Aug. 15, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:06:02
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| We'll bring notes. | ||
| No, sometimes you remember things. | ||
| Boom, and we're live. | ||
| Sometimes I have to remember things. | ||
| Like if there's a thought that popped in my head or something, I just forgot. | ||
| I need to write things down. | ||
| Too many ideas just slip away. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They slip away. | ||
| But one thing you said a while ago, which I've tried to start using are the voice memos on my phone. | ||
| And I'm not very good at it. | ||
| You say you record straight into your phone all the time. | ||
| Yeah, it's really good. | ||
| I'm trying to make it fun. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, I think recording anything, like when you have an idea, you go, God damn it, this is a good idea. | ||
| Like, grab it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Grab it! | ||
| I think as Neil Brennan said it best, that he looks at his notebook like a net for catching ideas. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| Why am I always driving, though? | ||
| I'm always driving. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Always! | |
| Always! | ||
| 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. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You get in a zone because you're so accustomed to doing it and you're tuning in to everybody around you. | ||
| And sometimes you're probably a better driver when you're doing that because you're not being conscious. | ||
| You're just being aware and just being in the moment. | ||
| Feeling the road. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Being present. | ||
| It's very nice, but my best ideas come then and I have no way to record them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, they're in a washing machine. | ||
| Like, what's in there? | ||
| Like a filtration system. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Just kind of shaking them through. | ||
| Yeah, because you're not doing anything else other than walking, right? | ||
| So you're just walking and them ideas are just bouncing around in there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or running. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Same thing again. | ||
| You must find that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| An idea pops in my head and I'm like, I'm definitely going to be remembering this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And next thing I'm into balls to the wall and And it's gone. | ||
| It's gone forever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's a lot of different life forms. | ||
| There's insects. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of different ones. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| What if that's what ideas were? | ||
| 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. | |
| You know what you should do? | ||
| You should build that building. | ||
| And then you're like, I'm going to build this fucking building. | ||
| All right, Hardy, right on the side of it, goddammit. | ||
| And you do it all in gold. | ||
| Like, where is that coming from? | ||
| Oh, the ego. | ||
| Oh, you know, men and the toxic masculinity and their desire for building things. | ||
| Maybe, or maybe ideas made that dude build that thing. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Maybe ideas were so clever the way they got you and talked to you like a siren pulling you into the rocks. | ||
| Come on, Dan Hardy. | ||
| Build that fucking building. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm into it. | |
| And you go and do it. | ||
| I'm into it. | ||
| Are you a subscriber to the idea that ideas are collective? | ||
| So when you have an idea, that idea is available to other people in the world if they're tuned in to be able to collect that idea? | ||
| 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. | ||
| We feel good. | ||
| There's something happening here. | ||
| There's an exchange of information. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| But I have to manage that because it exhausts me. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Two of the podcasts that you've done with Henry Rollins that I've listened to have just blown my mind. | ||
| He's awesome. | ||
| And there are so many things that he says. | ||
| He's my spirit animal, I think. | ||
| There's a voice inside my head that is Henry Rollins. | ||
| And some of the things he says... | ||
| It just resonates with me. | ||
| And the idea of being around people a lot of the time is just exhausting. | ||
| I like to be able to pull away, and that's when I feel at my best. | ||
| For like four hours a day, I can give a lot of energy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| Right from the jump. | ||
| Just fucked over. | ||
| Changes your perspective for life. | ||
| Changes the way that you interact with people all the way through your life because of those early beliefs. | ||
| It's crazy that so little is done to stop that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think it's zero to six, isn't it? | ||
| It's those first six years is when you develop patterns that influence you for the rest of your life. | ||
| It's like the programming that's embedded in you. | ||
| And from that point on, all of the decisions you make, all of the relationships you develop... | ||
| They're put through that filtration system of those first six years of your life. | ||
| And, I mean, this is where psychedelics have helped me be able to go back and unpack some of that stuff and try and figure out what influenced me. | ||
| And memories that you bury down that you don't remember for the rest of your life, they'll influence decision-making all the way through your life. | ||
| And there's little memories, little pit stops. | ||
| Like, they exist, no matter what you do. | ||
| You'll be in the middle of doing something, you go back to some weird regret you have when you were 18, you go, ugh, what are you doing there? | ||
| Do you ever have those moments now, though, where there's a moment where you stop and you think, that was a significant moment? | ||
| Like, I've just experienced a significant moment in my life that's now going to change the way that I think moving forward. | ||
| Like, you must have a lot of those conversations that you have. | ||
| Yeah, sometimes in the conversations, yeah. | ||
| But I feel like if you think like that, it's nice to think like that for a second, to take that in. | ||
| Wow, that's pretty cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But ultimately, it doesn't do you any good. | |
| It's like recognizing that you're in this crazy moment. | ||
| In many ways, it's like paralysis by analysis. | ||
| You're like, oh my god, this is happening. | ||
| And then you're just talking about it happening, but now it's not happening anymore. | ||
| Because now you're just talking. | ||
| And now you've fallen into this... | ||
| And it's past. | ||
| And you miss the moment. | ||
| You gotta appreciate it. | ||
| Talk it through so you all get it. | ||
| Whatever it was. | ||
| Whatever cool thing it was. | ||
| But yeah... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| It's so difficult. | ||
| It's so easy to talk about once you broke through it. | ||
| That's why concepts like The Secret are such horseshit. | ||
| Just because you made it doesn't mean your mind made you make it. | ||
| There's a lot of variables, man. | ||
| To say that you have your finger on the pulse of all the variables that were in charge of making you successful, that's so silly. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You could be a life coach. | ||
| What do you think about life coaches? | ||
| They freak me out. | ||
| How can someone coach your life? | ||
| Well, it depended upon how much personal experience they've had. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's completely dependent upon. | ||
| See, I'd want someone ancient if I was looking for a life coach. | ||
| I'd want someone that was, like, at least 90. At least 90. Yeah, someone with, like, a war-torn past and wrote poetry and climbed mountains. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Killed sharks. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He's an animal. | ||
| Dude, I'll tell you, I'll be honest though. | ||
| I was in Uruguay at the weekend and jet lag took me out. | ||
| It killed me. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| Normally I'm pretty good. | ||
| I fast on the planes. | ||
| I don't eat anything when I'm in the air. | ||
| That's supposed to be a good trick, right? | ||
| Yeah, it works really well. | ||
| I started using it towards the end of my career. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was freezing cold. | ||
| How cold? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't do temperatures. | ||
| It was cold. | ||
| My face burned when I stepped outside. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| It was cold. | ||
| So like zero? | ||
| Like zero degrees? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe I'm being a pussy, but it was cold. | ||
| So I decided, I mean, you know, when there's a coastline there, I always try and make the most of it because I live in the city center. | ||
| I live in the Midlands. | ||
| I'm nowhere near a coast. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, my pleasure. | ||
| I'm very thankful for you. | ||
| And I'm thankful for all those people that... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, it's been a while since I've been in California and I was actually reminiscing on some of those late night legends sessions back in the day. | ||
| Do you remember those days? | ||
| Yes, those were great! | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's my dream. | ||
| Nice, nice. | ||
| Where at? | ||
| It's in the Midlands, in Colville, near Leicestershire. | ||
| Do you have a website that people can get to? | ||
| HardyWallheadMMA.co.uk. | ||
| Spell that out because you've got an English accent, bro. | ||
| H-A-R-D-Y-W-A-L-L-H-E-A-D. MMA.co.uk So you two guys teamed up together? | ||
| Yeah, myself and Jimmy Warhead. | ||
| He's my longtime friend, training partner. | ||
| So we've opened that. | ||
| Yeah, he's a famous UK MMA fighter. | ||
| He's a thug. | ||
| He's a beast. | ||
| He's beautiful. | ||
| Yeah, so that's great, man. | ||
| Those old legend days, man, it's one of those places where I'll drive by, I get nostalgic. | ||
| I'm like, God, man, we had fun in that place. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Crazy wars. | ||
| It was just such a great place to train and such a great environment, a great gym. | ||
| They set it up perfectly. | ||
| It was such a bummer when that went away. | ||
| I was like, oh! | ||
| They were good nights. | ||
| Yeah, man! | ||
| My joy still clicks from your side control pressure. | ||
| Everyone always asks me, what's Joe's grappling like? | ||
| Is it loads of 10th Planet stuff? | ||
| I'm like, not really, no. | ||
| He fucking irons people out into the canvas with his shoulders. | ||
| People don't get your strong top game. | ||
| And I always think back to it. | ||
| Sorry, dude. | ||
| I've got a clicky jaw. | ||
| That's not from me. | ||
| Well, no. | ||
| That was from Vitor Belfort. | ||
| I saw that Carlos Condit fight. | ||
| That was from a Vitor. | ||
| Yeah, that one fucked me up. | ||
| You got Vitor'd? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Vitor? | |
| You sparred with Vitor? | ||
| Yeah, quite a bit. | ||
| I've sparred with Vitor. | ||
| Why didn't you call me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Call me before you think about doing something like that. | |
| Let me play you a highlight reel. | ||
| Get the fuck away from that guy. | ||
| He lit me up. | ||
| Oh, of course he did. | ||
| He's terrifying. | ||
| When was this? | ||
| That was Extreme Couture. | ||
| So when I was living here, I used to drive out to... | ||
| I used to stay at Sean Tompkins' house. | ||
| Was he fighting 205 then or 85? | ||
| Oh, this was... | ||
| He was fighting in Affliction. | ||
| I was helping him train for the... | ||
| Was it Terry Martin he fought in Affliction? | ||
| No, was it? | ||
| Yes, it was. | ||
| I think. | ||
| I think it was. | ||
| He only had one fight in Affliction, right? | ||
| And then Affliction went under. | ||
| Dude, Affliction had some wild shit! | ||
| They did. | ||
| They threw a lot of money at that. | ||
| When Fedor fought Tim Sylvia, holy shit! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Holy shit, that was wild. | ||
| When Fedor knocked out Orlovsky, holy shit! | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Both those were affliction fights. | ||
| They were. | ||
| They were. | ||
| Yeah, they were good cards. | ||
| But it was, yeah, it was Extreme Couture, and it was in the boxing ring that was right in the door. | ||
| And it was fight week, so there were fans in the gym, people taking photos, and we were on the elevator platform. | ||
| It's Vitor Belfort with some dude that no one's ever seen that's got a mohawk. | ||
| So everyone's like, this guy's going to get fucked up by Vitor Belfort. | ||
| So everyone's watching. | ||
| And I'm like, I'm like moving. | ||
| I'm like trying to stay away from him using my footwork and my jab. | ||
| And he was just trying to march me down. | ||
| And I caught him with a couple of jabs and a cheeky left hook. | ||
| And he stepped in and blasted me with this clean uppercut. | ||
| I was eating soup for a week. | ||
| Yeah, man, don't do that. | ||
| Yeah, he was so fast. | ||
| He's ridiculously fast. | ||
| Yeah, you don't need that in your life. | ||
| Not anymore. | ||
| He's too big too. | ||
| Vitor is big and fast. | ||
| He was like the first guy that burst onto the scene that had like real boxing, hand-speeding combinations. | ||
| Remember when he fought Trey Tellerman and people thought he was a jiu-jitsu guy? | ||
| Because he was only 19. But he came up with his hands wrapped with MMA gloves on and was throwing ridiculously- And shoes, right? | ||
| Yep, wrestling shoes. | ||
| He was sprinting. | ||
| He had wrestling shoes when he fought Vanderlei too. | ||
| That's why he took off so quickly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| But you know what's really interesting about Vitor is people think of him as a kicker. | ||
| But he really didn't start kicking until later in his career. | ||
| You know, it's kind of crazy when you think that he knocked out Dan Henderson with a kick, Luke Rockhold with a kick, Michael Bisping with a kick. | ||
| He knocked these guys out with head kicks. | ||
| Spinning kicks. | ||
| Yeah, well, some of them, yeah. | ||
| But Bisping was just a lead round kick, right? | ||
| Wasn't it a left round kick? | ||
| Yeah, the Rockhold one was a spinning kick. | ||
| Yes, wheel kick, man. | ||
| The second wheel kick he probably ever threw in a fight. | ||
| And turn straight back to stance as well. | ||
| Didn't spin all the way through. | ||
| He's a fucking serious athlete, man. | ||
| That's like the kind of kicking technique that you would get if you were a black belt at Taekwondo in your teens. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| For him to pick that up deep into his 30s, because he never threw kicks like that, right? | ||
| He would throw crazy hands, and mostly he would throw some low kicks or things like that, but... | ||
| He started throwing wild head kicks and shit. | ||
| And I think also something might have had to do with the fact that he broke his hands many times. | ||
| Like, many, many times. | ||
| I think he had something like seven or eight hand operations. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Something I've never had a problem with. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| You got lucky, man. | ||
| You got good hand structure. | ||
| I think it's because I put a video the other day of me hitting the maze bag with no gloves on. | ||
| And I do that quite a bit, and I've always done it. | ||
| And I think for the first five years of my training, everything we did was no gloves. | ||
| You must have done the same thing with Taekwondo, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I always think now, boxers go straight into a gym, and they wrap their hands before they do anything. | ||
| So they never get that structure of their hands. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think there definitely is some benefit to doing some hand strengthening, for sure. | ||
| There's no detraction. | ||
| There's no detriment doing it. | ||
| It's got to be good for you. | ||
| You're doing something where that's your weapon. | ||
| Two of your biggest weapons, the ones that land the most, are these two hands. | ||
| And if you could make them more strong, it only makes sense that that would be good. | ||
| And also, if you made them more muscular, if you just did a lot of... | ||
| You would actually make them heavier. | ||
| Not much. | ||
| How much more meat do you got in your hands if you have a thick hand versus a thin hand? | ||
| It's probably a couple ounces. | ||
| I've got quite small hands. | ||
| And crooked thumbs as well. | ||
| That's the other thing. | ||
| If you punch as hard as Vitor, you better have some fucking George Foreman hands. | ||
| To go with that speed and power. | ||
| There's a lot of great boxers, even with those big gloves. | ||
| Floyd Mayweather broke his hands multiple times. | ||
| He just hit people really hard. | ||
| Hit them hard on the forehead, your fucking hand breaks. | ||
| What about Chris Lieben? | ||
| He never broke his hands, did he? | ||
| That guy's made out of metal. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| He's made out of metal! | ||
| If you could take his hands off and put them on Vito Belfort, that's a lethal weapon. | ||
| He fires bombs at people bare knuckle. | ||
| It's crazy to see him. | ||
| Did you see his last fight, though, against Dakota Cochran? | ||
| We've got this giant gash in his forehead. | ||
| One of the worst cuts I've ever seen. | ||
| It makes me rethink my support of... | ||
| Because I was saying that MMA should be bare knuckle. | ||
| I remember we had this conversation back in the Middle East a long time ago. | ||
| I've been having that same repetitive conversation forever. | ||
| Because it doesn't make sense to me that we have this unrealistic... | ||
| The advantage of having your wrist wrapped and having knuckle protections on. | ||
| It seems like, how come someone can elbow you in the face, but they can't hit you with a bare knuckle? | ||
| They can shin you in the face. | ||
| Think about as hard as some people kick and then shinning you in the face. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| But then you've got to think, I mean, what MMA would look like if we took the gloves off? | ||
| It would look like a real fight. | ||
| It would. | ||
| The thing is, like, the gloves, it doesn't help anyone other than the person who's throwing their punches because it protects your hand. | ||
| But it gives you an unrealistic expectation of what you can do with your hands because they're all padded up. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I've seen the callous knuckles, but I've never seen one combined. | ||
| 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. | ||
| One of my party tricks is my shins, though. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Because I've got conditioned shins from Thai boxing. | ||
| There's still, like, none of the nerves have come back? | ||
| No. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| And they're like... | ||
| All calcified and shit? | ||
| Yeah, it sounds like the table. | ||
| But it's like the bone collapses down on itself. | ||
| And then you get, like, this thick chunk of bone right at the front of the shin. | ||
| So it's a different kind of bone, like a calcified bone? | ||
| 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. | ||
| What's the best way? | ||
| Heavy bag. | ||
| That's what I heard. | ||
| Heavy bag. | ||
| All day. | ||
| They have. | ||
| I've got a big old sandy heavy bag in my gym and I just kick that all day. | ||
| Kevin Ross said he would make me one. | ||
| He's going to make me a sand one that you just kick with your shins. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| That's what he told me he does. | ||
| I'm like, Jesus Christ. | ||
| You've got to put some rags in there with the sand just to give it a bit of movement. | ||
| No. | ||
| Not if Kevin Ross is going to install it. | ||
| I'm going to take it like a man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's that? | |
| I'm gonna just fuck my shins up. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You always had ear guards. | |
| Yeah, fuck you, man. | ||
| I'm going to hear. | ||
| You guys are crazy. | ||
| Bare knuckle boxing legend Big Joe Joyce dipped hands in petrol ahead of brutal fights. | ||
| Oh, is this that Irish guy? | ||
| One of those gentlemen? | ||
| He said, it made his hands hard as stone, is what he said. | ||
| It made me hands hard as stone. | ||
| Rock hard. | ||
| Oh, let me hear this fella. | ||
| Can we hear him talk? | ||
| Probably, yeah. | ||
| This is a traveler. | ||
| Why isn't it okay to say gypsy anymore? | ||
| What happened? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is that not acceptable anymore? | ||
| That's what I heard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No such thing is bandages. | |
| Because bandages kills the clouds. | ||
| When I hear the cutler man in, I'll do nothing in heaven. | ||
| Okay, just stop right there because we don't understand what he's saying. | ||
| I wouldn't refer to him as a gypsy. | ||
| I would refer to him as a pikey. | ||
| Ah, a pikey. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, they call themselves travelers as well, right? | ||
| These are weird distinctions, you know? | ||
| Yeah, that's how probably offended a bunch of people there, which I didn't mean to do. | ||
| A bunch of tough motherfuckers, man. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| A bunch of really tough motherfuckers. | ||
| Nicky Holtzkin, isn't he from that... | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I think he is. | ||
| He's very pretty. | ||
| Tyson Fury for sure. | ||
| Tyson Fury is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For sure. | |
| I used to train in the same boxing gym as him. | ||
| He used to have the ring the hour before me. | ||
| And I remember watching him. | ||
| He was just like this big hulking monster walking around. | ||
| Dude, he's so ridiculously tall. | ||
| Ridiculous. | ||
| He's so tall and long and he moves so good for a big heavyweight. | ||
| Nice dude, though. | ||
| Goddamn. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| He's a sweetheart of a guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He is. | |
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I'd love to see him again, Sandy Ruiz. | ||
| I would love to see that, too. | ||
| I think we'll see that. | ||
| I think we'll see all these fights. | ||
| Andy Ruiz is not looking forward to fighting in Saudi Arabia, apparently. | ||
| Yeah, why is it there? | ||
| I do not. | ||
| Look, again, one more time. | ||
| I'm a moron. | ||
| I'm not a fight promoter. | ||
| I don't know what the fuck goes on behind the scenes with lawyers. | ||
| I don't know what the contract said that he had, but what I had heard was that he had to fight in England. | ||
| That was in the contract. | ||
| That's what I had heard. | ||
| But that could be horseshit. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| Maybe it says in the contract that they have the right to tell him. | ||
| I shouldn't have even said that I heard that because I don't even remember who told it to me. | ||
| But the point is, there's a story that just came out that he does not want this fight to be in Saudi Arabia. | ||
| I think he wants a fight in New York again. | ||
| He said he doesn't trust it over there. | ||
| He doesn't trust it in England either. | ||
| doesn't trust fight Joshua and England. | ||
| He's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| I mean, he's the champ now. | ||
| He can call his shot, right? | ||
| He's the champ. | ||
| Yeah, he's the champ, man. | ||
| Neutral terrorist. | ||
| Fucking super nice guy. | ||
| Have you met him? | ||
| No, I have not met him. | ||
| He's great. | ||
| He was awesome on your podcast. | ||
| He's great. | ||
| I enjoyed listening to that. | ||
| It's a good dude, man. | ||
| Genuine as fuck. | ||
| And boy, does he have fluidity and efficiency in his punches. | ||
| No wasted movement. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And the other thing I was talking to Tim Hendricks about, we were discussing boxing. | ||
| He actually trains at the Ruka gym with Jason Perillo. | ||
| He's had a couple of fights himself. | ||
| I'm a huge Jason Perillo fan. | ||
| He's a very, very good coach, man. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| In the corners, he's great. | ||
| Like, his advice is great. | ||
| And you see, like, the advancement of his pupils. | ||
| He's got that deep bassy voice. | ||
| And he doesn't toot his own horn, ever. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| You know, that guy just stays under the radar and just kicks ass. | ||
| I'd like to see a couple of young fighters go to his gym, because he's, like, the old guard are kind of leaving now, like Bisping and Cyborg. | ||
| I'm not sure what she's going to do now. | ||
| Well, I think people are going to, you know, up and coming people that are in that area for sure are going to go. | ||
| It's one of those things where it's like, there's so many great trainers now that for fighters, it's like, where do you want to live? | ||
| Do you want to live in San Diego? | ||
| Do you want to live in LA? Do you want to live in Vegas? | ||
| Like, where do you want to live? | ||
| Like, you just have to figure out where you want to live and then find somebody who's going to match up with your style. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Assuming you're realistically at the level that you could benefit from such a move. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Kind of spoiled for choice, really. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was at American Top Team the other week, but I spent some time with Conan Silveira. | ||
| Can't get better than that, Blaze. | ||
| He's a wizard. | ||
| He's a wizard, and so is Dean. | ||
| Dean Thomas has one of the best Instagram pages with advice. | ||
| Advice for young fighters. | ||
| And he had a great one today that I texted him. | ||
| I said, this is genius advice. | ||
| Telling them that one of the biggest things that inhibits their progress is not looking at themselves honestly. | ||
| Not looking at what they're strong at, what they're weak at. | ||
| I think it helps to have a good sense of humor, though, as a fighter. | ||
| And I think, you know, with him having such a good sense of humor, he can be critical about himself and not take it to heart. | ||
| And I think there are a lot of fighters that are, you know, they're too delicate to be honest with themselves. | ||
| Like, how many fighters, they get knocked out and they don't watch the fight? | ||
| A lot. | ||
| A lot don't want to experience it. | ||
| They don't want to see it. | ||
| That's crazy to me. | ||
| That seems to be like an essential part of the learning process. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They know what happened. | ||
| They dropped their hand. | ||
| It's like burying it deep down inside. | ||
| You never remember exactly how it played out as well. | ||
| Oh, I'm sure. | ||
| Unless it's final, right? | ||
| Like if you wake up and you got flatlined and you look up and you see the highlight of you getting hit and then you barely remember it. | ||
| I mean, how much of that is going to help you to watch that? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| Like, how much is it going to help Ben Askren to see Jorge Masvidal land that knee on him? | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So, which is why Masvidal did the circle to make him put his head on that side so it was in the right place. | ||
| Dude, it was genius. | ||
| It was. | ||
| It was checkmate with one move. | ||
| That's what it was. | ||
| Because it was one move, there was no build-up, there was no set-up. | ||
| A fight that lasts a couple of minutes, I think there's a lot to be learned from that. | ||
| And the process in which you went through to be opened up for the knockout. | ||
| Like the Condit fight for me, I've watched that thousands of times. | ||
| I used to walk through casinos in Vegas and it was playing on a highlight reel on the TV. Here we go again. | ||
| But I know exactly what went wrong. | ||
| I learned so much from that. | ||
| And I remember opening my eyes and thinking, I'm just feeling different. | ||
| Don't you feel, though, like, I mean, now at this stage of your career, you've become this celebrated commentator as well. | ||
| And you can look back and you have so many highlights. | ||
| There were so many great moments in your career. | ||
| You could acknowledge that the bad moments are there, but they can't sting like they used to sting. | ||
| No, they don't. | ||
| I mean, I've always had a good sense of humour. | ||
| You always have, yeah. | ||
| I mean, you know, I got punched in the face. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I did. | ||
| I mean, it went like... | ||
| Well, you were really fucking good, man. | ||
| You thought you were better than you were. | ||
| Absolutely, I did, yeah. | ||
| And then I looked at Condit and this is where my ego took over and I looked at him and I thought to myself, he's not going to do anything to me. | ||
| He's awkward, he's slow, he's striking sucks, he's very predictable, he's not getting any punching power, he won't be able to take me down. | ||
| This was the whole conversation I was having in my head going into the fight. | ||
| There was no way he was going to beat me. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| I think the best commentators for sure are former fighters. | ||
| I don't know what the fuck I'm doing in there, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, shit. | |
| As a comedian. | ||
| You set the ball so high. | ||
| Oh, please. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| It's a great job for me. | ||
| It's a lot of fun, but I think it's best expressed by former fighters because they can do everything that I can do, which most of them can. | ||
| The big thing that's missing with me is not having fought in the UFC, where they can relay that. | ||
| It's very important. | ||
| I've seen a lot of it. | ||
| I understand what's going on, but there's an additional perspective that someone like you can provide. | ||
| Michael Bisping, who I think is also excellent at it. | ||
| Of course, DC. He's probably my all-time favorite guy to work with. | ||
| Dominic Cruz's excellent attitude, as is Paul Felder. | ||
| It's like, there's something unique about the perspective of... | ||
| You know who used to be really fucking good at it? | ||
| Frank Mir. | ||
| Frank Mir's very good. | ||
| He was great! | ||
| Dude, give him a job! | ||
| Somebody give him a fucking job! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But then I would say the same thing about Jimmy Smith. | ||
| Jimmy Smith's excellent. | ||
| Yes, he's excellent. | ||
| And, you know... | ||
| 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. | ||
| True. | ||
| It's easy to learn it that way around, I think. | ||
| 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. | ||
| This is my advice that I would say. | ||
| I would say for sure, if you're the type of person that needs to concentrate on one thing at a time and that one thing is fighting, just fight. | ||
| But if you're interested in doing it in any way, you don't have to think like, this is my way out. | ||
| You could just say, this is another cool thing I do. | ||
| So don't fuck with your head. | ||
| Don't fuck with your head and say, hey, maybe when I retire, this would be my career. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Stay in the game, but you can just get good at stuff, too, and just be zen about it. | ||
| The more you put pressure on, like, maybe it's time for me to move on. | ||
| Maybe it's time for me to... | ||
| Guys can headfuck themselves. | ||
| You don't want to fight when you're headfucked. | ||
| We've all seen guys fight when they're headfucked, and you're like, what happened to him? | ||
| Oh, he broke up with this girl. | ||
| Oh, this happened, or that happened, or someone in the family died. | ||
| Like, eee. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Yeah, that's why Paul Felder fights like it's always his last fight, because he knows he's got a good commentary gig when he retires. | ||
| That guy's a lunatic. | ||
| He is a lunatic, but he's great at commentary. | ||
| He's awesome. | ||
| You know, he's a theatre major. | ||
| He's just a super well-spoken guy. | ||
| He's quite a gentleman. | ||
| They bring him in for the European ones. | ||
| We worked on Moscow together and a few of them. | ||
| Him and Barboza 2 is going to be chaos. | ||
| That's a crazy... | ||
| As long as that motherfucker lasts, that's going to be crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Barboza's been in some fucking wars. | ||
| He is amazing. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| He is the fastest switch kick I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| And it's the placement as well. | ||
| It's the timing and the placement of it. | ||
| It's stunning how fast it is, though, man. | ||
| It's stunning. | ||
| Like, when you see it in real life, you're just like, Jesus! | ||
| I've seen a fucking thousand people throw switch kicks, probably. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But there's one that stands out. | ||
| It's Barbosi. | ||
| Like, Jesus! | ||
| It is ridiculous. | ||
| Like a world champion tie. | ||
| That's what it looks like. | ||
| He was down at American Top Team. | ||
| I was there a few weeks ago, just watching him hit pads and move around and stuff. | ||
| Dude, he's the best kicker in the sport, for my money. | ||
| He's the first guy to stop two guys with leg kicks. | ||
| Rafael de Oliveira and a wrestler. | ||
| Just like, he's a fucking lethal kicker, man. | ||
| The first guy to ever stop somebody with a wheel kick, Terry Adam. | ||
| You know? | ||
| God, how many times have we seen that? | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| That's on everything. | ||
| Always. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| Well, I remember thinking, like, Terry's got to take some chances here, but if he takes chances, he could get knocked out. | ||
| So I was literally saying that when he got hit with a wheel kick. | ||
| He's a fighter that I think would benefit from that weight class between 155 and 170. Mike Lulo. | ||
| Mike Lulo was the other guy he stopped with leg kicks. | ||
| I knew I'd remember it. | ||
| Do you remember the Jose Aldo Uriah Faber? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| I wasn't in the UFC, sorry. | ||
| What was another one? | ||
| The fight right before that, Marcelo Gautier. | ||
| Dude, he's fucking lethal. | ||
| His leg kicks are horrific. | ||
| The only one as close was Aldo in his prime. | ||
| Oh man, against Uriah Faber. | ||
| I did a show with Faber the week after and he came in on crutches. | ||
| His whole leg was like, you know the eggplant emoji? | ||
| That's basically what his leg looked like. | ||
| I saw it. | ||
| Ridiculous. | ||
| People don't understand. | ||
| You're at grave risk of infection when you have that kind of bruising all throughout your leg. | ||
| That could go terribly wrong. | ||
| That was a terrible leg injury. | ||
| That shows you how fucking tough Uriah Faber is. | ||
| Oh, he's ridiculous. | ||
| And he's back. | ||
| It's not just that, too. | ||
| How about the fight where he fought Mike Brown and he broke both his hands? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Broke both his fucking hands. | ||
| So he's throwing elbows and kicks and he's trying to keep this guy off him. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Dude. | ||
| And he's back as well. | ||
| I want to see him against Cejudo. | ||
| Dude, I want to see it too. | ||
| I mean, it came close. | ||
| It seemed like this is almost something that really could happen. | ||
| Because when he knocked out Ricky Simone, everybody was like, what? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Like, what? | |
| This is crazy. | ||
| Uriah comes back. | ||
| He's starching people. | ||
| And good fighters. | ||
| Knocks out a good fighter. | ||
| A young, up-and-coming, talented kid. | ||
| Just catches him perfect and like, damn, Uriah Faber's in the hunt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then everybody loves him. | ||
| And so he starts talking shit to Cejudo. | ||
| And Cejudo starts talking shit to him. | ||
| And you're like, wow. | ||
| But first, Cejudo has to fight Valentina Shevchenko and Amanda Nunes, apparently. | ||
| You see his new shirt? | ||
| He's got intergender champion shirts. | ||
| Yes, yes, yes. | ||
| Go to his Instagram. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Henry, I'm in your corner. | ||
| You keep this up. | ||
| No, no, Henry. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| No more rabbits out of hats. | ||
| No more capes. | ||
| He's got people excited about flyweight, man. | ||
| Yeah, but... | ||
| Dude, you gotta see this t-shirt. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Look, they're all in on it, man. | ||
| This might as well be pro wrestling. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| Everybody's in on it. | ||
| Let me see it. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Intergender world champion. | ||
| It's all in gold on a black shirt. | ||
| God bless you, Henry Cejudo. | ||
| God bless you. | ||
| That's terrible. | ||
| I mean, he's fucking in. | ||
| He coughed me in his way. | ||
| He's arguably, if he's not the most accomplished MMA fighter in history, he's the most accomplished combat sports athlete. | ||
| That's undeniable. | ||
| For sure, that's undeniable. | ||
| Olympic gold medalist and two-division world champion. | ||
| He can do whatever the fuck he wants. | ||
| I can do without it. | ||
| You let him wear that shirt. | ||
| You let him go crazy. | ||
| You let him do whatever he wants. | ||
| That's Henry Cejudo. | ||
| He does whatever he wants. | ||
| I think the girls are all in on it. | ||
| And I think it helps everybody because everybody's getting pumped up about it. | ||
| It's a joke. | ||
| Amanda Nunes thinks it's a joke. | ||
| She posed with them. | ||
| Valentina Shevchenko's in on it. | ||
| Yeah, they both fight him, though. | ||
| They would both fuck him up, too. | ||
| No, I'm just kidding. | ||
| You really don't want to see a 135-pound man ever fight Amanda Nunes. | ||
| You don't want to see it. | ||
| You don't want to see it. | ||
| But I'll see Amanda Nunes fight anybody else. | ||
| And I'll see Valentina Shevchenko fighting anybody else. | ||
| I mean, it would be horrible if you saw, like, a men's world champion fight a women's world champion and he fucked her up. | ||
| That would be terrible. | ||
|
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It would be awful. | |
| I would never, ever want to see that. | ||
| I was offered a fight against Jermaine Durandamy once. | ||
| She's hot in a scary way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She is. | |
| Scary. | ||
| Valentina Shevchenko's hot in a scary way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I mean that with all due confidence, or all due respect, rather. | ||
| I'm a giant fan of hers. | ||
| I think she's... | ||
| I had a conversation with Dreamkiller Bolanos. | ||
| You know Gaston Bellanos from Muay Thai and now he's fighting in Bellator. | ||
| We were talking about her and he said, I think she has the best fight IQ of anybody. | ||
| Like maybe better than anybody in the sport, man or woman. | ||
| And I was like, I can't argue with you. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What is she doing here? | ||
| Superman punch? | ||
| She's breaking down a Superman punch. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Yeah, see, she's hot in a scary way. | ||
| In a Bond villain kind of way. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, you're like, please. | ||
| She throws her spinning back fist differently as well, which I think there's a good reason for. | ||
| Because most people are throwing their spinning back fist with their arms straight and they're breaking their forearm. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because when she throws it, she's throwing it with her elbow down, which means that if she hits with the forearm, it's hitting both bones. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| And I think that's the reason she does it. | ||
| You might be right. | ||
| I mean, it makes sense. | ||
| It is harder to break the bone that way, right? | ||
| I would think so. | ||
| Is it, though? | ||
| Let me think. | ||
| Let me just think if that makes sense. | ||
| You've got to think hitting one bone is going to be weaker. | ||
| But if you block it, you want to block it with the edge. | ||
| You never want to block it like that. | ||
| Like, if you're blocking a kick, you don't want to take it like that. | ||
| That's how your arm snaps. | ||
| I wouldn't block a kick. | ||
| I would take it on my arm. | ||
| What if you have to block a kick? | ||
| What if you get stuck here? | ||
| What do you do if you get stuck here? | ||
| Yeah, but... | ||
| If the kick's coming over, I'm tucking up. | ||
| I'm taking it on the meat of my arm. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Wherever I'm taking the kick. | ||
| Hopefully. | ||
| Hopefully, of course. | ||
| But if it hits your forearm, wouldn't you rather it hit here? | ||
| I'd rather take a forearm than a face. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| But wouldn't you rather have it hit here than here? | ||
| It seems like here's going to... | ||
| Folks who are listening, we're describing the outside blade of the bone, which would be like the edge of a 2x4 versus the flat part of a 2x4. | ||
| I think if you kick the flat part, it would break. | ||
| Whereas if you kick the edge, it probably is a little bit more durable. | ||
| Do you think? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Someone listening knows. | ||
| Yeah, I think the problem is actually catching it flat. | ||
| It's one of those things where the size difference is so huge that that little bone is going to break. | ||
| If someone's a really good kicker, like if Francis Ngannou kicks your arm, some big giant dude with power, this part's going to break. | ||
| It's not his shin. | ||
| The shin's not going to break. | ||
| Dude, when Anthony Johnson kicked me, I felt like someone had hit me with a tree. | ||
| See, that's what they look like. | ||
| Wow, they look weird. | ||
| They don't look like what you would think they would look like. | ||
| We're looking at the bones of the forearm right now. | ||
| You have a delusional idea what your bones look like? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I thought they were cooler. | ||
| It's weird that that's our shape, right? | ||
| That's what keeps us together. | ||
| Just kind of all floating together. | ||
| Just weird fucking hard stuff. | ||
| Hard stuff that allows us to articulate as we move through Earth. | ||
| But then you see other animals like octopus. | ||
| No hard stuff at all. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Scares the shit out of me. | ||
| They're weird. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Dude, you haven't seen it? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, you know what? | ||
| I think I saw that a long time ago. | ||
| Something really similar to that. | ||
| Now that you're saying it... | ||
| I love these goddamn things. | ||
| I love those grasshoppers that get infected with that water worm that makes them commit suicide. | ||
| Oh, dude, I have seen this. | ||
| Oh my god, this is amazing. | ||
| So this thing is inside its eye like a goddamn... | ||
| Amusement park ride. | ||
| It's trying to trick a bird to eat it because it'll repopulate inside the bird. | ||
| So it's kind of trick a bird? | ||
| Yeah, because the snail's already dead. | ||
| I think it's gone. | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| Nature, you fucking scary bitch. | ||
| We've got it pretty good in comparison to the rest of the animal kingdom. | ||
| What a tricky, weird way to propagate. | ||
| Hey, look at me. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| No, you want to eat me? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Come and eat me. | ||
| Fucking terrifying. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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What was the one with the fly? | |
| The fly that lands on the spider and... | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| There's larvae inside the spider. | ||
| They eat it from the inside. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Isn't there like a tarantula hawk or something that does that? | ||
| I've stumbled across something similar that's talking about cordyceps, which we've talked about before. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They grow on catacles. | ||
| Cicadas have domesticated that fungus. | ||
| What? | ||
| And they use it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What? | ||
| Cicadas have repeatedly turned the infamous cordyceps fungi into indispensable allies. | ||
| What? | ||
| They grow it on their body? | ||
| Is that what he's doing? | ||
| That looks like an ant, but I guess it's a cicada. | ||
| Is that a cicada? | ||
| It says the relative of the zombie ant has been domesticated by cicadas. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh! | |
| So they own that shit. | ||
| They're running the show. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And they all get infected. | ||
| And they've figured that out, so they take it away from the nest. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Somehow or another they know. | ||
| That this fucking creepy ant is like a bomb. | ||
| It's like a dead bomb. | ||
| And inside of it, the cordyceps mushroom exploding ant rips itself apart to protect its own. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Is this a different one? | ||
| Sounded the same. | ||
| Google worm infested by fungus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Google that. | ||
| Try that. | ||
| Not worm. | ||
| Ant infested by fungus. | ||
| This is scarier than anything any humans could write. | ||
| We just don't think it's terrifying because they're little. | ||
| That's all it is. | ||
| If they get too big, we kill them. | ||
| There's no chicken-sized spiders running around my yard. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| You're dead. | ||
| I'm not going to call scientists. | ||
| I'm going to shoot you first. | ||
| But then you've kind of got to put yourself in that circumstance. | ||
| Imagine that happening to you on that scale. | ||
| Or put yourself on that scale. | ||
| Dude, if there was cockroaches and fucking giant bugs the size of dogs running around, we would have real problems. | ||
| Real problems. | ||
| Real problems. | ||
| They'd go right through your fucking walls of your house, eat everything in there. | ||
| They might eat your baby. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| Why are you putting these thoughts in my head? | ||
| Scorpions and fucking spiders and black widows. | ||
| Imagine if black widows were giant. | ||
| You'd be so fucked. | ||
| Black widows the size of giraffes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just running around jacking people. | ||
| It would change everything about the way we lived. | ||
| Yeah, if we didn't have weapons, guess what? | ||
| All that shit would be real. | ||
| Back to caves. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| So here it is. | ||
| So one of them gets infected and the other ones are going to carry this dude away because if they don't, he starts growing shit on his head. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| This fungus somehow or another gets into his body And it starts sprouting this mushroom out of the top of his head. | ||
| And we're looking at a slow motion version of this where you're seeing this thing sprout out of this dead ant's head. | ||
| It took three weeks. | ||
| To film this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Dude, this is like a science fiction movie. | ||
| It's just they're operating on a different time scale. | ||
| But if that happened as quickly as you're watching it in this video, you'd freak the fuck out. | ||
| Are we going to see it explode? | ||
| Like, how is it growing so quick? | ||
| Is it going to explode? | ||
| Is that the grand finale? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think that's the idea, though. | ||
| It explodes out of its head, is what they're sort of saying. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| But I think it does blow spores. | ||
| I think some of them, yeah, see, some of them, like, fill up, and then spores blow out of them, and those spores can infect other ants. | ||
| That's why they were removing them from the colony. | ||
| If you're a biologist, I've... | ||
| I sincerely apologize for butchering all science. | ||
| That's how I stumbled across. | ||
| There are exploding ants, though. | ||
| Oh, what do they explode for? | ||
| They literally explode. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's like a whole... | ||
| They explode, but their nests live to see another day. | ||
| Their abdomen's rupture. | ||
| The whole fungi... | ||
| Well, you ever see what they do with leafcutter ants? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-uh. | |
| Ugh. | ||
| So ruthless. | ||
| The women are so monstrous. | ||
| They chop off the man's arm and fuck him to death. | ||
| They chop off his arms and then they carry him away. | ||
| Yeah, they find the male. | ||
| For what purpose? | ||
| There must be a reason for it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For breeding. | |
| They find the male. | ||
| They say, oh, you're not going anywhere, bitch. | ||
| And they cut his arms off. | ||
| And then they bring him somewhere to fuck him. | ||
| Make sure this is true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Please Google this. | |
| I'm pretty sure it's true. | ||
| I watched this whole documentary. | ||
| I remember they were snipping off the arms and legs of the ant. | ||
| And then they carried him away. | ||
| Imagine. | ||
| That's fucking terrifying. | ||
| Dude, they're like, this is how we do it. | ||
| They know how to do it. | ||
| They're like, this is how we do it. | ||
| We cut off your arms and legs, then we fuck you to death. | ||
| Imagine how that changes life coaching. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| If that was the reality. | ||
| If you're a dude, right? | ||
| Because sitting around waiting for a horde of angry, egg-carrying women come charging through your door and remove your limbs. | ||
| They're terrifying enough women are. | ||
| We don't need to make them any more terrifying. | ||
| Women, humans are awesome. | ||
| But women, bugs? | ||
| That's a weird thing. | ||
| There's no love in the bug world. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's just making honey and getting chipped on. | ||
| There's something beautiful about that, though. | ||
| It's like pure. | ||
| It just keeps rolling over. | ||
| It's just, you know, it's fine. | ||
| It's rhythm. | ||
| We're the ones that make it complicated with all the other shit that we add onto it. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I have seen that. | ||
| That's terrifying. | ||
| It's like a Japanese hornet, right? | ||
| And they fly in, and just a few of them... | ||
| And they're a good size as well. | ||
| Oh, they're giant! | ||
| You wouldn't want it any bigger. | ||
| Hedge cutters for a face. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How did they figure that out? | ||
| How did they figure that out? | ||
| But that's their strategy now. | ||
| Their strategy is they swarm all over the hornet, and they just keep flapping their wings until they overheat that motherfucker. | ||
| See, that's the argument for collective consciousness. | ||
| Because, like, someone figured that out. | ||
| One of those honeybees figured that out. | ||
| And then the rest of them around the world. | ||
| I've probably started using that same tactic. | ||
| Probably, yeah. | ||
| Well, that's the Rupert Sheldrick thought. | ||
| Is that the sweet potatoes in the sand thing? | ||
| 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. | ||
| We've got to be. | ||
| 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. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I mean, we've done a lot of things to detach ourselves from all of that stuff. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And I think people like Wim Hof and Tim Sheaf and people like that that kind of go back to As far as close back to nature as they can. | ||
| They must be tuning back into something that we're lacking. | ||
| I always feel that like that. | ||
| I want to get closer to that resonance. | ||
| And I do feel like this is the study with the monkeys on the islands, the archipelago, and they drop sweet potatoes in the sand. | ||
| Have you heard this? | ||
| I think so, but go ahead. | ||
| So they dropped sweet potatoes in. | ||
| I mean, this is just a gathering of what I remember from reading the study. | ||
| But there was a series of islands all with the same species of monkey on the islands. | ||
| They dropped sweet potatoes into the sand on one island and the monkeys went over and bit into them. | ||
| And because they were covered in sand, they spat them out and left them. | ||
| Some of the younger monkeys realized that if they took them into the sea, they could wash the sand off and then they could eat the sweet potatoes. | ||
| And then when they dropped the sweet potatoes onto the successive islands, they already knew to wash them in the sea. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| See, I'm invested in it because if I have an idea, I automatically think that that idea is now available to everybody else. | ||
| So I need to jump on that shit pretty quick. | ||
| So I use it as a way of motivating myself. | ||
| Yeah, for sure, right? | ||
| And if you, you know, if you have an idea, do you ever wonder where it's coming from? | ||
| All the time. | ||
| Where is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
All the time. | |
| What is that? | ||
| But I've had experience, like, with mushrooms. | ||
| I used to work with mushrooms all the time. | ||
| You used to work with them? | ||
| Mushrooms, yeah. | ||
| Same office? | ||
| Yeah, same office, you know. | ||
| There were two cubicles over. | ||
| There were colleagues, you know. | ||
| And... | ||
| I didn't know mushrooms. | ||
| I worked with them. | ||
| I always felt like I was downloading stuff. | ||
| I always felt like it was being poured into my head from somewhere else. | ||
| That's just very similar. | ||
| A lot of people have very similar experiences. | ||
| So I always feel like I'm receiving it from somewhere else. | ||
| And I think that's a good way of kind of detaching myself from it, not taking ownership of it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Show up on time. | ||
| Do it and treat it like you respect it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it keeps you humble. | ||
| It keeps you appreciative. | ||
| Yeah, I would say so. | ||
| I like that theory. | ||
| It's not a bad theory, but it's got a lot of holes in it. | ||
| I'm sure a smarter person than us can shoot it right down. | ||
| What do you... | ||
| I know how much you've talked about this, but you and I have talked about it that you've been thinking about fighting again. | ||
| Where are you at with that right now? | ||
| Right now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to get back in the USADA testing pool. | ||
| I have to be in the pool for four months. | ||
| And then once I'm in the pool for four months, then I have the option to fight if I choose to. | ||
| You're going to be the first guy they test for mushrooms. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| You're going to have a new mushroom test. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I'll be a happy test pilot for that. | ||
| I don't mind that at all. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, so I've got to do four months because I never officially retired. | ||
| And so the whole thing, show up at six in the morning, you've got to pee in a cup, pick your blood? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The problem is I'm on the road all the time. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow, so what if you're leaving your hotel to go to a pub? | ||
| You have to tell them? | ||
| Well, if you're within an hour of the place, they give you like an hour or two to get back to one of those addresses. | ||
| I know, I mean... | ||
| What if you're on the hottest of all hot dates? | ||
| Jesus Christ, USADA! Davitsky, you cock-blocking asshole. | ||
| I'm out here trying to get my freak on with this wonderful lady, trying to check my pee at four in the morning. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| I don't mind that. | ||
| I don't mind that. | ||
| But I'm going to get back in the pool. | ||
| That seems outrageous. | ||
| And then, you know, my options are open. | ||
| It would be really nice if there was a way where they could... | ||
| I mean, I'm talking crazy. | ||
| Really, I should shut the fuck up because now I'm thinking it's creepy because I'm thinking like transhumanist shit. | ||
| I'm like, maybe they just have a chip in you. | ||
| Like, all the time. | ||
| And you just upload every day. | ||
| They know, hey, look at that. | ||
| Dan Hardy hasn't done anything. | ||
| Everything's good. | ||
| Vitamin B's a little high, but that's water-soluble. | ||
| That's a bit much. | ||
| That's a bit much. | ||
| I know. | ||
|
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It's too much. | |
| I need to be paid a lot more to have a chip inserted. | ||
|
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I know. | |
| 100%. | ||
| It's a stupid idea. | ||
| What is the price on that, though? | ||
| Imagine if there was no price and if you had to get a new chip, if you fought for a Bellator, and then there was problems turning off your old chip. | ||
| Because it was like, if you get an iPhone and you try to switch to Android, good fucking luck, Cupcake. | ||
| They're going to ruin you with those iMessages. | ||
| You're not going to get half your messages. | ||
| You're all going to be all fucked up. | ||
| So you're going to have to figure out a way to switch it over. | ||
| So what if when you move over to Bellator, you get one of those Bellator chips. | ||
| The UFC's chip cancels out the Bellator chip. | ||
| Everybody gets mad. | ||
| The 1FC chip would definitely be way different, too. | ||
| The 1FC chip gives you steroids. | ||
| It just shoots them right into you. | ||
| You got the old pride chip in there that keeps switching on every now and then. | ||
| Okay, all bullshit aside, but what if there was, like, we know that testosterone levels, just in natural human beings, it's not fair, right? | ||
| They're not fair. | ||
| They're not evenly distributed. | ||
| There's some people that are high testosterone, and there's some people that are lower testosterone. | ||
| And it doesn't necessarily correlate with success, but it's pretty high. | ||
| It's probably pretty high correlation with success. | ||
| There's something there, right? | ||
| What if there was a way where they would put everybody at the same level electronically? | ||
| They just put this little... | ||
| What's going on is your adrenal glands and your endocrine system are not firing correctly. | ||
| So what we'll do is give your DNA the signal to ramp up its production of testosterone by 170%. | ||
| I don't like it. | ||
| So you crank it up. | ||
| It makes your body do it. | ||
| It makes your body crank up your growth hormone, your thyroid. | ||
| Everything is perfect. | ||
| So everyone fights at a perfect level. | ||
| Everyone fights at whatever the number is. | ||
| But that's natural selection playing out in MMA. I like that natural variance. | ||
| Some people have got naturally heavy hands. | ||
| Some people are naturally stronger than others. | ||
| Some people have got more testosterone than others. | ||
| It's a natural advantage which I like to see play out. | ||
| I do too. | ||
| My idea sucks. | ||
| It's a terrible idea. | ||
| But how long before we see some sort of physical equality wanting to be implemented? | ||
|
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We'd have to have a different league. | |
| We'd have to have a different league. | ||
| I think that's one of the reasons why I'm so opposed to the idea that everyone is the same. | ||
| That there's something good about everyone being the same. | ||
| We're clearly not the same at all. | ||
| And some people, when you run into certain dudes, like Alistair Overeem, you're like, oh, okay, you're from another planet. | ||
| Look at the fucking size of you, how strong that dude is. | ||
| Especially when he fought Brock Lesnar, you're like, okay, what fucking planet are you from, man? | ||
| Because you're not from planet where I'm from. | ||
| You're so ridiculously powerful. | ||
| And there's other people that just, they're not. | ||
| They're marathon runners. | ||
| They weigh 130 pounds. | ||
| They're never going to be any bigger than that. | ||
| This is not even. | ||
| This is not even. | ||
| Some people are Tyson Fury. | ||
| Some people are me. | ||
| Some people are Brock Lesnar. | ||
| Some people are you. | ||
| It's not even. | ||
| It's just weird. | ||
| People wear a weird conglomeration of shapes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Whereas with the natural selection, you're never going to get Brock Lesnar winning marathons. | ||
| So he can always appreciate a marathon runner and what they can do. | ||
| True. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Keeps everyone humble. | ||
| Well, it definitely shows you that there's merits to all sorts of different shapes and sizes, like particularly marathon runners, right? | ||
| If you want to be able to go somewhere and stay alive, you have to keep moving. | ||
| It's one of the benefits. | ||
| One of the things that I think inherently we respect about marathon runners is they can keep running, and we know we can't keep running. | ||
| So why do you run? | ||
| You run to get away from things or to chase things? | ||
| Well, what if you're chasing something and you get tired? | ||
| What if you're running away from something and you get tired? | ||
| They don't get tired. | ||
| That's admirable. | ||
| Like, it locks into our... | ||
| It's a part of your psyche. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've always felt like the optimal, like, fight condition for, like, a lifelong martial artist is to find that balance between all of those things. | ||
| So you've got, you know, an equal balance of everything. | ||
| You don't excel at one particular thing. | ||
| You know, like, you get these martial artists that are just, you know, these juiced up monsters. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Like, I can see a glaring weakness in your technique already because I know it's finite. | ||
| I know it's going to run out. | ||
| And then I look at somebody else who's focused entirely on technique and they've got no muscle mass and no physicality to them. | ||
| And I'm like, well, I can see the glaring weakness in your technique because you're going to struggle to apply it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So it's like finding that Goldilocks zone, that beautiful balance in the middle. | ||
| Yeah, where is that zone? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've been searching for it for my whole life. | ||
| It's different with different styles, but here's one thing I can tell you. | ||
| Other than 145 pounds and 185 pounds, every single weight class is dominated by a wrestler. | ||
| Stop and think about that. | ||
| Henry Cejudo, 125 and 135. Then at 145, Max Holloway. | ||
| That's one weight class. | ||
| Then you go to 55, Khabib motherfucking Nurmagomedov, who's one of the scariest grapplers in the sport. | ||
| You go up to 70, Kamaru Usman and Colby Covington, two fucking beast grapplers. | ||
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Yep. | |
| You go up to 85, you got the exception. | ||
| That's Robert Whittaker. | ||
| But guess what? | ||
| I thought he lost against Joel Romero in the second fight. | ||
| I thought Romero beat him. | ||
| Last three rounds. | ||
| I thought Romero beat him. | ||
| And Robert Whittaker, I'm a giant fan of his. | ||
| I think he's fucking amazing. | ||
| And he epitomizes, to me, the best of all well-rounded capabilities. | ||
| His takedown defense is excellent. | ||
| He's a great striker. | ||
| He's accurate. | ||
| He's got knockout power. | ||
| He's got everything. | ||
| I just felt like in that second fight, It just seemed to me that Yoel had done enough to win. | ||
| But I'm open to an argument against that. | ||
| It was not egregious, like an awful decision where you're disgusted by it. | ||
| It was like, ooh, I think that one I'd have to go and watch it again. | ||
| But I think you would make a real good argument that Yoel was the only one that hurt him. | ||
| And he hurt him a couple of times, particularly in the second fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think I had the last three rounds to Yoel in that fight. | ||
| He's always a slow starter. | ||
| People always think that he's... | ||
| You know, people always have got this perspective on him that he's this really, really fast starter. | ||
| He's very explosive and stuff. | ||
| But he doesn't. | ||
| He just kind of lulls you in with that slow style. | ||
| Sneaks on you and then explodes. | ||
| And then goes. | ||
| And he's so scary that you don't know what to do when he's lulling. | ||
| Because when he's lulling you, you don't want to attack him because he's so fucking fast. | ||
| You know, that guy, when he landed that flying knee on Chris Wybin, I was like, Jesus Christ, he's such a freak athlete, man. | ||
| So, okay, that's 85. Robert Whitaker, let's call him one of two exceptions. | ||
| What about the female weight classes? | ||
| Well, let's get done with the male first, because the female's a different animal, right? | ||
| 205, John Jones. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Heavyweight Daniel Cormier. | ||
| I mean, that is fucking crazy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Going, come on, talk now. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Talk now. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Terrifying, right? | ||
| Because you can't get him off you. | ||
| See, for me, I've kind of started to change my perspective. | ||
| Because everybody you speak to kind of divides MMA into the grappling arts, the ground arts, jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Wrestling and then the striking arts, like loosely into three categories. | ||
| But I don't see wrestling as a part of that. | ||
| I see wrestling as like, that's the foundation. | ||
| That's the glue that holds everything together. | ||
| Yeah, I think you're right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's also the mental toughness aspect of wrestling that I think is undeniable. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| 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 mean, Marlon looked huge. | ||
| He looked like a beast. | ||
| He's hitting with these horrific leg kicks. | ||
| But that motherfucker never skipped a beat. | ||
| He just fired back up for the second round. | ||
| Here we go, bitch. | ||
| I'm right in your face. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| You watch how tough he is. | ||
| Yeah, the second DJ fight. | ||
| But to see him come back and start dominating Marais in the second round was almost like, what has happened? | ||
| Has someone put something in Marlon's drink? | ||
| It's like, no, Cehudo's just so goddamn tough, he discourages you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He freaks people out. | ||
| I think a lot of people canceled him out the second fight against Demetrius Johnson with the calf kicks. | ||
| When he KO'd Wilson Hayes, I was like, wait a minute. | ||
| Like, now he looks like a karate master? | ||
| Like, what the fuck is this? | ||
| Like, he was fighting like a karate guy and lighting Wilson up. | ||
| And I was like, this is crazy. | ||
| And I was like, okay, this, like when we're talking about Vitor learning kicks late in his career, this is just a super athlete. | ||
| This is what it is. | ||
| And maybe the best super athlete we've ever had in the sport. | ||
| Arguably, when we think about his physical accomplishments of going from Olympic gold medalist in wrestling, then he went golden gloves boxing. | ||
| You know that whole story about him living in the gym after he won the gold medal? | ||
| Really? | ||
| Won the gold medal in the Olympics. | ||
| This is from Will Harris. | ||
| Will Harris told me this. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Just drive! | ||
| That motherfucker's got blinders on. | ||
| He's just going for it. | ||
| Working out some demons. | ||
| There's some demons in there that he's working. | ||
| Whatever it is, keep working him out. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| 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! | ||
| Like, this Henry Cejudo is a different person. | ||
| Than what you saw at the beginning of his career. | ||
| He's adaptable. | ||
| He's so adaptable. | ||
| He's amazing, man. | ||
| And that's the thing that's beautiful about it as well. | ||
| He's not only adapted from one sport to another, but you can see how his style has adapted as a martial artist as well. | ||
| He's still getting better. | ||
| I guarantee you getting lit up by Marlon Marais in the first round is going to turn him into a better kickboxer. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Because he knows what someone did to him. | ||
| He knows, like, wow, Jesus Christ, this guy could keep this up. | ||
| But he wilted under that pressure. | ||
| That fucking psycho wrestler pressure. | ||
| That's real shit, man. | ||
| That's Khabib pressure. | ||
| That's Henry Cejudo pressure. | ||
| Those psycho wrestlers. | ||
| And you can only get that from grind. | ||
| You can only get that from forcing yourself through those hours on the mat. | ||
| You can't build that any other way. | ||
| And if you stop and you take some time off, that muscle weakens. | ||
| You need to start building that strength back up again. | ||
| You're calcifying your feelings. | ||
| You're just becoming a psychopath. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The best ones when they're in there, man. | ||
| They might as well be a wolf. | ||
| They just plow forward. | ||
| Calcified your feelings. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| There's like a primal breakthrough that you could see in some great fights where it's almost like they're down to just... | ||
| It's animal and technique. | ||
| Just animal and technique, no more person. | ||
| It's just savagery. | ||
| Just wild exchanges and savagery. | ||
| And one guy trying to finish the other guy, and they're both getting rocked. | ||
| You're like, holy fuck, this could go any way. | ||
| And even as people that appreciate the technique, there's still something instinctive about that as we watch it. | ||
| We're like... | ||
| That primal feeling against your heart racing. | ||
| It makes everybody so excited. | ||
| When you see a fucking wild, crazy war, everybody gets fired up. | ||
| Like Adesanya. | ||
| Like Adesanya, Calvin Gaslam. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| That is the epitome of one of those fights. | ||
| What about Mike Perry? | ||
|
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Did you see that? | |
| Yes! | ||
| Dude, that's another one. | ||
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| His fucking nose was like a broken fire hydrant, just spraying blood all over the back, and he still didn't tap. | ||
| And some people think he still won the fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| I have to go watch it again and try to score it. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I don't know where to score that. | ||
| And I think it's not really clear. | ||
| It's too subjective. | ||
| No, it's all opinion-based, really. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So I'm going to weigh that so much heavier. | ||
| Yeah, I 100% agree with you. | ||
| I think we're living in this compromise of the 10-point must system that we don't have to be. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Well, here's a perfect example. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How can that also be a 10-9 round? | ||
| Yeah, I hear you. | ||
| I hear you. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That was terrifying. | ||
| That was terrifying. | ||
| Yeah, I see your point, I guess. | ||
| But I think for sure there should be another category of impactful strikes. | ||
| Instead of just significant strikes and total strikes, there should probably be rocked. | ||
| He got rocked. | ||
| Your legs go, and you're covering up. | ||
| But then is a knockdown automatically a 10-8 round? | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't think 10-8 is right. | ||
| I don't think 10 is right. | ||
| 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? | ||
| You're literally locked up, ready to fucking tap. | ||
| Jen's pulled with BJ Penn. | ||
| That's the first one. | ||
| That's a good one. | ||
| That's a good one that comes to mind. | ||
| I was going to go with Dylan Danis' first MMA fight. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Wasn't the first one? | ||
| Didn't he lock up a darse and the guy got out of it and then he caught him with a darse in the second round? | ||
| Is that what happened? | ||
| Am I misconstruing him with somebody else? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| But it's that. | ||
| What I'm going with is... | ||
| There's moments where you go, this guy is fucked. | ||
| And then the buzzer rings. | ||
| And you're like, oh, he survived. | ||
| But let's see what happens if he comes back. | ||
| I want to say it's Dylan Dennis, but now I'm questioning myself. | ||
| I've seen too many fights. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what about if they're knocked and rocked right at the end of the fight? | ||
| Like Frankie Edgar against Grey Maynard first round. | ||
| That's interesting too. | ||
| How much is that worth? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Imagine if the corner had an opportunity to add an extra minute to the round. | ||
| Extra minute. | ||
| Go. | ||
| God. | ||
| Well, how about with K1 or Glory? | ||
| When they get to three rounds, if it's a draw, they go, one more round! | ||
| Everybody goes, fuck! | ||
| I love it. | ||
| They thought it was over. | ||
| You're going to sit back and rest. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Pushes the fighters to be more decisive, though, in the first three rounds. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Did Dylan Dennis win his first fight in the first round or second round? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Okay, so I'm dumb. | ||
| So the first one was a leg lock. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So it wasn't him. | ||
| It was somebody that landed a fucking darse, like a sick darse, at the end of the first round. | ||
| And I want to say it wasn't in Bellator. | ||
| Now that I think about it, it was in the UFC. That was a leglock. | ||
| Dylan Dennis, who's the top of the food chain jiu-jitsu practitioner. | ||
| There's so many guys that if you're going to go to the ground with a guy like that, you're in some deep shit. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| He's fucking dangerous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's out in New York at the moment. | ||
| My YouTube guys are out there videoing with him. | ||
|
unidentified
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He's... | |
| In a real good place. | ||
| His interview was fascinating. | ||
| He's a lot more... | ||
| People see the bravado. | ||
| I think he's great. | ||
| I think he's a very down-to-earth guy. | ||
| And I think he's just on a journey. | ||
| I think he's with the Meow Brothers at the moment. | ||
| Oh, it was Montel Jackson? | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| That's first round Darce? | ||
| I don't think that's it because... | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| Now that it wasn't... | ||
| I know it wasn't Dylan Dance. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He was fucked. | ||
| He was turning purple and then the buzzer rings. | ||
| And your guy has to let go and you're like, ooh. | ||
| Is that a 10-8? | ||
| That should be worth a lot. | ||
| 10-7. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| It's like you're a couple seconds away from death. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That seems like it should be worth a lot. | ||
| You trying to find it for me? | ||
| Who is it? | ||
| It says Woodley drops Till, scores second round Dar's choke. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| That was one of the most obvious Dar's chokes you'll ever see. | ||
| Woodley just smushed him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He smushed him. | ||
| He's so goddamn strong that you could see that darts coming a mile away, and he's not stopping it. | ||
| He just ran that fucking arm through and clamped it on his bicep and crushed him. | ||
| I mean, he didn't try to be sneaky with it. | ||
| He was just dominant with it. | ||
| That's a great example of the top of the... | ||
| Who's that? | ||
| Dennis Bermudez. | ||
| Remains perfect with first-round darts. | ||
| I do not. | ||
| How long ago was this? | ||
| I was hoping it'd pop up faster than this. | ||
| What year is this? | ||
| This is February? | ||
| Could be. | ||
| This is UFC Phoenix? | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| Doesn't matter. | ||
| The point being, if you do get caught like that, if you do get caught like that, and the buzzer saves your life, that should be worth a lot. | ||
| It's got to be. | ||
| It's got to be worth a lot. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| It's not the same as... | ||
| How is that 10-9? | ||
| How do you get a 10-9 out of that? | ||
| That sounds crazy if there's a 10-9 just like Karmouche and Valentina Shevchenko in the first round where it's fairly uneventful. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But we're confined by 10-9. | ||
| Or 10-8 or 10-7. | ||
| It's like, who decides? | ||
| Who decides? | ||
| Why is it 10-7? | ||
| This one isn't and that one is? | ||
| Well, show me. | ||
| Show me what it is. | ||
| Show me what happened. | ||
| But then we could overcomplicate it. | ||
| Actually, the benefit in the 10-9 thing is it makes it more of an instinctive thing. | ||
| Like, for me, a takedown should be its own reward. | ||
| Like, if you take someone down, you've put them in a position where you want them. | ||
| That's like octagon control to me. | ||
| So, like, controlling the center should be scored just as highly as a takedown. | ||
| The takedown's got to lead to something for me. | ||
| Oh, I disagree. | ||
| Because I think it's easier to take control of the center than it is to get a takedown. | ||
| I don't agree. | ||
| Honestly, I don't. | ||
| For how long, though? | ||
| Footwork in MMA is almost primitive, really. | ||
| 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. | ||
| This is an example of why I don't agree. | ||
| Tyron Woodley versus Wonderboy. | ||
| Tyron Woodley let Wonderboy control the center for most of the fight. | ||
| But that's like playing guard to me. | ||
| If you choose to be backed against the fence and choose to counter-strike, you're losing until you win a lot of the time. | ||
| But not as much as being taken down. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no. | |
| Because Tyron wound up doing what he wanted to do, which is catch Wonderboy in between these movements and land a big shot. | ||
| And he did it in both fights and he hurt him in both fights. | ||
| But both fights were a similar strategy of waiting for Wonderboy to fuck up and not a whole lot of volume and definitely don't charge at that guy. | ||
| Take downs are definitely worth more than controlling the center. | ||
| I don't mean that to be misunderstood. | ||
| But what I'm saying is that the goal is the same thing. | ||
| If you control the center, you're putting someone in a position where you can strike them. | ||
| If you take someone down, you're putting them in a position where you can hit them or submit them. | ||
| Yeah, but they're so removed. | ||
| Because when you're controlling the center, you can still get fucked up. | ||
| You're not controlling the guy. | ||
| If you're moving forward and you're controlling the center, you're definitely forcing the action. | ||
| But people get knocked out that way all the time. | ||
| Do you remember when Jeremy Stevens, was it Dennis Bermuda as he caught with that flying knee? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| He was getting pressed up against a cage, and then BOOM! He explodes out of nowhere to fly. | ||
| That shit happens. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| But then, like, Robbie Lord and Melvin Manhoff, you know? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Bites against the fence, rolling. | ||
| Yeah, that's one of the great ones. | ||
| Like, of course. | ||
| One of the great ones. | ||
| It can't be worth as much. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| They were in the top position. | ||
| So for me, I always kind of think that Playing guard is very similar to counter-striking. | ||
| I was a counter-striker all the way through my career, pretty much. | ||
| So my feeling was that I was losing the fight until I landed the strikes to win it. | ||
| And the idea of controlling the octagon doesn't necessarily mean you're controlling the center. | ||
| It means you're controlling your opponent. | ||
| So you had this mindset. | ||
| That's an interesting mindset for a counter-striker. | ||
| Probably very productive, right? | ||
| Because you put yourself to the point where you have to get it back. | ||
| You're already losing. | ||
| I'm at a deficit because I'm giving ground up. | ||
| But the benefit that I'm getting in giving ground is that I'm making them walk into the places that I want them to step. | ||
| So if I'm backing up straight and I'm just being pushed against the fence, I'm not controlling the center of the octagon. | ||
| But if I'm backing up and pivoting off and catching them with the left hook, I'm walking them onto that shot. | ||
| I would just say that as a counter-striker, I would have to be more significant in my output. | ||
| Just like if you were a guard player, you would have to be more significant in your output than you would if you were in the top position. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| And it certainly makes sense that there's a benefit for getting someone to fight your kind of fight. | ||
| There's so many variables that are really in play, and some of them are dependent upon maybe you don't really understand what their game plan was. | ||
| Maybe their game plan was a really unpredictable fight, something you would never expect from someone with their style. | ||
| Or maybe someone has some hidden skill that we didn't realize they were that good at. | ||
| Remember when Nick Diaz fought Robbie Lawler? | ||
| Everybody thought Nick Diaz is a jiu-jitsu guy. | ||
| Knocked him out with a jab. | ||
| He hit him with a weird right hook. | ||
| But he was beating his ass before that. | ||
| That was what was different about our expectations. | ||
| Our expectations were Nick Diaz was this really well-respected jiu-jitsu player who was real tough and young and had some real good fights. | ||
| I think he started, did he start in WAEC? Is that where he started? | ||
| He started in some smaller organizations. | ||
| That fight with Robbie Lawler was early though, like UFC 37 or something like that. | ||
|
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Very early. | |
| I'll never forget that fight, man. | ||
| He came out and he was like, Stockton, motherfucker! | ||
| And Robbie Lawler was like, what? | ||
| What is happening here? | ||
| It was like, what the fuck is going on? | ||
| But he outboxed him. | ||
| That was the thing that was exciting about it. | ||
| It's like, wow. | ||
| We thought this guy was just a jiu-jitsu guy. | ||
| And meanwhile, what he's doing is he's coming out talking mad shit to Robbie Lawler. | ||
| Talking shit to him while he's punching him in the face. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| That was something that I love about the Diaz brothers, though. | ||
| They've never really had to implement wrestling into their game too much because they've used pressure and boxing to force people to shoot on them. | ||
| Both have wicked guards. | ||
| They both have wicked jiu-jitsu, wicked guards. | ||
| Nick Diaz is a super respected jiu-jitsu black belt, as is Nate. | ||
| In the jiu-jitsu community, they're like... | ||
| They're recognized as being really high level, so they'll just keep punching you in the face until you decide to go to the ground. | ||
| I'd love to tap into some of that knowledge, get their perspectives on the sport and the scoring, you know what I mean? | ||
| Well, I like the fact that they're picking their fights now. | ||
| Nate takes some time off and takes a big fight, does whatever he wants. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| I like that he can do that. | ||
| I'm very excited about this fight. | ||
| This fight with Pettis is fascinating. | ||
| Because, first of all, Nate Diaz, he's acting like a maniac. | ||
| He's smoking weed during the open workouts. | ||
| He's smoking weed during open workouts. | ||
| I mean, his brother was suspended for like a fucking year for smoking weed back in the dark ages, wasn't he? | ||
| Yeah, he was, yeah. | ||
| It's like a long time. | ||
| And he didn't fight for ages because he wouldn't pay the fine, right? | ||
| Dude, exactly. | ||
| It's so stupid. | ||
| And meanwhile, the Diaz brothers are right. | ||
| So here you see, Nate Diaz... | ||
| CBD, right? | ||
| Yeah, just CBD, bro. | ||
| It's just health. | ||
| He's getting high as fuck. | ||
| That's what he's doing. | ||
| You can do that. | ||
| You can do that now. | ||
| As long as you're not high the day of the fight, your levels will be fine. | ||
| I used to stop for weeks before my fights. | ||
| It was awful. | ||
| I had to back then, right? | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| But he's getting so high it might stay with him for a couple months. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He might fail the test. | ||
| Imagine if he did fail the test now after this. | ||
| Imagine. | ||
| Remember when Nick fought Gomi and he had like six times the amount in his system. | ||
| They said he had to be high when he fought Gomi. | ||
| He had a pot brownie in the back or something before he walked out. | ||
| Dude, that was an amazing fight. | ||
| He caught him with a go-go plato. | ||
|
unidentified
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Go-go plato. | |
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Let's realize how goddamn good Nick Diaz is at everything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Submissions, you know, fucking... | ||
| Remember when he fought Cyborg? | ||
| Just got him to the ground, submitted him, stood with him for a little bit, and said, okay, that's enough. | ||
| And the Paul Daly fight. | ||
| That's the one that always stands out to me. | ||
| Took him into the jungle. | ||
| I never would have thought that Nick Daly was going to knock Paul out. | ||
| He took him into the jungle. | ||
| He took him into the deepest water. | ||
| He just said, let's just go to war. | ||
| Let's go to crazy war. | ||
| People don't do that with Paul David. | ||
| No way! | ||
|
unidentified
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His power is ridiculous. | |
| He's terrifying! | ||
| He tenderized the side of my head for many years in the gym. | ||
| Dude, I can't imagine getting hit by that guy. | ||
| That guy, his left hand is preposterous. | ||
| Huge hands as well. | ||
| Yeah, I believe it. | ||
| We're talking about hand structure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| I mean, he's got massive hands. | ||
| I couldn't imagine him not having massive hands. | ||
| He has big feet, too. | ||
| He's a wide tank of a man. | ||
| But that left hand is just one of the best weapons in the sport. | ||
| That's one of those game-changer weapons. | ||
| He clips people and you see them like, whoa! | ||
| I remember being in his corner one time. | ||
| He was fighting Xavier Fupapakum on Cage Rage. | ||
| And we'd had a late night the night before, as we usually did with Paul Daly's fight nights, because he's a bit wild. | ||
| So we've been up till like 4am Friday night. | ||
| Saturday we got over to the fights and he wasn't focused on the fights at all. | ||
| He had some kind of noodle pot for breakfast and nothing else and his head just wasn't there. | ||
| He was one of those kind of guys that sometimes he would just show up to fight at the moment that it was required. | ||
| Professor X, he was like a six-foot-two Thai boxer. | ||
| I remember that guy. | ||
| Remember him? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, real long-rangey guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very talented. | |
| Powerful dude. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He got Paul clinched, and he was nearing him, and he was hitting him with all kinds of stuff. | ||
| And out of nowhere, just this left hook just came creeping over the top. | ||
| And he just fell like a plank. | ||
| He knew he could do that to people, too, and knows he can. | ||
| When he hit Lorenz Larkin with that punch, I was like, Jesus, because Lorenz is a very high-level striker. | ||
| Like, you remember when Lorenz ran over near Magny? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you're like, holy shit. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you underestimate how long his arms are as well. | ||
| He's got a unique build. | ||
| His waist's like this big. | ||
| He's built like a Dorito and he's got really wide shoulders and really long arms. | ||
| That's where all that power is coming from, that leverage. | ||
| Were you shocked by his fight with Michael Venom Page? | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| I think Paul can play the game when he needs to play the game. | ||
| He knows when he's taking risks and when he's not. | ||
| There was a lot on the line for that. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| But that's the one thing that he always complained about. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Was when guys took him down. | ||
| Ego can have a say in these things sometimes, though. | ||
| And I think a loss over a bad performance is much worse for Paul when it comes to MVP. He would have never heard the last of it. | ||
| We occupied the same small bit of land. | ||
| You can't go very far in England without hearing about that kind of stuff. | ||
| He just wanted to get the win. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wonder if, yeah, I see what you're saying, and I like that he fought that way. | ||
| I like that anybody fights in a way that they can win, because if someone can't defend that, I want to know. | ||
| And it's not because I want one person to win over the other person, even if it's a bad fight. | ||
| I like when styles clash and you figure out, oh, look at this, if that guy just does that to you, guess what? | ||
| Now people know that they can do that to you, and other people who are better at doing that are going to try to do that to you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| It makes the sport fascinating. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| But I would say that Paul didn't get into the fight with the intention of fighting like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| I think the takedowns were a part of his game plan, but I think he planned on doing a lot more damage on the ground. | ||
| That guy is so fucking slippery standing up. | ||
| Michael Venom Page, he's so slippery. | ||
| That movement is so crazy to deal with. | ||
| That karate point-fighting background? | ||
| They are so good at blitzing. | ||
| You just don't feel like you can get close to him. | ||
| It feels like he's so far away. | ||
| And if you try to move into the danger zone, they can get to you before you can get to them. | ||
| And especially Michael Page, who has those long arms and legs. | ||
| And he's so good at keeping his hands down. | ||
| So you don't know where shit's coming from, too. | ||
| Everything's coming from weird angles. | ||
| And the confidence plays in as well. | ||
| Because he's so confident in what he's capable of. | ||
| He fights loose, which makes him faster. | ||
| He hasn't fought since the Lima fight, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, that was great. | ||
| 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 | ||
| That is always on my mind when he's fighting because they just don't heal. | ||
| They just never heal properly. | ||
| How about Michael Perry's? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's going to be a long time off. | ||
| He was on my flight on the way home and his eyes were swollen shut and stuff. | ||
| He was having a rough time. | ||
| But didn't he get surgery while he was in Uruguay? | ||
| Yeah, they fixed it while they were there. | ||
| Oh, so you left after he had gotten surgery? | ||
| I stayed for a day after to get some rest. | ||
| Jet lag was killing me. | ||
| Good for you. | ||
| How was Uruguay? | ||
| Was it interesting? | ||
| Yeah, it was. | ||
| It was cool. | ||
| I mean, the fans were great. | ||
| We had one fighter on the card from Uruguay, Eduardo Garagori, who just marched forward and just tried to bring the fight to his opponent. | ||
| He was fighting Bandanai. | ||
| He was backing up, trying to counter-strike. | ||
| The fans loved it. | ||
| You know, they were rowdy. | ||
| They were quiet when the fights were going on, which was kind of weird because the only fans that I've experienced that do that are the Japanese fans. | ||
| You know, when the fight's going on, they sit quietly, they watch, they applaud when there's a position change. | ||
| There were some good fights on the card as well. | ||
| The Haoleon Paiva knee as well from, what's his opponent's name? | ||
| Bontorin. | ||
| Hadira Bontorin caught him with a clean knee and opened him up. | ||
| A lot of stitches. | ||
| Oh, I saw that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the jiu-jitsu guy, the middleweight guy? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Adolfo Vieira. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| That guy's terrifying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Peota's good. | ||
| I'm surprised that he didn't press forward more, to be honest. | ||
| I was expecting to be more aggressive. | ||
| Vieira is good, but he's like five, six fights into his career. | ||
| You can still bully him a little bit because he might be unsure of himself in the striking. | ||
| A little bit, but he did land a hard jab early in the first round, and I think that woke him up a little bit. | ||
| He's got heavy hands, but the thing is, his squeeze is fucking outrageous. | ||
| His squeeze is so outrageous. | ||
| When he wrapped up that head and arm triangle, I was like, no one's getting out of that. | ||
| There's some dudes that do that head and arm choke like that, where you see their back look like some alien creature. | ||
| With all the striations, you're like, oh my god, no one's getting out of that. | ||
| You're going to sleep. | ||
| He's going to cut your head off. | ||
| Like, that's horrific. | ||
| Those guys that have that incredible jujitsu with incredible physical strength, like the Jacare's, Paul Harris, yeah. | ||
| Those guys who have that crazy jujitsu but also ridiculous strength as well are always the scariest. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look at the size of Gordon Ryan now in comparison to when he started out. | ||
| He's so big! | ||
| He's a monster. | ||
| He's terrifying. | ||
| Keep Jeff Dominski way the fuck away from that guy. | ||
| But that is the thing about jujitsu is like some of these things have testing and people do have tested positive. | ||
| It's been like a huge disgrace. | ||
| But the ones that don't have testing, these dudes, it's the Wild West out there. | ||
| They're running rampant. | ||
| I remember Jeff Monson. | ||
| I remember that monster walking around like he'd just been chiseled out of meat. | ||
| Yeah, he was a goddamn Fantastic Four character that came to life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When Monson was in Abu Dhabi. | ||
| There he is right there. | ||
| Jacked. | ||
| The kids jacked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I watched him on that... | ||
| The Beast. | ||
| What was it? | ||
| Quintet out in Vegas. | ||
| And he rolled through three guys on that. | ||
| Dude, this is amazing. | ||
| Polaris as well. | ||
| He's done Polaris a few times over in the UK. He's just a monster. | ||
| Well, it all comes out of that John Donaher, Henzo Gracie school. | ||
| Eddie Cummings, John Donaher... | ||
| All those guys, Gary Tonin, Nicky Ryan, Gordon Ryan, that's some of the cream of the crop of young jiu-jitsu players. | ||
| These guys are all savages. | ||
| And I'm really excited that Tonin is now in MMA. Because he's doing really well in MMA. He's undefeated and he's fucking people up standing up too. | ||
| He's getting better at standing up. | ||
| But when it goes to the ground, good fucking luck. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, he's a really, really interesting human. | ||
| If you just sit down and talk to him, he's one of the most well-thought-out people I think I've ever had the pleasure of having a conversation with. | ||
| He just thinks things through and irons out all his points before he ever expresses them. | ||
| So when he expresses something to you, he's like, let me ask you this. | ||
| And he's a lunatic. | ||
| And he's a lunatic. | ||
| There's an edge to him for sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He had a rash guard on. | ||
| Of course he did. | ||
| A rash guard, a paddy pack, and a pair of shorts, and he was just sitting in the club, just... | ||
| People don't understand. | ||
| John Donahue is famous for wearing a rash guard to a wedding. | ||
| But he's a savant. | ||
| He's a special individual. | ||
| You know, he's on a different frequency. | ||
| If you never wore a rash guard to a wedding, my apologies. | ||
| But I wouldn't put it past you. | ||
| No, he did. | ||
| I'm sure he did. | ||
| I'm sure that's a true story. | ||
| I mean, he is a savant. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| 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. | ||
| I mean, he's proven that, though. | ||
| The speed in which Gordon Ryan, and Nicky Ryan as well, And Eddie Cummings. | ||
| Eddie Cummings, of course. | ||
| And Gary Tonin. | ||
| 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 they stood out, like, significantly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, the thing with Danaher as well is to be able to sit on the mat and watch all of those high-level guys work against each other. | ||
| Like, he's seeing the patterns across the mat. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I wish I'd have done this earlier on in my career. | ||
| Like, I watched fights as a fan, but then the further into my career, the more I was specific about who I watched. | ||
| I only wanted to watch the fighters that I felt like I was going to benefit from. | ||
| Whereas now, because I watch everything, I see the patterns. | ||
| And I can imagine, because Danaher is on the mat all the time, watching all of these guys every day, seeing the patterns in jiu-jitsu all the time. | ||
| The same positions that get exchanged over and over again, and the different outcomes for each one. | ||
| And he just seems to have one of those kind of brains that just... | ||
| Absorbs everything, adds it into his filtration system, and then figures out the more high percentage stuff, and then focuses that as his syllabus. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's kind of crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, he's a unique individual, though. | ||
| And I think that the way that his brain works is perfect for jiu-jitsu. | ||
| And that's why his brain is fed so much by jiu-jitsu. | ||
| And you see him on the side of the mat. | ||
| He's sitting there coaching his guys. | ||
| And it's just... | ||
| It's so calm, and it's so well delivered, and he always says their full name as well. | ||
| That's something else I quite like it, but it stands out. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's so important to have these unique characters. | ||
| Farah Sahabi is another one. | ||
| To have these unique intellectual characters that are involved in the pursuit of people beating the fuck out of each other. | ||
| It's very interesting. | ||
| And we've not even seen the crossover of the fighters that are going to become those people yet either. | ||
| Dwayne Ludwig is a good example of one of the first to really make that crossover. | ||
| You look at the way that Ludwig fought and the way that he coaches his fighters is so very different. | ||
| Yeah, he jokes around about it. | ||
| But I like that because that shows the evolution. | ||
| When I'm coaching my fighters, I wouldn't coach them the same way that I used to fight. | ||
| It's got to vary a little bit, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| I love those moments. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And you're like, Jesus Christ. | ||
| It's like Max Holloway does it now. | ||
| That first round is like his download round. | ||
| He gathers information. | ||
| He studies their patterns. | ||
| And that's why if you look at Max Holloway's stats, his first round, his percentage of success is low and his output is low. | ||
| But then as his success rate increases, so does his output. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| I don't know any other fighter that does that. | ||
| No, he's brilliant in that. | ||
| And his output is preposterous. | ||
| His output is just so outrageous. | ||
| But not as outrageous as Colby Covington's. | ||
| Colby Covington might have the most outrageous output in the sport. | ||
| It's outrageous. | ||
| What about him and Usman, though? | ||
| They're both outrageous. | ||
| It's all who's the better wrestler. | ||
| Who's the better wrestler and who has more power and who can keep that up for the longest? | ||
| Because Colby can keep that shit up for five rounds. | ||
| He's done an amazing job of getting people to dismiss him because they think he's a piece of shit. | ||
| With his MAGA hat and all the trash talk that he does. | ||
| It's fucking brilliant, man. | ||
| Because what he's done is just insult everybody and anybody, get a lot of people talking about him, and then fuck people up. | ||
| So it's like, whoa. | ||
| This is a crazy combination because it fucks with their head. | ||
| They don't want to lose to this guy. | ||
| They don't want to hear him talk shit. | ||
| After he beats your ass, he's going to still talk shit? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| There's a slight, I don't know, depending upon the person, but at least slight burden in experiencing that from a person. | ||
| It might be a big burden. | ||
| Maybe you're one of those people that has a hard time getting fucked with, and it keeps you up at night. | ||
| And then it's like maybe it diminishes your performance 20%, maybe 30%. | ||
| And Colby doesn't get tired. | ||
| He keeps coming. | ||
| It's terrifying. | ||
| Robbie Law just kept bobbing and weaving and hoping for these openings that were never there. | ||
| And then Colby's just on you. | ||
| He was punching some ridiculous amount, like one every 2.4 seconds or some crazy shit. | ||
| He broke the work rate, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, something like that. | ||
| Against Robbie Lawler! | ||
| I know. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I think when you're an explosive guy like Robbie is, where he fires fucking hard. | ||
| Hurricane speed bombs at you. | ||
| And when he does that, he's going 100%. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Colby never goes 100%. | ||
| If you watch him, he's punching like 70%, 60%, 70%, 60%. | ||
| And he just stays on you, stays on you. | ||
| Very Nick Diaz-like. | ||
| In Diaz's early days, like when Diaz fought Frank Shamrock, perfect example. | ||
| He just puts that pace on you. | ||
| Keeps talking shit and puts that pace on you. | ||
| And he's hitting you a lot, so you're always tight. | ||
| You're always tightening up, tightening up. | ||
| And it's just draining your battery. | ||
| And you don't want to lose to this guy, because he's talked so much shit. | ||
| And you're like, well, he's talked so much shit, but when I get a hold of him, guess what? | ||
| When you get a hold of him, he's great. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| The problem is all those things that fuck with you, plus he's a great fighter. | ||
| So the meanness, the shit-talking, all the MAGA stuff, the strippers, the cringe, you're like, oh my god, right? | ||
| And then on top of it, the fucking output inside the octagon. | ||
| You're like, shit! | ||
| He's doing all that, and he's fucking me up. | ||
| He might have fucked me up even if he didn't do all that. | ||
| But he does all that, and I don't want to lose to him, and he's fucking me up. | ||
| It's like, God damn! | ||
| 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. | ||
| I think that Colby is doing a brilliant job of playing a bad guy, like pro wrestling style. | ||
| And I think he didn't used to do that early in his career. | ||
| He was a hard-working guy who just went out there and fought his ass off, but people didn't give a shit. | ||
| And they weren't giving him the credit that he deserves. | ||
| And so he turned heel. | ||
| And from that, he's become the interim welterweight champion. | ||
| He's one of the most talked about guys in the sport. | ||
| He took on a character. | ||
| That's what I think. | ||
| And I think that character is super successful at fucking with people. | ||
| You know, I mean, and he can fucking fight, man. | ||
| You can't underestimate that kind of cardio. | ||
| That kind of cardio is crazy. | ||
| To be able to do that for five rounds, that's bananas. | ||
| That pace is insane. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Robbie Lawler's strong as well. | ||
| He's a ball! | ||
| Such a difficult person to hold down. | ||
| I wonder whether Robbie Lawler left some of his training camp, whether he left some of his effort in the gym. | ||
| I would imagine Robbie Lawler's the kind of guy that still trains like he's in his 20s. | ||
| Like he's on it every day. | ||
| Well, maybe. | ||
| Or maybe they trained together. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So Colby against Khabib but a catchweight. | ||
| What do you reckon? | ||
| Who outpaces the other one? | ||
| Dude, they could get Ted Nugent to sing the national anthem. | ||
|
unidentified
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America! | |
| Fuck yeah! | ||
| I think that's an amazing fight. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then they just take it away from him. | ||
| I don't think you need to... | ||
| 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. | ||
| If they're not injured. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| So what, 12 months like a normal champion? | ||
| I just think, you know, in this day and age, there's this attitude that the fighters need to step up and fight even if they're injured. | ||
| That's not good for anybody. | ||
| It's not good for the ultimate, the eventual fight itself, the ultimate product that you're selling the fans. | ||
| It's definitely not good for the athletes. | ||
| This is hard enough as it is. | ||
| I think the solution to all this, and I'm a fucking, I'm beating on a dead horse, more weight classes. | ||
| I love more weight classes. | ||
| More weight classes. | ||
| More champions. | ||
| I keep saying this. | ||
| There's no need to move the 170 weight class. | ||
| We can't move that. | ||
| There's too much history there. | ||
| Oh, look at you. | ||
| You want to go crazy? | ||
| No. | ||
| You want to go 55, 65, 70? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| What are you saying? | ||
| I want to use the old pride weight class, so we do 55, 62. 62 is right in the middle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
62? | |
| Who are you? | ||
| 62, 63. Weird numbers. | ||
| I'm telling you, man. | ||
| That's the weight class to make. | ||
| Light welterweight. | ||
| It's right in the middle of the two. | ||
| Think of the fighters that we get in that weight class. | ||
| Masvidal could have stopped off there on his way up. | ||
| Cowboy, RDA. We've got guys that could move down. | ||
| I would say Covington, Mike Perry could probably make that weight class. | ||
| And then, you know, the next weight class after that's 177. That's halfway between the two weight classes. | ||
| You're talking madness. | ||
| You're making up these crazy numbers, bro. | ||
| These are the weight class, I'm telling you. | ||
| And then Gastelum stops off there on the way up. | ||
| Like, we were talking about Hadolfo Vieira, the guy that fought the weekend in Uruguay. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I would say he's not big enough for middleweight, but I would say he's too big for welterweight. | ||
| And I would say the same about his opponent. | ||
| Well, he was light heavyweight in the beginning of his career. | ||
| Yeah, but even if you stood him next to another middleweight, you would be surprised. | ||
| Well, he was interviewing Bisping. | ||
| Bisping was interviewing him. | ||
| I was like, wow, Bisping's quite a bit larger than him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's just filled with muscle. | ||
| He's a tank. | ||
| But, you know, so was Paul Harris, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| He was pretty fucking effective with that style. | ||
| Yeah, I love the idea of more weight classes. | ||
| I think it's easy to sell fives. | ||
| I know, but, you know, we're not idiots. | ||
| I mean, come on, we can have numbers that aren't. | ||
| I don't know about you. | ||
| Some people are idiots. | ||
| I don't like the idea of moving welterweight. | ||
| It would just be such a shame to lose that weight class. | ||
| Oh, that's so silly. | ||
| You know, in the early days, it was 199 for light heavyweight. | ||
| Remember those? | ||
| When Tito Ortiz first made his debut, it was 199. What was Pride? | ||
| Was that 190? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| Because Dan Henderson was either side of the line. | ||
| Yeah, he won both. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dan Anderson, man. | ||
| People forgot what a fucking savage he was in Pride. | ||
|
unidentified
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Woo! | |
| What a monster. | ||
| That dude took a shot better than anybody that's ever lived. | ||
| Goddamn. | ||
| Here it goes. | ||
| Okay, so middleweight was 205 pounds. | ||
| Welterweight was 183 pounds. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Lightweight, 161. Yeah. | ||
| So those are close. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| I fought at 161. I fought at 160 twice. | ||
| What do you walk around at right now? | ||
| I'm light now. | ||
| I'm like 82. Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I always start a training camp over 200 pounds when I was fighting at welterweight. | ||
| If you fought, you would want to fight welterweight again, right? | ||
| I'd be open. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Welterweight. | ||
| I could probably make lightweight if I had a bit more time. | ||
|
unidentified
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Would you want to? | |
| Yeah, I'd give it a go. | ||
| I'd give it a go. | ||
| How much body fat do you think you would try to lose first? | ||
| You would try to lose a lot of body fat first and then get down in the 70s? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've got about probably six pounds I could lose without... | ||
| Me looking unhealthy. | ||
| Do you eat clean? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Even though you know... | ||
| Well, not this week, I'm not, because I'm in California. | ||
| In-N-Out Burger? | ||
| What are you eating? | ||
| In-N-Out Burger last night, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That place is great. | ||
| It is awesome. | ||
| Old school. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| But yeah, generally, yes, I do. | ||
| Generally, yes, I do. | ||
| And I tend to eat in a small window of time, so like sort of six or eight hours, and that tends to start later in the day. | ||
| Because I'm on a weird sleep cycle, because I'm living in the UK. Most of the fights, you know, the main card's starting at 3am on a Saturday. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| So I stay up to watch the fights, and sometimes then I'll work through into Sunday. | ||
| Doing like radio shows and that kind of thing. | ||
| Do you stay awake? | ||
| Yeah, pretty much. | ||
| So then my whole week kind of kicks over. | ||
| So I'm usually getting up at about noon and then starting eating at about 6 or 7 in the evening. | ||
| And I eat for a few hours and then stop. | ||
| Train late at night as well. | ||
| And why are you in town right now? | ||
| Why are you in LA? Well, I'm here for the fights predominantly. | ||
| I've got my team in town, my YouTube guys, the Raptors. | ||
| Those gentlemen. | ||
| They're gentlemen in the other room. | ||
| They surprised me. | ||
| I was like, who are you? | ||
| Yeah, so we started a YouTube channel about three months ago and hit 20,000 subscribers recently, which is awesome. | ||
| Oh, beautiful. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Tell people. | ||
| So basically, we've got a few different series. | ||
| The one I'm working on at the moment is The War Room, which is my breakdowns of the fight. | ||
| So I do Inside the Octagon for the UFC, but because I only do the main events and the European cards, I get so many messages for the fight. | ||
| So for this week, everybody wanted a Diaz-Pettis breakdown and a Romero-Costa breakdown. | ||
| So I've done both of them, and they're up. | ||
| And this is all you independently, correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, it is. | |
| That's beautiful. | ||
| Now, are you allowed to use footage? | ||
| Yes, the UFC are allowed me to use footage on my channel, which is cool. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you for that. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| That's excellent. | ||
| Why wouldn't they? | ||
| Well, this is the thing. | ||
| I'm a UFC ambassador in Europe, so my job is to promote the UFC and promote the sport. | ||
| I've just taken a job as the head of MMA for UFC gym in Europe, in the UK as well. | ||
| Oh, excellent. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, give them the views. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Show them the tour. | ||
| That's excellent, man. | ||
| I think you do a fantastic job of breaking down fights. | ||
| I always like your analysis of how things are going to go. | ||
| And one of the reasons why I was really excited about you being today is because this weekend, it's a great fight card. | ||
| The Stipe DC rematch is an amazing fight for that card. | ||
| I love the card in general, but the Paulo Costa-Yoel Romero fight... | ||
| That's the one that perplexes me. | ||
| Like, how does that go down? | ||
| What happens when these two fucking Brahma bulls smash heads in the middle of the octagon? | ||
| First of all, it's all-time best body fight ever, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| They both look like they're chiseled out of rock. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| They look like statues of gods. | ||
| Both of them. | ||
| If you're going through options for bodies, if you could choose, you're like... | ||
| It's flip a coin in these guys. | ||
| He ain't getting robbed either way. | ||
| Romero might have an advantage because he's so freakish. | ||
| He's so freakishly built that you can't imagine someone having a better body. | ||
| You just have a different body. | ||
| Look at the two of them there. | ||
| Look at Yoel right there when he's posing. | ||
| He doesn't even look real. | ||
|
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Jesus Christ, he's such a tank dude. | |
| The difference in this fight between the two is that I think, well, we know Romero can fight for five rounds and he'll take his time early. | ||
| But Costa comes out throwing guns straight away. | ||
| He's dangerous, man. | ||
| He's wild straight away. | ||
| Costa's very, very, very dangerous. | ||
| He's got outstanding striking. | ||
| He's got real power. | ||
| And he's fast. | ||
| He's fast and powerful. | ||
| The thing is, though... | ||
| 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? | ||
| And then steps in, boom! | ||
| And then kisses him? | ||
| Get the fuck out of here, man. | ||
| As David Goggins would say, he stole souls. | ||
| He stole his souls. | ||
| He is a ridiculous athlete. | ||
| He's ridiculous. | ||
| My thought is that Paolo Costa's undefeated mentality might play into Romero's hands a bit. | ||
| Because Costa's going to come crashing forward and Romero will just take his time. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| And Costa has gassed. | ||
| I mean, he gassed on the ultimate fighter. | ||
| So if he fights hard for a couple of rounds and Romero's still strong in the third. | ||
| I think he's a different guy now. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I mean, I think Paul Costa is at the top of the heap for a real reason now. | ||
| And a lot of it is dedication. | ||
| Waleed Ismail... | ||
| That guy was a lunatic. | ||
| I love that guy. | ||
| He's training. | ||
| He's awesome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember the old pride days. | ||
| He's training with Paulo Costa. | ||
| He's working with them. | ||
| And he talked to me about them. | ||
| And you know how crazy Walid is. | ||
| He's like, he measures his food. | ||
| That's what he kept saying. | ||
| He measures his food. | ||
| That dude has everything portioned out. | ||
| He's just like 100% eyes on the prize. | ||
| He goes, that's all he does is train. | ||
| He goes, this guy doesn't party. | ||
| He doesn't fuck around. | ||
| He's just concentrating on measuring his food and training. | ||
| So what about the money that Romero's come into recently? | ||
| Crazy! | ||
| Does that change his mentality at all? | ||
| Here's the thing, man. | ||
| I don't know if it's real. | ||
| I don't know if they're ever going to give him that money. | ||
| Really? | ||
| He's staring down, man. | ||
|
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Whoa! | |
| Daddy! | ||
| But that's the guy not to tangle with. | ||
| Security Steve Reid on the right-hand side. | ||
| Steve's a bad motherfucker. | ||
| Steve's not playing games. | ||
| He's got eyes. | ||
| Look at the dude's eyes. | ||
| He knows what the fuck is up. | ||
| He saved a couple of shows in Europe that could have gone south. | ||
| Oh, I'm sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, I'd heard about that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I'd heard about that. | ||
| And that's why they canceled the fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They moved it over to Australia. | ||
| Fucking man. | ||
| They came around security. | ||
| They came through the glass at the arena. | ||
| Just... | ||
| And if it wasn't for Steve, that whole thing would have gone south. | ||
| Like, he's the... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dude, do you imagine if there was a fucking hooligan brawl in the middle of a UFC? Yeah. | ||
| That'd be awful. | ||
| Terrible for the sport. | ||
| Yeah, that'd be terrible. | ||
| No, Steve is a wise man. | ||
| He sees everything. | ||
| How do you feel like Romero and Costa plays out if you had a bank on it? | ||
| If I gave you $100, how do you see this play out? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Imagine if he KOs Costa and we play this over that. | ||
| You look like a goddamn hero. | ||
| Yeah, but what's most likely to happen is that it's going to be completely the opposite. | ||
| And everyone's going to be like, why has he got a job with the UFC as an analyst? | ||
| Well, every now and then you're so wrong. | ||
| Like when Derek Lewis fought Francis Ngannou, I was like, holy shit, don't go for popcorn. | ||
| This is going to be fucking chaos. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This is gonna be fucking chaos. | ||
| I was nervous before that fight started. | ||
| I was like, holy shit, here we go. | ||
| I'm like, Francis Ngannou's gonna be gunning for the title again. | ||
| He's gonna come out guns blazing. | ||
| Derek Lewis goes to war every single goddamn time. | ||
| They're both enormous. | ||
| I'm like, fuck, here we go! | ||
|
unidentified
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Nothing. | |
| Nothing, nothing, nothing. | ||
| Were you working with Cruz on that night? | ||
| Somebody else who you were working with, and they said the words that you never say during a heavyweight fight. | ||
| As soon as it's about to start, they go, there's no way this is going the distance. | ||
| Ooh, yeah, that's a rough thing to say. | ||
| That kills it straight away. | ||
| And I remember this. | ||
| I was so excited, and they went, there's no way this is going the distance. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm like, would you put that voodoo on me, Ricky Bobby? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that was a rough one, man. | ||
| But it's interesting how Francis has bounced back. | ||
| Francis is just nuking everybody now. | ||
| It's just that mental hump he got stuck on, right? | ||
| He had to go through that one fight, you know? | ||
| 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. | ||
| I understand where he was at. | ||
| You gotta give Stipe credit for taking fucking bombs in that fight. | ||
| I mean, he took bombs in that fight. | ||
| Especially in that first round. | ||
| I'm like, fuck! | ||
| Francis is always in it when he's standing in front of you. | ||
| When he's standing in front of you, he's always in it. | ||
| But Stipe managed to just slide away from most of them. | ||
| The ones he got hit with, he went with them, rolled with them. | ||
| The ones he got hit clean with, he just absorbed and kept going and ground them out. | ||
| So here's a question for you then. | ||
| Do you think you take punches better if you expect the person to punch hard? | ||
| Probably. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| Wouldn't expect to get caught like that in a clinch either. | ||
| It was a really perfect utilization of the clinch work combined with that crazy big overhand right. | ||
| I mean, he really set him up perfectly for that, and it was something that obviously was a part of his repertoire. | ||
| It was not something that was just, oh, it just happened to be there for the moment. | ||
| He set him up for that. | ||
| And that was just a perfect right hand, and he caught him when he was looking. | ||
| I mean, he just didn't know that punch was coming, clipped him, dropped him, put him away. | ||
| The real question is, what's it going to be like now that he knows that DC can knock him out? | ||
| I mean, is he going to fight from the outside, try to land big shots? | ||
| Is he going to avoid the clinch at any cost now? | ||
| He's got a big height and reach advantage. | ||
| Can he keep DC off of him? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then also... | ||
| When a fighter has had a lot of wars, like him with Junior Dos Santos, the first fight, it was a war, right? | ||
| I mean, he's had some wars in his career. | ||
| The Strew fight. | ||
| The Ngannou fight. | ||
| The Strew fight was a war. | ||
| He got stopped in that fight. | ||
| You know, how many... | ||
| The Mark Hunt fight, right? | ||
| That was a war. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wars. | ||
| He dominated that one from top position as well. | ||
| And even the Alistair Overeem fight. | ||
| I mean, that first round was chaos. | ||
| It was chaos until he wound up stopping him. | ||
| How many of those can a fighter have how many of those can a fighter have before we see them start to fade in front of our eyes? | ||
| And I'm not suggesting that we saw that with him because he was able to withstand the scariest fucking heavyweight striker in the sport. | ||
| And I think the DC punch was just a punch he didn't see and it was perfect. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it just put him away. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'd be surprised if it happens again, first round. | ||
| I'd be surprised if it happens again, because I think he is going to be far more respectful of the fact that DC's got power now. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I think you're 100% right. | ||
| And you go back to his UFC debut, and he did fight long. | ||
| He used to use a real good long jab and a low kick, and recently he's kind of crowded his work a lot. | ||
| He steps in very close with that right hand, which often offered the clinch to DC. Yeah. | ||
| He's just KOing so many people that I think that he's like, fuck it. | ||
| I'm just going to get in there and just bombs away with these people. | ||
| I mean, he makes it exciting. | ||
| I think he is the least appreciated, successful heavyweight champion ever. | ||
| And I don't understand it. | ||
| I don't understand it. | ||
| He's got everything. | ||
| He's a... | ||
| You know, he's a firefighter, an active-duty firefighter. | ||
| He's a knockout fighter. | ||
| I mean, he knocked out Verdun moving backwards with a perfectly placed right hand. | ||
| He's a fucking animal. | ||
| I mean, he fights super exciting. | ||
| He's been smashing everybody. | ||
| He won more heavyweight title fights than anyone in history. | ||
| He defended the title four fucking times. | ||
| No one's been able to do that. | ||
| That's how crazy that division is. | ||
| And still does not get the respect he deserves. | ||
| And he seems pissed off this week as well. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Fucking active duty firefighter, man. | ||
| Guy's an animal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He seems annoyed. | ||
| I wonder whether that's going to play into the fight. | ||
| Because I got the impression from him that he'd not watched the previous fight. | ||
| I got the impression that he'd not watched the first DC fight. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that concerns me because then the idea of what happened in his head might be very different to what actually happened. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well... | |
| God, do you really think they would let him not watch that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, there are some fighters that do. | ||
| It just blows my mind. | ||
| And the way he was talking in an interview is like... | ||
| And the thing that concerns me more is that he was talking about how he was winning that first round. | ||
| He felt like he was controlling the fight. | ||
| He did a lot of good things until DC caught him. | ||
| So if he starts banking on that being just one of those punches that he got caught with, he might not give DC the credit for... | ||
| You know, opening that vulnerability up. | ||
| Yeah, I think for sure he must have heard all the different people discuss tactics, though. | ||
| It just doesn't make any sense to me that he insulates himself that well. | ||
| And for sure, his coaches over at Strong Style, they've definitely... | ||
| Oh, they've watched it, for sure. | ||
| They've watched it, yeah. | ||
| They understand what... | ||
| So maybe he relies on his coaches and their guidance of him during training. | ||
| And for sure he knows that DC knocked him out. | ||
| So what he's going to do is go in there and fight like he's trying to get it back. | ||
| The question is, is he going to be able to use that long reach and that height and that power on the outside and keep DC the fuck away from him? | ||
| Because he's got a considerable height and reach advantage. | ||
| Can he stuff those takedowns? | ||
| Can he keep DC from getting on top of him? | ||
| If he can do all those things, he can get very interesting. | ||
| And if DC... You know, he's undefeated at heavyweight, man. | ||
| I mean, I think that's really where he shines. | ||
| You look at what he did to Josh Barnett, fucking throws him through the air like a ragdoll when he was in the Strikeforce Grand Prix. | ||
| Dude, he was a monster at heavyweight. | ||
| You know, and the wrestling's unparalleled. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So do we get Jones at heavyweight then? | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I think he wants to do it at light heavyweight, though. | ||
| I think he wants to prove a point. | ||
| What DC wants to do at light heavyweight? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I don't think he wants to lose that weight again, does he? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Perfect mechanics. | ||
| So fluid. | ||
| Everything is just smooth and fluid. | ||
| Who the fuck knows, man? | ||
| Maybe DC's the best heavyweight of all time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, quite possibly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He didn't make any sense. | ||
| And he's slightly bigger than DC everywhere, isn't he? | ||
| Like, reach and height and everything. | ||
| And he could fuck you up on the feet, too. | ||
| I mean, he could do everything. | ||
| He was so efficient and smooth and just relentless. | ||
| Relentless. | ||
| No one more relentless than Cain Velasquez in his prime. | ||
| For him, it was almost like his body couldn't handle the strength of his brain. | ||
| Like his mental toughness was so incredible. | ||
| His body just couldn't keep up with it. | ||
| His body just starts blowing things up. | ||
| Because his mind just pressed forward. | ||
| Go, go, go. | ||
| You know, and his cardio was just preposterous. | ||
| Didn't even make sense. | ||
| Yeah, DC looks in good shape at the Open workouts yesterday. | ||
| I think he's expecting a harder fight this weekend. | ||
| You know where we really got robbed? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| That we never saw Fedor versus Kane in their prime. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| We were robbed. | ||
| We were really robbed. | ||
| Who the fuck knows, man? | ||
| Who the fuck knows? | ||
| Maybe Fedor would have caught him in an armbar. | ||
| Who the fuck knows? | ||
| Maybe Kane would have beat the shit out of him. | ||
| Who the fuck knows? | ||
| We will never know, man. | ||
| We'll never know. | ||
| And now, they're both fighting, but it's too late. | ||
| It won't be authentic. | ||
| It won't be authentic now. | ||
| I'll never forget that suplex. | ||
| Kevin Randallman's suplexing Fedor. | ||
| And his face just didn't even change. | ||
| Cain Velasquez is doing pro wrestling. | ||
| And he looked good. | ||
| He did a lot of wild shit. | ||
| It wasn't just like he would go out there and fuck around. | ||
| They had some serious choreographed shit. | ||
| He did some crazy flips. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| Cain Velasquez is a fucking heavyweight wrestler. | ||
| Tony Hinchcliffe right now is screaming in his pants. | ||
| Like, yes! | ||
| This is better than fighting! | ||
| So does that mean that most of his injuries came from training camp then? | ||
| Hey man, who knows? | ||
| I think a lot of them must have come from fights too. | ||
| It's just the mind that he had. | ||
| That fucking berserker mindset. | ||
| That just juggernaut mindset. | ||
| He was dead behind the eyes, man. | ||
| He just was coming forward like a fucking shark. | ||
| He would see him when he was overwhelming. | ||
| Ben Rothwell. | ||
| You'd see that look on their face. | ||
| It's very similar to the look on the face you see of a lot of Khabib's victims. | ||
| They're like, motherfucker. | ||
| This is never going to end. | ||
| What kind of animal is this? | ||
| There's certain people where it's never going to end. | ||
| Ramon Deckers was another guy. | ||
| I remember meeting him once. | ||
| His eyes were just like... | ||
| Jamie loves this move that he did. | ||
| Watch this. | ||
| Here's the move. | ||
| He jumps up, flips, and throws him on the back. | ||
| So how can a guy with a bad back do this? | ||
| It's called what? | ||
| A Hurricanrana. | ||
| A Hurricanrana? | ||
| That's what it's called? | ||
| That's the name of the move? | ||
| Yeah, when you jump up and get your knees around their head and flip them over. | ||
| We're going to see Tony Ferguson do that soon. | ||
| You know who's trying something like that? | ||
| Darren Crookshank. | ||
| Go to Darren Crookshank's He's over in Rising now, isn't he? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, he's doing well. | ||
| What is his Instagram page? | ||
| Oh, I don't remember. | ||
| He's like the second coming of Dom Fry. | ||
| I love that, dude. | ||
| 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 look at that arm bar that DJ did. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I'm surprised we've not seen a few more people attempting that. | ||
| I don't think anybody else can do it. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| The sushi roll. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Watch it. | ||
| I mean, he's drilling it unsuccessfully sometimes. | ||
| Watch this. | ||
| I mean, he's going over the top. | ||
| He's doing it with a woman, too. | ||
| I wonder if that's his wife or something like that. | ||
| Because he's being rough on her. | ||
| Boom, boom. | ||
| I wouldn't want this big asshole rolling over my back. | ||
| I don't hurt your lower back, man. | ||
| See, now he's got it smooth. | ||
| This is interesting. | ||
| So it does kind of look like he's actually practicing this. | ||
| If he ever pulls that off in a fight, that would be fucking crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Was it Kyokushin? | ||
| Was that what he started with? | ||
| Because he's got those hips that kind of come up at the sides. | ||
| I'm trying to remember. | ||
| I'm trying to remember what his original style was. | ||
| But I know he has a wrestling base too, but I think it was some branch of karate. | ||
| I don't remember if it was Kyokushin though. | ||
| One of them. | ||
| Chodokan, Kyokushin. | ||
| There's a lot of good stuff in those traditional martial arts. | ||
| His parents started with Taekwondo. | ||
| Oh, Taekwondo. | ||
| Yeah, so that kind of martial art, traditional martial art style, but with also good boxing and shit. | ||
| He's doing really well over in Ryzen. | ||
| Yeah, I like that promotion. | ||
| I ordered some of the gloves the other week. | ||
| How do you watch it, though? | ||
| You have to watch it online? | ||
| Yeah, I watch it online. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Over to Ryzen. | ||
| Double espresso. | ||
| Stay awake. | ||
| Keep going. | ||
| Ride it out. | ||
| Keep going. | ||
| Did you... | ||
| I mean, that's where Krohn Gracie started too, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Very interesting seeing him in the UFC, isn't it? | ||
| He is fascinating. | ||
| He is a fascinating individual. | ||
| Just, you know, just to... | ||
| He's just got a unique energy about him, which you would expect from, you know, from Hickson's son of course. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Dude, he's lineage. | ||
| They're on a different vibration than they are. | ||
| I never forget Choke. | ||
| I used to watch that all the time. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| The gnarly breathing that he used to do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| Was he really? | ||
| It always stuck out in my mind. | ||
| It was like a vibrating platform and he had a medicine ball on it. | ||
| And he was like holding the medicine ball on this vibrating platform. | ||
| And then like changing positions like scarf hold. | ||
| I wonder if that would really help you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| And then Hickson had the elastic around the head, didn't he? | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| Do you remember when Mario Sperry started coaching over at Black Zillions? | ||
| No. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Really? | ||
| It's like, God damn! | ||
| Yeah, and it didn't work out. | ||
| I don't know why it didn't work out, but it was a really exciting development. | ||
| Because I know Rashad Evans was really excited about having him over there. | ||
| I mean, I don't know what happened behind the scenes, but I remember when Mario Sperry was coaching the classes and getting everybody fired up. | ||
| I'm like, damn! | ||
| I mean, he's old school, man. | ||
| Was he Carlson Gracie? | ||
| Yep, Carlson Gracie legend. | ||
| When I was a white belt, I was training at Carlson Gracie's on Hawthorne. | ||
| And Mario Sperry, when he would teach you a class, he would teach you a class, and I knew who he was. | ||
| I had watched him fight on television. | ||
| I knew who he was. | ||
| I mean, I was like, this is Mario fucking Sperry. | ||
| And Murillo Bustamante would be there, and Carlos Pajeto. | ||
| Remember all these guys? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sergio Cohen was there. | ||
| All these beasts from the Carlson Gracie hit squad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm. | |
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, he was in a bunch of the corners in the early UFC, wasn't he? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Was he in, like, Vito's corner and that kind of thing? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| I don't remember, but he's a true legend. | ||
| You know, there's a few of those guys. | ||
| 250 and 0 or something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was one of those guys from the early days of martial arts that was a real jiu-jitsu master. | ||
| He was a real master. | ||
| And they lived in the gym as well back then. | ||
| Everything about their life revolved around the gym. | ||
| Trying to find that kind of environment now. | ||
| I mean, Danaher's, as we were talking about, Henzo Gracie's, I'd imagine that's got a very similar vibe, you know, in a basement in New York. | ||
| Everyone's showing up every day and grinding, doing the same thing. | ||
| But it's such a rare environment to find yourself in. | ||
| Do you remember when Mario Sperry got tapped out by that badass Russian dude? | ||
| He was the badass Russian dude. | ||
| The Russian dude was the same guy that Frank Shamrock KO'd with a slam. | ||
| I'm trying to remember. | ||
| Amar Suluev? | ||
| I think he opened up a gym. | ||
| Who? | ||
| Mario Sperry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I look like he opened up a couple of gyms called Hard Knocks 365. Oh, okay. | |
| That's Henry Hooft. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So that's where he's at? | ||
| He's with Henry Hooft. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's where he was originally, too. | ||
| Google Frank Shamrock's mixed martial arts record. | ||
| Frank Shamrock slammed this dude and KO'd him, and this guy was famous for having beaten Mario Sperry in the old school, what was it called? | ||
| Battlecade? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't remember. | |
| I remember Extreme Fighting. | ||
| Extreme Fighting. | ||
| That's what it was. | ||
| Extreme Fighting Battlecade. | ||
| That was where... | ||
| John Peretti's organization. | ||
| That was where Conan fought Maurice Smith. | ||
| So here it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go... | |
| Where are we at here? | ||
| Go back a little low. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. | ||
| Igor Zinoviev. | ||
| That's who it was. | ||
| Igor Zinoviev. | ||
| Remember Igor Zinoviev? | ||
| He was a beast. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Dangerous guy. | ||
| Well, Igor had cut Mario Sperry open. | ||
| He had a big-ass gash in his forehead, and Mario wound up tapping. | ||
| But Igor Zinoviev was, I think it was a Sambo guy. | ||
| Yeah, I remember that guy. | ||
| Tough motherfucker. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There were some scary dudes that passed through the UFC a while back. | ||
| I remember there were two from the Red Devils. | ||
| There was Andrei Semenov and Amar Suloev. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. | ||
| Igor Zinovia was Jeffrey Epstein's security guard? | ||
| No fucking way. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Oh my god, look at his face. | ||
| That's him. | ||
| That's crazy, dude. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| Former MMA guy gives alarmingly cagey interview about working for Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| Click on that. | ||
| We've got all this shit to look forward to. | ||
| Alarmingly cagey interview. | ||
| Who is this that's saying this? | ||
| MMA-guy? | ||
| Deadspin. | ||
| Oh, it's Deadspin. | ||
| Oh, so scroll down a little bit. | ||
| Let me see what the fuck it has to say here. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, let's leave this alone. | |
| But anyway, feel free to Google. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, that's crazy. | ||
| They were just bringing him up, and it turns out he was Jeffrey Epstein's security guard. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| He was a real veteran. | ||
| I mean, that guy was on the early, early days of the John Peretti promotion. | ||
| He was a beast, man. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It seems like it was a long time ago, but not really. | ||
| Like, it still seems like it makes sense. | ||
| 89. I was in double figures. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| UFC 89. And that's the only time I've ever been cut, believe it or not. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I've only ever had five stitches. | ||
| Yeah, if someone looks at you, you're a beautiful man. | ||
| They would never imagine you get hit in the face for a living. | ||
| Single as well now. | ||
| Whoa, look at that. | ||
| Single and ready to mingle with that beautiful face. | ||
| Yeah, only ever had five stitches. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| And that was my UFC debut. | ||
| Akihiro Gona. | ||
| Hit me with an open palm and it was the seam on the inside of the club. | ||
| Mmm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, going back to the whole idea of people fighting bare knuckle, I've since amended my thoughts on it. | ||
| Just too many cuts. | ||
| Really because of Chris Lieben's last cut from Dakota Cochran. | ||
| He had a giant gap. | ||
| Have you seen it? | ||
| I don't think I have, no. | ||
| It's a rough one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't really watch the bare knuckle stuff too much. | ||
| Go to Chris Lieben's Instagram page. | ||
| I'm looking forward to it developing because I think it will. | ||
| I have no problem with it. | ||
| I think people should be allowed to do whatever they want, fight under whatever rules they want. | ||
| But at the moment, it just looks like they're boxing with no gloves on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As opposed to bare knuckle boxing, which I think looks very different. | ||
| Is there any video at all of people bare knuckle boxing from the olden days? | ||
| Look at that picture. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at that picture. | |
| Dude, that's horrific. | ||
| I remember when he fought Michael Bisping. | ||
| Do you remember his face after that fight? | ||
| He was sat next to me at the press conference like a bus had hit him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's had some tough fights. | ||
| Two tough for his own good. | ||
| Anderson Silva's UFC debut. | ||
| Ooh, yeah. | ||
| Ding, ding, ding, ding. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember when he knocked out Vanderlei. | ||
| He lured Vanderlei into a fucking war. | ||
| And Terry Martin as well. | ||
| That was a back and forth one. | ||
| He could KO you, man. | ||
| And if you wanted to stand in front of Chris and you wanted to swing wild punches, he'd shut your fucking lights out. | ||
| All day. | ||
| And when he did that to Vanderlei, I was like, whoa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's like two entire different styles of fighting, isn't it? | ||
| Like the Chris Lieben style of fighting, which we all love, and the Anderson Silva fighter style of fighting, which is like witchcraft. | ||
| I remember I was cage-side when he knocked out Tony Fricklin with that open elbow. | ||
| Oh yeah, you were there? | ||
| I was there. | ||
| And when he fought Lee Murray, I mean people don't talk about that fight, but he just dismantled Lee Murray. | ||
| Yeah, he did. | ||
| Murray was a talent that we lost early. | ||
| He made different decisions that led him down a different path. | ||
| Few unfortunate choices. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| But yeah, he dismantled him in that fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you got here? | ||
| Sam, right? | ||
| That's me. | ||
| UFC 89? | ||
| That's me. | ||
| Yeah, that was the card that he was on. | ||
| But if you can find a photo of him at the press conference afterwards, it'll look like the elephant, man. | ||
| Oh, it was bad. | ||
| Pictures right here. | ||
| Oh, this is... | ||
| Yeah, UFC debut. | ||
| Same fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| Like Bisping just ate him up. | ||
| Teed off on him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was still 15-minute fights as well in main events. | ||
| So that was only a 15-minute fight. | ||
| Yeah, isn't that interesting? | ||
| What do you think about the five-round main event? | ||
| Do you like that? | ||
| Yeah, I don't mind it. | ||
| Even if it's not a championship fight? | ||
| Yeah, I don't mind it. | ||
| It changes the sport. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So I don't mind it too much. | ||
| I don't mind it too much. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, it's one of the reasons why it's so exciting is because there's such a high output, high volume, because they know there's only three rounds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Yeah, it's interesting because tactics do get adjusted. | ||
| You just have to start faster. | ||
| You have to do your first two rounds in the dressing room before you walk out. | ||
| What do you think about Pettis versus Diaz this weekend? | ||
| Honestly, I took some stick for this on the YouTube. | ||
| You took stick? | ||
| Stick. | ||
| That's a Britishism, is it? | ||
| Is that dick? | ||
| Shit. | ||
| You took shit? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Stick sounds like dick. | ||
| No one says that. | ||
| I took some dick. | ||
| Yeah, I won't say that again. | ||
| Did you know what he was saying? | ||
| I never heard that before. | ||
| I'm trying not to nitpick. | ||
| I'm learning. | ||
| I'm still learning. | ||
| So, what did you think? | ||
| I think Pettis has got the skills to beat Diaz everywhere. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
| I think he's a better striker all round. | ||
| 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. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Vadim tried to do that against Mark Hunt a couple of times. | ||
| You know, he takes an overhand and falls to the floor. | ||
| He did it to Fedor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I do feel like Conor caught him at least a couple of times clean and rocked him. | ||
| He definitely did. | ||
| He definitely did. | ||
| But then Nate came back, and it was a really close fight at the end. | ||
| A really close fight. | ||
| An excellent fight. | ||
| But Conor McGregor is a fucking skillful striker. | ||
| And... | ||
| I don't know who would win Conor McGregor vs. | ||
| Pettis, but Conor McGregor has proven in the Dustin Poirier fight, in the Jose Aldo fight, he's proven in the Eddie Alvarez fight. | ||
| He fucking shuts people's lights out. | ||
| Was not able to do that to Nate Diaz. | ||
| So I think, I mean, in my perspective, you might be underestimating Nate Diaz. | ||
| I think Nadia is a lot slicker than he appears, and he's harder to hit. | ||
| He knows how to use his jab and his long left hand. | ||
| He's not like the best kicker in the world, but he's never really had that as a part of his arsenal. | ||
| But his ground game is super, super high level. | ||
| He's tough as shit. | ||
| His endurance is ridiculous. | ||
| I'm not going to underestimate any of that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, it's also... | ||
| We've seen Pettis now at 45, 55, and now 70. It's really wild to see. | ||
| And you go by that Wonderboy Thompson knockout, it's like, man, maybe this is his weight class. | ||
| Like, if he can do that to Wonderboy, maybe this is his weight class. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, he gets tagged again while he's out. | ||
| He's totally stiff. | ||
| You're like, wow. | ||
| Yeah, he's definitely got power. | ||
| There's no doubt about it. | ||
| Tyron Woodley couldn't stop him. | ||
| Nobody else has stopped Wonderboy, have they? | ||
| No. | ||
| Been dropped a few times, but not stopped. | ||
| Masvidal wasn't able to stop him. | ||
| Maybe he underestimated. | ||
| Maybe he wasn't expecting Pettis to have the power to knock him out. | ||
| I'm starting to feel that's a thing. | ||
| I'm starting to feel like if you're expecting of the power, you're more braced to... | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You've got your shock absorbers on. | ||
| You're ready to absorb that. | ||
| It's a good argument. | ||
| It's a real good argument. | ||
| The other thing to keep in mind is that Pettis at 170 is the same human that he was at 145 but without all the suffering. | ||
| So it's finding that right amount of suffering. | ||
| And I think a little bit of suffering for a weight cut is good. | ||
| I liked it. | ||
| I always thought about it. | ||
| I always likened it to the march to battle. | ||
| If I'm... | ||
| The Peloponnesian Wars, I'm picking my sword and shield up. | ||
| I'm not stepping out of my house onto the battlefield. | ||
| I'm stepping out and walking miles and miles. | ||
| So that process, that was the weight cut for me. | ||
| You know, the walking to the battlefield. | ||
| And I enjoyed that. | ||
| And I think that we saw McGregor at 170 didn't have that. | ||
| You see McGregor on the scales at 155 or 145 and he's feral. | ||
| Like, he's wild. | ||
| You saw him on the scales at 170 and he's smiling, he's rubbing his belly. | ||
| He's not marched to the battlefield. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Interesting. | |
| And I think there's something in that psychology as well. | ||
| Even if it's a small weight cut. | ||
| And I've done everything from 3 pounds to 16 pounds. | ||
| And I know how I felt across the board. | ||
| How did you feel best? | ||
| About 8. 8 was good for me. | ||
| So you put a little bit back on, you feel strong and big for the weight class, but you're not depleted. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| I mean, usually I would be back up to like 184, 186 when I was fighting at 170. That was my good weight. | ||
| Around 184 was comfortable because then I didn't feel too bloated and too slow. | ||
| I've been up closer to 190 before and it just didn't suit the way that I fought. | ||
| So there's a point of diminishing returns for you. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And did you use IVs during those days? | ||
| One time I used an IV. Only one time? | ||
| Yeah, never really. | ||
| For me, it was quite an internal process. | ||
| I always cut weight on my own. | ||
| And I always found it strange that everybody else... | ||
| Yeah, I always did. | ||
| You don't have anybody rubbing your shoulders? | ||
| No, none of that. | ||
| Scraping on me with a room card. | ||
| Have you seen that? | ||
| Yeah, I've seen that. | ||
| It's like, I'm not buying that. | ||
| It was always a personal thing for me. | ||
| So like, you know, running through the streets of Tokyo with trash bags on or... | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Sitting in the corner of the sauna in my own head. | ||
| Who's the most ridiculous weight cutter you ever saw in terms of volume? | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Anthony Johnson, for sure. | ||
| Oh, yeah, that's right. | ||
| No contest. | ||
| So when I fought him in Seattle, he cut weight Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday night to weigh in on the Friday. | ||
| And I don't know for sure this, but from what I understand, he was 214 on the night when he rehydrated. | ||
| He looked like a different human being. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| He went from 170 to 214? | ||
| Yeah, it was ridiculous. | ||
| He was massive. | ||
| And like my whole game plan, because this for me, and this was a good lesson for me, because he punked me in this one. | ||
| I put all my eggs in one basket. | ||
| That's a phrase that everyone understands. | ||
| So I thought if I can trash talk him into making weight, I'll make sure that I can get him tied in the fight. | ||
| And then I'll start to wear on him in the later rounds with my footwork and my movement. | ||
| And I just come off a knockout loss to Carlos Condit. | ||
| And then I get called up and I've got Anthony Johnson, who's never not knocked anybody out at welterweight. | ||
| So immediately I'm thinking to myself, well, first of all, somebody at the UFC hates me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| 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. | ||
| Dude, I think that weight class, when he was cutting down from way above 200 to get to 170, I think it tired him so badly. | ||
| We didn't see the real Anthony Johnson until he went up to light heavyweight, which is so crazy. | ||
| Remember, he missed weight at 85 and Vitor beat him up. | ||
| In 197 he weighed in? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Something like that? | |
| Something crazy like that. | ||
| But I think his next fight after me was Andrei Orlovsky at heavyweight. | ||
| Look at what he looked like at 170. Skeletor! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then look at him at 230. Crazy. | ||
| As a light heavyweight, he was the scariest. | ||
| Terrifying. | ||
| Because his power was fucking immense. | ||
| But he's another guy. | ||
| He fought at heavyweight in the PFL and fucked up Andrei Orlovsky, and now he's a million pounds. | ||
| Now he's so big. | ||
| He's so big, man. | ||
| You know, I saw him in the lobby of the hotel in Stockholm after he fought Alexander Gustafsson, after he knocked Gustafsson out. | ||
| And I walked into the lobby of the hotel and he was there taking a few photos and stuff. | ||
| And I walked up to him and I said, I'm glad you didn't do that to me. | ||
| And he shook my hand and he went, I like you though. | ||
| Thank God for that. | ||
| Thank God. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| He's a perfect example of a guy that when he wasn't depleting his body, we got to see what he could really do. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And like the Noguera fight, oh my Jesus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He kept him on his feet with an uppercut. | ||
| Yeah, his power is just extraordinary. | ||
| When he knocked out Glover with one punch, he's like, God damn, this guy's extraordinary. | ||
| But it was really interesting when I talked to him when he retired. | ||
| He retired in the octagon. | ||
| He said, I'm an athlete. | ||
| He goes, I'm not a fighter. | ||
| He goes, I don't like doing this. | ||
| I'm just good at it. | ||
| I'm like, wow. | ||
| Like how crazy that probably the most dangerous knockout artist in the history of the light heavyweight division. | ||
| I would say that. | ||
| Yeah, I would say. | ||
| Who the fuck's more dangerous than Anthony Rumble Johnson? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If he connects on you, the only person that absorbed it was DC. DC absorbed that head kick. | ||
| DC absorbed a big right hand in the first fight that sent him scrambling. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mm-hmm. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Ridiculous puncher. | ||
| Ridiculous power. | ||
| Ridiculous. | ||
| Especially he's a comfortable weight for him. | ||
| Dude, the Glover fight was stunning. | ||
| We never saw Glover get knocked down. | ||
| And then all sides, boom! | ||
| One punch. | ||
| Bank. | ||
| Out cold. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Remember the knockout that I always remember is the Shane Carwin-Gonzaga fight? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Because that was like a six-inch punch. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And Gonzaga just folded on the spot. | ||
| Didn't he KO Jimmy Manoa, too? | ||
| Oh, he did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yes, he did. | ||
| He fucks everybody up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Except DC. DC just had that number. | ||
| Takes those shots so well. | ||
| He takes those shots so well and his wrestling is so overwhelming. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And in that fight, he just wasn't physically prepared to do that. | ||
| And it's that same game plan twice. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| I'm calling it the grind cycle. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| He gets you trapped in that cycle. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yep. | |
| He puts you against the fence. | ||
| He takes you down. | ||
| He beats you up until he gives you his back. | ||
| Strangles you. | ||
| It's a beautiful thing to watch. | ||
| It's very, very effective. | ||
| I'm so curious as to whether or not he's going to be able to do that again this weekend. | ||
| What he's going to be able to do this weekend with Stipe and what Stipe has for him. | ||
| What he has planned and how he approaches the fight. | ||
| He's got to know that it was hard to get this rematch. | ||
| And DC's on his way out. | ||
| DC's publicly saying this might be his last fight. | ||
| He doesn't know. | ||
| And then... | ||
| Dana White is saying, reluctantly, I'll let you guys fight at light heavyweight if you fight Jon Jones, the remaster. | ||
| They're talking about another fight other than this fight, which I hate. | ||
| I never liked that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he's, what, a year past the date, he said he was going to retire as well, right? | ||
| DC? I think he said at 40, right? | ||
| Did he say at 40? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's at the end of 2018. Right. | ||
| You know what though, when you keep bringing that cheddar around, it's hard to say no to the cheddar! | ||
| That cheese! | ||
| I'm an old man and I'm talking about getting back in there one more time. | ||
| But you seem to want it for... | ||
| It seems to be more than just for money for you. | ||
| It seems to be something you want to challenge yourself one more time. | ||
| And for people who don't know, you're... | ||
| Career was taken from you in a way that you feel like didn't medically make sense. | ||
| They told you to stop fighting because... | ||
| Explain the whole heart condition thing. | ||
| Well, it was in the build of the Mike Brown fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're a part wolf? | |
| I am part wolf, yes. | ||
| I won't tell you which part. | ||
| Yeah, it was in the building of the Matt Brown fight. | ||
| And because it's California, they required a bunch of different tests. | ||
| And it showed up as an irregular heartbeat. | ||
| It's like I have a second heartbeat. | ||
| So it's another bunch of cells in the heart that produce an electrical current. | ||
| And it can confuse the heart, cause cardiac arrest. | ||
| It can cause electrical issues with the heart. | ||
| I'd never had any problems, never had any symptoms and side effects or anything like that. | ||
| So basically what they told me is that if I wanted to continue fighting, I had to have an ablation. | ||
| So they had to go into my heart and they had to burn the cells that were producing the second electrical current. | ||
| Fuck that! | ||
| I've never had anything wrong with me at all. | ||
| Healthy, I've pushed myself to whatever limits I think I've got and I'm hoping to find some more, but I push myself. | ||
| I know what my heart's capable of. | ||
| And I've never doubted it. | ||
| And you were known for having good cardio. | ||
| Yeah, I always push the pace. | ||
| So I just didn't want to have anything done. | ||
| They literally said to me, you can have it done and still fight on the same day. | ||
| This was five weeks before the fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god. | |
| So how much recovery time? | ||
| Oh, practically none. | ||
| So they go into the carotid artery and the femoral artery and they go into the heart. | ||
| But Lorenzo sent me out to California. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's what? | |
| What are they going in there with? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Some cables and wires. | ||
| These are beam, bro. | ||
| This sounds like a superhero movie. | ||
| Goes wrong. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And then I end up being Iron Man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You come out with powers. | ||
| 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. | ||
| When was the last time you sparred? | ||
| Oh, I spar regularly. | ||
| I drop in the gym because I've got guys that are training for fights. | ||
| So we've had Terry Brazier fighting recently, Adam Amasinga. | ||
| Dean Truman fought recently. | ||
| So I've been in there moving around with those guys. | ||
| And you've never really gotten out of training training. | ||
| You've always trained martial arts this whole time, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I've always stayed healthy. | ||
| I never gained any... | ||
| 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. | ||
| So is that how you'd like to approach it? | ||
| You want to immediately jump back in and fight someone with a big name? | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Because I'm having one more fight. | ||
| Just one more. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I want someone that everyone knows. | ||
| But if you love it, though. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So, if we are going to expect this, how much time do you think you need to fully prepare? | ||
| Where are you at right now? | ||
| I always work on percentages. | ||
| I would say physically, I would say I'm about... | ||
| About 58% condition. | ||
| 58? | ||
| That's an interesting number. | ||
| How'd you choose that? | ||
| Well, because I'm working through a couple of injuries, so I've not been doing a lot of hands-on stuff. | ||
| I've been doing a lot of training on my own. | ||
| I'm starting to build up my aerobic base again. | ||
| But the one thing I've noticed is, and I smoke most days, my conditioning always is good. | ||
| I can just get out and run 10 miles and feel comfortable with it. | ||
| That's never changed. | ||
| So all I need to do is just kind of test the toughness in that condition now and push it to the points where I feel uncomfortable. | ||
| How old are you now? | ||
| 37. But I'm healthy. | ||
| I've not drank in 20 years. | ||
| I've had ibuprofen since 2009. I have nothing. | ||
| And you've been out of competition for how many years now? | ||
| It's been seven years now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Seven. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I told you, I work in cycles. | ||
| I work in cycles. | ||
| Yeah, you do. | ||
| This is my seven-year cycle. | ||
| Seven-year cycle? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Listen, man, I hope you do it. | ||
| I hope you fulfill your vision quest like Matthew Modine in that movie. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| Just fucking do it. | ||
| It would be beautiful to see. | ||
| And we gotta do this more often, man. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| I really enjoyed this. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| It's always good talking to you. | ||
| It's just, you know, I live so far away now and I'm in the UK. Anytime you're here, anytime we're around, bring a mobile thing. | ||
| We'll figure it out on the road. | ||
| Okay, very cool. | ||
| If you're ever at UFC events. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Really appreciate you, man. | ||
| Always good talking to you. | ||
| Dan Hardy, ladies and gentlemen. |
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