Feb. 19, 2016 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:50:17
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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*Dum, doom, doom* *Dum, doom, doom* *Dum, doom* *Dum, doom* Amber live. | |
| My man. | ||
| I wish people who weren't watching on YouTube could just see the majesty that is the jacket that Robin Black is wearing right now. | ||
| How would you describe that? | ||
| It's just a gin jacket, man. | ||
| It's a colorful gin jacket. | ||
| I like colorful stuff. | ||
| It's definitely, but it's not just colorful. | ||
| It's like you're trying to blend in in a rave. | ||
| Well, it does have some camouflaging effects. | ||
| Yeah, if you were hunting in a rave, that's what you would wear. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I don't know what you'd be hunting there. | ||
| Pussy? | ||
| Yeah, I guess. | ||
| Ecstasy? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| It's like a light blue with purple. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Some sort of decorations. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Well, one day they're going to have that. | ||
| Have you ever seen that Japanese invention they came up with? | ||
| They have this cloak that you can wear, and it essentially takes an image of what's behind you and projects it on the front. | ||
| That's invisibility. | ||
| Yeah, it's kind of crude right now, but what it is is the guy standing, you can see it right here. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| That is ridiculous. | ||
| Isn't that nuts? | ||
| That is wild. | ||
| So what we're looking at is a guy holding a ball, and the ball does it. | ||
| And so the ball, somehow or another, he's holding it in front of his face, and it doesn't show him when it's in front of him. | ||
| It shows what's behind him. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| I don't know how that one's working. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| So this is the cloak. | ||
| I've seen the cloak before. | ||
| But, you know, you can still see the cloak. | ||
| Well, that's the thing with that kind of technology. | ||
| Once it starts, then you're on your way. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Then, whether it's in one year or three years or 12 years, you're going to be invisible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're in such a strange time because these emerging things are just starting to come out where people go, ooh, oh, whoa. | ||
| You know, like Magic Leap. | ||
| Have you seen that Magic Leap technology? | ||
| I just retweeted a new version of it today that somebody sent me. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| It just keeps getting so bad. | ||
| Was it Magic Leap or was it the Microsoft one? | ||
| One's a Google one and one's a Microsoft one. | ||
| Magic Leap is the Microsoft one. | ||
| Which one did I tweet today? | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm looking right now. | |
| But they've... | ||
|
unidentified
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The HoloLens. | |
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Microsoft is HoloLens. | ||
| That's Microsoft. | ||
| They've got these new goggles that you're going to be able to wear and it's going to be like Minority Report. | ||
| Like the world is going to be your desktop. | ||
| You're going to be able to spin things in the air, stop them, expand them, contract them. | ||
| I mean, you knew that was coming. | ||
| Like, as soon as you see it on a movie, you know that's going to happen. | ||
| The one thing right now, it's like, we are in probably the fastest time of change ever. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's like, if you have an idea, that idea can be done. | ||
| It's just a series of steps to have to do it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think, if you go back just a few... | ||
| Is this it right here, Jamie? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, it's just a picture. | |
| Just pictures of them using it? | ||
| Like how crazy that's going to be, man. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Insane. | ||
| Fucking crazy times. | ||
| And you know, the first thing people are going to start doing is, how do we connect this to sex? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Right away. | ||
| That's where the money is. | ||
| Somebody's thinking of that right now. | ||
| Yeah, people are going to be able to fuck right in your living room. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That's what the new porn's going to be. | ||
| The thing is, I can fuck in my living room. | ||
| Yes, right? | ||
| You can do it yourself. | ||
|
unidentified
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I could. | |
| Yeah, do it yourself, world. | ||
| We need to get back to that, people. | ||
| Get back to doing things, actually. | ||
| Not just watching them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That is a weird thing. | ||
| I mean, as much as you make comedy and fighting and podcasts and stuff, it's still strange that people watch stuff all the time. | ||
| Don't you find? | ||
| People love to be entertained. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I do. | ||
|
unidentified
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I do. | |
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We like to just have other people do the shit. | ||
| Just sit back and watch. | ||
| Yeah, but do you define... | ||
| This is something I always kind of wonder about you. | ||
| How you can possibly consume so many interesting and unrelated topics and develop expertise in so many unrelated things while being a content maker. | ||
| Like, you're making stuff that people consume. | ||
| How can you possibly be mastering all these things at once? | ||
| I don't really have any... | ||
| I'm not... | ||
| I've mastered anything. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I'm pretty good at comedy. | ||
| I throw some good kicks. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I know jujitsu pretty well. | ||
| I'm not a master at any of those things. | ||
| 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 assume that it's probably something wrong with my brain. | ||
| I assume that it's like an extreme form of ADD, but I need a bunch of different things going on in my mind, in my life. | ||
| If I don't have a bunch of different things going on, I don't feel stimulated enough. | ||
| I'm almost the opposite. | ||
| It's like I literally specialize so deeply in something. | ||
| Once I know something about it, I need to know way more about it. | ||
| And when I know stuff about that, that opens up a ton of new questions. | ||
| And that's why it's the same kind of area of stuff that I am obsessively researching and studying. | ||
| I do that too, but I just do it with a bunch of different things. | ||
| That's what I mean. | ||
| That's what I'm getting at. | ||
| 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? | ||
| 762? | ||
| 762 podcasts. | ||
| The shortest one is an hour. | ||
| Most of them are three hours. | ||
| That's 2,100 almost 2,500 hours. | ||
| Somewhere around that, you know, give or take. | ||
| But it's Yeah, so you're gonna get annoyed at me. | ||
| I get annoyed at me. | ||
| But his point wasn't that. | ||
| It was that you are authentically Joe Rogan. | ||
| Like, whatever it is you do, you ended up being... | ||
| I mean, you're sitting here in a place that you built to do the thing that you want to do exactly the way you want to do it. | ||
| You're as authentically a human being as a person can be. | ||
| I guess so. | ||
| You know? | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm gonna be this thing. | ||
| Well, that's just... | ||
| I think... | ||
| 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. | ||
| These are things I enjoy doing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's why I do what I do. | ||
| And I really believe people can do that. | ||
| I think you just have to start, first of all, by figuring out what it is you want to do. | ||
| Because if you don't know that, then you're just going to start wondering. | ||
| But the thing is, if you push somebody, they all know. | ||
| Most people really know what it is that they love. | ||
| I find that young people a lot of times don't. | ||
| A lot of young folks, when I talk to them, they just don't have a path. | ||
| They're like, God, I just need to find something to do. | ||
| I'm thinking about doing this, or maybe I'll join the military to get some guidance and some discipline, or maybe I'll do that. | ||
| It's hard to tell, because what's cool for you, Jamie might not like. | ||
| What Jamie might like, I might not like. | ||
| Jamie was trying to find Kanye West shoes all last night. | ||
| I don't like that, but he probably thinks this jacket is stupid. | ||
| Motherfucker was up all night trying to get Kanye West shoes. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Yeah, everybody's different, you know? | ||
| I think you've got to figure out what it is you like doing because the path of going to do that is the whole point. | ||
| People often be like, well, I want to get this kind of job or I want to buy this kind of house. | ||
| And it's not supposed to be that way, in my opinion. | ||
| You're supposed to start on a path and on that path, traveling along it, you're having adventures, you're stumbling onto new things. | ||
| And the challenge of It being really hard to achieve is part of what gets you up every day. | ||
| Yeah, and it's also fun. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It might take me a year. | ||
| It might take me a decade. | ||
| I'm going to find it. | ||
| Wherever it is you're ending up is somewhere in the future. | ||
| You don't know what that is. | ||
| And now it's like, well, I would like to do that thing I got to do, but I have all these responsibilities. | ||
| Okay, our new job, figure out how to take care of those responsibilities. | ||
| That's step one. | ||
| Do you know Maslow's hierarchy of needs? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That idea that first we have to like, you got to eat, you got to stay dry, and you got to drink water. | ||
| Once we've kind of accomplished that kind of stuff, that's out of the way, then we start to go a little further. | ||
| How do we become safer? | ||
| Once that happens, you climb up to the point that you're actually... | ||
| Eating, sleeping, having sex, you have a place to live, you have a job, and now you're trying to learn more things. | ||
| And it's just a natural kind of transition to get smarter and move. | ||
| But it's easy to say that. | ||
| The hard part, I think, is starting going that way. | ||
| You know, the hard part is going... | ||
| Okay, this isn't working. | ||
| Well, what if I got some exercise? | ||
| Like, maybe that would help. | ||
| Like, for some people, that path isn't, what job do I gotta start tomorrow? | ||
| That path is like, well, I'm unhealthy, or I don't think, my thought processes aren't things that lead me this way. | ||
| So you gotta start way low on that thing and start getting that shit together. | ||
| Eat good. | ||
| Get sleep and exercise. | ||
| Everybody should have to do those things. | ||
| Our society should be shaped in a way that you have to do those things. | ||
| Because if you aren't doing those things, right there, you're starting from a place where you're just not performing as well as you could. | ||
| It's so hard to tell people that, though. | ||
| They don't want to hear it. | ||
| They just love that food porn. | ||
| They just love just shoving donuts in their face. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
|
unidentified
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Pasta and just fucking sugar. | |
| It's tasty shit. | ||
| But there's a lot of things that are terrible for you that are great. | ||
| Heroin's... | ||
| I've only been in Woodland Hills three times. | ||
| This is the second time I've been on your show. | ||
| The other time was the time I was on heroin for four days. | ||
| That's the only other time I was in. | ||
| Four days. | ||
| Four days. | ||
| In Woodland Hills, I was 20 years old. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Yeah, it was weird. | ||
| Shooting up? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It was very strange. | ||
| That's a commitment. | ||
| Yeah, it didn't start that way. | ||
| Like all things. | ||
| Nobody grows up and says, I'm going to do really stupid things. | ||
| I was like 20, and I lived in Winnipeg, Manitoba. | ||
| And I was really into music. | ||
| And I came down here for... | ||
| I was a hairdresser at the time. | ||
| And so... | ||
| And this jacket would work perfectly. | ||
| So would your hair. | ||
| Yeah, my hair. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And I was down here doing some... | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| A conversation sort of happened. | ||
| I was trying to be not super uncool, but not saying, yes, I want to do heroin. | ||
| And then four days went by. | ||
|
unidentified
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Whoa. | |
| Like literally just shooting up for four days. | ||
| And then I just about missed my plane home. | ||
| So I had a girl and a home and a job and all those kinds of things. | ||
| And I'm kind of looking at like the plane ticket. | ||
| And I know it's like, okay, if I get a cab in the next two hours, I'll get the plane, I'll get home or whatever. | ||
| And he's like, well, just, you know, and you're not even thinking. | ||
| It's like you're barely even there. | ||
| And somewhere along the line, I was just like, don't worry about it. | ||
| Just fine. | ||
| You don't have to get on the plane. | ||
| But I probably got $100 to my name. | ||
| And if I didn't get on that plane, I'd have no job, no girl. | ||
| I'd be a heroin addict with no money in Woodland Hills with a guy who doesn't have his shit together. | ||
| I think in the years since, he's got his shit together. | ||
| I haven't seen him since then. | ||
| And I made myself go, and I was sick for two or three days. | ||
| And I realized, like, literally that second in time, if I don't convince myself to get on that plane, my whole life is fucking ruined. | ||
| I just so vividly remember trying to talk myself into just, fuck it, stay here, don't worry about it. | ||
| And then I would think to myself, well, what are you going to do? | ||
| When are you going to get home? | ||
| Don't fucking worry about it, man. | ||
| And I just forced my... | ||
| And I was literally convincing myself, don't bother, don't worry, it's not a big deal. | ||
| But it was obviously a big deal. | ||
| And I got home, I was sick for two days, and I've never taken an opiate or any kind of painkiller ever again. | ||
| So you were sick like hungover? | ||
| Yeah, like a violent form of it. | ||
| Was it withdrawals? | ||
| Probably, right? | ||
| Probably. | ||
| In the course of playing in music, I've met lots of people who have opiate problems. | ||
| And they would say, oh man, four days, that's nothing. | ||
| But to a person who was a normal person, and then all of a sudden they were doing drugs for four days, it probably was a violent withdrawal. | ||
| So it was very sick. | ||
| And I knew that day, I'm just never going to take any kind of narcotic or painkiller like that ever again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So that was the second last time I was in Woodland Hills. | ||
| Well, the idea that you could just become that person like that. | ||
| You just meet the wrong person. | ||
| Hey, man, you want to do some dope? | ||
| Oh, yeah, we just did dope. | ||
| All of a sudden, you're on heroin. | ||
| Yeah, and there's lots of those little moments in everybody's life. | ||
| That's a big one. | ||
| That's a big one. | ||
| But you don't know when they are or where they are or how they start. | ||
| You're just suddenly – you know what I mean? | ||
| Many less as we get older. | ||
| We start to get a little smarter. | ||
| You recognize big risks earlier on down the road as you get older. | ||
| A life experience helps you with that shit. | ||
| But yeah, that's – I was thinking that on the way here today. | ||
| I was like, oh yeah. | ||
| But I mean that's 25, 26 years ago. | ||
| So did you ever talk to that guy again? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Yeah, so crazy. | ||
| Yeah, Finland, yeah. | ||
| How many people are in Finland? | ||
| Probably about half as many as Canada would be my guess, which about 30 million, some 15 or 20 million, maybe. | ||
| And this guy's just a big rock star over there? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I mean, the whole music world is such a different life to me now. | ||
| Like, I've been so deeply embedded in fighting for the last decade. | ||
| Like, I don't know about much else. | ||
| Like, he could be the president of Finland right now for all I know. | ||
| Like, I just don't consume a lot of other things. | ||
| You know what's shocking to me? | ||
| I have a lot of friends now that are musicians that are doing really well and not making much money. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's fucking... | ||
| It's eerie. | ||
| It's eerie when you find out that these guys who you think would be ballers are kind of struggling. | ||
| Yeah, that business is... | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Dead. | ||
| It's not just... | ||
| But the touring is what I don't understand. | ||
| It's like, how come they're not making all this money from touring? | ||
| But I guess it's like a comic has a much lower overhead. | ||
| Comics just... | ||
| We don't need anything. | ||
| Just turn the microphone on and we're good. | ||
| They need support. | ||
| They have all these other people that are there. | ||
| You know, they have... | ||
| People that carry their stuff. | ||
| Roadies, sound people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lights. | |
| Rigs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They have other people in the band, obviously. | ||
| When we went and saw you at Ka there, that was awesome, too, by the way. | ||
| That was fun. | ||
| The Ka Theater at the MGM. Doing that again next month. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, cool. | |
| This is the shit. | ||
| So, something like that. | ||
| Do you have anybody else? | ||
| Like, is there a sound guy? | ||
| Is it the house guy? | ||
| Do you have a house guy? | ||
| Yeah, they just have to turn the mic off. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And then you move on to the next two hours. | ||
| And in those two years... | ||
| I'm going to pull this back to fighting because everything gets pulled back to fighting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I've been trying to just go, you don't have to talk about fighting all the time. | ||
| I've been telling myself that outside of work, regularly, actively trying to find other things to know about or learn about. | ||
| But you build... | ||
| Like structures around something, right? | ||
| So Johnny Hendrix goes to fight Stephen Thompson. | ||
| His whole world has been built like that act for years. | ||
| He built that thing and structures were built around how to perform that act that way. | ||
| And then all of a sudden it's just dated. | ||
| It's just not going to work in this setting, you know? | ||
| Yeah, it's completely dated when you're dealing with... | ||
| There's two things that Wonderboy did in that fight that you just didn't see up until he came around. | ||
| And one big one was the front leg attacks. | ||
| His front leg side kick and front leg roundhouse kick to the face. | ||
| You see, he hit Johnny with a front leg side kick to the body. | ||
| You can see it really shook Johnny. | ||
| And then immediately afterwards, he goes high and hits him with a front leg roundhouse kick right in the chin. | ||
| And he's like, what in the fuck? | ||
| Like, this guy can do some shit with his feet that I'm just not geared up for. | ||
| He didn't have the timing for. | ||
| It's... | ||
| Johnny was in a gym boxing with boxers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Lots and lots of boxers. | ||
| His hands are great. | ||
| He's got it. | ||
| He's moving around. | ||
| Yeah, as long as guys stand in front of him. | ||
| And it's like, literally, what Stephen Thompson did, and the really exciting thing you're seeing right now, is this weird moment where it's like... | ||
| You're a great wrestler. | ||
| So what do I need to do? | ||
| I gotta go learn to wrestle. | ||
| You don't have to fucking learn to wrestle. | ||
| We're gonna do that anyways. | ||
| We gotta learn to make it not about wrestling. | ||
| We gotta make it so... | ||
| I mean, MMA developed by finding the answer to the thing. | ||
| And somewhere, all of us, every coach, every one of us, five years ago, seven years ago, we were like, well, that's it. | ||
| It's boxing, wrestling, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, this cage work, this is how fighting is done. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| We're fucking way wrong. | ||
| So when we think that, we start building a structure, gym environment, curriculums, how we train, and that thing gets more ingrained and complicated. | ||
| And you go to the gym, you work these four or five things, and some guy over here is working other stuff. | ||
| And our whole gym is like that. | ||
| And all our training partners are like that. | ||
| And we're working the mixed martial arts curriculum. | ||
| But some other guy isn't. | ||
| And when he develops that thing, we're not prepared for it. | ||
| We're just not prepared for it. | ||
| Yeah, sport karate. | ||
| That's sport karate blitz. | ||
| That's something that Thompson can do, but also he came from a kickboxing background. | ||
| So he's got the sport karate ability to leap in, sort of like Raymond Daniels who fights in glory. | ||
| He's got that leap in attack ability that's very difficult to deal with if you don't have that kind of footwork. | ||
| And then on top of that, he can string together beautiful hand combinations. | ||
| So he'll slide in... | ||
| Blitz you with four or five beautiful hand combinations and then slide away and then kick you in the stomach as he's sliding away. | ||
| And you're like, Jesus Christ. | ||
| You can see the bewildered look on Johnny's face in that fight. | ||
| Yeah, and he's a brilliant fighter. | ||
| He was the champ. | ||
| He was a tough guy. | ||
| But Johnny's got that style where he'll stand like Johnny and Robbie. | ||
| They're stood in front of each other. | ||
| And you're just not going to find that with Wonderboy. | ||
| He's just not there. | ||
| That's what this guy's trying to... | ||
| That's the game he's going to try to play. | ||
| This guy, he's holding up a plastic cell. | ||
| Is it plastic cell? | ||
| Plastic cell? | ||
| They sent us a Conor McGregor doll. | ||
| Yeah, and it's all stumpy and angry. | ||
| The same guys who sent the Biggie doll. | ||
| They sent us a Conor McGregor and Jamie's got a Tupac over there. | ||
| There's a Bruce Lee for Joey Diaz. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| But that's what he'll try to do. | ||
| But what he can do with his feet is not nearly at the level that Stephen Thompson is. | ||
| Stephen Thompson's doing some shit with his feet. | ||
| The way he's throwing kicks, they're deadly. | ||
| I mean, he's one of the best kickboxers that America's really ever produced. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| 57-0 as a kickboxer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So then you go and train with Weidman, right? | ||
| And Weidman roughs you up, and Weidman's work ethic, and the whole thing rubs off on you, and you just start getting familiar with it. | ||
| And it is, yeah, I can defend takedowns, but more importantly, we ain't fucking wrestling. | ||
| We're not gonna wrestle. | ||
| And it seems him, Cruz, Cruz is a fucking absolute genius. | ||
| All these guys, even Demetrius and Matt Hume, they play this game, so we're sitting here, And like, we can't wrestle from here, right? | ||
| So for you to get to me, you have to travel through space. | ||
| As you move forward two feet, I move back two feet. | ||
| You move that way two feet. | ||
| And you play this game where we keep the space forever. | ||
| And I just keep that space as long as you want me. | ||
| I'm making that space. | ||
| And when the space is there, either you're going to get so lulled into it that I can... | ||
| Dart in, and Wonderboy's weapons are his kicks, but some guys will do it with their hands. | ||
| Dart in and hit you, or you start chasing me. | ||
| You chase me, I intercept you and fuck you up. | ||
| And it's just so logical. | ||
| And you're looking at it now, and just the way that the karate guys had to go learn to wrestle, or did they? | ||
| They had to learn to not wrestle, to make it not about wrestling as much as possible. | ||
| The Johnny Hendricks, the Matt Hughes style of fighter, they've got to figure this out. | ||
| They have to figure it out. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And the footwork, if it gets you over here, that I have to take one step to center back into you, then you blitz me there. | ||
| That's what Dominic's doing for the last, like, number of years. | ||
| And then he starts, now he gets so good at that thing. | ||
| You can't quite figure out how to even... | ||
| Anthony Johnson is so good at staying in balance to hit you. | ||
| Wherever you are, he's in balance to hit you. | ||
| Because Henry Hooft looked at him and was like, what's the key to this guy? | ||
| Just put him in a place where he can always hit. | ||
| Put him in a place where he can deliver with power. | ||
| He's really good at that. | ||
| Small little steps. | ||
| But... | ||
| Dominic Cruz could dance all around him. | ||
| Dominic Cruz can move it so that he has to step back to hit him. | ||
| That's when he'll get in. | ||
| Then he gets so good at that one thing, he just starts camouflaging with other things. | ||
| Now you don't know when it's coming. | ||
| Now maybe you hesitate. | ||
| Oh, when you hesitate, he has an option. | ||
| When you chase, he has more options. | ||
| You think it's better to stay still, so you do. | ||
| Then you get beat up. | ||
| So then you think, I better get after him. | ||
| And then when you do, you get intercepted. | ||
| And that whole thing must become so frustrating. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm. | |
| You know, so mentally frustrating. | ||
| Then you're like, I gotta take this guy down. | ||
| And in some cases, that's what they're waiting for, you know? | ||
| Hit you on the way in. | ||
| It's just, that game is so, it feels like the big difference now. | ||
| If you can't do that, if I can't do that and you can... | ||
| What the fuck am I gonna do? | ||
| I have to fight panic. | ||
| That was Ali in his youth. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And just think of that. | ||
| You know, you can ready yourself for that. | ||
| You're prepared. | ||
| You know it's a challenge, but you've been working on answers. | ||
| Like, I thought for sure Dwayne Ludwig with TJ, they would have worked on, like, situational things. | ||
| And maybe they did. | ||
| I think they did. | ||
| We're either going to option A or B. We know these are some of his choices. | ||
| Big, broad strokes answers. | ||
| And they worked sometimes. | ||
| I mean, we look back in that fight. | ||
| I thought Dominic won. | ||
| But TJ had the moments where he had the biggest shots or the cleanest shots. | ||
| There was only half a dozen of them in 25 minutes. | ||
| But you saw that was the answer. | ||
| But it must be incredibly frustrating to be in there. | ||
| You're mentally prepared for it. | ||
| You got the answers. | ||
| And as the minutes are clicking away, you're like, oh, shit. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Someone lied to me. | ||
| That feeling must be the worst. | ||
| When you're in there, you're like, oh shit, they lied to me. | ||
| What do you mean by they lied? | ||
| There was this... | ||
| I mentioned Anthony Johnson. | ||
| So, Phil Davis is like... | ||
| I'm a huge fan of Phil Davis. | ||
| I love Phil Davis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Me too. | |
| He was fighting Anthony Johnson, and he went for that first takedown. | ||
| And you go back and you look, the look on his face when he fails that takedown is like, this is not what I was told it was going to be. | ||
| Maybe... | ||
| Somebody lied to me sounds like a funny way to say it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But... | ||
| This is not how it was supposed to go. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah Yeah. | ||
| I think if Dominic... | ||
| I think when you watch the TJ fight, the big moments that TJ had, I think what Dwayne was trying to get him to do more was not load up. | ||
| And that he was really trying to knock Dominic out. | ||
| I mean, that's really what he wanted to do. | ||
| I think maybe if he just concentrated more on the leg kicks. | ||
| I mean, he had that one leg where it turned out that Dominic had had a serious injury with his foot. | ||
| Like plantar fasciitis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've had that. | |
| Have you? | ||
| What is it like? | ||
| Oh god. | ||
| So I actually had it after a fight. | ||
| My last fight was my best performance ever and it went great. | ||
| And that fight, training going up to it, the guy was a very good striker compared to me. | ||
| And he thought I was going to take him down. | ||
| He assumed we knew that he knew that was what I was going to do. | ||
| Only that wasn't what I was going to do. | ||
| I was going to put him against the cage and hold him there and beat him up there until he got tired and I could find a way. | ||
| But we were not planning to take him down. | ||
| We were planning to put him against the cage. | ||
| But all that leverage, like all that driving off the foot against the cage, it hurt my foot. | ||
| And then we went, my wife and I went on vacation right after. | ||
| And we walked nonstop the first day that we were there, just nonstop. | ||
| And the next day the fasciitis happened and it feels literally like you can't even put weight on your foot. | ||
| Like it's so inflamed and you don't know what it is. | ||
| Like did you damage it? | ||
| Is it just hurt? | ||
| And it hurt for months and months and months and months after. | ||
| And just yoga actually helped it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Strengthening the foot and the ankle. | ||
| Yeah, yoga's one of the things that I found when I started getting into it was how much my feet hurt. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah, because I was like, my feet are weak, I guess. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Because you're big, and your feet and ankles are designed to do the stuff that you do to them. | ||
| And now you're asking them to do all this other stuff. | ||
| I was surprised because I felt like I do so much barefoot. | ||
| I lift weights barefoot. | ||
| I kick the bag. | ||
| Everything's barefoot. | ||
| I was like, this is not going to be hard to just stand on my feet and hold poses. | ||
| But it's pretty hard. | ||
| For the first couple months, I would have some serious foot pain in certain positions. | ||
| And then now they're stronger. | ||
| Yeah, now it's much better. | ||
| But still, that's probably my weakest part is my balance, balancing my foot there. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's Nick Curzon's number one thing. | ||
| When I said, what's the number one thing that you like to work on with fighters is, like, foot strength. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's, like, the number one thing that guys have that they need to improve. | ||
| Well, mine just... | ||
| Fully inflamed for a long time after that fight and just mistreatment and they were already weak. | ||
| So what do you do for that? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So were you taking painkillers or anti-inflammatories? | ||
| No painkillers since the last summer. | ||
| No opiates. | ||
| But like Advil or anything? | ||
| Yeah, Advil. | ||
| I literally couldn't walk for three days. | ||
| I'm not joking. | ||
| I would lean on her to get to the bar to have some tequila. | ||
| So it is the fascia on the bottom of the foot that separates? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Yeah, it separates or inflames... | ||
| And yeah, we got it. | ||
| The plantar fascia. | ||
| Yeah, and I guess it affects people in different ways. | ||
| Like if it's over, you know, if it shortens, it gets hard and it shortens, that hurts your foot in other ways. | ||
| It's just a weird kind of spot. | ||
| We're walking on that all day, all the time, climbing and fighting and running and whatever things we do. | ||
| And that thing right there is on the bottom. | ||
| I mean, you got to figure that's going to take some abuse in your life. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The funny thing, like, when, you know, they're telling them not to use these shoes because their feet aren't strong enough. | ||
| But if they use the shoes, their feet will become strong enough. | ||
| Yeah, but they want them to go through some pretty fucking grueling, rigorous, soul-searching, you know, workouts. | ||
| 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, I'm a big fan when it comes to like minimalist footwear. | ||
| I'm a big fan of wearing like real... | ||
| I work out with either barefoot or these... | ||
| I have these new balances. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, blue. | |
| They're just like a slipper. | ||
| Yeah, I have the exact same ones. | ||
| They're black, but they're like this little thin thing. | ||
| Well, I wear the toe shoes, but goddamn people give you a hard time with the toe shoes. | ||
| Yeah, me too. | ||
| They're so brutal. | ||
| I have those new balance ones. | ||
| I do still do a lot of powerlifting. | ||
| I love powerlifting. | ||
| I just love it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I try to do yoga and martial arts and offset, but I love... | ||
| Heavy lifting. | ||
| And deadlifts, you can't use padding. | ||
| You're going to lose force. | ||
| You have to use some type of lifting. | ||
| I use Nikes, usually. | ||
| Or I'll use the New Balance ones. | ||
| Not Nikes, rather. | ||
| Converse, All-Star. | ||
| Like these things. | ||
| The Chucks. | ||
| These are my favorite. | ||
| Because they're just flat. | ||
| They're flat and they're very thin. | ||
| They're real flexible. | ||
| If you climb something with these things, they bend and give. | ||
| It's not like a rigid thing. | ||
| Have you ever done a powerlifting meet? | ||
| A meet? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's super fun, man. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| You compete? | ||
| Yeah, you go and compete. | ||
| You compete in powerlifting? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I won the nationals at my age and weight last year. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| I trained at this place. | ||
| What are you lifting? | ||
| How much do you lift in? | ||
| I weigh about 155 and I'll deadlift maybe like 360. Jesus, that's a lot of weight. | ||
| And then my bench is maybe 230, 240. Which doesn't sound like a lot of weight to people who go to the gym and just throw it around. | ||
| For 155? | ||
| That's a lot of weight. | ||
| But a powerlifting, like a regulation bench press, you bring it down, it's got to stop all movement and you wait for the command to push. | ||
| So it's... | ||
| How long do you wait? | ||
| Till all movement is stopped. | ||
| Might be one second, could be two, could be three. | ||
| And they say go. | ||
| They say press. | ||
| So you can't bounce it off your chest. | ||
| Stop all movement and press from that spot. | ||
| But I train at this place. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I just, I love it. | ||
| And in Toronto, my wife comes now too. | ||
| And I brought her at first because she always wanted me to cancel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because I was going in the morning, she's like, why don't we just go get for breakfast? | |
| Why do you have to go to the gym tomorrow? | ||
| So then I just started. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, she's one of those wives. | |
| Yeah, well, she's cool, man. | ||
| She's a temptress. | ||
| She's a temptress. | ||
| She's super cool. | ||
| But I was just like, she's always like, oh, just skip one. | ||
| So I got her going. | ||
| Now she loves it, too. | ||
| But tons of women powerlifting now. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And it shouldn't be the only thing that you do. | ||
| Because weightlifting, you mentioned, you've lifted weights all your life, and all of a sudden you did yoga, and it added so much. | ||
| But if you're lifting weights and doing movement and doing yoga and doing flexibility stuff, but that's hard to do. | ||
| That goes right back to what we said. | ||
| You've got to work out, you've got to eat good, and you've got to sleep, or else you won't have a good life. | ||
| Most people don't have the time to do all the different things you would need to do. | ||
| So one of the most frustrating things about people that get into Jiu Jitsu is they just do Jiu Jitsu. | ||
| And I'm always like, man, you really should lift some weights, especially if you're getting older. | ||
| It's one of the most important things to preserve the joints. | ||
| Like keeping muscle tissue strong and healthy and making sure that you've got good muscle density that protect those joints. | ||
| Because, you know, you're engaging in a form of combat on a regular basis and you're doing no strengthening other than that combat. | ||
| So weird. | ||
| People, when you go to the gym, you see the Muay Thai guys and they're standing around, they're moving and stuff. | ||
| The Jiu Jitsu guys are sitting around chatting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| So that mood makes you feel like it's not combat. | ||
| And then you do jujitsu and it's fucking fighting, you know? | ||
| It's physically fighting. | ||
| Your joints are fighting. | ||
| And I think the mood of it makes it feel like, ah, you know, it's a bit of a stoner sport in some ways. | ||
| Guys just chill out and they're wearing their pajamas, hanging out, but it's fighting. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Flexible is a big one. | ||
| It's very important. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's like, do you know how to play piano? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| But you could learn how to play piano if it was important to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| My fingers work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And in six weeks, you'd be a better piano player than you are today. | ||
| And in three years, you'd be a way better piano player. | ||
| That's true of every single thing in life. | ||
| And one of the reasons, you know, I learned stuff from studying fighters. | ||
| Like, I learned stuff about life. | ||
| Lots of stuff. | ||
| But one of those big ones is that growth mindset. | ||
| The idea that if we put in time on anything, it'll get better. | ||
| And the work itself is the point. | ||
| That thing, if a kid has that, their whole life is better. | ||
| And we can have it at 40 or 50 or at 60. The idea that whatever I am is not what I am, it's what I am today, but I can improve those things. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| That's a great attitude. | ||
| That's a great way to say it. | ||
| Whatever I am is what I am today. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I talk about this guy. | ||
| I like this little thing. | ||
| This thing's pretty cool. | ||
| I talk about that guy a lot. | ||
| And we were talking about people hating sometimes people that they see on TV. Some people hate this guy. | ||
| Of course they hate Conor. | ||
| He talks a lot of shit and he's super successful. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You put it perfectly. | ||
| But the thing that guy has is that insane growth mindset. | ||
| To him, anything is possible. | ||
| I believe anything is possible, but if you win the 155 belt, okay, you go fight Robbie. | ||
| Okay, if you won that, what are you going to fight? | ||
| Rockhold? | ||
| And then, you know, John Jones. | ||
| There are limits. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| There are fucking limits. | ||
| But he actually believes there are none. | ||
| And that belief, he's better at everything than he was yesterday. | ||
| You wait until Rockhold kicks him. | ||
| You realize there's a difference. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| There's got to be a point. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That is a powerful thing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Is it on iTunes? | ||
| No, it is or will be. | ||
| We're not super on top of that. | ||
| How long have you been doing it? | ||
| We've been doing it for a year. | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| Get it on iTunes, man. | ||
| It's on YouTube. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| It's on YouTube. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it either has been on iTunes for a few months or it's in the process. | ||
| We got a guy who does that. | ||
| But, so, and I've been doing it with him, and he is part of the SBG team. | ||
| He's the... | ||
| Straight Blast Jam. | ||
| Yeah, the combat, the sports psychology coach of the team. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| And when I ask him about Connor, and we're very good friends, but when I ask him about Connor, he says, Connor is his own... | ||
| But I know at the same time, when you work with his own mental coach, he's on his own journey. | ||
| And not that he doesn't want information from David, but he wants it from 50 sources. | ||
| He's consuming philosophy and ideas of how to improve and ideas of what it is to be your authentic self, peak performance, all that kind of stuff. | ||
| He's constantly consuming it. | ||
| But my inside info that I get from David working with him, he's like, They don't train really for an opponent, ever, really. | ||
| The opponent is, he's not a person. | ||
| He is a collection of skills and attributes and a body type, and that's it. | ||
| And we're training to get better every day. | ||
| The goal is to be better, not to train. | ||
| And why is that a good thing? | ||
| Among the millions of reasons, Jose Aldo's out, Chad Mendes is in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| 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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's a great mindset if you can pull it off. | ||
| He's pulling it off. | ||
| He is pulling it off right now. | ||
| I wonder how much of what he's doing, what he's able to do is his own unique physical gifts. | ||
| The fact that he's been so successful so far with this strategy and Also, the people that he's training with. | ||
| He's got fantastic training partners, great grappling with Gunnar Nelson, great coaching. | ||
| I wonder if that is the way to do it. | ||
| Because I wonder, is there going to come a time where he faces another guy like him? | ||
| Like a guy that's on that level, and maybe it's Rafael Dos Anjos. | ||
| Maybe it is. | ||
| I just sent the breakdown in, and Craig... | ||
| At the UFC said it's good to go. | ||
| So they'll release it when their digital department does stuff. | ||
| So it's coming out in the next day or two. | ||
| Your breakdowns are fucking awesome, man. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, man. | |
| I really, really love them. | ||
| I love doing them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can tell. | |
| This one, eight to ten days. | ||
| But that's of work on it. | ||
| The ideas... | ||
| How long is the piece? | ||
| It's four minutes. | ||
| Let's play it. | ||
| Can we play it? | ||
| No, we can't play it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shit! | |
| I know, we can't. | ||
| Fuckers! | ||
| I know I've already thanked you, but thank you for making that happen. | ||
| Oh, please. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| You put so much thought into it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, Chad's never really submitted people. | ||
| That guillotine, but Conor used that threat to get up. | ||
| But Chad was two weeks in for that fight. | ||
| Plus all the media obligations. | ||
| There's no way a guy who's got a wrestling-heavy strategy like Chad does, you're not going to be conditioned enough to go five rounds with two weeks. | ||
| He had to knock him out. | ||
| And so he went in hard and early. | ||
| He pushed all his chips in. | ||
| Conor's got a chin that's made out of some fucking, the same shit that Wolverine's bones are made out of. | ||
| Adamantium. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| I've never seen anybody take a Chad Mendes punch to the face like that. | ||
| And he was getting hit with the right hand quite a lot. | ||
| He was getting hit with it. | ||
| Whether or not now, I mean, Dos Anjos is a southpaw, too. | ||
| So it changes things. | ||
| And he knocked out Poirier, who was a southpaw, and I think Brandau is a southpaw, too. | ||
| So he has dealt with him. | ||
| But on the other hand, Dos Anjos took out Ben Henderson, who was a southpaw, Pettis switches. | ||
| Jason High was a southpaw. | ||
| He's faced plenty of them. | ||
| He's a beast, man. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's the plan. | ||
| Trick them into learning. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We've got to get you prepped with some knowledge. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's so much good stuff. | ||
| Who was the guy that Kenny was plagiarizing? | ||
| Yeah, I forget his name off the top of my head. | ||
| That was a weird situation. | ||
| Did you talk about that much? | ||
| Because you were a guy who, when that happened in comedy, you were not having that. | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| But it wasn't good. | ||
| You know, what Kenny's take on it is that Kenny, he writes a lot of notes, and he's been writing notes for years and years, and that's what happened. | ||
| He just failed to attribute, which, you know, may be the case. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But I like the fact that we found out, though. | ||
| Lee Wiley, that's right. | ||
| Yeah, he does great stuff. | ||
| There's a lot of really good people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| That was excellent. | ||
| Yeah, it was very good. | ||
| There's a lot. | ||
| And when I started to do analysis, there wasn't a lot. | ||
| And I was hoping, now, just like when you started doing a podcast, have you had hundreds of people say, oh, I started a podcast? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And just like, I get guys emailing me, hey, I'm doing analysis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I think... | ||
| And I wasn't the guy who started it. | ||
| I can't take any credit for that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, I think we both agree that the fighters of today are the greatest fighters ever. | ||
| And the audience is far more knowledgeable today than they've ever been before. | ||
| So when we're watching all these breakdowns and all these different technique videos, you have so much more access to mixed martial arts knowledge. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| You ever follow any of those BJJ video ones on Instagram? | ||
| Like viral BJJ? Holy shit, man. | ||
| Some of those fucking moves, like, I've never seen those. | ||
| I've been doing jujitsu for 22 years and I've never seen some of those moves. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Crazy. | |
| It's incredible. | ||
| Some of these guys have, like, some sick fucking transitions, man. | ||
| Amazing 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. | ||
| That just makes me, I'm glad that's happening. | ||
| I'm so glad that's happening. | ||
| And that happens in other sports too. | ||
| 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? | ||
| We still see that. | ||
| Yeah, we do. | ||
| We still see that. | ||
| Especially when we go to different markets outside of Vegas and the audience is not that educated and they start booing when it goes to the ground. | ||
| Yeah, crazy. | ||
| It sucks. | ||
| I commentated Taekwondo for the Pan Am Games. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, and I commentated like eight Maybe more like 10 or 12 traditional martial arts in Russia for the World Combat Games. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And it's super cool. | ||
| And seeing that Brazilian jiu-jitsu is moving the way that those sports moved in a lot of ways. | ||
| Taekwondo was awesome commentating that. | ||
| And the Mexican team won almost all the medals. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Because you can punch. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And they won almost all. | ||
| So they were throwing like body punches. | ||
| Body punches won almost all. | ||
| Boxing style body punches. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Alan Belcher, when he was fighting, what's his name? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Paul Harris. | |
| Paul Harris. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You don't see that anymore. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And so the transitions and the technique is so tight, you don't have that space to swing wild punches. | ||
| They're not giving it to you. | ||
| They are putting you in a very, very dangerous spot immediately. | ||
| And it's the technique and the thought process behind it, and whether it's perfected by Donaher or a bunch of other people. | ||
| I know Dean Lister was initially a part of that as well. | ||
| He taught those guys a lot, and he was one of the early leg lock masters. | ||
| But these guys, they're doing it in a way where... | ||
| These techniques that I might have agreed with you just a few years ago really aren't for MMA, like the 50-50 and stuff like that. | ||
| You're seeing those really apply to MMA now. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's a whole other part of the sport, too. | ||
| It's like, you roll with these gi guys, and they're sneaking this thing out, and you're like, oh shit, what is he doing? | ||
| And now, never mind the fact that that's going to work, just introducing that threat, and you're like, oh wait, what's happening there? | ||
| Now my brain isn't mindful where it's supposed to be. | ||
| It's worried about this, which might be nothing. | ||
| He's just pulling a piece of a gi. | ||
| It is fascinating. | ||
| Any kind of combat, any way that you put two people trying to best each other, it's going to be absolutely fascinating. | ||
| The geek guys are doing some weird shit, man, where they're like taking their jacket off and wrapping it around your head and strangling you with it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We don't submit from the guard anymore. | ||
| We use the guard. | ||
| Watch Brian Ortega. | ||
| Yeah, fuck. | ||
| There's lots of good guys. | ||
| Ortega's a monster. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| But think of the implications of that. | ||
| This is where I see... | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that thing changes, you know? | ||
| 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, Ramdeen and I, my partner, you met him at your show, we commentate a bunch of really old fights, and it's really cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that's nice. | |
| Old Pancrase, we just did a couple of Condit's old fights against... | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| I have an issue membering names. | ||
| I know it's because I got hit in the head a lot. | ||
| For real. | ||
| Or maybe it was like the drugs. | ||
| It was four days of heroin. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I literally was thinking of that on the way down here. | ||
| Old fights, and you see how different it was. | ||
| Like, you can spot the things where, like, now a guy would not do that, or he would do this. | ||
| But they just didn't know. | ||
| And that's why I think it's crazy that fighting is so structured in how it's trained now. | ||
| It's like, let's put it this way. | ||
| In 2030, does fighting look different than it does today? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Then why are we training it like it isn't changing? | ||
| If we know that it is ever-changing, why are we digging in deep and saying, we got it all figured out, You got to train your Muay Thai. | ||
| You got to train this kind of wrestling. | ||
| Because someone will come along. | ||
| That's what taxis did. | ||
| That's what hotels did. | ||
| They were like, hotels, this is the way to do it. | ||
| We're going to build bigger hotels, better hotels. | ||
| We'll put pools in them. | ||
| We'll advertise them differently. | ||
| And somebody's like, people don't want fucking hotels. | ||
| Airbnb comes along, ruins hotels. | ||
| Isn't it really ruining hotels? | ||
| It's damaging them at the very least. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, people, tons and tons of people just don't even consider it anymore. | ||
| When I was coming down to LA for the weekend, I was looking at how expensive hotels were. | ||
| I was thinking about it. | ||
| I don't really want to stay in someone's house, I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, that's kind of weird. | ||
| Although I have friends who do it all the time and they love it. | ||
|
unidentified
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People have cameras and shit in there until they catch you beating off. | |
| I never thought of that. | ||
| But now that that's in my head... | ||
| People have been caught. | ||
| Some woman was... | ||
| She was suing some man because he had set up hidden cameras that were on in this house. | ||
| Man, what's wrong with us, you know? | ||
| We want to see somebody naked. | ||
| Yeah, well, but the internet's full of naked. | ||
|
unidentified
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There's naked everywhere. | |
| I know, it doesn't matter. | ||
| People want naughty. | ||
| They want to be able to do things they're not supposed to do. | ||
| Yeah, I guess. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| There's something creepy about spying on somebody. | ||
| Yeah, it is creepy. | ||
| You could just go to YouPorn and watch people fuck all day long, but they don't want to. | ||
| Well, as soon as you think about the fact that somebody's spying on you, that feeling that you get proves that it's creepy. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Well, the technology, it's never been available before. | ||
| Where someone could remotely watch you in your own home, like, fairly easily. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, just 10, 20 years ago, if they wanted to do something like that, they had to set up some pretty elaborate equipment. | ||
| Now they use little tiny cameras. | ||
| They're so small. | ||
| A little GoPro or something like that. | ||
| Set it up somewhere. | ||
| It can remotely access it. | ||
| They have a bunch of different kinds of cameras they can remotely access. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| Freaky. | ||
| That's outside the point. | ||
| Yeah, but when you think about any kind of technology, you can use it for good. | ||
| You can use it to advance things. | ||
| You can use it to make things better. | ||
| You can use it for bad. | ||
| And I think there's a real perspective thing, I think, with the way that we look at things, the way that people look at things. | ||
| It's like the perspective that you take is everything. | ||
| If you look at something, somebody says something to you. | ||
| You give all this meaning to it and you assume you know what they mean and then you get mad. | ||
| You don't have to do that. | ||
| You can like just assign it no meaning at all and have whatever response you want. | ||
| That kind of perspective is you come across a camera and you go, well, wouldn't this be cool? | ||
| We can like film guys training and we can like come up with all these cool things. | ||
| I can do my job different. | ||
| Or somebody's like naked people without their permission. | ||
| That's what we got to do, you know? | ||
| Well, it's just... | ||
| Assholes. | ||
| You're always going to have assholes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know you had Boss on earlier, and I didn't get to see it. | ||
| I love Boss. | ||
| And he used to say straight up, no jabs. | ||
| Jabs and fighting are useless. | ||
| Now, that was a different era. | ||
| Now he would say something different, I'm sure. | ||
| But he was, the people, they were products of eras. | ||
| And then that other era, well, we can't front kick. | ||
| Well, why not? | ||
| Well, we'll get taken down. | ||
| Well, don't get taken down. | ||
| Just like that can opener in the arm bar. | ||
| If you get taken down, or whatever the issue was, but say the issue is getting taken down. | ||
| If you get taken down off the front kick, it doesn't mean don't front kick. | ||
| It means front kick can figure out how to stop the fact that you're going to get taken down. | ||
| Well, you see the guys who are really good at that front kick. | ||
| It's such a danger, like Kyle Noak when he won that fight in Australia. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those – some – I swear some of these guys – Shane Campbell's fighting, I think, Sunday. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he's got a few finishes with their toe stabs. | ||
| And I think some of the ones – I keep pointing at this Conor doll because it looks funny. | ||
| The – I think some of the ones he hit Mendez with were toe stabs. | ||
| Just roll the toes back and drill them in. | ||
| And – So you're saying like roll the toes back down instead of pulling them back? | ||
| 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 thing that gets to me, though, is that I feel like I could kick through a door with a ball on my foot. | ||
| That's your lifetime. | ||
| But with my toe, I'm not going to be able to have that kind of impact. | ||
| So if you do that toe stab and you hit an elbow, you're kind of fucksville. | ||
| Well, I guess that's the risk of it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That has to be the next answer. | ||
| It has to always be the next answer. | ||
| Yeah, I think movement is the big focus right now, right? | ||
| With Edo and with... | ||
| Erwin. | ||
| Yeah, Erwin, LaCour, Nick Curzon focuses a lot on movement, a lot of plyometrics and explosion drills and movement drills. | ||
| And I think they're realizing now that what's the glue in between the techniques is what they're really concentrating on. | ||
| I think that was a big factor in the Johnny Hendrix Wonderboy Thompson fight. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Was the movement. | ||
| The movement and the fact that Hendrix is so much more stationary. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| He just really wasn't able to close those distances or get out of the way. | ||
| Didn't have that kind of footwork. | ||
| And his game was just so dependent upon close-range fighting. | ||
| Yeah, he said, you know, I kind of hoped he would trade in the pocket with me more. | ||
| Why the fuck would he do that? | ||
| He shouldn't do that. | ||
| He should definitely not do that. | ||
| I feel like... | ||
| Should have said, I kind of hoped he would fall down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He was into that way, way before anybody was. | ||
| Bruce Lee was into... | ||
| 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. | ||
| That guy's going to dominate. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And that's just the way it is. | ||
| You know, technique is hugely important. | ||
| It's probably the most important thing. | ||
| But once that's covered, physical strength is a huge attribute. | ||
| Huge. | ||
| So then the physical strength becomes equal now. | ||
| So then I work that up. | ||
|
unidentified
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Flexibility and movement. | |
| Then it becomes flexibility and movement. | ||
| And when that's equal, it's just our minds. | ||
| Like, who's going to win this? | ||
| Being more creative. | ||
| Being more creative. | ||
| Who's more in the zone? | ||
| Who's more loose? | ||
| Who can pull the trigger easier? | ||
| Psychological training. | ||
| It's a huge factor. | ||
|
unidentified
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Huge. | |
| A lot of guys are getting into... | ||
| Hypnosis now. | ||
| You know, I got hypnotized. | ||
| Vinny Shorman hypnotized me. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Here? | ||
| Yeah, here. | ||
| I wanted to see what it was like. | ||
| He came and did the podcast, and he had been training. | ||
| He's trained a bunch of guys. | ||
| He works with Joe Schilling and a bunch of different kickboxers and Muay Thai guys, and I just wanted to know what it was all about. | ||
| And what was it like? | ||
| It's legit, man. | ||
| It's legit. | ||
| You know, I was like, okay, what is hypnosis? | ||
|
unidentified
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Is it bullshit? | |
| Did you try to fight it? | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| No, I didn't want to do that. | ||
| I wanted him to hypnotize me, see what it's like. | ||
| You definitely go into a state. | ||
| You definitely go into some strange state of consciousness. | ||
| I wouldn't say you're asleep, because I heard him talking. | ||
| You know, I remember hearing Vinny's voice, but I was most certainly hypnotized. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| I was definitely there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| You know, and it's like you're going into like... | ||
| Almost like a drug-induced... | ||
| It feels real weird. | ||
| That's what I felt like for four days. | ||
| I don't think it's quite that bad. | ||
| But it's a very strange state. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You get into some weird... | ||
| Alternative state of consciousness. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| A lot of guys do visualizing training, but with a A lot of the coaches wouldn't call themselves a hypnotist, but they lead it. | ||
| So they lead you through it. | ||
| You've got your eyes closed. | ||
| And David does it with some of the SPG guys and other people. | ||
| And he says, as you're getting them to go through and visualize it, you see them moving. | ||
| You see them sweating. | ||
| They are experiencing the fight in their mind. | ||
| They are visualizing everything. | ||
| And it's probably very similar. | ||
| But you lead you through it, and at the end, they feel tired. | ||
| They feel mentally tired. | ||
| They've done it. | ||
| And that idea that you visualize—I mean, if we do something, our brain is doing it. | ||
| So if we don't physically do it, but our brain does it, you definitely get huge, real, true value from that. | ||
| Well, it's been proven. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They just come to you. | ||
| So wild. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Octagon rust. | ||
| Yeah, rust is not real. | ||
| I 100% believe that. | ||
| I 100% agree with him. | ||
| It's real if you think it's real. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's not real if it's not real to you. | ||
| But the way it became not real to him is he prepared for it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| This is the second time I'm in this room. | ||
| I'm more comfortable in it than I was last time. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's interesting because a lot of these guys, their mental preparation is just doing it and learning once you've done it. | ||
| Instead of preparing for it, and then once you're actually doing it, you go, this is what I've prepared for. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And even just all the way along, like... | ||
| We all should learn stuff. | ||
| That's what I say all the time. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You couldn't be scared. | ||
| You couldn't be angry. | ||
| You couldn't be out to get them. | ||
| You had to be fucking free. | ||
| You love martial arts. | ||
| You love fighting. | ||
| This is what you wanted to do. | ||
| You don't have to be here. | ||
| You get to be here. | ||
| That's the state you have to be in. | ||
| When you do a breakdown, say if you do a breakdown for Conor McGregor and Rafael dos Anjos, how do you begin? | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Do you watch footage? | ||
| Do you think about what you already know? | ||
| How do you begin a breakdown? | ||
| I got to know what the point is. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So they edit your versions? | ||
| No, I sent in multiple versions for that one. | ||
| Only because they were like, they didn't know what I did or how I did it or how I work with them or whatever. | ||
| Actually, it's been super cool. | ||
| Like, I send it in, they're like, wow, it's great, and put it out. | ||
| But the first one, Dana was like, well, can you give me like a four-minute version, a five-minute version, a one-minute? | ||
| I just want for him to wrap his head around it. | ||
| So the first one that I sent in was many different ones. | ||
| And then since then, they've been fucking super cool. | ||
| They're just like, hey, I think this guy's good at this. | ||
| Yeah, go do that thing you do, which is exactly what you hope, right? | ||
| Oh, yeah, that's what you want, man. | ||
| But that one, now you sent them multiple, and it was mostly just so they could wrap their head around it. | ||
| Also, you're... | ||
| I mean, you're working in a company. | ||
| They've got to figure out, who is this guy? | ||
| You know, he talks fast. | ||
| He seems enthusiastic. | ||
| Is he smart? | ||
| Is he easy to work with? | ||
| How does he take direction? | ||
| You know, so you've got to figure all that stuff out. | ||
| But I think they figured out pretty quick. | ||
| He's like, oh yeah, he just likes doing this stuff and he does a good job. | ||
| Well, you're very, very committed to 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. | ||
| He's going to do it. | ||
| He likes doing it. | ||
| He's going to do it right. | ||
| You're going to do it right. | ||
| That's how it's been. | ||
| They don't need to give you much direction. | ||
| Yeah, that's how it's been. | ||
| But in that one. | ||
| So yeah, so I'll look at it. | ||
| And now I've got like, that fight is not for eight weeks. | ||
| So I'll still do other breakdowns at Fight Network in the meantime. | ||
| They're a family. | ||
| I do 40 hours a week of TV there. | ||
| And I build these around. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you really? | |
| You do 40 hours a week? | ||
|
unidentified
|
At least. | |
| Not of hours. | ||
| Not of hours of TV, but I'm in there five days a week. | ||
| We're a 24-hour fight channel. | ||
| Is that on in America? | ||
| It's on Xbox and all those other things. | ||
| Xbox. | ||
| Like Roku and all of that kind of stuff. | ||
| And then it's in the tri-state area and it's in Texas. | ||
| It doesn't have national carriage, but it's got pockets of carriage. | ||
| It seemed like a no-brainer. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, and I mean, in Canada, the timing was pretty good because George was a big star. | ||
| Right now, in Ireland, fighting is the thing because Conor's over there. | ||
| And Canada was like that. | ||
| And that allowed us to kind of get entrenched in there. | ||
| But when all day every day is fighting, literally it's like there are times, hey, Robin and John and John, go and talk about this news. | ||
| So I'll do – on a Monday, we'll do five rounds, which is an analysis show. | ||
| We'll do two or more chats of what's going on in the news. | ||
| I'll do five rounds today, which is a podcast version, but it's for television. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| And then on Tuesday, we'll do similar stuff. | ||
| And then call two hours of old vintage pancreas. | ||
| And then the next day, call two hours of deep out of Japan. | ||
| So all day, all the time. | ||
| So for me, this is a fucking amazing thing, right? | ||
| Because this is my life's work. | ||
| It's my job and passion and obsession. | ||
| And I get to do it all day. | ||
| But I do that, and I'm now making these breakdowns. | ||
| So they have to happen around that. | ||
| But all day long, you've got to be ready. | ||
| It hits you or you pick up on something or there's a sea change or there's some kind of little movement going on in something. | ||
| Well, I got a breakdown in six weeks. | ||
| Maybe I can explore that for that. | ||
| Then you get excited. | ||
| The Connor one, I'm very interested in this guy. | ||
| I look at these guys. | ||
| Chris Weidman's work ethic. | ||
| That taught me how to work really hard. | ||
| I always kind of worked hard, but you look at this guy. | ||
| Okay, that's how winners work. | ||
| And then McGregor's growth mentality. | ||
| It's like, okay. | ||
| Hey, that's how I'm gonna get better and better and better. | ||
| And he's innovating. | ||
| I gotta innovate. | ||
| If I innovate, you want other people to spread the idea. | ||
| I want people to rip my stuff off. | ||
| Cause then they'll rip off what I did a year ago. | ||
| And then a year from now, I'll do new stuff. | ||
| Like you want it all to influence how people see fighting. | ||
| Cause I think fighting is the coolest thing. | ||
| And if they see it through my eyes, they'll think that too. | ||
| You know, but you want, you know, so you, you cop, you learn about innovating from him. | ||
| You look at what Rhonda's going through and you learn how do people deal with that? | ||
| How would I deal with that? | ||
| I'm super attached to all of these people and these things and these experiences and I kind of get to live them out and learn from them. | ||
| When you look at Conor and Rafael dos Anjos, how do you think that is going down? | ||
| There's obviously a bunch of different ways they can interact with each other once the cage door shuts and the fight begins. | ||
| How do you perceive it? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I go through... | |
| Fighting gets more and more and more complicated. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The thing about Dos Anjos, though, he's very fast. | ||
| He's very good at closing the distance. | ||
| I was really shocked in the Pettis fight, how quickly he pulled the trigger. | ||
| And how he leaves no space. | ||
| He leaves no space for you to analyze his movement and prepare to counter. | ||
| He's on you before you could get that breathing room. | ||
| The Pettis one is definitely... | ||
| 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. | ||
| And he never really did that. | ||
| Pettis broke his orbital in that fight? | ||
| Yeah, in the first round. | ||
| That first punch, that hard left hand? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Now, the one... | ||
| 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. | ||
| And now that's all I see. | ||
| Did you see the video that somebody put together? | ||
| 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. | ||
| But Donald doesn't land the punch. | ||
| Like, you see very similar movement. | ||
| He sees... | ||
| That's what he says. | ||
| He sees... | ||
| Now when I look at him, he does, and I'm a... | ||
| I actually hate to criticize in any way. | ||
| I don't feel comfortable with it. | ||
| I don't feel qualified to criticize. | ||
| And that's just a personal thing. | ||
| I don't think other people shouldn't. | ||
| I'm looking at 90 to 99th percentile fighters. | ||
| And I'm some guy who won a couple of fights and was terrible in fights. | ||
| And I don't feel qualified to always criticize because... | ||
| I don't even know if it's necessary. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| 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. | ||
| That's just a fact. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, and he's got... | ||
| He's got some very good movement himself, though. | ||
| Dos Anjos may telegraph things a little bit, but it's because he puts so much power into his shots. | ||
| What's shocking about him, though, is his ability to close the distance. | ||
| It's very fast. | ||
| That's one of the things that I've disagreed with what Conor said, is that he's a slower, stuck-in-the-mud version of Aldo. | ||
| Man, I don't see that at all. | ||
| I see a fucking savage. | ||
| Yeah, he is a fucking savage. | ||
| As I watched it, it's like you're looking for what you could think you could exploit, and that's the thing. | ||
| It's like, okay, I think I can see the things coming. | ||
| Now, that may turn out to not be true, and that's a bad time to figure that out. | ||
| Yeah, it's a terrible time. | ||
| It's when you're getting ripped in the face. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Like, the way he's moving. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| You have to calculate that. | ||
| You have to figure out, like, you think he's coming this way, but he's going that way, and then he's coming this way again. | ||
| You're like, wow. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| This isn't, like, improvised. | ||
| Like, these are, like, very specific, very... | ||
| The amount of efficiency involved in these movements are excellent. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| And it's that same thing we were saying, you know... | ||
| I don't do submissions from guard anymore, so all my training partners are not dealing with that. | ||
| Some guy's quietly just building the shit out of that. | ||
| Dominic's been doing that for 10 years. | ||
| If you try to figure that out now, good luck, 10 years. | ||
| Well, here's what I want to know. | ||
| But he did it in front of everybody. | ||
| They all saw him do it, and they still let him do it, and they didn't try to, you know what I mean? | ||
| He did it right out in front of everybody's nose. | ||
| It's hard to figure out. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Is this a movement drill? | ||
| Here, look at this. | ||
|
unidentified
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Look at this. | |
| Good fucking luck. | ||
| Look at all this. | ||
| If you want to catch up to that, he's been building that for 10 years in front of everybody. | ||
| And everybody sat around going, well, that's just Dominic. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he's different. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Dominic would tell you he's not different. | ||
| He would say, if you did this for 10 years, you could do it too. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| No wonder why he gets plantar fasciitis too, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, exactly. | |
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| I mean, that's his solution for having, you know, he says he has bitch hands. | ||
| He jokes around about it because he has small hands and he's broken them several times. | ||
| I mean, he put away Mitsugaki in the first round, but it's very rare that he puts guys away. | ||
| He just doesn't have the physical frame for it. | ||
| But because of that, he's developed all this incredible movement. | ||
| It's one of the things I always tell people when you learn jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Don't learn jiu-jitsu from a gorilla. | ||
| Learn it from an Eddie Bravo or, you know, a small guy, you know, a small physical, like, a guy who's not imposing. | ||
| Those guys are the ones you really want to learn technique from them because they've had to develop that technique. | ||
| It has to be laser sharp because they don't have the ability to gorilla out of things. | ||
| You know, when you learn jiu-jitsu from really big people, Man, it's rare that they're technical. | ||
| It's really rare. | ||
| Because they can make it work. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, you want a Barrett Yoshida, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Perfect example. | ||
| Small guys with razor sharp technique. | ||
| And if you watch them roll against even bigger guys, their technique is so fucking sharp. | ||
| They can get through. | ||
| Whereas, like, if you find a big guy who's got gorilla jiu-jitsu and he fights a bigger gorilla, he gets fucked up. | ||
| That's just what you said earlier when Hoist went into UFC 1 because they knew it would be that much more amazing if the little dude did it. | ||
| Sort of. | ||
| That's not really what happened though. | ||
| That's the standard description of what happened. | ||
| What really happened was they couldn't control Hickson. | ||
| Hickson was the master of the family. | ||
| Everybody knew he was the king. | ||
| But if Hickson won, he would be like, I want $10 million and now I'm going to go surf. | ||
| He would just do whatever the fuck he wanted. | ||
| I mean, Hickson truly marches to the beat of his own drum. | ||
| And no one could control him. | ||
| So his brother was not really interested in putting Hickson in that position. | ||
| The idea was, put Hoist in. | ||
| If Hoist lost, then you go into negotiations with Hickson. | ||
| And you get Hickson in there. | ||
| Because Hickson's gonna fuck everybody up. | ||
| It would have changed everything, though. | ||
| It would have been different. | ||
| The way he did it would have been different. | ||
| Like, have you ever looked at some of the brutal beatdowns, the Gracie in action beatdowns that Hickson did? | ||
| He's so goddamn strong. | ||
| He's not just unbelievably technical with his jiu-jitsu, but also really physically strong. | ||
| I think some of the audience, a lot of them maybe, Wouldn't have gone, oh my god, jujitsu's amazing. | ||
| They'd have gone, holy shit, this guy's a killer. | ||
| And Hoist being there, Hoist's fighting tonight, too. | ||
| I know, isn't that crazy? | ||
| We're sitting here, Hoist is going to fight in like three hours. | ||
| He's 50, in his 50s. | ||
| He's at least 50, right? | ||
| How old is Hoist? | ||
| I think Ken and him are both 50. Just let him juice up. | ||
| Let him juice up. | ||
| I mean, they're probably gonna if they can get around it. | ||
| They're 50. 50! | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
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Like, they're 50. Think about being 50. I know, man. | |
| I still have this little tiny hint in the back of my mind somewhere that I could fight one more time. | ||
| Like, it's just hidden back there. | ||
| But you were just talking about your head. | ||
|
unidentified
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I know, I know. | |
| That your memory's not so hard. | ||
| I have a weird sort of perspective on that. | ||
| One, that's why I think we have to celebrate these fights way more. | ||
| Because these guys are getting hurt. | ||
| And they're doing it for their adventure or their reasons, but they're still getting hurt. | ||
| But I was in Belize with my wife, and it was beautiful, actually. | ||
| It was beautiful. | ||
| And there's a huge percentage of men over 40 that are blind. | ||
| Yeah, they're blind. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because one of their biggest crops is cashews. | ||
| And something about the process of cashew farming makes you go blind in 5 years or 10 or 20 at some point. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Certain people who work in cashew farming, it's known that you will go blind. | ||
| Holy shit, man. | ||
| So when you're 20, Cashews are not worth going blind over, man. | ||
| And so when you're 20, and you say, I'm going to be a cashew farmer, you're doing it with the knowledge that you're going to be blind one day. | ||
| Full knowledge, because you've known your grandfather, you knew an uncle, there's just a certain percentage of people. | ||
| And they do it because at the end, they will provide for their family, it's a good career, you will take care of your kids, and they do it knowing. | ||
| People go and they work in mines. | ||
| People do all kinds of things that harm themselves. | ||
| But you need to know that it's happening. | ||
| You need to be fully informed and make a solid decision that this is what you want to do. | ||
| And a lot of 17-year-olds who go and start boxing or whatever don't have all that information. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, they don't. | ||
| But if you have it, and you're like, this is my passion. | ||
| This is all I want to do. | ||
| This is what I want to do with my life. | ||
| I was put on earth to fight. | ||
| I know there'll be repercussions for this in my future, and I'm choosing to do it. | ||
| Go do it, man. | ||
| It's a free society. | ||
| You can eat as much sugar as you want, and that'll kill you. | ||
| You can do it, but you want people to know the dangers. | ||
| I have no idea about cashew farming. | ||
| Do you find anything on that, Jamie? | ||
| Please don't tell me that that's a myth. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Apparently it's a chemical that's used, and I don't know. | ||
| I don't even know what a cashew shell looks like. | ||
| I don't know either. | ||
| I've never seen a cashew in a shell. | ||
| It was something that was mentioned more than a couple of times in Belize. | ||
| Whoa, that's what it looks like? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How weird. | |
| So, I mean, that chemical could be connected to pain. | ||
| Blindness may be one of the effects, but that was the story that I was told more than a few times down there about that. | ||
| They don't even look real. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| That looks like an avatar plant. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's true. | |
| You know? | ||
| It doesn't look real. | ||
| It looks like some sort of a weird, crazy squash. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Definitely the most abuse I took was boxing, but I love boxing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's fun. | |
| I love it. | ||
| I took a lot of it. | ||
| I remember I got a couple of concussions. | ||
| One for sure, that I remember, it's almost like life was different the moment after that concussion. | ||
| The way that I saw the world was different after I took that one punch. | ||
| It was just training. | ||
| How so? | ||
| I just, I don't know, my perception or something. | ||
| Like in what way? | ||
| I had a headache, and I threw up that night. | ||
| So I was in Lethbridge, and you know Jordan Meehan. | ||
| His dad, Lee, is a good friend. | ||
| And Lee and Jordan were out of town, and I went to train, and this guy, Dan Torture Chambers, who was a big, powerful, good 185-er. | ||
| You were sparring with a 185-er? | ||
| I don't know what the fuck I was thinking. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's a very distinct moment. | ||
| Like that time I almost didn't get off the couch. | ||
| That moment, I was different after it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| You didn't even get knocked out. | ||
| No. | ||
| That's what's really crazy. | ||
| You got your bell rack. | ||
| But you kept sparring. | ||
| So you're still mobile. | ||
| Your legs were working. | ||
| But then after that sparring, the rest of the... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Football. | ||
| But knowing that any time like Gokhan Saki lands a head kick on somebody, that guy might not ever be the same again. | ||
| And that is a big fucking factor that I really get upset when people downplay that. | ||
| Like when you see someone get head kicked and knocked dead, they might not ever be the same again. | ||
| That is a fact. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know a guy back when I was a young kid who got kicked in the head, and the doctor told him, I don't want you to ever do combat sports again. | ||
| I don't want you to ever do contact sports again. | ||
| I don't want you playing football. | ||
| I don't want you to do it. | ||
| You're like, stop. | ||
| You have to stop. | ||
| You got fucking killed, and you survived. | ||
| You got real lucky. | ||
| And you see guys like that, they get hit like that, and then they're fighting five months later. | ||
| And then they're fighting six months later. | ||
| And they're not the same. | ||
| You can tell they're not the same. | ||
| They can't take a shot anymore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is spooky. | ||
| 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. | ||
| People love to attack people when they lose, like the way Hendrix lost. | ||
| I saw people attacking him online. | ||
| I'm like, God damn it. | ||
| That guy just fought a wizard. | ||
| He fought like a real striking wizard, and he learned something. | ||
| People are like, yeah, you should have fucking made weight against Woodley. | ||
| Yeah, you fucking cheater. | ||
| He was probably on PEDs before. | ||
| All this hate and nonsense. | ||
| Terrible, terrible fucking shit. | ||
| I read about him online. | ||
| Everyone deals with it. | ||
| I've actually taken... | ||
| 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. | ||
| You just can't do it. | ||
| You have to drop your bodyweight down. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| Guys were using diuretics before you saw that, too. | ||
| There were diuretics. | ||
| We all hear who apparently is doing it. | ||
| But I talk about fighting all day on TV. I can't address that. | ||
| Just because some three coaches and two fighters are like, everybody knows that guy's doing it. | ||
| Never failed a test. | ||
| There's no evidence. | ||
| It's just you can't really talk about it. | ||
| You can make observations around it. | ||
| But the truth is, in that era, man... | ||
| If you were fighting Josh Barnett in Japan, you don't know what somebody else might be on. | ||
| You don't know what Vanderlei might be on. | ||
| You've got to go over there. | ||
| You do what you thought you had to do. | ||
| If you were fighting in pride after a few years, first call you've got to make us to a doctor because you may not want to do it. | ||
| It may be harmful for your future in some ways, depending. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| I'm going to pride. | ||
| Look at these guys. | ||
| They're all on something. | ||
| I need to fight. | ||
| I've got to make... | ||
| You know, you don't go ask the bodybuilder at the gym. | ||
| You go ask a doctor. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Or both. | ||
| Or both. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Most likely. | ||
| Most likely. | ||
| The thing people don't see somehow, they are, oh, that guy did steroids and now he's this. | ||
| That may be true. | ||
| But the natural reaction is this. | ||
| Whether that's your hormonal reaction. | ||
| You're doing hand motions for people that are just listening. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's an up and a down. | ||
| Doing a dance, yeah. | ||
| And, you know, your hormone levels will crash. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Not look like the Incredible Hulk and still win. | ||
| That said a lot about... | ||
| You mean when he fought Henderson? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but who knows? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| Who knows what kind of shenanigans are going on? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Especially when you're fighting in Brazil. | ||
| I hate to say it, but it is true. | ||
| It's a different thing. | ||
| It's a different thing. | ||
| I don't know what... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He popped hot for EPO. He popped hot for something else as well, right? | ||
| Yeah, I forget. | ||
| It might have been a diuretic too, but... | ||
| But then Yul Romero, another one. | ||
| You look at that guy and you go, well, how's that even human? | ||
| I love the USADA guy when he introduced the concept of the smell test. | ||
| All that is basically like, come on! | ||
| That's what that is. | ||
| Well, Nowitzki's on top of it, man. | ||
| He's giving these guys no space. | ||
| That's the only way. | ||
| I mean, either, hey... | ||
| Everybody can do whatever, which is probably going to be unsafe in a lot of ways. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Or, well, we're going to kind of test, but you guys work around it. | ||
| Your workarounds will be an acceptable amount of drug use that we're all going to say we're okay with and just do it. | ||
| Well, it's interesting because the UFC didn't have to do this. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| This is all their own idea. | ||
| This is not instituted by the Nevada State Athletic Commission. | ||
| This is entirely the UFC's idea to bring in Nowitzki and say, look, let's fucking chase this down to the end of the earth. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Let's find exactly what the fuck these people are doing and let's clean up the sport. | ||
| And you're seeing much more realistic bodies, much more realistic performances. | ||
| You're seeing guys like Eric Silva change radically. | ||
| He used to look like a yoked up Bruce Lee. | ||
| And then he became an athlete. | ||
| He looked like a regular athlete. | ||
| I was in Saskatoon when he fought. | ||
| And when he went out to do the open workout, we were like, oh, this guy looks dope. | ||
| Totally different. | ||
| Totally different. | ||
| You know, it's funny, being a fan or a fanatic fan, people always, there's a lot of that negativity we're talking about. | ||
| People always want to take a jab at the UFC or Dana or whatever. | ||
| Nobody ever wants to point out the good moves, like the really positive moves that they make. | ||
| And this is one of those. | ||
| It's a huge one. | ||
| It's a big one. | ||
| It's a big one. | ||
| You can't half-ass it. | ||
| Because if you half-ass it and leave it to the... | ||
| And Dana used to say, it's not our job, it's the commission's job. | ||
| The reason they instituted this is like, they're just not doing a good enough job. | ||
| They're not. | ||
| They're not, so we'll have to do this. | ||
| The piss testing is inexpensive, and that's why they would do it. | ||
| The type of blood test that the USADA guys are doing is so much more comprehensive. | ||
| Which was also why it was so maddening when Nick Diaz got in trouble. | ||
| Because Nick Diaz, and this is also to Nowitzki's credit, Nowitzki was one of the ones that's saying, this is fucking bullshit. | ||
| This suspension's bullshit. | ||
| What they're doing is bullshit. | ||
| Because the USADA testing showed him under the limit. | ||
| So he is fine. | ||
| And then they had some other wacky piss test that's not nearly as accurate. | ||
| And that's where he tested high. | ||
| And so they fined him $100,000. | ||
| Now it went from $165,000 down to $100,000 or something like that. | ||
| And then they're going to give him a 16-month suspension instead of... | ||
| They have three years. | ||
| Five years. | ||
| And they were going to give him five years. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Well, they just gave Vanderlei three years. | ||
| You saw that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I think it's only 17 months. | ||
| I think you're right. | ||
| If that's the case, that's a year and five months. | ||
| This guy's still got another year and a half to go. | ||
| So he can't fight Fedor. | ||
| He can't get that payday. | ||
| Or he can go and say, I'm going to finish my career in Japan. | ||
| He's going to. | ||
| Yeah, I think he's gonna do that. | ||
| Which is sad for our fans over here. | ||
| What was the most sad thing was all those crazy videos he was doing. | ||
|
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I know. | |
| Where he was saying the UFC is disrespecting the athlete and they're paying... | ||
| And then the UFC is like, alright, well, we're gonna tell everybody how much money you made. | ||
| And then you found out Vanderlei made $9 million. | ||
| And you're like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wait, wait. | ||
| That's not poverty. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Dude, you made nine million bucks? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| But he only won a couple of fights. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, obviously, he's a fucking legend. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| And one of the all-time greats. | ||
| And one of my... | ||
| If I had to pick, like, three favorite fighters, Vandele's in that top three. | ||
| Yeah, pretty brilliant. | ||
| Because he was so much fun to watch. | ||
| He was just... | ||
| When you saw Vandele rolling his wrists before those fights in Pride... | ||
| Shit, imagine looking at that over there. | ||
|
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Come on. | |
| He was chaos, man, which is what makes the Crow Cop knockout of him even more impressive, is that Crow Cop showed the difference, man. | ||
| The difference between a guy who's a wild brawler and an elite striker. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Yeah, you feel bad for Vandal. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was the ultimate fighter. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| He acted like an asshole. | ||
| He acted like a bully and an asshole and it didn't work. | ||
| And Chael made him look like a fool. | ||
| He made him look like a fool verbally and then physically when Chael took him down really pretty easily. | ||
| Chael made him look like an asshole. | ||
| That's what Conor's doing now. | ||
| Conor's been compared to him. | ||
| I don't think there's... | ||
| Chael? | ||
| Yeah, like in the thinking. | ||
| I don't think it's a similarity, but you can't fuck with guys who are so good at that. | ||
| You will lose. | ||
| It's either going to affect your performance, you're going to look bad. | ||
| I thought my guy Uriah figured out exactly how to tangle with Conor McGregor. | ||
| Like, he became kind of a friend and he was a part of the game. | ||
| Joking around with him. | ||
| That's what Uriah does. | ||
| He's jovial. | ||
| Yeah, he's a very likable cat. | ||
| You know, it's looking like it's going to be Uriah and Dominick Cruz. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| What do you think about that? | ||
| 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. | ||
| He's got to have some other different answers. | ||
| Yeah, I wonder what he's doing as far as working on his footwork and working to try to deal with... | ||
| I mean, he has fought him twice. | ||
| He's the only guy to beat Dominic. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| He caught Dominic with a guillotine in their first fight, and I wonder, like, what's... | ||
| I mean, having the knowledge of having faced Dominic not just once, but twice, and especially the second time, he knocked him down a couple of times. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, very close fight. | ||
| Just like TJ was a very close fight. | ||
| Yeah, very close fight. | ||
| With Dominic, so we were talking about this earlier. | ||
| So somebody says, go figure out, here's your guy, go figure out how to beat Dominic Cruz. | ||
| You have three years. | ||
| What the fuck do we do? | ||
|
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Leg kicks. | |
| Yeah, leg kicks is going to be a big one. | ||
| I think leg kicks, giant factor. | ||
| Slow those legs down. | ||
| I'm almost at all costs. | ||
| I think, first of all, you've got two things to consider. | ||
| One, Dominic is most likely not going to knock you out with one punch. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Slick stuff. | ||
| Yeah, slick stuff. | ||
| Yeah, slick stuff. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's got to be a starting point. | ||
| How crazy would it be if Faber reunited with Dwayne Ludwig? | ||
| If they buried all the bullshit, got together... | ||
| It's so crazy. | ||
| It wouldn't happen, because now that he's with TJ, and they've said so much bad shit about each other, and I don't think it would, but it is too bad. | ||
| But he needs someone like that. | ||
| He needs someone who's going to really tighten up those footwork movements and those leg kick movements. | ||
| But if we saw a totally different Uriah, imagine that. | ||
| He comes out, hands up high, and just starts attacking those legs. | ||
| I mean, that would be wild, man. | ||
| It would be. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| Again, with the memory. | ||
| Who's that? | ||
| Jorgensen. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I bet you're probably right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's so brilliant. | ||
| It's funny, too. | ||
| I've met him once. | ||
| It was TJ and him. | ||
| I was asking him about the fight. | ||
| And I could see him going, okay, this guy kind of knows about fighting. | ||
| Because he doesn't give a fuck if you like him. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Dominic Cruz. | ||
| I like that about him. | ||
| I like that about even the way he does analysis or commentary. | ||
| He doesn't really give a fuck. | ||
| You ask me to analyze some shit, I'm going to analyze some shit. | ||
| He's doing it like mathematics. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| One plus one is one, whether you like me or not. | ||
| Or one plus one is two. | ||
| See, I can't even count with that. | ||
|
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One plus one is one. | |
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| 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. | ||
| We did a little bit of commentary together. | ||
| I saw it. | ||
| And I really enjoyed it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Just so smart. | ||
| Oh man, it's so important. | ||
| It's everything. | ||
| It's one of the most important things about MMA is analyzation of technique. | ||
| And having that fighter explain to you, it illuminates things in such a beautiful way. | ||
| Like when I say, well, what did you see? | ||
| Well, what I saw, he kept blocking on this side, or he kept moving towards that. | ||
| So I was going to try to pretend that I was going to do the same thing I was doing before, but set him up for a different thing. | ||
| And that level of like, his skill level is so incredibly mind-bogglingly high. | ||
| It's so easy for him to think in there. | ||
| Like a lot of guys, guy in fight number three, he's like 8-0 and it's UFC fight two. | ||
| It's like, I gotta get the choke, gotta get the choke. | ||
| Oh my God, he's stopping the choke. | ||
| Okay, I'll try to get it on. | ||
| Like it's just the thought process isn't as clear and concise as Damian Maia who's like, all right, jujitsu. | ||
| I do this every day for my whole life and you don't. | ||
| You know what's interesting about Maya as opposed to anybody else, too? | ||
| He's really adamant about not wanting to hurt people. | ||
| He's like, you know, once I got him to the ground, I threw a few punches just to open him up, but I really wanted to get the choke. | ||
| I don't want to hurt him. | ||
| I'm like, wow. | ||
| I don't want to hurt him. | ||
| That is his real mentality. | ||
| He's not bullshitting. | ||
| He's not trying to get you to like him more by pretending to be more kind and peaceful. | ||
| No, he really is not trying to hurt you. | ||
| He's just trying to win. | ||
| Fighting isn't violence. | ||
| It doesn't have to be violence. | ||
| It happens to be violent. | ||
| But it is competition. | ||
| It's violent. | ||
| When Rumble Johnson fights, it's fucking violent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's true. | |
| The thing about Rumble Johnson that doesn't get enough... | ||
| People can't necessarily appreciate how good he is. | ||
| Oh, he's got power. | ||
| Yes, he has power. | ||
| He has crazy power. | ||
| But he also, when you watch his hips and you watch his feet, he is in position to deliver power anywhere, all the time. | ||
| And that... | ||
| Like, when you, we're trying to figure out, you know, how CM Punk is going to fight. | ||
| And I'll talk to people who've never trained or never studied training or whatever. | ||
| They're like, well, he could be pretty good. | ||
| It's like, I can tell you exactly how good you can be at this stage. | ||
| Because if you look at the very best people you've ever watched, trained with the best coaches at 18 months, this is maybe what they're capable of. | ||
| And he's 36 or whatever. | ||
| And he's not a super athlete. | ||
| So it'll be a little less than that. | ||
| He's fucked. | ||
| Yeah, he's fucked. | ||
| He's fucked. | ||
| He made a big... | ||
| I feel for him because I looked at that. | ||
| When he started doing that, I was like, I know exactly how he feels. | ||
| I wanted to fight. | ||
| I wanted to figure it out. | ||
| I wanted to get in there. | ||
| But there's that thing, unconscious incompetence, right? | ||
| Unconscious incompetence. | ||
| You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. | ||
| And you don't even know that you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I got to think about it. | ||
| I consciously am working at it. | ||
| And then the greats are unconscious competence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Zen. | |
| Yeah, Damian Maia doesn't have to think about it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He didn't understand how low that would be. | ||
| Yeah, you still suck. | ||
| Yeah, you suck. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Kudos to him for giving it a shot. | ||
| I understand the motivation. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| 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. | ||
| He just couldn't know. | ||
| Well, where's he at now? | ||
| Have you seen him train? | ||
| I've seen a bit of it. | ||
| It looks where you'd think a guy who worked really hard for a year and a half would be, which is okay. | ||
| Let's watch some of it. | ||
| See if you can find CM Punk training. | ||
| What's that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've been looking right now. | |
| There's no videos from any time recently. | ||
| There's like some stuff I'm looking at from August of last year. | ||
| Let's try that. | ||
| The reason I brought him up when I was talking about Anthony Johnson is one of the first things that you find when you go and... | ||
| Let's see what we got here. | ||
| I'll tell you. | ||
| What you find is that you can do these things, but as soon as a guy is moving, you're not in balance anymore. | ||
| As soon as you're in reality, you're not in balance. | ||
| I mean, the athleticism stuff here... | ||
| This is not CM Punk though, this is Luke Rockhold. | ||
| Oh, CM Punk, EXO's Performance Center? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I mean, that's a guy working out, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It doesn't show too much. | |
| That's it? | ||
| I saw him hitting pads at one point and it looked like you would think. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| He's jumping up on these boxes. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't know, man. | ||
| It's not a knock against him. | ||
| No. | ||
| He just didn't know. | ||
| He was unconsciously incompetent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's math. | |
| It's like we were talking. | ||
| It's mathematics. | ||
| It's similar. | ||
| Okay, here we see his guard. | ||
| First of all, look at this. | ||
| He's a fucking white belt. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| And he's doing this with Henner Gracie. | ||
| Okay, so he's doing some plank workouts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's an old video. | |
| It's an old video. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was awkward. | ||
| He just couldn't do it. | ||
| And I remember thinking, wow, okay. | ||
| They're just not there. | ||
| Is this him here? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you can tell that's a white belt who is trained a bit, you know? | ||
| That's not too bad. | ||
| Yeah, it's alright. | ||
| Well... | ||
| But even the white belt for life thing, that smells of trying not to be, you know... | ||
| When he says he's a white belt for life, is what he's saying? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It reeks of not being judged. | ||
| And fighting is not a place you want to not be judged. | ||
| This is not bad. | ||
| This is not bad. | ||
| This movement is not bad. | ||
| But he's training with Henner Gracie, by the way, who's just a fucking wizard and an awesome instructor. | ||
| Okay, that's bullshit. | ||
| And there was space as he pushed that off, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 that's the way to do it. | ||
| Yeah, that's the way to do it. | ||
| In a small organization, fight somebody who's, like, at your level. | ||
| The other thing that really bummed me out is that he just got back surgery. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Man, back surgery is fucking tricky as shit, man. | ||
| They start chewing away at those discs. | ||
| There's other ways to handle that. | ||
| I don't know how bad it was, but the guy was walking around. | ||
| And Matt Brown had a good conversation about that recently. | ||
| I was reading some of the things that Matt Brown said about his own bulging discs because he didn't have to get surgery. | ||
| He rehabilitated it. | ||
| But he does a lot of work down at Westside Barbell with Louie Simmons, who created the Reverse Hyper, a machine that we have in the back here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| 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. | ||
| Pick an aerial up. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, what the fuck is going on, man? | ||
| Why are you getting surgery? | ||
| Have you reviewed all the options? | ||
| He was saying to Ariel, I want to fight on either 199 or 200. I hope I got the juice to fight on 200, which is crazy. | ||
| You shouldn't have any juice, regardless of how famous you are. | ||
| The juice meaning the notoriety? | ||
| Yeah, I guess. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We'd all probably go, cool, that's great. | ||
| That's what he should do. | ||
| Well, I don't think he can't fight. | ||
| I think he definitely could fight. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with that. | ||
| No, nothing at all. | ||
| 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. | ||
| With him, you never wrestled in high school. | ||
| You never wrestled in college. | ||
| You're a white belt in jujitsu. | ||
| You're a white belt in... | ||
| What are you in karate? | ||
| What are you in Muay Thai? | ||
| And to not strike until you sign a contract. | ||
| That to me is insane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Insane. | |
| You're having a conversation about maybe fighting in the UFC in two years. | ||
| You start training yesterday. | ||
| You don't wait and then figure out what gym. | ||
| Day one of training striking. | ||
| That's insanity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he went to the right place. | ||
| Yeah, Duke's amazing. | ||
| He's such a wonderful guy. | ||
| Duke Rufus is the shit. | ||
| I mean, that gym is amazing. | ||
| He's got fantastic training there, from Daniel Wanderlei to Ben Asperin to Pettis to Duke himself, who's just amazing. | ||
| Coach Cush, Scott Cushman. | ||
| He's got a great gym. | ||
| If I was thinking about fighting, that would be one of the places that I would consider it. | ||
| Yeah, he did the right thing. | ||
| Between that, TriStar, Faraz Zahabi, Alliance, Matt Hume. | ||
| I would just go to Matt Hume right on the spot. | ||
| Matt Hume's a fucking genius, man. | ||
| He's a goddamn genius. | ||
| And he's the most low-key out of all of them. | ||
| You don't hear a peep out of that guy. | ||
| Demetrius and him are, like, symbiotic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, Demetrius is... | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's hard to find someone who's willing to do that and then forget about someone who has the knowledge and the ability that Hume has. | ||
| Because he's not just a knowledgeable guy, but he's very similar in Farah Zahabi in that he's not just incredibly knowledgeable. | ||
| But he's also incredibly physically capable. | ||
| Like, Feroz is fucking nasty. | ||
| He's got nasty kickboxing skills and nasty jujitsu. | ||
| I mean, and his knowledge is very deep and wide. | ||
| And I think the same thing can be said of Matt Hume. | ||
| It's so rare to find a guy like those two guys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I admire Faraz and I like him very much. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Fuck off, man. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember sparring with a guy, and after I looked, he was wearing, like, novelty boxing gloves. | ||
| Like, everybody showed up to sparring, and he had little, like... | ||
| And it's like, are you out of your fucking mind? | ||
| Like, you're looking for an edge over people you're working with, you know? | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| Those guys are almost always not good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But sometimes good enough to hurt you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
you. | |
| 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. | ||
| Be a friend. | ||
| Yeah, and he was literally ornery and aggressive, but I loved having him in the rotation in the last week before a fight. | ||
| Or a couple weeks of real training before a fight. | ||
| Because of that. | ||
| Training partners, some gyms have them. | ||
| TriStar has some guys, they don't fight. | ||
| But man, they're a huge important ingredient to every one of those fighters. | ||
| You know, you were talking about getting that concussion in Jordan Meehan's camp. | ||
| What happened with Meehan? | ||
| He just retired. | ||
| He's really young. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, his dad just fought recently. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| His dad's like 45. Just enormous. | ||
| And won. | ||
| And his dad is a cool dude. | ||
| I don't know exactly. | ||
| We talked to Jordan after... | ||
| He's like 25, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He's got like 30 plus fights. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's fucking talented. | ||
| He's super talented. | ||
| You see what he did to Mike Pyle? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Mike Pyle's brilliant. | ||
| Mike Pyle's a super fighter. | ||
| Well, what he was doing to Tiago Alves before he took that body kick. | ||
| Props to Tiago for figuring a way through that first round and landing that body kick and taking him out. | ||
| And then to have me and retire like that was really shocking. | ||
| I'm guessing. | ||
| So what I'm going to say is... | ||
| I know Jordan. | ||
| I like Jordan very, very much. | ||
| His father and I are very good friends. | ||
| I'm guessing. | ||
| But... | ||
| 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? | ||
| They are. | ||
| They are really rare. | ||
| It's just me and was so talented. | ||
| You know, another guy like that that vanished is Adlon Amagov. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know what happened. | ||
| He became very religious. | ||
| And I heard that he was going to be... | ||
| I'd heard some rumors that he was going to be a cleric or something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Because he was a pretty devout Muslim. | ||
| I don't know what happened. | ||
| But he was another guy. | ||
| You're like, wow, that guy was so talented. | ||
| I used to manage some UFC fighters, a couple all the way up. | ||
| So it was really to learn. | ||
| Like everything I could do to learn any angle, fighter, manager, if I could carry the bucket, whatever I could do, I wanted to do. | ||
| And I came across this guy, Nick Denis. | ||
| Do you ever remember Nick Denis? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| And I managed Nick and we got him to the UFC. We got Sean Shelby. | ||
| I fucking loved Nick. | ||
| And you should. | ||
| If you go and watch his first fight or his fights in the UFC, he fought like a caveman. | ||
| The guy has a master's degree in biochemistry, I think. | ||
| He's brilliant. | ||
| But when he fought, he loved fighting like a caveman. | ||
| And he retired because he said he was taking head trauma. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, he did. | |
| He didn't like it. | ||
| Yeah, and he... | ||
| 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. | ||
| I haven't talked to him in a while. | ||
| I'm going to make sure to... | ||
| Give him a call or something. | ||
| He's such a brilliant guy. | ||
| Very, very smart guy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's when you need to stop. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just so hard for people. | ||
| It's really hard. | ||
| One of the things I've heard before is people will... | ||
| Paulie Malanaji, I never pronounced the name well, who is actually a brilliant commentator. | ||
| Very, very good. | ||
| Very fucking good. | ||
| Love listening to his comments. | ||
| He's one of my favorites in boxing. | ||
| He is very good. | ||
| He wrote an article about how his passion and desire to get back to fighting, and everyone told him he shouldn't, but it's just in him he needs that. | ||
| That cannot be the motivating factor. | ||
| Among the reasons that that's 100% true it can't be is because when you're 60, you're still going to have that. | ||
| That's never going to go away. | ||
| So just having that does not mean go fight because you'll always have that. | ||
| It's one of many pieces of a pie chart that you have to have in place. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So that can't be a part of the decision process. | ||
| I think you probably didn't see that Rocky movie when Rocky was like 59 and he decided, you know, just thinking about maybe having a fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| That was the one where he was... | ||
| Who the fuck did he... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tommy Gunn? | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| It was after that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, yeah. | |
| Was it... | ||
| The one where he fought the guy who knocked out Roy Jones Jr. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I don't know, Tarver. | ||
| Tarver. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tarver. | ||
| Magic Man. | ||
| And, you know, which was fucking ridiculous. | ||
| And apparently he got knocked out in training. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| In training for that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| At like 60, whatever the hell he was, getting punched in the face by Tarver. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| When we're... | ||
| Yeah, insane. | ||
| When we're looking at Anderson Silva fighting, one of his very favorite fighters is Roy Jones Jr. There it is. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Come on, son. | ||
| What the fuck are we even looking at? | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| He's like 70 years old and he looks 30. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing what testosterone replacement therapy has done for him. | ||
| But the fact that he could try to sell that. | ||
| Jesus, look at him. | ||
| He shredded... | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| How old was he when he made this movie? | ||
| In his 50s. | ||
| At least. | ||
| 2006, 10 years ago. | ||
| At least. | ||
| How old is he now? | ||
| Let's find out how old he is now. | ||
| Because that would mean that he had to be like 57 then, I think. | ||
| Yeah, if he's 67 now. | ||
|
unidentified
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69 now. | |
| So he's 59. Oh my god, that's insane. | ||
| That's science, man. | ||
| That's science. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| I love... | ||
| This is so... | ||
| It's so insane. | ||
| People always try to say he's 5'6". | ||
| I'm 5'8". | ||
| I stood next to that dude and maybe he had lifts in his shoes, but he's taller than me. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Yeah, everybody always tries to pretend he's so tiny. | ||
| That's some weird thing that people do. | ||
| They always try to pretend that people are tinier than they are. | ||
| Oh, he's only like 5'5". | ||
| Yeah, he's only like 3 feet tall. | ||
| I am 5'8". | ||
| I don't wear lifts in my shoes. | ||
| I never have. | ||
| I have terrible posture. | ||
| I'm short as fuck. | ||
| I'm 5'6". | ||
| But when I stood next to him, he's bigger than me. | ||
| I expected him to be what everybody says. | ||
| Like, I want to meet Tom Cruise because everybody says he's tiny too. | ||
| He might not be tiny either. | ||
|
unidentified
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He might not be. | |
| I don't know why that would be something that people do, but whatever it's perceived as undermining, people just tend to do that. | ||
| Yeah, people love doing that. | ||
| They love doing that. | ||
| You realize you don't have to do that. | ||
| Like when you see people, you know, Rhonda comes out and says that she had a horrific experience. | ||
| People are like, yeah, fuck her. | ||
| And then when you're like, you know, why are you reacting this way? | ||
| They're like, well, she brought it on herself. | ||
| But yeah, but you're still choosing to have that response. | ||
| You could easily have a different response. | ||
| You could easily have a different perspective. | ||
| Yeah, but that's a long path to improvement for an asshole. | ||
| You're like trying to improve a troll with one sentence. | ||
| That's like not going to happen. | ||
| There's a lot of people also, their life sucks and they see someone who's doing as good as she was doing when she was on the top. | ||
| I mean, was it Sports Illustrated called her the most dominant female athlete of all time? | ||
| And, you know, there's just so much hype and fanfare. | ||
| And then also there's all the shitty things that she was saying to her opponents and the way she was talking to them. | ||
| And the Misha Tate thing, when she did the show with her, and she would win the competition, she'd be like, fuck you. | ||
| And after she beat her, she walked away and wouldn't shake her hand. | ||
| There was so much fuel for the haters. | ||
| But it still feels like you don't have a choice but must hate. | ||
| Like, you do have a choice. | ||
|
unidentified
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Of course. | |
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, I guess. | ||
| All you can do is hope that you keep offering up that there is another choice than that. | ||
| But we also have a binary culture. | ||
| There was this article I read, The Tinderization of America. | ||
| We're either going to swipe, yes, yep, want a fucker, or left, nope, don't. | ||
| And that thought process, that binary process has actually influenced how our culture thinks. | ||
| Ronda Rousey is either the greatest athlete ever or she fucking sucks and she's terrible. | ||
| She can lose and still be the greatest athlete ever. | ||
| She can still be a 99 out of 100, but we can't have that in our culture. | ||
| She's a left swipe or a right swipe. | ||
| And people only want one or the other. | ||
| There's gray areas in everything in the world. | ||
| And the gray area is where the beauty is. | ||
| It's where the interesting, fascinating shit is. | ||
| And where our culture is making it so that we don't look there. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Aldo was the greatest pound for pound. | ||
| Now he's terrible. | ||
| No, he's still among the greatest. | ||
| He had a decade of being the greatest. | ||
| Maybe he's now been surpassed by somebody. | ||
| It's been a long career. | ||
| A lot of damage. | ||
| A lot of damage. | ||
| A lot of hard fights. | ||
| Plus the gym wars. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and you talk about how they trained back then. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| He used to live in the gym, probably trained all day, every day. | ||
| His body's all broken down. | ||
| Sparring with Andy Sauer on a regular basis. | ||
| I mean, Sauer's like an all-time K-1 great. | ||
| By the way, that was Carlos Condit's first kickboxing fight. | ||
| Yeah, I saw that. | ||
| Yeah, I saw that. | ||
| How fucking crazy is that? | ||
| He's got zero fights. | ||
| He fought a guy with 100 fights. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Un-fucking-sane. | ||
| I loved it. | ||
| I watched much of that podcast that you did with him. | ||
| You were saying Vanderlei would be one of your three favorites. | ||
| Those things do change every time we talk. | ||
| We would have different ones thinking differently. | ||
| But Kanda's absolutely one of my favorites. | ||
| Yeah, he's a tough, tough guy. | ||
| That fifth round with Lawler was just insane. | ||
| I thought he won that fight. | ||
| It was very close. | ||
| Very close fight. | ||
| Very close fight. | ||
| That one... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, what I thought was beautiful... | ||
| It didn't really fucking matter to him. | ||
| He was seeking that fight. | ||
| And he had that fight. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And would he like to do it again? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Maybe not. | ||
| Maybe that was, you know, I don't know, man. | ||
| He's only got a few more left in him, I think. | ||
| You know, I think Carlos is a really smart guy. | ||
| And I think he's also got a lot of other things that he could do with his life. | ||
| He's very intelligent. | ||
| And what made him such a great fighter would make him greater than anything he chooses to do. | ||
| And I think he's got a realistic perception of how much longer his body can go through those kind of training camps and those kind of fights. | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| Andy Sauer was his first. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| He loved it. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| I saw that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And sometimes it's a bit of both. | ||
| Well, that was a big thing with Anderson, just recognizing where those patterns were and being able to create something in the moment. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| What do you think about Anderson versus Bisping? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, but what's fucked up is that wasn't that long ago. | ||
| What's really crazy about him was Stefan Bonner was like, what was that, 2013? | ||
| Yeah, 12 or 13. So four years ago, he was the wizard. | ||
| He was the greatest of all time. | ||
| Now, he's barely hanging on. | ||
| He took a whole year off. | ||
| He fought Weidman twice. | ||
| Broke his leg in half. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Took a whole year off. | ||
| Also broke his leg and then tested positive after the Diaz fight. | ||
| Took that year off. | ||
| So he's in some weird place right now. | ||
| We don't know what his body's going to be like. | ||
| Bisping's accusing him of taking steroids his whole career. | ||
| That could be partly gamesmanship or he might know something. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| All of those things hint to me, point towards not expecting him to be his best. | ||
| If he's not his best, Michael Bisping is the most underappreciated, underrated, undervalued by his opponents. | ||
| Tough, fundamentally really good. | ||
| He's not going anywhere. | ||
| He's got hard, smart punches. | ||
| Not knockout punches, but enough to make you aware. | ||
| Everything he does is intelligent, well-placed. | ||
| He can get emotional, and that might be something Anderson will want to play with. | ||
| But, I mean, I just don't I'm not imagining Anderson Silva from his highlight reels. | ||
| I'm imagining a guy who had his leg broken in half, lost twice, 100% of the fights he's had since then, which was the Diaz fights. | ||
| He didn't have brilliant performances. | ||
| So we haven't seen him have really a brilliant performance since Yushin Okami, years back. | ||
| Now, could he come out and be mind-blowing? | ||
| That'd be amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, Bonner was his last fight before. | ||
| I guess I'm kind of undervalued. | ||
| Yushin was a spectacular performance. | ||
|
unidentified
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Spectacular, yeah. | |
| And he had many of them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He's 40. Yeah, exactly. | ||
| He's 40. Unless you're on some shit, 40 is 40. And it's hard to be on shit now. | ||
| Almost impossible. | ||
| Almost impossible. | ||
| Listen, Robin, we ran out of time. | ||
| That was three hours. | ||
| Just ran through three hours. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And we did it. | ||
| Thanks, brother. | ||
| We've got to do this more often. | ||
| Let me know when you're in town again. | ||
| Let me know when your breakdown of Conor McGregor and Rafael dos Anjos goes live. | ||
| I'll tweet it. | ||
| We'll get it out to people. | ||
| Thanks, brother. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Appreciate it very much. | ||
| All right, folks. | ||
| See you guys on Sunday with the Fight Companion. | ||
| Much love. |
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