Henry Cejudo, UFC’s two-division champ and Olympic wrestling gold medalist, reveals his near-retirement at 33 but hints at a return for Volkanovski or Garcia—if the right fight and pay align. His success stems from blending "heart" (resilience) with technical mastery, like exploiting leg kicks after losses to Demetrius Johnson and Marlon Moraes. A psychedelic DMT ritual with Mike Tyson transformed his perspective, confronting past traumas and refining his comedic/podcasting style, while underscoring the drug’s risks and potential for addiction recovery. Cejudo’s elite fight camp—Neuroforce-backed, with DEXA scans, altitude pods, and stem cell therapy—mirrors his disciplined approach to wrestling since age 11. Though not the "best" fighter, his dominance over Johnson, Cruz, and Moraes cements his legacy, leaving Rogan to ponder if he’s the greatest combat actor ever. [Automatically generated summary]
At 45. If they were to give me an opportunity to go up and obviously be compensated, then that would be a fight that would really wake me up in the morning and be like, hey man, this is a challenge.
If I was to explain it to you, like what's made me successful.
And I've seen it, you know, being at the Olympic Training Center as a high school kid and living out there for four years.
And that's actually where I met Daniel.
And I was a 16-year-old kid when I first met these guys.
And I was able to analyze a lot of the greats like, you know, Stephen Abbas, Daniel Cormier, a lot of the Olympic team.
And what I've learned now at the age of 33, I learned that there's been two things that have separated me from the rest of the pack.
It's two things with what I call heart and ability.
And I was actually able to tell this story to Chachri, the founder and CEO of One FC. So it's two things.
I call it heart and ability.
What is your heart?
Your heart is your passion, your will, your desire, your determination.
Your heart is something that you're willing to suffer for in order to obtain.
Now, the next one is ability.
Ability is a gift that you have since it's a coordination.
It's something that you've repped over time where you become a master at it.
And what happens a lot of time, I always tell people it's good to question one or the other.
It's good to question the mind.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, the heart or the ability because to be the 1% of the 1% is like both of these things have to match.
What happens is a lot of people have heart, but their ability is like way down here.
You know, their ability doesn't match their heart or their abilities up here and they're just a little lazy and can't really put the, you know, because there is a separation between mind and body and your job is to connect them both.
And I'm going to use an example.
With Marlon Marais, you saw me getting my ass kicked.
You saw me getting late kicked.
You know, from the first all the way to the second round, but I knew that I had to connect and make that transition.
That was a combination of combining the heart and the ability.
You know, so I was able to kind of...
So what separated me, I'd say that, I think is being gifted through the ability and then just having a passion, a will that's just second to none.
There's a lot of other factors, though, isn't there?
Not just ability, it's also you have to be coached by someone who really knows what they're doing.
There's so many guys out there that are really tough, and they have will, and they work out hard, and they're in shape, but they just make technical mistakes, and they've never corrected those mistakes.
The reason why is because you got to put yourself in the right situations.
Like, I didn't start winning until I let go of my coaches.
The first time I lost to Demetrius Johnson, it was...
Man, it was hard, and this sounds very crazy and cynical, but it was kind of hard to blame myself.
Even though I was training, because I knew, coming from the Olympic sport, that I had a coach that could take me to the top, and there was no ifs or whats.
I knew he knew the recipe.
And it's still a fairly new sport.
So I knew that I had to find the professors.
I knew that I had to find the scientists.
And all this together in order for me to become that perfect storm.
So that's exactly what we did.
Putting the science, the recovery, finding the right coaches, listening to my ability, understanding my biomechanics.
It was a mixture of all these things that separated me from the first time I fought Demetrius.
To just being a legend killer, man.
To being all these guys that they said, you know, Demetrius Johnson, TJ, you know, Marlon Marais, Dominic Cruz, man.
It's one of the reasons why it bums me out that you retired.
Look, I... Conflicting feelings.
One, I'm happy.
I'm happy you're retired.
Young and healthy, and you can do anything you want, man.
I really believe a guy who can accomplish what you accomplished inside the octagon and also winning an Olympic gold medalist.
You're winning an Olympic gold medal in wrestling at 21 years old, retiring from the sport, then getting into MMA, becoming a two-division world champion in MMA, and then stepping away while you're still healthy and at the peak of your abilities.
Part of me loves that.
I love the fact that you did what you wanted to do and then you step away.
But part of me looks back Like say when you fought Benavidez or say when you fought Demetrius the first time and then looks at you now like you're a completely different animal Nobody had been able to shut down Dominic Cruz's footwork game But you came in and just chopped the shit out of his legs just right off the bat you you Whatever advantage we thought that he would have with his footwork and movement was actually becoming a disadvantage because you you were using that Against him.
You found the angles, and you found the perfect times to attack his legs, and then you put him away, which is also something no one's ever done before except Uriah caught him in a submission and finished him.
Yeah, and I think with Dominic, too, just to get back to him, In order for you to understand the funk, you have to train for the funk.
If you don't train for Dominic, if you think you can just go out there and just fight or train the way you train and try to fight Dominic, you're gonna be missing.
So throughout my training camps, I treated almost like a wrestler, like a boxer.
My training camp, I build a team around me.
A mentor, actually, who's here, Dave Zowan, who's been helping me to shape.
He's a businessman, but he's been able to help me to form, obviously, the perfect storm.
We brought guys in from California that mimic just like Dominic, that were just a little faster than Dominic.
And I knew that I wasn't even trying to touch his face because I knew that he was a hard hit.
But I also knew that he would leave his legs a lot.
You can push your body backwards, but your legs will always be in that same position.
So the whole game plan since the beginning, this is why I felt so confident in that fight.
Through training was to continue just keep taking his legs out as much as I can.
But what really broke down Etten Barbosa was what Justin did to him.
He started whipping that calf kick.
And actually, right before I even fought Dominic, Like I went on YouTube, like this is like maybe an hour before I went to the arena, and I just put like some Justin Gaethje highlights.
Just ruthless, man.
Just really just swinging those kids with bad intentions, almost just to murder you.
And also the reason why I've been able to kick and do things like that because I'm very confident with my takedown defense.
It's like Jon Jones.
Jon Jones is so comfortable with the stand-up because he knows his ability to stop Tony from taking him down are just so much higher.
And I feel that same way, so I become a little more free with my kicks and punches and things of that matter.
It has, it has, and I think we're going to start seeing more of it.
So people are going to have to start adjusting, man, because there's, what was it, there's two stoppages within, there's a stoppage before Alex Perez recently that came out.
And then between the mats, when I stepped in, I rolled my ankle bad.
I have pictures of it.
It's black and blue.
But I still wanted to fight, so...
You know, so anyway, so, you know, I went in there, hurt or whatnot, but I knew that that first round, and you said, you mentioned it too during the fight, you said, I think this might be a survival round for Henry, and it absolutely was.
So I knew when to fight and when to compete, but I also knew that Marlon Merlin was throwing so much power And I've gone against some of the best in the world, and I was like, dude, there's no way he's going to be able to maintain all that power for five rounds.
And I don't think this kid has any idea, as a wrestler, because he's never wrestled before, how much pain a guy like me can endure.
So he can say he was tired, he can say that something happened, but in reality, it's a mixture of two things.
He blew his wad, and this guy here could...
Which is me, could take a lot of pain.
I was with Mike not too long ago and I asked him, I was like, hey Mike, this is Mike Tyson.
I'm like, how would you describe Muhammad Ali, man?
What was the difference between him and everybody else?
And he sat there and he thought about it and he's like...
Which was cool to hear, man, because I can put myself in those shoes and he's like, he's like, man, Muhammad Ali was a guy that I've never seen before because he could just endure so much pain.
Like the dude could just endure so much pain that it's almost like the average guy would fold, the average guy would probably get killed, but Ali just had a certain will to him that separated him from everybody else.
So when I won the Olympics, my mom wasn't able to attend the 2000 Olympics due to her citizenship status.
So then three years later after that, she was awarded her citizenship at the age of 20. So, you know, I stand on both fences, man.
Like my dad, he was, you know, my father, which I was just raised by my mother.
He committed crimes in and out.
He was in and out of jail here in California.
He was actually deported.
So I was a five-year-old kid.
My dad was the poor.
He never came back to America.
So I understand both sides, man.
And I hate to say this, but it's true.
My dad came here as a foreigner, as an illegal, and he decided to break the law, man.
And rightfully so, man.
He should go back to his native country.
My mother came here illegally, paid her fine, paid her taxes and whatnot, and then she was granted her citizenship in 2008. 2011, man.
So, I've been able to speak on this on behalf of Congress and kind of share my story to the world, man, because, man, it's almost like I've become neutral.
You break the law, you go, man.
You obey the law after a certain amount of time, man.
Yeah, it's a very frustrating thing for people who do want to have a better life for their family and they realize how difficult it is to come here.
I fully understand illegal immigration.
I fully understand wanting to keep out people that are criminals and people that are murderers and people that are in the drug trade.
But if I was a person who was struggling to feed my family in South America or in Mexico or wherever, and I found out that I could sneak in and that I could do better, I would sneak in.
If you found out there was a place across the border where you could make five times as much and you could send money back and all you had to do is grind, this place where literally anybody can go from being completely impoverished to being on top of the world, being a millionaire.
But what I'm saying is he's been able to come out of, you know, obviously he was a murderer, but he was able to somewhat make it in the sport that he desired to be at that time.
I'm not, you know, obviously I think we all know he's a crook.
But, man, it lets you know what America's able to do, man.
It doesn't matter what you've done in life.
You really do get only a second, a third, but a fourth and a thousand opportunities.
You can't deny the fact that the guy's been remarkably successful.
But the extenuating circumstances that led to that success is very different than your mother sneaking over here because she wanted to do better for her family.
That's the raw version of the American dream.
I mean, the American dream is really immigration.
I'm a version of the American dream.
I'm a third generation American.
My grandparents came over here because they wanted a better life.
But the bottom line is you talk to guys like Justin Gagey, guys like yourself, you know, many fighters that have had come in here that are repped by him and they love the guy.
Yeah, Khabib, Frankie, all these dudes, Cody, Verdum, and he's been able to, and I've been there and I've never seen this before, but he's kind of like the glue with all of us.
I wouldn't be mad if the judges would have gave it to Demetrius, man.
You know what?
Because it was a hell of a fight.
And I would have been like, man, I almost had him.
But...
You know, the judges, I conveyed enough for the judges to give it to me.
And the reason why I was able to beat him was because I nullified a lot of his team with my wrestling, my inside trips, my takedowns.
So I completely dismantled this dude, you know what I mean?
I took him out of his rhythm when he was used to kind of catching people and then being able to take people down.
So I feel like if a guy like Kyle Snyder gets in the game and he's able to kind of go through the process that I've gone through, That's the only guy that I could see beating somebody like Jon Jones.
But also extremely motivated because he had a very sick daughter, and he realized that he couldn't play basketball.
He wasn't going to school, couldn't play football.
He was trying to figure out ways to make money.
He was driving a truck.
I believe it was for Budweiser.
He was delivering things, and he just decided, I'm going to get into boxing, and just had Unbelievable, God-given talent and just ferocious punching power.
His punching power is like nothing I've ever seen before.
I mean, you look at Deontay Wilder's knockouts, they don't even make sense.
He sends people flying across the ring and when he fought Tyson Fury, the first fight, when he dropped him and knocked him down twice, he only weighed 209 pounds.
I feel like boxing in particular is one of those sports that's very difficult to learn properly as you get older.
There's something about muscle memory and your body being ingrained, like developed to move a certain way and to strike a certain way and to be able to react on openings, like instinctually.
It's almost like once you hit like 25, 26 years old and you start then, like, ooh, it's real hard to ever get to an elite level.
Yeah, your body starts to change, and that happened to me.
And it's crazy, and it's ironic, Joe.
It's like, even my UFC debut, like, think about this.
Like, I didn't make weight, and I'll never forget it.
I was with my brother.
He's actually back here, too, with my brother Alonzo.
And I remember, you know, I didn't make weight.
I couldn't make the weight, man.
I was just doing too much.
You're talking about by the time you get 25, like, you hit the nail on the head.
Because that's when I first started struggling to make weight.
And I didn't make weight at that time.
And I remember I was just going to get on a flight and just disappear and never freaking see and never look back, man.
Really?
Yeah, this is crazy, Joe.
This is crazy.
And my brother was, you know, thank God for him.
My brother Alonzo, and he's like, you need to be a man and you got to go and talk to Sean Shelby and tell him thank you and let him know that you're retired, man.
And I was, man, it took everything in my heart because I was so embarrassed, Joe.
This was when TJ fought, when he was supposed to fight Burrell, I think the second time.
And this is when we fought Joe Soto, so I was supposed to be on that card.
I was supposed to fight Scott Jorgensen.
And I went down there, didn't make the weight, and I'll never forget it.
I was dehydrated.
I couldn't even have tears to cry, but I was all dehydrated.
Then I went up to Shawn Shawn.
I was like, Shawn, thank you, man, but I no longer want to do this sport, man.
I started vomiting all the fluid that I had in my body.
Just stupid.
I was doing 16 pounds, Joe.
I was doing 16 pounds pretty much the day of weigh-ins.
Wow.
Like something stupid.
And the only reason why I was doing something like that was because I felt when you come from the sport of wrestling, like to me, making weight and doing everything that the MMA fighters were doing, I was like, man, these dudes are spoiled.
These dudes get 24, these dudes get close to about 30 hours before they fight.
I says, man, that's a lot of recovery time.
So this is how stupid, this is the way I saw it.
And again, the age caught up to me.
I would do the 16 pounds.
I would murder myself.
I would really hurt myself, make the weight, and then balloon back up.
But there came a point by the time I turned 25, 26, that my body just started to shut down on me.
So was your thought process that because of the fact that these MMA guys get more time to recover, it's not like they have to weigh in the day of the wrestling match.
They're weighing in the day before the fight in the daytime.
They don't have to fight.
And then eventually it became in the morning, right?
So you have even more time.
And then they didn't have to fight until the next day at night.
So you were like, I'm going to be heavier.
I'm going to come in bigger with a bigger advantage.
And that's another reason is because they're so tired, man, that they just don't have any energy.
Even McGregor, people like that.
But what I'm trying to get to is guys that lose, if you don't recover from your defeat, from your loss, if you don't get therapy, if you don't understand the reasons why you lost...
But for me, it was more like a realization when the first time I lost to Demetrius Johnson and getting knocked out in 2 minutes and 36 seconds, man.
It's like, to me, the worst thing that could happen to a fighter and the worst scenario that something could happen to somebody and get stopped is getting kneed to the body.
You're conscious, Joe.
You're conscious and this is kneeing you from left to right.
And then your eyes are open and you've had enough.
And then you see Big John McCarthy waving his hands.
And you're knowing that he's making the right call.
Did you know like when you fought him and First of all you fought the best version of Demetrius Johnson ever though the guy to this day I think is the best Example of a mixed martial arts.
I've ever seen.
Oh, yeah, I think Demetrius in his prime He was so fucking good man.
He was so fast and he was so technical and he made such good decisions He set his footwork his movement like everything was so precise Did you say, okay, I see the gap.
Yeah, it hit the peronial nerve, which numbs all the nerves to your feet, so it sleeps it, and then when you try to lay your foot down, your foot's still awake, so I even sprained it in the first round.
It was crazy to see.
But this is the mind power that I had, Joel.
It was a survival run, as you say.
I went back to the corner and I thought to myself, this is how crazy I am.
I was like, hey.
I just thought to myself, man, how crazy is this going to be when I beat this dude?
Like I survived that first run.
I said, man, this is going to make my story, whatever I desired in my life, that much better because I went through adversity with this fucking dude again.
And I noticed my team, they're still kind of grabbing their fingers.
I'm pacing back and forth.
And about a few hours before we went out to the arena, I talked to my team and I sat them here and I sat my whole team down.
It's just almost like a dad.
And I'm like, listen, man.
I says, I need you guys to trust me and have faith in me.
The key plan to being this dude, like I know this is the greatest of all time, but I know what I've done in wrestling, I can replicate that what I've done in mixed martial arts, man.
The only thing I'm gonna ask from you guys is for you guys to be composed.
For you guys to be composed, man.
Don't over yell, stay calm, like whatever happens in a fight, man, I just need you guys to bear with me and have faith in me because I'm gonna...
Yeah, what the toad is, what you're referring to, is 5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine that's excreted by the toad's skin.
They take...
This type of toad, I forget the name of the toad, but they get it excited and excrete this stuff from its skin onto glass, and then they leave that glass out in the sun, and it dries, that excretion dries, and then you scrape it up with a razor blade, and then you smoke that stuff.
Because a lot of what that does is it brings out a lot of your, as you say, you open up the stage, a lot of your demons.
A lot of things that you've probably been holding on to for a minute.
So I'm seeing Mike over here twist and turn and kind of talk about a lot of...
I don't want to share that stuff, but...
Talk about a lot of his past, man.
As you said, he's an idol, he's a legend.
That's the way I look at Mike, too.
I'm over here, I'm almost tripping out, but at the same time, intrigued.
So then I go up and I do it, and man, it took me to, especially out of retirement here, man, I almost kind of somewhat wanted answers.
I was hoping that it would give me, okay, man, this is like the path and whatnot.
And it took me to my mom's first love, man.
You know, and it showed me like in a story, almost like in a movie, you know, how I was born, how my mom had me, how by the time I was eight years old, like I had my sister, so I was no longer the youngest, how my mom kind of like, you know, in all fairness, kind of somewhat pushed to the side.
Leaving home at the age of 17 and substituting my mom's love for self-fulfillment, wrestling.
It makes martial arts and it brought me back to a little kid when I was maybe four or five when I would cry to my mom because I remember as a kid we would go we would go from LA to New Mexico like in Greyhounds and I remember stopping at McDonald's and things like that but to me You know, as a kid, you don't know you're poor.
But what that did is that brought me back to the person that created me.
I think there's a fear of it just because it's illegal.
I really think that's it.
And it should be respected.
It's very dangerous in that sense that it could...
Not that it could do harm to you physically if it's the real deal.
It's not going to do harm to you physically.
Your body has it in it.
Your body knows what to do with it.
It's one of the reasons why it's such a quick trip.
Your body knows how to bring that stuff back to baseline very quickly.
That's why it's only like a 15 minute trip.
But it's not it's not bad for you all the time I think it's like many it's a really powerful thing that it's got to be respected it could fuck you up if you're not ready if you have some Distorted versions of the world that you're operating under for me one of the things that made me feel like right away one of the first things was Realizing how much of like the way I talk about things is like calculated I was like,
I was trying to figure out, like, I would say things in a way that I wanted people to say, ooh, he phrased that cool.
Like, I would try hard to impress people with the way I was saying things.
And I was realizing that as I was trying to describe the trip after it was over.
I was like, that's interesting.
So that probably leads to a disconnect between me and someone who's listening.
Because it's not 100% what's going on in my head.
It's at least a little bit showmanship and bullshit.
And it made me realize that in that moment, I think it probably made me a better everything.
But the last time I did it, I did the other kind, the NN-dimethyltryptamine.
Actually, maybe a little less than two years ago.
A little less than two years ago.
It was NN-dimethyltryptamine, which is...
That's the different version.
That's the version of it that's in ayahuasca.
That's the version of it.
There's a bunch of different snuffs and different ways that people try to get that stuff into their system.
But smoking it is the quickest.
Smoking it gets you, you vaporize it, and it gets you right to the center of the universe immediately.
And all those things, you know, I think, man, one of the cool things about life...
Like what you're talking about in your journey, your journey as a man, your journey as a champion, your journey to become better and to show what you're capable of.
All of this is because no one gets it right.
You don't just get it right.
Like, you fuck it up, and you try to do better, and you fail, and then you figure out what went wrong.
And you just constantly analyze whatever you're doing and obsess on it, and you can become better at that thing, and through that you can understand that you can be better at anything.
And I think when you, any kind of psychedelic, Where you have an opportunity to look at yourself just really look at yourself accurately You're not gonna like it But it's gonna give you great benefit because it's gonna give you you're gonna be able to see yourself Honestly and see whatever those flaws don't get mad that you have all these flaws Just fix them Just fix them.
Do your best to fix them.
And you're not going to get it right.
Because ego's still going to come creeping back in your life.
And ego's still going to hold on to your legs and drag you down while you're trying to run.
You know?
That's what it is.
Ego's like hanging on your ankles while you're trying to run.
Like, come on.
Stay the same.
But you can't stay the same and get better.
The way you get better is to relax and to realize that all your fuck-ups...
All the fails.
That's not you.
Just because you lost a match doesn't mean you're a loser.
You just lost.
You should be happy that you got this opportunity to feel terrible.
Because through that opportunity to feel terrible, that's where all the growth comes from.
If you can survive it.
Some people can't survive it, right?
We all know those guys that were really good in the gym and they had one or two matches or one or two fights and they just couldn't handle the pressure for whatever reason.
They couldn't handle the things that went wrong and they just didn't want to do it anymore.
I think a lot of diseases of addiction are diseases of despair, right?
It's like disease of the mind and wanting to squash those demons and drown them out.
The anxiety, the fear, the depression, you know, just the...
Terrible feelings you have about who you are, you know?
Maybe you're homeless, maybe your life's falling apart, but you're alive right now and you can't handle it.
You can't handle where you're at, you can't handle who you are, you can't handle what people have done to you, so you just throw drugs in there, throw drugs in there.
And something like DMT or, you know, there's a bunch of different sort of psychedelics that can do it.
For a lot of people it's Ibogaine.
Ibogaine is a big one for drug addicts.
People have real issues with opiates.
Ibogaine knocks it out of the park with those people.
It cures a giant number.
See if you can Google the percentage of people who are cured of addictions by Ibogaine.
Ibogaine comes from the...
I've never done this, with all due respect.
In full disclosure, it's from the aboga tree.
I believe it's from Africa.
And there's something about this drug that just kills all ideas that you have of addiction and rewires your brain.
One doctor reported a 70-80% success rate with effective aftercare.
He added that when people recovering from meth addiction took Ibogaine but returned to the same environment where they had originally abused meth, there was a 90% relapse rate.
That's not good.
So that's terrible.
So you have to do it and then get out.
Or maybe it's meth.
Maybe meth's just like super hard to kick.
What's the hardest one to kick?
I've never fucked with.
Eddie Bravo and I were talking about this once.
We were both saying this.
There's no meth advocates.
People are telling you you should take weed.
Bro, weed will calm you down.
We will make you more friendly.
There's weed evangelists.
There's no meth guys.
You know what I'm saying?
unidentified
Oh, that's funny.
And Ozark, that comes up at the end.
She's like, I want to start those treatment centers.
Having any sort of a psychedelic experience it just makes you realize how you how badly you're fucking up and for some people that's enough like the whole reason why they would do a psychedelic if they were addicted also is because they realize they were fucking up and they're looking for some way to change You know those good feelings that you have man like when when you beat Dominic Cruz and you raised your hands at the end of that fight and you knew it was gonna be over.
You knew it was gonna be over.
You knew you're gonna go down in history no matter what.
Even if you step away right now.
I know you say the greatest, but I'm just in the fairness of experts.
But that's the point that I'm trying to get to is it's a striking game for him right now.
You know what I'm saying?
There is a whole other aspect, and that's called wrestling and jiu-jitsu.
That phone I've heard, he has developed pretty good jiu-jitsu, but there's that other art that I want to see when you're really good testing, you're taking it to deep waters, then I'll see your real colors.
Then I'll be like, okay, man, you are ready to take on...
I'm gonna give you a good example that Yair Rodriguez when he fought Frankie Edgar That was a good example that Frankie Edgar was just that wrestling was too strong that ground-to-pound was too strong He couldn't keep him off him.
He just couldn't do anything about it And that was a great example because Yair was this super flashy kicker.
I mean, Yair, to me, has some of the best kicks I've ever seen inside the octagon.
Wild, flashy shit.
Remember when he threw against BJ, he hit him with a 360 roundhouse kick to the face?
Do you remember that?
unidentified
Bro, that's some crazy shit to pull off in a fight.
I'm really excited about that Jose Aldo-Piotr Jan fight, but it's fascinating to me that they decided to give the fight to Aldo even though Marais won the decision.
That's a real interesting choice, isn't it?
Because although I agree with the decision, I think, or excuse me, I agree with Aldo.
I think Aldo won that fight.
I think it was a really close fight, but I thought Aldo won the fight.
But it was close.
It was really close.
But the fact that the judges gave it to Marlon and then the UFC is like, nah, player, we're going to have Aldo fight Piotr.
And part of it is because Aldo is obviously a huge draw and one of the greatest of all time, particularly greatest featherweights of all time.
I mean, even though you kind of knew that Chael was in over his head in some of those fights, like with Jon Jones, I had a real deep feeling he was in over his head with Anderson Silva in the second fight in particular.
You know, I just had a feeling he was in over his head, but he would still talk so much shit.
Let's talk about that fight because that was a crazy situation, right?
First of all, TJ looked like dead man walking, going to the weigh-ins.
Like I said...
As bad as anybody I've ever seen besides Travis Luter.
I mean, Travis Luter was a dehydration thing.
TJ had starved himself down to a skeleton.
It was real weird.
And then when you found out that he is taking EPO, and then he said that he was taking EPO because he just didn't have any energy from cutting that weight.
They can say, like a guy misses weight by five pounds, he can still fight you.
That's a fucking big advantage.
He didn't have to cut those extra five?
You know how many times guys miss weight and still win?
It's big.
It's a big number.
When guys miss weight and wind up winning the fight, I believe...
Who was talking about that?
One of the...
One of the commentators might have been Dominick Cruz.
He was talking about guys missing weight and then winding up winning the fight because they have an advantage.
They didn't cut the weight.
We all know there's a certain point in time where you shouldn't lose any more weight.
But we also know there's a dark land where most people don't want to travel through, where you can make it through, where you can get to that point where you don't want to do it anymore.
You're fucking dying inside, but you stay in there an extra 20 minutes and you make the weight.
Or some people don't.
But the guy who doesn't, it's bad for your body to cut that much weight.
The guy who leaves those extra five pounds on his body, that's a big advantage.
You had a really interesting team with you the last time you were here.
They're called Neuroforce?
Yeah, Neuroforce One.
Without having people go back and listen to that podcast, give me this rundown of what they did in terms of your reaction times and all that sports specific neuro shit they were doing with you.
I say neuro shit because I'm a I don't know what the term is.
But it's fascinating listening to them talk about how they used real science and data to mark your performance.
Yeah, I think everything from like the morning by the time I wake up, I have the Omega wave.
And a lot of the credit that I do O2 is out at the US CPI with Roman.
The physiologist down there, and it was, you know, I wake up every morning, I use Omega Wave, which tells me, like, which gives me my heart rate ability.
Yeah, it suggests that when you wake up, the first thing you do before you brush your teeth or anything is you put this strap on it, and, you know, it's...
It's taking levels of your heart rate.
So it allows you and lets you know, according to your heart rate, how hard you're able to train that day.
So it gives it into like, you got your windows of trainability, like how hard you should go.
And it kind of measures a lot of your training.
So I do that every morning.
And then obviously I've done testing with them from balance, like just body scan, DEXA scans, like a bunch of things.
Crazy amounts of testing to kind of figure more out of like my biomechanics and things of that matter.
So I only have about three to four hard workouts like a week.
Because it's all according, because it's about you understanding your threshold.
And I think where a lot of fighters don't succeed is they exert that and then they want to fight that and then next you know they're on the ground or they're losing.
What I do down there is I do a lot of infrared lighting.
I do altitude pod capsules, the technology that they have.
There's certain headphones that helps activate everything in your body.
It's the new-age thing with a lot of pressure machines and things of that matter.
Doing a lot of mobility exercises.
It's crazy how powerful and how strong you become just through doing mobility and understanding posture.
So, you know, big shout out to my strength coach Andre Hicks and Kevin Longoria, Kareem Amin, and everybody down there because they're revolutionizing, man.
I feel like I'm ahead on the curve when it comes to understanding how to do a proper camp for MMA. Where I'm not extremely killing myself, I'm loving the sport through the process like it doesn't always have to be a crazy battle.
I've never heard anybody break it down that way, particularly the fact that I don't think I've ever heard anybody doing that where you have your opponent's walkout music, you have your walkout music.
You have a referee.
You do the whole thing like a fight.
I've never heard anybody do that, but that makes sense.
And particularly if you do it at the Apex Center, where there's no crowd, it is like doing it in your gym.
Yeah, because your nerves, like if for some reason, like your nerves, it's hard to digest your food when you're nervous, you know what I'm saying, when you're anxious to do something.
There's a guy that goes in there every time I fight and he's monitoring my heart rate every time like he's a slow down slow down and he'll tell the coach and the coaches will tell me like it's all there's a dude in there warming me up before I go train like at my gym like a personal trainer every single day do they give you anything specifically right after you're done training to sort of recovery anything for like replenish glycogen yeah Yeah, so that's immediately, what is it?
I think being a coach is probably the hardest job, man.
Because you've got to deal with pride and sometimes they leave you or not.
But anyways, if there's one thing that I could do and help people with, if I was a coach, would it be game planning and actually putting a game plan together and understanding...
Since we fought Demetrius and since I started having success.
Actually since Wilson Hayes.
So as soon as I lost to Benavidez, I fought Wilson Hayes and then since there and then it got a little more serious when I fought Demetrius and then so forth.
Not just that, but even for me, it's like stem cells.
I did stem cells in Columbia with BioAccelerator out in Columbia.
Six months ago, right after my fighting, man, I felt so good for this.
If I used to have a jacked up neck, stem cells, like they did a whole, you know, they did all the scans you could think of, you know, from x-rays to MRIs and whatnot.
And, you know, they would pinpoint, like, where my body was an ache.
And they started injecting stem cells on me, man, all over my neck.
Parts of my body that I've never experienced before.
Yeah, I don't know if it's the same level, because when I was explaining it to or talking to one of my friends about it, they said, what's the difference between that and what they're doing in Panama?
Like Dr. Neil Reardon, he has this clinic down there in Panama.
They send a lot of fighters down there as well.
I think they're allowed to do anything.
They can get buck wild.
They can fill you up with stem cells.
Whatever limitations they might have here in America, they have a fat syringe with them.
It didn't happen for two years, and two years later, people start growing hair, weird hair, on their chest and shit.
I mean, I don't think that's going to happen, but I think along the lines of all this medical experimentation, we're going to get some pretty spectacular results, and some of them are going to be bad.
Just makes sense.
Someone in some other country is going to take...
They probably already have.
They're probably taking some chances and...
Mixed a person with a crocodile or something.
I don't think they've probably done that in some places.
These last 10 months, last 10 weeks, things have been crazy.
It's a weird time to be alive.
Things are happening very rapidly.
From the invention of the cell phone to social media.
To the ability to share videos and for people to get information, for people to find out about world events, for people to get together and try to make change.
It's just a different world, man.
It's a different world, in good ways and in bad ways.
It's a different world.
People are more disconnected than ever while being more connected than ever.
I have hope man when I see like yesterday there was Part of the George Floyd protest in downtown LA had filled this it's a craziest picture man You see the picture of the street filled with people all nonviolent so all the the looting and all that shit seems to have stopped and now the people that remain seems to be they seem to be dedicated to change in a way that I can't remember anything like this in my life.
I think this man's murder has a real chance of changing the world and changing America, for sure.
I think it really does.
It has a chance in further bridging the divide between people and to get people to look at things in a better way.
Like, look how many people got together for this.
Look how many people.
I mean, it's It had the real bad parts in the beginning with the looting, but I don't think there's the same people.
I think those are people that are broke because COVID kept them locked up in their fucking house for a month at a time without any ability to make any money.
And I think people saw free shit and then everything got wild and it was jumping off and people were smashing windows and a lot of people just stole shit.
That's what I think.
But I don't think that's the same thing that's happening.
I think that's happening along with This protest, but the protest is pretty fucking amazing.
When you think that this, in our time, we've never had a moment like this where literally the whole country is getting together and saying things have to change and stop.
They're defunding the Minneapolis Police Department, man.
Yeah, I guess as a fighter, like, you don't, you don't, like, you ever, like, rough play with your friends when you're a little kid, and then all of a sudden there's, like, a mosh pit next to you, you know, you're freaking, you're, you know, you're, you're being suffocated by everybody's weight, like, that feeling?
Like, these cops, they think, you know, sometimes the people that are being arrested, they're fighting, man, because, dude, that's a lot of pressure on the neck, or that's a lot of pressure on the stomach, and things like that.
And also, the way the guy was lying down when he had a shin on his neck, he was lying with his neck against, like, this drain.
So this is like this like cement drain area and his neck is right there So his shin is on the top of his neck and then the drain area is the bottom.
It's fucking horrible It's horrible to watch man.
It's like you're watching a guy getting tortured to death Something has to be done.
Now, I don't think it's defund the police.
I think it's definitely get rid of anybody like that guy.
And it's retrain them.
Train them where they realize that there's a chance to do this correctly.
You have an amazing job.
Being a police officer is incredible responsibility.
And it takes an incredibly powerful person to do it and not abuse the power that you have.
Because people have a tendency when someone says why do I have to do that because I fucking told you I'm the cops like That's what they're doing when they have that kind of power.
They just go to it right away It's you you get you need exceptional people and there's a lot of people that aren't exceptional and Some of those become cops and you see these non-exceptional people who are cops who abuse the fuck out of the power that they're they've been given and That's the problem.
I don't think the problem is that we don't need cops.
Like, Jesus Christ, if someone's breaking into your house, you want to be able to call the cops.
If you've got a real problem in your life and, you know, there's something going wrong, you want to be able to call the cops.
But the cops have to have a better relationship with the people in their communities.
If I look at you completely objectively, even if I didn't know you and you're a great guy, and I always enjoy talking to you, but if I didn't know you, I'd be like, that motherfucker, name someone who's done more.
Name someone who won two world titles and a fucking gold medal in the Olympics in wrestling and did it all in the most technical of divisions.
There's a lot of people that think it should be GSP, and that's in the conversation.
He's in the conversation.
He's one of the greatest of all time.
Some people say, you guys must have forgot how good Anderson Silva was when he was in his prime.
That's true, too.
That's in the conversation, too.
But you are as well, man.
You really are.
I mean, whether you were joking around about it or not, you're in the conversation as one of the greatest combat sports athletes of all time.
And there's a real good argument that when you beat the guys who you beat, particularly beating Demetrius Johnson, who is untouchable, You know, beating Dominic Cruz the way you did, which is Dominic Cruz is always known for not getting hit.
And, you know, you hit him and you hit him a lot.
And then coming back from the Marlon Marais fight, holy shit, after that first round, to come back and dominate him and just glue yourself to him in the second and then put him away.
Fuck, man.
I mean, those are pretty, pretty powerful accomplishments.
Yeah, but the other one is, and there's actually, you know, potentially in the talks, like Ali's going to talk with Ryan Garcia's manager, possibly making a fight with...
Yeah, well even with PK karate was all the kicks were above the waist like a lot of the PK that's one of the one of the things that really defined really woke everyone's eyes up to the power of leg kicks was when Rick Rufus fought this Thai legend God damn it.
I'm gonna fuck up his name if I don't see it written out.
But this Thai guy, Rick was fucking him up in the beginning.
He's real fast and long and hitting him with spinning kicks and shit.
There's his name.
Try saying that name.
C-H-A-N-G-P-U-E-K. Put that on real quick, Jamie.
Because watch some of the action from that.
This dude came out and did the Y crew and everything.
And yeah, just take it from there.
And Rick Rufus was lighting him up with his hands.
Rick was really slick, and he was probably one of the most talented of all the kickboxers back then that were doing the above-the-waist style, but this dude just kept chopping at his legs, man, and chopping at his legs, and he hurt him.
That's what Rick hurt him at one point in time.
He caught him with the right hand, it looked like.
This is 1988. And this is actually when I had, oh, we heard him again, dropped him.
Did he kick him in the face on the way down, too?
I mean, he had him fucked up in that first round.
Then the fight goes on, the dude survives.
And this was like right around the time I was introduced to Muay Thai by this friend of mine that I was training with that was friends with this other dude who was, even back in 1988, was taking trips over to Thailand.
And he was learning from the Thais and fighting over there.
And he would come back with these like crazy gashes on his head from getting elbowed.
But I remember that was the first time anybody had ever kicked me in the leg.
And I was like, oh my god, it's so painful.
And so this is what happens with Rick Rufus.
Rick Rufus had this dude in all kinds of trouble.
But this dude, there he is.
He's chopping at those legs and chopping at those legs.
And Rick doesn't know what to do.
And he's chopping at those legs because Rick's never fought with leg kicks before.
If he did, he never fought a guy as good as this gentleman.
So this is the fight that's really known as the fight that changed kickboxing.
It changed martial arts because people understood what a devastating weapon tie kicks to the thighs are.
He goes across the front of the thighs and this dude just starts killing his thighs.
And what's really interesting is Rick's brother, Duke Rufus, is now one of the top MMA coaches in the world.
Look at them calling timeout.
They're making them sit in the corner and they're calling timeout.
Or I could return depending on the art that I really got to develop so I could go back to just a two-hour class in boxing or an hour and a half of boxing, an hour of just pure wrestling.
So you have the ability to do that, but there comes a time where you just gotta get in, maybe within eight to nine weeks, okay, you gotta transition.
Everything's just MMA specific and then having your partner.
Jose Aldo had a different style than Dominic.
You know what I'm saying?
And I was able to understand Dominic because he was a last-minute replacement the last four weeks.
And when you say that, like say if you're fighting someone who has like an unusual southpaw style, they have to, when they spar with you, they should be sparring from a southpaw style.
I know every detail in the UFC, from the security guard to Heidi.
I had a relationship with these people, with Jeff Nowitzki.
You know what I'm saying?
Without having to take a picture or a fan wants to see you, I'm giving back to the people that have been here the last, I don't know, what, five, six years?
And I could argue that—look, it's a dumb argument, because I also think that it's better to have a 25-foot octagon than it is to have a 30-foot octagon.
I think it's better to have it smaller so you can't get away.
If you're going to have a thing where someone can press someone against it, I think it should be smaller.
Think about this scientific approach that you guys put together for formulating your camps, whether from nutrition and training and recovery and all that stuff.
Now imagine doing the same sort of work with bringing you disciples.
Someone who puts the same amount of effort into finding fighters that are worthy of your kind of coaching.
Well, listen, brother, I've said it before, but I really mean it.
It's an honor to call your fights.
One of the coolest things about being a fan of the UFC and then being able to be a commentator is, like, I know I've experienced history.
You know, I've been there and I've, you know, I've had this incredible...
Where I get to talk during some of the greatest fights of all time and try to do justice to those fights and try to let people know how insanely impressive some of these performances that you've accomplished have been to me as a person who's been watching fights my whole life.
So as a fan and as a person who gets to do it professionally, it's been an honor.