Luke Thomas joins Joe Rogan to critique MMA’s systemic failures, from ER doctors’ PTSD in March 2020 to fighters like Bisping’s unmatched resilience and Silva’s decline post-Weidman KO. He slams USADA’s invasive anti-doping policies—like Tim Kennedy’s shower surveillance—calling them ineffective, citing Jon Jones’ loophole exploits vs. Alexei Torakiti’s disproportionate punishments. With UFC fighters earning just 18-20% of revenue amid monopsony lawsuits (Quarry et al.), Thomas argues unions could fix pay disparities, while Rogan questions PED safety claims, noting Belfort’s eye injury and Cyborg’s skull fracture occurred without drugs. Concluding, they agree the sport’s mental complexity outweighs physical enhancements, but systemic exploitation demands reform. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean, this is the future, and it apparently has some fog-proof attachment some way, somehow or another, and you put your hand, if you have to scratch your face, there's little zips on the side, and you put your hand through.
But my stepfather, my mom eventually got divorced, but I had a stepfather for a time, and he was a cop for 30 years in Washington, D.C. I'm not saying he had the most enlightened ideas of the world, but when you spend a few months in the hospital because they broke all your ribs...
And you had to deal with a two-year-old with a gun and every other situation.
It will warp you.
It will affect your moral calculations.
And if you have improper training and improper funding, it only exacerbates the problem.
We ask cops to do way too much shit and it results in a lot of problems.
I'll never forget the first time I went to 29 Palms, because there is fuck all to do at 29 Palms.
And so the Marine Corps wisely just invests in weight rooms.
It was the nicest gym I'd ever been in in my life, and it was nothing but Hoss Marine.
I mean, they're all on steroids.
They had to be...
I don't think any commanding officer gave a fuck.
And they were all huge.
And they lived this gung-ho life and blah, blah, blah.
But when it came time for hand-to-hand combatives training, McMap is shit.
It's not good.
It's better than nothing.
But unless you do straight-up army combatives, which is the best thing maybe the army's ever done for themselves in terms of that kind of aim, policy aim...
You get nothing.
And every cop I know who has ever trained, there's a bunch of guys who I know from various different martial arts schools, they took the initiative to go train outside of what law enforcement was providing them.
But like, this is what I mean, they don't get any of this shit.
Or if they do, it's like, you know, here's how to get out of if someone's choking you in this very, it's almost like a women's self-defense class is really the extent to which they learn.
Also, I would challenge it a little bit, if I may.
Which is, I saw in the wake of the George Floyd thing, there was a lot of people like, how do we...
Most people were basically horrified by that.
But the question is, what do you do about it?
And so I saw some op-eds.
I think MMA Junkie published one from this guy.
I'm sure he was well-intentioned, but he was like...
I think Henry Gracie had some similar ideas.
Because he really believes in the transformative power of jiu-jitsu, right?
I do to an extent.
I mean, here's what I would say.
It's the same thing going through the military.
If you don't succumb to the process, it will not redevelop your character.
You have to willingly give yourself to that.
Just giving cops jiu-jitsu training does not force that transformation.
So while I think it would help in certain situations, it could exacerbate existing problems with whatever cop has deranged or bad training about the world.
And now, oh wait, now you know Kimora's and you're a fucking asshole?
If you do get an asshole and you just teach him a few moves, you could create a worse asshole.
But I would hope...
The problem is, like...
In normal jujitsu, the way jujitsu transforms your life, it's not transforming your life in the stress of you being a police officer and all the things we talked about, PTSD, people shooting you, dealing with all the horrific things you see every day.
Essentially, you're going through this struggle, and that struggle sort of steals you and makes you a better person.
Yeah, if you went through that struggle along with the chaos of the police academy or of rather police duty, I would imagine best case scenario is it alleviates some stress.
It helps you get past a lot of the bullshit that you would normally eat at you.
And it also allows you to relieve some tension and...
But I would say doing that by itself would not be sufficient.
That along with other forms of reform – So that we're asking police to do the things that police are supposed to do and not the things they're not supposed to do.
I think in conjunction, it's never one solution, right?
Most problems in the world require a series of interventions.
Do those in conjunction, you're probably going to get a better policing.
When I was 19, I worked as a security guard at a concert place called Great Woods in Mansfield, Massachusetts.
And it was a short amount of time.
I wasn't there for but a few months over the summer.
But during that time, I recognized a really clear us-versus-them mentality between the security force and the concertgoers.
And it happened pretty quickly.
It happened really quickly where I saw security guys beat the shit out of me.
The first day of the job, I saw this guy get beaten up with a walkie-talkie because he stole a golf cart.
Like, 19-year-old, fresh-faced kid, like, what is going on here?
And this guy, his name is Alley Cat, tackles this kid who had stolen one of their golf carts, and he's hitting him in the face with a walkie-talkie.
And I'm like, what kind of job did I fucking sign up for?
I mean, and it was only like, you know, 15 bucks an hour or something, I would imagine.
I don't really remember, but I remember thinking real early on, like, this is a very strange how I've, like, very quickly developed this us-versus-them mentality.
I've also noticed, you know, back when I was 24, I was working doors at various bars in New York City to make some money to make ends meet because New York City is crazy expensive.
And I was lifting weights like crazy.
I was huge, you know, the whole bit.
And I'll never forget, people would always tell me, they're like, oh, I bet people don't want to mess with you.
You know what's really very satisfying to me is that when I first got involved in the UFC in 1997, it was when I was on news radio and the people on news radio literally look at me like I was doing porn.
They were like, what are you doing?
Why are you doing this?
You're going to ruin your career.
And I was like, I don't know.
I don't know what to tell you.
I like it.
My whole life I've been a martial artist.
Now finally someone did the thing that I've always asked them to do.
My whole life I was like, I want to know what would happen.
If you've got a judo guy with a boxer, if you've got a this with a that...
And then the UFC's like, let's find out.
And then I'm like, oh my god, it's real.
It's happening.
To me, it was like someone came along with the Willy Wonka golden ticket.
It was happening.
It was real.
And then when they offered me a job, I was like, fuck yeah, I'm going.
He fought John Hess over in Hawaii and beat the shit out of John Hess.
And, you know, I was training at his school and I thought he was like...
Impossible to stop.
And he was 19. And when he was 19, his hands were a blur of light.
He was so fast and so aggressive and so different than any other Brazilian jiu-jitsu guy.
Because we thought of Brazilian jiu-jitsu guys, and he was a black belt, but we thought of black belts as being someone who just wants to get a hold of you, drag you to the ground, strangle you, or get you in an armbar.
And all of a sudden, you've got this guy who's wearing gloves, because nobody else is wearing gloves, or very few people, 10 Cabot wore gloves.
And just lighting people up with punches.
And we're like, holy shit!
And so, just by chance and fortune, I was training at his school and got to be on the card and doing the post-fight interviews the very first time that he fought in the UFC. Wow.
Yeah, so I got to see him.
He fought Trey Tellegman.
Remember Trey had a car accident when he was a little kid.
To your point about the origin of things, I remember most people were like, I've been watching UFC since UFC 1. Well, I didn't.
Because I just didn't know.
I was a 12-year-old kid at the time.
You only know what someone shows you for the most part.
This is pre-internet, so you definitely only know that shit.
And I had a family friend who was involved in a martial art that was South Korean called Tukong, which apparently was the official...
So Taekwondo is, as I understand it, and someone's going to correct me on this, but as I understand it, what was explained to me was that Taekwondo is the official sport of South Korea, but Tukong was the official martial art or self-defense system of the military.
I don't know anything about it, other than what this guy told us.
General Chaeyoung Yi, he was the guy, I used to teach Taekwondo, and General Chaeyoung Yi was the guy who really formulated Taekwondo into a system, and my instructor, Jaehyun Kim, was one of Chaeyoung Yi's I remember
it was the summer of...
Was it 95, 96?
Something like that.
And he was like, have you seen the skinny Brazilian dudes out here fucking people up?
I think it was three he had skipped and four he had come back and fought chemo.
What was the one where he had, I forget the genesis, but there was enough in the video where he was just like lighting these people up in the way, he's like, how the fuck is this possible?
And it's been politicized now and it takes on a different meaning, but that truly was red-pilled at that moment.
Like, there was a eureka moment and the lights go on and you're like, wow, this really is the future.
Understand, for folks who don't know who Mark Breland is, former, I think, Olympic gold medalist, world champion, across two different weight divisions, if I'm not mistaken.
He is the voice of sanity, or was, until he was dismissed in that corner.
That was the guy that threw the towel for him, who, I mean...
Breland should be thanked by Wilder and his camp until the end of time.
His other trainer, I forget his last name, he was out there at the post-fight press conference being like, I don't know if I would have thrown that towel.
It's like, you fucking yes man.
Are you kidding me?
Breland took it upon himself to, I don't know, save the guy's life, but certainly make the right call for halting the contest.
He was thanked by being dismissed and now essentially dragged through the mud with utterly, I'm guessing, or utterly baseless accusations about poisoning his own fighter.
And also you have to realize that Tyson Fury in the first fight was coming off of a multiple year battle with depression, mental illness, drinking, got suicidal thoughts.
He talked on my podcast about driving his Ferrari and almost slamming into a bridge.
He's like, I was pedaled to the metal and I was thinking about slamming into this bridge.
and they changed his mind and you know just slowly worked his way into shape got healthy again got his mind right again and pulled it back around but when he fought Deontay Wilder the first time his father didn't want him to take the fight he's like you're not healthy enough yet you're not ready yet and he did his best he fought well but it was a draw by the time they fought the second time he was in tip-top condition he had gone through the camp for the first fight
his body was completely recovered from all the abuse of alcohol and cocaine and all the shit that he was doing And then he took on the cronk trainer, Sugar Hill.
And then his whole strategy changed.
He's like, the guy does not fight well off the heel, off the back foot.
I mean, every once in a while you come around to a guy who not only can train fighters to a high degree— But has an idea about what the game is missing and how to fill that gap.
And they are big believers in fainting.
They make a point.
They basically say, like, how is it possible you can have people come from this little tiny island?
And, you know, Adesanya is the very best version of that.
No punches thrown, just fainting, just to set it all up.
Because they basically say, if you look at the way which a lot of American and even European strikers throw, it's a lot of sit down and throw combinations.
Mm-hmm.
Which you can do, but they don't really believe that's the best way to do it.
The best gap to fill is that.
Fury, to circle the point here, is excellent.
He is such a brilliant fainter.
And he had Deontay Wilder dead to rights over and over and over again, which he didn't really do the first time around.
And so, you know, all these excuses about, Mark Traynor poisoned me.
My view on his power is that for straight rights, which is really what he basically throws, or maybe a little bit overhandy because it's a little bit looping, that's one of the best, if not the best, right hands in all of boxing.
If you're talking about full-on power punchers, though, I don't know that he's got the full repertoire.
Like, is his uppercut with his right hand as good as his straight?
I mean, I've seen so many guys who you'd look at, and they're big and strong, and you would say, wow, but that guy hits hard, and they can't crack an egg.
There's been a bunch of them, like, you see them in the gym, and then you see guys, like, do you remember Michael McDonald when he was a kid when he was coming up?
He was right in the middle of saying, you know, if Gervonta Davis thinks that his power is going to put Santa Cruz down, and then he cracked him with it, so he stopped mid-sentence.
Wouldn't have been his fault, because the point was, like, Santa Cruz opened up.
A serious question about this, because I went through it a couple times.
So from the moment he got kicked, then he initiates the takedown.
He tried the first round.
He did it off a head inside single.
It didn't work.
Second round, he tried it off a double from the outside leg kick.
First round was an inside leg kick, hence the inside single.
Didn't work, so then he goes to the double.
It's 22 seconds from that till the finish.
So 22 seconds, we're apart.
22 seconds later, you're unconscious.
I mean, this is my question to you.
Is that the best back take you've ever seen in MMA? Because what he does is, when Gaethje is sprawling in this contest, he's not just sprawling.
He is sprawling and turning so he doesn't get pushed into the fence.
He was very diligent about that in the Alvarez and the Gaethje fights.
You can go back and you can watch it.
So in this fight, when you see the level change that Khabib hits, You'll see automatically Gaethje turn because he doesn't want to get turned that direction.
But what Khabib does is he actually scoots under him, pulls him up, and then with his head posts him over, gets the hands to plant.
Well, once the hands are planted, the double is over.
He doesn't care about it anymore.
Now he just wants the tight waist.
And from the tight waist, he's holding...
His elbows aren't flared.
They're tight here, right?
Like he's T-Rexing inside.
At that point, you have created, if you're Justin Gaethje putting your hands, you've created a stable structure for this guy to now mount.
Plus, if you want to escape to the fence to, like, stand, he can control the ascent.
So he goes, double, turns, pushes hands to the mat, forces Gaethje down, and then with his gable grip, then keeps it there and then replaces it with the hooks.
And then turns it to a fake, not a real Joe Rogan, a fake head and arm triangle attempt, just so Gaethje gets his elbows away from his body.
Then he chair sits to occupy the space, then throws the leg over, and then sits back and takes mercy upon him.
As we learn later from Daniel Cormier, rather than arm bar him from his mom's, I'm just going to triangle you because that's the merciful.
This guy is out here taking fucking pity on his opponents.
And he's doing back takes like that.
He is...
Jon Jones, to me, is the most accomplished fighter we've ever seen.
Like, who is the GOAT? I think if you look at Jon Jones' early career, right?
Jon Jones wins the title in 2011, and...
He, from then on, has fought more fights as championship fights than he has other fights.
So he's the most accomplished, for sure.
Wins the title, earliest, youngest guy to ever win the title in the UFC. Beats Mauricio Shogunhua, who's a legend.
And then the way he dominates all these other fighters, up until you get to Alexander Gustafson, you can make the argument that he had a similar career.
You can make the argument, like if you look at what he did, Jon didn't lose any rounds.
Jon was smashing people.
You look at what he did to Rashad Evans.
You look at what he did to Rampage Jackson.
You look at what he did to Lyoto Machida.
You look at what he did to everybody.
Everybody he fought up until the Gustafson fight.
But the Gustafson fight, then you have to say, well, how much slack do you give him for admittedly not training?
Because it was a really close fight.
He pulls it out in the championship round, even though he's out of shape, even though you talked to Greg Jackson, he didn't train for that fight.
Didn't fucking train, like barely worked out, but definitely didn't go through a training camp.
Still managed to beat one of the best guys in the division after getting taken down for the first time in his career.
Look at the way he beat Daniel Cormier in the first fight.
Took him down.
Like, who the fuck takes Daniel Cormier down, right?
And then you look at him in the second fight.
Even though it was ruled a no contest, we know what the fuck happened.
He head-kicked him and stopped him.
You know, it was spectacular.
You look at what John has done Then you have to take into account The things that didn't go that well And we haven't seen those from Khabib yet You have to take into account the fight like Tiago Santos That fucker goes to a split decision You're like whoa Dominic Reyes Dominic Reyes thought he won the fight Real close Real close fight So those fights haven't happened with Khabib yet.
And we don't know if they ever could.
We don't know, right?
Like, right now, would you see flawless victory after flawless victory?
You could maybe make the argument that Khabib lost two rounds his entire career.
Maybe the second round against Justin...
Or first round rather, maybe first round rather against Justin, and maybe the third round with Connor.
In a sport filled with, it's not a scientific measurement per se, right, who gets cut the most or something, but in a sport built on unpredictability, on violence.
The John Joad situation is also, it's a contrast in personalities, right?
Khabib, who's this really religious, very moral, ethical person who doesn't drink, he doesn't party, he doesn't do anything, he just trains, he's always in phenomenal shape, he takes every fight incredibly serious, he's never been out of shape, he's never been fat, he's never, I mean...
He's missed weight a couple of times earlier in his career, but he got that dialed in.
I mean, the stories I've heard, I don't want to repeat them because I cannot verify them.
But I've heard stories like, if y'all think that was the one fight, he's just like, oh, I'm going to pump the brakes this time.
No, bitch.
I mean, here's the other part about it.
It's like, when you...
So who's a guy, for example, who maintained dominance through the game and took significant amounts of time off in boxing?
Floyd Mayweather would be a great example of that.
But Floyd has been training as a family affair...
From adolescence, right?
For the long part of his life.
And he is so gifted that he can take time off and the game is so developed that people aren't going to make warp speed development in his absence.
And so they got a little bit better every time he took a little bit of time off, like the Maidana first fight with the corkscrew punch.
That was a little bit of a wild card there.
But in general, he was able to maintain that dominance.
In MMA, the game changes rapidly.
Super fast, because people are still discovering best practices.
In two years, people will not be doing the same kinds of things to the same degree they do now.
The calf kick and its explosion is sort of an obvious example of that.
John was doing things like not training between camps.
I mean, that's something only elite boxers do because they've been doing this since they were five, six years old, and they can take the time to not necessarily do that.
Whereas most MMA fighters are like, I'm an everyday martial artist.
I just ramp it up.
He would do nothing and then something and still go out there and beat world fucking champions in what at the time was the UFC's marquee division.
I wonder if maybe there's some benefit, because it's not like you got totally out of shape, but I wonder if there's some benefit to that in that he's not getting beat up.
He's not getting his joints wrecked.
Probably?
Yeah, it's a real question of what's the best way to approach it.
We're still trying to figure that out, right?
If you go back to the early days of, say, Hammer House and the Miletic Fighting Systems guys, those guys used to beat the...
This is not like, hey, you want to get better at self-defense?
No, not that kind of school.
But my answer to the question about, is it better to do what John did?
My hunch is that there are probably some net benefits to it.
On balance, there's going to be some downsides and some upsides.
The downsides are going to be that this development that you might need as a martial artist will be somewhat impeded.
However, there'll be some longevity issues you may not have to worry about by consequence.
In fact, you look at him tearing his toe in the Chael Sonnen fight.
Now, I fucked up my toe similarly, not to the extent where I was through the skin, but he has a buddy system with the wrap on the toe, and I had to use the exact same thing for a long time, because even now, if I step on my right foot just right, it sends fire through my toe.
Not like in the fuck you kind of sense, but like, I'm going to fight you in a way where all these stories that they told me about you, it's like the buzzing of flies to me.
But it doesn't also say something that, like, okay, Noguera exception aside, most of the brother tandems, or even the sister tandems, one is clearly better than the other, though.
Well, sometimes that is what makes a really tough fighter, too.
Like, Chris Weidman's story, him and his brother, his brother used to beat his ass, and his brother was bullying him, and Chris Weidman became a fucking savage, cause he was just so tough from dealing with his fucking brother.
My brother was a super hardcore academic nerd, and so I don't have any...
I have a brother, and you're telling me these stories, and it's like, that is so divorced from my reality from having a brother as a sibling, you know?
You ever seen this documentary, I think it's called The Season, but if I'm getting it wrong, I know your listeners are going to fucking kill me if I get it wrong.
I forget the exact name, but they, you know Steve Mako, he's the ATT wrestling coach?
I'm not sure exactly who he is.
He was for a long time.
Steve Mako's hilarious.
One time, speaking to Jon Jones, Jon was fighting Glover in Baltimore, and Steve definitely did not want me to interview him, but he didn't say no.
I was like, Steve, can I get a couple seconds with you or whatever?
And I stuck a microphone in his face, and I'm like, so, you know, specifically, what kind of strategies around Glover have you trained here?
He's like, you know, some particular strategies around Glover for Jon.
Like, he would just literally repeat the exact words back to me.
Four questions in, I'm like, you don't want to do this.
He fucking sent me to hell on a press conference once.
But real quickly, when it comes to Steve Mako, Steve wrestled at Oklahoma and then Iowa.
I think Iowa first and Oklahoma.
And they had...
I think it was ESPN had done a documentary and they had gone to...
Iowa wrestling is like...
Penn State is now the best program in the country and has been for some time because of Kale Sanderson and the recruiting and the great work that they've done.
But in general, for a long time, Iowa is sort of one of these titans of college wrestling.
And they ask Steve Mako, as a college student, why do you like wrestling?
Why do you want to compete so hard?
He's like, because when I really win and I dominate, I change people.
They're not the same after I get done with them.
They realize they're not who they think they are, and I'm everything that they feared I would be.
But about John, so I don't know what the issue is, candidly.
I actually, what basically ended up happening was he had a very good relationship with him and his management for a long time.
and I still have a decent relationship with his management, but he had...
So the fight back with Cormier at 214, I think it was, whatever the number was, the rematch, he had a press conference, he had a shaved head, and he was in a mood.
And I'd ask him some totally softball, innocuous question.
And to the public, he goes, you know, Luke, I don't like you, so I'm not going to answer your question.
And it was a shock to me because his coach, Brandon Gibson, I'm like very tight with, you know, and a bunch of other people.
And they didn't know either.
In fact, I talked to his manager, Malky, at the time.
I had a discussion with John where he was thinking, why did I go bad on him?
What was I saying?
Because one of the things that I said, I speculated that maybe one of the reasons why he was behaving the way he was behaving was CTE. And I still kind of stand by that.
I think one of the things that happens with CTE, and not that I think John should get out of the game, I'm not saying this at all, but I'm saying that there's an inevitable consequence of getting hit in the head.
We've seen the video of John getting pulled over drunk driving and he says, I forget a lot of things, I get hit in the head for a living.
There's an inevitable consequence of getting punched in the head where fighters experience some sort of negative effect of it.
Well, in the case of John, as it relates to my interaction with him, And I hold no ill will, believe it or not, because, frankly, I almost prefer that.
Like, I always tell fighters, I'm like, I'm not your friend, but I'm definitely not your enemy.
Like, you have to understand that.
Like, I mean this truly.
You cannot work in MMA media.
You cannot work in MMA media.
It's not possible to do the job correctly, such as the job can be done correctly, which I'm not even sure that's even true anymore.
But if you don't understand that the fighter doesn't owe you anything and that the fighter is uniquely disadvantaged relative to the power structures inside MMA, you cannot do the job effectively.
You cannot.
So to the extent that he gets mad, he's okay.
Does he want to answer?
He does not have to answer my question.
I'd have fucking preferred a different result, you know?
Well, I think fighting is uniquely personal, right?
It's not like saying Bill Buckner's a loser because he let that ball go between his legs.
It's a different thing.
Like when a fighter loses, I almost feel like they put themselves out there more than any other athlete and they deserve more respect than any other athlete.
This is my personal opinion.
Obviously, I'm incredibly biased because that's the only sport that I've ever covered.
Right.
I get why they feel the way they feel.
I get it.
And I try to be as respectful as possible while still being accurate.
And that's a fine line to draw.
But I'm an employee of the UFC. You're not.
And one of the things that I would love to get into with you, you said What was the way you phrased it?
That they're uniquely disadvantaged within the power structure of MMA? Yeah, there's no way to...
Your job is to commentate for UFC and then do your podcast.
And, you know, my position I come to a little bit differently, right?
So for me...
If you're looking at the world and your job is to the best approximation that you can, tell the truth about it, how do you tell the truth about the world and say that the fighters don't have every power structure pushing against them?
Because they basically do.
That doesn't mean they don't act petulantly at times.
That doesn't mean they don't bring shit on themselves at times or that everything they do is above reproach.
That's not what I'm here to say.
But let's go through it here a little bit.
Okay.
In the case of Fighter Pay, the debate is over.
There is no argument anymore.
We now have court documents to this effect.
They get paid roughly 18-20% by the UFC year over year as a more or less fixed position.
Now, as the UFC makes more money, 20%, the percentage might stay fixed, but the amount of money can go up.
So money is going up, but it's relative...
It's all a function of this continued amount.
20%.
Okay, that doesn't seem to me quite equitable.
That's a personal opinion, but that's the way I look at it.
Then, you want to look at their management.
There are no barriers to entry for management.
I cannot tell you half of these guys.
Listen, some of these guys I interact with, they're great.
I disagree with them at times.
I agree with them at times.
I think they really have the fighter's best interest at heart.
But there's a lot of them there that are fucking snakes.
That's just the way that it goes.
And they are not...
I don't think the fighters are necessarily the best stewards of understanding what's in their rights and interests.
It's my personal opinion, but anti-doping to me is, to me, I won't call it a fraud, but I think it's a tragic mistake in the way that we are doing it.
So then it goes to the sponsors, and then they take away all of them, which is the UFC's right, by the way.
It totally is their right.
But again, to me, I never understood it from just a pragmatic standpoint, because this was a way to offset complaints about fighter pay, because you have now Venom at the time, or name any brand or whatever the fuck that was sponsored.
Ryu, whatever brand that's come and gone, was a way to offset fighter pay.
So they are restricted.
And by the way, the media, I think, doesn't treat them fairly in the sense that, and I'm a member of the MMA media, and I have been for almost 15 years, You are expected to be either friend or foe with them.
And I don't want to be either.
I want to be friendly.
I want to be professional.
But I don't want to be your buddy because it causes all kinds of problems down the road when shit starts to go south for you.
And by the way, it will.
Every fighter who's young thinks that they're going to live off these winds forever.
And it's like, dude, I've been around long enough to see the downside.
It's coming for you.
So, you begin to add up all of these factors, and you can say, well, what is the moment we can create to fix all of this?
That is the responsibility of the fighters.
It used to be the case that you can make an argument that MMA media was not covering enough of these issues with full-throatedness.
That is no longer the case.
They have aired out all of this.
They have covered this multi-billion dollar lawsuit that is happening.
There is a Nate Quarry, Kyle Kingsbury, Kung Lee lawsuit, and many others as well.
They are basically suing the UFC for...
To put it in layman's terms, the bad effects of monopoly.
And they believe they're entitled to compensation and other forms of change in the industry as a consequence.
We are going to get a result, I think on the 19th of this month, from the judge in the case that if he allows it to go forward, he will have to certify them as a class.
And all indications are he's going to, which means that trial will proceed.
Now, it still has a long way to go, but that is a major institutional hurdle on behalf of the plaintiffs.
He goes by the name of, you want to follow him on Twitter, it's at HayNotTheFace.
I don't understand it.
He has done absolutely fantastic work and is a professor at Pepperdine.
He's an economist.
He's a professional economist who teaches economics there.
He goes by the name of MMA Analytics, but his name is...
God, I'm blanking now because I've been drinking.
But I've had him on my show a million times.
These two guys, and also MMA Payout has done a good job of covering this.
Josh Gross, to an extent.
I know you know Josh.
Josh has done some good work for The Athletic, although he's no longer with them.
But these are basically the only folks really talking about it.
No one else is really doing it.
It's hard to focus on the lawsuit because if the judge denies them class certification or it gets thrown out at any moment, then the whole thing goes away and it's a long-term projection.
We're not anywhere close to any kind of end on this for the next five years or something.
Basically that the UFC is not a monopoly, it's a monopsony, which instead of sort of one seller, it's one buyer.
It's a different kind of monopoly and that it has resulted in depressed wages, it's resulted in unfair contracts, It's resulted in any number of harms related to the fighter and their ability to negotiate.
I mean, most of that is not arguable, right?
You cannot argue that the UFC and the fighter go to contract negotiations with equal amounts of leverage.
That is not true.
Now, what the solution to that is, is very debatable.
How do you want to fix that?
What kind of policy prescriptions do you want to pass?
Do you want to pass the Ali Act and extend it to MMA? There are some problems with that as well.
It was passed, I think, by John McCain, I want to say around 2000 or so.
I might be getting the date wrong.
But basically, the idea behind the Ali Act is that it provides a series of protections for the boxer against the promoter and or the industry in the form of disclosures.
So, for example, by virtue of the Ali Act, they have to disclose to the fighter, to the boxer, like Teofimo Lopez just won, right?
Top rank has to disclose to him who's making what.
Margins on the costs, sales on pay-per-view, or it was on TV, but to the extent that it's relevant.
So they have to disclose that kind of thing.
The Ali Act prevents any promoter from having the title.
So it's a Strikeforce title.
It's a Bellator title.
It's a UFC title.
You can have a problem with the alphabet soup, but that really is the crux of the issue, is to the extent that the promoter holds the title, they hold everything.
But yeah, see, because the other thing is, like, promoters and then the sanctioning body, like, then the fighters are paying the sanctioning body, and they're paying the promoter, and the sanctioning bodies are, you know, they're trying to get mandatories that nobody gives a fuck about, and if you don't, you know what I mean?
And even WBA. I covered boxing for a long time, and then I stopped because the nature of my job changed, and I didn't have the opportunity to really...
I was just so engrossed in the MMA world.
I'd missed a lot of time, and I remember I was catching up with my co-host for the show I do on Showtime, Morning Combat, and my co-host was like, okay, so...
This guy has the WBA regular title, and then this one has the WBA franchise title, and then this one has the WBA Latino title?
Two guys who are roughly similar positions in their division, actually from the same area.
Regis Progray just fought Juan Geraldes on Showtime.
He was the number one guy at 140. He's probably number two now, right?
Josh Taylor's probably number one.
You got Dustin Poirier.
He's number two-ish or close in his division.
If you look at the Google Analytics, Dustin Poirier is eminently more popular than Regis Progray.
It's not even close.
He's four or five times to one in terms of how people are interested in what he is doing and looking for him.
Regis Progray makes seven or eight times what Dustin Poirier makes.
Really?
Seven or eight times.
So you can make an argument that there are sections of the boxing world that don't take care of the middle class as well as the UFC, and that is very, very true.
Again, I'm not here to paint UFC as criminals.
The UFC is a business.
They're going to run it like a business.
And the only way to fix this is for the fighters to decide they want to do something about it.
Hence the lawsuit being a bit of a game changer because it could, again, this is very much speculating, it could change the procedure for how this goes forward.
There's a couple of outcomes where it could result in a union or a trade association and then that sort of fixes the problem.
There's fighters that get to a position where they are world-class, where they're challenging for a title, and they never quite make enough money where you feel like it was worth it.
It's like, there used to be this debate because you hear these fighters come out and be like, you know, I got this bonus one time and it wasn't expected and it was huge.
And it's like, listen, man.
If you've ever been broke and someone came in with a lifeline, you can't get anything but teared up thinking about it.
Especially if you have kids and now you can have a Christmas with your kids.
I take what the gesture of money to a person who needs it, I take it very seriously.
I mean that absolutely sincerely.
I really do.
But the debate is over.
There is no more debate about fighter pay.
We have court documents year over year over year with express intent written in language by UFC to say we want to keep it at roughly 20%.
And they include the fighter expense of USADA as fighter compensation.
That's called fighter compensation.
So it's really a little bit closer to 18 or 19. What?
The UFC is obviously a different kind of an organization than, say, boxing, where you just have a promoter, and the promoter promotes the fights they promote, and they don't have obligations to 500 fighters they have on the roster.
There's obviously much higher overhead for the UFC. The UFC runs multiple performance centers all over the world.
The UFC has...
This promotion machine built into it, right?
Which is very expensive.
The UFC has a tremendous staff, which they've kept employed even during the pandemic.
They never let anybody go, which to me is very admirable.
I feel what you're saying.
I have always been the person...
Obviously, I'm an employee, a long-term...
Started for the UFC in 1997, was a different organization.
I'm pre-Zufa, right?
But they do...
They have something that doesn't exist anywhere else where you can go through the system, become a champion, and be a multi-multi-millionaire.
And then you see what they lost it on, they got scammed, or they bought a car, or some $700,000 Maybach or whatever.
And you're like, holy fuck, how did we get here?
How did we get here?
But I'm just saying, on some level, it's like with USADA, which we've kind of lost track on, like, when I get up and I think about, before I hit publish or whatever, what do I owe these people?
What do I owe the fighters?
What do I owe UFC? What do I owe the public?
What do I owe?
Right?
And I owe it to the fighters to say, there is a situation where you could be making more.
It's hard to parse that because you have to ask yourself to what extent is that kind of – it's vertical integration, right?
They want their own hotel, which they're building.
They want their own Apex facility, which they have.
They want their own broadcast.
They have UFC Fight Pass.
If ESPN went away, UFC just still puts on fights.
They're going to have their own hotel.
They have their own facility.
They have their own broadcast network with Fight Pass, whatever.
They have this total, not total, but they have near vertical integration across the industry.
And so, in many ways, that is a great way to keep fights going.
But it's like, you hear Eddie Hearn, who runs Matchroom Boxing, and he always sort of laments, He's like, there's got to be a better model that, you know, the UFC model really has figured it out.
But you don't get that if the fighters have rights.
You don't get that.
You don't get a model where you can have all this extra stuff if the fighters get a significantly greater share.
So my answer to that would be...
I don't know how it will all shake out.
And I don't know that I have the right answer.
I would like a union to decide this.
I would like a trade association to decide this.
Not me.
This is not me deciding it.
But I just, you know, get into a place where it's like, oh, we can just keep fights going.
You do that because you have the leverage to keep it going.
In defense of the UFC, they're going to have this...
Again, let's imagine the pandemic doesn't exist for a moment.
They either have, or it's already opened, the Institute in China.
So they are forcing that market to begin to recruit and develop and recruit and develop.
And I don't know if it'll be successful, but no one in boxing has that kind of hand in the pot to begin to make things happen in the way that UFC could for the betterment of MMA. That's a real thing I give them absolute credit for.
It's just you have to decide what you want.
Do you want an institute in Shanghai?
Or do you want Diego Sanchez to have been paid what he should have been paid?
There's a question you have to ask yourself there a little bit.
I'm not the guy who gets to decide what the checks are, but...
I think they should be paid as much as they can be paid.
I mean, I think it's the fucking hardest job outside of being a cop or a soldier or a firefighter or a first responder or a fucking surgeon in the emergency room.
It's one of the hardest goddamn jobs on the planet Earth.
I mean, I don't want to quantify whose job is tougher, but to me, I am obviously a massive fan.
And it means everything to me that these guys make as much as they can.
But it also, the UFC has to be profitable.
In order to be sold to someone like WME, it has to be valuable.
In order for it to be valuable, it has to be profitable.
In order for it to be something that they can promote and get behind and make it as big as they've made it.
There has to be some sort of pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for these people.
When you're dealing with business folks like, you know, like the WME. I mean, these are big-time players in the entertainment business.
For them to come along and fork out billions of dollars, literally billions, for the UFC, it has to be a valuable thing.
And from that, people have clearly profited.
From that, stars have been born.
And when you get to a guy who's a superstar, like a Conor McGregor or a Kameed Nurmagomedov, Israel Adesanya or Jon Jones, they're going to make a shitload of money.
The argument is, do the guys below them, do the journeymen, journeywomen, do they make enough?
The problem with asking for Deontay Wilder money when there's not a stadium, obviously you realize that stadiums bring in a significant amount of revenue.
It's a big deal.
I mean, it's millions and millions and millions of dollars for a fucking...
You're Jon Jones, you sell out the T-Mobile arena.
I'm not asking for the guys to get 50. I don't think 50 is realistic for the reasons you mentioned.
What the UFC has done spectacularly well is create a fighter middle class where guys can make six figures a year.
I don't know how many of them, but there's a portion of them where they can make six figures.
They at least have some accident insurance, and there's ways to leverage that, and there's a whole lot of them relative to what there is in boxing.
That's the sweet spot there.
But when you talk about the argument about who's most underpaid, the people point to the guy who's making 10 and 10 because he's a sob story.
But if you're asking who has generated the most versus what they were paid, yes, for the reasons you articulated, John shouldn't be getting whatever Deontay got for the second Fury fight.
No, it would be a little bit less than that.
But relative to what he got, no.
Conor McGregor is underpaid.
Relative to what he generates for the company, you think he got 50% of that?
They get a stipend for each individual pay-per-view, and then on top of that, if it sells past a certain point, they get a percentage of everyone past a certain threshold.
Anyway, so the point being is what they have done intentionally, again, quite wisely, is they've removed volatility.
They're going to have a certain amount of – and then through overseas deals with Kombache in Brazil or European providers, they've got a series of contracted pieces of revenue that take out the volatility provided they can meet the overall inventory of content that they have to meet.
This is very, very smart, but what it has done is it has reduced the amount of leverage that any one individual fighter may have, Plus, Conor pulls out and they go, okay, Jorge, you're on deck.
And Jorge has just fucking exploded to a megastar.
And he's all too willing to play ball until he had his own moment.
But they have a ton of different resources to go to so that fighters think, oh, I'll just retire.
You know, that would be the argument whether steep A is a big enough challenge for John to generate X amount of pay-per-view buys, which would justify the revenue.
It's like their reluctance, because I know for a long time, you know, privately fighters would be like to me, they'd be like, y'all never talk about this shit.
You'll never talk about it.
And I was like, you know, it's a fair point.
We never talk about it.
And then we spent the last seven, eight years talking about it, and it hasn't moved the needle.
And so it's like, I don't think it's up to me.
I don't think we can solve this problem.
You know, it's really, if you guys want it to be better, it's up to you.
Because again, UFC is going to do what they are allowed to do.
And they're just going to keep doing it.
So, like, for example, we had this whole issue with Leon Edwards.
He got removed from the rankings.
And everyone was like, fire and brimstone, fire and brimstone.
I mean, they show the story and you feel like all at once, I don't know who Leon Edwards is, but I want to know more.
I understand his story.
There's a lot of Jamaican immigrants, certainly in the UK, and growing up hardscrabble and getting fucked up and being in fights and shit, and then finally arriving at this moment.
Well, you know, the good news is he's still in his prime, and once all this shit blows over, there's still a lot of big fights to be had at 170, and there's also the opportunity that comes with guys inevitably getting injured and fights falling out, and the Chemayev fight, if you can shut down the hype train, that will put him right in the driver's seat.
Chemayev, I mean, it's really quick that this guy has all the hype on him, and the Mearshart fight just fucking put a candle on that cake, didn't it?
So there was this dude he fought, he made most of his fights in Brave, which is the promotion out of Bahrain, and he fought this dude who was a world champion in Sambo.
I think it was 170. When the guy's doing the one arm frozen up in the air or a leg, anytime there's something frozen in the air, you know, it's a bad knockout.
I don't think folks understand, to get, when you, if you lose enough at something, and not that they've lost a tremendous amount, I mean, he's a Hall of Famer and a champion, but I'm just saying, at the elite level, when you lose like that, There it is.
And the fact that he KO'd Rockhold with that beautiful left over the top like that, and that him and Jason Perillo saw that as a flaw in Rockhold's defense.
But I mean, that was an amazing performance.
Clearly the performance of his life because it won him the title.
But I say you go to the Kong Lee fight.
The Kong Lee fight, he beat the fucking brakes off of Kong Lee.
And that was when Kong Lee was Kong Lee.
And Kong Lee was like a scary guy.
He had these wild taekwondo kicks.
He'd throw spinning back kicks and wheel kicks.
And, you know, had a dangerous style.
Hard to figure out.
And Michael Bisping just beat the fuck out of him at the end of the fight.
When Vitor stopped him, Vitor was on just full whatever the fuck he was on.
There was a moment, for people who don't understand this, there was a moment of madness in MMA where you were allowed to take testosterone.
And all you had to do was show low testosterone.
Well, guess what?
If you've been doing steroids, you show low testosterone.
You get off the steroids, and then your endocrine system's all fucked up, so you go to a doctor, the doctor blood tests you, and says, yep, you have low testosterone.
You need TRT. So testosterone replacement therapy is on the menu.
And then all of a sudden, you go from Vitor Belfort, who got frontkicked in the face by Anderson Silva, who had, if you go, pull that up, because it's one of Anderson's most spectacular knockouts.
And the first time ever I saw someone get KO'd by a frontkick to the face.
Because I remember I had a conversation with Eddie Bravo once in my gym where I had like one of those little rubber dummies that looks like a person.
And he goes, could you throw a front kick to the face?
I was like, yeah, you could.
But you'd have to time it perfect.
It's really not the best place for it.
I'm like, place for it?
Meanwhile, you know, front kick.
But look at Vitor.
Vitor then, you know, he just looked normal.
Just looked like an athlete.
You know, he wasn't particularly shredded, particularly ripped.
Now go to Vitor Belfort.
Yeah, I mean, what in the fucking holy shit?
You go, 2012 was the year he was like super saucy.
Go to Vitor Belfort versus Michael Bisping, if you could find that.
Because there was a time where they let Vitor take whatever he wanted, and the problem with that is they did a test once, and when they did a test on him, like look at that picture where they're touching gloves.
That wasn't the unofficial weigh-ins where you weighed in and rehydrated and then you got to step on those, you know, and I would say the official weight for Vitor Belfort, 185, but really he'd be 195 plus when he would stand in front of the camera.
At least, yeah.
But look how shredded he was.
And that's when he was on testosterone replacement therapy.
So Bisping fights him all natural.
And Vitor, when he was on TRT, it's like the best goddamn...
If you want to do an ad for TRT, you would have Vitor during those dominant years.
That was a fight that really tested Jon Jones' mettle.
And that's a fight where a lot of people forget...
John Jones had a fully hyperextended arm bar on him.
I mean, his arm was fucked, and most people would have tapped.
I mean, that arm was gonzo, to the point where John decided to coach the ultimate fighter because he knew he wasn't going to be able to train for a long time because his arm was so fucked from the Vitor fight.
Vitor, in his guard, threw up an arm bar and had it fully hyperextended.
And I think Vitor might have let it go or something.
I mean, I don't know what happened there.
Either John just gutted it out and Vitor got tired, but his arm was fucked.
Where if you're watching it, you're cringing because you're waiting for that Frank Mir, Tim Sylvia snap.
And watch how many times when, you know, they're getting the mouthpiece put in and the Vaseline put on at the At the beginning, watch how many times the commentator says, folks don't understand how good he is.
Folks don't know how smart he is.
This is one of the most well-rounded fighters in all the UFC. And they do it in this kind of way to almost plead with the audience to understand the fighter as they do.
Well, I remember when he knocked out Eve Edwards with a head kick, when Eve Edwards is one of the best 155-pounders in the world, after Eve Edwards had beaten Josh Thompson, who's another guy who doesn't get nearly the respect that he deserves.
The first guy to ever knock out Nate Diaz, right?
I mean, Josh Thompson at one point in time was the fucking man, right?
And yeah, because Calvin Iyer, when he had the Bodog thing, had a big billboard for Bodog fight, but it was him.
Like, Calvin Iyer, like, in Vegas, like, looking slick with a nice, tailored, expensive suit, and he was talking shit about Dana White, and Dana White's like, you can't even get into this country.
Like, you're a fucking fugitive for the law.
If you come into this country, they'll arrest you.
Like, I don't remember what it was, but I think it was one of those things where he was doing this online gambling thing, and they were like, this is illegal, and he's like, fuck you, I'll do it in Belize or some shit.
There was some weird shit that went down, which, look, I'm a big fan of personal freedom, and I'm a big fan of people being able to gamble wherever the fuck they want.
I'm not a big fan of people regulating things.
Unless you can prove that someone's getting robbed, unless you can prove they're stealing money from people, I think they should be able to gamble.
I think that was one of the things that happened with that Bodog organization, but they threw around a lot of money and put together...
The Kane fight that they had was in an ice rink, in the middle of an ice rink, and they actually built a studio slash stage presence for it in the middle of an ice rink in wherever the fuck it was, St. Petersburg, and then a ring to make it look like they were somewhere else.
Meanwhile, they're in the middle of a fucking ice rink.
You know, the thing is, it's like, how long can you be at that level?
That's the real question.
It's not...
Sometimes you want to look at a guy like you look at Anderson, right?
And you look at the Jared Kananier fight, or you look at...
The second Chris Weidman fight, it's really interesting.
You look at Anderson's career, and I actually went over it last night because I knew I was going to talk to you today, and I was thinking, you know, there's one point in time where I was convinced that Anderson was a GOAT, and I think he was at his time.
I think in his prime, he was the GOAT at the time.
And you go from the Chris Weidman fight, where he's the baddest motherfucker on earth.
Chris Weidman KOs him, and then he loses every fight afterwards.
There's a big punch that lands, and you watch the body language and the sort of tactical approach begin to change almost instantly after he gets drilled with one.
Now, maybe, I'm not saying he's the best striker, I'm just saying at that moment...
But Anderson, when he was in his prime, there was moments, like the Forrest Griffin fight, where you walked away and just go, who's better than that fucking guy?
But obviously, it was a tailor-made kind of style for Anderson.
Forrest was like a blood and guts, come forward, doesn't hide anything, just really charges...
And Anderson would just, like, see everything.
He was so relaxed.
He would find openings.
And the famous step back away from those punches and then just hit him with a right hand, a fadeaway right hand, and knock him out.
Well, it was also like when you're watching Anderson move, he's doing things that he would have never done when he was younger.
It's almost like he's trying to get the sparks flying, like crank the engine over, but it doesn't want to.
He's moving forward in a way that you're like, ah!
You would never see the Anderson Silva that fucked up Rich Franklin twice.
You would never see him fight like that.
The Anderson self that stopped Chris Lieben, he would never fight like that.
You know, that Anderson was a clever tactician.
That Anderson was a technical fighter.
Whereas, like, he fought really aggressive in the first round.
But, you know, go back to Vitor being on TRT. You give Anderson TRT, you'll see a different fighter.
But if you want to make him fight on the natch, you're 45, man.
This is 45. It's 45. It's like, unless you're Bernard Hopkins...
Unless you're a guy that's so fucking good at boxing, where you're clever and you don't waste any energy, and you're so disciplined and so technical and so defensive-oriented that you can take these, like, world championship-caliber young guys and drag them into seven, eight, nine rounds and then set traps for them and eventually capitalize on them.
There's very few guys that get to the point, like, Bernard got into his feet.
But the difference you highlight, I think it's really important between Hopkins and Silva, which is that It would not be accurate to say that Silva lived on his chin.
That is not true.
But it would be accurate to say there was a couple of times he let it slide.
You'd see times in fights where he would kind of just take one and then his head would whip, but he'd still be right there.
But if I had to ask how many fighters currently competing in the Ultimate Fighting Championship have pro MMA wins that predate 9-11, Robbie Lawler, him, and Overeem were the ones that come to mind.
I think what they've done, their whole hydration thing, I think it's the most important thing in MMA. I think we need to do that across the board, but I think there needs to be more options for fighters.
The weight hydration system, as we understand it through collegiate wrestling, appears to be a godsend, right?
So what we understand of it works.
Now, I want to be very clear about what I'm about to tell you.
I am not declaring to you that what they are telling us about their weight cutting system is wrong, because like you, I've talked to Ben Askren, I've talked to Gary Tonin, and they really enjoyed it.
What I'm telling you is, I'm a little bit skeptical of the veracity of the claims that aren't independently verified.
They have only recently begun to stream their weigh-ins and even then you can't see what's on the scale.
You have no idea about if someone is missing weight and there could be any number of factors related to whether or not they actually made it.
I'm just telling you, personally as a guy in media, I do not take promoter's word for it.
And so this is not me declaring to you that their weigh-ins are Fugazi.
This is me declaring to you, until we get independent verification of them, I would pause a little bit on some of their claims.
There's an argument that could be made when it comes to things like Tour de France, that you could argue that it's safer to do it with the steroids than it is without.
Financial doping is basically a way to cook – They call it doping because it's a way to make things sound bad.
In fact, the word doping comes from the early 20th century when they were trying to figure out a name for giving horses drugs.
They called it doping and then they used that.
They ported it over to human athletics to sort of make it sound...
And by the way, in fairness, it was the mafia doing a lot of that.
that.
So they took the sort of like organized crime, human on animal crime, and then they brought it over to a human sport.
But basically this idea of like, oh, we have certain limits.
You can't pay more in salary than this.
We'll find ways to sort of manipulate the books to make sure that you get paid more and I get paid more.
It won't show up on the ledger in the way that it normally would.
But when you actually calculate the total, we're not meeting the demands of keeping the payload restricted so that we can remain competitive across the league.
It's called financial doping.
But there's a couple of scholars, Werner Muller, I think he's out of Denmark, and then Paul DiMio out of Scotland.
They have written a couple of books on the history of anti-doping, on the state of anti-doping, on the ethics of doping and anti-doping.
These are not guys who think that steroids should just be legal.
People think that, like, this is one of the major problems with being in the position that I'm in.
People are like, oh, you just think everyone should take steroids.
No, that's not what I think.
I think if you're an athlete and you say, listen, man, I'm really good and I don't want to take drugs to compete, I think that's perfectly reasonable.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
But when you begin to drill down how you solve that problem, no one really wants to get to what the heart of the issue is.
First, the issue is this.
Everyone, you cannot understand drugs in America without understanding media hysteria and how it has changed things.
And no one should appreciate this more than you.
Think of any drug we've ever had.
To what extent have false media narratives, exaggerated claims, totally ridiculous things, have had to been year over year pulled back by virtue of...
Evidence that has weighed in or whatever the case.
Reefer Madness is sort of the common example.
Steroids is exactly that way.
The claims of harms related to them are totally overstated.
It does not mean there are no harms.
It means relative to what people have claimed, it is simply not true.
In fact, the Australian government did a study over what would be the most harmful drugs in a human experience, and it was behind tobacco.
It was behind numerous other drugs well in advance that are perfectly legal.
The argument about steroids, especially as it relates to combative sports, if you wanted to make the claim that if you and I were fighting and were, let's say, reasonably equal, and I took it and you didn't, it tilts the competitive balance and that makes it unfair, I would agree.
I think that is actually true.
I don't think there's much argument about that.
But that is not really fully what they claim.
What they claim as it relates to MMA or any other combative sport is that it makes MMA safer.
There is literally not a shred of evidence they have ever presented not one time that makes that true.
I think the argument is that if someone is on it and the other person isn't, a la Vitor versus Michael Bisping, that Michael Bisping winds up blind in one eye from a high kick by Vitor.
The Vitor Belfort incident doesn't even come close to the Cyborg versus MVP incident where he cracked his skull, which was ostensibly totally done naturally.
And you can make the argument that if you are taking EPO and if you are taking testosterone, you'd have more energy to get away from shots as much as you would have energy to land them.
Right, but when I watch any other sport where I know it's drug-addled, it does not reduce my enjoyment of it.
You're supposed to have this moralistic, puritanical idea about drugs.
I do not, because I understand this is complex, but the basic idea is this.
All the claims that folks want to make about MMA as it relates to safety, there is no indication that if you say USADA is working, it's any safer.
You're asking about how it's being used now.
It's a little hard to say because, again, USADA claims a lot of victories without providing any evidence about them.
Can you imagine somebody you hired to do some kind of service for you?
Claiming all the victories they claim, and then when you ask to see the receipts, they don't have any.
I know Jeff Nowitzki came on your show, and I'm sure he means well, but saying that the testosterone has been lowered, I actually asked Paul DeMio about it.
It means nothing.
In any way, there's no way to draw any conclusion about usage.
There's a guy, by the way, who has a YouTube channel, More Plates, More Dates.
He's been a long-time steroid user and PED user.
He has gone through several UFC fighters.
He has shown, there was a recent study that was done, you can still take all kinds of testosterone exogenously and come way under the limit for what USADA is looking for.
More to the point, what we know from academic research is that...
What we know from academic research is that, is there a reason to believe that relative to what commissions were doing, that the introduction of USADA has overall depressed usage...
Everyone doesn't respond to physique changes equally.
In other words, you could have genetics that make major pronouncements and change related to physique change, and I could take the exact same thing you're taking and not have the same result.
But the point is this, is that as it relates to these considerations, what ends up happening is you might depress overall usage, but what you do is you end up empowering the folks at the higher end.
I mean, since 1960, the growth in pharmaceuticals, which the anti-doping world basically just plays catch-up on all the time, I mean, they didn't catch Marion Jones, right?
The way they got her was somebody mailed some shit anonymously, then they developed a test for it, and all of a sudden, eureka.
But the amount of independent stuff they can find to catch everyone is...
They have to wait until someone basically tells them about it.
What you end up doing is you end up codifying a system where the rich are able to avoid detection and entrench their relative advantages over those who don't have those economic resources.
So you might have prevented overall amounts of use.
That's one plausible explanation.
But by doing that, you have only made those who had more money to begin with solidify their position.
And this is what kills me when MMA fans try to defend USADA. It's like, this ain't the hill to die on, folks.
In American football, we have multiple deaths and fatalities every year.
I'm sorry, deaths or paralysis every year.
Not just that, we have multiple deaths at the high school level annually annually.
Annually, these kids die.
If you look at the health outcomes from American football relative to fighting, it is much worse across the board in American football.
And that is a sport where you can get caught taking something and they'll suspend you for four fucking games.
You are watching in the NFL, and I don't want to name names because I don't want to be sued, but you see a lot of guys in their 40s or late 30s continuing to do shit that they're not supposed to be able to do, or they look like fucking He-Man.
It's because it is very easy to take something in the NFL and avoid detection, and the fans simply do not care.
The idea that they're really concerned about the health and safety, given the outcomes and given the nature of the sport, simply does not match the reality at all.
So, what do I think is best?
Couple of things.
One, if you have a system where the athletes have a say, and they work with the organization, and they carve out a system where it may not be as rigorous as possible, because by the way, there's a study out of the University of Adelaide.
Testing is basically low information.
It's basically theater for low information fans.
It does something, but not really all that much.
The real big fucking fish that USADA gets or any other anti-doping agency is a function of investigations through snitching, which MMA fans don't like.
I'm like, folks, that's how the sausage is made.
I don't know what to tell you.
So if you wanted to do testing, you'd have to do it literally.
The University of Adelaide has a study that came out that said it would have to be basically every day.
But that would require privacy invasions, right?
So you have this enormous amount of privacy invasions where they have no life.
Random is the idea is that it would happen frequently enough...
That there would be no method of, or at least very few methods of wooding detection.
The idea, though, is that there are sufficient things you can take to gain real clear advantages that even randomized testing simply could not account for.
Again, it would be some kind of proprietary drug that a rich person could make that there'd be no test for, as a clear example.
Well, NBA, MLB, to a lesser extent, but MLB, and then NFL. We already exist in a world where basically a pretty significant chunk of those guys are taking something, and nobody seems to care, and it works out well for everyone.
What people claim they don't like is sort of the scandalization of it all.
Sorry, I know I'm ranting, but the last thing is this.
There's a couple different methods you can pick.
You can just decide that the existing professional sports leagues, in my judgment, have totally figured it out, which is that you get a union to organize, basic protections.
You put kind of a lid on the lobster, and you just let it cook there without sort of really being super inside the details about it, which means you will allow for some, but you basically get to a point where there's not Too many violations, you're not giving too much of an advantage, and you just let it rock because the general for-profit sports world tends to prefer that.
And they said, you tested positive for, it was an Osterian at the time, and you tested at such a level, we're going to ban you for two years.
Two years later, they come up with a test that makes them give more refined results.
And they come back and they say, if you had tested at this level, you'd have been totally exonerated.
They took that fucking guy's career from him.
And they never apologized and they never acknowledged that basically they had too much belief in their scientific instrumentation to ever say sorry.
Dude, that is fucking evil.
That is evil.
You cannot do that to a person.
So this is my point.
There's one system which is basically let a union decide and the union decides with the sports organization.
The other one is basically what the strength of fitness world has done, which is that you have some competitions where you just don't test, and you have some where you do.
And that's not a perfect solution either, right?
Because you can still take it and try to take the one that's sort of...
If you have an organization like the UFC, that's this multi-billion dollar organization, they're never going to come up with rules or say, hey guys, we know you're going to lie, so we're going to allow you to lie, and we're going to talk to your unions, and we're going to set it up so you can lie.
If it's that easy and it's that ubiquitous and it's that easy to hide, you've not created enough stumbling blocks and obstacles along the way to deter some usage.
The whole point is to deter the low-hanging fruit.
But doesn't that set it up so that the rich guys and the guys that are the big camps that are funded by major sponsors, they're the ones that are going to have the best athletes?
So you are of the opinion, and we don't need to name camps, but the top camps employ scientists or doctors or someone who knows how to get around the system.
One, do you want a professional sports world like we have, where people claim they care very much about health outcomes, but they really don't, where people are obviously using in the NFL? Which, by the way, I mean, how do you get through an NFL season without growth hormone?
And after the fight, I think it was the Whitaker fight.
Doctors examine him, and the doctor calls up the UFC and goes, Where did you get this guy?
And he goes, he's one of the UFC fighters.
He's like, this guy's a specimen.
He goes, yeah, yeah, he's amazing, right?
He's a top fighter.
He goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
No, no.
Like, I've never seen a person like this.
He's like, I've been doing, I've been a doctor for decades.
He goes, his tendons in his eyes are three times larger than a normal person's.
And he goes, and that fracture's already healing.
Yeah, and so Dana was telling me about this, and he was saying that, you know, Cubans had this crazy athletic program, and they were doing all kinds of experiments with people, and he thinks that they did some experiments with athletes to create super athletes.
Like, you remember Corellin?
You know, Corellin was, they called him the experiment.
That was his nickname, because his parents were both like 5'5", 5'7", and he's a fucking giant of a man.
Well, that's what I'm thinking is going to happen eventually in MMA if the money does get higher.
You're going to see more of these next-level Yoel Romero-type athletes because they exist more in NFL and NBA. Like, imagine.
You know, a guy like LeBron James fighting in MMA, who's like just a perfect specimen.
Imagine these Michael Jordans.
Imagine these next level athletes, which unfortunately, a lot of those guys wind up going to sports like basketball or baseball because there's more money.
There's more money in those sports and you don't get kicked in the face.
You know, and then the football guys, like, there's more money in football.
Like, you can make a fucking insane amount of money in football.
Like, I was just reading about some guy whose contract was like $400 million, like some crazy shit.
And the difference between being able to perform in a sport and being able to fight another man who's trying to separate you from consciousness is a very different thing.
It's like some guys just can't rise to the occasion in a fight.
There's creativity that's involved in fighting that may not be involved in a lot of other sports that are just pure strength and speed and athleticism and a knowledge of moves and understanding of positions.
But there's a different thing that's going on where you're trying to create an opening.
When you're trying to create an opening fighting, You know, there's things that people can do in fighting that...
Also, you have to commit to that at a very young age if you want to be elite.
Like, you can be a guy like Greg Hardy, who has a reasonably successful career as a heavyweight, just because he's a tough motherfucker who hits really hard and he's a very good athlete.
But are you ever going to be Francis Ngannou?
Are you ever going to be Stipe Miocic?
It's like there's a level that you reach where you only reach that level if you've been training it most of your life.
And particularly for striking, for some reason.
There's exceptions to that rule where some people can figure it out, but not in boxing.
In boxing, it's very rare that someone even picks it up after their teenage years and reaches an elite world championship level.
There's something about the timing and the understanding of...
It's like, to someone who's looking out on the outside, it's a guy trying to punch another guy, the guy's trying to punch you, you're trying to punch him.
But there's so much more to it.
That's why a guy like Floyd Mayweather always wins.
Like, he's got a vocabulary that's just fucking volumes and volumes of books, and you got a little pamphlet.
And he's standing in front of you with his shoulders like this and you think, oh, I see.
I can hit this guy.
You don't have a fucking chance in hell.
He's so many steps ahead of you.
That's what you saw in the Conor McGregor fight.
He just slowly lures Conor into his web and so relaxed and composed and eventually starts piecing him up and taking him out.
But there's levels that I think you only achieve if you start while your body's developing.
There's something that happens while your body's maturing and growing with striking.
That's where the real speed and timing and power comes from.
And again, there's exceptions.
There's some people that are just sensational athletes.
I don't think Gilbert Burns started out as a striker.
I don't think he started out doing any striking.
I think he learned how to do that shit as a world champion jiu-jitsu player who got into MMA. But he's a rare freak, you know?
But it's also...
He's already a champion martial artist.
He already knows how to smash men, right?
There's a thing about that.
There's a thing about knowing how to solve a puzzle, knowing how to figure a man out, getting a hold of a man's neck and putting him to sleep.
He knows how to do that already.
So to figure out that, I just need to know how to put knuckles to chin.
And he's already a fast guy.
He's already an explosive guy.
And the dedication that allows someone to get to a world championship level...
In jujitsu, it's the same thing in striking.
If he just puts the time in and has the focus, the intensity, and figures out how to put in with the right coaching, which is also huge.
The wrong coaching can set a guy back for...
I mean, it could ruin you.
The wrong coaching can ruin you.
Someone with bad ideas and piss-poor strategy and execution, you could fucking ruin...
You can run into a guy like Duke Rufus, and he can create a world champion out of you.
There's so many factors that play into it, but if you can get a guy who has that mentality, has a fighter's mentality, a person who wants to risk it all...
You know, and not have the protection of other players, not have the, you know, the caveat, well, you know, the team, we didn't put together defensively, and we'll be back next Sunday.
Bitch, there's no next Sunday when you get head kicked, right?
You know, like, you're not fighting again for a long time, you're suspended for 90 days, you're not even supposed to be sparring, you know, and then when you come back, you're probably still going to be a little bit fucked up from that fight.
There's a thing about fighting that separates us from all the other sports.
I hate to say it again, but I call it high-level problem-solving with dire physical consequences.
It's different than anything else.
Because there's so much going on.
It's just two people.
And there's so much going on in those exchanges.
And it's so hard to read unless you know it and understand it.
It's like the ground game.
One of the things that meant so much to me when I first started doing commentary...
Was expressing what I know about the ground game so that a person who's never trained at all can understand it.
So when people are going through positions, and a guy gets to a position, and I know they're close to a finish, or I know they've reached a pivotal point, I would get excited and explain it.
I wanted to explain it so descriptively, like, now he's got to get the arm.
And once he gets that arm past his leg, now he's fucked.
And being able to do that to people so they could piece it together and watch it at home.
Like, oh, when Khabib mounted him and sat on top of him and put his leg around him.
I wanted to be able to show people what I feel when I see a guy do a mounted triangle in a fucking world championship MMA fight and then find out the guy had a fucking broken foot when he did it.
Madness!
Just madness!
Not every baseball player can do that.
Not every soccer player can do that.
Not every football player can do that.
It takes a man with a gladiator's mind like Khabib Nurmagomedov to do something like that.
Well, I would say, for me, I often view the combative arts like a language, which is why learning them five, six, seven, that's actually teach someone a second language, right?
If you teach them at two, they don't actually pick it up.
You have to wait a few years, and then they begin to get it, and then they learn to speak.
But the point being is you wait until they're 5, 6, 7, and they begin to begin to get absorbing.
And then once it becomes the language and the fluency and everything begins, by the time they're 14, 15, 16, 20, 21, my God, the fluency is sort of incredible at that point.
So that's part of it.
Wrestling is the same as boxing in that way.
You have to start very, very young to actually want to compete later on.
But the other part is the problem solving.
I would say that someone who's like a quarterback, Dude, that is high-level problem-solving.
I guess I haven't because the first time I'm talking to you, but I was just thinking about this the other day.
He did something in the Silva fight where I was watching and I was like, I don't know what the fuck he is doing here.
I can't make it.
If you just watch it, even in slow motion, I can't make heads or tails of it.
I don't understand what the point of it is.
So because of him, now when I break down fights, I actually start.
I go round by round and I make notes every time any kind of strike lands or misses.
And then I begin to go back and I piece together a narrative based on what, if there is a narrative, sometimes there's not, but more often than not there is, about what is happening.
And I had to do it from this stance and then that stance because he was switching stances.
Close distance, far distance, inside distance.
He is so meticulous and so thoughtful but so effortless that I had to peel everything apart before I could even begin to comprehend it.
People go and look at that fight and they go, oh, well, he only won 29-28.
That's not the story there.
The story there is that, yes, it was a little bit on the defensive side.
That is true.
But he is so smart and so – he's the smartest fighter we have right now, I think, personally.
Yeah, particularly that one where you broke down how he pointed the fake, like he faked, pointed out that Paulo fell for it, and then kicked his leg right afterwards.
Afterwards, like, you signed a contract, signed the guy's contract.
Contract!
Did you just not watch what happened?
You got torn apart for two rounds where you landed two body kicks and one leg kick for two rounds and you got dismantled and dropped to the left hook and then beaten down and dry humped.
That was the...
And you're talking about a guy in Paulo Costa that everyone was terrified of.
The guy who walked down, Yoel Romero.
The guy who was smashing everybody they put in front of him.
Look, you know, that guy moving up to 205 is going to be some growing pains, but now he's the champion, and he knows that he can nuke a guy like Dominic Reyes, who went five hard rounds with Jon Jones, and in your eyes, won the fight against Jones.
I'd have to go over and watch it again if I wanted to score, but I remember thinking, God damn, this guy is ahead, deep.
And then John came on strong in the fourth and fifth.
But he nuked that guy.
He nuked Reyes.
And it's not like Reyes wasn't in the fight, but when he started hitting that left kick to the body and left that gigantic brute, you'll realize this dude hit so hard.
If you have Fight Pass, Fight Pass, I can't say enough good things about Fight Pass.
I think they need to update their interface, but in terms of the service it does for someone like me, because you think you see a fight in your head one way, then you go back and you watch it, and you're like, oh my god.
I totally forgot half this shit, you know?
So it's a great way to remind yourself.
But if you go back and you look, he had a certain kind of wrestling dominance from the Shogun to the Rashad, really even up through most portions of his career that has begun to wane.
His takedown ability has gone from about the mid-50s, a little higher than that.
I'm very interested to see that because Blachowicz has that power style and Stylebender is, in my opinion, the most sophisticated striker the sport's ever seen.
And he's so clever.
And you look no further than the Paulo Costa fight.
I mean, Paulo Costa is a fucking gorilla.
He's just an attacking, smashing dude.
And he...
He had nothing for him.
He had nothing for him.
And then afterwards, to see Paulo Costa, I was injured, I was this, I was that, signed the contract.
It's like, bro, stop talking.
Take away his iPhone.
Stop.
Stop talking.
What is happening here?
Opens as heavy favorite over UFC light heavyweight champion Jan Blachowicz.
And there's something about exchanging ideas with one of the best kickboxers on planet Earth.
Not just the best kickboxer, but a weirdly powerful one.
He's a freak, man.
There's something about Pereira.
He's astonishing.
And I think him moving into the LFA, and if he gets through a few fights there, I have zero idea what his ground game is, zero idea what his wrestling, zero idea what his takedown defense is.
But he nukes motherfuckers.
I mean, in a weird way.
I mean, when he knocked out Stylebender, it was like, Jesus, one left hook.
The Dutch will fight their teammates without a whole lot of consternation, especially in kickboxing, where it'll be like, wait, you're from Mike's gym, and you're from Mike's gym.
How come you're fighting?
And they're like, business.
They're not personal.
I'm like, in America, that's the most personal thing.
Can I make one final point about that to wrap up on this?
The one thing I want folks to understand is if you look at the history of anti-doping, and again, the scholarship on this is quite clear, pre-USADA-UFC, I mean, long into the 20th century, and then Really beginning around 1968. The way in which anti-doping has moved itself forward is through, there's been reports in the media that drive further forms of hysteria, and then that forces the institutions to act.
And so you have to understand, you can't talk about A, anti-doping without media hysteria around drugs.
And B, a lot of times when you see these developments in anti-doping protocol, it's institutions protecting themselves.
Like when the UFC really went to USADA, was it on behalf of the athletes?
If you want to believe that, you can.
I cannot say it is wrong.
But what the scholarship is pretty clear about in anti-doping is that institutions do it for their own protection.
Which I understand.
There's nothing wrong with the UFC being like, you know what?
If we have a scandal here, we're going to get fucked if we don't do more.
I totally get it.
But that's a part of the argument that deserves to be noted and should not be forgotten.
Listen, if you're going to have a system where folks are going to use, then the way to screen that is through health outcomes.
So you're looking at forms of screening, not so much for what they're taking, but how their blood enzymes look and digestive organs and what kind of damage they're taking and blah, blah, blah.
To me, TRT is one of these things where it's like, we're going to make it super easy and we're going to...
Like I said, the readiness of it is too easy for me.
Is part of the issue that testing is random and that testing is, you know, you might get tested four times a year, you might get tested ten times a year.
No one knows, no one can tell.
What if there was a way where every fighter had something, almost like an app, and somehow or another you put it on you and it screens you?
There's something that you could do where it can't be faked.
You check in.
Maybe you check in on your computer, like a FaceTime thing, and it does something.
If there was a way, obviously, I don't know what I'm talking about, but if there was some sort of technology that allowed them to see every day, twice a day, check you in the morning, check you at night, okay, Luke, it looks like you're good.
It's like every employee that I know who's not an athlete gets to have time off except an athlete.
We ask certain things of athletes that we don't ask of anyone else in the world.
And the reason why is supposed to be to combat these harms.
But if you can't prove to me that these harms are existing or that you're meaningfully doing anything about it, then why are we engaging in these privacy invasions?
If you moralize doping, which they have done, if you moralize it, which is not a moral issue, it's a strategic issue, if you moralize it, you've decided that it's an evil worth combating to the point now, well, this is Rodchenkov Act is being floated through Congress.
They're going to start putting more and more people in jail.
This is the way it's all headed.
Because every time I've tried to make an argument, everything has escalated.
I've just noticed it's falling totally on deaf ears, and I suspect it will be the same here, even though I've tried to make an earnest argument.
They're going to start putting people in jail.
And they already have in Europe to a degree.
Now, what they've done is they've carved out, if you're an athlete, you won't get put in jail.
But if you're anyone who's aided in that process...
You're going to go.
But they're eventually going to realize what they've always realized, which is that the punishment, the sociological research on this is pretty clear.
It's really not the punishment that really concerns them.
It's their, to what extent they'll be caught.
They think they'll be caught.
But if you're rich and you can avoid it or you're willing to take risks because that's inherently in the job that you're in, you don't really think about these kinds of things.
And by the way, you might have good methods of evasion.
So they're going to put people in jail.
And I think, honestly, they're going to put a lot of people in jail.
I think almost like we need a separate podcast just about this, and I feel like it almost should be a roundtable discussion with someone like you as a proponent of this, someone like me.
I kind of see your point and I agree with you.
And maybe some doctors and maybe someone from USADA that would argue against it.
I think that would be an interesting discussion.
Because my arguments against USADA are the Josh Barnett arguments, the Tom Lawler arguments.
The arguments where you're ruining guys' careers and there's no repercussion.
They're ruined financially.
They lose so much money.
They don't get any of it back.
You've made mistakes.
It doesn't matter.
And I get what you're doing.
I get you're trying to make the sport safer.
You're doing your job.
You were hired to do it.
But is it the most effective use of time and resources?
And they will be like, oh, but probabilistically we should rely on this.
I have never seen an institution in my life more than anti-doping institutions who just are begging you and frankly demanding of you to take their word for it.
Keep it on your bookshelf, because even if it's a reference tool, you may find some value in it.
Again, you read the shit and you're like, I had no idea, I had no idea, I had no idea.
It just keeps going, you know?
But what they found through scholarship is that...
So they've upped the punishments from a year to two years to four years.
So first of all, someone explain to me why UFC athletes are on Olympic cycles, number one.
Number two.
That's number one.
So the second one is, beyond that...
In putting together this sort of portfolio of punishments beyond the sort of Olympic cycle, I think I said this already, there's no evidence that indicates that the severity of it forces the behavior change.
It's only the sort of surveillance of it all as a function of sort of fear.
But you can only do that if you abridge the rights of athletes.
So the point is this.
You'll hear them talk a lot about we have to protect the rights of clean athletes.
Clean athletes deserve to have their rights protected.
Joe, let me ask you a question.
How do you protect the rights of clean athletes by overrunning the rights of athletes generally?
That seems like a contradiction in terms, doesn't it?
The UFC fighters did not sign up for it.
And you have a situation where Jon Jones, for example, he got the whole Terranoball thing.
We don't have to get into it.
But there was another athlete in the Olympics from Ukraine.
Alexei Torikidi had the exact same problem, tested the B sample.
It was totally negligible amounts, and they took that fucking guy's gold medal from him.
So wait a second, why do we have one standard for the Olympics?
We've got one standard for a private client for an underfunded organization, which is about $20 million is their budget for USADA, and results in this sort of different world punishment.
John is the future because the research shows that the more severe punishment you get, The more that you have to take precautions to not fuck someone over, right?
Because if you're going to ban a guy for eight years, you're going to ban a guy for life, man, you better be damn sure you're doing it.
But that has opened the door to fighters like John who have money and a legal team, and of course there may be the science on his side as well, but it shows that you can take that opportunity and you can say, aha, you were trying to ban me for four years.
Man, what is your evidence?
And they can poke holes through all of it.
When your punishment is a year, it doesn't really matter what mitigating circumstance you can show.
Well, his case is so weird, too, because it showed positive and then negative and then negative and positive, but in such trace amounts, there's no way he could have tested it and then had it go out of his system in time.