got this, like, I'm actually going to get something out of this.
As opposed to, like, I'm just being nice to Joe because we're friends and I'm going to go humor him and, you know, he's going to throw some pussy-ass kicks.
The round kick wasn't as in play because of the position of how far his shoulder or hip was.
So then we freeze it and say, that's what he knows.
He knows from a lifetime that both of those are in play.
Now let's watch.
He throws the side kick and goes, freeze.
Now, Chris in his mind would know if this still happens, the next option, since he's just given me a sidekick, his point is hoping to drop my hands and hook kick me in the head.
When he saw that happen, there was a little flare of the hip and his brain goes, oh yeah, that's coming.
And then he timed it on the hook kick.
But it was his ability to kind of see the future.
You know what I mean?
Exactly.
And we predict the future all the time.
When you go to open a door handle, the reason if it was really hot or if it was spongy that you'd be surprised is because your brain was predicting what a door handle would feel like.
Yeah, and it's definitely what guys are playing with.
Do you know Adam Zuchek?
He trains Sarah Kaufman, but he's also kind of a secret weapon for Greg Jackson.
He's up in Victoria, BC, and he sends guys up there to do certain things.
He's very talented.
And we were talking about after Sarah's fight, Kaufman's fight, her last one in Quebec City, she was throwing a lot of off-tempo things which he taught her because she's a dancer, right?
So he can work footwork off time and different rhythms with her.
But he was also talking about pattern recognition and how him and Greg Jackson, that's one of the things they're on heavy, is training you to expect certain patterns, chunking those patterns that your brain anticipates and then giving you a surprise.
And that's on the front end of some of their thinking right now.
And what's so cool is when you have that many great minds doing it, now you've got one of these guys thinking that, but you've got Duane over here fucking thinking this.