Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Professor in the Cage, reveals how his MMA journey—sparked by envy at fighters’ discipline while teaching in Pennsylvania—exposed brutal realities: 85% of UFC knockouts stem from gloved punches, worsening brain trauma despite hand protection. Rogan counters with risks like eye pokes (e.g., Alan Belcher’s surgery) and weight-cutting dangers (Gerald McClellan’s in-ring stroke), framing combat sports as evolutionary "monkey dances" that channel aggression into innovation. Yet Gottschall’s book, born from childhood bullying, and Rogan’s admiration for fighters like Anderson Silva—despite UFC’s harsh drug policies (e.g., Silva’s lifetime ban)—highlight how extreme dedication, genetics, and even PEDs blur the line between skill and survival in the cage. [Automatically generated summary]
And that's the violence that I think that everybody has a problem with.
What you're engaging in is martial arts, and although violent action happens in martial arts, overall, it sounds contradictory, but it's not necessarily about violence.
So I go, you know, when I'm first looking at the cage from across the street, I'm looking at it with all the stereotypes that most outsiders have about the spore.
And to me, it looks really, really violent.
I assume that the guys over there must be of a screw loose.
They must be savages.
And so I went over there to test a theory.
And the theory was, well, you know, There's a darkness at the core of human nature.
And mixed martial arts is a perfect metaphor for it, for this violence at the heart of human nature.
Then I go over there and I find that my theory isn't very good.
And what's happening over there is rough.
It's often bloody and painful, but it's not really quite even violence.
I agree, you know, because the emotions behind it are not angry emotions.
I did it because you really don't know anything about it unless you've done it.
Unless you've gone over there and gotten into the cage and been sort of locked up inside there.
They literally lock you up in there half naked, you know, and you're with this other guy and this other guy's really scary, you know, he's a savage killer.
And the only way to get out of that cage is to somehow survive these next few minutes you're going to spend with this guy.
So there's an intensity to that thing that you know is there when you watch it from the outside But it's much different to actually feel it to feel what's actually happening to you to feel what it's like to get punched in the face really hard It was a tremendously educational experience to actually do it Did it change the way like did you watch martial arts before that or were you like really an outsider when you did you watch any UFC matches?
You know, because when I first started watching it, I had a really good excuse.
I was in my early 20s, it was about 1995, and I was a committed but basically inept karate student.
And the UFC was a tremendous education about what worked in a fight and what absolutely did not.
And most of the stuff that I was learning in my karate classes absolutely did not work.
You know what I mean?
And so I was not new to the UFC, I was not new to cage fighting, but I had a very much of an outsider's perspective on it.
And I was confused about what draws people to these kinds of spectacles.
What draws people not only to compete in the cage, that's an interesting question, But also, what draws people to watch combat sports or watch other forms of violent spectacle?
As long as you're mixing it into a system, rather than sticking with karate, which is what I had.
And so my school was very purist.
And when I went to my sensei and said, hey, you know, sensei, very carefully, you know, there's authority in these dojos, there's tradition that you question at your peril.
And so I went in and said, yeah, you know, sensei Bill, you know, I've been watching these tapes.
I watched them on Blockbuster, you know, Blockbuster tapes of these UFC fights.
And long story short is guys like us, they're not just losing.
They're getting slaughtered.
They're getting massacred.
You know, they get a couple of feeble punches off, they get tackled to the ground, beaten half to death.
And so I'd say to him, you know, what do we do?
What do you do if you're taken down in a fight?
And he'd be like, and he'd look at me and be like, it's obvious, just don't get taken down.
It's that easy.
And right then it hit me that he didn't know anything about fighting.
He didn't know how often fights go to the ground.
He didn't know that not getting taken down is a martial art.
It was just all about kicking, and when guys are only kicking you, there's a lot of things you can get away with that you can't get away with when they're punching you.
And I had this, like, big enlightenment moment, like, man, I've been wasting my time.
Not really, it turned out in the long run, because I learned a lot of things, and I developed dexterity that's very unusual.
Flexibility.
Yeah, flexibility, but anybody can develop flexibility, is the dexterity is unusual.
Like the ability to throw kicks in positions in ways that a lot of other people can't.
And it's just because that's all you do.
You're throwing a lot of kicks.
And so there's a lot of guys that took that style, like Anderson Silva's one of them, and started out as a Taekwondo guy, and then eventually developed all the martial arts skills, takedown defense, wrestling.
But yeah, when the UFC came around, most people who are on the outside, they'll look at it like I've had so many people say that it's not martial arts, it's a sport, it's a martial sport, and there's all this silliness attached to it.
I started jiu-jitsu almost immediately after discovering it.
I found out about it in 94 or 5. I think I found out, it started out in 93 and I think I came out to LA in 94 and somewhere in mid 94 I found out about the UFC. Yeah.
And I didn't see the first one, I saw like the second one and I watched it on video.
Yeah, I remember I was training at the Jet Center, which is a famous kickboxing gym in Van Nuys.
It was right before it went under, because they had gotten damaged in the earthquake, and then once rain came after the earthquake, they got massive flood damage, and they eventually went under.
But before they went under, that was where, when I first moved to California, I started working out.
And Benny the Jet Orquidez is like one of the pioneers.
Of not just kickboxing, but incorporating low kicks and fighting against the Thais and the Japanese with their low kicks, and then fighting in sort of no-holds-barred tournaments back then.
And Benny had this, and his brother-in-law, I guess, Blinky Rodriguez, who's a famous kickboxer as well, would teach classes there, and It was a crazy environment, because Blinky had some family tragedy involving gang violence, so he had a lot of gang members that would train there and work out there.
So you'd have these guys...
I remember this one guy had this really shitty prison tattoo on his back that said whatever his gang member was, La Plata's, and then underneath it it said, Fuck the rest.
Like, tattooed big on his back like a 12-year-old drew it in there.
I was like, oh, Christ.
Like, this is where I'm working out.
And, you know, when we take classes with those guys and spar with those guys, it was just very disconcerting.
Like, you didn't want to beat up a gang member and then get shot in the parking lot.
But the place was abuzz.
About these tapes.
Like, people had found out about them and everybody was like, you see this shit?
Everybody's like, damn, this motherfucker just grabs people and drags them to the ground and chokes them.
And everybody wanted to talk about it and it was just...
Yeah, but they had a montage, like a training montage thing for one of the fighters, and he was training at Carlson Gracie's.
And I knew that Mario Sperry trained there, and he was like one of the big guys at the time.
Murillo Bustamante was there and Vitor Belfort was there before he made his UFC debut I came in there right when he was making his debut he had just I got there when he was about to fight John Hess in Hawaii and he fought John Hess in Hawaii who had fought in the UFC and beat the fuck out of him in about 10 seconds it was like one of the craziest fights ever he got on top of him and just I think he went knee to the belly on him and just uncorked about 50 punches to his face like Nobody had seen anybody like Vitor.
Immediately upon going to Carlson Gracie's, I was just manhandled and thrown around like a little baby and strangled left and right.
I was like, Jesus Christ, I'm fucking helpless.
I had this delusional idea that I could defend myself.
But as a white belt in jiu-jitsu, even with a year of high school wrestling, I kind of knew how to wrestle a little.
I knew how to get on top of guys, and then I'd get triangled or armbarred or guillotined, and they'd take my back, and I didn't know what the fuck to do with the gi.
Well, one of the best gyms, American Kickboxing Academy, Dana White was just talking about how they train like cavemen, like they've got to get out of Stone Age.
Yeah, yeah.
And they kind of said, look, you kind of don't realize what's necessary to prepare for fights.
But then you look at the amount of guys that get hurt there.
It is pretty crazy.
But you look at the amount of guys that are really good there.
Luke Rockhold, Daniel Cormier, Cain Velasquez.
It's like, fuck, you can't argue with that success.
And it seems to me like there is no easy way out of this.
Because anytime anybody goes, well, the people in the NFL, well, people in the NFL, first of all, that fucking whistle blows, and you get a nice, juicy break.
You know, you get to catch your breath, walk around offsides, you get that guy talks, and he says a bunch of shit that went wrong, and everybody complains, and it's a joke.
If you compare the amount of effort you have to put forth in an NFL, sure, the collisions are horrific, sure, I mean, you've got to work out hard to be that fucking big and strong, there's no doubt about it, but As for, like, the life and death experience of being in the cage, fuck, man.
So I think he expected, as a lot of guys who opened those gyms did, that the level of popularity as a spectator sport would track with the level of participation.
So maybe most nights would be 15 guys there, something like that.
Like, you'll automatically go in defensive mode, which is also very dangerous for the guy who's the best guy in the gym because you can get a very inflated sense of your abilities if you're always...
There's certain fighters that fought in lower-level organizations and then came over to the UFC. And as they came over to the UFC, one of the first things that was clear was that they had never faced another killer.
Like, they might be a killer themselves, but they had never faced another killer.
And then when faced a killer in the UFC, they'd be like, oh, this is what it's like to fight me.
This sucks.
And you would often find out, like, who's got it and who doesn't have it.
When you're that good and you can say, just hit me as hard as you want to get hit.
Don't hit that guy hard!
Trust me!
But that's, you know, it's finding that perfect balance of competition, but of also, you know, like, you've got to figure out how to not kill each other inside the gym.
You've got to compete and push each other.
And oftentimes it's just a matter of just pulling back on shots of not trying to knock each other out because the guys who try to knock each other out man that fucking that style of sparring that just cannot cannot maintain No, I think it's really dominant there are guys in my gym like that guys who apparently can't pull the punch either by either by lack of athleticism and You know what I mean?
I did, you know, this was a big thing that, this was the big surprise for me about doing this whole project was, again, I look at it from across the street.
I'd always been a fan, but I never really wanted to do it myself.
I wanted to do jujitsu, but I didn't really want to be a cage fighter.
It didn't look like fun to me.
It looked like about as much fun as torture.
You know what I mean?
It looked scary and painful.
And the biggest shock for me was that I loved it.
I loved it.
So I expected to do it for a year and then to quit the absolute second my fight was over.
You know, that's it.
I'm retired.
I'll go write the book.
But I kept doing it for a couple years longer because I really loved it.
I love the camaraderie.
I love the challenge of it.
I love the way it made me feel.
I love the way it, you know, gave me this ability to live A sort of headlong life, you know, for a couple hours a week is all.
You know, I knew I was kind of pushing my luck, and I figured I'd go out on my shield at some point, you know, go out on a stretcher after some horrible head injury or blow up my knee or something like that.
It wasn't like that, though.
It was more like an accumulation of little things.
Rickety old man stuff, you know?
You just get older and you start picking up these little injuries and they don't go away.
So I got, you know, I kept getting turf toe from kicks and from getting stuck on the mat.
And that turned into arthritis at some point.
And I pulled my groin bad.
And that's been bad.
And I messed up my neck one time.
And it's never been quite the same.
Just got rickety.
And part of the reason I started going to hot yoga, as we said before, is in hopes of...
Curing all this stuff, you know, getting physically healthy, getting my flexibility better so I can get back in the gym.
I don't ever want to do the hardcore MMA sparring anymore.
I don't want to get hit in the head anymore.
But I do want to get back into the grappling elements of it.
And people are going to say, get the fuck out of here.
If I have to roll with five blue belts that are my size or do a class in hot yoga, I guarantee you it's harder to do yoga.
Because if a guy's under my level, I can pretty much control what happens.
I can hold positions.
I can choose to take breaks.
I can mount them and just relax.
Yeah, you can't do that, obviously, if you're fighting for your life against someone good.
If you're grappling with someone really good, jujitsu's harder, because it's fighting to the death.
If there's someone who's just a little bit better than you, or a solid notch better than you, and they're trying to kill you, but they're not good enough that you're in total defensive mode, you're still in the game.
You get to heart attack stages where you're like, this might end right here.
This whole fucking life on this planet might end right here for me.
I think guys don't get it at all because I'm always there and I kind of like the female environment of it.
I like that it's such a big transition from the gym, you know, where like it's non-competitive and the whole, even if there's a male teacher, The whole culture is still female.
Because I'm newer and I have to work really hard to get into these positions because my flexibility sucks.
And with these women, a lot of them are super flexible and they seem to get into those positions pretty effortlessly and hold them with less vibration.
But then there's other ones where I'm just fucking dying, you know?
It's really difficult.
But, you know, again, I think there's a balance issue.
And I think when you're all the time just...
All the explosion, lifting weights, kettlebells, and fucking...
I think it's good to do, like, static tension-relieving, long-holding those poses, stretching, elongating the muscles, stretching out all the tissue, stretching out all the hamstrings and the back muscles, and there's so much stretching going on, I realize what I'm doing, and I'm like, I don't ever do this.
I never lengthen everything out.
Everything is just getting compressed.
Everything is...
Everything is explosion and all this fucking heavy weight.
I think you need balance.
I don't think you should have only yoga.
I think it's good to put weight on your body and your muscles because it's good for your density of your bones, it maintains mass, it keeps you from getting frail, especially as you get older.
Stretching and yoga positions should be almost mandatory for people to get their shit together You know, it's it's it makes you way calmer.
I don't know why I mean, I wish I wonder if it's just physical tension being released or if just Stretching itself if there's something in the act of doing so that just when it's over Everything else just seems like calm and relaxed like the difficulty of those poses.
An adjunct is like not a full-time faculty member.
So, you know, for like almost 10 years, I've been making about 16 grand a year, you know, just kind of chasing this dream of being a boyhood dream, really, of being a college professor, of being a scholar.
I wanted to be that guy, like the guy who makes some small but Meaningful contribution to knowledge and I've been chasing that dream for a long time and writing books and doing the articles and doing all kinds of stuff but it just wasn't my research was a little bit non-conventional and it just wasn't I wasn't making it you know what I mean and so and I just didn't have the courage to quit it wasn't I don't know if it was a courage thing or if it was a A desire thing.
I don't like quitting on something I've invested in.
It's hard.
You know, it's like if you're gambling, you know, you throw money in the pot.
You don't want to fucking fold, even though you know you should fold.
And so when I started, when I went across the street that first time, I made that joke at my own expense.
It wouldn't be funny if I went over there.
Part of it, part of what was driving me to cross over there was a career suicide fantasy.
I was thinking to myself, well, you apparently don't have the courage to quit your job and move on to something else.
Maybe you can do something offensive enough to people in your profession that will get you fired.
And so if I showed up in the cage, everybody in my department would be able to, honest to God, like look up from the poems they were reading, you know, reading their poems, they look up and they'd be able to see me right across the street, you know, engaged in blood sport.
And they don't really approve of blood sport in English departments.
So I went over there thinking, I can't quit, maybe I can get myself fired.
On my campus, people were much more tolerant and open-minded than I had hoped.
You know?
They didn't get furious with me.
They didn't try to fire me.
It's because they know me.
They know I'm not a savage animal.
They know I'm a decent human being.
The bigger question is what effect will it have within the larger profession?
Will it be an effective career suicide strategy once other people in the profession get a hold of the book?
And I do think probably it'll be a success as a career suicide strategy.
About two weeks after the book came out, this article came out about me and about the book in this magazine that no one reads in the real world called The Chronicle of Higher Education.
But it's the main trade magazine for academia.
And the book comes off pretty much as a...
Glorification of macho barbarism in their thinking.
You know, a dumb glorification of butchery and barbarism.
So that could be effective in ending my career, because that's a guy, like I read about that, and I read the article, I said to my wife, like, okay, that ends it.
So, one example he quotes in the book is, like, we're at lunch.
You know, and we're having a nice time, and at some point, I lean across the table toward him, and I say to him, like this, you know, across the table in an intimidating fashion, what would it take?
unidentified
What would I have to say to get you to punch me in the face?
Some people are super uncomfortable with any idea, like any form of conflict, you know, and they would like to categorize any kind of violent interaction, even voluntary violent interaction, like a mixed martial arts competition, as being barbaric, as having no virtue, as having no...
That people have this burning desire in them to do what I think is the most difficult sport in the world.
I don't think there's anything even close.
I think as far as the emotions that are invested in trying to win and the devastating effect of a loss...
And then the actual physical damage that you take along the way.
Your vehicle that you're racing is your own body.
And unlike a race car, your body will respond only if you push it in training.
You have to elevate its capacity.
You have to elevate its tolerances.
And you have to do that intelligently, and it has to be done in the watchful eye.
of trainers and along the way there's all these variables you have to take into account strength and conditioning what kind of a body type are you dealing with what you know what skill set do you have what needs to be improved objectivity objectively and analyzing your strengths and weaknesses looking at your skill set looking at the weapons that you have that you need to keep sharp and looking at ones that you need to acquire there's so many variables to me it's the ultimate Problem-solving, high-level competition.
I don't think there's anything like it.
But I have a problem with a lot of the assholes.
I have a problem with a lot of the thuggish behavior.
I have a problem with, I mean, even though I know a lot of it is psychological warfare and trying to intimidate each other, I have a problem with some of that.
I have a problem with the damage that guys take.
I have a real problem with that.
I have a real problem with guys not knowing when to get out, with their friends telling them, listen man, just gotta put together one hard camp.
You're like, no, no, he's been knocked out seven fucking times.
Like, no, he needs to preserve his brain for the rest of his life.
Have you ever met an old man that used to fight?
I have.
It's not fun.
It's not fun at all.
It's very uncomfortable to talk to a guy who tells the same fucking story over and over and over and over and over and over.
Yeah, it's possible that there'll come a day where I can't do it anymore, that I don't want to do it anymore.
I'll probably always be a fan to some extent.
But like my favorite guy is Mighty Mouse.
You know, people think like my all-time favorite guys Some of the craziest like Vanderlei Silva is one of my all-time favorites because his fights were fucking chaos You knew if you're gonna watch a Vanderlei Silva fight that dude across the ring and he's wiggling his wrists back in the pride days doing this shit He was probably one of the best middleweights ever You know, or light heavyweight in that division is 203, but they called it middleweight.
They called the 185 pound division was Walter weight, I think.
But Vanderlei, who was just the opposite of like...
Mighty Mouse.
Like, Mighty Mouse is my favorite currently because he fights so fucking intelligently.
Everything he does, his movement, his footwork, his positioning, he's always in condition.
His conditioning is insane.
They can just push guys to the point where they just cannot keep up with him.
And his technical superiority over all the competition is just so obvious.
And his work ethic, his intelligence, he's a great role model.
When you hear him talk, he's a very intelligent young man, but also humble and friendly.
I mean, you see him.
The only thing that tells you that guy's a martial arts fighter is his ears.
Well, they didn't even put his mouthpiece in for the second round.
We didn't know about it.
He was saying something to the referee and pointing at his mouth, and I was trying to figure out what he was saying.
While they were squaring off?
When he was on the bottom and Rockhold was beating him up, he said to the referee something and pointed to his mouth that he didn't have a mouthpiece in, and the referee didn't pick it up.
I mean, you gotta check that.
The corners, it's ultimately their fault, but the referee fucked up too.
You can't let a guy fight and get the shit beat out of him with no mouthpiece in.
Well, I think you and I are both in agreement with the gloves issue and you wrote something about it and I discussed it with Sam Harris.
I've discussed it with a bunch of people.
I feel like This would kind of be contradictory for people who don't train in martial arts, but I'll try to explain it visually for people who watch this, which is a much smaller percentage of the population.
If you look at someone's wrist, your wrist, when you hit things, Your wrist tends to wiggle around.
It flexes.
It's very hard to keep your wrist stiff and hit things hard, especially repeatedly when you're bouncing your wrist off of elbows and shoulders and even foreheads.
You tend to break your hands much easier if you don't have wraps.
And when you see a fighter in the UFC and they have those gloves on, those gloves aren't really protecting the other opponent, the opponent, the person you're punching, nearly as much as they're protecting the person who's punching the opponent.
But the big thing to me is not just the gloves, it's the wraps.
Yeah, you tape up your wrist, you tape up your hands, you make that thing hard as fuck.
Before I work out, before I hit the bag or hit the pads or anything like that, I tape this fucking bitch down, I go in between my knuckles, I have these pads that I put over my knuckles, and I tape over them, and then I go everything with athletic tape, and at the end of it, that fucking thing...
You can slam things with it, and it just, it's unnatural.
You have an unnatural situation with your hands, and when people say, well, it looks barbaric if you bare knuckle, let me tell you something, you would be way better off with me bare knuckle punching you than you would with me kicking you with my shin.
And that's totally legal.
Head kicks, heel, like, when you see, like, Terry Edom versus Edson Barbosa, and Edson Barbosa wheel kicks him in the head, there is not a fucking punch that's ever been thrown by a human being, ever, that has the kind of power that a fucking wheel kick has.
Your legs are, I mean, especially not that weight class, you'd have to have, like, the biggest, most giant heavyweight boxer, and still, I don't think they could probably punch as hard as a world-class kickboxer can throw a kick like that.
I mean, one of the things that was interesting to me is there's a paper out in some journal, like the Canadian Journal of Criminology, not Criminology, sorry, Sports Medicine or something like that, went through all the UFC fights over, like, I'd say a decade, and saw how they ended.
And when it came to KOs and TKOs, 85% of them were from the hands.
So my feeling is, you know, again, people have the wrong idea about these gloves.
They really have the wrong idea.
They think it makes the sport safer.
And they think it can make it safer, safer.
And it does make it safer for the guy's hands.
And the cost of that is making it exponentially more dangerous for the other guy's brain.
You take those gloves off.
Those guys cannot throw their hands around like that.
It happened in boxing in 1867. You know, boxing was on the verge of getting outlawed, basically, for being savage.
And they said, okay, we'll change the rules.
We'll add these different elements.
We'll make it possible for the referees to stop fight.
And we'll put pillows on the guy's fists.
So it was a well-intended thing.
It's a well-intended thing where a well-intended humanitarian gesture will make the sport safer by putting these pillows on these guys' hands.
And the UFC made exactly the same mistake 130 years later or something.
They were on the verge of getting outlawed.
They were having all kinds of political problems.
And so they reformed.
They said, we're going to outlaw these really brutal-looking techniques, and we are also going to take away the prime symbol In the public's mind of the savagery of cage fighting, which is bare-fisted fighting.
It's even in our language.
When we say, we're going to take the gloves off, that means we're going to resort to a really primitive style of brutality.
And so So it was a well-intended gesture that backfired in a tragic way.
So people think that the sort of savagery and the damage and the danger, the neurological danger especially, of fighting is intrinsic to the sport and unavoidable.
And it's not really true.
You could massively decrease the danger, the neurological danger of the sport, just by taking off the gloves.
You can't grab your shorts to finish a technique, though, I don't think.
I don't think.
I think if you had, like, there is a position that you could get where you could have your arm wrapped around a guy's neck and grab your own shorts and use your own shorts to aid in the choke.
I wonder if you could do that.
I wonder if you could do it offense, I probably should know this, seeing as I do it for a living, but I know that you can use it defensively, which is big with Kim Warris.
If a guy's going for a shoulder lock and you reach deep into your shorts and you hold on to them, it could be just enough to protect you, to keep you from getting tapped.
If you get a guy who's a really good kicker and you take away the gloves, you just made his kicks better because now he doesn't have to worry nearly as much about the other guy's punches.
Because I think the eye pokes, that's a huge tragic issue.
For people who aren't familiar with the sport, Muay Thai, the art of Thai boxing, they have a very specific style of using the hands.
Well, they'll put the hands on the forehead and they'll throw knees.
They'll put the hands up and they'll throw kicks.
They have a lot, especially in different practitioners, they have a lot of ways of using it.
But when they're doing it in the gym or in the ring, they're usually wearing big boxing gloves.
And the boxing gloves don't have anything free to poke.
But fingers, in the MMA gloves, the fingers are completely exposed.
And when guys utilize the same techniques to try to keep a guy off them, they oftentimes wind up poking guys right in the eyes, and they cause irreparable damage.
Guys like Alan Belcher, he's been out of the UFC for a long time.
He had knee eye surgery, like significant eye surgery.
Because a rematch with TJ Dillashaw, the fight was one of the fights of the year, one of the upsets of the entire history of the UFC, one of the biggest upsets.
Spectacular performance by T.J. Dillashaw.
Hennenborough trains like a monster ready for this comeback and then passes out in the sauna or the bathtub, I guess, and cracked his head off the wall and they wouldn't let him fight him.
He knocked himself out trying to get up out of the tub.
Yeah, I only had one actual fight, but I cut weight twice because the first fight I showed up to and my opponent, fearing the legendary fistic prowess of English professors, He backed out.
You know, it's small-time, amateur shows, and a lot of guys just say, hey, you know, well, this seemed like a good idea a couple months ago, but, you know, as it got close, he wasn't hurt or anything.
You know, it happens at the UFC. It happens at the UFC and people don't know.
You know, there's guys that wind up fighting and there's guys that are pretty highly ranked.
I don't want to name any names, but Shaw, Brendan Shaw and I were actually having a conversation about this the other day about guys that were warming up while he was back there.
And they would say to their coach, I don't want to fucking do this anymore.
That's amazing to me because part of the reason I fought finally was because of the social pressure.
Once you've started off down this path, it becomes like this thing where you've told people you're going to do it and everybody at the gym knows you're going to do it.
So one time I kind of tried to back out.
Months before my actual fight, I said, you know, other riders have done this, and I'm all hurt.
There's no reason to do it.
And I went in and told one of the guys at the gym that I was kind of leaning away from doing it.
He's like, well, so you're pussying out, huh?
And then I told another guy, and he said, so you're pussying out, huh?
So everybody's kind of said that, and it becomes this huge pressure to do it.
And I felt more fear of a failure in courage than I did of the sort of whatever was going to happen to me in the cage, breaking my nose or whatever.
I felt much more fear that I would just find a way to chicken out in the end.
I'd get cold feet.
I'd refuse to climb the steps and get in the cage.
Maybe I'd run for it in the cage, just sprinting circles around the outside, jump over the fence, run for home.
You know, I honestly thought that could happen, you know?
You know, sometimes guys are injured and then they get there and they realize, like, I can't fucking do this.
I can't move my leg right.
There's a lot of guys who fight.
That's another thing.
A lot of guys who fight in the UFC that are fucked up.
They're really injured by the time they get in there.
I know guys who have hid...
Torn ACLs where their ACLs were completely blown out and they really had no stability like they would they would try to move one way or another and then they would just give right out yeah and there's I mean there's got to be nothing more terrifying than being in the octagon and competing against some highly trained Well-prepared killer, and you can't even move right.
If you juke left or right, your leg's going to go boink!
Yeah, there's no equality when it comes to physical attributes.
There's certain people that were just given a way better genetic roll of the dice.
I mean, that's why we have weight classes.
That's why Mighty Mouse can never fight Jon Jones.
The argument can take place as to who's better pound for pound, John or Mighty Mouse, and there's a lot of arguments both ways, but as far as like what would happen if they fight, there's no argument.
More tragic for the woman he hit with his car, but so tragic for him because I don't know him well enough to know where his mind's at or who he's talking to.
You hear all these bad things, like the people that he's hanging out with and the people that he surrounds himself with.
You hear some of them from his coaches, so there's got to be some validity and truth to it.
For every guy like that that's super fucking talented, it seems like it's so hard to stay on track.
It's like Mike Tyson had Customato.
You know, and Customato was not just a great trainer, but he was also a great mental coach.
Like he had instilled lessons in Mike Tyson about fire and fear and all the different aspects of competition that are gonna arise and how the hero and the coward feel the same thing.
It's just the hero reacts to it differently.
The more you prepare your body, the less, not fear, but the less confusion you have when you get into that ring, the less doubt you have, the more clarity you have.
You're 100% confident in your conditioning.
You're 100% confident in your training.
There will be certain fear, but you can mitigate some of that.
And all this was, Customato just was a genius with Tyson.
The guys who train with him, the guys who talk, like if you talk to people, you're like, he's so good.
He's so much better than everybody else in the gym.
He's so much better than that.
When you saw him grab ahold of Daniel Cormier and wrestle Cormier to the ground the first round, you're like, listen, this is another fucking level of shit you're dealing with.
You're dealing with like another level of greatness, another level of ability.
And when you, you know, you see a guy like that get involved in...
I mean, the cocaine thing, man, that didn't bother me that much.
It's like, you know, so he's doing coke three weeks out.
I think part of the issue that people have with a guy like John, who's just so uber-talented, and he's so young, and all these things come handy to him, or come so easy to him, is that when a guy like that professes to be very moral and very religious, and then you see all this craziness, like testing positive for cocaine, and the drunk driving, crashing into the tree with strippers in his car.
It's like...
Clearly, he likes to have fun, you know, and there's nothing wrong with that.
And that's just, you gotta dot your I's and cross your T's all day, every day.
You can't take anyone lightly.
I've seen that many times where guys were way favored over their opponent, but they took it lightly because they were favored and their opponent was terrified because they were the underdog.
So they trained like a demon and the other guy slacked off and went in there with a false sense of confidence and also a Minimized sense of danger.
Yeah, like nobody likes that fucking feeling man you and you went through it, right?
That feeling of being the locker room.
You're like fuck when is this over?
Get me out there.
Yeah when I stopped competing That was the one thing that I appreciated the most like I didn't have to feel like I was always scared.
Yeah, I was always like waiting for the next fight and You know, the book is, I say it's about the duel.
But it's sort of a mono-a-mono conflict of various kinds.
An MMA fight, or any kind of combat sport fight, is kind of a duel.
You set it up in advance.
You have seconds who negotiate for you, work your corner and all that stuff.
And you know weeks out, months out, even longer, that you're going to be in a car crash at such and such a time.
And it weighs on you.
It weighs on you so heavy.
Whereas, if you were to walk out in the parking lot right now and some guy picked a fight with you, That would be bad, but you wouldn't have the same kind of fear, that anxiety, the buildup to it.
So, yeah, I was glad to get that out of my life because I lived with that for a long time because it took me a long time to get a fight.
It took me a long time because I was old, and the state commission makes it pretty hard for older fighters to allow a certain matchup.
And fights kept falling through, or somebody would not show up, or I would get hurt, or the other guy would get hurt.
And so I lived with that sense that the fight was right around the corner.
Well, I started the project at close to 200 pounds.
I was heavier.
I was kind of fat.
And then I, you know, so I could fight at 185. I could fight at 205, you know, bulk up and, you know, fight the huge guys.
But I decided to fight all the way down to 170. So I cut down to where I was walking around like 180. Because at the amateurs, you don't have 24 or 30 hours, whatever it is to rehydrate.
All of the more significant deaths, brain damage, all the big issues in boxing, almost all of them, except for a few isolated events, which were horrible beatings, which is why I think Eric Perez was involved in one.
Is it Eric Perez?
The heavyweight guy was involved in some horrible beating of this Russian guy, and that guy suffered some pretty significant brain damage, which is a heavyweight bout, which is very rare.
Gerald McClellan's, another one, who was a notoriously huge guy, would cut a tremendous amount of weight to get down.
I think he was fighting at 175. Was he 175 or 168?
I forget what he fought at, but Gerald cut a tremendous amount of weight, got down, fought Nigel Benn, and he was bleeding inside the octagon, or inside the ring rather.
He had an episode where he had a stroke.
Inside the ring like in the middle of his fight.
He had to take a knee and then just quit and realize something was way wrong.
And people were like, I can't believe he quit.
And then he collapsed in his corner and you know, the rest is history.
He's all fucked up now.
And if you went back to the day, if you ever watched that guy fight, have you ever seen Gerald McClellan fight back in the day?
Well, he was a terrifying fighter, and the big showdown was always going to be him and Roy Jones Jr. That's what everybody was thinking.
Like, one day, him and Roy Jones Jr. are gonna throw down, and Jerry McClellan was a fucking killer.
He was a killer.
But he fought Nigel Benn, and Nigel Benn was just tough as shit, and they went to war.
Gerald had him all but knocked out had him knocked out of the ring like he went through the ring got back into the ring got back and but just Nigel Benn would not quit and there was a period in the fight somewhere where they collided heads and that was one of the big ones Nigel definitely landed some big punches on him but they collided heads and you could tell like after the headbutt like he was all fucking woozy and whacked out and then you know you had to take a knee and then it was over and And he's blind now.
I think he can't hear.
He can't move.
He's all fucked up, and it's all just from brain bleeding.
Yeah, and you said, you know, earlier on, you said, you know, how do you stop it?
And I think it is one of those things that's really, really hard to stop because, as you've talked about on the show, any kind of new measure you set up, there's a way to beat it.
There's still going to be cutting weight.
I think amateur wrestling has dealt with this.
Little kits by body fat percentage things or maybe hydration measurements, like you can measure how much...
Hydration they have, so you can tell when the kid is cutting weight through dehydration.
I'm not sure if that would be possible to measure hydration levels.
I mean, even if they listen to me, they rationalize, like, oh, you got some good points, and then there would be a butt, blah, blah, blah, we can't, because blah, blah, blah.
I think the major obstacle to it, if you thought it all through, the major obstacle to it would be the upside of this is there would be a lot less neurological damage.
The downside to it would be there'd be a lot less neurological damage.
There'd be a lot fewer knockouts.
There'd be a lot less heavy, you know, the barrages of heavy punches.
They'd have to change their repertoire of punches.
They have to go back towards a bare knuckle style of punching.
Much more straight punches.
Trying to throw punches into the fleshy part of the face that you're throwing with more control.
Some people would like big giant hands like Brock Lesnar hands or Shane Carwin hands.
Those guys probably wouldn't have nearly as much problem.
But if you can go back to the old UFC's and you see when guys fought bare knuckle you very rarely saw like blistering combinations like you'll see like a guy like Vitor throw.
You know, barrages of punches.
You very rarely see those because you just kind of can't.
You kind of can't do those without breaking your hand.
So, you know, I start off that article I wrote with a retrospective on, remember this fight, one of the greatest fights in the UFC, Hackney versus Yarborough?
I think if he stuck with that, he probably wouldn't have broken his hand, which is kind of amazing, but for whatever reason, you can hit things really hard like that with the palm of your hand.
I mean, he was the first guy that really figured out...
The Palm Hill.
Yeah.
Pancrase was an organization, for folks who don't know, in Japan.
And they didn't allow gloves.
And they also didn't allow punches to the face.
You could kick a guy to the face, but you were wearing wrestling shoes.
And then on top of those wrestling shoes, you had this big fat shin and instep pad.
So there's this big padded-up shin thing, and then you had nothing on your hands, so the guys would kind of slap at each other and try to kick each other.
You could not throw closed hands, but you could throw closed hands to the body.
But Bas Rutten, who's a Dutch kickboxer and had this fucking power explosion style, he was the first guy that figured out if you just pull your hand way back, you throw that bitch just like a punch.
And he would uppercut guys and hook guys, and he would beat, like when he fought Funaki, he beat the fucking shit out of him.
And he beat him like a guy who was throwing punches.
I mean, he would come at you with his hands pulled back like that, and instead of doing what everybody else was doing, which is kind of throw these wild bitch slaps, Boss Root was throwing him straight down the pipe, and somehow or another, he had stretched his hand out, where he could pull his hand way back.
So he was just palming your fucking nose into your brain.
He was nasty.
He was the first guy to figure out, like, there's a different approach you could take to this.
He was also one of the first real strikers.
Like, you got to see the difference when he kicked guys, that fucking whack, you know, feel it in their arms.
One of the beautiful things about watching the UFC since 1993 all the way up to 2015, where we are today, is the evolution of the understanding of the techniques, of what's effective in certain positions, the distances.
Those guys like Bas Rutten were critical for establishing that stuff.
You know those real pioneers fucking nobody before him and pancrease they were fighting like that.
There's nobody He came along with big power in his kicks and ridiculous punching power and figured out how to do it with the palm You know and then you see him fight in the UFC when he could use punches before his body started failing him like he's had Significant neck injuries and to the point where he has significant atrophy of one of his arms one of his arms he calls baby arm and It's like, yeah, he's had it fixed and had some stem cell stuff done and some operations and has discs fused in his neck and bad stuff.
It's an important time, historically, to watch those fights, to see the difference between the way they fought then and the way they fight now.
There's still room to grow, but the problem is you have athletic commissions, you have bureaucracy, and you also have Look, I love the UFC. I love working for the UFC. It's been an honor to work for them all these years, but you're gonna have a certain amount of stagnation when you have one group and one organization that's so dominant over the other ones.
I disagree that it's a monopoly because Viacom owns Bellator and Viacom has untold fucking billions of dollars.
They have an entire channel.
That they can promote it on.
Spike TV has an entire Friday night lineup that's dedicated to combat sports, to boxing, glory kickboxing.
There's plenty of eyes on Spike.
And they're also getting guys from the UFC now.
They have Phil Davis just signed with them.
Yeah, it's sort of the senior league for the UFC. And there's also, they picked up this wrestler, this guy who helped Chris Weidman prepare for one of his recent fights.
They're starting to get these big-time names, guys that are coming up.
And a lot of that is also because of the Reebok deal.
The UFC has a Reebok deal that doesn't allow them to get their own sponsors.
They have to use the Reebok sponsorship, so some guys are shying away from it because of that.
So, like, the concept of a monopoly, I just don't think it's fair.
I don't agree that it's a monopoly.
I think they're better than the rest of them.
There's better competition.
They're better organized.
I think their production is better.
The people that direct it and produce it are better.
They're just the best at what they do, because they've been doing it a long time.
In having that, like that, there's a certain amount of stagnation.
Because if someone came along and had a bare-knuckle UFC-style mixed martial arts event where they fought not in a cage, but in a basketball-sized mat, If you have an arena for basketball, you have this big, gigantic space that you have a wooden floor, this parquet floor on.
How about do something like that with mats and have mixed martial arts?
And when they go out of bounds, you bring them right back to the center again, and you have them duking it out again.
Interesting, but it hurts visually you can't see that good me I can't see that good.
I have the best fucking seat in the house for the UFC I'm touching the floor that they're fighting literally touching the floor.
I see you looking at the monitor all the time Yeah, sometimes I have to sometimes when when fighters like to the left or to the right and the backs like they're like up against the cage I have to look at the monitor.
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Otherwise, I don't know what's going on if you ever looked at the crowd We're all looking at the monitor, too.
Thought was Paul Ophelia I think someone used the ropes want to catch a guy on an arm bar like you had the guy like they were trapped inside the ropes The guy's arm was trapped in the rope while I was getting arm barred and I was realizing like whoa He just used the rope to get that submission.
This is kind of fucked like the rope came into play It's almost like what tank Abbott submitted Steve Jenham He had his knee to his head and he grabbed the fence and he was holding on the fence and pulling and smashing him in the face.
Yeah You know that using the cage back then like you can't grab the cage Just like you can't grab the ropes and pride.
Oh, yeah, it comes into play still too much to be interesting I'd like that because there's so much of the action now is pushed up against the fence I think if a guy grabs a fence immediate one-point deduction immediate immediate one point and The problem is it's so reflexive.
And there's a big difference between a guy grabbing the fence when you're trying to take him down and then being able to stand up and then kicks you in the head and a guy not grabbing the fence and you take him down and you dominate him for the rest of the round.
Yeah, those are cool But what I'm saying is something to cover the tips of the fingers because as a jiu-jitsu guy like if I had like Say like you know those Everlast bag gloves.
Yeah, you know those style that come over the tips like those aren't really gonna impede my grappling that much because I don't do this and I don't do this and You know, you never, what I'm saying, I'm showing something, obviously, to people who are listening, but interlacing your fingers.
You don't interlace your fingers.
You grab in, like, an S-grip, or you grab in a gable grip.
And these grips that you do, most of the really strong grips, don't ever involve your fingers sliding into the grooves of each other, of the opposing fingers.
But I feel like something like that maybe could work, where the tips of the fingers were covered up, and it wouldn't affect you as much if you eye-poke somebody.
We're kind of like going into a dark territory here Having this experience and I wanted to get back to your peers because we didn't I don't think we really completely We kind of got off track with that yeah having these people stand outside and watch you do this was there Did the reaction vary or was it pretty uniform?
Or was there extremes on both ends where people were like, what the fuck are you doing?
And other people were like, I want to be like you.
You know, to me it was always, I always, you know, played it off in sort of a humorous way.
You know, basically me being fed to lions.
Right.
So, but again, the bigger problem is in the wider profession where people don't know me.
And that, you know, when those sort of people get a hold of the book, I hope they read it, you know, because the book is, it's not really even about mixed martial arts, you You know, it's about using mixed martial arts as this bridge into big questions about human behavior, especially human male behavior and the nature of masculinity and all the dumb stuff we get up to.
And it's one of the reasons, you know, I thought of you as I was writing the book, actually.
You know, a lot of people write a book and they don't have anybody in mind for it.
They have like a vague, nebulous sense of who the readers are going to be.
That never works for me.
I always have to think of an actual person.
You know, who's going to read this book?
Like, who would be the ideal reader for me?
And for me, it was you.
And I thought of you a lot when I was reading this book.
As a person, like, who would be interested in the subject matter, charitable and generous about it, because these are things that you wonder about, too, and also sort of meshes with not only your interest in fighting, but your whole interest in human behavior, and especially your basically evolutionary outlook.
On human life and human behavior.
That's what the book is really about.
It's sort of an evolutionary exploration of the basis of masculinity and manhood.
That's a that's a very interesting way of approaching it because I think that's one of the issues that people have when it comes to the idea of mixed martial arts or the idea of any sort of combat sport is that in Embracing that and supporting it or in even just pursuing it Somehow or another we're doing a disservice to the idea of a cultural evolution that we kind of all agree is going on if you compare Society and human beings and our behavior today with what
we know about several thousands of years ago We know that we're in a far safer time far more civil time For the most part in most places of the world obviously there's exceptions, but yeah overwhelming but the people that are communicating now we're communicating about We have an understanding about what we would call you know what they the the super progressives like to call toxic masculinity man Part of me understands where they're coming from.
And part of me also thinks that they're kind of copping out.
And they're denying certain aspects of their own life and their own masculinity that maybe they feel are weak.
And maybe they feel like they can't compete in these areas.
Especially if you look at some parts of the world, they're like, they're fucking way closer than we are to Russia.
You look at what North Korea has threatened to do to South Korea, or what Pakistan and India, when they look at each other, and you motherfucker, I've got a missile with your name on it.
All it takes is the wrong guy with the right amount of power, and that can happen.
And it's very likely that we're saying guy for a reason.
It's not going to be the wrong woman.
And yeah, there's a certain reality to that.
But there's also a certain reality to the fact that The reason why we have these thoughts and ideas and we have this quote-unquote toxic masculinity in the first place is because it served our genes well.
That's why we got to 2015. That's why we fought off the competition and unfortunately I think there's a yin and a yang to life.
There's a give and a take, and there's an action and a reaction when it comes to aggression and when it comes to fear and danger.
And that reaction is innovation, reinforcing the safer aspects of society, law enforcement.
There's all these different reactions to violence that lead to a better world.
Yeah, and that's really what the focus of my book is.
Again, I expected to write a book with MMA as a metaphor for this darkness, this blackness, this danger, this nastiness at the core of human nature.
That's what I expected.
I wrote a very different book than that.
The book ended up being a book about something that I call the monkey dance.
And if you've ever seen like a nature video of two elephant seals clashing in the surf or two mountain goats cracking skulls on a hillside, biologists call those sorts of contests, they call it ritual combat.
And ritual combat is a way that a huge diversity of animal species have developed to figure out who's bigger, who's tougher, who's stronger, who's fitter, without fighting it out to the bitter, bloody end.
But what my take on it is, is that there's a big difference between that and what guys are doing to establish greatness.
When you achieve greatness in martial arts, what you're essentially doing by becoming a champion is you're showing a genetic superiority, you're showing a mental superiority, a character superiority.
That makes you more preferred for breeding.
I mean, that's just the reality situation.
Like, I joke around about it, but it's kind of true.
The only reason why anybody gets laid is because Luke Rockhold didn't get there first.
I mean, when it comes right down to it, you walk around the world and you see these differences between men and women, and you see physical differences, you see behavioral differences, and you naturally ask, you know, where does all this stuff come from?
A good provider but also someone who can deal when the shit goes down some dudes They you know when they'll they'll chirp all around about toxic masculinity or negative male behavior But the reality is they don't have any fucking character and if something happens really bad in their life They start weeping and they fall apart.
That's unattractive and the reason it's unattractive to your friends If you have a friend and every time something goes wrong in his life he starts crying he wants a hug you like Jesus bitch get your fucking shit together and Come on, dude.
And that's how you're supposed to feel.
Because you know that that guy, if anything goes wrong, that guy's not going to be reliable.
And these are unfortunate but realistic aspects of being a human being in the 21st century.
It's still there.
It's still there.
I mean, one day we might come to some point where we have so much control over the world that we live in that masculinity won't be unnecessary.
And if that's the case, we'll probably evolve to the point where we look like the aliens that are depicted, you know, in every movie with the giant head, no muscles, and the giant head that uses telekinesis to move things.
I mean, the world has gotten softer and softer and safer and safer, and we're still...
Carrying this baggage, this evolutionary baggage of a sort of masculinity that's best suited to a world where, you know, there's barbarians at the gates and bears in the woods and all that stuff.
But in this same world, there are avenues to express this masculinity where you can be completely civil, where you can be completely kind, you can be a generous person, but...
Get over your own genetics in a way.
Give yourself difficult tasks to do.
And even what we were talking about earlier, fucking yoga can do that.
It doesn't have to be beating the shit out of each other in a cage to achieve this.
That's why we have disdain for people that pick on folks that they know that they can beat.
If you see a guy, and he's a bully, and he's like a 250-pound guy, and he wants to fight a 100-pound guy, why does he want to do that?
He wants to do that because he's scared of a challenge, because he's a coward.
A 250-pound man would never want...
I mean, the only time you would threaten a 100-pound man is if that 100-pound man was threatening a 100-pound woman or something, or another 100-pound man.
You're trying to step in and keep the peace.
But...
When you see a bully, it's one of the most disgusting characteristics because we know ultimately it's cowardice.
It appears as strength because they're flaunting their superiority, but it's really cowardice.
There was a fighter that fell out of a card because he got injured, and they offered this other fighter a replacement.
And he said, no, I don't want to fight that guy.
But then he listed off a bunch of guys that he would fight that were like way below him.
And his idea was like, hey, I have to change opponents in four weeks.
I don't want it to be difficult.
Everybody was like like the mixed martial arts the underground forum was fucking awash with people angry Yeah, and they're right.
They are right.
They are right You know either you're willing to fight another top contender who's just as capable of beating you as you are of him Or we're wasting fucking time here.
Yeah, you know, and we don't want to watch that you gotta understand like true What did you sign up to do?
You signed up to be a fucking gladiator, okay?
You signed up to be the most noble of all martial arts combatants of all time.
You're competing at the highest level we've ever achieved in martial arts.
Today, make no mistake about it, the fighters of today are the highest skilled, the most competent There's been some great judokas of the past.
There's been some great Taekwondo competitors and great Muay Thai fighters.
But as far as the overall combination in the form of a mixed martial artist, today, they're the best that they've ever been.
Because they come from really good camps, they're really well trained, they have a bunch of success under their belt, but they're always terrified of the one guy who's going to expose them.
It's one of the most fascinating aspects about fighting.
But, you know, and that was one of the big findings for me at the gym is like, You know, you go into the gym and it's like, what's a fighter?
And for most people, I think most people think a fighter is like, I don't know, a person who's strong and fit and has developed this toolkit of, you know, all these sophisticated techniques and all that stuff.
But you talk to fighters, they don't define a fighter that way.
They define a fighter as, you know, a person who's really tough and who will fight.
Who's game in a fight?
And that was one thing that I found sort of interesting going in.
Because one of the things I wondered about was whether I'd be able to do it.
Just go in there and square off with people.
I didn't think I was ever going to be good at it.
But could I compete bravely?
And I do think that you do build your character by doing it.
You do get stronger and tougher and braver through the process of training.
I think there's also, it's curious to me that there's a bunch of people that are fight fans, and even fighters, that don't respect people that don't put themselves at risk.
Well, I think people were reacting there not to lack of, you know, carnage.
I think they were reacting to a lack of drama.
You know, people are attracted to fighting sports, I think, for a lot of reasons.
You know, there's probably a creature in us that kind of likes violence.
But there's also this sort of...
Drama to a fight that's hard.
I mean, with that fight you have these two guys.
You have the good guy, you have the face, you have the heel squaring off in this incredibly climactic showdown that's going to define the story of their entire careers.
And you're expecting some sort of epic battle to go down that's going to be incredibly gripping drama.
And then as a sort of dramatic spectacle, I think it sort of fell flat.
Which is why that's my sort of theory for why the the reaction to the fight was so negative Yeah, I guess man.
I mean just when you're dealing with two of the best boxers of any generation who I think Manny Pacquiao, I think it's safe to say that 95% of them don't know anything about boxing That is a problem, boxing fans.
That's what Roger Mayweather always says famously.
It's a quote, most people don't know shit about boxing.
You ever seen anyone say that?
No, but it's true.
It's a meme.
Anytime there's anything on the underground, every time people talk about boxing.
But you're able to appreciate as an aficionado and somebody who's really sophisticated in your knowledge of the sport, whereas most people are just wanting to see an intense drama.
Well, I watched it with my wife, who has never been in a fight in her life and doesn't know jack shit about fighting, which is kind of funny, you know, because, you know, if you look at our DVR, it's like two competing philosophies.
Like, I really love watching Canelo Alvarez fight because his fights are fucking chaos.
Gennady Golovkin who fought this weekend.
He's the best.
Golovkin's the best to watch because you know someone's getting knocked the fuck out.
Like, that guy just is a destroyer.
He just seeks and destroys, seeks and destroys, and just slowly chips away at the best of them to the point where they just can't take it anymore, and their body starts giving out.
He's amazing.
You know he's had 350-something fights when you count his amateur career?
But, you know, I watched a video of him wrestling Luke Rockhold, and I'm like, how come a fucking guy who fights at 155 is wrestling the biggest 185 pounder the world has ever known?
What is going on there?
Does he wrestle Kane, too?
Because I know that Rockhold I mean, where do you guys end this?
Does he spar with DC? I mean, he's 155. What the fuck is going on?
So he blew out his knee again.
And, you know, he's supposed to be fighting cowboy in my fight of the year.
I fucking love that fight.
Woo!
That's a stylistic fight.
I mean, you got the best grappler, I think, in the division in Habib versus one of the very best strikers in all of the UFC. I mean, Donald is such a good Muay Thai striker.
He's so good.
He's so good.
I mean, when you see him fight a guy that is not at his level, that's when you really understand how good he is.
When you see him fight like a Jim Miller and see what he could do to those guys, that's when you kind of get in your head.
You're like, well, this guy's on a very high level right now.
We had a guy on Fear Factor that had his elbow or shoulder rather just destroyed.
He was a professional bull rider.
And he showed me his scars.
I get to go off his shirt and his whole like is is he had like lines Everywhere connecting his shoulder to his his jigsaw puzzle.
So I said like how many times you had surgery and he had some fucking ungodly number of shoulders so I don't remember like nine or ten And he goes anything goes wrong.
It just pops out Like if he falls wrong, it just pops out and then he needs someone to like yank on it Yeah, I guess you gotta extend it in a pop back in place like yeah, our friend who has that Yeah, and all for what?
I'm very curious now, because I rode one of those things for some stupid MTV thing, and I was shocked at how easy it was for them to fly me off of that fucker.
Yeah, bullfighting is way more fucked up because I don't think there's anything bad that really happens to the bull.
He doesn't like those people on his back and he bucks them off ferociously and they're only on there for eight seconds.
And some of these bulls are smart and they figure out how to hurt people.
Like they know if they buck in just a certain way while throwing their head back at the same time, you know, they can really do damage to people and get these people off their back.
They drain energy from the animal and they also force it to put its head down.
And that's important because the killing stroke needs to be delivered over the horns.
And so what they want is a very clean, balletic type of kill, which means that they have to get the animal's head arranged in a downward position so they can get the sword to go home.
It's just, it's a fucking unbelievably powerful animal that, I mean, if he got older, he would have these huge fucking saloon doors growing out of his head, and then he would use those to slam into other dudes who also have those things.
And my friend shot a water buffalo in Australia, and he said they cooked the back strap, which is like the most tender part, and he said he had a piece of meat in his mouth that he chewed for half an hour.
Yeah, he said he was practicing with his bow and arrow, and he was practicing for a half an hour with one piece of meat in his mouth that he was trying to break down.
Well, his friend died, you know, like a week after, not a week after, but soon afterwards, his friend, the other cameraman, a guy named Tim Hetherington, was killed, I believe, in Libya.
And so, yeah, I think he's got some pretty severe emotional, psychological damage from it.
The first time I got punched really hard in the face.
It's really educational, you know, because watching from outside the cage, you kind of know, like, you know, this isn't good for these people.
You kind of know it's a brain damage contest, but it's different to actually feel it.
And the first time I got knocked around pretty good, and afterwards kind of felt concussed, even during the attack, even when I was taking these shots, I was able to think to myself, you know, I make my living trying to think smart thoughts, and I better quit while I still know my alphabet.
There's also, there's an accumulative damage issue, but there's also, I've met guys where I knew them, and then they had one really hard fight, and then they were different.
But a guy like you is different because you're not really, I mean, you are an MMA fighter in that you did fight, but that's not like what your pursuit.
I was kind of curious about whether I was a coward or not.
And I wanted to do this brave thing.
For me, it was a brave thing.
But there was also a professional thing, just like the fighters have.
The fighters are doing it because they need to make a living.
I was doing it because I wasn't making much of a living, and I needed to try to do something...
Mix it up.
Yeah, that would...
Shock shock a little bit shock me out of my old ruts And write a book that had a larger audience than the books I'd written before which is sort of books for English lit nerds now What was the actual experience of the fight like?
You knew holy shit today's the day I was you know There was a level of anxiety That was always there and I was glad, however, that I didn't feel the terror that I felt that I might fear.
I was afraid that I'd be so scared that I'd chicken out or just behave in a cowardly fashion.
And there was a lot of anxiety, but it wasn't as bad as I expected.
And when I got in the cage, one thing that was really interesting to me, because I didn't know this would happen, is all the fear pretty much evaporated.
Fear is really, really useful.
You know, it's your body's way of saying to you, dude, this is really dumb.
This is really dumb.
Let's reconsider.
Let's see if there's a different way to do this thing.
So it's useful going in, but once you're in the cage and you've been locked inside, fear is no longer very useful.
Cowering is not going to save you.
You know, you're locked in.
There's no getting out of this thing.
And my fear just kind of went away.
And it was replaced by something that was really cool in retrospect.
It was this sense of focus that I'd never felt before.
Never felt before.
Nothing close to it.
Like I was in this arena, a minor league hockey arena.
There's people there hooting and howling.
I saw nothing.
I heard nothing.
All I could see was the guy in front of me.
All I could hear was him.
You know, I had this incredible tunnel vision.
So at some point my coach was screaming at me, you know, screaming out instructions, screaming out warnings.
And he's a loud guy.
He's one of his classic corner men whose voice just fills the whole arena.
I never heard it.
I never heard it.
There was just nothing in the world except for that guy.
Basically, my strategy going in was I was always a better grappler than I was a striker.
It wasn't that I was a great grappler, but I was better at it than striking.
And so we didn't know anything about the other guy.
We knew nothing.
He had no Google presence.
We didn't know if he was a striker, a grappler.
We didn't know if he was left-handed or right-handed.
These are all really bad things not to know.
And so the game plan was just we'd take him down and try to make him fight me off his back because that's what I did best.
So, you know, right off the bat, you know, within a few seconds I shot, got the takedown, got him down against the fence, was about this close to securing the mount.
You know, he kind of had me in a headlock.
I got out of it.
I swept my foot up and Was almost in the mountain then you know that then was the first clue that I was out of my league and right away He just did this really kind of fancy Sophisticated thing where he drew me effortlessly into the guard and started working on that armbar and I I didn't and I knew something was bad something bad was happening So I got up and I yanked and yanked and yanked and yanked and got out and ran for it Okay,
he rolls to his feet and chases me and And at that point, that was when an experienced fighter would have said, okay, it's not a good idea to roll around with this guy on the ground.
We need to change the plan.
And that's what my coach is screaming at me.
You know, he's just screaming at me, you know, you don't want to go to the ground with this guy.
And immediately, you know, I couldn't break out of the game plan.
It never even occurred to me.
So I waited.
I sort of set that ambush where you're waiting for the guy to throw a punch, throw a kick, and you shoot.
And that happened.
You know, he kicked me in the ribs.
And at the same second, I shot.
And it was this great moment in my life.
It was almost better than the bull riding moment.
It was this great picture.
I got him, you know, a perfect double leg takedown.
You know, he's airborne, and we come down hard, smack.
And at this point, again, I feel like I'm in control of this fight.
One of the things, and this is going to seem weird, that I've been noticing about yoga, is getting into yoga again recently, is the various complexities of each position.
It's not as simple as like, put your leg here, stand up.
It's like, back has to be straight.
Expand your chest, lengthen your back, push down with your heels, you know, push your hips forward.
There's all these different variables that you have to take into consideration in every single posture.
Well, the same exists in jujitsu, just on a much more complex level.
There's so much, because you're attacking someone.
And then they're defending.
And then you're anticipating the defense and setting up a second attack off of that defense.
Oftentimes the first attack is just to gauge how they respond.
And then you're chaining all the...
Like Helsing Gracie, Steve Maxwell, famous strength and conditioning coach, jujitsu black belt, been on this podcast a few times, described how Helsing Gracie describes jujitsu.
And he goes, because he's got kind of a pretty deep accent, he goes, you do this, then I do that, then I do this, then you do that, forever.
And the more you understand about each position, the more you understand about where could things go wrong, where can things go right, what are you trying to achieve?
And when you don't know that, like the way you're describing it, like what's happening?
And so what happened was like why I wanted to fight again like right then afterwards was because I knew that you know I'd chosen exactly the wrong game plan to fight this guy and afterwards we became Facebook friends and I see all of his pictures on his Facebook page are of him with gold medals on his chest from winning jiu-jitsu competition tournaments.
Well, there was a guy that used to come to our jiu-jitsu gym.
This is one of the reasons why I posed it.
And he was this big fucking football player.
And he was like 250 pounds.
And whenever I used to roll with him, I used to literally say, I'm going to go ride the bull.
Because that was what was like rolling with him.
He wasn't good.
I think I was a brown belt, and I think he was a white belt at the time.
And so I would always get him, but it would be a while.
I mean, it would be like, ah!
Like hanging on to this guy for a long time and riding the bull.
But this guy was a dedicated athlete and one of the things that he did was he radically improved his flexibility while he was there.
When he first started out, you know how you sit there like with your legs in a butterfly position and try to push your knees down to the ground?
He couldn't even come close.
His knees are like stuck up like this.
He couldn't push him down at all, but that fucking guy would be there after class for 40 minutes longer than anybody else, just stretching, just pushing his soft tissue to the limit every day.
And it's that kind of dedication that led to a year plus later, like my friend Eddie Bravo, my jujitsu instructor as well, He always talks about that guy, this one guy.
He fucking put in the time, put in the numbers, and he got really flexible.
I mean, he was almost at a full split after like a year and a half.
But it was the kind of dedication that led him to be a football player.
I mean, he was a professional athlete.
And this guy just fucking...
Put on the blinders and went for flexibility.
He knew he was ridiculously strong.
He knew he was ridiculously powerful.
So he had to learn the technique and he had to get flexible.
Because some people get to a certain point like, okay, okay, okay.
But you got to get to that super I can't breathe point.
And you got to push that bitch.
It's just...
It's also like, how do you do it?
Do you do it correctly?
Do you have someone who's pushing you correctly?
And where are you starting out from?
You're starting out from 39, 40 years of doing jack shit to stretch out, and then all of a sudden you're trying to take these mature, older muscles and pull them apart.
There's one thing if you're a dedicated professional athlete, you've been doing it a long time, and your body knows how to grow, and there's a certain amount of muscle memory that comes into play.
When you see someone who is really big, but then they lose the muscle mass, like maybe they'll get into something else and they'll stop lifting, they can get really big way quicker than the average person.
Like, say if you used to weigh 230 pounds, you're a big fucking giant dude, and then you drop down to 170, you could gain, like, if you took two dudes that weighed 170, and they were both, you know, reasonably fit, and one of them used to be enormous, he will get bigger quicker.
Just muscle memory.
There's no getting around that.
But your body doesn't want to do it.
You have to really push that bitch.
And I think the same takes place with flexibility and the same holds true with gains, with size gains.
He got caught for all sorts of shit that he never thought he'd get caught for.
Growth hormone, EPO. He had it all.
Yeah, he had a cocktail going.
But, you know, in his mind, I think he had a very small window to achieve something, and he probably was correct in assuming that he wasn't the only one doing it.
Yeah, there's a lot and there's also I think that there is nothing this is my opinion I think that it is not only is there nothing wrong, but there may be a case for doctors to prescribe Some sort of steroids some controlled amount of some sort of steroids for catastrophic injuries like massive leg breaks or you know the pec tears or there's some Pretty fucking significant injuries.
Here's another one.
Hector Lombard went through a bulging disc, like a significantly injured disc, and then was fighting, you know, I think he had a fight schedule like six months later.
Good luck trying to recover from something like that in six months.
I mean, you kind of can, but can you recover enough in three months to go through a three-month camp?
Well, I've said the same thing about Fedor and people got mad at me.
Fedor fought in a dirty league.
He fought in Pride.
It was a dirty league.
I mean, Ensign Inouye sat in the very seat you're sitting in and was laughing about his contract for Pride where they told him that we don't test for steroids.
Does that mean that Fedor was not on it?
No, it doesn't mean that.
But when you have a league where everyone's on it, like Vanderlei was without a doubt.
And I said, one of my favorite fighters of all time.
It's not my number one favorite.
Yeah.
Like when I get excited to watch a fight, when Vanderlei was fighting, it was probably the most excited you can get.
You know, it's just like you knew it was just going to be chaos.
Yeah, they wanted to make an example out of him, and they said, you know, we're gonna give you a lifetime ban.
Well, that's fucked up, man, because this guy, this is his life, this is his living.
He essentially took away his living from one violation, the only violation of his entire professional career.
You know, suspicions aside, and there's certainly suspicions of when he was competing in Pride, and even possibly suspicions of when he was competing in the UFC. But the reality is, the guy never got caught except for the one time when he evaded a test.
Treat it like it's a positive test.
You know?
I mean, I get the whole idea of sending a fucking message, but that message has long been sent.
I mean, everybody knows.
If you test positive, and then you see the new testing rules that they pulled out, the new ones are brutal.
You can most certainly, if you're on EPO and human growth hormone and testosterone, you can most certainly hit someone more than you would be able to if you were not on that.
Definitely.
Especially if, like, these cases where guys are testing with, like, literally superhuman levels.
Like Vitor, when they eventually rescinded the testosterone replacement therapy thing for Nevada, when they tested him, he was at 1,475.
An average man in his prime is like around 500 to like 800 for some crazy stud.
So he was like essentially like double a human being.
They broke at 230. Vandele Silva won a major victory in court today with a Nevada district judge throwing out the lifetime ban.
I will applaud!
I applaud that!
ESPN's Brett Akimoto reported via Twitter that the judge did agree that the Nevada State Athletic Commission had jurisdiction over Silva despite being an unlicensed athlete at the time, but that there was not sufficient evidence to support a lifetime ban.
I agree.
35-12-1 MMA, 5-7 in the UFC was handed a hefty punishment after he ran from a random drug test.
So they overturned the suspension, the lifetime ban, but it doesn't mean that he's been reinstated.
It's not reinstated.
But what's good is he's still under contract with the UFC. The UFC wouldn't even let him...
He made a bunch of really critical videos about the UFC. Which, again, a lot of these guys, man, they need someone to talk to.
I would love to be the guy, you know?
I'd love to be the guy that talked to a lot of these guys and just go, don't do that.
And then, you know, Rafael Cordero, a guy who's gone from that gym and now is training like Fabrizio Verdum, radically increased his striking.
Rafael Dos Anjos radically increased his striking.
Those guys are good.
Yeah, it's not just like that attitude and that drive.
It's also skill.
Like those guys are very skillful.
And they just also know about putting pressure on motherfuckers.
Like Dos Anjos versus Pettis, that was just aggression and pressure.
But again, after that fight, I've got Nick Curzon, the guy who trained him in his strength and conditioning up, I think he's here next week.
No, I'm sorry.
He's here on Wednesday.
And I'm really interested to talk to him about it because his style of training fighters...
He learned from the Marinovichs, the same guy that got B.J. Penn in the best shape of his life, back when he fought like Diego Sanchez.
That B.J., I think, one of the greatest fighters of all time for sure, B.J. Penn, but I think that B.J. is the prime B.J. So I'm really curious to see what their approach was to get a guy in the kind of condition where he could fight five retarded hard rounds like that.
In the amateur divisions, we did two-minute rounds.
And if you were in a, you know, in really intense rounds where the striking was heavy and you mix in the grappling with it, all the heavy exertion of grappling, I was more, you talked about having a heart attack doing hot yoga.
I felt that way all the time, like I'm gonna die.
And I watch these guys on TV doing five minute rounds after five minute rounds and sometimes walking back to their corners after this crazy round with their mouths closed.
Breathing calmly through their noses.
To me, that's the most freakish thing about these athletes.
Just insane work ethic and never getting out of shape and never abusing your body and always Eating the right foods, getting the right rest, putting altitude tents up in your house.
Neil actually trains at altitude.
He trains in altitude MMA. Actually, that's his gym in Denver.
But yeah, there's an advantage in that for sure.
There's an advantage in sleeping at altitude is the big one.
They actually say that you should go up to Big Bear to sleep and come down to sea level to train.
Well, like I said, you know, when I was writing it, I was thinking to myself, sometimes, like, you know, if Joe Rogan doesn't like this book, I'm fucked.
Personally, you know, I'd been through a sort of lifetime of, I don't know, like, I was a late bloomer as a kid, real small, always sort of the runt of my in school.
I'm a sort of average-sized guy now, but I came to my growth really late.
And so I sort of have a basic, you know, schoolboy story about getting pushed around and bullied.
And there's no heroism in that story.
I always backed down.
I always ran for it.
I always found some way out of it.
It wasn't because I was a pacifist.
It wasn't like I had some noble, high-minded reasons for avoiding the violence.
It was that I was scared, and I knew I was going to get my ass kicked.
But I've always kind of felt like that's no excuse for not for fighting, you know, that you should stand up to the bully.
I've always felt that way, even though I never did it.
So I've So part of what I wanted to do was I wanted to go into that cage and I wanted to sort of stand up to guys who were stronger than me and more skilled than me and sort of take in those beatings that I felt like I should have taken 20 years ago.
It's amazing to me how much psychological weight that still carries for me, that I can still make myself blush.
Thinking back to those moments.
So part of it was a redemption story for me about whether I could do something to redeem myself, at least in my own eyes, for those times when I'd flinched as a kid.
One time when I was, I think I was about like 19 or 20, when I was already a black belt and I was working out at my gym where I used to teach in Boston and I was just doing these heavy rounds on the back preparing for this tournament.
I looked up, and this guy was watching that used to bully me in junior high school.
This guy, not even from my high school, I went to a really rough junior high school in Jamaica Plain, which is kind of gentrified now, but at the time it was a really sketchy area in Massachusetts.
And I looked up, and I felt bad for the guy.
It was really interesting.
Instead of being angry at him, I felt bad for him.