Dan Hardy and Joe Rogan explore idea-capture techniques, comparing voice memos to psychedelics for unlocking creativity, while critiquing society’s neglect of childhood trauma. They debate MMA fundamentals—wrestling’s dominance, Paul Harris’s karate-based speed, and Stipe Miocic’s cautious rematch strategy against Francis Ngannou—highlighting how adaptability (like John Danaher’s jiu-jitsu coaching) reshapes fighters. Early UFC legends Mario Sperry and Igor Zinoviev’s brutal clashes contrast with modern weight-cutting extremes like Anthony Johnson’s 170-to-214-pound transformation, revealing MMA’s evolving brutality and tactical depth. Hardy’s 58% fitness and potential return to competition underscore the sport’s toll on longevity, blending nostalgia with its shifting landscape. [Automatically generated summary]
I've got like an old-school Elvis microphone and like a 1950s-style chord into an old recorder, and I'm trying to use that a bit more because we were talking about Hunter S. Thompson.
I like the idea of recording stuff as I'm moving, but it's a habit I'm not getting into right now.
Because I think when you're in the zone, like, you're driving, there's something about, like, you know how sometimes you could be, like, miles away, and you're like, how the fuck did I get here?
Like, you're sober.
Yeah, that's terrifying.
And you're like, how did I drive miles?
I evidently changed lanes.
You know, I know where I'm going.
Everything was inside the lanes, but I'm barely there.
But I think it's because you're in that weird mind state.
A lot of people also get the same thing when they walk.
A lot of writers, what they like to do is they like to write, and then they like to go on walks and think about the writing.
And the idea is that when you're on the walk, you just get left, right, left, getting a little bit of cardio in, going up hills, and all you're thinking about is you're breathing and you're moving, and those eyes just sort of bounce around the back and get washed.
Mitch Hedberg had a funny joke about that he keeps a note, a notepad by his bed, because every now and then he'll have some sort of an idea that he needs to write down.
Or if he don't have a notepad, I have to pretend it wasn't a good idea.
I'm paraphrasing.
I did a terrible job paraphrasing.
I couldn't remember.
Exactly how it was worded.
But it's like, yeah, that thing, like, ideas are strange, man.
I entertained for a while the idea that ideas were life forms.
That because we don't think of them like, look, there's a lot of different life forms, right?
I mean, there's squids, and there's chimps, and there's barracudas, and there's hawks.
And that what they're doing is just making their way, and the more you nourish them, the more they grow, the more you pay attention to them, the more they propagate your head with new ideas, and then you take action.
On those ideas and it creates everything the world's ever seen that humans have created.
All that stuff comes from ideas.
Everything from cars to buildings to planes.
All that comes from ideas.
100% of it.
But yet we don't even think about what the ideas are.
Like what the fuck is that?
You just get some random new way of looking at things.
What is happening?
Is this just pure calculation?
Or are you interacting?
With some sneaky little influencer that wants to give you credit for it.
unidentified
Like, God, Dan Hardy, you're so smart with these ideas.
I think it's entirely possible that a lot of people are thinking exactly the same way you think when you're thinking it.
I think that there's a lot of fucking people thinking right now.
And there's a lot of sharing information through podcasts and Twitter and Facebook and YouTube videos and all the different things that people are doing.
And it's not outside the realm of possibility that we share some sort of common thread psychically.
You know, that there's some connection that we have with each other.
We know we like to be around each other, right?
Like, logically.
I'm not talking woo-woo.
People like to be around each other.
When you hear someone talk about, oh, I'm just alone or I want to be by myself, like, that's a fucked up person.
Like, most people, I mean, not for a little bit of time, for a reset, miss your friends.
Yeah, that's wonderful.
That's a good idea.
That's probably really healthy.
But those people that are like them Ted Kaczynski type dudes who just want to just move to the middle of nowhere and by themselves and be a fucking nomad.
Like, hmm, why?
Most of us don't want that.
Most of us want to be around each other.
Well, how come?
Well, we feel good.
It's like a little drug.
We feel good around our friends and our loved ones.
Yeah, no, you definitely need a balance of it, but you don't want to be completely absent of it.
What it is, in some way or another, we feed off of each other.
Good and bad, right?
And good people, people that you enjoy being around, you feed off them in a very positive way and it's very fulfilling and addicting and you want to do what they do and you want to help each other and you all want to feed off of each other.
You all want to have this powerful community where you love each other.
And then there's people that are super negative, too.
It's all about what kind of circles do you travel in.
If you get fucked over as a child and you just get tossed into a bad circle really early on, that's one of the primary causes for life-sucking, right?
You're a kid and you're born in a shit situation with abusive people, abusive neighborhood, danger, crime.
So little is done to mitigate that in terms of how much effort is put into trying to ensure that people are educated or somehow or another we...
There's no real what to explain to someone what it's like to be a parent until you're a parent.
You can talk about it until you're blue in the face.
But if you're talking to crazy people, you're never going to know how good they are at it anyway.
Like if you take someone who's like a crazy, abusive person, what words could you ever say to that person to stop them from being crazy or abusive?
Is there a string of words that you can say where you could convey the way you feel about it in a way that would cause them to go, wow, I should probably stop being a piece of shit.
In terms of the number of events that you see in your life that shape you and impact you in a way that make you reassess where you're at as a person and what life is like, those are so critical.
If you don't have those, if you just have this flat plane of nothing happening, going to the same job, I think that's what makes people fucking go crazy, more than almost any other aspect of this life.
It's just monotony and boredom and no thrills and no challenges and nothing makes you scared.
Yeah, and I think it's difficult to see that when you're in it though, right?
I think we're both fortunate enough to be in a place, and I was with a good friend yesterday, Tim Hendricks, getting tattooed, and we were having the same conversation.
He's in a place where he's in control of his life.
He's living in the place that he wants to live.
He said he can walk his kids to school for the next 10 years.
He works in the tattoo studio that he got his first professional tattoo in.
He's living his dream, and he's got all these businesses that support what he's doing.
And we're in a similar situation as well, and I can see other people around me now that are caught in that monotony, and they can't see it, and it's just so difficult to break that.
But it's just, most people that are doing that, this is no disrespect, because I think that some of them actually provide some legitimate fuel for They give people some words that could encourage them, and even though they've never really accomplished anything, they're not necessarily doing anything negative, because they're propagating good ideas.
They're promoting healthy values and healthy ways to live life.
But let's be honest, bitch, you ain't done shit.
It's weird.
It's weird to be given advice when you ain't done shit.
And some people have done things.
Some people are legitimate.
Some people, like Jocko Willink, when that guy's giving motivational advice, you know who he is.
You know what he's accomplished as a Navy SEAL, as a martial artist.
He's the real deal.
And when he talks to people and talks about discipline and establishing a core relationship between your squad and all the people you work with, you really believe it.
You buy it.
It's why David Goggins works.
You know that fucking savage is out there running right now.
While we're talking, he's running down the street.
Do some people want to keep you soft?
He's running down the street making YouTube videos.
He'll be out there for fucking five hours today just running.
It's something about your circadian cycle and you have breakfast in the time zone that you're leaving and then when you arrive in the next place you have breakfast at that same time and it kind of kicks you over and it works.
But for some reason this time it killed me.
And I'm laying in bed and it's freezing cold.
South America, I just assumed it was going to be warm.
It was not warm.
It's the southernmost capital city in South America.
So when I'm near a coast, I want to make the most of it.
But I had no warm training clothes, so I'm out there running.
And the reason I was out there running and my lungs felt like they were bleeding was because you put an Instagram post up saying something about not being lazy.
And it just, it got me straight.
I was like, I picked it up.
It was the first post that came up on Instagram.
I was still laying in bed and I was like...
I'm going to see Joe next week.
I've got to be inspired in this moment, so thank you.
There's legitimate people that make posts like that that are fuel.
They're mental fuel.
You know, like when Goggins makes a post or when Jocko makes a post or my friend Cam Haynes makes a post, I read those posts and I fucking want to get going.
I want to get going because I know they're getting after it.
It sounds so, like for people who are not into exercise, for people who think that we're macho assholes, this is like an excellent place where you would criticize.
Like, God, it's so cliche.
What, are you going to go get after it?
I'm telling you there is great value spiritually in doing something hard.
There is.
There's something about it.
It makes you a better person.
Sounds ridiculous, but all my favorite people can fucking push themselves.
All my favorite people work out hard.
Because when they do it, it breaks down bullshit better than anything else you can do.
It just breaks down bullshit.
You know who you are when you're done.
You know when you bitched out.
You know when you started coasting the last 30 seconds of a round.
You know all that, man.
You can't lie to yourself.
It's the grand exposure of who you are, and it only comes during extreme duress.
It only comes when you're doing something that's hard as fuck, whether it's rolling jiu-jitsu or running hills or doing yoga.
It comes in those moments where you want to fucking quit.
I even took a drive past the place and I just, it's empty, there's nothing there now, but I took a drive past it and I remember, like we were in there till like 10.30, 11 o'clock at night, the windows steamed up and Yeah.
They were good nights.
Just that grind.
I'm trying to bring that back because I've just opened my own gym, Hardy Warhead.
But I still think people, you know, the people that are fighting Bare Knuckle right now have got an unrealistic perspective of what boxing is with no gloves.
If you look back to any of the old photos or drawings of the old bare knuckle boxers, their stance was so much different.
They leaned back, their knuckles were curled in, and they were hitting with the front two knuckles with a back fist.
I think if bare knuckle boxing had started around the same time as the UFC started...
It would develop and it would look very different right now.
Everybody's standing like boxers, like they've got 14-ounce gloves on when they're sparring.
And they're throwing punches like they've got gloves on.
They've not made that adjustment yet to lean back and start using that lead hand better.
So do you think that you're going to see that in this bare knuckle boxing guys?
They're going to develop like that old-timey style?
I think so.
And start jabbing with those strong, for folks who don't know, the strong two knuckles are the ones that are right next to your index finger and your fuck you finger.
Those are the two strong ones.
And if you look at my friend John Lee, who is a national taekwondo champion and one of my mentors, taught me a lot when I was in Boston.
He used to punch bricks so often that he didn't have two knuckles.
He had one solid knuckle.
It was so crazy.
On his right hand, it was like where a knuckle would be and another knuckle would be.
All of it was covered by this thick callus.
Have you ever seen, like, when dudes have those knuckles from breaking boards and bricks and shit?
Jamie, see if you can find a photo of this, because I've seen it on other martial artists before, but you have to be one hardcore motherfucker to turn your hand into a hammer.
The way it was explained to me is that if you take a cross-section of the bone, it looks like ladders stacked up next to each other.
And what you do is you collapse the rungs on the front set of ladders, and that collapses down in itself, and those two pieces calcify, and then that becomes a thicker outer wall, and then you do the same thing.
So you collapse the...
Like we used to do bottles and rolling pins and...
All kinds of stuff to try and condition the shins.
The same thing apparently is the process that happens with cauliflower ear.
is calcification because when you get internal bleeding as it's been explained to me remember I am a moron and I'm definitely not a doctor but it was explained to me that when you have blood inside the tissue that that blood can calcify and that's why your your ears when they get cauliflower they're so fucking hard because literally it's like a rock in there damn I used to just get it out I used to stuff some insulin needles good for you good for you Yeah, good for you.
There's a lot of people that want that nonsense with their ears.
Listen, no disrespect to people who have it, because many of them are my heroes.
Because it's part of the game for Jiu-Jitsu.
But if you have the option right now, not if you already have the cauliflower, God bless.
But if you've got the option right now, you really should drain your fucking ear.
Because that's the reason why your ear hears a certain way.
All that sound comes through there.
You can hear it.
I have like little tiny pieces, chunks of little hard stuff, you know, places where I had like a little bit of cauliflower, but I always wore ear guards.
And he really, genuinely cares to reach out to people and tell them that if you are going through depression, if you're dealing with and suffering from mental illness, talk about it and get help.
Because I almost killed myself and now here I am, champ of the world, feeling great.
Maybe in their mind they know what happened and they don't want to experience the bad feeling again and what they're just going to do is just get through this, learn and improve.
That they don't need to see themselves getting left hooked.
Yeah, I mean, well, the thing is with that, that was, I'm not saying it was a less technical circumstance, but it was one of those kind of wild circumstances which, I mean, the only thing that he could have learned from it is the fact that Masvidal had probably figured out that he shoots with his head to that side.
I get reminded of that line after the Condit fight all the time when you interviewed me.
First thing I thought to myself, you've always got to be able to laugh at yourself because you're exposed.
You're very, very vulnerable.
You're in front of millions of people putting basically your health on the line.
So I think having a sense of humour has always helped.
And I think also now being able to look back from where I am now and look at my career and go, well, I had 10 fights in the UFC. I went four up, title fight, four down, and then I pulled it back for two.
And that's where it kind of ended.
So I had a bit of everything.
I had a taste of everything.
I had the quick rise.
I was in a co-main event in my second fight.
You know, O2 Arena in London, 69-second knockout, on top of the world.
Marcus Davis after that was just ridiculous because of the build-up to it.
Then Mike Swick, I'm fighting for a world title.
Holy shit, what's happening here?
Next thing, I'm facing off against George St. Pierre.
And then I had like a four-month process after that of...
Looking back at it with everybody saying, oh, you just need a bit of takedown offense.
You just need some takedown offense.
And I'd started to believe that in my own head and thought I was really, really fucking good.
That was a good turning point for me because that put me back on the track where I should have been and I'd already started to veer off after the GSP fight because the rides have been so quick, four fights.
Because I experienced that, it's nice for me to be able to I try not to talk about it, but to relate my experiences when I'm watching other fighters coming up.
I can put myself in their shoes because I've probably experienced something of where they're at.
A high or a low.
So I look back and I think maybe my career prepared me for where I'm at right now.
I think the UFC had decided that they wanted to use their former fighters more and sort of give them a career option after fighting, which, you know, we look like Rashad Evans, he's really flourishing there.
Tyron Woodley has already kind of established himself as being a big-time commentator while he was the champ.
After he was the champ, he's doing more of that.
The more guys do that, the more they're going to see, like, oh, well, there is a life in sports after competition.
I can make a great living, still be involved in the sport that I love, that has given me so much, and I've given so much to.
And it's all a cool thing.
And I think I encourage more of them to do podcasts, like Schaub.
You know, like Schaub's kind of carved the path.
In terms of ex-fighters becoming successful at podcasts.
And so many people go to him for, you know, what's your take on Canelo versus Triple G? What do you think is going to happen with this?
Is Deontay Wilder ever going to fight Tyson Fury again?
Coming from a former fighter, man, people really dig that.
It's a unique perspective.
If you can get good at fighting, you can get good at talking.
Get the fighting learned first and then figure out how to tell people about it.
I often think, you know, when I'm talking to people though, like Anthony Smith, when I speak to him, I always think to myself, as soon as he's done fighting, he can cross straight over into broadcasting because he speaks so well.
And every time I find a fighter and I feel that about them, I always make sure I tell them.
Because although you don't want to think about it when you're a fighter because you always want to think, of course you're going to become the world champ and of course you're going to be massively successful and not have to worry about it because that's the only mindset that you should have as a fighter, of course.
But there is life after fighting.
What I've realized is that if I'd have had other options planned when I was fighting, I would have had a lot less pressure when I was fighting.
Well, I mean, you watched that last fight against Liz Carmouche and I know a lot of people complained that it was a slow fight.
And this is something I realized actually during that fight.
Sometimes you need to see the whole octagon to really appreciate what's going on.
Sometimes you need to see like an elevated shot of the whole space because her ability to control that space with the threat of doing something and her ability to cut people off.
Did you see that little clip going around of the snail that had a parasite in it that the parasite took over and it's like pulsing in its eyes and the body?
So this aquatic worm, it climbs inside the grasshopper's body, and then when it's ready to be born, it makes the grasshopper commit suicide, so it can get in the water and swim away.
Literally talks the grasshopper like, come on, bitch, you're going over here.
It hijacks its physical motion, makes it jump into water and drown, and then the worm fucking comes out of it like some Stephen King movie.
Well, there was one thing that I saw in the cordyceps mushroom, and I don't know if it's exact.
I think there's many different strains of cordyceps mushroom.
But one, some particular fungi, might not have even been cordyceps, but I think it was.
Jesus, let me get to the story.
It infects an ant, and the other ants take it away from the colony, because they know that it's going to get to a certain point, and then it's going to explode.
So the ants will literally fill up with these spores, and then explode, and then the spores get into the sky and land on the other ants.
Well, we've made ourselves so safe and so removed from the whole cycle of life.
And that's amazing that we've done that or that somebody other than us has done that.
And then we've reaped the benefits.
But because of that, we look at the real suffering of the natural world almost like if it's preventable or if it's bad or if it's It's something we should be sad about.
But there's some really horrific things that take place, especially in the insect world, on a daily basis, that make you just go, what?
Have you ever seen those hornets that fly into the honeybee nest and behead everyone?
And they just come in and chop the heads off of these other honeybees.
And it's crazy to watch, man.
Because the honeybees can't do jack shit.
Just hundreds of them.
And they're just getting slaughtered.
Just thousands of them.
But then they figured out the way to kill these things is to get on top of them and bat their wings to heat up So they heat up to the point where it overheats the bee and kills it, or the hornet and kills it.
He had this theory called morphic resonance, and one of the things that he was saying was, he was talking about studies they did with rats and mazes, and then if they did a study with a rat in a maze, like on the East Coast, Rats on the West Coast, if they went through the same maze, would get through it quicker.
So it's like they were learning from each other how to get through.
It's almost like they were sharing some sort of an understanding.
We want to think that all genetics are the same in terms of like, you know, you have a child and your child shares your wife's genetics and your genetics and this is how it works and this is the way people learn things.
And that might be the way we learn most things, but it also might be that we're getting some information from each other in some weird way.
But we might be a little detached from it, whereas rats who are out there fucking scratching and clawing and they don't have a language, they might be completely tuned into it.
It might be the sacrifice that language...
That we made when we went with language where we lost our ability to read each other the way we used to or to read thoughts and ideas where we used to.
We rely instead on this other thing.
So it's sort of like when you wear shoes all the time, your feet get soft.
So that's very similar to the Rupert Sheldrake thing.
That's really interesting.
Yeah, I really wonder, I mean, I really wonder how much like the human race benefits From the collective knowledge of everyone involved, not just through the internet and books and universities, but maybe even just through consciousness.
Maybe there's some element of it that's being relayed through consciousness.
Yeah, Steven Pressfield wrote about that in a really unique way in The War of Art because he talked about how just showing up and counting on the muse, like thinking about the muse as a real thing, you know, the muse has always been like some, the idea is like something's coming to you with these ideas, something like, something magical, right?
And so I think his idea is to treat it like it is magical and respect it and to show up every day at work at the same time And summon the muse.
And then if you just do that with discipline and you act as a professional, all this stuff comes to you.
Where does it come from?
Well, let's just say it comes from the muse.
It might not.
Let's just say it does.
Treat it like it does.
And it works out.
It's one of those weird ones, whereas if you pretend it's magic, it kind of works like magic.
But if you just analyze it, these are just neurons firing in my brain.
The collective work of all these other people that I've ever experienced in movies and literature, they're all feeling through me, so let's not get carried away about the pretentiousness of creativity.
It might be pretentious.
It might be pretentious to think that way.
But you might be open to the idea that let's just pretend that it's magic.
Let's just pretend.
Just trick yourself into thinking that it's magic and then operate like it's magic.
But then give it the respect as if it's like, you know, piss off a wizard because you show up late.
And this is a conversation I've had with Jeff Nowitzki is because, like, I can't give them, like, I don't know exactly how it works, but as far as I know, you have to give them, like, three addresses that these are the places that you're most likely going to be at.
And if you're not at any of those places, you have to let them know where you are.
But then the thing is, if it was completely even across the board, then there would be an opportunity for one person to be completely superior to everybody else.
If you wanted to ask someone, hey, my kid's thinking about becoming a mixed martial arts fighter, what discipline do you think you'd start with first?
It's either a traditional martial arts where you learn how to kick when you're real little and you just learn a lot of flashy kicks because you'll carry that with you.
And you'll develop leg dexterity, but then wrestling.
For sure wrestling.
Because if you're a dominant wrestler, that advantage, if you're real similar in everything else, but you're dominant in wrestling, you're going to be able to control the clinch.
You're going to be able to get the guy down.
You're going to be able to do things to them.
And you see it.
It might not be the most glamorous way to win fights.
Sometimes people get upset that someone takes someone down and just kind of hits them while they're down.
But guess what?
They're hitting them.
And they're doing something to that person that person doesn't want to be done.
And maybe it's not the most exciting thing for you to watch, but as someone who respects what the sport is supposed to be all about, what can this guy do to that guy?
Well, that guy can take you down and punch you in the fucking face, and you can't do anything about it.
And even if you get up and you say, I'm not hurt.
Okay, well, you never got up, though.
This is a viable, legitimate way to win fights.
And the guys who can smash from the top, they're the most scary proposition.
Because you can't get up.
You can't get up and Khabib's on there talking shit to you.
So I think, like when you watch a fight where someone is winning with just wrestling and very little else, that's a boring fight because it's not a fight.
That's a wrestling match.
The wrestling is the thing that enables you to utilize the submissions or the striking.
And there's something instinctively about us.
Whenever there's a fight where they're just wrestling or there's someone just dominating the top position and not using it at all, the fans get restless.
They start to boo because they feel like they're being robbed of what they came to see.
And that's my only criticism when it comes to wrestling is to use just wrestling.
Like, you've got to understand that that is the foundation, that's the glue that you bolt everything else onto.
So that's why Khabib's so good, because he uses wrestling to put people in a position where he can beat them up.
Or, I mean, Chuck Liddell, he used his wrestling to keep people in a position where he could knock them out.
But wrestling, that's the glue.
That's the part, you know.
And what's beautiful about Cejudo is that he's...
Instead of having a method of wrestling, he has principles of wrestling.
He understands how to break a body down.
I understand that from a striking perspective and it's taken me years to start to see that from a grappling perspective as well.
Training with the old 10th Planet guys and stuff, they had quite a...
What's the best way of putting it?
An instinctive understanding of how to break down and control a human body based on the techniques that Eddie had developed.
It took me ages to kind of start to figure out that it's not like...
I'm not trying to learn techniques to do that.
I've got to understand the principle of it to break it down.
And to watch Cejudo chain things together against Demetrius Johnson.
You know, go for the inside reap and then Demetrius Johnson steps out so he ankle picks him in the same process.
Like, the principle instead of the method is a beautiful thing to watch.
It teaches you how to be super uncomfortable at an early age.
And there's something about that uncomfortable grind that if you can get through that and make that normal for you, you could get through almost anything.
And these guys, you see them, like, perfect example, Cejudo versus Marlon Marais.
Marlon Marais is lighting him on fire in that first round.
It looked terrifying.
It looked like Henry's in real danger of being KO'd by a far superior striker.
I think there's a video about it from Will Harris Productions, but he won the fucking gold medal in the Olympics and then immersed himself in boxing and was living in a fucking boxing gym and sleeping in a boxing gym after winning the gold medal in the Olympics.
I love watching these extreme outliers, like guys who can do things like that.
And you know Luke Thomas, right?
Luke Thomas had a really interesting take on it that I really appreciated and agreed with.
He said, you've got to remember that Cejudo, early in his career, wasn't consistent.
He was missing weight.
He didn't have the best performances.
He didn't have the same focus.
then reinvents himself after the Demetrius Johnson loss and becomes a fucking demon in the gym and works with all these who are those people that came here that is it neuro force what is the the company that works for them that works on yeah find the name of those folks so ridiculously scientifically monitored testing of everything he does is His workload is...
Neuroforce 1. Neuroforce 1. So, like, there's fucking scientists working with him.
So scientists and elite trainers and wrestling coaches and kickboxing coaches.
And then all of a sudden he emerges as this murderer, right?
Like, you see when he blasted away T.J. Dillshaw, you're like, holy shit!
I think whenever it's a close fight, sometimes I like the way a certain type of fighter, the way I prefer someone who's doing damage versus someone who takes someone down and doesn't do anything.
And sometimes you'll have a kickboxer who's lighting a guy up for the first minute and a half of the round, but then the wrestler will take him down and maybe stay on top of him for three or four minutes, but don't do anything, and they'll give it to the wrestler.
Which I'm like, okay, maybe.
But I think it's debatable, especially if it's 50-50.
It's like two and a half minutes down, two and a half minutes up.
Well, what happened in those two and a half minutes downs?
Yes, you held position, but did you get it back from what that guy was doing to you in the first two and a half minutes when he was chopping at your legs and kicking you in the body?
It's down to the interpretation of the person watching, and this is how your own personal life experiences come into play.
If you're a sport jiu-jitsu guy, you're going to see it different to a boxing coach or something like that.
And the other thing as well, when it comes to the stats, and you look at the total strikes landed, significant strikes landed, I always argue some strikes are far more significant than others.
Like, if you land 50 significant strikes in a round, sorry, in a fight, and someone lands 10 significant strikes, but those 10 significant strikes blow your eye up, break your nose, knock you down one time, it doesn't matter what the other significant strikes did if they weren't as significant.
And I think, like, with the Mike Perry-Vicente Luque fight, I would say that that knee was probably the most significant strike of the fight.
What about the way that Pride used to do it, where they would score the person finishing stronger as heavier?
Because that's another argument that comes in.
If you look at Mike Perry at the end of that third round, you go...
Fourth round, fifth round, he's got nothing left.
That nose is a mess.
So then I think instinctively I do that.
And I try not to.
I do try and score it per round.
But I think instinctively if somebody finishes stronger, which again, Joel Romero against Robert Whittaker the second time around, he finished stronger than Whittaker quite obviously.
And I think that people naturally lean towards the person that is...
They've overcome the hump at the start of the fight.
It's almost like you've got a round or two.
You can kind of forgive the person before they take over.
The first round with Liz Karmuch and Valentina Shevchenko.
That was a fairly uneventful round in terms of significant strikes landed, in terms of anybody establishing any dominance.
You just got to see Valentina dealing with the movement and advancing and landing a little bit more than Liz, but that's it.
Not much, right?
But that's a 10-9 round.
But how could a round where they're scrapping and they're going at each other, but no one gets knocked down, but it's a fucking wild, chaotic, crazy round.
But that's where people's perspective of fights can sometimes lean one way.
Because if someone has a really, really big last round, but they've lost the first two, people are not seeing it as three sections of a fight to be scored.
If one person's two rounds ahead, sometimes, like I was saying instinctively, if someone has a strong round, you score towards that person because it was more impactful what they did to their opponent.
So if you take someone down and control them and hold them, even if you do that for four minutes of a round, but for one minute of that round you get lit up against the fence, I'm always going to go towards the person that was doing the lighting up because that was more significant and more impactful on me as a viewer.
If I'm choosing a tribal leader, I'm going for the guy that had the one minute of success on the feet as opposed to the guy that was holding him down for four.
Yeah, unless the guy who holds him down eventually mountains him like from Game of Thrones and crushes his fucking head with his thumb through his eyeballs.
I think we should have a comprehensive system that recognizes the fact that there's near submissions, there's a leg kick that barely touches, and there's a leg kick that cripples your leg.
They should be scored differently.
We should have actual numbers that are attributed to these things.
If we want to have an accumulation of things at the end, how much should we count total strikes?
How much should we count submission attempts?
How much should we count near submission attempts?
What about submission attempts where you're literally saved by the bell, which does happen, right?
I'm trying to say, what fucking jujitsu guy was it that slapped on a Darce and then finished it the next round, finished it with a Darce?
Maybe it was Ferguson.
It's not going to...
This is not going to work.
I'm never going to remember now because it's fairly recent.
But there's, you know...
When someone's locked up, we've gotten way off track, but my point was if someone's locked up in a submission and the buzzer ends, you know that guy was fucked.
And then you've got one round where the fighter nearly gets finished and saved by the belt and then their opponent can edge out the next two rounds by stuffing takedowns and fighting defensively and then they win our decision.
Yeah, I really think that there's room for growth.
There's room for improvement.
And I think that if someone developed some sort of a more comprehensive system, like what is a takedown actually worth?
Why do we have to stick to this 10-9 stuff?
It's like, I guess.
It's like, oh, I'm going this way or I'm going that way.
Let's see your work.
Like, what are you deciding it on?
Are you deciding on, okay, I have...
Takedowns versus submission attempt, and with the accumulation of leg strikes, I feel like an advantage was gained, and even though much wasn't done with the takedown, it did defensively stop the attack that he was getting on his feet, and he was able to impose his will upon him, so I'm going to give him 10-9.
We can go, ooh...
We can talk about this.
And experts can sit around and try to figure out what makes sense to people who have been studying martial arts their whole life.
What do you think is worth more?
Who do you think won that round?
Forget about the 10-9.
If you had to score it on the Dan Hardy system, who do you think won that round?
And if we did something like that, I think we'd get at least an idea what the territory is.
I mean, there are certain people that stand out that got really good footwork, but for the most part, there's so much bad decision-making by people not understanding how to corral someone against the fence.
But the thing is, say if you're playing guard, right?
If you've got somebody in your guard and you play 15 minutes of throwing submissions up and nothing comes off, and the other person sits in your guard and lands a few punches, the person on the top is probably going to win the fight because they were sitting in your guard defending submissions and the defense part is its own reward.
And he throws that oblique kick to the body like a sidekick, and you're like, whoa.
Yeah.
This guy's hitting him with some shit, and he's swift on the feet, man.
Lorenz is like, he's got a very unusual style of footwork and movement, and it's like a lot of guys, you see them trying to decipher it as he's coming at you, and then boom!
The shots are coming.
So to see him get clipped by Paul and get really hurt and stopped, you realize, like, wow, that's how hard fucking Paul Daly hits.
Lima's a murderer he might be one of the scariest guys in the 170 pound division across the board and one FC UFC Lima's one of the scariest guys for sure he's boom boom out go the lights that motherfucker he puts people to sleep you know he does he's he's fuck when he knocked out Koresh Koff I was like Jesus he knocks out everybody man yeah and his rematch with Rory is going to be very interesting I just always worry about Rory's nose you know
And I think people would underestimate John Danaher as an MMA coach as well.
The experience that he's had.
His knowledge of MMA is outstanding.
I spent some time talking to him when I was up in Montreal at TriStar and the way he unpacks things and breaks things down and not only breaks them down for himself to understand but for him to be able to communicate that easily to other people for them to understand.
It takes a special kind of coach to be able to do that.
I'll never forget him sitting in a club in Montreal Like, GSP's there, and all of his mates, and they're all, like, dressed sharp and stuff, and they're, like, talking to the girls.
What he is is I think he's singularly focused on transitions and attacks and patterns in jiu-jitsu and how to improve upon various athletes' success in games.
And he's created these pathways and these guys that believe in him also happen to be super dedicated and very talented.
And then you have that entire Henzo Gracie team, which is just one of the best lineages of jiu-jitsu in all of martial arts.
And if you look at what came out of that Henzo Gracie, you have Matt Serra came out of there.
There's been so many high-level competitors in a million different martial arts organizations.
Henzo is like old-school Gracie.
I mean, he's from the root.
I mean, that's the purest jiu-jitsu you're going to find in the world.
He's got, it's just, that's an amazing pool of talent on top of having a wizard like Donaher in there fucking with things and fixing things and finding new pathways and how to counter things and how to switch things around on people.
And they have a bunch of systems, like back-taking systems, leg-locking systems, and it's super, super effective.
And the way he describes it is he's able to cut years out of the learning curve of these guys by addressing problems that come up before they come up.
And for sure, they all learn from each other, for sure.
I mean, Eddie is also a big innovator in leg locking and understanding these systems and innovating and coming up with new entries and new transitions.
All those guys are.
It's like everyone has their own little piece of ingredient that they're putting into the stew, but the result is really exceptional in terms of success rates.
Like, they stood out in a world where everyone's trying to kill everybody with chokes and arm bars, and everybody knows chokes and arm bars.
And what's really interesting is if he wasn't injured as badly as he is, I mean, he probably would have gone on to compete and maybe not been as good of a coach.
That's one of the more amazing pieces to that puzzle.
He was a rugby player, fucked his knee up early.
They fixed it, but they didn't fix it right, and it was always a problem, and he was always kind of leaning on it in a weird way, and it fucked his hip up.
So he had to get a hip replacement, now he's going to get a knee replacement, and he's a guy known for teaching people how to rip people's legs apart.
Depending upon body size and style and what strengths you come into, especially in MMA. But what Dwayne is doing is sort of like learning what he learned from everybody, watching everybody, but not what he did.
Which is crazy.
He's obviously teaching you stuff that he knows how to do and stuff that he did do, but that style of footwork and switching stances and movement that you see TJ employ and a lot of his other students employ, Dwayne's got that written out.
He's one of those guys that has a real system.
If you look at his book, you're like, oh my god, he's a crazy person.
In a great way.
He's got everything written out.
All the combinations and all the movements.
This is not like free-for-all and just do what feels good.
No, he's got patterns he's following.
And he puts those patterns on you and you see the success rate from his students learning this thing.
He had a big effect on Team Alpha Male for the brief amount of time that he was there.
You saw some good results from some of those guys.
He's just uniquely obsessed with teaching people how to strike correctly.
And that's where I think there's a very fine line between programming a fighter and being a computer programmer.
You get all those systems in place and then...
That's why, like, Faraz, as you just mentioned, and GSP, they had such a good relationship because it always felt to me like Faraz was, like, sitting in the corner with his control pad, just kind of playing the game.
And because he programmed his fighter so well, it was a responsive thing.
Same with Matt Hume and DJ. Yes.
And, like, obviously there's some level of freedom and creativity for the fighter, but they've always got that backup, that person in the corner that can tell them something, and they know exactly what they mean, and they just apply it and it works.
Those systems coming into play and all the codes that are coming in now, it's interesting.
It's an interesting development.
I think those kind of fighters will always fall short to the likes of the Adesanya's and Anderson Silva's that can play the game inside the Octagon.
Anderson Silva, I think the most underestimated knockout of his, and it was a great knockout, but still people don't really fully appreciate it, was the Vitor Belfort front kick to the face.
Because Vitor was expecting the low kick and he brings his shin up to block the low kick as he gets kicked in the face.
And if you watch it from the opposite angle over Vitor's shoulder, you can see Anderson's looking at his lead leg.
That is so underappreciated because you don't see those cells from the replays.
You don't see the glances and the looks and the shifts of the body weight and the nuances of the fight.
Sometimes I'll watch these replays 10-15 times from different angles and all of a sudden I'll see something and It's like a light bulb moment.
Yeah, Anderson had many of those moments in his career where you recognize that he had seen a pattern and then he just struck on that pattern and hit pay dirt.
But Robbie just, you know, like that first round in particular, when he's up against the fence and he wasn't even hand-fighting the chokes, like that, it looked like he was kind of coasting for a couple of rounds with the intention of getting started later.
But then, I just think the intensity of Colby just burned him out faster than he expected.
Do you think there's a point where Colby thinks, you know, at any point during his training camp, like, shit, I've stacked the odds against myself here.
I had that moment before Marcus Davis where I thought to myself, if I lose here, I'm going to look really fucking stupid.
And when they trained together, Colby was getting the best of it.
I mean, I think they did train together at an American Top Team.
Maybe Colby knew that he could out-wrestle him.
He knew if he just stayed on him, he would break him and out-wrestle him.
I mean, when someone has a wrestling advantage, it goes back to this one more time.
When someone has a wrestling advantage, that is a big deal when you start getting tired and this guy has better technique than you and he's not as tired as you are because he's fighting more efficiently and then he gets a hold of you and they're like, fuck him on my back.
And then you're like, God damn it.
And then you try to get back up, but you can't.
And the bell's over, and you get back up.
And you go, I've got to keep this guy from taking me down.
Then, boom, he takes you down to Dan.
Again, he keeps punching you on the feet.
He keeps hitting you and making you move backwards.
And you're just looking to land this big bomb, but there's never an opening for it.
And you think he's going to slow down, but he never does.
If Khabib ever did want to fight at 170, I think him versus Usman would also be an amazing fight.
I want to see Colby and Usman.
I mean, that's the fight, right?
I mean, and I also think if you're going to have an interim champion, you should treat that fighter...
Like, it's a champion.
Like, you can't just take their fight, you can't take their belt away if they don't want to fight right now because they're injured or because they need surgery.
I think we have to respect the championship title.
Otherwise, people are going to look at interim championships like it doesn't mean anything.
It should mean as much as a championship.
Like, we're saying you have to fight for the title next.
So to say that they don't have to fight for the title next and we're just going to take that thing away from you.
You just take it away.
But the person's still fighting.
So they're still the champion.
They didn't lose.
You just take it away because what?
Is there a mandatory contender that the WBA or the WBC or the IBF? No.
It's just the UFC. The UFC decides who fights and who fights when.
I'm happy that they have interim championships because I think there's times and places for that.
But you've got to treat it like it's a championship.
And Kobe never lost the championship.
He won that interim title against RDA in an incredible performance.
The problem is sometimes you've got the champion defending their belt against another contender and there's an interim champion that's not available to fight.
But that doesn't mean you have to strip the title from the interim champion.
I agree.
It's almost like it's not a placeholder.
It's like a guarantee that they've got a title shot in their next fight regardless.
I'm having a few, like, you know, I'm walking over Old Grand and having a good, you know, some memories, because I went to the 101 Cafe and had the waffle brownie Sunday.
Oh, nice.
We used to go there after the Thai boxing fights, and so, yeah, In-N-Out Burger.
So we've got a load of gyms opening up, and my own gym obviously has opened up.
And then, like, the YouTube channel is really my main focus, because it's my way to communicate directly to the fans, because they're constantly asking for breakdowns, so I can do that.
And the Raptors are now doing all the media stuff, so they're creating vlogs.
But, I mean, today, I actually feel today I was saying this on the drive over, because they wanted to come over and meet your big fans of the podcast and everything.
So I brought them to your show in Vegas as well, which blew their mind.
But they were supposed to be at media day today interviewing the fighters as part of their job this week.
So I said I feel like a parent taking them out of school for the day.
Because when we're done here, I'm going to take them to the Mel's drive-thru and then up to Malibu and show them some California.
Is he as fast and powerful as Yoel, and you know, he's beaten really good guys like Uriah Hall, but this is the cream of the crop.
I mean, he's in there against the motherfucker of all motherfuckers at 185. You talk about a dude who just can explode on you and send you flying through the air.
He ragdolls people.
He does shit to people when he's wrestling them, and you just go, what the fuck?
He jumps at them with shots.
When he knocked out Luke Rockhold with that left hand, you're like, what the fuck?
I have a little story for you from the Gdansk show.
I'm standing on stage at the Wayans.
I'm announcing the fighters as they come out.
We have a fight on the card.
We have a Polish fighter against Anthony Hamilton.
And I had the voice come through in my ear saying that that fight wasn't going to be walking.
So just to drop it off the schedule, like during the weigh-ins are going.
And immediately I'm thinking that's kind of strange.
And I'm not sure whether, obviously, you know, some areas of Poland, there's a racial undertone.
I wasn't sure whether it was because Anthony Hamilton was going to Get some heat if he walks out on stage.
The next thing, I've got quite a unique perspective because I can see down the two tunnels where the fans walk into the floor and I saw this whole bunch of skinheads with bomber jackets and boots just come marching in and they filled the floor space and then they all went and sat down in one of the blocks and just sat there waiting for him.
And it was because he was from a rival football firm.
I think Costa starts fast, and I think he pushes Romero back up against the fence.
Romero defends it, covers and covers, throws a couple of shots to push Costa back, and then I think the second round comes, and Costa comes crashing forward, and Romero catches him with something.
Right hook over the top, something like that.
The technique I'm watching out for for Costa, which is going to be useful for Romero, he throws a great body kick to left hook.
And Romero's got this bad habit, and you can see it all the way through the Whittaker fights.
Every time someone throws a kick, he does this over-dramatized scoop with his arm to parry it out of the way.
If he's parrying out the way, that body kick is going to be wide open for the left hook.
So that's something I'm watching out for with Costa.
I just feel like his overconfidence, his willingness to take risks, and the fact that Romero's patient can take his time, he's never in a rush to get the knockout because he knows he can get it at any point in the fight.
I feel like his patience might play off and Costa might walk onto something.
The thing is sometimes we get these fighters coming into the UFC and they're so talented that they're in the UFC fairly early in their career before they've had any real lessons, especially if they've just starched a bunch of guys.
If they come in 10 fights into their career and they've knocked everyone out in the first round, there's no real learning process there because they've not found anyone to challenge them.
So then they get into the UFC and then we get to see them go through that process in the UFC. And I think that's what we've seen with Ngannou.
It took him getting to a world title for someone to really show him something in his game that made him feel vulnerable.
And then we've watched him go through that process.
In the moment, it's really annoying because we want to see a mad fight.
But in hindsight, you can kind of look at it and go, well, I appreciate that as part of his journey now.
Because I would say that he took bigger punches from Ngannou in that fight than the punch from DC. And I would say he was probably more vulnerable to the punch from DC because he probably wasn't expecting DC to knock him out.
What I had heard was that he wanted to fight at light heavyweight if he fights John for a third time.
That's what I had heard.
And I think I might have heard it from him.
But I would encourage, if I was in his camp, I'd say, fuck all this dieting, bro.
Like, look at you.
When you have a belly, you fuck people up.
And he doesn't worry about food.
He doesn't worry about cutting weight.
And he's fast for heavyweight, much like Andy Ruiz.
I think there's a benefit in that.
Obviously, there's people that knew that Andy Ruiz was a really talented boxer coming in.
But there's other people that looked at his body and dismissed him.
But when you see the efficiency of those punches and the fact that he's able to uncork so many punches in close, whereas Anthony Joshua with his giant arms and his long length gets a little bit smothered by that closer distance.
And he's just dropping bombs on him over the top and big power to him too, man.
And there's something to be said for that physique as well.
There's an efficiency that comes with that.
You look at Anthony Joshua, and yeah, he looks like a physical specimen, but the drawbacks would be obvious over rounds, whereas Andy Ruiz, DC, they just keep flowing.
And those punches are more about the momentum.
You need a certain amount of muscle mass to get the movement started, and then you maintain it with good technique.
An additional amount of muscle is not going to make for a heavier punch, really.
Right, and he's talked openly about being far stronger in training as a heavyweight than he was as a light heavyweight.
He just felt better.
I think it's his weight class.
I really do.
He beat the greatest of all time.
I mean, the greatest on paper of all time, at least.
At least on paper.
I feel like performance-wise, there was moments where Cain Velasquez was in his prime where I said, like, that's the motherfucker.
That, to me, I mean, I know it doesn't play out on paper because he was injured multiple times out of gang surgeries, but when he was in his prime, man, he was terrifying.
He just didn't stop.
He had welterweight, Colby Covington-style endurance as a fucking heavyweight man.
But he's practicing this really weird takedown defense the other day, and I was wondering if he's actually going to try to use it, where someone's diving on him, and he's drilling this, where someone's going in on a leg, and he's diving onto their back and rolling over the top of their back.
He's going back-to-back with them, and then rolling over the front.
And I was like, wow, imagine if he pulls this off.
I think nobody would expect that.
I mean, maybe they would now that he's put it on fucking Instagram.
But he's a really interesting fighter in that he's got a great blend of traditional martial arts, wrestling, and he's got boxing style, but he also has karate style.
Because the good thing with Ryzen is that usually it's starting when the UFC's just finished.
So I'll have been up all night, so the prelims will have started at 11 o'clock, main card's at 3 a.m., then by 6, I'm waiting on the press conference usually, but then Ryzen's starting, so I'm switching.
yeah dude that's like one of the most legendary martial arts documentaries of all time yeah do you remember um do you remember the one uh day of zen mario sperry yes that was like i do that was like it was it was a day it was a day in the life of mario sperry he decided to put one of each of his training sessions from the whole week into the same day there were like five different training sessions and by the last two he was just exhausted like it was quite clear they tried to fit so much into that one day right that was fascinating And he was using one of those vibrating platforms.
Yeah, Mario Sperry became one of the head coaches at Black Zillions for a short period of time and put on these crazy motivational speeches where everybody got fired up.
And the guy would teach you, and then after he'd teach you, we said thank you, and he's like, no, my friend, thank you for the pleasure of teaching you.
Thank you.
And he really meant, like, shake everybody's hand.
The most gracious, down-to-earth guy ever.
But it was hilarious.
He was talking about how he practiced his triangle on his girlfriend.
He's like, he goes, just repetition, repetition, boom, boom, boom.
And my girlfriend's like, no, I don't want you to do it.
He's like, shut up.
Keep going, keep going, keep going.
He's like talking about like practicing on friends, like get friends to like let you triangle them over and over again.
Yeah, this is when he had white hair at the time.
So this is UFC 220. He's training with Volkan Ozdemir.
I wonder where he's at now.
Because he was really good at it, man.
He was really good at, like, hyping people up.
And, you know, obviously his jiu-jitsu knowledge is top of the food chain.
So that's crazy that we're talking about this guy just randomly.
Wow.
Wow.
He said, one thing you told me, for instance, okay, one thing you told me is he got a heads up when the authorities were going to come to his house the night before.
And then he says, listen, what you say is between you and me.
I remember getting those video cassettes from the Virgin Megastore in town, UFC 2 and 3. Man, I remember when you first started fighting in the UFC. I remember those days.
It changes the way that fighters approach the sport, I think.
It changes their output.
There are some fighters that will go, okay, you want 25 minutes?
I'll just spread out my same workload over 25 instead of 15. The thing I like about it is that it can be far more tactical and the one thing that I enjoy about boxing is the fact that you can implement a narrative in the first round that can play out in the later rounds and you can allow it to breathe a bit because you've got 12 segments that are being scored separately.
You can gamble a few and you can play that game whereas in MMA you lose one round you've got to win two.
So the five rounds you can lose one, you can even lose two if you're feeling very brave and then win the last three.
Yeah, I think it definitely changes the way you fight, right?
I mean, if all boxing matches were like glory fights, like glory fights, three rounds for the non-title fights, and they're only three-minute rounds, those guys go to war.
I think he's got a higher fight IQ, at least what he shows us.
He makes better decisions than Diaz does.
I think Diaz relies far too much on his toughness and his ego and his ability to walk through stuff.
And it worked sometimes.
It worked against Michael Johnson.
He got his front leg battered in that fight and just kept marching him down and eventually forced him into a boxing match.
And that could happen against Pettis.
There's no doubt about it.
My feeling is that Pettis has got the skills to start setting Diaz up because Diaz is very predictable.
You can make him walk the directions that you want.
You can make him lean in the ways that you want to lean.
If you've got the ability to land the strikes that matter, then you can put him out.
And, you know, same thing with Costa having the body kick to the left hook.
I feel like Pettis has got, well, he used it against Tony Ferguson.
He used it against Michael Chiesa.
It's a right body kick to a straight right.
And because Diaz is southpaw and he leans so heavy on that lead leg, blocking the body kick and eating the straight right might be something that Pettis is going to be looking for.
But I just, I feel like Diaz is there to be hit.
And I think he uses that to his advantage because he's kind of Homer Simpson's people.
Like, you wear yourself out hitting me, and then I'll start to push my game on you.
But when you think about him against talented strikers, like you brought up Michael Johnson who chopped at his leg, but he wound up beating him up.
But the Conor McGregor fight, Conor is a very skillful striker.
And in both fights, he wasn't really able to do much with Nate.
He clipped him a couple times in the second fight and dropped him.
And, you know, there's speculation.
Like, did he drop because he got knocked down?
Or did he drop because he felt like it was a good enough punch to lay down and have Conor come and meet him and wrap him up and catch him in something, which he easily could.
You know?
You don't know.
I mean, part of his strategy might have been to try to lure Conor into following him to the ground.
One thing I will say, though, is that the difference in the way that the fighters absorb punches is different.
So all the people that you mentioned that got knocked out by McGregor, they were all leaning heavy on their lead leg.
So to me, that is like hitting a punch bag that's hanging from the ceiling.
Hitting Nate Diaz is like hitting a punch bag that's standing on the floor because his weight is so spread over his base that when you hit him, you know those inflatable stand-up punch bags?
If you blast that thing in the top, it just rocks away and comes back.
It's like a reed in the wind.
That's how he was able to absorb those shots from McGregor because as they were coming at him, he was already moving away and he was able to ride the power and then McGregor was overextending.
There's no doubt he's a durable individual.
I'm just saying that he leans on that sometimes too much.
I mean, maybe this guy's been just torturing himself...
Dehydrating himself and not fighting like he's capable of because his body's always weakened like his number one complaint was when he went down to 45 he was a dead man yeah he looked terrible his body just couldn't do it so he goes back up to 55 and like discouraged and then on this wild whim takes this fight at 70 against Wonderboy and Fucking Superman punches him in the mug and KOs him.
Like seeing Wonderboy out cold for the first time in a UFC fight and seeing it happen because of Pettis.
And second of all, I've got to deal with this monster in some way.
So I thought, it's going to be a rough fight.
He's going to throw power at me.
So if I can at least get him to throw and fatigue himself, then my window of opportunity will come later in the fight.
And the original main event was Tito against Naguera.
And Tito pulled out of the fight injured, so they put Phil Davis in.
And immediately I got a message on Twitter from Anthony Johnson, like DM on Twitter, and he was like, I can't believe they didn't bump us up to the main event.
We need to steal the show.
We need to, you know, like, and we were friends.
We used to do signings at Tap Out with Tap Out and stuff all the time.
So we were going back and forth throughout training camp.
This is going to be great.
We're going to have a wild fight.
We're going to, you know, just kind of basically kind of psyching each other up for the fight.
Me coming off a knockout, I'm thinking to myself, there's no way he's not going to try and knock me out.
Right.
So I went into the fight with the full intention that I was going to have to move around and cover and try and counter him until he got tired.
Then I was going to take advantage of that.
He hit me with a head kick like early on in the fight and I blocked it.
It didn't knock me out, it knocked me down.
It knocked me over.
It was just a heavy leg just like being hit with a tree trunk.
Bang!
I hit the deck.
Then I think there was a scramble back to the feet and then he took me down and I dislocated my thumb on that first takedown.
And you can see in the fight, I actually reach over it because I had him in my guard.
I reached over and put my thumb back in.
And it's still crooked.
It's still not quite right.
But then, like, he just drowned me with wrestling and I had just not...
I'm not prepared for that.
I put all my eggs in one basket.
It was going to be a counter-striking match, and I was going to defend his strikes, and I didn't expect him to try and take me down at all.
But Lorenzo sent me out to Beverly Hills to a specialist out there to have more checks done.
And they couldn't find any anomalies within my heart.
No additional growth or anything like that.
So I just said I'm not having anything done.
I went back to the UK and then I was busy for a few years doing the commentary.
But I did go and see a specialist.
A cardiac specialist for athletes and he put me through all the same tests and he pointed out what they'd seen and he said that it could have been accentuated because I was weight cutting, I was in training camp, I was tired.
He said, but ultimately there's nothing in these records that show that you can't fight and you're not safe to fight.
So I have the paperwork now.
So four months in, you saw the testing pool and I've just got the option to step back in there.
I would like one more because I never felt like I showed what I'm fully capable of.
I actually lost weight after I stopped fighting because, you know, my...
My diet changed.
I didn't feel the need to be constantly eating all the time.
So I just, I allowed my body just to kind of figure out where it wants to be naturally.
182, 184 is perfect for me.
So my plan is just to kind of get to about 85% condition and just sit there.
And then, like, I mean, this weekend is a great example if, like, you know, Petit or Diaz fell out and there's no one else around.
That's the kind of place I'll just throw my name in the hat just to be available.
And one of those fights will be perfect for me.
One of the veterans of the game, someone that's not too concerned with the rankings or anything like that, drop in there, have a great fight, and then step back out again.
Well, I know I will love it, but I feel very selfish thinking about fighting again anyway because what I've realized since I've been fighting is it's not just me coming out of retirement.
It's my whole family.
I was there when Till got knocked out in London.
I was there when Gunnar Nelson got knocked out in Glasgow.
I see the reactions of their family.
I know what I put my family through and because I've had time to kind of step back and allow them some time to Their souls aren't as calcified to the idea of me fighting anymore.
So it's a serious conversation to have.
The reality is the sport's very different now.
Everything's changed.
When I was fighting GSP, the conversations I was having with the media was what we are and aren't allowed to do.
What's legal, what's illegal.
So it wasn't really about what I was doing.
I was basically being an ambassador for the sport while I was in training camp.
So now it would be far more of an internal journey.
I'd be able to really embrace it a lot more and focus on myself.
And now I've got my camera guys.
I'd like to document the process.
I'd like to be able to speak quite candidly to the camera and just bank a load of stuff.
So after the fight, I've got all this footage that I can put into something to kind of...
Give some insight into the mentality of the fighter and the ups and downs of training camp.
Because the days you show up to media day, to the press conference, and you're confident on the stage, and you're shit-talking your opponent, and you're smiling and stuff, you might get back to your dressing room and you might be exhausted.
You might feel like shit.
You might have been playing a game for a particular reason, and there's a good reason you're playing that game.
And I think that a lot of those narratives go untold because the sport moves so quickly.
And I think I might be able to give a nice little insight into that.