Sept. 25, 2025 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:02:52
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Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Mark. | ||
| Dude, the movie's fantastic. | ||
| And I told you outside, but I wanted to save it. | ||
| Uh when I kind of have a had a little bit of a prejudice when I went to see the movie, I was like, okay, it's gonna be an MMA movie. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's not, it's a movie that happens to be about MMA, but it's a great movie. | ||
| Oh, I appreciate it. | ||
| It's really good, man. | ||
| It's it's like, you know, it's very gripping, and the performances are fantastic, and the way the rock did you was nuts. | ||
| I like I can't explain it. | ||
| It's I I keep using the word surreal, but it doesn't describe it. | ||
| Um like I was saying that my son when he watched it, and just flipping out, like talking to me, like on the side, like I was saying, like literally, just going, Dad, dad, he's got your mannerisms, he's got your speech manner. | ||
| But you imagine, like I'm I'm picturing my son, he's in New York when he watched it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so I'm picturing him in the corner of the lobby of the theater, talking with his back to everybody, going, Oh my god, Dad, like it's like a doppelganger. | ||
| He's got all of it, you know, like full blown, like it was like the the the lot of my saying for myself is I'm it I can't see the force through the trees. | ||
| I'm in the middle of it, am I looking at it objectively? | ||
| Am I really looking at or am I seeing something and to hear my son say, Oh my gosh, dad, he nailed it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, unbelievable. | ||
| He really did nail it. | ||
| I like we were saying in the lobby, like I didn't know the rock could act that well. | ||
| You know, it's really good acting, it's not like blockbuster movie acting, which is he's great at that, but it's it's a different thing. | ||
| It's compl so with DJ, I kept trying to say to him, you don't have to do this, dude. | ||
| Like you don't have to do this. | ||
| And he would he would stop me and he would go, Yeah, I do. | ||
| What do you mean by you don't have to do this? | ||
| So meaning that like he's at a leading me. | ||
| He's at a place in his life where he can just keep doing blockbusters and be perfectly fine with it. | ||
| There's there it I mean, he says it himself. | ||
| There's always a place for that. | ||
| There's always gonna be a place for blockbuster movies and and for that, but he needed to do something different. | ||
| He needed to do something different. | ||
| Well, it's the perfect role if you want to do something different for him because it's a very complex role, and it's about a giant dude. | ||
| Yeah, and that's him. | ||
| Yeah, so it's like really like the perfect way. | ||
| Because otherwise, if you're built like he is, it's very hard to get work as a serious actor. | ||
| This might be like the only opportunity to show people like, hey, I can actually act. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think he did it. | ||
| He did it. | ||
| He did an amazing job. | ||
| I mean, too. | ||
| Amazing to the point where like Emily, unbelievable. | ||
| She's great. | ||
| She plays such a crazy bitch. | ||
| Oh my god, man. | ||
| She's so good at it. | ||
| Oh my god, she's so good at playing crazy. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| It gave me anxiety. | ||
| Like some of the sometimes, like when you're getting ready to fight, she's starting arguments. | ||
| I'm like, oh my god, I'm getting anxiety. | ||
| So here's what was he so it vet, so I saw a a 80% complete version of the film in January of this year. | ||
| And then um, and then the first time I see a complete version of it was in Venice. | ||
| And so I'm in Venice, and there's Benny on my right, and there's DJ on my left, and there's Emily next to uh DJ. | ||
| And the last scene of the movie, right? | ||
| That intensity of that scene, I'm just telling you, it was like I I said it was therapy for me. | ||
| Because I think for the first time I could actually I could actually see my part in it. | ||
| Like I could see my part, how fucking hard I was on the people around me. | ||
| You know, how just singularly driven I was to accomplish something at at all cost. | ||
| And the person that paid it the most was Dawn. | ||
| She paid a heavy price, you know, and you know, anybody that's successful, you know, for me, I was trying to raise everybody up, you know, everybody around me. | ||
| And it was just his selfish endeavor, and I could see it in those moments. | ||
| I could see it in what who DJ was, you know, and who Emily was in the intensity of it. | ||
| I was like, fuck. | ||
| Well, it's such a crazy task to try to be an elite MMA fighter at a time where there was no no one even knew what it was. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, you when you first said I met you in 97. | ||
| There's a crazy photo of us together. | ||
| I saw that. | ||
| Dude, 97, that's like 30 years ago almost. | ||
| Isn't that nuts? | ||
| So this is what's fucking crazy. | ||
| So trying to describe what I did back then, like people their jaws would hang open. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They would go, you do what? | ||
| Like, why would you do that? | ||
| That's us. | ||
| 1997, dude. | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| So crazy. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| So were they even paying you back then? | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| They paid me a little bit. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| It wasn't a lot of money. | ||
| But it was for me, it was just for fun. | ||
| It's like uh I was a giant fan of the sport, and what happened was Campbell McLaren. | ||
| Do you remember Campbell? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Um, he he was good friends with my manager, Jeff. | ||
| And uh they were just talking, and he said, uh, we need a guy to do backstage interviews, uh, post-fight interviews. | ||
| And he goes, Joe really loves the sport. | ||
| He's like, really? | ||
| He goes like, oh yeah, he follows all the fights in Japan. | ||
| And he's like, and so for me it was just fun. | ||
| I mean, it was it wasn't, it was actually costing me money, which is why I wind up quitting. | ||
| Because I quit and I did it for like a year and a half, two years, maybe, and then in 98, I was like, I can't do this anymore. | ||
| I'm just it's just actually costing me money. | ||
| And so then when I um started doing Fear Factor, that's when Zufa bought it, I went up working for them again. | ||
| But in those days, it was it was for me, it was a dream because as a lifelong martial artist, when I was a kid, there was always the big question, what was the best style? | ||
| And no one knew until Hory and Gracie put it all together and decided to create the UFC, and then all of a sudden we get to see it, and then obviously you had Japan Valley Tuto and then Pride and all these big events over in Japan, and and it it became to me, it was like finally someone did it. | ||
| That was so part of my first fights in Brazil, I was still uh brainwashed by the idea that oh shit, he's seven foot tall or six nine, he's the toughest dude in the room. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Cause you because you I because that's how I grew up, right? | ||
| Or 10th degree black belt, same thing. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Oh no, no, no, you know, don't mess with him. | ||
| Yeah, and then one where that first time I fought, I was still under the delusion that that was the truth. | ||
| And so my trainer kept going, uh trust me, you're gonna you're gonna do fine. | ||
| Trust me, you're gonna do fine. | ||
| And it's just like he understood what what what I was as a wrestler, you know, that I can impose, like I said to tell you the def best definition I've ever had for a wrestler is I can hold a grown ass man where he doesn't want to be held for as long as I want to hold him there, and he can't do a fucking thing about it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's a wrestler, and you can dictate where the fight takes place always. | ||
| So if you come a wrestler like Chuck Liddell, yeah, then you say, No, no, no, you can't take me down, so I'm just gonna beat the fuck out of you standing, and there's nothing you could do about it. | ||
| Not not a single thing, it's the most important skill. | ||
| Oh my god, it's foundational, and and that's why there's so much success for for the deck. | ||
| Um I'm gonna blank on the names, but uh the wrestlers are it's a resurgence of like really what a foundational piece it is, yeah, and how important it is when you have a high high you know what they're able to do too as a wrestler. | ||
| I used to look at the Russian wrestlers and go, what makes them so good? | ||
| They could flurry in succession more times than I could, like Kurt Angle, right? | ||
| When I wrestled against Kurt, Kurt trained at a level that I wasn't training at. | ||
| He could sustain a flurry to the point where I would just make mistakes, right? | ||
| Because I would be to exhaustion, and you watch him, these they'll string these moves together and string them together. | ||
| Like Hamza Chamaya's great extra. | ||
| Oh my god, unbelievable example of that. | ||
| Unbelievable because you'll see you'll see him shoot, reshoot, shoot again, get up, stand up, fake, shoot again, and you can't keep up with it. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| You just and inevitably you just make mistakes or you just give in to the exhaustion of the moment, right? | ||
| Yeah, and it's just like okay, nothing you can do about it. | ||
| When a guy has an ex insane Cardio with those kind of skills, it is the toughest combination to be. | ||
| Like Kane Velasquez in his prime. | ||
| Oh my god, insane cardio, elite wrestling, and then elite MMA stand-up skills as well. | ||
| Like get everything. | ||
| Scary. | ||
| The cardio is the scariest thing. | ||
| When you're scared to hit the gas, like three more minutes in the round, and you see Kane is just fucking bob bombing around. | ||
| Like he's not even breathing heavy in between rounds, the stomach's not even heaving. | ||
| He's a big dude. | ||
| He's 240, and he's not even tired. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It defies logic. | ||
| But there's guys like that that have that fucking insane cardio. | ||
| You know, I mean, I don't know how much you follow in the UFC, but this is kid Anthony Hernandez in the middleweight division. | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| And then you got Mirab, Rob Dobish Willie, who's like the best example of it. | ||
| Unstoppable. | ||
| So this is kind of again one of these things where where there's certain athletes that have a gear that nobody else has. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's just how they're built. | ||
| It's just how they're built. | ||
| Well, I remember when you came along and when Coleman came along, all of a sudden everybody's like, I gotta get on steroids. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Oh my god. | ||
| But he's like, I gotta get bigger. | ||
| I gotta get bigger. | ||
| That's what Vitor got up to like 240 pounds. | ||
| He was big, he was big. | ||
| Way too big for his frame. | ||
| I mean, you're talking about a guy who eventually won up fighting at 185. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| I mean, he finished his career up at 85, and he was there at 240 when he fought Randy the first time. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Which was bananas. | ||
| So that night was my last UFC. | ||
| That was UFC 15. | ||
| Ah, wow. | ||
| And that's when Randy beat Vitor. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| And it was one of those where I'm like, oh, just wait. | ||
| I know because I know what Randy is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Randy's cardio. | ||
| Randy goes like he can take it. | ||
| And he it was one of those things where I was like, I don't think Victor's gonna win. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| It's just that. | ||
| And that's what we call him back then. | ||
| His name was Victor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When he first came into the UFC, his first fight when he was fighting in Hawaii, he was Victor Gracie. | ||
| Oh, snap. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He was going by the the last name Gracie. | ||
| And then I think he got sued or threatened with a lawsuit. | ||
| And then he changed it to Victor Belper because like Horian was very litigious. | ||
| You know, he was like very protective of the Gracie name. | ||
| And um so he fought John Hess in Hawaii and beat the living shit. | ||
| Rumble on the Rock stuff or whatever. | ||
| I don't think it was Rumble on the Rock. | ||
| That was BJ's promotion, and that was later. | ||
| This was like really early on. | ||
| This was uh I don't know who the fuck was doing that event, but uh it was just in a ring, and Vitor came out and blitzed him with punches, and nobody had seen anything like that before. | ||
| Like, oh god, this is a because everybody thought Brazilian jujitsu black belt, yeah. | ||
| You need to think you're gonna have a guy who has hands like that. | ||
| Oh my god, his hand speed was unreal. | ||
| He was so fast, unreal and accurate. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Like you can be fast, and that's one thing, but fast and actually hitting the target when the target's bobbin and weaving, it's like, oh my god, man. | ||
| He's an interesting case study because he's uh like first of all, pioneer, right? | ||
| First fought in the UFC when he was 19 years old. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| And you know, went through, won the tournament at 19, which is just bananas. | ||
| And then when we got to see him kind of he got off the sauce and his body kind of faded out, and then they brought back testosterone replacement, and then when testosterone replacement came in, all the sudden it was TRT Vitor, and he was the scariest motherfucker alive for like five fights or whatever it was before they killed the TRT exemptions, and then it all went away for him. | ||
| It's just like that should be a commercial for testosterone replacement. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it really could be. | ||
| You know, part you know, back then, because there was so much myth surrounding mixed martial arts that you felt like if you didn't do something, it was like the saying is like oh, you're going to a gunfight with a knife, right? | ||
| It was that type of mentality back then. | ||
| Well, it's also everyone was on it and there was no testing. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And in fact, in Pride, when Ensign was on the podcast, he told me that in large letters it said, We do not test for skills. | ||
| Yeah, oh my god. | ||
| They're like, Yeah. | ||
| So they would literally they would do this. | ||
| They would hand you a cup and go, urine. | ||
| And you go, uh, who's clean? | ||
| You just looked around and you just you just hand the cup off going, I can you piss from here. | ||
| And you literally walk back to the medical and go, here's the P. Yeah. | ||
| Here. | ||
| And I mean that That's the but that's the era it was. | ||
| So your first fight was in was it in Brazil? | ||
| In Brazil, yeah. | ||
| And um the crazy thing is they reproduced that arena, that that conference room perfectly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like because I saw your first fight. | ||
| I saw all those early fights. | ||
| And then to see that in like the movie, I was like, oh, they did it. | ||
| This is perfect. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Because you know, sometimes they fudge a little. | ||
| You know, they so here's what so I was in Vancouver for the set when they had the setup, and I I was sitting there, I was laughing with Benny about it, going, All right, who came up with the pyramid in the door opening with fog machines? | ||
| Because it's like I can't even imagine the brainstorm going, you got any bright ideas of how to introduce the yeah, let's do a pyramid and let's have a trapdoor fall. | ||
| It's like what the fuck? | ||
| Where like where in the bigger picture of stuff would go on, but they reproduced it to the T. It was perfect. | ||
| Oh my god, it was amazing. | ||
| It was really great because in in the movie they did about Mark Schultz, what was that movie again? | ||
| Um fucking Fox catching it. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That that movie had a lot of shenanigans in it. | ||
| There was a lot of stuff that wasn't. | ||
| Wasn't accurate to it. | ||
| It wasn't accurate. | ||
| Yeah, like he fought Big Daddy Goodrich in his one MMA fight, but in the movie, he's fighting some Russian dude. | ||
| Didn't make any sense. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| Completely different cat. | ||
| Fought a white guy in the movie. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| You fought Big Daddy Goodrich and Big Daddy was wearing the gi. | ||
| Like wow. | ||
| Yeah, remember? | ||
| I mean, not only that, but it was uh Big Daddy Goodridge is a legend. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, how do you leave him out when that was his only MMA fight? | ||
| Like, why did you change the guy he fought? | ||
| That doesn't even make any sense. | ||
| But they just did Hollywood shenanigans. | ||
| Yo, uh so you know that was a huge part from the beginning of this when when DJ and I DJ and I talked back in 2019 is just the like the trust factor. | ||
| You guys started talking about this in 2019. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Six fucking years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| Here's what's crazy. | ||
| So he says, hey, you know, we're gonna move forward with this. | ||
| And and I so for me, I hadn't even thought about any of this. | ||
| Like it being a movie, it he wants to play me in a movie, and he goes, I'm gonna make the announcement. | ||
| Madison Square Garden at the BMF belt. | ||
| He goes, This we had this beautiful conversation, and it was just like this, do you trust me? | ||
| And it was like, Yeah, yeah, I do. | ||
| He's a fucking great dude. | ||
| Oh my god, solid. | ||
| He's by the way, he says, say hi. | ||
| He left me a great message on the way over here. | ||
| I was listening to him and he's just he's he's a rare human being. | ||
| He is. | ||
| I'm gonna I'm gonna call him after this just to tell him what a fucking amazing job he did. | ||
| Because I wanted to watch it right before I saw you. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So I watched it today. | ||
| And I was like, God damn, this is a good movie, man. | ||
| And I just I was just blown away by how well he captured the chaos of the pride organization, all the the weirdness of the contract negotiations, everything. | ||
| Off uh so Benny from the beginning said the only way we're gonna be able to do this is have that authenticity to the point where I sent them watches, rings, necklaces, posters, everything I could find, picture-wise, everything to their props in production. | ||
| Oh wow and they reproduced everything. | ||
|
unidentified
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Uh wow. | |
| So Joe, and when I I mean, like when I went up to Vancouver, like and walked into some of these sets, like literally going, Holy fucking shit. | ||
| Did he flash back? | ||
| Oh my god, like like you'd walk into a room and there there'd be from one corner all the way to the other on the wall, just pictures of me and my house and my this and this outfit and this and these in my house and this and and then production saying, okay, was this accurate? | ||
| How did this it was this it was this unbelievable painstaking they rebuilt my life 25 years ago? | ||
| So when DJ got into care got into me, he actually was that was he was me. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It seemed like it, man. | ||
| I mean, it really did because you know it's just It's hard when a guy's so famous to pretend that he's someone else. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He has to like be really good to get you convinced. | ||
| And I was all in. | ||
| I was all in. | ||
| So first time I saw him in uh in uh Vancouver, like nobody told me nobody said, Hey, listen, we're gonna do prosthetics, we're gonna give me your cauliflower ear, we're gonna make his brow, and then nobody told me this. | ||
| So I was up there for fight week, and uh they're getting ready to shoot uh the scene where they're introducing everybody to the finalist for the Grand Prix, and so DJ's the last one to walk in, and I'm watching the ring. | ||
| I don't know he's behind me. | ||
| And I turn around and it's like this like I see him as me, like this is Joe. | ||
| This is what I did. | ||
| I'm like, fuck you, like fuck you. | ||
| Like, oh my god, and it's this moment where I'm looking at him, and I'm I'm looking at my like myself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I could still see him in there, but I'm like looking at a like a mirror picture myself, and it's this experience where I'm like, oh my god, man, like wow, like you like you're going, like this is you going to a place that nobody even thought you could get to. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like it was it was incredible. | ||
| Well, you're you're such an important part of the history of MMA that I think this movie did that, it really honored that. | ||
| It really did it justice because at the end of the movie when it talks about how fighters today make millions of dollars. | ||
| Go on, I'm sorry. | ||
| No, it's okay. | ||
| It's like but that you guys paved the way. | ||
| If it wasn't for you guys, just doing it for very little money, like barely getting by. | ||
| Putting your whole life on the line, yeah, and barely getting by. | ||
| Oh, and I love that you had Alexander Usyk. | ||
| Oh my god, is he? | ||
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| That was amazing. | ||
| So Megny signed him before he beat, before he became the undisputed champ. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 2019. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| So so it's one of those things where um everything just kind of lined up in a way where you're like, all right, this is like this is Manifest Destiny, right? | ||
| This is like this is like Joe Dispenza. | ||
| You know, like really like you're like you're really tapping into something that's bigger, because it's pulled all these people together. | ||
| Uzek did a great job. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, he didn't move like oh my god, he did that spinning back. | |
| Like Jesus, I'm like, he's a boxer. | ||
| He's not supposed to. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I didn't even know he could do that. | ||
| No, neither did I. That's kind of crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, I guess that guy could kind of do anything. | ||
| Yeah, God, he's he's you know how many rounds he trained prior to to uh fighting Tyson Fury? | ||
| No. | ||
| Six hundred. | ||
|
unidentified
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Jesus. | |
| With three different training partners. | ||
| So every dude came in every third round. | ||
| He had a fresh guy on him. | ||
| I know that he was doing 15 rounds a day, and he made a deal with himself that his back touched the ropes, he would have to do another round. | ||
| An extra round. | ||
| So he that's one that I didn't hear that, but he he said he would do rounds where he wasn't allowed to punch. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh wow. | |
| At all. | ||
| Okay, like he he takes he's like one of us. | ||
| Like he just takes it to a level that is just unbelievable. | ||
| He's a genius. | ||
| Like a literal boxing genius. | ||
| Like, and I don't use that term lightly. | ||
| Like what he did to Dubois, I was like, oh my God. | ||
| Because when you see Dubois, when Dubois knocked out Anthony Joshua, you're like, wow, this kid might be the future. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He is a fucking destroyer. | ||
| He's seeking destroy, brutal power, giant guy, incredible athlete. | ||
| And Usak just pieced him up. | ||
| Dismantled him. | ||
| Just took him, dismantled him, and took him apart, and did it with all skill. | ||
| Like, literally, like, understanding. | ||
| He's not the biggest dude in the world. | ||
| He's big, but he's not like six-nine, right? | ||
| No, he's not Tyson Fury size. | ||
| He's not Dubois size. | ||
| He's not Dubai's not Tyson Anthony Josh. | ||
| Josh, none of them. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, he's a cruiserweight. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh. | |
| He's a cruiserweight that beat everybody and knew that the only way to make real money is to go up to heavyweight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And really have a leave a real legacy. | ||
| Because he could have been one of those guys that retired as an undefeated cruiserweight, and boxing fans like myself would talk about him, but everybody else would be like, who? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Meanwhile, now he's in the conversation of one of the greatest. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Tyson Ali. | ||
| He's like, he's in there with that conversation. | ||
| And it it's just consistently an overachiever. | ||
| Consistently an overachiever. | ||
| And he's fucking 38. | ||
| Oh, even crazier. | ||
| Because it's like he hasn't shown any slipping in his skill level at all. | ||
| Or his endurance or his enthusiasm or his discipline. | ||
| None of it. | ||
| Just well, also it's like he was so fortunate to have been trained by Lomachenko's dad. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So he's like a giant Lomachenko. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Because Lomachenko's so agile, so much footwork and movement. | ||
| And that makes sense. | ||
| He's basically like the heavyweight version of it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That makes actually more sense. | ||
| Makes more sense, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because his movement for such a big guy is just extraordinary. | ||
| It just doesn't exist anywhere else. | ||
| Because it's not just the light on the feet, it's the angles he takes after punches and then the shifting of the weight back to center when you don't expect it. | ||
| And then that's like my son. | ||
| Actually, it's my son's birthday today. | ||
| Happy birthday. | ||
| What's Bryce? | ||
| Happy birthday, Bryce. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Twenty-one. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I go, it's a birthday to wait for, but he's already doing all this stuff that you know. | ||
| They all did. | ||
| Yeah, I know, right? | ||
| It's that it's an age record. | ||
| But uh so my son loves the science of boxing. | ||
| You know, even ten years ago when he was like 11, 12 years old, he'd be on YouTube watching the footwork of boxers. | ||
| And I'm like, I because I didn't get into that science of it and footwork and all that until I started doing MMA. | ||
| Like understanding, like I understood wrestling, but boxing on that level is just it's a whole nother complex set of skills. | ||
| Well, you were so deep in wrestling, though, it's almost impossible to pay attention to anything else. | ||
| At the level that you were competing at, yeah, you have to that has to be everything you eat, breathe, sleep, yeah, singular. | ||
| Yeah, it has to be singular. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It has to be. | ||
| It's almost like you can't go down any rabbit holes. | ||
| No. | ||
| And that's one of those where you know, my mentor, the guy that uh that really brought me to another level is a guy named Chris Campbell. | ||
| He was Dan Gable's first NCAA champ when Dan Gable's coach at Iowa. | ||
| Um he made the 1980 Olympic team that was boycotted, won the 1981 world championships, voted best technician in the world, and then retires. | ||
| And then decides he's gonna make the ninety 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. | ||
| So he's at 37 years old, he wins a bronze medal that year in Barcelona. | ||
| 37. | ||
| That's pretty impressive. | ||
| For amateur wrestling. | ||
| Oh, people do it. | ||
| No, that's unheard of. | ||
| It's I think still to this day, he's the oldest uh Olympic medalist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Cause you just don't, you just I mean, wrestling's just so demanding to be a good thing. | ||
| It's such a young sport. | ||
| Oh, yeah, it is. | ||
| It is. | ||
| So he ends up, he ends up, he ends up just really taking me by the hand and and understanding like singular devotion to something. | ||
| It's he would back then he did tape study, which wasn't a huge, huge deal, but literally watching the Russians wrestle in some of the tapes, his nemesis was this guy Kdartsev. | ||
| And you look and watch the tapes, and you go, I don't see anything. | ||
| Once you slowed it down, you go, you can't move him out of position. | ||
| He doesn't when he attacks and retreats, he's never out of position. | ||
| And you know, you'd look at it and go, wow. | ||
| Because it was just these little things, little things that make it. | ||
| It's amazing that the Russians achieved that level in not just wrestling, but also in MMA, also in any combat sports, name boxing, Russian kickboxers are super technical. | ||
| They're all known for being so technical. | ||
| It's really interesting. | ||
| You know, like and it's and again, I would think that somewhere in there, there's a route. | ||
| There's a common like there's coaches and mentors. | ||
| You know, somebody really going, Hey, let me let me show you. | ||
| And they had a mentor and they had a mentor. | ||
| It's this lineage that's passed along. | ||
| Um, and I know I went from being a good wrestler to being a really good wrestler when Chris took me under his wing. | ||
| You know, we drill the same thing thousands of times, and it would be like the difference between holding my hand here and holding it here, and I'd go, It's two inches. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What's the difference? | ||
| And we go. | ||
| When you speed it up the full speed, those two inches become six. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so the leverage points. | ||
| Yeah, and so I need him to be here perfect. | ||
| Because once you go full speed, you're gonna miss it, but you're only gonna miss it by this much. | ||
| You know, it's interesting that George St. Pierre, although he never wrestled in high school or college, his training in Montreal was with Russian wrestlers. | ||
| It was all Russian nationals who had moved to Canada. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| GSP, I was just talking to a friend of mine, and uh I said he's probably in my book one or two. | ||
| Yeah, of all time. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He's he's certainly in the conversation. | ||
| It's so hard to say who, because you know, Mighty Mouse, I think never got the credit that he deserves because he was on 125 or then people forget how good Anderson was when he was in his prime. | ||
| People and then BJ Penn, BJ Penn when he was in his prime. | ||
| I feel like you really have to look at a guy when he's redlining, like when he's really at the peak of his abilities. | ||
| You can't judge him by the fights they fight after their prime. | ||
| Yeah, you can't because it's not fair. | ||
| You just gotta say, like who when they were champion, when they were running shit. | ||
| Yeah, who exhibited a level of MMA that's above and beyond everyone else? | ||
| And George is certainly in that conversation. | ||
| Oh, he's for sure I mean part of um part of what I like John Jones, right? | ||
| Like when you get somebody that's at that level at his peak, right, and he can make other professional fighters look like they're amateurs. | ||
| They look silly. | ||
| Yeah, they don't belong in there. | ||
| And he was doing that to guys when he wasn't training. | ||
| That was crazy. | ||
| He was fucking off and barely in the gym and still dominating in world title fights. | ||
| Sometimes I get a little upset because I'm like, you know how many fights he probably rot as a spectator as a fan. | ||
| Like how many fights we missed because of his shenanigans. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Just like you know, what happened with you and what happened with him and what happens with a lot of guys is like the pressure of life, sometimes and what makes you a great fighter in the first place, there's a certain wildness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And with a guy like John, that wildness, it's like it's hard to keep on a leash. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I know how that feels. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure you tell Well, I remember I had no idea. | ||
| And I don't think anybody had any idea until the Smashing Machine documentary came out. | ||
| And when that documentary came out, everybody was like, holy shit. | ||
| First of all, kudos to you for allowing people to see you like that, raw, completely honest about all of the addiction problems, all everything. | ||
| And no one would have expected it. | ||
| Then they saw you, they just saw this fucking dominant destroyer, this guy who was like smashing everybody, and you just thought, oh, well, that guy's just uh he's just a machine and just so mentally strong, and he just gets out there and gets it done. | ||
| And then you allowed them to show you where in the the making of the documentary, it was what they were essentially trying to capture was you at your prime. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what they caught you was you where your life was falling apart just fortuitously. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was just kind of random luck they caught you at that time. | ||
| So when uh John Greenhall, who's a producer, uh I went to Syracuse with him. | ||
| I was we were on the wrestling team together. | ||
| He's the one that called me, said, Hey, um, I'm gonna do a documentary at that point. | ||
| My vision of what it was was a little best buy camera where they're like little flip screen and they show up and they go, okay, we're filming a documentary. | ||
| Hang on, I got changed tape, you know. | ||
| And they show up in Japan for my Volchanchin fight with two 10,000, 15,000, whatever they were, digital Sony cameras, a boom mic, and like five people. | ||
| I'm like, oh fuck, you're you're like you're really gonna make a like you're gonna make a documentary. | ||
| And so he was right from the get go. | ||
| John could see, John could see what was the contrast, like me as a fighter and me as a person, that contrast. | ||
| Um, and so that's what he was after is like to to really show this contrast and like you can do this for a living and be this kind sensitive, you know. | ||
| Well that was what was weird about you. | ||
| It was a very weird contrast because you're very soft spoken, very kind, always very considerate to people, very nice, and then you get into the cage, and it's like who the fuck is that guy? | ||
| You know, you know what the feeling is. | ||
| The feeling is like the question I always had in my head is going, okay. | ||
| If somebody's gonna go you, me, in a room, who the fuck's coming out? | ||
| And I never was able to answer that question for myself. | ||
| I know I was competitive, right? | ||
| But I didn't know if I had that switch, that thing, and then start fighting and going, oh fuck, man, there's a switch in there. | ||
| And I figured through that process, what I was really trying to get is your will. | ||
| I was trying to take your fucking will. | ||
| And most people don't want to give it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like when you get a high-level fighter, it's like Fabio Gagell didn't want to give me his will. | ||
| Headbutted him, dug into cuts, did all this, beat him mercilessly, and he didn't want to give me his will. | ||
| He wouldn't give it to me. | ||
| And it frustrated me. | ||
| I didn't know how to take it from him. | ||
| I'm going, I'm out of answer. | ||
| You're waiting for him to break, yeah. | ||
| He doesn't break. | ||
| He doesn't break. | ||
| Yeah, some people don't break. | ||
| You can break their body, but their will, you can't break. | ||
| No, he was one of them. | ||
| He was one of them, and it's just still to this day. | ||
| I mean, the next day, his wife calls me and I have lunch at his house. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Which was crazy because my first fights don't know. | ||
| Everybody in the audience was there for him. | ||
| And uh when his wife calls me in the next day, I I literally go, Oh, fuck, man, here it is. | ||
| He's gonna have all his boys up at the house. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's gonna fuck he's gonna fucking get his due, right? | |
| Like I didn't know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so I go, okay, what do I got to lose? | ||
| And so I go up and we sit down just like we're sitting here, and his wife interprets the whole entire time, and it was this it was actually beautiful. | ||
| It was beautiful because that's awesome. | ||
| Here's here's what it set for me. | ||
| It set a standard of how I was gonna carry myself as a fighter. | ||
| What happened in the ring is in the ring. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The second you're out, you're you can that's different. | ||
| Well, that speaks to his character, why you couldn't break his will in the first place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Absolutely. | ||
| Because he's such just locked down. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It was for me, it was it was one of those like revelations of like, okay, this is this is how you do this. | ||
| As a professional, yeah. | ||
| Well, you know, also like Brazil had a much longer history of these kind of fights, like going way back to the Ayleo Gracie days, and this is an ad by better help. | ||
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| That's where therapy comes in. | ||
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| That's better.com slash J R E. I mean culturally understanding way different. | ||
| And that's like the okay, I'm gonna carry myself. | ||
| You know, part of it was, you know, I wanted to change the narrative of like when you looked at the early UFCs, it looked like some some guys were just scraped off a bar stool and thrown into the octagon, right? | ||
| And so when I came there, I was like, okay, I'm gonna be considered professional, right? | ||
| I'm gonna carry myself as a professional. | ||
| I'm gonna be articulate, I'm gonna dress as a professional. | ||
| I'm gonna because I wanted up the ante. | ||
| I wanted to like raise the standard, right? | ||
| Especially when I went to Japan. | ||
| It's like, you know, press conference, everybody's in sweatsuits. | ||
| I'm in a, you know, I couldn't afford it, but I was in a thousand dollar Calvin Klein suit that I had on a charge card, right? | ||
| But I wanted to change the narrative. | ||
| I wanted to be, I wanted to be a professional. | ||
| Because if I was a professional treaty like a professional, I could ask for pay like a professional. | ||
| Not like some dude that was just scraped off a bar stool and thrown into a ring. | ||
| So what was what was the pride experience like? | ||
| So you you had fought in the UFC and then did you have a contract that expired? | ||
| Like what happened? | ||
| So, oh boy, this is so I signed a three-fight tournament deal with the UFC. | ||
| I did 14 and 15, and I still had one uh tournament obligation on the contract. | ||
| Um so after 15, the Japanese had seen enough footage, and I got contacted by Pride and they're like, hey, we want to fly you over. | ||
| We want to um we want to have uh you as a key piece to build this organization. | ||
| So I'm like, okay. | ||
| So they fly me first class over, first class hotel. | ||
| I meet with um, I meet with a guy named Mr. Ishizaka who uh his real name is Kim Duksu. | ||
| He's a Korean guy. | ||
| And uh um Mr. Ishii, who owned K1. | ||
| Wait a minute, a Korean dude was pretending to be Japanese? | ||
| You had to have a Japanese name. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| You couldn't do business in Japan without a Japanese name. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Signed all of his documents, signed all of his documents, legal documents, Kim Duksu. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| But every single person called him Mr. Ishijaka. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So he had to learn Japan Japanese. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's still with an accent because he spoke Korean too. | ||
| So it's just one of those where understanding like the the culture back then just it was still stuck, you know, and hadn't really progressed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Um, so Mr. Ishii owned K1 and Mr. Jaka started Pride. | ||
| And it was called KRS at the beginning before it turned into dream stage. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| And so here's here's where it gets a little sticky. | ||
| So I go over there, I take uh for Pride 2. | ||
| It's supposed to be me and Hoyce Gracie. | ||
| Him and I, I there's still fight posters that have signed of him and I facing off with each other, signed the contract to fight for way more money than was being probably paid for the in the UFC. | ||
| And um when I get back to the States, I get served with uh I get served with papers to appear in court in New York City, the UFC suing me. | ||
| Um it's when Bob Meyerwitz still owned it and Art Davies was involved. | ||
| And so they're suing me for breach of contract. | ||
| And it was like one of those things where I was like, okay, I didn't, you know, like one of those experiences where I was like, oh shit. | ||
| You know, and the Japanese said, okay, we still want you. | ||
| You need to sort this out. | ||
| So it took it took four months, five months to sort out the differences between what the UFC needed and if they're gonna let me go and all this other stuff, and in that time frame, Hoyce got hurt. | ||
| And so Hoyce had to step out and they put uh Broncosigate in there, and I ended up fighting Bronco and Pride too. | ||
| Oh wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So if everything if if everything would have gone as everything, I would have fought Hoyce Gracie in the Tokyo Dome, him and I main event, me at my peak, Hoist still in his prime. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That would have been insane. | ||
| Oh my God, it would have been like thinking about it going, because people have asked, like, oh and a one. | ||
| I'm like, I don't fucking know. | ||
| But I would have given it every single thing I could. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's the poster. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Signed inked everything. | ||
| You had at least 80 pounds on him. | ||
| Oh, at least that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But but this is it. | ||
| This is the transition from not knowing what I was getting into, going, I can't fucking carry that much weight at all and be cardiovascularly. | ||
| I just can't do that. | ||
| What were you at your heaviest? | ||
| 280, 285. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jeez. | |
| Like six percent body fat. | ||
| Woof. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's hard to breathe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Brutal. | |
| Like if I didn't if I didn't fucking get a hold of you and fucking squeeze the life out of you in the first like couple minutes, I was fucked. | ||
| I was completely fucked. | ||
| You know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that was kind of the case with Coleman as well. | ||
| Like when he was really, really big. | ||
| I was in the corner when he lost when I was cornering him when he lost to Marie Smith. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I was there for that one. | ||
| That was that was uh a real game changer. | ||
| Oh, that changed the narrative for everything. | ||
| Because Maurice, what Maurice brought to the game was Maurice was training with Frank Shamark at the time, and so he had extreme cardio. | ||
| He was doing a lot of swimming, he was running hills. | ||
| I mean, he was really cardiovascularly at an elite level for an MMA fighter at the time. | ||
| Frank and I used to talk about heart rate training. | ||
| Way back when. | ||
| Like literally like functional training and going, okay, how do how do you how do you approach something and come up with a formula where you can get through a training camp and still be viable at the end of that training camp when you have five minute rounds? | ||
| Right? | ||
| How do you do it? | ||
| There wasn't a formula for it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So Frank was like, I started doing this heart rate training and heart rate recovery and all this stuff, and I was like, oh shit. | ||
| And then I run into these trainers when I was in California at Gold's Venice. | ||
| Um, there's a guy named TR Goodman, and he was training hockey players. | ||
| And hockey players have to have that burst recovery, burst recovery. | ||
| Wow, very similar cardiovascular system to fighters. | ||
| So TR took over my training when I was in California, and that was a whole nother level. | ||
| Because I had never really had the functional training implemented the way he did. | ||
| And that's when my weight came down. | ||
| It's like I f really tried to fight between like 230, 235 and 240 was ideal. | ||
| Yeah, that's much better. | ||
| That seems like the ideal heavyweight. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is a lot. | ||
| It's it's very weird that first of all that the heavyweight division has a weight limit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That is really weird. | ||
| Especially the UFC. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it doesn't really in Japan and some other organizations, they'll allow the super heavyweight division. | ||
| And in boxing, you can be as heavy as you want. | ||
| Like Tyson Fury's been 290 before. | ||
| But when the UFC has this 265 pound weight division, it seems like the best elite guys like that 240 range. | ||
| That's for me, that was like I knew I had a good training camp. | ||
| If I came in 235, 240, if I didn't train hard enough, I was 250. | ||
| If I overtrained, I was under 230. | ||
| You know, like for Pride Grand Prix, I think I weighed in at 229. | ||
| Because right before you felt overtrained? | ||
| I felt overtrained because in between uh when I fought Ensign and the Pride Grand Prix, I did Abu Dhabi. | ||
| Oh I won my weight class that year and I won the all-around. | ||
| So you got super conditioned. | ||
| Oh my god, super conditioned, but you you lose I lost a little bit of what I needed was that physical dominance. | ||
| You know, I could have the endurance, but again, it's one of those where it's like going into it when I fought Fegina, there's so many factors that were just uh, you know, that I didn't account for and my calorie intake just wasn't where it needed to be. | ||
| And like a lot of times leading up to a fight, like my appetite just diminishes as I get towards it, especially that fight week. | ||
| And that's interesting. | ||
| Why do you think that is? | ||
| Uh nerves, nerves. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It gets to a point where it's like that that morning, I know like fight morning. | ||
| I have a small little window where I could digest food or I could take food in. | ||
| It's not like I could sit and eat all day. | ||
| And then it's his nerves start kicking in. | ||
| It just starts kicking in like my like like literally, and it's controlled focus, right? | ||
| Because it's like you can't have all my nerves running everywhere, but it's controlled focus. | ||
| But that controlled focus, my body goes, I don't need digestion. | ||
| Fuck, I'm about to fight. | ||
| What the fuck do I need to digest food for? | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah, a lot of guys have made those mistakes. | ||
| Algermain Sterling said he made that mistake when he first fought Piotr Yan. | ||
| He just he didn't eat. | ||
| It's brutal. | ||
| So that so that last scene against Fujita isn't as 100% hypoglycemic crash laying there, can't move my body. | ||
| And if you watch a documentary, what I'm saying on the way back is I need sugar, I need sugar, I need sugar. | ||
| I uh that's all I could think about was like I need sugar, I need sugar, I need sugar. | ||
| Because my blood sugar levels had just crashed to this, like I can't fucking move. | ||
| Jeez. | ||
| It's so crazy too to watch the evolution of the training methods from back then from 97 to like what we're seeing today. | ||
| Yeah, oh incredible. | ||
| It is really extraordinary because there's not a real another sport that has gone through that much of a metamorphosis. | ||
| Not even close, really. | ||
| In that time frame. | ||
| Because it's a short it's a short time frame because again, it's asking the question of like, okay, championship fight, 25 minutes, five five minute rounds. | ||
| How do you train for it? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because the reality is no one can go full blast for five, five minute rounds. | ||
| Can't do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe Marab can. | |
| I wouldn't fucking doubt that. | ||
| He might be the one be the only guy because he doesn't seem to get tired. | ||
| You get so this is this is like observationally, usually in that championship fight, if it's a striker against a wrestler, usually the first two rounds, strikers usually have that advantage. | ||
| And then third round, if you go back and watch this third round, the grappler starts to impose a little bit more on him. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then fourth take down fourth and fifth round is the grappler completely just takes that fight over because it's one of those things where you it's that grind. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's that's also fucking grind. | ||
| You want some coffee? | ||
| Yeah, a big part of being able to stuff takedowns is having energy. | ||
| Oh my God, it's everything. | ||
| The guy's trying to fuck you up and take you down. | ||
| There's so much energy involved in trying to stuff a takedown and then when you don't have it, you're like, I'm just let him take me down and just like take a break here and then work back to the but no, like with some guys like you're not getting back up. | ||
| No elbowed in the face. | ||
| That I'm just gonna grind you into a pulp. | ||
| And that's that control thing, right? | ||
| Yeah, part of part of what I I go, like if I look at my fight and go, I was never gonna be the best striker, like never gonna be the best kicker puncher, but if I could turn you into a wrestler, that's that was the secret sauce for me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just need to make you wrestle me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm good. | ||
| Right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because I know I can fucking beat the fuck out of you wrestling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The key was tr transitioning to make you wrestle me. | ||
| Yeah, it's that specialist, specialist thing. | ||
| It's like if you want to be a specialist, being a specialist at wrestling is by far. | ||
|
unidentified
|
By far. | |
| Well, you know when you see what Hamzad did to Drakas. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Then that's the example. | ||
| I get that's perfect. | ||
| Elite, elite, elite wrestler. | ||
| Against a world champion, MMA fighter who's been dominating everybody and who's very difficult to take down. | ||
| And Hamza just ramped it up, kept it up. | ||
| Attack. | ||
| And like I was saying, that that Russian Dagistan, Uzbekistan, it's this ability to sustain an attack repeatedly. | ||
| Because it's that cardiovascular system. | ||
| I'm born at 6,000 feet in altitude, 7,000 feet in altitude, a little bit more of an advantage, right? | ||
| And so you end up with these attacks where you can sustain them beyond your ability to defend them. | ||
| It's also having such a technical game that as you're implementing the first attack, you've already got three attacks on standby. | ||
| Like, and then as he counters you've anticipated the counter, you have a counter to his counter, and then in a counter to his readjusting after your counter. | ||
| And you're you're just hitting him over and over. | ||
| He just can't keep the rhythm. | ||
| I I literally I text my son, I was at that fight. | ||
| I text my son and go, This is what an elite wrestler could do to a professional fighter. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| It's nuts because it was like a lot of people thought it was boring because it just didn't get to a decision, you know, it just went to a decision. | ||
| But you just kind of appreciate that level of dominance against a world champion. | ||
| It's kind of crazy. | ||
| Where the guy before the fight, Dracas was being looked at as one of the greatest middleweights of all time. | ||
| I mean, look at what he did to all these guys. | ||
| He knocks out Robert Whitaker. | ||
| He beats out Asanya. | ||
| He fucking beats Sean Strickland twice. | ||
| Like, oh my God, he might be one of the greatest of all time. | ||
| And then after that fight, you're like, I don't think he's ever gonna beat that guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't think he's ever going to beat that guy. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| It was like I don't think there's enough time in the world to bridge that gap. | ||
| You can't you can never catch up. | ||
| You know, like I would never pretend stepping into the octagon that I would be able to get elite striking skills, right? | ||
| You know, uh like that gap could just it's constantly just something you never can get to. | ||
| It's also it's like Sean O'Malley, right? | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| He's gonna the only way that he's gonna be able to get a championship back is somebody else needs to beat Marab. | ||
| Yeah, Marab. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then it's gotta be stylistically. | ||
| Stylistically match up, right? | ||
| That's that's that conflict of matchup. | ||
| Because skills, you're not gonna do that. | ||
| You mean he got better for the second five. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He did a lot better, but still did Marab, though. | |
| That was part of the problem. | ||
| That guy's not he's not stopping. | ||
| God, how old is he? | ||
| Marab? | ||
| I think he's 34. | ||
| How old is Marab? | ||
| 34. | ||
| I was 34. | ||
| So he's you know, he's in his prime right now, in his prime for another few years at least. | ||
| Yeah, I I would think that it's one where there's gonna be a lot of people that think they can, but that's just a different animal. | ||
| Yeah, it's gonna take someone who's that kind of a wrestler who maybe has a striking advantage, yeah, who could beat him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But then, you know, that's an anomaly. | ||
| It's just it's such a crazy sport to watch that you know, from 1994 to 2025, it's almost unrecognizable. | ||
| The difference in the gap. | ||
| Like there was a period of time where I couldn't I couldn't watch uh I didn't watch the UFC, probably about like seven, eight, nine years. | ||
| And uh over the last five, six years I watched it uh almost religiously, right? | ||
| And just realizing the fighters today, oh my god, man. | ||
| They're they hit a level, and it's that it's that mutation, it's like this first generation, second generation. | ||
| And they're advancing so fast that you're looking at these new fighters, you're like, where like it's such a unique set of skills to do this. | ||
| Incredible set of skills, unique to any other sport in the world. | ||
| I know it's and it's also you're really fighting three different sports as one sport, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, which is really nuts. | ||
| You're fighting grappling, you're fighting jujitsu, and you're fighting striking all together in one sport. | ||
| It's like wow. | ||
| It's like playing soccer football and baseball at the same time. | ||
| It's like how the fuck would you do that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| While getting kicked. | ||
|
unidentified
|
While getting kicked. | |
| While getting kicked and punched and elbowed. | ||
| It's uh it is uh but without guys like you, it would have never gotten here because if there weren't people that were willing to fight for very little money, travel overseas, have these crazy events, and you know, and beat your body up and do what you did and what Coleman did and a lot of those guys did in the beginning. | ||
| Without you guys, there's there is no UFC today. | ||
| It's just not it's not the same. | ||
| It was you know, one like being in the Hall of Fame and being in the pioneer we and understanding that um like I said to myself, you know, even if I advance a sport, you know, this much, it needed this much at the time to get to where it is today, right? | ||
| Like Coleman advances sport this much. | ||
| Well, you guys brought in the new element, and the new element was elite wrestling with enormous muscles. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And everyone was like, oh, this is a real problem. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And especially in the early early days, because Coleman would get on your guard and just headbutt the fuck out of you. | ||
| Because headbuts were legal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Legal. | ||
| Like and bare knuckle. | ||
| Like when I first did his well, I I interviewed him after he beat Dan Severin when he became the first UFC heavyweight champion. | ||
| Total bare knuckle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He had a little bit of tape on the on the hands, try to keep the bones from snapping in half. | ||
| Isn't that frightening? | ||
| Why? | ||
| Like people I I you know, they Watch it now and and you know this this film, right? | ||
| It it gives it gives people a a little bit of a look inside of like what it was and and you know for for me the cool part about it is understanding like I'm like I said, I'm just a little piece, but that little piece is necessary to be able for me to watch some of the guys do what they do now. | ||
| Well, it's different than any other sport in that these little pieces had to be there before people could figure out what to do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, Dana put them all together. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, when I when I actually talked to him when I was in Newark, that's one thing I said. | ||
| I said, look what you built. | ||
| You can feel however you want about you know him personally. | ||
| I go, look what you built. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like no one could even imagine this. | ||
| Well, you have to be a madman to do what he does. | ||
| Like he that guy works so hard and he works so many hours and he fucking loves it. | ||
| And he loves the sport, like truly loves the sport. | ||
| He and I have like long conversations on the phone. | ||
| I would imagine about fights. | ||
| I would imagine. | ||
| Just about like I'll go, what are you gonna do about this guy? | ||
| Oh when's that? | ||
| When's this happening? | ||
| You know, is this true? | ||
| Did this guy really get hurt? | ||
| He did fuck. | ||
| Yeah, oh my gosh. | ||
| Oh, it's minor. | ||
| Okay, six weeks. | ||
| Are you rescheduling it? | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, we have these long ass conversations, and I'll tell him about kickboxers that I've been watching, or tell him about these guys. | ||
| I mean, that's one of the ways that we became friends, and one of the ways that I started working for him in the first place is because we would have conversations when I first met him when I was on Fear Factor and I wasn't even working for the UFC. | ||
| I'd be like, You got you watched the fights in Japan? | ||
| Do you ever watch Japan Valley Tuto? | ||
| Do you know about this guy? | ||
| Do you know about Hicks and Gracie? | ||
| Do you know about this guy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I would just rattle off different names, and he was like, What do you how do you know all this? | ||
| I don't know, I don't even know the rules to basketball. | ||
| I don't know what's happening. | ||
| I know when the ball goes in the net, it's good. | ||
| I don't know the rules to football. | ||
| I don't know the rules to any I just I only have room for combat sports. | ||
| But you know, ask me about Marcelo Garcia, ask me I can answer that. | ||
| I'll rattle off some stats. | ||
| I know some shit about fighting. | ||
| But to me, it was like it was a Eddie Bravo and I when we were kids, well, we were young, young fellows, when we we were hanging around working out, we would say to ourselves, like, you know what this sport needs some crazy billionaires who love the sport, they're just gonna dump a bunch of money. | ||
| Because we knew at the time, we were like, this is the most exp exciting sport in the world, right? | ||
| So all it needs is for uh these really rich guys to be fans of sport. | ||
| And it's almost like it manifested itself because that's what happened. | ||
| The fratidas came along, and they were just really rich guys who love the sport, and they took a crazy chance. | ||
| They were forty million dollars in the hole. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Forty million in the hole on the UFC, and it was just losing money, losing money. | ||
| And they just hung in there year after year after year until it they were almost ready to fucking sell, and then they decided to go forward with the ultimate fighter. | ||
| That's the game changer. | ||
| That was it. | ||
| That's personalized it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That personalized it. | ||
| Well, people got to see it on spike TV, and then it became the fights were so wild that people were calling their friends, yeah, and they were saying, You gotta watch this. | ||
| So as the the show is on, and this is like before social media was really, yeah. | ||
| So as the fight was on, the the ratings kept going up and up and up and up. | ||
| And it was like Spike TV was like, holy shit, we gotta fucking hit. | ||
| We gotta hit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And Diego Sanchez won the 1850 pound division, and then the fight between Stefan Bonner and Forrest Griffith. | ||
| That's the fight that changed everything. | ||
| Changed the game. | ||
| Cause that's one of those, if you ask just a marginal fan, they'll refer to that. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They'll refer to that. | ||
| Because at the time it was nobody had ever seen anything like it. | ||
| They didn't know what MMA was. | ||
| And here it is on TV, and these two guys were so evenly matched. | ||
| That was the best part about it. | ||
| They both had trained together in the house for all those fucking weeks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They'd all be talking shit to each other and all that, and they knew they were gonna fight in the final, so it was like this long build-up, and they were perfectly matched. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it was just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, fucking swing, wheel cake, punch, take talk, that's it. | |
| I mean, there's so much shit in there. | ||
| That fight just went on and on, and at the end of it, the whole crowd was like, Oh yes! | ||
| And you know, I was the one I was the first person to suggest. | ||
| I was like, they both should have a fucking contract. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| You can't take a contract away from one of these guys for this fight. | ||
| And the and Dana, to his credit, gave both those guys the contract. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was all of a sudden the sport was hot. | ||
| And then Chuck Lidell was the poster boy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because he was the perfect guy to be the most famous champion at the time. | ||
| Because he was a destroyer. | ||
| Oh God. | ||
| He just seek and destroy. | ||
| And he had an iron chin, and he just and he would just stare at you with a fucking serial killer's eyes and just march. | ||
| When you watched him, like me watching him, he was so awkward when he held his hands and punched. | ||
| It was so like even watching now going, he was just hunting. | ||
| He was just hunting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And hunting. | ||
| And loading up. | ||
| And he would hunt. | ||
| And it wasn't like. | ||
| It was every single thing was thrown with intent. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everything was shown thrown to shut you off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| And he could do it. | ||
| And he could do it for five fucking rounds, too, which was crazy. | ||
| Which is in his prime the thing about that style is it's unsustainable. | ||
| He never ducked a punch in his life. | ||
| He took him running the chin and fucking and blasted right through. | ||
| He had an iron job. | ||
| It was fucking iron. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But everybody's iron jaw gives out after a while. | ||
| It's just you can't. | ||
| And he's not. | ||
| You can't stay. | ||
| You can't sustain it. | ||
| It's just one where the fratidas first bought the UFC. | ||
| Um I was living in California, and a friend of mine who was helping me at the time said, Hey, listen, uh, they're up at Big Bear having a training camp. | ||
| I'm like, okay, let's go up. | ||
| So get my truck, drive up. | ||
| It starts snowing. | ||
| It was like February. | ||
| They're gonna do their first big push with Tito, right? | ||
| And uh I get hit by a drunk driver at 11 a.m. in the morning on the way up. | ||
| So uh my attorney was in the car with us. | ||
| He I literally the tow truck takes us up to the top of the hill. | ||
| Um I still get to talk to Dana, I still get to talk to Frank and Lorenzo, and I'm like, yeah, I got it by drunk everything like, well, we're going to Beverly La Hills Wheelshare tomorrow. | ||
| Why don't you just jump in the limo with us and we'll take you down? | ||
| I'm like, okay. | ||
| So I get like this three hour drive down the mountain with Frank and Lorenzo, the new owners of the UFC. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And we're just sitting there talking, they're they're like, hey, you know, how is it working in Japan? | ||
| They knew everything about me. | ||
| Yeah, how is it working in Japan? | ||
| How do they do this? | ||
| How did they do that? | ||
| And it was just this really cool conversation, really cool experience to be able to go, okay. | ||
| Maybe this has landed in the right spot. | ||
| Oh, they were the right guys. | ||
| They were the right guys because they were like Frank and Lorenzo are rabid fans. | ||
| Yeah, like rabid. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And they would train and they would beat the fuck out of each other. | ||
| And that's where they met Frank. | ||
| Frank they brought Frank in to help them. | ||
| They've kind of erased Frank. | ||
| So Frank Shamrock, in my opinion, is one of the all-time greats. | ||
| And also one of the most important in terms of the metamorphosis in terms of the evolution of the sport. | ||
| Because Frank was the first guy with the elite cardio that could do everything. | ||
| He could submit you off his back. | ||
| Like remember when he fought Kevin Jackson. | ||
| Yep, yep, caught him in an arm bar, bang, first round, right off his. | ||
| He was elite everywhere. | ||
| And his cardio was off the charts. | ||
| When he fought Tito Ortiz, Tito was much bigger than him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not just a little bit bigger than him, much Frank's not a big frame guy. | ||
| And Tito is a fucking house. | ||
| Tito? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he just overwhelmed him, beat him down with cardio. | ||
| And then after that fight, Tito taught everybody. | ||
| Cardio is number one. | ||
| It's number one. | ||
| He when he was teaching, when he was coaching on the Ultimate Fighter, he told everybody, it's fucking cardio. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Without cardio, you have nothing. | ||
| And his cardio was legendary too. | ||
| I mean, they say what fatigue makes cowards of us all. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| I mean, it's just one of those, and again, this goes back to what I was saying about Frank and I haven't conversations back then about heart rate training. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Twenty-five years ago, you go heart rate. | ||
| What? | ||
| Little polar, you know, watch and you know, keep and like, oh, we need to recover this many beats in a minute, but actively recover. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like you had to still continue to do shit and recover. | ||
| And this is what Frank was saying. | ||
| Yeah, I started doing this. | ||
| I'm like, what the fuck? | ||
| He was a very smart well, he is a very smart guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I don't know why they had some kind of a falling out, but they but they don't highlight him anymore. | ||
| They don't talk about him at all. | ||
| And I think that's pivotal. | ||
| Pivotal. | ||
| I think you gotta let that go of just for the honor of what happened. | ||
| The honor of the sport. | ||
| Because the for the honor of the sport, when you look at Frank, like when you look at his fights, like he was elite, man. | ||
| He was ahead of his time. | ||
| He was ahead of his time. | ||
| By By far. | ||
| He was the first really truly complete mixed martial artist. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| You know, and people see him like the fight that he fought when he was fighting in strike force. | ||
| You're not seen the same guy. | ||
| You're seeing him, it's later in his life. | ||
| You see when he fought Nick Diaz. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| It's like what I said about goats. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You want to look at BJ Penn? | ||
| Look at BJ Penn when he fought Sean Shirk. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look at BJ Penn when he fought Big Daddy Stevenson. | ||
| That's one of the scariest fucking guys who's ever stepped in an octagon at 155 pounds. | ||
| Period. | ||
| I put him with all of them, and I don't know what happens. | ||
| And then there's Kabib. | ||
| Same third. | ||
| You put that guy with any 155 pounder who's ever existed, and I don't know what's gonna happen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How are you gonna beat that guy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know? | ||
| There's there's a few guys like that, and Kabib has to be in that conversation too. | ||
| When you look at his dominance over like the way he was winning fights, I'll never forget when he fought Edson Barbosa. | ||
| It was in the first round, and Edson had this look in his eyes, like, oh my god, I've got to get two how many more rounds with this motherfucker. | ||
| Because he was just already exhausted in this fucking animal from Dagastan with just on him, on him, dragging to the ground. | ||
| I'll never forget we had Michael Johnson down the ground. | ||
| He's beacon beating Michael Johnson up, and he's like, quit, quit. | ||
| You know I need titles shut is mine. | ||
| You know title shot is mine, you know I deserved it. | ||
| Quit. | ||
| And he's just beating the fuck out of him, trying to be nice. | ||
| He gets him in Kimura, and I'm going, please tap. | ||
| I'm like, please tap, please tap. | ||
| Because I'm seeing that spiral fracture. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| When they get that spiral fracture, I've seen it coming. | ||
| I'm like, please tap. | ||
| We don't even have been through that with Frank when Frank got Minotauro in there. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| He's talking to him. | ||
| He's like, listen, give me some volume. | ||
| I need to fight for the title. | ||
| You know I deserve this. | ||
| Come on, buddy. | ||
| I don't want to have to hurt you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god. | |
| Look at this. | ||
| I mean, he's doing whatever. | ||
| But this is speaks to your point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
See, everybody agrees that people are cheering. | |
| Look, I need to fight for it. | ||
| Look at it. | ||
| He's he's trying to be nice to him. | ||
| That's such dominance. | ||
| It is trying to be nice to a nice guy. | ||
| Like, come on, you know what the fuck is going on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And again, to his credit, he didn't. | ||
| I think he could have just fucking ripped that arm apart. | ||
| He let him tap. | ||
| He let him tap. | ||
| I think he could have so much. | ||
| So this is this is like again, we're seeing like taking somebody fucking will. | ||
| Taking it, he was a will taker. | ||
| Like what he did to Connor. | ||
| Oh when he got on top of Connor, he's like, let's talk now. | ||
| Let's talk now. | ||
| Just beating his face in, going, come on, you want to talk? | ||
| Let's talk now. | ||
| You talk about about humble pie, like you fucking having to sit back and like that's at a level where where you're a bad motherfucker to begin with, and somebody that's even a badder motherfucker. | ||
| Who just dominates you? | ||
| Just oh my god. | ||
| Just could kill you. | ||
| Same size as you, and basically he could kill you. | ||
| If he wanted to, you're dead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You're not gonna live, he's gonna live. | ||
| He could just literally choke you unconscious and just keep choking until you're he was gonna break his neck. | ||
| He had him in that fulcrum choke. | ||
| That is such a nasty choke. | ||
| Look, here's where he gets it. | ||
| So he's getting it, and he's holding on to it. | ||
| Look, he's not he's not doing he's not going all through. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| If he wanted to, he couldn't just ripped that right hip down, pull that left arm up, and that thing's snapping like a twig. | ||
| It's so scary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god. | |
| That's my scariest tech. | ||
| Other than guys, when they break their shins, yeah. | ||
| When they go shin to knee and the shin snaps in half. | ||
| Like silver breaking and something like that. | ||
| Oh, it's horrible. | ||
| Widman was the worst. | ||
| That like that stuff, I one watch is good enough. | ||
| It was so when Wideman's. | ||
| And Wideman, yeah, don't pull that one. | ||
| Wideman's went through his calf. | ||
| His bones snapped through and poked out of his calf. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Which is real dangerous too, because then you run the risk of heavy infection. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, all of that. | |
| All that you're on the dirty mat, and you got an open wound and oh. | ||
| No, some of that stuff is just like, gosh, man, it's other lines. | ||
| Do you feel weird that you did it? | ||
| Like now when you look back on you've been removed for so long, and you're like, you beat the fuck out of somebody. | ||
| I remember when you took Dan Bovish down, you stuck your chin in his eyeball. | ||
| God, man. | ||
| First, the only one still exists, yeah. | ||
| Is this mission by uh chin and eyeball choke. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't know if you call it choke, but I'd never seen anybody do that before. | ||
| I'm like, that's genius. | ||
| Yeah, you know what? | ||
| It wasn't illegal. | ||
| It wasn't illegal. | ||
| And it I know it hurt like a motherfucker for him. | ||
| Why would it be illegal? | ||
| Why is it okay to elbow the eyeball? | ||
| But it's not okay to shove your chin in there. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You know, and those are the headbutt days. | ||
| So headbutts were legal, so why wouldn't it be legal to sh you could chin butt a guy if you wanted to, I guess. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So if you you use I mean, but the thing is, it's a real weapon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is real. | ||
| It's very effective. | ||
| Like, I don't think we should poke to eyes because you know that's a different thing. | ||
| But that is also obviously a real weapon. | ||
| Like Kung Fu guys point to that all the time. | ||
| They go, look, these guys are the toughest fighters in the world. | ||
| You poke them in the eyes and they're fucked. | ||
| They're right. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, I don't know how good you are at eye poking. | ||
| You have to be pretty fucking accurate. | ||
| Yeah, but it's not something you can count on. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Yeah, here it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You shove your fucking chin right in his eyeball. | ||
| He's just like so when I'm down there, you could I could hear him. | ||
| Oh like fuck that hurt. | ||
| Oh, it was horrible, dude. | ||
| It was horrible. | ||
| But it's again, it speaks to what we're talking about. | ||
| The dominance of elite wrestling and how elite wrestling, it surpasses all martial arts. | ||
| It's the number one most and an elite wrestler can lure jujitsu. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| An elite grappler can you could easily teach them how to do head and arm chokes, triangles, all that. | ||
| All that. | ||
| That's not you're already used to manipulating bodies. | ||
| So part of um my participation ADCC was to represent wrestling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Because the first year when I got approached to go over there, I'm like, uh what like what is that? | ||
| Like a submission grappling, like um, like Gilas grappling or geeless you too. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're like, hey, listen, here's what we're gonna do. | ||
| We're gonna give you X, you know, come over. | ||
| And it wasn't a ton, it was like $15,000 to go over. | ||
| And I was like, uh, okay. | ||
| I was like, all right. | ||
| Like, fuck that, I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But while you were fighting, yeah, while I was fighting. | |
| And so I'm like, okay. | ||
| I just go just as a source of pride, suppressed it was one of those where I was like, okay, now that it's explained to me, I go, well, wrestlers need to be represented there. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And so I go over there, and it was one of those things where it's like, well, I can actually show everybody here in this world that thinks their shit's dominant. | ||
| Like, no. | ||
| This is a skill set you need. | ||
| You need elite wrestling skills, right? | ||
| You can have jujitsu black belt and all this stuff, but if you're missing this piece component to it, you're fucked. | ||
| You're fucked. | ||
| You're fucked. | ||
| And so it was all about control. | ||
| Did you see um the most recent fight with uh Mauricio Rufi? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay, so Mauricio Rufi, who is one of the most dynamic strikers in the sport. | ||
| He's literally like a big Connor. | ||
| I mean, it doesn't make sense that he's in the same weight class as Connor, because I think he's six-one. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| But he's real tall. | ||
| He's at least six feet tall. | ||
| He's real tall and long and just elite striker. | ||
| But he fought this cat, Benoissan Denis, who is uh judo black belt, elite on the ground, super fucking strong, and he just dominated him, man. | ||
| He got a hold of him, ragdolled him, got him to the ground. | ||
| And Mauricio had his moments in the fight standing because Benoit Saint Denis is a French special forces guy, he's a hard motherfucker. | ||
| And so he did stand with Mauricio for a little bit, but he got dinged up a little bit, but once he got him to the ground, it was just full domination. | ||
| And then it left everybody in this position where we were looking at Mauricio Rufi as being like that guy's a future world champion. | ||
| To like, oh no, like that gap's too wide. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like he's gotta learn so much to be competitive with the elite. | ||
| Now they're gonna know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Imagine like Camaro in his prime. | ||
| No, for sure. | ||
| You know, yeah. | ||
| And that's probably that's that gap we were talking about. | ||
| Like you can't do it. | ||
| There's no way to fucking make that up. | ||
| There's no there's not enough time in your career. | ||
| Well, we got to see that. | ||
| Kamaro was like 38 now, okay? | ||
| And he just fought Joaquin Buckley and dominated him. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Domin and Buckley's another one who is this guy who is dominating everybody at 170. | ||
| We just knocked out Wonderboy. | ||
| We're like, this fucking guy might be the one. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| And then all of a sudden, 38-year-old Kamaro Usman shows how fucking important wrestling is. | ||
| It's everything. | ||
| It's everything. | ||
| Because you could be defensively responsible. | ||
| Like he's very defensively responsible standing. | ||
| You know, other than the Leon Edwards kick, he very rarely gets cracked. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| You know, Gilbert got him a little and dropped him, but very rarely gets in trouble standing. | ||
|
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But once he gets you, the gap is so big. | |
| You can't make it. | ||
| The gap's so big. | ||
| Yeah, that's you know, and again, this is this is one of these things where fundamentally also wrestling gives you a cardio base that you can build off of. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not only not only because that's the other missing component, right? | ||
| It's like this because it at an elite level, it's fucking intense. | ||
| It is really intense. | ||
| Like Kurt, when he was on your show, he's talking about, yeah, I trained till exhaustion, and then I trained. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's like that's how he because at one point when Kurt and I were competing against each other, like 93, 94. | ||
| I just I just was bigger, stronger, and and I could just defend his attacks. | ||
| But he won the Olympics with a broken neck. | ||
| Yeah, fuck, man. | ||
| With a broken neck. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| With a broken neck. | ||
| I was there at Nationals when when he literally hit the mat, and I'm like, like literally, I watched when he when his neck broke at freestyle nationals, and he got hit with an arm spin, and he gets arm thrown and his head gets almost like separated. | ||
| It was nasty. | ||
| And and I'm in the stands going, oh fuck, he's not gonna be in the trials. | ||
| Like there's no fucking way he's gonna be in the trials. | ||
| And sure enough, fucking like five weeks later, he's in the trials. | ||
|
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And I'm like, what the fuck, man? | |
| There's no way he should be fucking able to wrestle. | ||
| There are guys like that in the world, and people need to know. | ||
| You need to know. | ||
| There's levels to everything, and there's levels to mental strength. | ||
| There's levels to guys who just will go, and it's really kind of a crying shame. | ||
| Uh it's look, he had an amazing career in WWE. | ||
| He's loved by everyone. | ||
| Yeah, everybody loves him. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| But it's kind of sucks that people don't know. | ||
| Like at real wrestling, that guy was the shit. | ||
| Oh my god, man. | ||
| He was the shit. | ||
|
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He was so good and small for a heavyweight. | |
| He was so he was always undersized. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But this it's like the years that I beat him, and then 95 when we wrestled in the freestyle nationals, and I had beat him four four times in a row at that point. | ||
| So we we wrestled in the 95 Freestyle Nationals, and I get a hold of him for the first time, and something was different. | ||
| I was like, oh fuck. | ||
| Like wrestling, going, oh man, something's different with Kurt. | ||
| And he ends up beating me. | ||
| And then in the freestyle nationals in 95, and I'm like, oh fuck. | ||
| There was just something different. | ||
| I'm like, because he he could stay on an attack longer, stay on an attack longer. | ||
| He was stronger. | ||
| He hit a gear that I didn't fucking have. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| Like I go, oh fuck. | ||
| Like looking back on him, I'm going, oh shit, I totally missed that. | ||
| Like most guys at 220 pounds, which you're wrestling at, they they would have these attacks that they would initiate. | ||
| It's like grab a hold of you, hold on to you, and then initiate an attack. | ||
| Kurt was constantly probing and attacking and attacking. | ||
| Which was the benefit of being lighter. | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And lighter. | ||
| Lighter and quicker. | ||
| But still wicked strong. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| He could still get in. | ||
| So it's these attacks that he just sustained and he just wear you out of position. | ||
| So this constant attack, attack, attack. | ||
| And all of a sudden it was just this little little angle that he was hunting for the whole time. | ||
| And then he hits that attack and fucking takes you now. | ||
| You're like, fuck. | ||
| Like, what the fuck? | ||
| It's just there's levels of of drive. | ||
| There's levels of discipline, there's levels of will. | ||
| There's levels of wanting something. | ||
| And that's what scares people, I think. | ||
| That's why people get really terrified of like truly special athletes because they don't want to know how lazy they really are. | ||
| I think it's one of the things that drives people nuts about seeing like some insanely disciplined, like elite top of the food chain grappler or striker or whatever it is. | ||
| Yeah MMA fighter. | ||
| Because it's like you don't want to know that someone's willing to work that much harder than that. | ||
| Harder than you are than you ever have. | ||
| Then you ever have at anything. | ||
| At anything. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| That's I mean, Kurt Kurt was one of the where he opened my eyes or I was like, fuck, there's there's another gear. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I thought I was trained fucking hard. | ||
| That's what's crazy. | ||
| It's we're kind of seeing that we We've had this conversation recently in regards to Marab, because we're saying, okay, is Marab just physically gifted? | ||
| Because I think Kane had a a some sort of a genetic advantage with cardio. | ||
| Because DC would talk about how he would take three months off and come back in the gym and fuck everybody up with like cardio. | ||
| Somebody that size, it's an anomaly. | ||
| It's an anomaly. | ||
| It's an anomaly. | ||
| But Marob swears that when he was young, he had bad cardio. | ||
|
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He said, No, I I smoked it. | |
| I can imagine. | ||
| Like Sakuraba smoking cigarettes at all. | ||
| I'm like, really? | ||
| And he it's just hard work and discipline. | ||
| And then so I have a bunch of friends who do hundred milers. | ||
| You know, and uh, you know, I'm real good friends with my friend Cam Haynes. | ||
| And Cam Haynes, he just did a hundred miler like two weeks before we went elk hunting. | ||
| Like he does hundred milers all the time. | ||
| He's done a 240. | ||
| He's what is the the Bigfoot 240? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| He's done a bunch of these through the mountains with thousands of feet of elevation and decline. | ||
| He's done a bunch of these that are 200 plus miles. | ||
| God, that's not and you gotta build up to that. | ||
| But once you get to that, you c if you're sustaining it, you can do those things. | ||
| So he does those things on a regular basis. | ||
| He does multiple ones a year. | ||
| So that didn't you didn't used to think that that was possible. | ||
| They used to say that if you ran a marathon, like you were destroyed for like two weeks. | ||
| No, he was running a marathon a day while he worked a full-time job. | ||
| So he was getting up in the morning at dark, he was running 13 miles, he was going to work during his lunchtime, he would eat after lunch, after work, he runs another 13 fucking miles. | ||
| He would be one where I I wouldn't want to look at him because I'd think I'm lazy. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| That's why there's a thing about like I think I'm lazy and I love him. | ||
| He's my friends, but I think I'm lazy when I when I like watch what he's doing. | ||
| And then Goggins is another one. | ||
| Yeah, oh my god. | ||
| Because he ain't doing it for nothing. | ||
| He's not preparing for elk hunting. | ||
| He rarely even competes in races, but yet he's doing the a level of cardio where he brings world champions like Israel Adasanya comes to train with him and he's throwing up in a bucket. | ||
| He can't keep up and Coggins is fifty. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
|
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|
He's 50! | |
| Wow. | ||
| How old is Goggins? | ||
|
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|
50. | |
| Oh my god. | ||
| And he's got two terrible knees. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| He's had many knee surgeries. | ||
| His knees are destroyed. | ||
| And he does not give a fuck. | ||
| He forces them to work. | ||
| Golly. | ||
| So that so again, this is like that's a level which is just exceptional. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because there's just a lot of things. | ||
| What's a weird level? | ||
| It is because that's a pocket. | ||
| It's just a pocket of people that have that. | ||
| There's only a handful. | ||
| There's only a handful like that guy. | ||
| Because it's not just that. | ||
| He broke the world record chin-up competition once. | ||
| Like he's he's done uh he's done a ton of things that are just like physically insane. | ||
| You know, he was a smoke jumper, he didn't even tell anybody about it. | ||
| He did it just because it was hard. | ||
| This is why he's famous. | ||
| So while he was famous, they take him up in a helicopter and he fucking parachuted to fight forest fires. | ||
| Because it was hard to do. | ||
| I'm not shitting you, man. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| He sent me a photo once. | ||
| He texted me a photo of a grizzly bear track. | ||
| And he goes, We just landed near this. | ||
| I mean, it's a fucking track like that big. | ||
| And he's out there with a backpack and a fucking shovel to fight fires. | ||
| And only because it's hard. | ||
| He's a multi-millionaire. | ||
| Yeah, oh my god. | ||
| He's a multi-millionaire who's getting parachuted to fight fires. | ||
| And here's the thing, man. | ||
| If I didn't talk about it, and maybe I'm out of school, people wouldn't even know. | ||
| You have to know that. | ||
| Maybe he doesn't want people to know. | ||
| They need to know that. | ||
| That's fucking insane. | ||
| That is beyond insane. | ||
| That's like one of those where it's like you know, the wiring that exists in him, it it doesn't happen by chance. | ||
| That's that's that's you have this genetic ability. | ||
| But he was fat when he was young and he is lazy, he was drinking milkshakes. | ||
| He talks about it openly. | ||
| He said the first time he decided to in enlist when he went like to run to go running, he couldn't even run around the block. | ||
| He was totally out of shape. | ||
| He's got he has photos of it. | ||
| He shows you like this is like no, I made myself this. | ||
| So this is my thinking about fighting. | ||
| Like, have we just accepted that you can't really fight full blast for five, five minute rounds? | ||
| Or is it that no one has built themselves up to a level where you can't? | ||
| Like when you were talking about how Kurt get a new gear. | ||
| Or with the gear that Marab is clearly on right now, Or Hamza. | ||
| There's there's that gear. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What if what if like we're gonna push that even further where there's guys that can sprint for five, five minute rounds like there's a few flywaves that can do that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like Pantoja can kind of sprint for five, five minute rounds. | ||
| You can go. | ||
| So they'll eventually be a fighter that can do that. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm thinking too. | ||
| And because it's just one where, like I was saying, from where I started from 25 years ago, and the training methods and how archaic they were, and how little knowledge was out there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now knowledge is advancing at such a rapid rate, and they're understanding how to recover. | ||
| Yeah, and if you add in a bunch of stuff like hyperbaric chambers, so if these guys have access to hyperbaric chambers and and training with uh hypoxic chain chambers and shit like that, there's it's there's levels and levels and levels that can be reached. | ||
| It's you just have to be a complete fucking psycho and go through all the levels. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And get like Donkey Kong. | ||
| Like measure all your food, all your electrolytes, everything throughout the day, have your sleep environment perfect, wear a mask. | ||
| I'm telling you, there's guys out there that'll do it. | ||
| There's guys that'll do it. | ||
| They'll do it. | ||
| Well, they have to if that's where you get the edge, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's becoming it's becoming to a point now where the financial benefit is worth the sacrifice, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That you'll end up going, okay. | ||
| Because what what started to happen when I was fighting is that once the financial piece started getting in there, it started attracting more talent. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that m talent, it brings the level of everybody up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then all of a sudden it's like a little bit more money, talent that could have maybe went and did something else. | ||
| They're going, no, I'm gonna go do this because I can make money. | ||
| Yeah, this is the thing, right? | ||
| If you're a young kid and you're really good at baseball, but you also like jujitsu and MMA, and you you know, have an amateur fight, maybe, and you're thinking about what you're gonna do with your career. | ||
| You could be so rich playing baseball. | ||
|
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Oh god, yeah. | |
| You could be so rich if you're really good at baseball, you can be rich as fuck, and nobody's trying to kill you. | ||
| Yeah, nobody's trying to beat you over the head with elbows, nobody's taking you down in front of everybody and humiliating you. | ||
| Well, fuck this. | ||
| Let's play ball. | ||
|
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Seriously, seriously, I fucking play baseball on a heartbeat, man. | |
| Fuck yeah. | ||
| So that's the problem with MMA, is like you you hear like, what is it to fight in the UFC? | ||
| Like, what is the bottom scale? | ||
| What's like the lowest contract that you can get in the UFC in 2020? | ||
| And I this is not even saying they deserve more because this is just how the sport works. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And even and it's way better in the UFC, by the way, than it is in boxing. | ||
| When you watch a boxing card, most of the money's at the top, and there's there's very little spread out. | ||
| Yeah, there's guys that fight in the UFC undercard that make excellent money, but when you first start, you don't or think it's like 10. | ||
| It's one of those things where it's like would I expect this like start at Microsoft, right? | ||
| Yeah, and going, Yeah, I get a million dollars a year. | ||
| Fuck no, you work your way into, and that's one of one of the things about the sport, as long as it has the opportunity to let somebody grow into it, you know, and still gives them financial incentive to grow into it, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And just one where it's like I wouldn't expect, like, hey, I'm a good fighter, pay me a million dollars. | ||
| It's like, well, that's not how fucking works. | ||
| No, I wouldn't say a million dollars, but wouldn't you say, like, let's make this argument. | ||
| Wouldn't you think that for young struggling fighters, if they got paid more for fights, they could put together better camps. | ||
| They could. | ||
| They could get better recovery and nutrition, have less stress, yeah, and be able to perform better so it would make the product better. | ||
| So here here's where here's where my career transitioned. | ||
| I call it internally funded. | ||
| My first four fights, I was using that money to get to the next fight to get to the next fight to get the next fight. | ||
| Then all of a sudden I get in Japan and they pay me enough money for the one fight that the next day I woke up and I was a professional fighter because it was the only thing I had to do was train as a fighter. | ||
| What was the biggest check you got in Japan? | ||
| Uh yeah, a little over half a million. | ||
| Damn. | ||
|
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Back then, that was cash. | |
| Yeah, fucking. | ||
| How did you get it out of the country? | ||
| That was how did you get it? | ||
| So here's a million. | ||
| Here's what's fucked up about it, right? | ||
| So my first couple times over there, I'm like, I put like first time I I got I put forty something thousand in one cowboy boot with two socks. | ||
|
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I put 40,000 in the other cowboy boot with the two socks. | |
| I'm serious. | ||
| Because it was straight out of the fucking cartoons how you got paid. | ||
| Because the next day you would go up to a room and and you literally would have a room, you'd have an adjacent room used to Japanese guys in black suits smoking, and then you'd have this room, which is where you get paid. | ||
| They had these you know, suitcases that had your pay, you could choose your currency, right? | ||
| I'm getting paid in American dollars. | ||
| So they would have your contract slide your contract over and then go, okay, this fight you get paid. | ||
| This is the dollar amount, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And they would literally take it out, count it, you would sign on it, and then they would just hand you the cash. | ||
| First time they ever did that, I'm like, it's a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash, and I'm like, fuck. | ||
| I'm like, I'll be right back. | ||
| I go to the to the bedroom, that's it's in the hotel room, and I grab the fucking case to the pillow, and I go over and I fucking just scrape the fucking money, put it in the pillowcase, and I go, okay, thank you. | ||
| It's just a fucking go ahead out. | ||
| I don't know what to fucking do. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| I'm like down I'm like down in the elevator, like fucking holding the money, like I don't know what to fucking do. | ||
| Like, who is that? | ||
| Big giant guy with a hundred fifty grand ability. | ||
|
unidentified
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That does not look like no, no, it does not, man. | |
| It's it's like what did they expect you to do with it? | ||
| They give you any advice on how to get it out of the country. | ||
| Oh no, no, that was not. | ||
| That was it was your responsibility. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| So literally, I'm like, oh fuck, man. | ||
| I like get on it, and like in my head, I'm playing all these movies, right? | ||
| Like, oh, in this movie, he got caught at the border. | ||
| You know, I'm like, fuck. | ||
| You know, I know that's gonna be this one, you know. | ||
| It's like so I end up fucking just going, oh, cowboy boots, tube socks, like fucking 40 grand in one boot, 40 grand in the other, put it in a fucking and like walk and like you got anything to declare? | ||
| No. | ||
| Just like walk through, but realizing that eventually when I claim the money, um, they handle claim form, they go, okay, you're claiming 140,000. | ||
| Okay, thank you. | ||
| Have a good day. | ||
| Oh, you just have to claim it? | ||
| You have to claim it. | ||
| Because they want to send it, they want to send that receipt to the IRS. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| So when you go through customs. | ||
| I thought it was just a function of not being able to take that much cash and no. | ||
| No, when you declare it, when you declare it, there's that situation too, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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But when everybody's gonna go, where'd you gonna have a mail? | |
| Exactly. | ||
| I guess back then, could you even go? | ||
| No, you couldn't even like YouTube. | ||
| Oh no, there's you couldn't say, Look, this is me, man. | ||
| I just won't look on I awesome. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| This is how I really did win. | ||
| Back then it was hard to get games, man. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| It the the like example example I give is like the corner video store next to the shutters that where all the porn was. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Right next to that was the VHS tapes. | ||
| Everybody can hear it when you went through, you dirty pervert. | ||
| You gotta go see face and death. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's it. | |
| Uh yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that was right, literally, those were where the UFC tapes were, those were the pride tapes were. | |
| I remember, I remember I was living in Hollywood, I just moved there, it was 94. | ||
| It was when UFC 2 was uh available on VHS. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I'd heard about UFC one, but I didn't see it. | ||
| And then UFC two, I saw on tape. | ||
| I rented it from like some one of those video stores, and I was like, Holy shit, they did it. | ||
| I couldn't believe it. | ||
| I'm like, holy shit, they did it. | ||
| Because this was always this was the always the dream. | ||
| This was literally Bruce Lee's dream. | ||
| Yeah, Bruce Lee's conversation. | ||
| I mean, his whole he was the first guy to be completely outside of the norm in terms of like sticking to your style. | ||
| Yeah, because that you were like a traitor if you left certain kung fu styles or certain karate styles. | ||
| He was the first guy to say, no, use use what's useful. | ||
| Put it all together. | ||
| Judo Jean Label he got with Chuck Norris. | ||
| He got with all these other that was the first thing, like this symbol is a kanji for a dragon, right? | ||
| Bruce Lee was under the dragon, right? | ||
| Dragon is all these parts to make one mythical thing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that's that enter the dragon. | ||
| That's that. | ||
| Bruce Lee was the first one. | ||
| If people don't realize it, he was the first one to go, fuck, this is incomplete. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And so fortuitous that he ran into judo Jean LaBelle. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| And because I think once you grapple with that guy, you're like, oh my God, I'm fucking helpless. | ||
| And then it's just like, oh, this is super important. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, because like Gene was one of the first guys to ever have like a mixed fight. | ||
| So there was uh a guy who was a boxer and he had a judo gi on, and he chases the guy and gets the guy into a grappling exchange and then strangles him. | ||
| But it's guys, he had like a boxer versus judo. | ||
| You never saw that? | ||
| No. | ||
| See if you can find it, Jamie. | ||
| I want to say it's in the Soy back 60s? | ||
| So this is gonna be way back when. | ||
| Way back when he was so this is Mark Coleman and I did a clinic in North Carolina that was a judo Gene Labell clinic that he brought us in for. | ||
| What year is this? | ||
| Sixty-three. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| So Milo Savage. | ||
| So uh the boxer looks like he's okay, I remembered it wrong. | ||
| The boxer's bare knuckle. | ||
| And uh he made him wear a judo gi though, which is not said, fuck you know we're in this gi. | ||
| He probably doesn't understand that that's a weapon for Gene. | ||
| We didn't see him take him down. | ||
| Oh, that's just they show him taking him down? | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Oh, don't skip through it. | ||
| I'm gonna see the technique. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| So Milo throws up, but that's it. | ||
| So once Gene's got a hold of him, it's over. | ||
| It's fucked over. | ||
| I mean, you don't know what that even feels like until you feel it. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| So I so I rolled with Higgin Machado, and uh Oh my god. | ||
| He's just putting him to sleep with a collar choke. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god. | |
| Yeah, he's mangling them. | ||
| He's just mangling on this poor guy. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| And Gene is uh his style was very, very brutal. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Like he had uh a very almost like catch wrestling style base submission He had a a lot of like very very painful moves that he would do on you. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| You imagine just not understanding what you're agreeing to. | ||
| No, he just got choked unconscious. | ||
| No, you I mean you you can't know until it happens. | ||
| I mean, I don't know how much cross-training people did. | ||
| I I bet he probably thought I was just gonna go in there and use my boxing. | ||
| Yeah, and I'll fuck him up. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| Yeah, it's just you know you don't know until you know, and then you go, wow. | ||
| But it's just it's so wild that even at the highest levels, like at the wrestler the level that you were wrestling at, a guy like Kurt Engel can go, Well, let's check it out another notch. | ||
| Another notch, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's the crazy part. | ||
| You always find like me being uh a fan of MMA and UFC and watching it, there's there's always an outlier, right? | ||
| Always always an outlier that you go, that doesn't make sense. | ||
| How the fuck is he getting to there? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And that's like fuck he's just found a new way to do it. | ||
| He's found a new gear, he's found a new, you know, way to just go, okay, this is what this is what I'm gonna do. | ||
| It's like a Daven Goggins thing, oh, I'm just gonna run 125 miles. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, and to be able to maintain that drive, that's what's the probably one of the hardest things. | ||
| Cause you you have to have almost no rest, and you're maintaining an insane drive for years and years and years while sharks are nipping at your ankles. | ||
| They're all coming up. | ||
| Yeah, all chasing you. | ||
| All chasing, yeah. | ||
| And everybody's scary. | ||
| Well, I used to tell my fucking training partner, I go, fuck the getting there, that's one thing. | ||
| Fucking staying there, that's the secret. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's that's the fucking it's so hard to stay at that level because everybody else is building on your your experience, right? | ||
| They're going, Well, this is what he did. | ||
| This is what he's incorporated, these are the things he's doing. | ||
| You know, I'm just gonna build on it. | ||
| Yeah, you know. | ||
| There's some weird rules to this fight that they had agreed upon too, and Gene LaBelle said that Savage had brass knuckles in his gloves. | ||
| Oh, what? | ||
| Yeah, I start reading like uh here, like the rules he couldn't punch or tackle, or sorry, he couldn't kick or tackle him. | ||
| And then in exchange for that, Savage offered to wear a judo gi. | ||
| A judo gi. | ||
| Oh, sorry, that's how they wrote it right. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's a judo gi. | ||
| That's new outfit. | ||
| Because they didn't know the difference. | ||
| Okay, so in the parent belief that Labelle was a Karatika. | ||
| So that's interesting. | ||
| So he made a rule that uh that Gene couldn't kick him. | ||
| So he thought that he was gonna use it. | ||
| He couldn't tackle him and you couldn't take him. | ||
| So kidnapped tack tackles or takedowns under the waist. | ||
| Ooh. | ||
| So you had to only hip toss him or only drag him to the ground. | ||
| And everything had to be above waist. | ||
| That's kind of silly. | ||
| Yeah, it's really silly. | ||
| Because it's one of those things where it's like it's like Greco. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're doing like a bet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A thousand dollar bet. | ||
| Yeah, to anyone who could prove that uh boxer would be beat by a martial artist, I think, in a straight fight. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| This is way ahead of its time. | ||
| I wonder, yeah, I wonder if the brass knuckles thing is true. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I'll try to look that up. | ||
| According to LaBelle, another sort. | ||
| He was a bad motherfucker, Gene LaBelle. | ||
| Ahead of his time. | ||
| Again. | ||
| And again, that fortuitous meeting. | ||
| Him and Bruce Lee getting together with Bruce Lee was like, you know, the most famous martial artists on earth, the guys who's turning people on to martial arts, had the most open mind. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And had this philosophy of using everything that's useful, and then meets this guy and it's like, oh. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He would have loved MMA. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god, he would have fucking totally jazzed on it. | |
| Oh my god, he'd be at every fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's one of those things where where, you know, again, it's just somebody being ahead of their time. | ||
| Way. | ||
| Yeah, way ahead of his time. | ||
| But not just that, but like the first guy that became a world famous martial arts person. | ||
| Like there was no real world famous martial arts people before Bruce Lee. | ||
| I mean, you'd have to be into martial arts to know about martial arts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But Bruce Lee, like everybody knew Bruce Lee. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Changed martial arts, like igniting martial arts all over the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's one of those things where I look back on it and I've read like part of part of the history and stuff, and you understand it obviously way better than I do, but you know, like ahead of his time, just like when Gracie came along ahead of his time, you know, and in presenting something where he's knocking down all these stereotypes. | ||
| Yeah, and they had rigid stereotypes back then. | ||
| Oh, where you'd have you'd have to like get in gang fights to protect the style that you were doing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you think that's a good idea? | |
| Do you know? | ||
| Do you know, like, like so I started training at Beverly Hoods Jiu Jitsu Club, right? | ||
| In California. | ||
| I remember that spot. | ||
| So so uh so boss would have me, boss would have me out there, Avi Rubin is a guy that owned it, and I would go out there and I would teach wrestling a couple days out of the week. | ||
| It's how I got introduced to boss, Olec Tara of Markahuas and Pedro Hizo. | ||
| They were training out of there as well. | ||
| So you would get these guys, uh jujitsu guys, that would sit on the outside, wait until the other students were gone, draw all the blinds, lock the doors, and go, can you teach us wrestling? | ||
| Because they were so afraid that if they got caught there with me, it was like a traitor. | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| So you would get like That's so crazy. | ||
| It was one of the it didn't make any sense to me because you would figure sharing information would be better. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Jiu Jitsu, we're not sharing shit. | ||
| We're not, you can't participate. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| It was so fucking archaic. | ||
| Like the outlook, and it's like looking back on it going, God, like, wow, that's dogma. | ||
| That's like this, like they didn't all have that though. | ||
| No, they didn't. | ||
| There's some guys who were open to teaching people everything, but there was definitely some schools for a while that were holding back techniques. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Like I remember when Hoyce Gracie, one of my friends said that when Hoyce Gracie uh caught Dan Severn in a triangle that uh he asked his instructor to show it to him, he's like, You're not ready for that. | ||
| I'm not gonna show you that. | ||
| Like, why wouldn't you just show him something that works? | ||
| I rerund that tape probably 50 times, and I still can't, I'm like, what the fuck is he doing? | ||
| Like, what the fuck is he doing? | ||
| Like you could figure it out. | ||
| Like what the fuck is he doing? | ||
| Because all of a sudden Severin goes from beating the shit out of him going, he's fucking tapping out. | ||
| Yeah, nuts. | ||
| We couldn't believe it. | ||
| I didn't I didn't know there's a name for it. | ||
| You could submit a guy off your back because you're legs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, like what the fuck. | |
| Like what if you look at it like the space where he had Dan's head and arm is like that big. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's like that fucking like when you when you do a triangle like this, like that's not a very big space. | ||
| It's like they have fucking Dan because he's a big dude going, oh I get it. | ||
| And your legs, you could hold your legs in place for a long time. | ||
| Your legs carry you around all day. | ||
| Oh, that's like especially if you actually get that foot under the knee where it's like really locked in. | ||
| It's not pressing on the end of your foot. | ||
| You could hold on to that bitch for a long time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god, and then he's like pulling on the fucking I'm like pulling on the fuck nuts. | |
| Changed everybody. | ||
| Like, oh my God, you could win off your back. | ||
| It it literally, I'm st I still remember to this day just looking at it with my mouth hanging open, going. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh fuck. | |
| I think it was one of the things that made MMA so popular. | ||
| Because Hoyce wasn't a big he didn't look like you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| So if you were dominating everybody, it would be like Jesus look out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But Hoyce was uh just looked like an athlete. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just like a thin, he was a hundred and seventy-five pounds. | ||
| Which is so crazy. | ||
| So you know what's a good thing. | ||
| So crazy. | ||
| I had a conversation with Hoyce probably about four or five years ago, and I'd never spoken with him outside of a competition or event or anything like that. | ||
| I cried. | ||
| He's such a good person. | ||
| Oh, he's a great guy. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| Like he was so just like talking to him, and he was just so powerful and so inspirational, and it just having this conversation with him was just just like amazing. | ||
| I was just left the conversation, hung the phone about and going, wow, what a what a just an amazing human being. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, he's a He's a really good guy. | |
| And the most important guy ever in terms of like the spread of MMA. | ||
| He's the most important guy. | ||
| Oh, but prolific. | ||
| Because he's the guy when he won the first one, and you looked at the way he did it, everybody's like, that guy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And everyone was like, what's he doing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No one knew what it was. | ||
| What is this stuff he's doing to these people? | ||
| Changed everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Made everybody instead, because it like it it went from this idea that it was uh just the most brutal person would win. | ||
| It was the tank abbots, like no no no. | ||
| There's this one guy, and he's doing everything with technique, and he's not physically imposing at all. | ||
| And he's handsome. | ||
| It didn't make yeah, he's good. | ||
| Handsome fella. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he wears that fancy ghee thing, you know. | |
| He looks like he's choking everybody out. | ||
| It's God it was incredible. | ||
| Watching that for the first time, I said like literally it was like, oh, this is fucking new. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like this is I've because you've never seen it before. | ||
| No, nothing like it. | ||
| And then this the sport explodes. | ||
| But the sport was getting fucked so hard back then by all these organizations that didn't want it ever to become sanctioned. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like because boxing was very threatened by it, and everybody had businesses with people, and then there was there was so much bullshit that kept it like it it was out of New York until like ten years ago. | ||
| So we were we were on um, me and my brothers were on our way to see uh a UFC event in New York, and it got cancelled and it got moved down south. | ||
| Yes, to Dothan, Alabama. | ||
| Yes, UFC twelve. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're on our way, we were on our way to go see it. | ||
| Uh I was on my way to work at it. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| That was the first one I was gonna work at. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Yeah, and it got moved. | ||
| Yeah, it got moved and so we New York was like, nope. | ||
| Nope, ain't having it, ain't having it happening. | ||
| Well, they they kept it out for the longest time though. | ||
| There was the guy who took who was really fighting to keep the UFC out of New York eventually got he got brought up on corruption charges. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Shocker. | ||
| Yeah it was like it had more to do with like unions and the fact that Zufa who owned it, they also uh owned hotels. | ||
| And didn't have unions. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So there was a lot. | ||
| A lot going on. | ||
| A lot to make it. | ||
| You know, I went you know, I went to the first sanctioned uh the UFC flew me out to go to in New Jersey when they had their main main main card in in New Jersey. | ||
| Uh huh. | ||
| Their first big event that was sanctioned by the New Jersey Boxing Commission uh with Tito and um they flew me out to that event. | ||
| Oh wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, flew me out to that event. | ||
| And actually, this is this is at the time uh they offered me to fight uh after that they offered me to fight Pete Williams. | ||
| Oh and it was one of those where they go, Yeah, we're offered to fight Pete Williams. | ||
| You might have to take a little bit of pay cut, but you have to believe in what we're doing, and I'm like, okay, what's the bake out. | ||
| They're like, well, we'll give you like an appearance fee of like 15 grand. | ||
| To fight? | ||
| To fight. | ||
| Fifteen grand? | ||
| To show up. | ||
| And then it would be doubled if I won. | ||
| And I'm like, I'm making, you know, a lot more in Japan. | ||
| Like, why would I go do it? | ||
| Like, well. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a terrible offer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So that's one of the worst offers I've ever heard. | |
| And it's one where where the whole idea behind it would be, hey, we just if you believe in us and you believe in directors you're going, look, we just got sanctioned in New Jersey, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's the the steps we're taking to move this to Vegas and to do this. | ||
| And in one is like, you know, like most fighters, it's like I have X amount of fights and I don't have more. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I only have X. So that would have been one off my X number. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I'm like, oh man, I can't do it. | ||
| And they only ask once. | ||
| At that time, the UFC was like, we're gonna ask once. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just leaving that alone. | ||
| Just leave that one alone. | ||
| That one's one of those like, okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Why not ask me a second time? | ||
| Why are we negotiating? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Um if you were if you were at Pride then, right? | ||
| So like what what year are we talking about? | ||
| Uh 2002. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So this was in the UFC was still hemorrhaging money. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And still that crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And would you want to still Oh gosh, man? | |
| It should have failed. | ||
| It could have. | ||
| I mean, one is they didn't have charge of the channel. | ||
| Yeah, if anybody else was crazy, they had no idea how much money you were getting in Japan. | ||
| Oh, they had no clue. | ||
| They had no clue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's cool. | |
| So you know what's crazy with Japan? | ||
| Here's what I ended up doing. | ||
| I said, listen, I said, they said, what do you need? | ||
| And I said, I need consistency. | ||
| And they go, okay, what does that look like? | ||
| And I said, pay me X dollars per month. | ||
| And then every time I fight, pay me a bonus on top of that. | ||
| And they go, okay. | ||
| How much do you need? | ||
| And I said, okay, I need this amount per month. | ||
| And they go, okay. | ||
| And that was just another stabilizing thing where I knew that every month I had X amount of dollars coming in that I could pay my bills. | ||
| I could do my stuff, not worry about that, because it allowed me to transition to like it's not a hobby. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, I'm not like fighting, and then I go to work, you know, it's like this is what I do for a living. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was the uh the point of thinking about money investment. | ||
| Like by giving them more money and they get better camps. | ||
| Wouldn't you think the product would be better? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like I mean, I don't like to be thinking of people as products, but it is a good idea. | ||
| Program the program. | ||
| Now I guess you don't have to pay for it. | ||
| You're gonna just pay for the subscription to Paramount, which is pretty badass. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where you don't have to pay for a pay per view every time. | ||
| But you know, if they had more money, they'd be able to do a better camp. | ||
| They'd be in better shape. | ||
| All the way around all the way around. | ||
| They they'd be better recovered, they have better nutrition. | ||
| It it it's investing in what your product is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And your product is is elite athletes. | |
| Elite athletes. | ||
| In order to get elite athletes, they need funding. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They need tools. | ||
| The only way they can get tools is through money. | ||
| You know, better coaches, better recovery facilities. | ||
| But and and I don't know the the the you know, I obviously let me ask you this. | ||
| If you're if you were like looking, like say if your son wanted to start fighting or someone wanted to look to you would you if you were giving a young fighter advice, would you say go right into the UFC? | ||
| Or would you say, no, the best case scenario is go into another organization like the PFL, build build your style up, yeah, build it up on maybe a slow little slightly lower level of competition, although not necessarily still elite guys. | ||
| Submission grappling. | ||
| That's uh literally I go, go you you fundamentally you need to build a base of what you what you're gonna become, right? | ||
| So submission grappling ADCC, if a young kid, like 16, 17 year old kid, even 18, 19, 20 year old kid, I'd go, you need submission grappling because you can participate in those at a competitive level that teaches you how to compete. | ||
| It teaches you how to prepare to compete, right? | ||
| And it teaches you without the impact of striking and punching and all of this. | ||
| So that's like the first foundational piece. | ||
| And this is just my opinion, right? | ||
| Foundationally is like if you you have to have uh A mechanism out there which allows you to compete without having the physical impact that fighting does. | ||
| So that would be the first thing. | ||
| Like submission grappling, ADCC stuff. | ||
| You know, all of that really teaches you how to compete to train to compete. | ||
| And it starts building that base. | ||
| And then you start adding pieces in, going, okay, I understand this. | ||
| Let's add the striking components into it now. | ||
| And let's do these little like PFLs, or let's do this, let's do that. | ||
| And it just allows you to build out something where you're not just throwing into the fire. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because that shit doesn't work. | ||
| I mean, the fighters have become so good now that you can't just throw somebody in there because it fu you get fucked up, it might fuck your confidence up and you go, I just I'm done. | ||
| I ain't ever doing this. | ||
| Yeah, you could definitely reach an opponent that you shouldn't be reaching. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I wonder that if you also, if you build yourself up in another organization, then obviously you have at least a name and the hardcore fans know who you are. | ||
| So like uh Rainier De Ritter is another example. | ||
| Okay, who's uh elite right now? | ||
| It I I can't I I say middleweight, but I can't believe he's really a middleweight. | ||
| He's so fucking big. | ||
| But he's a fantastic grappler, but he was already a champion in one, so he's a champion in one FC, and then when he comes over to America and he starts fighting for the UFC, people are already hyped for he's like immediately getting tossed in there with Kevin Holland, immediately getting tossed in there with like very elite fighters. | ||
| And so, like maybe there's uh uh an argument for if you were like managing a fighter, saying, like, d don't just if you're if you fight well in the UFC, you might be three fights in and in the waters that you really can't swim in. | ||
| Yeah, because the the level gets high very fast. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It does, it does. | |
| Like maybe you'd be better off getting a f uh a few years in at a different level of competition to really tighten your skills up and make sure that when you finally do it. | ||
| You see, you've been bringside for this. | ||
| You see when a young fighter, when he clicks and he gets it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And he understands how to compete at that level, it's brilliant. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like watching it, you're like, oh my god, he's it like he's in there. | |
| Oh my god, it like gives me goosebumps to think about it because it's that moments that I can look at and go, oh fuck. | ||
| And you know, it's a beautiful creation, it's like the a testament to the amount of hours worked, like you know it better than anybody alive. | ||
| When you see someone perform at like a super elite championship level, you go, you know how hard that motherfucker had to work to get to what you're seeing right now. | ||
| It's it's even and this just brought this up uh just as a thing, like DJ playing me in the movie. | ||
| You just don't get there. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| It doesn't happen by magic, right? | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| That's fucking work. | ||
| That's work for him to become work. | ||
| Oh my god, he became you. | ||
| Like he got all of your mannerisms down, like down, not like an assimile, no facsimile, no, like down like creepy down. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like he like even said he fucking walks like me. | |
| He even got my little fucking walk. | ||
| I'm like, you man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm like where like where do you hire a walk coach? | |
| Well, the crazy thing is like that story was made for him. | ||
| Yeah, it was that it was made for him because you have to be that big to sell that, yeah. | ||
| And you can't get that big that quick. | ||
| No, we so we were talking about this the other day, uh uh with DJ is that like there's like uh you know, through the history of like you know, movie making, there's been actors that have like I'm getting big, and they go eat you know, Ben and Jerry's ice cream. | ||
| And then there's like watching the whole transition of what DJ was doing and how he's like, Well, I just don't need to be big because that's one thing. | ||
| I need to be big, but put on quality of what I'm doing, and so it's these fast twitch, it's like a wrestler, fast twitch fibers. | ||
| You look at him and go, Oh shit, he just didn't get big, he put on specific muscle for what he was doing, you know, and to be able to go through everything and understand going, he secluded himself. | ||
| He literally locked himself away uh for 11 weeks up in Vancouver and didn't bring his family up, which I guess he normally does, and just went through his training camp. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| Like going, like going fuck, okay. | ||
| You know, like every day, same routine, get up, do the same routine, do this. | ||
| I was up there for fight week, got all of his stunt guys all like this is this is foundationally, because I'm not gonna teach him wrestling, 25 years of wrestling and Fucking a month, right? | ||
| Or two weeks or a week or an hour. | ||
| It's like, okay, but let's get foundational pieces, right? | ||
| Because the people are gonna watch it, they can look at the film and tell whether you put the work in or not. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Especially someone like you. | ||
| Oh God, man. | ||
| It was one where where that was the biggest deal uh for Benny is to be able to shoot these scenes without a stunt double. | ||
| Going how because it just detracts from what he's trying to do as a filmmaker. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| How do you shoot this whole entire well uh well I'm gonna give DJ foundational pieces of like changing your level for a double, here's where you get and like certain foundational pieces you have to have, and then like I told them once you get to a certain point, everything from that point on is your own. | ||
| It's like when you watch wrestlers going, oh he sh changes his level, and then all these little nuances, that's individual. | ||
| That's individualized. | ||
| Like Michael Jordan, it's like a the structure for a jump shot's the same, right? | ||
| But all these little nuances of like how to get to the position to hit a jump shot, that's Michael Jordan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Right. | ||
| So I go, like a f like when I shoot a double leg, like lowering your level, that's foundational, fundamental, right? | ||
| It's like attacking without my arms out in tight. | ||
| That's fundamental. | ||
| But once I hit the person with with the attack, right? | ||
| Double egg, everything from that point going on is my own. | ||
| Whether I tip him this way, tilt him this way, run them for run them backwards, sit down, change that it's all these little new I go, we need to do foundational and then you're good. | ||
| So I so it was a lot of work for him to get to that foundational point. | ||
| And uh once he got there, it's like, okay, you're good. | ||
| It looked very realistic. | ||
| The fight scenes were excellent. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was like really well done to the point where it looked like the historical fight. | ||
| Yeah, they did, and again, this is Benny, you know, just like him and how he wanted to shoot it. | ||
| And I really appreciate that because it's like that's hard to do. | ||
| It's hard to uh hard to really capture. | ||
| Like you watch a documentary or a doc you drama rather on a person's real life when that person's a famous person like yourself, and I've seen you compete for decades. | ||
| I'm like, I've seen it. | ||
| I know I remember those fights. | ||
| They got it. | ||
| They got it real close, man. | ||
| To the point like, wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is uh it's really well done. | ||
| And it also like it looks realistic. | ||
| It doesn't look, you know, sometimes fights look a little corny. | ||
| Oh my god, that was the one thing we're talking about going there's always gonna be a space for a Rocky fight. | ||
| Sure, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I literally nothing wrong with Rocky. | ||
| Nothing wrong at all, but that's not the film they were shooting. | ||
| They were shooting like this is how do we create something that pays homage to? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And something you can build off of and somebody can look at and go, Oh wow. | ||
| I think it's important if we're talking about Rocky though, we have to say Rocky two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten, whatever the fuck they got to, but Rocky one was real. | ||
| Oh my god, that was I I literally I remember being in the theater and literally watch it and just like as a kid, yeah, watching it and like I I wanted to be Rocky. | ||
| Dude, I drank a raw egg and I ran around the block as I got home. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh yeah. | |
| One hundred fucking percent. | ||
| I mean, you're like that's you're like, holy shit. | ||
| Yeah, that was a great movie. | ||
| Oh, and they tried to push him out. | ||
| He didn't they didn't want him to play the lead. | ||
| Who wrote that movie? | ||
| Oh my god, he won an Oscar for that, right? | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| Yeah, it's a great movie, and it's a weird movie. | ||
| It's a weird it is, it is because that that's that's the classic underdog, yeah, overachiever, you know, but he doesn't win. | ||
| There are guys like that, man, and that's what's crazy. | ||
| There's guys that like are hyper fucking talented, but for whatever reason, they just never Buster Douglas Yeah, oh my god, it yeah, Buster Douglas. | ||
| Buster Douglas got it together for one fight against Mike Tyson and pieced him up and didn't artistically. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was it was hitting with a jab followed by a left hook, just wap whap. | ||
| And it was beautiful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The movement wasn't that in Tokyo. | |
| I believe it was. | ||
| Yeah, Tokyo Dome. | ||
| Yeah, I believe you're right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was one of the craziest. | ||
| I'll never forget that. | ||
| I'll never forget that. | ||
| Because his mama died. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he just got it together for this one fight. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And if it was one fight, he showed everybody what he had. | ||
| Yeah, it was amazing. | ||
| Never to be repeated. | ||
| Never and then Holyfield knocked him out in the next fight. | ||
| Yeah, gosh damn. | ||
| But like that one fight, man, he got it together, and you go, wow. | ||
| So there's guys like uh that Out there that that are supremely talented, but for whatever reason they just never sustain, never can keep it together. | ||
| It's a mental thing. | ||
| I mean, all of it is, right? | ||
| I mean, just like you're saying, like the like the outliers, it's a mental thing that they have that uh a level or a gear they can get to that everybody else just can't. | ||
| It it has to be, or it there's there's gotta be something, something they're doing that's so different. | ||
| And everybody's trying to figure it out. | ||
| Like, what is he doing? | ||
| Yeah, what is and it seems to boil down to almost always dedication. | ||
| It's like how dedicated are you to it? | ||
| And are you so dedicated that you're really willing to objectively look at what you do good and what you not so good and and and change that and fix it and and really tighten down your diet and really get like get religious with your subject. | ||
| That's the ability um to be able to be just have the self-perspective, right? | ||
| Like this in-depth honesty. | ||
| Because a lot of it, like I I literally before Chris Campbell, right? | ||
| I was just talking about, I thought I was training fucking hard. | ||
| I thought I fucked in I thought like I'm training fucking hard. | ||
| And he just grabbed me by the hand and he goes, No, let me show you what hard is, right? | ||
| And so it was this routine where it's like it's in college, my senior year, 6 a.m., I get up. | ||
| He would pick me up, and I wouldn't be a minute late. | ||
| I had a chair that I put next to the door that I slept in for the last because one time being late, he just throttled me. | ||
| And I'm like, I ain't never happened again. | ||
| I ain't fucking ever happening again, man. | ||
| He slept in this chair. | ||
| Slept in the chair next to the door, you know, and be like, all right, fucking because he would just give two beeps, beep beep, and you know, all right, I'm up, you know, and fucking out the front door. | ||
| We go to the gym, we'd train in the morning, so we'd do wrestling drills, stuff like that, and then I would do cardio or strength. | ||
| He would go to work, he was a full-time attorney, he'd go to work all day. | ||
| I would start practicing with the the wrestling team, warm up, and then I'd wait for him to get off of work five o'clock, and then we train for a couple hours and then get up and repeat. | ||
| But it's this level of intensity with everything had intention. | ||
| There wasn't anything that was left without intent. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, from how we drilled, how we trained, everything was very focused and intentional. | ||
| There wasn't anything like I'm gonna do this today. | ||
| You know, it's like, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Everything has intention. | ||
| This is why you're doing this. | ||
| This is why you're doing that. | ||
| This is why you're doing this. | ||
| And that's the difference. | ||
| That's the difference. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's this intention of every single thing you're doing has this intention for an end purpose. | ||
| You know who Gordon Ryan is, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's Gordon's belt up there. | ||
| When Gordon trains 365 days a year. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He he doesn't take any days off unless he's injured. | ||
| And if he's injured, he he'll still be on the mats watching. | ||
| Watches everybody. | ||
| He says, like, I'm still thinking about jujitsu. | ||
| And it's not just training like hard sparring, it's going over technique, going over counters, tape style of it. | ||
| All day. | ||
| And that's that is somebody who's living their life intentional, right? | ||
| Everything has a and purpose. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| And it's why he's been able to do what he's been able to do. | ||
| I mean, I've looked at it going, if he existed when I was doing ADCC, I would have never won. | ||
| It's just a d it's just a different level. | ||
| And and that's that's a skill set I had wrestling, but he's got a skill set that incorporates that plus 20 things more. | ||
| And it's nuts because he gives away the formula. | ||
| He's like, but no one's willing to do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| He's like, and he just says it with confidence. | ||
| He he goes, uh I put on all my videos out there for free. | ||
| Isn't that fucking funny though? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, he put he puts techniques up all the time, shows you how to do stuff. | |
| And he sells DVDs still. | ||
| It makes millions just selling instructions. | ||
| Because he's that's how much he knows about Jiu Jitsu. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| And he's only 30. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he's uh everybody considers him the greatest of all time. | ||
| You know what's crazy? | ||
| It's funny this brought this up. | ||
| So when uh DJ and I connected again in 2023, when this got kicked off green light for the film, he sends me this picture of Panther Videos, Panther uh martial arts, seek and destroy videos. | ||
| That are in a VHS tape. | ||
| He's got like 10 of them in the picture, right? | ||
| And it's Mark Kerr, seek and destroy. | ||
| Benny had found them and sent them to DJ, and he's like, study him. | ||
| So it's this video tape series that I did for Panther production here it is. | ||
| So this is one of these things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You can destroy bar fighting techniques. | |
| Yep. | ||
| And so DJ sends me this picture, and it was fucking I was literally like, okay, I'm in. | ||
| Dude, look at the size of you. | ||
| You look like a superhero. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, dude. | |
| I had such this is I call it phone. | ||
| I call it phone booth fighting. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like I like and it's like I could in a very small space, I could generate a fucking shit ton of power. | ||
| Oh, dude, you were a freak. | ||
| Shit ton of power. | ||
| You were a legitimate freak. | ||
| And I remember like watching you fight the first time, I was like, that's gonna be a real problem. | ||
| That's gonna be a real problem. | ||
| What do you do with that? | ||
| It's one thing that you're giant, but it's also that you got elite wrestling skills on top of that. | ||
| Like, oh shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This this might be a problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh my god. | ||
| All these dudes in karate geese are like, God damn it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh my gosh, you're like, Phil, I'm turning in my gi. | ||
| And then the gi, the pro the problem with the ghee is they can anyone can grab it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it makes wrestling even easier. | ||
| If you like if you allowed the gi still, I think there'd probably be a few people that get choked out. | ||
| But also a lot of people get taken down a lot easier. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So even so you can grab the gi. | ||
| Hig and Machado. | ||
| I've rolled with him. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Uh Jean-Jacques and Higgin. | ||
| And Higgin it was like giving him an extra set of hands. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I f I go, dude. | ||
| I literally, so the so on Torrance, when I've trained with him, there's like uh there's one room and then another room, and there's a door between them, and so he had half of his class kind of all stacked up in the door watching us train, and it was like five minutes with a gi, and I just looked at Higgin and I go, I ain't never fucking wearing this thing again. | ||
| Take the ghee off, man. | ||
| Fuck it. | ||
| Here, have it back. | ||
| It's a weapon. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Yeah, it's a weapon. | ||
| Especially the guy who's got really good collar chokes. | ||
| Those guys are terrifying. | ||
| They get that thumb behind your neck and you're like, oh Christ. | ||
| It was like he was getting me in position, he would tie up an arm like with a ghee, and then be like, fuck now. | ||
| He's got like what the fuck, dude. | ||
| It's a totally different thing. | ||
| You have to really be aware of grips and pos and you gotta you can't explode your way out of stuff. | ||
| That's the that's what the argument for the ghee is defensively, that you have to get out of every position with technique. | ||
| You can't just pull your arm out, your arm's stuck, so you have to figure out the right way to do this. | ||
| Yeah, where you don't expose yourself because they have too much friction. | ||
| Oh, it's been a minute since I've been like no friction. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you literally it's all friction. | ||
| I mean, it's like you know slip. | ||
| It's yeah, it's a problem. | ||
| If you have one, but the thing, Eddie Bravo always used to say, why would you want to train in that for MMA though? | ||
| He's like, that would be crazy. | ||
| That would be like saying if you play racquetball, you're gonna be better at tennis. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, play tennis. | ||
| You have to play tennis at an elite level. | ||
| You should be you all your grips should be based on control of the body, gable grips and underhooks and overhooks, and like you you can't you're because that's the one thing that we saw with a lot of jujitsu guys in the early days. | ||
| They were so used to grabbing collars and grabbing sleeves, yeah, that when they went to the ground, they lost 30% of their game. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And that's again, that's the evolution of it's why like foundationally geeless grappling, right? | ||
| Because it just teaches you fundamentally what you're about to do if you're gonna get an MMA. | ||
| Yes, right, for sure. | ||
| Foundationally, it's like that's where you need to start. | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| You know, it cuts even to the point where it's like you have because you have a lot of wrestling in there and you have a lot of moves. | ||
| Um like my first times at Abu Dhabi, I can't the only thing I kept saying is small moves, small moves, small moves. | ||
| Like I didn't like like I literally, if I felt uncomfortable, it was these small tiny moves. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, it wasn't this like explosion because it's like fuck, I don't know what I'm gonna explode into. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| You know, so it's foundationally, it's it's yeah, ghys are it's a different sport. | ||
| It's a totally different sport, but I think there's something to be gained from cross-training with the ghee. | ||
| I think the ghee is like it's a fun thing to do, and in most street fights, the realistic thing is you're gonna be wearing clothes. | ||
| Yeah, especially if you're fighting in a place that has a where people are wearing winter coats. | ||
| Oh god, that'd be amazing. | ||
| So much stuff. | ||
| Smorgish board, so many things to choose from, So much control available. | ||
| But for the if you if you really ever wanted to think about competing, I would say just go right into wrestling. | ||
| Wrestling and jujitsu learn that stuff first. | ||
| That's foundational. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| God man, I can't believe you've been involved in this this long, yo. | ||
| I know it's so long. | ||
| I mean, you're a spectator to history. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I feel super lucky. | ||
| Incredibly fortunate. | ||
| You know what I felt the most fortunate? | ||
| During COVID. | ||
| Because everything was locked down. | ||
| You couldn't do anything, but the UFC was still putting on shows and you'd get tested and you'd have to get tested when you got there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everybody was wearing a mask until you sit down next to each other. | ||
| But we were in the Apex Center. | ||
| And I got to watch like world championship fights with no audience. | ||
| I was like, this is crazy. | ||
| And there's only one of maybe maybe there's a hundred people in the whole room that are getting to watch these fights. | ||
| Like when we saw Stepe fight Francis and Garrett when Francis beat him for the world title. | ||
| There was no one in that room, man. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's crazy to watch. | ||
| If you watch it today, it's such a weird video because it's an elite performance by Francis in his prime where he's like seeking destroy going after Steve A patient. | ||
| You know, it's when DC started calling him patient Francis. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And dude, there's no crowd. | ||
| And it's kind of eerie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| It's eerie. | ||
| Cause when he KOs him and he star you hear people go, whoa, oh you're like, it's like people kind of freaked out. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's that's unique. | ||
| It's very unique. | ||
| And I was like, wow, there's so few people that get to be here. | ||
| Oh my gosh, yeah. | ||
| While this fight is happening. | ||
| Like when Justin Gagey fought Tony Ferguson. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| The arena was completely empty. | ||
| It was only the UFC crew and only the people that were working around with the with the UFC. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| There was no crowd. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And if you watch that today, it's bizarre. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| So I even thought like my first fights in Japan, how quiet the crowd was. | ||
| But not that quiet. | ||
| There was no one there. | ||
| The Justin Gagey Tony Ferguson fight, there might have been a I don't know, a hundred people, two hundred people in the whole fucking arena. | ||
| It was nuts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was like so spooky. | |
| It was it was eerie because you the you heard the slaps of the of the punches and kicks way different. | ||
| Oh, I bet. | ||
| Because there's no no people cheering. | ||
| Because there's always people cheering. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's always this background noise. | ||
| The UFC like ha ha and you hear thuds and stuff, and I hear it a little better than most people because I'm wearing the headphones and the microphones are in the but you don't hear it like you hear it when there's an empty arena. | ||
| Wow, there's an empty arena. | ||
| You hear the thugs. | ||
| I need to go back and watch that to see if I can't. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| So that's so I've sat there with with a group of people that like watching somebody check a kick in here shin on shin and just me, nobody in the room getting it but me going, Oh, yeah, having it like ow, I don't care. | ||
| Like I don't care that fucking hurt. | ||
| That hurt I don't care. | ||
| You can poker face that shit all you want. | ||
| Oh, dude, it fucking hurt. | ||
| That's like a big fuck you. | ||
| Like, I know that hurt, dude. | ||
| I know that hurt. | ||
| I know that hurt. | ||
| I mean, the the the COVID times were dark times, but it did make me feel very fortunate to be working for the UFC because to be there live as a you know, a person who's like just love this sport since it first started. | ||
| To be there live while those fights were going on, I'm like, this is nuts. | ||
| That is just one of those where uh you know, again, money can't buy that. | ||
| I mean, it's just one of those experiences like uh like I've had a couple through this process of filmmaking where it's like n no money on earth could buy that experience. | ||
| Like in Venice, standing there, like literally like I'm crying because it like I said, it was at the end of that, it was like therapy. | ||
| Watch watching me and and literally settling into like wow, man, I was a dick. | ||
| You know, I just was really hard on everybody around me. | ||
| And then having Benny next to me, DJ next to me, feeling their emotions and feeling DJ's emotions, because they never experienced anything like it either. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Well, I think anybody trying to do what you were trying to do is gotta be a bit of a dick. | ||
| I don't think I don't think as nice as you were and you were always super friendly. | ||
| There's you're doing something that's really insane. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, you're you're you're cage fighting for a living in front of the world in your underwear. | ||
| Yeah, oh my god, I tell people it's hot pants. | ||
| I go fucking I'm in the hot pants. | ||
| You want to know the truth? | ||
| Fucking hot pants. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I mean, you were a a su a human superhero, built like a human superhero, and you're fighting for who the fuck expects you to be normal. | ||
| No, they do though. | ||
| That's the one where I'm like I'm like, no, I was a selfish, self absorbed. | ||
| And I look at it, I go, okay, all right, I can accept that and and understand that I was trying to raise everybody up. | ||
| And if you couldn't get with a fucking program, I didn't have patience for you. | ||
| Well, you had gone through like when you were talking about these camps, and you had gone through the kind of training that's required to reach the level that you were reached that you had reached. | ||
| You know that you know what's in there for everybody, and people that don't want to come aboard, you get mad at them. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like you're gonna hold me back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's part that's part of it, like understanding like I just didn't have patience for it. | ||
| Cause I didn't have time. | ||
| I didn't have time for it, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's understanding like I know that X, I only have X amount of fucking fights in me, and I gotta try to maximize and that's not gonna work. | ||
| You know, because a lot of that was assembling people that were accountable to me, right? | ||
| And and you know, money can hold people accountable in a certain degree, but at a certain point, it's like, you know, the training partners I had around me, um, it was like, hey, I can help you get to the next level. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That was kind of the enticement. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You just need to make a commitment to me. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Make a commitment to me, and I'll give you that little piece that you're missing. | ||
| You know, and that was kind of the the the part that I helped, you know, go, okay, my training partners be accountable to me, and and I'll help you with that little missing piece of how to be a professional. | ||
| You know, and so I just didn't have patience, I didn't have patience, and it's one where I'm nice, I'm cordial, all this other stuff, but uh you know, at the end of the day, I was like, I was demanding. | ||
| Do you think that maybe that that kind of drive played a factor in you having an issue with substances? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cause you just wanted relief, yeah. | ||
| Maybe relief from the mindset. | ||
| Yeah, I uh you know, part of it was that um you know, you almost like I almost buy into the bullshit and I can never be this perfect being that I was trying to be, and so I'm always falling short, and that feeling of always falling short and this just like you know, I couldn't live up to what I thought I needed to live up to. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so that was hiding, and you know, I'm just gonna get a little relief from it. | ||
| You know, it's gonna so I can unplug. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, and it was just one of those where it started with pain, you know, realistically. | ||
| It started like uh fuck, I'm doing something that inherently I'm gonna have pain. | ||
| Yeah, you know, and it was this progression from that of like, you know, from pain to I didn't know what an opiate addiction was. | ||
| Yeah, in all fairness, I think we should tell people uh to b back when this was all going on, the opiate epidemic had not occurred yet. | ||
| Yeah, and people did not know. | ||
| And they were also telling a lot of people when they were taking these pain medications that they were not addicted. | ||
| Not addictive. | ||
| Yeah, they argued it in court. | ||
| They argued it in court that it was not addicted. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Which is really crazy. | ||
| Which I didn't understand. | ||
| Well, fuck, I didn't understand. | ||
| Like, I didn't understand, like when I took it the level that I took it when I stopped, tried to stop. | ||
| I didn't understand what being dope sick was. | ||
| I didn't understand like getting like physically sick because I don't have the substance in my body. | ||
| Like I would get diarrhea, I couldn't walk from here to the end of the room without having to sit down for a half hour. | ||
| It's almost like a parasite. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's almost like a parasite that y needs you to keep feeding it to stay alive. | ||
| Because like, how else could getting poison out of your body be bad? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How nuts is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That you want it bad, you want to get it, you want to get the poison back in you? | ||
| Like what kind of weird and that biological mechanism is that? | ||
| The crazy part is the first recognition of like that I'm stuck, that I don't know the answer of like because I'm caught between, you know, like, all right, I'm going through this physical withdrawal and everything else that comes with it, or I'm just gonna go seek the thing that's causing the physical withdrawal because it makes me feel better. | ||
| You know, so you're caught in this loop of just bullshit, right? | ||
| And then you go, I'll just have a little. | ||
| Yeah, just that's it. | ||
| I just need to feel better just a little bit. | ||
| And you know, so it's one of those where it's like there wasn't the internet back then. | ||
| I couldn't fucking get on and like, oh, let's Google Something, you know, it's like, wasn't that? | ||
| So how did you figure out that when did you realize like I've got a problem? | ||
| Um God man. | ||
| I always from probably age 14. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I knew I knew when I first drank. | ||
| First had a drink that I drank until I was drunk. | ||
| Like 'cause that was this taste of Jack Daniels, and it was like, oh, this feels good. | ||
| It was like a not a normal reaction. | ||
| Looking back on it, going, oh, so I've always had a propensity towards it. | ||
| And then you know, it functions both ways because I get addicted to the sport. | ||
| I get addicted to the routine. | ||
| I get addicted to getting in a ring and taking someone's will. | ||
| I get addicted to the crowd, the championship, the adulations, the this. | ||
| It's like that's who I am, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's a it's a contributor to my success, but it's also contributed to my to my demise. | ||
| You know, in both ways, it's like, you know, from an early age, I understood like, hey, you know, this could be a problem, you know. | ||
| And then when wrestling came along, I didn't drink during wrestling. | ||
| Like during that whole season, I didn't drink. | ||
| You know, in college I didn't drink during wrestling season. | ||
| Like when, you know, when it's like, okay, uh, you know, I'm in recovery, I have seven years of sobriety now. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's it's for me, it's it's one of those foundational things of like, oh, that's what I've been missing my whole life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you keep repeating that term for a good reason. | ||
| Foundational is everything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like having like like morals and ethics, that's foundational. | ||
| Foundational. | ||
| Having your health, that's foundational. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, because it's just one of those where understanding like those are the building blocks. | ||
| Because if I don't have those things in place, nothing else fucking stands up. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| You know, I mean, it's not it sounds like the duh. | ||
| No, but it's an important thing to reiterate because everybody should hear it. | ||
| You know, and coming. | ||
| It's a huge part. | ||
| It's a huge part. | ||
| It's it with most things in life. | ||
| Most things in life. | ||
| You have to have structure, some kind of structure. | ||
| You know, figuring out like my son, what like what makes him function, structure. | ||
| He he's told me this. | ||
| He goes, You should have been harder on me. | ||
| I'm like, fuck. | ||
| I'm like, okay. | ||
| I'm like, all right. | ||
| I didn't I didn't know hilarious. | ||
| Yeah, I didn't know. | ||
| I'm gonna give you four stars, Dad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Could have given you five, but you weren't fucking iron on them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, fuck up. | |
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But he functions best with structure. | ||
| He's just one of those individuals that are built like that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I think part of that is gotta probably have seen what you did and genetics and there's it's like some learned memory in there, probably. | ||
| So I would think I think there is. | ||
| I don't think we totally understand where personalities come from. | ||
| It's a mixture of like oh gosh, spirits and hormones and genetics and where you are bored and what part of the fucking moon's facing this way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god, yeah. | |
| I always wondered if that shit's real. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my gosh, it's like, yeah, well, Jupiter's orbiting around my Saturn and I always wondered like why are they so into this? | |
| Is there something to this? | ||
| Because if there is, I'm I would feel real stupid if I was ignoring it the whole time. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Um listening to Joe Dispenza, some of his stuff. | ||
| It changed my whole it it's changed some of my perspective of how like just having um we're energy, right? | ||
| We're energy, and your your emotional energy is transferred to me. | ||
| It's like why I was addicted to dawn, because of that exchange of negative energy, right? | ||
| Yeah, back and forth. | ||
| It's like a being an addict. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'm addicted to the drama. | ||
| You're also addicted to making up. | ||
| Yeah, that's the other one. | ||
| Yeah, because that's a feel good too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Sometimes people want to get in fights just to make up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hell yeah. | |
| I mean, it's the whole process of that fucked up shit. | ||
| It's how fucked up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's all fun. | |
| Oh my god. | ||
| What do you hate fun? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god. | |
| So it's it's that really fucked up part of like understanding, like looking back on it, going, Oh shit. | ||
| Bro, when you guys were fighting in the movie right before you were about to fight Fov Chench and it is Oh my god. | ||
| It is such a crazy scene. | ||
| It's really well done, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god, it's really well done. | |
| It it's it's how Emily flips that switch of like fuck you, motherfucker. | ||
| Yeah, you well, you wanted me to come. | ||
| It's like, oh my god, it's Like fuck. | ||
| That's what does it every fucking time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's amazing. | |
| Like that little, like, oh God, I guess I did want to come. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm fucking asshole. | |
| It's amazing. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| It's so realistic. | ||
| I mean, they nailed it. | ||
| They really nailed it. | ||
| How weird is it for you to watch like a segment of your life be recreated in a movie. | ||
| Is it surr- I mean it's it's so surreal, I've used I've like I haven't found another word to explain. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It seems like there's not a word that's figured out for that one. | ||
| There's not. | ||
| Because it's just one where it's like, you know what on the other side of it, and this is just me going, you know what? | ||
| I'm grateful. | ||
| I I have a sense of humility. | ||
| I have a sense of just being like deep profound gratitude that DJ, Emily Benny, everybody involved in the film wanted to take this on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like that's amazing. | ||
| Because I looked at it going, like a lot of it's self-worth, going, you really want to do a movie about my life? | ||
| About me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, what the fuck? | |
| Like, really? | ||
| And then understanding like what they see in me and the belief they have in the story and everything that's around it. | ||
| Because at the end of it, it's redemption. | ||
| It's like where I am today. | ||
| I'm so thankful that I have my health. | ||
| I'm so thankful that I have my sobriety. | ||
| I'm so thankful that I get to experience these things and share, you know, my experience, strength, and hope, they call it, right? | ||
| You know, with other people and give them going, look, look at all the fucking bullshit I went through, and I'm on the other side of it. | ||
| You know, so whatever you're going through, anything's possible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anything. | ||
| Truly. | ||
| I mean, uh, and the thing about what you did is that like I said, I thought it was so brave that you did it publicly when you did the Smashing Machine documentary. | ||
| And I was thinking, like, did you were you happy that you were getting on film, so like maybe this like would make you get clean. | ||
| Was there any of that? | ||
| Ooh, there's a little bit of that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because part of it is that I didn't, I didn't at that point, the only person on the planet that knew what I was doing was Don. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Nobody else on the planet knew what I was doing. | ||
| And so when John had put the camera down, and he's he's like, dude, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| Like you're not being truthful with us. | ||
| And I'm like, well, at that moment I kinda went, fuck you, get the fuck out of my house. | ||
| You're done filming. | ||
| And there was this, there's this moment where it was like I needed to tell somebody, and I go, okay. | ||
| Like, here's what I've been doing. | ||
| And I don't know who to tell. | ||
| I don't know how to tell it. | ||
| I'm just gonna show you. | ||
| And that's when it shows me shooting up. | ||
| It was that moment where I'm like, you want to know what I'm doing? | ||
| Well, I'm I'm gonna show you. | ||
| Because it was one of those where it's like it felt like a weight got lifted. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like all of a sudden it's just like, oh fuck. | ||
| Did you ever think about not going through with the documentary? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So here's what they ended up doing. | ||
| So I didn't see one stitch of footage at all until I saw the complete documentary in Los Angeles at the Dolby Sound Studios. | ||
| So it was like a couple of years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Not a second of footage. | ||
| So I sit down, the documentary as it appeared on HBO, right? | ||
| And the filmmakers aren't watching the fucking film. | ||
| They're watching me watch the film. | ||
| Right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| There's like eight of us in the in the movie theater. | ||
| I get the film's done, lights come up, and I literally stand up and John Greenhall goes, What do you think? | ||
| And I go, I don't have to get back with you. | ||
| And I just walk straight out, don't say another fucking word, get in my truck, start driving. | ||
| Back then the phones, you know, like in the car, he's calling me on the phone, and I'm and he goes, You're gonna be okay. | ||
| I go, I have enough fucking clue. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I I honestly don't know. | ||
| Because the the agreement we had in place was I had I had final veto over the content of it. | ||
| But he never showed you the content? | ||
| Until that day I saw it in the Dolby Sound Studios in Los Angeles. | ||
| The content, the the whole film, I didn't see any of it until that moment. | ||
| So literally I drove home and John was like uh what I go, I I you have to give me a day. | ||
| You have to fucking give me a day. | ||
| I I just fuck it. | ||
| I I said, I don't Know, I don't know if I can go forward with that. | ||
| I don't think I can. | ||
| I don't think I can. | ||
| It's just too fucking much. | ||
| Okay, so you did have the power to veto it. | ||
| Yeah, I did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I did at the at the very what made you decide not to. | |
| Um John had said something to me like um I guess it's like a uh parable where it's like if you live your life and you've saved one person's life, you've had a worthy life. | ||
| Meaning that if somebody watches this and sees your struggles that you gone through and sees the hope that you have in that in your recovery, it gives them hope or gives them because what keeps you addicted is shame. | ||
| The shame of what I was doing. | ||
| It kept me kept me quiet. | ||
| I didn't fucking who the fuck am I gonna tell? | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You don't want them to know. | ||
| No, you don't want them to know. | ||
| Like fuck no. | ||
| And so that shame is what usually keeps people, but if they see me and the film go through this process and this deep revealing process of what was going on with me, it gives them an opportunity to go, well I I can I can ask for help too. | ||
| When you got through the film, how how long did it take you to get clean? | ||
| Um I got clean off of off of off of morphine off of the new bane I was doing um right after all the way through the Volchanchin or all the way through the uh Fajita fight, and I was clean for started drinking, | ||
| which is a whole nother topic, but you know, I hadn't done narcotics in you know, probably like three years after that, and then I started up again, and then it's was this process of like start stop start stop start stop, and then the thing that predominantly dominated me was alcohol, because it's socially acceptable, easily accessible, yeah, you know, all these different factors of it. | ||
| And so that's eventually like I've like I've said, uh my so my mom passed away September 3rd um 1996. | ||
| And uh, so my son knows this, and so my sobriety date's September 4th. | ||
| And so my son asked me that day, September 3rd, he's like, Dad, I know you need to drink today, uh, because your mom died, uh, but would you stop tomorrow? | ||
| And at the time I thought it was just another empty promise of like, yeah, yeah, I'll I'll stop, I'll stop. | ||
| And next day I got up and there's just something a little different or whatever it was that day. | ||
| And I stopped asking the questions why, because it's irrelevant, right? | ||
| Um, and from that day till today I'm sober. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Makes no fucking sense. | ||
| But it does. | ||
| It's like you get better at sobriety, just like you get better at all other things in life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You get better at figuring out why. | ||
| And you know, there's also the reality that I think a lot of people need to take into consideration when it comes to fighting, is that uh a lot of guys are they're self-diagnosing or or or self-dispensing something to make themselves feel better. | ||
| Yeah, because they've taken a lot of damage. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And they feel like shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's alcohol's a big one. | ||
| A big contributing factor. | ||
| A lot of a lot of former fighters become alcoholics. | ||
| Cocaine's another one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cause it's one of those where I thought I I literally woke up, Joe, and this is no shit. | ||
| Like waking up going, okay, I don't know what's wrong with me, but there's something fucking wrong. | ||
| Like there's something wrong with me. | ||
| And understanding like all this different stuff, head trauma and all these different things and factors. | ||
| I I literally thought I was like going off the deep end. | ||
| Like I was like, okay, alcohol or drugs was the only relief I got for what the fuck was going on in my head. | ||
| So the thing what what did it it was it past a specific fight? | ||
| Um it was it was literally towards it was after 2006. | ||
| It's like 2006, 2007, 2008. | ||
| I stopped fighting 2009. | ||
| I didn't know what else to do. | ||
| All my identity was tied up in being a fighter, you know, and understanding like these simple words of like fighting's what I did, it's not who I am. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'm much more than that, right? | ||
| I'm much more than a fighter. | ||
| And understanding once I got to that point, you know, It's like that's when some of the relief came in, but part of it, my head, like there's something fucking I don't know what it is. | ||
| And so I was just seeking relief because of like there's something that's fucked up in my head. | ||
| And uh I didn't know what it was. | ||
| Didn't know what it was. | ||
| Still to this day I look at it like you know, it was I call it a god shot because it it was one where it's like something needs to change because this is unsustainable, you know, unsustainable with the alcohol, unsustainable with what's going on in my head, and you know, get sober, things quiet down. | ||
| You know, it's actually quiet down. | ||
| That first year it took uh that of sobriety to to clear out all the bullshit that was in my head, going, I just need neutral. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And once I hit neutral, it's like, oh wow, I can build on this, you know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it's it's it's been incredible. | |
| It makes no sense at all, but it makes perfect sense. | ||
| No, it does make sense because you're willing to articulate your deep thoughts, your your very vulnerable thoughts on you know who you are as a guy who was, you know, one point in time, one of the scariest fucking human beings walking the face of the earth. | ||
| And you're you know, it's that's important for people to know and to hear and to that and to recognize that like man, a lot of people can get caught in that trap. | ||
| They can't think you couldn't. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, just be a little bit more compassionate and understanding and appreciate people for s telling a very difficult truth about their life. | ||
| Because I think people need to hear that stuff. | ||
| They do. | ||
| They do like I said, you know what I understood, like giving them the permission for the documentary, saying to John, going, Okay, if this could change or help one person, then uh my life has value, right? | ||
| Because I helped another person. | ||
| And then when it premiered at HBO at the studios, there there's a this was like the whole crowning moment is having like a sixty-five-year-old grandmother come over to me who I would have nothing in common with and say to me, you know what? | ||
| That was beautiful. | ||
| My grandson, he's got a drinking problem, and I don't know what to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| You know, it's like this this door had been opened. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Where she felt comfortable to sit down and talk with me about her grandson, and it was like this moment of like, oh fuck, this what this is what it's about. | ||
| It's about opening that door up so people can connect and go, Well, if he can do it, I can I can I can tell my truth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, because it's difficult, man. | ||
| Addictions are just I mean, shaming and they keep you in a box, and it's just this it's it's a horrible existence. | ||
| Did anybody ever recommend Ibogaine to you? | ||
| No. | ||
| I've heard of that though. | ||
| So they're doing that now in Texas. | ||
| Um the Ibogain initiative uh passed through thanks to former governor Rick Perry, Republican, who uh through working with veterans found that a lot of veterans who struggle with addiction and who uh PTSD that Ibogaine is incredibly effective. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And it's not a recreational drug, it's not funny. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| But it's a psychedelic that takes twenty-four hours and it's apparently like brutally introspective, but literally corrects addictive pathways, like whatever the connection is in the brain that causes you to be addicted to things, yeah, it can disrupt those in a very bizarre and unique way. | ||
| And it's something like eighty plus percent effective with one dose of getting people to stay off of narcotics, cigarettes, alcohol. | ||
| And I think with two doses, it's in the nineties. | ||
| So if you do two different hybrid gain ceremonies, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's it. | |
| It was in a yeah, they were going, most people were going. | ||
| My friend Ed Clay uh did it down in in Mexico, and he even had a place that he was running down in Mexico because you couldn't do it in America, because it's illegal here. | ||
| But it it literally stops the train of addiction dead in its tracks. | ||
| They don't totally understand how it does it, but it's very effective. | ||
| I know a lot of veterans who have to be. | ||
| So they've talked about relief like uh the neuroplasticity of of drugs like that to create new pathways instantaneously. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'd like to say those words, but I don't really know what they mean. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what I mean? | |
| When I say 'em, I'm just faking. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know that's how you're supposed to say it, so I'll say it, but respectfully, I don't know what the fuck's going on. | |
| What I do know is the my friends that I know that have gone and donned the out of the game, It's been massively effective. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Get them off drugs, get them off drinking. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Get them, you know, they just change their perspective. | ||
| They they go, okay, I get it now. | ||
| They just realize where they were tripping over their own dick, like what they were doing wrong. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Quick. | ||
| I mean, what what else is like that where like 24 hours later you can get a totally new perspective in life and be cured of addiction? | ||
| And somehow another that's illegal. | ||
| That's illegal, but the stuff that they're addicted to is not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god, that's like you know that's fucking bizarro land, right? | |
| Oh my god. | ||
| Total bizarro world. | ||
| Yeah, none of that makes sense, man. | ||
| I mean, it just that's so that's a whole nother rabbit hole. | ||
| It really doesn't make any sense. | ||
| No. | ||
| Like what we just said makes it's just like, no, it should be the opposite. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It should be the opposite. | ||
| This is so stupid. | ||
| Is it just one where it's like if that stuff existed back then, it it would have cut short. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It did exist, but it just didn't exist here because we're corrupt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so there again, kudos to Governor Rick Berry, because what he's done is like open the doorway to right wing leaning people going, oh, maybe we shouldn't dismiss all these things that God put here on Earth. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| Maybe some of these things are actually here to heal your brain and we're ignoring them because you can't patent them. | ||
| Like that might be the thing too. | ||
| Not saying there's anything else on the circle drugs. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But I'm saying that this also might cure you, and it's read of it's it's a plan. | ||
| So that's again in the last five, six years, alternative perspectives has been just paramount in my just in opening me up, you know, to having a better understanding of like how rigid I was and how how just this thin line of thinking I had had for so long about stuff like this. | ||
| You know, and so you know, it's just been this incredible um experience to get to here because I've had to open up. | ||
| I've had to go, okay, I'm gonna do meditation, I'm gonna do this. | ||
| I did I did meditation for fighting, but it was visual meditation. | ||
| How the fuck I was gonna dismantle a dude in the ring, right? | ||
| I would sit and do but this is meditation to access different parts of my brain, right? | ||
| To try to get into delta waves and you know, theta, beta, you know, all these different things, so I can open different spots in my brain up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, and so it's just been this you know, my wife, she's Nietzsche Rem Buddhist. | ||
| You know, number numyo horenge co. | ||
| She cheats every morning. | ||
| Duncan does that. | ||
| Yeah, nummyo horenga go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So the Buddha you have the Buddha, the gold Buddha you have, yeah. | |
| We have one in our house, not quite that big. | ||
| Oh, that's yeah. | ||
| So she's Nietzsche and Buddhist, and it's one of those things where she got me to start chanting. | ||
| Um I don't do it as much now, but the first three, four years we were together, it's like I chanted with her regularly. | ||
| And it's one of those where it's like harmonics and vibrations and frequencies, you know, and understanding like man, we know so little, but realistically, all this stuff through like all the different stuff they discovered in Egypt with the sound chambers and all the different things. | ||
| I mean, it's a whole different thing where we just ignored. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's like, well shit, we we don't even we're so archaic in our thinking. | ||
| Well, I think what happens sometimes is thinking and ideas get connected to people. | ||
| And you think that the ideas and whatever you're whatever you think you know about history or about the the way things can be done. | ||
| Yeah, like it's all it's all been solved, kids. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like settle down. | ||
| Well, everybody knows. | ||
| No, no, no, no, I don't think they do. | ||
| I don't think that you should show me how they built that. | ||
| Yeah, show me who the fuck figured this out. | ||
| Like maybe they knew about medicine that you're ignoring because you can't patent it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| These people have been making ayahuasca for 10,000 years in the jungle. | ||
| Like you don't tell me Yeah. | ||
| Oh my god, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Settle down. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Settle down. | ||
| There's there's all the things that you think are valid, plus other stuff. | ||
| That's the thing that people have to recognize. | ||
| It's you can't be rigid with what you believe in. | ||
| Because uh sometimes it's wrong. | ||
| That's the part where I can't believe how much I've opened up and been just receptive. | ||
| Um and a lot of it's because I'm sober and it's like fuck, I don't know shit, man. | ||
| Like when you look at the bigger picture stuff, I I know so little. | ||
| Dude, nobody knows shit. | ||
| That's the scariest thing. | ||
| There's a bunch of people pretending they've got it figured out, but they're full of shit too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Every one of us is a talking monkey flying through space. | ||
| We are in a convertible organic spaceship hurling through the universe. | ||
| That alone. | ||
| Once you start with that, that's your foundational. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| This is foundational to your view of the world. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| The problem with us is that we don't fucking see the stars anymore. | ||
| That's a giant problem with human beings. | ||
| We've screwed ourselves up with light pollution. | ||
| And it's not a coincidence that the people that live in the most populated cities are the most diluted, ridiculous people that are the furthest away from nature. | ||
| Not that they're not awesome people, but what I'm saying is like you you are so far away from nature. | ||
| You're so diluted from being like a wild animal. | ||
| So you know what I've actually done the last company? | ||
| I've hugged trees. | ||
| I've literally hugged trees and it feels beautiful. | ||
| Yeah, that's real. | ||
| It it really is like uh walking barefoot, right? | ||
| Like on grass and getting connected. | ||
| And you know, I at first you would have said it to me 10 years ago. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, okay, whatever dad. | ||
| You know, but it's like, okay, who says it who says it's not? | ||
| I think nature's a vitamin. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I think plants. | ||
| Hey, where did the term tree hugger come from? | ||
| Did it come from the time where hippies were doing acid? | ||
| Probably. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because then that would make so much more sense. | |
| Because if you were on ass and you hug the tree, you would be like, Oh, I love you. | ||
| I love you tree. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're so fucking amazing. | |
| Oh shit, that originated a while ago. | ||
| Oh from a series of nonviolent environmental protests in India, beginning with uh Bishnoy Bishwing. | ||
| Bishnort community in 1730. | ||
| Wow who physically clung to trees to prevent them from being cut down. | ||
| See, those people are probably on mushrooms. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| I was like, that's why that's why they worship cattle. | ||
| That's what I think. | ||
| I I wouldn't have to do it. | ||
| Why else would all those poor people not eat cows? | ||
| Oh my god, cows are so good. | ||
| But doesn't that make no sense? | ||
| It makes no sense at all. | ||
| It makes no sense. | ||
| You guys have food everywhere and you're starving. | ||
| And your your religion won't let you eat that food. | ||
| Boy, okay. | ||
| How'd you come to this? | ||
| The only thing that makes any sense to me is those cows were giving you the mushrooms. | ||
| They had to mushrooms go. | ||
| That's what they grow. | ||
| The best source of psilocybin is cow poop. | ||
| Duncan used to live in uh my friend Duncan Trussell used to live in Asheville, North Carolina. | ||
| And uh the farmers out there used to put a certain kind of feed into their diet to make sure that fungus couldn't grow in their shit so that the the kids wouldn't go in the field and pick the mushrooms. | ||
| Because there were so many spores in that area. | ||
|
unidentified
|
These kids would go just get bags of mushrooms and go to other planets. | |
| So the farmer had feed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The farmer to feed is some anti mushroom. | |
| I want to get still there. | ||
| I wonder if it is I bet there's parts of this country where they just grow naturally all over the room. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would imagine. | |
| I would imagine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I'd imagine. | ||
| I was supposed to actually go down and to Brazil and ayahuasca. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Isn't it crazy that you have to go to Brazil to do that too? | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But all these things. | ||
| A friend of mine uh we actually went down to stem cells in uh Panama. | ||
| It's called Origins. | ||
| And so we go down there and he starts explaining like this. | ||
| For him, it was like seeing the face of God. | ||
| He said it changed his whole entire uh whole entire being. | ||
| And he's like, it's in the jungle. | ||
| So there's no like it's dum-dum-dum-dum. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| And he goes, it's it's it's life changing. | ||
| I just picture Alex Pereira walking towards totally, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| Like that's a scary motherfucker, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I swear. | |
| He's the scariest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, dude. | |
| His walk in is the scary. | ||
| Oh my god, man. | ||
| It's the dopest, too. | ||
| Oh, it's that music starts playing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's this like I'm coming to get you. | |
| Nothing you could do about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, he's built for one thing. | ||
| And I bumped in him in Chicago and like he's built for one thing. | ||
| He's built the fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's he's built the fuck you up. | ||
| Oh, he's built the fight. | ||
| Weird weirdly strong guy. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Yeah, like literally, it's like like he shouldn't be Able to do what he's doing. | ||
| It's like you know, I go, there's no wind up in his kicks, his low kicks, nothing. | ||
| There's no no tells. | ||
| No tell. | ||
| Like you look at it. | ||
| Really sneaky. | ||
| But he's got unbelievable power. | ||
| But the thing is, he puts it together with technique. | ||
| It's not like he's just waiting after you, trying to exchange with you and land first. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, he's setting you up, and while he's setting you up, he's taking your legs away and you're not seeing the tells. | ||
| They're not there at all. | ||
| Yep, that's it. | ||
| They don't move. | ||
| I was trying to. | ||
| And you're like, and that's a whole thing is that you go, okay, you're you're thinking you're gonna pick up on it, and it's like no, you're never going to. | ||
| Yeah, he's very clever with that. | ||
| And he does it with both sides, too. | ||
| He's just as good with the left leg with a switch kick when he's fighting a southpaw. | ||
| He just starts chewing up those calves really quick, man. | ||
| I can't believe that he's even a thing. | ||
| Is that that nerve from the Yeah, it's a horrible nerve. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| That wasn't a thing when you were fighting. | ||
| No, it wasn't fancy. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Oh my god, it's you have to know it now. | ||
| Oh my gosh, like looking at it going, oh my god, he's taking him out. | ||
| He can't, he can't walk. | ||
| Look at it's like five kicks in. | ||
| You're like, oh fuck. | ||
| He can't push off of it. | ||
| Isn't it crazy that you went your whole career without seeing that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I like where like who discovered it. | |
| Michael Bisping. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even Michael Bisping said it. | ||
| I went through my whole career without getting calf kicked. | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| World champion. | ||
| Never never got calf kicked. | ||
| Like that's a good thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just amazing. | ||
| But it's amazing that it came along so late. | ||
| It's on because it's it's unbelievable you would think that something that looks that innocent is so debilitating. | ||
| Well, Benson Henderson was the first guy to start implementing it in the UFC. | ||
| And then uh Mighty Mouse did it to Henry Sehudo and made his leg go limp. | ||
| Did you ever remember remember that? | ||
| He started he started doing it. | ||
| But this was like around the time where it started catching on. | ||
| There was one fight between Dustin Poirier and Jim Miller. | ||
| Oh, there was a horrible one. | ||
| There was a lot of calf kicks in that fight. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's the copycat league, right? | ||
| It's a copycat thing, like watching another fight or go, shit, I'm gonna try it. | ||
| Now it's see everyone has it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everyone has it. | ||
| You have to have it. | ||
| And you have you can't take too many. | ||
| No. | ||
| No matter who you are. | ||
| No, it doesn't matter. | ||
| I mean, it's just one of those where I'm so vulnerable. | ||
| It's it's one of those where it's like there's there's other than checking it or getting out of the way, there's not a fucking shit you can do. | ||
| Well, Pereira has a very interesting way of checking it. | ||
| So he checks it like the hacky sack way. | ||
| Do you know what I'm talking about? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So like when you throw a kick at him, he just lifts his leg. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He just lifts his shit. | ||
| He le he has his knee there and he just picks his his leg up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the kick just kind of goes with it. | ||
| And he goes, it takes all the impact away. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Because he was saying, as far as checking it, like you don't want to check it because it fucking hurts too much. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Like even if you're even if you're just checking it, now that leg is fucked up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why check it when you can just do that like hacky sack thing? | ||
| And he was showing us with it. | ||
| Like, see, oh, that's a different one. | ||
| He does that one. | ||
| That's a different hacky sack one where he uses the back of his foot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But what I mean is uh he is picking up his leg like at the knee, his ankle is coming up parallel. | ||
| Yeah to the floor. | ||
| I know exactly what you're talking about. | ||
| You're not gonna see it, but he's just uh he's clever. | ||
| There's a lot of cleverness, and it seems to be very creative, like the style that he has, like how he figures out how to know he's just gonna land one. | ||
| So he's got it's very creative little ways to chop at the legs. | ||
| Yeah, I still I still think Sean O'Malley's got the best feints. | ||
| Oh, he's got phenomenal feints. | ||
| I mean, just so I I remember watching him before he got to the UFC, and a friend of mine was like, No, no, no, you gotta you gotta watch this kid. | ||
| You gotta watch this kid. | ||
| You know, and watching him going, it would be like this just again and again and again, and just realizing, oh fuck, that's what he was setting up. | ||
| Yeah, it was 14 feints, right? | ||
| To get to what he wanted to get to, and then it was like a feint here, feint on this side, faint here, and he all of a sudden he's got a tendency, and now it's like attack time. | ||
| Did you ever see the Eddie Winlin one? | ||
| Uh he faints an uppercut and he comes over the top with a right hand. | ||
| I've seen it, but I haven't seen it. | ||
| Oh, you gotta see it. | ||
| Yeah, it's so pretty. | ||
| It's one of his prettiest knockouts. | ||
| He like he like stepped in like fainted like he was gonna throw an uppercut and turned it into a left hand. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god. | |
| It was so clean. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, he's watching stuff. | |
| Watch this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Watch how I think it's amazing. | |
| Look at that. | ||
| He faints a left uppercut and comes over the top with the right hand. | ||
| Watch that again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's one of those words. | |
| That is that's silly. | ||
| Bro, that's so good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my God. | |
| That's like one of those things where it's like you can't teach it. | ||
| It's so slick. | ||
| It's such a slick move. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cannot teach it. | |
| Did you watch the Terrence Crawford Canelo Halvarez five? | ||
| Yeah, I did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoo. | |
| Talk about slick. | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| Crawford's just out boxed, man. | ||
| Like fucking unreal. | ||
| Who's ever done that? | ||
| Who's ever jumped up two weight classes like that? | ||
| Scary. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Scary. | ||
| So realizing like watching it going, Carnello has such a bully style. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's gonna get in, he's gonna bang with you. | ||
| He's gonna power. | ||
| And watching Canelo just or Crawford just box. | ||
| Just box. | ||
| Beautifully. | ||
| Oh like I watch the whole thing. | ||
| I'm like, that's art. | ||
| That is art. | ||
| He's so clever and just like the way and it got to the point where he got so comfortable, he's like pit patting them, and then what? | ||
| Bop bop bop, bang. | ||
| And you're like you're watching like wow, it's towards the end, towards the final rounds. | ||
| Really started getting comfortable and really started putting it on them. | ||
| I'm like, this is amazing. | ||
| You know, one of those rare, like that's history, obviously, right? | ||
| Watching somebody do you shouldn't be able to do that. | ||
| You shouldn't be able to fight at that weight for the first time ever. | ||
| Against one of the greatest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Undisputed greatest of all time. | |
| And do what you did. | ||
| It's it is beyond like my favorite an outlier. | ||
| You're beyond an outlier. | ||
| You're something, you're an anomaly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Something special. | |
| I believe he's 37. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One of those where you shouldn't be able to do that by by any account. | ||
| By any account. | ||
| 37, my body was so wrecked. | ||
| I'm like, fuck you. | ||
| You know, I do I can barely go bowling. | ||
| I was I watched a video of Dolph Lundgrid the other day. | ||
| Like I that guy was like, remember in Rocky 3, he was the first guy that was scientifically trained. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whenever I think of like UFC fighters like you absolutely get talking about guys doing everything scientifically. | ||
| Dolph Lundgren in Rocky 3. | ||
| Yeah, oh my god, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was. | |
| It was a Rocky 4. | ||
| Rocky 4, right? | ||
| That was a stereotype. | ||
| That was a stereotype like the Russians, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, they're manufactured. | |
| You know, like biologically manufactured. | ||
| I came from a test tube, you know, type of thing. | ||
| He totally looked like a Russian experiment in that movie. | ||
| He did. | ||
| That was the first time I saw a Versa climber. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was like, whoa, conditioning. | |
| Look at that. | ||
| He's unstoppable. | ||
| Yeah, I was on a versa climber two days ago. | ||
| They're brutal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, fuck, I hate him. | |
| Not a lot of fun. | ||
| No. | ||
| Not an enjoyable idea. | ||
| All the things that suck. | ||
| All the things that suck. | ||
| Like going shit, just you know, but it's one of those where I'm like, you know what? | ||
| I don't have to do it for anything other than the challenge of just doing it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know? | |
| I think everybody needs a little bit of a challenge. | ||
| And just getting over the challenge of doing like I'm doing 45 minutes on this elliptical machine, period. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's it. | |
| Yeah, that's good for you. | ||
| Oh, it's huge. | ||
| It's huge. | ||
| It's giant. | ||
| Because it's just like when I train the comes small wins, right? | ||
| I just need a win. | ||
| It's like some days I just need fucking a win. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I don't care what it is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, I just need a win. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Being nice to my wife, you know, being nice to, you know, just whatever it is, I just need something that day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, it's like, fuck, I'm gonna go to the gym, I don't get out of fucking thing that I hate, and I'm gonna fucking do it for 45 minutes and I'm and I'm that's a win. | ||
| And I think if you looked at the proportion, like if you looked at this if there was a study done on people that are happy versus people that are not in this life, I bet the people that would gen generally say they're happy get more of those. | ||
| I get more of those wins in over themselves. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Get more of those doing some shit that you did want to do, but you did it. | ||
| Yeah, I'm done. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I feel better. | ||
| And that that's that's the for me, that's the link to get to where I am today. | ||
| Is that I didn't understand how huge those components were. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because when you're competing and stuff, it's easy because every day you need you need to get wins. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you're stacking them, right? | ||
| I'm stacking them. | ||
| I need every day. | ||
| I need a good training day. | ||
| I need a good training day. | ||
| And then you get to regular life, it's like, okay, let's the fuck I'm not I'm not like what's my doing anything. | ||
| Yeah, what's my win letting somebody in on traffic? | ||
| That's that's a giant problem for fighters too, because you're you're you're at fucking 9,000 RPMs for years, and then all of a sudden boom. | ||
| And you're supposed to go to normal life now. | ||
| No, no, and I didn't so this is this is again where fucking this idea of like of like I didn't understand how much of myself was tied up in it and how much I needed to go, it's what I did, not who I am, and understanding like this who I am has a lot longer career than this fighter. | ||
| Yeah, it's it's it's understanding who I like really getting into the fact that you know I'm much more than just a fighter. | ||
| You know, and understanding like, okay, what is that? | ||
| You know, I'm I'm a compassionate person, I'm empathetic, you know, um, you know, I'm trying to be kind and in understanding the people around me. | ||
| I try to bring um I call it emotional sobriety, right? | ||
| Like if I'm emotionally honest with the people in my life, everybody else is fits in. | ||
| If I'm emotionally dishonest, people get fucked up. | ||
| My environment gets all fucked up. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, so it's like it's understanding these these aspects about my life going, oh God, man, I need to make these the important parts of where I'm building and what I'm building in my life. | ||
| And it's been you know, it's been a process. | ||
| It's been some days I'm like, fuck this, man. | ||
| Fuck this. | ||
| And other days I'm like, that was just a day. | ||
| As long as you can keep that clarity of knowing that these fuck this days are gonna pass. | ||
| Oh god, yeah. | ||
| Well, I call well in my hall of fame speech, I call it, you know, s at like when I was first getting sober, it was like I just I would try to get through a minute. | ||
| I go, I just need to make it through this minute, that's all. | ||
| And then I just need to make it through this next minute. | ||
| This I just need to get through this next. | ||
| Some of them are fucking hard because I just wanted to fuck fuck this, because I'm so uncomfortable. | ||
| You know, and I'd get through that minute, I go, I just need to make it through this hour. | ||
| I need to just make it through this day, and then it'd be this week, you know, and then all of a sudden it's like a month goes by, but I'd still have to go back, I just need to make it through this fucking minute. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, like it like so it like it's just it's just how I'm built. | ||
| You know, like this this just self that just is so restless inside, you know. | ||
| It's like fuck, you know. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Do you think that that's that was accelerated by fighting? | ||
| Or do you think that was a pre-existing thing that drew you to fighting? | ||
| Um I think it was accelerated by fighting. | ||
| You know, I do. | ||
| Um a lot of it just, you know, I'm a competitor. | ||
| Being a competitor allowed me to fight, but fighting was like hurting another human being to the level that I had to hurt them. | ||
| That was a whole nother experience. | ||
| You know, it's like I could wrestle, I can compete, I can do grappling, but to physically beat I I had to flip a switch and turn into this other person that I'm like, fuck, I'm glad I know he's there, but it's like that's not that's not me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, it's just this weird dichotomy or this weird that nobody ever really gets to experience except for someone like you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or maybe like at another level, a higher level, someone at war. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Oh my god, that's I mean, that's you know, I understand why there's you know, a lot of the veterans and what they go through. | ||
| It's like that's normally that's not how you're built as a human being. | ||
| Right, you're not supposed to experience that and then come back and just be normal. | ||
| Normal. | ||
| Yeah, like it's like oh fuck. | ||
| That movie hurt locker when he's walking around the supermarket until he wants to go back. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| It's because it's just one where it's like it's not how I'm built, you know. | ||
| I have a I have um a lot more compassion as you know for other human beings. | ||
| But you know, I was glad to know that if I got put in a fucking room with another dude, I was coming out, motherfucker. | ||
| That was a good thing to know. | ||
| It's a good thing. | ||
| It's a good thing to know, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's a good thing to know. | ||
| Do you when you look back, do you I mean if you would gotta give yourself advice, when would you think would have been a good time for you to stop fighting? | ||
| After Fajita. | ||
| After Fajita? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Cause it because that wa you know what? | ||
| And and like if people understood like uh that time period, like I got sober, um, I just fought Ensign and then I went and did Abu Dhabi and I and I won my weight class, won the all around, which was a big deal for me at the time. | ||
| It was a huge deal. | ||
| And then if I would have won that championship, uh if I would have won the Pride Grand Prix, it would have been mic drop. | ||
| I could have walked away and it could have been a kabib moment where it's like, oh, I wonder how good he fucking I wonder how good he could have been. | ||
| You know, it would have been a complete fucking mic drop, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's just at that moment I I knew that something had changed in me that I didn't have that thing in me that I needed to do it. 'Cause you need a thing in you to do that. | ||
| You do. | ||
| And that's what we're talking about, like a gear. | ||
| You need a different gear, you need a different component to get to that level. | ||
| Um and if you if you don't have it, it's like you know, they say in the NFL, if you're thinking about retirement, you shouldn't be playing the game. | ||
| So you were at a point where your dislike of hurting people was interfering with your job. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cause I mean, just I had to g I had to just get to a place which is just you know, just a place that I just didn't like being. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, it makes sense talking to you. | ||
| You know, because it's it's funny you talk to certain people like yourself and and George, like George St. Pierre. | ||
| I was just hanging out with him the other night, and he p my friends are always like, he's so normal. | ||
| This is so weird. | ||
| Like it's so hard to believe that that guy's one of the greatest fighters of all time. | ||
| But because he's so normal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that that's also the beauty in it. | ||
| It's that's why people are fascinated by fighting because they want to know what can a normal person do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What can a normal person turn himself into? | ||
| What what is possible? | ||
| Yeah, and that's that's the I answered that question for myself, right? | ||
| And it's one where it's like, okay. | ||
| You know, and it to get for me to get there was was so not difficult, but i like I would watch film of me walking out and I couldn't even recognize myself. | ||
| Like my facial expression, how I walked, how I carried myself, I'd look at it and go, Well, that doesn't even look like me. | ||
| Like transforming like into a completely different person. | ||
| And it's understanding like like compartmentalizing everything, like no emotions, no nothing, singularly focused to one thing, and that thing was I'm gonna impose my will on you till I fucking take yours. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And for me, it just was a darker place for me to go. | ||
| Right, of course. | ||
| And uh probably unsustainable if you want to be a happy person. | ||
| No, you can't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But you can't. | |
| In order to be the mark current everybody loved, you kinda had to go there. | ||
| That's the only way to do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the wildest thing that most people will never understand. | ||
| Only a person like yourself who's actually experienced it will really truly understand what those words mean. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, uh it's just one where it's a nutty requirement of someone. | ||
| Fuck yeah. | ||
| A nutty request. | ||
| Hey, you want to go fight in front of the whole world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Cause it's it's fucking you talk about vulnerable, like vulnerable, yeah, like fucking barren your soul. | ||
| That's you you get to a place of exhaustion, you know, it's weakness. | ||
| You know, you're showing everybody you're in there, you weren't strong enough to train to the capacity you need to train to to fight, and look at this dude, he's beating the fuck out of you, and you got fucking hot pants on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Right? | ||
| Uh you have fucking hot pants on and beat in the fuck I so I mean there's that whole thing, it's it's very fucking vulnerable to fight. | ||
| Cause there's it's just it's just very like the loneliest places, two loneliest places in the world is walking into the ring and after the fight's over. | ||
| The two loneliest places I've ever been in my Entire life are those two places. | ||
| Because there's no help when you're walking into the ring. | ||
| It's just fucking you, and you know that. | ||
| And after the fight, it's just you. | ||
| And you have to live with whatever experience you just had, win, lose, or draw. | ||
| You know, times I won, I felt empty because it felt like I needed to go do something again. | ||
| It felt like I needed to go achieve something again. | ||
| Like everything was so focused on this thing. | ||
| Once this thing's over, I need another thing. | ||
| I need to go chase that thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| It's this never ending. | ||
| Like for me, it was this never ending. | ||
| Because I was trying to be enough. | ||
| I was just trying to be enough. | ||
| And I could never get there. | ||
| Isn't it crazy that that kind of addictive behavior and thinking is almost the only way to make true excellence? | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's just so fucked up, right? | ||
| So like come on. | ||
| Because I know, I know it doesn't only apply to fighters. | ||
| I know it's actors. | ||
| Oh, and I know it's artists and you know, people that yeah. | ||
| Do you think Steve Jobs had fucking I mean that's again singularly focused. | ||
| Singularly focused. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean it's just this, it's a yeah, it's the you know, madness and brilliance, you know, are almost of the same vein. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you know, this driven component of me, the the bane of that is that once that thing was over, I had to go fucking chase something else. | ||
| And I can never fucking sit in that moment and be okay with whatever and you know, again, it's one of those things where it's like thankfully I am designed the way I am, you know, because I'm finally in a place where I'm like, I'm okay with me. | ||
| I'm completely okay with me. | ||
| You know, and it's taken me a long time to get here. | ||
| Well, that's awesome, dude. | ||
| I'm I'm glad that you got there, and uh I'm glad to just be able to sit down with you and talk to you and tell you how much I appreciate first of all your career. | ||
| But you've been able to do that smashing machine documentary, I think wasn't just eye-opening for a lot of people to realize like wow, a lot of these guys are struggling in a way that we couldn't even possibly comprehend. | ||
| It's all they're doing it in in private. | ||
| This guy just let us into his life. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Yeah, like how many more stories are there out there like this? | ||
| Opens people up to the conversation. | ||
| But also like having the courage to let people like look at your life like that. | ||
| I think it's pretty powerful, man. | ||
| No, I appreciate it. | ||
| And the movie's great, and the rock, you fucking nailed it. | ||
| Oh my god, he I mean, the rock, Emily, you know, she nailed it. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| She nails crazy with it. | ||
| She got an A plus. | ||
| Oh my god, yeah, exactly. | ||
| For that craziness. | ||
| Well, thank you, sir. | ||
| Thanks for being in here, man. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Smashing Machine. | ||
| It is out October 3rd, right? | ||
| Is that what I'm October 3rd? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's very good. | ||
| I appreciate it, Joe. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And Boss Rutten killed it in it too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was great. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Bye everybody. |
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