Dave Portnoy and Joe Rogan reject rigid political labels, exposing how "woke" ideology and corporate media—like ESPN’s cancellation of Barstool Vantock or HBO’s biased documentary—suppress nuance while independent platforms thrive. They critique fake charities (e.g., Wounded Warrior Project misusing $800M) and controversial figures like George Santos (whose lies persist despite exposure) and Kanye West (platform bans for Hitler remarks), questioning free speech’s limits when rhetoric normalizes harm. Ultimately, their discussion reveals systemic distrust in institutions, from politics to media, where authenticity and accountability are often sacrificed for spectacle or profit. [Automatically generated summary]
People just have to lump you into one category or another, and if you're not completely aligned with the left, they'll just lump you in with the right.
I mean, I wish that they didn't, but what are you going to do?
I mean, yeah, if somebody miscategorizes me or mislabels me, I guess it would bother me a little bit, but...
That's just on them.
It's not the way I am.
I'm a big believer in social programs.
I'm a big believer in welfare.
I'm a big believer in taking care of poor people.
I'm a big believer in social programs to clean up cities.
There's a lot of shit that we should be doing in this country to help people that are disenfranchised because it's not fair.
Anybody thinks it is fair that someone lives in a fucking crime-infested, gang-ridden inner city, and that's exactly the same as someone who grew up in the suburbs.
Yeah, but I also, you know, I'm a cage-fighting commentator.
I'm a big believer in the Second Amendment.
You know, there's a lot of reasons why they would decide to categorize me as a right-wing person, but it's...
It's not correct.
And also, there's all this ridiculous woke shit that's going on, this bizarre mind virus that's going from universities into tech companies and the media and just fucking infiltrating people with these rigid ideas of what you have to say and not say and what you can and not say.
None of that is liberal.
None of that is really open-minded or progressive.
It's all just a cult.
So if you go against it, the only thing you could possibly be is the other.
My main thing with it If I know how you're going to answer a question basically before it's asked, which I think you can do with almost everybody involved in politics, I don't trust you.
And you really can.
On both left and right, ask any question, you know what they're going to answer.
Like if you are on the right, I have to assume you're dismissive of climate change.
You know, if you're on the left, I have to assume that you want a woman to have the right to choose, period.
You know, and like there's like things like that.
Like you are pro-abortion or you are pro-this or you are pro-that.
And what's weird now is like if you're on the left, you're pro-Ukraine war.
You want to send, like, your pro-military industrial complex getting funneled billions and trillions of dollars into their system to be able to create weapons to fight off Russia.
And it's also very complicated, too, because there's NATO's involvement in pushing weapons closer to the border of Russia and trying to get Ukraine to join NATO. It's like Jack Ryan.
The book that was written about the Titanic before the Titanic?
If you want to Google that, there is literally a book that...
Is called like, I forget the name of the book, but it's like the biggest cruise ship that will ever sail, it's gonna hit an iceberg, and it's gonna sink.
What fewer people have heard is a short novel called The Futility, The Wreck of the Titan, published in the U.S., writer Morgan Robertson, a novel that tells the story of the world's largest passenger ship, the Titan, and how it sank after hitting an iceberg, a novel published 14 years before the Titanic sank.
Well, see, that's the Nostradamus theory, that if you do enough, like, I mean, you can at this point say pretty confidently there'll be another gigantic war at some point.
Talked to offshore casinos and said, how do I get involved?
And they all said, the internet at the time I did this, if you went to a gambling site, fireworks, pop-ups, look like you're getting your credit card stolen.
They actually said, get us off the internet, put us in a physical newsletter, and we'll advertise.
So I sold like a year of advertising before we launched, and it was a gambling rack.
It was like a four-page newspaper, but I sold the advertising, and it allowed me just a morph.
So like during the course of the year, we slowly moved strictly away from gambling to more like men's interest, like girls and things like that.
It's half public pressure and half business because, like, Victoria's Secret got basically bullied out of their fashion show and their entire model by only having, like, the perfect Victoria's Secret angels.
They had to go plus size.
Now, they did that because of public pressure or because of business decision or kind of both?
You know, were they stuck their guns if, like, our business is killing it?
Just because someone enjoys it doesn't mean it's not altruistic.
It's just that there is a benefit to the person that does it to the I think a lot of people have this idea of altruism that you only You're only benefiting the person you're helping and that's the only real altruism.
I think it's you're also Yeah, I mean it it benefits you But it's benefits you and it just it feels good.
It's like I think people look at When people have ulterior motives.
Charities bother me when I find out that the people behind the charities are making millions of dollars.
I mean, when you give to charities, there's a list of charities that you can find online where you can see what their overhead is and how much money actually gets to the people.
And it's a very small percentage in most of them.
What's like the lowest charity in terms of like the worst charity for like you give them money and how much of it actually goes to the charity?
Because some of them are pretty good, but man, some of them are shockingly bad.
They were fired by the charity's board amid criticisms about how it spent more than $800 million in donations over the last four years.
The development was confirmed by Abernathy McGregor, a public relations firm hired to represent the veterans charity.
To best effectuate these changes and help restore trust the organization amongst all constituents sees WWP serves, the board determined the organization would benefit from new leadership, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, it was because just, like, every time, any shaking could be a concussion, so he was considering, like, the definition of concussion to be like, well, then I've had thousands of them.
So the NFL, the concussion thing, I think is because if they start acknowledging it, really, they got to go all the way back in time and deal with ex-players and things like that.
MMA guys get hit in the face every two seconds.
Are they just released?
Is that why no one ever talks about concussions in MMA? But in football, it's a huge discussion?
Various players have filed lawsuits against the league for the concussions, accusing the league of hiding information that linked to head trauma and permanent brain damage, Alzheimer's disease, and dementia.
Some teams choose not to draft certain players in the NFL draft due to their past concussion history.
And I think that's part of the problem, moving forward with it a little bit, is if you admit it or change, you have this laundry list of lawsuits that can come forward then.
The NFL tried to intimidate scientists studying the link between pro football and traumatic brain injury.
This is in 2017. Rather than honestly deal with this burgeoning concussion problem, the National Football League went after the reputation of the first doctor to link the sport to degenerative brain disease.
He named chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
So it was back in 2002. I think that's the guy.
Yeah, Dr. Bennett Omalu.
Mmm.
Yeah.
That's real, man.
And I think with football, it's probably even more pronounced because if you think about what they're doing, they're running full clip into each other.
So you have these giant super athletes, 300-pound guys capable of generating preposterous amounts of power and force, and they're just fucking...
No, maybe not now, because I... I don't know about you.
I didn't dream I'd have the life I had now, but for 99.9% of Americans, I would think, being a star athlete football player is worth that risk.
I think most of them, even if you said, you may get a concussion, you may get brain damage from doing this, they'd still probably do it.
I mean, you live a life that You really can't compare to from what?
When you're 15 years old or whenever you start being that athlete to well into your 40s, yeah, the end of your life is going to suck, but people don't look forward to that.
People don't worry about what's going to happen to them generally when you're 20 at 50. Yeah, they don't think about it.
Yeah, I think that people don't generally think about the risks in terms of the future.
They think, how do I feel right now?
Especially fighters.
And the glory of winning a fight, the glory of getting your hand raised, it's so above and beyond normal life experiences that even guys who have taken some shots and probably do feel the effects, they take a few months off and They want to get back in there again because it's so much more exciting than regular life.
People are telling that Justin Gaethje was recently seen hanging out with a warlord accrues to brutal crimes against humanity, so it's hypocritical for him to say we look bad supporting Patty when he supports a warlord.
I'm gonna take the high road, plus not mention it.
If the media is saying things like, oh, Ukraine is corrupt, or oh, Ukraine has done this...
Critics say a new media law signed by Zelensky could restrict press freedom in Ukraine.
Lawmakers who passed the bill said it would help meet European Union conditions for membership, but journalists have denounced it as a move towards censorship.
Imagine if you have to join the European Union, you have to fucking...
What is that?
Some of the law's most stringent provisions were relaxed in response to the criticism.
Serious concerns about the independence of the regulatory body remain.
Domestic and international news media groups said on Friday, noting that they were still receiving details of the final 279 page legislation.
The law expands the authority of Ukraine's state broadcasting regulator to cover the online and print news media.
That's not good.
Previous drafts gave the regulator the power to find news media outlets, revoke their licenses, temporarily block certain online outlets without a court order, and request that social media platforms and search giants like Google remove content that violates the law.
Well, you know, they're doing that over in America.
I mean, we found out that because of the Twitter files.
When Elon released all the Twitter files, they found that the United States government was actively trying to suppress the voices of certain people that were saying things they found disagreeable on Twitter.
It's not only the handpicking of people, but if people complain, if they just, this is offensive, this is whatever, there's a certain number of those that will trigger you to get pushed down.
Now, for whatever reason...
One thing that also I think is kind of self-evident, if you're talking left and right, the left is far more savvy with social media.
The right will generally just want to sling it out.
They'll let you say anything, and they're not going to complain, and they're not going to try to violate, like, ooh, that's a violation complaint.
The left will, and it's a good tactic to get the right off.
I mean, there's people that are trying to accuse Elon Musk of being right-wing, but I think that's just because Elon Musk has said the Democrats are out of their fucking minds.
This former FBI guy estimated the actual amount of fake accounts on Twitter, and he was like, it could be as high as 80%.
So if you're buying something, and they say, well, it's 95% people, it's 5% bots, but we're trying to figure that out.
And he's like, how are you trying to figure that out?
Show me.
And they won't show him.
And he's like, show me your data that shows you.
And they show him 100 accounts.
They went over 100 accounts.
Over 80% of Twitter accounts are likely bots, former FBI security specialist, which is fucking wild.
So that's like 20% of the people on Twitter are actual humans and 80% of it is propaganda either by publicity firms or super PACs or whoever the fuck is trying to manipulate narratives.
And one of the things you saw with Elon was like there's a bunch of tweets that people retweeted.
Well, I think if they found out that information, Twitter would be worth substantially less.
And that's also what he was trying to do.
I think he's trying to probably talk them into a better price.
Because if you find out that a company is 95% horseshit or 80% horseshit and 20% what they say it is, if that gets out, that's devastating to the company.
I think it's eye-opening for a lot of people, but for a lot of people for a long time, that information never got to them.
They didn't really know.
That's one of the most substantial and significant aspects of Elon buying Twitter, is these files being released, where you're getting to see the actual involvement of intelligence agencies, the actual banned lists and blocked lists and shadow banned and how they're suppressing People's signals.
It's pretty fucking wild shit.
And it's almost entirely done to people that are on the right.
And then the people that are on the left that are dissenters, right?
The people that went along with the Great Barrington Declaration and didn't think that we should shut the country down during the pandemic.
Legitimate scientists, like top of the food chain, epidemiologists, virologists who said that we are handling the pandemic absolutely wrong.
And then there's internal emails and memos from Fauci calling to publicly discredit these people who were...
Legitimate, like, absolute top-of-board scientists that were saying that this is not how you handle a viral pandemic and that we don't need to do it this way.
But as time goes on, more and more information comes out about how deceptive they were about their studies and how many actual risks there are involved in the vaccines and how much damage it did to small businesses and all that shit.
When that starts coming out more and more and more, there's so many people that had this like...
Doug their heels in stance on what is right and what is wrong and now they're being forced to reevaluate and it's also they're they're confronted with the overwhelming evidence that Pharmaceutical companies have been doing this forever.
They've never been honest about stuff.
They've always hit information Not only have they hit information They've actually the way they run their studies is so fascinating because when a son when when you know you hear like peer-reviewed studies The scientists that evaluate peer-reviewed studies from pharmaceutical companies don't get the data.
They get the review of the data by the pharmaceutical companies and then they study that.
But that's why freedom of information is so important and freedom of expression is so important because you've got to be able to find out what's true and what's not.
And the only way is you get differing opinions, differing perspectives.
If someone could write a very biased perspective on you and they're doing it on purpose, it's a hit piece.
They're trying to make you look bad.
But then someone can write a glowing review that might ignore some of your flaws and some of the things you have done, and that's not real either.
It's like you need to sort it out over time, and the only way that gets done is through freedom of information, freedom of expression.
And if we don't have that, we're fucked, because then whoever's in control of the media, who's ever in control of social media, or whatever the narrative is, they're the ones who get to dictate what's real and what's not real, and you can convince a lot of fucking people that things aren't true.
I think, first of all, mainstream media is so controlled by advertising.
There's so many...
Like, if you know that 75% of all advertising on television is pharmaceutical companies.
75%.
That's a big fucking number.
If you think...
That they are going to have an unbiased, negative perspective on pharmaceutical drugs, on the pharmaceutical industry.
That's not going to happen.
They're going to suppress that because that's bad for their business.
It'll shut them down.
If they lost 75% of their advertisement, they would fucking go under.
Think about a company like CNN, right?
CNN is already hemorrhaging money, hemorrhaging viewers.
I mean, they've dropped radically since Trump left office, right?
If they came out and started attacking pharmaceutical companies and they lost all their ads, they're fucked.
So you're not going to get an unbiased, really honest perspective on anything that has to do with pharmaceutical companies when it comes to CNN or when it comes to any of these mainstream news platforms that rely on pharmaceutical companies for ads.
You have the people that are in these ideological camps where you, this is this and that is that, and you can't differ from, you can't like have any sort of nuanced perspective or look at people that have a different point of view in a charitable way.
You can't do that because then you're a sympathizer or you're platforming these bad and evil people and you're carrying water.
There's all these stupid fucking phrases that they like to use.
Like, guys like Matt Taibbi, guys who were with these corporate news structures who left, and now they're doing it on their own.
Glenn Greenwald, you know, Crystal and Sagar from Breaking Points.
All these kind of people that you can trust, because even if you don't agree with them, you know they're not lying.
That's all I need.
You can have opinions that I don't agree with, and I 100% support your ability to do that.
I don't want to suppress people I don't agree with, but I want you to be honest.
I want you to tell me what the actual data says, and even if your perspective on that data I don't agree with, at least I know you're telling me the truth.
That's all I need.
And there's not a lot of that in mainstream media, and that's why mainstream media is dying.
It's controlled by these corporate interests that really care more about money than they do about anything else.
If you think that the Washington Post or the New York Times is really just about getting out the truth, that's not real.
If I wasn't doing what I was doing, I would still, because I don't pay enough close attention, I would still sort of believe the New York Times was like a real thing.
If I didn't have a podcast, and I didn't talk to people all the time, and talk to people from different walks of life, and different...
Perspectives and different careers.
I would have no idea.
I would have no idea.
If I was just a comic, I would kind of vaguely know that they're probably corrupt.
Vaguely know that they're full of shit.
But if I read something, I was like, oh my god, this is terrible.
I would just take it at face value.
Especially if you have a regular job.
Where you don't have the time to be looking into this shit.
You're busy all day, and then maybe you have a family and obligations and fucking bills that are piling up, and you don't have the time to be sorting out whether or not the Washington Post is being honest about gender-affirming care.
It's important, but you step outside, you walk down the street, and most people don't even know what's going on at Twitter.
We're in it, so you see it, and you pay attention to what people are saying.
But I always, if I'm in the center of a controversy, something's going on, I focus like, oh my god, the world, everything's happening here, and then you go outside, nobody knows.
It's also, I think, legitimately bad for mental health to communicate that way.
To communicate just through text and it's almost all of it is aggressive and almost all of it is insulting and almost all of it is disparaging of people.
The amount of like anti or negative tweets versus positive tweets.
I mean I wonder if anybody's done a study of that.
Like how much negative tweeting versus positive tweeting.
It's not a normal way for human beings to communicate where they're not looking at each other across a table, having a drink, just looking at each other as another human, appreciating each other as a person, a human being.
When you just see text on a screen and you're like, I'm going to fuck this guy up, and you go...
Humans are supposed to communicate with words in front of each other.
That's how we evolved.
That's what we're capable of understanding and appreciating And you know when someone's bullshitting you, and you know when someone's got a secret agenda, you're like, this guy's kind of a creep.
You get it.
And then you get some people like, I really like talking to that guy.
And then you can't wait to talk to him again.
And then you kind of have an agreement.
When you see each other, you know that he likes you, and you know that you like him, and you know he's a nice guy, and he knows you're a nice guy.
And also, I have a podcast, so I can actually sit down and talk to people, which most people don't have, right?
So you don't have that opportunity to work things out with someone and try to find out what they really feel and what they believe face-to-face in front of them.
It's the best way to talk.
It's the best way to communicate ideas.
And so I don't communicate ideas in a piss-poor way because I think that way sucks.
And so if I get to do the best way all the time, which I do, why would I engage in the worst way?
Like, just back and forth with people on Twitter that just want to make you feel bad.
I had a guy the other day that he has a giant piece of land in Alaska and they're finding woolly mammoth bones.
I like that.
That's what I like.
I like talking to fighters.
I like talking to you.
I like talking to whoever.
I just like talking to people.
It's fun.
I like...
Seeing how different people see this world, it enhances my perspective.
I've gotten through this podcast a very unexpected and accidental education.
That's what I think.
So because of that, I don't have any desire to communicate in an ineffective way that makes me feel bad and read a bunch of mean things that people say about you and just go back and forth with them and saying things that's not true.
It's like if you haven't been around Coke in your life, you're probably a loser.
Honestly, if you haven't been around it, I'm not going to say do it, but if you haven't been around it at least once, you're probably not the most fun person ever.
And then I watched a bunch of kickboxing matches and I got into it.
And then coming home from a Red Sox game.
It's a crazy story.
I had already been taking karate a little bit, but it was too far from my house.
It was hard to get there.
My parents didn't want to drive me.
And this place was right off the tee.
So I was at Fenway Park with a buddy of mine, went to see a baseball game, and then I was like 14 or 15. And when we were walking home from the baseball game, there was so many people waiting in line for the tee.
You know how it is after the game.
So we decided to just fucking walk upstairs and see what this Taekwondo school was all about.
And as I was walking up the stairs, I was hearing this sound.
But it was people in the neighborhood, I saw them doing coke, and they just wanted to do coke all the time.
They wanted to get out and do coke.
As a kid who was like finally I was a loser my whole life and then finally when I was 15 I found this thing that I got obsessed with that Changed the way people looked at me like I was now all of a sudden I was good at something like really good at something and then I became state champion four years in a row and I won the US Open and I won these national tournaments and it was a big fucking deal for me So I was like I'm not doing anything that jeopardizes that right and coke to me was the big one like I knew that that was it I feel like If I got drunk,
which I did occasionally, I would feel like shit the next day.
I couldn't train well.
I was hungover, and I'd get beat up in sparring.
I was like, I can't do this.
So I just caught most partying.
Like, I smoked pot a handful of times.
I got drunk a handful of times during high school and in my early 20s.
And then I just, in the comedy world, Coke was a problem with there, too.
He went to jail for quite a long time, quite a few years, and then he came out, and he was just a totally different person.
He came out super jacked, and he had a bunch of really bad tattoos, and all of them were now these heavy keloid scars, like he had burned off his tattoos or cut off his tattoos or some shit.
I don't know what he did in prison.
He was real vague about it.
But when he came out like he was a fucking different human.
He was an animal You didn't want if you sparred him like when we sparred they weren't sparring matches They were fights like they were full-on fights like we would spar like we were trying to kill each other it was very dangerous and He was doing I know he was selling coke and doing coke and then he got arrested for this murder where they took this guy and And again, I don't know if he did it, but he did get arrested and then released.
They broke all the bones in this guy's body with a hammer, and they kept injecting him with cocaine to keep him awake.
I didn't know a lot of guys like that, but I knew guys who were hitmen.
I knew a guy was a hitman for Whitey Bulger.
I trained him.
I remember teaching him shit.
After a year or two of doing Taekwondo, my instructor offered me a job.
And I was basically teaching the younger lower belt classes.
Teaching them basic techniques.
And I would teach early classes and kids classes and stuff like that.
In exchange for training.
So I didn't have to pay for training anymore.
And I'd get a key to the school.
I could go anytime I wanted.
It was like they would do that with the prospects, people that they thought really could have a potential.
And so I was teaching a lot of people, and I was teaching this one guy, and I remember he goes, if you wanted to kill somebody, where would you hit them?
It was like a real question.
It wasn't like an asshole just fucking around like, if I was going to kill somebody.
unidentified
It was like, if you wanted to kill somebody, where would you hit them?
But it's like, you know, if you have hundreds and hundreds of students and your business is teaching people how to fuck people up, you're going to get bad people that want to learn those skills.
That guy went away.
And I knew a couple guys who went away who were in the South Boston mob.
That was the reason why Dana moved out of Boston.
The South Boston mob.
They were shaking him down when he was running a boxing gym.
There were scary fucking people.
That's the Whitey Bulger situation because he was in bed with the FBI. They were letting him kill people.
So I would go into Boston and most of my friends...
We're from the inner city.
Most of my friends were from Chelsea and, you know, Dorchester and these, you know, young, tough kids who would come from these, you know, bad neighborhoods and bad households.
Well, we were just looking that up last night, and we were trying to figure out how many people are on Adderall, and there was 41 million prescriptions, I think, in 2020. 41 million.
Like, I don't want to be a tea toddler, and I do Sober October every year where I don't do shit, but at the end of the day, I think a little bit of alcohol, a little bit of...
You just got to take care of your body.
You got to know when you're overdoing it, know when you're doing too much, make sure you take vitamins, make sure you recover, do a bunch of different things to take care of your fucking meat vehicle.
There's one moment of 25 minutes in a championship fight...
And you've got to be fully fucked.
If you're fighting Israel Adesanya or Alex Pajera and you have that fucking cage locks, you don't want to have any thought like, I should have got more sleep or shouldn't have got drunk last week or shouldn't have this or shouldn't have that.
At the elite levels, everything has to be on point.
These guys are so good.
You have to have your recovery, your diet, your nutrition, all the fucking modalities have to be on point to compete at the elite of the elite level.
Unless you're Jon Jones.
But even Jon Jones.
Jon Jones was so goddamn talented, and still is, that if he just did none of that and just trained like a fucking Spartan and was a samurai about everything, he would have been unstoppable.
He wouldn't have had those close fights.
When he fought Alexander Gustafson, he didn't even train.
Didn't even fucking train, and he beat him.
But it was a close, close fight.
Close, close fight.
But then when him and Gustafson fought the second time, he beat the fucking brakes off Gustafson.
Because he wanted to let everybody know, like, this is Jon Jones when he's ready and prepared, motherfuckers.
But I only have so much time in the day, and I have to just, what excites me?
What excites me is combat sports.
I watch very obscure kickboxing matches from Thailand.
If you see me on my phone and I'm just sitting somewhere, I'm probably watching some weird grappling match that's taking place in fucking Uzbekistan or some shit.
Yeah, if you told me that he could eclipse Michael, and you could argue either way, because I am a boxing guy, he's done the biggest fights, but, you know, are you ready to rumble?
I also was like an eye-opening experience because I was a kickboxer.
So I was a stand-up fighter.
I was a striker.
And then I was watching this guy just grab ahold of people and get them to the ground and trip them.
I'm like, is it that easy?
Is it that easy to fuck me up?
I wrestled in high school for a year.
Like, maybe I could stand up on my feet.
And then I went to jiu-jitsu classes and got mauled.
And I was like, oh my god, I'm helpless.
Like, I had this totally distorted perception of my abilities.
I was like...
I'm a good kickboxer.
If someone comes up to me, I'll fuck them up.
And I have this whole idea in my head.
And then, like, jujitsu?
Like, I'm sure it's good and everything, but I can avoid all their bullshit.
No.
I got just mauled and manhandled.
I remember thinking, like, after a few classes, like, oh my god, I'm fucking helpless.
And I thought I wasn't.
That's most people.
Most people have this idea in their head, like, oh, my fucking mentality.
I see red.
Body start dropping.
You're helpless.
You're a child to someone who knows how to fight.
You really don't know until you experience it.
And so I think what UFC did is it opened everybody's eyes to jiu-jitsu and how effective jiu-jitsu is and how it's so much different than every other martial art because, like, If you're a good athlete and you're strong, you can hit hard, there's always like a swinging chance.
If you're in a fight with someone and you sucker punch them or something happens, but in a jiu-jitsu match or a guy with a jiu-jitsu black belt, there's no chance for like a lucky submission.
There's no chance for you winning.
You have zero chance.
If they clinch you, you're fucked.
You don't even know how to stop it.
You don't know what to do.
All of a sudden you're tripped, you're inside control, you're like, what is this?
Well, they used to have these earpieces that they would hand out.
They would sell at the concession stand.
It was like a little local radio, and you could put it on.
You could hear the commentary, which was great.
But I don't know what happened.
They stopped doing that.
It would be a good thing for people to have, because I think if I was watching in the audience, I think I might also buy it on ESPN +, and then listen to the commentary on an AirPod.
I think that's the way to do it.
Because, like, when Daniel Cormier is explaining wrestling, like, to this day, when he's explaining shit to me, like, I'm all ears.
When he's talking about clinch positions and, you know, what's important and what a person has to do in this spot or that spot.
And then when it goes to the ground, like, when I'm explaining transitions and I'm explaining when someone's okay and when they're not okay, and now they're fucked.
And what he's gonna do is this and then the person does it like for people that follow along at home that was in the early days of the UFC that helped the UFC very much because Otherwise, it's just a scramble of bodies on the ground.
You don't know what's happening.
You need someone to walk you through it in a step-by-step way.
So if you don't have access to commentary, I think that does hurt the experience a little bit.
The real story was the medical misinformation story.
That's where things got weird.
And there was a lot of people that were behind that.
It was very organized.
But that was because of having people like Robert Malone and Peter McCullough that were telling a narrative that was contrary to what was going on in the public about vaccines and about the efficacy and about the dangers and about COVID and the actual dangers of COVID and also alternative treatments, whether or not they were effective, whether or not the information is being suppressed.
No, because I would have done the same thing and I would have been banned from YouTube.
I would have been in trouble in other ways.
It was a matter of like a time where talking about certain things was very taboo.
And I talk about everything.
And when I had access to someone like Robert Malone, who owns nine patents on the creation of mRNA vaccine technology, and that guy who got vaccinated was telling you About a terrible cardiac event that happened to him while he got vaccinated and then him doing the research on mRNA vaccines and the benefits as well as the adverse side effects and as well as what the actual studies showed in terms of efficacy,
the fact that they never really showed that they could stop transmission, that they were lying about that.
It's going to stop it in its tracks.
There was no information about that.
In fact, there was a woman in Pfizer that had to talk to the European Parliament, and they asked her, like, did you do research to see if it stopped transmission?
She said no.
So all they knew is that it created antibodies.
And everybody wanted the pandemic to be over.
And everybody wanted it and they feel like this is our way out of this and it was like that was the narrative Rachel Maddow was like if you get this vaccine you won't get COVID, you won't spread COVID, the virus stops with you.
We all now know that is horseshit and that's a lie and this guy was telling me that over a year ago and when I started talking about that it became a real fucking issue but my perspective was like look If it's true, it's true.
And the chips will fall where they may.
And if the only way people are getting this information is through me, that's fucking crazy.
But that's also the cross I have to bear.
This is what it is.
I'm talking to this guy.
I'm fascinated by it personally.
I want to know.
I mean, and he was wildly disparaged.
So was Dr. Peter McCullough, wildly disparaged.
But turns out he was accurate.
And as more and more information gets out over time, it will show What happened, how they were suppressed, how there was active campaigns to silence them, and how those campaigns were funded.
And that's what we're finding out right now.
So it was an uncomfortable time for sure, especially when people like fucking Neil Young.
Oh, I love Neil Young.
But, you know, Neil Young, I don't know if this is true or not, but somebody told me that after I released my video explaining how a lot of the stuff that they called misinformation in the past that would get kicked you off is now mainstream news, like the fact the lab leak hypothesis.
If you talked about the lab leak hypothesis on YouTube at the beginning of the pandemic, you would have been fucking canceled.
They would have pulled you off of YouTube.
They would have suppressed your episodes.
They would have canceled.
Now that's on the cover of fucking Newsweek.
Right.
Right?
And now, most scientists and epidemiologists and virologists are porting towards that as a likely scenario, that there's a lab leak.
I had Brett Weinstein, who is an evolutionary biologist on yesterday, and he explained why that lab leak hypothesis is most likely correct in scientific terms that are, like, mind-boggling.
So, was it good?
No.
But it is what it is, you know?
And, you know, my perspective is, look, it could be...
I'm in a very unusual, unfortunate situation.
And sometimes you find yourself in a place in life where you have to figure out what you're going to do.
Are you going to not talk to these people because of pressure when you think these people are telling the truth?
Or are you going to let the chips fall where they may?
I shouldn't say I was wrong because I wasn't really the one who was saying these things.
These things were mostly being said by experts.
But if those experts turned out to be horseshit, that would be devastating.
Like if it did cause the death of millions of people because these guys were lying and these people didn't take something that could have saved them.
But it turns out that's not really the case.
And it turns out there was alternate therapies and alternate different medications that were suppressed.
Not only that, the information about simple things like vitamin D and exercise and the benefits of those things and how that was suppressed, about how obesity contributes to COVID, that was all suppressed.
You know, the fact that an independent media organization, whether it's like Breaking Points or Substack, can exist and have millions of subscribers and millions of people that pay attention.
This is not a world where you're on fucking ESPN and you get caught dealing coke and they just fire you.
Right.
They live in a different world than I do.
I live in the world of social media and the world of online platforms, direct to consumer.
It's a different thing.
And I've had a lot of offers to do that.
There was a lot of people that were these fucking huge billionaire people who came to me and said, listen, we can take this and go straight to subscriber model and then you never have to deal with anybody ever telling you what to do again.
And I thought about that, but also Spotify's been great to me.
I have a great relationship with the CEO of Spotify.
He's my boy.
I love that dude.
You know, I stick with them.
they stick with me, we're good and it works.
It's a fucking very unique thing that I got in right at the right time where YouTube was demonetizing people.
And that was one of the ways they got people to self-center.
Self-censor, rather.
They demonetized people that talked about controversial subjects.
And they demonetized a lot.
That was one of the things that we found about when we left YouTube.
Because we had a really good relationship with YouTube.
And most of our episodes were monetized.
But every now and then they would demonetize an episode.
And we would try to...
Jamie would protest it or he would dispute it and put in a request for review.
And sometimes they would reverse it, and sometimes they weren't.
And it was like this weird touch-and-go game where you're like, who is telling me what I can and can't say?
Who the fuck are these people?
And why are they in my life?
Why am I making decisions based on whether or not some fucking dork who has this subjective opinion of whether or not something should be discussed or not discussed?
Right.
When we left YouTube and went to Spotify, all that stopped.
The moment we left YouTube, the moment we got a deal with Spotify, we were on YouTube for several months.
They didn't demonetize any of our shit during that time.
They just took in all the revenue.
They stopped demonetizing us completely.
So it was an increase in revenue by like somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 to 30 percent.
Because that's the amount of podcasts that they would demonetize.
The revenue just went sky high.
I was like, this is wild.
This is really fascinating.
And if I stayed over there, during the whole COVID shit, during the Neil Young stuff and everything, dude, it would have been bad.
They would have probably yanked me off of YouTube.
They'd have probably killed my account.
They could have done it.
They did it to many people.
They killed many people's accounts for wrong reasons.
And those reasons now are being very clearly exposed as being incorrect.
Yeah, well, the thing you have, I've said this in the past, similar, I think, to Barstool, you've been doing it so long, so your audience knows very well who you are.
Well, that is, so of all the people who have come at me, and a lot of people say it, so you can take it kind of with a grain of salt, if someone writes a hit piece, I always say, let's sit down, I'll bring my cameras, you bring yours, and we can both do whatever we want.
But it's an interesting thing because this is all very new.
The idea of podcasts and these independent platforms that reach millions of people has never existed in human history.
There's never been anything like this.
So guys like you and guys like me and people that are doing it, There's no road map to follow.
Now for young guys coming up or young girls coming up, like young non-binary folks coming up, they get to look at what we're doing and they see like a little bit of a road map.
So for people that are getting involved in this right now, I love the fact that some 17 year old kid in Michigan in his fucking apartment You know, or his bedroom can start a podcast.
And if people like it, they keep tuning in, and then it can grow, and it can get to a point where that person could be the number one podcaster in the world.
You see it with like Twitch streamers and YouTubers.
It's more than leveling the playing field because you're uninhibited.
You're unhindered by corporate interests.
So you have this ability to talk about things in a way that, like, there was never a long-form discussion of complicated ideas for hours and hours uncensored that ever existed before.
Well, I don't know if that should be perceived as a threat.
I think they're looking at it the wrong way.
If they were an individual, I would say you shouldn't look at it that way.
You should look at, like, what are the benefits of doing something in the way that that person does and whether or not you can adjust and do whether— You don't think they—you don't think like— I'm sure they do.
But what I would say, if they were an individual, I know they're a corporation, so it's sort of a different entity, but if they were an individual, I would tell them, you're looking at it the wrong way.
If someone's out there killing it, don't look at that person as a threat.
Look at that person's like, what did they do?
How did they do that?
Why did they do that so differently?
Why is it so effective?
Maybe, what's the flaws in my delivery?
What's the flaws in my application?
What's the flaws in the way I'm promoting my thing?
And why doesn't that resonate with people?
If you have someone who speaks like a normal person, like who speaks like you would if you're having a drink with a buddy, that resonates with people.
So we just did our first—we had the rights to a college football game, and we announced it as though we had a rooting interest because we did, and half the people loved it, half hated it.
But even the people hated it.
It's like, this is how we talk in our living room.
We would turn the cameras early on us, like the Barstool people watching sports, in our biggest moments, because everyone wants a fan.
Like, someone hits a home run, Against your the biggest is always when your team loses people like to watch someone die on camera, which is great, but it's the fan experience It always works and that is what works with podcasts if someone's interesting Yes, if someone but if they're not God so fucking annoying like if you like I watch a lot of professional pool and There's a lot of telling me that yeah, I'm addicted And then there's these pool commentators that are just fucking amateurs.
People are supposed to have the freedom to do something that other people enjoy.
And that's the most unique thing about this time, is this time you don't have to have any qualifications, you don't have to have any background in broadcasting from a specific institution or any of that.
When we've hired people from networks, it's crazy.
First, the internet.
The network people generally flame out with us a little bit because they want, they're expecting like a producer to be like, you gotta do this, this is set up.
Where people who are kind of born from the internet, They've gotten on our radar or wherever they are by just doing it themselves.
You don't need anybody, really.
That drives me nuts when people apply for us.
I can do this, I can do that.
It's like, you don't need us.
You should have a library that I can just go watch you.
Why do you need Barstool?
You don't need anything.
It's so easy to create your own content without Any help, really.
But they'd like to be connected with Barstool, because Barstool's a brand that also has a gigantic following already attached, so they know if they hook up with you, they'll get an audience.
Imagine how long that podcast could have kept going.
And everything, only IP. And they could have left and gone to Spotify the same way with her attached, and she would be fucking driving a pink Rolls Royce and balling out of control.
You're literally talking to the greatest boxer the world has ever known.
And you're saying, play that, play that.
unidentified
Let me hear this.
Exactly.
Even though it appeared that he wasn't protecting himself and thought that that was part of the ceremony that you were going through of apology, that you unfairly took advantage of it.
What do you say to those who say, What'd you do there?
You were winning the fight and in charge.
I just want to say to everybody that bought pay-per-view, that came out to Las Vegas, thank you.
Floyd, you know you're a promoter, but now we're talking to you as a prize fighter.
Let's take a look at what happened at the end of the fight, and you describe it.
Also, you know, that's just all within the rules of boxing.
That's why he won the fight.
Also, Larry Merchant, I don't agree with the way he communicates with fighters.
The way I communicate with fighters...
I try to be 100% respectful at all times and also with reverence to the fact that these people, they trained for their whole life and then, you know, 6 to 12 weeks for this particular event.
When I'm in the ring and I'm in the cage and I'm trying to interview a fighter, all I'm trying to do is try to get that person to express themselves the best way that they can, as respectfully as they can.
Back in that world, the sports world, the way sports broadcasters talk about athletes is very different than the way fight broadcasters talk about athletes.
You know, sports broadcasters will call athletes bums, they'll call athletes, you know, he's lazy, he's this, he's that.
Well, he opened up a lot of people's eyes to what you could accomplish with that.
Because although Chael was a world-class fighter, defeated world champion, submitted Mauricio Shogun, who, I mean, he beat guys when they were at the top of their fucking game, who were, like, beat Nate Marquardt when he was a Fucking killer.
I mean, Chael Sonnen was a beast.
He was really fucking good.
And people get confused about that because of like his antics and his...
I mean, he's not the guy that's gonna beat Jon Jones.
He's not the guy that's gonna beat Anderson Silva.
He almost beat Anderson Silva, but Anderson Silva had a fucked up rib going into that fight and wound up submitting him in the last round with a fucking triangle, which was wild.
But...
Cheo opened up people's eyes to the benefit and the value of promotion.
And to be witty and entertaining and get people invested in you fighting.
They wanted to see you get your ass kicked.
They wanted to see you win.
They wanted to see there was some shit talking going on.
And then Conor McGregor took that to a completely new level.
And occasionally, occasionally I have to confront them about certain things.
Like when Hamzat Chemaev beat Kevin Holland.
See if you can find that interview.
When Hamzat Chemaev beat Kevin Holland, I was in a very interesting situation because Hamzat weighed in eight and a half pounds overweight.
And he fucked up the entire main event because he was supposed to be fighting Nate Diaz.
So I was in this situation where I wanted to praise Hamzat because he just ragdolled Kevin Holland in one of the most spectacular performances of the year.
I mean, he showed why he's the motherfucker of motherfuckers and why everybody's scared of him.
But also, he weighed in eight and a half pounds overweight.
But imagine if this was a fight for the title, and you came in eight pounds over, it wouldn't have taken place.
unidentified
It was lower.
The guy said to me, the doctor, you have to drink water and make some vitamins and s**t.
and they let me do that and I knew I knew that night I couldn't fight that guy so they make my way up to the guy I wasn't that more so the doctor told you to stop cutting the way but you believe you still could have Yes.
You know, Kevin Holland's a fucking entertaining guy, but this is for a fight where you just trained stand-up and you're against literally the best wrestler in the division who's a fucking motherfucker.
That guy is a motherfucker.
Hamzat ragdolls people and talks shit while he's doing it.
He picked up Li Jingleon and carried him to Dana White while he was talking shit.
He had to just do what he did and hope that his skills would prevail, and they didn't.
He got fucked up.
But if he survived that, let me tell you something, the pace that Han Zopp put on in that first round, I don't know if he would have been able to do that for three rounds.
He might have significantly tired if he didn't get that finish.
Because the amount of...
Look at this.
He picks up Lee Jingleon, and he carries him over to Dana White, drops him down, and while he was doing it, he was talking shit to Dana.
Like, when he's...
You've not seen it here, but before that, when he picks up Lee Jingleon...
Yeah, but during the middle of a fight, while you're fucking a guy up, before you even decide to fuck him up, you're holding him up in the air, talking shit.
That's how good that guy is.
He's so good, and he's so focused and dedicated.
Hamza Chemaev is a fucking terrifying human being.
I think Usman, the rumor was that he has to get hand surgery.
Kamaru Usman had a tear in one of the ligaments in his hand that had bothered him for a long time and was misdiagnosed, and then he eventually wound up getting surgery.
And he got that surgery before the Leon Edwards fight, but I believe the word is...
That he needs another surgery for his hand.
I don't know if it's the same hand.
I don't know what it is.
But I do know that there's been talk of whether or not he will fight Leon Edwards for the title in England now.
Because that's a giant fight.
Leon's coming home.
Spectacular knockout, one of the greatest head kick knockouts, if not the greatest, the most consequential in the history of sport.
Fifth round, down on the cards, a minute to go, and then again, that's why John Anik is the GOAT. John Anik is literally saying that he could stop, and he could resign himself to his fate, but that's not the cloth he's cut from.
The greatest call in the history of MMA, and maybe the history of all sports.
And then that would be the big fight, the rematch, because Kamara was winning that fight, and if he just chose to fight defensively and move away that round, he would have won that fight.
But he engaged and he got head kicked.
That would be the big fight.
But if Leon...
Wants to fight in March, and if Kamaru can't recover in time, maybe it was a minor surgery that only needed a few weeks off and he can get back.
I don't know what the story is, but I've heard various stories.
That's a good fight because Jorge Masvidal sucker-punched Leon Edwards backstage when Jorge just won a fight, and then I think he just knocked out Darren Till.
When he was in Bellator, that's when he was in his prime.
When we got him in the UFC, he already had fucked up hip.
He had a hip replacement.
And then when he fought Jake Paul in the boxing match, which he had no business in doing, he just did it because he just gave it a try and a lot of money.
But when he was in Bellator, when he was the champion in Bellator, he was a motherfucker.
He would ragdoll people like Douglas Lima and Andre Koroskov, all these elite killer fighters.
And I was like, Jesus Christ, could he do this to everybody?
He might be able to do this to everybody.
And he might have been able to do that to everybody if they fought him during that time period.
But unfortunately, he was in Bellator, and Bellator was always considered like the B League.
Right.
It was always like guys who fought there, they fought there because they couldn't fight in the UFC. And I was like, maybe for some of them, but I don't think that's the case for...
There's guys over there in Bellator, guys like Douglas Lima, that I could think could beat anybody in the world.
They just have to be in the situation where they could fight them.
And that's how I felt about Ben Askren at that time.
I'm like, he's so fucking good, man.
He's so fucking good.
And his wrestling was so above and beyond what everybody else's was.
That he would get a hold of you and you were just going down.
You're going for a ride, baby.
And you couldn't stand up with him because, you know, you always worried that if you...
Committed to a strike, he was gonna grab a leg, grab an ankle, grab your fucking waist, and then you're ragdolled.
And that's what he did to everybody.
Find like Ben Askren highlight in Bellator.
Because when he was in Bellator, people thought it was boring.
Because all he was doing was throwing them to the ground and giving them noogies.
He wasn't a devastating striker, and he wasn't a devastating ground-and-pound man.
But for me, I'm a purist.
I want to see what a person is capable of doing to another person.
And even if it's not exciting, even if that person can just take that person down at will and hold them down and keep punching them, Even if the punches aren't devastating, I am fascinated by someone's ability to impose their skill set on someone else.
See, that I find boring.
This was Ben Askren, man.
He would just take guys down and, you know, these aren't the most devastating elbows, but you ain't doing shit about it.
You can't do shit about it.
And if he can do that to you for five rounds, then so be it.
Everybody got taken down.
Everybody went for a ride.
Everybody wound up with Ben Askren on top of them, beating the fucking shit out of them.
And, you know, was he the most exciting fighter?
No.
No, but was he exciting to me?
Yes, because I'm a purist.
What I wanted to see is guys at the height of their ability doing what they want to do to people.
Look how he avoids this leg lock and he just starts beating people up.
They didn't know what the fuck to do.
They couldn't believe it.
He could just take you down at will.
And the way he would do it was so weird.
Like that.
Just back up a little bit so you can see that exchange right there.
Like, he goes down on his back and then grabs a hold of a leg.
Like, he's doing things that you're not supposed to do.
But this is not to me because this is a guy that is doing what his skill set is.
He's doing wrestling.
And he's doing it to the best fighters in the division and just beating the shit out of them.
And no one could stop it.
I firmly believe that if the Ben Askren, in the peak of his condition at Bellator, fight in the UFC, I think he's a fucking nightmare for everyone in the sport.
Everyone.
Maybe guys like Kamaru Usman, because he's also an elite wrestler, would give him a hard time, and maybe he would have beat him, but I would have loved to have seen it.
I would have loved to have seen him against Tyron Woodley in his prime, against all those guys in their prime, against Wonderboy in his prime.
Anybody who denies he's a bad motherfucker is crazy.
He knocked down Anderson Silva in a boxing match.
I don't care if Anderson Silva's 47 years old.
I'm sure he's in the best shape that you could be at 47, and I'm sure their drug testing is basically non-existent.
I'm sure he was probably, you know, trained as well as you can be trained at 47 years old, and he's also like a certified killer.
He's so good.
Anderson Silva was so fucking good and still good.
I mean, in the beginning of the first round, he was winning that fight.
You could see what Anderson Silva's capable of.
And Jake Paul beat him.
That's fucking end of story.
Now, if he goes on to start beating actual real professional boxers with credible records, that's where things get interesting.
And I think the way he's doing it is brilliant.
He fights Nate Robinson, he fights Ben Askren, he fights Tyron Woodley, gets all these fucking brutal knockouts against guys who are like, at least have names.
Tyron Woodley.
Even though Tyron Woodley might have been, you know, at the end of his career and maybe not as dedicated he was when he was the welterweight champion of the UFC, he's still Tyron fucking Woodley.
This might not be the best performance that he has ever had in his career, but what I see from his highlight reel, what I see from some of the fights that I've watched, he's a good boxer, man.
And I'm not saying that he's even reached his full potential or gotten to a place where I think that he should be in consideration to be fighting for any kind of a title.
The one thing I don't get about this, well, I do get it, I understand.
People are actually like, want the charges to be true, which is crazy because that would mean a lot of bad shit to what happened to a lot of bad people.
You know, look, Romania, I don't know what their system is like.
I don't know whether they're corrupt.
I've heard things, but I don't have any real information.
So I'd be talking out of my ass to say...
You know, if he really did like sex traffic people, if he really did all the things he's saying, well, I hope that gets proven in court and I hope he gets punished if he really did that.
If he didn't do that, I hope he gets exonerated and I hope he gets the fuck out of Romania.
I don't know.
I don't know what he did.
I know a lot of what he does is theater, right?
A lot of what he does is very, like, satire.
He plays the role of this boastful misogynist who smokes cigars and drives Lamborghinis, and that's his thing.
And because of that, he's amassed an amazing amount of money.
And he's done it by doing this character, this online persona, but then also says very wise things.
He says ridiculous shit, but also says really interesting things.
He's a very smart guy.
If you listen to him being interviewed by Patrick Bet-David.
Patrick Bet-David interviewed him after he got cancelled off of all social media.
And Patrick is fantastic.
He's really good at letting people talk and talking to everybody.
And Patrick is so wealthy and so successful outside of the world of podcasting that he only does it because he's interested in it.
And so he's the perfect guy to handle that because he's not afraid to talk to anybody.
He'll talk to anybody.
And so he had him on for a long-form conversation.
They talked for hours, and you get to see this is a very intelligent and calculated guy.
You might not agree with his message.
You might not agree with all the misogynist stuff.
You might not agree with...
And I don't agree with it.
You might not agree with all the crazy antics, but...
You cannot deny that that's been incredibly successful because it resonates with a lot of young men who don't feel represented in the media.
Now, again, that move from somebody who's being accused of sex trafficking, I think rape was thrown in there, and then you're out there being like, look at me, look at me, crazy.
I just found an exclusive story on Vice that says the reason he was kicked off of Big Brother is not the reason that was publicly known or what was thought of.
It says that he was arrested for suspicion of rape in 2015. He was investigated over allegations of sexual assault and physical abuse in the UK, during which time he appeared on Big Brother for five days.
The girl came out and said that that was very consensual and that they were doing role play and that they liked to do this thing where he would beat her up or something.
It's also another thing, like this Matrix thing which he has, which, again, I... I am a firm believer, based on my experience, like, people are out to get you, they're out to get you.
He also, if he committed these crimes, he's sort of brilliant, be like, they're coming for me in the next couple days, because you know they're coming, and then your followers go, aha, he was right.
But you also hope that he's not accused of these things when it's just because of his bombastic personality and talking shit and getting all this attention, which he clearly has done.
You gotta wonder how much of it is sad.
Like, when you talk to Piers Morgan, that was a very interesting conversation because Piers confronted him on all these things and he did a great job of explaining what he does and why he does it.
And, you know, it's like the guy went viral in a way that no one has.
I think the way he's going down is he's never – I don't think he's experienced anything like – of course he's never experienced anything like this, right?
Where everything's taken away from him.
I mean, he had to stop construction on his house.
He's losing all of his money, all of his sponsorships.
Everything's gone.
All of his connections to all these businesses, connections to banks.
Everything's gone.
It's kind of wild to see.
Because we've never seen that before.
Where a guy is a superstar and a billionaire.
And he says some awful shit, and then everything's taken away from him.
Because, you know, the saying the election was rigged, that's a threat to the foundation of our democracy.
And I believe that if you're going to say the election was rigged, You have to have rock-solid, very specific information that points to that, that you could show the world.
And I don't think that was the case.
I don't know how much election fraud exists.
I know it's less than zero.
It's not there's no election fraud.
There's fraud in everything.
If you don't think that there's people that are running some sort of an election center that are democratic centered that wouldn't do something that they think would help the world.
By making sure that someone who they think is evil and a very threat to democracy itself, if that person gets into power, and you don't think that they would do something to suppress that, whether it's by making voting machines not work correctly or by suppressing ballots or by hiding ballots, there's unscrupulous people that exist.
How many of them exist, is the question.
How much fraud was it on the Republican side?
How much fraud was it on the Democratic side?
Has it happened?
Has election fraud happened in the history of humans?
And that guy is not prosecuted, not arrested, not charged.
And then the FBI has to have a conversation with Ted Cruz, and he's saying, did you have people in the FBI that were involved in that, that were actively trying to rile people up, and they won't answer that question?
I've actually come to, this is how fucked up our country is, I'm actually enjoying it from like, the cameras are falling around, no one wants to sit with them.
They don't know where he got the money for the campaign.
There's a lot of people that like all kinds of stuff that I don't like, and that's okay.
But the problem is when people don't like someone like you, because you represent masculinity, you represent gambling and sports and girls and money, and they don't like that.
They don't like that.
So they just like, like the automatic instinct.
Instead of just going, ah, that's not my thing.
They just like, we got to take that guy down.
And then, of course, when someone, that's their job.
Their job is to write hit pieces.
And those hit pieces get a lot of clicks, and that's their industry.
It's shocking because we've never done it before, and now all of a sudden you're in the middle of it, and as an independent person, which you are, it's a rare spot where someone gets as much attention as you do and has as much power and influence as you do, but you're completely unconnected.
You can do whatever you want, and that's what's scary.
So, I mean, I still deal with, like I've always said for people who don't like me, the best thing that ever happened was we became this gambling company or associated because I can't be as unhinged or I can't go after people in the manner I would like to.
I have to stay away for the most part.
That's probably good for you.
Yeah, well, no, it keeps me up because, you know, I am a petty...
I think now the UFC recently, because of the James Krause thing, but that was a fighter who was managing and training a fighter who was accused of telling people about an injury that could affect the outcome of a fight.
And I don't know if it's true.
I don't know what the evidence is.
All I know is the allegations, but I know it's serious enough where they're investigating it, and it's serious enough where his fighters are not allowed to compete in the UFC anymore.
So it's a really big deal.
You know, I'm friends with people that just train at his gym that work at the UFC that now have to find a new gym, they feel.
And I'm like, whoa.
But you just train there.
It's a gym filled with fighters.
You're not even allowed to train there anymore.
Or they feel like they're not allowed to train there anymore, I should say.
Like Laura Sanko.
her home gym and she's in this like situation and there's a lot of fighters like Brandon Moreno who is the you know one point in time is the flyweight champion and now he has to find a new camp to train because he was trained by Krause sports take it wildly seriously and naturally it's the integrity of the game Gambling.
And that people aren't doing something like that, where they're giving someone, like letting them know this guy's gonna lay down and then bet the house on this guy.
It wasn't just that Mike Tyson's life was falling apart.
Buster Douglas was a bad man.
He just didn't commit himself to boxing like he could have.
Like many super talented people, he just didn't go all in.
There's some super talented people that just skate by because they're able to.
Khabib said that.
Khabib said that the talented guys, it's too easy for them.
You want the guys that are just willing to just grind and work hard and they eventually overcome the talented guys because they just have this mindset where they can suffer and they can train and they can get up in the morning and do it again.
They're dedicated and they don't drink and they don't party.
I mean, Camille makes all his guys cut their hair a certain length, and there's no fucking around in his gym.
And that's why he's Nurmagomedov.
That's why he's one of the GOATs, if not the GOAT. And that's why he retired undefeated.
Because he had that unstoppable commitment, that discipline, that championship drive.
And some really talented guys don't.
They just don't, for whatever reason.
It comes too easy in the beginning, or they're They're trying to chase pussy, or they want to hang out with their boys and party too much.
He fought John the Beast Mugabe, who was knocking out everybody, and Hagrid just kept beating the fuck out of him.
Eventually broke him, and Mugabe was never the same again, after he beat up Mugabe.
But that's the...
I mean, obviously Hagrid was super talented, too, and one of the best switch hitters ever in boxing, other than Terrence Crawford, who I think is, like, right up there.
Terrence Crawford, he switch hits better than anybody.
Well, maybe not biggest, but what, in my mind, MMA, boxing, is the best guys always fight in MMA. In the UFC. But you have to be in the UFC. Like, we never got Fedor Emelianenko.
Fedor Emelianenko, when he was the king of pride, he was the baddest fucking heavyweight that ever lived.
He was so good, dude.
He was so scary and so stoic.
And he could submit you or he could knock you out.
God damn, he was good.
That's, to me, the biggest regret of all of MMA is not seeing Cain Velasquez versus Fedor Emelianenko when Fedor was in his prime.
I would have given anything to see that.
I would have flown to Japan to see that fight.
I would have loved to see that fight.
That was, to me, the biggest tragedy was we never saw Fedor in his prime come over to the UFC. And by the time he went to Strikeforce, He was already, I think, miles on the odometer, hard fights, brutal, brutal, brutal fights that he had in Pride.
You think there could be a guy who could be that good who's not in the UFC? Yeah, you could have a guy in Bellator that's dominating everybody and just decides, Bellator's giving him a lot of money and he doesn't want to go over to the UFC. You've got guys in one championship now that are fucking elite.
They're straight-up killers.
They're as good as anybody alive, and they fight over in Asia.
And they just haven't gotten the fanfare and the people behind them like, say, some of the fighters have in the UFC. The UFC is the biggest organization in MMA, period.
There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
If you're not a UFC champion, even if you are elite, even if you're fantastic, there's always going to be that thing that's attached to you that you never fought in the UFC. Which is why I didn't think that would happen, because UFC has progressed so much.
It has, but there's still guys that, for whatever reason, they don't make it over here.
Maybe 1FC gives them a bigger contract.
Maybe they feel like they can shine over there more.
Maybe they have less stringent drug testing, which is a very big factor, an undeniable factor.
If you have an organization that doesn't have something like USADA or people showing up at your doorstep at 6.30 in the morning and waking you out of bed and making you take a piss test and making you take a blood test, then you don't know.
If you're just doing a drug test after the weigh-in, that's just an intelligence test.
That's just a scientific test.
That's like, do you have a good team behind you?
Because the early days of the UFC, there was a lot of guys doing steroids and they still passed drug tests because they knew how to cycle off or when they got to the weigh-in and they knew what was getting tested for and whatnot.
There was camps that had scientists That were involved in the camps.
And I know this for a fact.
There was camps that had doctors who knew exactly what you could take and what you couldn't take and how much to take and when to take it.
Why wouldn't you?
Why wouldn't you?
Because the rub was that everybody was doing it.
And then USADA came along and you saw physiques melt.
If you're in a sport where everybody's doing it, like if you're in a sport like bodybuilding, which you could say is a sport or not a sport, because they're competing just based on the way they look, I think it's still a sport.
But it's complicated.
If you have a sport like bodybuilding and everyone's doing steroids and you say, I'm not going to do steroids.
Well, guess what?
You're not going to win.
You're not going to win.
You can't be Dorian Yates.
You can't be Ronnie Coleman.
You can't be those guys unless you're taking steroids.
That's just the sport.
And that's like where a lot of sports are right now.
There's certain sports like grappling.
Gordon Ryan, who's the greatest grappler of all time, openly admits to taking performance enhancing drugs.
Openly talks about it.
Because everybody's doing it.
And he's just honest.
He's just like, yeah, I take them.
Everybody's taking them.
They're not illegal in our sport.
And if you look at him, he looks like a guy who takes performance-enhancing drugs.
Well, he could go to one FC. He could go to one of these organizations that doesn't test like that.
But I think because he's not a striker and because he's dominant in jiu-jitsu and he thinks that he could be like a Tony Hawk of jiu-jitsu, like a guy who rises past the sport itself.
And he becomes like an icon for what that sport is and becomes pop, and he is!
He's making millions of dollars without fighting in MMA, without getting the brain damage, and dominating in his art and what he's dedicated to.
I mean, you could say it's all performance enhancing drugs, but that's not correct.
If everybody's doing it.
Everybody's doing it.
And it's not everybody.
There's some younger guys like the Rutolo brothers who are totally clean, but they're 19 years old in a lower weight class, but he's a heavyweight.
And if you just look at all the elite guys in the sport, when you go to Abu Dhabi and you look at the best guys that are competing...
To be able to train every day the way a guy like Gordon does.
And I mean every day.
He trains 365 days a year.
Christmas, birthday, fuck you, show up.
Everybody shows up.
And his coach, John Donaher, is not just one of the most brilliant guys that has ever coached anybody, but he's one of the most brilliant guys I've ever talked to.
He was a professor of philosophy at Columbia.
And got obsessed with jujitsu and started training and then teaching it and then became the greatest jujitsu coach literally the world's ever known.
And the two of them together are this unstoppable force.
So to attribute all that just to performance enhancing drugs is crazy.
But to say that it doesn't play a part in it is also untrue.
There's a factor because the way he's able to train, one of the things, like if you're on performance enhancing drugs, your recovery is way better.
So you're able to train far more than someone who's not on those things.
On top of that, his nutrition's on point.
On top of that, his recovery, all the stuff that he does to get better.
He's doing everything.
He's doing everything right and you can't stop it.
I feel like he was like 40. Yeah, it wasn't that long ago.
I think he just redlined his system until it just BOOM! It's 2017, so he would have been 47. Yeah, 47 and just preposterously jacked.
So he won a bunch of physique competitions, Mr. Teen California, Mr. California, National Physique Committee competitions.
But, you know, mostly he was like an online famous guy for being super jacked.
Which is, like, a lot of these, you know, social media influencers.
That, like, becomes their business, is to become super jacked or super shredded, and, you know, then they're committed to this, and then they're online.