Dan Peña, a flamboyant California-based entrepreneur and former stand-up comic, argues the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is unsolvable due to deep-rooted religious divides, while dismissing environmental fears over fracking and pipelines as political distractions, claiming Saudi Aramco’s reserves are trillions of barrels. His Boots to Suits program combats veteran suicide by pushing them into high-stakes business training, where he exposes emotional weaknesses—like a 26-year-old engineer raised in a brothel—while mocking millennials for avoiding discomfort and squandering low-interest opportunities. Success, he insists, demands brutal self-honesty and relentless action, not just financial metrics or social validation. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean, when I first said 30 years ago, the two things to get involved in were healthcare and telecommunications, which morphed into the Internet, I had no idea what the Internet was going to be.
You know, people measure returns on their investment and return on the minute.
Not return on the hour or the month or return on capital because things can change, you know, in a few seconds.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, but how do you feel about that?
Of a guy that's been an investor for as long as you've been, how do you feel about this new thing where they're using computers and algorithms to buy and trade, like literally at the speed of sound?
They're just click, click, click, going back and forth depending on the trends.
They're paying money to get a server that's as close as possible to the exchange.
They're literally buying and selling in milliseconds.
They're a millionth of a second ahead of everybody else because they're closer to the exchange.
I came up the old way.
I appreciate the progress, but I don't like it because most people don't understand it.
Like I was tweeting this morning, gold's down.
Oil broke $48 a barrel or $49 a barrel.
And how has your 401k improved?
What are your gurus telling you to do now?
The market's up, depending on how you want to measure, 20-25% since Trump got elected on the 8th of November.
And hardly anybody's benefited.
The guys that have benefited are the guys that drive the indices.
He's created $3 trillion in market cap.
On just the New York Stock Exchange, but most people haven't benefited because 70 to 90%, depending on how you want to count or calculate, of that money is big money.
Rockefeller, Pena, Trump, etc.
And so the average guy, the average Joe, didn't benefit.
I ask anybody listening, check your 401k or your pension plan.
Tell me how much it's up since November 8th.
Most people say nothing.
So, part of that is just what you're alluding to, the algorithms, because it's the fast big money that's making all the big money.
Although, hedge funds have fallen out of favor the last couple years, because their returns haven't been the same as even the indices.
How do you feel about the things that Trump is doing right now, and the way he's...
You know, he's bringing on all these guys that have worked for these major corporations like Exxon.
They're doing that whole thing that he announced the other day of creating 45,000 jobs in the Gulf Coast.
And if you look at it, there was a thing on the New York Times today, I think, that was talking about, maybe it was Time Magazine, was talking about he's created 239,000 jobs since he's been in office.
Which is, what is it, a couple of months?
Not that long.
So are you, from a business standpoint, forget about like socially, but from a business standpoint?
And I knew him from that late 80s and the early 90s because one of my partners and one of my mentors was Governor Hugh Carey, the former governor of New York.
So because of his New York relationship and also one of my ex-business partners was Mayor Wagner, the former mayor of New York.
So I knew Trump then.
But I haven't talked to him in over 20 years.
But getting back to your original question, I believe that there's a reason why he's meeting with all the CEOs of all these major industries because nobody else has ever done it.
I believe, and as I endorsed him, I was one of the early endorsers of Trump.
And I said that if he's serious, he'll win.
He knows how to win.
He doesn't know how to lose.
If he's serious, he's going to rock the fucking planet.
Not just the U.S., but the world.
And the financial models are changing in Europe, not just because of Brexit.
The financial models are changing in Russia.
The financial models are changing in China because they've got a guy, I got an alpha male in office that is surrounding himself with alpha males.
It's no coincidence that 60% of his staff are ex-military.
I mean, the press secretary is a goddamn lieutenant commander of the Navy, not counting all the four-star generals that he's got.
So I don't agree with everything he says.
I don't agree with everything he tweets.
I wouldn't tweet as much as he does.
But I do agree that the country needed change, financial change, and he's going to bring it.
Now, whether he gets elected a second term or not, I don't know.
But I do believe, and I've said, Joe, that November the 8th was the beginning of the greatest transformation of wealth The planet has ever fucking seen since World War II. How so?
Because, well, I mean, just look, $3 trillion so far in stock market.
I believe it's going to be $100 trillion he's going to add to the market before he leaves office.
Caterpillar, even though they got in some trouble for taxes, they got raided here a couple days ago.
Caterpillar, they make tractors.
The infrastructure is shot in this country.
The bridges are all 40, 50, 60 years past their prime.
I didn't know a bridge could go past its prime.
The roads are 50, 60, 70 years past their prime.
The infrastructure for pipelines are past their prime.
So he's going to rebuild all this.
He's going to spend, supposedly, $3 trillion Which is not a coincidence because he's added $3 trillion to the stock market.
But he's going to add infrastructure.
So all the stocks like Caterpillar, AT&T, Boeing, etc., have gone up 15%, 20%, 25%, 30% since he got elected because the big money, the smart money, knows that those companies are going to get all the contracts.
The real no-brainer is aerospace.
Not just because he cut the cost of Air Force One down 700 million or whatever he did, but because he's going to bring the United States military back to what it was under Reagan 30 years ago.
And being a vet myself, I believe a strong country.
I think we get involved in too much shit outside the country.
Okay.
But I mean, a strong country, then nobody's gonna, you know, screw with us.
He's gonna bring back jobs.
I believe he will build a wall.
And my mother and grandmother swam across the Rio Grande River as illegal aliens in 1924-25.
My mother, God rest her soul, we were just out at the cemetery a couple days ago, wasn't a naturalized citizen until she was in her early 30s.
But I figured out a way to pay for the wall, and yours is the first show I'm going to say it on.
I know it's feasible, but I'm a guy that I would rather pull the trigger And see if it works.
Then not do anything.
The biggest difference between most of the kids that are out there trying to be successful like yourself and some of the other people you've interviewed here is they spreadsheet it to death, they read books, they listen to podcasts, and they never do a fucking thing.
I've had kids come to my seminar that have read 700 books On personal development.
People don't know today, kids aren't scared of AIDS anymore, but back in the 80s when Magic Johnson got AIDS, I will never forget where I was, in my car, when he got HIV rather, when they announced it on the radio.
I was driving in my car, I was like, oh my god.
It was like a scene in a zombie movie where you thought this was the beginning, this was the first one, and then eventually it was going to spread across the entire country and everyone you knew was going to be dead.
Yeah, I mean, when I had lunch with him a few days ago, I think I told you on the phone, I was expecting he and his wife to be keeping me rolling in the aisles.
Yeah, they chop the top and the bottom, the femur, and then they put, it's like a joint like this, and then it has these like spikes that go into the bone marrow and they cement them.
Oh, Jesus.
But what they didn't tell me is, see, your knee goes like this, moves both ways.
Well, let me just say, I have three regrets in life.
It leads into this.
The segue will become obvious.
First regret is the day before my mom died, I told her, you're not fucking sick, you're not fucking sick, you're not going to die.
She dies the next day.
Okay.
Second regret I have is the fact that I'm a combat trained army officer who never saw combat.
Never got any real trigger time.
The third regret is that I didn't set my goals high enough.
As successful as I am.
Okay.
So, because I tried to get involved with mercenary things when I got out of the military about 10 years, because I had done very well as far as business was concerned.
But I actually did a joint venture with the CIA. It's all public record now, and my statute of limitations passed, so I can't get in any trouble.
And that didn't work out, so I decided I'm going to do big game hunting.
So I started with rifles.
I know some guys do bows.
I believe you do.
That was too easy.
Then I did a handgun.
Handgun?
Handgun.
454 console used to be the biggest handgun made 25, 30 years ago.
So I went down there to hunt with him in Australia for 10 days, again with a handgun.
And I said, I want to get a big bull.
Like a water buffalo.
Yeah, exactly.
And he said, okay, well, we have to go into a certain part of Australia, near Darwin, up north.
And he said that, I can't promise he's still going to be there, but there's a big pond about four or five times as big as this room, and he should be there in the late afternoon, scratching his back on the roots, overhanging.
So we got there, we hiked in four or five hours, and he was there, just like he said he was going to be there.
And he said that, you don't want to just shoot him in the back.
So, he throws pebbles at him, he spins around, and he says he won't come out this way because it's too far for him to jump, and he can't jump that high.
Just like magic, that goddamn bull jumped 15 feet in the fucking air, spun around, and ran right at me.
So, about where you are.
As he ran over me and I fell back, I shot once and I hit him through the chin.
It went out his nose, but it missed his brain.
He put one hoof on my hip, and that's why I had to get a hip eventually, and one hoof on my left knee.
I mean, when you separate a little bit, sometimes you have time to think about what you're going to do, but most of it is you're relying on your training and your conditioning.
Well, I hear you when you're announcing those deals about there's some guys that are really in good condition, that they're animals or beasts, and it seems to me that that's...
One of the telling things, if you run out of gas in the second, third, or fourth round, you're screwed.
In the early 80s, I had the privilege of being mentored by Konstantin Grazos, who was the chief executive of Onassis Shipping Line, the 60-year right-hand man of Aristotle Onassis.
He was one of my mentors.
And he, the Vatican, the CIA, Imelda Marcos, and a guy named Talaveras of Mobile Oil, the CEO, came up with an idea that they were going to invade Haiti, just like Clinton did 12 years later.
Okay?
And for all different reasons.
Onassis wanted the shipping of the oil.
Mobile wanted the oil.
The Vatican wanted more Catholics.
C.I.A. wanted to have them not be a baby Doc Duvalier, communistic, eating with the communists right near Florida.
And I don't know what the fuck Emelda was there for.
She wasn't buying shoes or anything, but she was there.
And I was put in charge of that project by Mr. Grazos.
And we put together a mercenary army, and we had some of the great mercenaries, a guy named Mike Williams, one of the great mercenaries of the 70s and 80s.
And just as we were going to launch the attack and land with boots on the ground, Cyrus Vance, Secretary of State, pulled the plug on the deal.
But I was going to come out of a helicopter just like Schwarzenegger does.
By the way, you can't hold those big guns.
Even Arnie can't.
The way they do it, they're too heavy.
But anyway, I was going to be the first feet on the ground.
And then when that thing fell to shit, I said, well, maybe I'm just not meant to see combat, you know?
But was it important to you because you didn't know how you would fare or because you knew how you would fare and you wanted to test yourself or you just wanted to experience?
And when you look back on all that stuff and all that intense aggression and all those thoughts, did you take anything out of that that you carry with you as an older man?
Well, I mean he's lost 40 pounds this guy I saw him pick up a Corvette when we were kids and Now he has trouble getting up steps Wow Yeah, Agent Orange is some scary shit, wasn't it?
So you think that the way they, like for instance, where they treat women, the way they won't let women drive, the way they make them wear their religious, how do you say it?
Well, I would be absolutely fascinated if I found a group of chimpanzees that had figured out how to make fire with sticks and were building structures and were starting some sort of an organized war against other chimpanzees.
I would be absolutely fascinated.
If they had weapons and they were sneaking up on these other chimps and using spears, I'd be like, holy shit, look at this.
This is us a long time ago.
And I would imagine that aliens would feel the same way about us.
Maybe 100 years from now, we won't be ready to go to other planets, but maybe someone out there is just a little bit more advanced than us, and they're watching.
Not because they need money, because they've got all the money in the world.
Because when you go public, you have to have a reserve report.
The reserve report is going to show how many barrels they have.
Proved producing, proved, unproved.
And we've been guesstimating for years and years and years that Aramco's got a couple hundred million barrels, maybe three, four, five hundred million barrels.
Billion barrels, excuse me.
That report's going to show they have trillions of barrels And there's no fucking way they're ever going to let fracking, electric cars, or anything else.
When they're out of their trillions of barrels, then they're going to let electric cars come to pass.
In August 2014, I was on not a show as prestigious as yours, but some other guy's show, and I said when oil was $120 a barrel, we will see $40 oil before we see $200 oil.
Okay, in February last year, oil hit $26 a barrel.
Today, it's $48.
Now, there's a whole bunch of reasons why I know that.
Having done business in the Middle East, knowing Aramco's got hundreds of trillions of barrels, knowing that when the king of Saudi Arabia passed away about a year and a half ago, and his brother, who's considered not as bright as his half-brother died, and who hates Americans, allegedly, and who is sick and tired of hearing about fracking, that we're going to end the frackers forever.
See, OPEC is great, except there's no accountability.
There's only two countries in the world that actually adhere to OPEC. Canada, three countries.
Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. Everybody else cheats.
So now what they're doing with fracking is they're making oil in America so readily available that what they're doing in the Middle East is dropping the price down low so that the fracking is not worth doing.
Because I've heard mixed stories about fracking or mixed reports and mixed opinions.
Some people believe that it's a good way for us to be independent with our oil and to break off from this whole Weird sort of crisis in this situation that we have with the Middle East.
And other people feel like it's super dangerous.
And what we're doing is we're potentially poisoning water supplies.
We're creating earthquakes in some place that's as stable as Oklahoma, which was like seismically, it was a non-entity, like never had any issues with earthquakes.
Now they have tons of earthquakes.
And they're just constantly drilling into the ground.
It's not poisoning the water supply like the protesters are saying.
But by the same token, why frack when, if my theory is correct, about Saudi Arabia having hundreds of trillions and they're never going to allow the fracked oil to come to market, why do it?
But now Trump says that you can have the pipeline.
Because he's looked at the same studies that I've looked at, and it's all online on Google, is that There is this much in the United States, and the environmental things that may be hurting is this much in the United States.
But isn't it something that if we could avoid those very small environmental disasters, those very small environmental disasters, they're going to impact that area for thousands of years.
Sure it is, but I mean, there's more than, you know, there's the one side of an argument, the other side of the argument, and then somewhere in between is the truth.
But do you think that the only way for us to prosper is to put those areas in danger?
I mean, if you say that there is a potential for an environmental disaster that could affect that area for thousands of years, take that risk for financial gain No, I'm not saying for a financial gain.
I've done other things very successfully, but that's the one that they talk about.
I turned $800 into $500 million.
In eight years and so forever more I'm an oil man, right?
Okay, but I did a I've created 50 billion since then So I mean the the what's more important the 50 billion to the 500 million, right?
So I got it.
Yeah, okay, but the the fact is that Politically, whoever gets in office, and right now we have Trump, and he's backed by the Senate and the Congress, etc., has promised to be like an isolationist, more or less.
He's not interested in the wars around, and I'm not saying that's right or wrong.
I'm just saying that's his position.
And a majority of the electoral votes got him elected.
Not the popular vote, but electoral votes.
But whether the United States of America is ruining parts of it, 500 years from now, that'll be ruined.
Whilst important, it is not the overriding energy, pun intended, of what we should be thinking about.
What we should be thinking about is doing away with war.
You know, living happily.
You know, and even I believe that, and I'm an aggressive guy.
But, I mean, don't you think that in terms of, like, if you compare pre-Bush, you know, when 9-11 happened, from then on, we've been in this perpetual state of war.
But during the entire eight years that Clinton was in office, although there were some military actions, it was one of the more peaceful times.
With ISIS. But what's happening in Libya, Libya is basically a failed state.
It's a scary, scary place right now.
And if you talk to people that were there pre-Qaddafi or during Qaddafi's administration now, like it's way safer then when Qaddafi was running things.
Obviously, if you were an enemy of Gaddafi, it wasn't safe for you.
He was a brutal dictator.
But the business of running countries, especially running countries all around the world, is a horrible, horrible, messy business.
I think there's a real possibility that information...
And I think there's some battles going on right now with information where people are trying to figure out...
How it should affect things and what it should affect and what kind of an impact it's ultimately going to have in our culture, but I think it's having a massive impact.
And I think it's hard for us to...
Yeah.
Well, I said Google, but Google meaning the ability to search things.
You know, there's Bing and there's the access to information through those portals.
And I feel like that, if anything, is going to change foreign countries quicker than any other kind of change.
Because I feel like just having the access to the information that things are different in other parts of the world, that people are thinking differently than they ever thought before, that there's more understanding about people, that we have more in common than this idea that countries are against each other.
The countries are consisted of people that don't even know each other for the most part, and we're supposed to be against some other people that we don't know in some other part of the world.
Well, why is it then Tiananmen Square in Beijing 30-whatever years ago it was.
We were in China not too long ago as a guest of the government.
Most kids don't even know that that happened because they're not allowed to have Google.
Same in Russia.
Same in countries in South America.
Now, getting back to why the oil...
Hydrocarbons are so important.
Russia's got an oil-driven economy now.
A good many of the countries in South America have oil-driven economies now.
Canada has an oil-driven economy now.
The UK arguably has an oil-driven economy now vis-a-vis the North Sea.
The US... It doesn't really have an oil-driven economy, but it has a big, big part of what happens.
Now, when you are making loans from financial institutions at $100, $120 oil with projections, because some dipshit MBA did a spreadsheet on them, to $200 oil, and you make loans, and now all those loans are underwater, pun intended for the offshore stuff.
Why did they think that unlimited growth in oil was going to happen and it was going to get to $200 a barrel if guys like you thought it was horseshit?
Now, to connect the dots to find out how much the Middle East actually has in barrels of oil, these trillions of barrels of oil, how would one do that?
And is this public information?
Like what you're saying, most people don't know this.
And I think it's very surprising that Aramco is going to go public with the numbers, because it's been one of the great big secrets of all time in the energy business.
It was a book that was saying that oil is not fossil fuels, and that it's not what people think it is, but it's actually a renewable process that the earth creates this oil, and that wells go dry, and then if you leave them alone for a while, they build up with oil again.
And they sit under the ground and they form hydrocarbons.
Two different kind of hydrocarbons.
Either it's like gas and oil.
And...
And when it comes up one pipe and there's a separator, sometimes you just have a pure oil well, sometimes you have just a pure gas well, but mostly you have a mix.
So there's a separator.
It's a unit that is an engineer's wet dream at the top that separates all this.
Solar, you probably don't know this, but for every square foot on the earth, the sun, natural sun, advancing the sun's light, gives between 10,000 and 13,000 times more energy than the planet needs.
10,000 to 13,000 for every square foot just from the sun.
We lent out hundreds of billions of dollars to these solar guys because at the 13 to 18 cents a megawatt, and then supply, then we had too much supply because everybody's doing it, and drove down the price.
So now these poor bastards that started these solar deals 15, 20 years ago can't make any money.
So they can't pay off their debt.
The guys that benefit the most from solar are the farmers that own the land that lease to the solar companies.
So it's another one of those unlimited growth things where they felt like it was 10 cents back then per kilowatt and it's eventually going to be 20 and they thought it was going to go up and instead it went down.
We're spinning around I was like you get they're getting electricity from these wind robots like how fucking weird is this and each one of those deals Costs roughly speaking a million dollars Wow each one And the technology Has come a long long way in the 30 or 40 years that they've had those wind wind deals.
Yeah, but Supposedly, the wind currents don't change.
I mean, it's going to happen in the next 20, 30 years, let's say.
Florida...
Most of Central America, a whole bunch of the world is going to be gone because they'll be underwater.
Right.
Depending on, you know, the most severe is 30 meters of water, that's 100 feet.
The less severe is 10 meters of water, 30 feet.
Okay.
If that were the case and you were building condominiums in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, there should be a disclaimer in the prospectus.
There should be a disclaimer.
The next big wave of class action lawsuits, if global warming happens in the next 20 to 50 years, is going to be the disclaimers that were not written in an investment prospecti for condominiums, buildings, everywhere.
Do you think they're going to figure out how to give you new eyes or do you think they're going to figure out how to shoot some stem cells in your eyes or rejuvenate them?
I talked to Dr. Davidson from the UFC and they're beginning trials.
I think they were going to do it this Monday.
So, past Monday, a couple of days ago, where they're going to shoot stem cells directly into discs of people with degenerative disc disease, where their discs are shrinking because of compression of the spine and, you know, just overall life and wearing down.
They're going to be able to regenerate disc tissue.
If you get punched or kicked or elbowed really hard in the eyeball, which sounds horrible to people, but you get a blowout fracture where you actually blow out the bone in the back of the eyeball.
So they have to literally take your eye out and they have to go behind it, repair.
Usually sometimes they have to put like a little plate or something that...
It puts the bone back together in the back of your eye.
Put your eye back in.
And sometimes when guys do get those kind of orbital fractures, they have these weird eyes.
Like the one eye that pokes forward more and the other eye looks weird.
Very dangerous sport.
Very dangerous sport.
You know, it's just, obviously, it's a combat sport.
Yeah, I've been pretty vocal about, there was a pretty famous case of a guy who had been a guy for 30 years, became a woman for two years, you know, or, you know, went transgender, whatever you want to call it, and started fighting MMA and wasn't telling these women that she used to be a man for 30 fucking years.
And I was like, well, that's crazy.
Like, if you tell people and they still want to fight, that's fine.
I think you should be able to do whatever you want to do, just like I think you should be able to ride a bull.
You know, I support your right to ride a bull.
You want to ride a bull?
I'm not telling you you shouldn't do it.
Because I don't...
Who the fuck am I to tell you that you shouldn't jump out of buildings and skydive?
Or jump out of planes, rather.
Or jump off cliffs with one of those wingsuits like my friend Andy does.
You should be able to do whatever you want to do, as long as you're informed.
But this idea that...
It's not something that you need to tell the other person about because now you're a woman.
I say that's bullshit.
You're biologically a man.
You were born a man.
You have an XY chromosome.
You have all sorts of mechanical advantages.
You have a different bone structure.
It's not the fucking same.
And if these people want to continue this crazy narrative that once you decide that you identify with being a woman, you should be able to compete as a woman, it's fucking crazy.
happened with that kid in high school.
There was a kid in high school.
Oh yeah, the wrestler.
Yeah, she wanted to be a boy, and so they started giving her testosterone treatments, but she still has to compete as a girl in wrestling while she's transitioning to being a boy.
So they're giving her these testosterone treatments, and she's just mauling these girls.
There was some holes in her approach that were exposed by Holly Holm, the one who knocked her out, the girl who had kicked her.
Holly had the perfect style to deal with Ronda's style.
She's really strong, she's fast, she's an amazing athlete, and she is an outstanding striker.
And so Ronda's thing was to charge at you like a fucking bull.
And Holly just played the matador brilliantly, caught her, lit her up while she was coming in, and then eventually head kicked her and stopped her.
Once you get knocked out like that, first of all, she was very, very confident while she was the champion.
And some people would say arrogant.
And because of that, there's all these people that are waiting for you to fall.
There's a lot of people out there that don't have much confidence.
And when they see someone who's out there who's got a lot of confidence, it's very compelling.
Like a Floyd Mayweather or like a Conor McGregor.
Their confidence is incredibly compelling.
Like you want to be near them.
But those people, when that person loses, they're the first ones to attack.
They're like, yeah, you fucking loser.
I knew you were a loser.
Like, you go to Ronda Rousey's Instagram page and read the comments under her pictures.
It's ruthless.
Some fucking assholes.
Just assholes.
And I guarantee you, all those people are severely unaccomplished.
Or really young.
Either young kids that don't understand what they're doing, they just have this opportunity to be able to talk shit, or they're a bunch of fucking losers and they're finding this opportunity to shit on someone who was this incredible, bright, shining star that fizzled out.
So she lost to Holly Holm and then she came back in a Far worse matchup against Amanda Nunes.
And I thought Nunes, before Holly Holm beat her, I thought Nunes was the most dangerous matchup for her.
Because Amanda Nunes is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt and she has heavy, heavy hands.
She's a dangerous striker.
And I was like, Ronda's going to have to close the distance in order to grab her and take her to the ground.
And when she does, it's no fucking picnic.
Because Amanda Nunes is nasty on the ground.
And then getting close to her, she's got knockout power with her hands.
I mean, this is a terrible, terrible matchup.
And it turned out to be right because she got knocked out in 48 seconds in the rematch.
But what she should have done is revamp her camp or not fight.
Revamp.
Go to one of the masters.
There's a few masters of mixed martial arts in this world.
There's Farah Zahabi and Matt Hume and Duke Rufus.
There's a few of these striking mixed martial arts masters.
And you have to go to them.
You have to go to them and you have to like submit yourself and say, look, let's fix this.
Let's fix whatever I'm doing.
And let's see if we can take this to the next level because the sport evolved and the sport passed her by.
Like she was at the very top.
But if you build it, it's like that Field of Dreams movie.
You build it, they will come.
And when she built the women's bantamweight division and became this dominant force and stopped all these people and looked invincible, all those women were coming up below her.
And they were getting better and they were evolving.
And they were like the rest of MMA.
They were reaching this incredibly high level.
Whereas the women's MMA movement in the early days, you know, three, four years ago, if you watched women's MMA, the skill level was nowhere near commensurate with the men's skill level.
the men's skill level, three, four years ago, they're better today, but only a little bit better.
But the women are way better today than they were, because it's a new thing.
It's like 1997 for mixed martial arts, for men.
That's what, like, three or four years ago was.
But now, the women have essentially pretty much caught up, or close to it.
There's very high-level striking, very high-level submissions, very high-level fluid overall mixed martial arts games that you're seeing in the women's division.
And Rhonda, in a lot of ways, as spectacular as she was, had a very limited approach.
She didn't kick.
She punched, but she wasn't necessarily like the most brutal knockout puncher.
And she wasn't necessarily the most skillful boxer.
She didn't really have a tremendous amount of experience.
What she had was incredible athleticism, a world-class mindset.
She was a world-class athlete.
You know, she's a former Olympian and outstanding judo.
Her judo and her arm bars are amongst the best in the world.
I share her transitions, the way she attacks and attacks and attacks and sets things up.
She's phenomenally talented and really accomplished in judo.
But when you want to be a world mixed martial arts champion at the highest level of the game, now you have to be great at everything.
There's people like Demetrius Mighty Mouse Johnson, who I think is the best fighter in the world.
He's amazing.
That guy's great at everything, and that's why he's the best, because you don't know what the fuck he's gonna do.
You don't know if he's gonna kick you, or knee you, or take you down, or strangle you, or elbow you.
He's just got so many options, and he's coming at you from all different directions, and he never gets tired.
He's the total full package.
We don't have a Demetrius Mighty Mouse Johnson in women's MMA yet, but it's coming.
It's coming.
And Ronda's not that.
You know, Ronda's more like...
Maybe like a Chuck Liddell or one of the early pioneers of men's MMA. Super talented, really fun to watch, but perhaps limited in their approach.
But the guys who sold it, or the guys who bought it, rather...
You know, they're savvy, intelligent dudes who are trying to do it their way, and there's going to be some bumps along the way.
They've made a lot of changes, and they're trying to do some things differently, and some of the things I agree with.
Like, now I have a three-man booth.
Like, it's me and a fighter, and then the play-by-play commentator, which we've done a couple times, so I think it's really good.
I like it.
They've got a lot of matchups that have fallen through, unfortunately, because of weight cut issues and a bunch of other stuff.
It's a tough business, man.
I wouldn't want to be a promoter.
What I do is easy.
I just show up and things are happening.
I talk about the things that are happening.
I don't have to do a lot of work to get there.
I just kind of get there and I watch and I talk about the fights.
The promoting angle of it is unbelievably brutal.
You have to rely on so many people to do their job, so many people to have their shit together.
You gotta rely on these crazy, impulsive maniacs known as MMA fighters to get their weight in order and to have their camp go through without severely injuring themselves and to do things smartly and intelligently and conservatively so that they can show up for the dance and be able to perform at their best.
You know, you're asking a lot of a lot of different people.
And most of them come through.
You know, most fighters are incredibly professional.
But some of them don't, like that Habib Nurmagomedov-Tony Ferguson fight that fell through a couple weeks ago, or last week.
Horrible.
Just devastating that we were, you know, we were all ready for that fight, and then the day of the fight, he can't make, the day of the weigh-ins, rather, he can't make the weight, and they sent him to the hospital.
So those kind of things do happen.
These guys that are running it now, the WME guys, you know, they're smart as hell.
So we'll just see.
They'll figure it out.
That's what I think.
I think they'll take a little while.
There'll be a little bit of trial and error.
Just understandable.
I mean, they spent $4 billion on the UFC. They're going to want to run it their way.
I get that.
It's an incredible investment.
I don't know how the fuck they're going to make that money back.
Now, let's just say that right now you make, let's throw out numbers, a million dollars a year off your podcast, and you have no other shareholders.
Okay.
Now, you want to take it public, and you want to take it public on one of the secondary or tertiary exchanges, because this wouldn't be big enough to take the New York Stock Exchange.
And you want to sell shares in your baby for $1,000 a share.
If Brock Lesnar got into MMA when he was young, if somebody grabbed him right out of college and really trained him properly, better yet, right out of high school, and trained him properly, just an unbelievable freak athlete.
And, you know, he just was a guy who got into MMA very late in life and wasn't a natural striker and really didn't have the natural striking capability.
When I say natural, I mean like fluid...
Really effortless striking that you get when you've been doing it for years and years and years.
That's one of the hardest things to learn as guys get older when they're in their 30s and they're learning how to strike.
Learning how to strike against someone who's really seasoned and good, there's just going to be these openings and it just takes a few shots.
One, two, three, get in and all of a sudden you're diminished and the leg kick and then the fucking shot to the body and you're hurt.
And then, boom, you saw what happened when he fought Cain Velasquez.
Cain just overwhelmed him.
He was just so much better with striking.
And really great at wrestling as well.
So Cain was able to get back up on his feet when Brock took him down.
And then just Brock could not handle the onslaught that Cain was putting on him on the feet.
Just wasn't prepared for it correctly.
You need years and years and years of striking training.
And you need to spar lightly.
And you need to develop fluidity in your movements.
Not only that, those guys are on the road, you know, 200 plus days a year doing that.
So it is an absolutely brutal business.
It's a hard way to make a living.
They are tough, tough guys.
So they might not be really competing like an MMA fighter is, but there's no doubt about it.
They have my respect.
Those guys are tough.
It's a tough way to make a living.
They are earning their money.
And I think they're doing it in a way where most people don't even see them earn their money.
I mean, they're out in these arenas, you know, they're playing this state and that state, and they're going on the road, and they're slamming each other and throwing each other into the turnbuckle and elbowing each other in the face.
It's fucking hard, man.
That is a hard way to make a living.
And a giant percentage of those guys wind up having problems with pain pills, severe pain in their body, always constantly, you know, back injuries, knee injuries, neck injuries, elbow injuries.
I mean, it's just, it's a fucking brutal way to get paid.
Some would consider maybe, like, there's some people that are more sensitive that would say, well, that's a distasteful thing to even bring up.
Like, why is there honor in shooting people?
Why is there honor in trigger time?
But I think what you were trying to figure out when you went into this big game hunting with handguns thing, whether or not you would pussy out when the moment was there, is because you knew that it's a significant challenge when your life is legitimately on the line.
I've had this conversation with people before because, you know, if you have anybody on a podcast that is saying anything controversial, like you're saying about global warming, people go, oh my god, can't believe you had a climate change denier on your show.
What you're saying is that it's an exaggerated effect that human beings have had, and regardless of whether or not we had that effect at all, if you look at, like, the end of the Ice Age, you look at all these different monumental changes in the temperature of the United States versus the temperature of the world globally.
So even if you did something, like say if you jump rope for three days straight, and you made the Guinness Book of World Records, you'd have to pay to get in there.
My pet project right now is trying to put together a veteran program that I'm funding.
I put up all the money.
I don't want anybody's money.
But so far, even though I had one of the world's largest talent agencies, and I had 10 of the top 15 production companies say that vets don't make good TV. Now, they won't say that in public.
What do they mean by vets don't make good TV? Veterans don't make good TV unless they're wrestling around in the mud.
That's what I've been told.
By some names that you probably know, even.
And I've been told by four-star generals, names that, positively, everybody on this podcast would know.
I've been told by congressmen, senators.
I've been told by TV personalities, moving heads, you know, that all come out for vets.
Except when they're asked to do something, and I don't want their money.
Okay, well, I mean, will you be on an advisory board saying that putting vets in business after they try to transition from the military to civilian life and try to reduce the 22 vets that commit suicide a day?
And on CBS they'll say, yeah, yeah, yeah, but when you ask them to do something, they're not as generous with their time.
And I could understand if I was asking them for money.
But what I found out, Joe, all these guys, save a few, still need to make a living.
And they're not going to get paid for this.
So they have less time, pro bono time, and charity time than they let people on when they're on CNBC, etc.
Well, I think people just need to understand that there's consequences.
There's consequences that you pay to constantly seeking comfort and avoiding discomfort and avoiding hard work.
And those consequences are you're never gonna feel self-realized.
You're never gonna feel like you accomplished anything.
You're never gonna have this feeling of understanding that Difficulty and struggle and and the ability to push through that is a muscle and you develop that muscle by doing it and once you do you develop a lot of self-satisfaction and you develop peace of mind and you You understand that you can overcome obstacles if you don't have to overcome obstacles You never know whether or not you can like what you're talking about with trigger time Unless you were faced with actual adversity You don't understand how you're gonna feel and how you're gonna react when you overcome that adversity One
But what I do, and before they put dirt on me in 50 more years, is I want to minimize people's regrets.
Because we all have regrets.
And I told you what my three regrets were earlier in your program here.
But I mean, to minimize regrets.
And the millennials will have a different sort of regrets.
Right now, for the past seven or eight years, we've had free money.
Interest rates have been free.
It's literally free.
A hundred years from now, they're going to say, what the fuck were you doing when they were giving away free money?
I mean, literally.
The people that are listening to this, 20 years from now, their children and grandchildren are going to say, grandma, grandpa, what the fuck were you doing other than having your thumb up your ass during the period of free money?
I mean, it's never going to get, well, it can only go up from here.
And Yellen, the head of the Federal Reserve, has already upped them once, and she says, I guess she's going to up them a couple more times.
But historically, interest rates ought to be 8, 10, 12, not 2, 3. Right.
If you can't make a business proposition work at 2 or 3% interest, so you pay one or two points over that, Which is the vigorous or the interest that they get.
People come to me for either they're inspired or desperate.
Even the few people that think they're inspired aren't.
They're desperate.
I'm the last town saloon.
You have tried Tony, Grant Cardone, Jay Abraham.
You've tried every motherfucker that walks that tells you it's easy to be successful.
I tell you just the opposite.
It's a motherfucker to be successful.
And so when you come to me and I look through your psychological profile and I measure you day by day, sitting there for 14, 16 hours a day, then you have one hour of private time with me and I go through this, you know, why you're really here.
I ask you, what's the most defining moment in your life up to today?
I mean, coming here.
What's the most defining moment for your siblings?
What's the most defining moment of your parents?
Why do you think it's defining?
Oh, my dad got out of jail for the last time.
We've had convicted murderers at the seminar.
Convicted murderers.
I did their time.
As long as you're not an obvious, and I'll get in trouble for this, obvious cross-dresser, you can come to the seminar.
So when you have these guys crying, you're just sort of exposing to them what emotional baggage they're carrying around with them that's hindering their professional life?
So, by this eight-day pressure cooker that you put these guys through, when you're making them work all day for eight days in a row, you essentially, like, establish, like, this is what it's like to try to be successful.
Now, if you take a kid, 18, that's got physical attributes, you can train him into being an MA guy probably easier than you take a 38-year-old, for sure.
And so if people want to learn more about your stuff, and if anybody ever wants to go to the castle and go through this crazy eight-day seminar, how do they get in touch with you?