The Joe Rogan Experience - #2384 - Mark Kerr

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

Joe sits down with retired mixed martial artist and wrestler Mark Kerr. Kerr is the subject of the A24 feature film "The Smashing Machine," directed by Benny Safdie and starring Dwayne Johnson. Look for it in theaters on October 3, 2025. https://a24films.com/films/the-smashing-machinewww.markkerr.com Buy 1 Get 1 Free Trucker Hat with code ROGAN at happydad.com This video is sponsored by BetterHelp. Visit https://BetterHelp.com/JRE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joe Rogan podcast checking out The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night All day Good, but What's happening? Do the movie's fantastic And I know I told you outside

But I wanted to save it When I kind of 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 that. It's really good, man. 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. I keep using the words surreal, but it doesn't describe it. Like I was saying, my son, when he watched it, and just flipping out, like, talking to me, like, on the side, like I was saying.

and like literally just going dad dad he's got your mannerisms he's got your speech manner but do you imagine like i'm i'm picturing my son he's in new york when he watched that they 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 because a lot of my saying for myself is i'm 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 hear my son say, oh my gosh, Dad, he nailed it. Right. Unbelievable. He really did nail it. 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 a different thing. It's complete. 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, 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 place in his life where he can just keep doing blockbusters and be perfectly fine with it there's there I mean he says it himself there's always a place for that there's always going to 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 a 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 that's fucking that's 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 think he did

He did an amazing job. I mean, 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. 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 is he, so it very, very much. So I saw an 80% complete version of the film in January of this year. 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 DJ. And the last scene of the movie, right, that intensity of that scene, I'm just telling you, it was like, 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 you know You know, for me, I was trying to raise everybody up, you know, everybody around me. And it was just a 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. 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, 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 it? That's us. Yeah. Oh, my God. Ninety-seven, dude, that's so crazy.

Oh, my God. So crazy. Oh, my God. 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 was like I was a giant fan of the sport. And what happened was Campbell McLaren. Do you remember Campbell? Yeah, yeah. He was good friends with my manager, Jeff. And they were just talking and he said, we need a guy to do backstage interviews, 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 wasn't, it was actually costing me money, which is why I wound 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 started doing Fear Factor, that's when Zoufa 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 Hori 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 Tudor and then Pride and all these big events over in Japan.

And it became, to me, it was like, finally someone did it. That was, so part of my first fights in Brazil, I was still brainwashed by the idea that, oh, shit, he's seven foot tall or six, nine. He's a toughest dude in the room. Right. Because that's how I grew up, right? Or 10th degree black belt, same thing. Right, right, right. Oh, no, no, no, don't mess with him.

Yeah. And in one where that first time I fought, I was still under the delusion that that was the truth. Mm-hmm. And so my trainer kept going, oh, trust me, you're gonna do fine. Trust me, you're gonna do fine. And it's just like, he understood what I was as a wrestler, you know, that I can impose, like I said,

to tell you the 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, then you say, no, no, no, you can't take me down. So I'm just going to beat the fuck out of you standing and there's nothing you could do about it. Not a single thing.

It's the most important skill. Oh, my God. It's foundational. Foundational. And that's why there's so much success for, for, for, you know, that's a single thing. The deck, I'm going to blank on the names, but the, 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 always just 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 them, they'll string these moves together and string them together. Like Kams on Chimae is a great example of that. Oh, my God. Unbelievable. 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, inevitably, you just make mistakes or you just give into the exhaustion of the moment, right? Yeah. And it's just like, okay, nothing you can do about it. When a guy has 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 elite elite NBA stand-up skills as well. Scary.

Scary. The cardio is the scariest things is when you're scared to hit the gas, like three more minutes the round and you see cane is just fucking bobbing around me like he's not even breathing heavy in between rounds his stomach's not even heaving he's a big dude 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're following the ufc but there's this kid anthony hernandez in the middleweight division that's nuts and then you got mara rob rob dobbish willie who's like the best example of it unstoppable so this is kind of again one of

these things were there 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. Yeah.

Oh my God, yeah. But he's like, I gotta get bigger. I gotta get bigger. That's what V-Tor got up to like 240 pounds. Oh my God, 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. Right? 85 and he was there at 240 when he fought Randy the first time yeah which was bananas so that night was my last UFC that was UFC 15 oh wow and that's when randy beat v tour and it's one of those where i'm like oh just wait i know because i know what randy is right randy's cardio randio's 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 right it's just that's what we called back then his name was Victor. 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 last name, Gracie. And then I think he got sued or threatened with a lawsuit, and then he changed it to Victor Belfer because, like, Horian was very litigious. He was, like, very protective of the Gracie name. And so he fought John Hess in Hawaii and beat the living shit out of him. Rumble on the Rock stuff or whatever. I think it was Rumble on the Rock. That was BJ's promotion, and that was later. This was, like, really early on. This was, I don't know who the fuck was doing that event, but 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 Jiu-Jitsu Blackbell, you need you don't think you're going to have a guy who's hands like that. Oh, my God, his hands speed was unreal. He was so fast. Unreal. And accurate. Yeah.

Like, you could be fast, and that's one thing, but fast. and actually hitting the target, when the target's bobbing and weaving, it's like, oh, my God, man. He's an interesting case study because he's, 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. Testosterone replacement came in, all the sudden it was TRTVitor, 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, 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 was 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 that said, we do not test for sterolots in the contract. They're like, ha. 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 look around.

And you just hand the cup off going, can you piss from here? And you literally walk back to the medical and go, drug test. Yeah, here. And I mean, that's the, but that's the era it was. So your first fight was it, was it in Brazil? In Brazil, yeah. And the crazy thing is they reproduced that arena, that conference room. Yeah.

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. Yeah. This is perfect. Yeah.

Because, you know, sometimes they fudge a little, you know, they. So, so here's what, so I was in Vancouver for the set when they had the set up. And 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? I go, because it's like, like, I came to me imagine the brainstorm going, you got any bread ideas of how to introduce the? yeah let's do a pyramid and let's have a trapdoor fall you know it's like what the fuck we're like where where in the bigger picture of stuff going but they reproduced it to to the tea it was perfect oh my god it was amazing it was really great

because in the movie they did about mark shultz what was that movie again um fucking fox catcher that's right yeah that movie had a lot of shenanigans on it there's a lot of stuff that wasn't It wasn't accurate to it. It wasn't accurate. Yeah. Like, he fought Big Daddy Goodrich in his one MMA fight.

Yeah. But in the movie, he's fighting some Russian dude. Didn't make any sense. Completely different cat. Fought a white guy in the movie. Wow. Yeah. He fought Big Daddy Goodrich and Big Daddy was wearing the ghee.

Wow. Yeah, remember? I mean, not only that, but it was a... Big Daddy Goodrich is a legend. Yeah. Like, how do you leave him out when that was his only MMA fight? Fight. Like, why did you change the guy he?

fought that doesn't even make any sense but they just did Hollywood shenanigans you know so you know that was a huge part from the beginning of this when when DJ and I and I talked back in 2019 is just the like the trust factor you guys started talking about this in 2019 wow yeah six fucking years yeah yeah wow here's what's crazy so 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 he wants to play me in a movie and he goes I'm going to 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 he's a rare human being he is i'm gonna call him after this just to tell him what a fucking amazing job he 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 although the weirdness of the contract negotiations everything off so so Benny from the beginning said the only way we're going to 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

they reproduced everything oh wow so Joe and when I'm 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 flashback? Oh, my God. Like, like, you'd walk into a room and there'd be from one corner all the way to the other on the wall just pictures of me in my house and my this and this and this and this and this 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, Garrett 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 Vancouver.

Like nobody told me, nobody said, hey, listen, we're going to do prosthetics. We're going to give me your cauliflower ear. We're going to make his brow. And nobody told me this. So I was up there for Fight Week. And they're getting ready to shoot the scene where they're introducing everybody

to do 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 can 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 mama that i think this movie did that it really honored that it really did it justice because at the the end of the movie when it talks about how fighters today make millions of dollars i'll cry i This is going. I'm sorry. No, it's okay. It's like 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 and barely getting by. Oh, and I love that you had Alexander Usik.

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so benny signed him before he beat before he became the undisputed champ oh wow right 2019 yeah 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 like really like you're like you're really tapping into something that's bigger because it's pulled all these people together ozick did a great job oh he didn't phenomenal job oh my god he did that spinning back he's a boxer he's not supposed to Yeah, I mean, I didn't even know he could do that. No, dear to die.

That's kind of crazy. Yeah. Well, I guess I could kind of do anything. He's such a great athlete. Yeah. Oh, my God. He's, he's, you know how many rounds he trained prior to, uh, fighting Tyson Fury? No. 600.

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 said he would do rounds where he wasn't allowed to punch oh wow at all we just had to bobbing even defense i'm like okay like like he he takes he's like one of us like he just takes

it to a level that it's just unbelievable he's a genius like a literal boxing genius again i don't use that term lightly like what he did to dubois i of 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 Ussick just pieced him up, just took him up, 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. No. He's big, but he's not like six, nine. No, he's not Tyson, Fury. size. He's not Dubois. He's not Dubai. He's not Anthony Joshua. None of them. No.

Now he's a cruiserweight. He's a cruiserweight that beat everybody and knew that the only way to make real money is to go up to heavyway 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. 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's just consistently an overachiever. Consistently an overachiever. And he's fucking 38, right? Which is even like... Even crazier, because he hasn't shown any slipping in his skill level at all.

Or his endurance or his enthusiasm or his discipline. None of that. Well, also it was 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 is so agile, so much footwork. movement and he's basically like the heavyweight version of it wow yeah that makes actually

more sense makes more sense right yeah yeah because his movement for such a big guy is just extraordinary it 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 yeah oh oh and that's like my son actually it's my son's birthday today happy birthday what's name brice Happy birthday, Bryce. Yeah, 21, right? I go, it's a birthday to wait for, but he's already doing all this stuff that you, you know. They all do.

Yeah, I know, right? It's that age bracket, but, uh, so my son loves the science of boxing. You know, even 10 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, like, I started doing MMA. Like, understanding, like, I understood wrestling. But boxing on that level is just, it's a whole another 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, you have to, that has to be everything you eat, breathe, sleep. Yeah. Singular. 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 that really brought me to another level is a guy named Chris Campbell. He was Dan Gable's first NCAA champ when Dan Gables was coached at Iowa. 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 going to make the 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 really amateur wrestling oh my god no that's unheard of it's i think still to this day he's the oldest uh Olympic medalist wow because you just don't you just i mean wrestling's just so demanding it's such a young sport oh yeah it is it is so he ends up he ends up just really taken me by the hand and 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, Kartzv. And you look and watch the tapes, 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 look at it and go, wow, because it was just these little things, little things that made a difference. It's so amazing that the Russians achieve that level in not just wrestling, but also in MMA, also in any combat sports, named boxing, Russian kickboxers are super technical. They're all known for being so technical. It's really interesting, you know? And again, I would think that somewhere in there, there's a route. There's a common, like, there's coaches and mentors.

Because the only way I've learned how to wrestle are MMA is through mentorship. 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'd 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 it if and you 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 them to be here, perfect. Because once you go full speed, you're going to miss it, but you're only going to 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. Wow. Yeah. GSP, I was just talking to a friend of mine, and, uh, I was just talking to a friend of mine and, uh, I, I said he's probably in my book, one or two. Yeah, of all time. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. 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 deserved because he was a 125er. And then people forget how good Anderson was when he was in his prime. Oh, my God. 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're just going to 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 what, like, John Jones, right? Mm-hmm. Like, when you get somebody at that level at his peak, right? and he can make other professional fighters look like they're amateurs they look that they don't belong in there and he was doing that to guys when he wasn't training

that was crazy yeah what's 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 as a spectator as a fan like how many fights we missed because of his shenan yeah yeah just like but it's also I mean I mean, 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. 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. When 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 is just, 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 making of the documentary, it was what they were essentially trying to capture was you at your prime. 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 John Greenhol, who's a producer, I went to Syracuse with him.

We were on the wrestling team together. He's the one that called me. He said, hey, I want to do a documentary. At that point, my vision of what it was was a little Best Buy camera where the, like, little flip screen and they show up and they go, okay, we're filming their documentary. I know I got changed tape, you know. And they show up in Japan for my Volchanchen fight with. to 10,000, 15,000, whatever they were digital Sony cameras, a boom mic in like five people.

I'm like, oh, fuck, you're like, you're really going to make a, like, you're going to 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. and so that's what he was after us is like to really show this contrast and like you can do this for a living and be this kind sensitive but 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 what the feeling is the feeling is like the question I always had in my head

is going okay if somebody's going to go you me in a room who the fuck coming out and I never was able to answer that question for myself I know as competitive right but I didn't know if I had that switch that thing and then start fighting and going oh fuck man there 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 right like when you get

a high-level fighter it's like Fabio Giselle didn't want to give me as well head budded him dug into cuts did all this beat him mercilessly and he didn't want to give me as well 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 answers you're waiting for him to break yeah he doesn't break yeah some people don't break you can break you can't break no he was one of them he was one of them and it's 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 when his wife calls me in the next day, I literally go, oh, fuck, man, here it is.

He's going to have all his boys up at the house. He's going to fucking get his due, right? Like, because I didn't know. Right. And so I go, okay, what are I got to live? 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. That's awesome. Here's what it's set for me. It set a standard of how I was going to carry myself as a fighter. What happened in the ring is in the ring. Right. The second you're out, that's different. Well, that speaks to his character why you couldn't break his will in the first place, right?

Absolutely. Because he's such as locked down. Absolutely. For me, 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 alio gracie days and yeah this is an ad by better help when you have a problem when you're feeling down it's nice having someone to turn to like a partner who could cheer you up a friend to vent to

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And so when I came there, I was like, okay, I want to be considered professional, right? I want to carry myself as a professional. I'm going to be articulate. I'm going to dress as a professional. I'm going to, 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, you know, I couldn't afford it, but I was in a $1,000 Calvin Klein's suit. that I put on a charge card, right? But I wanted to change the narrative. I wanted to be a professional. Because if I was a professional and treated like a professional, I could ask for pay like a professional. Not like some dude that was just scraped off a barstool and thrown into a ring.

So what was the pride experience like? So 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 tournament obligation on the contract. 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 have 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 a guy named Mr. Ishi Shaka who, his real name is Kim Duxu. He's a Korean guy. And Mr. Ishi, who owned K-1. Wait a minute. A Korean dude was pretending to be Japanese? You had to have a Japanese name.

Whoa. You couldn't do business in Japan without a Japanese name. That's crazy. So he just changed his name? The documents signed all of his documents, legal documents, Kim Duxu. Wow. But every single person called him Mr. Ishi-Jaka. Wow.

Yeah. So he had to learn Japanese. Yeah. And it's still with an accent because he spoke Korean too. So it's just one of those were understanding like the culture back then, just it was still stuck, you know, and hadn't really progressed. Wow. So Mr. Ishi owned K-1 and Mr. Xshaqa started pride.

And it was called KRS at the beginning before it turned in a dream stage. Oh. And so here's where it gets a little sticky. So I go over there. I take for Pride 2, it's supposed to be me and Hoyst Gracie. Him and 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 paid for the, in the UFC. And when I get back to the States, I get surgery.

It's, I get served with, I get served with papers to appear in court in New York City, the U.S.C. suing me. It's when Bob Meyerwitz still owned it and Art Davis was involved. And so they were 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 four months, five months to sort out the differences between what the UFC needed and if they're going to let me go and all this other stuff. In that time frame, Hoyst got hurt.

And so Hoyce had to step out and they put Bronco Sigatee in there. And I ended up fighting Bronco and Pride too. Oh, wow. Yeah. So if everything, if everything would have went 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 who would i want 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

wow yeah signed inked everything you had at least 80 pounds on them 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 it. What were you at your heaviest? 280, 285. Jeez. Like 6% body fat.

Oof. Yeah. That's hard to breathe. Brutal. If I didn't fucking get a hold of you and fucking squeeze a life out of you in the first, like, couple of 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 cornering him when he lost to Maurice Smith.

Oh, okay, yeah. Yeah, I was there for that one. That was a real game changer. Oh, that changed the narrative for everything. Because Maurice, what Maurice brought to the game was Morris was trained with Frank Shamrock at the time. And so he had extreme cardio. He was doing a lot of swimming. He was running him.

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 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 Golds, Venice. There's a guy named T.R. Goodman. And he was trained in hockey players. And hockey players have to have that burst recovery, burst recovery. Wow.

Very similar cardiovascular system to fighters. So T.R. took over my training when I was in California. And that was a whole another level. because I never really had the functional training implemented the way he did. And that's when my weight came down. It's like I really tried to fight between like 235 and 240 was ideal. Yeah, that's much better. That seems like the ideal heavyweight.

It is. It is. It's very weird that, first of all, that the heavyweight division has a weight limit. Yeah. Oh, my God. It's 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. Tyson Fury has 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 it hard enough, I was 250. If I over-trained, that was under 230. you know like for pride grand prix i think i weighed in at 229

because right before that felt overtrained i felt overtrained because in between when i fought ensign and the pride grand prix i did abodabi oh and so i won my weight class that year and i won the all around so you got super conditioned oh my god super condition 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 Fijita. There are so many factors that were just, 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 weak.

That's interesting. Why do you think that is? Nerves. Nerves. It gets to a point where it's like 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 just the nerves start kicking in. Yeah, it just starts kicking in 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. Al Jermaine Sterling said he made that mistake when he first fought Peelter Yon. He just, he didn't eat. It's brutal. So, so that last scene against Fujita is, as 100% hypoglycemate, 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 need sugar. That's all I could think about was like, any sugar, any sugar, any sugar. Because my blood sugar levels, I just crashed to this, like, I can't fucking move.

Jeez. It's so crazy, too, the 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 not even close really in that time frame because it's a short it's a short time frame because 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. Maybe Marab can. I wouldn't fucking doubt that. He might be the one. He might be the only guy because he doesn't seem to get tired. You get, so this is like observationally, usually in a championship fight, if it's a striker against a wrestler, usually if 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 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 also a big part of being able to stuff take do you want some coffee yeah thank you part of being able to stuff takedowns is having energy oh my god it's everything guys trying to fuck you up and take you down there's so much energy involved and trying to stuff a takedown and then when you don't have it you're like i'm just let them take me down 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 going to grind you into a pulp and that's that control thing right part of part of what i i go like if i look at my fighting going i was never going to be

the best striker like never going to be the best kicker puncher but if i could turn you in 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? Because I know I can fucking beat the fuck out of you wrestling Yeah The key was transitioning to make you wrestle me Yeah, it's the specialist specialist thing It's like if you want to be a specialist Being a specialist at wrestling is by far

By far When you see what Hamzot did to Dracus Oh my God Hamzat Then that's the example I get that's elite 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 Russian Dagestan, Uzbekistan, it's this ability to sustain an attack repeatedly. Because it's that cardiovascular system, 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. And then as he counters, you've anticipated the counter.

You have a counter to his counter. And then a counter to his readjusting after your counter. And you're just hitting him over and over. He just can't keep the rhythm. 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 it just went to a decision but you just kind of appreciate that level of dominance against a world champion is kind of crazy

where the guy before the fight, Dreckas 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 of Sonia he fucking beats Sean Strickland twice like oh my God he might be one of the greatest

of all time and then And after that fight, you're like, I don't think he's ever going to beat that guy. 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, like that gap could just, it's constantly just something you never can get to. It's also, you know, it's like Sean O'Malley, right? Uh-huh. He's going to. The only way that he's going to be able to get a championship back is somebody else needs to beat. Marab. Yeah, Marab.

Yeah. And then it's got to be stylistically. Stylistically match-up, right? That's that conflict of match-up, because skills, you're not going to do that. You mean, he got better for the second fight. He did a lot better, but still. So 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? Rob Dwaevishwilly. 34. Wow.

So he's, you know, he's in his prime right now, in his prime for another few years at least. Yeah, I would think that it's one where there's going to be a lot of people that think they can, but that's just a different animal. Yeah, it's going to 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 25, it's almost unrecognizable. You can't, you can't, like, like there was a period of time where I couldn't, I couldn't watch, I didn't watch the USC, probably about like seven, eight, nine years. And over the last five, six years, I watched it almost religiously, right? And just realizing the fighters today, oh my God, man. They hit a level. And 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 fight. You're like, it's such a unique set of skills to do this. Incredible set of skills. Unique to any other sport in the world. And it's also you're really fighting three different sports as one sport. Yeah. Which is really nuts.

You're fighting grappling. You're fighting jiu-jitsu. 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? Yeah, while getting kicked. While getting kicked and punched and elbowed.

It is, 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 Wing and understanding that

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 advance a sport This much. Well, you guys brought in the new element and the new element was elite wrestling with enormous

muscles. Yeah. And it's like, and everyone was like, oh, this is a real problem. Yeah. And especially in the early, early days, because Coleman would get in your guard and just headbutt the fuck out of you. Because headbutts were legal. Yeah. Legal. Like, and bare knuckle. Like, when I first did his, well, I interviewed him after he beat Dan Severn when he became the first UFC heavyweight champion. Total bare not. 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? Wild. Like people, I, I, you know, they watch it now and, and, you know, this, this film, right, it gives, it gives people a little bit of a look inside of, like, what it was.

And, and, you know, for, for me, the, the cool part about it is, 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 new work that's one thing I said I said look what you built you can feel however you want about you know him purse I think Look with your belt. Yeah.

Like, no one could even imagine this. Well, you have to be a madman to do what he does. Like, that guy works so hard, and he works so many hours, and he fucking loves it. And he loves the sport. Like, truly loves a 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 going to do about this guy? Oh. When's that? When's this happening? You know? Is this true? Does this guy really get hurt?

He did? Fuck. Yeah. Oh, my God. Oh, it's minor? Okay, six weeks. Are you rescheduling it? Okay, good.

Yeah. And, 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 watch the fights in Japan? Do you ever watch Japan Valley Tuddo? Do you know about this guy? Do you know about Hicks and Gracie? Do you know about this guy?

And I'd be just rattling off different names. And he was like, what do you? How do you know all this? I don't know, 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 baseball.

Yeah, exactly. I just, I only have room for combat sports. Yeah, you know, ask me about Marcello Garcia. Yeah, I can answer those. I'll rattle off some stats. I know some shit about fighting. But to me, it was like, it was Eddie Bravo and I, when we were kids, when we were young, young fellows.

When we were hanging around and working out, we would said to ourselves, like, you know what? This sport needs some crazy billionaires who love the sport that's just going to dump a bunch of money. Because we knew at the time, we were like, this is the most exciting sport in the world, right? So all it needs is for these really rich guys to be fans of sport. And it's almost like it manifested itself, because that's what happened. The Furtitas came along, and they were just really rich guys who loved the sport, and they took a crazy chance. They were $40 million in the hole. Debt, yeah.

40 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 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 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. And they were saying, you've got to watch this. So as the show is on, and this is like before social media was really a thing. So as the fight was on, the ratings kept going up and up and up and up. And it was like, Spike TV was like, holy shit, we got a fucking hit.

We got a hit. Yeah. And Diego Sanchez won, the 185 pound division. And then the fight between Stefan, Bonner, and Forrest Griffith. That's the fight that changed everything. Change the game. Because 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. They'd all be talking shit to each other and all. And they knew they were going to fight in the finals. So it was like this long buildup. And they were perfectly matched. Yeah, and it was just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, fucking swing, wheel kick, punch.

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, my God. 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 Dana, to his credit, gave both those guys the contract. Yeah.

And it was all of a sudden, the sport was hot. And then Chocladeau 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 would 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 watch it now going, he was just hunting. He was just hunting and hunting and he would hunt and it wasn't like no it was every single thing was thrown with intent Yeah everything was shown thrown to shut you off oh and he could do it and he could do it for five fucking rounds too which is crazy which is in his probably the thing about that style is it's unsustainable Yeah, he never ducked a punch in his life He took a burn and shooting and fucking and blasted right through he had an iron It was fucking iron, but everybody's iron jaw gives out after a while. It just, you can't, and train that way too. You can't sustain it.

It's just one where, um, so when the Fratitas first bought the UFC, um, I was living in California and a friend of mine who has helped 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 snow and it was like February. They're going to do their first big push with Tito, right? And I get hit by a drunk driver at 11 a.m. in the morning on the way up. So my attorney was in the car with us.

Literally, the tow truck takes us up to the top of the hill. 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. I was like, well, we're going to Beverly Hillsville, we'll share 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 Lorenzo, the new owners of the U.S.C. Wow. And we're just sitting there talking. They're like, hey, you know, how is it working in Japan? They knew everything about me. How was it working in Japan? How did 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. 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 grades. And also, one of the most important in terms of the metamorphosis, in turn of the evolution of the sport. Because Frank was the first guy with elite cardio that could do everything.

He could submit you off his back. Like, remember when he fought Kevin Jackson? Yep, yep, yep. Carb 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 no no and Tito is a fucking house Tito is yeah and he just overwhelmed him beat him down with cardio and then after that fight Tito taught everybody cardio is number one king yeah 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 yeah 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 having conversations back then about heart rate

training 25 years ago you go heart rate what it's like 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 don't highlight him anymore. They don't talk about him at all. And I think that's pivotal, pivotal. I think you got to let that go just for the honor of what happened, the honor of the sport. Yeah. Because 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 he was ahead of his time he was ahead of his time by by far it was the first really truly completely 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 dyes you can't it's like what i said about goats yeah you want to look at bj pen you look at bj pan when he fought sean shirk yeah look at b j pen when he fought big daddy stevesant that's one of the scariest fucking guys yeah 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 there's Khabib same

Oh yeah You put that guy with any 155 pounder Who's ever existed And I don't know what's gonna happen How are you gonna beat that guy You know there's a few guys like that And Kabebe 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 you How many more rounds with this motherfucker? Because he was just already exhausted and this fucking animal from Dagestan

was just on him, on him, dragging it to the ground. I'll never forget. We had Michael Johnson down the ground. He's beaten Michael Johnson up. And he's like, quit, quit. You know I need title shut his mind. You know title shot is mine. You know I deserve it.

Quit. And he's just beating the fuck out of him, trying to be nice. He gets him in Camura and I'm going, please tap i'm like please tap please tap because i'm seeing that spiral fracture when they get that spiral fracture i'm seeing it coming i'm like please tap please we don't have been through that with frank when frank got minotaro in that yeah 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 oh my god look at this i mean he's doing whatever But this speaks to your point. See, everybody agrees that people are cheering. Look. I need to fight for it. Look, 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. Wow. He was so dominant, man.

This is like, again, we're saying, like, taking somebody's fucking will. Taking it, he was a will taker. Like, when he did DeConnor, when he got on top of the Conner, 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 humble pie, like, fucking having to sit back and, like. Yeah.

Because that's at a level where, because you're a bad motherfucker to begin with. And somebody that's even a badder motherfucker. It 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. You're not going to live.

He's going to live. He could just literally choke you unconscious and just keep choking you until your... He was going to 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 going all through.

No, no, no. If he wanted to, he could have just ripped it off. Drop that right hip down, pull that left arm up, and that thing's snapping like a twig it's so scary that's my scariest other than guys when they break their shins yeah oh my god yeah shin to knee and the shin snaps in half

like silver breaking it's like oh it's horrible wideman was the worst that like that stuff one watch is it's good enough it was so when you don't need to pull you don't need to pull that one and wideman yeah don't pull that one Wythman's went through his calf

his bones snapped through and poked out of his calf which is real dangerous too because then you run the risk of heavy infection all of that all that you're on the dirty mat you got an open wound and oh no some of that stuff is just like gosh man it's other level do you feel weird that you did it like now when you look back you've been removed for so long and you're like you beat the fuck out of something too I remember when you took dan bovish down you stuck your chin in his eyeball my god man first the only one still exists yeah is this mission by um chin and eyeball choke yeah I don't know if you call it choke I'd never seen anybody do that before I'm like that's genius 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 I don't know you know and those are the head butt days so head butts were legal so why wouldn't it be legal you could chin butt a guy if you wanted to

yeah so if you use I mean but the thing is it's a real weapon yeah it is real it is real It's very effective. Like, I don't think we should poke to eyes because, you know, the eyes are so vulnerable. 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, absolutely, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know how good you are at eye poke, and you have to be pretty fucking accurate. Yeah, it's not something you can count on. No, no. Yeah, here it is. Yeah. You shoved your fucking shit right in his eyeball. And he's just like.

And I know, so, 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. That's not, you're already used to manipulate bodies.

So part of my participation, ADCC, was to represent wrestling, right? Yeah. Because the first year when I got approached to go over there, I'm like, what, like, what is that? Like, submission grappling, like, I don't know, like gleeless grappling or giless jiu-too. They're like, hey, listen, here's what we're going to do. We're going to 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, okay. I was like, all right. He's like, fuck, I don't know. But while you were fighting. Yeah, while I was fighting. And so I'm like, okay, I just go. Just as a sort of surprise.

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 was 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?

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from $599 biweekly at 3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event. Conditions supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to Explorevolvo.com. 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 the most recent fight with Mauricio Rufi?

No. Okay, so Maricio Ruffy, 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 6-1. Oh. But he's really tall. He's at least 6 feet tall.

He's real tall and long and just elite striker. But he fought this cat, Ben-Wasand-Denie, who is judo black belt, elite on the ground, and he just dominated him, man. He got a hold of him, rag-dolled him, got him to the ground. And Maricio had his moments in the fight standing because Ben-Wazan-Den-Denis is a French Special Forces guy. He's a hard motherfucker. And so he did stand. with Maricio 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 Maricio 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 got to learn so much to be competitive with the elite. Now they're going to know. Yeah. Imagine like Camaro in his pride. Oh, God, no, forget it. Yeah. And that's that gap we were talking about.

Like, there's no way to fucking make that up. There's no way to fucking make that up. No, there's not enough time in your career. Well, we got to see. Camaro was like 38 now, okay? And he just fought Joaquin Buckley and dominated him. Wow. And Buckley is another one who is this guy who is dominating everybody at 170.

He just knocked out Wonderboy. We're like, this fucking guy might be the one. 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 can be defensively responsible. He's very defensively responsible standing, you know?

Other than the Leon Edwards kick, he very rarely gets cracked. Yeah. You know, Gilbert got him a little and dropped him, but very rarely gets in trouble standing. But once he gets you, the gap is so big. You can't make that out. The cap's so big. Yeah, that's, you know, and again, this is one of these things where fundamentally also wrestling gives you a cardio base that you can build off of. Yeah.

Not only, because that's the other missing component, right? It's like this Because 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 I could just defend his attacks You 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 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 I'm in the stands going oh fuck he's not going to be in the trials like there's no fucking way he's going to be in the trials and sure enough fucking like five weeks later he's in the trials and 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. Look, he had an amazing career in WWE. He's loved by everyone. Everybody loves him. That's great.

But it's kind of sucks that people don't know. like at at real wrestling yeah yeah yeah that guy was the shit oh my god man he was the shit he was unreal unreal and small for a heavyweight he was so so so he was always undersized yeah but the like the years that i beat him and then 95 when we wrestled in the freestyle nationals and i'd beat him four four times in a row at that point so we we wrestle in the 95 freestyle nationals and i get a hold to 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 beat 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 wow like I go oh fuck like looking back on I'm going oh shit I totally miss that like most guys at at 220 pounds, which you're wrestling at, they would have these attacks that they would initiate it. 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. Yes. Yeah. And lighter and quicker. 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 just counts in 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 and 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 It 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 you are. Than you ever have at anything. I know. At anything. Fuck. That's, I mean, Kurt, Kurt was one of the where he opened my eyes are. I was like, fuck, there's another gear. Yeah.

I thought I was training fucking hard. That's what's crazy. It's we're kind of seeing, 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 some sort of a genetic advantage with cardio. Because D.C. 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 Marab swears that when he was young, he had bad cardio. He said, no, I smoke cigarette, I didn't imagine. It's like Sakaraba smoking cigarettes. He said he didn't take care of himself at all. I'm like, really? And it's just hard work and discipline. And then, so I have a bunch of friends who do 100 milers, you know, and, 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 100 milers all the time. He's done it 240. He's what is 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 got to build up to that. But once you get to that, 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 yeah 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 yeah during his lunch time he would eat after lunch after work he runs another 13 fucking miles he would be one where i wouldn't want to look at him because i 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 watch what he's doing. I'm Goggins is another one. And Gaggans is even more insane 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 a level of cardio where he brings world champions like Israel out of Sonia comes to train with him and he's throwing up in a bucket.

He can't keep up and Gagins is 50. Oh my God. He's 50. Wow. How old is Gaggans? 50. 50. 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. Godly.

So again, this is like, that's a level, which is just exceptional. Yeah. Because there's just 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. Kine up competition once. Like 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'd take him up in a helicopter and you fucking parachute 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 and fires and only because it's hard he's a multi-millionaire 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 exist in him, 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 was lazy. He was drinking milkshakes. He talks about it openly. He said the first time he decided to enlist when he went like to run, to go running, you couldn't even run around the block. He was totally out of shape. He's got, he has photos of it. He shows you.

He was like, this is like, no, I made myself. this. So this is my thinking about fighting. 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?

Like when you were talking about how Kurt you hit a new gear or the gear that Marab is clearly on right now or Hamzaa. There's that gear. Yeah. What if we're going to push that even further where there's guys that can sprint for five, five minute around? Like there's a few

flyways that can do that. Yeah. Like, Pantosia can kind of sprint for five, five minute rounds. He can go. He can go. He 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. They're understanding all these different factors that just weren't there. Yeah, and if you add in a bunch of stuff like hyperbaric chambers, so these guys have access to hyperbaric chambers and, and training with hypoxic chambers and shit like that, there's levels and levels that can be reached.

You just have to be a complete fucking psycho and go through all the levels. Yeah. And get to. It's like Donkey Kong. Yeah, like measure all your food, all your electrolytes, everything throughout the day, have your sleep environment perfect. a mask. I'm telling you, there's guys out there. That'll do it. There's guys that'll do it. They'll deal it. Well, they have to if that's where you get the edge. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, 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 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 going to 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 going to do with your career. You could be so rich playing baseball. Oh, God, yeah.

You could be so rich. If you're really good at baseball, you can be rich as fucking 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. Better up.

Seriously, I fucking play baseball and heartbeat, man. Fuck yeah. So that's the problem with MMA. It's like 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 get in the UFC in 2020? And this is not even saying they deserve more because this is just how the sport works. Yeah.

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. There's very little spread out. There's guys that fight in the UFC undercard that make excellent money. But when you first start, you don't.

I think it's like 10. It's one of those things where it's like what I expect to 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 the things about the sport. As long as it has the opportunity

to let somebody go. 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. Now, 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'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.

And 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, as a fighter what was the biggest check you got in Japan a little over half a million damn back then that was a lot cash who yeah fucking how did you get it out of the country dude that was so here's what here's what's fucked up about it right so so so my first couple times over there I'm like I put like first time I got I put 40 something thousand in one cowboy boot with two socks I put 40,000 in the other cowboy boot with the two socks I put 40,000 And the other company boat with the two socks. I'm serious.

It was straight out of the fucking cartoons how you got paid. Because the next day, you would go up to a room and you literally would have a room. You'd have an adjacent room. You used to have 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 American dollars.

So they have your contract, slide your contract over. And they go, okay, this fight. you get paid this is the dollar amount 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'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 pillow case straight and I go okay thank you

it's just a fucking go head out I don't know what the fucking do you know I'm like down in the elevator like fucking holding the money like I don't know what to fucking do 150 grand in a pillowcase I didn't know what to fucking do big giant guy

with a 150 grand of that does not look like no no it does not round it's like what did they expect you to do with it they give you any advice how to get it out of the country oh no 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 on 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 and like walk and like you got anything to declare no you just like walk through But realizing that eventually when I claim money, they hand a claim form. They go, okay, you claim it $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. So no, when you declare it, when you declare it. There's that situation too, right?

Because everybody's going to go, where's you going to have a million? I guess back then could you even go, no, you couldn't even, like, YouTube yourself. No, no, no, there's, no, look, this is me, man, I just won, no, look, aren't I awesome? Exactly, this is how I really did win it. Right, back then it was hard to get tapes, man. You know what, the example, example I give is like the corner video store next to the shutters where all the porn was, right next to that was the VHS table. Maybe beads. So everybody can hear it when you went through, you dirty pervert.

You got to go see faces of death. Oh, my God. That's it. It was faces the death. U.S. Oh, my God. Yeah. 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 available on VHS. Yeah. So I'd heard about UFC 1, but I didn't see it. And then UFC 2, I saw on tape.

I rented it from one of those video stores And I was like holy shit they did it I couldn't believe him like holy shit they did it Because this was always this was always the dream This was literally Bruce Lee's Dream yeah 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 stuff styles. He was the first guy to say, no, use what's useful. Put it all together. Judo Gene LaBelle he got with. He got with Chuck Norris. He got with all these other, that was the first thing like, like the symbol is a kanji for a dragon, right? Bruce Lee was enter 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 Gene LaBelle.

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 a guy was a boxer, and he had a judo gie on. And he chases the guy and gets the guy into a grappling exchange and then strangles him. But he had, like, a boxer versus junior.

You never saw that? No. See if you can find it, Jamie. I want to say it's in the... So way back... 60s? So this is going to 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 Jean LeBelle clinic that he brought us in for. What year is this? 63. Oh, my God. So Milo Savage. So the boxer looks like he's...

Okay, I remembered it wrong. The boxer's bare knuckle. and he made him wear a judo gie though which I would have said fuck you don't know wearing this ghee he probably doesn't understand that that's a weapon oh my god it's an extra set of hands we didn't see him take him down oh that's just did they show him taking him down

oh my god don't skip through it I'm going to see the technique because once he grab right here it is so myel throws up but that's it's it's it's it's over it's over it's over I mean you don't know what that even feels like until you feel Oh, my God. So I, so I ruled with Higgin Machado and, oh, my God. He's just putting him sleep with a collar choke here.

Oh, my God. Yeah, he's mangling him. Oh, my God. He's just mangling him. Oh, my God. And Gene, his style was very, very brutal. Oh, my God. Like, he had a very, almost like, catch wrestling style, base submission.

He had a lot of, like, very, very painful. I meanful 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, I mean, you can't know until it happens. I mean, I don't know how much cross-training people did. I bet he probably thought I was just going to go in there and use my boxing.

Yeah, and I'll fuck him up. Oh, my gosh. It's just, you don't know until you know. And then you go, wow. But it's just so wild that even at the highest levels, the level that you were wrestling at, a guy like Kurt Angled and go, well, let's take it up another notch.

Yeah. And that's a crazy part. You always find like me being a fan of MMA and you see him watching it, 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 I'm going to do. It's like a Dave and Goggins thing. Oh, I'm just going to run 125 miles. Yeah, and to be able to maintain that drive, that's what's probably one of the hardest things. Because 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.

All of it. Because they're all coming up. Yeah, all chasing you. All chasing you. Yeah. And everybody's scary. Well, I used to tell my fucking training part And I go, fuck the getting there, that's one thing

Fucking staying there That's the secret Yeah, that's the fucking It's so hard to stay at that level Because everybody else is building on 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 to And Gene Lebel said that Savage had brass knuckles in his glove oh oh what yeah I start reading like here the rules he couldn't punch or tackle or sorry he couldn't kick or tackle him and in exchange for that savage offered to wear a judogi a judogi oh sorry oh that's how they wrote it probably yeah no it's a

that's a new outfit they wrote a karate one instead because they didn't know the difference okay so in the parent belief that La Belle was a Karatika So, that's interesting. So he made a rule that Gene couldn't kick him. So because he thought that he was going to use. He couldn't tackle him and he couldn't take him. So Kidna Tampil, tackles or takedowns under the waist. Ooh.

So you had to only hip toss them or only drag him to the ground. 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 Greco. Yeah. They're doing like, Yeah, a $1,000 bet.

Yeah, to anyone who could prove that a boxer would be beat by a martial artist, I think, in a straight fight. Wow. This is way ahead of its time. 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 and other side. Who's a bad motherfucker, Gene LaBelle?

Uh, ahead of his time. Yeah. And, again, that fortuitous meeting, him and Bruce Lee getting together, where 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 it's like oh here it is yeah he would have loved mhm oh my god he would have fucking be totally jazzed on 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 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 you mean you had to be into martial arts to know about martial arts yeah but bruce lee like everybody knew bruce lee yeah changed martial 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 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 have rigid stereotypes back now you'd have you'd have to

like getting gang fights to protect the style that you weren't like do you know do you know like so I started training at Beverly Hills Jitsu Club right in California so so so 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 Oleg to Tar of Marco, who us, and Pedro Hizzo. They were training out of there as well. So you would get these guys, jiu-jitsu 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 this 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 it didn't make any sense to me because you would figure sharing information would be better yeah and it was like no no no no no no no jih Tzu we're not sharing shit we're not you can't participate he can't it was so fucking archaic like like the outlook and it's like like look back and I'm going like wow that's dogma that's like this like And it's weird. Yeah.

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%. I remember when Hoyst Gracie, one of my friends said that when Hoyst Gracie caught Dan Severn in a triangle, that he asked his instructor to show it to him. He's like, you're not ready for that.

I'm not going to show you that. Why don't you just show him something that works? I reround that tape probably 50. 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, Severn 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 with your legs. Yeah, like, what the fuck? Like, what? But if you look at it, like, the space where he had dance, head, and arm is like that big.

Yeah. It's like that fucking, like, when you, when you're doing. triangle like this going that's not a very big space it's like to have fucking damn because he's a big dude going oh I get it and your legs you can 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 that bitch for a long oh my god and he's like pulling on the fuck I'm like pulling on the hood nuts changed everybody like oh my god

you could win off your back it literally Literally, I'm, I still remember to the stage just looking at it with my mouth hanging open going, oh, fuck. I think it was one of the things that made MMA so popular because Hoyst wasn't a big, like, he didn't look like you. No, no. So like, if you were dominating everybody, it would be like, Jesus, look at him. Yeah, yeah. But Hoyce was just looked like an athlete. Yeah.

It's like a thin, he was 175 pounds. God. Which is so crazy. So, you know what's a good. So crazy. I had a conversation with Hoyst 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 just having this conversation with him was just like amazing I was just left the conversation I hung the phone about and going wow what a what a just an amazing human being 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, prolific. Because he's the guy when he won the first one and you looked at the way he did it, everyone was like, what's he doing? 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? The thing. Changed everything. Yeah. Made everybody instead. Because it like it went from this idea that it was just the most

brutal person would win. It was the tank habits. Like, yeah. But no, no, no. It. there's this one guy and he's doing everything with technique and he's not physically imposing at all and he's handsome he didn't make yeah he's good look at him handsome fella and where's that fancy guy thing you know he looks like he's a bad motherfucker and 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 mean because you've never seen it before no nothing like it and then 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 they kept it like it was out of new york until like 10 years so we were we were on me and my brothers we were on our way to see a ufc event in new york and it got canceled and it got moved down south yes to dothan alabama yes ufc 12 yeah we're on our way we're 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 going to work at oh my god yeah and it got moved yeah got moved and so me york was like nope nope ain't having it ain't having it ain't happening well they they kept it out for the longest time though there was the guy who took it was really fighting to keep the ufc out of new york eventually got he got brought

up on corruption charges. Oh, yeah. Shocker. But it was like, it had more to do with, like, unions and the fact that Zufa, who owned it, they also owned hotels. And didn't have unions. Exactly. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So there was a lot. A lot going on. A lot that makes you go. You know, I went to the first sanctioned, the UFC flew me out to go to in New Jersey when they had their main, main, main card in New Jersey. Their first big event that was sanctioned by the New Jersey Boxing Commission, with Tito and 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 they offered me to fight 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 then I'm like okay what's the pay cut they're like we'll give you like an appearance fee of like 15 grand to fight to fight 15 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 that's crazy yeah yeah that's a terrible offer yeah that's one of the worst offers and it's one where where the whole idea behind it would be hey we just if you believe in us and you believe the director you're going, look, we just got sanctioned in New Jersey, right?

Yeah. So that's 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 going to ask once. And that's it. okay yeah just leaving that alone leave that one alone that one's like okay yeah why not why not ask me a second time why we negotiate I don't know um if you 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 stand that crazy how much you want and it's still oh gosh man

it should have failed it could have I mean one is they didn't have yeah if anybody else was in charge Yeah, if anybody else was, yeah. That's crazy. They had no idea how much money you were getting in Japan. Oh, they had no clue. They had no clue. So you know what's crazy with Japan? Here's what I ended up doing.

I said, listen, I 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. Then 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. 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 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. I mean, I don't like to think of people as products, but the show. It is. It is. The program. The program. Now I guess you don't have to pay for it. You're going to 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. Yeah. They'd be better recover. They have better nutrition.

It's investing in what your product is. And your product 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.

And I don't know the, you know, I obviously. Let me ask you this. If you were like looking, like say if your son wanted to start fighting or someone wanted to look to you, would 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 your style up, build it up on maybe a little slightly lower level of competition, although not necessarily. Yeah. Still elite guys. Submission grappling. That's literally, I go, you fundamentally, you need to build a base.

of what you what you're going to become right so submission grab ADCC if a young kid like 16 17 17 year old kid even 18 19 20 year old kid I 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 found foundationally is like if you you have to have 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 80 c 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 and do 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 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, you get fucked up. It might fuck your confidence up. And I just, I'm done. I ain't ever doing this. 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 Rineer de Ritter, is another example. Okay. Who's elite right now. I can't, I say middle wave, 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 him. So 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 an argument for if you were, like, managing a fighter, saying, like, don't just, if you're, if you fight well in the UFC, you might be three fights in in the waters that you really can't swim in. Yeah. Because the level gets high very fast.

Oh, it does. It does. Like, maybe you'd be better off getting a few years in at a different level of competition to really tighten your skills up and make sure that when you finally. do run into you've been ringside 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 like watching it you're like oh my god he's 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 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 how 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 right right it doesn't happen by magic right right right that's what's work for him to become you oh my god he became you like he got all of your mannerisms down like down not like an assimily no fact simile like creepy down like he like even said he fucking walks like me he even got my little fucking walk i'm like fuck like you man 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 that was made for him because you have to be that big to sell that yeah and you can't get that big that quick It should take you forever. So we were talking about this the other day with DJ is that like there's like, you know, through the history of like, you know, movie making, there's been actors that have like, ah, 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 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 Jesus like going like going fuck okay you know like every day same routine get up to the same routine do this I was up to for fight week got all of his stunt guys all like this is this is foundationally because i'm not going to teach him wrestling 25 years wrestling in 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 going to 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 yeah it was one where where that was the biggest deal for benny is to be able to shoot these scenes without stunt double going how because because it just detracts from what he's trying to do as a filmmaker right how do you shoot this whole entire well well i'm going to 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 changes this 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 right right so i go like a 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 a everything from that point going on is my own whether i tip him this way till them this way run them for run them backwards sit down change it's all these little new i go we need to do foundational and then you're good so so it was a lot of work for him to get to that foundational point and 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 hard to really capture like you watch a documentary or a docu 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 remember those fights they got it they got it real close man to pull like wow yeah this is 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 going to be a space for a rocky fight right right literally nothing wrong with rock

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 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, whatever the fucking I got out to. But Rocky 1 was real. Oh, my God. I literally, I remember being in the theater and literally watch it and just, like, as a kid, watching it and, like, I wanted to be Rocky. Dude, I drank a raw egg and I ran around the block as soon as I got home.

Oh, yeah. 100 fucking percent. I mean, you're like, that's. You're like, holy shit. That was a great movie. Oh, unbelievable. And they tried to push him out. 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 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 got it yeah Buster Douglas got it together for one fight against Mike Tyson and pieced him up and did it artistically. Yeah. He was hitting him with a jab followed by a left hook just whop, whack, and it was beautiful. 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. Yeah. I'll never forget that. I'll never forget that.

Because his mom had died. Yeah. And he just got it together for this one fight, wow. And if this 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. Yeah. Gosh, damn. But, like, that one fight, man, he got it together. And you go, wow. So there's guys like that out there that are supremely talented. But for whatever reason, they just never sustain, never can keep it together.

It's a mental thing. It has to be. I mean, all of it is, right? I mean, just like you're saying, like the outliers, it's a mental thing that they have that a level or a gear they can get to that everybody else just can't. It has to be, or there's got to 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 in what you're not so good and and change that and fix it and and really tighten down your diet and really like get religious with that that that's that that's the ability um to be able to be just have this self perspective right this in-depth honesty because a lot of it like I literally before Chris Campbell right I was just talking about I thought I was training fucking hard I thought I thought like I'm training fucking hard.

And he just grabbed him by the hand, he goes, no, let me show you what heart is, right? And so it was this routine where it's like 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 happen again. I ain't fucking ever happened again, man. He slept in the chair. slept in the chair next to the door you know and be like all right because he would just give two beeps beep beep and like all right I'm up you know and fucking out the front door we go to the gym we train in the morning so we do wrestling drills stuff like that and then I'm going to 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 wrestling team warm up and then I'd wait for him to get off of work five o'clock and then we'd train for a couple hours and then get up and repeat but it's this love 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. 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. 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 doesn't take any days off unless he's injured. And if he's injured, he'll still be on the mats watching. He watches everybody. He says, like, I'm still thinking about Jiu-Jitsu. That's intention.

And it's not just training, like, hard sparring. It's going over technique, going over counters, tape study. All of it. All day. and that's that is somebody who's living their life intentional right everything has up 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 a dCC i would never won you know because it's just 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 no one's willing to do it No. He's like, and he just says it with confidence. He goes, I put on all my videos out there for free.

You know what? Isn't that fucking funny, though? I mean, he puts techniques up all the time and shows you how to do stuff. And he sells DVDs still. It makes millions just selling instructions because that's how much he knows about Jiu-Jitsu. Oh my gosh, man. And he's only 30. Yeah.

And he's, everybody considers him the greatest of all time. You know, it's crazy. It's funny to brought this up. So when 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 martial arts, seek and destroy videos connected that are on 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 videotape series that I did for Panther production here it is

so this is one of these things seeking destroy oh my god barn fighting techniques yep and so 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 oh dude I had such this is I call I call it phone I call it phone booth fighting right 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 going to be a real problem. Like, that's going to 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, fuck. Yeah. This might be a problem.

Yeah. All these dudes in karate gays are like, God. Yeah, oh my gosh, you're like, Phil, I'm turning in my ghee. And then the key, the problem with the ghee is anyone can grab it. Yeah. You know, it makes wrestling even easier. Like, if you allowed the ghee still, I think there would probably be a few people to get choked out. But also, a lot of people get taken down a lot easier.

Yeah. So even, so. Because you can grab the guy. Higgin Machado. Higgin Machado, I've rolled with him. Right. John Jock and Higgin. And Higgin, it was like giving him an extra set of hands.

Yeah. I go, dude. I literally sewed the, so on Torrance, when I train with him, there's like, there's one room and then another room and there was 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 guy and I just looked at Higgin. I go, I ain't ever fucking wearing this thing again. Take the key off. I'm fucking here, have it back.

It was like, fuck. It's a weapon. Oh, my God. Yeah, it's a weapon. Especially a 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 guy and i'd be like fuck now now he's got like like like yeah like what the fuck dude it's a totally different thing you have to really be

aware of grips and you got to you can't explode your way out of stuff that's the that's what the argument for the geese defensively that you have to get out of every position with technique you can't just pull your arm out your arm stuck so you have to figure out the right way to do this where you don't expose yourself because they have too much friction it's been a minute since I've been I'm like no friction

I mean you literally it's all friction I mean it's like you know slip 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 going to be better at tennis yeah no play tennis you have to play tennis at an elite level You should be, all your grips should be based on control of the body, gable grips and Yeah, all that. Underhooks and overhooks. And, like, you can't, 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 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 gleeless grappling, right? Because it just teaches you fundamentally what you're about.

to do if you're going to get an MMA. Yes. Right. For sure. Foundationally, it's like that's where you need to start. Yeah, I think so. You know, because 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.

Like my first time at Abu Dhabi, the only thing I kept saying, small moves, small moves, small moves. Like I didn't like, like I literally, if I felt uncomfortable, it was these small, tiny moves. Right. You know, it wasn't this like explosion because it's like, fuck, I don't know what I'm going to explode into. Right. You know, so it's foundational.

It's, yeah, geese 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 geese, like, it's a fun thing to do, and most street fights, the realistic thing is you're going to be wearing clothes. Especially if you're fighting in a place

that is a where people wearing winter coats. Oh, God. Oh, my God. They'll be amazing. A smorgasbord. So many things to choose from, so much control available. But for the, if you really, ever wanted to think about competing i would say just go right into wrestling wrestling and jiu-jitsu learn that stuff

first that's foundational yeah you have to god man i can't believe you've been involved in this this long ago 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 when 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 if everybody was wearing a mask until you get to 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 we saw stepe fight francis and got out

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 seek and destroy going after Steve and patient. You know, it's when D.C. started calling him patient Francis. Yeah. And dude, there's no crowd. And it's kind of eerie.

Wow. It's eerie. Because when he caos him and you hear people go, whoa, oh, oh, that's like people kind of freaked out. Wow. 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, we were in an empty arena. Wow. The arena was completely empty. It was only the UFC crew and only the people that were working around with the UFC. 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 I don't know 100 people 200 people in the whole fucking arena

it was nuts it was like totally quiet it would be so spooky it was it was eerie because you heard the slaps of the of the punches and kicks way different oh I bet

because there's no people cheering because there's always people cheering yeah it's always this background noise the UFC like yeah and you hear hear thuds and stuff and I hear 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 there's an empty arena I need to go back and watch that to see if I can't hear of shins hitting me oh my god so that's so I've sat there with a group of people that like watching somebody check a kick in here

shin on chin and just me nobody in the room getting it but me going oh yeah I'm like owly I don't care like 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 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, like, this is nuts. That is just one of those where, you know, again, money can't buy that.

I mean, it's just one of those experiences like I've had a couple through this process of filmmaking where it's like no money on Earth could buy that experience. Like in Venice standing there, like literally, like I'm crying because like I said, it was at the end of that it was like therapy, watching me and literally settling into like, wow, man, I was a dick. You know, I just was really harder 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'd never experienced anything like it either, you know. Well, I think anybody trying to do what you were trying to do is got to be a bit of a dick.

I don't think, as nice as you were and you were always super friendly, you're doing something that's really insane. You know, 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 as an hot pants. You want to know the truth? It's like a hot pants, you know? I mean, you were 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 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 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, what 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 going to hold me back. Yeah. And that's part of it, like, understanding, like, I just didn't have patience for it. Because I didn't have time. I didn't have time for it, right? Yeah. It's understanding, like, like, I know that X, I only have. X amount of fucking fights in me and I got to try to maximize and that's not going to 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 mm 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 part that I helped you know go okay my training partners be accountable to me and I'll help you with that little missing piece of how to be your 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 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 because you just wanted relief yeah maybe relief from the mindset yeah I 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 in 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 going to get a little relief from it you know it's gonna so I can unplug right you know and it was just one of those where it started with pain you know realistically started like a 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 Yeah, in all fairness, I think we should tell people to 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 addictive. Yeah, they argued it in court. They argued it in court that it was not addictive. 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 at the level that I took it, when I stopped, you tried to. 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 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? 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 that 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 going to 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? Yeah, I knew when I first drank, first had a drink that I drank until I was drunk. Like, because that was this taste of Jack Daniels and it was like, oh, this feels good. It was like 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 adjulations, the this. It's like, that's who I am, right? And it's a, it's a contributor to my success, but it's also a contributor 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 you know I'm in recovery I have seven years of sobriety now congratulations yeah I mean it's 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 morals and ethics that's foundational foundational having your health that's foundational yeah yeah i mean because it's one of those we're understanding like 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 it sounds like the duh no but it's an important thing to reiterate because everybody should hear it you know and 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 like what makes him function structure he stole 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 I'm gonna give you four stars dad yeah could have given you five but you weren't fucking hard I'm like fuck on that's hilarious but he functions best

with structure he's just one of those individuals are built like that right well I think part of that it's kind of probably have seen what you did and genetics and there's like some learned memory in there probably i would think so i would think there is and i don't think we totally understand where personalities come from it's a mixture of like spirits and hormones and genetics and where you are born and what part of the fucking moon's facing this way oh my god yeah i always wondered if that shit's real 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 would feel real stupid if I was ignoring it the whole time. You know what? Listen to Joe Dispenza, some of his stuff. It changed my whole, it's changed some of my perspective of how, like just having, we're energy, right? We're energy. And your emotional energy is transferred to me.

It's like why I was addicted to dawn because of that exchange of negative energy, right? Back and forth. It's like being an accident. 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.

Hell yeah. I mean, it's the whole process of that fucked up shit. It's how fucked up. It's called fun. Oh, my God. What do you hate fun? Yeah. Oh, my God. So 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 off Chanchin. It is my God. It is such a crazy scene. It's really well done, man. Oh, my God. It's really well done. It's how Emily flips that switch of like, fucking motherfucker. Yeah. Well, you wanted me to come. It's like, oh my

God, it's like, fuck. That's what does it every fucking time. It's amazing. Like that little, like oh, God, I guess I did want her to come. I'm fucking asshole. It's amazing. 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, I mean... It's so surreal. I've used... Like, I haven't found another word to explain it. Right. It seems like there's not a word that they 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 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. Yeah, it'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? 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 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, and the thing about what you do, did is that like I said I thought it was so brave that you did it publicly when you did the matching 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 dawn right nobody else on the planet knew what I was doing and so when john had put the camera down 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 could have went fuck you get the fuck out of my house you're done filming and there's 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 going to 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 gonna show you because it was one of those where it's like it felt like a weight got lifted 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 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. 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? There's like eight of us 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 my truck, start driving. Back then the phones, you know, like in the car. He's calling me on the phone. And he goes, you're going to be okay. I go, I don't have enough fucking clue. I don't know. I honestly don't know.

Because the agreement we had in place was 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 whole film, I didn't see any of it until that moment. So literally, I drove home and John was like, what, I go, you have to give me a day. You have to fucking give me a day. I just, 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. Yeah, I did. I did at the very... What made you decide not to? John had said something to me like, I guess it's like a 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've gone through and sees the hope that you have in that and you're... 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 right you don't 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 why i can i

can ask for help too when you got through the film how long did it take you to get clean um i got clean off a off of morphine off of the new bane i was doing um right after all the way through the volchanchen or all the way through the uh fidgeta fight and i was clean for I started drinking, which is a whole other topic, but, you know, I had done narcotics in, you know, probably like three years after that. And then I started up again. And then it 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, you know, all these different factors of it. And so that's eventually, like I've said, so my mom passed away September 3rd, 1996.

And so my son knows this. And so my sobriety date September 4th. And so my son asked me that day, September 3rd, he's like, Dad, I know you need to drink today because your mom died, but would you stop tomorrow? And at the time, I thought it was just another empty promise of like, yeah, yeah, 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? And from that day until 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. 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 a lot of guys are, they're self-diagnosing 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 alcohol is a big one. Oh, huge. A big contributing factor. A lot of former fighters become alcoholics. cocaine's another one because it's one of those where I thought I literally woke up showing this is no shit

like waking up going okay I don't know what's wrong with people 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 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 did it, was it passed a specific fight? Um, it was, it was literally towards, it was after 2006, 2006, 2007, 2008, I stopped fighting 2009. I didn't know what else to do. All my identity was tied up and being a fighter. You know, and understanding like these simple words of like, fighting is 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 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 it i call it a god shot because 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 took that of sobriety it took to clear out all the bullshit that was in my head going I just need neutral right and once I hit neutral's like oh wow I can build on this you know so it's it's been 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 very vulnerable thoughts on, you know, who you are as a guy who was, you know, one point in time when a scariest fucking human beings walking the face of the earth. And you're, you know, that's important for people to know and to hear and that and to recognize that like, man, a lot of people can get caught in that trap. They can. Don't think you couldn't. Yeah.

You know, just be a little bit more compassionate and understanding and appreciate people for telling you 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 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 as having

like a 65 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 wow you know it's like this this door had been opened 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 mm-hmm it's about opening the door up so people can connect and go, well, if he can do it, I can, I can, I can tell my truth. 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 a horrible existence. Did anybody ever recommend Ibegain to you? No. I've heard of that, though. So they're doing that now in Texas. The Ibegain initiative passed through thanks to former governor Rick Perkins. Republican, who, through working with veterans, found that a lot of veterans who struggle

with addiction and PTSD, that Ibogaine is incredibly effective. Wow. And it's not a recreational drug. It's not fun. No, no, no. But it's a psychedelic that takes 24 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 80 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 90s. So if you do two different Ibogaine ceremonies, yeah. That's incredible. Yeah, they were going, most people were going, my friend Ed Clay did it down 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 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 had relief. So they talk about like the neuroplasticity of drugs like that to create new pathways instantaneously. Yeah. Like I'd like to say those words, but I don't really know what they mean. You know what I say them?

I'm just faking. I know that's how you're supposed to say it, so I'll say it. Respectfully, I don't know what the fuck's going on your brain. Neuplasticity. What I do know is my friends that I know that have gone and done the IBA game, it's been massively effective. Wow. Get them off drugs, get them off drinking.

Wow. Get them, you know, they just change their perspective. They go, okay, I get it now. They just realized where they were tripping over their own dick, like what they were doing wrong. That's incredible. Yeah. Quick. I mean, 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. Oh, my God, that's like, that's fucking bizarre a world, right? Oh, my God. Total bizarro world. Yeah, none of that makes sense, man. I mean, it's just, that's, so that's a whole other rabbit hole.

It really doesn't make any sense. No. Like, what we just said makes, like, no, it should be the opposite. Yeah. It should be the opposite. This is so stupid. Because it's just one where it's like, if that stuff existed back then. then it would have cut short.

Yeah. It did exist, but it just didn't exist here because we're corrupt. Yeah. And so, 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. Yeah. 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 this is anything wrong with pharmaceutical drugs. but I'm saying that this also might cure you and it's readily it's a plan so that's again in the last five six years alternative perspectives has been just paramount yeah in my just in opening me up you know to 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 you know it's just you 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 going to do meditation. I'm going to do this. I did, I did meditation for fighting, but it was visual meditation. How the fuck I was going to 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 could open different spots in my brain up, you know. And so it's just been this, you know, my wife, she's Nietzsche Rambudist, you know, what is, what is that? Numbio ho Rengeko. She chants every morning. Duncan does that. Yeah. So the Buddha you have, the the gold Buddha you have. Yeah. We have one in our house, not quite that big. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So she's Nietzsche and Buddhist and it's one of those things where she got me to start chanting. I don't do it as much now, but the first three,

four years we're 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 and 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 way things can be done yeah like it's all it's all been solved kids yeah like settle down

every way he knows like no no no no i don't think they do i don't think they should show me how they built that yeah show me who the fuck figured this out like me 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. Yeah. Don't tell me. Yeah.

Oh, my God. Yeah. Settle down. Yeah. Settle down. 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 sometimes it's wrong.

That's the part where I can't believe how much I open. up and been just receptive 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 know so little dude nobody knows shit that's the scariest thing there's a bunch of people pretending they've got to figure out but they're full of shit too

every one of us is a talking monkey flying through space that's a great man to look at it right over our head 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. Right. 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. Nature, right? Not that they're not awesome people, but what I'm saying is like, 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 really is like like walking barefoot right Like on grass and getting connected And you know I at first you would have said to me 10 years ago I'm like yeah okay whatever you know but it's like okay Who says it's not? I think nature's a vitamin

Oh yeah I would agree Hey, where did the term tree hugger come from? Did it come from the time where hippies were doing acid? Probably. Because then that would make so much more sense. Because if you're on acid and you hug your tree, you would be like, oh, I love you. I love you, tree. You're so fucking amazing.

Oh, shit. That originated a while ago. From a series of nonviolent environmental protests in India, beginning with Bish, Bishnoi. Bishnoi, Bishnoi community, and 1730, who physically clung to trees to prevent them from being cut down. See, those people are probably on mushrooms. Whoa. That's why they worship cattle. That's what I think.

Why else would all those poor people not eat cows? Oh, my God. Cows so good. But doesn't that make no sense? It makes no sense. You guys have food everywhere and you're starving. And 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. Because that's where the mushrooms go. That's where they grow out. The best source of psilocybin is cow poop. Duncan used to live in, my friend Duncan Trustle, used to live in Asheville, North Carolina. And 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 kids wouldn't go in the field and pick the mushrooms. Because there were so many spores in that area. These kids would go and just get bags of mushrooms and go to other planets. The farmer had to feed his cow. Some anti-mushroom. I want to see them that's still there. I wonder if it is, I bet there's parts of this country where they just grow naturally all over the place. I would imagine.

Once those spores get out there. I would imagine. Yeah. I would imagine. I was supposed to actually go down to. Brazil and ayahuasca. Oh, really? Yeah.

Yeah. Isn't it crazy that you have to go to Brazil, do that too? That's nuts. Yeah. A friend of mine, we actually went down to stem cells in 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 being. And he's like, it's in the jungle. So there's no like, it's... Tom, dump, dumb, dumb, dumb, down. Exactly. And he goes, it's, it's life-changing. I just picture Alex Pereiro walking to him. Dude, totally, man.

Totally. Like, that's a scary motherfucker, man. He's the scariest. Oh, dude. His walk-in is the scariest, bro. Oh, my God, man. It's the dopest, too. That music starts playing.

It's this, taunt. It's this, like, I'm coming to get you and nothing you could do about it. Yeah. Yeah, he's built for one thing. And I bumped in him in Chicago And it's like he's built for one thing He's built to fuck you up Oh he's built to fight

Weird weirdly strong guy Oh yeah like like literally it's like 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 tell's no tell 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 sitting you up, he's taking your legs away and you're not seeing the tells. Oh, my God. They're not there at all. Yep, that's it.

They don't move. By the time you think it's coming, it's already there. And you're like, blood. And that's the whole thing is that you go, okay, you're thinking you're going to 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 even a thing is that nerve. Yeah, it's a horrible nerve. Oh, my God. That wasn't a thing when you were fighting. No, it was crazy. Oh, my God. 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 walk. Look at it. 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?

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. He's a world champion.

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, because 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 Mighty Mouse did it to Henry Sohudo and made his leg go limp. Did you ever remember that? 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, that 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. And like watching another Friday going, yeah, I'm going to try it. Now we 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... So vulnerable. 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? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like, when you throw a kick at him, he just lifts his legs. He just lifts his knee there And he just picks his leg up So the kick just kind of goes with it And he goes it takes all the impact on it 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 Even if you're even if you're just checking 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 Yeah

But what I mean is he is picking up his leg, like at the knee, his ankle is coming up parallel to the floor. I know exactly what you're talking about. You're not going to see it, but he's just, 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, because he knows he's just got a land one. So he's got this very creative little ways to chop back the legs. Yeah, I still think Sean O'Malley's got the best.

faint. Oh, he's got phenomenal things. I mean, just, so I remember watching him before he got to the U.C. And a friend of mine was like, no, no, no, you got to watch this kid. You got to 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 faint, right, to get to what he wanted to get to. And then it was like a faint here, faint on this side, faint here and all of a sudden he's got a tendency and now it's like attack time. Did you ever see the Eddie Wyneland one?

He faints an uppercut and he comes over the top of the right hand. I've seen it but I haven't seen it. Oh you got to see it. Yeah. It's so pretty is one of his prettiest knockouts. He like stepped in like fainted like he was going to throw an uppercut and turned it into a left hand.

Oh my God. It was so clean. Yeah, he's done some stuff. Watch this. Watch how he thinks. It's amazing. look at that he faints the left upper cut and comes over the top with the right hand watch that again and that's one of those words that's so crazy that is that's oh my god that's silly bro that's so beautiful oh my god that's like one of those things where it's like you can't teach it you can't teach that stuff it's so slick it's such a slick move cannot teach it did you watch the terence crawford

canello halvers yeah i did who talk about slick oh my good Crawford 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,

Cornello has such a bully style. Mm-hmm. Right? He's going to get in. He's going to bang with you. He's going to power. And watching Conno just, or Crawford, just box. Just box.

Beautifully. Oh, like, I watched 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 him and then whap and thrown, like, what? Bap, bap, bop, bang. It's like, wow. Towards the end, towards the final rounds, really started getting comfortable and really started putting it on him.

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 what of the greatest of all time fucking 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 so you know something really special i believe he's 37 yeah one of those where he shouldn't be able to do that by by by any account by any account 37 my body was so wrecked i'm like fuck you you know i can barely

go bowling I watched a video of Dolph Lundgren the other day Like 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 Yeah absolutely Talking about guys doing everything Scientifically Dolph Lundgren in Rocky 3 Oh my God man It was a Rocky 4

Rocky 4 right That was a stereotype That was a stereotype like the Russians Yeah Oh they're manufactured You know Like these biological manufactured I came from a test tube you know type he totally looked like a

Russian experiment he did he did he did but he that was the first time I saw a Versa climber I was yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I'm gonna yeah oh my god god he's unstoppable yeah I was on a versa climber two days ago they're brutal oh fuck I hate him not a lot of fun no no not an enjoyable idea I do an aerodyne Versa climber a rower and then a skier all the things that suck all the things that suck Like going, just 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. 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. That's it. Yeah, that's good for you. Oh, it's huge. Yeah.

It's huge. It's giant. Because it's just like when I trained it, come 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 right you know it's like fuck I'm gonna go to the gym I don't get on a fucking thing that I hate and I'm gonna fucking do it for 45

minutes and I'm and I'm and that's a win and I think if you looked at the proportion like if you looked at this 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 in that that's 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 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 what's the fuck i'm not i'm not like what's not 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 9000 r pms for years and then all of a sudden boom yeah and you're supposed to go to normal life no no and i didn't so this is this is again we're 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 try 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 right if i'm emotionally dishonest people get fucked up my environment gets all fucked up right right yeah you know so it's like it's understanding these these 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 going to pass oh god yeah well i call well in my hall fame speech i call it you know like when i was first getting sober it was 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 I just need to make it through this next minute. I just need to get through this next. Some of them were 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 like 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 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 you know know 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 other 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 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 Is 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 tell he wants to go back Oh my God Because it's just one where it's like It's not how I'm built You know I have I have a lot more compassion

As it 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 to know Right It's a good thing to know Do you when you look back Do you, I mean, do, if you were going to give yourself advice, when would you think would have been a good time for you to stop fighting? After Fugita. After Fijita. Yeah.

Yeah. Because that, you know what? And, like, if people understood, like, that time period, like, I got sober. 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, if I would have won the Pride Grand Prix, it would have been a mic drop. I could have walked away and it could have been a Khabi moment where it's like, oh, I wonder how good he. Fuck, 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 knew that something had, changed in me, that I didn't have that thing in me that I needed to do it. Because 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. And if you don't have it, it's like, you know, 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 because i mean just i had to 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 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 my friends are always like he's so normal this is so weird like it's so hard to believe that that guy is one of the greatest spiders all the time 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 is possible yeah and that's that's the

I answer that question for myself right and it's one where it's like okay you know and to get for me to get there was was so not difficult but 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, wow, that doesn't even look like me. Like, transforming, like, into a completely different person. And it's understanding, like, compartmentalizing everything, like no emotions, no nothing singularly focused to one thing. And that thing was, I'm going to 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 probably unsustainable if you want to be a happy person no you can't but you can't but in order to be the mark cur that everybody loved you kind of had to go there that's the only way to do it 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 yeah i mean it's just one where it's a nutty requirement of someone fuck yeah a nutty request it is hey you want to go fight in front of the whole world yeah yeah because it's it's fucking you talk about vulnerable like vulnerable yeah like fucking bear in your soul that's because 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 dude right to add a little fucking insult right you have fucking hot pants on his beat and the fuck so i mean there's that whole thing it's it's very fucking vulnerable to fight because there's it's just it's just very like the loneliest places two loneliest places in the world was 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 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 and i know it's artists and you know people that yeah do you think steve jobs had fucking i mean yeah that's again singularly focused singularly focused right i mean it's just this it's the it's the you know madness and brilliance you know or 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 taking me a long time to get here. Well, that's awesome, dude. I'm glad that you got there. And I'm glad to just be able to sit down with you and talk to you. 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 in private. This guy just let us into his life. Holy shit. 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 look at your life like that. I think it's pretty powerful, man.

Oh, I appreciate it. And the movie's great. And The Rock, you fucking nailed it. Oh, my God. I mean, The Rock, Emily, you know. She nailed it. She nailed 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, man. I appreciate it. The smashing machine. It is out October 3rd, right?

Is that what it's out? October 3rd, yeah. Yeah. It's very good. I appreciate it, Joe. And Boss Routon kills it in it, too. Yeah. It was great.

All right. Thank you. Bye, everybody. Bye, cheer. Thank you.