Kirik Jenness and Chris Palmquist trace MixedMartialArts.com’s rise from a niche 1998 forum (400 members) to a half-million-account hub with 1.3M monthly visitors, preserving MMA’s underground roots when it was banned from mainstream TV. They discuss rampant PED use—90% of fighters likely cheat—like Kevin Randleman’s whizzinator tricks and Vitor Belfort’s steroid-induced collapse, alongside mental tolls like Anderson Silva’s post-Weidman breakdown and CTE risks. Rogan praises their site’s integrity amid UFC’s commercial dominance, while Palmquist highlights fighters’ financial struggles, from Jon Jones’s legal battles to Tom Lawler’s $100K bonus squandered on a condo. The conversation underscores MMA’s evolution: extreme athleticism, regulatory failures, and the cost of chasing glory. [Automatically generated summary]
And then my mother said, she would tell her friends what I was up to, and they'd say, what's the URL? And she'd say, submissionfighting.com, and she'd get long looks from them.
So after my mother started complaining, I changed it to mixedmartialarts.com.
Then the UFC switched to UFC TV, so we became MMA TV. And then the UFC dropped the TV, so we went back to mixedmartialarts.com.
That's where we are forever.
Although, somebody offered us...
They didn't complete $600,000 for MixedMartialArts.com, and we would have dropped it in a heartbeat for that and gone back to MMA TV. Why didn't you take it?
I would, I mean, I would date that to when everybody got together, when Nick Lembo got everybody together in New Jersey and came up with the Unified Rules, which would have been 2000-ish, and that's when the name sort of started to stick.
It's all the athletic commissions in the country come together for a year and drink and just pretty much talk to each other about the issues that are going on in their ACs and they try to...
The Muhammad Ali Act says that requires, federal law requires that boxing commissions share suspension information so you can't get knocked out in Boston and then the next weekend go up to New Hampshire and get knocked out again and then go to Maine and get knocked out again.
It's a guy who has synthol injected into his arms and chest and his shoulders.
You know that synthol stuff?
If you don't know, people are listening to this.
Synthol is something that...
I guess bodybuilders created it because if they had a body part that wasn't sticking out enough, that wasn't symmetrical, like say, some guys, their calves don't grow very well, so they would have these big upper bodies, big legs, but their calves would be skinny.
So they would inject this oil into their calves and it makes your muscles swell up, but they're like fake boobs.
They jiggle when you move.
So this guy has it all over his body.
He has it on his shoulders.
He has it on his chest.
He has it on his arms.
And because of that, first of all, his arms are heavy.
It's like he's punching with like 10-pound gloves, and the other guy has 8-ounce gloves.
And this guy is known for having fake fights.
Apparently he has like 11 fake fights on his record.
And he's a senator in Mexico.
And he comes from a wealthy family.
The guy on the left, massive plastic surgery all over his face.
His whole face looks like a fucking kabuki mask.
But look, his whole body is like fake.
And if you turn it up, Jamie, so we can hear, when the crowd sees him fight, they start laughing.
I mean, maybe you guys might want to suspend that guy if he's still a lawyer.
But, you know, it's so crazy because Mexico is known for its great tradition of fantastic boxers, like some of the greatest boxers of all time have come out of Mexico.
It's a huge part of their culture.
So to have this guy do that, this rich guy do that, is so crazy.
I think in 96 we had the art of NHB fighting on AOL. So if you started in 98, I was a member, I think, in 98. I think I was a member like the first year then.
Well, it's the best forum, and it's hard to regulate, but you guys have done an amazing job of keeping the douchebags off, or at least keeping them at bay, because that's what ruins those places.
It kicks off all the pro fighters.
Like, So many guys used to post there and don't anymore like Tito and a lot of other like Evan Tanner of course is a famous thread that gets bumped up and Every now and then where Evan Tanner was saying hello before he died and It was cool back then that like these guys who are fighting in the UFC would come on on a regular basis But they get run off by these just anonymous shitheads who just say the rudest meanest shit to them after they lost or before the fight,
you know like I've talked to bunch of fighters like not even to name names, but Even guys like John Fitch are like, I don't go there.
I gotta stay off there because it fucking fucks up my head.
It baffled me so much, I actually went to a psychiatrist to ask him.
There's a psychiatrist who's a friend of family.
I'm like, why do people do that?
And he said, human beings have all sorts of emotional impulses, and we're constrained by society from acting out on a lot of them.
Maybe you're an unhappy person, you want to swear at every single person you see, but you can't, or you get punched in the eye, or there's other bad feedback.
But on the internet, all that stuff just comes out.
But I'm like, dude, your name is like, you know, suck it off 69. You really think someone's going to find that?
It just seems like...
It seems like a weird place to look.
Now, when you started, what's really interesting about this sport, for folks who don't know, Mixed Martial Arts, when I came along in 1997, when I first started working for the UFC, it was essentially a banned sport.
The only way you could get it was DirecTV.
That was the only way you could get it.
It was banned from cable.
And when you would talk to people about it, they would talk to you like you were a horrible person for being involved in such a thing.
And the sport stayed alive because of the internet.
It was the first sport ever that stayed alive because of the internet.
The websites, the Sure Dog or MMA Weekly, I don't know when that came along, but there was a bunch of them that came along.
That was how we found out about the sport.
That's how we found out about the Pride shows.
K1 and you know all the different fights that were going on in Japan and in Brazil the only way to find out about them was the internet so we were all like really active like and you would go to these forums and you would try to find out you know what is happening what's going on now and a lot of times you know you would be able to buy tape I used to get tapes from a dude in Canada A friend of mine in Canada had a friend, and this dude contacted me, a dude named Brian, and I would buy tapes from him.
He would get them from Japan, and he would send them down to me in California.
I still have a gang of them.
And it was like all Genki Sudos, old fights, and Kid Yamamoto in the early days.
And it was such an underground sport.
It's one of the reasons why the name of your website was so perfect, because it was the underground of the underground sport.
I actually, many, many years ago, maybe 15 years ago, I tried to get Wired Magazine to do an article on it, because they did, maybe it was 10 years ago, they did an article on the role of the internet in revolutions in countries, and that was starting.
I was like, hey, I got a sport that was saved by the internet, and they sent them some cool pictures, and they were like, oh, those are cool pictures, we're not interested.
But I agree 100%, and I try to get some notice of that in sort of the tech community, or at least as much of the tech community as I know, which wasn't his Wired magazine.
But there was no sport in my lifetime that grew like MMA did, from complete total obscurity to the cover of ESPN, or the front page of CNN, the cover of Sports Illustrated.
Like, that shit never happened.
There's never been a sport that blew up like that.
And when it was at its worst, when it was at its most desperate time, it was sites like yours, really, that kept it alive.
Yeah, Ultimate Athlete Magazine listed, again, this is going back 10 or 12 years, because they tried to compete with the UFC with a show also using the term Ultimate, and they got sued and disappeared.
But before they disappeared, they gave out, they did the 20 most important things in the history of the internet.
And number eight was the underground.
And they were like, if not for the underground and several other sites, the sport might have died.
And then they went on to discuss exactly what you are, because it had been banned from television and everything.
I've only worked with Keurig since 06. Before that, I was just an IT guy.
I graduated college, regular IT job, but I was into the sport, and so I would work IT 8 to 5, and I had the underground up all the time, or I was doing work for him, like on the side, and I had a button on the floor that was attached to USB, and when I tapped it, like an Excel spreadsheet would pop up, and like another document, so it looked like I was working.
So if like a boss came in behind me, tapped the button, looks like I'm working.
But I'd really just be OG and I'm working on something else all day.
For the first decade or something, occasionally we would get ahead by a few hundred dollars, and then there'd be some local fighter I know who got a chance to fight in the...
Nebraska.
I had a guy who got to fight Nebraska, so I bought him an airplane ticket.
Maybe 2008. Yeah, we brought in Chris, and Chris kind of got some good deals, and all of a sudden I was like, oh my god, we can make more than $75 a month.
So I reached out to like tap out the big guys in the space and I made big deals that these guys were like, you guys should go ask tap out for 800 bucks a month.
And I'm like, let's go ask them for 8,000 and see what happens.
And sure enough, tap out bit at the time and it kind of took off from there.
He was so serious about his lessons at Henzo's that he had moved from Canada, moved from Canada to New York, was taking lessons at Henzo's.
He's a black belt now.
He was probably a blue belt or a purple belt then.
I was reffing a match.
Probably made a wrong call.
He lost.
I was telling him, it's not that important.
And he said, this is what I do instead of having health insurance.
I can't do both.
That's how serious it is for me.
And there's a hardcore fan base of the sport that's like that.
Like, if you were like, okay, health insurance or never discussing or having anything to do with MMA, they're, sorry, health insurance, hope I don't break my leg.
But that's the hardcore fan base.
Around them, there's millions of knuckleheads that also buy the apparel and stuff, and eventually the knuckleheads outnumber the hardcores, and it doesn't work.
One of the huge exceptions to that, though, is Roots of Fight.
My favorite MMA t-shirt of all time is, Kip did a runoff of it, but a couple of companies have, my girlfriend loves to grapple, but you should see her box.
No, the worst of the sport is in some ways when I was the most dedicated to it.
When the sport got off a pay-per-view, and there was like three pay-per-views in a year, and that was more or less it.
Hook and shoot.
Jeff would put on a couple of hook and shoots.
There was almost nothing.
I figured the sport was going to die on a national basis, and then we would just sort of build it up over 40, 50 years, and I'd be dead at the end of it.
But I believed in the sport.
I always have.
And I thought it would build up from the bottom up.
And so I thought the Internet, at the time at least, was incredibly important to do that.
So when the sport was at its lowest, I was actually the most excited about keeping the site going.
I've definitely never for a single moment wanted to turn it off because of all the jerks.
Well, I always had loyalty to your site for a couple reasons.
One, because it was one of the first ones that I ever joined, and it was one of the places where, like I said, you would get guys like Josh Barnett would post on there.
I always had loyalty for two reasons one because of that but two because Karek and I we know people from from Massachusetts like we knew like We're probably pretty close to the same age.
I'm 47. How old are you?
54 54 we in that time period we knew a lot of the same martial arts people like I'd heard about you I heard about your school in Western Massachusetts Western Massachusetts was always the home of Larry Kelly who's like a really well-known karate guy and He was my business partner for 20 years.
And he was really popular, or famous rather, for knocking out Billy Blanks back when Billy Blanks was a fucking superhero.
I mean, he was the point karate guy.
And that's another one where they dusted a guy off and made him fight again.
If you watch that fight with Billy Blanks, Larry Kelly KOs him with a hopping hook kick to the face.
And Larry was famous for his hook kick.
Which is a really hard shot.
It's a hard kick to generate force with.
Because your hips have to start out here, and then they have to switch that way.
It's a weird motion.
Whereas a round kick seems more natural, kinetically.
But Larry had it down.
And he hook kicked Billy Blanks in the face and sent him flying.
He skid across the mat.
He was completely unconscious.
And they waited for him to wake up, and then they were literally trying to get him to fight again.
This is it right here.
Oh, here it is.
Watch this.
This is like when people talk shit about the hook kick, I say, well, let me show you something here.
First of all, Bill Superfoot Wallace, and boom, that.
I mean, come on, son.
Look at that.
I mean, that was beautiful.
One more time.
Look at this.
The hop.
Boom.
And he disguised it behind the back fist or a jab or whatever he was doing with his front hand.
Beautiful.
And when they dusted him off after that, if you watch the actual full video, they waited for a long time.
They were trying to get him to go back in there and fight again, which is how stupid people were back then.
That's terrible.
They had no knowledge.
When we were coming up, and we were talking before the show started about guys who had been knocked out in the gym and all these people that we know, people get knocked out, they would dust you off and push you right back in there.
That day, five minutes later, right here is Billy.
They're warming him up.
They're like, wake up, Billy.
Wake up.
Wake up.
He's like, I got a dream.
It's called Taibo.
Smelling salts in his nose.
And there was a bunch of these guys.
There was him and a bunch of other guys like him that were these really big, super muscular guys that were involved in the point fighting circuit.
And they got real good at leaping in and tagging you.
And you're starting to see that skill emerge in MMA. I know there's a guy who fights for Bellator.
And then, of course, you've got Raymond Daniels, who's fighting in glory, who's really picking up the kickboxing game, who also was a great fighter in the point karate circuit.
And he's got that style, that leap-in style.
And the ability to cover distance, the ability to jump in and cover distance in a way that you can't.
There's a lot of guys that are sticking to that Muay Thai style, sort of flat-footed, Tiago Silva, Plod Ford sort of style.
And that shit is not flying anymore.
You've got these guys like TJ Dillashaw that are now using that Neo footwork style.
But the Raymond Daniels style, I think that's the next level.
I think you've got that style of leaping in on top of the Neo footwork style.
Because...
That ability that those guys had of just closing the distance really quick with that karate-style blitz, I still think that's a missing aspect in a lot of MMA. Machida had it a little bit.
He has an element of that, but he was more of a counter-striker.
I think...
Larry Kelly, like, in that video, like, demonstrated, like, why that can be, like, super effective, like that.
It actually came, originally, it came into the sport of a point fighting from Bruce Lee, and Bruce Lee picked it up from fencing.
Bruce Lee watched all kinds of, like, he watched boxing, he loved Muhammad Ali the same way Dominic Cruz did, try and pick up things from him, and he watched fencing, and Fencers have the quickest footwork and handwork that I personally have ever seen.
They just explode forward and he picked it up and he showed it to a karate guy named Joe Lewis, not the boxer Joe Lewis, but a karate guy named Joe Lewis.
And Joe Lewis started smashing everybody with it and so everybody else picked it up.
And then the point fighting in karate where you stop every single time you land something, which is kind of nutty.
It started to dissipate, and people started doing what's called continuous point, where you weren't trying to knock each other out.
You were trying to land super clean shots without a knockout, but you kept going, and that's where Daniels came from, and Michael Venom-Page, and guys like that.
I do think that it can be applied to the sport.
And then, you know, in a couple of years, people learn how to counter that and something new will come along.
But when you can do something new in the sport, you get a little edge for a while, like Machida did with his traditional Shotokan karate.
Those long, long lunges forward and sort of jabbing super hard and throwing that right hard.
He had an advantage over everybody until he started bringing karate guys in and they're like, okay, it's not that tough to shut down.
Once guys figure out what they're doing, you know, once you find a guy who's really good that you can spar with, then you can kind of time it.
But until then, it's like, what is this new style of movement that I have in front of me that I don't know anybody who moves like this, and it's super hard to judge.
There's a new level of guys that are coming at the grappling circuit out of John Donaher School.
And it's like this new level of leg locks.
Leg locks are really permeating all of grappling and jiu-jitsu now in a very new and strange way.
I've had some interesting conversations with Eddie Bravo about it, where Eddie really ignored leg locks until a few years back, and then started incorporating it, and a lot of it is because of the success of a lot of these East Coast guys.
Like I said, Gary Tonin, Eddie Cummings, and a lot of it is under the tutelage of Donaher, but there's a lot of guys in grappling that are really getting good at it, and of course, in MMA, it was Paul Harris.
It really kind of opened up a lot of people's eyes.
I'm going to train with Eddie tonight down in LA, and I told someone that, and they're like, yeah, he's been really working on his leg locks lately, so that's what you need to look out for.
My gym, coincidentally, we've been doing leg locks forever.
Like, Joe Lozo and those guys, that's their brother and brother.
They've been doing flying heel hooks for 10 years, and it all came from a guy named Donnie Banville in Fall River, who's actually passed now, but he grew up with a Japanese mother in Judo, and...
He was like the leg lock king and this is like 2002 and we're like, what the fuck is a leg lock?
He came into our gym and he taught us like rolling toe holds.
He taught us to fly and leg lock.
All inside, outside, all that stuff.
And we're like, this is awesome.
And for years, our gym was a competitive advantage.
We knew leg locks.
So we'd beat guys in grappling tournaments and fights with leg locks and they had no idea what was going on.
That was when I wasn't working for the UFC. I was watching that at home.
And I remember that was the issue with leg locks, was that when someone would attack a leg lock, you would have both your arms committed to the leg lock so you wouldn't be able to defend against punches.
And as you know, with a guy like Ian Freeman, it only takes one to scramble your fucking senses.
And then a couple, I mean, Frank got hit by like four or five in a row.
He just was gone, you know, and it's interesting to see that the progression of these techniques how it changes and how it morphs and One of the things like from like if you look at a guy like Larry Kelly or you look at like a lot of these traditional karate techniques those those techniques were kind of looked at Like, those don't work anymore.
But now, you're seeing so many of these traditional martial arts techniques.
Like, front kicks to the body are now standard.
Like, Conor McGregor ruined Chad Mendes with front kicks to the body.
Just jabbing him with those front kicks to the body.
And the spinning back kick to the body.
You've seen a lot of guys throw those kicks to the body now.
You've seen a lot of wheel kicks.
That Wonderboy Thompson fight, we fought Jake Ellenberger.
I mean, you're seeing these traditional techniques that are just super effective when you get them in the hands of a guy like Edson Barboza, when you get them in the hands of a guy who knows all the other things.
At various points, I have thought, okay, the sport is done, we've sort of got this body of knowledge, and we've just got to refine what we've got, and we're not going to be seeing a lot of new stuff coming in.
And every time I had that thought, six months later, something had come along, and And I would be proven wrong.
Including super simple things like the Ironman guillotine.
When it first started happening in grappling tournaments, I was reffing.
First time it really hit me hard.
I was reffing in Hawaii.
A guy stuck in an Ironman guillotine.
I thought it was a front headlock.
In Inaga, you give points if somebody gets close to a tap.
When guys started getting that guillotine, they would lean back like a regular guillotine and it didn't work.
But now when they get up high on the neck, man, it just shuts the lights out.
If you got a good grip, you know, there's also different grips.
Like this is a big one that a lot of guys are using.
This pretzel grip where you wrap around this way.
It seems awkward until you have someone's neck in there.
And then for some reason it feels amazing.
Yeah, I know.
Jake Shields likes it.
I learned it from Denny Propagos, who was a big fan of adding and incorporating all kinds of weird grips to it.
Different people have different grips that they use with techniques, and it's amazing how just those little subtle adjustments have a huge impact on the efficiency of the technique, how much leverage you can get into the technique.
Somebody won in Mexico with a guillotine and then, you know, did like motion to the camera.
They went like this and they were like, no, no, no, like this.
Like he did it to the camera, showed after he got the tap.
The name escapes me who it was.
But it's fascinating to me, all the different techniques and the different variables.
And we're seeing that even with the traditional martial arts techniques, there's still a lot of things that guys are doing wrong with traditional kicks, like sidekicks and spinning back kicks or turning sidekicks.
There's still a lot of guys that have the knee down instead of the knee up.
They don't lift the knee high enough because it takes a long time to learn how to do that.
But when you do do it, then you get that thrusting kick, which just has so much more power.
Like Barboza.
Like, you see Barboza's turning sidekicks this weekend?
He lifts that knee up high, and it comes straight at you.
I ran into Mayhem Miller and he had his cup and it was just a cup that you would buy for $14.95 at Dick's Sporting Goods or something.
The metal cups are, I think they're the best, because if you kick them, you get a broken toe, and if you figure four somebody's body, you can dig the metal cup into their spine, and they'll tap just from that.
Like, Joe Lozon has this back mount, and he calls it broke back mount.
So he gets the hook set, right?
And then he's got the hook set.
He flattens you flat on the ground.
But he scoots his ass back so like his cups in your like your asshole pretty much Mm-hmm and it's terrible.
It's terrible I've tapped out to it because he just drives forward with a hard cup and it feels like you're getting fucked in the ass So you gotta just pretty much tap.
Well, you kind of are you kind of yeah Probably no penetration, but it's pretty close.
That's so rude in terrible, but I can't move You can't be like stock because you can't like push your hips up to the sky.
Oh, the 12 to 6. The 12 to 6 elbow was banned because, and Big John McCarthy told me this, that when they first brought the sport to the athletic commissions, they said, okay, you can do anything, but you can't do this downward elbow strike because I saw a guy on ESPN break bricks in a karate tournament.
So they thought that this was the most powerful strike known to man.
Meanwhile, you got Barboza wheel-kicking Terry Edim into another dimension.
And that's legal.
And also, like, the back of the head.
Like, I get the fact that you don't want people to get hit in the back of the head.
But here's the reality.
Almost every head kick is landing in the back of the head.
A big part of the impact is the instep or the shin literally hitting that spot where everyone tells you not to hit when you do ground and pound with little short punches.
I mean, it's kind of funny.
Like, someone's telling you you can't hit a hammer fist in the back of the head, you know, when your arm is half-tied up and you're trying to do that, and they're like, watch the back of the head!
But meanwhile, when you're standing, you just crank it with all that thigh meat and bone and 50 pounds of leg behind it, and BOOM! That's legal.
The thing about the back of the head that a lot of fans don't know is that both players have a responsibility and that what usually happens, especially with those kicks, is the kick starts to come in and people shy away from it.
Because the kick's coming in and they expose the back of their head and then they get knocked out.
But both players, both fighters have a responsibility about that back of the head stuff.
And if a shot comes in that if you hadn't moved would hit you in the side of the head and then you move and the back of your head starts to get exposed, it's kind of on you.
When a guy's pounding on you on the ground and you're moving your head away from the punches to your face and he hits the back of your head and then the referee says, watch the back of the head.
Well, you were already launching that punch before the guy turned.
When we're little kids, the bones haven't quite grown together.
And as you get a little older, up until two years old or something, all the bones come together and they form in a little spot right here.
But he thinks that there's actually a weakness in being hit right here.
And in the 80s, I remember being at Master Tati's Muay Thai studio in Manchester, England, and we watched a videotape, and Tati said, that guy died on the tape.
And I was like, holy God, how did he die?
And it was a downward elbow right to here.
It sounds like a silly sort of a blood sport thing, but that jumping downward elbow right to this spot here is illegal in Muay Thai.
It may be as simple as a few times, guys, well, a lot of times in Muay Thai, guys have been downward elbowing, you know, winging elbow across the head, and they didn't die, they just got a big cut, and then somebody actually passed away from the straight downward, and they were like, we're not doing that anymore.
But the problem is, in Muay Thai, you're not dealing with the most stringent athletic commissions that are doing MRIs and CAT scans and making sure the people have their EKGs in order.
And then try that in a fight when you're adrenalized, and you're bleeding, and he's bleeding, and the referee's screaming, there's 2,000 people screaming, and imagine what your heart would have done.
But it's interesting how the supplement industry, when it comes to bodybuilding and when it comes to, you know, any athletic training, has really benefited from all these...
You know, these different, like, regulations get passed where new things become illegal.
So they come up with some new thing to kind of like fill in the blanks.
Let's talk about what's going on right now with MMA, with the testing, because I think it's pretty fascinating that this is a sport where, to be completely and totally honest, most likely a giant percentage of the population of the people involved in the sport were taking some sort of performance enhancing drugs.
It seems like to get through a training camp, and if you're not familiar with MMA, one of the crazy things about the sport is that it involves so many different disciplines.
You have to learn how to wrestle.
You have to learn submissions, meaning joint locks and chokes.
You have to learn how to kickbox.
You have to learn all these things, and you have to put them all together, and you also have to do a strength and conditioning program.
So unlike boxing, where you're learning how to box, and then you're probably doing a little road work on top of that, but that's mostly it.
It means some guys engage in some calisthenic programs.
Manny Pacquiao is like his famous ab routine.
You can see him do.
Kovalev actually does Pilates, which is kind of interesting.
But they don't have to grapple.
So for them, what's important is just honing those hand skills, recovering and coming back and honing those skills.
It's counterproductive for them to go through the same kind of workouts that the MMA guys do.
But for MMA guys, this fucking grind of getting up in the morning every day and doing this for six to eight weeks for a camp, it's almost impossible to do at the highest levels without some kind of help.
And now the UFC has incorporated this rigorous Incredibly intense testing where they're doing randoms five times a year on people.
So guys like Conor McGregor, Leota Machida or anybody, they're just going to get tested.
They're going to show up at your house.
And if you're in camp, this is what's really fucked up to me.
Say if you've got to work out at 10 o'clock in the morning and you need your sleep.
You went to bed at 10, you're looking to get 10, 11 hours sleep, and they wake you up.
They'll wake you up at 5, 6 o'clock in the morning, pee in this cup right now.
And you have to.
And they wake you up.
They fuck with your sleep.
And yeah, they're only going to do it that one day, but you might go to the gym that one day and be tired because of that, and that might be the time you get injured.
It's totally possible.
It's totally unprofessional.
It doesn't make any sense to me that they're allowed to just wake you up.
They should have to do it in an off time, in a time where you absolutely are not going to be getting your rest.
You should have parameters.
You should say, listen, I go to bed at 11 p.m.
every night.
I wake up at 9.30 a.m.
In those times, leave me the fuck alone.
Because I've got to recover, goddammit.
But they don't do it that way.
They just come anytime they want, and you have to pull out your dick and pee in a cup, and that's it.
I would say, have used at some point, it's 90. Using right now, I have no idea, but at some point in their career we're using, yeah, it's 90. Do you think that's the case at other sports?
I have no idea.
I know a fair amount about mixed martial arts, but I wouldn't know which end of a tennis racket to hold.
I don't know.
Although Chris and I spent the good party yesterday with two senior guys from USADA, and for hours they talked about everything that they've gone through ever since.
Yeah, that's the group that the UFC has contracted with to do all the testing.
And when we look at it, it does seem completely onerous, but from their point of view, they've been in a decades-long battle against people, particularly in a lot of sports, including maybe most notably cycling, where...
They told us a story yesterday about one of their testers, and they found this out later, years, years later in deposition.
One of their testers shows up at the hotel.
Somebody's waiting in the lobby, and cell phone's up.
The guy is on his way up right now.
The athlete sprints to the doctor's room, and the doctor grabbed an IV bag and squeezed it in front of him.
Forced it into him and then put another one in and squeezed it and forced it and there was enough extra liquid in his body from that so his levels were a little kind of weird but they didn't go over any threshold and that's the kind of shenanigans that they've been fighting against and I think that's the origin of that stuff like we're going to show up at 3 a.m.
and we don't really care about you.
In MMA it does seem completely unnecessary.
But from their point of view, with this decades of trying to fight dirty cyclists and things, they feel like that's the corner that they're forced into.
You can't do that because then the idea is that kids coming up are forced to take performance enhancing drugs because otherwise there's no way to win that sport.
It's a fake sport.
It's a fake sport in that the results that you're seeing are not normal results.
They're superhuman results and they only come about because you take a guy and you alter his chemistry.
You alter his chemistry to the point where he's not a human anymore.
Like if you look at a bodybuilder, perfect example, and you look at some fucking giant Dorian Yates type character just Veins all over his eyeballs, and his fucking face is ripped, and he weighs 300 pounds, and he's 5'2".
And when I got off of it, my dick died like I got hit by a sniper.
My dick was useless.
My dick was useless for like a month.
It just wouldn't work.
And I was like, wow, that's a steroid.
That's a real steroid.
And it was one of those things you could just buy for a little bit.
It was like that little window.
You could buy it and then it went away.
But I'm telling you, I never got bigger in my life off of anything other than this stuff.
And I felt so strong.
I would go to the gym, and one day I'd be able to get 10 reps, and then my next workout four days later, it was 12 reps.
It didn't make any sense.
I'm getting an extra two reps in in three or four days.
That doesn't make any sense.
But you would just recover.
And then I would think about, what is it like to take Anadrol 50, or some of the really crazy ones that they say, turn you into a wild silverback gorilla.
Yeah, those guys that would take him like I remember I knew this dude was a football player who told me that they would take anadrol 50 and they would take all this different stuff and Oh, no, no, this is a different guy.
He's a bodybuilder He told me he became a jiu-jitsu guy became a black belt under Jean-Jacques Machado great guy and He told me that when he was bodybuilding and he took the anadrol 50 stuff.
He said literally he would see red and And then wake up grabbing someone about to kill them.
Like some guy said something to him in traffic, and before he knew it, he was out of the car, reaching into the guy's car, ready to kill him, and he was like, what the fuck am I doing?
I don't want to go to jail.
I don't want to kill anybody.
But it was this overwhelming rage for almost nothing.
It just turns you into like an animal like it sets you back like you're strong as a gorilla and you you lose that like human part of you fucking well you don't think you're not really a person you're some you're like you you're mostly person but you got some other element in you and the anadrol 50 stuff is apparently I don't know if still is but that was like the stuff that people would talk about like if you fuck with that like that is that that's the rager that's the rager and that's the stuff that puts 30 40 pounds of just stacked Shredded beef on you.
That was for the light heavyweight title and that was in the 2000s.
This was way before that.
I want to say 97 or 98 and I was there for that fight.
And Vitor was like 240 pounds.
That was when everybody thought he was going to kill Randy.
And Randy just beat him down, took him down, smashed him, and changed his life.
Like, Vitor before then was this unstoppable force who had destroyed Tank Abbott, destroyed Tellegman and Scott Ferrozo, and everybody was like, Vitor is the fucking...
Like, people were talking about Vitor versus Hickson.
There was all this, like, crazy talk back then, you know?
And then Vitor had like that downward spiral that he went on for a little bit where his sister got kidnapped and all that stuff happened after that.
But the point being that like performance enhancing drugs, it's not all fun games.
Scary shit.
Scary shit.
And when you force your body to do something totally unnatural like that, The rapid change of putting on 30, 40 pounds in literally 6 to 8 weeks, that is not good for you.
See, that one I don't have any problem with at all, because he was born with just a weird eyebrow.
And also, on top of that, he had so much scar tissue from all of his fights.
So it wasn't just a matter of the bone was cutting his it was also a matter of like he had to get that scar tissue removed because it would just burst you know scar tissue if you don't know when you have scar tissue around your eye when something heals up it's measurably weaker than it was before that but now they have new methods of dealing with that like Vanderlei like before Vanderlei got his surgery his eyes he would just get hit once and it would swell up and it would like come down and almost close his eye and then would cut open and start bleeding And if you looked at him back then,
before he had his surgery, his eyes were just a mass of scar tissue, like, all around his eyebrows.
So it makes everything thicker, because you've got all these cuts, they heal, and there's a knot, and another one, it heals, and there's a knot.
And all this time that's happening, your eyelids are relaxing also from getting hit a lot, because the muscles get pulverized, and it starts drooping down over your eye.
So some guys get surgery to sort of raise their eyelids back up and put them in place so they can see better.
Because when you're fighting for a long period of time, the palooka look, like you always see it in cartoons, they get that thing, yeah, I thought you would, boy, so I'll go knock his brains in.
That thing where they would get where the eyebrows would drop down, that impedes your vision.
One thing I wanted to throw in, because there's a huge audience here, and I know as a fact a lot of them are fighters, is when you do get cut, don't let like the EMT or somebody just throw three quick stitches in there.
Get that cut done by a plastic surgeon.
It makes a huge difference.
That scar tissue comes from people letting, I've actually seen EMTs just, I know how to do that, and they'll put three stitches in and Not very nicely.
So, guys, when you get a really bad cut in a fight, go find a plastic surgeon.
Part of the story that Chris isn't telling you is that like any good person from Lausanne MMA, the minute he got a head cut and he was bleeding all over the place, he did a selfie.
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Oh, yeah.
When you walk into Lausanne MMA, they have this little wall of fame.
Because he fought 205-er and then I was way bigger and I'm just sitting there like oh this is not going our way and uh the round ends we go in there and John Wood, the syndicate guy, is talking to him.
He's like, you know, you're doing all right.
You're doing all right.
Just stay in it.
And then the second round starts, and he hits him with a hook from hell.
I found a guy at Iowa who did his PhD on the changes in wrestling rules over maybe a 50-year period or something.
I read his thesis and it was interesting.
And you can see, they call them concession holds, not submissions, but it's the exact same thing.
You could see year by year, decade by decade, they took out every dangerous hold from wrestling.
But curiously, or interestingly, by taking out every dangerous hold, it actually made wrestling better.
Because it's the one part of combat sports, you can do as hard as you want, and nothing gets broken.
You can't do Muay Thai, you can't box 100% all the time.
You sure can't put submissions and roll, you can't do Jiu-Jitsu on people 100%.
But by virtue of having taken all the concession holds out of wrestling, you can wrestle a guy just as Hard as you want and nobody has to go to the hospital and I think that's what makes wrestling so phenomenal.
Some of these guys start when they're eight years old and they go as hard as they humanly can for 20 years and they're monsters.
It's also the mental toughness that they developed.
There's a mental toughness that wrestlers possess because also they're usually dehydrated, they're cutting weight, they're irritated, almost always overtrained, almost always.
So you develop this ability to push through discomfort that a lot of people just don't have.
You know, jiu-jitsu, you can go full blast, but you have to tap.
And if guys don't tap, that's when problems occur.
But you can certainly go full blast up until the moment when you have to concede.
But, you know, a lot of people don't like to concede, and that's where the problem comes in.
This is one of the dumbest things.
People don't mind.
If someone scores a point on them in basketball, it seems normal.
But if somebody taps you, it's like the end of your life.
Because you're in a fight you would have lost.
But guess what?
That's the only fucking way you learn.
You have to put yourself in positions where you're going to tap, and you've got to deal with that tap.
And if you don't do it, you're never going to get good at it.
And we've all known so many guys that come from kickboxing that, for whatever reason, they got really good at one sport, and they never could get good at jiu-jitsu because they didn't want to roll with people who could tap them.
You know, I opened up an MMA gym way before I knew one single thing about the sport in 93, just a couple months after UFC won.
And for years and years and years, I just didn't want to tap.
If some new guy came in, if he was a blue belt, that's when blue belts were kind of a big deal, I would lose my mind at the fear that the guy might tap me.
And then I read an interview with Frank Shamrock, and he goes, oh, I tap all the time.
I was actually talking to Big John last night about the same thing.
And he's like, because he has a gym up in Valencia, which is pretty close to here.
And he's like, when a guy comes into my gym for the first time, they're a little, like, starstruck, but they're close, they want to train jiu-jitsu, and he rolls with them, and he shakes hands like they're going to start, and he taps them three times.
He's like, cool, you tap Big John, now let's have some fun.
My sense is, I've never played football in my life, and I barely know the rules.
When I watch football, I personally cannot appreciate their athleticism because I don't know what's going on.
I know that NFL players are probably the best athletes in the whole world, but I can't see it because I don't know the sport.
My sense is there's a lot of MMA fans that just don't understand the artistry that goes on there, the timing it takes to take somebody down and all the nuances of I think if they did know it, they would love watching.
I love...
GSP fighting is a fight clinic.
Look at that guy for 30 seconds and I pick up something I didn't know before.
I love watching the guy fight.
But if I didn't know much about the sport, I'd be like, ah, just why don't you guys hit each other and give each other a bloody nose.
I'm excited by the next level athletes and the next level ability that you're seeing in the sport that I think TJ Dillashaw shows, like those kind of guys.
I think you're going to see a guy, like eventually, who can move and strike like TJ, but kicks like Edson Barboza.
You know what I'm saying?
Like you're gonna see that with a guy who could wrestle like Johnny Hendricks.
You're gonna see that with a guy who could submit guys like Damian Maia.
Like right now we're still in this growth stage.
We haven't hit the critical mass yet.
We haven't hit that one where we see the perfect Michael Jordan of MMA. They don't exist yet.
I think you're starting to see glimpses of these possibilities and what TJ showed this weekend I think is a great glimpse of that possibility.
And that's what excites me about fighting.
People think, oh, you're a fucking meathead.
You like watching people beat the shit out of each other.
And it's like, I get it.
I look like a meathead.
I sound like a meathead.
It's a crazy sport being a cage-fighting commentator.
It's a crazy sport to be a part of.
People would assume that you're some sort of an uncivilized fuckhead.
But my take on it is that we only live for a short amount of time anyway.
You live and you die.
And there are extreme, exciting things that you can do with your life if you so choose to.
I think fighting is one of those things.
And I think at the very highest level, what it is, is problem solving.
It's intense consequence problem solving.
And when you're looking at a guy like TJ Dillashaw, he has created this problem solving solution with Dwayne Ludwig.
And their problem-solving solution involves incredible athleticism, amazing determination, and a fanatical coach who has a deep, deep understanding of movement and striking in a way that I don't think any other coaches have.
The way Dwayne teaches his guys is so different.
I've worked out with him, man.
He's on another level.
Like, he's all fucking Asperger's out when you're talking to him.
He gets crazy OCD, ADD, whatever the fuck it is.
But he's like...
Starts rattling out.
I've watched him and TJ hit mitts together, too.
You watch him rattle out information, like the intensity level and the amount of data that they're crunching and processing and how much thought is behind every single movement.
You know, a lot of guys, when they throw punches, like you say, you throw a one-two, you sort of move a little bit forward with the jab and then you rotate the shoulders and the hips to throw the right hand.
Dwayne has the moving.
He's got...
You move with the left, you move with the right.
And after you throw that right hand, you're moving again, and you're throwing the left hook.
You're moving again when you're throwing the right hand.
You're not just rotating your shoulders, you're stepping in, or you're stepping back.
There's all these movements, and when you see it in the Boral fight...
Especially that final flurry.
I mean, that's some shit from a fucking movie, man.
I mean, he's going left and right and left and right.
One of my heroes in the sport is Andre Pedernaris.
I think he's my hero, first of all, because he, as far as I understand it, he was the first guy to bring poor kids into jiu-jitsu and into mixed martial arts.
It was a rich kid's sport.
And he would, I mean, you look at all the top guys from his gym, they didn't have any money when they showed up there.
They'd live on the mats there.
And He played sort of an avuncular or father role, and he brought him up, and then he sent himself to learn striking.
He went to Holland and learned Dutch kickboxing, and then he welded world-class jiu-jitsu with Dutch kickboxing.
Dutch kickboxing is like Western boxing.
And plus Muay Thai kicks and some karate kicks and then a bunch of combinations.
In short, that's what it is.
And he learned it.
He put those two together.
And he created guys like Burau and like Jose Aldo.
It's so fascinating because, again, if you look back at football from the 1960s, if you look back and you watch some of the great players that played throughout history, you will see better athletes today than you see then.
But the game is recognizable.
If you go back and watch UFC 1 from 1993, I mean, go back and watch a Marvin Hagler fight from 1988, you know, or 1985. Watch Hagler fight Mustafa Hamshou, or, you know...
I mean, you might see a guy in Floyd Mayweather who has it down to a science, and I think personally, as far as boxing, I think Floyd Mayweather is the best boxer ever, because I think he gets hit the least, he moves the best, and he shuts guys down the most.
You don't have to like him as a person.
You might think he's a douchebag or whatever, but I think as far as being a skillful boxer, it's my personal opinion.
I mean, I got in an argument with Max Kellerman was telling me Sugar Ray Robinson is the best.
I'm like...
Maybe.
Do you think Jake LaMotta would beat Floyd Mayweather?
I think you're fucking crazy if you believe that.
I don't think Jake LaMotta would lay a glove on him.
I just don't believe that would happen.
I just don't see it happening.
I think if they were the same weight class, I think Floyd Mayweather would fucking pot shot Jake LaMotta and tie him up and cut angles on him and move away from him on the ropes.
I just think he's better.
I think, yeah, Ray Robinson might have fought more times and fought more people and went all the way up to light heavyweight and all that jazz, but I think Floyd's the best.
But when you look at Ray Robinson's fights, it's recognizable.
It's the same sport.
It's the same sport.
There's a little bit of a difference, a little more plotting.
They fought a little different.
They stood in the pocket a little bit more.
But Jesus Christ, you look at the difference between MMA from 93. Shit, go to 95. Look at MMA from 20 years ago and look at it now.
It's not the same thing at all.
You watched T.J. Dillashaw's fight the other night and tell me there was anybody that he was even remotely similar to that just 10 years ago.
I was talking with my, I'm the records keeper for MMA and my counterpart, the records keeper for boxing is Annie Miramontes.
A couple of, two, three years ago, I was talking with Annie and John McCarthy.
And McCarthy was talking about the fact that he owns a gym, and he rolls with all the athletes and stuff, and Andy Miramonte's got kind of a weird look in his face, and he goes, wait a minute, you roll with these people?
Because in boxing, you have to keep a distance, a separation between the officials and the athletes.
And what McCarthy said is, this sport is evolving all the time, and I can't do my job unless I'm in there actually rolling with the people.
And then he showed them a go-go plata.
And Annie, the boxing guy, was like, oh, that's unbelievable!
And several years ago, the go-go plata was a fairly new move, and he just threw that out as an example of how...
So boxing basically stays the same.
So if you're a records keeper or you're a referee, you are refereeing and officiating a sport that's been the same for 50 years, basically.
You don't have to know all the new things in it.
And MMA is just changing all the time.
And if you're an official involved in the sport, you've got to be on the mats every week or something's going to be coming up that you've never seen before.
Yeah, in jiu-jitsu, there's always some new move that someone figures out.
There's always something.
Some new way to do a choke.
Some new way to lock an arm bar in or attack a leg.
That combination that Jamie just put up on the big screen, this is TJ's final flurry against Hennon Burrow.
You show me a painting that anybody ever made that looks better than this.
Look at the way he just did that, the way he's moving on them.
And look, every time he's punching, he stands in front of them, he lands shots, and then he moves.
Boom!
Moves to the left, moving to the right.
Look, every time he's throwing these punches, he's moving.
I mean, this is like a sponge, next-level athlete, and a kid like TJ Dillashaw, super dedicated, got a perfect mind for the sport, that became best friends with a fucking maniac, like Dwayne Ludwig, who's a world champion kickboxer, who showed him how to do it.
And maybe the craziest thing about it is TJ does have a base in something else.
He started off, obviously, as a wrestler.
There's a whole new generation coming up that were on the swim team or they played hockey or something.
They don't have any base in any sort of a thing.
All they're learning from the get-go is mixed martial arts.
Guys like Joe Proctor out of Chris's Gym was a hockey player in high school and walked into the gym and never done any kind of combat sport in all his life.
And I think...
With the whole next generation of Joe Proctor's is gonna throw up stuff I can barely imagine.
Well, there's a thought, there's a school of thought that the best way is actually not that way, but rather the best way is to get really fucking good at one thing.
To get like really good at kickboxing and then dedicate yourself to learning MMA. So you will always have this advantage in the striking because we all know that to get Really incredibly good at something.
Almost requires a singular dedication.
Although TJ is one of the world's best mixed martial arts fighters, for sure.
He's probably not one of the world's best strikers.
If you put him in glory, and you put him up against Andy Ristey, or one of those really high-level...
Muay Thai guys, he might not be able to beat those guys.
But when it comes to putting all that shit together, he's one of the best at it.
But if you get a guy like Andy Ristie, who learns all the shit that he's doing, that TJ's learning, then he will have an advantage over TJ, at least in that one aspect of the game.
Whereas TJ will always have an advantage over him in wrestling, because that's his base.
There's an interesting schools of thought there that some people think that it's best to learn everything from the get-go, like a Rory McDonald.
Yeah.
And some people think it's better to be like a Damien Maia.
You come in, you have this one insane discipline, the world-class Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and then everything else you've got to kind of learn to go with it.
But worst case scenario, you could always take it to that place, and you'll have this giant advantage over everyone else.
Do you remember when Damien Maia took Rick Story down?
Rick Story is this fucking beast of a wrestler.
Super strong guy, but Damian Maia took him down, smushed him, transitioned to his back, and squoze his fucking head like a zit.
And I remember watching it going, holy shit.
I never saw anybody do that to Rick Story before.
But it's that next level jujitsu that he has that no one else has.
It was crazy, but it was real weird to watch, because it didn't make any sense, because Damian Meyer was never really a shit-talker.
He's a gentleman.
So to see Anderson, like, screaming at him, and then not fighting for the last three rounds.
Like, that whole arena was...
they were so pissed.
Because this was a huge event in Abu Dhabi, and it was right after Sheik Tok Noon had bought 10% of the UFC. It was kind of embarrassing for them to have that event there and have the greatest fighter in the world at the time, Anderson, fight this guy in Damian Maia who's well-respected and people thinking this was going to be some sort of a crazy war, and then Anderson just doesn't fight for the last three rounds.
Well, Anderson is a crazy, crazy sort of special example of a guy who had this aura of invincibility.
Everybody thought he was just indestructible until he met Weidman.
And Weidman just smashed him.
And then all of a sudden, he's not the same guy anymore.
You see him in the Nick Diaz fight when Nick Diaz fell to the ground and put his hands up like he was sleeping because he was bored with him.
He's taunting him.
And you could see Anderson was fucking with his head to the point where after the fight was over...
Anderson fell to the ground and was crying after he beat Nick Diaz.
I mean, he's crying, weeping, openly weeping.
I was standing over him while I was doing it.
He was openly weeping just because it was so much pressure to get through it because of those two fights with Weidman.
Like, Weidman stole something from him.
You know, he just beat him when he knocked him out and then the second fight when he broke his leg...
We didn't just beat him.
He stole all of his confidence.
He stole who he was as a champion.
Those moments are crazy because before that, when he fought Stefan Bonner in Brazil and put his back up against the cage, he's like, come on, try to hit me.
And they just moved out of the way and then blasted him with a knee to the body and took him out and then jumped up on the cage and all the Brazilians went crazy.
I was like, who's better than that guy?
Who the fuck is gonna beat that guy?
Meanwhile, Chris Wyvern was watching the whole thing at home, not impressed.
The mental game, I think, is way under, way, way, way underappreciated.
And it hit me when I was a kid, I learned that Sir Roger Bannister, the first man to break the four-minute mile, everybody thought you couldn't break the four-minute mile.
And he finally did it.
And once he did it, within like 60 days, four other guys did it.
Because they knew it could be done.
And then when you have an idea in your head in sports, but particularly in combat sports, whether it's I'm invincible or I'm going to beat this guy or whatever, when you have that idea in your head, it's actually physically, physiologically really, really powerful.
But that got taken away from Anderson Silva.
He realized he was not, in fact, invincible.
And then I think life's a lot tougher for him now.
I think that's why a guy like McGregor right now he really thinks he's invincible and it's that power of his mentality that pushes he literally thinks he can't lose he can call his fights call the round and he does it because he's so confident it's not that he believes it he knows it in his in his own head and it's it's powerful it carries him through just destroying these guys that Chad Mendes is a good fighter Chad Mendes is way out of shape for that fight let's be honest about things first of Chad Mendes and Urias stated this and Dwayne Ludwig said the same
thing when I talked to him Chad takes time off in between fights.
He likes to go hunting He likes to spend time doing other shit and for him to accept a fight like that on two weeks notice He did it because he thought he was gonna be able to win anyway But if you gave Chad Mendes a full camp if you gave Chad Mendes six to eight weeks and you know really let him know three months preferable It would be a different fight.
It would be a very different fight.
As long as he wasn't injured and, you know, Conor actually was injured going into that fight.
Some people just have abilities that other people just don't have.
Like Cain Velasquez has always had this incredible ability to have this phenomenal cardio.
You know, which was so ironic.
Here's another example of a guy you think is invincible and then Fabricio Verdum literally out cardioed Cain by training really hard and doing a lot of cardio at 8,000 feet above elevation, above sea level.
And Kane just thought, hey, I got the best cardio in the sport.
I don't even need to go to Mexico early.
So they're fighting in Mexico City as heavyweights at 7,500 feet above sea level.
Super high altitude.
Ridiculous for heavyweights.
And Fabrizio had been training 1,000 feet above that.
He really prepared.
He really got ready for it.
And you see Cain gassing.
And you see Cain gassing in that second round.
I was like, I don't even fucking believe what I'm seeing.
The UFC had one of their, I don't know if it was an embedded, some kind of a little video that they shot of Verdum in his camp, and I saw he was sleeping on the floor.
They showed he had four fighters in the room, and he just had a tiny little, it wasn't even a cot, he just had a pallet on the floor.
And I looked at that, I looked at the elevation, and I was like, this guy's going to win.
He's sleeping on the floor for two months at a time.
His brother was an animal and his brother bullied him.
And I think when you grow up like that, you're constantly defending yourself against your brother.
I think that's one of the reasons why Matt Hughes was so dominant.
Him and his brother used to beat the fuck out of each other.
I think that's one of the reasons why John Jones is such a badass.
Him and his brothers are all super athletes and they beat the fuck out of each other.
I think that is super normal.
I think when you develop in a household where you're constantly competing with your own brother, and in Weidman's case, his brother was older than him.
His brother was older and bigger.
And there's like bad stories that came out of that too.
He had to go to the hospital once.
I think his brother dropped a weight plate on his head.
I don't know if that's a true story, but that's what I've heard.
Well, I just think that there's an advantage in that, a psychological advantage in not being afraid, because you're constantly going to war with your own brother.
You know, you just develop a steel-hardened sense of competition where you're just ready to go.
You're ready to go.
I'm ready to go right now, motherfucker.
You're ready to go.
You know, like, you have this...
When Chris Weidman got in Anderson Silva's face, when they first waited and Anderson Silva walked up to him and kissed him, he pressed the face and Weidman didn't move.
And Anderson's staring at him and said, we'll see you tomorrow.
He goes, hey, I'm not afraid of you, motherfucker.
That's what he said.
He goes, I'm not afraid of you.
And you could see in his eyes, it wasn't like, I'm not afraid of you, man.
There's no craziness.
It was just a real calm, I'm not afraid of you, man.
I'm not afraid of you.
And Weidman was like, tomorrow we will see, we will see.
When he shot on Vitor, that was such a deep double.
And when he shot on him and clasped his hands together, I'm like, no one's defending this.
He's not defending this.
And then once he got Vitor to the ground, the difference between, first of all, the difference between Vitor, the Vitor that fought Rockhold, the Vitor that fought Bisping.
I mean, he's just not the same dude.
You take away the TRT. Yeah, TRT gone.
No testosterone injections, and he's just this fucking regular guy.
He actually is at a deficit, because his body has really low testosterone, as opposed to a normal 36, 37-year-old man.
His body, I mean, he's been taking that shit for so long.
I mean, if you go back to the Randy Couture fight, like we were talking about before, he was 240 pounds.
He's been messing with his system and hyper-human levels for so long that his regular endocrine system is probably really fucked up.
That's also the fight where Weidman got in his face at the weigh-ins, and he was yelling at him about the levels that he showed in camp.
Because his levels in camp were three times higher than Weidman's.
You know, it's an old, old, old, old line, but you talk about punch a black belt once and he's a brown belt and so on, and Vitor just got punched into being a white belt.
Well, I don't know, you know, how good Vitor's just straight ground game is.
I've never seen him roll jujitsu with, like, a high-level guy.
I've never seen it.
I saw him almost catch...
He almost caught John Jones with an armbar, but John kind of wasn't respecting his ground game.
He's just kind of...
Leaving it out there it just it wasn't like a difficult arm bar to catch I mean any purple belt who's worth his salt could have got that same kind of arm bar if a guy's like doing that with his arm but I would love to see, like, you know, you hear about guys, like, this guy's a black belt, that guy's a black belt, like, what level are they really, like, in a real jujitsu sense, you know?
They fillet them like a salmon, and they get in there and they scrape out all the cartilage.
I had that shit in my nose.
I always wear ear guards, so my ears are okay.
I have a little bit of cauliflower in a few spots, but most of it is fine.
But my nose had been broken so many times that...
What cauliflower ear is, is when your skin breaks and it fills up with blood, the blood remains in the skin and then it calcifies.
So when the blood is trapped under the surface of the skin, it bulges up in like that little hematoma or whatever you would call it, that blood becomes hard.
It calcifies and literally becomes like a stone in your body.
That's why cauliflower ears are harder than a rock.
Well, not only did they have cauliflower ear back then, but an MD in New York saw this and he believes, he's pretty confident that that's actually draining an ear.
It wasn't just the guy got hit in the ear and he had cauliflower and he was bleeding.
They just sent me a pair of these and I fucking love them.
They're amazing.
They make shorts now, too.
MMA shorts have the same material, but the jeans look and feel like jeans except in the way you move.
There's just some sort of elastic quality to the pants.
And this is a new company.
I've bought some before from some other companies that make them for hockey players and stuff because I don't fit in regular pants because I have a fucking troll body.
Really, I wear a 32, but I have to wear a belt.
I really have a 30-inch waist, but I have big-ass thighs.
A lot of times I wear 33-inch pants, straight leg, just so I can get them past my mid-thigh.
I mean, why would they design them for people that don't even wear them, in their world at least?
But the thing about guys who weight lift, if you lift weights and you develop big-ass fucking football player thighs or something like that, regular pants are just not going to fit you.
I'm always amazed when I wear XL. I'm like, I'm fucking 5'8".
What about a real XL person?
What the hell do they wear?
You know, how am I an XL? What the fuck does a guy like Big John wear?
I think that's what you're going to get, like everything.
If you want to buy a computer, what you're going to do is you're going to, you know, it's like buying a license for your computer from somewhere.
You're going to get a license for it, and then you're just going to, like, you know, like a one-click on Apple or something like that, and then you're just going to print up your computer.
I really think that.
I think you're just going to have, like, a printer, but that printer's going to have raw materials, like metals and, you know, minerals or whatever you need for batteries or what have you, and you're just going to print it.
Just cocoon your entire consciousness from the entire outside world.
Sterilize the house.
And after, I think, four months, she said, you can get a baby chicken.
Because the you know don't spend a lot of time with people because that's an awful lot of thought and even a cat would be too interactive But she thought a little baby chick would be some human thing you could interact with a little bit low low low But you know a top MD at Mass General Hospital saying buy a chicken to fix your brain indicates at the level of Understanding is as you said very low.
There's not much they can do don't even talk to people yeah, they do that and She had some family money and sort of cocooned herself away.
It makes you think about all those videos that you laugh at on LiveLeak where a guy gets fucking clipped on his ankles by a car and flips through the air and lands on his back.
Well, there was a guy in LA, California, Southern California, that got in trouble recently because they were drifting.
And he drifted into a bystander.
Clipped him.
There's a video of it.
See if you can find it on JoppaLink.com.
Drifter hits pedestrian and took off.
I don't know what the story is, but they were all trying to find this guy, and it was a total hit-and-run.
He clipped this guy with the side of his car as he was going sideways, and you would think you would, like, fall, like, got knocked back or something.
No, you flip through the fucking air like you weigh nothing.
You flip through the air like one of those little paper footballs.
You know when you do those things?
Yeah, you remember those?
That's what it looks like when this guy gets clipped sideways by his ankles and goes hurling through the air.
It's terrifying.
My exposure to people getting hit in the head is so much more than the average person's.
I don't think this is it.
But it's one of them.
Here's one.
Oh, no, that's different.
That guy got hit head-on.
That guy broke his legs.
This one, he got hit with the back and he goes hurling through the air.
But point being, I can't look at those anymore and not think about the consequences.
I know there's a woman who fights in the UFC that, not even her last fight, but the fight before that, Fucked her up so much that to this day she's got all these hormone problems.
But the damage that these guys receive on a daily basis, like we were talking about the Rory McDonald fight, or like a lot of these fights, you watch it and you don't think about it.
You just go on with your life.
But every now and then you'll run into one of those guys years later.
That doesn't fight anymore, and you're like, whatever happened to that guy?
And then you'll see him somewhere, and you're like, oh shit.
And you'll talk to him, and you'll hear him slurring their words.
I remember the first time I was training in Boston, and my boxing coach was this guy, Joe Lake, who wound up training Dana Rosenblatt.
Yeah, Dangerous Danny Rosenblatt, who was a training partner of mine.
He was one of the guys that convinced me to stop fighting because I realized I wasn't training the way he was training because I was trying to do comedy and all these different things at the same time, but I was still fighting.
I wasn't realizing how much dedication I had let slip by until I watched him train.
I trained with him, and I realized, okay.
I need to get out of here.
And I was only 21 at the time.
He was like 17 or 18. I think he was 18. But we trained at this gym with a bunch of really tough guys.
And Joe Lake, who was my boxing coach, was that prototypical South Boston boxing trainer.
It was fucking wars.
It was wars in the gym every day.
There was wars.
There wasn't no pity-pat bullshit.
You were going to war.
And I watched a few guys that I knew from a few years back come in the gym, and they would just slur and start talking funny.
I was like, holy shit, I'm looking at fucking brain damage.
Like, I'm looking at it, and here's a guy that I knew five years ago, and he didn't have it.
And now I'm talking to him, I haven't seen him in a while, and he's got it.
And it started to sink in.
Like, these headaches that I'm getting from these training sessions, like, this isn't free.
I'm not immune, you know?
And you watch Joe Frazier talk on TV. Where do you think that came from?
The thing about it that I find that haunts me, and I'll be honest, it haunts me because it may start happening in our sport, is CT sometimes doesn't manifest itself until five or even ten years after retirement.
The guy's fine.
Could be a commentator on TV. Everything in his brain is working well, and then five years kicks in, six years, and all of a sudden he starts getting a little more aggressive, and his gait isn't as good, and he becomes a different person, and his soul starts to piss away.
I know guys that have fought like twice in their whole career and already like they just that one fight did them in and they should never fight again because they're just punchy.
The people that don't give a fuck, they're just looking to be mad at anybody but their mom or whoever's fucking yelling at them at work or whatever your issue is.
You're taking it out on Kenny Florian, but really you're mad that you live in your mother's basement.
There's a certain amount of people that are just getting fined, people mad at anything.
But Kenny, I think, was posting about it on the UG. That's how I found out about it.
Because I knew about Sean.
I knew Sean Gannon from The Fight World.
And I knew about Kimbo, obviously, from these YouTube videos.
And I couldn't believe that they had actually organized a fucking real fistfight.
And it went down.
Jamie, pull that video up because that's a fucking goddamn crazy video.
That was the first time Kimbo fought someone who actually knew how to fight.
And, you know, he became this internet celebrity by just lighting these idiots up in backyards and move away from the satellite dish and, you know, look out for that metal thing.
Part of the rules were the winners got the footage.
So there were like six guys with cameras.
And so, like, I see Mike and those guys, they all had their own cameras, and Sean won, and were like, hand over the tapes.
So there's all this, we like, we figured they just taped the fights, but there's all this footage of them driving up, flying in their jet, flying in their jet, going to the hotel, and like, you know, we're gonna kill this, I probably can't use their language here.
And you see him now when he fought Ken Shamrock the other day.
It just didn't look the same.
He just looks like a completely different guy.
That's the old Ken Shamrock one from the one Ken backed out of, and then he wound up fighting Seth Petruzzelli.
Yeah, that's the old one, I'm pretty sure, because Ken looks younger there too.
Ken already looks fairly old there, but Ken backed out of the fight like last minute, and then he fought Seth Petruzzelli, and I knew that that was deep water for him.
I was like, yeah, you can't fight that guy.
But look how good Ken looked there for a guy who's 51. That was a super disappointing fight, though.
I just couldn't imagine that Ken couldn't finish that.
That doesn't make any sense to me.
I mean, it might not be a word.
I said it looked fake as fuck, because it did kind of look fake as fuck.
But one of the things that might have made it look fake as fuck, because it was a 51-year-old man who has fought combat sports for 20-plus years, and his body just is not capable anymore.
I mean, anybody like Luke Rockhold gets your neck like that?
But just to see Ken not be able to finish a perfectly placed rear naked choke, hand on the bicep, you know, anybody who's really good at jiu-jitsu is going to finish that.
It's like it moved me because I've been there before when a lot of Brazilians had shown up to maybe see Anderson fight or something along those lines But the level of patriotism that the Irish had was on a completely different scale It was just it was another level like several notches crazier That's why I like I mean For me personally, my favorite shows are just the little amateur ones when I'm actually coaching or somebody that I've helped train or something.
I'm going not just because it's my job, but I'm very curious to see how they're going to treat her in Brazil, whether or not this Betch Coheia chick has that kind of love and respect, whether they think she has a chance, what kind of crowd's going to show up, what is it going to be like if Ronda beats her.
I learned that in the late 90s, or it could have been, yeah, it was the late 90s.
Pat Miletic fought Dan Severn, and I got the tape afterwards from Monty, who promoted it, and they're doing the pre-fight interview, and they say, Pat, what do you think is going to happen?
And Pat goes, I don't know what's going to happen.
That's why we're having the fight.
And he was fighting a guy who was 100 pounds heavier than him.
And I think it ended up being a draw because nobody tapped anybody.
But Pat, Pat really did win that fight.
And ever since then, I've been like, you don't know what's going to happen.
You throw bones at people, you zig when you should have zagged, and BOOM! Pretty sure we were all thinking when Anderson Silva beats Chris Weidman, what's next?
Yeah, he caught Uriah Hall with his long left hook.
Boom!
And put him away.
Standing.
I mean, he puts guys away standing.
Puts Mark Munoz away with that fucking brutal elbow.
Yeah.
He's no joke, man.
He's an animal.
You know, and now as a middleweight champion, what's fascinating right now is now that he's passed Vitor, which is sort of a mandatory fight, there are so many good fights there.
My first experience was I was cornering somebody at a show in Massachusetts, and Chris, I think my guy lost.
I'm just kind of sitting there, arm around him, giving him water or whatever, and Chris goes, there's this new guy, and he's had to suffice, and it's only in five seconds.
Come here!
And so he grabs me, and we go running up to the cage, and it was over.
The fight had ended in 19 seconds, and I know the guy who fought, and the guy who fought is, like, tough and got crushed by him, and Chris just said, this guy is going to be the next one.
So I cornered him, this is funny, I cornered him in the Michael Kuiper fight in Sweden and we walk in after the first round and he looks at us and he's like, I think I blew my fucking knee.
And I'm just like, what do you mean you blew my knee?
And so the other corner, his jiu-jitsu coach is like, you should sit down.
He's like, I can't, I won't be able to get back up.
Yeah, he's from that area, like Swansea, Somerset.
No, he did.
Did he live there?
He lived there for years, because he used to, that's where he grew up, like Swansea, Somerset area.
And he liked Rhode Island, because everything's a small city, everything's close.
He lived in the nastiest condo you've ever been in.
It was like cat piss everywhere and like just like smell the you know everything it was terrible but you know he doesn't need all the money so for him like a hundred thousand dollars is like five years of living because he doesn't need you know nice amenities nice things and he just teach jujitsu here and there and do seminars and I don't think he's worked a regular job since since after before fighting he was like a high school history teacher for a while And then just get into fighting and that's it.
Our gym, if we don't think you're ready to fight, you don't fight.
And guys will leave.
They'll go to the Taekwondo school that lets them fight MMA with no experience, and then you just see them get killed because they're just not prepared.
Guys that come to our gym don't fight for years.
Even amateurs, they come in and they learn everything.
They learn how to wrestle, jujitsu, kickbox.
And then maybe if you think they're ready, you take a fight.
But either way, you guys have fucking made it through the storm that was the beginning of MMA, and I think this website was an integral part of keeping the core fan base alive.
So, Kierik, thank you very much for everything that you've done.
I really, really appreciate it.
It gave me a place to waste a lot of fucking time and talk a lot of shit about all kinds of different fights and read a lot of cool information and news.
And whenever anybody's hurt or breaking news, I always find out about it on the underground.
As I've told these guys before, when there's a UFC that you're not on, to me, and again, I don't want to sound like an ass kiss, but it's just what I've said, not in front of you, but to these guys previously, it doesn't feel like a UFC without you there.
The weigh-ins aren't just, it's just not the same.
So thanks to you for making the UFC the UFC for me.