The Joe Rogan Experience - #491 - Steve Maxwell

Episode Date: April 28, 2014

Steve Maxwell is an American fitness coach, physical educator, and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu instructor. He was named one of the top 100 trainers in the USA by Men's Journal.

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! Good to see you my friend! Hey, great to see you again too! Steve Maxwell is, for folks who don't know, a long time Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt,-time strength and conditioning guru, and my friend. And I found out about you from DVDs, actually. I think someone from the underground posted up a link to one of your DVDs a while back.

And I got one of your kettlebell DVDs, which I thought was very informative and very interesting. And then I started reading about your lifestyle and reading about your philosophies on training and reading some of your blog entries. And you're an unusual dude when it comes to the strength and conditioning and fitness and just the wellness advocates. You usually have a bunch of different schools of thought when it comes to those. You've got meatheads who are just into lifting the heaviest weights that they can and getting as big as they can. But you're sort of a weirdo, man. You're traveling the world.

You're doing seminars all over the place. You're eating very little food. You've got a lot of people interested in how you're living your life these days. Well, I've definitely gone through an evolution. You know, I've been at this for 51 years. I started when I was like 10 years old. That's when you started working out. Yeah, when I was 10.

My father got me a York barbell set. York was just down the road from Carlisle, Pennsylvania. And I was one of those kids that was sort of weak and scrawny and basically getting picked on by some of the neighborhood kids. And my father kind of saw where this was going, got me the barbell set, and literally made me go out for wrestling. Really? Made me.

I went kicking and screaming. And then I found out I was actually pretty good at it. Well, you must be happy. You must have thanked him at some point in time. Oh, for sure. Absolutely. I mean, he had tried to teach both me and my brother boxing and so forth in the backyard. And I learned early I didn't like to get hit.

But I sure liked to clinch and take guys down, man. Well, that's a sign of intelligence. It was just a natural evolution. And then I discovered, hey, man, I really got this thing for wrestling. And all my training was geared to making me a better athlete as opposed to the body beautiful or even powerlifting or Olympic lifting. I was always interested in improved performance for my chosen activity. And back then, that wasn't that common, right? I mean, back then, everybody was trying to be like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Everybody was trying to lift weights and get huge. Well, this was in the 60s. And at that point, bodybuilding was still in its infancy. I mean, up to the 1950s, bodybuilding was actually a really honorable profession. It was pure. There was no anabolic steroids. I mean, they didn't even have so much as a Flintstone vitamin. I mean, there was no creatine or protein powders and such. What was the diet like back then when guys would try to get big? Did they have any idea of what the correct foods to eat? Well, yeah, for sure.

A lot more emphasis was placed on health. Health was always first with a lot of these old bodybuilders. They called themselves physical culturists. Right. Jack LaLanne was one of those guys. Well, I first heard that term from you, actually. these old bodybuilders, and they call themselves physical culturists. Right. You know, Jacqueline was one of those guys. Well, I first heard that term from you, actually. I believe it was reading your blog or reading, you know,

something that you had, a conversation that you had with someone. But the term physical culture, like being involved in physical culture. I like that term. It's a good term. It's a throwback to ancient Greece. I mean, if you think about it, the standard for male beauty and male excellence for 2,000 years was the ancient Greek statue. The Greek god. The Greek god. And, you know, if you look at the sculpture from that time, it's just magnificent.

Something got very skewed right towards the end of the 60s, early 70s. And a lot of it was the anabolic steroids. And, you know,'s but let's face it it's the human condition right if people will do things because they can do things and people just wanted to get as big and freaky as possible it's a bit of dysmorphia too isn't it it's isn't it sort of like like an anorexic that doesn't realize they're so skinny looking or a woman who has enormous fake breasts and still doesn't think they're big skinny looking or a woman who has enormous fake breasts and still doesn't think they're big enough.

There's some sort of a weird psychological condition where people can't see themselves. There's definitely a disconnect in there somewhere where they have a very skewed body image of themselves. But yeah, back in the 60s, it was pretty innocent still. I mean, steroids existed, but it wasn't prevalent. Most of the information, if you're looking for really good, solid information about sports training, you have to go before 1950.

Really? Yeah. Why is that? Well, I mean, that's when steroids began to make inroads into Olympic weightlifting. Oh, I see. And, of course, that's when the Eastern Bloc really started getting into this stuff. Of course, it's not like the U.S. didn't have, you know, plenty of drugs, too. Sure.

But in those days, you know, it was still legal in the early days. But you had asked me about what did guys eat back in the mighty medieval. Just normal food. Just good, basic food. They drank a lot of milk. Milk was considered a bodybuilding food. And you can trace that clear back, you know back thousands of years ago, even into India, where the Hindu wrestlers would drink the milk and eat almonds in an effort to build mass in their bodies. So it's been well known. So it's been well known.

Well, everyone talks about lactose intolerance and things along those lines, but a big issue with lactose intolerance is just homogenized and pasteurized milk. And I've talked about that in the podcast and people have said, yeah, well, if you don't do that, people are going to get sick. And that's not because of the milk. It's because of the way we're raising cattle. It's because of what we're putting in these animals' diets. It's because these aren't healthy animals. And if these aren't healthy animals and the milk isn't treated properly, if it does get somehow or another contaminated by E. coli or things along those

lines, that's not because the milk is bad. It's because somehow or another it was handled poorly and people got sick because of it. But this idea that pasteurization and homogenization is the only way to go with milk is really ridiculous. I mean, it kills all the enzymes. It is ridiculous. I mean, people have been drinking milk literally for thousands of years. I mean, animal husbandry goes back 10,000 years. And to my way of thinking, the modern cow is just a – I mean it's just a very sickly animal. Even though they give these things steroids and they give them all sorts of antibiotics and all this stuff, they're feeding them grain.

Cattle were never meant to eat grain. They eat grass in nature, in the wild. And then like you said, you superheat the milk and you cook it literally to death until there's nothing left in it. No wonder people have. And then on top of that, people are drinking milk combined with all other kind of stuff and overburdening their digestive system, overdrinking milk, and, you know, your body develops an intolerance.

Yeah, people have this aversion to bacteria. But what folks have to get in their heads, like this idea that homogenization, pasteurization is the only way to go because it kills all the bad stuff, but it also kills the good stuff. I mean, sure, you're going to get some protein and calcium out of milk that's homogenized and pasteurized, but you're taking in cultures when you're drinking milk. You're taking in a part of that animal's body. And the closer it is to being alive, the better it is for your body. That's why meat is supposed to be consumed medium rare or rare.

Like that's the best way to eat meat. You're going to get the most nutrition out of that food. The only time you're supposed to cook meat past that is when the animal is assumed to be sick like the reason why we cook pork to 150 degrees is to kill trichinosis and that's one of the reasons why with um with factory pork or with um you know uh what's the best word for it farm pork or domestic pork domestic, they're now saying that they're lowering their standard. They're lowering it down, I believe, 140 or 145 degrees because the instances of trichinosis are so rare. In fact, 90% of all trichinosis cases in this country

come from eating bear meat. Interesting. I've had bear meat, by the way. It's delicious. It was absolutely. It was black bear. Yeah. Corn-fed black bear. Corn-fed? Yeah. Really? The bear had actually been living outside this farmer's field. And a friend of mine actually shot this thing and had prepared steaks and had told me, hey, listen, I'm coming up to Philly to train some jiu-jitsu with you.

This guy was a firearms expert. He actually taught firearms for the FBI. And he used to take Brazilian jiu-jitsu with me when I had my school in Philadelphia. So I'm thinking, oh my God, bear steak. Gee, this sounds really sick, man. So I was trying to think of every excuse for not eating it, right? So he comes up. He takes my wife out for a shooting lesson at the local range. I, in the meantime, make some dinner for myself, and then I'm going to give him the excuse, well, I was so hungry I couldn't wait, right? So he's so hurt.

He's so hurt because, you know, he made this especially for me. So I says, oh, what the hell, you know, I'll have a bite. Dude, it was absolutely delicious. And then I was ashamed of myself, like, wow, man, I wish I would have waited for, you know. So I saved it and had it the next night. Yeah, bear is very good for you. Shockingly delicious.

You just have to make sure you cook it correctly. Like a smoky beef. Yeah. But you also have to make sure that the animal hasn't been eating a lot of fish. When they eat a lot of fish, they can get funky. Like if you eat bear or if you catch a bear that's been eating like a rotten moose and then for real. Yeah, any kind of scavenger. Well, they're omnivores

yeah whether they're scavenging and so forth but you know back to uh quality of food and so forth an awful lot depends on a person's ability to digest their food it all comes back to digestion if you can't digest it then you can't assimilate it and a lot of the molecules of this undigested food passes through the gut membrane and creates this inflammatory response in the body. That's how these people are getting a lot of their food intolerances and so forth. When the digestion is in line, your immune system is in line. You don't get sick. Bacteria doesn't bother you. I mean, in many cases, when the immune system is really, really strong, you even fight off cases of worms and all sorts of stuff. Your body is amazing and it's resilient.

Do you follow anything like a Gracie diet or one of those things where you don't combine foods to give your digestive system a bit of a break? Yeah, very much so. foods to give your digestive system a bit of a break? Yeah, very much so. I was originally introduced to the Gracie diet by Jorgean Gracie, the oldest son of Elio, and then later Elio himself. I spent some time with Elio. I actually stayed down at his ranch for almost a month one time in Brazil. Wow, that must have been amazing.

Oh, man. It was. What year was this? This was the year that Hoist fought in Copacabana and lost to Valige. Oh, okay. Do you remember that? So it was probably 96 maybe? Was that 96?

Yeah, okay. Somewhere around there, I want to say. Maybe I'm a little off. It might be 98, 99. Let's find out. Anyway, keep going, please. Yeah, I can't forget. But at any rate, that's when I became aware of food combining.

Then I did a lot of research and reading about it. I read about this guy, Herbert Sheldon, who had a clinic in San Antonio, Texas and cured a lot of people from a lot of different diseases and sicknesses using food combining and fasting. So I got really, really interested. And then later I read this guy, Dr. John Tilden, who wrote a book called Toxemia Explained. He was a turn-of-the-century physician, and he cured many so-called incurable diseases just through diet and fasting alone. And the basic premise is when you overmix a lot of food in one meal, there's a real tendency to overeat. When you overeat, you overburden your digestive system. And of course, there's a real tendency to put on body fat. So when you eat just, let's say, for example, I have a fruit-based meal, a starch-based

meal, and a protein-based meal. Occasionally, I'll have some light dairy with the fruit, but a lot of times it's just fruit but so. Occasionally, a little bit of nuts. With a starch meal, I will usually stick with something like sweet potatoes or potato. But occasionally, I'll have wheat-based product. I don't have any gluten problems whatsoever, mostly because of the way I combine my foods. And I can have that with some vegetables and so forth. And then I'll have a protein meal. And all these meals are interchangeable.

I can have my protein meal for breakfast. I can have my protein meal for lunch and so forth. And usually with the protein meal, if it's really cold or I'm really hungry, I'll have a little soup and I'll have a raw leaf green vegetable salad, occasionally a couple of cooked vegetables, but basically meat and vegetables. And when I say meat, I'm talking about fish, fowl, you know, all of the type of flesh foods and so forth. And since adopting that, I feel fantastic. I'm like 61 years old now. I still feel really good. You know, I've been able to maintain a really low fat percentage and keep my energy and health because traveling is brutal, man.

I mean, I'm in a different country every couple weeks. Ruthless on the immune system. Oh, my God. Flying can kick your ass, man. A two-hour flight, 12-hour flight, doesn't matter. It's just really debilitating to fly. Something about the air and the... It's radiation as well.

Yeah, the electromagnetic fields from the plane. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that's hidden that people don't even realize that can make flying pretty hard in your system. But I do okay. I really do. The radiation thing is pretty shocking. When I first started, someone was talking about x-rays.

I said, all right, well, let's look up how much radiation an x-ray does cause you. A fucking airplane is way more than x-rays. And, you know, people do it all the time. All the time. And those poor stewardesses and flight attendants and pilots, I mean, those guys must be beat down on a regular basis. It's very, your body, once again, your immune system, when you're eating in accordance with nature

and you're not overburdening the system, overburdening your digestive system and so forth, your immune system is pretty strong. Your body can handle just about anything, really, but it does make you tired. It can make you quite tired. So rest becomes really important. I don't know about you, but I know you fly all over the place to do your comedy act and so forth.

I find that if I rest up really well and don't do anything too strenuous, I bounce back pretty quick. I find that also I have to exercise when I land. When I land, that's my secret to avoiding the real feelings of jet lag. I get to the gym. I hit the elliptical machine, and I just do a hard half an hour on the elliptical machine. Just something about it forces my body into that sort of recovery response and that kicks everything up a notch and just seems to really help keep my energy at high levels when I fly. Well, depending on what time of the day I'll land, one of my secrets for making the

transition, the second I get on the plane, I reset my watch to whatever time zone I'm going to be in. Sometimes I'm flying many time zones. And then I immediately tried to adapt my eating plan to the place I'm going, which means often skipping a meal. Occasionally I'll even fast and not just drink water the whole time I'm on the plane, don't eat anything. I figure it's low activity anyway. And then the second I land, I'm like you. If it's in the early part of the day, I'll take a nice walk. I do this thing called Russian breathing ladders where I work the breath. It's fantastic. You match the inhale exhales to your steps and you see how many steps you can get up to on the inhale and how many

steps you can get on the exhale. So you might be taking like 20 steps in one inhale and exhaling over 20 steps and you'll keep that going. That's really interesting. I do something similar in the isolation tank. Just to clarify what I said earlier, I was incorrect. It's actually the same as an x-ray. A seven-hour flight from New York to London, you receive the same dose of radiation as a chest x-ray. From New York to Tokyo, it's two chest x-rays. So that's where I'd gotten it wrong. So, you know, six, seven hour flight is like an x-ray. That's still a lot. I mean, like when you go to the dentist, right, you always see the hygienist jump behind the curtain. She doesn't want to, when you're supposed to just doing this x-ray, harmless x-ray, but you never see her in the room with you, man. Yeah, they run away. It's kind of hilarious. They're covering your balls and your chest and thyroid with a lead shield.

So obviously it's not as harmless. Yeah, especially if you think about poor pilots. I mean, that's pretty crazy when you really stop and think about it. It's pretty nutso, man. So it was 98, which was Hoyce Grac's uh waleed ishmael fight okay um so you went down there in 1998 you stayed for a month with uh ilio gracie for folks who don't know ilio gracie is one of the most important figures in the history of martial arts if not the most important him and carlos gracie uh essentially created what we call modern Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

They started the revolution. And since then, there's been a lot of innovation and a lot of change and a lot of growth since that time, since the 1940s and 50s and 60s and on through the Hickson, Hoist, all these guys that came up afterwards through the 90s. And then once the Ultimate Fighting Championship came around, boy, it just skyrocketed. Now jiu-jitsu. And your son, Max, is really— Zach.

Zach, excuse me. Zach Maxwell. Excuse me. Zach fought in Metamorris. Yeah, yeah. Wow, he really did a terrific job. That kid was tough. He fought Sean Roberts.

Yeah. That guy's like a real submission machine. So, you know, I was a little nervous. Zach is slick. He's slick. He's a very relaxed guy. But, you know, he was one of the first generation of American children to grow up in the Brazilian jiu-jitsu system. I started him when he was really just a little, you know, I was laughing when Krom was talking about the invisible jiu-jitsu, you know, more like invisible pressure. Well, I wasn't so subtle with the pressure I put on poor Zach.

Really? But he really grew up in that whole system. Was that because of the way your father pushed you into wrestling? Probably. It was an unconscious thing. I had a little bit of that Little League syndrome going on there. unconscious thing. I had a little bit of that Little League syndrome going on there. And maybe looking to, you know, live some type of, get some type of fulfillment through my kids. You know, I mean, there was all that crap going on. Well, I have girls, but I teach them jujitsu,

but I make it fun. You know, I have them arm bar me and, you know, I just show them where to put their legs and how to pull and how to, you know, how to set up the position. And I show them where to put their legs and how to pull and how to set up the position. I show them the mount. But what's really fascinating is, you know, you're familiar with the concept that there's certain things that get passed on through genetics. In fact, they've proven that with certain mice, that they can take mice and they can institute, they can put a smell in the air. institute, they can put a smell in the air and when that smell happens, like a citrusy smell, they'll give an electrical shock to the feet of the mice.

Like they're standing on this thing. And when they smell this smell, they zap their feet. Not to kill them, you know, just enough to make them realize, like, yikes, this is not good. Their children, with no electricity whatsoever, smell that smell and a panic ensues

they have a panic response so it's passed on through their genetics cellular memory yes my three-year-old when her and my four-year-old uh well her my five-year-old started rolling around um the three-year-old would take the back and go over under. Okay. She throws the hooks in, and she goes like this, and she hangs on. I was like, that's crazy. I was like, it's almost like instinct. They were rolling around, and the older daughter turned sideways, and the three-year-old went like this and then threw her legs over. And I was like, that is fucking crazy.

Because she did what I've done probably 100,000 times. But it's in my mind, you see the back, you get that over under, you throw the hooks on. I mean, it's just instinctively. So to see a little three-year-old immediately do it, I'm like, I wonder if that's in their genes. I wonder if that has somehow or another been passed on. I mean, we'll never know, but it's an interesting theory.

We may in our lifetime. I mean, they may be able to illuminate that. But human beings are natural grapplers. All mammals are grapplers. I mean, even orca will wrestle sharks. There was an amazing film in New Zealand of some tourists that there was a female orca with her calf training the calf how to hunt. She hit a great white from underneath and stunned it and grabbed it and turned it over. Sharks need to continuously move in order to breathe.

When they turn over, for some reason, they go docile. So she held it upside down until it drowned. Yeah, I've seen that. Then they ate the liver. Yeah. Once again, grapplers, man. If you think about it, in nature, prey animals are strikers and predators are grapplers.

Sure, cats. What do cats do? They immediately get a hold of the neck and then they dive under. They go to full guard. You know? I mean, that's super common in the cat world. Pretty much the neck bite, man. Yeah.

There's a crazy video of a lion, a female lion, killing a wildebeest. And the way she kills the wildebeest, not a wildebeest, what are those pig-looking things? Not a, was it a warthog? Yeah, I guess it's a warthog. A warthog, sure. Yeah, crazy-looking tusks. Yeah, I guess it's a warthog. Crazy looking tusk. She dives on it, she bites its neck, and then she rolls under it. She pulls guard on this warthog and then slowly chokes it out and kills it

by holding onto its neck. It's fascinating to watch because it's totally like watching jiu-jitsu. I was in Bali and I stayed right across the road from the monkey sanctuary. And the place where I was staying in Bali, the monkeys would just overrun the place

like a couple times a day. The whole troop would just come walking through. Hundreds of them, right? Hundreds of them. It's kind of scary. Don't leave your iPhone laying around in your room key

or anything because little suckers will grab it and then you have to bribe them to get it back. But I was watching these. Did that happen with you and well i almost got my iphone but uh i i would be working my ipad a lot of times because i make my living to a online personal training uh aside from seminars so i'd always be working at the wee hours in the morning when this monkey troop would come

through so i bought like just one of these cheap little wooden slingshots and you know you don't even have to shoot at the monkey. You just pull it back, and they start to scream and run away. They're smart enough to know, I guess, enough people were shot at them. So they would take off and leave me alone. But I would watch these young monkeys wrestling. And my God, it was jiu-jitsu. They were using the guard.

They would put the feet in the hips and flip each other over. They would go to the back. It was really fun to watch the little suckers doing jiu-jitsu with each other in the morning. And, of course, they used the neck bite like a cat. Have you ever seen the documentary Grizzly Man? I saw the one part where the— The bears going at it? Yeah.

Fascinating. Yeah. The documentary is amazing. I never watched the whole thing. Oh, it's incredible. It's one of my favorite documentaries. That was Werner Herzog, yeah? Yes. Yeah, okay. Yeah. I did see part of that. it yeah fascinating yeah the documentary i never watched the whole thing oh it's incredible it's one of my favorite that was werner herschog yes yeah okay yeah i did see part of that i just kept thinking to myself the whole time what is this guy thinking man yeah you're just

you're just emile you know yeah he was crazy he had a lot of issues for sure i mean as you delve deep into the documentary all these different people from his past are talking about how crazy he was. It's actually an unintentionally hilarious documentary. It's really quite funny. But when the bears are going at it, it's full jiu-jitsu. It's full jiu-jitsu. Like full guard. The bear gets side control at one point.

I mean, it's – and then the other bear hip escapes and gets back to guard. I mean, it's crazy. I mean, you watch how they're doing it. It's like these bears are using a form of jiu-jitsu. It's very similar. Back in the 70s, I went down to Atlantic City, and I used to be really into arm wrestling. It was actually pretty good. And I actually won the East Coast Resort Championship in Atlantic City in my weight in arm wrestling.

I was a college wrestler at the time. I wrestled Division I NCAA and did a lot of strength training in those days. And the halftime entertainment was Victor the Wrestling Bear. And do you remember the karate guy, movie guy, stunt guy, Joe Hess? No. He was a fairly well-known martial arts guy at the time. He did a lot of Hollywood stunt work and so forth. Anyway, he went out to wrestle Victor the Wrestling Bear.

And it was amazing how this bear would use single leg takedowns. Really? It would grab him behind the Achilles and put his big old bear shoulder and head against the thigh to take him down. It was just really amazing to watch this bear go to work like he actually had moves or something so he would go for a low single yeah he would he would and he would take this big this guy probably weighed about 240 250 this joe has and if you saw him you probably recognize he used to play a henchman in a lot of movies and stuff

anyway he was throwing this joe has around and this was just like a little black bear. And then people could wrestle the bear, you know, if they wanted to. The bear was muzzled, of course. And it was really amazing, man. Did they cover the bear's claws with anything? Yeah, they had like little pads around the claws. But you had no chance against this bear, man. I mean, no chance whatsoever. Frighteningly strong, this animal was. And it was really funny to watch. Yeah, the comparison, the relative comparison of strength between a person and an animal, it's so ridiculous. We had a two-year-old chimp on news radio, this show that was on once.

I don't even think we ever used it on the show. I think it was one of those scenes that just got cut. But the chimp was hanging around the set, the chimp trainer and they were explaining to me how you can only have babies like you can't have like a grown adult male chimp like that crazy lady in connecticut like they don't do that face yeah well it wasn't her it was her friend right it was taking yeah her friend got got attacked by the chimp but the woman who was keeping this chimp was fucking insane because trainers don't even do that. They don't spend time alone with these things because they're fucking dangerous. They are dangerous.

And then they start to think and act like they're human because they've been humanized. Yeah. And there's been cases where some of the animals become sexually aggressive towards the females. Yes. Imagine. where some of the animals become sexually aggressive towards the females. Yes. Imagine, it's basically a teenage mammal, and they don't have any outlet. I mean, it's crazy. Yeah, they don't have any sexual outlet other than masturbation or frogs. If they catch a frog, you ever see one catch a frog and they fuck a frog?

It's like 98, they have the same genetics, 98% of the readers. So they're going to have a lot of crazy human characteristics. But no morals, ethics, no understanding of language. No morals, no nothing. They don't understand the concept of doing someone harm. It doesn't even mean anything to them. But this two-year-old chimp that we had was on my back and just playing with me, just like smacking me like every now and then, like just joking around. I was like, this is freaky how strong this thing is.

Crazy strong. It was only like this big you know it was this little tiny thing and i was holding it and it was like hanging on to me and then it would like rotate on me and then it like like slapped my back and i was like jesus christ this little baby could probably fuck me up you know and imagine a gorilla oh i was um i was uh part of uh uh arthur jones had, the inventor of Nautilus, had a ranch down in Florida. And he used to be an animal hunter and trapper. He used to catch animals for zoos. He had white rhinos.

He had a huge herd of the biggest. Florida? Yeah, yeah. This is in Lake Helen, Florida. He had his big Nautilus Medical Sports Industries down there. He owned giant jumbo airlines,

airplanes. He was a pilot. I mean, it was crazy. He had the biggest private herd of elephants. So he would fly them in on planes? My father was an inspector for the Federal Department of Agriculture. He actually inspected Jones elephants when they were— that's how I got to go down to the ranch and meet Arthur Jones.

I wouldn't even imagine you'd get a fucking elephant on a plane. They had those big cargo jets, and they would fly those— Like those military-style ones? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. That makes sense. And he— Wasn't that a movie, Dumbo Drop or something? Something like that. But he was an elephant hunter at one point and felt pretty bad about

slaughtering elephants. So he decided to do some conservation work. But at any rate, he had a pet gorilla named Mickey. And this Mickey, they actually sedated it one time and put it on an old Nautilus pullover machine. It's a pretty funny picture. I actually had it in my gym at one point, this gorilla. But I saw Mickey throw a fit with his trainer one time and threw a head of cabbage at the guy because he was pissed off about something. I don't know. But it hit the guy in the head and knocked him out.

Wow. Just a head of cabbage, dude. Imagine the power. Maybe the guy had a glass jaw. I don't know. It looked to me like it was the back side of the head. Wow. Knocked this guy out, man.

Yeah, I bet it was coming at 300 miles an hour. For sure, man. I mean, you didn't want to... I mean, it just gave you the idea just how powerful these animals are, man. Yeah, we can't even wrap our head around what an 800-pound primate would be like, the kind of strength that they would have. It would just be ridiculous.

A chimpanzee, they say that 150... Is this him right here? That's him right there. The photo up there on the screen? That's it. Wow. Mickey the gorilla. I can't believe the guy kept a gorilla.

I can't believe you found that picture. Nice research, man. Powerful Google. I actually had that poster in my gym at one point. They say that a 150-pound chimp is supposed to have the strength of a 500-pound man. So what does an 800-pound gorilla have the strength of? My God, it's just unfathomable. Yeah, they probably just tear you apart, just pull you to pieces.

Pretty much. You just have to wonder about these researchers laying out there in the grass with these things. You ever see them stand still? When they bluff charge you, you can't move. You have to stand still. Too much for me, man. Well, you know, they didn't even know that gorillas were real until the early 1900s. It was just a legend.

1900s it was just a legend they did that was a recent discovery as far as like You know Biologists would just hear about these things that lived in the jungles But they didn't have any real evidence of mountain gorillas until I think it was like 1910 or something like that And they finally started seeing them and taking photographs of them Do you imagine the first person to stumble across a fucking gorilla and realize that's a real thing? of them. Can you imagine the first person to stumble across a fucking gorilla and realize that's a real thing? It blew your mind, man. It's only a hundred years ago. Of course, in those days

they were into trophy hunting and they were probably just shooting the hell out of these things. And they're pretty peaceful from what I understand. I mean, they let you alone. Yeah, there's a lot of trophy hunters now. Reclusive and all that. Yeah. What was really amazing to me was the chimpanzees, they commit murder and rape

and the different tribes actually hunt each other, and they're cannibals. Yeah. They're not the cute little things that you... They're nasty little guys. That's another thing about chimps. They didn't find out until the 90s that they even ate meat. Yeah.

They're omnivores. Just pretty much, like I said, 98% of our DNA. That's the crazy thing about gorillas, that they're not. Gorillas are huge, enormous, muscular beasts. Muscular beasts. Super aggressive, giant canines. They eat sprouts and shit. Bamboo.

Yeah. Bamboo. It's nuts. Well, they have that enzyme where they can process the cellulose. One thing that differentiates us from, let's say, a lot of other, let's say, like sheep, cattle, but even gorillas, they have a digestive enzyme that breaks down cellulose. Human beings do not. That's why a lot of people that go into veganism and try to do all raw food diets don't do so well. Human beings cannot process cellulose. So all the nutrients that are bound in the cellulose fiber

cannot be absorbed or assimilated into the body. So we have to do things like cook food, you know, like broccoli, for example, is completely undigestible, but yet you see it in every salad bar. Really? So when you eat broccoli raw, you're just doing nothing? You're not getting much. Really? It becomes a digestive irritant, really. Same thing with cauliflower. That's why they should be cooked or steamed to break down the cellulose. Or you can juice them. The high-speed juicing process. You take the cellulose out of there, and then you get the nutrients and so forth.

Do you cold-press juice? Do you ever have cold-press juice? Well, you know, because I'm on the road, I don't have kitchen implements and so forth. But for sure, I would if I had a permanent setup. Yeah, there's a company near me that sells cold-pressed juices. God, they're so good. I mean, this company, they have like cabbage and all these. I mean, they don't taste the best, but God damn, you just feel the nutrients when you drink it.

It's like your body just goes, yes! Like it does a little Diego Sanchez, yes, cartwheel when you drink it. Diego's like your body just goes, yes! It does the little Diego Sanchez, yes, cartwheel when you drink it. Diego's a character, man. I worked with him down at the University of Jiu-Jitsu. What a good guy. Well, you got him in probably the best shape of his life when he fought BJ Penn for the title. I remember that.

He was in amazing shape. I mean, BJ is an incredible fighter. Let's face it. His skill set is just amazing. And the only thing that was probably keeping Diego on his feet in that fight was the fact that he was just in such superb shape. It would have been more merciful if he wouldn't have been in shape because then he could have just got knocked out.

I mean, it was really bad, the cuts and so forth that he got. Well, the cut is what stopped it, and that was that big head kick. Oh, it was just awful, man. His face was really laid open. It was very sad. Yeah, he got caught Well, the cut is what stopped it, and that was that big head kick. Oh, it was just awful, man. His face was really laid open. It was very sad. Yeah, he got caught early in that fight, too. He got hurt moments into the first with a right hand. And then it's just, I don't know.

I mean, even if he wasn't in shape, Diego's just got such an incredible will. I mean, I don't think I've ever seen a guy with a will that strong. I've never seen a guy able to push himself to such an nth degree. Look at that picture of him. He looked fantastic in that fight, too. Yeah, he really did. He doesn't look like that now. Oh, no?

Well, maybe he's trained a little bit different way. Well, he just doesn't look as muscular or strong. You know, he's smaller now. I think maybe he sacrificed a little bit of muscle mass for maybe more cardio. But he's also fluctuated back and forth now more. He's done a few fights at 170, like with Jake Ellenberger, Martin Kampman, and then he's gone down to 55, and he goes back and forth. He actually said that before his last fight, he ate some bad beef tartare and got sick,

and that he had some sort of a food poisoning that sapped him of his strength. Before the Miles Jury fight, his last fight, I thought that was crazy that he would eat beef tartare like right before he fought like a major UFC fight without knowing like the source of, I think he ate it at like a hotel. You know, he was in Vegas. Well, I've been a long-time wrestling competitor. I wrestled all through the 60s and 70s,

and then later I got into Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I was very animate about never eating anything different, you know, when it came, you know, within a day or so of the fight. So I would never experiment or eat anything unusual or no way, man. Yeah, I would think Diego would. I think it was Dallas, actually.

Now that I think about it, I don't think it was Vegas. But, you know, I was shocked that he would do that. He would eat beef tart. I mean, that's a risky thing to eat, too, raw beef. Well, you just don't know these hotels. I mean, what you're going to get in these restaurants and so forth. Usually when I travel, I try to use Airbnb. Airbnb?

Airbnb. What? Airbnb. What's that? It's a website where you can rent little apartments or even little cottages and houses. And they're all over the world. Oh, bed and breakfast. Yeah, bed and breakfast. BNB.com. Fantastic.

So much cheaper than hotels. Plus, you don't have to go broke going out to dinner all the time and restaurants and so forth because usually these places have stoves or ovens and you can cook. Sometimes you'll walk out and have a blender or something. I mean, wow, it's really good. You can buy your stuff and bring it back. Oh, that's nice.

So you go and go to a grocery store. That's got to make a huge difference. It makes a huge difference when you're traveling like I do. Yeah, it's tricky, right? I mean, I eat out a lot, but, you know, with the kind of diet I have, it's really not that hard. A lot of times I'll just go to grocery stores and so forth and buy the food and bring it back.

I find, believe it or not, in Europe and even Russia, I was just in Russia not too long ago, the food is superior to what we have in the United States. Really? How so? Well, they don't have agribusiness there. If you go into an average supermarket in the United States, you'll see all the fruit. It's perfect.

It's all waxy and shiny and everything is lined up. Of course, unless you're going to like an organic place, like Whole Foods or something. But if you're not buying organic produce, the produce always looks so uniform and so pretty. But it tastes kind of like cardboard. In Europe, it looks like they've just picked the apples off someone out of someone's backyard. I mean, sometimes they'll have like holes and they're irregular shaped. And I mean, it just looks like, you know, like fruit you'd pick off a tree and absolutely delicious. You go down the aisle of a U.S. supermarket.

Let's just take the cereal aisle for example. You might have like 80 choices. There you might have like five or six. People don't overeat like we do here in the States, and the food is much simpler but really delicious. It's not hard to feed yourself in Europe. So the vegetables are closer to like heirloom tomatoes, like that type of thing. And you can taste the difference.

Boy, have you ever had, folks who've never had heirloom tomatoes, you know, you see the tomatoes that we have in stores today, a lot of times what you're getting is these genetically modified tomatoes that are surviving for long periods of time since they've been picked to the time that you eat them. They can last weeks and weeks and weeks, which is not normal.

I grow tomatoes, and if I take one of my tomatoes and I pick it, then I put it on my counter, in a couple of days it starts getting funky. That's right. You want to eat it quick. You want to pick it and eat it within days. But these store-bought tomatoes that you're getting that have been modified, they're pale and they're hard, and they can take a beating. A regular tomato is like kind of a mushy fruit. They don't really, they don't stay firm that long. And a lot of the nutrients and so forth,

there's just not there. I mean, they're grown in nutritionally depleted soil. They're harvested early so that, you know, they have a longer shelf life. They're genetically modified, you know, like apples, for example, you know, they have these storage apples and, you know, people are eating apples during the winter and so forth. But I mean, these things are like really old. I mean, they've been around, you know, in storage, cold storage. They're not getting the nutrients like they could if they were eating in season. Yeah, I've started over the last couple years, started growing my own food, growing my own food and my own eggs. That's a big one. I have my own chickens. And I mean, these chickens are pets, like my three-year-old daughter picks them up and she can carry them. I mean, they're pets and they run around the yard. They eat grass and worms

and they eat food. They eat table scraps too, which is great because food that, you know, we necessarily might not eat. You know, you scrape a plate off. It doesn't have to look pretty. You know, like leftovers, you know, we do eat leftovers and we, you know, we'll seal them and put them back in the refrigerator. But like the stuff that's just sort of like a little bit left on your plate, we'll just take a little bit of that, like from everybody's plate, put it on a plate, put it out there for the chickens, and they go nuts for it. We don't feed them chicken, of course, but we'll feed them beef, and we'll feed them vegetables, and they'll eat all sorts of different things. That was like, yeah, Louie Gracie's farm in Terrazopolis.

He lived up in the hills, and he had his own farm. And he had his own chickens that were free range. They would bring the eggs in. He had his own herd of cows that were just grass-fed. He would milk those cows every day. He knew I liked milk. He would bring me a pitcher, so frothy, from the cow's teat, set it on the table for me to drink. That would be my breakfast, a liter of raw cow milk.

Wow. He would make cheese from that milk, his own brand of cheese with no salt or anything, just like a fresh non-aged type cheese. He would go down to the pond. He had this big spring fed pond where he would fish, catch the fish for that night. Vegetables were grown in a garden. You hear about these acai drinks. Most of them are just sugar water, just frozen sugar water, this acai you buy in the supermarket. Yeah, acai is a berry, a Brazilian berry, this guarana that has this sort of – it's got a stimulant effect to it.

Extremely high in all sorts of nutrients and so forth. Antioxidants. But it tastes really bitter. It's not a sweet fruit. He would pick the acai off the tree and come in and actually literally juice the acai right there fresh on the spot. It was amazing, man. You know, there's coconuts. There was these little tiny bananas he would get. I mean, he was basically living off the land, you know.

It was really cool. I think the only thing they would buy, they would have rice and stuff occasionally. But for the most part, he was just living off the food that he produced on his farm. I want to do that. Self-sufficient, man. That's my ultimate goal. I mean, I'm slowly working my way towards that by growing a bunch of food around the house. But that's the solution.

I mean, I thought about it. I was like, everybody wants all these things. Everybody wants, I want a boat, you know, I want a vacation home. I want this. And like how many people that have money ever raise their own food? No one ever says, Hey, I'm going to take this money and I'm going to invest in a patch of land and in soil and farming tools and the, you know, the, the, you know, heirloom seeds. And I'm going to grow my own food. Nobody fucking does that. It's, it's a weird thing. People's priorities are very skewed. Very skewed. And, uh, well, you know, like with my own example, I mean, I wasn't always this way, but, uh, I, everything I own is in one 65 liter bag. One 65 liter bag is in the trunk of the car.

How big is 65 liters? It's about maybe 14 inches high by about 28 inches long. And that's it. It wasn't always that way of course. I had the four story brownstone house in Philly and the gym and the first Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Academy

in the eastern seaboard. Maxercise, right? Maxercise. Even before Henzo. I heard about that place back in the day. You were one of the first seaboard. Maxercise, right? Maxercise, even before Henzo. I heard about that place back in the day. But you were one of the first American black belts. I was. I don't know what the ranking, but it's certainly one of the early ones. What year did you get your black belt? 2000 from Helston Gracie in Hawaii.

And then I was Horace Gracie's trainer for his first couple years. So you got your black belt when you were in your late 40s. Yeah, I did. Wow. I was 48 years old. Wow. I'm 61 now, so what was 2000? So I was, what, 58?

Wow. So when you were training down at Elio's place, you were still brown belt? I was a purple belt. Purple belt. Yeah. Wow. How did you get invited to go down there? I was with Hoyce as his trainer.

I was trying to prep him for the Valigi fight. Oh, so you were his strength and conditioning coach. So I was his conditioning coach. And I was pretty close with Hoyce. His wife used to actually be my kid's babysitter. And I knew her when she was going to medical school, Marianne. She also taught aerobics and was one of my exercise instructors. And very knowledgeable woman when it came to exercise and fitness and things.

And she was actually going to get her degree in podiatric medicine. Pediatric? Podiatric. Podiatric? Yeah, she was a foot doctor. Oh, podiatry. Yeah, podiatry. And then I used to bring Hoyes, and he would stay with me for a prolonged period of time.

He stayed with me for, I forget how many weeks. It was a really long time. And, you know, my wife and I, we're older, and, you know, we have this young Brazilian kid. What are you going to do with this guy? So I said, Marianne, she was a really pretty girl, you know. I said, hey, would you just take him out? I mean, just do something, anything, you know. So she was doing it basically as a favor, you know, a little bit under protest, you know.

But she took Hoyes out and they fell in love. Aw. It was awesome, man. I mean, it was so cool, you know. That is cool. And then he was supposed to go back to California and we had a huge blizzard in Philly. The airport was shut down, all that stuff. So he stayed like this extra week.

And that was the first snow that Hoyce had ever experienced. No kidding. In fact, we made a snowman together. And, of course, he put abs in the snowman and had this snowman with this big butcher knife. And it was a real macho snowman. Macho snowman. But it was so much fun.

Of course, he wanted to drive my car in the snow. And I was like, oh, my God. Get the fuck out of here. Did you let him? Yeah. Well, hey, it was Hoyce Gracie. You didn't say no, man. How'd that go? He was actually an amazing driver.

Very... What kind of car was it? It was a Subaru front-wheel drive. Oh, Subaru's a great in the snow. Notoriously great in the snow. So, yeah, no, he did great, man. He figured out how to steer to the skid. That must have been fun, though. He must have been like a little kid.

That was back in the early days, you know, when things were still innocent. Right. When I started with the Gracies, they were all one big happy family. What year was this? This was 89. I had my first seminar. I said, holy shit, this is what I've been looking for, man. 89.

So you were way ahead of the curve. Way ahead of the curve. I had, you know, after college wrestling, I coached for a few years in a local high school. I did the freestyle circuit. But, hey, it's a young man's sport. And it's really hard when you have a family and you're working to actually go to a university and train with university wrestlers. And you start missing your timing and, you know. So I was looking for something to replace the thrill of wrestling.

And what were you doing for work then? I was actually working in a gym. I was a fitness director at the Society Hill Club in Philadelphia at that time. And so I'm just looking for something, man. I tried kung fu. I tried kempo karate. I tried a Japanese-style karate. I tried my hand at Muay Thai.

I basically sucked at these striking arts. It just wasn't in my genetics. I wanted to grab and clinch. It used to really piss my instructors off because it was almost like an instinctive reaction. I quickly learned that you can avoid – let's take MMA and put it to a side. I was interested purely in self-defense at that time. I always felt like somehow I missed the boat because that was the Bruce Lee era.

70s and later. I always thought, wow, I shouldn't have been wasting my time with wrestling. I should have been doing Jeet Kune Do or that Ip Man stuff. I didn't realize what a good basis wrestling really was. The few scraps I did get in, I found that, wow, you know,

double leg takedown goes a long way. You smash somebody down, it kind of takes the fight out of them a little bit, you know. And by a little striking I knew, I was able to equip myself all right in the few scraps I had. But I still felt like there was something missing. There's fancy kicks and punches. And when I saw that Gracie jiu-jitsu, I said, man, I could do this. I could really do this. And then I saw the first Gracie in action tape and I realized, wow, man, this is very doable. And so I went into it with

this whole self-defense aspect in mind, which they really emphasized in those days. But yeah, hey, it was one big happy family. The Machados had just split from Horium when I first met them. They went with Chuck Norris, as you know. There was like a bit of a difference of opinion or whatever. And then after I'd been at the Gracie Academy for a couple of years, I would fly from Philly. At that point, I had my own gym at 1909 Open. I would go out for a couple of weeks at a time with a certain budget. And I would take like $1,000 or whatever. And I would take lessons for $100 at that time.

With Horian or Hoyce or Hoyler or Hickson. And if I got one move in that hour, I caught up with my $100 move. Because usually there would be, you know how it is in Jiu-Jitsu, especially when you're a blue belt, you get really confused and you get in these

positions over and over again, and you can't quite figure out what to do. And if they would give me the answer to that particular problem, I would say, oh, that was the $100 move. That was worth every penny to me. Because that's how into it I was. And then I would go through my $1,000

or so, right, with the private lessons. And, of course, they would throw the classes in for free since I was buying so many privates. And then I would go back, and I had mats in my gym, and then I would just call up all my old wrestling buddies, and there was a judo club nearby. I would call those guys in, and there was a keto guy down the street,

and I would just basically beat up these poor guys. You just didn't know what you were doing. I had no idea. The judo guys didn't know any of it? They didn't know much. It was more, you know, judo became very sports oriented. But I did pick up some good stuff from the judo guys. Take downs, throws.

Oh, yeah, some good throws and so forth. Trips. But I had what they called wrestler jits, you know. And pretty rough, pretty rough stuff. A lot of strength, a lot of power. Just like wrestling, you know. I mean had what they called wrestler jits, you know? And pretty rough, pretty rough stuff. A lot of strength, a lot of power, just like wrestling, you know? I mean, what did I know? But I got my blue belt pretty quick, about six months, and I got my purple belt in about a year and a half, I think.

I went through the ranks, but then I reached the level of my incompetence. And there I stayed, purple belt for about four years. What do you mean, you reached a level of your incompetence? Well, I just couldn't make that next jump to brown belt. I was still using too much power, too much strength, too much athleticism, you know. And, you know, jiu-jitsu is supposed to be based on technique and relaxation, and I still didn't have that. I can remember one time Hoyce got really pissed off with me.

We were in the middle of a session, you know, and I was being what, you know, in the jiu-jitsu world is sort of rude. I was kind of grabbing the gi in a rough way. And, you know, wrestlers have this way of kind of grinding heads sometimes, you know. Right. It's really pissing them off. And he says, hey, wait, this is the gi. This is skin. And then we wrestled.

He said, well, why are you grinding your head into mine what are you possibly thinking to achieve with this and then he looked up at the clock he says okay

these next 10 minutes are going to be the most terrifying of your life Steve and I'm like swollen gulp you know I knew what was

going to happen he basically just wiped the mat up with me squeezed me smashed me knee in the belly in the mat up with me, squeezed me, smashed me, knee in the belly and the ribs. And he wouldn't let me tap. And he just basically thrashed me for 10 minutes straight, nonstop. I was just utterly exhausted, not to mention just the trauma of just being thrown around by your idol or your hero, you know, and who was mad at you. So there

was that emotional thing going on. And then he says, okay, how does it feel, Steve? It feels pretty bad, doesn't it? I says, man, it really does. He says, well, you know, that's what other people feel like when you wrestle them. He says, when you wrestle these other guys, that's what you're doing to them. He says, not much fun. You're going to turn people off from jiu-jitsu. So you better never, ever ever I never better catch you again

using all that power and strength and being so rude and it was like wow okay and then the next day I got the flu because it lowered my immune system wow I'm telling you it really kicked my ass

and I got the flu and I was so disappointed because he's teaching these seminars. And I couldn't go. I was on the couch with a fever. But, man, it taught me such an important lesson about relaxation and all that. Yeah, I've learned that around probably Purple Belt too. Just learned how to relax. Well, also learned how to do a real 20-minute session.

How do you roll with someone for 20 minutes if you're just going, you can't, you can't sprint for 20 minutes. In those days, I, you know, I still wasn't getting it, man. I wasn't getting it, but that Beaton really made a profound influence on me. And he did me a great service, great service. I always liked that whole Gracie teaching aspect of the whole thing, you know, like, like Horian always said, you know, it's not really a martial arts style. It's an educational system. It's a way of teaching jiu-jitsu. Yeah, I like their motto, keep it playful, too.

Henner and Huron, they say that all the time. Keep it playful, keep it playful. And you can protect yourself while you're doing that, and then slowly but surely a guy who's going to unless you're dealing with a three minute match you're going to have your opportunities. And I'm not against the competition aspect of it but it is different. I know

Elio told me one time that he considered the modern day competition to be anti-jiu-jitsu. I thought that was an interesting statement. He says I would never I would never have been able to win like one of these modern style matches with the points and all that. So that wasn't my game. He said, I couldn't do my jujitsu to other people because I was too small, too weak. He said, they, they did it to themselves. Did Elio do any strength and conditioning?

No, not that I know of. I mean, he did stretching and, you know, basic jujitsu conditioning stuff, but he never really believed in weight training or any of that. But, uh, you know, basic jiu-jitsu conditioning stuff. But he never really believed in weight training or any of that. But, you know, he always mentioned how weak he was. But he did have a strength. His grips were pretty amazing, even for an old man. And, of course, he had these huge Popeye-type forearms, you know. So, I mean, it was obvious that he definitely had some athleticism and strength. But he was such a lightweight guy.

There was no way he was going to overpower anyone. Right. But have you ever read the biography of Asai Maeda, the guy that taught the Gracie Carlos? No. I read the Japanese translation into English. And of course, it definitely had a Japanese prejudice to it. But that guy was a pretty amazing guy. He was a representative sent from the Kodokan.

Shigeru Kano organized all the Jiu-Jitsu clans in Japan and was trying to come up with the one style of Jiu-Jitsu, which he called Judo, the gentle way. In those days, there was a lot of ground fighting, throws into joint locks, all the stuff that's illegal in modern-day Judo was still part of the game.

They had knee locks. I actually watched a videotape of old black-and-white footage. Some of these a videotape of old black and white footage. Some of these old Japanese masters were doing the X guard. Wow. Elliot told me that everything was there when Carlos learned jiu-jitsu from Maeda. But Maeda, a lot of people don't know, won over 1,000 no-holds-barred fights. 1,000?

1,000. How the hell do you fight 1,000 times? I don't know. How is that even possible? It's like that Hickson 400 and 0 thing. Someone tried to break that down once of how long it would take. I would like to know, but he did stage fights in Spain and England and France. Then he came to the U.S.

You mean on stage? You don't mean like stage like with predetermined outcomes? On stage. They would ask people from the audience to come up and challenge him. came to the U.S. You mean on stage? You don't mean like staged like predetermined outcomes? On stage. Like they would ask people from the audience to come up and challenge them. Oh, okay. Like those type of things.

And there were no-hold bard fights or there were judo matches? There were no-hold bard fights. Wow. They could do anything to the guy.

And he fought boxers. Well, he taught, was one of the guys that taught Theodore Roosevelt the early judo. Really?

And that became part of the training for Army aviators during World War II. And a lot of the Army guys in World War II, jiu-jitsu was the basis for the self-defense in the U.S. Army. And then one of his cohorts was humiliated by a champion wrestler from West Point. And Maeda got some Japanese businessmen to put up some money and then he beat the guy that beat his partner. And then from there, he emigrated to Cuba and did all these fights in Cuba. I mean he was fighting like apparently for money a couple of times a week. He was fighting, like, apparently for money a couple times a week.

He went to Mexico, and they would go to the mining camps or lumberjack camps where he had all these guys with a lot of money, and they would bet. And sometimes he would almost lose a match on purpose to encourage guys to come out there and say, oh, I can beat this little guy. And then he would kick their asses. So it was like Charles Bronson in hard times, just the Japanese version. Japanese version. Wow. He was only 165 pounds, but apparently he had some devastating throws,

and his groundwork was just absolutely superb. And Jigoro Kena threw him out. It was on Budo-like. You're doing these fights. You're fighting with no gi sometimes. It's not what we represent here at the Kodokan. The Kodokan. So he was basically – The Kodokan is the main sanctioning body.

That was the main sanctioning body in Japan at that time. And so he kept going further and further down and then, of course, the Gracies met him and helped him get a Japanese immigration colony started. The father of Carlos Gracie helped this Maeda guy get established and in gratitude he taught the

five sons it was Carlos, Oswaldo I forget the guys but Carlos had the five brothers the only guy that didn't directly get taught was Elio Elio learned his Jiu Jjitsu pretty much from Carlos. He was a very weak, sickly child at the time.

And they basically were doing the jiu-jitsu of Maeda. Wow. And then Elio would watch his brother teach. And then it was discovered that, wow, he's really adept at this. You know, he has a real knack for teaching and doing jiu-jitsu. Carlos kind of just handed the reins over to Elio, and then he took it and ran with it and developed it, and the rest is pretty much history. It's so fascinating that even to this day, the smaller guys are the more technical guys. And when you think about the birth of jiu-jitsu happening from Carlos teaching Elio and Elio being a small guy his jiu-jitsu became very technical like the last UFC we were talking about this when it comes up when the fly

weights and the bantam weights he's 125 135 pound fighters and I have said many many times if you want to see excellent technique like these are really the guys to watch first of all because they never get tired and two because when you're-pound guy and you're at the gym, you're not muscling anybody around. You're not muscling anybody. You got to learn to do everything correctly. Everything has to be proper technique. Everything has to be perfect form. You have a gravity and strength disadvantage from the jump. And so because of that, you learn to do everything absolutely correctly. You very rarely see a really good light jiu-jitsu guy who tries to muscle things. They don't try to muscle. Sometimes ex-wrestlers.

And they'll do that right up through a purple belt like myself. And then they get lost. The technique begins to outstrip their strength at the brown and black belt levels. The guys, everyone is strong and in good shape but they have an incredible technique at that level so if you've been basing most of your your winnings on athleticism and strength and all that once you hit brown belt man forget it it's not going to happen too much anymore yeah i've always said man if you could get a guy like mark coleman who's such a dominant wrestler in his prime you know when he was he was UFC heavyweight champion,

if that guy just fell in love with jiu-jitsu and just was passing the guard, mounting, taking backs, taking arm bars, I mean, he would have just been a fucking beast. He would have been a beast. Well, yeah. Well, he was a beast. Kevin Randall. Still. Yeah, all those guys.

Yeah, none of them embraced jiu-jitsu. No, they never did. It was always, you know, well, it's that wrestler mentality. I mean, I had it. I thought I knew everything. Wrestlers are pretty aggressive guys, and you're very confident in yourself, and there's a tendency to think you know everything. But smart wrestlers, they eventually start to lighten up,

and they start to embrace the technique of jiu-jitsu. Yeah. It makes a perfect combination. It's real easy for wrestlers to just slide right in that, man. Sure. I mean, that's the other thing about wrestling as opposed to jiu-jitsu is wrestlers are so much more drill-oriented. Wrestlers, by necessity, drill techniques a lot, constant training.

If you go to any high-level wrestling room, you'll watch guys hit techniques over and over and over and over and over again Whereas jujitsu this is like a little bit of drilling and then okay free train Everybody let's roll and everybody just roll because it's so fun to just roll so fun I just try to submit each other that you know, they don't do the same sort of drilling and technique based training that a lot of wrestlers do. At the highest level, wrestling on the feet, the stand-up part of wrestling, is just as technical as jiu-jitsu in many ways.

It's very subtle, a lot of setups. I mean, it's pretty amazing. Those guys at Flow Wrestling, you ever gone to that website? I have. I love that website. Great website. But they do a great job of explaining that and showing how technical the European and the Russian wrestlers are

and how much more they rely on those techniques and the subtle varieties of their exchanges and their entrances into techniques. I really like that. I like emphasizing that aspect of the wrestling because a lot of people don't know what it is. You see big, strong guys trying to overpower each other. You don't understand. This is like there's so many different moves that are being exchanged at a rapid pace

and, you know, attacks and counters. Yeah, feints. And I had the privilege of working with five-time Ukrainian national wrestling champion, Andrei Brenner. He used to come up to my school in Philadelphia all the time and train. And wow, that guy showed me so much technical wrestling. And then one of my students

was Yasushi Miyake, who was one of the judges for Pride. He was a fourth on black belt in judo from the Kodokan, but he was also a three-time world record Roman wrestling champion. And he was working for a Japanese import company in Philly. Came into our school. Guy was, you know, big thick Coke bottle glasses, just this kind of silly little grin, really polite. He's bowing a lot. He spoke almost no English. And, you know, so he went to train with us. So we gave him a gi, you know.

He puts on the white belt, you know, no fuss. Next thing I know, he's launching dudes, man. It's like, oh, my God. What a sleeper. What a sleeper. This guy's a white belt, man. I mean. And you had no idea what his background was?

Dude, he's doing like sagging augies from the knees and throwing guys, man. It's like, wow. So we finally get the guy to write his name for us so we could Google him. What year was this? This is like 95, 96. There was Google in 95? No. There was like some sort of an internet search.

There was some kind of internet because I was completely non-tech. I didn't even have a laptop in those days, Joe. I didn't even have a cell phone back in 95. Wow. I don't know. One of my students did whatever you do on a computer and looked him up and found him. And then we said, holy shit. You got a gem.

This guy is unbelievable, man. And we were shocked. It was like three-time world Greco-Roman. He was an Olympian in the Atlanta Olympics. Wow. So he's just trying to have some fun. He plays just out of the medal round, yeah. He just wanted to train.

And I guess he had heard about Brazilian jiu-jitsu and wanted to try it out. And he went through the ranks fast, man. I actually took him the first professional grappling tournament was the Pro-Am event down in South Carolina. Do you remember this? There was a couple guys that put it on, a couple entrepreneurs. What year was this? Oh, man, I'm terrible for these dates, man.

You really put me on the spot with these dates. But it was pre-Hoyce and Waligi, right? That was 98, was Hoyce and Waligi when you went down to Brazil. I think, yeah, it was pre. Pre. That was probably the White Belt. Sala fought in it. Oh.

Maybe it was 2000, after 2000. maybe it was 2000 after 2000 you see she fought in this thing it took second place against really good black belts at that time wish i could remember something i know hoyler fought uh there was it was like a who's who of grappling solo fought he uh he fought this catch wrestler guy no kidding it was real interesting it was like a mixed grappling style but it's called the pro am it was like the first professional level type grappling thing i remember it vaguely now i remember it vaguely now because but i was still i was really i started in 96 i started i took my first class at hickson's and then um hickson's was pretty far down it was on pico and i found that carlson had a place on hawthne, which is like really close to where I was working.

So, uh, I went to Carlson's. To me, I was a white belt. I was like, Gracie is Gracie, you know? Yeah, for sure. I mean, at that stage. And I came in right when Vitor was fighting John Hess. When Vitor was like 18 years old. And they were calling him Victor Gracie.

It wasn't Vitor. They put a K in there. I don't, you know, I don't know whyitor it was they put a k in there i don't you know i don't know why what happened they changed his name i don't know what happened but it was victor gracie victor when carlson was trying to uh adopt him or was treating him like he was his son and so he's taking on the name gracie because the gracie name was huge back then yeah 96 a couple years after the ultimate fighting Championship. Everybody wanted to train with a Gracie. Everybody wanted to be a Gracie. Yeah, yeah.

And I got a chance to see Mario Sperry was down there. Murillo Bustamante was training back then. Sergio Cohen. All these black belts from Brazil. Carlos Baheto was there. They were the guys, man. They really laid the foundations here in America, you know? I just got so lucky.

I came in and I watched that all happen right during the extreme fighting days, remember that? When John Peretti was putting on those extreme fighting challenges and Half Gracie was there and, you know, Half Gracie was fighting in those. Remember those? Man. That was back in the day. That was back in the day, man.

Well, a lot of people don't realize your athletic prowess either. I mean, a lot of your listeners't realize your athletic prowess either. I mean, a lot of your listeners have no clue. I'm always shocked when I say, well, Joe is like world-class athlete, man. People always say, really? He says, yeah, he's not just a television host or a comedian or an actor. He says, this guy can rumble, man.

I'll never forget when you showed me that spinning back kick on the banana bags in your garage. I mean, they were 200-pound bags, Joe. You were bending those things in half. My ribs hurt just watching you do that, man. So a lot of people don't realize your pedigree in jujitsu and submission wrestling and kickboxing too, man. Well, I've been obsessed with it my whole life. The only thing that's been fucking with me lately is I haven't really been able to roll hard for the last year. I've been obsessed with it my whole life. You know, the only thing that's been fucking with me lately is I haven't really been able to roll hard for the last year. I've only rolled once over the last year. I had a bulging disc in my back, actually my neck. And I started doing this thing called Regenikine.

I did a bunch of different therapies for it. But I was really worried about pursuing jujitsu past this because I started getting numbness in my fingers. And I had heard a lot of horror stories. And I'm friends with Boss Rooten, of course. And Boss Rooten has had a pretty bad neck injury. He's had two surgeries on. And he actually just started going and doing Regenikine at the same place where I've had it done. And so I went through a bunch of different procedures. And after a year of different therapies, like I did prolo ozone, which is prolo therapy with ozone, which stimulates healing. And I did a lot of rolfing, like really hardcore deep tissue massage and soft tissue manipulation. I'm really familiar with rolfing.

Do you do any of that? I was actually rolfed by Ida Rolf's son. Whoa. The guy, you know, she invented rolfing out of frustration because her son went through that polio epidemic of the 50s and was all twisted up, this poor kid. And she took him to specialist after specialist. She had a Ph.D. in biochemistry, a very intelligent woman. and biochemistry, very intelligent woman. Out of sheer frustration, she just started molding the boy herself and came up with her ideas of rolfing and then began to teach other people

the postural integration techniques. I was rolfed by that boy. Wow, that's amazing. He was an amazing rolfer. Then I had a woman in Philadelphia, Linda Grace, fantastic, one of the professors at the Rolf Institute. They go and teach for a while, and they revolve in and out. It's not always the same professors at the Rolfe Institute.

But this woman saved my life and my jiu-jitsu career. I had some pretty horrific injuries. No one ever said that playing combat sports is healthy, man. No. I had this conversation today with the doctor because I have some photos of it that I'm going to put up on Instagram, but I'll show them to you what this process is. But it's pretty fascinating. What they do is they take your blood, and this is me lying on this table with all these needles in my back, and then those little tubes on the end of the needles, that's where they pump this serum in.

I'll put all these on Instagram later so you guys can see them. And what it is is they take your blood and the blood is placed in a centrifuge and it's spun around and it's heated. And somehow or another during this process, like it treats, your body treats the blood, like the blood reacts as if it's having,

like if there's a fever. And so it generates this intense anti-inflammatory response. And this yellow fluid becomes the most potent anti-inflammatory medication known to man. And it's produced by your own blood, which is really amazing. So they pull this yellow serum out and then they inject it directly into the injured areas with dramatic results. It's your own anti-inflammatory. Yes. Well, see, we had talked about supplements earlier, right? Mm-hmm.

And I used to be quite the supplement hound. You know, anywhere between $250 to $300 a month I was spending on supplements. And I quickly realized that I was actually undermining my body's ability to make its own anti-inflammatories. Your body, when it's being fed properly and your digestion is in order and you're assimilating the nutrients that you need from your diet, you make your own anti-inflammatories. And you do not need to be taking a lot of extra nutrients. If anything, it throws you completely out of balance. Well, I'm sure that your body can make anti-inflammatory responses to injuries, but nothing like this. I mean, your body is making it this, but what's genius about this?

You're using your own body, so it's different than taking a sup. Well, it's also, they're directly injecting it into the – this guy, Dr. Peter Welling, is a spinal surgeon in Dusseldorf, Germany. And he's the one who figured this out. He has this two-year study of osteoarthritis of the knee that's published in the medical journal Osteoarthritis and Cartilage, which started a lot of all this off and got a lot of people invested in this procedure. And they figured it out in Germany in like 2003. And the United States has really been hampered in a lot of this research because of all the shit that went down with stem cell research. The religious right was really putting the brakes on any sort of stem cell research. And they were connecting stem cell research with fetal tissue and aborted babies and people are gonna abort babies just to get

the fetal tissue there was so much fucking craziness craziness man and this this thing that they do the way that it differ it differentiates between platelet rich plasma which is uh what a lot of people think of when they think of blood spinning. What this is, it's a little bit more potent. And I would butcher it. So if anybody's interested in it, read about it online. They call it orthokine in Germany, and it's called reginokine in America. But they do it in Santa Monica now.

It's done in Vegas and Dallas. And they're doing it all over the place with miraculous results for athletes. There's a lot of athletes that have. Pretty fascinating stuff. Well, all these guys were flying to Germany. Like Kobe Bryant was flying to Germany. What is his name? Peyton Manning had two neck surgeries.

He was ready to retire from football. Went and got ortho-keen in Germany, and boom, playing better football than ever. It's pretty amazing those NFL guys. Hey, can we take a brief break? Sure. I just need to hit the head real quick. Yeah, hit the ever. It's pretty amazing those NFL guys. Hey, can we take a brief break? Sure. I just need to hit the head real quick. Yeah, hit the head. Go ahead.

Go ahead, man. That awesome coffee you gave me just right there. Listen, man, it takes a while to get used to it. I got that old man bladder going on there. Don't worry about it, dude. I got a lot of shit to talk about and let people know. Anybody who's interested in the place, if you're anywhere near Santa Monica, the guy that I go to for this Regenequin thing,

and I have no financial, just in the interest of full disclosures, I have no financial interest in this whatsoever. His name is Dr. Ben Ruhi, and he does it out of a place called Lifespan Medicine that is in Santa Monica. And it's incredible stuff. And it's also, the beautiful thing about it is you don't have it's incredible stuff. And it's also the beautiful thing about it is you don't have to worry about your body rejecting it. This is all something that your body naturally produces. So if you're interested, just run a Google search on it and find out if there's a place anywhere near you that has this. But for me, I've had amazing results with this. And then from that and the rolfing and all these other different procedures that I've tried, out of all of them, the Regenekine has had the most dramatic responses.

Because it's pretty dramatic and pretty quickly. I've also found that if you have any joint pain, if any people out there with joint pain, a big one for me has been fish oil. Fish oil is really incredible anti-inflammatory properties to it. I have a friend who's a carpenter and he's told me that through taking fish oil, like he used to get like really sore knees and elbows after a long day of work, just completely eradicated a lot of that stuff. I take pretty high dose fish oils i mean there's pros and cons and people will argue that uh i take 10 a day i take 10 pills a day 10 000 milligrams and some people say that's overdoing it and probably steve would say it's

overdoing it i don't know but i work out like a madman and for me it has a huge difference between when i take it and when I don't take it. I just feel like, uh, I have less, less joint soreness, which is, uh, really important for me. He, I, you know, I would try what, what you're doing, but I eat like a fucking, a madman. And I just, I don't see myself eating only a vegetable meal and then a meat meal. I eat like a fucking pig, dude. I don't know. I always have. I eat less bad things.

Like I eat very little sugar at this point in my life. I will reward myself every now and then with like some ice cream or a treat. But for the most part, I get all my sweets from fruits. I very rarely indulge in any sugar. Like somebody offers me candy or something like that. Let's just pot in it. I'll get a pot candy. Yeah. I'm not really into sugar myself other than eating fruit. Some people say, well, how about the fructose? But they forget that it's all bound with fiber. Push up to this thing. There we go. And it slows down the digestion. Yes. So that you're not getting this big sugar rush or anything

when you're eating raw, natural fruits. Well, that's part of what's going on with this bulletproof coffee idea. The idea, which apparently was originally invented by Rob Wolf. I don't know if you know Rob Wolf. Yeah, the paleo guy. Yeah, he was the guy who created it. And Dave Asprey is the guy who sort of made it popular. A lot of it because being on the show.

But the grass-fed butter and MCT oil is what slows down the digestion of the caffeine because it's blended up together with the coffee. Because when I drink, I like black coffee. I like to drink black coffee. But, man, the difference in like the wow, bang, wow, bang. There's a big difference in the spike and crash with that as opposed to this stuff, which is like a slow burn. And that's also the same thing with eating fructose, which you get from an apple or from an orange. It's like you're getting it in a natural way. And it's also, it's sort of a natural reward system.

Your body's getting this sweetness because you're ingesting all these nutrients. Like your body's, it's letting you know, ooh, do you feel that mouth pleasure? Good. Keep eating something stupid. We need all that stuff. You need the vitamin C. We need the fiber. We need the, you know, it's all good energy.

Good for your body. As opposed to this weird thing that we've invented where we figured out how to process sugar and pull it out of all these fruits and pull it out of corn and just shoot it right in your fucking bloodstream. I mean, when you're eating that high fructose corn syrup, I mean, your body doesn't know what the fuck you're doing. Like, what is this? How are you getting this? Never before in the history of man were there these type of frankenfoods. But, I mean, even sugar cane. I mean, have you ever actually eaten sugarcane?

I have. When I lived in Florida. It's a whole different experience. It's delicious. Yeah. But I mean, you don't get that rush because it's- What's a fruit? It's bound up with all the other nutrients and fibers and so forth that you get in a whole food as opposed to a fractionated food. Yeah. When I lived in Florida, me and my friends used to cut sugarcane down.

There was like a sugarcane field near our house that was University of Florida in Gainesville. They had these, I don't know why they had sugarcane just growing there, but it wasn't like we were stealing it from anybody. It was just growing there. So we'd go and we'd cut it down and we'd just eat it. And I guess it's not a fruit technically because a fruit, you know, it's something that grows on a plant. You pluck it off the plant. I guess it's a grass, I believe, maybe.

Is that what it is? Yeah, I think it's a grass. Like tomato is technically a fruit, right? Isn't that how it goes? Like it's considered a vegetable. Agriculturally it's considered a vegetable. Yeah, I believe it is a fruit. Like how it's taxed, I think they consider it a vegetable.

But it's a fruit. Like how it's taxed, I think they consider it a vegetable. But it's a fruit. But, you know, the diet – I mean man seems to be able to adapt to any number of diets. I don't know if you've ever heard of this guy Weston Price that went around the world. He was looking at indigenous people. This was a time earlier in the 1900s when there was indigenous people still around. And he was looking for signs of health.

He was a dentist. So, you know, tooth health is a very good indicator of a person's overall health. If you have rotten teeth, your general health is pretty poor. I mean, they've even linked gum disease to heart problems and, you know, all that kind of stuff. So he went all over the world. He was looking at every type of population possible, the Inuit, the Polynesians, these different places. And he came to the conclusion that man is a very adaptable creature. There's any number of diets that a human being can thrive on quite healthfully. But the thing that seemed to be commonplace to all these people was the purity of the food, the naturalness of the

food, the freshness of the food, and the lack of stress in their diets. And of course, the exposure to sunlight and the vitamin D and so forth. And I mean, in his estimation, the most magnificent of all the populations he studied were the Polynesians who were living primarily on a starch-based diet, taro and fish and coconut. You were the first person to also set me hip to the idea of sun tanning for conditioning, that sun tanning, the vitamin D levels get raised in your body. And that, you know, like when Georges St-Pierre would fight with a tan, that there's that. It's not for vanity.

No, no, not at all. The tanning salons have gotten a bad rap because people go in there and bake themselves, just like people bake themselves in the regular salon. But if you go in with the idea of not going for the tan per se but to convert vitamin D in the skin, even if you're in a place like Iceland, for example, where you don't even get sun half the year,

your body makes its own natural vitamin D. And you just go in for a few minutes, maybe four times a month, and your body will make all the vitamin D you need. It's a very anabolic nutrient. It's absolutely essential for immunity and muscular growth and recovery. And it's really important. I had no idea that athletes actually would tan just to raise their natural levels of vitamin D and to aid in their conditioning though.

A lot of people don't even know about it, but vitamin D actually even has kind of a steroid like effect on your body. It's very anabolic. D3, right? D3 is the big one. Yeah, we had Dr. Rhonda Patrick on who is just brilliant. FoundMyFitness is her name on Twitter. And we're having her on again soon. Fascinating, fascinating woman who is just really brilliant and knows a tremendous amount about the human body. And it's just a great resource for us to be able to ask her questions about, you know, what does this and why does that work and what is this about? How did Carlos Gracie, like he was the one who invented the Gracie diet, these commentatory foods.

Yes. How did he figure that out? Well, you know, there was another Brazilian writer that talked a lot about food combining. I actually read a translation of his book. And there was a lot of food combining people at the time. It was fairly well known back in the early 1900s. This Dr. John Tilden I told you about, he wrote a book, Toxemia Explained.

But there was also Dr. Herbert M. Sheldon who wrote Food Combining Made Easy. It was fairly common knowledge to a lot of the naturopaths and alternative medical people back in the day. This is at a crossroads where the medical establishment was beginning to take over. And they were in cahoots with the big pharmaceutical industry. And this is at the time when the drug companies were really beginning to develop a lot of vaccines and drugs. And that's when the Western medical model was all going towards the drug side. And that's when the Western medical model was all going towards the drug side. And the chiropractors were getting pushed out and alternative people were being pushed out, osteopathy, naturopaths and so forth.

But I've done a lot of reading and research on my own and I pretty much pulled away from Western medical model. And I tried to do things as natural as I can. I haven't been to a doctor, Joe, in probably about 40 years. So you don't ever get your blood work done? Nah. You just go based on how you feel? And if you don't feel good, what do you do about it? I fast. Really?

Yeah, yeah. Your body. If you don't feel good, you fast. Yeah, fast. Like if you're feeling like shit, I'm like, oh, man, I feel like shit. I'm just not? Yeah, yeah. Your body – If you don't feel good, you fast. Yeah, fast. Like if you're feeling like shit, I'm like, oh, man, I feel like shit. I'm just not going to eat anything. Well, you see, in a fasting state, your body, it goes to the morbid or diseased tissues in the body. In its wisdom, it doesn't go to muscle.

Really? Yeah. Whoa. Your body is very wise. So when you're not feeling well, it's usually digestive system related in some way. And putting more food and burdening your body, people don't realize just what a burden digestion really is. It takes a lot out of you to digest food. Is that why people that have lower caloric diets or people that eat less generally live longer?

Well, for sure. people that eat less generally live longer? Well, for sure. I mean, in many animal studies, they found that by systematically underfeeding animals, you prolong their lives a really, really long time. You know, Rhonda Patrick, who I just mentioned, one of the things that she brought up was a study where they showed that it's actually a genetic transference that people who have survived through famine, their children actually live longer. Like the children of people who have had like less calories, their children actually have longer lifespans. It's fascinating. Well, if you look at animal husbandry, your prize bull, your prize stallion,

your stud dog, they have relatively short lifespans. The big muscular bull, you know, they feed these animals. They build a lot of mass. They do not live very long at all. It's because your system gets overtaxed to maintain all that muscle. Yeah, you become innervated. You know, you only have a finite amount of energy and it gets taxed. You know, that's a big debate. The amount of muscle

you should have as a martial artist. That's a huge issue that comes up a lot. Um, it comes up a lot in my own commentary because I find it fascinating. There's certain guys like the guys, like the Hector Lombards or the Tyron Woodley's, he's really muscular, like abnormally muscular guys who are fucking hell on wheels for a few minutes but they can't maintain like a guy like say you know like a diego sanchez a guy who's known for having fantastic endurance but diego's worn a lot of guys out in that third round you know the third round is where diego is the scariest motherfucker on earth because he's just as fresh as he was in the first like look at jake ellenberger who's a natural welterweight,

brutal knockout puncher, couldn't put Diego away. By the time the third round came along, Diego's on his back, pounded on him when the last bell rang. You know, and a lot of that can be attributed to his ability to keep up that same pace, that ruthless pace. Doesn't have a lot of muscle. Well, a lot of it has to do with the type of nervous system you were born with, whether it's an efficient nervous system or maybe not so efficient. You know, they call it neurological efficiency.

Guys with neurological efficiency are able to use a lot of their muscle fiber all at once, so they're like power guys. And guys that don't have neurological efficiency, they usually have a high anaerobic endurance level. They just can go and go and go at a fairly high percentage. Isn't that fascinating? Like less efficient. Yeah.

So they have less power. They have less power. But they can go – well, Hoyst was a perfect example. The guy had unbelievable endurance. But he didn't have a lot of fast twitch muscle fiber. He was not a power guy. Yeah, and that's not something that you can change, is it? Is like can you take a guy –

That's an inborn thing. So a guy like a, you know, like a Kevin Rounderman, never going to be a triathlete. Never, never, never, never. Just like most guys are never going to be a Kevin Rounderman, you know? And all this idea that you can do Olympic lifting and do selective recruitment of muscle fiber, that's a lot of nonsense, man. I've been in this game for a long time, man. I've never seen that. You mean you've never seen someone who's got that ectomorphic sort of—

Explosively to make you more explosive on the mat. It's a big mistake. Doesn't do anything? I mean, it must improve it in some way. I mean, any strength training, no matter how god-awful, is going to improve, especially beginners. But as you become more advanced, man, that explosive weight training does more harm than good. Take it to a guy that's 61 that's had every injury in the book. Have you had disc injuries?

I have. What have you done to fix those? I did a lot of inversion training. You know, I used to hang upside down a lot. Yeah, I do that. I like that a lot. It's huge. Of course, my rolfer helped me a lot.

I've had acupuncture to release some of that tension in the muscle. I've done some kind of other interesting stuff. I believe in the power of the subconscious mind to heal the body. I do a lot of visualization and prayer and literally image myself getting better. I believe that your mind and your subconscious mind is in control of every cell in the body and that if you can get rid of any disbeliefs, your higher mind can actually influence healing in your body. Wow, that's super unscientific.

But bold of you to talk about it. Because you're a fairly scientific guy. There's a lot we don't know. there's a very interesting book out right now i'd encourage your readers to or your listeners to check it out it's called the healing code they talk a lot about the healing code the healing who wrote that do you know uh let me see johnson a guy by the name of john there's an md and a phd that actually wrote the book. And they talk about it in the relationship to like physics and how belief systems absolutely affect molecules. Well, they absolutely affect so many different aspects of your body. And for anyone who doubts that, the placebo effect is measurable. I mean, the placebo effect is

nothing more than your brain thinking that it's got the cure. So it reacts as if it's got the cure and then things get better. I mean measurable amounts. Yeah, I mean it's amazing. Like how many studies have shown the placebo effect. It all comes down to belief system and believing in yourself and believing that you have the power to heal. belief system and believing yourself and believing that you have the power to heal. I mean, you know, I don't know whether you're religious or not, but I mean, you know, you hear about the miracles of Christ and you hear the miracles of other prophets and so forth. I mean, you know, it's documented

that a lot of these things happen. I don't buy into anything that's old when it comes to documentation of certain acts because it's so difficult to find out what the fuck actually happened. I find religious texts to be fascinating and enlightening in a lot of ways. I think you can learn a lot about what they learned about wisdom, what they learned about the correct path to living a happy, healthy life. But a lot of those principles, you know, the golden rules of Christianity, of Islam, of a lot of different religions, they essentially come down to wisdom, life lessons learned over long periods of time, but then translated into sort of some sort of a weird metaphysical deity connection that

gets a little sketchy, you know, like, you know like Christ rising from the dead and all this stuff. It's like, boy, what really happened? You're talking about thousands of years of stories and over a thousand years before anybody wrote anything down, you know, stories over the campfire. Most of the things that were written down were several centuries after the fact. So, yeah, I agree. several centuries after the fact. So, yeah, I agree. But I have – during the late 1800s, early 1900s, there was a movement in the United States and through Europe

called the New Thought where people began to realize that thoughts are things. It's an energy form. And that you – when you think things and especially when you say things, you're actually putting energy into action. It's the law of attraction. So you're basically attracting what you're putting out. I mean that's been long understood in physics.

That's basically what Einstein was talking about. In what way was he talking about that? Well, for every action, there's a reaction. If you're putting out negative thinking, negative statements, you can only attract the same. It's virtually impossible for any good to come from bad. Well, it's funny how that sounds so simplistic. It sounds very simplistic. But anybody who doubts that, run into people that go, oh, fucking nothing good ever happens to me.

Those people, you're right, nothing good ever happens to you. You have this mindset, and then you run into people that say, hey, we're going to work through this. We're going to figure it out, and this is only going to make us better and stronger. Let's keep pushing forward. Those people seem to always prosper. And I don't know whether or not luck is involved. I don't know whether or not it's all just your attitude. But I do know that the people that have that great attitude, I feel better when I'm around them.

And it empowers me, and I feel like it enables me to also spread that empowerment onto other folks. Well, it's a whole energy. It's like guys, oh, I can't afford this. I can't afford that. You're right. You can't. It's like going into a fight, and you already thought you'd lose. You're going to lose, man. No fighter goes into a fight believing that he's like going into a fight and you already thought you lose you're going to lose man no fighter goes into a fight believing that he's going to lose the fight if he does go in

he's pretty much going to get his ass kicked right that said if you're some guy who's not very good but you've got this crazy belief in yourself and you fight john fucking jones you're still going to get your ass kicked it only works up to kicked. So it only works up to a certain point. It only works up to a certain point because then there's other factors that come into play. Yeah. There's a lot of factors. The positive belief system has to be grounded in reality. Yes.

Right. That is a big factor. I mean, obviously, if somehow I could be convinced that I could fly and I jump off this building, I'm going to get a splat. Yeah. And the people that are into like the secret will tell you, you didn't really believe. Well, who knows, man? You know, my belief system doesn't go past a certain point, but maybe that's my limiting factor.

But I do know when it comes to the body, you have an amazing capacity for self-healing. And I've actually undergone it with my own body. Well, the people that really truly believe that we are in some way or another, the vehicle of God, that's sort of what they point to, that we manifest our reality with our own mind and our own intent and with our own actions and our own thoughts. And that as we grow and as we evolved and as we get stronger and stronger with our consciousness and our ability to understand this, that we enact those powers more freely, more consciously, and that our intent truly does create the very universe around us. It sounds a little ridiculous,

but then when you start and think how much of an effect human beings have on the environment, how much of an effect human beings have on Earth, and when you stop and think about all the bad things that go on on Earth, whether it's war, pollution, well, what is that? It's like there's a lack of attention and a lack of intent on the important aspects

of harmonious relationships with your environment, whether it's with people or... Let's take just one small example of how my belief system works about this. There's this one thing called the accumulation mindset, I call it. I work online with people on fat loss programs. And when you really look at their lifestyle, they're into this accumulation mode of just buying and amassing all this stuff. I've been in some people's homes where the shelves are just littered

with stuff they never use or don't need. They just have so much stuff. The attic is full of stuff. The garage is full of stuff. But they keep buying more and more, adding, adding, adding, adding. Their bodies reflect this type of belief system. And for sure, they're adding more cells under their body. Just indulgent. Just indulgent. And then they find themselves over eating, eating more than their fair share of the natural resources of the universe,

taking more in. I mean, it's just like this whole belief system in accumulation like i need to add i need to add it's all subconscious of course no one goes into it you know yeah i have friends that are overweight and when i watch them sometimes eat i almost see like a person who's like consuming a drug you know you see them like they know they shouldn't have it but like fuck it give it to me uh uh relief you know and i don't know what it is have it, but they're like, fuck it, give it to me. Relief. You know, and I don't know what it is, whether it's a distraction from their own mortality, whether it's just some sort of a weird hitch in the system of the way the mind interacts with the world. Like it's just too much stress and too many variables. And they need something to sort of inject them out of this.

So they focus entirely on an ice cream sundae knowing that they shouldn't even have it go fuck it we're gonna have it anyway and so by doing that you sort of block off all your awareness and just funnel that stuff down your fucking pie hole until you're it's like an addiction to the pleasure senses of the body you know you get like that little drug like response in the brain for a moment in time you know right? Right. When you eat this kind of stuff. And so you get like that little chemical reward that the brain puts out for having like this big thing of sugar or whatever, you know? You get that rush.

But then that's quickly replaced with either disgust or self-loathing. Yes. But it sets up another cycle because now you get depressed again, but you need that little brain reward. And, man, it can be pretty tough. And it really parallels with gambling addiction, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, same addiction is very, very common.

I mean, if you think about it, you can kick cigarettes, you can kick most drugs. Cigarettes are tough for most people. One of the toughest things to give up is that nicotine. But any drug you can give up, you can get off alcohol, all those things, right? But you don't need those things. But you do need to eat. Food addiction is very common and it's the toughest one to give up because you can never not eat. That's a very good point.

It's a very good way of putting it. I don't think I've ever heard anybody put it that way. That's such an important way to describe it because you're always going to, you know, it's like if you were a heroin addict and you go, okay, I can't just shoot up until I pass out. I'm just going to shoot a little bit and keep me happy. Yeah. I mean, that's really similar. You need it. You need food if you don't. And if you're addicted to food and you need food. Yeah. I've had friends lost a lot of weight and they look great. Like, oh, you look great. You lost all this weight. And a year later. So easy to do. Well, think of it as the species. Our survival depended on our ability to lay down a rapidly high body fat. We were programmed to

overeat and eat as much as possible because food was not very prevalent. Right. Now in this modern society with food, you know, so easily to get get, I mean our genetics actually work against us. That's probably like why sex addiction exists as well too. It was hard for human beings to breed and even harder for them to stay alive. So it was imperative that we breed as much as possible to spread the population as far as possible. possible to spread the population as far as possible and so that that pleasure reward system that's in in place to make sure that you keep breeding just throw is a hiccup gets thrown into it when you inject it into modern society where you don't really have as many issues about breeding but you still have this genetic impulse to constantly need to fuck and spread your seed

yeah yeah stuff your face, breed. But I don't get the gambling one. The gambling one's a weird one, right? Where the hell did that one come from? Well, that's still a brain reward, you know? Right. You get that rush, that excitement, you know? But why?

I guess to take risks in the rewards of life. Well, these guys need to get out and do a sport. Right. And replace it with that. But instead, they get it from the rush of putting it all on the line. But, well, I mean, think of some of the adrenaline sports like rock climbing. Some of these crazy dudes like climbing without safety harnesses or ropes. Alex Hanold.

We had him on the podcast. We had the craziest of all. The one free climber just died recently. I don't know. Who died? There was a guy that was written in that just died. The one free climber just died recently. I don't know. Who died? There was a guy that was written in an outside magazine. They did a little tribute to this guy. I hope it's not Alex.

I hope not. I would have heard if Alex died because he's the craziest of all of them. We had him on the podcast. He's the most mellow kid ever. But think about the base jumping. There's two crazy dudes that jumped off that tower in Dubai. That's the type of adrenaline rush. But guys like you and me, we get that going on the mat.

Yeah. You know? Yeah. Yeah, I think that is a big thing, the pushing yourself and the reward of – and that's the difference between a martial art as well. Really, in my opinion, the difference in jiu-jitsu as opposed to all the other martial arts because i i enjoyed kickboxing and i enjoyed taekwondo i enjoyed uh competing i certainly got a lot out of it it certainly shaped me as a man but i never felt good when i knocked somebody out i always felt weird the to the body wasn't that bad it didn't

bother me that much but man when i when i would head kick guys and watch them fold it was a terrible feeling pretty sickening i've never enjoyed it i never felt good and even worse when you get a head kick yeah way worse i got lucky i i got stopped only once in my entire career and it was a kickboxing bout and it was more out of exhaustion than anything it was the third fight in the night. I won my first one by KO. I won my second one. It was a two-round.

Both of them were two. It was because you fought three times in a night, so there were two-round fights. So first one I won by KO. Second one was just I kicked the guy's ass. But then I had a long period of break between the second fight and the third. And I was just fucking exhausted. And I was kind of sick too. And then I got hit with a left hook in the second round.

My legs just gave out. But I was conscious. It was nothing bad. It was like, and that was the last fight I had. And I was in the middle of like doing comedy and competing at the same time. I was saying, you know what? If I can get out of this with, think about all the shit that I did to people. If I can get out of it with just one left hook to shit that I did to people, if I can get out of it

with just one left hook to the face, because my instinct initially was I'm not going out on a loss, fuck that, I'm coming back, I'm going to find that guy,

I'm going to beat the fuck out of him. And my initial instinct was to start training like a fucking madman, abandon comedy, but that was emotional. Within a week or two,

I sort of realized I have a different... Common sense, that's it. I realized I had a different goal too, that I changed the way I train. And I wasn't training like I was when I was younger.

And when I was completely obsessed with competition, now I had all these different requirements. I was now no longer living with my parents. Now I was feeding myself and I was working and I was worried about my future. I was like, what am I going to do for a living? Like, what am I doing here?

I'm teaching. There's not much money in that. And I go, what am I going to do for a living? Like, what am I doing here? I'm teaching. There's not much money in that. And what am I going to do? I'm going to be a kickboxer and get fucking brain damage? So there's all these very – so I was terrified that I was going to run into me when I was 19 who was just a psycho that just trained constantly and lived at home and didn't have many bills

and just every day would get up and run hills and stairs and just all I was thinking of was I got to do things that other people aren't doing because that way I'll win you know and I wasn't doing that anymore so I kind of recognized it so I was like if I can get away with one loss like that like that kind of loss we're good because I didn't want anybody kicking me the way I kicked people I just fucking I've seen it happen to friends too. Like good friend, my friend Larry, he, when we were like, he was a little bit older than me. I think I was 18 and we went to this tournament and he fought this Canadian national champion, this guy named Jersey Long. And he got hit with an axe kick in the head.

And I'll never forget it. I'll never forget watching this guy whip his leg up like more than a split and slam that heel down on my friend's face and he just crumpled and i was like that is just not something i ever want to happen to me it's a pretty brutal way to make a living and when you do it to somebody it doesn't feel good when you choke someone out in jiu-jitsu and they tap it doesn't feel bad at all no you know i mean yeah you're not hurting them i've never broke anybody's arm i mean mean, I've never in, in, in class. I've never, I mean, I've seen guys get injured, you know, accidentally knees blow out and stuff like that, but it's always an accident.

It's never, you know, never an intentional thing, at least on my behalf. So I never felt bad about it. So I got all that, the competition, the thrill, the energy, the excitement, all the charge, the adrenaline without any of the bad karma feelings that you get from kicking somebody you know because there's something about you know that kind of competition where you have to put almost you have to put your humanity aside in order to to compete in in a mixed martial arts or in so i tell people like when people come to me for advice about fighting,

well, I'm thinking about fighting, well, stop right there. Because if you're just thinking about it, don't fucking do it. Don't do it. Okay? If you have to be completely obsessed, and if you're not completely obsessed,

you're going to fight someone who is, and you're going to get fucking killed. Think about someone who's not completely obsessed fighting Vanderlei Silva in his prime. Just imagine that. Okay? And then do you want that to happen to you? No.

Then don't do it. But if you want to be Vanderlei Silva, if that's your destiny, then do it. But unless that's your destiny, unless that is you, and I don't know what the fuck anybody, I don't know what makes someone want to be a folk singer. I don't get it. I don't understand. Someone has it in their head to get up every morning and do macrame and that's what they want to do that i would never discourage it but you must have that in your head

if you want to be a fighter you have to only have that in your head if you have anything in your head any doubts if you have any problem with giving people concussions get out don't do it because you're gonna run it i don't believe in dabbling and fighting. It's like people – You cannot do it. Oh. It's – like you say, the risk-to-benefit ratio of that type of activity, it's just terrible. So when you've had injuries and you have done what you say is prayer and meditation and focusing. What is the process? Do you put yourself in a certain particular state when you're trying to heal something?

Like how do you go about doing it? There's a really famous guy by the name of Neville Goddard who wrote about the power of visualization. A lot of it has to do with visualization, visualizing yourself as whole, as being well. visualizing yourself as whole, as being well. You know, we're all born with this perfect DNA blueprint, but then we get skewed somehow as we get older or through injuries and so forth. So I try to visualize being like that perfect little kid that had full mobility and ability to move and so forth. And there's a step-by-step process.

You literally generate the feeling of being that. Fighters do this all the time. You know, or great athletes like, you know, like a John McEnroe or somebody. You know, they had this power to visualize themselves in certain situations and prevailing or winning. And I mean, in all walks of life well i certainly know people use visualization whether they know it or not even if they're unconscious of it they're

still using it yeah there's certain folks that just they have super confident and they i only see myself winning but there's other folks like i know frank shamrock talked about that a lot that he used to go through he was a big proponent of visualization and when he was in his prime and he would go through all these different scenarios and see himself winning go through he was a big proponent of visualization and when he was in his prime and he would go through all these different scenarios And see himself winning go through all these different scenario a lot of people, you know Don't give Frank Shamrock enough credit like back in the day Frank was the original Well-balanced mixed martial artist. I mean he was a fantastic fighter. I never forget that match he had with Zinovia. Oh, yeah Oh, yeah, that was a quick one

You know, that was a crazy slam and he broke his collarbone and fucked him up. Just that devastating double-A pickup throw he did was like, wow. Frank was an animal. Yeah, well, how about when he beat Kevin Jackson with that armbar in Japan to win the title? Or the time he beat, who was the bad boy? Tito Ortiz. Tito Ortiz. Yeah, I'll cardio him.

Not only that, he was way smaller than Tito. And, you know, he used jiu-jitsu. He basically was repeatedly taken down by Tito Ortiz, used the guard as good as any jiu-jitsu guy I've ever seen. We get back to his feet. Tito got tired taking him down. Yep. And he couldn't do anything with him because he used beautiful guard work. I was shocked at how good his jiu-jitsu was.

Beautiful guard work. I was shocked at how good his jiu-jitsu was. Well, that was an important fight for MMA as well. Because that was an important fight where people understood the benefit and the need for cardio. Because Frank had tremendous cardio. Frank was also training with Maurice Smith, who was a huge, huge cardio fiend. Maurice would swim. He was an animal. He would put those weird paddle things on your hands and just do lap after lap and that's how he wound up beating mark coleman same strategy mark coleman

took him down over and over again maurice defended while he was on the bottom and then eventually got up and he was fresh still because his cardio was so good mark was exhausted then maurice started kicking the shit out of his legs you know ma, Maurice implied that strategy, applied rather, that strategy many times. And, you know, I think Frank learned a lot from Maurice in that respect too. But that fight was a big,

when you think about how, how young MMA was back then, I mean, when did he fight Tito? Was that 96 or something like that? Somewhere around there? Yeah, it was really in the early days.

Really in the early days. So three or four years into the UFC. No, it must have been after 96 because I was there for Tito's first fight, which was 97. I was there. Wes Alberton, I think he fought. He came in as an alternate. I was there.

I interviewed him. I think he was 19 at the time. And he won in that fight. And then he got submitted by Guy Metzger. Guy Metzger caught him in a guillotine. And then he went on to, when he fought Frank Shamrock, after that fight, he became a cardio machine. Cardio machine, yeah.

And he taught a lot of guys that. When I talked to Kendall Grove, after Kendall did Tom on The Ultimate Fighter, came out like a much improved fighter. And one of the things that he said to me, Kendall said, I learned from Tito that cardio is everything. You know, these guys learn. It can't be everything. So we saw that growth.

You know, we saw these guys learning. Well, sure, I was involved as a sport. Well, you know, I don't know whether I ever told you this, but I was one of the original investors in the UFC. My ex-wife. D.C. Maxwell, yes. Horian Gracie put that first UFC together in a shoestring budget in Denver.

Wow. And he was going around to all his friends, and we were all kicking in a little bit of money. And, you know, I had a little extra money saved up. I actually had a retirement account as a schoolteacher, and I had some money sitting in the bank. I said, sure. And so he went to, like, a whole bunch of different people, put it together in a shoestring, and thus was born that first UFC. put it together in a shoestring, and thus was born that first UFC.

And he wanted to use it as a showcase to show the superiority of jiu-jitsu or basically what happens to you if you don't know how to fight on the ground. And then he picked the most unlikely guy because he could add Hickson, who was just a stud, but he was afraid that people would say, well, that's Hickson. Look at the physique. Look at the athleticism. He wanted to pick Hoyes, who was a really nice kid, pretty thin, wasn't particularly strong. He was a perfect guy to showcase the technique of jiu-jitsu.

There's also what I had heard was that he couldn't control Hickson and that he didn't like that Hickson was a bit of a wild man. Yeah, he's his own man. Still is. He wasn't going to tell him what to do, man. Still is. He wasn't going to tell him what to do, man. Still is. And Hoyce was a very young, naive kid, and he pretty much listened to what Horian told him to do. And it just makes it amazing what he did in those first UFCs. But the big difference was the no gloves. Everyone was breaking their hands.

Yep. And I'm telling you, you take the gloves off, you would still see wrestlers and jiu-jitsu guys win almost every fight. For the average audience, I think it would be boring. They want to see the spectacular knockouts. You're not going to get the spectacular knockouts with the bare fists like you would

with those gloves. You would with knees and kicks, though. Muay Thai has advanced tremendously, though. We had Orlando Veit, who's like one of the best early guys, striker guys, who's a really high-level kickboxer who was in the early UFCs. But I agree with you. You wouldn't see nearly as much punching to the face.

Your hands break. All guys would have to do is just duck their head down. You hit their forehead. If you want to punch me in the forehead, shit, go ahead. That used to be Hickson's strategy in self-defense. He'd just head-butt the hand. It's pretty much done.

The other thing, too, was with the no-time limit thing that they had back in those days, where you just go and go, that was very terrifying for a lot of guys. It was like, oh my god. I feel my gas going and people are just literally panicking. can't recover. Panic. Yeah, there's no sitting on a stool, ice bag on the back of your neck,

have a sip of water, someone is picking your feet up or relaxing your legs. None of that. You know, you just got a fucking Mark Kerr on top of you, dropping elbows in your face. They had the hair pull and they had the punching to the testicles. I mean, it really is amazing what Hoyce accomplished when you think about that. The guy fought three or four times in one night. Gee.

It's impossible to underestimate, to underemphasize it or overemphasize it. What an amazing thing he accomplished. It really, truly is. And that fight he had with Matt Hughes, that wasn't the same Hoyce Gracie, you know? I mean, that was pretty much him past his prime. In addition to wearing gloves and not wearing the key, I mean, it was just everything. I know he must have felt incredibly uncomfortable in that particular fight, you know? Well, he was also fighting a monster.

And Matt Hughes is a monster. And he was fighting a monster at 175 pounds. He didn't want to lose the weight, so he let Matt Hughes be even fucking bigger. And Matt Hughes is a goddamn gorilla and has really good jiu-jitsu. Matt Hughes out-jiu-jitsu'd him. I mean, that was the thing about what Matt Hughes did to him in that fight. He took Hoist's fucking back, flattened him out, was pounding on him. The fight ended with Matt Hughes having both of his hooks in on top of him. He is a classy jiu-jitsu.

Went hoisted to guys thousands of times. He was a gorilla. Matt Hughes back then was a gorilla. He had these neck muscles. Like, you look at the back of his neck, it's like he's got two kielbasa's. Not even kielbasa's. Like, one of those really fat salamis, you know, that go from the base of the spine outward towards the traps. He's such a fucking animal with good technique.

With good technique. Great technique, by the way. Some of the guys, some of his sparring partners I saw in a video clip, it was like a who's who of high-level jiu-jitsu guys. And he was more than handling himself in the jiu-jitsu room. Yeah, and he'd already been through scraps with guys like BJ Penn. He had trained on a regular basis with really, really high-level guys, both at Pat Miletic's and other gyms. I mean, he had guys to train with him.

He was constantly around guys that were really, really high-level, and he was being pushed in title fights. He was being pushed, and Hoyce had been out of the game for quite a while. But boy, really high level. He was being pushed in title fights. He was being pushed. Hoist had been out of the game for quite a while. But boy, did that sell. Everybody wanted to see it. Everyone wanted to see it. To me, it was kind of sad.

It was. Hoist was a real hero to me. I just hated to see. Because people sort of undermined him. I see UFC has become so much more sophisticated. Look, there's old ones. You can never hang with these guys. That's not true at all, man. Well, it would have been really interesting to see Hoist in his prime with a Gi versus Matt Hughes.

That would have been really interesting. That would have been an interesting fight, man. Yeah, it would have been interesting. But it's also you've got to realize that one of the reasons why Matt Hughes was so good is that Matt Hughes had benefited from all the lessons that we had all learned from Hoyce. From Hoyce entering into UFC 1, UFC 2, and then, of course, Jeremy Horn, who was training all the time with Matt, who was a huge student of the game and one of the most technical guys. Jeremy Horn is a perfect example

because Jeremy is a really smart guy no ego who has a body that is just it's there's nothing super powerful or unusually athletic nothing extra long about him just excellent technique and intelligence and you know he worked a lot with matt matt got to you know learned a lot of techniques from him the b BJ Penn fights. Of course, BJ Penn, Mundial's champion. One of the best jiu-jitsu guys ever. One of the best guys ever. And so Matt, you know, the game passed Hoyes up. You know, things had changed. And his body wasn't the same.

It became, yeah, it became a real bona fide sport. I think those early UFCs were pretty much like real fights, like street fights. Yeah. You know how they used to try out for this? This is crazy, man. I was actually called into the ballroom by Horan one time. They had guys trying out for the UFC in the ballroom. They'd get Hillian Gracie, and they would have a couple other, the Gracie family.

They would put on knee pads and fight in these hotel ballrooms. Whoa. Yeah. Fight. Bare knuckle. They would just go, man. Wow. It was like, oh, Yeah. To see. Fight. Bare knuckle. They would just go, man. Wow. It was like, oh my.

To find out if a guy's any good. Like those old Gracie and Action tapes. To find out if the guy was any good, you know? Well, you know, the early Ultimate Fighters. It was nuts. You know what they have? They would have a guy. They had guys fight in the early Ultimate Fighters that had no fights.

Zero. And they would get those guys and they would have them hit the pads they'd have a guy hold the tie pads for him okay guy got some striking technique they'd have him roll a little bit okay it looks like he can roll get in there and then they put him on the ultimate fighter i mean there's quite a few guys that they had that did that in the early ultimate yeah of course as this show evolved like all things now you're getting guys like uriah hall they come into the ultimate fighter already a killer you know just lighting guys on fire when they get in there. Fascinating, fascinating to be a part of the evolution of all that.

Really. And, you know, the training has really evolved too. I was going to ask you about that. Well, let's talk, for example, about you mentioned muscularity and strength. How muscular do you need to be to be a fighter and so forth? Yeah, that's the question, right? Well, obviously it's a weight class sport, and you want to be as light as possible

and as strong as absolutely possible. So absolute strength is pretty important. There's a fixed ratio between absolute strength and muscular endurance strength. There's a fixed ratio. So if you increase your ability to lift a really heavy weight one time, your endurance with a lighter weight

is going to also improve. Let's say you managed to build from 80 pounds to 100 pounds in a bicep curl. And prior to that, you could take 50 pounds and maybe you could do 10. When you go from your 80 to your 100-pound curl, your ability to, if you went back to that same 50 pounds that you could do 10 with, you'd probably do about 13 or 14 reps now. So there's a fixed ratio between strength and muscular endurance. That's interesting.

So if you do chin-ups, like say if you can do – I can do 20 chin-ups. That's pretty remarkable. That's always been like an amazing standard. Well, you – I'm kind of a stud. I always tell people you're a stud. Listen, I learned a lot from you. But if I did it with a weight belt, like a dip belt and a barbell or a dumbbell plate underneath it, that would probably make my chin-ups better.

It would. So I could probably get to 20. My ultimate goal, I want to be able to do 30 straight arm chin-ups. Like all the way down. Which one's a chin-up? Like this way is where— Palm's face. That's the way I always do it because I feel like that's more applicable to jiu-jitsu.

Absolutely. Because you don't really choke anybody like this. No. Unless you're doing a gi choke. Yeah, but I don't really like gi chokes. When I use the gi, I don't use the gi. Like I use the gi for... I roll with the gi.

I have a black belt in the gi. But my game is completely defensive with the gi. Like I do the same techniques, overhooks, underhooks. I do the same type of jiu-jitsu. I go for chokes and arm bars. I don't try to collar choke people very rarely. I do the clock choke every now and then, the same one that Valigi caught Hoist with,

put him to sleep with. That's a beautiful choke. That's a beautiful choke. Because I love the spin underneath. It's such a ninja move. But if you think about it, the old saying was, it's not the grips, it's the hips. And really top practitioners in both Gi and no Gi, a lot of times the game is virtually the same. Salo, for example, or Shonji, the game is pretty much the same with Gi, without Gi. Right.

They don't overly depend on grips. There's so many guys, though, that do. And we used to see that in the UFC. These guys who are Mundial's champion, high-level Gi guys, but they relied so much on spider guard, so much on grabbing the sleeves. There and below. So much on the, yeah, it's like that fucking shit is gone when everybody's sweaty. When you've got a sweaty guy in his underwear on top, you're dropping elbows on your face, and he happens to be a wrestler,

so he knows how to grapple. And how to use his weight and how to keep you pinned down. Reaching for shit that's not there instead of underhooks and overhooks and controlling the body. Use the body and not the jacket. Well, that's what Eddie Bravo always emphasized. That like so many of the techniques of jiu-jitsu that these people relied on and trained on a regular basis, they just weren't applicable. You know, it was like, do you see judo guys training Greco-Roman to get better at judo? Well, actually, the Yusushi Miyake, the three-time world Greco-Roman wrestling champion, his

judo game and his Greco-Roman wrestling game were virtually identical. So he did both the same way. Yeah. So it was sort of the same idea. He was a huge underhook, man. Ah. You did not want to get in his eye. Once he had that underhook, it wasn't a matter if you're going to be thrown, just a matter of when. And it was a terrifying experience. I was on the

receiving end of it. The guy was brutal. Well, when you see the guys that are really good at judo and they can apply it to MMA, it's so beautiful. Like Hector Lombard. Did you see Hector Lombard versus Jake Shields? That was quite a magnificent match. Oh, the way he threw him, though. And who was that Korean judo guy in Pride that was just tossing dudes? The Korean judo guy. Yeah, it was the guy that won the gold medal from Korea that was just magnificent throws. It was in one of the Japanese shows.

Yoshida? You're talking about Yoshida? But he was a Japanese guy. No, no, it wasn't Yoshida. He was a gold medalist. It was in one of the Japanese shows. Yoshida? You're talking about Yoshida? He was a Japanese guy. He was a gold medalist. It was another Japanese show. I just remember watching it and just watching this judo guy really...

Was it Akiyama? Akiyama was a judo guy. He was pretty high level judo. Korean. Gold medalist in the Olympics. I think Akiyama was like half Korean and half Japanese. I'm not sure. Magnificent. He took the judo and really turned it into quite a fighting art without the gig.

It was really fun to watch. I wish I could remember the show, but I was hoping you'd remember. Yeah. Well, if you said his name, I'd remember what he did. You're like an encyclopedia for this stuff, man. I don't have any other sports in my head. I have jiu-jitsu, kickboxing, and MMA. That's all I have in my head.

But you asked me some football questions. I'll stare at you. But let's go back to strength training and conditioning. Well, there's a point of diminishing returns where getting stronger is not going to improve your performance anymore. In order to get stronger past a certain point, you have to almost become a strength specialist. And this is where a lot of guys get mixed up. They start training like a powerlifter or Olympic weightlifter. Big mistake. The majority of your time should be going into improving your skill set. That's the single most important thing. When it comes to endurance now, you know,

we talk about cardio and gas, right? The absolute best way to get your cardio and gas at a high level is to wrestle or to do mma the problem is a lot of these guys are so good they have no one to push their gas for example i trained shanji ibero the the year he won uh abadabi in barcelona and he took second in the open division. He hurt his shoulder in the finals, but he won his division. He was so good that there was no one in the room to push him, man. I mean, this guy is, like, so good. So elite at jiu-jitsu. I had to pre-exhaust him before he would train. I put him through rolling circuits and such to really, you know,

bring his cardio up and get him really tired. Before he would roll? Before he'd roll. So that even an average dude can give him a hard time. So now I have no juice left. I've got to use pure technique in order to be able to do what I do. That's fascinating. So that when he could roll when he was fresh, it was probably a real treat.

Oh, yeah. I mean, it was a play. In fact, I was actually in Oslo, Norway at the time when he was fresh. It was probably a real treat. Oh, yeah. I mean, it was a play. In fact, I was actually in Oslo, Norway at the time when he won. He texted me, and it was one of the nicest things anyone ever said. He says, Coach, I didn't even get tired at all. And it was like, yes, the strategy really, really worked. Well, you come up with some brutal workouts, man. I still have those suspension things that you gave me.

But normally, normally normally you wouldn't need those type of brutal workouts if you're getting high level competition on the mat it almost be would be too much it pushed you towards overtraining that's interesting so like a guy like fedor like or fjodor however you want to say it if you want to be correct um he in his at his best stopped all the strength and conditioning training. And all he would do is fight specific training. Pretty much sports specific training, which was always the Russian model. I do believe that you do need to keep your absolute strength up.

You do need to lift weights a couple times a week just to keep, you know, fairly heavy weight, low rep, but don't tax yourself. Use it sort of as a tonic. And then really push yourself in the gym to get your hard rolls on, to develop your sports-specific conditioning. Because let's face it, all the rope skipping, running, kettlebell swings, stairs, it isn't the same as getting on the mat. Right. It's slightly different energy systems. You're using your muscles, different firing patterns.

And, yes, okay, if you don't have someone to push you in the gym, yes, this stuff is one way to do it, but it's not the ideal way. Because most MMA guys, let's face it, it's like a full-time profession, man. You're doing your wrestling, you're doing your kickboxing or boxing or whatever, you're doing your jiu-jitsu. My God, there's three disciplines. It's like being a triathlete, you know? Yeah. You have to equally divide up. I found, too, that when you get injured and then come back, it's always horrifying. Like if I tore my knee meniscus, I had it scoped, and then I was out for a couple months,

and then come back and you're just like, oh, death. You know, like a couple minutes in, you're just a dead man. And one of the ways that I mitigated that was kettlebell training. Well, yeah. I mean, when you're hurt or you have injuries or you don't have people to push you in the gym, there are ways that you can very closely simulate the energy systems that you would use in actual grappling. It's never as good as actual grappling or kickboxing or whatever. Because you're forced to react to the other person, which you're not when you're training.

So even when you're pushing hard, you're still pushing hard at your pace. You're not reacting to someone else's pace and relaxing and breathing while you're reacting to someone else's pace. That's correct. That's the big one. And the other thing, like I mentioned, I wasn't a real big fan of like Olympic lifting, you know. That's the big one. And the other thing, like I mentioned, I wasn't a real big fan of Olympic lifting. Olympic lifts are very technical, an amazing athletic feat.

You're basically throwing a barbell over your head and jumping underneath it simultaneously. That's what Olympic lifting is. Very specific movement pattern. Has nothing to do with martial arts. When's the last time you saw anyone lift something over their head in martial arts? Very rarely. Unless it's Tank Abbott trying to throw somebody out of the cage. And the skills required to Olympic lifter are really high level.

I mean, these guys are amazing athletes in their own right. But becoming an Olympic lifter is not going to make you better on the mat. It just isn't. The more skill level an exercise takes, the higher the skill, the less care of or value to anything else. That's why you want to keep your workouts fairly general, fairly simple, like your chin-ups, fantastic care of or to any martial art because it's very general. It's no skill. You pull yourself up or you don't. You really develop a tremendous amount of strength and in your case, strength endurance. So deadlifts, squats, cleans.

Yeah. So one that I got from you is alternating cleans. I love that one with kettlebells. Yeah, with kettlebells. That's one of my favorites. I'm not a big barbell clean fan, only because of the way it can affect your back in a really negative way. You mess up a barbell clean, you can really screw your lower back.

Let's face it. What we do on the mat is dangerous enough in the ring and the mat. It's pretty dangerous already. So I don't need to make my workouts, you know, I don't need to include traumatic type exercises like that. Right. I only use barbells or, yeah, barbells. I only use it for bench press. And I try not to do that too much, but I will if I don't have someone there with me to help me spot because it's hard to do individual kettlebells with bench press or for deadlifts. Oh, no. I mean, the bar is made for deadlifts and bench pressing. That's what a bar

bell is for. Kettlebells are for swings, pretty much. Get-ups, you know, bodyweight training, of course, any kind of pull-up or chin-up, obviously dips and push-ups and things are fantastic. You know, the right tool for the right thing. You know, some people get really hung up on kettlebells only, but hey, look, it's just one tool in the box, man. They're good, but, you know, there's plenty of other good tools. But it doesn't simulate chin-ups, right? No.

There's a lot of things that kettlebells really don't simulate. There's no vertical pulling in kettlebell training. there's no vertical pulling in kettlebell training. So ideally you would do your general strength training, and then you get on the mat and you get your conditioning need met in the mat and the ring. So you would say that if someone was like a high-level jiu-jitsu guy and you were looking to just maintain strength or get stronger, you almost wouldn't do conditioning with weights. You would almost do like heavy weights, low would almost do heavy weights, low reps.

Heavy strength work, low reps, heavy weights. So you would take maybe two 70-pound kettlebells and do alternate cleans, do some reps with heavy stuff. Or some heavy swings. Heavy swings. Heavy turkeys get up some chins. Maybe a 90-pound kettlebell with two hands for swings. Yeah, exactly. Something real heavy. Heavy, low rep work. And not worry so much

about developing strength, endurance, or cardio with the weights. So you're just trying to get strong with the weights. Trying to get strong as you can for your weight class. Now, if you need to hypertrophy, you need to change the reps a little bit. If you need to armor up, let's say I'm working a guy that might be playing NFL football and he needs to put on some muscle, it's going to be a slightly different protocol. Right. But we're specifically talking like MMA and weight class sports like jiu-jitsu and so forth.

And hypertrophy, I've always seen that word. Muscular, increase in muscular size. Okay. There are some people that need that. And the way to get that is just heavy, low reps, right? Well, no, more moderate reps. Moderate reps. Yeah, the most important factor there is what they call tall time under load. You need to have your muscles under a certain tension for a specific time.

That seems to be the most important factor to increase muscular strength. Do you believe in slow lifting? Do you know that style of lifting? Especially for people that have been injured like yourself and myself. It could be a very good training tool. I do a lot of slow rep work with myself because I have had some trauma to my shoulders and my neck and my back over the years. You know, you don't do 43 years of combat sports without paying the price. Yeah, last time we worked out together, you were having some real shoulder problems. Did that get better? It did not. It hasn't got worse. Wow, you were having some real shoulder problems. Did that get better? It did not.

It hasn't got worse. Wow, this still fucks with you. But, yeah, well, I developed some osteoarthritis in the shoulder, mostly from just doing silly stuff. Get a bunch of snatches. Look into this Regenequin stuff, man. It's fantastic for that. Yeah, maybe I will, man. Yeah, you really should.

It's fantastic for that. You're not a fan of CrossFit? Not at all. For one thing, there's not one elite athlete anywhere in the world that actually uses CrossFit as the model. The second problem I have with CrossFit, Greg Glassman, the guy that invented it, it's no secret that he's very fat, an obese cripple basically, who doesn't even train. very fat, or an obese cripple, basically, who doesn't even train.

What kind of system is it when the inventor of the system is not a good example of what he's putting out there? That's crazy, right? I don't know who the guy is that invented it. Can we see him? Pull him up, Jamie. Of course, then the other thing is... That's him? Get the fuck out of here. No way. Now, would you listen to him or would you listen to me?

Well, I'd listen to you anyway, but – No, no. I mean, okay, listen. You don't need to look like a men's health fitness model to be – Right, like Fedor. Look at Fedor. Not – I mean, he looked like someone's dad that someone went in a bar and said,

hey, do you want to fight? Right. Pull him off the bar stool. Like someone's dad that someone went in a bar and said, hey, do you want to fight? Yeah. Right. Pulled him off the bar stool. I mean, for sure, if the best physique was what determined who was going to win, the bodybuilders would win every fight.

Right, right. But that just doesn't happen. But for sure, you want to be an example. You certainly don't want to be like overweight. See if you can find some other pictures of him. I mean, maybe you caught him on a bad day. Maybe he was bloated. He ate some pastries. Had some cozzoni or something. Yeah. That's what the guy looks like? That's fucking crazy. That's crazy. Well, I have to tell you something else. Come on. That's really him?

There was a major university study on CrossFit, right? And for sure, it improved people's fitness levels. They got improved VO2 max, which is a measure of your ability to process oxygen. They got stronger. They lost body fat. But when the study was looked at closely, 20% of the people involved with the CrossFit dropped out due to injury. That means, like, if I'm a gym owner, one out of every five of my clients is getting hurt, and I'm losing the client. That's insane, man. Wow. One out of every five of my clients is getting hurt and I'm losing the client. That's insane, man. Wow. One out of every five. Because proper training for athletics is supposed to prevent

injuries, not cause injuries. If you're hurting yourself in the gym with your supplementary training, dude, you got to go to a new model, man. Well, who was that major CrossFit guy that just got paralyzed? Jamie, pull that up if you can. There's a guy who was that major CrossFit guy that just got paralyzed? Jamie, pull that up if you can. There's a guy who was in the CrossFit games, and he was a major star of CrossFit. And I don't know what exercise he was doing, but he dropped the bar on himself or something and broke his back. I hear these horror stories all the time, Joe. Eddie Ift, who was a buddy of mine, he jumped like someone shot him. CrossFit athlete was left paralyzed after having his spine severed by a dropped barbell.

Oh, my God. So there, once again, risk-to-benefit ratio of the exercises. And so many of these guys, they're competing in exercise. How the hell do you compete in exercise? Well, I had a conversation with a guy who was on – is that him right there? We dropped it on him? Pictures of it. It's not a video.

Oh, my God. That's pretty sick, man.? Pictures of it. It's not a video, but. Oh, my God. That's pretty sick, man. Oh, my God. It's falling on his neck? Take it off, man. Oh, my God. It's pretty screwed up, man. Oh, my God.

It just fell on his, oh, fuck. But think about this for a minute. Oh, my God. Don't play the video. If I was to say to you right now, hey, let's do some push-ups. We would use good form and good technique, right? We'd really be working for the true purpose of exercise is to give a stimulus to our muscles so we get stronger, right? Our body adapts.

Right. But if I said, hey, man, I bet you $20 right now I could do more push-ups than you, you think we'd be doing good reps? After a while, no. Form would go right out the window because we want to compete with each other. That's the insanity of competing in exercise, and that's what CrossFit does. So exercise really should only be to benefit sport, like your initial impulse to get into exercise in the first place. Exactly.

To make you a better athlete, to increase your performance. The CrossFit people need to get the fuck out of there and start getting out on the mat and do some real competition because let's face it everything every kind of sport is a sublimation of man's desire to wage war why not really do war and do mono mono combat that's what i'm talking about steve maxwell yeah i had a kid on fear factor once that was a crossfit uh animal kid was in serious shape. His girlfriend was a crossfitter too. They were both like fucking really fit. And I was like, dude, what do you, what do you get out of it? And he's like, you know, I just love competition. I

just love pushing myself. I'm like, okay, have you ever done jujitsu? You know, I tried to get him to do it. I'm like, but you would be, you're a fucking animal. You're a stud. I mean, do you know what an advantage it would be to be this fit? You could go on the mats. You would right away, your conditioning is so high. Your VO2 max is so high. You would just have to learn the techniques and you'd be able to already just outwork people. But you know, the shocking thing though is a lot of times work is very, very specific to the particular sport. You take, for example, well, I'll use Lance Armstrong. You know, the greatest endurance athlete, right,

is what he was coined. I mean, let's take all the drug stuff out. They all use drugs, okay? Right. But he was the greatest cyclist ever. Amazing endurance, right? His first few 10K runs, he sucked, man. He sucked because he didn't have the specific movement patterns of running.

Now, he got better. He had that type of energy system. But each sport is different. You take an average swimmer, even a really high-level swimmer, he's going to be exhausted in minutes on the mat. But you take me and put me on a bike. I'm not going to have any endurance on a mountain bike or a road bike or whatever. You only develop endurance in a very specific way. So, you know, the CrossFit guys, believe me, they would have to pay their dues.

It would take them a long time to adapt to jiu-jitsu or wrestling. Because I can remember being off the mat for a long period of time and doing all these heinous workouts with, you know, kettlebells and body weight and all this. Go on the mat and, oh, my God, I would suck air so bad. My gas would be horrible. I'm thinking, what the hell, man? Right. I'm in shape. What the fuck's going on?

I'm in shape. Yeah, I was in shape to swing kettlebells and to do burpees. It's not the same, man. Okay, it would be better than if I hadn't done those things at all. But let's face it. There's no substitute for doing the actual activity. Especially if you're in there and you have to roll with some savage who's in the gym five days a week, training 90 minutes a day, doing yoga in the morning, just gearing up for jiu-jitsu.

And part of the skill of jiu-jitsu, of course, is conserving your energy while you make the other guy put all his energy out. Yeah. So you got that factor going in there too. I found myself shocked at how bad a shape I was in when I was in good jiu-jitsu shape. And I started kickboxing again after a few years off. I had done no striking at all. I mean, like occasionally I'd go out to the garage and hit the bag a little bit, but like just abandoned it because I was really trying to get my black belt. And then I started kickboxing

when I was in really good jujitsu shape. I could roll hard for a long period of time and I'd fucking hit the pads for a minute and I'd be exhausted. It's amazing how sports specific endurance. That's how the body is specific adaptation to impose demand. You can't get good at something else by doing a particular activity. You get good at that activity and the body is amazingly specific when it comes to that type of thing. This is something I, it took me a while to kind of figure out. So all this crazy, silly buggery of waving these battling ropes and so-called MMA circuits, you know, it's just, you know, MMA, you know, MMA gay. But don't you think that that's important though, to build a base? Like that's one of the things that Diego Sanchez told me that he does when he trains. He said he would take like, say if he had

a fight coming up in like four months and he would take the first six weeks and just concentrate entirely on strength and conditioning. Just get himself very, very, very fit and strong. For sure you want to have the base. Having an aerobic base for anaerobic sports has been proven. Having that type of—I remember even in a wrestling season, we would do some distance runs, a couple miles, doing general strength training just to build our general strength up to a pretty high level. And then as the season progressed, we get more and more specific with our drills and our training.

And, you know, the shark bait drills. Have you ever played that drill in jiu-jitsu? First points, everyone lines up against the wall. You have your best three to five guys out in the middle. First guy to get the two points stays. You have your best three to five guys out in the middle. First guy to get the two points stays. Yeah.

Man, I'm telling you, even a high-level black bot is going to get taken down by a blue bot at some point or get scored on because you get that tired. Yeah. But, I mean, that's the type of strength endurance I'm talking about for grappling. I mean, those are brutal drills, man. Yeah, Jean-Jacques used to do one with sweeps where you'd be on the bottom and fresh guys would be on top. It's just brutal yeah and as long as you could sweep the guy you stayed in there but if he swept you you got off so for endurance there's no amount of like i say supplementary training they can beat that no way man just like you found with the grappling you know high level grappling conditioning you lost

a lot of the endurance in the ring now imagine imagine an MMA fighter that has to have high-level endurance on takedowns, high-level endurance in kicking and punching, high-level endurance of jiu-jitsu on the ground. He doesn't have time to be burning his body up with all this other nonsense. He's going to be absolutely, utterly overtrained in no time at all and burn out. And, of course, a lot of these kids do get burnt out. overtrained in no time at all and burn out. And of course, a lot of these kids do get burnt out. Overtraining is really pretty high in combat sports.

Yeah. How do they figure out how they're overtrained? Is it monitoring resting heart rate? Yeah, morning resting heart rate. Morning. You take your first thing in bed when you first wake up and you take it for like seven days to get it. Now we're assuming you're not already overtrained. Right, right, right. You know, if you suspect you're overtrained, you might want to take a couple of days off and then start this process of seven days in a row monitoring your pulse. On your iPhone, there's an app that you can actually hold your finger on the camera lens and do it.

It's pretty handy. What? It's called Instant Heart Rate. You hold your finger on the camera lens and do it. It's pretty handy. What? It's called Instant Heart Rate. You hold your finger on the camera lens? Yeah, yeah. There's an app on your – How does a camera lens figure out what your fucking heart rate is? I don't know what the technology is.

Because the Samsung Galaxy S5, the new Galaxy Samsung, one of the things I like about it that I was thinking about picking it up is it has a heart rate monitor built into the actual phone itself because they have some sort of fit app. It has something to do with the heat coming off your finger is what I was told. Like each pulse, it's a little bit of heat. Does it work? Yeah, yeah. Can you do it? Do it right now. You have it on your phone?

You know, I'm embarrassed to say this, but I was running here. Yeah. I'm embarrassed to say this, but I was running here. Yeah. I actually had gone downtown, and I lost my iPhone as I was jogging to the show. Like it fell out of your pocket? It fell out of my freaking pocket. You've got to invest in a fanny pack, Steve Maxwell.

I sell them. I'm going to send you one. Okay, man. I'm going to wear a Joe Rogan fanny pack. Please do. I would be honored. Damn it. I've been selling these sweet leather roots fanny packs. I lost my freaking iPhone.

So it's laying out there on Santa Monica Boulevard somewhere on that little trail. Do you have that app? I was due for an iPhone 5 anyway. Oh, okay. Yeah. You know how they have that Find Your Phone app? Yeah. We were going to go see if we could find it, but some bum probably has it right now.

Yeah, some stinky bum. There's a lot of those in Santa Monica, man. Oh, man. Isn't it shocking how many bums are in Santa Monica? A lot of homeless. Hey, but look, if you've got to be homeless, why not here, man? It's a pretty nice place to be homeless, I guess. Yeah, it's definitely a good spot.

Sure beats Toronto or Chicago. Fuck, yeah, it does. Siberia. Yeah. Yeah, there's brutal spots to be homeless. So you hold your finger on the lens. Yeah. You're doing it, Jamie?

Yeah. Is it working? Yeah. And you hold your finger on the lens. Yeah. You're doing it, Jamie? Yeah. Is it working? Yeah. And you can also monitor your carotid artery. Bitch, your fucking heart rate ain't 62 beats per minute. That shit's broken. Let me see it. I'm an athlete. Are you?

Yes. Are you? I ran seven miles yesterday. Did you really? You fucking animal. Look at you. You are an animal. Savage.

Dude. My normal resting heart rate is 59. Now, remember- I'm kind of out of shape. The true resting pulse rate is when you first wake up in the morning before you even get out of bed. How do I start it, Jamie? There's probably a button on the bottom that might restart. There you go.

Okay, let's see. And you put it over the camera. Yeah. Okay, here we go. That's amazing. Yeah, the technology is pretty crazy. I'm going to try to slow it down. I'm not a tech guy.

There you go. What's it called, Jamie? It's a bunch of them, right? Instant heart rate app. Yeah, instant heart rate app. And then it'll record your message, and it'll keep, you will be able to keep a record. That's pretty fucking dope. So once you know what the average is, right?

Take it for seven, divide. Oh, and it has options. Just woke up, before bed, exercising. That's incredible that it can figure it out from you holding your finger over a camera. What a world we live in. What a world, man. What a world. I know, man.

Fascinating. And you're talking to a guy that won't use a cell phone or a laptop for years. Well, when I first met you, you had one of those BlackBerrys with the push button. We would click, click, click. I had one of those pieces of shit you remember that and you were like this is amazing i can do everything on this you were so fired up about it so resting heart rate and then and then if your morning resting pulse rate when you first wake up is more than six or more beats you should not train that day

that means if you have an elevated heart rate, you're stressed, dude. You have not recovered from the previous day's stress. Elevated heart rate is the first sign of stress. So it's all that nonsense about pushing yourself. You don't want to get up. You got to get up anyway. Push through it. You feel like shit. Push through it. There's days that I just didn't want to train, but I forced myself to. You really shouldn't do that. You should not. That's fascinating. So that's a real lesson for people. So there's a lot of folks out here that think, there's a lot of folks in MMA that think like

there's days when you're beat and exhausted and you got to push through. You shouldn't push through. You should not push through. You're doing damage to your body. You're pushing yourself further and further into exhaustion. That's amazing. Now that doesn't mean that you can't get up and do joint mobility, stretching, yin yoga, walking with breath work. You can go in and if you can hold yourself back,

a lot of these kids are pretty addicted to training, but you could also do skill rehearsal. You could do drill. So do something that doesn't push you. Yeah, let's say you're a competitive jiu-jitsu guy. So you practice your favorite sweep or your barren bolo or your turtle guard, whatever. You do that, and you don't do anything hard. Does your son Zach follow all your principles? Yes, he does. And he's been a really good model of this type of intelligent training. And he does not do supplementary training other than strength training. And he lifts weights and just—

Yeah. And he does this all monitoring the heart rate and all that jazz. Yep. That's fascinating. And he's done really well for himself. He won Brown Belt Worlds. And he's one of the few guys to actually beat Karon Gracie. He beat Karon in the Las Vegas Black Belt Challenge.

No, look, I was very impressed with Zach. You know, I knew who he was because of you. You know, you told me about him. But then Eddie Bravo actually told me about him. And I said, did you know that that's steve maxwell's son he was like holy well no wonder you know he was like no wonder because the other kid must be a fucking animal growing up steve maxwell he's an animal man he's an animal so if a guy wakes up like say if your normal resting heart rate is you know for an elite athlete let's say it's 40 beats a minute right and you wake up and one day it's 45 yeah you, you definitely should take off that day.

So stretch. Or just something like they call it active recovery. Yes. Where it's just moderate, low-level activity. But definitely don't go beat your brains out in the gym. Wow. And so the people that do do that, that think you just got to push through, they're just being strong but being dumb. They're being dumb because it's going to work against you.

Let's put it this way. It's not what you can do in the gym. It's what can you recover from in the gym. Wow. Because all the magic happens from rest. I mean, a workout only has negative consequences. Your blood pressure is elevated. You're muscularly weaker.

You've actually torn and broken down muscle fiber. Your whole hormonal system is lower. It's that rest phase in between the workouts where your body adapts and you become stronger. The more fit you become, the longer it takes to recover because you're able to push yourself harder and harder. A weak person that's not very fit, they can't push themselves hard enough to really, they actually could probably work out every day. But a really fit, strong guy like yourself, for example, you cannot drive yourself every day because each workout you're making such a demand on your body. One thing that you cannot control is your ability to recover. It's set at

the biologic level. It's cellular, man. Unless you're doing steroids. Unless you're doing steroids. That changes a lot. But even those guys still, one of the things that steroids does do is it allows you to recover much, much more quickly. I want to talk to you about weight cutting too because there was a really fascinating thing today. There was an article in Bloody Elbow about Jim Miller.

And Jim Miller was talking about how he believes that weight cutting took years off of his life. And, you know, I mean, Jim looked fantastic this weekend. He beat Yancy Medeiros. He submitted him to guillotine, put him out, actually. First time I've ever seen a guy celebrate while a guy's unconscious lying on him. Like, Jim is like this, and Yancy's

completely out cold, eyes open, lying on top. And Yancey's a fucking stud too. So it was a big victory for him. Miller's a sick jiu-jitsu guy. He submitted Fabricio Comoy in his last fight, who was one of Hoyler's black belts. Wow. So he caught him with a really slick arm bar.

So this guy's got to be pretty doggone good. Jim Miller's a bad motherfucker. But he was talking about his weight drop and uh you know his weight cut that he's you know made a lot of errors over the years and that uh he you know he's fucked it up but you know this is a direct quote he says i'm positive i took years off my life cutting weight that's fucking crazy well if you think about it just combat sports itself like i said, I mentioned this several times, no one ever said it's healthy. It definitely shaves years off the end of your life. But, hey, look, man, you can't just have – I mean, you could just be like some dude that never did much and just sits around and has a really nice long life.

But, I mean, what the hell is that, man? You know? It's like a man can't just sit around. Right. So, like, you take the typical NFL football player. You know, the average life expectancy for an NFL football player, I believe, is 64 years old. It's not very old. You know, that's young, dude.

That's only three more years older than I am. Right. But if you were to ask those guys, hey, was it all worth it? They'd say, hell yeah. Man, the roar of the crowd, the adulation, you know, the excitement of playing at such a high elite level of sport. Almost every guy to a man would say, yeah, you know what? I would take the shorter life for the glory.

But that aside, you know, people that are just doing this for fun, as a hobby, they got to be careful, man. They can't be doing all this crazy stuff. These kids that go to the local tournaments and this and that and are playing around with all this serious weight cutting, they're doing their health irreparable harm. Fight your damn weight and stop trying to get an unfair advantage by cutting down and then gaining back. Well, look at some of the greats. Look at Frankie Edgar, constantly fought guys much larger than him.

Won the title. Beat BJ Penn, who also did the same thing. BJ Penn fought below his weight for his entire career. Fought fucking heavyweight when he fought Lyoto Machida. Machida was like 208 when they fought. That's pretty amazing. Fucking crazy. And held his own.

Held his own. You know, beat Matt Hughes, who was a monster at 170. You know, BJ Penn was the perfect example of a guy who just fought anybody at any weight. Anybody. The guy had no fear, man. He's an animal. And now he's fighting at 145. I know, man.

It's incredible. I mean, that's probably where he should have been his entire career if you compare the athletes of today and what they're doing. But even at 145, he just decided to alter his diet, really intensified his training, and now he got down to, like, he's walking around a little over 150 pounds. So he's not going to cut a lot of weight. You know, these guys that are cutting, like, 25, 30 pounds of weight, I've seen guys shuffle up to this scale. Like death warmed over travis luter was the worst cadavers man travis luter when he fought anderson silva missed the weight cut and uh missed

it tried it again missed it again and then wound up fighting for a non-title fight because he couldn't make the weight and he was off by not much at the end it was only like a pound and a half but shuffling to the weight to to the scale, because he couldn't walk. And then they tried to rehydrate with these IVs. Yeah. You know, they take the IV. Yeah. Man, there's no way that your body could sustain that type of abuse and you'd be at your best.

You're not going to be at your best. No way. The idea is, though, that you're going to be, there's Luder when he weighed in. It's hard to tell from photos how bad he looked. You had to see him moving and walking look how sunk in his eyes were though but he um i mean it's it's hard to tell from that picture how much different he looks than he does when he's normal and healthy and full and ready to rock that was a guy who had fucking massive potential he was such a good jiu-jitsu guy. Such a good jiu-jitsu guy. Until the end of his career. Even in my own personal

experience, like 1974, I was gearing up for the NCAA tournaments. You know, we're getting into the big tournament season. I had a record of 18-2-1 at that time. I was a really good college wrestler, high level.

Somehow I got talked into going down to 158. I was doing great at 167. That was like my natural weight. I felt really good. I was strong. Joe was a huge mistake. I ended up getting the flu.

I got sick. I felt like shit. So you're probably already lean at that weight. I was already lean, man. And you were cutting. How much did you drop and how much were you cutting? Well, you know, from 167 to 158, that's almost 10 pounds. Right, but what were you weighing when you weighed 167? What were you walking around at?

Usually about 170 maybe. So you're only cutting a little bit. Yeah, because I was very strict even in those days. Even in my college days back in the 70s, I was very strict about my diet. There's a lot of people that are trying to figure out the point of diminishing returns. Like what is it when it comes to weight cutting because you'll see guys that rehydrate and they are beasts like glace and t-bow that guy cuts almost 30 fucking pounds well one of the things i really liked about the moon giles and the pan ams you weigh in at the edge of the mat and then you go out and you fight right

then and there there's no cheating the scales can Can't do that for the UFC, though. I often wish they would, though, because I'll tell you, you would see the abuse of weight loss would completely end. I agree. People would have to fight their own weight. I think that they should fight their own weight, and I think that's more in line with the spirit of martial arts. I do, too, because why are people losing weight? Well, they're trying to have a mechanical advantage. Tall, rangy guys have that leverage strength, a leverage advantage.

I mean, you know. Physical strength advantage, muscle advantage. Yeah, physical. And then, you know, you lose this weight unnaturally, artificially. And then, you know, by fight time, you're much, much heavier. It's kind of a form of cheating, actually, in my opinion. In a way, it is. In a way, it is. In a way, it is.

But if everybody's doing it, it almost is a necessity to compete at the highest levels. That's the problem. Well, that is the problem. It's just like the guys, you know, like Lance Armstrong said, look, everybody was taking the drugs. How can you compete at that level in the Tour de France if you don't? Well, okay. But my point is no one should be doing it. Well, the Lance Armstrong thing, the problem was he's a douchebag.

Well. That's the problem. Sued everybody for saying that he was taking drugs. Said everybody. You know, looked people in the eye and said, you know, I never doped. I never did anything. That was an amazing liar, man. Not amazing.

I didn't believe him. No? Not for a fucking second. Not for one second. I had a friend. My friend is a former professional cyclist. And he told me, he goes, listen to me, man. No one.

No one's clean. I go, no one? He goes, no one. No one's clean. No one. I could believe that. He said guys would get up. He was on the tour.

And guys would get up. And they were on a bus together. Guys would get up. They would be on so much EPO that they would have to take their bike out in the middle of the night and run because their blood would start getting thick. Oh, Jesus. Yeah, oh, Jesus.

That's crazy stuff, man. He said you would hear the guy get their bike rack off and you would hear them just ride off and you knew exactly what it was. Just trying to thin out their blood. Well, you know, I think we see it in fighters. There's some fighters that work out the day before the fight and why are they doing it? They fucking have to.

They probably have to. Why would you want to stress your body out the day before a fight? I mean, it's one thing to get a light workout in, loosen up. A little jumping rope, some stretching, a little yoga. There's guys who would work out hard the day before. And also, EPO wasn't even being tested in Nevada until, I mean, I don't know. I think they're testing for it now. But for the longest time, they weren't testing for EPO because they thought it was an endurance sport problem.

Like a thing like cycling and triathlons. And they didn't think that applied to boxing, which I thought was like one of the best pieces of evidence. You got fucking morons who are dictating what gets tested and not tested. Like, you want to talk just a complete ignorance of what is involved in the sport. Boxing is such an intensive endurance sport. Amazing endurance sport, man. Anyone that doubts it, just get in there and do three minutes sometime in a boxing gym and see. Just hit the bag.

It's absolutely, utterly devastating if you're not used to it. Yeah. I mean, without anybody ripping your body with left hooks. Yeah, I mean, let alone taking the punches in addition. And trying to breathe while someone's punching you. And breathing. Well, that's the thing that Nick Diaz always does to guys. People always say, well, why does he punch like that?

Because he'll throw a lot of punches that aren't even that fast. Because you can't breathe while he's hitting you. While he's hitting you, you're going, you're tightening up. So a few minutes of that, you've essentially held your breath. He's just pop, pop, pop. Yeah. Of oxygen. Yeah. Of oxygen.

Yeah. But one thing I was really happy about the Moonjow, they finally started testing the metal winners for the drugs. Oh. For years they did not. When did they do this? This has just been the last couple of years. That's very important because for the longest time, guys would come out looking purple. Some of the guys were bragging about the drug that they were taking and finally they made

it illegal they are now testing the the place winners in the munja and you're suspended now i believe zach told me this the other night that uh i believe it's a year i don't know whether that's true or not i heard it's a year of suspension so no jiu-jitsu tournaments at all for a year for For one year. I think it should be more, like three years. Well, that would really keep the blow. The UFC does nine months for the first offense, but they're really trying to crack down on it.

And now we have the TRT issue, which I had Dr. Mark Gordon, who is an expert in traumatic brain injury, who was talking to me about the, you know, he's like, there's two reasons why someone needs testosterone. Well, there's three. One, you're an older person and your body starts to wane. Two, you've suffered brain injuries. Brain injuries. Three, you took steroids and then you depleted your system and now you have to replenish it artificially. And so finally they removed that from fighting,

which I think is very important. I think so too. Because two of those things, the traumatic brain injury for sure and then the steroid taking for sure. And then if you're old, you're a guy and he's in his 40s and you want to keep competing

and the only way to do it is with testosterone, boy, you probably shouldn't be fighting anymore. Probably not. I mean, it's a certain point. It's a young man's game. And you can do things naturally to stimulate it as you get, like, my age. Yeah, we're running out of time here. Sorry.

But, yeah, doing high-intensity interval training. Squats. Yeah. Full body movement patterns. Big movements. I like to run some sprints, wind sprints, those type of things. You know, Short and intense can really stimulate the body too. What do you think, have you studied at all any of these new

gains that they're making in genetic engineering and what they're pushing for? Have you contemplated what the possibilities are for sports? Because it's one of the things that I'm more, I want to say concerned, but fascinated at the same time, you know, as a, as a person who's standing outside of it, I mean, obviously I'm a commentator, but science is so close to altering the very genetics of a human being. I mean, within our lifetime, 40, 50 years from now max, you're going to see super athletes from the bottle, from a test tube, from a needle, from whatever it is. Genetic engineering. That's what they keep threatening anyway.

It's going to happen. Yeah, I'm sure maybe at some point. It still seems to be pretty far off and still a lot of theory and conjecture. But what happens then? I mean, how much do we lose? and conjecture. But what happens then? I mean, how much do we lose? If we think about what an athlete is, when you admire a guy like, say, a Rocky Marciano, a great boxer or any great athlete from a time where they weren't doing anything, what do you admire them for? You admire them for their willpower, their determination, their focus, their tenacity, the fact that this guy...

Their workmanship. Yes, the work that this guy... Their workmanship. Yes, their work ethic. Their work ethic, yeah. When I was a kid, when I lived in Boston, Muhammad Ali was going to fight Mustafa Hampshire, and Muhammad Ali was one of the most Spartan training... Excuse me, not Muhammad Ali, Jesus Christ. Marvin Hagler was going to fight Mustafa Hampshire.

I can't believe I said Muhammad Ali, because I was thinking about him as another example of a great athlete who just trained hard in an era with no drugs. But Marvin Hagler was going to fight Mustafa Hamshah and he was training for it on Cape Cod in the winter. And one of the reasons why he did that is because he would run the sand dunes. And just because he loved the fact that he was in the fucking brutal cold of Cape Cod running by the ocean. And I remember they had a thing on the news where they were hyping up the fight and they were going through his training regime. And he was running up sand dunes screaming war.

Just screaming. Just war! And just running and shadow boxing. And I saw that and I went running. I ran stairs near my house. There was stairs near this bridge near my house and I went running. I ran stairs near my house. There was stairs near this bridge near my house and I went running. I was like, fuck. But instead, he's sitting there and they're pumping him full of EPO and they're monitoring his blood and giving him artificial this and genetic that.

Remember Drago in Russia? Yes. In the Rocky IV? When you saw Stallone was fucking running with logs on his back through the snow and they have Drago

there spiking him with steroids. Yeah, lifting a cart full of rocks and all that. Yeah. Well,

you know, we've already done to our food with genetic modified. It's inevitable though, right? I suppose they're going to do it to the human body also.

I mean, who knows? But what does that have to say about athletics? What is athletics going to be when that happens? Well, it sure isn're going to do it to the human body also. I mean, who knows? But what does that have to say about athletics? What is athletics going to be when that happens? Well, it sure isn't going to be what we knew it to be. And it sure strays far from the ideal that carried us for 2,000 years, which was the ancient Greek ideal.

Golden age of Greece. Our generations are probably the last generations to know what privacy feels like, like real true privacy. Remember when you were a kid, you could leave the house, you could just fuck off and go anywhere. Nobody had any idea where you are. Your parents hoped you came home, and that's about it. That's pretty much it, man. My mom sent me out with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a brown bag saying, see you at dinner.

And that was it. I remember the first day we got an answering machine. Someone could leave a message when you weren't home. Making tree forts and all sorts of crazy stuff. The era of genetic manipulation, though, is surely right around the corner. Or within our lifetime, within 40, 50 years. Yeah. So I don't know.

But probably when it goes into full swing and becomes completely accepted by society, I guess I'll probably be dead by that point. I don't know, dude. I have a feeling you're going to live a long time. I have a feeling you're going to be around for a long time. You're kind of planning for it, too. Yeah.

Your diet is very unusual in that respect. I've gotten very Spartan, and the systematic under-eating has shown to be one of the keys to longevity. Systematic under-eating? Yeah. How many calories? Do you mark your calories? I use an okinawan you know okinawa are like one of the uh that that blue zone where people like an unusual amount live to be centenarians very high level another blue zone is zikaria

greece where there's an unusual amount of people that live to be over 100 years old part of its genetics but a lot of it is the lifestyle, the lack of stress, and so forth. But at any rate, the Okanawans have this saying, 80%. You never leave the table feeling satisfied. You never eat until you're full. You leave 80% capacity. Why do they do that? What's the philosophy behind that?

The idea is if you overburden your digestion by overeating or making yourself feel full, it's too much of an innervation on the system. It takes more out of you than what you get out of your food. So that has been something that it's ingrained in their culture for a long time? It's ingrained in their culture. Wow. So this is something they figured out a long time ago. They figured this out a long time ago.

It probably goes way back to ancient times. They also get a lot of coral calcium too, right? Isn't that like a big part of it? They do. They have a lot of mineralization from their fish broth and so forth. And they eat a very simple, pretty Spartan diet really. I mean it's very simple. Now in these days – how much time do we got left, Jamie?

We got like five. Five minutes. These days, do you roll at all anymore? Do you still do jiu-jitsu? I was just down in Arcadia rolling around at Carson Gracie School. Now, do you make sure

that you don't go in any... Carlos Gracie's affiliate school. Don't go in any big crazy dudes? Well, you know, I'm a fifth degree

black belt now and a lot of times I am a little bit younger than what I look. So kids don't see a 61-year-old dude. They see like, black belt. Oh, I'm going to... Right. So kids don't see a 61 year old dude. They see like, oh, black belt. Oh, I'm going to, you know, so I got to be very careful who I choose.

Right. I like to do light roles. Usually the instructor at the school is pretty good. Yeah. You know, and you go in with a lot of humility, you know, for sure. Get permission before you go to these schools. You just don't show up and put the guy in the spot. Right, right, right. They might think you're challenging or something and they want to show up in front of the students or whatever. So I'm very, very careful. I like to roll with lighter guys.

I try not to roll with the really heavy guys anymore. Yeah, I'm done with heavy guys. It's just too bad for your back. Yeah, no, it is. Your back, just any guy over 200 pounds stacking you. It's just too much on your joints and especially your spine. Like here on Gracie, apparently. I want to talk to him about this, but he's got a numb arm. I do an awful lot of joint mobility work. I actually teach a specific anti-aging mobility

routine. You have a DVD on it? Yeah. Video downloads, actually. I've switched from DVDs to downloads. I have the DVD. I'm old school. Yeah. I bought it years ago. But yeah, mobility is really important. But I've changed my mobility over the years. Now I've learned new things and I've incorporated new ideas. So I should get the new one. Yeah, I think so. I'll send it to you.

Where do I get it from? If somebody was listening to this. It's Steve – it's MaxwellSC.com. Maxwell Strength and Conditioning. Yeah. SC. Maxwell SC. MaxwellSC.com..com. That's the website Yeah. SC. MaxwellSC. MaxwellSC.com.

.com. That's the website. That's everything. And I'll send you the link. You just write me and I'll send you the link. And your Twitter, though, is SteveMaxwellSC. Yes. SteveMaxwellSC.

So if someone wants to get a strength and conditioning program from you, you do all that stuff online, right? I do. And you have a lot of videos online. There's a lot of cool stuff. A lot of videos and stuff on work. I'm always trying to improve myself. I'm still a student.

I don't care how long you've been in the game. Man, you can still learn new things. And so it's a never-evolving thing. And, of course, as I get older, I have to change up too. I mean, no one gets out of here alive. Yeah. Your capacity does diminish over time and you feel the bump, but you can really slow it down to a crawl. As long as you continue to push. You got to do some push. You got to constantly fight against the aging process.

You were also, God, we're running out of time here. I wish we weren't. Um, you were in Russia recently. I was. Doing some training. Krasnodar and Novosibirsk. You went there on your own dime just to learn. I was working with, uh, Kadashnikov, who was the father of, uh, Russian military martial arts. It was pretty interesting. This guy is like 80 years old, kind of like an Elio Grazi kind of guy.

Man, he put me in the most painful wrist lock. This guy was, he, he was saying, do something to me, you know, in Russian. And I get in the translation and I'm thinking, oh shit, what am I going to do to this old man? And wow, the guy is really amazing. Very soft, relaxed martial art. He was the creator of this particular Russian military martial art. And it's all geared towards military and self-defense.

What does it have its roots in? Slavic martial art that was earlier. There was a guy by the name of Spiridonov that studied Chinese and different internal systems. And then he taught it to Kandashnikov, and then Kandashnikov mixed it with some native Slavic-type martial arts. And then Kandashnikov mixed it with some native Slavic-type martial arts. And he also created the biomechanical exercises for the body, mobility drills for health and well-being.

Good for any sportsman, wrestlers, jiu-jitsu guys. So I'm teaching a lot of this stuff now. I've incorporated it in my own system. Fascinating. So when you go and meet with a guy like that and learn his stuff, are you videotaping it? No, no videotapes a lot. So how did you just remember what he said? Yeah, I have a really good memory. I took notes on my iPhone and so forth. The one I lost.

Did you back it up? Thank God for iCloud. Ah, there you go. You backed it up. So it's Systema? Is that what it is? Yeah, it's called Systema. And there's a couple of branches to Systema. This is the original Systema. There's the group up in Toronto that does their version, the Michael Ryabko. That's like the Phantom Punches. Yeah, what is all that? That's what I've seen.

A lot of that is Ryabko's punched those guys, and he hurts when he punches. It really hurts. And what he does is he'll show the fist, and the guys just fall down because they don't want to get hurt. So he really is controlling them psychically just by intimidating them. So he's just a hard puncher that's got a bunch of pussy-whipped students. Pretty much. Their students are pretty tough guys.

But there's something to it. It's the breath work. You know, Hickson came out of retirement and is doing the seminar circuit. A black belt friend of mine in Germany, Bjorn Friedrich, he was the first German black belt in BJJ. He took Hickson's seminar. He says, wow, he spent the first hour just in breath work and relaxation. And that's what the Systemagons do. Well, Kron was talking about that on the podcast as well.

It's funny because the Gracies all did it, but they never taught us. But now they're revealing the secret. And it really does go back to the breath i would love to be here this could be a podcast in itself just breath just the breath well when are you back in la again well it may be sooner than later i'm i'm thinking about doing another video download of some of the stuff i learned in russia and i'm going to do three full-on workouts that guys can do in their hotel room or while they're on the road uh anytime any place anywhere and i'm going to actually do a full long workout. And I love this videographer

out here. I shot a trailer for a possible reality TV show. And that's what I was doing here in LA, plus a book deal. I had an article in the March issue of Men's Health and it attracted a lot of attention. So I had an offer to come out and shoot a trailer, maybe to pitch some people. Because I'm a pretty weird dude, man. Yeah, you're a pretty weird dude. You're living out of a bag. You know, I don't have a key. No keys.

No keys, because I don't have any locks to need them for. I don't have an apartment or a house. That doesn't ever freak you out? Sometimes. Does it? Being a former householder and having a gym and a house and cars. Do you ever think you'll go back to that? Is this temporary?

Hell no. Once you leave all that stuff, it's so freeing, man. Wow. It's like real freedom. You're an inspiration, Steve Maxwell. You're a bad motherfucker. Hey, you are too, Joe. Thanks.

I appreciate you coming on, man. This is a lot of fun. So, folks, MaxwellSC.com. Teresa gave me some stuff to read about. You're in the U.S. until the 24th of May. You have a seminar in Buffalo the 4th of May. Unfortunately, it's sold out. New York, 3rd of May. Toronto, 10th of May. PDX, which I guess is Portland? That's what they call PDX? Yeah, yeah. There's Portland, Oregon. What is PDX? Why do they call it PDX? I have guess is Portland? That's what they call PDX? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's Portland, Oregon. What is PDX?

I have no idea, man. Okay. That's the 17th and 18th of May in Indianapolis, the 24th of May. Again, all of this available on MaxwellSC.com, SteveMaxwellSC on Twitter. Anything else? Yeah, Rev Gear. There's a MMA Expo in San Antonio, Texas, August 1, 2, 3. I'm teaching kettlebells specifically for martial arts, MMA, jiu-jitsu.

So if you want to learn about kettlebells or how to teach them better, get to the Revgear expo. It's an MMA expo. And will all this be on your website as well? Yeah, it's going to be on the website. And check out Revgear, man. MaxwellSC.com Steve Maxwell, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much, sir. And thanks to our sponsors. Thanks to Squarespace.

Go to Squarespace.com and use the code word Joe to save yourself some cash. Thanks also to Onnit.com. That's O-N-N-I-T. Use the code word Rogan. Save 10% off any and all supplements. We'll be back Thanks also to Onnit.com. That's O-N-N-I-T. Use the code word ROGAN. Save 10% off any and all supplements. We'll be back tomorrow with Dave Attell.

On Thursday, we got Greg Fitzsimmons, and then we're also doing the UFC, I want to say wrap-up analysis, post-fight with Brendan Schaub and Brian Callen, the fighter and the kid. So that's two podcasts on Thursday. And then Friday night, I'll see you guys at the Lobero Theater in Santa Barbara with Joey Diaz. It's almost sold out.

It might be sold out this week. I'm not sure. It was pretty close the other day. All right, much love, everybody. Big kiss. Mwah!