Joe Schilling reveals how quitting smoking for three months left him drained in an amateur fight, despite his elite cardio—proving nicotine’s paradoxical role in endurance. They critique UFC’s octagon size and Reebok’s union-hostile sponsorship deal, slashing fighters’ earnings (e.g., Brennan Schaub’s six-figure losses), while debating bare-knuckle MMA and flawed officiating, like missed illegal sweeps or uncounted knockdowns. Schilling’s emotional journey—grieving his father’s cancer death and cousin’s fatality—clashed with a brutal knockout win over Melvin Manoff, underscoring how combat sports demand mental resilience as much as physical skill. His June 26 Bellator fight looms as a test of recovery from past mistakes, like losing to Simon Marcus due to poor rest. [Automatically generated summary]
I've been smoking since before I started doing kickboxing, so it was something that was just, you know, my cardio always sucks at the beginning of the camp and by the end of the camp I'm outrunning everybody else.
I think it also has a lot to do with hiding how tired you are.
You know what I mean?
And like that example, for example, that fight with Simon Marcus you were talking about.
I usually, the way I hide it, and all the secrets can be out there, but I'll do like a little walk-off.
And if you notice, the ref broke us.
John McCarthy broke us.
And I turned my back and I was walking away.
And I was like...
Catching my breath, and then he stalks me, and as he's coming, I'm waiting for that one big shot.
So it's like you're exhausted, you pace yourself for a second to give that next explosion.
It's just experience.
I've always been tired in every fight I've ever had, so I'm at that level.
But my last fight with Bellator, I was just a different level of exhausted from the wrestling and the jiu-jitsu that I haven't been doing for 15 years of my life.
I'm at a point now in my career where it's like, I've worked my ass off for so long that like kickboxing comes natural to me, you know, and with MMA It's like if I want to you know, yeah, I have half of the game down but if I want to really take this to the next level I have to Improve on the ground and the wrestling and that's gonna take me improving my cardio.
Up until it got to the ground, it just seemed like you were having a real hard time getting up.
There's such a giant issue when it comes to the difference between the kind of endurance that you have with grappling and your ability to calculate all the different moves.
It takes so long to get grappling information in your body and in your head.
There's just so much stuff that's going on.
The guys are holding you down.
There's a few guys that get the takedown defense game down, like Krokop did in Pride, and then start to become really successful.
But once they actually get taken down and actually get held down on the ground, it just saps you of your energy, man.
And it takes away...
I was watching, I was like, I wonder how frustrating this is for him, because you're used to fighting your style of fight.
Your style of fight is kickboxing.
And then all of a sudden, you got this guy on top of you, and you can't get up, and he's holding you down, and nothing really was happening on the ground.
There wasn't a lot of ground and pound, it wasn't real significant submission attempts, but it's just keeping you from doing the shit you want to do.
I just, I wonder how, I mean, I know that being a professional fighter takes a tremendous amount of dedication and time.
And I wonder, like, when I see you in Glory and I see you also in Bellator, I'm like, man, does this guy have the amount of time that it takes to compete at the level that you compete at in kickboxing in both?
I mean, do you have the time to put in to jiu-jitsu and to wrestling defense and stuff like that?
At the beginning of the year, I was really excited about it.
Oh, it's gonna be a busy year, you know, but it's really hard to have a fight and then immediately go right into another training camp for a different style or for, you know, for another sport.
And it's, you know, it's like my next fight's June 26th and it's like I just fought and I'm jumping right back into camp.
I'm just gonna make the jump and just fully make the jump but to do both me You're still active at a world-class level in kickboxing You're fighting world champions in kickboxing.
I'm the real number one contender right now for glory, but I couldn't take that shit That's a statement The last person they you know, I knocked out Simon I was ranked number one He beat two guys that weren't even in the top three and somehow got ranked number one to fight Arctum 11 I'm just saying Well, those were good fights, though.
unidentified
They were good fights, but that's what I'm saying, Joe.
Now, to make the decision, though, to say if you have a camp and you're going to go and do this Bellator fight in June, and then if they offer you a kickboxing fight, like, say, in August...
Is that a difficult decision?
Like, do you say, like, hey, you know, I would rather be kickboxing, like, four or five months, really get sharp and in the groove, or is it okay to bounce back and forth?
Do you do enough kickboxing during your MMA training?
I think I can go back and forth with kickboxing at that level.
You know, it's just cut out.
The problem is when I do the kickboxing fight and then they offer me a Bellator fight right away because when I... If I fought Bellatoria in June and then I was going to fight kickboxing in August, July, the end of June, July, and August, I wouldn't be doing any wrestling or, you know, I just don't have time.
I'd be focusing on kickboxing, sparring, all that stuff.
So that was kind of the issue, you know, it was going back and forth.
Would it make any difference at all if it was a Muay Thai fight instead of kickboxing, like if you're doing Muay Thai all the time and then went right into MMA where you got a little bit more grappling?
I'm still clinching with kickboxing, just not for as long a period of time.
You know, every referee is different.
Even with Glory, it's like they say no clinching, but then you watch my fight with Simon, they were still way longer than five seconds of clinching in there.
That's one of the reasons why it was so particularly impressive, that first four-round fight, because Simon Marcus is a Muay Thai guy, and he's known, that's one of his specialties, is his clinch.
And he's just very physically strong, and he fights a draining kind of fight.
Just really gets a hold of guys, manipulates you around, throws a lot of knees and elbows in the clinch.
And fucking go four rounds with that guy and then fight two more times afterwards.
And then against Wayne Barrett and fucking Artem Levin.
I don't think nicotine is really as bad as the chemicals that are in it and the burning of the plant matter.
I think there's something about the burning of the actual leaves themselves and then the 500 plus chemicals that the cigarette companies put into cigarettes to enhance the flavor and to enhance the addictive properties of it.
Like, something will happen, they'll put some shit in the cigarettes, and you're like, you know what, I don't think I'm real excited about gay marriage.
Like, all of a sudden, people have these weird Republican right-wing views.
I think that it's real possible, because if you see those natural cigarettes, like those American, what are those, American spirits?
Because I think that tobacco itself is, I don't think it's good for you, but I don't think it's nearly as bad for you as the tobacco with all the jazz in it.
Did you ever see that movie, The Insider, Russell Crowe?
It's about, you know, you don't really know how much, whenever they do a movie on real life situations, you don't know how much fuckery is involved and manipulate things.
But the movie is about a guy who is a scientist working for cigarette companies that his whole deal is figuring out how to make them more addictive.
And then he testifies against cigarette companies.
And they, you know, they're fucking stalking his home, scaring the shit out of them and Apparently, supposedly, you've got to say that, based on a real story.
How clean is your diet when you, I mean, obviously you have the issue with the cigarettes, but other than the issue with the cigarettes, how clean is your diet when you're training?
Yeah, it would, especially as the fight got closer and I would really start cutting back on carbs.
I would try to keep carbs Under 100 a day and then as I got closer it would be like under 50 and like last week it'd be like almost no carbs and then I'd find myself like pulling out in front of in traffic like your brain works off of of carbs and water so Yeah, it wasn't good when I went up to 180 187 for glory It was a lot easier to make weight.
There's got to be a significant point of what you would call diminishing returns, where you can only cut so much weight where it's not going to benefit.
It's not like when you see guys like Frankie Edgar that fought so well at 155, and he weighed 155, and then you see other dudes that are coming down from, you know, way, way above that.
Oftentimes, like in the high 180s, like, Gleason Tebow, you ever see that guy in real life?
I mean, I've had some really, really bad cuts in the past.
Obviously, the performance wasn't good, but there was a couple of ones where it was like walking to the way in.
At Commerce Casino, there's like a long fucking stairway.
And like every step I would have to stop and like...
And then take another step.
It took me like 15 minutes to get up the stairs.
And it was like the doctor like check, you know, does like the check or whatever beforehand.
He's like, I'm not letting you cut another ounce if you don't make it.
Usually they give you like two hours to make two more pounds or whatever.
He's like, you're not cutting any more weight.
And I had to like tell him like, I'm okay.
I have a nurse standing by.
I'm going to get an IV. Like, I'm going to be all right.
But it was really, really bad.
And then, you know, you see some of these guys, uh, which I think was the ultimate fighter where the guy was like in the back cramping and screaming and crying.
They wouldn't let him fight.
But yeah, I don't know why people go that far for it.
It's all the wrestling, the influence of wrestling, because that's always been a part of the wrestling culture.
Like, if you try to wrestle at your natural weight, you're a pussy.
Like, what, you can't cut weight?
You can't be uncomfortable?
Like, wrestlers only seem to be happy when they're miserable.
Like, they're happy when they're chewing ice and running upstairs.
They're like Marines in a certain way.
Have you ever talked to Marines?
They'll brag about how much more miserable their time was than other people's time.
They take pride in the fact that they can suffer and endure it.
It's not easy to fucking endure misery.
I guess there's a badge of courage attached to that.
When it comes to wrestling, there's a culture of being miserable, a culture of overtraining.
No one over-trains wrestlers.
It's a significant issue because, yeah, you get mental toughness out of it.
There's no one mentally tougher than wrestlers.
When it comes to MMA, when those guys enter into MMA, they have this fucking steel determination, like the elite high-level wrestlers.
You get it from elite high-level kickboxers as well, but...
It seems like there's something about the grind of amateur wrestling, going through high school, going through college, going through Olympic trials and whatever you do.
The level of intensity in the wrestling room and the dealing, the constantly dealing with being in a bad state physically, like constantly overtrained.
They just develop this mindset of driving through that.
And for people who don't know, the real issue with weight cutting when it comes to combat sports as opposed to wrestling is head trauma.
Because your brain takes a while, especially when you're just ingesting fluids orally, meaning just drinking water or Pedialyte or whatever, it takes a while to get up to your brain.
But in wrestling, that's okay because no one's kicking you in the head.
When you're in MMA or kickboxing, you've got a real issue because it takes a while for it, which is why everybody likes to go with IV bags.
Fuck.
It's almost like MMA is too much.
There's like too much going on.
Between all the different shit you have to do, and then also you have five minute rounds as opposed to three minute rounds of kickboxing.
The wrestling, the kickboxing, the submissions, like all the different variables.
It's almost like you fucking can't keep up with it.
Yeah, like you see a guy like Chris Weidman who fights at 185, he does not weigh 185 right now.
If you weighed Chris Weidman right now, he's got to be well over 200 pounds.
He's a big boy.
And he has a hard cut to get down to 185, and he's the UFC middleweight champion, you know?
And he fights a very, very heavy, physical style, very aggressive, gets on top of dudes, vicious ground and pound, knows how to use his weight, and if you're not prepared to that weight, like, after Lyoto fought him, one of the first things Lyoto said was, I gotta get stronger.
I always wonder how much of a training camp, and this is particularly important, I guess, in MMA, how much of a training camp should be dedicated to strength and conditioning?
You know, for me, for Last Man Standing, I had like a six months notice or something for the fight.
And my fight before that was with Wayne Barrett in New York.
And I just felt physically too small when I fought him.
I mean, that was the first time in my career where the guy that I weighed in against and the guy I got in the ring with were like two different people.
And it really bothered me mentally.
And like there were shots that he would hit me with That didn't even land, but he hit me in the forearm and he'd be pushing me across the ring and I really felt too small.
I hit the weights and I was doing the high calorie things or whatever and I did the weights for a long, long period of time.
And then my coach stopped me about six weeks out from the fight and was like, you know, more weights.
Now you have to get your...
Because I was stiff and, you know, if you lift weights...
Yeah, it's about getting that punch to snap at the end and not trying to push through.
I had a really good result with that camp and I felt like I was hitting harder.
Obviously it knocked out Simon, so it was good.
But, like, now when I'm fighting so actively, it's like I don't really have time to hit the weights and, like, bulk up or, like, get that tight again, you know?
So that's been an issue for me when you're fighting so consistently.
I'm sure that, you know, I'd be interested to see what Donald Cerrone does when he's fighting so often, you know, if he has time.
Because for me, it was like, okay, get right back into camp.
You're right back where you are, like, the last, you know, five weeks.
You're running all the time.
You're trying to get your speed and your agility, but there's not a whole lot of strength training going on.
I mean, I had seen it when he was walking out yelling yes or whatever, but I hadn't seen where he pulled out the cross and was fighting demons on the way to the ring.
If I was there live, I most certainly would have started laughing.
But what I was going to say is that Diego, what he does before camps, is he would do only strength and conditioning.
No fitness, no striking training, no grappling training, no nothing.
Everything he would do leading up to his camp would be like weightlifting, running, like all physical, physical shit.
Just get his body to the peak of condition.
Then he would start to taper off of that and then go into his skill set training.
So they do it like when he would actually do a six weeks for camp his six would be all wrestling all striking all jujitsu Right, that's ideally what I would do except now it's like I only have six weeks between if I you know You know what I mean?
He brought in Steve Maxwell for his BJ Penn fight.
And, you know, it was interesting because Steve said it would almost be better if I didn't train him because Steve was like, because if I didn't train him, he wouldn't be in as good a shape and it would have been like a quicker fight.
He was outclassed in that fight.
BJ was just lighting him up.
And because he was in such good shape, he was able to take a tremendous amount of punishment.
I mean, BJ dropped him just a couple minutes or so into the first round and then just battered him for the rest of the fight until he eventually cut him with that head kick and stopped him.
But in the kickboxing tournament, I fought three times in one night.
And I won the first fight by knockout.
I beat the shit out of the second guy.
And then I had a long wait.
Like an hour plus for the third fight.
And I was exhausted.
I wasn't in the best of shape.
You know, wasn't that smart back then.
Wasn't eating very good.
And I was really tired after the first round of this fight, and this guy hit me with a punch that really wasn't that big of a punch.
Like, I remember seeing it on video.
He hit me with a left hook, and my legs just went, take care.
We'll see you later.
They just stopped working.
I'm like any other time I'd be able to take that punch like it doesn't make any sense It wasn't like sometimes you see a punch and you see your head snap back and you go goddamn Like you got cracked, but this wasn't that it was just my body just was exhausted and if I was in better shape I know I would have been able to take that better and you see guys that are in really good shape and It's very rare that they can't recover from a couple hard shots whereas it seems like Everything is based on your vitality.
And if your body is in really good condition, you can bounce back from things quicker.
Like Frankie Edgar is another perfect example.
I think a lot of it you have to chalk off to heart and will and determination.
You know, like some guys like Frankie just has this fucking incredible will.
Like you can't, like he's like a dude who's a little dude who people have been fucking with him.
Guys in the gym that have a certain amount of times you can punch that card.
Until it's like, it's over.
It just doesn't work anymore.
Chuck described it to me once.
And he said the way it was described to him is that the doctor...
Was telling him that at a certain point in time your brain recognizes that you're too tough for your own good So your brain knows when it gets tagged.
Oh This fucking dude is just gonna start absorbing punches again, and we're gonna have to deal with all this damage Let's just shut off right that makes sense.
You gotta wonder, like, what is that, when that time is?
You know, like, when, when do you, uh, when do you, when do you know?
Because most fighters have think, like, you know what, if I just have one more camp, and maybe I'll do eight weeks instead of six weeks, and maybe I'll clean my diet up, and maybe I'll bring in a guy...
To work with me maybe on my defense a little bit more, and maybe my strength and conditioning could be better than improve everything.
Regular occurrence in MMA. Forrest Griffin, when he fought Anderson, he got knocked out apparently twice.
You've seen the Marvin Eastman-Travis Luter fight?
Yeah, that was when Marvin got hit with this very strange punch It was like it was a decent punch But it was like at the very end of the punch and he just went out like he got shot All right, and I remember thinking wow, that's kind of crazy Then we found that afterwards he got knocked out twice in camp like really recently Tito had knocked him out with a knee And then someone had knocked him out.
He got knocked out with a takedown attempt or something like that.
It was like two in a row.
So one didn't really recover from that, went back in, got another one.
I remember BJ Penn in one of the countdown shows, he goes, when you're gonna sleep in a big plastic tent, you know someone's gonna get their ass kicked.
Yeah, it's kind of fucked up, right?
Like sleeping in a big plastic tent just to...
But that's the only way to mimic it.
They say that's actually the best way.
That's actually even better than training at altitude.
Because training at altitude kind of limits your workload.
It was designed by the guy that invented the MRI machine.
And it's actually, the purpose behind it was to cure diabetes or treat diabetes with circulation problems or something.
But they're in the process of getting it...
Licensed or whatever to where they could, was it approved by the FDA? Diabetes, huh?
Yeah.
Something about, they get people that have like, you know how people have diabetes, their feet turn purple because their fucking blood flow is all fucked up.
They put people on this machine and they'll like, After a couple treatments, their feet get regular colored again.
But the way it works is it takes you to way higher altitude.
My home goes to like 16,000 feet.
This will go all the way to like 33,000 feet or some shit.
So in a 20-minute session, it goes, based on what program it is, maybe Everest to back down to zero like 100 times in 20 minutes.
While you're in there, it's constantly dropping.
The pressure's filling up and dropping because the guy found that Your body goes through more of a metabolic change during the change of altitude as opposed to like what we've known is you go and you stay there for eight hours or however long and then you come back down to train.
So this is constantly going up and down, up and down, up and down and your body's like what the fuck, what Fuck, and that's supposed to create more red blood cells or circulation.
I use it for, like, if I have a joke that I'm working on that's not working well, I'll go in there and I'll sort it out.
I'm like, fuck, there's gotta be an angle for this joke.
I could sit down and look at a keyboard and maybe think about it, but I feel like my mind has more resources when I'm in the tank.
And the reason being is that the idea of the sensory deprivation tank was created by this guy named John Lilly.
John Lilly was this really nutty dude.
He was a psychedelic pioneer We're good to go.
From the influence of the body he was thinking that there's like my neck hurts like I got a fart you know like all these different things that are going on in your body that are Distracting the mind how could I get away from that and he came up with a bunch of different solutions One of them was you've seen that movie altered states You ever seen that movie?
It's really stupid, man.
It was great in the 80s when I saw it.
When I was a kid, I was like, this movie's great.
And it's one of the movies you watch again when you're 40. You go, what the fuck?
He's wearing a Bruce Lee outfit from the Game of Death, and he's got nunchucks just like Bruce Lee's, and he's doing it in sync to Bruce Lee behind him.
And by the time that kid's 12, there will be 500 people in his life that tell him to be realistic and shoot down every imaginative thing that he has in his fucking head.
I remember when that Tap Out commercial came out a couple years ago and they had those two kids, the two little boys when they were doing all that shit.
So the sensory deprivation thing, to get back to that, the way he first did it was like a scuba helmet.
He came up with a way to hook up a scuba helmet with these underarm harnesses so that you're suspended by the air and the scuba helmet and it kind of floats your body.
And then eventually you forget about the scuba helmet.
And then somewhere along the lines he realized that if you just had water that was filled with salt, That you would just float in it, sort of like the Dead Sea.
You ever see those videos of the people that go to the Dead Sea?
The salt is, as long as you continue to cycle the water, the water, my pump goes on every morning.
It's on a timer.
So I get 5 o'clock in the morning.
Sometimes I'm up real early and I'll hear...
Coming down from the basement and that's the pump kicking on automatically.
And the water cycles...
Through this series of filters is huge spa filters with like the way that guy crash down at the float lab in Venice is a Mad genius this guy has done like when he first came around I found out about him Through a guy who used to repair tanks for this company called Samadhi Samadhi is the first company that I bought a tank from and they were actually in business with Lily Lily's first tank one of his first tanks was a Samadhi There's
no sound.
No heat, no sound.
It keeps the heat stable and they're much taller.
His tanks are seven feet tall and six feet wide and nine feet long.
I mean, he's a master.
The guy just figured it out.
And so this pump kicks on and it goes through all the water, cycles all the water so the water doesn't crystallize.
Because if you let it sit, the salt will eventually crystallize.
And then I've done that before.
Accidentally, the power kicked off and I didn't know about it.
A circuit blew and I had these rocks, these giant like crystals in the water just because the salt it sort of congealed because there was no heat in it anymore to keep it warm.
But as long as the water keeps cycling and as long as the water stays at a high temperature, which is around, you want to keep it, mine's at 94 degrees, which is about the same as the surface of your skin.
So, then, when you lie in it, you don't feel the water, really, because the water's the same temperature as your skin.
That's the goal.
If it's too hot, you'll start to sweat.
If it's too cold, you'll feel cold.
But if you get it just in that Goldilocks zone, then once you relax, you don't feel the water.
And half of your body, like, say, like, if you cut a person in half from the top of their head, like, sideways, like, everything above your nipples is like, that's what it looks like right there.
Perfect example.
So, in this image that we're looking at right here, this guy's floating in the water, and it's just because of the salt.
Mine's a little bit bigger than this tank, so mine has a thousand pounds of salt in it.
It's all Epsom salts, too, which is really good for your body.
Like, when I'm real sore, I take Epsom salt baths.
Some people get a little claustrophobic, but you just gotta relax.
Nothing's gonna happen.
It's just like laying on the ground.
It's just the door.
The door doesn't have a latch.
You just push it.
It opens up easy.
I've done it so many times, I don't have the panic feeling anymore, but there's a weirdness to it, definitely.
You climb in there, and I squeegee it because there's always a little bit of condensation on the roof.
The inside ceiling rather of the tank.
So I squeegee that away.
Otherwise, it'll drip down your face while you're in there, which is annoying.
And then once I've done squeegeeing it, I shut the door.
I go, here we go.
I just lay back and float.
Yeah.
And you will definitely, once you do it for a while, you will definitely have trippy experiences in there.
You definitely have like some sort of strange psychedelic experiences that happen.
But also...
Real good for sorting out things.
Like, say if you're like, man, I gotta get my shit together.
Let me go in there and think about my life.
You'll go in there and you'll go, you know, I gotta stop doing this.
Or I gotta stop hanging around with this person.
Or I gotta do more of that.
Or I'm slacking off in this area.
Like, it's almost like a seminar on your life.
And if I have, like, jujitsu moves, it's great for jujitsu moves.
Like, I'll drill jujitsu moves in my mind.
And the way I'll do it is...
I'll lie in the tank, and I'll go over positions as if they're happening in real life.
Like, I'll start off slow, and like, you know, like if you were doing like flow drilling or something like that, like I'll start off, like I'll, like say, for instance, I'll do like a half guard sweep.
Like, I'll start off in half guard, I'll scoop my hips to the side, I'll fight for the underhook, I'll get the grip, I'll pull the guy in, I'll trip the leg up, I sweep, I get on top.
And then I'll do it as if it was a drill, like if you're performing a drill, but I'll do it all completely in my head.
And I'll go over the motions first slowly and then I'll do it fast and then I'll go over and then I'll do it like I'll I'll recreate like the violence of it like the explosion of it in my head I'll recreate the resistance and then once I get like one drill down then I'll have counters to the drill like I'll go into it But I'll lose the position and now I have to you know reestablish another position and when you do that like that kind of mental training and Really shows up in the gym.
Like it really recreates in the gym.
And I would imagine it would be the same with striking.
I would imagine it would be the same with tennis, with anything.
I think they've shown that recreation and visualization is as much of a factor in the development and growth as actual training is.
Every time I talk to him, it's like a new thing that he comes up with.
He's helped me so much in my life that I don't even know if it's even about fighting anymore.
He's done hypnosis on me.
He's gotten me to the point now where we call it trance, it's not even hypnosis, but he can start talking to me a certain way and I'm already in a different thing.
When I get off the phone with him, My mind's just going insane based off the conversations we had.
So that stuff you were just talking about right now is...
It's really interesting to me.
I've done that with my fights, you know, like, you know, watching a fight, you know, if, how do I explain it, even like blocking leg kicks, you know, when you can visualize it happening and your reaction to it, you know, in your head without actually seeing it, or without actually doing it, I think it plays it out to be so real.
Ah, it's a good example.
So, one thing we do is, I'll focus when I when I sign a fighter we get booked for a certain date about four or five weeks out All the time when I wake up in the morning when I'm sitting on the toilet anytime I'm alone I'll I'll think about 15 minutes after I've won the fight 15 minutes after I'm thinking As high-def as possible.
The first time I'm doing it, it's not very high-def.
By the end, it's so real.
I can smell the room.
I can feel the chair I'm sitting in.
I can see my coaches' faces, who else is in there, what they're saying to me, how I feel about myself.
The idea behind it is if If you focus on 15 minutes after you've won, and you do it over a period of time, it becomes so real in your head that it's like it already happened.
And if it's already happened, how could you possibly have anxiety about something that your mind thinks already happened, you know?
I don't know if you've experienced this I'm probably you probably have where you didn't get up for a fight because you thought that you're gonna kick this guy's ass pretty easy So you weren't nervous and then when you got in there you felt like off like you didn't you weren't Performing the way like you would be like say if you fought a guy like Artem Levin who you know top of the food chain You're you're gonna be on your toes, you know, you're gonna be ready Whereas you're going in there, you're like, I'm gonna kick this fucking guy's ass.
And you go in there, and it just seems like, damn, I'm not firing right.
It's not...
Is that possible?
The alleviation of anxiety is like a negative in some way?
I think that what you're talking about is something that Vinny's ultimately helped me with a lot.
Because my problem is...
One of my problems...
I have so many problems.
One big problem is I always do poorly in that situation.
When I'm the favorite, I have a hard time.
It's not that I don't train hard for it.
It's just something about I'm that guy that rises to the occasion.
The three fights in one night where it's three rematches and two guys beat you, and that's when I do really well.
No one expects you to win is when I really rise to the occasion.
When people start telling me that it's an easy fight or that I'm the favorite or whatever, I just really try and shut that out and try and convince myself that he's gonna kill me and he's a really bad guy.
I don't know if it's about not getting up for the fight or if it's...
If it's, you know, you just take the guy lightly or what it is, but I've always had issues with that in the past.
Point is, the guy was giving him, like, boxing instruction in the corner, and I'm like, he's dealing with a guy that's kicking him, throwing elbows and flying knees and spinning back kicks his way.
Like, what the f...
You know, like, this is...
You got the wrong guy here, man.
You need a fucking Matt Hume-type character that's telling you, like, MMA-specific shit to do.
So there's probably some technical issues with the way he approached the fight, but also it just didn't seem like, if you saw him against other fighters, like Jeremy Stevens, who's a fucking murderer, you know, he's a murderer, he's fighting another murderer, these two guys are dangerous as fuck, you know, he is sharp as shit, because it's just a deadly, dangerous fight.
Whereas Max Holloway...
You know, he had beaten some real good guys, but he was thought to be like a notch below Cub, and Cub just couldn't fucking put it together.
And, you know, you gotta say, well, it was definitely a case of Holloway rising to the occasion, fought better than he ever fought before.
You can't take nothing away from him.
But when you look at Cub, it just didn't look right.
It just couldn't...
And you've got to wonder how much of that is, him coming into that fight as a prohibited favorite.
Yeah, I really think, we discussed this, I really think that mental coach is going to be just as important as having a striking coach, just as important as having a grappling coach.
I mean, you're going to have to have a mental coach.
It's going to be, just like guys have strength and conditioning guys, you know, that they work with on a regular basis, you're going to have some sort of a mental coach that you work with on a regular basis.
Well, I would wonder if someone could do it where they have a microphone that pumps into a tank, where you lie in the sensory deprivation tank and it's mic'd up, which would be very easy to do.
And as you're lying in there, like, Crash has developed this system.
Where he actually has a screen that's in front of you as you lie down.
So as you're floating, the screen is floating above your head.
And it's so low in its light emissions that you can't see the edge.
You don't see the border of the screen.
You just see the images.
But because you're in an environment that has no light in it at all other than the screen, it's like these images are floating in the sky in front of your face.
And in doing so, he believes because you have no distractions, like no physical distractions, you're not feeling the weight, you're not feeling gravity, you're not feeling sensory input, you're not judging space around you, you're just getting the images, you'll learn things quicker.
Because your body will have no resources that it's demanding of the mind.
Which is a legit strategy in MMA, as long as they have stand-ups.
I don't agree with stand-ups.
I honestly think they should be removed from fighting, because I think that if you're going to have MMA, if you've got a guy that can hold you down for five minutes, that's what it is.
In five minutes from now, you're going to be able to get up, and every fight starts, every round starts standing.
I understand what you're saying, but I think that if a guy can take you down and hold you and control you, he's kicking your ass.
Even if he's not beating you up the way you would beat a guy up, if you had your druthers, you'd force guys to stand with you and you'd light them up.
You have a giant advantage over 99.9% of the planet in MMA when it comes to kickboxing.
Your ideal world is get these guys to just stand with you.
Hey, let's just make an agreement.
Fuck shooting.
No takedowns.
Let's just throw.
You know, you're gonna have a giant advantage.
And so other guys would say, let's just make an agreement.
No kickboxing.
Let's just see who's the better grappler.
Get the fuck out of here.
But for a guy like Ben Askren, that would be a really good agreement, right?
Because he could take down most guys he fights.
Ben Askren gets a hold of guys like Douglas Lima, a fucking killer kickboxer, dangerous motherfucker.
Ben Askren just ragdolls him, ragdolls him, tosses him to the ground, and can do that consistently.
So for a guy like that...
Why would a guy like that want to stand up?
He could grab ahold of you, and you can't stop him from taking you down.
If you watch some of Askren's fights, by the time it gets to the third and fourth round, his opponents are like, fuck!
This guy's gonna take me down again, and I can't do shit!
Well, that's a fight.
I mean, he is fighting, but he's fighting you his way.
He doesn't have the kind of snap to his punches or kicks that you do.
He doesn't have the kind of arsenal of attacks when it comes to striking that a guy like you does.
But when it comes to holding motherfuckers down and giving them noogies, punching them in the face, and they can't do shit about it, that's his world.
And I think for fighting to be realistic, you've got to have guys like that as well.
Like, a lot of people didn't like Matt Brown and Johnny Hendricks, the last fight.
I loved it.
I didn't love it because I wanted Matt Brown to lose.
I loved it from a technical standpoint because you've got a guy like Johnny Hendricks, who is a decorated All-American wrestler, and it just shows you.
This is what happens when you fight a high-level wrestler like Hendricks.
It's on point.
The motherfucker's gonna take you down whenever he wants to, and he's gonna be on top, and you're gonna be eating shit sandwiches.
And that's just the way it goes.
And that's a real fight.
If you want to fight in MMA, that's a real fight.
Now, if Hendrix and Matt Brown fought in a Muay Thai fight, it'd be a completely different fight.
If Hendrix couldn't shoot for the takedown whenever he was in trouble, and he got stuck, or especially, forget Muay Thai, glory rules, where you can only grapple for five seconds, or you can only clinch for five seconds, then you've got a completely different fight.
And then you've got a fight where Matt Brown's just throwing elbows and kicks and knees and punches, and just keeps coming at you.
He's not afraid to throw a flying knee, because he's not worried about getting taken down.
He's not worried about just blasting you with leg kicks, because you can't grab his legs.
You can't trip him and throw him down and get on top of him.
But I think that if you take the guy down and you just lay on top of him, that it's somebody's responsibility for the love of God and the fans to do something and stand him up.
Or like, you know, my last fight, you know, the referee's like, you guys got improved position or I'm going to stand you up.
If you want to judge damage, for sure you won that round.
And you won that fight if you want to judge damage.
But the problem is they don't just judge damage.
They also judge control.
He didn't do anything to you once he got you down.
I mean, he stayed active, but there was no moments where, like, you were in trouble.
The moment where you hit him and dropped him was the most significant moment of that fight by far, because the dude's consciousness was wobbled, his fucking legs gave out, he was on Queer Street, he was in deep shit, but he was able to clinch up with you and was able to turn into a grappling match and survive.
So when you look at it damage-wise, yeah, that was the closest to him losing consciousness, for sure.
I don't agree with the yellow cards as far as taking 10% of your purse.
I think that's bullshit.
But I do think that some stalling, like if guys are just running away and they're not doing something, you should be able to penalize them maybe a percentage of a point.
Like maybe instead of a full point deduction, maybe it's a percentage of a point and all that.
Because I think the scoring system, 10-point scoring system is retarded.
The only reason it exists is because it exists for boxing.
And it kind of works for boxing.
It's a good system for boxing.
But when you have MMA and you're dealing with takedowns, submission attempts, kicks, punches, elbows, knees, I mean...
Most people, if you don't know, if you've never watched Muay Thai, Muay Thai is judged very different than MMA and very different than boxing.
Like, the clinch in Muay Thai is very important.
Controlling the clinch is one of the most important things.
But you know what I'm saying, like someone who's maybe competed in Muay Thai, someone who's been around for a long time, someone understands Muay Thai.
What frustrates me about that situation is, like, I have to look at my record and deal with it.
I have to deal with the consequences pay-wise, sponsor-wise, whatever, you know, if I don't do my job.
Regardless of anybody else.
If I don't do my job, there's consequences.
And all of the athletic commissions on a regular basis, there's constantly mistakes and there's constantly people not doing their jobs correctly and there's no consequences for them.
There's never anything but the fighter that has to deal with it.
Well, one of the women who was a very controversial judge in that stopped judging because of that fight.
And there was one other fight that she judged as well where there was a lot of speculation about...
Whether or not there was corruption involved or just incompetence, which is just speculation.
No one knows.
But she had a series of really ridiculous scorecards on championship-level fights.
Where you're like, what the fuck?
First of all, especially in boxing.
Boxing has been around for fucking hundreds of years.
We're not talking about MMA, where there's just really not that many people that are really good practitioners and all the various martial arts that understand all the different positions.
When you watch in boxing, it's pretty goddamn clear-cut.
What drives me nuts is how many people have no clue about boxing and are all over the internet now complaining and saying their side of the story.
The fact is Mayweather is the best in the world of defense and not getting hit and hitting you and not getting hit.
And the reason this fight was so interesting to everybody is they thought that Manny Pacquiao was going to do something different than what had happened in 48 other Mayweather's fights.
And it didn't happen and everyone's pissed off at Mayweather about it.
It's like, that's the same shit he's done his whole career.
Because of the fact that we have the internet today, I think there should be a panel of experts that you just have that are floating online.
Like, say, like, you know, pick out a bunch of guys, like a guy from Bloody Elbow, a guy from SB Nation, a guy from Sure Dog.
Have, like, a bunch of guys who are real, legit fans, journalists, guys who have been doing it for a long time, and have that be, like, a fourth judge.
Like, say if you're in a situation where you got a close fight, have the three people calling at ringside, and then the one group of people that agree online.
Say maybe 80% of them agree that this guy won.
And that should count in the scoring system.
I think having three people is not enough people.
I think you should have a bunch of people that judge a fight.
Nobody ever wins, but the reason they don't win is the same reason why the police never get charged with murder when they kill people.
It's because they protect their own.
The head of the athletic commission writes you a letter and says, yes, you made valid points, but we need to support Our people, because they don't want to say that our guy screwed up.
One of my fights, I got swept what was questionably an illegal sweep, and I got slammed on my head, and the referee didn't see it, and let me stand up walking the wrong way, and then I got teed off on.
And they called it a knockout.
And I appealed to the athletic commission.
I had three different videos with footage of showing that it was an illegal sweep and that the referee wasn't paying attention.
It was like, no way, I'm not winning this one.
And Kaiser wrote us a letter saying, you know, although you made very good points, we need to support our athletic commission.
And then my next fight, I score a knockdown and a jab in the first round, and then the scorecards come out, and two of the judges didn't count the knockdown.
It just didn't count the eight...
The eight point must system.
What?
He won by one, or I lost, he won by one point.
It was like, where's the, I forget what the score was, but there was no way he could have scored that many points if they would count the knockdown.
Yeah, there's a lot of shady shit going on when it comes to judging.
Just the idea that, what drives me crazy is the idea that someone who is not a practitioner, doesn't understand what's happening, has never really been punched in the face probably their whole life, can judge a pro kickboxing bout.
Right.
That's bananas.
That doesn't make any sense.
Like, how'd that guy get that gig?
Especially jujitsu and MMA. Because if you don't understand what the fuck...
Like, say if a fight goes to the ground and the guy on the bottom is threatening with submissions and the referee, or the judge rather, doesn't score it for him because he doesn't understand how close the guy was to getting tapped.
What do you think about this Reebok sponsorship shit that's going down?
This is a big deal right now in MMA that Reebok is the official sponsor for the UFC. Fighters can't have independent sponsors when they walk into the cage now.
And financially, it seems to be a huge disaster for the fighters.
It's great for Bellator and the guys at Bellator because all of those sponsors that can no longer sponsor in the UFC. Got to go somewhere in June and July.
The culinary union, when he was talking about hotel workers, what he's talking about is the culinary, the UFC, this is the long and short of it, the UFC is owned by Zufa.
Zufa also owns, the people that own Zufa also own station casinos.
They own 20 plus casinos in Vegas and they're non-union.
The employees voted for them to be non-union.
The union wanted to turn union because if it was union, they'd make somewhere around $15 million a year just from the station casinos.
So they've had this campaign for years to try to get the UFC to acquiesce and become union casino, station casino, union casino.
So they have this smear campaign against the UFC. And so that's what he's saying.
When he's saying hotel workers, that's what he means.
He doesn't mean like the UFC shows up and starts beating up hotel workers.
So John Fitch posted about this thing, MMAFA, Mixed Martial Arts Fighters Association.
MMAFA is on Twitter.
There's, I guess, a guy named Rob Macy, M-A-Y-S-E-Y. He must be in charge of it.
And I don't think it's a bad idea to have some sort of an organization that looks out for...
For fighters and I also think that it's it's super important to have something like Bellator like that is owned by Viacom that starts to come up in the public's consciousness and become bigger and bigger and Have more competition.
Yeah, I think competition is it's the best The only way you get a fight like Manny Pacquiao versus Floyd Mayweather is you have two bad motherfuckers who are on rival promotions, they get together, and Showtime and HBO both got together and said, listen, let's make some money.
And nothing like that exists in MMA. And if Bellator had a champion, If you become champion at Bellator at 185 pounds and it builds up where you're knocking dudes dead and then whoever is in the UFC at the same time, Weidman or Vitor or Jacare or whoever the fuck it is, if it builds up In the public's consciousness, like, this fight has to happen.
I mean, not in a good way, but they made a lot of money doing that.
You know what the whole Pride UFC thing happened?
Do you know the story behind it?
The UFC purchased Pride for $65 million.
When they got it, they realized that all their contracts were invalid.
They were all illegal.
All they had was a library.
They essentially had a library of DVDs and tapes, which, good luck making $65 million off of that.
And so then they tried to sell it or tried to sue them, and that didn't really...
Work I mean good luck trying to sue someone in Japan, right?
You know you gotta keep flying over to Japan every couple weeks for court dates and yeah, and on top of that just good extension Yeah, while they were While they bought pride they were gonna keep the pride office open and have like, you know They were gonna start running pride events in Japan and they realize how much How hard it is to do.
It's not easy.
It's not like you would do an event in New Mexico.
It's a totally different country.
They have completely different laws, completely different customs.
And the people that were working for them, while they had an office running, the people who were working for them started putting together Dream.
So then they put together their own MMA organization and started putting on their own fights.
M1 Global, who are the people that promote Fedor, they wanted to have co-promotion rights with the UFC. But the problem is, there's no promotion there.
It's just the management team of Fedor.
They wouldn't really be promoting anything.
They would just be glomming on.
So the UFC offered them a big percentage of the pay-per-view buys, a large chunk of money you would get when Fedor fights.
Yeah, you're not talking about like Showtime and HBO or like Bob Arum and, you know, and Golden Boy Productions, two established companies.
You're talking about one company that fucking no one knows and one company that's the NFL of MMA. So it didn't make any sense.
They offered him a fuckload of money and then Dana always said, listen, you guys gotta realize that this guy can lose and if he loses, this ain't worth shit.
Like, as soon as he loses, this is not worth anything.
And then he goes to Strikeforce, and then Verdum triangles him, wraps him up, taps him out, and like, that's it.
Everything just got weird.
And then after that, Bigfoot beats the fuck out of him.
And then after that, Henderson KOs him.
That's it.
There goes your big money.
It all went away.
And there goes the dreams, man.
The fucking fights that could have been with that guy in the UFC would have been amazing.
Apparently, the way they do business is, a lot of them will say, we will get together and have a meeting, and we are interested in selling pride.
And then, you know, then they get together, and everyone gets really excited, and there's all this publicity, and they go, oh, we changed our mind, but we have a big event next week.
And then they put on this big event, and now they have all this publicity because the UFC is going to buy pride, and then they have the...
Put on this fucking gigantic show.
It's very clever.
They just have a different way of approaching things.
And look, when you look at that, like, say, you know, they definitely did some fuckery, but they put K-1 on the map and therefore kickboxing on the map on a grand scale.
When you look at those K-1 Grand Prix's and they're in the Tokyo Dome in front of, like, God knows how many thousands of people.
Well, I just hope that Glory, and there's a big event that's going on this Friday night.
They're doing regular events on Spike.
I just hope that it can achieve the same sort of level in America that the UFC has, or that Pride and K1 had in Japan.
And I just think if you look at the quality of the the fights that they're putting on it's right up there.
It's amazing I think they're the best quality as far as the the the level of the strikers the best quality we've ever had guys like you and Nicky Holskin and and Mark Debonk there's like so many guys that are like a super high level in in in glory right now.
Yeah, but I heard Kirkland I've realized that I watched the you know the countdown show that they were doing about it whatever they call it 24 7 and Kirkland didn't train with Ann Wolfe for this fight No, which is like if you ever thought like a guy definitely should be training with a woman trainer Like in any in any other sports that ever happened a combat sport you'd be like what but if you look at like the shit that Ann Wolfe would make him do and She would get in a truck and she had a heavy bag attached to an arm on the front
of the truck.
And then the truck would move forward at like a certain amount of miles per hour.
And he was forced to back up and punch the bag as he's backing up doing road work.
It's like this Nick Curzon guy who trained Rafael Dos Anjos.
It's one of the reasons why I can't wait to talk to him.
It's because when you put those guys through hell like that, the results are undeniable.
But it's a matter of, like...
How much should that replace skill training?
Here's a perfect example.
Say if a guy like Rich Franklin had gone through a guy like Marinovich when he fought Anderson Silva, he still would not have been technically able to deal with Anderson's striking.
I mean, even outside of the clinch, you know, when you see Anderson drop his hands and chuck and jive in front of him, my Franklin throws punches and kicks at air, and Anderson's just ducking under the kicks and looking at him like, that was a terrifying place to be when you're standing there with a guy who he knows you can't hit him.
Did you ever see his fight, Anderson's fight, with Jorge Rivera and Cage Warriors?
It was weird being there for that and then watching Anderson after it was over, realizing how much pressure was on him when he just laid down and started weeping.
I always wonder, especially in MMA, why do they have gloves on?
We've been talking about this a lot lately, that if you wanted to lessen the effectiveness of punching techniques, one of the best ways is to just remove the gloves.
If you remove the gloves, you make guys fight barehanded, you get to see what's really effective and not effective when it comes to striking.
I mean, it doesn't matter to me if a guy has sponsors all over his shorts, but if he's got like a big sponsor tattooed on his back, it just seems like...
You know a lot of apparently not just internal bleeding, but when you have an unbelievably grueling physical event like ultra marathons like look at it up there That's his piss, bro What?
Well, I have a friend who did an ultramarathon, my friend Cameron Haynes, and he said the same thing, that when you do an ultramarathon, when you pee, it looks like Coca-Cola.
Started getting into endurance training because bow hunting, you would think, is not a physical event.
But what the physical event is, is getting to the animals up the mountains and packing out all the meat.
So, like, you're going...
Like, I had this guy, Remy Warren, on the podcast recently, and he was talking about how they had to pack out this...
Was it a moose or an elk they shot?
Moose or an elk?
One of those.
Big fucking animal, okay?
And he's packing out 100 plus pounds at a time, walking several miles back with 100 plus pounds at elevation, going up mountains, down mountains, and then going back.
So he, over the course of, you know, X amount of days, when they packed all the meat out, it took them 30 miles of walking with 100 pounds on your back up mountains.
And he's like, after it was over, he goes like, I was just done.
He goes, I got sick, I was exhausted, my body was just broken.
That's what you don't think about.
And these guys that do it, like Cameron, every year goes elk hunting in the mountains, shoots a big elk every year, has to carry it out.
And so he does all these crazy workouts, and one of them he does, he takes one of these, like a meat backpack, they call it a Tenzing backpack, and he puts 135 pound rock in the backpack and he'll fucking hike up hills with this fucking rock on his back.
Man, I didn't realize how spoiled we used to go to my buddy's uncle's property and then we'd hike a little bit and then we'd shoot the thing and drag it to where he could get to it and call him and he'd bring a fucking four-wheeler and drag his shit out and we'd hang it in the barn.
But when you go for elk in the mountains, the big elk, oftentimes, they're hard to get to.
They're smart.
They're not going to hang around near your house.
They're gonna go up in the mountains and they're trying to get some elk pussy and you gotta sneak up to them and then you gotta call them in and then once you shoot them then you gotta cut them up and drag them out of there.
It's like I give you see like pull up a little bit from up there above there That's him in the marathon, but there's a picture of his legs.
We go keep scrolling up up up up up not down up Okay, go down a little There's it there right there like you see like The fucking veins this dude's gotten his legs.
He's using some sort of massaging tool But that's him.
My brother and I were living together, and we were, you know...
Every dollar was spent on like cigarettes and beer.
Like 17, 18, 19, I think.
And I guess I was younger than that, 17, 18. And we would go hunting every year and there'd be like three or four of us and we'd all get a deer and we would chop up like every little piece.
And I remember having like deer kebabs like for a whole year.
We were living off the deer that was in the fridge.
When I eat that, something about mousse, I think something about those big, athletic, very lean animals, I feel energized when I eat the meat.
That doesn't seem to make sense.
I don't know if they really have an accurate account of all of the properties of various different kinds of meat.
I would like to see if there's a way to do some sort of double-blind, placebo-controlled effect Test on the difference between eating elk versus chicken, or the difference between eating, you know, alligator versus beef.
I really would like to know.
I really wonder what the fuck is happening.
Because I try to look at it really objectively.
Like I try not to like, maybe this is a placebo effect, maybe I'm fucking with myself.
I don't think it is, though.
When I eat moose, like more than any other animal I've ever eaten, there's something about when I eat it, I feel like, ah!
I just feel like fucking charged up, man.
I don't know what it is.
I have a buddy of mine who was lifting.
He's a big fitness fanatic, too, and his wife shot an elk, and he was eating nothing but elk for months.
He's like, dude, I'm making all these fucking gains, and I gotta think it's connected to this elk.
Yeah, well, I kinda decided, like, when I started getting into hunting, The first time I went hunting, I was like, I'm either going to become a vegetarian or I'm going to become a hunter.
Like, let's see how I feel after I shoot this animal.
It's like the idea of mammals, like mammals are the issue.
So I decided once I did it, like, I'm going to try to eat exclusively in my house only wild game.
I don't really totally do that because occasionally I'll go buy some bison or something like that from Whole Foods, but almost exclusively in my house I'm eating wild game.
When the chicks are born, they pack them in special boxes and they send them.
The boxes have like air holes in them and they send them one day air and it gets to you, you know, express mail, whatever it is, UPS Express, whatever the fuck they call it.
It gets there and, you know, they give you an alert like, hey, it's going to be coming within one day.
And then, you know, these animals haven't had any food at all for 24 hours when you get them.
And you get them and you give them some food.
And they're these little tiny things, man.
You have to incubate them.
We put them in this large box with a heat lamp above it.
So they're in this, like, little chicken container box.
I have an indoor courtyard in my house, and while I was on Fear Factor, when I was losing my fucking mind, when I was full-blown losing my mind, I was actually thinking about putting a roof over the indoor courtyard, putting thick glass walls all around it, and...
Putting like crocodile monitors in there and like feeding them rabbits like having my own Jurassic Park Like having like a little opening throw a rabbit through there and watch the crocodile monitors attack it and devour it I might come on that would be the dopest shit ever but the problem is those motherfuckers if they get really big you can't really stop them like if they want to attack you they'll get like seven eight nine feet long and Also, they're shit Is toxic.
Like, this shit is just disgusting.
So I was like, who's gonna clean their shit?
I'm gonna have some dude come over the house and clean this shit and like...
See, somebody was telling me that they had, I mean, it wasn't that kind of, I forget what it was called, but it was like, they get about, it was like a little outbreak monkey, whatever that's called.
She was telling me that her dad had bought one off of some people that was already full grown.
And loved the dad, but it hated, like females get really possessive over the males.
The type of crazy bitch that's going to have a chimp and have him walk around with diapers on is the same type of crazy bitch that's going to give a chimp Xanax.
They don't know if they're doing it just for food or if they're doing it because they want to bring the female to estrus quicker.
So it could be both, or it could be the side effect of them doing it for food is the female comes into estrus quicker.
But when I was bear hunting in Alberta, we got to watch a male try to get this female's cubs, and the female fought the male off, and we're like 30, 40 yards away from this.
Like, the guys, while we were in camp, one of the guys witnessed a male kill one of the cubs, and then he ate half of it, and then the female came over and chased him away eventually, and then she ate the rest of her own cub.
You know, with these bows, the power of these bows is insane.
A real, like a Hoyt compound bow...
80-pound pole.
You're talking like 288 feet per second of 468 green arrows flying with razor-sharp broadheads.
It blows right through the body.
Yeah, these are this is in fucking New Jersey, dude New Jersey has such a bear population problem.
New Jersey has the largest population of bears per capita in North America Big-ass fucking black bears and they're fighting over who controls the garbage like the territory where the garbage is These fucking bears are biting each other in the face in front of people's cars and they're big I mean these are several hundred pounds these fucking bears If you go earlier than that, you get to see them knock over the garbage cans.
Yeah, up there, back up a little bit.
They first start duking it out.
Like, one bear is controlling.
This is the guy's fucking front lawn, man!
His mailbox is getting knocked over by these bears.
If you leave food out for a deer, it'll eat that food and then go find food other places.
You leave food out for a bear, he knows that's where the food is.
He'll keep coming back.
So they have real problems when a bear like this, when a bear gets a hold of your garbage, like these bears, they're going to war right here because they've found a spot where the garbage is.
But it's weird because in California, silencers are illegal.
I don't know why.
Because if you can hunt, and you can hunt with a rifle, what a silencer does is it eliminates the sound.
I mean, it doesn't eliminate it totally, but that big boom, it's...
Do you want the boom like why doesn't make any sense?
It's like it's one of those weird things where people aren't they're not thinking Logically and objectively when they create laws like they think that someone's gonna like snipe people and you're not gonna hear it and someone's gonna die and get shot But the reality is if somebody shoots you like it Doesn't matter if there was a bang or not.
Yeah, it's the rifle still works You have to have a silencer on your muffler.
You have to have a silencer on lawn equipment, lawn mowers, anything.
You have to use some sort of a muffler, but not on rifles.
You know, I think part of it is, I think it's just numbers.
You're also dealing with 350 million people in this country.
Who knows how many thousands and thousands of police officers?
Who knows how many incidents they have to deal with?
Who knows how many people are incompetent?
And the ones that are incompetent, they get highlighted, videotaped, put out there.
And I also think that there's a culture that they have developed of doing shit in a fucked up way that people don't like, that they got away with for a long time.
And then cell phones and cameras and YouTube came along and now everybody's super aware of it.
And you just can't do it anymore.
You just can't do what they've been doing their whole career.
I don't even know what it was, but it was, like, the older woman walks out, and then the husband walks out right behind him, and he was like, oh, drop it, blah, blah, blah, and the guy's like, what?
And then, and they shot him, like, nine times.
And then they don't even go up to, like, help the guy, you know?
It's like, I find almost like these guys are just looking...
For that opportunity for when it's okay than more so like when it's necessary.
There's a lot of them that are just too stupid to be cops.
But I think most people are unqualified to be cops.
We've talked about this ad nauseum on this podcast.
I just think that we have to appreciate the fact that being a cop is a fucking ridiculously hard job.
You want to talk about PTSD for soldiers, but nobody talks about PTSD for cops.
Cops are dealing with horrible shit every fucking day of the week, and most of them are doing a great job, and the ones that do a great job you don't hear anything about.
It's the ones that fuck up and shoot like that guy in South Carolina that shot that guy as he was running away.
Yeah, my dad was just really upsetting and disgusting and I have kids and to have see all this shit right now It's just really scary and worry about your sons getting involved in something have some asshole cop do something.
Yeah, I mean Mike my uh my bit my wife my fiancee Yeah, it sounded really bad.
She's mixed, and we have two boys, and one of them looks white, and the other one looks mixed and black.
Yeah, this racial shit and ignorance is upsetting.
I'm hoping that all this anger, and all these protests, and all these videos that are coming out, and all these YouTube videos, and all these people that are rising up, that it's going to change things.
My brother and I. We didn't talk about this the last time and this was something that was controversial after our podcast because during the man-hoof training camp, your dad died.
My dad and I had like a falling out probably 10 or 12 years ago.
I hadn't spoken in 10 years and he came to one of my fights when I've won Glory 10 with Artham Levin and it was one of the biggest things that Vinny helped me work on.
I found out my dad had cancer and like My reaction when my brother and sister told me was like, fuck him.
When I started talking to Vinny, I mentioned that my dad had cancer and I didn't know how I felt about it because part of me cared at some point.
We did some, like, he called it timeline therapy, and we had a, this is not at all what I was planning on talking about, but we, he asked me all of these scenarios, like, think of a time in your life when you were really proud, and then think of a time when you were really upset, and, like, all these different emotions.
And he didn't know what it was about or what was going to happen.
He was just trying it on me.
And every one of the things that he talked about was my dad.
Like, every one of those times was a time with my dad.
And he did, like, the, you know, the whole session or whatever.
At the end of it, I just had no more resentment or anger toward my dad and it was really weird and It was like this chip on my shoulder like my whole life and at one point for a long time I used to think about my dad before I would fight when I was fighting professionally like I would use not necessarily like I'm fighting my dad but like to shove it up his ass like look what I'm gonna do you know and I realized that like that anger that I had and And that I used to tap into all the time was actually like holding me back.
It was almost like a handicap.
And yeah, when he helped me forgive my dad, I was able to go to Florida.
You know, he's got stage four cancer.
He's gonna die.
And I had a relationship with my dad for the last year before he died that I hadn't had in 10 years.
And we were giving him CBD oil for about, I don't know, I guess seven months, probably.
He wasn't going to chemo.
He just didn't want to do it.
He was a really stubborn guy.
He wouldn't do that.
They tested him.
They did a graph or whatever to see where the cancer had grown or whatever over a period of time.
They were shocked that 90% of the cancer had died.
90% of the cancer was dead and 10% of the cancer that was still alive was completely surrounded in dead cells so that they couldn't get even medicine to it and it couldn't grow.
He was going to have to live with it.
But it was completely surrounded by dead cancer cells.
And the only thing possibly that could have done it was the CBD oil because he was doing nothing else correctly.
He was like...
They had him on so many narcotics and pain pills and stuff that he was...
He's an asshole to be around.
It was really hard.
He was constantly on this drug thing.
And he wouldn't eat.
All he wanted to eat was chocolate cake and ice cream.
Within less than two months, her cancer had shrunk by 30%.
She had been doing chemo, and they were saying that her immune system was so devastated by the chemo that the chemo was probably going to kill her quicker than the cancer was, and they had recommended her stopping chemo.
And he was just in full desperation mode.
My friend's real super straight edge.
He's just, you know, Mr. Republican American, doesn't, you know, thinks Obama's a Muslim, that kind of guy.
And never would want to have anything to do with CBD oil or anything cannabis.
I got it to him and now his mom can sleep.
She's eating.
She sleeps at night.
She doesn't have pain anymore.
Her tumor's shrinking.
The doctors are astounded.
Those stories, you hear so many of them, it's almost like they seem like anecdotal fairy tales because until it happens to someone you actually know and care about, And then you start getting angry.
Like, this is what these goddamn assholes that are making laws in this country and fighting against us, the lobbyists and the people that are working for the pharmaceutical companies that are actively trying to suppress this information.
You are keeping one of the best ways to heal these people.
And they won't even tell you about it, which is just atrocious.
They're giving my brother the talk that my dad is going to die and it's terminal and all this stuff.
For, you know, weeks and weeks and weeks, he's going to the doctor and finally my brother's like, hey, so, you know, what about, you know, medical marijuana?
Is that something that, and they were like, oh yeah, we can prescribe him Marinol, but we just can't, you know, there's no question that the cannabis or THC, whatever it is, cannabis helps fight cancer, but we can't, we can't refer, you have to ask, we can't just offer it to you.
And then they gave him the prescription for Marinol, which is like the government pharmaceutical form of the pill, which is probably way weaker than the CBD oil than we were giving him.
That's gotta be unbelievably difficult to deal, both of those things, unbelievably difficult to deal with while you're trying to focus on, especially fighting a guy like Manhoff, which is a scary fuck.
Every post anybody tags me in is like Moe and Manhoff's highlight reel.
It's like, fuck!
It was tough.
And it just drains you.
I come back and I've got two weeks left before the fight and I'm trying to stay focused.
I can run at a good clip.
I run six miles.
You know regularly and like I'd be like half a mile in and just be exhausted because all of this mental stuff just wears on you and You know I had this internal battle of myself, you know should I pull out of the fight should not pull out of the fight and I Talked to Vinny and I was like, you know, I just I don't know what to do and He was like he's just a dick actually.
He was like He was like your dad and your cousin died and I was like yes, and he's like and that that's sad and I'm like yes, and he's like and and You're never gonna see them again.
And I'm like, yeah, man, I'm never gonna see him again.
He's like, and that's not fair.
And I was like, hey, yeah, motherfucker, it's not fair.
And he's like, you know, he says all this shit, and then he's like, now what?
And I was like, what do you mean?
And he's like, what are you gonna do now?
And I was like, he's like, are you gonna not ever fight again?
Are you gonna not take care of your family?
Are you gonna, you know, let this stop you from everything you've ever wanted to do?
And I was like, no.
And he's like, well, then turn off that app and wait until after your fight.
Handle your business.
Whether you're religious or not, at some level, somewhere, you think your cousin and your father, what would they want?
And I was like, well, I talked to both of them about the fight.
They were both excited about the fight.
I knew what they were going to want.
So I just kind of turned off that emotion until after the fight.
And when I knocked out Melvin, there's like this moment right after the referee stops it.
I fucking explode and Bellator posts the picture all the time.
But at that moment, all of that emotion that I had turned off came back right at that moment.
After the fight, I was thinking about them and stuff.