Robin Black and Joe Rogan dissect combat sports’ evolution, from Stallone’s Rocky comeback at 59 to modern fighters like Dominic Cruz refining footwork post-leg surgery. They critique MMA’s monetization-driven rule changes (e.g., punching-free BJJ) and highlight underrated techniques like Anderson Silva’s front kick. Concussion risks—seen in Vandele’s USADA ban or Nick Denis’s retirement—contrast with the UFC’s inconsistent drug testing, though Eric Silva’s shift to sustainable weight-cutting is praised. Black compares fighters’ adaptability to "jazz odyssey" vs. rigid "sheet music," while Rogan questions aging legends like Silva and Malignaggi’s passion over safety. The discussion underscores how innovation and awareness now define greatness in combat sports, beyond brute strength or outdated narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
Camouflage is a weird thing, like when you see guys walking down the street with camouflage, and it's like, what if they really were camouflage, like you just see a head floating down the street?
You're going to be able to see movies play out in your living room right in front of you.
Video games.
If you were doing a demonstration for a company or something like that, and you want to show them a project you're working on, or maybe some architecture you're trying to construct.
Yeah, but I mean, you're bow hunting, you're, you know, there's so many different things, you know?
Like, I literally do fighting stuff all day every day, and when I get a break, I hang out with my wife, and sometimes I'll take a day off, and that's it.
I don't know about other stuff.
It fascinates me how you can possibly know about so many things that seem unconnected.
I listen to archery podcasts where they're just talking about very specific ways to hold a bow and fix your sight and make sure you use your release properly.
I listen to those fucking things for hours and hours and hours obsessively on top of practicing.
I just get obsessed with things.
But I used to worry about it when I was younger.
I used to be like, what the fuck is wrong with me?
I can't just concentrate on one thing.
I always have all this other shit going on in my life.
But then I realized, well, that's just me.
If I just enjoy it and just do those things, then it doesn't concern me.
Then I'm just appreciative that I have so many interests.
Did you ever read some piece somebody wrote, something about, I hate Joe Rogan, or why I hate Joe Rogan, and then he went on this path and he discovered that he actually hated that you were your authentic self.
Have you ever read this?
Somebody wrote this thing.
And as he learned more about what it was to be authentically him, he realized his hatred for some famous person was that he was looking at him and he hated that that guy was actually him.
Well, it's easy to hate somebody that's, like, in the microscope all the time, because you'll find all these flaws.
Like, if you follow someone every day, day in, day out, and expect...
Perfection or enlightenment.
You're gonna be massively disappointed because the kind of exposure that you get when you're doing a podcast like when you're talking to someone for hours and hours and hours, you know, I've done 700 and what is this?
Like when you're talking about accepting why you go and do things the way that you do them, that's why you do, because you're like, fuck being some other thing.
Having this kind of a life is super lucky, and if I didn't live it that way, I wouldn't be taking advantage of this huge opportunity that very few people get.
Most people have to work.
They have an actual fucking job that they don't really necessarily like that much.
And somehow or another, I've figured out a way.
I mean, I worked when I was younger, for sure, and I figured out how to get to this spot by...
Sort of moving away from things that I didn't want to do.
But now that I get to a point where everything I do, whether it's this, I was looking forward to this.
I'm like, I'm going to get to hang with my friend Robert.
We're going to have some fun.
Talk some MMA and life and all kinds of shit.
And that's the same thing I feel like when I go do stand-up.
Same thing I feel like when I'm practicing archery or I'm working out.
Watching things improve, watching yourself get better at things and analyzing things and figuring out what the holes are, the flaws, where the errors are in your little system that you've created.
Those moments are fucking awesome.
They're really fun.
Yeah.
You know what really frustrates me, really frustrates me when talking about these things?
Sometimes I'll get messages from people and they'll say, well, that's easy for you to say because, you know, you've got lucky and you found it.
But like, you know, a lot of people can't do that.
A lot of people have responded.
They'll come up with all these reasons why they can't instead of saying, well, my situation is particularly difficult, but there's a workaround and I'm going to find it.
I would do platform work where I would demonstrate how to do stuff for other hairdressers and people.
And I went to...
Not the Viper Room.
One of those clubs.
And this pretty woman comes up to me and says, are you a musician?
And I'm like, yeah.
And I'm kind of about to say, but I live in Canada.
And she goes, well, my husband's putting together a band.
And you've got to meet him.
His name's Andy McCoy.
And Andy McCoy wouldn't mean much to a lot of people, but to somebody who's really into Motley Crue and stuff like that, he was in a band called Hanoi Rocks that kind of started that movement.
I'm like, whoa, shit, I'm going to be famous.
I'm going to be rich and famous.
Not knowing that, although Metal Edge told me that this guy was a big deal, he was just a musician.
But to a 20-year-old from Winnipeg, he's like, oh my god, I'm going to be in a huge fucking band.
So I go and I meet him.
We go to his house in Woodland Hills.
Actually, I've been here four times.
There was that time.
Then I flew home to Winnipeg and they flew me back down because they were going to get me singing in their band.
I'm like 20 years old.
This guy's like famous to me, right?
So I get down there and that shit is not all that organized.
You know what I mean?
Like something's not making a lot of sense.
And then around day two, I figure out, okay, it's because everyone's on heroin.
And it started, we had smoked some pot, which in Winnipeg, in Manitoba, we called that dope.
You want to smoke some dope?
It's like, sure.
It was like, so he goes, do you do dope?
I'm like, yeah, I just smoked it with you like 20 minutes ago.
He goes, no, like, and then before I knew it, he'd injected me with heroin.
We were in touch about maybe still putting this band together and then he was clearly, you know, had addiction issues.
I followed him a little bit after.
He had a reality show.
He's from Finland and he's a pretty big rock star in Finland.
And he and his wife, who was there at the time, that was the woman that I met, they had a reality show with, you know, kind of like what Ozzy did, but with them.
Well, it's just so low-maintenance, being a comedian.
You just have to...
You know sell tickets and you get there and you say hi and you just go do your act Except for the 30 years of developing your act yeah building it and having you know the insight to Understanding how people laugh and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, you're sort of developing your ability to make an act But the act itself is like it lives for about two years and it dies Then you have to like let it go like you you you build it up You put it on something, put it on some sort of a special or a CD or something like that, and then you got to abandon it.
Well, you know, what happened was he learned how to get comfortable standing up, where he didn't worry about being taken down all the time.
And then you got to see what he's really capable of with his striking.
Because you look at his earlier fights, he was a little more tight because he was worried about being taken down.
So all that takedown defense, I mean, he always had the great footwork, but now he also has a solution if you do grab him.
So when guys grab him, he's not out of water.
He knows what to do.
He can break free again.
And it is way harder to take someone down when they're not trying to wrestle with you.
If someone's trying to be aggressive and attack, you can counter.
And you can take advantage of openings that they leave.
But when someone is just being defensive, like if jujitsu, if you roll with someone, it's very hard to tap someone who's just being defensive.
They're not trying to attack.
It's when they open up and they go after you, that's when you can get them.
That's when they leave openings.
And I think the same thing with wrestling.
These guys, like, Mirko Krokop was a great example.
When he first started fighting in Pride, he took, you know, just like a year or so, and all of a sudden he had takedown defense figured out and everybody was fucked.
Because then you gotta stand with this guy, and he was one of the best examples of a high-level kickboxer that entered into MMA because he was always a one-shot explosive striker.
Whereas a guy like Ernesto Hust was a combination fighter, a guy who threw beautiful, technically perfect combinations, but never really like, bah, like blitzed in and exploded.
And it seems like the blitz is a big part of MMA fighting.
I mean, the technical striking for sure is important, but I think you've got to be able to make that mark quickly, especially with those little gloves.
You know, when Ali was young, before they took away his title and he was kicked out of boxing for three years and then he came back and he was much more flat-footed.
But the early days when you would watch Ali fight guys, he would be able to move away from them and then slide back in and hit them.
And they really didn't have a solution to that.
And when you don't have a solution to that, it means you're getting hit and you're not being able to hit the other guy.
This is not he holy fuck Anthony Johnson someone said he I was gonna be able to take him down.
I can't and that look on his face like that changes everything The whole fight now from this moment that this big dude stopped my takedown shook it off and kind of looked at me Now the whole fight is nothing like I had laid it out.
I saw when you had Carlos and his movement guy on here, and that was one of the things they talked about.
It's one of the things Ido Portal talks about, too, is that one of the biggest weaknesses in our whole chain for most of us is our feet and our ankles.
I literally, I was in Mexico and I would have to like sit against, lean on my wife to get to the bar to drink some tequila so that it would hurt a little less so I could get to the pool where it didn't hurt as much because you had water buoying you.
They also say a big issue is shoes the way the the padding that we have on shoes the extra like the runners padding You know you're really supposed to have like the most minimal amount of protection from the environment as possible Just a thin minimalist type of a shoe that and that allows us to use our feet The thing we got is just a big lump on it, you know, so you don't get to use it But when when you train taekwondo growing up like martial arts for kids like kids and teenagers and stuff man, it's just gonna make everything better and Well, definitely flexibility.
I'm still really flexible at 48. I mean, it's because I never stopped doing it, but it's also because I started doing it before my body grew up.
But what they're saying now is that Navy SEALs that are learning, they're going through training and everything with those...
Toe shoes.
They're trying to stop them from wearing those toe shoes.
Because so many guys, their feet are not strong enough to run and do all these exercises and those things.
Because they're used to wearing your basic running shoe with a thick heel.
And if you ever...
People are listening to this.
I think there's a TED Talk about it where they went over how...
Someone had created one of those running shoes with the thick heel area, and what it had done is really essentially changed the way people run.
It changed their gait, and it made people run heel first, which is totally unnatural.
You're supposed to ball the foot first, and your foot's supposed to absorb the energy.
And when you do that, your foot acts as sort of like a spring, and it slows you down, it decelerates you, and that's how you're supposed to run.
You push off that, and you run with that.
If you do that, your foot will be very strong, and you could run long distances, and your foot will stay healthy.
But if you're used to using those running shoes with the big heel, you go heel down first, you don't have that strength in your foot, and you can get really fucking injured if you try to do the same amount of miles and the same intense workout with a toe shoe or something like that.
Because your feet are just not designed for it yet, or conditioned for it, rather.
And we talked about, I was hurt, I did yoga, it fixed it.
You did yoga, it hurt, now it's better.
Like, you have to go through a certain amount of hurt.
You have to go through a certain amount of, you know, challenge to repair it.
But it strikes me so strange when you think about some things that humans do, something as small or big as going, well, we're going to wear these shoes, changes everything.
Not only how we are, our future, these little things that we do as people, you're never able to project the good and the bad outcomes of them in the future.
You just have to deal with them when they have them.
Yeah, if you're getting caught in things, you know, just trying to fight out of them or trying to not tap, you put tremendous amount of pressure on your joints.
Put a tremendous amount of pressure on your neck, on your back, always a lot of pressure on your back to try to get out of situations.
You're contorting yourself often, you know, and you really need to be strong in those areas and flexible.
I took, first time I met Eddie, I took his seminar and Eddie's got a room full of people.
And I think he, I maybe had heard him say this before in a video or something and people are stretching and he says, so you gotta, you gotta work on that.
And somebody said, well, this is as flexible as I am.
And he's like, that is a very North American line of thinking.
No other place where people go, this is as flexible as I am.
They'd say, this is as flexible as I am right now.
If I work at it, I will become more flexible, like everything in life.
But for some reason, we have these limiting beliefs.
But that belief that there is no point, that belief that there is no limit whatsoever is incredibly powerful when it's put together with a drive of a work ethic, with an insane work ethic.
Well, it's interesting, too, because with fighters, when they're in camp, most of the time you're preparing for a specific opponent.
You're not really picking up new skills.
The way they really pick up skills is by training and taking chances and going outside their comfort zone, which is really not something you want to do while you're conditioning yourself for a fight.
So when a lot of times when guys are going back to back to back and they're fighting a lot, they're not really improving much.
What they're doing is just they're improving their ability to compete because they're getting more comfortable because they're competing a lot.
They're getting relaxed, they're in great shape, and they're getting used to the feeling of being in competition.
But man, there's not a lot of time to take some time to just go over new stuff, to learn new things, to add new weapons.
Well, when I talked to him and his coach, Kavanaugh, who I only spoke to briefly, I actually tried to contact him to ask him if I could pick his mind a bit before doing this breakdown.
I took it as a big compliment that he's like, no, no, I'll maybe chat with you after.
Like that But if he gave me something, I might pass it on.
I took it as a compliment.
And I do a podcast, The Mentality of Combat Sports.
And I do it with my very good friend, David Mullins.
If you spent all that time training for Jose Aldo, and only Jose Aldo, oh my god, Chad Mendes is in, questions, doubts, concerns, what are we doing, game plan.
Instead, he was like, it doesn't matter who it is.
And they train to get better every single day in everything.
When you recommended my stuff to Dana, I flew down to the office with him and Craig, and Dana and I were literally standing up acting out stuff while we were talking.
It was really, really, really exciting and cool.
And it is cool to be doing that for the UFC. It's awesome to have you, man.
Yeah, well, when you first started doing it and we became friends and I would watch your stuff, you know, I just immediately was saying like, wow, this guy should be doing this for the UFC. I mean, your stuff is awesome.
There's so much, and you can get so much out of it as a fan.
As someone who's like, look, this fight is goddammit.
This Conor McGregor, Rafael Dos Anjos fight is an epic super fight.
It's two champions in their prime, one of them coming off of a stunning 13-second knockout to win the title, the other one coming off of a brutal beatdown of one of the most popular contenders.
I mean, Dos Anjos looks like a goddamn murderer, and Conor looks like a freak.
He's like just these two guys, it's perfect.
It's the perfect fight.
So to get some technical insight and to get a view into what your thoughts are on footwork and movement and what Dos Anjos could possibly do to mitigate some of that footwork.
What's gonna happen if Conor gets on his back the way Mendez got him on his back?
Because Dos Anjos is a lot bigger, a lot stronger and dangerous as fuck with his submissions.
But breaking that stuff down, when I looked at it, so my real goal is to try to influence the way people watch fighting and to make them see it the way that I see it.
That's the actual goal.
The goal is that I see this crazy, unbelievable stuff happening underneath some of the surface, and I want to entertain people long enough that I can trick them into learning some of it.
You just want to entertain them, make sure they're having a good time.
And at the end of it, they are walking around going, yeah, and by the way, that kick works this way.
Because if you go and you just stand there and you have a diagram, I think there was always outside of...
People were learning fighting from your commentary.
And then there wouldn't be another show.
So then they'd have to come back and they'd learn during the fights, which is great.
I mean, that was your...
You did more to educate people about fighting than any person ever, probably.
I mean, I can't think off the top of my head anybody who has...
Contributed more knowledge of fighting.
And it was done.
You're entertaining.
You're having fun.
They love your voice.
So that was the learning.
But then there's not another fight now for a few weeks.
We should learn some shit in the meantime.
And we should get you prepared so you don't have to teach them everything about this fight in the fight while calling the fight and making sure it's entertaining.
Well, there's never been a time like this before where you could get so many different breakdowns, like the Gracie breakdowns of submissions that Henner and Huron do, Lawrence Kenshin stuff, Jack Slack stuff.
But when people did it excitedly, people were like, oh shit, fighting is way more interesting than just...
I mean, the real thing that kind of would bother me is there wasn't...
You know, a fight would happen.
This awesome stuff would happen.
Crazy things that had, you know, changed the way that you understood how people moved and what happened when trained athletes fought each other.
And it meant something to the next time that you fight, the way they move, all that stuff.
And then people would be like, alrighty, got it done at two minutes of the third round.
What's next for this guy?
Which is, that's a great conversation too.
Or what does this mean for the title rankings?
Or, you know, who are you going to call out?
It was instantly looking ahead.
Fighting immediately was like, well, what's the next fight and how's it going to go down?
No amount of like, what does it mean?
What happened?
I mean, we're taking human beings at the highest level of training and in a global experiment to figure out what is the ultimate way that human beings can do combat.
And we're putting them there at personal risk to themselves.
For our entertainment.
And brilliant shit happens.
We can't just move on.
We can't just go, oh, well, you know, Johnny won or GSP won or whatever.
Well, what's his next fight?
We got to honor that fight.
We got to honor the fact that these guys are giving that stuff.
Yeah, jujitsu is a whole other fascinating world of its own right now.
But, yeah, I just love now that it's like it isn't just...
The outcome, or the storyline around it, or the shit-talking, people are interested in the fight, like the thing that's happening when these geniuses are actually moving.
Eventually, at first, just gotta see home runs, man.
We're just gonna sit around until the home runs happen.
Or, like what if in football, people who love football didn't understand, they were just bored out of their tree booing when they ran the football one yard.
And they only cheered when it was like a long bomb.
That's what happened to some degree in fighting.
Guys would be against the fence or guys would be grappling and people would be like, ah, when is the fighting going to happen?
As we all know, but we don't do it because our coaches and the way that we've taught and the way we've celebrated the spinning and beautiful techniques, that's what we're doing.
That space in between you and me being able to kick each other from here, the Mexican team entered that space, took it away and punched you in the body.
It's like the sport itself kind of agrees to do taekwondo.
And that happens in every sport.
And in jujitsu now, I love jujitsu, but sport jujitsu isn't really fighting anymore.
All this barambolo and all these interesting stuff, they're beautiful.
It's fascinating.
It's an amazing sport.
But if we are in an environment where we are going to...
sort of unconsciously agree that these are the structures and rules we have the sport changes as soon as you remove punching like a lot of these things certain defenses to things is punch so once we remove that you get this beautiful cool sport but it moves further away from fighting the same way every other martial art did well it can but it also doesn't have to
One of the things I really love about what John Donaher's doing with Eddie Cummins and Gary Tonin and these assassins that he's got out of Henzo's in New York is they're figuring out a way to use these leg lock transitions in a way that it's not dangerous to do.
The traditional thought was when a guy goes for a leg, and if you do it improperly, it is the truth.
You're committing two arms to the leg, and you're not going to be able to defend against punches.
We saw that with Frank Mir versus Ian the Machine Freeman.
Remember that fight?
Frank was going for that heel hook, and Ian just kept punching him in the fucking face, and he stopped him while he wasn't tapping, and he was just slamming him in the face.
With the highest level jujitsu guys, they're putting themselves in a position, first of all, when a guy like Gary Tonin or Eddie Cummings grabs a hold of your leg, you have fractions of a second before your knee explodes.
The cool thing about fighting, like everything is fucking cool about fighting, you know?
But another in a long list of cool things is how the money that exists, like when we talk about why the UFC is a great thing, I think the UFC is an awesome thing.
When you monetize something, more study and things happen to it.
As soon as you say you can become wealthy if you get good at this, gyms and businesses and things can pop up around it.
It speeds the evolution of how things happen.
And because MMA exists as a way to get paid for doing fighting, guys like Donaher will arc back with their study of the martial art back to where they get paid, which is fighting, which is the UFC.
Well, it's interesting because you need a guy like a Donaher.
You need one of those genius guys to just try to figure out what's the best way to approach this.
Where are the problems?
Well, the problems keep happening when you're going into the transition and the guy grabs this leg.
Okay, how do we stop that?
Well, let's look at it backwards.
Let's attack it from this side.
Now, we're going to attack it this way.
So many times when guys would go for an arm bar from side control, you'd be in side control or you'd be in a mount, you'd grab an arm, you'd swing over, and you'd go and you'd commit to that arm, and then the legs would fly over for the defense.
Well, Eddie Bravo was one of the first guys to say, well, let's not hook it with the right arm.
Say if you're going for someone's right arm and you're trying to arm bar them, don't hook it with your right arm.
Hook it with the left and grab their leg with your other arm.
And then commit to it that way.
Because this way, you've stopped the defense and you've got a much more secure set of offense.
One of the reasons why people were going for it in the first place was because of the gi.
Now, the gi is a really interesting thing because I think the gi is very good defensively.
And I think defensively it's one of the best tools to make sure that you're using proper technique because you can't just explode out of things.
You have to use the right position.
You have to understand where you're in danger, where you're not in danger.
However, when it comes to attacking, the gi gives you so many more handles and so many more options that I think it's false security.
And I think you're way better off not using it to attack.
Makes sense, though, if we're really going to use this thing, if it's going to be in there.
But fighting, too, it's like even how jiu-jitsu is used in fighting changes so much in such interesting ways, in ways that we've now seen happen over and over so many times that you can predict their future again.
Like, you know, the one example that I always kind of use is, you know, I'm in your guard, so I do a can opener, and then your guard opens.
And then you discover, hey, wait a second, I'll armbar that.
And you armbar me, so I'm in your guard, a can opener opens your guard, wait a second, you armbar me, no more can openers!
That doesn't make any fucking sense.
Danaher later goes, George, we're going to can open Condit.
But Danaher, what?
I don't do a good French accent.
But what about the armbar?
We're going to can open him and shut down the armbar.
We don't stop can opening because there's an armbar there.
We just solve the problem.
And that kind of adjustment, you see it now in the guard.
It blows my mind that in gyms everywhere, very smart coaches, they're like, the guard is dead.
The crazy aspect of it, because we've seen this a million times.
So, all right, guys, we're not going to submit from guard.
Our use, when we are in guard, we're going to use it to get an underhook, threaten one of these three things, and heist their hips back out, and we're going to stand up.
We're going to work on our stand-up more, and for here, we're going to get back up.
Okay, coach, that's great.
So now for the next year and a half, your job on top of me becomes hold me down, stop my stand-up, and hit me.
And my job becomes fight you to get back up.
That happens for three months, six months, two years.
That becomes the game.
You hold me down and beat me up, and I try to get back to my feet.
Your game on top hasn't even involved the real threat of submissions for two fucking years because all your training partners are just standing up.
So you're getting weaker at dealing with submission threats because you never see them anymore.
Your training partners don't do them.
Somewhere in Eddie's gym, you got Ben Saunders and guys, they're working on it.
Not only are they getting better at it, You're getting worse at it.
As time goes on, you're getting worse at it.
Inevitably, all of a sudden, it's like the guard's back in play.
Holy shit, everybody's submitting guys off their back.
Why?
He got better, but you got worse.
The mindset of how to train that thing in the gym every day removed a very real threat because your training partners don't even throw it at you anymore.
Yeah, you see that also with wrestlers that don't wrestle much anymore, because they're working on their striking, and they kind of put the wrestling aside, and then they get out-wrestled, and you realize, like, that's something you've got to stay on top of.
You've got to keep sharpening it.
Yeah, there's just so many different variables in MMA. It's one of the reasons why it's such an amazing sport, is there's so many different ways to go about it.
I mean, you can just decide to Damien Maia it, close the distance, get guys to the ground, use your superior jiu-jitsu, submit guys, and, you know, look like a wizard.
Or, you can Wonderboy it.
Where you're just standing up, I mean, boy, there's an interesting fight right there.
Damien Maia and Wonderboy, that is a very fucking interesting fight if that ever happens.
You know, we were talking about like fighting today versus fighting 30 years from now.
Why don't we train like it's going to be 30 years from now?
I think one of the problems is we need to see it be successful.
Like you need to see a guy like Wonderboy fight where you go, okay, we got to learn some fucking sport karate.
We've got to figure out how to do that blitz.
We've got to figure out how to slide back and throw those kicks the way they're doing it.
And I still, to this day, think we haven't seen the level of traditional martial arts techniques that exist in a really good Taekwondo match or a really good Kyokushin match.
There are guys in these other sports.
You've seen some guys like Muntasri, who's fighting the UFC, who's a national champion.
Yeah, he's a bad motherfucker with his kicks.
So you're seeing him, but he's got to learn all that other stuff first.
He's got to get, I mean he had to rather, learn all that other stuff first, get better at all these other techniques.
And perhaps there's going to be some guys that are even better or more powerful than him.
You know, these traditional techniques, I think, are probably the most underused or the most underappreciated aspects of MMA. I mean, when we saw Anderson front kick Vitor in the face, and it was like the first time we'd ever seen that, we're like, this is crazy that the first kick ever that they teach you is now the new kick.
Instead of pulling them back like with the ball of your foot like Taekwondo, make them like a fist.
Like roll them and then they stab it into the body.
Really?
Yeah, an old Thai technique.
Yeah, if you Google Shane Campbell toe stab, you'll probably see one of his fights right before he got in the UFC. But lots, I bet some of them are doing that.
Now the ball of the foot we can penetrate pretty deep, but when they commit to like literally drilling it in, And it penetrates in and touches your organs.
The reason you can do that is you did it since you were a little kid, over and over, thousands and thousands of times.
And it is harder, and it is safer, and it is smarter.
But if you know that that spot is there, I mean, all of these things have to be the next answers.
Because the next answer isn't, just do what we're all doing, only better.
I mean, and it was kind of like, who was it?
Matt Hughes' coach.
He was from that- Pat Miletic?
Yeah, Miletic.
Miletic and Frank Shamrock and these guys were like, okay, well, you were a wrestler and I was a striker and that's all these things.
I just got to get really pretty good at all those things.
That worked for a while, but now that everybody knows every single choice that you're making in every single position, we're just playing within these rules that we've kind of agreed on.
It's gotta be some other stuff.
It's gotta be things that you don't train.
It's gotta be things you haven't dealt with.
It's gotta be things your training partners don't show you.
I feel like I know why McGregor started doing that movement training.
I could be wrong.
I'm going to hopefully get the chance to ask him.
But remember last time that I was here, we talked about that flow state?
You know, when you achieve that flow state?
The best guys are fighting that 100%.
And that state of freedom, right?
And Condit was one of the first guys I really spotted that kind of did that earlier before we chatted about it last time.
And so you're seeing that a lot.
When you're in a true flow state, you are free, innovative, able to do things you weren't aware of, fully present in the moment.
There's all of these things.
It's about sort of true freedom.
I think he believed that his body – his mind and his goals were freer than his body was allowing him to be.
That if he was truly mentally free to fight, that the thing that was stopping him was his physical movement limitations.
And I really believe that's why he went and pursued that kind of open movement because we're not going to become any freer than in a peak performance state.
So we have to free up our body if we're going to go further with this.
Well, it makes sense if you look at what people...
Well, George St. Pierre, in a lot of ways, was ahead of the curve with this because of his gymnastics approach.
But really, the originator of this shit is Hickson.
If you go back and watch Hickson, when Hickson was into the gymnastica natriale, he was into a lot of crazy yoga things, a lot of flexibility and balance things.
Building the body to do martial arts too in whatever ways you can figure and you were just saying it half an hour ago I don't know how long it's been that You tell jujitsu guys you got to get strong.
Yeah, you know you identified that Hickson identified that all that long ago.
He's like, okay We figured out how we're gonna move it now What about what can I do with my body to enhance that or take that further Eddie with his flexibility?
Yes, well Hickson was always the best out of all the Gracie's he's widely regarded as the greatest jujitsu artist ever and So if you look at Hickson in comparison to all the other ones, like Hoist when he was fighting, what was so impressive about Hoist was that he wasn't a specimen.
And he was just a regular guy who was in shape, obviously, but had really good technique.
What Hickson is, is that really good technique with a freak athletic body.
You know, a guy who can stand on a balance beam and do a full split holding onto his heel.
I mean, he's really freakish in his ability to move his body.
And physical strength was a huge factor in his ability as well.
So if you look at Hicks in the old days in comparison to the other guys, you're seeing a much more physically robust guy.
Much stronger.
And because of that, he was able to overcome.
Like, if you get two guys, they both have equal technique, but one guy is much stronger.
It's very difficult to describe it and compare it to something else because I don't think I've ever experienced anything like it other than maybe a state that you get into sometimes when you're doing like a sensory deprivation tank or I guess you would do if you were doing like heavy meditation.
It's been proven that people can improve as much through visualization as they can from actual physical movement, as long as you actually commit to it.
And, you know, don't be all fucking weird and, like, half-ass it.
You have to think of it as if you're doing it.
And if you can think of it as if you're doing it, your mind will take those same pathways.
I know that guys have learned new jujitsu techniques that way.
Like, you visualize yourself pulling them off, and then when you're training, they just come.
That just shows you what your brain can do and why it is the most important part.
I mean, by the time we've learned how to do everything, we're going to fight, and you're walking down there, and if you haven't prepared mentally, everything else was a waste of time.
If you can't go in there and be in an optimum state, Free of worrying about the consequences.
I need my win bonus or what if I lose this fight?
You can't have any of that.
You have to be truly free to perform.
Guys will spend years training the physicality and the technical stuff and then not have a plan for that.
When Cruz said that, you know, ring rust or octagon shock or whatever is...
Jamie and you are way more comfortable than Brendan Schaub who's more comfortable than me do you know because it's the environment and BJ Penn used to go and train for a fight and he'd have a Ref and a fake ring announcer and an audience and the walkout and he would create all of that before he fought so that That stuff wasn't new because the first fucking time you're standing in there Bruce buffers doing that crazy shit at you all
If you haven't prepared for that, the next thing you know, you either wake up or you somehow won, but you really don't remember anything.
You're looking at him and it's like, that can't be the first time that you've looked at Bruce Buffer.
It has to have been in your mind 30 times.
It's like, right, this is where I belong.
I'm supposed to be here.
I belong here.
I earned my way here.
Fucking right Bruce Buffer's introducing me because the whole world's going to see how fucking good I am.
You can't be like, oh shit, when you see the UFC. There's Joe Rogan over there.
It's like, Yeah, you can't.
That can't be new.
That has to have happened dozens or hundreds of times in your mind when you go in there.
Sometimes I'll use an example of something that I do or my friend does or whatever.
And I don't mean to put it back to myself.
I'm saying we should all try to do this.
You look and you prepare for stuff and you go back and it's the work.
It was the work that you did.
That's what matters.
You're just a guy.
But you're a guy who worked like crazy, prepared like crazy, made notes of the things that you did.
When you can go back and look at your journal or your notes and see everything you've done in the day or afternoon of that fight, that stuff is fighting.
All of your work is fighting.
All you got to go in there and have fun.
The work's been done.
That's the state you have to be in.
And the reason I mentioned, I have a stack of every breakdown I've ever done.
All the work, every note, and it's like this high.
And I bring that with me.
When I went to meet Dana and Craig, I had that in my suitcase when I went down to meet them in Vegas because I look at that and it's like, right, I'm supposed to be here.
I worked really hard on this stuff.
I'm supposed to be talking to these guys.
This is where I'm supposed to be.
If I don't have that, you can be like, what should I, what do I, you know, you can't be questioning.
You have to look at all the work that you did.
And on that walk to the cage, I had terrible performances and I had one or two good ones.
And the best one was the last one because I understood what state you were supposed to be in.
And the point is, like I said, to influence the way people watch fighting in a way that's positive.
So make them learn stuff.
And you hope it influences other people who influence stuff.
Because you want people to take, you want to inject these ideas into the world.
So that has to be where you start.
If you start from that point, it's not to, I got to earn money or I got to like get clicks, nothing.
I want people to see how fucking amazing this is.
So you start from that point.
That point could be months in advance.
Then there's things that you've been watching and studying and looking at in full immersion.
Things like, you know, this movement stuff that we're talking about or comparisons that you make of how people work against the cage and compare to another sport or all these ideas are all floating around.
Hopefully you've got 50 of them.
And then the fight comes up, and you see, oh fuck, it's Conor McGregor and Rafael Dos Anjos.
That's got to start brewing.
I know, I asked Craig, they accepted mine today, so the next one is Jones and Cormier.
I'm on that already.
What's going on in that fight?
Do I look back at their other fight?
Do I look at how they do?
What is happening?
What happened?
What's going to happen?
How's it going to happen?
And where's the fucking cool in it?
So that starts immediately.
And then you go, you might have a couple of ideas.
You might have some, oh, well, you know, range, man.
There's this four ranges kind of thing I've been playing around with.
And I did it in the Ronda one, but they didn't release it as that version.
So that sure applies to Jon Jones.
So it'll start.
I'll start thinking about it in terms of four different ranges and how we manage it.
And if you were smart and you were running a business, and obviously the UFC is very smart, they'd look at a guy like you and they'd go, just tell him to do it.
There was a channel that just had fights on all the time.
How many times have you been flipping through the channel, bored, looking for something, and you go, well, I'll always go find something on the fight channel.
And then you go through these periods where it gets really, really simple.
And then it gets more and more complicated again.
That's kind of the process of my learning.
And right now, I'm looking at it kind of simply.
Obviously, Connor wants to get...
Connor has a left hand that knocks people out.
So almost everything he kind of built was to put himself into situations to hit guys with his left hand and knock them unconscious.
So that's our job.
We need to knock you unconscious with this.
So what are some of the problems that could prevent that from happening?
Well, you can get a hold of me.
You can push me up against a cage.
You can do all these things.
And what are the ways that I could increase the likelihood of doing that?
Well, I can fuck with you.
That seems to help.
Works for everybody who's good at it.
But ultimately, if Dos Anjos puts him on his back, he's in real fucking trouble.
He's in real fucking trouble.
I agree.
This is not kind of a pretty good jiu-jitsu guy.
This is a vicious, violent guy who will happily stay on your guard until he caves your face in, until you overreact, and then he'll start passing, then he'll start abusing.
You're in trouble.
But, at the same time...
We can't look at it and go, I must stay off the ground at all costs, because that infringes on Conor's being Conor.
So he has to play the game that Stephen Thompson played.
That has to be...
That's the game most of these guys are looking to try to do right now.
This was one of the ways I was going to break it down.
So when you're looking at it, there starts to be multiple different ways because no thing is one thing.
There's 50 things.
One of them was Dos Anjos might be looking at this as, this is similar to the Pettis fight.
And so what would you do different if you were Conor, if your job was to beat this guy?
Pettis didn't move laterally very much because he's also really good at, and him and Duke and lots of people have been working on, as you back up, delivering with power.
So back up, a lot of it has to do with the stomp of the back foot.
Bam!
And so they were working on that.
This guy is a pressure fighter.
As he moves forward, we're going to rip him, we're going to hurt him, we're going to drop him, we're going to discourage him.
Just never got it off.
Somewhere, now my orbital bone is broken.
My idea of lulling you in and hurting you bad isn't working.
The adjustment is we've got to start moving laterally.
So then we're looking at it where Conor and his people, and they're taking a positive approach to it.
What can we exploit?
One thing Dos Eños does really, the only thing that he, if you're looking at it and going, what one thing jumps out as less than perfect for this killer champion, and that he really telegraphs his punches.
He telegraphs them a lot.
You see it.
And when I break things down, I'll watch fights in slow motion, sometimes dozens of times.
It's like an animated GIF file of Aldo Chasing after Conor, Conor landing the left hand, and then the same exact movement by Dos Anjos, chasing after Pettis, or chasing after Donald, rather.
I feel like the way I look at fights, the way I try to look at fights is I look at them like we're looking at mathematics.
I'm looking at like there's an equation going on and one there's values and there's numbers in one side and there's values and numbers on the other side.
What's fascinating to me about this fight is there's equations Where you have to factor in many things.
You have to factor in power.
You have to factor in technique.
You have to factor in the ability to execute.
And you also have to factor in persona and personality and just charisma.
And that's one of the things that Conor brings to the table that's hard to monetize.
Or not monetize.
It's hard to quantify.
It's hard to measure how much he fucked with Aldo's head.
Before Aldo just chased after him and get lit up like that.
I mean, what was it that caused that?
There's many possible factors, but all these movements and interactions that they have, I think you can almost look at them like a mathematical exchange.
Like, there's certain guys...
Ed Shortfuse Herman, great guy, tough guy, very good fighter.
You're never going to confuse him with Wonderboy Thompson when it comes to his footwork and his movement.
If you looked at those two guys mathematically, you looked at them as an equation, you would go, this side is very lopsided in its movement.
If you have $100 in one hand and $10 in the other hand, the $100 is worth more than $10.
And all that prefacing it was coming to say that now that I've watched through the eye that I'm thinking it's Connor's eye watching him and his eye watching Connor, I see Dos Anos as...
Being taken to the best level of what you can take guys who still are kind of sturdy.
They still got that old version of strength, different, not sort of free and flowing.
And you see his telegraphing.
That doesn't mean he can't fuck you up.
Just because I would see that doesn't mean you can do anything about it or stop it.
Or if he ends up on the ground, he's like, who's fucking telegraphing now?
No.
None of that may matter, but that is what I definitely see now.
When I'm picturing, what is Conor seeing?
Like, you see...
Boom.
Move back.
Boom.
Like it's much more sort of labored and it's built around an old sturdy style of building a fighter.
And Condit and McGregor and all these guys believe that the answer to that is not only mobility where we move our feet, but how we move through space.
You know, Condit comes on weird angles and different things.
And that's got to be what he's seeing.
Whether that matters or not, it suddenly doesn't matter at all if he puts you on your back and caves your face in.
But at the same time, it's also like the dude is just so aggressively violent.
But whether it's McGregor is not at, in my opinion, yet, or we haven't seen it at the Dominic Cruz level, but Let's say that you and I have a really great fighter and somebody says, we'll give you guys a million dollars if you can have this guy beat Dominic Cruz in five years.
What do you do?
If we start figuring out, trying to teach him the same movement as Dominic Cruz, the most we could hope for is him achieving Dominic Cruz five years earlier.
You know, the five years of learning it, Dominic Cruz has improved for five years.
We've got to figure out the answer to make it not about that.
That's the hard part.
And that's what Conor and his people, I think, believe, is it will make it not about what he wants it to be about.
Well, don't you think with a guy like Dominic Cruz, one of the reasons why Dominic has created that style is because he's not capable of putting a guy away with one shot.
He's not that kind of Conor McGregor, one punch, death touch kind of a guy.
He just doesn't have that.
So he's got to hit you with volume, and he's also very smart.
And very smart guys don't want to get hit.
So what do they do?
They incorporate a lot of footwork, and Dominic's footwork is pretty fucking spectacular.
I watched him, we were all just hanging around backstage one day, and he and Brian Stan and DC were talking, just joking around.
And DC said, show me some of that footwork, Brian, or show me some of that footwork, Dominic.
And he steps in with this shuffle and then sidestep, and I'm like, whoa!
Like when you see him just playing around with someone standing in front of him, like Brian Stan was just standing there for him, and he's like...
I mean, you watched him do it even while he was doing it with TJ. There's so many movements that he's capable of doing.
There's so many different combinations of steps and exchanges, and you think he's stepping this way, and he switches stances, and he goes off to the left, and he knows you're going to step in.
You want a little tiny guy that has just a laser-sharp technique, an Eddie Bravo, a Hoyler Gracie, you know, a small person who's just got fucking razor, the Mendez brothers.
I didn't see anything about blindness, but blood cashews are coming up, and the way that they farm them and get them deshelled is pretty bad, and it causes people intense pain because there's some sort of...
A liquid that comes out of them when you pull the shell.
But if you decide you're going to go farm that stuff, and you know what the outcome is, and you do it anyways, you chose to do that for whatever your reasons are.
So you're not finding anything on cashews causing blindness?
Just give it a shot.
Yeah, it just makes me sad that these people obviously don't have a whole lot of options.
It makes me not want to buy cashews.
But then again, then they don't have any money, so what the fuck do you do?
Yeah, fighting is also, some people can get away with it.
Bas Rutten, who was here on Wednesday, obviously former UFC heavyweight champion, one of the greats, one of the real pioneers of the game, sharp as a tack.
No problems mentally at all.
He's speaking a second language, by the way.
He speaks Dutch.
So in English, he's smooth as silk.
He's talking fast.
He's got all these great stories.
His memory's sharp as a razor.
There's no problems with him at all.
And then, of course, we all know guys that are punchy.
And I've known a lot of guys from the time when I was a teenager, and now today I can't talk to them anymore because they're fucked up.
Guys from my old boxing gym, They're fucked up, man.
They have real problems.
They're very, very compromised.
And I feel very fortunate that I'm not.
I'm sure there's something going on.
I definitely got hit a lot.
So I'm sure there's something that didn't go well up in there.
Probably made me more impulsive, more angry, or more aggressive.
I don't know.
I don't know what it is.
Overall, I got out of it pretty unscathed, but it's because I stopped fighting when I was 22. I realized at that age, I was like, I'm already getting headaches.
There was no future in it back then.
There was no money in it back then.
There was no MMA. It was just kickboxing.
I was way better at Taekwondo than it was at kickboxing.
My kicks were my biggest attribute, and I was learning how to box more.
In that learning, I was getting the fuck beat out of me.
So he fights at 185. Yeah, so he was in the 200s, 210. And I thought we were just going to light spar, but that's not what they do.
And I took a crazy, straight...
Oh yeah, he was a southpaw and I took a crazy straight left or two from him and then immediately something was different.
And then I started slipping it and hitting with my left hook and I was happy.
There's moments in fighting where, you know, you find out you're just not, I'm not like Chris Weidman, you know, that's just the truth.
But then there's moments in a fight or in sparring where you're like very proud, like when threatened with danger, my answer was to fucking hit it back as hard as I could.
So I got through the round or rounds and then I just had a headache.
I couldn't think.
I went and I ring announced that night.
I started throwing up in the back and just my thought process was different.
I was single at the time and this really cute girl was asking me to go hang out with her and I just couldn't focus.
Better a month or two later, but I feel like that day was different.
After that, I really feel like I saw things differently or I thought differently.
I didn't really train anymore, and then he gave me a ride back, and the rest of the day, even the ring announcer, I think I was probably behaving very strangely during it.
And I don't remember that day super well, other than telling that pretty girl that I couldn't hang out with her because my head hurt so much.
I remember the rest of the round, though, and I got a concussion in the first couple shots of my first fight, too, and I fought until about the middle of the second round, and I knew I was different.
Like, you just know.
But it's cool in a weird way that you go and keep fighting.
Because now I understand it when I commentate or when I'm analyzing it.
I've had that experience, and that's why I fought, was to have that understanding.
But I know what it is to fight with a concussion or spar with a concussion, and you see that guys do it.
They're hurt in round one, and they'll fight all the way through, sometimes win.
I wonder what, if anything, they're gonna figure out in the future to mitigate some of the problems with head impacts.
You know, whether it's gonna be something with stem cells or some sort of a new method of rehabilitating and healing people.
It's so depressing to me to watch this incredible Problem-solving at its highest level event like MMA or like boxing or kickboxing or anything along those lines.
You don't know what the answer is because there isn't really one now other than you can't spar with big guys like that and do it because it's fun and it's fun to fight.
You should never...
And most guys aren't doing that, or many guys are not doing that as much.
But it's, you know, this is, to me, when you get the chance to have people who have trained their whole lives to help us have an experiment in combat right now in front of all of us, that is such a beautiful and wonderful thing in humanity.
Fighting is a part of what we do.
Fighting is a part of us getting here.
It may be a part of our future depending on where we are and what's happening and different aspects of it.
Fighting is a part of us.
And to see it done at that level in this sort of almost global experiment kind of way It's beautiful.
It's this wonderful, incredibly artistic thing.
But it has the downside.
And that's another reason.
It just sickens me when I see the way people respond to a Ronda or respond, Conor's going to lose one day.
And how are they going to respond to that guy?
You know, Johnny Hendrix lost.
How are people responding to this?
Because these guys are just doing incredible, incredible things for the furthering of what humanity is capable of.
The only time I ever take stabs, and even talking about it, I don't feel great about it, but it's when guys miss weight.
And other fighters...
Fighters are doing it.
Coaches do it.
It's just...
Missing weight, there was always...
Right.
know finger pointing has always been a part of that penalty every other guy on that card has made weight and it's the worst part about their job and hopefully guys are getting a I think we are getting away from weight cutting a little more as we're getting away from the bodybuilder wrestler weight it's a part of that prototype of fighter and that prototype of fighter is gonna be keep getting beaten now that we have new answers to him And I think as that fighter changes, that weight cutting is a part of that prototype.
Well, also USADA and the IV ban, that's a big issue.
As soon as they started banning the IVs, you saw people's bodyweights lowering because they realized they couldn't make that big, crazy 25-pound cut in a couple days and rehabilitate enough or rehydrate enough, rather, to be able to fight 24 hours later.
Well, it's interesting, too, because when you watch guys that were competing in pride and were looking amazing, and then you see them when they got over to the UFC, and they weren't nearly as good, you have to think one of two things happened.
Either they took so much punishment in pride that they never really fully recovered, which is absolutely possible, or they were on some shit.
And when they crash, like, you know, TRT Vitor and dad bod Vitor is not like, you know, in theory, if you had to take TRT because you had no or very little testosterone, well, now that you're off it, you're going to be dad bod Vitor.
When I saw that, and it was, you know what, I was really happy for Vitor to...
The future holds as far as testing for performance-enhancing drugs, but I've got to imagine that they're closing in to the point where there's almost no wiggle room.
And these guys are getting popped that never got popped before, like when Gleason got popped.
And everybody's like, wow, who fucking saw that coming?
Guy looks like the Incredible Hulk.
He's one of the biggest weight cutters in the history of the sport.
I mean, he is...
The biggest 155 pound fighter I've ever seen in my life.
Bigger than anybody.
Because he would weigh 155, make weight, shredded, and then the next day you'd be like, Jesus Christ, he's 200 pounds.
He's so goddamn big.
He was so big.
Just swole, shredded, not an ounce of fat, just gorilla strong, and freakish endurance.
But here the problem with the Vanderlei thing is they did it just before he's going to fight Fedor in Pride.
Now if he goes...
Or in Ryzen, rather.
I'm saying Pride.
Pride never die.
So he's gonna fight Fedor and Ryzen, so he will have violated his ban, so that it will essentially keep him out of fighting in the United States forever.
I mean, that's a sneaky thing they did right there.
A lot of people aren't pointing that out.
Like, they kept that guy on the shelf.
They told him he's banned for life.
They fucked with him.
They wouldn't give him a hearing.
They kept postponing the hearing.
Then, coincidentally, right after the guy gets a big fight, he's gonna fight in August in Ryzen, and then immediately they hit him with his three-year.
And I think he's only 17 months in for the original suspension from the time where they caught him to today.
That reaction with those videos, and he loved being a hero.
He loved it.
Like when I talked to him, he loved the people and he loved that people celebrated it.
A big reason that he loved fighting was the audience.
And he told me that.
He loved it.
And then somewhere between injecting some jailness in there and a few other things, suddenly the audience was negative against Vanderlei for some length of time.
One of the reasons I wanted to fight and wanted to learn more about fighting, and one of the things that pointed me to start pursuing this was Uriah Faber, Mark Hominick, these little guys that fought.
I admired them, wanted to be like them.
I was older, so I'm a Uriah guy.
But when he went to fight Frankie, my breakdown kind of was, this guy's really fucking good at these things.
And he gets better at these certain things.
But we got to see some kind of innovation out of him.
We have to see something else.
Uriah wins with drive and determination.
He'll win every position.
He wins with will and he wins by overwhelming you.
He can mentally break you.
He can't be stopped.
All of that is great.
But we need something more technically.
We need some new tricks.
We need some shit that the other guy doesn't know.
He didn't have that against Frankie.
I'll say exactly the same thing for Dominic Cruz.
He must have some new things, some other stuff.
Just being the best Uriah isn't going to win him this fight, I don't think.
So he doesn't have the kind of knockout power that a Conor does where you really have to be terribly fearful about closing that distance.
So you know his number one asset is his movement.
Chop those legs, man.
Chop those legs.
If I was him, I would go and train with the best Muay Thai leg kicker I could find.
I would seek them out.
I would say, this is...
Priority number one, and maybe even, you know, concentrate on switching stances quite a bit because Dominic will switch stances quite a bit.
And if Uriah could switch stances and throw the power back leg kick from the southpaw position and from orthodox, you know, that would open up those kicks and work on those combinations when Dominic is switching.
Work on also going across the top of the thigh if he's not in the right position to throw the outside leg kick.
If you were ordinarily going to inside, throw it like an outside, but go across, take that right step and go across the top of the thighs.
So this is part of my McGregor breakdown, but there's lots of little elements.
So it was Jeremy Stevens.
I was asking him about fighting Max Holloway.
And he's like, I'm like, you know, these guys are moved.
They're long.
They're going to be lateral, all this kind of stuff.
And he said, we have to keep them in the headlights, right?
So we're a car and our headlights kind of go out on an angle.
If we keep them in that lit area of the headlights, that's great.
But he doesn't want to be there.
He wants to be outside of there.
So what do we do?
Small steps.
He's making grand movements, but if we keep our headlights lined up and we're working at angles, We make small steps and small adjustments to keep him in the headlights.
Then when he goes to flee outside of there, quite simply, the right kick is the barrier that way, and the left kick is the barrier that way, and we kind of shoehorn him into our headlights as best as we can.
Faber's never really used leg kicks that way, but sure as fuck sounds like a great idea.
If we can just keep them in those headlights, and as he goes to flee, that extra weapon of the leg starts to...
If our headlights are a certain width, the leg becomes the barrier to keep him in there.
When Uriah fought Jorgensen, that was my favorite performance ever.
And that's the Dwayne Ludwig was cornering him.
And he did something we see TJ do a lot.
I call it like a shell game or like a ball and cups.
Like, you know, we've got three cups.
Which one has the ball?
When TJ changes his level, obviously that can be a takedown.
But it can also, from there, he comes up with the right uppercut.
From the same spot, he comes up with the left high kick.
He has takedowns.
He has so many things.
And it all centers on that position.
Which just shows you how smart Dwayne is.
We have these wrestlers.
In wrestling, they have this level change spot.
That's going to be the home to many of our attacks.
And Uriah did that awesomely against Jorgensen.
Now Jorgensen is not Dominic Cruz, but he did it so beautifully that the level change became a starting point for like eight different options.
TJ tried to use that with Cruz, but Dominic Cruz literally won when a magician, you're a magician, you're trying to do a trick on me or a comedian tries to tell you a joke.
You're like, I fucking heard all these jokes.
Or, I've seen all these tricks.
A magician can't do that to another magician.
So Cruz just wouldn't play a ball and cup game.
He's like, I'll dance around out here.
You chase me around, put your ball and cups on like a little trolley and try to convince me to play it.
I'll just kick them off, you know?
And so he's just different.
And Cruz is so fucking smart.
He's so brilliant, you know?
And that goes right back to that sort of growth mindset.
When the guy had fucked up legs, he's like, well, I still got to get better.
I'll learn more about fighting.
I'll learn to explain it better.
I'll learn to analyze it better.
I'll make myself understand it more.
He used, instead of that being, well, two years down the tubes, it was like, two years I'm going to gain other skills and other applicable skills, and it made him way better.
He's way better because he had that surgery, you know, than if he just was in the gym and he never was forced to take that time.
And he's one of my favorite analysts, the way he breaks down fights, especially when it comes to making mistakes and striking, leaving yourself open to get hit.
He's so good at not getting hit.
It's one of the best things.
He is so good at explaining how to not get hit or why someone made a mistake in getting hit.
He's putting it together in a really clear, obvious manner, and you don't have to enjoy his personality in order to appreciate the brilliance of what he's saying.
But I like his personality, and I think he's a super smart, articulate guy.
I really enjoyed, like, being able to bounce ideas off of him and ask questions.
And I would like to do that with a bunch of different kind of fighters, too, because guys who aren't like him, maybe like a Damian Maia.
Like, one of my favorite, when Damian Maia fought, Neil Magny.
I couldn't wait to interview him because I wanted to know what adjustments he was making when he couldn't tap him from his back and then he eventually did get it.
And he was explaining to me how he saw that he was defending on one side so he started turning him towards the other side and setting him up to defend on that side so he could catch him on the other side.
And if you learn enough, eventually you get conscious incompetence where you're like, I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, but at least I know that so I can start learning some shit.
Then you'll get conscious competence where you're like, yeah, I'm pretty good.
He was unconsciously incompetent when he said he wanted to fight in the UFC. And I feel for him.
The guy didn't know what he was doing.
It sounded like a cool thing.
He's a driven guy who believes you can achieve what you put your mind to and you work really hard.
He just was unconsciously incompetent.
He didn't have enough knowledge to know how much could be acquired, what he might be capable of if he worked harder than anyone had ever worked in his life for 18 months.
If you have no background in combat sports at all and you're 36 years old and you think you're going to fight in the UFC in a year, that's almost insulting.
But I got mocked and ridiculed and fucking ended up with a concussion when I did it on the smallest levels.
People who were in fighting, who the fuck is this guy to come into fighting?
So I feel for him that way.
I know he probably really loves fighting.
He just didn't know how shitty was the maximum he could get at this stage.
And that level of shittiness is not good enough to ever fight in the UFC. Never mind debut in the UFC. It's also, I don't think he's that much of an athlete.
Like, when I watch him move, there's nothing about him where I go like, well, okay.
We're watching, like, Brock Lesnar.
Brock Lesnar was a fucking freak athlete.
You would watch that guy move.
I remember the first time I saw Brock fight.
I saw him fight.
I mean, I obviously had seen some videos of him in WWE doing some spectacular shit.
He's a physical specimen beyond compare, right?
But when I saw him fight in K-1, I was in LA when they fought, and he fought some Japanese gentleman, took him down, just smashed him.
I remember thinking, good luck keeping that motherfucker off you.
That's a totally different kind of a thing with this CM Punk guy what you guys a good-looking guy who speaks well It's got a lot of charisma and that led him to the top in wrestling But if you watch his wrestling moves like there's nothing there's nothing ridiculous about it.
You look at his body There's nothing ridiculous about his body.
He's not doing anything out of the ordinary He just didn't understand how little knowledge and skill could be acquired in the time that he was going to look at it.
But even that, I mean, two years, the reality is, unless you're 20 years old, two years is not really a lot of time to get prepared for something.
If you're a 20-year-old guy, you can watch somebody who's a blue belt at 20 years, and then in two years, they're a black belt.
That is possible.
If you're obsessed, if you're a fucking maniac, if you're a real nut, if you're some BJ Penn when he was in his prime, but...
You know, this guy probably likes pussy, he likes to eat, he's got bills, he's got taxes he pays, he's probably got media obligations.
It ain't that easy to become a complete fucking obsessed freak.
And then again, the whole thing is like, athletically, his body did not develop to explode.
I have a good buddy of mine who's very good at jujitsu, and I brought him to a boxing gym once, and the guy was holding pads for him, and I was like, oh my god.
Watching him hit pads, I was like, fucking crazy.
He'll nail it.
He's never going to get it.
His body did not grow exploding like that.
His body moved slow, and it was labored.
It was like me trying to write a fucking book with my left hand.
But, you know, it's, hey, man, if this guy was still wrestling and he loved fighting, was talking about it, was fighting on a small scale, Batista fought, and he had a great fight.
It was a really good fight for a guy who's only been training for a while.
And I bought one specifically because I knew that Louie had designed it because they were trying to get him to have back surgery and he wasn't buying it.
And he was like, there's got to be a way, if there's a way to compress the disc to make it bulge out like that, there's got to be a way to decompress the disc actively and strengthen the area.
So he created that reverse hyper machine.
And, you know, to see this guy go straight to back surgery like that, when just a few days before that, he was standing there talking to that Mickey Gall kid.
But are you lying to Ariel then because you knew you were having back surgery?
Are you lying now that it was weeks before you saw this guy fight?
Regardless, I want to pick on the guy because I understand his motivation.
But I think if somebody asked my opinion, if he was my friend and he said, what do you think I should do?
I'd be like...
Why don't you come out and have a long, interesting conversation with somebody, someone you know, Ariel's his friend, and say, listen, I went and I explored this for a long time.
I found some incredible things in fighting.
It gave me this.
I learned this stuff.
And what I discovered was there's no way I could fight.
That's crazy.
It would have been an insult to fighting.
And I learned enough to know it.
And now that I love it, I want to work for the UFC. I want to do some other things.
I want to contribute.
People would look and go, honesty, right!
That's one of those things we never see.
It's so refreshing.
Just come out and say, I trained my ass off.
And what I found was only a further appreciation for fucking everybody in this gym and all these fighters.
And I learned enough to understand that I barely know anything about fighting.
But now that I love it, I want to do some other stuff in fighting.
I don't think that a year is nearly enough time to fight in the UFC. I think that's preposterous.
But I think anybody could fight at a commensurate level.
If you could find someone who is at your level, who's been training as long as you have, and have an amateur fight, there's absolutely nothing wrong with not being the best in the world, or not being at a world championship or a world-class UFC level.
I think what insults a lot of people is that he jumped right into the UFC and he did so because, not just because he has notoriety and when he was younger he was a boxing champion or a wrestling champion like Brock was, NCAA national champion.
I mean you gotta look at Brock and go, hey man, maybe the guy can actually do it.
Matt Hume's cruising around the world, knows everything about fighting, fought himself, researched his study, loved the martial arts, pursuing it, looking for all the truths of martial arts.
And along comes this super athlete.
And he's like, oh, I'm going to invest a couple years...
See if he really...
Oh shit, he's really becoming...
He learns incredibly well.
He's a good guy.
He's a smart person.
Oh shit.
Then once he gets to that level, it's just like, I'm going to commit my life to making you the champion.
And symbiotically...
Matt trains with him.
Physically trains with him.
He's his training partner most of the time.
And he's a fucking genius.
That symbiotic one-on-one thing...
There isn't much of that in the world.
There's not many fighters that have one brilliant coach that commits most of their time to them.
And I just spoke with him the other day on the phone before I went in to do the McGregor one.
He was working on something with McGregor and I love the man.
He's brilliant.
But the one difference is he's got 50 students.
And he makes them great and he gives them real time and he dedicates himself to them.
But this guy's basically one of a handful.
That is crazy.
But for us, it's such an interesting martial arts.
It seems to have this interesting path where you come along and you learn some moves.
And then you learn how it works.
And then you do work on your body.
And then you learn how to learn.
And then you learn strategy.
And then all these things grow.
And inevitably, you end up at a mental thing and then philosophy.
The study of martial arts ends up somewhere the study of philosophy, how to live your life, how to learn, how to improve, how to become better in being a human being, not just in kickboxing.
Like, that inevitable result, if you stay on the martial arts path long enough, inevitably you end up, how can I be a better person?
Like, how can I get better at being a human being?
Well, you find that those things are part of what trips people up.
You know, Part of what trips you up in anything you do is if you have personality flaws.
If you create problems in relationships and in interrelationship conflict, problems with friends, problem with wife or girlfriend or what have you, those things that make you a bad neighbor will also make you a bad fighter.
Because they get in your way, and you realize you've created this unnecessary...
You yelled at your fucking neighbor for no reason because there's dog shit in your lawn or whatever the fuck it is.
You created a problem that didn't need to be there, and now you've got extra friction and conflict in your life that's unnecessary.
Instead of creating some sort of a positive bond by being a really good person.
So you learn...
Again, no one's perfect, but you learn somewhere along those lines...
Okay, if I just approach this in a better, more friendly, more open, more nice, and then I get this positive reward out of that, and then I realize that's the path.
The path is to try to be a better person.
The path is to try to have more character.
The path is to try to be a better friend, to be a better training partner, to make sure that you are pushing your friend towards victory.
You're not trying to kick his ass because you know he's tired.
That's a real issue in gyms, right?
When they run a gauntlet, having a guy that is going to wear you out but is not going to fuck you up because he knows he can, because he knows you're tired, because you just ran with three other guys before.
One thing used to drive me crazy where I would be training and I would be exhausted and I would see a guy sitting down waiting, taking the time off of training, not training that round, and then as soon as this round is done, he tries to jump on you.
I'm like, you're just sitting down.
Why were you just sitting down?
And I'll call him out.
I'll go, what are you doing?
You want to rest and then you want to jump in while you're fresh and other people are tired?
There's this guy that I used to love working with.
I just really like, there's a lot of guys in Canada that kind of end up being like, I kind of get to admire them over time because they were pioneers and maybe some of some of them weren't even in the UFC.
Some of them got there, Claude Patrick, Sean Pearson, some of those guys who were important Canadian pioneers, Hominick and Pat Cote, all those guys, Joe Dirksen, who's a cool dude.
You admire those guys.
One of them, he never got to the UFC and he's probably close to 40 now, Adrian Woolley.
And he was like the best 125 ever going.
And when I would go and I had a fight coming up, I wanted some rounds with Woolley.
And the reason I wanted them was one, he would push you really hard.
But two, he hurt me one time and he's very aggressive.
And he hurt me one time and my leg wobbled.
And as I circled, I saw him take the time to let me recover.
And that's literally the perfect training partner.
You want him to push you so hard, as close to a fight as you can handle right now, and understand what you can handle, but not take you past that point of what you can handle.
I picked up bits and pieces of him kind of figuring out, well, I'll get paid real good money when I'm kind of at the top.
And then it's like, wait a second, I'm fighting like top five guys.
I'm fighting like Tiago Alves level guys.
I'm there.
Jordan wants to be rich and Jordan wants to be successful in life in some of those ways, and at least he's told me that.
And he didn't say anything about pay or any of that stuff, but it was like he's right at the top and he's not becoming wealthy enough for what he's doing.
That's my guess.
And he loves fighting.
But one day he loved other stuff too.
He's like, you know what, I didn't...
Again, I'm guessing.
But a guy like him is like, you know, I didn't have as much sex in high school as a lot of other guys did because I was training all the time.
You know, I didn't go on fishing trips as much as other guys because I was training all the time.
You know, drinking beer on Saturdays is really fun.
Like, all of those things happen.
You're 25, you're like, you know...
And man, having the guts, the smartness to identify and the guts to quit something, we all as a society think that, like, don't quit anything.
Do it for life.
To really analytically look and go, this will not give me what I want.
Even if I achieve the results I will achieve I don't want or are not enough for me, so I will step away.
I admire that.
Like fucking rock bands and I'm trying to think of somebody in particular, Aerosmith or someone like that.
What the fuck is this guy still doing, going up there, playing?
He might love it, but why is he on American Idol?
He needs to still be on TV, or he needs an audience, or he needs to be worshipped, or whatever.
You made all the money, you made all the great records.
Go and sit on a beach somewhere.
People who go, you know, I've done enough of this stuff.
I think I'm going to move on to other stuff.
We should admire those people, because they're really rare, you know?
We talked about it, and he talked with other people about it.
It's like, could I fight different ways?
Yes, but he likes fighting like a caveman, and fighting like a caveman will result in brain damage.
He got knocked out by Marlon Sandro in Sengoku.
And then he said, after he recovered from that one, he said, you know, if I ever get another concussion, I'm going to retire.
And then after the last fight he had, he had a broken orbital bone, and he thought, why am I waiting until after I've sustained the damage to step away?
Why am I saying, it's okay to take one more large amount of damage?
If I'm going to step away, let's just go.
Let's step away.
He's a brilliant guy, one of the most interesting and cool guys.
And he's a guy who's using an example of someone who's very wise in recognizing the risk versus reward and realizing the reward's not worth it anymore.
And there's going to come a time for all these guys.
They have to decide, like, when is it over?
You know, when we were talking about the pursuit, like...
Getting after something and being obsessed with something and wanting greatness.
There comes a time where that's no longer in your mind and you're still on this path because it's something you've always done.
Because you've been a fighter for X amount of years and so this is what you're doing.
You're going into training camp but you don't have that fire inside you like you did when you first started or when you were improving or when you were at your best.
Yes, but if you're going to have it your whole life, it's irrelevant whether you have it or not because you know you have it and one day you're going to have to retire even though you have it.
I just feel like sometimes when we say these things, and I do it all the time, I'm guilty of it as charged, but it's almost like you're yelling out into the abyss.
Because of that swipe, though, is why a real winner like Conor is so spectacular.
Because with the amount of scrutiny, with the amount of pressure that's on him to still perform the way he did and win in 13 seconds by knockout, then you are the hero.
And then that's also why people were shitting on Aldo after that fight so badly.
And what three guys sitting at the side think doesn't take anything away from the 25-minute brilliant experience that he had that will affect him positively for the rest of his life.
He said, you know, it was such a great experience for him.
He gave me one of the great quotes when I was trying to figure out more about fighting, and it was actually relevant to what we're saying about Dominic Cruz and you're talking about, we showed the footwork drills and how he moves.
And I asked Condit because he's like that and he's very special.
And I said, when you're doing that, when you go into a fight, are you working with pre-planned sequences?
So you'll run sequence A twice or three times on Robbie and when he starts reacting to sequence A, you'll trick him with sequence B. Are you running these things?
Are you improvising what's happening?
And the way he put it was brilliant.
He said, some of the time I'm reading the sheet music.
And I'm just reading the sheet music and playing it.
And other times I just go off on a solo and I just improvise.
And Stephen Thompson, McGregor, Cruz, Hawley, that's what the best are doing.
They have sheet music.
Some nights the sheet music is going to be killer.
Everybody's going to applaud.
It's going to be fantastic.
Other times you've got to go off on some crazy jazz odyssey to make it work.
Like I was saying, Roy Jones Jr. is one of his favorites.
And you saw what happened to Roy Jones when he got older.
It will happen eventually.
Is it now?
Or is it in a year?
Or is it in five years?
It's going to happen.
I mean...
I played a troll game with Anderson Silva, and not with him, but Sherdog used to ask for predictions.
And I just picked against Anderson on everyone, because everybody was picking Anderson.
I thought it was funny.
I mean, Stefan Bonner is going to defeat Anderson Silva and be considered the greatest.
It was comedy.
So friends who know me or people who follow our channel know that.
So when I say I think Bisping's going to win, they think I'm just still playing that.
But I do probably think that when we picture Anderson Silva, we're picturing him in there against Forrest in the greatest moments.
And that's not what I expect him to be.
I don't expect him to be like that anymore.
The fact that he was one of the greatest fighters of all time and brilliant and beautiful to watch and did incredible things, that's not diminished in any way.
And just because I played, picked against him for a comedy, I don't want my friends of ours or people who watch Fight Network to think I don't like Anderson Silva.