June 8, 2020 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:15:28
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Henry Sahudo! | ||
| How are you, sir? | ||
| I'm doing good, Joe. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| What does it feel like? | ||
| What does it feel like having stepped back? | ||
| You step away, you get to look at it from a fresh perspective. | ||
| What does this feel like? | ||
| It feels good, man. | ||
| I think the biggest thing with me, Joe, is there's satisfaction in my life. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| I've done so much in the sport. | ||
| And I can compare myself a little bit to Daniel. | ||
| If Daniel would have beat Stipe Miocic and he would have retired on top, he could almost say retired as a two-division world champ. | ||
| And I don't feel like I have that chip on my shoulder. | ||
| As a wrestler, I retired from the Olympics at a very young age. | ||
| I decided to come back three years later, but it was already done. | ||
| I retired at the age of 21. And then now at the age of 33, I'm truly calling it quits unless there's a couple fights that if I do come back. | ||
| I like that word, unless. | ||
| I like that word. | ||
| Yeah, and as you know, before it was about the money a little bit with the UFC. And obviously, you know, everybody does have a price. | ||
| But I think there's a fight that I would really like in the UFC, and that would be against Alexander Volkanovski. | ||
| Really? | ||
| At 45? | ||
| 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. | ||
| This is a whole new mountain. | ||
| A chance to be a three-division world champion. | ||
| A chance to be a three-division world champion. | ||
| As you know, a lot of people have counted me out against Demetrius, against TJ, against Marlon. | ||
| Maybe it was you too, Joe. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| And I think that's what I love about it. | ||
| You can't find any evidence of me counting you out, sir. | ||
| Never. | ||
| So, I love that. | ||
| I love challenges. | ||
| Since I was a kid, I knew I was different. | ||
| I knew I was special. | ||
| What is it that you knew? | ||
| What separates you? | ||
| Oh my god, I think it's a couple of things. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I think that also goes back on the ability. | ||
| I would put that into the ability portion. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's a hell of a list, Joe. | ||
| That's a hell of a list. | ||
| You know, that's a hell of a list, 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. | ||
| But no one's ever put him away the way you did. | ||
| Yeah, and I think it's all about game planning. | ||
| I think the ability that I have, too, that separates me, too, is the fact that I'm Watch all my fights, man. | ||
| I fight everybody different. | ||
| Like, I really do, man. | ||
| There's times where I have to use wrestling as I did with the Beatrice. | ||
| Well, the Wilson Hayes fight's a great example. | ||
| You came out like a karate guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was like, holy shit, look at this! | ||
| You were like Wonderboy! | ||
| Sideway stamps, like, hands down. | ||
| You really fought like a karate guy. | ||
| And then when you caught him with that straight punch and dropped him, I was like, look at this shit! | ||
| This is crazy! | ||
| Like, you fought a different style. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Did the first round of your fight with Marlon Marais sort of open your eyes to like how effective that can be in a fight? | ||
| Absolutely, man. | ||
| We saw it this weekend. | ||
| We saw it this weekend. | ||
| You mentioned it actually. | ||
| And I was a little bummed out you mentioned it because a lot of people don't see those little details. | ||
| Those calf kicks, man. | ||
| You start to take out that lead leg, man. | ||
| You lose your mobility. | ||
| It's insane how we've had all these years of MMA, right? | ||
| 1993, the UFC starts. | ||
| Here we are in 2020. But it's really only been the last two years or so. | ||
| I give credit to Benson Henderson. | ||
| Because Benson Henderson was the first guy to really bring it to MMA. But for whatever reason, it wasn't as devastating when he was doing it. | ||
| I don't know if he was doing it differently, but there was no moment in a fight where he kicked someone's calf and you saw immediately them buckling. | ||
| But you're seeing that now with these guys. | ||
| Like, immediately one, two kicks, and their leg is semi-useless. | ||
| Yeah, you look at somebody like Justin Gaethje. | ||
| Justin Gaethje is... | ||
| Man, if people don't catch on to that, if Khabib don't catch on to that... | ||
| And he's in trouble. | ||
| And I know them both. | ||
| He said wide out in the open. | ||
| He said, when I fight Khabib, he goes, I'm not even going to try to kick him in his thighs. | ||
| I'm just going to kick him with that low calf kick. | ||
| He goes, I'm going to kick him four times. | ||
| He goes, after four times, he's fucked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he saw that. | ||
| You watch the fight with him and Etten Barbosa. | ||
| And Etten Barbosa, he's a high-level striker. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We saw two guys in one of the weight classes that you ruled over, Alex Perez and Jussie Formiga, this past weekend. | ||
| And Alex Perez stopped him with those low leg kicks. | ||
| Two UFCs in a row, we've seen guys get stopped with low leg kicks. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's crazy how prominent that technique has become. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, last week. | ||
| Last week, I forget who was fighting, but... | ||
| It was another stoppage because of leg kicks. | ||
| In that stoppage, the dude crushed both of his legs. | ||
| I apologize for not remembering the names. | ||
| I didn't call that fight either. | ||
| If I called it, I'd probably remember it. | ||
| But the low leg kick is just a gigantic factor. | ||
| When you were fighting Marlon Marais, it seemed like he was a bit of a step ahead of you in the first round. | ||
| But you made some serious adjustments in between. | ||
| It was like two different fights. | ||
| It was like the first round was like, damn, this is not going well for Henry. | ||
| And then going into the second round, like damn, this is not going well for Marlon. | ||
| Like you, it was a totally different fight. | ||
| It's like you figured the adjustment out, figured out what you needed to do, you stepped in further, you were closer, and you started attacking. | ||
| Yeah, and I think a lot of that too, Joe, and if I was... | ||
| I know when to fight and when to compete. | ||
| First, I went in there with a sprained ankle. | ||
| This is why I had my ankle tape. | ||
| And actually, Marlon's team had heard me scream on Tuesday night when all this happened. | ||
| So they knew I was somewhat injured. | ||
| When did you scream? | ||
| I twisted my ankle between the UFC mats. | ||
| That has some cheap tape. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was the fact that he was able to endure pain. | ||
| You don't hear that too often. | ||
| It's true though. | ||
| If you watch his fight with Ken Norton, he fought most of the fight with a broken jaw. | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| This is heavyweights, too, man. | ||
| Hell yeah, man. | ||
| That's probably a five-pound jaw, too, huh? | ||
| Heavyweights, man. | ||
| He fought big heavyweights. | ||
| I mean, George Foreman in his prime. | ||
| Joe Frazier, when Joe Frazier was in his prime. | ||
| Ah, same example. | ||
| George Foreman, Louis Watt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| He had no idea how much pain Ali could endure. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And how much movement Ali had going for him. | ||
| Ali was so slick. | ||
| There's a famous video of Ali with his hands on the ropes and George is just winging punches at him and Ali is using the ropes. | ||
| He's holding on to the ropes and using the ropes. | ||
| And he's not even putting his hands up at all. | ||
| And the most murderous puncher up to that time since Sonny Liston. | ||
| In the history of the heavyweight division. | ||
| You got like, Joe Frazier was a power puncher. | ||
| Joe Lewis was a sniper. | ||
| He was an excellent power puncher. | ||
| But George Foreman would lift people in the air. | ||
| He would hit people. | ||
| Like, you ever see his first knockout with Joe Frazier? | ||
| Yeah, he had knocked him on, then he fought Ali, right after he beat Frazier, yeah. | ||
| When he fought Frazier, he literally lifted him in the air with a punch. | ||
| That's how hard Joe Frazier would hit. | ||
| And Ali, no hands up, just holding onto the ropes, doing this shit, sitting in front of him, leaning back, doing this shit. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Yeah, but imagine how many of those punches, even though they get hit in the face, imagine how many of those punches. | ||
| George Foreman was thrown at him and then Ali was just laughing and talking to him. | ||
| It's a certain mind power, man. | ||
| It's a mind power. | ||
| That you cannot... | ||
| You just cannot replicate, man. | ||
| It's got to be in you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or you have to have developed it over time and have complete confidence in it. | ||
| I think you can build mental toughness. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| But I think you have to be very conscious about it. | ||
| I think it has to be done over time. | ||
| Some people build mental toughness because of their environment. | ||
| Or because of how they grew up or some of the bad things they faced in their life. | ||
| And some people build mental toughness out of a decision. | ||
| They make a decision to be mentally tough. | ||
| And then they actually cultivate that. | ||
| They work on that. | ||
| I think it's a mixture of both. | ||
| And this is why sometimes I respect more of the upper middle class when they become champions. | ||
| Especially in a rough sport like wrestling or MMA. It's because I feel like minorities are people that have gone through adversity. | ||
| It's like, man, we have an advantage because it's through the nurture side of things. | ||
| How you were raised, man. | ||
| I'm one of seven kids, Joe, raised by a single mother. | ||
| I was the youngest, man, so I was a kid that was picked on. | ||
| It's different when you're the smallest in an immigrant family. | ||
| It's like, dude, you're the last one to eat. | ||
| You're going to get beat up pretty much the majority of your childhood. | ||
| You start getting to that age where you can kind of fight back. | ||
| So, a lot of it, I guess, you owe through the nature and nurture, obviously genetics, your mother and father, but also through the nature side of it. | ||
| How you were raised, man. | ||
| How tough are you? | ||
| Me, as a kid growing up, I remember as a family, hot summer days would come around. | ||
| We didn't eat, man. | ||
| We didn't eat, man. | ||
| Going to school was a place for us to, like, at least I could see. | ||
| My family, they don't talk about that stuff so much. | ||
| They're a little more private. | ||
| But for me, it was like, dude, I get a chance to eat lunch and breakfast. | ||
| Well, that was a big problem with this COVID shit, where they shut schools down. | ||
| And a lot of kids are in that same position, where that was their opportunity to eat. | ||
| And some people were just not aware of that, that that's where a lot of people got their food, was at school. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And I was one of those kids. | ||
| So if there's any of those kids or any of those guys that are adults now, it's like, hey, man, be happy for that. | ||
| Because I tell you what's made me has been adversity, man. | ||
| It's understanding that grind, that grit, man, of being angry and things like that. | ||
| And if you're able to challenge that into something constructive... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Joe, I'm a living example, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You are. | |
| You are. | ||
| Look at that flag behind you. | ||
| I represented that flag. | ||
| You did. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And ironically, you know, my mom came to this country, you know, maybe not the most political way. | ||
| But she came to this country to live the American dream, and her American dream was just to make sure her kids... | ||
| Well, it's a timing thing, you know, because my grandparents came over here too, but they came over here when it was easy. | ||
| You just came over, and you just signed some shit, and you were in. | ||
| You know, in the early 1900s. | ||
| Look, if that's how it was today, you wouldn't have the kind of illegal immigration you have today. | ||
| This country was founded on people coming over here because it was easy. | ||
| It was a better place to live. | ||
| You have a better life for your family. | ||
| But there was no hoops to jump through. | ||
| My grandparents just arrived. | ||
| They just came here and moved in. | ||
| I mean, they didn't have to take any serious tests or do any crazy shit. | ||
| They just came in. | ||
| You know, they didn't have to prove that they had some special skills. | ||
| Like now, it's very difficult for people to come over here and to get citizenship. | ||
| No, it is. | ||
| And I do believe, even as an immigrant, that there is a pathway to citizenship. | ||
| Because you're right, times do change. | ||
| And you have to adjust to whatever political power is going on right now. | ||
| I just happen to be fortunate that my mom did it. | ||
| Yeah, your mom did it, yeah. | ||
| I said, she crossed. | ||
| I'm here now. | ||
| I think guys like you are amazing sources of inspiration for other people that are struggling. | ||
| And this is crazy, Joe. | ||
| So I'm going to mention something to you. | ||
| It's like my mom, both of my parents came here illegally. | ||
| I'll just say it, man. | ||
| You guys forgive me. | ||
| Don't tell Trump. | ||
| Well, my mom was granted her citizenship. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Maybe you might get granted as an American. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would do it. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| And anybody says they wouldn't, you're lying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're lying. | ||
| 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. | ||
| This is the place. | ||
| I think the best example, man, I hate to use the example because he's burned a lot of people, is Don King. | ||
| Well, Don King is maybe not the best example because he was born in America, first of all, and he's a murderer, twice, twice over. | ||
| You know, he's an example of a different time. | ||
| And, you know, you talk to guys like Mike Tyson, he'll tell you that that guy played me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| Yeah, you're probably right. | ||
| Maybe Don King. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He's from a different era. | ||
| I feel like if the internet was around, well, you know, who knows? | ||
| Maybe he'd be president today. | ||
| Look at our president, man. | ||
| This is why, dude, Trump is the example of the American dream. | ||
| In many ways, yeah. | ||
| A faulty version of it, but yeah, in many ways, yeah. | ||
| I think the other person that I would- Actually, probably not the version of the American dream because his dad was rich and he gave him money. | ||
| Like, he started off, his dad gave him millions of dollars to start businesses. | ||
| Right, but he turned that into billions, too. | ||
| He did, but he also went bankrupt a bunch of times, too. | ||
| You got me, Joe! | ||
| It's tricky. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Their parents wanted a better life. | ||
| They came over here from Italy and from Ireland. | ||
| Yeah, it's a trip, man. | ||
| When you talk about things like that, you know who I think of a lot when you talk about the American Dream? | ||
| In my opinion, I feel like he's somewhat misunderstood in our MMA community or just in general, man, is Ali Abdelaziz, man. | ||
| A dude that came from Egypt, you know, came to America. | ||
| I remember Ali, I've known him for a minute since 2004. He would sell FUBU. He was just hustling the whole time out of Colorado Springs. | ||
| Now he's got over 150 fighters. | ||
| He's got five champions in the UFC. This dude is... | ||
| When I think of the American Dream, I really do think of somebody like Like Ollie. | ||
| Well, he's a very controversial guy. | ||
| He is. | ||
| He is. | ||
| But his clients love him. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You know, it's hard to deny that. | ||
| His clients love him. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of people that say a lot of wild shit about him. | ||
| I don't know how much of it's true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| Dude, I was eating lunch and dinner with Marlon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Were you really? | |
| Yeah, not too long. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is like maybe... | |
| Four months after my fight. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure it must have stung, but out of the respect for him. | ||
| And I told that to Ali. | ||
| I'm like, Ali, man, these dudes are good. | ||
| Because I was picking on Frankie Edgar, too. | ||
| But I was like, man, you're next, dude. | ||
| You're going to bend the knee. | ||
| And I was like, Ali, these dudes are going to want to fight me, man. | ||
| There's two against one. | ||
| Who's back? | ||
| He's like, my brother. | ||
| He's like, you think they're going to do that when I'm here, man? | ||
| He's like, these guys respect as much as you, dude. | ||
| I'm just like, huh. | ||
| And then we sat down. | ||
| It was just like nothing ever happened, man. | ||
| Well, that's very cool that Marlon has that kind of character that he could sit down with you after that fight. | ||
| That's very cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Marlon's an interesting guy, man. | ||
| He's one of those guys that you wonder, is he too big for that division? | ||
| How much weight is that man cutting? | ||
| He's so fucking big. | ||
| To see him get down to 135, you look how shredded he is. | ||
| What do you walk around at? | ||
| He looks like he walks around about 160-something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, he's big, and I personally think that Marlon could hurt some people at 145 pounds. | ||
| I think so, too. | ||
| Yeah, it's that risk versus reward. | ||
| Like, when do you go up? | ||
| When do you stay down? | ||
| Like, how much are you beating your body up? | ||
| And then you got some guys who go down later in their career. | ||
| Barbosa is a good example. | ||
| Barbosa in his last fight. | ||
| I thought he got robbed. | ||
| I thought he won that decision. | ||
| And he got down to 145. That's not always the answer, Joe. | ||
| I mean, look at me, I was at 125 pounds, and could I still make it? | ||
| Yeah, I could still make it. | ||
| But the fatigue that it'd bring to me, like, I think the psychology side, too, of cutting weight, like, going down is not always the answer. | ||
| I mean, I started having my best success when I decided, like, hey, man, I'm just sick of cutting weight, man. | ||
| I'm getting ready to go up and, you know, challenge myself at 135 pounds. | ||
| What you hear from the naysayers, it's like, man, you're too small, man. | ||
| You're not ready for some power like that. | ||
| I'm just like, no, I don't think so, man. | ||
| I think there's an advantage in me for me to feel well. | ||
| If I feel well and I feel healthy with my speed, you know, I'm a short, compact fighter. | ||
| It's like, man, trust me, I don't need that much. | ||
| As long as I land, I'm going to hurt you, man. | ||
| You can be 10 pounds heavier than me. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| There's been a lot of guys who've moved up and it's been the answer. | ||
| Jorge Masvidal. | ||
| Yeah, Masvidal, Calvin. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even Kelvin has success. | ||
| Kelvin, I still think if I was... | ||
| I mean, if someone gets in Kelvin's ear, I'm like, Kelvin, we got to do this the right way. | ||
| There's a lot of guys way bigger than you that make 170. I think at 170, he could be a world champion. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| He's a scary man when he's in shape and motivated, but he just gets big. | ||
| Yeah, I think, man, he loves... | ||
| Loves food? | ||
| He loves Mary Jane! | ||
|
unidentified
|
He loves that too. | |
| He loves that too. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's the... | ||
| You think that's what it is? | ||
| Yeah, Calvin is, dude. | ||
| He's one of my best friends, man. | ||
| Like, we become super, super close and he's a very gifted, very gifted human being, man. | ||
| Like, he's... | ||
| When you see him, looks are deceiving. | ||
| No, he doesn't have enough, you know, muscle definition. | ||
| But, man, the dude's athletic ability, what he could do, his counter-punching. | ||
| It's like, it's ridiculous. | ||
| He's got one of the best straight left hands in the business. | ||
| The one he dropped Bisping with, like, Jesus. | ||
| It's a piston, man. | ||
| Yeah, but I also feel like, and I see that, I always think, okay, Calvin can make 170. I agree with you, Joe. | ||
| But what about that happiness portion? | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Will he be happy throughout that process? | ||
| Maybe he'll be happy when he lies in bed with that big-ass gold belt. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Maybe that's what will make him happy. | ||
| I got two of them, so I just don't know, Joe. | ||
| Atta gold medal! | ||
| Atta gold medal! | ||
| You're the youngest guy to ever win a gold medal in the Olympics for wrestling? | ||
| Yes, in 2008. That's amazing. | ||
| In 2016, Kyle Snyder, who, if he does decide to make a transition to the UFC, a guy like John Jones would be in trouble. | ||
| You think? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, the dude is. | ||
| Just the reason why I beat Demetrius. | ||
| You know, obviously, I beat Demetrius. | ||
| And it was... | ||
| Joe, I wouldn't be mad. | ||
| I'm bringing this up right now. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How old is he now? | ||
| He's young. | ||
| I want to say he's 24, about to be 25. Interesting. | ||
| And does he have any desire to fight? | ||
| He's mentioned it. | ||
| He's mentioned it. | ||
| Does he have any experience in stand-up at all? | ||
| And that's the biggest thing, man. | ||
| A guy like that, you would have to groom him properly. | ||
| You don't want to stick a guy like that straight into MMA. Put him into boxing for at least a couple years. | ||
| This is what I did. | ||
| I boxed for three years. | ||
| I did amateur boxing. | ||
| I competed. | ||
| I didn't do any jiu-jitsu, none of that, because I was in love with the sport of boxing. | ||
| My original goal... | ||
| And this is crazy. | ||
| This is how crazy I think, Joe. | ||
| I was trying to make the Olympic team right after 2008. For boxing. | ||
| For boxing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And the reason why that idea came up is because Deontay Wilder did it. | ||
| Within, I think it was four years, he was able to make... | ||
| A year and a half. | ||
| A year and a half from boxing wins a bronze medal in the Olympics. | ||
| Crazy, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was like, dude, if that dude can do it, give me a few years. | |
| When he told me that, I'm like, that is one of the craziest stories I've ever heard in my life. | ||
| Ridiculous. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| 209 pounds? | ||
| 209 pounds. | ||
| That's a heavyweight. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| And, you know, he's fighting Tyson Fury. | ||
| He was an enormous heavyweight. | ||
| And, like, he hits guys, man, like nobody else. | ||
| What Tyson had over him, though, that he showed in the tactical side of it in the second fight, was... | ||
| His boxing, his understanding of the game is so complex. | ||
| It's so much different. | ||
| Whereas Deontay has just this ferocious power and he figures out how to put it on you. | ||
| But when you can knock out a guy like Luis Ortiz with a fucking right hand to the forehead, he looked like a shot. | ||
| And a fucking elite boxer. | ||
| He hit him on the forehead and Ortiz, just his legs went out and you see him going, what the fuck just happened? | ||
| Forehead! | ||
| Who punches that hard? | ||
| Deontay's just got crazy, crazy power. | ||
| But, fact remains, he did it after a year and a half, and he won a bronze medal in the Olympics, which is just spectacular. | ||
| Yeah, it's nuts, man. | ||
| So that's where the original goal came from, but I just saw, like, it just wasn't realistic for me at that time, like, especially at my weight class. | ||
| Like, these dudes have been doing this since they were four years old. | ||
| There's a different speed. | ||
| And I was sparring with a lot of these guys. | ||
| I'm like, damn, man, this is like... | ||
| It's nuts, man. | ||
| It's nuts when you're at the lower weight because now you're dealing with not just in heavyweight. | ||
| You can somewhat get away with it because if you might be faster, more athletic. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But at the lower weight classes, man, there is speed. | ||
| You got the dudes from Philadelphia, from California, like all these Mexicans, blacks, whites that are just like, hey, man. | ||
| They've been doing it forever. | ||
| This is a different sport, man. | ||
| And I've been humbled before. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Did you back out of that fight? | ||
| I can't. | ||
| I remember cutting weight. | ||
| That's probably one of my worst weight cuts ever. | ||
| I had a cold lip. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I just wasn't doing it right. | ||
| And that finally kicked me in the ass. | ||
| So imagine that. | ||
| UFC debut, and I told Sean Shelby that I'm done. | ||
| I ain't never fighting again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's crazy. | |
| But let me ask you this. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Is that the idea? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| And now, looking at it now, it's just... | ||
| It's dumb, dude. | ||
| It's like, you're... | ||
| It's better to feel good than to feel bigger. | ||
| Being bigger is... | ||
| Marlon was bigger than me. | ||
| A lot of these dudes were bigger than me, but it didn't... | ||
| Dominic was bigger than you. | ||
| Dominic, too. | ||
| Even TJ. Even TJ, when we did make flyweights, somehow he... | ||
| I was 146, so imagine that. | ||
| I made 125 pounds, 124 pounds. | ||
| TJ made the weight, right? | ||
| Did he make the weight? | ||
| Yeah, he made the weight. | ||
| He was 24, too. | ||
| I ballooned up to 146 pounds. | ||
| TJ ballooned up to 150 pounds. | ||
| Dude, he looked worse cutting weight. | ||
| He looked worse showing up for the weigh-ins than I've ever seen anybody since Travis Luter. | ||
| When Travis Luter missed weight against Anderson Silva. | ||
| Travis Luter missed weight against Anderson Silva. | ||
| I'll never forget this because I saw him when he missed the weight. | ||
| Then I saw him. | ||
| I was backstage while he was trying to continue to cut because they gave him time to make weight. | ||
| And he couldn't lift his legs up to walk to the scale. | ||
| He was shuffling, like shuffling towards the scale. | ||
| His lips were all cracked. | ||
| They're all sucked in. | ||
| His face was sucked in. | ||
| He was literally on death's door. | ||
| You could see it. | ||
| If that guy was released from a prison, like an overseas prison, I'd be like, oh my god, they were torturing him. | ||
| He was about to die. | ||
| I've never seen a guy look so bad. | ||
| He looked so fucking bad. | ||
| And people forgot about Travis Luter. | ||
| Travis Luter was a beast, man. | ||
| He had some of the best jujitsu that anybody had ever seen in the octagon up to that point. | ||
| Everybody he fought, he submitted. | ||
| He was so fucking good. | ||
| But he, for whatever reason, when he had that big fight with Anderson Silva, he just couldn't keep it together. | ||
| And I believe he had Anderson Silva down at one point in time in that fight, too. | ||
| Anderson Silva caught him in a triangle and elbowed him off of his back. | ||
| I believe that's how the fight got stopped. | ||
| Travis was the worst I've ever seen for someone struggling to make weight. | ||
| Yeah, but even you think about guys like that, guys that could have potentially become a world champion. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So what happens when somebody loses? | ||
| What are the stages, the emotions when somebody loses? | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| It's like... | ||
| There's a recovery process when people lose. | ||
| I hate to say this, but I'll bring up Marlon Marais again. | ||
| Because I feel like I gave the blueprint. | ||
| If you watch me fight him, then you watch Aldo fight him. | ||
| These guys, when they lose, they go through a certain psychology thing. | ||
| And you can see them as a fighter. | ||
| Every time I do fight, I always look at their demeanor. | ||
| I always pay attention to their demeanor. | ||
| From the first round to the second round to the third. | ||
| As far as it goes. | ||
| And I've noticed that Marlon's demeanor was changing. | ||
| I've noticed that in my fights when people's demeanor changes. | ||
| To me, that's a breaking point that the mind has. | ||
| So I was able to see that with Marlon. | ||
| What did you see? | ||
| You saw that? | ||
| He was slowing down. | ||
| I saw he was slowing down. | ||
| His face starts to slouch. | ||
| His shoulders start to drop. | ||
| And then that's when I... You really can't see in the video, but that's when I started talking to him. | ||
| I'm like, all right, man, you ready? | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| Bring it. | ||
| Give it to me. | ||
| You know, this is during the fight. | ||
| Was he talking back? | ||
| No, he wasn't. | ||
| He wasn't. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Man, you're screwed, man. | ||
| Therapy. | ||
| Therapy. | ||
| Have you gotten that? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But you're still conscious. | ||
| You still want to go, but you can't. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Your body shut off. | ||
| In front of 20,000 people. | ||
| You know, with Joe Rogan commentating. | ||
| I mean, it's miserable and it's terrible. | ||
| But it's a certain therapy. | ||
| It's a certain acceptance that you got to go through. | ||
| In order for you to come out of that. | ||
| What did you do afterwards? | ||
| I let go of coaches, man. | ||
| I let go of coaches. | ||
| I started traveling the world. | ||
| I mean, I went to Asia. | ||
| I went to... | ||
| What did you do in Asia? | ||
| I went out to Singapore. | ||
| I went to Evolve. | ||
| I spent about a month out there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah? | |
| Just to train? | ||
| Just to train. | ||
| Just to go find the best minds of mixed martial arts and just of basis, too. | ||
| I went out to... | ||
| To Holland for a month. | ||
| I would go out to Brazil. | ||
| What did you do in Holland? | ||
| In Holland, I trained with Paula Moth. | ||
| He's Andy Sauer's coach. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| Yeah, so I was with them and just training with them and just humbling yourself, I guess I could say. | ||
| And obviously, throughout this whole time, it's like, man, I was on a quest because I still had Demetrius Johnson. | ||
| I wasn't going to retire from the sport. | ||
| Without me giving him a fair shake. | ||
| So I knew that it had something to do, not just with the body, but with the mind. | ||
| It's almost like, you gotta come out of this, man. | ||
| Almost like, you can call it a mistake or whatnot, but the reality is, is you lost, man. | ||
| There's holes in your games. | ||
| So I always tell people, like, don't face it. | ||
| I'm sorry, don't fake it till you make it. | ||
| I don't like that. | ||
| You have to face this shit. | ||
| Once you face it, this is when you start to create, man, freaking overflowing success. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I see these holes, and I know where he hit me. | ||
| I know where there was mistakes made. | ||
| I gotta tighten those up. | ||
| How do I do that? | ||
| Yeah, Dimitri was so good everywhere, even in the wrestling. | ||
| I can even tell you as an Olympic athlete, even in the wrestling, his timing... | ||
| Was really good. | ||
| So I don't even think it was so much Demetrius Johnson. | ||
| Obviously it was a distance game, but it comes down to such, when you fight a guy like that, it comes down to such the minor details, man. | ||
| And I think the minor detail for me was composure. | ||
| And I remember right before I fought the dude, I noticed that like my corner, my team, that they were extremely nervous, Joe. | ||
| Like my team, dude, you imagine fighting somebody like Demetrius Johnson and your coach is not having faith in you? | ||
| And I'm like, what the fuck? | ||
| I'm like, shit, man, are you kidding me? | ||
| Well, he was a ghost back then. | ||
| Demetrius was a ghost. | ||
| I mean, he wasn't there for you. | ||
| You would be swinging at air. | ||
| He was just off to the side, then he was kneeing you in the body and punching you in the face and kicking your leg on the way out. | ||
| And we should even say in the second fight, the fight that you won, he got you with that low calf kick and your leg went numb. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a great attitude right there. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| That's a champion's mind. | ||
| And even before... | ||
| So I'm getting ready to walk out. | ||
| I'm getting ready to fight Demetrius Johnson. | ||
| 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... | ||
| You gotta coach your coaches. | ||
| Yeah, in some way, man. | ||
| And it's crazy to say that. | ||
| So then right when I'm getting ready, check this out, Joseph. | ||
| Right when I'm getting ready to walk out, you know, right before I walk out first, I was going to walk out and then Demetrius. | ||
| And I still noticed my coach was still a little nervous. | ||
| And I looked at him. | ||
| I said, hey, guys, remember composure, man, composure. | ||
| Like I was so ready for this, dude. | ||
| So then I go in there. | ||
| I get kicked in the first 30 seconds. | ||
| Dude, my leg starts to wobble. | ||
| And so forth. | ||
| You know, it was a survival round. | ||
| I allow him to win. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| I think he won. | ||
| I think he won the first. | ||
| I won the second. | ||
| He won the third. | ||
| And then I believe I won the fourth and I won the fifth. | ||
| And then after this whole thing, check this out, Joe. | ||
| Demetri Johnson was on Ariel Hawane. | ||
| And then Ariel Hawane asked him. | ||
| He was like, hey, Demetri, just one last question. | ||
| He was like, what's one thing that surprised you about Henry? | ||
| And Demetrius Johnson said, well, I knew he was going to be fast. | ||
| I knew he was strong. | ||
| But there's one thing that really did surprise me with Henry. | ||
| It was the fact that he was so relaxed. | ||
| So it's these tactical things. | ||
| And everybody that you fight is completely different. | ||
| You can have a certain word that you can put up here. | ||
| But I knew that being composed and relaxed and not overreacting to Demetrius Johnson... | ||
| That that would win me the fight for this fight. | ||
| And there's a lot more to it. | ||
| It was me knowing what to fight and knowing what to compete. | ||
| It's me being a little theatrical, like bumping my fist, like conveying the judges. | ||
| Those little things that you learn as a veteran of competition, that you can even convey the judges. | ||
| So there's even acting going on, Joe. | ||
| I'm telling you guys all my secrets here. | ||
| But in reality, there is, man. | ||
| I'm just a winner. | ||
| The only thing I just know how to do is know how to win. | ||
| How are you gonna step away from this? | ||
| Come on, Henry! | ||
| How are you gonna do this? | ||
| Show me the money! | ||
| I'm torn. | ||
| Like I said in the beginning, man, I feel both ways. | ||
| I'm happy when a fighter gets out on top of the game like you. | ||
| One of my favorite boxing stories of all time is Marvin Hagler. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Because he fought Sugar Ray Leonard. | ||
| I think he got robbed to this day. | ||
| I think he won the decision. | ||
| They gave it to Sugar Ray, and then he... | ||
| Backed away. | ||
| That's sage. | ||
| What you got here? | ||
| You smoking that show? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, bro. | |
| No. | ||
| You light it up to kill the demons in the room. | ||
| This Native American lady gave me this. | ||
| She came in to talk to us about... | ||
| I got in this long kick of reading about Native American history. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They actually... | ||
| A lot of them refer to themselves as American Indians. | ||
| And then this lady came in and educated me on a lot of the issues and brought me some sage to clear out all the bad spirits. | ||
| Yeah, no, I believe in a lot of these rituals. | ||
| Actually, not too long ago, I was actually with Uncle Mike. | ||
| Yeah, you told me that. | ||
| With Mike Tyson and... | ||
| Get rid of demons right now, bro. | ||
| Demons be gone. | ||
| Don't start shaking back there, man. | ||
| No, we'll be alright. | ||
| Jamie's no demon. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| Yeah, but I was able to... | ||
| Because, you know, as you know, Mike has always talked about the toad. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I believe you've done the toad, too. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Or, you could just get a synthetic version of it. | ||
| Colorado River Toad. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| Sonoran Desert Toad. | ||
| Yeah, it's Sonoran. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And you can find the center of the universe through the excretions of this toad's body. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my God. | |
| It's a trip, Joe. | ||
| It's a trip. | ||
| Have you done anything before this? | ||
| Before you did this, have you had any experiences with psychedelics? | ||
| Yeah, I've done mushrooms and obviously high smoke, which I don't know where all the Mary Jane is. | ||
| It's right here, bro. | ||
| You want something? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| You're retired. | ||
| Yeah, why not, man? | ||
| Come on, Jeff Nowitzki. | ||
| Leave him alone. | ||
| Novitski actually wanted everybody to be able to. | ||
| He's one of the first guys to say it's nonsense. | ||
| It's not a performance enhancer. | ||
| Although with Nick Diaz, I think it might be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think with Nick Diaz, it might actually be a performance enhancer. | ||
| I really think so, man. | ||
| When he fought Gomi, they said he had to have gotten high. | ||
| He had so much weed in his system when they tested him that he had to have gotten high right before the fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Light that up, Joe. | ||
| You puff-puff pass, or...? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| So, I'm going to share my story with you, Joe. | ||
| And I want you to share yours with me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| What type of leaf is this? | ||
| Well, that's tobacco on the outside, so it's a blunt. | ||
| And then inside, it's the weed. | ||
| I get this from Speed Weed. | ||
| Shout out to my man, Gino. | ||
| Anyway, so check this out. | ||
| You imagine doing the tour with somebody like Mike? | ||
| I get high with Mike and I got nervous. | ||
| I'm nervous when I meet him. | ||
| He was one of my heroes. | ||
| When I was a kid, Mike Tyson was the fucking man. | ||
| I mean, in a way that it's hard for people to convey today to understand what a cultural figure Mike Tyson was in like 1986. It's hard to convey. | ||
| No one's going to understand. | ||
| Youngest ever heavyweight champion. | ||
| Knocks out Trevor Burbick when he's 20 years old. | ||
| The same guy that beat Ali, right? | ||
| Trevor Burbick beat Ali late in his career when it was real sad. | ||
| It was a real sad fight. | ||
| It was a real sad fight. | ||
| But it's touching. | ||
| Remember when Ali went in the ring and gave Mike a little pep talk? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know? | ||
| And then Mike went out there and knocked that dude out in the first round. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Priceless. | ||
| Yeah, Muhammad Ali's like, fuck this dude out for me, will you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| But anyways, to get back to that, Joe. | ||
| So, you know, I've actually been shadowing Mike Tyson for like the last... | ||
| I'm good friends with his manager, Rob Hickman. | ||
| And just the stuff that they're doing at Tyson Ranch, man, is pretty cool, man. | ||
| Yeah, it's really cool, right? | ||
| Yeah, they're bringing medicine to the world. | ||
| So, Mike, I've been on this podcast. | ||
| He's always talked about the toad. | ||
| I was like, alright, you know, so I became good friends with, I call him Uncle Mike, man, because he's just, you know, he scolds me a lot. | ||
| Every time he sees me, he's always, you know, he'll compliment me, but then he'll scold me at the same time. | ||
| So he always talked about the Torah. | ||
| I'm just like, well, let's do it then, Mike. | ||
| Let's do it, Uncle Mike. | ||
| So he's like, man, dude. | ||
| You sure you want? | ||
| I'm like, yeah, man, you've been talking about it for a minute. | ||
| So, you know, so we go out, we go on this, you know, they have this whole rural night settlement with rituals or whatnot. | ||
| And we go out to Antigua, which is an island off the Caribbean. | ||
| We have a, I forget what they're called, the person that... | ||
| Shaman? | ||
| Yeah, shaman, I'm sorry. | ||
| And he's out there, and Mike goes first. | ||
| So imagine this, Mike Tyson does it. | ||
| Mike Tyson, he's doing it. | ||
| He's going a bit crazy, man. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That brought me back to my mom's love, man. | ||
| So it like resurrected something in me. | ||
| And I was crying. | ||
| I was asking for forgiveness. | ||
| I was speaking in Spanish. | ||
| Mom, perdóname. | ||
| Mom, forgive me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| It was something scary in some ways because it takes you out of your body. | ||
| It's almost like you're in judgment day and you're the one that's being convicted and you're the judge too. | ||
| And it's telling you but it's giving you this certain peace. | ||
| It's like you're so dead that you're alive. | ||
| It's a trip, Joe. | ||
| I don't know which ones you had, but this is what I can share and what I can experience. | ||
| It was cool, man, because I was able to do it with special people. | ||
| I did it with Kelvin. | ||
| We all did it. | ||
| It was already formally planned. | ||
| I know my brother back there, my mentor, probably pissed at me because they look out for me a lot. | ||
| But, man, it was something that, as an adult, you have the rights to make these decisions and share if it's good. | ||
| And I felt like the toad was... | ||
| Probably one of the best things that's happened to me, like honestly, because it makes you realize and reflect on what truly matters. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Probably made me a better comedian. | ||
| Probably made me a better podcaster. | ||
| Also, it's been a minute. | ||
| When did you do this for the first time? | ||
| The first time I did it was early 2000s. | ||
| So I guess we're looking at like 2002-ish, somewhere around then. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was like the first time I did it. | ||
| Last time I did it was about two years ago. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But they could have been like a world-beater. | ||
| You know, everyone knows that guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And what is wrong with that guy? | ||
| Well, that guy's got one aspect of your two-part thing that you were talking about. | ||
| Heart and ability, right? | ||
| He's got one aspect. | ||
| He's got the ability. | ||
| But he's got a missing part, and he doesn't want to look at it. | ||
| Because if he wanted to look at it, he would concentrate entirely on that, and he would get better at that. | ||
| But it's hard. | ||
| It's hard to look at yourself. | ||
| Psychedelics let you look at yourself like, hey, stupid, look at you. | ||
| Remember the last time I did DMT, there was a string of jokers, like jesters with the bells on, dancing in front of me going like this. | ||
| Fuck you! | ||
| Just openly mocking me. | ||
| I was like, oh, that must be what I need. | ||
| I must need that. | ||
| I'm like, that's good. | ||
| That's good to see. | ||
| Yeah, it's definitely an ego check, man. | ||
| Big time. | ||
| Dissolves it. | ||
| Man, like with Mike, he loves it, dude. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He owes it to the tone. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| He said that's been a big reason why he's changed his life. | ||
| Mike wasn't doing so well until he tried this. | ||
| He talks about it all the time on his podcast. | ||
| It gives you an opportunity to shift. | ||
| It's healed drug addicts. | ||
| I mean, drug addicts have gone from doing all kinds of crazy things where they try to toe and they completely just left everything. | ||
| Guys that they left almost like a dead man walking to, hey, he's alive again. | ||
| He's here with us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And it's insanely effective, but ruthless. | ||
| It's like a 24-hour experience. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god. | |
| Look at this. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| At the same time. | ||
| Don't spoil it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was trying to figure out how to say it. | |
| Yeah, you did a good job. | ||
| Yeah, that didn't give away too much enough. | ||
| Goddamn. | ||
| There's something about... | ||
| 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. | ||
| In combat, in combat sports. | ||
| You are one of the greatest of all time for sure. | ||
| Olympic gold medalist, two-division world champion. | ||
| That's unheard of and you're doing it all in this super technical division. | ||
| Both of them. | ||
| 25 and 35. Super technical divisions. | ||
| Everybody's a wizard. | ||
| And we saw that this weekend, man. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| What a weekend for the Bantamweight division, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's exciting, man. | ||
| There's a lot of good people out there. | ||
| The resurrection, too, of Cody. | ||
| Dude, Cody looked so good. | ||
| He didn't just look so good. | ||
| He looked so fucking fast. | ||
| So fast and technical. | ||
| I mean, it was super impressive, but so was Aljamain Sterling. | ||
| Aljamain Sterling. | ||
| Choking out Sanhagen like that and being able to do it in under two minutes, that's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, that is, man. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| And especially the guy who he beat and how he beat. | ||
| Sanhagen? | ||
| Sanhagen's a beast. | ||
| Yeah, he's the real dude, man. | ||
| That was the fight that I was thinking on the card was going to be the most difficult to call. | ||
| I was like, who's going to win that one? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Because they're both so good. | ||
| And Sanhagen's just surging. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But Aljo just shut it all down, man. | |
| The way he did it. | ||
| Just so intense. | ||
| Like he hits a new level. | ||
| You know how sometimes a fighter will just hit a new level? | ||
| Now when you think about him, it's probably hard for you because that's your division. | ||
| Yeah, but again, his wrestling... | ||
| I break people down, even through their mentality. | ||
| The fighters I'm going to study, I study their mental game too and how they do interviews. | ||
| And I'll give you two examples. | ||
| And I feel like Al Jermaine Sterling is almost the same thing as Demetrius Johnson. | ||
| Just in the concept of my wrestling. | ||
| Just because of my wrestling, I feel extremely confident with my hands. | ||
| And I know he can't take me down. | ||
| I know he won't take me down. | ||
| So I know there's a game pack set in place where I can be a little more offensive with somebody like Aljamay Sterling. | ||
| And obviously, let's talk about Sean O'Malley. | ||
| I just want to break these dudes down real quick. | ||
| Even somebody like him. | ||
| Listen to his interviews. | ||
| And you study these guys and you see what their mindset is and where their holes are going to be. | ||
| They asked Sean O'Malley, who do you want to fight next? | ||
| And he's like, you know, I just want to fight the best strikers. | ||
| He never mentioned about, I'll take anybody out, I'll take anybody in the top 10 or 15 or whatever. | ||
| Because in my opinion, he hasn't really beat somebody that's like, okay man, you're the real deal. | ||
| Even though he did be Weiland and he was a contender, but it's been a long time. | ||
| Well, he's a young kid that's learning the sport while we're watching him on the UFC. That's what's crazy about him. | ||
| I mean, you go back to Dana White's Contender Show, and he was looser, wilder, you know, fun to watch, but not nearly as sharp. | ||
| Like, now he's on a completely different level. | ||
| Knocking out Wineland like that, faking the uppercut, and then just following over the top with a straight right hand and catching him slipping? | ||
| I mean, that was fantastic. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Anybody in the top five. | ||
| 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. | |
| 360 roundhouse kicked him in the face. | ||
| Yair was a beast and everybody was like really thinking, you know, he's on a short path to the title. | ||
| But the big hole was that wrestling. | ||
| It was exposed by how elite Frankie is and how nasty Frankie's ground and pound is. | ||
| It was a major beatdown, you know, and that's one of those fights where you watch a guy and you go, this guy, it's all about styles. | ||
| Because it's all about... | ||
| If he found someone that played his game, like, oh shit, he's good at that game. | ||
| But what Frankie did is just completely impose his game. | ||
| Just drag him down... | ||
| And beat him up, and then we don't know what would happen with O'Malley when it comes to that, but I know who he is as a person, and he's working. | ||
| He's working on everything. | ||
| That kid is, he's focused as fuck. | ||
| He keeps getting better and better and better, like in a trippy way. | ||
| Like when you saw him come back after two years off, you know, two years dealing with a bunch of bullshit. | ||
| I forget what he was suspended for. | ||
| I don't remember what it was. | ||
| Was it marijuana? | ||
| That doesn't make sense. | ||
| Tainted supplements? | ||
| Yeah, something in protein or something like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anyway, I'm interested. | ||
| Yeah, and it's making the Bannerwood division with guys like that. | ||
| It's making it exciting, man. | ||
| Oh, it's so exciting. | ||
| First of all, we didn't even talk. | ||
| You got Piotr Jan versus Jose Aldo for your title. | ||
| Does it still feel like yours? | ||
| I let it go, Joe. | ||
| I let it go, honestly. | ||
| Honestly, I let it go, man. | ||
| They can all kill each other. | ||
| That's how I feel. | ||
| I'm so happy. | ||
| I'm so satisfied, Joe, honestly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You look happy. | |
| You look happy. | ||
| The point is, like, what a division. | ||
| Unless you cross me with something here. | ||
| I don't know what you... | ||
| No, it's all good, bro. | ||
| It's all good. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, remember, I'm actually going to change your mind on that. | ||
| It's actually, it's really my fault. | ||
| It's your fault? | ||
| Yeah, it's my fault that Jose Aldo's fighting for the belt. | ||
| Because that's who I was originally supposed to fight with, Dominic. | ||
| But this whole COVID thing happened. | ||
| So Aldo was going to fight for the title, and then it's like, you can't do that to him. | ||
| So the UFC, you know, they stuck to their word. | ||
| Oh, that's interesting. | ||
| Or at least I think. | ||
| If Eddie was here, we could debate, man. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| That 100% makes sense. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| Listen, I'm happy for both fights. | ||
| I'd be happy if Marlon fought Piotr Jan for the title, or I'd be happy if Aldo fought him. | ||
| I'd be happy if Marlon and Aldo fought again. | ||
| There's great fights in that division. | ||
| Step down. | ||
| Really? | ||
| For now. | ||
| The people that I think that should fight for the belt would be Aljamain Sterling and Piotr. | ||
| I'm going to call him Peter, man. | ||
| I ain't going to get that authentic. | ||
| It was Peter for a while. | ||
| We were supposed to call him Peter. | ||
| And then they said, no, it's Piotr. | ||
| Piotr. | ||
| Piotr. | ||
| It's like Fedor, you know. | ||
| Fedor's real name is not Fedor. | ||
| It's Fyodor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's so rude. | ||
| We could have said Fyodor. | ||
| Yeah, but even somebody like Peter Yoneman, like, how dangerous is he really? | ||
| Yeah, he beat Uriah, but Uriah's been out for a minute. | ||
| You know, besides Uriah, what's another big name that that dude has beaten? | ||
| No, well, clearly he's very good. | ||
| There's no doubt about it. | ||
| Whether or not he's at your level, you don't find out until he fights a guy like you. | ||
| Or he fights a guy like Aldo. | ||
| That's when we find out what's up. | ||
| But we know he's really good. | ||
| You know, the way he beat up Uriah, it's not just that he beat him. | ||
| He beat him up. | ||
| And, you know, Uriah's... | ||
| Always gonna be a tough out. | ||
| He's a tough guy, man. | ||
| He's a super skilled, super seasoned guy. | ||
| Uriah's been around forever. | ||
| You know, he's fought so many good guys. | ||
| He knows how to survive. | ||
| And to see Piotr beat him up like that, it's like, wow. | ||
| And he's fucking strong, man. | ||
| He's fucking strong. | ||
| Like, he's got that weirdo Russian strength. | ||
| You know? | ||
| He is dangerous. | ||
| He's got power. | ||
| He throws knees. | ||
| He throws off the clinch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Yep. | ||
| Dangerous. | ||
| He's technical. | ||
| When I see a guy like that, it's like he's technical and he has malice. | ||
| And when someone's technical and they have malice, it's like, that's what I have. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| And I can recognize that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Malice is a good way of putting it. | ||
| What Mike Tyson would call bad intentions. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, he's got it. | ||
| So the division's never been more exciting. | ||
| And there's still guys like Jimmy Rivera, still a dangerous, dangerous fighter. | ||
| That's what I'm saying, Joe. | ||
| You think they'll miss me? | ||
| They're going to miss you anyway, man. | ||
| Come on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're going to miss you. | |
| They hated the crib. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Listen, you did a great job with all that cringy shit. | ||
| You made people pay attention. | ||
| I thought it was genius. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Knowing you, who you really are, seeing this character that you're doing. | |
| Did I get you out? | ||
| Yeah, I was laughing hard, man. | ||
| Are you ready for me to become the intergender world champ? | ||
| When you're telling Valentina to bend the knee, I was crying. | ||
| I was crying like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's so funny. | |
| Can we pull up some pictures of that? | ||
| The intergender world champ. | ||
| That is hilarious. | ||
| What made you decide, just like, look, I need something. | ||
| I need something to market myself. | ||
| No, it was actually, no, I wasn't even, oh my God, this is kind of a, it's funny, but it's somebody high profile that dared me to. | ||
| I'm like, dude, I can't do that. | ||
| He challenged me so much. | ||
| He's like, I dare you. | ||
| You know, I was like, ah, all right. | ||
| So I ended up doing the video and then I was like, God, dude, what am I doing? | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| But look at what it's done, Joe. | ||
| I was like, we saved, I saved, I saved an entire division, man, because the way I wanted to cut its neck off. | ||
| And he told me that. | ||
| There's something about what you did that's like, this is what Conor did, this is what... | ||
| Chael Sonnen was probably the best at it, the original. | ||
| Chael Sonnen's the original pro-wrestling-style shit-talker in MMA that really made people hyped up about fights. | ||
| I mean, you gotta give credit to Chael, because before Chael, there was, you know, I'm gonna fuck him up, I'm gonna kick his ass. | ||
| People always talk shit, but they never talk shit with an entertainer's flair. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The way Chael did. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was so fun. | ||
| And it made the fights way bigger. | ||
| They should all thank him. | ||
| Thank you for what you said about my mother. | ||
| Thank you for... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shit. | |
| Thank you for all that crazy shit you said because that's what really sold that fight. | ||
| They all made more money because of him. | ||
| The thing is, is what I admire about that now, like a guy like Kobe, obviously Connor, even Ronda. | ||
| I think Ronda was more of a persona. | ||
| It was more the fact that the pressure that comes with that shit, like, dude, that's like a hoax. | ||
| It's a whole nother fight, and you have to make sure that you gotta live up to your expectations. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You remember me throwing shit out the bag with the pillow? | |
| What'd you think of the pillow stuff? | ||
| I'm like, dude, I really gotta beat Dominic's ass to you. | ||
| I know the pillows with the heads on them, and you're kicking the pillows with different guys' heads. | ||
| But dude, it was funny. | ||
| It was funny. | ||
| It does put extra pressure on you, right? | ||
| Because if you lose, people are so happy. | ||
| But check this out. | ||
| This is how crazy I am. | ||
| That pressure, man. | ||
| I channel that thing, and I almost love it, Joey. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| I like feeling a little scared. | ||
| Look at you with the pillows. | ||
| Lay it in bed with your belts and the pillows with TJ's head and DJ's head. | ||
| It's hilarious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The king of cringe, bend the knee. | |
| So what did your friend, that you won't say the person's name, can you say what their name rhymes with? | ||
| Man, I can't, Jill. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| Don't throw him. | ||
| Tell me later. | ||
| But what did they say to you? | ||
| Like, you have to come up with this character? | ||
| Is that what they said to you? | ||
| No. | ||
| I think it was... | ||
| After I beat Demetrius Johnson, I went to the Apex fight with... | ||
| And I happened to be there randomly. | ||
| And then, obviously, Dana was there at the fight. | ||
| And I pulled him aside. | ||
| I was like, hey, Dana, let's... | ||
| You know, how are you? | ||
| And he actually wanted to talk to me. | ||
| He was like, hey, come to my office. | ||
| So... | ||
| I ended up, you know, going from the fights to his office and we're, you know, I was in his red Ferrari. | ||
| Freaking really nice too, man. | ||
| And he's like, hey, bud, I just want to let you know that, you know, that I'm thinking about getting rid of the division. | ||
| Or I'm going to get rid of the division. | ||
| This is right after I beat Demetri Johnson, man. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like there's new blood. | ||
| And he told me straight up, and I was just like, man, I have to do something, man. | ||
| If I don't start speaking up, if I don't start being hated, my division's gonna drown, man. | ||
| And it's up to me, and I felt like that's something that Demetrius never did. | ||
| Can I tell you why? | ||
| It wasn't entertaining. | ||
| People don't pay attention. | ||
| I think because Demetrius was so dominant. | ||
| They don't appreciate true art, man. | ||
| Demetrius was so dominant that he heard a division because it gets born. | ||
| There has to be a storyline to people. | ||
| And Demetrius wasn't the most personable dude in the world. | ||
| So then I took that upon myself when he said that. | ||
| I was like, well, I'm going to have to come up with a gimmick. | ||
| You know, originally I was supposed to go up to 135 pounds. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I brought TJ down because if I was going to go up to 135 pounds, they were going to strip me from my belt. | ||
| It was like, this is the contract. | ||
| And that was the original plans for me to go up. | ||
| But then I decided to come down and keep the division and kind of fight for it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I don't know what the answer is. | ||
| My brother and I were talking about that yesterday. | ||
| I'm not sure what it was, but I felt sick inside when I found out, Joe. | ||
| It's like a sadness that it brings to you because, dude, it's like, yeah, we may talk stuff to each other, but it doesn't get that personal. | ||
| Oh, I shouldn't get that personal for somebody to take an EPO, man. | ||
| Something that... | ||
| A drug that you just will never get tired of. | ||
| And fight that dude with these four-ounce gloves. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like, there's a little bit of malice there, man. | ||
| So I remember that day I called. | ||
| I talked to my brother. | ||
| I talked to my mom. | ||
| I'm like... | ||
| As thick-skinned as we grew up and whatnot, this is hurting me, man. | ||
| What would you have done if you found out before the fight? | ||
| If they gave you the option? | ||
| I felt so good. | ||
| If they pulled you aside and said, listen, Henry, the fight's going to go on, but we got an issue. | ||
| It turns out we just got TJ's drug sample back, and he tested positive for EPO. You can still fight him if you want to. | ||
| We're going to strip him. | ||
| Even if he wins, we're going to strip him. | ||
| We're going to fine him and keep him from fighting for two years. | ||
| He's going to get convicted of using this stuff. | ||
| But you can choose to fight him. | ||
| Just don't tell anybody. | ||
| But here's my deal, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, if you're going to ask me a question like that, I got one for you too. | |
| Okay. | ||
| But a guy can... | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's big. | ||
| Yeah, it is, but also... | ||
| It is, actually. | ||
| It is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's bigger, that or EPO? EPO. I imagine, man. | |
| Yeah, because, man, TJ was saying how good he felt. | ||
| He never felt so good in his life. | ||
| I'm just hearing it from him. | ||
| But also, in that fight, that's when I felt like the most prepared, Joe. | ||
| I felt, even until now, my career... | ||
| I'm retired. | ||
| I'm really done. | ||
| And that's the best that I've ever felt, man, against TJ Dillard. | ||
| So I think to answer that question... | ||
| I think I still would fight him for that reason because I did everything natural and I used science. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It kind of gives me my windows. | ||
| What's it called? | ||
| Omega Wave? | ||
| Yeah, Omega Wave. | ||
| And this is a test strap? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like I don't do no more than maybe even three. | ||
| Really? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So they're not optimizing their performance by giving themselves an ample amount of recovery. | ||
| They're training too hard too often. | ||
| Yes, and using a lot more recovery. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's a big revelation for a lot of people. | ||
| They're hearing this from you and they're like, oh shit, that's crazy. | ||
| This might literally shift the way people train because so many guys are out there leaving it all in the gym. | ||
| They're so tough and they're trying to condition themselves, but there's a... | ||
| Just like a tipping point where you're working too hard and you're always sore and your body doesn't have a chance to recover and you don't grow. | ||
| You don't get better. | ||
| You just sort of maintain. | ||
| And that's where a lot of guys wind up getting injured as well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And a lot of that stuff too, it's like when I do my training, it's like I revolve all my training around my sparring. | ||
| Like my sparring is my most important thing. | ||
| So I almost number my workouts on how numbers that should be that day. | ||
| So I'm going to give you an example. | ||
| On Monday, it could be a seven and an eight, two practices right on Monday. | ||
| The next day, they're going to be more of like a 4 and a 5 or a 5 and a 6. It all depends on your max, you know what I mean? | ||
| On your performance and all the testing that they've done. | ||
| But on Wednesday, this is where I got to deliver and this is where I have to give the 10. So it's a sparring day? | ||
| Yes, it's a sparring day. | ||
| And there's only one sparring day a week? | ||
| There's two. | ||
| So one's technical. | ||
| And the other one is, alright man, we have the ref. | ||
| I got a doctor in there. | ||
| Literally, man, it's legit. | ||
| Every time I spar, the music comes out. | ||
| My opponent's music, my music, I walk out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| I get checked, yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's done every time during cap. | ||
| My coach, Captain Eric Alberison, he's... | ||
| We've been able to simulate and emulate everything that we're going to do in a fight. | ||
| Like even my training. | ||
| Like my training is not me doing jujitsu for two hours and then at night I do boxing. | ||
| Like no, no, no. | ||
| I'm in there play sparring, seeing where I'm doing good in play sparring and then adjusting what I saw in play sparring with the coaches individually. | ||
| And then I'm giving 20 minutes to that and then I give 20 minutes to my striking with pad work or it could be with the partner. | ||
| But I'm going the whole time. | ||
| You see what I'm saying? | ||
| So I'm collaborating everything together, simulating the fight as much as possible, being very detailed in my training. | ||
| And then when it comes to sparring, that's the real deal. | ||
| That's where I have to shine. | ||
| And that's how I show myself how good I'm becoming. | ||
| Are you taking notes? | ||
| How are you keeping track of your progress? | ||
| Are you just knowing in your head? | ||
| I know it and I feel it, but I also have a communication with my coaches where they know that I'm extremely honest. | ||
| Man, I'm not feeling well. | ||
| I need to rest another two, three hours before I go train today, guys. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| It's a very... | ||
| Selfish style training. | ||
| That's a big advantage. | ||
| I am giving a lot of knowledge here, man, but that's who I am and I want to share what I have. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And this is how we train for Dama. | ||
| This last camp that I had was like the best... | ||
| This camp that I had with Dominic was like the best fight camp I've ever had, man. | ||
| Like the best because I've learned from everything that I've done, man. | ||
| It's almost like I've built this team. | ||
| I'm not from a team necessarily, but I've built this team around me according to every opponent that I fight. | ||
| So everybody's moving and everybody's mimicking Dominic Cruz and vice versa for TJ, for Marlon. | ||
| Like it's... | ||
| And these dudes are being compensated. | ||
| These dudes are being paid. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| So it's a real business. | ||
| Not just, hey, just go out there and spar them. | ||
| Try everything that you do. | ||
| To me, that's like a chicken with his head cut off. | ||
| Are you truly improving? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, what you're saying, all of it 100% makes sense. | ||
| I mean, it's brilliant. | ||
| Doing it that way is brilliant. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And in the process, man, you cut all the bullshit out. | |
| There's things in jujitsu that doesn't work. | ||
| As a wrestler, which I love, there's things in wrestling that doesn't work. | ||
| In boxing, the distance is different, like all this, so you almost have to mimic everything that you do in a very technical sense. | ||
| So when you do this, are you wearing normal four-ounce gloves, the whole deal? | ||
| No, they're more like the sparring gloves, like the puffier ones. | ||
| Have you fucked with any of those Onyx ones? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| How goddamn good are those? | ||
| Those are awesome, man. | ||
| Those are the best MMA gloves I've ever felt. | ||
| Once these guys decide to truly launch and whatnot, I think that company could completely take over. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| They make the best shit. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Dude, he's such a madman about it too. | ||
| Trevor was on the podcast with Justin and describing his process of making those gloves. | ||
| He got me a pair of them and he let me try on those MMA ones. | ||
| When you compare them to the UFC one side to side, you're like, what? | ||
| These are crazy good. | ||
| They're so much better. | ||
| They're so well designed. | ||
| Everything about it, man. | ||
| It's engineered. | ||
| The padding is better. | ||
| It's better padding. | ||
| It feels better. | ||
| The headgear. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| No, he's a wizard. | ||
| Yeah, doing good things. | ||
| So you're wearing a slightly larger MMA glove? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, slightly larger. | ||
| I get Vaseline, the pep talks, like I'm saying bye to everybody. | ||
| It feels so normal for me to compete, Joe. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It really does feel like a sparring session. | ||
| That's so genius that you reenact it every week. | ||
| Yeah, every week. | ||
| So you get accustomed to it. | ||
| Every week. | ||
| Sometimes you're cranking, sometimes you're pissed, but that's even part of how you're going to feel during fight week. | ||
| You know how many times I've fought with my coach, man? | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Eric, it's like Captain Eric because it's like, man, we're like brothers. | ||
| He's a coach, but he's a brother. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| So it simulates the fight. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| That's a genius idea, man. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| And so who's mapping out your training camps in terms of when you do strength and conditioning? | ||
| Is it a collaborative effort? | ||
| It's a collaborative effort. | ||
| And a lot of it, I have to pay attention to science. | ||
| So there's things that my coach have to say, there's things that I have to say, but it's truly like the science. | ||
| So in terms of your recovery? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then what should I eat? | ||
| Everything's calculated on how hard I'm going to go. | ||
| So my meals are prepped according to every day of how hard I'm going to go. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, so there's times where I'm doing fives where I'm not gonna eat, like when I'm doing a 10 during sparring, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| And does this go with, in terms of your preparation, like your pre-workout meals as well? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So if you know you're gonna spar on Wednesday, at what time in the afternoon do you spar? | ||
| Sometimes we even simulate the time that we're actually fighting. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So you'd be like 9 or 10 o'clock at night, right. | ||
| Yeah, you don't want to always do that. | ||
| When would you eat? | ||
| So if you were going to fight at 8 o'clock at night, when would you eat? | ||
| Oh my God, but that's... | ||
| Again, a lot of that stuff, you would have to say preference, man. | ||
| Like personally, I like to have like a big brunch. | ||
| So 2-ish? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 2 o'clock in the afternoon-ish? | ||
| Yeah, about 2 o'clock, 2.30. | ||
| So you give yourself like five, six hours... | ||
| 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. | ||
| What kind of food do you eat before you fight? | ||
| Eggs, pancakes, and obviously I need the carbs and whatnot. | ||
| I would just eat normal, like bacon. | ||
| I eat pretty clean throughout the whole camp. | ||
| You don't have specific pre-fight meals? | ||
| No, no, but I think at that point it's just the psychology side of it. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like, I'm gonna eat what the serotonin in my mind, like the happiness in me, what it wants, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| Because I'm gonna deserve it when I fight that night. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's a treat. | ||
| It brings happiness to you. | ||
| I couldn't do that, man. | ||
| The first time I lost it, Demetrius. | ||
| I eat chicken breasts right after I beat them, and veggies. | ||
| I was super light, but I had no fat in me. | ||
| I got put out. | ||
| A lot of them, you have to turn every stone, man, because there's a lot of details, man. | ||
| It's very complex, man. | ||
| If you can understand the game on the recovery, on the nutrition, on the happiness, on the preparation, on the game planning, all that. | ||
| So, let me ask you this. | ||
| Who is this company that puts these meals together? | ||
| They're basing it on when you say the meal depends upon the workout. | ||
| How are they doing that? | ||
| Give me an example. | ||
| They're speaking to the physiologists at Neuroforce. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, it's almost like there's a team of... | ||
| And shout out to them too, my friend's kitchen. | ||
| There's a team of men, maybe 12 people, man. | ||
| 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? | ||
| UCAN. I get UCAN every time. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| It's just a protein. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| It's just a protein that I take soon right after. | ||
| And even the water, man, like alkaline water. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| So it's all just down to... | ||
| Every T is crossed and every I is dotted. | ||
| It's all down to the science. | ||
| Yeah, it's fun. | ||
| It's really interesting. | ||
| And I think if I have a gift in anything... | ||
| I've never seen myself coach, Joe. | ||
| I think being a coach is... | ||
| 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... | ||
| Putting a solid team together. | ||
| When did you start doing this thing where you would emulate your opponent's walkout music and your walkout music and the whole deal? | ||
| 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. | ||
| We just got better, better through all camps. | ||
| So that was when you decided, okay, we're going to make some wholesale changes. | ||
| And this is a big one. | ||
| We're going to reenact. | ||
| Is it your idea to do it that way? | ||
| I had to. | ||
| I had no choice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I mean, your idea to introduce the fighter and have you introduced and the whole deal, have the walkout music? | ||
| No, a lot of that was my coach. | ||
| And then a lot of it's me like, all right, man, well, let's take it to the next level. | ||
| Like put me in the back. | ||
| Hey, sejudo up in five. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And I've noticed that since I've done that, Joe, it's been like, dude, I feel like I'm walking out. | ||
| Why is the Huda getting so better, dude? | ||
| It's the comfort of how I feel, man. | ||
| It's a tactical thing that we've developed. | ||
| Yeah, you've, yeah. | ||
| You've figured out a way to make it a normal part of your life. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's a big thing about fighters returning, right? | ||
| Taking a long time off and then coming back, it's very difficult because everything feels weird, right? | ||
| Yeah, I remember they were talking about that with Sugar Ray Leonard. | ||
| When Sugar Ray Leonard was in the process of making one of his comebacks, then one of the things they did is they put together... | ||
| It might have been for the Hagrid fight. | ||
| They put together fights... | ||
| In the gym. | ||
| Like they had a real fight in the gym. | ||
| So just get used to it. | ||
| Like you would fight 12 rounds in the gym. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I guess you go back to it's all... | ||
| It's not just simulating, man. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| But this is the thing. | ||
| The biggest problem that I've seen, because I've gone through a lot of coaches now, is getting all the coaches on the same page. | ||
| And getting all the coaches, you know, getting them to commit on science. | ||
| Is that all your responsibility? | ||
| Do you have to handle everybody? | ||
| Does Captain Eric handle it? | ||
| Yeah, Captain does. | ||
| He does all that. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And immediately my neck started, almost the same day, my neck started feeling better. | ||
| And ever since then, I think three months into it, my neck was 100%. | ||
| I wrestled my whole life. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| My neck jacked up. | ||
| So many people have jacked up necks from wrestling too. | ||
| Backs, necks, knees and shoulders. | ||
| That's been a big part of my recovery. | ||
| Do you remember specifically what kind of stem cells they were using? | ||
| Did they tell you? | ||
| Well, it's done in Columbia, so the stem cells are being pulled from a baby's umbilical cord. | ||
| I don't necessarily know the full science of it, I guess the basic side of it, but man, I can tell you, my body feels good. | ||
| Yeah, it's real shit, man. | ||
| It works. | ||
| I have had stem cells done on my knee, my shoulder. | ||
| I've had a bunch of different things done, injuries. | ||
| And you've done that here? | ||
| Yeah, I've done it here. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Get in there. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I really wish I knew. | ||
| I don't know if this is true, Joe, or maybe you could look it up. | ||
| I don't know if even animals. | ||
| Somebody says something is done with the stem cells of an animal, of a horse, I think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| And they're using it on humans. | ||
| On humans? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| See, that would be weird, man, if people started growing horse hair all over their body. | ||
| Damn, that's a trip. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, shit. | ||
| For sure, right? | ||
| China. | ||
| It's crazy what our world is coming to, man. | ||
| How different it's been. | ||
| These last 10 years, man, how different has it been? | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's a lot of things about this life that are really weird. | ||
| Do you think our world's getting better? | ||
| 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. | ||
| I was too young, so I would ask you for this. | ||
| The Rodney King shit? | ||
| I wasn't here for that. | ||
| I watched it on TV, but I was in New York. | ||
| I came here right after the Rodney King shit. | ||
| But the thing about the Rodney King shit was it was confined to LA. People weren't rioting about Rodney King in New York. | ||
| It was just an LA thing. | ||
| These riots were all over the country, man. | ||
| I mean, the Freddie... | ||
| What happened is... | ||
| What was that guy's name in Baltimore? | ||
| Freddie Gray? | ||
| Yeah, that was the last big one I remember. | ||
| That was about five years ago. | ||
| And when Freddie Gray was killed by the cops, they went crazy in Baltimore and lit everything on fire and smashed everything. | ||
| But it was still just Baltimore, you know? | ||
| With George Floyd, it's the whole country. | ||
| Yeah, now it's just an excuse to... | ||
| It was. | ||
| This is what it is, man. | ||
| It's like people are fed up, people are pissed. | ||
| Yeah, but it's also, they're also broke, man. | ||
| It's not through any fault of their own. | ||
| They got stuck in this COVID thing like we all did, and they were forced to not be able to work for months and months at a time. | ||
| And most of them still aren't back at work, right? | ||
| So they're broke, and they're fucked, and this is a chance to steal some shit. | ||
| I don't condone it. | ||
| I don't condone it. | ||
| But I saw a lot of what looked like high school kids. | ||
| Running out of those things, holding boxes of sneakers. | ||
| Like, they just were taking advantage of free shit. | ||
| And yeah, there's some bad people in there, too. | ||
| There's some criminals in there, too. | ||
| There's some people that lit, you know, churches on fire. | ||
| There's some people that did some horrible shit. | ||
| But I think the whole movement is not connected to that. | ||
| That's just some people that did some shit taking advantage of a moment in time where everything went haywire. | ||
| But the people... | ||
| That are marching, they're doing it very peacefully in these enormous groups. | ||
| I think it's got a real chance of being something that changes the way cops interact with people. | ||
| It's got a real chance, because it's so big. | ||
| 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, so they can make the excuse that you're resisting arrest. | ||
| But look, everyone's gonna resist when you put your fucking shin on their neck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, that's crazy. | ||
| That's torture. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| I think out of all this craziness going on, I think, at the end, I think people are starting to unite. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like, even through this whole COVID stuff, not so much what happened with, like, I think it's... | ||
| It's made people more aware that anything can come and go. | ||
| It was a revelation for me. | ||
| Look at Kobe Bryant's situation. | ||
| Even the most wealthy of people could die because of a mistake in a helicopter. | ||
| Nothing's gonna save you. | ||
| The most beloved of people, it doesn't matter. | ||
| You slam into a mountain, you slam into a mountain. | ||
| I think through this whole tragedy, I think everybody will be better off, man. | ||
| I think we'll be better off as a countryman. | ||
| That's the hope. | ||
| We need more good days, you know? | ||
| Like you have a good day and then a bad day and then another bad day and then another bad day and another bad day and a bad week and a bad month. | ||
| That's a lot of people right now. | ||
| And then the riots broke up. | ||
| And now the riots are over. | ||
| The looting seems to have stopped. | ||
| The National Guard's moving back out. | ||
| Let's hope people keep it peaceful. | ||
| And if people keep it peaceful, it really could change the world. | ||
| It really could. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's hope on that, man. | ||
| Let's hope. | ||
| So what do you do now, Henry Cejudo? | ||
| Say if you do decide to not fight again. | ||
| You're like, I'm done. | ||
| I did what I had to do. | ||
| I'm Triple C. Two world titles, an Olympic gold medalist. | ||
| My name is cemented in the history books. | ||
| That's who you are. | ||
| I mean, that's legit. | ||
| I think I programmed Joe to talk like that. | ||
| You see what I'm saying? | ||
| You see my gimmick worked. | ||
| It worked. | ||
| I'm an analyst. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like I said, I'm not saying I'm the best fighter in the world because I'm not, man. | ||
| I would even put Demetrius Johnson in front of me. | ||
| I would put a lot of people in front of me, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| Even though I do have a win over him. | ||
| But I wasn't the best wrestler in the world. | ||
| I wasn't the greatest in wrestling, even though I was an Olympic champion. | ||
| I fall into a very secluded group, but I'm one of a lot. | ||
| But I think when you collaborate both of my accolades that I've done in sports... | ||
| That's where the greatest combat actor of all time comes in. | ||
| Yeah, and it's a gimmick and I say it a lot, but part of the gimmick is I am telling the truth. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Whether you think it's a gimmick or not, it's in the conversation. | ||
| You're in the conversation. | ||
| So maybe in the next 20 years they'll... | ||
| It's a conversation. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No doubt about it. | ||
| No, I appreciate it, Joe. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| I think to answer your question, what's next? | ||
| There's not only the Volkanovski fight. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Because he's not that much taller than him. | ||
| I call him an overgrown midget. | ||
| And he's not that much bigger than me. | ||
| And I feel like, man, I know I could beat him, dude. | ||
| I just know. | ||
| What do you walk around at? | ||
| Probably about 150. 150? | ||
| Yeah, but it would be my skill. | ||
| What would you do to prepare for that? | ||
| Would you gain any weight? | ||
| Or would you just keep the body weight you have when you walk around? | ||
| Yeah, I would try to gain maybe another five, six pounds. | ||
| But I would try to do it as natural as I possibly can. | ||
| Just to have a little more mass. | ||
| But... | ||
| It's a big jump. | ||
| Yeah, it does get dangerous, man, at 45. Yeah, those 45ers, some of them are enormous, you know? | ||
| 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, with Ryan Garcia. | ||
| Ryan Garcia the boxer? | ||
| The boxer. | ||
| You gonna box? | ||
| Why not? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why not? | |
| Call me crazy if things iron out financially and the cars are played right. | ||
| Yeah, why not? | ||
| He tweeted at me. | ||
| He says, you know, he pretty much called me out. | ||
| That's the way I took it. | ||
| Tell him as long as you can throw some leg kicks in there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You get three leg kicks around. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's been a lot, man. | ||
| I've actually been pretty busy. | ||
| I was with Tyson and we were at the AEW event and I was with him. | ||
| So there's even a potential even crossing over to AEW or the WWE. Do you remember PKA Karate? | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| No. | ||
| I think they used to call it the kick of the 90s or the kick of the 80s. | ||
| Anyway, PKA karate was like kickboxing that you'd watch on ESPN at like 3 o'clock in the morning. | ||
| I think Jeff Foxworthy even had a bit about it. | ||
| But it wasn't very good. | ||
| There were some really good fighters like Rick Rufus. | ||
| There was a bunch that were real good. | ||
| Jeremy Trimble. | ||
| Jerry Trimble. | ||
| But the majority were kind of second-rate fighters, with no disrespect. | ||
| They weren't elite. | ||
| And so they had to throw a certain amount of kicks. | ||
| They had to throw like six kicks a round. | ||
| Imagine if you had a boxing match where you were allowed to throw just two kicks a round. | ||
| Two leg kicks a round. | ||
| That's all I would take. | ||
| Look at that calf kick. | ||
| That calf kick's been killing people. | ||
| You have two that land in a round. | ||
| That's all you're allowed to do. | ||
| And that's all I need. | ||
| That's all I need. | ||
| Against a boxer? | ||
| Heck yeah. | ||
| These dudes have never felt that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Is that right hand? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, he had him in real trouble. | ||
| This is round one. | ||
| Now, this is the first ever, like, mixed or televised? | ||
| Yeah, it was, well, one of the first ever. | ||
| 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. | ||
| His legs are hurt. | ||
| Timeout. | ||
| Even Jamie knows how ridiculous this is. | ||
| The rules were crazy back then. | ||
| I'm getting into this fight. | ||
| I've seen this before. | ||
| I believe he gets up and I believe he keeps going and I believe the dude chops his legs again and then he's done. | ||
| But is he going to let him go? | ||
| I think they might let him go or are they stopping the fight? | ||
| Isn't this crazy? | ||
| Like, they haven't stopped the fight. | ||
| They haven't stopped the fight with leg kicks, even though he clearly got fucked up by leg kicks to the point where he was incapacitated. | ||
| But they're gonna allow him to keep fighting, which is just preposterous. | ||
| So he gets to walk it off like, alright, let's keep going. | ||
| Like, this is how weird martial arts were back then. | ||
| We didn't think... | ||
| We didn't think that those were legitimate. | ||
| Look at this guy just chopping at those legs, man. | ||
| Beautiful Thai technique. | ||
| Just so classic with the stance. | ||
| He's got the hands way up high over his forehead with that stepping motion. | ||
| So anyway, keep it going. | ||
| Because they keep going. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| It makes it into the second round. | ||
| You know what this fight reminds me of? | ||
| It reminds me of the Muir Marias, man. | ||
| Yeah, in a lot of ways. | ||
| Except the chopping down in this case worked. | ||
| So Rick is really incapacitated by this point. | ||
| And look, he just got chopped across the leg again. | ||
| That's only the third round. | ||
| Look at that again. | ||
| Boom and boom and boom. | ||
| So what's interesting is that Duke Rufus was in his corner, and Duke was like 19 at the time. | ||
| He's a baby-faced Duke Rufus, who now is one of the best MMA trainers in the world. | ||
| And Duke was saying, oh, I just don't think it takes that much talent to kick someone in the legs. | ||
| And he became one of the best coaches and a world champion himself at Muay Thai. | ||
| Like, no, this is how... | ||
| And this is not to knock... | ||
| Dick or knock Rick Rufus or Duke Rufus, they're both awesome. | ||
| This is just to say this was where martial arts was in 1988. We really just didn't know. | ||
| There was a developmental period where we just didn't know. | ||
| And see, Rick is just still, they're still going to let him fight. | ||
| Those are hard kicks too, man. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| I mean, even though they're stopping it like that, those are hard kicks and he's still... | ||
| He's still fucked. | ||
| He's gonna be fucked for weeks, right? | ||
| I mean, look, he could barely walk and they're gonna let him keep going. | ||
| Give it a little forward head. | ||
| What is he gonna say to him? | ||
| Oh, he's warning him you threw him to the ground. | ||
| Okay, so they tell him you can't dump, which is hilarious, because he's destroying his legs, is what he's doing. | ||
| So they got him in the corner. | ||
| Look at some of this. | ||
| This is the end of the fight. | ||
| The end of the fight was ruthless. | ||
| And you gotta think, Rick Rufus is so goddamn tough. | ||
| He's so goddamn tough to just have endured this. | ||
| Because he doesn't know how to check it. | ||
| He's just taking them all. | ||
| Like, there. | ||
| Like, boom. | ||
| And that was it. | ||
| That last one? | ||
| Dude. | ||
| High, high shin bone across the thigh. | ||
| And I think that's the end of the fight, if I remember correctly. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| This is another one? | ||
| Oh my god, they let him get back up. | ||
| They dusted him off. | ||
| He's still just getting fucking... | ||
| It's all leg kicks, man. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| I'm surprised he's... | ||
| Dude, he's taking a lot of pain, man. | ||
| Do you imagine how horrible this must have been to him? | ||
| That was the end that we did before. | ||
| Yeah, that's the end. | ||
| Is that the end of the fight or does it keep going? | ||
| Oh, it is the end. | ||
| Oh, because it just replays all the other stuff? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm pretty sure that was the end. | ||
| We were watching the same round three times. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| No, I think it went three rounds, if I remember correctly. | ||
| But it was just a horrific example of how this is the development of martial arts, right? | ||
| I mean, this is like one of the steps on the way to the UFC is that we had to realize about leg kicks. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| It's a ruthless fight to watch. | ||
| He looks like he's in super pain. | ||
| Oh my god, dude. | ||
| Well, you remember that one cat that fought in the UFC that almost lost his leg due to compartment syndrome? | ||
| Did you ever see that scar? | ||
| No. | ||
| You wanna freak out? | ||
| Maybe rethink a comeback. | ||
| I'm gonna show you something. | ||
| This dude had compartment syndrome in his thigh. | ||
| Sorry, I'm blanking on his name. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Austin Hubbard. | |
| Austin Hubbard, who's a tough motherfucker. | ||
| That's him. | ||
| And they cut him from his ankle all the way up to the top of his thigh. | ||
| Yeah, you're freaking out? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I'm trying to find a good... | |
| They're all disgusting. | ||
| People have photoshopped it. | ||
| Oh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They made it like a subway sandwich and shit. | ||
| That's his leg. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| That's his fucking leg. | ||
| His leg is so, it was so swollen and destroyed and the tissue was so fucked up. | ||
| That big thing on the tube is a drain to drain all the swelling and the fluid. | ||
| So they had to open up his leg. | ||
| I mean, it's one of the biggest scars I've ever seen. | ||
| It goes all the way down to his knee. | ||
| Like from the top of his hip all the way down to his knee and they had to open his leg up because after the fight his leg was just destroyed. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Who's that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I thought that might have been it because it's coming up. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| That guy's got Everlast shorts on. | ||
| I don't think that's the same cat. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There's a lot of those dudes from Muay Thai fights afterwards. | ||
| They have giant swollen legs. | ||
| But that was definitely his leg. | ||
| Because John Anik showed it to me in between fights. | ||
| And he's like, have you seen Hubbard's injury? | ||
| And I'm like, oh, I heard about it. | ||
| He's like, no, no, no. | ||
| You gotta see it. | ||
| Look, look. | ||
| That's what it looked like. | ||
| Look at the size of that scar, man. | ||
| And look at the blackness of all the tissue. | ||
| Like, it's all rotting. | ||
| And it's all destroyed from shins. | ||
| Bro, that's terrifying. | ||
| That fucking shit is terrifying. | ||
| And that is what Rick Rufus went through. | ||
| Just got his legs destroyed. | ||
| I think I'm gonna stay retired. | ||
| I forget, what were we- It's like a sub. | ||
| Yeah, it did. | ||
| Yeah, it looked like some pulled pork. | ||
| Pastramia. | ||
| What were we just talking about when we brought that up? | ||
| No, what was next? | ||
| No, we're just talking about that. | ||
| Career. | ||
| And you were talking about possibly boxing. | ||
| Yeah, possibly Ryan Garcia, man. | ||
| That's just for a giant payday? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Obviously, to win, obviously to fight, to challenge yourself. | ||
| The boxers don't get as crazy as we do. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| They don't get crazy heavy. | ||
| But I'm walking around 150, so if we do fight, it'll probably be at 35. Which is good. | ||
| I think McGregor... | ||
| I think McGregor's done it with Mayweather. | ||
| I think if Ryan wants to do it, then I think it's... | ||
| How much time would you need to prepare for something like that? | ||
| Probably about two to three months. | ||
| About three months. | ||
| Three months? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would like three months at least. | ||
| How much on a regular basis is boxing a part of your workout? | ||
| I know that you did a lot of amateur boxing right out of your Olympic career. | ||
| You went right into amateur boxing. | ||
| You did that for how long? | ||
| I did that for three years. | ||
| And that was thinking about trying to make the Olympic team again. | ||
| Now, once you went back to MMA training, how boxing-focused is your MMA training? | ||
| It's a lot, but it's also different. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| So now it's just... | ||
| I don't even call it Muay Thai or boxing. | ||
| It's just MMA. You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Because the distance, everything's just different. | ||
| And then you've got to do it according to your style, man. | ||
| According to what you feel comfortable throwing. | ||
| So all of your workouts are MMA? They're all. | ||
| I'm cutting all the bullshit out, man. | ||
| I think when you get to that level where, okay, man, a two-hour striking class is just too much. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| A two-hour jiu-jitsu class, that's not MMA-based, it's not good, and it would be too much. | ||
| What about when you're done with a fight? | ||
| When you're done with a fight, in between fights, do you work out just to stay fit? | ||
| Do you work out for fun? | ||
| Do you go and do like a jiu-jitsu class with a gi on or anything like that? | ||
| Or do you stick to sport-specific workouts even in between fights? | ||
| Yeah, even in between fights. | ||
| 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 how much time do you spend and how much effort do you spend weeding out sparring partners and getting the right ones? | ||
| And how important is that for a camp? | ||
| That's my coach's job. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| That's for him to call and to see the people that we know and trust and all that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the other thing is, it's hard what I do. | ||
| I mean, I got a guy alternating like every round. | ||
| I'm doing a five round fight and I got a fresh dude in every round when I'm going hard. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| So a lot of like the practices that I'm doing, like I'm really investing in what I'm doing in sparring. | ||
| Do these guys know you already? | ||
| I mean, have you trained with them previously when they make it to a camp, or this is the first time you've ever trained with them? | ||
| Yes, the first time you've ever trained with them. | ||
| So it becomes a very, it's a relationship, but it talks to a very business-like, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| It's like, hey man, you're so focused and you'll be compensated to do such and such, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, southpaw style and always, even from the height, like I don't, when I fought Dominic, everybody had to be exactly Dominic's size. | ||
| And they had to be able to move like him or try to move like him the best as possible. | ||
| So I'm not sparring with the guys about my size. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it depends on who you're fighting to. | ||
| How hard is it to get a guy to mimic Dominic Cruz? | ||
| Actually, they're out there, man. | ||
| There's a lot of guys that grew up watching Dominic fight. | ||
| There's a couple guys at our gym that moves just like Dominic. | ||
| So with his whole art, they studied him. | ||
| They were able to develop certain things. | ||
| They're the ones that were telling me, don't even go for this. | ||
| Smoke bomb the hands, take the legs off. | ||
| Smoke bomb the hands, take the legs off. | ||
| Something that I saw from this whole COVID thing, from finding an empty arena is... | ||
| Our corner, we were prepared. | ||
| Check this out, Joe. | ||
| This is how prepared we are. | ||
| We're even prepared to the point where we're using cold words. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| So every time I heard spaghetti, take the legs out. | ||
| Pumpkin, you know, let's start going up top. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Potatoes, it's sticking the bodies. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| I could hear clearly what Dominic's corner was saying during the fight. | ||
| They're like, left high kick! | ||
| I could hear it, man. | ||
| So it made me understand that maybe the sport of fighting, maybe it's just you fighting. | ||
| But when you're able to study, just like even your surroundings, you understand, dude, this is a team sport, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Was that weird that you could hear the coaches so loudly? | |
| It was fun. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| It was fun, man. | ||
| I don't know how the other people... | ||
| I've been fighting with tons of people in the crowd. | ||
| It was fun to just hear the corners, man. | ||
| It was a treat for me. | ||
| Was it weird that that was going to be your last fight? | ||
| At least you've experienced it once, right? | ||
| To do it that way. | ||
| I think that's why I liked it. | ||
| It was so personable, man. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Was it more or less relaxed when there's no audience? | ||
| More relaxed. | ||
| Way more relaxed. | ||
| Seems like it would be. | ||
| Look at the fights, man. | ||
| Look at this card, man. | ||
| You think the fights would be like that if there was a big crowd? | ||
| Like, people were into their groove, man, whether you're winning or losing. | ||
| Maybe it would have. | ||
| Well, there's also the factor of the smaller octagon. | ||
| What do you think about that? | ||
| They're using for the apex center the 25-foot octagon. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's... | ||
| You want to see blood, Joe? | ||
| No, it's not that I want to see blood. | ||
| I want to see exchanges. | ||
| I feel like you can still move in a 25-foot octagon. | ||
| You can still get away from shit, but you shouldn't be able to get away from everything all the time. | ||
| Like, the bigger the octagon, the more it comes to... | ||
| If you're going to use an octagon at all... | ||
| I think the smaller one's better. | ||
| My feeling is you shouldn't use anything. | ||
| My feeling is it should be in a football field. | ||
| Mad up a fucking football field. | ||
| I'm for real. | ||
| I'm not joking. | ||
| I've said this a million times. | ||
| Just let them go up the stairs. | ||
| Well, where there's no obstacles, no wall to press someone up against. | ||
| If someone gets up, they have to get up on their own. | ||
| They have to be flat on their back in the middle of nowhere, and they can't use the wall to get up. | ||
| I feel like there's a factor, and I don't think it's a good or a bad thing, but there is a recognizable factor that the cage provides. | ||
| The good thing, if you wanted to say a good thing, the smaller cage is better because they can't go anywhere. | ||
| The bad thing that there's a cage at all and that it does get in the way, it does become a thing. | ||
| Like when someone's clinching you against the cage and kneeing you, your back is against the cage. | ||
| There's a barrier. | ||
| You're stuck. | ||
| I feel like... | ||
| It would be better if there wasn't a thing that someone could press you against that would be good for their advance. | ||
| Do you know what I'm saying? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, I hear you, but it's almost like the Kumite. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, obviously, but bigger. | ||
| Yeah, bigger. | ||
| Just a big, open, like, basketball-sized court. | ||
| Put some crocodiles out. | ||
| No! | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, just have it— Make it real right, a big wave on the other side. | |
| 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. | ||
| But I'm a moron. | ||
| You don't have to listen to me. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| I get you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you're fighting in the woods sometimes, it's more practical. | |
| Would you prefer the larger octagon that you've fought in in Jacksonville or the smaller one like the Apex Center for your style? | ||
| As a wrestler, if I'm going to wrestle, it's going to be the smaller one. | ||
| I fought in both. | ||
| If I was a striker, if I was somebody like... | ||
| Just one of the strikers, a good striker, maybe Sean, maybe O'Malley, I would need a bigger cage. | ||
| Because the wrestler's out there to cut distance. | ||
| If you know how to use a cage, it's a powerful tool. | ||
| What do you think about the possibility of becoming a coach? | ||
| Is that something you really consider? | ||
| Because you were kind of talking about the heartbreaks of it. | ||
| I think you would be an amazing coach. | ||
| Yeah, but maybe to a certain extent, man. | ||
| Maybe to the right people. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's hard, Joe. | ||
| It's hard, man. | ||
| This is why, because there's some people, you know, we talked about heart and ability today. | ||
| It's like there's some people that have a lot of heart, but their ability is just like, dude, when are you going to get it? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Or vice versa, so... | ||
| I think because I know what it takes and if I don't see that from a certain person, then I can't be a part of it. | ||
| Let me put this in your head. | ||
| Think about this team that you put together. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You could develop a fucking empire. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Come on, son. | ||
| Maybe, but it's not... | ||
| I want to get into real estate, man. | ||
| I want to do... | ||
| Do you? | ||
| Yeah, I want to do that. | ||
| I want to do... | ||
| You want to get paid. | ||
| I want to get paid, man. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I love freedom, Joe, more than anything, man. | ||
| I've competed my whole life from age 11 to... | ||
| Joe, I have over like 600, maybe 700 wrestling matches. | ||
| Competitions, man. | ||
| Boxing, wrestling. | ||
| From age 11 to 33, that's all I've ever done. | ||
| That's all I've ever known was competition. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're done. | |
| To compete. | ||
| I'm done, Joe. | ||
| Unless that Ryan Garcia or maybe the Volkanovski, but even then, if it doesn't happen or whatever, it's okay, man. | ||
| I'm happy. | ||
| Whatever happens, man, what you've accomplished so far has been truly spectacular. | ||
| And I really believe that you could do anything you want. | ||
| Whatever it is, whether you decide to focus on real estate or anything, a man who can do what you've done can do anything. | ||
| And I think it's one of the best lessons of martial arts. | ||
| The amount of power that you have to have in your mind to push your body to do what you've done. | ||
| To push your will to get those workouts in and to compete when it's game day. | ||
| You've done that. | ||
| You've overcome the balance. | ||
| And you're getting out while you're still fresh. | ||
| You're a young man. | ||
| What are you, 33? | ||
| 33? | ||
| That ain't shit! | ||
| You're a young man. | ||
| You have all this energy, man. | ||
| I got some hairs on my... | ||
| I got some grays on my... | ||
| You've had a very strenuous life. | ||
| I mean, you know, very few people have put their body to the kind of strain that you have in all those 33 years, but you can do anything, man. | ||
| Anything. | ||
| Whatever you want. | ||
| And you get out with your wits intact. | ||
| Yeah, no, thank you, Joe. | ||
| Thank you for... | ||
| Man, thank you for everything, man. | ||
| This was a fun time. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| Getting a chance to share my knowledge and obviously getting a chance to hear your knowledge and... | ||
| It's been a good time. | ||
| Can you mind if I give a couple thank yous here? | ||
| Yeah, please. | ||
| I want to give a special thank you to my new sponsor, Smart Cups. | ||
| That was just your friend who owns Smart Cups? | ||
| Yeah, Chris Connect. | ||
| He just showed me a video of what it is. | ||
| Can we say it? | ||
| Yeah, go ahead. | ||
| You want to explain it, Joe? | ||
| They figured out a way to have a 3D print. | ||
| Nutrients and flavor into cups. | ||
| So you take the cup. | ||
| It's the craziest shit I've ever seen. | ||
| There's a cup. | ||
| You buy like a box of cups, take the cup, you pour the water in the cup, and it turns into this electrolyte drink. | ||
| Because the 3D printing of all the stuff is actually on the surface of the cup. | ||
| It's pretty fucking badass. | ||
| Yeah, it's a trip. | ||
| So let's say, like, I'll give you an example. | ||
| Let's say, you know, you go to a ballpark and you want a lime. | ||
| Like, the ballpark's for 50,000 people. | ||
| It's the world champion. | ||
| They're going to have a bunch of limes like that, dude. | ||
| It's expensive. | ||
| And there's, like, a fee. | ||
| That's what it looks like, folks. | ||
| So that's the 3D printing flavor and nutrition that's in these cups. | ||
| And they pour that stuff in there. | ||
| So, for instance, that picture right there, like, if you like your beer with lime, like, that would have printed, like, actual lime. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So you could have a cup that was a lime cup. | ||
| You pour your beer into the, like you say, if you have a Corona, you pour it into the lime cup and you get that lime flavor in your beer. | ||
| No, but check this out too. | ||
| Sometimes you don't even need alcohol. | ||
| You just need water because there's already like... | ||
| Alcohol in there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You just need water. | ||
| It turns into beer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| There's a mad scientist next to you. | ||
| Is that real? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| So it's a trip. | ||
| 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. | ||
| For real. | ||
| Thank you, Joe. | ||
| Thank you, Joe. | ||
| That means a lot to me. | ||
| That means a lot to me. | ||
| Thank you for giving me the platform. | ||
| Like, I haven't really, you know, shared a lot of things that I've shared today, and there's no other platform here than the Joe Rogan Show. | ||
| I'm honored, brother. | ||
| Thank you so much for being here. | ||
| Thanks to everybody for listening. | ||
| Henry Cejudo, it's over, baby! | ||
| He's done with you people! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Intergender chat! |
Export Selection