Joey Diaz and Alberto Gallazzi break down The War of Art’s lessons on overcoming resistance, then dive into Gallazzi’s mobility-first fitness—short, intense sessions paired with breathwork and yoga to prevent injuries. They critique CrossFit’s speed-over-safety approach and praise low-rep strength training like Pavel Tsatsulini’s methods, citing Woodley vs. Masvidal as a case study of strategy under pressure. Diaz shares his psychedelic tolerance and dietary quirks, while Rogan aligns with Gallazzi’s cortisol management via diet and supplements. The episode reveals how elite performance hinges on mindset, breathing control, and deliberate training—not just brute strength or flashy routines. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, I've been going to Alberto, and Alberto is the man in Burbank for tactical fitness.
They do it in the mornings and the afternoon, but the one kid, Coach Robert, you know, he would just, after class, he would say, Joey, what are you going to do?
Are you going to go home, or do you want to do this for a little while?
And at first, the first two weeks, the movements were difficult.
But then, you know, level one stuff, man.
Any age could do it if I could do it.
Just laying on the back, lifting your hips and spinning over on your toes and doing it back.
If I can handle it on my wrist being 300 pounds, anybody can handle it.
Simple stuff.
And one day I was getting caught and the guy was pulling me into his guard and magically my hips flew up and I just mysteriously got into sight control and something made me look up and Alberto Crane's jaw dropped and he goes, that's from doing that stuff.
We met each other a long time ago, in 1994. And then I was doing security contractor work, that was my line of business at the time.
I've always been involved in training, martial arts, and any kind of such training.
And, you know, all the injuries I got from competing and...
Normal way of lifting.
I've lost contact with him for a few years and then I saw him in 2000 coming out with the clubbers.
The clubbers really attracted me.
It was different tools.
I said, OK, I want to get back in contact with these guys.
I want to understand how things can help him.
So I went back to him and it blew my mind.
It blew my mind and helped me to get back in the best shape of my life.
I feel now I'm 47. I feel like I can move better, do things better than I used to do when I was 20. So I promised him, you know, I'm going to make these things happen in Europe.
You're my coach, you change my way to fitness and I'm going to do that.
So between my job and security, I was introducing this to my teams and then I see changing on people, people being able even to just to go moving easier, you know, and then Transfer to whatever it was, our training, handgun or whatever, skills and stuff, everything was easier.
So I started to believe.
I started to believe, basically, and I started to say, okay, I want to help more people that I can.
In my line of duty, in the army, because I still have a different contract as a consultant in the army back home, as a physical trainer, and sometimes also end-to-end combat training.
And I start to introduce these things from basic, right?
It's a big factor because for so long, people have just been concentrating on getting strong or getting in great shape.
But, you know, I know people that are in fantastic shape.
They can run forever, but they can barely touch their toes.
And you develop these bodies that are severely limited in the amount of motion that you can actually get out of your body.
In certain motions, you're really good.
You might be explosive with a bench press.
You might have a great run.
But whatever else you're doing to your body, you're compromising all of your overall mobility.
So over the last few years, there's been a tremendous amount of concentration and effort by a bunch of different trainers.
Kelly Starrett, he's done a lot.
Kelly's done a lot of work in his book, Becoming a Supple Leopard, an excellent book on that.
And Kelly has a great Instagram you can follow too.
And what he's done is he's done an amazing job in highlighting mobility and how important mobility and just having a full range of motion, which seems so simple, but it's not something that most people really concentrate on.
Most people are concentrating on getting stronger, more deadlift, more bench press, more this, more that.
But you're compromising all these different areas of your body.
I put that on the ground, and I do, like, bridges on it.
I lie on my back on it, and I put all my weight on that ball.
For people just listening, it's a rubber ball that's, like, the size of a softball, and it's really hard, and it's got, like, this textured outer surface, and Kelly developed this to help.
He also uses lacrosse balls.
That's what he started out with, but I think that's a little bit better than a lacrosse ball.
That's what I have too in my bag, because all the trouble in flight, every time I get off on some flight, my infraspinatus, my neck, my lower back have the same problem.
I find those things fantastic.
Yeah, like you were saying, Joe, What were the things?
Years ago, to take to a unit like my community, working with the army or stuff like that, they say, oh, we're going to do mobility.
They will look at you like, do we really need that?
They're all tough guys.
They need to be.
They're all thinking about, ah, I need something to get myself stronger, faster.
Yeah, but they don't get it.
They don't get it if you don't allow yourself to regain the mobility that you're supposed to have.
At one point, you're going to be...
You're going to be reaching a plateau, you're going to get injured, and you're going to lose those guys in the field.
And this is something that Nick Kurson said as well.
Nick Kurson, who's a really well-respected strength and conditioning coach, speed of sport down in, I think he's in Huntington Beach, somewhere in Orange County.
But he trains Joe Schilling, Rafael Dos Anjos, Fabricio Verdum, big-time MMA fighters.
And kickboxers, and works with Aaron Pico, who's a top-level wrestler, and just a long line of real high-level combat sports athletes.
I asked him, I go, what do you think that the one thing that a lot of athletes have that is something they need to improve on?
He said, feet strength.
Nobody says that.
Nobody says that.
Everybody's like, work on your cardio, work on your explosiveness.
You gotta be able to, you know, fucking throw more kettlebells around.
He was like, your feet.
Like, think about it.
Your motion.
Like, if you can't move out of the way or towards your opponent, you're useless.
Right?
If your foot's broken in a fight, you're severely limited.
One of the things that I found out almost instantly when I started doing yoga and when I started skiing, my fucking feet would be killing me.
In the beginning of skiing was because my boots were too small, because I have really wide feet, and so my feet would be smashed in there, and it sucked.
And I was like, you know, well, fuck skiing.
I can't do it.
My feet are too wide.
Then I got boots that are made for wider feet, and they fit, but my feet would still hurt after a while.
I was like, what the fuck is wrong with my goddamn feet?
Maybe it's just because my feet are flat, and I'm just going to have to deal with that.
No.
As soon as I started doing yoga.
Now I can ski all day.
It doesn't bother me at all.
As long as I'm doing yoga twice a week, all that foot problems are gone.
We're building the capability to Grabbing the ground, understanding the stability of the foot, the mobility of the toes, and the ankle mobility is mandatory.
Because I'm going to transfer power through my feet engagement to the ground, to my leg drive, to my hips, and to my core.
I try to work with them to realize something specifically for flow, because sometimes when they have some rubber on the side, and for some specific flow, especially if you want to focus on your knee, understanding how my knee and my hips work, they get too much friction.
Yeah, that's one of the reasons why Eddie's gotten so into yoga, too.
Eddie's doing yoga three times a week now.
And he realizes it after he had back surgery.
When people get older in particular, you start realizing the limitations of some of the things that you're doing.
You're putting tremendous stress on your body in very specific areas, especially jujitsu.
You're attacking the joints all the time.
You're attacking the joints, you're attacking your neck, and almost everybody that I know either has a back problem or some sort of a knee problem or a neck problem.
It's just a constant issue when it comes to jujitsu.
And I feel like the only way to mitigate that is, first of all, roll with people that you know.
Like, people that you know, they're good people, they're not gonna try to hurt you, they're not crazy.
You know, like, it's not even their fault, but young people in particular.
Like, you get, like, some young 20-year-old kid who's all full of fucking, just...
Some little animal.
They want to kill.
They want to kill.
Like a young guy, when they roll, they roll a fucking full clip.
And you could get a knee caught in a scramble and it gets ripped apart.
It's just super common.
So you've got to be real careful with the kind of people you work out with.
Make sure that people aren't going to yank on an arm bar or a knee bar or a heel hook or something like that.
That's big.
But also I think that...
Improving your mobility.
There's so many times I would go to class, and I would be stiff before I walked in the door.
Before I walked in the door, my back would be fucked up.
I'd get up in the morning, my back would be fucked up.
I'd just be stiff.
And then I'd get in there and start warming up.
But jujitsu is so fun.
As soon as you get in there, you just do a few movements.
Point A to point B. Yeah, we don't really know what is our point A. We think we know, but we don't know.
We don't know what's going on inside.
We don't know about our hormone tracker, about estrogen, testosterone, cortisol, whatever.
We don't know exactly how the fascia Smith set up with us or the joints.
If you don't think about that, we're never going to reach point B, or probably we're going to reach it, but going zigzag instead to go straight line, and we're going to face what?
Injury, plateau, go back to the losing power, imbalances.
I see flow, like for me, at the beginning of everything.
Why?
Because you go through a little bit of joint mobility and then you start to connect the exercise logically and connect it to what?
Challenging your breathing.
So also your breathing will tell you exactly when you're forcing your breathing through some of the movement, you should be starting to understand and investigate why do I force through this range of motion?
Probably something is stiff for me.
It might be my joint, it might be my fascia, whatever.
It doesn't allow me to flow through one movement to the other movement.
Because I'm working sixth degree.
I don't just work in a yoga mat, up and down, left and right.
I just roll, jump, squat, whatever it is my body is supposed to be doing.
I look like the magic eyes picture.
For me, the magic eye picture is the one that you look and then you step back.
When I see you standing or do a couple of movements, I can interpret it yourself a little bit, but when you move, Freestyle, now I can understand exactly what's going on with you.
Do you drop your knee when you're squatting?
Do you know your feet is not connected?
You cannot torque your knee when you...
You cannot even understand loading one side, unilateral power to one leg to the other.
So for me, it's all information that's...
For me as a coach, okay, I start to plan out what you should be doing, what kind of exercise, what kind of strength training maybe is needed for you, more stability or more yoga.
Because until you are not ready, I will not let you lift or load your body if your body is not even able to hold in your own weight.
Most people don't know what their body is capable of doing.
There's a lot of people that walk into any kind of a class and they start working out and they might not even know what deficiencies they have because they've been overcompensating for that or compensating.
You might have something wrong with your hip and because of that it's putting extra pressures on your knee.
You know, one side might be overbalanced.
That's one thing you see with a lot of people that have done very specific sports.
Like they're very strong on one side, and then the other side of their body is weak.
And when you do that, you create these imbalances.
You can get some serious injuries because of that.
I don't leave my ass on the floor, so I basically pick up my hips as a hip escape, and then I hold that breath, but I pull myself up, I stay there, and then as I alleviate my hips back is when I accept Exhale.
It's like if you breathe correctly, especially under stress, and you need to regain access to your cognitive presence, especially if you need to do something that is more complex.
Think about it.
Some people, they're just thinking, okay, under the gas response, you know, when my fight or freeze situation rises, and the situation is on, I probably go to my gross motor skills.
Yeah, but some people, like an advanced fighter, an operator, they need to go to access to gross motor skills and fine motor skills.
Think about it.
I'm going to run across this room, and I need to use my gross motor skills to run faster, but I need to understand where am I going to find cover and maybe shoot him back To a target.
So now you have fine motor skills on and gross motor skills.
I need to be able to get my vertical view on because I can't stay in my tunnel.
So what you're talking about is big motor skills like running and sprinting and then being able to shoot like a gun and be able to be very precise and very accurate.
What is the importance of learning how to recover fast?
Using the breathing.
Recovery breathing, like the tactical breathing, something like you were talking about.
They used to do a lot.
Four seconds in, holding for four seconds, releasing for four seconds, holding for four seconds.
It's a very basic way to learn how to get back from the high intensity to above your RA max to, let's say, 85%, something that you can bring back to a cognitive presence so you can make the right decision.
And that, obviously, when you're training soldiers, it's got to be one of the most important things to do, to be able to operate under pressure and under, like, physical pressure.
And if you've been training more to that kind of alarm, you're going to see the car and you want to do, before you jump in and out, you're going to look and see on the other side.
Because maybe you see the car, you jump back, you didn't see the car coming from the other part.
And you got killed from the other car.
That takes a response of 300 milliseconds.
So, the amygdala will tell you to do whatever is needed to get out of the problem faster.
But the long way of your brain response, if you've been training and you're becoming resilient to the kind of alarm and shock situation, you're gonna make the right choice.
And for an operator, for a fighter, whatever, it's logical.
Think about Jiu Jitsu, a chess game.
Chess game.
Even those guys, they play chess.
They're so under stress hours.
The brain is cooking.
And the guys make a move, and maybe me, but I'm not playing.
I see the move, I say, I gotta move this way.
The other guy is planning, taking more time to plan whatever is going on, because he starts to understand why you did that move.
So it's not logical for me, I should be going that way.
And in training, regaining access to your breathing, to your heart rate, to your brain control is fundamental.
That's why I believe we need to be careful and understand fitness is so important.
Yeah, the ability to become under pressure is something that very few people have, and it's not something that they exercise.
They don't get to do it on a regular basis, they don't get severely stressed, so that when they are in a severe stress situation, and they have to make a critical decision, or they have to use fine motor skills in a critical situation, most people are just completely incapable of handing that emotional and physiological load.
What is it about?
There's something interesting about breathing in through your mouth that creates a panic feeling, like when guys are tired.
Yeah, breathing in, one of the things that you really learn that, like during yoga class, in particularly stressful situations, it's so hard to breathe smooth.
It's one of the things that I've learned how to do is to try to concentrate only on my breath, and it actually makes the exercise easier.
Which doesn't seem to make any sense because before I'd just be concentrating on the exercise and what I realized somewhere along the line is my breath is not very smooth and I'm not doing a good job of controlling myself.
So now when I'm in a situation like a really difficult standing bow pose or something like that, What I concentrate on more than anything, more even than the posture, is just my breathing.
Concentrate on big, slow, deep breaths.
And I swear it makes it like 10% easier.
Just concentrating on the breathing makes everything easier.
And Chrome Gracie said that too when he was in here.
We were talking about jiu-jitsu.
And he's like, it's breath, man.
Breath is everything.
And once you can control your breath, once you understand how to control your breath, it makes those positions better, makes jiu-jitsu easier, makes everything better.
You know, and when you get nervous, your adrenaline kicks in, and when your adrenaline kicks in, everything tightens up.
Physiological stress, like yoga positions, can kind of mimic that.
When you're in a position like when you've got your hands over your head and you're leaning your whole body to the side, it's very hard to stay smooth with your breathing when you're in those spots.
That's the number one thing that I concentrate on.
Holding my body in that position is not nearly as hard as holding my body and breathing smoothly.
Breathing smoothly is the most difficult part of that posture, like a lot of postures.
It's like a lot of people, they misinterpret it, or they all think, okay, we go tactical training, we do this, and we can control fear, reaction.
No, that's two different things.
You can control when you are really under stress for that kind of situation, so our rate.
And fears and other things.
Matter of fact, under high intensity workout, you become red.
Under fear, you become poor.
So it's different physiological things going into your body.
So the only thing that people do is misunderstanding that doing some kind of high intensity workout, we can control also the fear, real fear, because real fear is another thing.
Well, one of the things you see with fighters is they perform better when they're more active, when they fight more often.
So if a fighter fights like three times a year, they're used to fighting every few months and they get that feeling of competition becomes a normal, natural thing for them.
And it's also something that happens when you see a fighter lose.
When you see a fighter lose and they come back, they're very tense and they fight, a lot of times, they fight different.
Sure, and that's also one of the biggest factors when you talk about the difference between the way someone performs in the gym versus the way someone performs in competition.
We've all known these guys that were phenomenal in the gym, but for whatever reason, they weren't able to win in competition.
It's so common.
With some guys, it's almost like...
It's crazy.
It's almost like there's a spell on them or something.
You'll see them in the gym and you're like, this guy's a world beater.
But they can't beat anybody in a competition.
Why is that?
Psychological.
It's all psychological.
They are imprisoned by their own fears and doubts.
They don't have the confidence to rise to the occasion.
They don't have the confidence to perform under pressure.
They can't just accept the potential failure.
They're so overwhelmed and imprisoned by their fear of failure that when they get out there, they can't perform at their best.
It's crazy because it forces failure.
It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy because they can't perform like they do in the gym.
They can't just react.
They can't flow.
When you are fighting, when you're at your best, you're sort of just in this empty space.
You're not thinking about the moves as much as they're just happening, and you're just relying on your training, and the best thing you do is stay calm, because as soon as you get emotional, as soon as you get aggressive, you might win being emotional and aggressive.
You could catch someone and knock them out, but you also might get knocked out yourself.
You might do something that's not smart, like when you were talking earlier about playing chess.
Martial arts is a lot of ways like very much like chess, but way more complicated because your physical consequences are so severe.
So there's all this fear.
It's not just about losing.
It's about getting hit and that punishment of physical consequences is just so significant.
It's so much different even than in jujitsu.
Like jujitsu, the physical consequences are tapping and losing and those are terrible.
But it's nothing like getting kicked in the face or getting one of those Yoel Romero flying knees to your head.
You know, that kind of fear, that's an overwhelming fear.
And for some people, they throw up when they're in the locker room and they panic.
I love watching movies like Collateral or something when...
People go into some place and they shoot a place up and people's reaction, how they run.
That's not usually the case, bro.
I've seen it.
People drop to the fucking floor.
People drop without even getting shot.
They don't know what.
You just freeze.
The sound of you being somewhere and being transferred to the sound of gunfire is fucking overwhelming.
And some people get it and react to it.
And some people just think it's the 4th of July.
You know, it's really weird, but I've seen people fucking drop from fear.
Drop from fear.
Something that I was, as a child, when I was two blocks away from, just people dropping from fear.
You know, it's so...
Like, I remember when I lived in Aspen, they have the ESI Bodyguard Academy in Aspen.
I don't know, but the guy supposedly was in a room, 6x12 room, and he killed 12 Mexicans at night point with his bare hands, so he opens up this ESI thing, and it's, you know, it's 20 G's, you know?
It's a summer long program, and you learn how to adjust up at the high altitude, and drive, and evasive driving, and shooting.
Then they have a course on maritime, how to defend people out on the ocean.
And all that stuff.
But see, Aspen and all those places, like Woody Creek, where you went, is home to the baddest retired soldiers in the world.
And you don't know who they are.
You just think that dude over there with the American flag is mowing the lawn?
That guy killed 80 people with one hand in Vietnam.
And I asked him once, I go, should I go to that ESI? And he goes, listen, I'll go in there and smack them all with my left hand.
He goes, first of all, you can't teach.
What you need to learn over there.
Because four years of Charlie in the bush is a lot better than 12 weeks of you hanging out with some white dude with suits shooting people, targets in the mountains.
I would think that the best thing would be actually being in boot camp, actually going to Bud's, actually being in some sort of a situation where you realize this is life.
This is real.
Whereas if you're preparing up in Colorado and you're just going through that course, you might have some things in your mind.
But that's one of the things people say to me like, Like, should I take a self-defense class?
Like, will they show you how to kick somebody in the knee?
I go, listen to me.
That shit is not gonna...
Like, there was just a guy on the fucking radio that was...
He was always talking about...
It was on an Opie and Anthony show back in the day, and he was always talking about this difference between the street and martial arts.
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There's martial arts and tournaments, there's rules.
And I'm like, I fucking hate when people say that kind of shit.
Because listen to me, the stuff that works on trained killers is the real shit.
And if you think that you're gonna come in and you're gonna throw some fucking karate chop at someone's balls, and you're gonna somehow or another be able to stop Anderson Silva from kicking you across the room, you're out of your fucking mind.
You're out of your mind.
First of all, you're not gonna karate chop his balls.
He's not gonna let you get close enough to him.
And if he does let you get close enough to him, he's gonna strangle you.
And you're not gonna be able to do a goddamn thing about it.
You're gonna be 100% helpless.
So these ideas, there's this shortcut, and the shortcut is like street defense.
There's certain pressure points around your neck.
I could attack that, and you will be helpless.
No, no, no, you're not going to get in my neck, you fuck.
There was a guy at the store who used to pinch down on, literally, this is the biggest phony I've ever met in all my years of meeting phony martial arts guys.
He used to pinch down on your thumbnail.
He was like, there's a pressure point on your thumb.
That's a big thing with, again, what we were talking about with fighting.
I had one time where I tore a muscle and I didn't compete for like six months.
It was like the longest time I'd ever gone without competing because I tore the muscle that connects the groin to like, I think it's called the sartorius muscle.
It's like at the top of the leg.
It was real bad.
I couldn't throw any kicks at all.
I could only do my workouts in the pool.
It was pretty bad.
And so when I was recovering from that, When I got back in, my first fight back, I was like, wow, I just feel so off.
My timing feels off.
Everything feels weird.
But then I fought again less than a month later, and I felt great.
Like, less than a month later, everything was like, all right, I know this again.
This is my thing.
I've been here before.
And then I felt normal again.
It's like when you have a girlfriend.
If you have a girlfriend for a long time, you don't get nervous about whether or not you're going to get it up.
You don't panic like, I hope she likes me.
She fucking likes you.
She's naked.
She's right there.
She's been with you forever.
You know she likes you, so it's not an issue.
But if, you know, if it is, like you said, a girl that you've been thinking about for the longest time, and you're, I'm gonna ask her out, I hope this goes well.
And then you finally get where they're like, yikes!
The human penis is such a fucking odd thing in that regard.
What a bizarre thing.
It's designed to make sure, like, look, dude, if you ain't calm, you're not gonna fuck, okay?
Because we don't want any weak-ass, nervous bitches out there making babies.
So the system is built.
To make sure that your dick does not get hard if you're fucking panicking.
It's not like a rhino horn where it's armed and ready at all times.
No, it's like a very specific physiological process has to be in place where the softest part of your body becomes hard like a fucking rock.
The process itself is crazy.
When you look at your dick when you're going to pee and it's this soft little spongy thing and then you grab your dick when it's that full mast And it's like, how is that the same thing?
Because it's this crazy physiological process that only works if you're ready to rock.
I don't know how you translate it in English, but there is a book that explains it so well, so simple about those reactions of the body and the stress.
And you say, think about the zebra and the savanna.
You know, that's exactly, you know, when someone is chasing you to hit you, and when you are under stress, high stress, your body starts producing hormones, like testosterone.
Why?
You know, the last thing you want to have is sex when some lion is behind you.
So that's exactly what he's doing, shutting down whatever is needed.
Zebras are so bizarre because you see the way their body looks.
They're not camouflaged at all.
They have white with black stripes on.
And for the longest time, they thought that the white with black stripes on would confuse an animal's mind.
There's a type of camo.
Have you ever heard of ASAT camo as a type of camouflage?
It doesn't look like trees or anything.
It's just a bunch of black and white.
Brown lines.
And those lines for animals, because animals, their eyes operate on edge detection.
They operate on a lot of them, especially prey animals, like deer and things along those lines.
They see movement.
They don't necessarily see things the way you see things.
They mostly just see movement.
And so for the longest time, they thought, well, maybe when you're looking like a lion is looking at a zebra, The lion is seeing this zebra's body, and there's all the lines, confuses it so he can't see it.
Then they realized, no, no, no, what it actually is, is you can't pick out individual zebras.
So, like, if an individual zebra, like, looks different from the other zebras, that's the one they get after.
Like, if one zebra's bleeding and has blood on its body, and it looks different from all those other white and black lines, that's the one they target.
Which is kind of fucked.
And one of the ways they found out this, they tagged a zebra.
They put like an ear tag on a zebra, and they sent...
Jordan Peterson was talking about this recently in this video.
And they put it back into the herd, and the lions immediately killed that zebra.
That's the one they went right to, because it had something different.
Like, you see all these white and black lines, and then, oh, this motherfucker's got an ear tag.
So it's really designed like, look, we know we're fucked.
We're born fucked.
But if we stay together, you know, maybe, like, look, when you see that.
So when you see all those zebras together, it's super confusing.
Well, we will have this fucking TV fix soon, I swear.
This TV cuts in and out.
That one, you can see it back.
So when you see these zebras and we see these lions, what it's designed to do is confuse the lions so that they don't know which one to target, which is crazy.
But if one of those motherfuckers had an ear tag, a big old yellow tag hanging off their ear, the lions would be like, there you are, bitch.
A lot of people were like pissed off, it was boring, but I think that's because they just want to see people beat the fuck out of each other, which I understand.
That's why you tune into cage fighting.
But to me, the way I always describe martial arts is it's high-level problem solving with dire physical consequences.
And if you run in on Tyron Woodley, you got some dire physical consequences.
He's a fucking powerhouse.
And if Woodley charges at Thompson, There's dire physical consequences because he was getting tagged when he would he said it to me after the fight He's like he caught me a few times as I was charging towards him so Woodley has a different style than Thompson Thompson has that wide stance that karate style and he's excellent at moving in and moving out and almost like point fighting you He's just jabbing you hitting you with these Clean left hands,
sliding out of the way, occasionally throwing kicks, but mostly what he's doing is making you wonder what he's going to do and when he's coming at you.
And Woodley had to pick his battles and figure out when he could launch himself at him.
So, at any moment, something could have happened.
But a lot of shit didn't happen.
So the people watching at home are like, that was the most boring fight ever.
It's because those moments are so critical.
Those moments are so dangerous.
They would like it to be like Frankie Edgar Grey Maynard, just fucking chaos.
Punches, throwing, wild.
It's not going to happen like that.
You can't do that with Wonderboy.
You can't charge at him like that.
He will fucking counter you, and you will be one of those people on his highlight reel.
So Tyron Woodley was very smart, and that he knew that he couldn't charge at him.
And Wonderboy, he's not gonna charge at Woodley either.
I mean, he got almost knocked the fuck out in the first fight.
He almost got knocked the fuck out in the fifth round of the second fight, too.
Woodley's a powerhouse, man.
He hits so goddamn hard.
So everybody had to be on their toes.
They both had to be minding their P's and Q's.
And that translated for a boring fight to a lot of people, but not to me.
To me, I was like, anything can happen at any moment.
In the fifth round, it almost did.
When Woodley connected and Thompson's knees went out, I mean, he slumped.
He was out, man.
He was out for at least a half a second or a moment, you know?
There was a moment where his legs gave out, his body went limp, and they could have stopped the fight right there.
I'm glad they didn't.
I'm glad they kept it going.
I talked to Big John McCarthy in the cage after the fight.
I go, how close were you to stopping that fight?
He goes...
He goes, I wasn't close to stopping that fight.
I go, but you were looking, right?
He goes, I was looking.
I go, you were looking close.
He goes, I'll never admit it.
I go, but it was, I mean, he was almost out, right?
He goes, he was almost out.
He might have been out for a half a second, but I gave him a chance.
I go, he did a great job.
He did an amazing job.
I mean, that's why Big John McCarthy is so important.
A guy with that kind of experience.
And if he fucked that up, everybody would be so mad at him.
But he did it perfect.
It was perfect.
He has the most difficult job in the sport other than the fighters.
They're moving around, and they're fast, and they could go to his left, and he could be over here, but something could be happening on their right, and he doesn't even see it.
You don't know.
Sometimes guys don't see taps.
Sometimes guys don't see certain eye pokes or groin shots.
There's a lot of things that can happen.
A referee's job is insanely difficult, and they only get praise when they fuck up.
They only rather get attention when they fuck up.
They don't get any praise when they do a great job.
They need more.
More people need to understand how difficult that is.
So that moment where Tyron finally did connect on Wonderboy, and everybody's like, why didn't you do that earlier?
Because he could have got knocked the fuck out.
Like, that was where the opening was.
Woodley was so aggressive because he was down on the scorecards, at least in his corner's eyes, and in my eyes he was as well, and he had to charge forward, and he had to connect, and he did.
But to make that happen a lot of things have to be in place You have to understand Wonderboy's timing he had been fighting him for four rounds already He was getting a sense of what Wonderboy could and couldn't do he also knew the consequences He'd been tagged a couple of times So he knew like I can't just rush at him because Wonderboy was trying to time him with that right hook He was standing in the southpaw position with his right leg forward and He throws that front leg side kick to the body.
He throws it really well because he picks it up from the ground like low and it sort of scoops up.
So you don't see it coming until it's too late.
It might not be the most powerful application of the front leg side kick, but it's very sneaky because he slides in with that foot low and then it comes up and stabs you.
And you don't know if it's going to come up as a sidekick or if it's going to go up and over your shoulder as a round kick.
You don't know what he's doing.
He's so sneaky.
So Tyron had to be very cautious.
And for a lot of people, it was very boring because of that.
But I didn't think it was boring while it was happening.
I was on the edge of my seat.
I was like, there are moments, there's going to be moments when the shit starts flying.
And in those moments, that's where the fight becomes amazing.
But those guys are smart.
They're not dumb.
And the belt is so goddamn important.
When you have the belt, you get to decide.
You fight all the best fighters.
You make the money.
You get the opportunities for the big money fights, like the Conor McGregor type fights.
Those only happen if you have the belt.
If you don't have the belt, nobody gives a fuck about you.
So for a guy like Tyron, man, that belt is everything.
For a guy like Woodley, or a guy like Wonderboy, rather, that belt is everything.
If you don't have that belt, you make a fraction of what you make.
Like, think about that fight.
That fight's insanely close.
It was so close, Dominic Cruz afterwards said, that's basically the same fight as the first fight.
It's like, if you've called the first fight a draw, you could easily call this fight a draw.
And I agree with him.
So that means that Wonderboy and Woodley are essentially like so closely matched stylistically that it's a wash, right?
But meanwhile Woodley's the one who's the champion.
Woodley's the one who has the potential to fight Conor McGregor.
Woodley is the one who has the potential to fight Michael Bisping or who else he fights at whatever weight he fights at.
And that is where the money is.
So he's the guy who's gonna get the money.
Whereas Wonderboy, who essentially had a draw with him, proved that he was At least close enough on one fight and just a hair under on the second fight, he's gonna make a fraction of what Woodley makes, likely.
So, those consequences have to be taken into consideration when you're watching these guys fight, is that they know there's a win bonus and there's a loss.
If you lose, you get your show money.
You don't get a bonus.
But if you win, you get twice the money.
A lot of guys, the way their contract is structured, they'll make X if they win, and they'll make X plus X. They'll make X plus X if they win, but if they lose, they only make X. So they might be getting $200,000 for the fight, but another $200,000 if they win.
That's a giant swing.
That's a big deal.
So they have to be really fucking careful they don't make mistakes.
I don't like win bonuses, man.
I don't like it.
I think those guys are trying to win anyway.
They're trying to win.
I just think, like, especially in particular in situations like that, when fights are, like, that fucking close.
Like, a judge can decide whether or not you make an extra 200 grand or don't.
But once you get up to the top, like look at that picture where you're seeing the ocean, Jamie, like up in the right-hand corner, upper right hand, yeah, like there.
That's what it looks like once you finally get up there, you're like, wow, it's so pretty.
Like, you know, if you went to a good place and got like linguine vangole, they'll give you a linguine with a very light olive oil and garlic sauce with the linguine and like that is the kind of pasta.
That's why if you try to go to a real Italian restaurant, you ask for cheese, like grated cheese on linguine vangole, they'll look at you like you're a fucking monster.
Yeah, karate style with the shin, where the instep rather, when you're kicking with the top of the foot, everybody had this idea like that was the way to do it.
And then the moment you get kicked with a shin, you go, oh, all right.
Like, there's certain techniques that people learn where they don't learn how to do pool correctly.
You only play in billiards, you stand the wrong way, and you get used to it.
And when you're in a match and there's a lot on the line, you go right back to the old ways, even if you take lessons.
It's so important that when you learn things in life, to learn them right the first time.
That's why when you're growing up as a human being, I think it's been an issue with me, I think it's been an issue with you as well, when your childhood is kind of fucking crazy.
Like you develop these ways of thinking and acting as a child that are very difficult to break.
As you get older and as an adult, it's like you have this foundation that's very faulty.
And you have to be cognizantly aware.
You have to be consciously aware of that, okay, this foundation is fucked up because I grew up with domestic violence and I grew up with, you know, no dad.
And so I have to make sure that I don't fall into these...
Patterns that I had established in my head when I was 8, 9, and 10, and 11. As you're growing up as an adult, this is the way you're looking at life.
And then you have to kind of restructure it.
It's almost like you're starting over.
But if you meet someone who has like...
Great father and a great mother and they grow up and they have like a great fundamental balance But there's those people used to always make me nervous when I was a kid Because I was always like God like these how do they I don't even know anybody like that I don't know like I would feel like Inferior to them like when I was around people that had like a good childhood.
I have friends that I think about them now and I go, I want to really interview their parents.
Like, what did they do to get this kid to be such a fucking...
What was their recipe to get this child to be fucking a superhuman being?
And I'm not talking about Julius Irving's father or fucking GSP's dad.
I'm talking about people who you meet in life that are really fair...
That are really kind.
I look at those people and I go, I wondered what their parents did with them to have that ability to want to help people and go out of their way.
I always think about that shit, especially now as a parent.
You're like, what is the fucking chemistry of love for them to understand?
You know, we were talking on the way up here when my mother died.
You know, it was the 70s.
And let's face it, we were still Spicks in that New Jersey neighborhood.
You know, in Boston and those areas, you hear things.
But I remember those Italian kids coming to my mom's wake, and they couldn't make eye contact with me.
The same ones that would say Spick or whatever, because I short-circuited them.
I broke them, because the number one word in Italy is mama.
Right.
That's it.
That's it.
When you're Italian, everything is mama.
They would come to that wake, and I would short-circuit them, because they never could think of that situation happening to them.
And I'm still friends with those people today.
And I always wondered why, you know, who raised them, that they're super great people.
And then you come here, to a place like California, and you meet people, and they have nice parents or whatever, but they're just the biggest scumbags in the fucking world.
I had construction jobs too because my dad was an architect.
My stepdad always set me up with...
These construction crews and stuff.
So I did these jobs.
And so it gave me the understanding that if you've never worked hard and you don't know what the fuck hard work is, then all of a sudden you're 18 and then you're in college and then you got out of college and then you have to get a job.
You have no real experience with actual difficult work.
I just don't think you appreciate what it takes to get by.
Growing up, seeing people that had a strong work ethic and realizing that that wasn't something that I had, but maybe it was something that I need to consider as being a very important skill, a very important trait.
The ability to, like, just actually get shit done.
To get up in the morning when your alarm clock goes off and go.
You're uncomfortable.
You want to stay in bed.
It's cold out.
You don't want to do it.
That ability to just do it.
Just get up and do it.
You know that old Nike fucking slogan, just do it?
It's one of the best fucking slogans of all time.
You know how many people actually went out and worked out just because of that, just do it?
That might have been like the most effective ad campaign in the history of ad campaigns.
When it came to actually getting people to do things that are uncomfortable and something that actually made sense, just do it.
So fucking, so important.
It's so important.
You just gotta fucking get things done.
And for so many people, like you were talking about at the beginning of the podcast, Joey, that book, The War of Art, where it talks about resistance.
There's so many people that just fuck off.
They fuck off, and they don't get the things done that they need to get done, and that haunts them.
We know it as comics.
We know so many guys that don't write new material.
They just don't.
They just don't.
They don't work.
They don't work.
You know why?
Because when you have new material, man, sometimes it doesn't go well.
Sometimes you bomb.
Sometimes you go up and it's clunky.
It's not ready.
And when you do a special, like when you just released a special, you know what it's like.
That material's dead now.
And so now you have to write all new material and you have a bunch of people that are coming to pay to see you.
Yeah, I panic every fucking week every week when I go on the road I panic because I do not have a full 50 minutes that snow I got a couple fucking minutes and I'm trying out new shit constantly constantly, but it comes together slowly but surely together But it's just like anything else.
It's sticking with it.
Right now I'm in a slump.
So what do you do as a baseball player?
Jamie, when you're in a slump, what do you do as a baseball player?
You quit?
No!
You keep fucking hitting.
And you keep striking out, and you keep fucking striking out, and you keep it together.
You cannot lose it.
I.K.A. Tony Perez, 1976-75 against the Boston Red Sox.
He went 0-17 in the series, and in Game 7 he hit the single that changed.
They won the World Series, really.
So he could have just said, I don't want to do it.
I know I'm in a comedian slump.
Well, not anymore now.
But like in December and January, it was fucking heavy, Jack.
It's all about, for me, when I train people, you know, I try to say, okay, you're doing 10 push-ups, and if you come to the 8, the number 8, and you see that you start to struggle, that's it.
Stop.
I don't allow you to do a bad...
Number.
Number nine, because I know number nine is going to be a bad push-up.
So a bad form.
So what happens?
When you're going to be under stress, you're going to be repeating the bad form.
So for me, I try to remap you, like you said before when you were teaching, remap you in the way that you always try to achieve The best.
Like you said, just do it.
What I say, okay, you need to repeat the things until you never do it wrong.
Don't do it right.
You never do it wrong.
Because do it right once, it can come from luckiness.
But now, I'm lucky that I have weights at home, so I have kettlebells at home, so I can do it four days a week, five days a week, and I'll work out for an hour.
I just go in there.
It's 8 o'clock in the morning.
I start lifting.
I'm done in an hour, and I'm not even exhausted.
Not only am I not exhausted, I feel kind of pumped up and kind of charged.
But I'm not like, oh.
Like, I used to work out sometimes.
Like, back in the day, I would do lifts.
And by the time the lift was over, I was lightheaded.
I know I'd be fucking wrecked for like two or three days.
So I'd be really nervous to lift in the morning and then do jiu-jitsu at night because I would know that I was going to be operating at like 50% or 60%.
I'd just get my ass kicked.
But if you do kettlebells with low repetitions, even with heavy weight, you could do a real good workout and then that night you could work jiu-jitsu and you could be 100%.
And then I'd do five sets of cleans with two 35s, and then strand, and then jump rope, and then try to do sit-ups, and then for three days, I'm dog shit.
When I go to a hotel now, every two weeks, I work every other week, I'll hit the dumbbells and do the elliptical, but when I'm in town, I'll just do the tack fit in the beginning, a little jujitsu, and then I'll do a tack fit at the end.
And you know what, man?
I don't want to walk around hunched up when I'm 60. I got a four-year-old.
I got to be around and be...
I like that I can touch my toes.
You know, I like all this stuff.
But one thing I noticed about TACFIT, that there's a couple moves that they put in there.
If you look, even the kids rolling around when it's in this early stage, you go to some, you know, double S, they can transfer to a shin box or whatever.
One of the things that Eddie found is that guys who are break dancers excelled in Jiu Jitsu.
There's a kid who fought this past weekend, Lando Venata.
Groovy Lando fought this past weekend.
He fought David Tamer.
Crazy fight.
It was a co-main event.
Lando has only been striking for six years and he's phenomenal.
But what happened was he started with a BMX background.
He was a pro BMX racer and was like apparently like a national champion BMX and that pumping, pumping bike legs, you know, just being able to like generate extreme speed off the line.
He developed this explosive ability to use his legs.
And so that, like, having cross-training, whether it's through tack fit, or whether it's through yoga, or whether it's through kettlebells, or breakdancing, or anything else.
And if you're taking a weightlifter, he spends an entire life to learn that kind of movement perfectly.
Never screw the movement.
And how many reps he does in his competition.
One.
You can't do that kind of athletic jazz movement so fast, even if you reduce the weight, because you can't control one, two, three reps, and then you might be using up.
I was talking to Michael Lach.
Michael Lach was one of the most successful CrossFit coaches, especially here in South California.
He used to own a big CrossFit gym in Van Nuys.
And he was telling me about it.
He has more experience than me, of course, CrossFit.
That was his business.
He told me, I believe that if you do it when you are 20 years old or something like this, into the 30, you can speed a little bit.
Then if you are smart enough, you understand that then you need to slow down.
If you train CrossFit without thinking, Cup time.
Try to see online how much this guy did.
So I want to beat this guy.
You're just training smartly.
You do your weightlifting, your rings.
It's going to be good.
But if you just take it as a sport, It's just conditioning you for that part, such as CrossFit.
You can, in conditioning for Jiu-Jitsu, try to do a CrossFit wood with the cup time, because, like you say, you're going to destroy yourself.
Well, Steve Maxwell said that he believes that what you're doing is when you're lifting and you're doing these Olympic lifts, you should be doing Olympic lifts to get you stronger for another sport, for a competition.
He doesn't believe that it should be a sport in itself.
And if you want to get endurance, run up a fucking hill.
Okay?
Do rounds on a heavy bag.
You want endurance?
Do sprints on a heavy bag.
You know what I do?
I have a timer, and I set it for three minutes, and every 30 seconds, a buzzer goes off.
So there's a bell, and then every 30 seconds there's a buzzer.
And when those 30 seconds hit, you fucking sprint.
So it's 30 seconds, ba-ba-ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-ba-boom.
Just go fucking crazy for 30 seconds, and then the next buzzer hits.
So the next 30 seconds is so light.
The next 30 seconds, I'm just sort of going through the motions.
So I'm kicking and punching, and I'm waiting for that fucking buzzer.
And that buzzer goes off, and then I go off again.
Just do that if you want endurance.
That'll give you phenomenal endurance.
But strength, I am of the opinion, and this is just from the last few years of me operating this way, that you should do low repetitions and you should do it more often.
For example, since January till now, I've been in Australia, I've been back to Italy, then I went back to Brazil, Brazil, back to Italy, Italy, Panama, Panama, Mexico, Mexico here, then I go back to Italy, then I go back to Korea.
And, you know, they only do it so that they can keep them on those trucks longer and drive around the country with them and keep them on the shelves in the grocery store longer.
There's this thing called the Glory Hole, the Morning Glory Hole up in Northern California.
It's this crazy hole that's in this lake.
And it hadn't operated in 10 years.
It hadn't been doing it.
Because it's like a vortex.
What do they call those when it spins like that?
What do they call those things?
Is it a vortex?
So it sucks this hole somehow or another.
When the water level gets to a certain point, it develops this hole in this lake, and it wasn't there for 10 years, and now it's finally back again for the first time.
Yeah, so for 10 years, the water level wasn't high enough for that actually to be happening, and now it's finally happening again, and people are all excited.
So it's pretty much over.
All of the drought issues that we had here in California are pretty much over.
Tell this fucking guy.
I don't care what TV they get.
Just get rid of this guy.
We've been waiting on this other TV for so long.
Tell him today.
Say, just get whatever the fuck you can get by Saturday.
Just the way my office building is, I can't go in there in the daytime and smoke a pound of pot and play loud music.
I just can't do it, and I don't want to do it, so I prefer to do it at night when I don't have a gun to my head.
If I come here at 1 o'clock, Joe, and we have to sit here until 4, from 3 to 4, I'm going to be fidgety or out of control because I'm thinking about that fucking traffic.
So he had to meet him, and the Iceman, the only reason why the Iceman contacted him was because he heard he could get different guns, and he was ATF. So when the Iceman contacted him, he wanted Sinai.
So he kept saying, bring me to Sinai, and then he was going to sell him arms.
So for 18 months, this guy had contact with this guy.
I had to meet him in a diner.
He said he would hold his gun pointed right at him.
Jesus Christ, that's a fucking scary book and it details this guy was a Mob boss was it in the 70s?
Yeah in the 70s and this It details how he slowly started killing a bunch of people Like slowly but surely and then they would cut him up in their fucking bathtub And then they had this one apartment where they would take these people to that was above this bar that they would go to.
They'd take these people upstairs and fucking kill them.
There was two guys that were talking about your podcast.
It was fucking hilarious.
They were talking about Lee.
And they were like, what Joey has done to that poor guy?
He's like, every time he sees him, he's forcing him to eat mushrooms, he's got to take acid, he's giving him pot, he's giving him edibles, he's lying to him about the dosages.
When the guy got me the liquid acid, I called him and I said, listen, I got liquid acid.
And you can hear him getting anxiety on the phone.
He goes, oh no.
You can hear a little bit.
And then he goes, how are we going to do it?
I said, so we're going to get sugar cubes and put the acid on it.
But I called him back like a day later.
I didn't have no acid and I had no sugar cubes.
I just made it up.
I go, listen, I just put the acid in the sugar cubes, and I put them in the Tupperware, and I put a lid on it, and I left, and when I came back, the lid had blown up.
So whatever's in that acid is going to be really fucking strong.
I go, I put aluminum foil over it with holes so it could breathe, so the acid won't fucking go into...
Oh my God, I had him going for three weeks.
I go to Cleveland, guess what?
Some guy comes up to me, gives me a tube of acid.
I says, this is the pharmaceutical grade shit.
This will kill Gaddafi the whole fucking thing.
I go home, we put two drops on each ice cube, on each sugar cube.