Robin Black, back from Singapore’s ONE Championship, contrasts its values-driven martial arts approach—where losing is framed as growth—with North America’s spectacle-focused culture, citing Aung Laun Sung’s historic rise and Chatri Sityatong’s philosophy. They debate high-risk moves like Anderson Silva’s knee or Lyoto Machida’s front kick as "art," genetics vs. effort (e.g., Francis Ngannou’s "unicorn" traits), and T.J. Dillashaw’s chess-like rematch against Cody Garbrandt, shaped by Dwayne Ludwig’s kickboxing-rooted discipline. Black’s work with Dr. Stu McGill on "double pulse neurology" reveals how fighters like George St. Pierre weaponize tension and footwork, while UFC’s interim titles and rankings expose arbitrary systems favoring star power over merit, risking backlash like Conor McGregor’s divisive tactics. The sport’s evolution demands adaptability—rigid styles (e.g., low kicks vs. Nick Diaz) fail, but mastery thrives through relentless refinement, as seen in Paul Felder’s analytical striking or Darren Till’s undefeated record at 25. [Automatically generated summary]
So it's wild that you say that because to me this is the approach.
So I think what we do or the way that we present it in North America is radical.
I think martial arts is an art form.
Martial arts is this inspiring thing.
I mean, you take, say for example, Aung Laun Sung.
He is their 185 pound and 205 pound champion.
He's from Myanmar.
They have never had a world champion in any sport ever in their history.
I don't think they've had a gold medalist in the Olympics.
They've never had that.
This guy's a two-division champion.
And when I talked to Chhatri about it, and he was talking sort of about why he sees it this way and why he's proud to present it this way, he's like, he knows without question that there are kids, and he won his 205-pound title in Myanmar, in a stadium in Myanmar.
And he said he knows without question there's a kid in there going to become a lawyer one day because of that.
I think people, rightly so, are concerned with the idea of violence against someone who's an unwilling participant.
And that's how they think of fighting.
They think of it as this thing that they want nothing to do with.
They don't want any violence in their life.
They don't want anybody to hurt them.
And I completely understand that.
I understand that position.
But that's not what it is when it's a competition.
I mean, it's a tired expression because I've said it too many times, but my perception of what fighting is is high-level problem solving with dire physical consequences.
And the possibility that bad things can happen to you.
And do sometimes happen, even to the great ones.
I mean, you see great fighters have been KO'd and come back, and there's something about that where you realize, like, hey, even Fedor can get knocked out.
I mean, hey, even Anderson Silva.
Can play cocky and get caught by that Chris Weidman left hook.
And, you know, I think in Asia in particular, but there's different pockets of how this is viewed and how the philosophy of connecting to martial arts and fighting is viewed.
And in Asia, you would see, a certain amount of the fighters would see losing badly It's an opportunity, a chance, because to come back and win again or to come back and show that you're able, you were given the gift of trying and failing.
And winning, when you're just winning at everything and things come easily to you, I'm sure it still feels good.
But when you've gone through really hard times or when you've been challenged by something or you've dropped lower, the high of the success is so much higher.
It's so much of a longer journey.
Personally, when we spoke before and when we talked about CM Punk when he was fighting the first time, I was like, this is stupid.
This guy is pushing, stacking himself into a position to try to not fail by making the challenge so difficult that even if he fails, he don't really.
But this is fully different now.
Like now I'm cheering for him because he was humiliated.
Like he was – he didn't just fail.
He was humiliated.
He in front of everybody was shown to be – people would judge him as weak or people – the judgment that he would feel is bad.
And he said, I'll go do it again.
He – We are now in a completely different context because that's a guy who epically failed in front of everybody and then dealt with that and now says, I will try the journey again and this will make me a better person.
But that, again, I think it makes it deeper and harder and more chances to fail epically And I lost twice in a row and then still wanted to fight again and still because I really wanted to.
And it was important to me and it meant something to me.
And I was going to change as a human being by doing it.
And I was ridiculed.
I can relate to what he's going through.
But I did it on a little show in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
You know what I mean?
I would never have put myself in that place to look bad.
But here he is and here it is.
And I'm cheering for him as a human being in a weird situation that has been put himself into a deep, dark, hard spot and saying my way out of this is to try really hard and really go in.
And the chance – all that I would want for him if I knew him and he was my friend is to fight your way through some adverse situations.
To be able to be in it and find when it's hard, you discover, yeah, I can handle when it's hard.
I can get up when I've been dropped, or I can fight through not being able to breathe.
If he loses and does that, it will have been worth it for him.
No matter how much ridicule he'll take, it will have been worth it for him.
And that is, at that stage, he was maybe 1-0, I think, or maybe 2, but it's still the lowest level that there is in the entire elite world of fighting.
And when he was on top and just delivered with like, yeah.
Just nasty.
But that's how it, that's, and you're 100% right.
If somebody's watching that, that is the reality of thinking, I'll put myself in a situation that I can't win, but I've got guts and heart and I believe I'm going to do it.
You get the metaphorical version of that punch in the face if you go through life like that.
You shouldn't do it in fighting because you don't want those punches in the face if you can't avoid them.
If you're in a situation where you want to prove your toughness and you want to battle it against someone who's of your skill level and try to figure your way through the maze of this contest, that makes sense.
What doesn't make sense is getting punched in the face unnecessarily.
And when you fight, in my opinion, when I looked at that fight, I was like, Mickey Gall's gonna smash him.
This is just how it's going to go.
There's very few fights where I can tell you this is absolutely gonna happen.
And we've subsequently got to see Mickey Gall in some contests against some really tough guys and beat them.
Yeah, beat some good guys.
And we got to see, like, okay, this kid is fucking for real, which is what we suspected all along.
But we don't know anything about Phil.
We haven't seen him spar.
We haven't seen him train.
But from what I saw, when I first saw him training, the first, you know, when I first saw him sparring and moving around, I was like, God damn, there's a lot of work to be done.
First steps of Everest work to be done.
We're not talking about a guy who has a deep background in martial arts, like Brock Lesnar.
Wrestling is absolutely a martial art.
He was a legit top-of-the-food-chain amateur wrestler.
I think it's something you also develop as a child, as a young kid.
When you're in your developmental years, 13, 14, 15, your body's growing, and it's growing into whipping kicks and punches and shooting takedowns and landing chokes, your body develops that way.
When you're a full-grown man in your 30s and then you're starting to throw roundhouse kicks and front kicks and your body's all goofy and shit and doesn't want to listen right.
And, you know, it helps you physically understand where your body is.
And so later on in life, I was always at least okay at sports because I understood how to move my body in space.
And I understood where my hand was compared to my foot and how I balanced.
And to learn that as a child, somebody who was a master of something as a kid who at 30 picks up another thing and has some really advanced learning abilities, there are exceptions.
I wonder if, like, maybe perhaps someone in their family was a great athlete and is transferred through their genes, which I am, as I get older, a firm believer in.
I just don't think we know enough about what transfers through genes, but there's some freaky shit I see in my kids in particular where I go, "Okay, that is my fucking personality." That's just something.
And I'm not teaching her to do this.
This is something that's in her, like this repetitive exercise, like doing things over and over again obsessively.
There's some weird shit that I'm like, I wonder if that's a neural pathway that's passed down through the DNA. It just seems like there could be A person who's never engaged in athletics, but maybe their grandfather was like a world champion boxer.
And then one day they put on the gloves and then they just sort of like start moving around and the coach was like, hey, what the fuck's going on here?
Where'd you learn how to throw your jab like that?
He's been around like the best of the best through Europe.
And Cameroon to France and these areas.
And he's seen the best of the best that that genetic crop of humans has to offer.
And then Francis Ngannou walks into his gym.
And you talk to – next time you see Fernand, ask him about this because you see his eyes light up.
Like that thing where there's like a color in the eye and he's like, you know, I just knew.
Like he said, I watched him do things and his awareness of his body and how he could physically express himself.
He said he'd just never seen anything like it.
You know, week one in the gym, he said first sparring session, he didn't really know how to fight yet.
But he said he saw him adapting and learning within the round against somebody who knew how to fight.
And you see it in his eyes.
He literally found a fucking unicorn that just strolled in off the street and came in.
And then he was like, man, if he's has a work ethic, if he is like, you know, if he's passionate about this, if he can commit and learn and all that.
It goes physically, genetically speaking, this human being, the length of his bones, the speed of his neurology, all of these things, he said, you just knew.
And you see it in his face.
You're like, oh, that must have been wild.
It must have been wild to experience that when you have a lifetime of seeing athletes.
I don't know if you ever saw that movie with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise.
When Paul Newman hears Tom Cruise break the balls for the first time and turns around, he's like, what the fuck is going on over here?
And he looks over and he sees this kid.
There's certain people that just have this crazy talent and when someone has been around for a long time as a coach and had a bunch of untalented or reasonably talented or very talented people, there's this big stew of humans coming to their gym and you see that one unicorn that steps in.
And he's also a case where his father, I mean, he didn't have a background in martial arts before he started training, but his father was a great street fighter.
And it's entirely possible that something was carried on through him.
But then you get effort with a talented guy with freak genetics like a LeBron James or a Michael Jordan or a Brock Lesnar and then you get some crazy results.
And the guy who doesn't have the talent but had effort twice, effort was applied twice, will go as far as the man or woman will go as far as they possibly could.
They'll actualize their true potential by committing themselves to effort.
And not going, well, I can't do it, so forget it.
By applying effort over and over and over again, and then once you've developed talent, more effort to take that talent and do something, that twice-used effort will get you as far as you possibly can.
If you say, well, I'm not gifted, I'm not talented, so I won't put in any effort, you have no idea how far you can go.
So I absolutely cannot beat Francis Ngannou.
But by not thinking that I'm too limited by my genes and continuing to apply effort regardless of my genes, I can get to the best possible place I can as an individual.
Do you know what I mean?
So I think that you don't want to go down some road that cannot be accomplished, but you also don't want to not go down roads because you're not genetically predisposed to them.
And that's why when something magical takes place, when you get a, you know, a George St. Pierre or when you get a Mighty Mouse, when you get someone who's like, whoa, like, look at that.
There's so many factors that lead you to be Gennady Golovkin.
There's so many different things have to fall into place.
Here's a guy, like, how about Michael Bisping?
Like, Michael Bisping is just one of the toughest motherfuckers ever.
And I think this is at the root of questions about life.
Was Michael Bisping genetically tough?
Is he genetically mentally tough?
Or did he work really hard and just push himself through things?
And that one day when it got really fucking tough, he didn't give up, which taught him that he shouldn't give up, which taught him to go even further, which made him push himself.
Or was it in all likelihood it's both?
What's his name?
Think of the mentally toughest guy that – I have a thing with names sometimes – Even names I know I'll describe.
A guy's got a chain and he's howling and he does a power slam, but I can't think of Rampage.
I think he's right too, but he's also mentally tough.
Because he also does those things.
But one of the things about Matt Brown that separates him is that that guy empties out in the cage.
He separates himself from the pack because he's so ferocious.
Like, that guy's ferocious.
I remember when he stepped into the cage, we were watching.
I think we were doing a fight companion, but we were, maybe we weren't, anyway, when he stepped into the cage and fought Diego Sanchez, when he stepped into the octagon and screamed and roared, it was literally like an animal.
I mean, it was ferocity defined.
And that's just how he fights, man.
That guy just empties out whatever the fuck he's got.
Diego Sanchez is another curious example because he's also a guy who is ferocious, like a ferociously tough guy.
But there's always been something about his movements that makes him come up short against the best of the best.
And I mean, you're talking about a guy who's so fucking mentally tough as well.
Like I always bring his fight against Jake Ellenberger, who is a brutal knockout artist at 170. And Diego really, I mean Diego fought at 145, remember?
And Diego really is a tweener.
He's like a little too small for 55. I don't know how the fuck he made it to 145. He basically starved his body away.
And probably did some irreversible damage, but his movements are always just shy of elite.
And I've always wondered, what is that?
It's almost like, even if you see that, go back to that clip again.
You don't have to.
It's okay.
But there's something about even the way he steps.
So I watched Diego Train in Albuquerque, and I love the guy.
I was there interviewing Cub, who is my favorite artist probably to watch for many reasons.
I'm not really sure exactly why.
People can't tell you why their favorite band is their favorite band, but there are many things I can describe.
But I was there to interview him for Monster Zim.
It's a website in South Korea that when I became a freelancer, they were like, we'd like to give you some work.
I'm like, well, that would be amazing.
We'd like you to go.
He just fought Do Whole Choice.
We'd like you to go interview Mr. Cub Swanson.
I'm like, this is.
Badass.
It's like my favorite fighter.
They're going to send me to Albuquerque.
Then I hung out in the gym and analyzed them and watched and made notes about what I could.
And Diego trained super intense.
And he like does everything super intense.
And as much as he loves yoga and at different times yoga and meditation has allowed him to do it differently, that hyper intensity, I think, doesn't allow the sort of soft relaxation that's necessary to really do what you're describing.
Like, one of the things that people don't understand about striking hard and, like, having real power is that you're not fully tense through the entire movement.
There's a lot of parts of striking where the momentum starts and you're almost, like, completely loose, like, up until instance before the point of contact.
And then it's bling!
There's this weird thing that real knockout artists have that you don't see in these fucking super tense windmill guys.
Yeah, the spinal cord and your neurology and your nerves and how your nervous system.
And George St. Pierre has worked with him a lot.
If you ask him about him this week, he would talk about him extensively.
So Dr. Stu and I became friends.
And it's a big compliment because he sought me out based on seeing my work.
And saying, that guy knows some things I want to talk to him, which was a fucking deep compliment to me.
And now we became friends and we chat all the time.
And one of the things we constantly talk about is the double pulse neurology.
And people talk about a fast twitch fiber.
It's not a fiber.
That's just terms we've started to hear.
It's a fast twitch neurology.
Fastball hitters have it.
You know what I mean?
That neurology where there's a pulse of tension and then a complete relaxation until the pulse of tension again.
The Bruce Lee's one-inch punch was the simple example of that.
But that is the neurology of high athletic performance.
And that's what I zoomed in on when I was looking at your kick because you can see it quite clearly.
There's the moment, there's the relax, and it ends up being more of a whip.
And Dr. Stu has all these incredible analogies because he's examined this in so many different angles and layers, which is the beauty of analyzing anything for years.
And he'll use terms like, you can't shoot a cannon out of a canoe.
And you think about that, and you're like, of course.
Yeah, but if it's tense, and then it shoots, or you can't push a rope, right?
You push a rope, right?
And so, but you can whip a rope through tension, relaxation, and tension again.
And that neurology is the neurology of high performance.
And George, you talk to George about neurology, he'll go deep down some shit, George St. Pierre, because he studied this to understand himself and what he was doing at a high level with Dr. Stu.
But it is a fascinating thing because we often will say fighting is 90% mental.
Sipping this cup is 100% mental.
My brain told my body to reach out and do it.
My brain made the choice.
I activated everything.
It's all your brain.
Everything.
And once you get to a high level of performance, you know how to punch and kick and you train like crazy and you make the things happen by themselves almost by training so much they take so little attention and decision making.
I'm surprised to see George wearing your typical running shoe when he's training with the thick heel.
And, you know, I'm still surprised to this day when I see, when you talk about neurology and activating muscles and tissues, like there's so many athletes that still train with those big cushy bottomed running shoes.
The only thing connecting you to a stable surface is your foot.
I agree 100%.
Sometimes when we're trying to make sense of these things, we go to multiple different sort of perspectives of it.
So I'll take what I learned from Dr. Stu, and he's just my friend now as well, so I like hanging out and chatting with him about way out there aspects of these things.
But you talk to Erwan LaCour as well, who has a different sphere of connecting to this kind of thing.
And Erwan starts with the foot.
and you've had Irwan on the And he starts with the foot and everything else.
It makes sense, right?
I go to throw a punch and the important part is going to be my foot through the leg, through the hip, through the core and relaxed until the moment that it hits.
I tried to ice I would ice or I would get in immediately into the cold pool and spend the day in the cold pool drinking tequila in hopes that it would help and it kind of did I guess Yeah, foot pain is, I mean, that's one of the things that hurt Dominic Cruz in his comeback fight when he fought TJ Dillshaw.
You notice he was, like, kind of limping a little.
We were attributing it to the leg kicks.
He said that's not the case.
He said what was going on was he had plantar fasciitis because, you know, he had multiple injuries that he was receiving.
Recovering from during that training camp and when he got knee surgery and he came back from that and he tore his groin he tried to like really ramp up his training he was doing a lot of sprinting and a lot of different things with his feet you know because obviously he's very footwork intensive with his fighting and he fucked his feet up man his feet just weren't in condition to do the kind of stuff that he used to be able to do and the first thing he got was plantar fasciitis Schaub had it too he told me it was one of the worst things he's ever had me too Think of this for
So you got somebody else and they're going about fighting and their career as a martial artist, a competitive fighter, one way.
And Dominic goes about it a different way.
And through Dominic's choices, Moving, training, footwork, he avoids a lot of the damage that these guys will take.
But you can't avoid, something's going to go.
So instead of getting kicked a lot and punched in the head and taking all those things, the training necessary to make that not happen fucks up something else.
You can't get away from it.
You're going to work yourself until your body gives up.
Even Dom, brilliantly finding a way to work outside of taking the damage that they take, still could not get away from damaging his body.
Cody Garbrandt, the rematch, is one of the most intriguing fights of the year for me.
I'm really, really curious about that fight because I know those guys were tightly matched in the gym, and I know that Cody cracked him with a big right hand before TJ put him away.
And he was stunned.
Yeah, he was stunned.
He got rocked.
And I believe when Cody cracked him, it was towards the end of the round.
I mean, who knows if he had caught that right hand the first minute of the round, what had gone on.
But when TJ recovered from that and then landed that head kick and then, you know, knocked him out and put him away, you got to see, like, what a high-level, high-stakes game these two guys are playing.
And, you know, TJ has, through Bang Ludwig, has really radically improved his movement, his footwork, his angles, his approach.
He's so versatile.
With his ability to switch stances, his ability, I mean, he's constantly cutting angles and striking as he's switching stances, and there's so much information coming at you if you're fighting him.
Your brain's overloaded if you're not used to that.
And even the guys who used to train with him, I believe in alpha male, are not used to what he's doing now.
That's about as good as it gets right now, like from the raw materials of those guys and the skills that they have.
But I am definitely with you as far as my deep curiosity of the choices of the coaches.
And you talk to some of them, different ones.
I've got a few key friends that I talk to on a very regular basis.
And so what it will take, what we would decide to do to train to make our guy the best in the world or try to be the best in the world in 10 months, if we take a different strategy and we start to build them to be the best in the world in three years, it's a different game.
And that's what Dwayne's done.
Dwayne has said, we will, and it's fucking hard work for Dwayne, too.
Like, that's the thing that people won't necessarily appreciate.
They'll be like, oh, he's a brilliant coach.
That's nonstop, constant searching and examining and trial and error and reinterpreting his language of understanding where the chaos is and understanding, you know, can we make this guy believe something's happening or are we too deep in it that he doesn't think that and it fails?
Like, what levels of misdirection are too deep?
How good is he?
And when I talked to them leading up to that one, it was like, you know, the conversation was about making Cody believe and anticipate something wrong.
And the layers, the multiple layers, like you just said, overloading the ability to – you're trying to catalog what's coming and how you chunk that, we don't necessarily understand.
So your brain may be going, okay, this is all the stuff from the left, which happens when this happens, or the legs are doing this, or you're running algorithms in your brain.
I don't know what yours is.
I don't know how you categorize my threats.
I don't know whether you categorize anything from my right hand or anything in combination.
Or if you're watching the patterns of my shoulders, I have no idea.
So Dwayne and anybody else playing with this concept is trying to figure out how you'll read this and use that against you.
And to me, that's the layer of complete mind-blowing nature.
And they've told each other lies for long periods of time.
Lies on lies.
I one time went with, I worked for a company called the Score Fighting Series.
It was a brilliant show.
Like it was kind of Canada's Bellator.
Like it was on the same network and they aired Bellator.
And it was very, very good.
developmental league stuff.
And that company brought in Forrest Griffin and then a bunch of poker players.
And they were on a train together, and contest winners on the thing got to ride on this train with Forrest Griffin and a bunch of high-level pro poker players.
And I was there, and that was the first time I met Forrest, and he's a killer smart dude.
But you watch these poker players who are all riding together, and they all know each other, and they are just telling each other lies all the time, trying to tell stories about things that represent the fact that they are conservative when really they're risk takers, or trying to tell each other things that make them think they're crazy, but really they're calculating.
They are telling each other lies ongoing, and they're gambling with each other.
It's completely degenerative.
But that's the kind of thing that's happening on some level with the high-level fighters, too.
Making them think certain things about what they will do or believe they'll do.
Almost everything they say, the fans and the audience, we should assume is a game chip.
It's like a something to make the other one believe something that might in that moment let me land that kick if he thinks that I'm, you know, whatever, right?
It's manipulative stuff.
And at that level, that is just so unbelievably fascinating.
The kick misses, and you get caught with a left hook, you're a loser.
You know, there's just so much at stake with every single choice you make and all those choices have to be almost subconscious or semi-conscious because you've got to be in the Zen state.
You've got to be flowing.
So everything has to be prepared.
You have to have, you know, while you're in there, you have to have no regrets.
You have to be able to just flow.
And you have to be able to capitalize on any movement, any opening you see.
You've got to pounce.
And you have to be in condition to execute all these things.
So you have to have had the physical discipline and the mental fortitude to push yourself through training to a level that you probably didn't think you could get to.
Like, what if Matt Brown's line on that thing was actually, that one would be hard to be a lie, but there are other ones where it feels like that one little opening, but instead TJ's going to catch you or Cody's lined you up to draw you into something.
Dwayne, unlike a lot of guys, has notebooks, like binders, full of ideas, and his system is a very declared system.
It's not like loosely based, like, we always work off the jab, we got good footwork.
No, it's None of that, no.
Like, there's a system to his, like he has a belt system to his style.
And his style is based on, for people who don't know, Dwayne was a world-class kickboxer.
World-class Muay Thai fighter.
I mean, he fought Ramon Deckers.
I mean, he fought some of the best of the best.
Had some amazing fights in both MMA and in kickboxing.
I mean, he was a really talented guy.
And then transitioned on to being a coach.
And the obsession that he has towards coaching, is really at a higher level than even his obsession towards fighting and he talks about that that his passion is teaching people he loves it he loves being able to mold students and he's found the perfect muse or the perfect willing uh participant in tj And TJ and him have a very unique friendship and a very unique student mentorship sort of relationship.
It's really, really interesting to watch the two of them together.
the super gym with 20 guys, and then you've got, and Dwayne has tons of athletes too, but a commitment and connection to TJ.
And Dwayne has tons of athletes too, but a commitment and connection to TJ.
Then you got Matt Hume and Demetrius.
Like you've got a few of these guys who are just like, we will funnel all of my experience through everything through this super athlete.
But like you talk about those books, the only way that you get to a point of this level of mastery that we're talking about is that you must go down some fucking road for six months that amounts to nothing.
So that you learn that road isn't the road.
And the only way, and you can't give up too early, and what if by going down it long enough, some different concept about how you switch your feet in a certain moment.
You think maybe that ain't it, but you have discovered that by pushing through some of these concepts long enough, you find it, so you stick with it long enough, and it turns out, no, Dwayne, or anybody else reaching that level of mastery, has gone down some rabbit hole for months or years and discovered the only value they got out of it was, well, no, there's lots of value, That wasn't the rabbit hole.
And the process of searching this rabbit hole has made me better at searching rabbit holes.
So those two values, some of the stacks of his books are things that didn't work.
And he will probably appreciate those just as much as any of the ones that did.
There's also TJ's approach is really interesting to me because TJ is obsessed with improvement and knowledge and he keeps talking about his fight IQ and you know him and Dwayne, I've been around them, I've trained with them, I've worked out with them, I've watched him coach TJ and I mean they're constantly working on the minutia, they're constantly working on finite details and improving every single aspect and Tightening things up.
And it's really interesting.
And TJ's a fucking open book, man.
I mean, you can talk to that guy about anything.
And he's considering it.
He's thinking.
And he's like, oh, okay.
I see what you're doing.
I see what you're doing.
He's a guy who's always trying to take in information.
So, these are the things when we do watch this kind of thing, whether it is martial arts or even jazz or football or whatever, there are these lessons that are there.
We should do that.
We're supposed to go through life doing that.
We're not supposed to look at T.J. Dillashaw and go, wow, isn't that crazy?
If we do that, our lives will get better, right?
I got to work for TSN in Canada, which is like ESPN in the States.
Myself and Aaron Brodenstetter are like the two-person division that talks about UFC and fighting.
And when George was fighting Michael, they went and said, you know, could you approach your friends with George and his people?
Could you approach them about doing a half-hour-long documentary on him about his comeback and training and stuff?
And I did.
And at first, George was open to it, and Rudolf, his manager, was like, oh god, I hear the word documentary, and I know what that means.
It's going to be months, and there's going to be cameras, and it's going to be a distraction.
I said, I'll just travel with George, and I have the best producer, Simon, the best producer we have.
And we'll just travel with him.
And they said yes.
And so I got to travel with George for a month, six weeks, off and on New York, LA, Montreal, life, eating ice cream, training with Freddie Roach.
And it really made me a better human being getting to do that.
So what I didn't really connect to, sometimes there's something so simple, and we don't see it because we're deep in whatever we're in.
But the idea of point karate, people right away say, well, they're just touching each other.
It's like, true.
So if I'm training to just touch you, I'm not training to hurt you.
Okay, that seems like that's not valuable.
Yeah, but you're training to not let me even fucking touch you.
If you can't get touched by me, how hard, impossible is it for me to hit you clean?
You know what I mean?
If your movement and your defensive systems and your management of the distance between our weapons and targets are such that I can't fucking touch you, how can I hurt you?
There was a lot of people that I trained with that openly dismissed point fighting.
And the reason why they openly dismissed point fighting was because they would stop every time someone would get touched.
And I would be like, well, in the real world, or everybody would say, in the real world, you don't just stop when you get touched.
You keep fighting.
And so with our techniques, a lot of it, you would hit someone once, and they would counter, and then you'd set up the big shot afterwards.
Like, this is part of the thing.
And if the referee kept stopping you, then you would never get anything done.
But my thinking once I got into MMA was, okay, yeah, but if you can do that and do the other things.
It's like people dismiss Taekwondo because they're like, well, Taekwondo, you know, you get taken to the ground, you get your legs kicked out.
Absolutely.
But if you have takedown defense and you know Muay Thai, you can wheel kick someone into another fucking dimension.
And we saw that with Edson Barboza versus Terry Edom.
We've seen these Taekwondo techniques manifest themselves in MMA, and you realize like, oh, these are some of the most powerful things you could do to a person inside a cage.
When you see the point-fighting style, like the Raymond Daniels or the Michael Venom Page, this ability to blitz, if they can do those other things too, this is another level.
There's something to it.
So as a fighter, I wasn't willing to dismiss point-fighting because I had been lied to already.
When I went and took Taekwondo and then started kickboxing, first American kickboxing above the waist, First thing I realized was how easy it was for me to get punched in the face.
I was like, oh, okay.
Now if I'm trapped in this ring, and I can't go anywhere, and someone's throwing punches, and I don't understand how to get away from them, and I'm used to this Taekwondo style of having your hands down low, I'm getting fucked up.
But there is something absolutely legit about that blitz, that karate blitz, that some of these guys can do.
And I fought some really good guys in those karate-style tournaments, and I got an ass made out of me.
I mean, you don't know what to do.
And you get kicked, and then the referees point, and you're like, ugh.
You don't have a chance to fire back because they're separating you guys and I really absorbed those lessons and I was like in MMA that ability to close the distance because in MMA there's so many guys and Connor talked about this there's so many guys that have this Muay Thai stance and they're presenting this very predictable target they're standing right in front of each other and I think This stance,
and especially the forward stance, is one of the reasons why Vitor has been caught and knocked out twice with front kicks.
Because he squares off.
Vitor explained this to me in, like, shit.
1997, when I was training at Carlson Gracie's, he was explaining that some kickboxers are going to have a hard time in MMA, even though they're really good kickboxers, because the MMA stance, you really have to square off.
You can't stand like this.
You can't stand like a boxer.
And a kickboxer is a little more open than a boxer, but then MMA is a little more open than that.
He's like, you almost have to be square.
But that square leaves you open to front kicks to the face and then turning side kicks and side kicks to the body.
Think about what Vitor has been dropped with.
Jon Jones dropped him with a side kick to the body.
Sakuraba dropped him with a turning side kick to the body.
But those types of doctrines is literally, and in martial arts, in day-to-day life, in anything, if you think anything is the thing, you're totally wrong.
Because if we all agree it's the thing, then we're all acting like it's the thing, then we all start ignoring other things, and those things will work.
So if you have to, if MMA, you have to square up.
All of a sudden, some Connor comes out with a different thing, and you were wrong.
Benson Henderson was, in my opinion, the first guy to bring it to MMA. And he started doing that back in the day, but not at the effectiveness, the level of effectiveness that we're seeing now.
You know, I bring this to Paul Daly versus John Fitch because that fight was extremely frustrating to Paul Daly and frustrating to a lot of people that were watching it, too, because John Fitch was just able to take him down and kind of do what John Fitch does and hit him on the ground and kind of beat him up and controlled the position.
And, you know, at the end of the fight, Paul's yelling, boo!
It was so strange, you know, and but this is a guy that if you just stand with him, he's going to fuck you up.
Like, if you just decide to trade shots with Paul Daly on your feet, he's got a left hand that is a goddamn nuclear missile.
Basically, everybody he hits with that thing goes night-night.
It's like our human bodies and minds don't do all that many things that are that unbelievably beautiful and rooted in our history as human beings.
You know what I mean?
This is at the basis of what it was to survive and protect and expand and stuff.
And you see it right there when Paul Daly hits somebody.
It's unreal.
The opposite of that scenario is Johnny Hendrix was fighting Stephen Thompson.
And Johnny Hendricks wanted, when Steven would come in, he wanted to drill him with hooks and uppercuts and then get to his body and take him down and do what John Fitch did.
But Steven's like, you're not doing that.
And after he kicked him and beat him up at distance and then finished the fight, Johnny was being interviewed and he's like, well, it wasn't my name.
And Johnny's a classy guy all over the length of his career.
He sometimes gets heat, but who cares, right?
The opinion of other people shouldn't matter to Johnny Hendricks.
But Johnny said after, he's like, well, I was kind of hoping he'd come in and trade a little more.
Which is what brings me back to the Paul Daly-John Fitch fight.
This is the answer to that style.
The answer to that style is take you down and not ever let you get up and force John Fitch's game on you, which is what makes fighting so interesting.
If John Fitch had just decided to go cowboy and bite down his mouthpiece and just wing punches at Paul Daly until one of them went to sleep, that would have been a great fight for Paul Daly.
I mean, he hasn't fought since the Anderson Silva fight.
That's crazy.
And it's crazy that they suspended him from marijuana when Anderson Silva tested positive for steroids in that fight, and he got a shorter suspension than Nick.
Well, I'm sure he does want that, but if they offer him a fat paycheck, and they really should if they want, look, the UFC's in a weird position.
They bought the company for $4 billion.
I don't know what it's worth, but I would guess it's probably not really worth $4 billion.
They have a giant monthly nut.
It's fucking huge.
The monthly nut that they have to make caused them to fire I mean, there's a lot going on and there's been some, you know, great fights and it's obviously still incredibly popular, but you want to make those big pay-per-view bucks.
You need the big name stars.
GSP was always a big name star, became even bigger when he came back and beat Bisping and won by a finish and got him on a rear naked choke and put him to sleep.
He's still a giant star.
However, he hasn't fought in a while, vacated the title, doesn't have the title anymore.
So it's not as big of a deal to the public's eyes.
See, the funny thing to me is like, I always feel like, and I always feel like a lot of these mechanisms, title shots, rankings, belts, you know, Twitter beefs, they were intended to be there as a short-term solution to give people a talking point until they saw a lot of these mechanisms, title shots, rankings, belts, you know, Twitter beefs, they were intended to be there as a short-term solution to give people a talking point until they saw how, until they got deeply invested and connected.
Right.
And I think that was, but yet somehow these sort of extra outside distractions became Who the fuck cares who's the number eight guy?
And who cares if these guys are mad at each other on Twitter?
And the belt itself is a mechanism for discussion.
What matters is the fight.
And I know that it's like, yeah, but you're obsessed with fighting.
Most people, if you show them what's really going on there and contextualize the fact that these two human beings have dedicated their life and taken all of the knowledge in human history to put on the line in this moment of severe intensity and consequence, you won't care as much about whether somebody has an interim title.
But I think at the root of it is an incorrect philosophical belief.
So if I talk to people at the UFC, and I talk to them periodically, and I'll discuss something with them about, you know, and it's generally at different times been like, hey, man, you can see the work that I'm doing, and you can see people like it.
Could I contribute something X or Y? And then I'll mention, you know, they will then say, well, you know, You've got like a really unique way of approaching it.
We think, you know, we've got so many casual fans watching on Fox or on these TV stations.
It's just such a casual audience.
And I think about it and it's like nobody questions that.
The percentage of people that are a casual fan that is watching anything is very close to zero.
Yeah, because the casual, the not actively choosing what to watch is being on a Netflix search, or is somebody put something on, and I go and see what The Rock is cooking in his kitchen.
You know, what's your dog's name, the gold dog?
Marshall?
I go and see what fucking Joe's feeding Marshall.
Nobody's watching something they're not interested in ever in our society.
We are all constantly and consciously choosing what we consume at all times.
And if we're sitting there with our boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife and they're watching it, we're somewhere else.
By feeding this non-existent casual audience and really believing they exist despite all the evidence that there is no such thing, you are now giving less attention Importance to your actual audience who is ready to go deeper, ready to see something more meaningful, ready to be brought somewhere different.
There is no casual audience of almost anything in our modern world.
A guy like you comes in talking about artistry and all this, I think you are great.
I love your approach, but I think your approach in their eyes is a little bit too esoteric and complex and maybe they balanced out better with someone like me.
I think, I agree with you, but I think it goes back to the money.
Because I think there's so much money involved in the UFC that they have to make money every month.
I mean, They're in a tricky situation.
It's like if you're a guy and you make $500 a week and you really like this car.
Goddamn, that Corvette is so nice.
I really like it.
Well, how much is the lease?
The lease is $1,000 a month, but you only make $2,000 a month.
How are you going to do that?
Well, if I only pay $500 a month in rent.
I can kind of pull it off.
You're like, yeah, I guess you can.
But you've got to watch every penny, and you've got to be cautious.
And I think you could put yourself in these traps and then you have to like really micromanage everything you do.
Like we got to make money, but we got to make money, but we got to make money instead of we got to do what we like and put together what we like and do the best possible version of what we like.
A perfect example is this podcast.
I don't have a boss.
There's no overhead.
I have a couple employees.
It's very easy.
There's no worries.
So I don't give a fuck if I have you on to talk about stuff or...
Or a sleep expert?
I'm not going to have anybody on that I'm not interested in talking to.
And I'll talk about whatever the fuck I want to.
I don't think, I don't know if people are going to be interested in this.
I need that advertising money.
I need to say if you because of that, I think it's one of the reasons why the show has been successful, because it honestly represents my thinking.
It's like I'm allowed to pursue my interests and have these conversations and let it be pure.
I think if the UFC took that exact approach, I think the product would be better.
And I think if they had someone like you breaking down the artistry of specific techniques, the air quote casual fan would be more educated and they would learn more about it.
And you get some of that from Dominic Cruz when he does his breakdowns on Fox and some of the other fighters who do breakdowns and when Daniel Cormier does wrestling breakdowns and breakdowns, specific techniques of why they work and why they don't work and what someone's doing right or wrong.
You get educated.
And I try to do the best I can, too, when it comes to the ground in particular, which is what I think is the most confusing aspect of MMA for the casual fan.
But I think we should approach the entire sport in the most illuminating way possible.
And I think a guy like you and your approach is very valuable.
And I love your breakdowns.
I'm a big fan of them.
That's why I retweet them all the time.
I just think you have a very unique and passionate and not just a passionate approach, but it's genuine.
Like, I know you.
I've talked to you when the cameras are not on and you're just as interested in this stuff.
I think we're going through whatever you're doing, if you're trying to seek some kind of mastery, and if you realize you're really early in it, you can do it by studying yoga.
Some people do.
Some people do it.
They go to church twice a week.
You're just looking to try to grow.
And if you do it with something that you're deeply fascinated in, eventually you kind of learn about connections in all things.
The study of martial arts or the study of yoga or the study of jazz or whatever teaches you about connections and all things.
And my life is so fucking good.
And these little moments where I'm like, I don't know why these guys, I don't work for them.
That doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't make any sense for me to think that because I get up in the morning and I make my wife and I coffee and I sit in my kitchen.
And I fucking analyze fighting.
I sit down, and I look at it, and I look for moments, and I look for things that I think people will find fascinating.
I look for things that will teach us something about life.
And I look for these, and I make them.
Then when I make them, people seem to like them.
And then that gets me jobs commentating, where I fly off and I get to, I mean, I got it so fucking good.
To try to square peg my way into a large corporation, because years back I dreamed about working there, Sometimes you change your dream.
Sometimes it's okay to change your route and find, the world changes constantly.
And next thing you know, you've got a family, and you've got kids, and you definitely can't move, and you've got a mortgage, and you definitely ain't pursuing any music dreams now, motherfucker.
I decided I wanted to get up and tell stories and hopefully entertain people or inspire them or take them somewhere.
And I did it partly, I watched your show, and then I would have never in a million years, or when I saw you in Vegas, would never in a million years thought I could do that.
Because it's clearly a lifetime of training, and development, and improvement, and trial and error, and thousands and thousands of repetitions.
And you look at that, and you don't look at an Olympic gymnast and say, I can do that.
And that's kind of so I didn't think of it at all.
But then I saw Brendan do his show, and it was awesome, and I realized he only started working on this two years ago.
You know what I mean?
And all he represents is hard, hard work, sacrifice, and drive to learn.
Yeah, force, power generation, like momentum, the ability.
I mean, if the other guy is that big and our goal is just to smash into each other until one of us is taken from the platform and you're not that big, it's going to be very difficult.
So it's like an arms race of size over generations where they just got bigger and bigger out of necessity.
Because if you're bigger, I mean, what am I going to do?
Right.
We could, in theory, maybe I could use your size against you, or I could use technique and strategy and smarts to take you off.
And I got wasted with him at the World Combat Games in St. Petersburg, Russia.
So I got to commentate it.
So I was in St. Petersburg and I absolutely love, I found a niche where I get to commentate like real traditional martial arts a fair bit.
I've done Taekwondo and Karate at the Pan Am Games and I did the World Sumo Championships or the World Combat Games.
I do the World Wushu Championships which is Kung Fu and San Da.
And so I've carved out this niche where I get called for these and develop expertise in these different areas and get to experience them and see the little details that change when you change something.
And so I got to commentate Sumo.
And then after, he seemed to like me and he's kind of like, you, we drink.
He said that's why he couldn't do a deal with Bellator.
No shit.
And his deal with ACB, who he loves and respects, he's become sort of partners in there with Mr. Haseev, who runs it, where Frank is now a partner of the presentation of it for American shows.
He'll be part promoter.
And I think Frank may even get away from some of the commentary.
As much as he's good at it and loves it, I think he's interested in some of the other aspects of it now.
But yeah, they pay very well.
And they pay the athletes very, very well.
You can be a guy that had a couple of UFC fights or a Bellator fight or two.
They'll give you $60,000 U.S. cash in your hand in an envelope at the end of it.
It just seems like that approach, we know, okay, if this wasn't the approach, would this be the ideal approach?
No.
It's never the ideal approach.
The ideal approach is to do the best fights possible.
The ideal approach is not necessarily to make the most money, or to have the, like, the most spectacular, like, like, When they were really promoting Ronda Rousey in the rematch or the fight with Amanda Nunes and didn't promote Nunes at all, I was like, I'm a huge Ronda Rousey fan.
But when you see the overall game, like, versus Holly Holm, then you get to see, oh, there's a lot of limitations here in trying to smash through the bricks.
If the bricks aren't there, and the bricks head kick you, you know what I mean?
There's a lot going on there.
So we're seeing the layers upon layers upon layers.
So what happens after you get to the first layer?
Oh, well, you don't have a second layer.
This is your layer.
Your layer is straightforward, move ahead.
You know, coaching is to blame as well.
There's a lot of things there.
But the fact that they weren't even promoting Amanda Nunes.
You have the very first ever openly gay women's MMA champion in the UFC. From South America.
But at that point, you have to stop and wonder, is there anything we could do strategically Like, just because something worked all the way along in any business or in anything you're doing, there might be a time to take a slightly different approach or to change one of the fundamental beliefs of how we do business or something.
You know what I mean?
What you can't do is just go, well, hopefully the next one will be good.
I mean, you watch that happen all the time.
There's some massive change in your business or in life.
That change, at first people deny that it's there.
Right?
They deny.
And then they say it's a niche.
And then they say it's a blip.
And then by the time that it's actually in the heat of something scary or challenging happening, you've wasted two or three years that you could have used adapting to be ready for it.
Yeah, I mean, I think that what you got to do when you have a champion that has spectacular results, like Amanda Nunes, you got to hype the shit out of her.
And you talk to Mike Brown or anyone there who's been around the greats, and they talk about it.
But this level now, where they are, the brilliance of what we've seen, it's another example.
If you think that only fighting to stand up when you're in guard is right, or only keeping somebody down is the game, and the only thing you have to worry about is they'll stand up, they'll submit you.
As soon as you don't recognize where you are in the change of the river of life and time, you sometimes get fucked up.
It's a fascinating thing.
I know I literally was just in Singapore and I just spent days with this company, but they see the world differently.
Is simply they're a values-based company that believes in the values of these things and tries to show people and share martial artistry for the greater good.
And it's not some business.
It's what they truly believe.
They truly are going about and making choices.
And when Chhatri says, I would not hire Conor McGregor because of what he represents, He's dead fucking serious.
His idea is, and what he sees, and I shouldn't speak for him at all.
He's a brilliant man, by the way, this guy.
He was a homeless kid with a single parent that later became educated and then moved to America and went to Harvard and then started managing corporate funds and became a Muay Thai champion.
And this is all easily documentable.
This is who that individual is.
And he's lived that life based on honor, respect, teamwork, excellence, that mind.
That is what built that company.
And one is a billion dollar company now.
It's a billion dollar company.
It's in 1.7 billion homes in Asia.
This isn't some mythological idea.
This is a guy who's built a massive company based around these values.
And that sounds because – and I'm not quite – although I've drank the Kool-Aid, I believe in what they're doing and I see it as real, not only because my values line up with it, but I think they are going to grow dramatically as a result of some of these – the way they see the world.
But not only that, but I'm still also immersed here.
And I like Connor.
I think of – I work for TSN because Connor fell out of a march to a red carpet to shake my hand while my boss was watching.
You know what I mean?
Some of the most interesting moments I've had are with that guy and some of the most interesting, many dozens of hours of trying to figure out what's happening and research and growth has happened by studying that guy.
And I see the games that he is willing to play as part of his strategy for success as a fighter and success trying to be successful for his family and his future.
I see it all connected.
So I don't dislike him, but I respect this idea that conflict and controversy are not good for us.
I understand that, but I also understand psychological warfare, and I think that Conor's a master of that, and that has a huge factor in victory.
I mean, this is something Miyamoto Musashi used to his advantage.
You know, if you read the Book of Five Rings, what Connor's doing is fucking with people's heads to To the point where he has space in their head, and then Connor goes into the cage like loose as a goose, relaxed and calm.
So he's letting you know, I don't give a fuck about you, but you give a fuck about me, and I'm going to fuck you up right now.
And you're like, no, you're not.
You better not.
You can't.
This is too much.
And Jose Aldo is the perfect example.
Aldo was so out of composure.
Aldo charged at him with that just leaping left hook and just got fucking waylaid on the way in.
And Eddie Alvarez, the greatest game day performer, one of the great game day performers we've ever seen.
And I talked to Eddie.
Eddie's one of my favorites.
And I admire and am inspired by Eddie Alvarez.
Michael Chandler, too.
You know, those two are like the same guy.
Yeah, almost.
But Eddie was like, the plan was to wrestle a lot and stay at distance barely at all.
And I stayed at distance almost the whole time and barely wrestled.
Like he's just like, it was real.
Like, and I, and by not accepting it was real coming in and suddenly you find yourself in there and it's real and you feel different and you're, you know, your mind is working differently and your hormones are working differently and who you are in that moment is different.
And you're like, holy fuck, it's real.
Had I prepared for it to be real, I could be in a different state right now.
But I denied that this was going to be real, and now it's fucking real.
Yeah, once you're doing something and I'm responding, which he responds, that happens every day in gangs and wars in Northern Ireland and Ireland and all types of religions.
That's been going on forever.
Nobody ever wins when that happens.
It just perpetuates it.
And when you watch it, and then there'll be a lot of people, you see this scenario and like Khabib's fans or friends or supporters and Connors and they're like, he did this, now he We did this.
They're both wrong.
And nobody, everybody always, when somebody does something bad to somebody else, they almost always feel like something was done bad to them.
But, obviously, it's a terrible thing to do and stupid.
You know, there's a way to manage that.
But then these people say, well, you know, now it becomes like the WWE.
And, you know, there's people that love real fighting that have a real hard time with these fake WWE style scenarios where you know that whether it's Colby Covington.
You know, like he did a promo recently where he had a girl by the pool and the girl sat in his lap.
And she was like, obviously had a planned script and it seemed kind of corny.
There's people who think that's great and there's people who fucking hate it.
It's also, I mean, again, if you're viewing it as inspiring artistry with which there are lessons to fucking live your life on one hand, and that's how I truly see it and interface with it and experience it and share it and want to see people get to feel that.
And then on the other hand, you're putting together these weird scripts to sell pay-per-views.
But I mean, wrestling, that stuff came up in wrestling because it isn't inherently real.
It needed those extras.
It needed all that stuff.
If we understood how brilliant Colby Covington was, if we understood how brilliant of a combat sportsman he was, he wouldn't have to do that.
Well, no, if we understood, he would get it based on that.
But we don't understand.
We, the royal we, don't get it.
It's like, I'll see people talk about fighting after, and they'll be like, and some people, this is their idea of covering a fight, or fans, or people, and everybody's entitled to their own thing, but they'll be like, yeah, the show is kind of a lackluster affair, not a lot of finishes.
Fuck it, you had 20 brilliant athletes interact and your opinion of how it did or didn't excite you is super valid to you.
I mean, he's beaten some other people, but in terms of top 10 contenders, in terms of like real world-class fighters, there's a lot of guys that are out there that have fucked up a lot of other people.
Like, Wonderboy was like, how is this guy fighting for the title, for an interim title, and I'm not?
After he's gone through those two big fights with Tyron Woodley, beating Jorge Masvidal, beating Johnny Hendricks, beating all these different fighters, Colby beat Damian Maia, and that's really the big name on his resume.
But it's also because he's going to be fighting Rafael dos Andros, who's a Brazilian.
He said a lot of stupid shit about Brazil.
Brazilians hate him.
Brazil's a giant market.
It's an easy sell.
And this is what he's talked himself into.
And it's a tough fight.
Don't make no mistake about it.
The guy that beat Damian Maia is a tough fucking fighter.
And again, you talk to Dean Thomas or Mike Brown, and they, two years back, when they were talking, and I'm Jorge Masvidal, That's one of those special artists to me.
And so I'll be asking, you know, like when I'll see Mike or Dean or these guys or anybody around that, I'm like, hey, how's Jorge doing?
What's he working on?
What does he change this?
And they'll talk.
Oh, and he's always training with Colby.
He's a fuck.
He's deadly.
He's one of the greats in the gym.
The two of them are first there, last to leave.
You've heard about how good he was under that public surface.
But I see what you're saying.
Based on what we've created, he doesn't have much of a choice if he wants to achieve his goals other than doing it this way.
And the guys who are good at it, Chael, obviously, Chael is really good at it.
And in fact, even if you were talked to somebody like a stereotypically passionate person we're talking about here, and you said it's a joke, and they'd be like, "You can't make that joke." Their point isn't that I don't care if he was kidding.
The fact that he was willing to do that is so disrespectful to all of us that we must slit his throat.
And that's what they'll chant when he goes to walk out there.
And really, if we move away all other things and just look at the systems at play and how and why it's there, if he had another 2 million Instagram followers, that would not happen.
Also, if you're going to strip Conor, which they did, and you have Khabib fight for the title, the true title, and, you know, look, that's arguable whether or not you should do that.
It should probably be two interim fights or two interim titles.
Well, there's there's a bunch of yeah, it was really fun and I like Ally Quint is another one of these guys.
How can you not be inspired seeing a guy that's like Life is traveling along and all of a sudden you have this one shot at something.
You're not ready You don't have you haven't prepared in the ways you want but you know what I'm gonna go for right that's a life lesson you know and there's also like There's a forgiving nature to this machine that is kind of admirable.
Like, Al has created problems.
Al has had conflict with that company.
And then they were still like, you know what, let's do this.
They don't even know where rankings come from, which is a bunch of people hanging out who kind of watch fighting a bunch and making an arbitrary choice and then combining it.
Do you know what a first-class noticer is?
Have you ever heard this term?
A first-class noticer in business or any number of things is somebody who, over time, you start to see the different systems and how they interact with each other.
And you are one.
You clearly are a first class noticer.
You see big picture, small picture, combine how the outside, right now you're like, well, the commission did this, but Paul Felder did that.
Rankings are this way.
And you're able to pull all these things together and look at it, right?
And if you look at any of these things from that perspective of how the systems all work, the whole thing barely makes sense.
And it's a different skill set than just being a good fighter.
There's language and being able to rationalize things and all these different things.
But you look back and he did it on the small leagues.
Which he didn't need to do.
He pursued because it was of interest to him.
He pursued it to get good at it because he loved it, which means he's predisposed to thinking that way.
So now you also have a thinker, a fighter, an incredibly dangerous striker, a guy who can play complex games in it, and you, in your infinite wisdom, don't think he can fight Habib because somebody somewhere said that he put a seven next to his name instead of a three.
Because if we have some kind of value root of what we're about other than the necessity to sell things based on the same marketing that we've used, we wouldn't have to be in that situation.
But we find ourselves there.
And when you're on the bottom of half guard, you just have to work your way out of half guard.
It's a really, you know, there's so many little oddball variables and unknowns, right?
Like, we literally, when we go and we look at these, the more you've studied and analyzed and commentated fighting for 20 years of your life, the more you realize how little we actually know.
Like, we have about 2 or 7 or 18% of the actual information.
You know what I mean?
And we're trying to work with it.
And the big one, so when Cody fought Dominic, I was like, I just don't see how he can win.
I don't see how Cody can win.
And then somebody would say, well, why'd he say that?
He knocked out all these guys.
I'm like, well, yeah, it's hard to get to Dominic.
And we've never seen evidence of him doing well after those minutes.
The evidence isn't there to see it.
Of course, 100% wrong.
But you have to go by what evidence you have.
What have we seen or what information have we gathered that can allow us to make this decision?
To me, Cody Garbrandt did not have, there was no evidence he could beat Dominic.
And then, boom, beats up Dominic and you're blown away.
And that's an exciting feeling.
And that is, I think, what's at play here.
Is there any evidence that Darren Till can do what Rory McDonald couldn't do and Jorge Masvidal couldn't do and get to a guy who has that movement, that blitz thinking, that karate, those karate instincts we were talking about?
And his fights previous in the UFC as well, although they didn't have a lot of fanfare behind him.
You know, stunning results.
And then you talk to people that know him, you know, talk to people that know his striking acumen and people that have seen him in the gym and understand what he's been through in his life.
And he's a young guy.
I think he's only 25. How old is Darren Till?
I'm pretty sure he's 25. He's also never lost, right?
But what I'm saying is, I would not be the slightest bit surprised if he could do it.
Because we've seen enough over time to know that what a 23-year-old is capable of, they'll see the whole game differently.
They'll see their understanding of where they are in relation to the other guy is so different that one day, all of a sudden, all these 25-year-olds are just so fucking good, and we don't really have the language to explain why.
Can we just say, oh, he was able to close the distance on Stephen Thompson?
If he does, we'll say yes.
But then the question will be, how?
When nobody else could do it, how and why could he do it?
And that's always what obsesses me.
If you see him do it, there is now, the explanation isn't he was better at closing the distance or his range management was excellent.
That's true for a bit.
But then my next question the next morning will be like, how the fuck did he do it?
What changed now?
What about the entirety of the game itself, the systems of the relationships of two fighters?
What changed in such a way because of his behavior?
And that's where it gets to me really, really wild.
Because right now, nobody gets to Stephen Thompson.
The hips and the knees and the shoulders and that whole thing.
And there's also that he developed mastery in what he does.
And once you've developed that elite, elite, top level of reached your highest potential, it's hard to keep going.
And then the masses start to close that distance.
The general young kid start, you know, a kid at TriStar, like some of their young guys, they have that, and they've had Thompson in there for years, and Faraz has been able to study people like that up close, and they all studied Lyoto.
Now the young guy can do a lot of those things at a much higher level than fighters that came before them.
So your level of mastery starts, you plateau to a point that it's hard to go beyond.
It's really hard work, and sometimes it requires you to get a little shittier.
For a bit to go past that plateau, to weaken or get worse by having to re-examine what you believe and the way that you train or the way that you fight.
To break through a plateau, you've got to kind of be willing to go backwards a bit.
And when you're fighting Tyron Woodley's other world, you cannot go backwards.
So it kind of stalls you there.
But ultimately, the big question also is, is there some other strategy that hasn't yet been done that is a Stephen Thompson beater?
And that low leg kick you talked about, so I cannot get to your – so what would I prefer when I'm fighting Stephen Thompson?
Body lock.
If I can get to the body lock, I'll rip him down.
To get to a body like I got to touch him.
That's really hard.
He stops me from doing that.
Or I got to hit him or kick him.
But when I do that, he moves away and hits.
What if I can just get to the edge of his sort of bubble of that hot range where he can hurt you?
And maybe that low leg kick is a part of that.
Maybe that low leg kick just getting on the outside of it where you're still somewhat safe, but you can smash him up a little bit.
Well, this is also arguably the best striker that Wonderboy's ever faced in MMA. Arguably, right?
I mean, Masvidal is a very talented striker as well, but Wonderboy is a master of that front leg, and that front leg is a real tricky one.
Because that karate style that he uses, he keeps his hands down low, he stands totally sideways on you, and you've got to get past that front leg side kick.
And Johnny couldn't get past it.
Hendrix got lit up by that front leg side kick and then front roundhouse kick to the face right afterwards.
It's just, there's a lot going on with that front leg if you're not used to that.
How and why that hasn't been rabbit-holed a lot more.
Although you do start to see that in that moment where I get to four points and I'm going to stand up and you just kind of decide, okay, that's all right, we'll get back to the fence.
In that process of standing up, a lot of guys throw a fight-finishing kick there or just at least take that chance to smash your leg with one.
There's free shots that exist in these moments and Jon Jones is a master of finding them.
Yeah, I hope they figure out what the fuck they're going to do with him soon.
I don't know where they stand now in terms of his suspension or what have you, but here's my ultimate goal, my hope, my dream, is that Cormier fights Stipe for the heavyweight title, and somewhere around then they announce when Jon Jones' suspension is up, they announce Jon Jones versus Brock Lesnar.
He's being honest and he's also had some things that he planned out.
I like John a lot.
I really love that guy.
But I think he surrounds himself with a bunch of knuckleheads.
I think he's around too many people that are of bad influence, and I think he's a wild man.
And I think when he's a wild man around other people that are sort of indulging that stuff with him, this is the word that I get not just from what I know, but from the people that know him very well.
But when we turn the TV on, I don't care if you watch CNN or Fox or CNBC or whatever, or the NFL or hockey or fighting or whatever, a lot of what we see is a bunch of heads who somebody has said, you choose different sides, or they know that's what they should do, and then they just argue.
And we watch it, we're taught it, we see it every single day all the time.
The sports guy talk, that drives me nuts when it comes to fighting because they have this sort of robotic, predetermined pattern of behavior that they apply to football and baseball.
I just feel like fighting is more personal, more intimate.
There's more on the line.
There's more at stake.
It means more to me.
And when I see that Dopey sports guy jock talk applied to fighting.
Now that is a rehearsed, over-strategized, constructed, artificial speaker.
In a world where someone watches the fucking Joe Rogan podcast or goes on and sees Dwayne training guys or watches a supermodel on Instagram or sees what The Rock is cooking, like I said, we see real people everywhere.
Yeah, but if you haven't been through that, if you haven't experienced failure, if you haven't been carried out on a stretcher as everybody boos you or felt victory or been terrified, you cannot logically criticize them because you don't understand.
Even if you haven't done it, if you have some respect for it, I respect you.
Just understand what they're going through.
I don't think you necessarily have to have gone to war to be a war correspondent to understand it, to talk about it.
You don't have to have shot someone to be able to understand what people are going through, or at least try to comprehend it, but have some respect about it.
There's a way to criticize technique and movement without being insulting.
Yeah, and like I said, it acts as if, as less and less people consume this older, but valid interface, television, less and less, and more and more are consuming other things that are different and new and stuff.
It's bizarre that the old one starts to say, "Yeah, well, we still do it this way." You can't do it that way because people...
Now it looks weird and old.
Now it looks...
Its context has changed because we have seen thousands.
We've seen what Michael Chandler ate today and how he held his son.
And this guy is saying, "Well, you know, striker versus grappler." And it's just...
You have to re-step in, and this applies to us all.
You have to re-step in, look at where you are and what its meaning is, and realize, oh, technology changed, the audience changed, the world changed, my life changed, the economy changed, the market.
But the reason sports television, the NFL, or many of these things, news, doesn't, is it starts out that there are innovators.
So in fighting, it was Dana White and the Fertittas, and you guys, and the vital, young, innovative creators.
And then as it grows, you need organized thinkers.
You need people who can organize and structure something so that it can grow.
The problem is they get really good at structuring hierarchies.
They get really good at structuring business in such a way that they are then in charge.
And then when it changes, you need those creatives again.
But these structure guys are there and they've built these formulas that they are then bound by.
Where it's like, well, of course we're starting with the opening shot, and then we're going to go, we're right here in Brazil, shot of Christ the Redeemer, and then we'll go, and here we've got a, oh, it's an unbelievable matchup with the winner gets the title shot.
Those are rituals.
Those are bizarre, formulaic rituals created when they mattered and they were valuable by highly intelligent people that were required to make this work.
But now you need different people.
You need a different thought.
You need the creatives back in, and they usually don't want that.
If that guy pulls out of a fight, you gotta go, well, he obviously must be too hurt to fight.
And this is part of the game.
But I've read some ridiculous shit that people have said about Mirko.
I went to Canelo's page the other day.
Oh my god.
There's pictures of Canelo Alvarez and people are, you know, judging his body and saying he looks tiny now and there's all these emojis of pills and needles all throughout his entire Instagram post.
When she's on, I don't even fucking touch those comments.
I don't look at the comments period period, but if I did those would be the last ones that I would look because they've looked at them before and like Whitney contacted me and she's like, what in the fuck?
Wherever the positive people are, if you're going to spend time, and I like to because if 50,000 people watch me do a breakdown, that means a lot to me.
And if 60 of them commented, if I can schedule in the day 45 minutes, I'm going to take the time and thank as many of them as I can.
But only where the good ones, only where the positive ones are.
Not that I want to be reinforced at what I'm doing, but I'm not going to spend the time on people who are going through life so negative that I can't get through to them anyways.
Because of the fact that we had the comments killed during the live feed, you couldn't chat during the live feed, when we would transfer it over to YouTube, the comments would be disabled, and people went crazy.
And I had a tweet about it, but look, I'm not disabling the comments.
I don't know what this glitch is, but they're going to figure it out.
But Schaub decided to disable his comments on purpose.
And dude, they fucking went crazy.
And they were attacking him.
But what are the numbers that give a shit?
Have you ever commented on a YouTube video?
Have you ever watched a YouTube video and commented on it?
It's like, I know there's some really positive comments and people who are healthy people who are just interested in debate and discussion about particular topics, but when you're dealing with all these negative people, like, what are the numbers?
If you have a million people watching a YouTube video, are we talking about a hundred people that are cunts?
And they're the ones who are going to be mad that you disable the comments.
But does that really matter?
And is keeping that cesspool open, keeping that commode open for them to dump their fucking verbal diarrhea into, is that giving the kid candy for being an asshole?
Can you imagine if the person asks you while you're feeding your daughter, if somebody did that, maybe the first time he'd be like, well, I can't believe this guy wants to take a selfie with me.
But after that, you're still living your human life.
He's 40 years old, trying to compete in something that's a young man's game.
That's the thing.
It's like, you can get mad, you can get outraged, and that's a reasonable result, a reasonable response if you want.
But if you rationalize, if you have empathy, it's like this guy still wants to do this thing that his body won't allow him to do, and so he's willing to bend the rules to attempt it.
He failed, and now he's going to have to pay the consequences.