The Joe Rogan Experience - #534 - Robin Black

Episode Date: August 13, 2014

Robin Black is an MMA analyst and color commentator for Fight Network and was also the lead singer of Canadian Glam Rock band Robin Black & the Intergalactic Rock Stars.

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! There's very few people in this life can say that they've gone from glam rock to expert MMA commentary and even fighting in MMA. Very few people, other than you, Robin Black. There might be some lady out there somewhere. Some chick, I don't know. Pretty weird.

I tend to try to do stuff that I like. That's kind of my goal in life is do a bunch of stuff I like. That's a beautiful goal, man. And if everybody did that, we would have a lot more happy people in this world. Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, you do a fantastic job.

You work for the Fight Network in Canada, right? Yeah. And you do a fantastic job of breaking down fights. And your enthusiasm is so contagious. It's really cool. Oh, thanks. Network in Canada, right? Yeah. And you do a fantastic job of breaking down fights and your enthusiasm is so contagious. It's really cool. Oh, thanks. I've really enjoyed watching those videos because as a person myself who's a huge fan of fights and just, there's so many aspects that I think that maybe the casual fan might miss or the person who has never trained or competed might miss. And you do a great job of sort of encapsulating those really important moments and highlighting

them and isolating them. And you do it all with passion. It's really fun. Man, thank you. That is the coolest thing anyone's ever said to me. I really fucking love doing these things. You can tell. Yeah, I do.

To spend hours sitting there and look at how beautifully these guys moves in the moment in time where two unwilling guys are like they each are trying to choreograph their own thing right and what's going on psychically what's going on mentally like it honest to god i've done a lot of fun things and they all seem to kind of lead to this and if i can only do one thing for the rest of my life I'd spend my time in my little lab researching what's going on when two men fight like that's what I do with my life and that's what I do now and I absolutely love doing it yeah you could tell and like I said as someone like me who is also a huge fan of MMA and a huge a huge fan of watching two people try to figure each other out

in the most dangerous and most the most high-stakes sport I think in the world maybe not the most dangerous as far as like I mean I guess like maybe NASCAR is probably more dangerous dangerous but the the high stakes of the human hand-to-hand combat to me there's so much on the line there's so much psychologically going on and there's so many little things like combat to me there's so much on the line there's so much psychologically going on and there's so many little things like i'm sure there's a lot that i'm missing if i watch basketball i'm sure there's a lot that i'm missing if you watch football but when it comes to striking and and grappling and mixed martial arts the variables are so gigantic and the different

approaches to overcoming those variables are so gigantic like you did a recent thing on gunner nelson yeah and uh gunner nelson who is a uh jujitsu expert and now an mma fighter out of iceland yeah who's a really interesting dude like super stoic yeah cold yeah fucking cold as ice never smiles never laughs he's a weird dude but wicked jiu-jitsu i remember him from the just before he ever got into mma or high level mma um he beat monson fucking monson yeah who's a gorilla i remember seeing this little guy on monson's back i'm like who is that motherfucker like that guy's a beast how do you take jeff monson's back yeah and it's and that calmness he uses that so intelligently like i was i'm reading this well have you heard of this book

uh the rise of superman no oh dude you have to read this book immediately so this guy goes and he has researched the biochemistry that's happening in the brain at the opportunity at the moments where people feel like a surfer feels like at one with the wave you know where a free climber feels at one with the wall there's actually biochemistry happening in the brain and there's four four neurotransmitters that are released simultaneously and in that moment there's all of these things that humans do better uh one of them is pattern recognition so So when two guys are fighting, you can see patterns in how they move and predict outcomes, right? And different guys get into it in different ways. The bulk of the research is on action adventure sports, like flipping motorcycles through the air

five times and stuff. Because those guys, if they are not in that state, they die. Right? So the level now, like, there's exponential growth in what people can now do in that state because it's being sort of a global experiment that men are pushing each other further and further. I mean, everybody used to gather around to see Evel Knievel jump 10 buses.

Now, every day, 10 guys do that and flip four times while doing it. So the level of what people are able to mentally accomplish. So that's happening in fighting. And I'm obsessed with science. So that what's going on physically is fascinating, what's going on psychologically, but the science is crazy. And that's kind of where my research is going now. If you could take an EEG and put it on their brain in the highest moments of combat, what's going on in there? I wonder if you ever could do that, because if they brain in the highest moments of combat, what's going on in there?

I wonder if you ever could do that because if they were in that highest moment of combat and they had an EEG on their brain, would they be thinking the same because would they realize they had an EEG in their brain? Would it distract them? Well, in theory, if all these people screaming and you sitting at the side of the cage and wearing your underpants getting punched in the face, if all that isn't distracting a couple of things on your head, It's hard to say, though. I mean, the state,

what you want to check with that EEG or something is the mental state, the biochemistry, the neurology happening in the brain. And if they're not in that state, you can't do it. But people have done it in other sports. They've done it and looked at

what's happening in the brain, and there's something called hypofrontalism, where actually less is happening in the brain, and there's something called hypofrontalism, where actually less is happening in the front of your brain during these moments of perfect performance. And that's what this book's about. This guy is chemically analyzing the highest level of performance. So to take that into fighting, these guys are operating at that level now.

The top guys, Carlos Condit is operating at that level. He's operating in moments of pure flow and when these guys are in those moments what's happening in that that shit's fascinating like to look at fights and understand look and see that these guys are operating in the highest level of human performance and in that state against each other they're fighting each other it's crazy yeah it's really fascinating. The book is called The Rise of Superman, and it's by a guy named Steven Kotler. And it's got four and a half stars on amazon.com. So that's a pretty good sign. It's a great book. I'm going to do a little breakdown on what's going on with pattern recognition in that state. And imagine you and I

are both in that state. And you know that I'm starting to recognize patterns you can lay traps for me by doing something called chunking where you'll go one two three four and i'll start to recognize that pattern and anticipate it and you'll change one thing in that pattern and hit right so chunking use understanding that i'm predicting your patterns and using that against me like all of that kind of stuff just fascinates the shit out of me right now well that's always been a big thing about striking about changing up the speed of your approach and also throwing feints in pretending to go one way and going another there's all sorts of different things that people have done to try to offset pattern recognition and each other's brains like your your brain the better your brain performs the different i have to approach to

make you pay for having such a good performing brain you know what i mean like your brain performs, the different I have to approach to make you pay for having such a good performing brain. You know what I mean? Like your brain can anticipate stuff. So I need to make that a bad thing for you. Wow. So what it says here is that flow is caused by a mighty cocktail of five powerful chemicals from dopamine to serotonin. And that's interesting that I've never really thought about it, that they have all these chemicals flowing together. I've always thought of it as just sort of a quote unquote state of mind, that you achieve a state of mind. But this state of mind

being a bunch of neurotransmitters are flowing together in the optimum levels. Yeah, man. Think of that. Your state of mind affects your emotion and your emotion affects your biochemistry and your biochemistry affects your performance. So it's – they're linked to each other. So that idea that guys get focused, that focus causes a biochemical change in their brain. This is the kind of shit I want to go to next on my breakdowns. Like start playing with this kind of stuff. Evolutionary things. You probably read that the hand, part of the reason it evolved the way it did was for fighting have you read that

yeah and the jaw and yeah the shape of a man's face exactly like so start looking at what that means and why they're like the science of that kind of stuff is just starting to blow my mind it is totally fascinating stuff and it's also the the thing about this achieving this flow state that's so maddening for people is that it just slips through your fingers. It's there and it's gone. You achieve these brief moments where you've seen it in basketball games where a guy just feels like he can't miss. He hits those three corners from the outside. In pool, I play pool a lot, and there's these moments.

They're rare and fleeting, but when they come, it's like you can't miss. You know where everything is. I'd be willing to bet you're in that state some huge percentage of time when you're doing comedy. Because once you read about it, there's a whole bunch of confidence that how it affects your inhibitions and your unwillingness to use inhibitions,

you're probably in that state almost always when you're hitting it in comedy. Yeah, I would think so because when you're doing comedy, I've always described it as you're more like a passenger than you are like the pilot. You're all just kind of like doing it, and sometimes words will come out of your mouth, and you're like, I don't even know if I could take credit for those words because I guess it's not. I know it's me. It's coming out

of my mouth. I know it's my voice. I know, I know technically I created them. I wrote them, but it's not really me that's doing it. It's like, it's just coming out on its own. And, and a guy who catches an enormous killer wave will say exactly the same thing. And a guy who walks a tight rope over top of Niagara Falls will say the same thing. You're going into that state in that time. Yeah, I would imagine. And in jujitsu, you see it as well. Like when guys are rolling, there's moments where you know, like there's a certain transition, like someone will hit the over under, the guy will try to escape a flow immediately to an arm bar and then immediately to a triangle. And it's all happening so so fast it's almost impossible for that person to be thinking they're just reacting and hitting those moves and just completely like in that zone

one of the aspects of flow state is that you you interpret time differently so you'll hear that from a lot of fighters i mean the one of the things i think that helps me analyze stuff is that when i fought i had success and I had terrible failures like terrible embarrassing changing who you are as a man failures how many times you fight nine yeah and I won four of them I'm gonna do one last fight I'm gonna end five wins how old are you now 45 five wins and five losses you're sure I'm sure I'm sure. Hey, man, to get to 10, I mean, but I'm telling you, I had the kind of losses that make you question who you are as a man. You know what I mean?

For days or weeks or a fact you're popping your head. Experiencing that, I think that's an analyst's life. Like I've had a flow. My last fight, I won in the second round. I literally completely did whatever I wanted for seven minutes. It was perfect. And two fights earlier, my brain almost melted down. When I look back, I don't know if I lost vision or if I fainted or what.

Like just absolute, utter failure. And it hurts you because in our genes, when males would fight, if one of them would lose, you'd be kicked out of the group. Like you may never have sex again. You may never – one loss of a fight with another male could change your history for the rest of your life. That's in our genes only X generations ago. And we still feel that. But failure is really fucking brutal. But it makes you look at these things differently.

Like now when I look at these elite level fighters who can do that every day, I have such a marvel in what they're capable of. And I think that's because I got brutally embarrassed in fight before. And I think, and you sure don't like that experience, but it changes who you are and hopefully in good ways later on. Well, it also, when you lose and whenever you fail at something and you feel that awful feeling of failure, the motivation that comes from that to never feel that again is almost impossible to recreate without having experienced failure. You find it in comedy. I experienced it in fighting as well like that those moments where when it's over you just feel like such a hunk of shit that like when you're training from then on

you your intensity is so much higher because the stakes are higher because you know that this a brutal beat down by somebody is such a horrible proposition not just in the moment but after that moment the the thinking about moment, the thinking about the act, the thinking about it, the same as failing. I think failure as a person, and especially as a man, I think it's a huge part of life. I think it's an important part of life. The people that stay on the couch and don't risk anything, that's trying to stay comfortable is one of the worst decisions you could ever make as a man.

Trying to stay comfortable is a terrible, terrible path. Yeah. Because you're just going to stay soft and weak, and you're never going to figure out anything. You're never going to accomplish shit. I've got to do some pretty fun things. I have a really good life. I like everything that I do.

And I've got a killer wife, and I live in Canada. I have fun and stuff. And I really think the only two things that I ever had going for me was that I have a crazy good work ethic and I'm not afraid to look like an idiot. I don't give a fuck. I am not afraid to look like an idiot. Failure sucks and it hurts you. But being not afraid to be made fun of or put down or looked at and laughed at and not give a shit about that, you'll try stuff.

You'll go for things. You'll do stuff. And I mean, man, nobody ever had more haters than a guy who wore eye makeup and tried to go into the fight game. I mean, fucking everybody hated me. Everybody in Canada. Anybody in the fight business. And here I am fucking six years later.

All you can do is put your head down and try to do good work. can't do anything else nothing you can't kiss anybody's ass I was talking to Eddie about this too you can't kiss anybody's ass you can't beg your way out of it you can't buy your way out of it if they hate you and they think you're a joke the only answer is to just do try to do great work there's no other there's no other cure and that's what I tried to do yeah I think in that sense sometimes it's good to have haters because it keeps you motivated. It keeps you motivated. And it also, it's a balancing act. You know, I think the world needs yin and yang.

The world needs push and pull. And I think that having some negativity in your life, it makes the positivity feel so much better. Yeah. No, it makes a lot of sense, man. I mean, we were just talking about losing. What, you know, there is that evolutionary reason and that like deep in us that, oh, my God, I am never going to be made, pushed out of the group and never have sex again. I'm going to wander the earth alone for the rest of my life.

That's in us. But I think also, you know know i forget where i was going with he's not even stolen ladies yeah no i had an edible this morning actually um but uh yeah i mean it's just one of those things it's a miserable miserable thing but i know where i was going winning is so good because losing so terrible you know like i mean if losing didn't suck winning would be oh cool let's go try and win again next weekend. I remember when I was competing the day of the competition, there was always moments where I was like, I got to stop doing this. Like, this is just too much stress.

This just feels terrible. This is just, and then once I would win, I would go, this is the greatest feeling the world has ever known. Like, people who, I feel sorry for people who don't know what this feels like. To just, to win like a major Taekwondo tournament or something like that It was just the craziest feeling like you just felt like wow all that work paid off and that fuels you as a person to accomplish other things it gives you this this understanding of focus and of motivation and Discipline and then if you apply all those things to anything, to writing, to whatever you're trying to do, to building a business, to whatever you're trying to do,

you can accomplish things that you felt were insurmountable before. For sure. I mean, there was the opposite of that too is in us, I think we all think if the zombie apocalypse happens tomorrow, I'll be the guy who rolls the car off, my wife picks her up, runs out of here, kills 10 zombies on the way, gets on the helicopter and gets out of there. But that's not entirely always true. And you need to find that out about yourself. Right.

You need to face the fire to understand what it's like to be under extreme pressure. Under extreme pressure. Yeah. And losing makes you say, I'm not necessarily that guy who fucking flips the car, does that, jumps, kills 10 zombies. But then if you can come back and win, you go, you know what, if I'm at my best, if I'm focused, if I have my shit together, some of the time I can be that guy. And I think that's what you kind of hope for. Well, it's also objective analysis of your own shortcomings and your own strengths and that comes in martial arts it's a huge factor in martial arts because when especially when you're training when you're in the gym and you're sparring with you know if you've got a great gym

like you're training a 10th planet jiu-jitsu or something like that you got just a whole room filled with killers and everyone kind of knows the food chain. Everyone knows where everybody stands. And why does everyone know where everybody stands? We know where everybody stands because we're tapping each other out on a regular basis. Yeah. And so because of that, you're forced to really analyze your game. Like this motherfucker gets me in his guard.

I'm in trouble. Like I got to stay out of this guy's guard. I know this. Why? Because I've been caught. I understand it. Whereas if you don't have any experience overcoming adversity like nobody's catching me and then you get in there with somebody who just

ragdolls you and you like what the fuck and like your ideas of who you are change because you you have this distorted like how many guys out there that have never fought have this crazy distorted perception of what they're capable of insane likeane. Like nobody looks at Tiger Woods and goes, on the right day, I'm beating that guy 18 holes. Bro, you don't know how I play golf. Exactly. If I played golf, I would dominate. Because I'm taking it to the streets.

It's going to be fucking street golf. You know? Like guys really think that, but that's a lack of understanding of what that really is. I mean, you can kind of see the willingness or the ability to go, there's trouble. I'm going to hit it with this fist. That's in every guy.

So they don't understand that other guys have an understanding of physics and understanding of where the body works. What happens when you hit somebody in the throat? The natural instinct to roll away gives them your back. Like all the most basic, they don't even understand that exists. Right. So they have the idea that if I hit that thing with this thing, might be able to beat it yeah they think that somehow or another they're tougher somehow know they're they're more alpha there whatever whatever goofy

shit they have in their head and it's just a prop it's like it's like a building that they use for a movie but there's nothing inside the house like you have this like this fake facade and then behind there there's no house where's your fucking house? Ah! Yeah. And some fucking beast mounts you and starts pounding on you, and you give your back, and you're like, and then after that's over, you're so devastated and defeated, and your perceptions

of who you were were so screwy. Yeah. I can't tell you how many times I've had guys tell me that they would never lose if they fought. Because my mentality, they're always like this. Yo, bro, I don't lose. My mentality. I've had guys tell me that they would never lose if they fought because my mentality they're always like this yo bro i don't lose my mentality that's i've had a dozen why are they all why do they all have italian accents because they're all italian it's a huge part of my uh my culture the italians i don't know what it is about my people but they're goofy as fuck when it comes

to that they have this bizarre belief in their ability to fight that's awesome i don't know what it is it's wrong most of the time if you know even if it's wrong like you see dudes do terrible things treat people bad be assholes if that guy took a beating when he was 15 he'd be a better person you're right he would be a way better guy today he would treat people better he'd under but you know there's not enough of that going on. We're really soft. Like our culture is really so like by a fight network where I work, there's like a Metro where the, you get the groceries and then we used to walk around this building. It takes like four minutes and they built this path on the other side. So it only takes two minutes now.

It costs like 80, a hundred thousand to strip it out, put this stuff down, put, what the fuck are we doing that for? Well, you're in Canada, though. What part of Canada? Yeah, Toronto. It gets cold as fuck in Toronto. Yeah, but two minutes. I mean, it's like, well, you're going to literally spend money to make sure that people don't have to go do more effort for two minutes?

Even escalators. Like, why do we make this shit? Like, you know what I mean? We, in the history of humankind, there has never been a softer culture than North America. Canada. It's true. Never in human history. It's true. You know what I mean? In the history of humankind, there has never been a softer culture than North America, Canada. It's true. Never in human history. It's true. And that's, I think, another reason why fighting is so interesting.

Because in a world like that, let's go see what happens when we see the opposite of that. When we see people who drive it to the hardest level, push it as far as they can humanly go, and go in against another guy. You're talking about a guy saying, oh, you know, I'm hard. That guy's fucking hard too. The guy you're fighting is also mentally unbelievably talented. And he's better than you. Yeah, and he's training

every day, and he's objective, and he's got a real balanced sense of who he is. He's a real martial artist. Yeah, that's a good point, that how soft we are is one of the reasons why it's so exciting to see someone compete in such a dangerous and volatile profession. But the critics of MMA would say, well, the reason why we are so quote unquote soft is that our race, the human race is evolving and that we are moving towards a state where we no longer require physical conflict. I think that martial arts is the key to that gap. And this would seem like contradictory to someone who doesn't engage in martial arts. But I think that the realities of the biology, the realities

of the body itself and the long history of combat that's ingrained in our genetics our dna has this long history of all these people before us that had to fight to stay alive whether it's to fight off animals or fight off intruders or fight off and this all this conflict is almost built into the system and one of the best ways in my opinion to ensure peace is to actually exercise out all of that conflict in the gym so that it doesn't exist in society. It doesn't exist in the workplace and it doesn't exist in friendships and it doesn't exist in the world at large. It only exists in dojos. It only exists in gyms. And some of the nicest, most respectful people I have ever met have been killers, murderers, I mean, in the gym, in the cage, in boxing rings, kickboxers, the nicest folks.

Because of the fact that they have no insecurities when it comes to that stuff, their focus when it comes to their martial arts is not about going out and bullying people on the street or going out and picking fights no their focus is in bettering their skills and in doing so and in training really hard all your need to prove all that goes away like some i've seen like mma fighters that people don't know and they get into discussions with people and someone will get douchey with them and they'll smile and laugh like Like, there's a famous story. My friend Tate Fletcher fought on The Ultimate Fighter. He's a black belt in jiu-jitsu.

He's a bad motherfucker. He's a cool-ass dude, too. Super nice. If you're a friendly guy, Tate's going to be your best friend. He's just the nicest guy ever. But we were in the Hard Rock Hotel, and there was this big fucking kid, man. He was like 6'6", maybe, at least 6'4", 6'5", and Tate's like 6'4".

So this guy was bigger than Tate. And probably like a big, he's probably like college age, 23, 24, and he was just being a fucking drunk asshole to everybody and just walking around with his shirt off, this big giant kid, and he got to tate's door and he said to tate like hey man that's my fucking room and uh tate's like no i'm pretty sure it's my

room it's like i got my key right here and i'm gonna use the key and uh cake take goes take it easy and tate opens his door and goes inside and i had the room next to tate so i go inside my room and i hear bang bang bang i hear banging on tate's door and we had our doors open, you know, we, uh, yeah, the joining rooms. And, uh, I stepped through Tate's door. What the fuck's going on? Is that that same guy? And so Tate opens the guy, he goes, don't you shut the door on me, bitch. Like it was like some crazy moment where this guy was like, not just picking a fight, but going after Tate. Once he went into the room, they go out into the hallway and people do that. It's just a big bully, but going after Tate once he went into the room. They go out into the hallway. It's weird that people do that at all.

Just a big bully. Just a big bully who used to be, you know, used to being a big bully. And Tate goes, what do you want to do, man? What do you want to do? He goes, I'm going to kick your fucking ass. Tate goes, why don't you come over here and swing on me, man? Come on. Come on.

So Tate is standing in front of the dude, and the dude is the dude is like oh shit this is really happening right and then tate throws an inside leg kick and then pulls guard grabs the guy pulls guard before the guy even knows it tate hooks an omoplata is on the side of the guy and then security shows up so he's got this guy in an omoplata he's got his arm under his neck in an omoplata and security shows up and they go stop stop stop so i go don't worry about it man i go it's fine he's just gonna put him to sleep it's okay and the security guy goes hey you're that guy from fear factor and in that moment in that moment where the security guys are completely going holy shit what are you doing here I go, this drunk guy's picking on my friend.

And when I said, don't worry, he's just going to put him to sleep, Tate said, in his head, he was like, all right, I guess I'm going to put him to sleep now. He wasn't going to hit the guy. He just decided, look, if I hit this guy, then it becomes this crazy assault and there's marks on him. So Tate just puts a rear naked choke on him and sleeps him right there in the hallway. His friends pick the guy up and it's like a scene in a goddamn movie.

His friends pick the guy up, they put him in the elevator, the elevator door closes and the guy vanishes. And he disappears from life. And that's the end. And it just laughs all night about it. For years. We still bring this up. This shit happened in like 2003. We still

bring this up because it was so ridiculous. You've seen Ryan, what's his name, that jujitsu guy in a bar and he takes the guy down, takes his bat, or mounts him. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Ryan Hall. Ryan Hall. Yeah, yeah. Same deal.

It was like in a restaurant or something, right? Yeah, it was in a restaurant. Calm as all hell. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Gets him down, mounts him, waits until he's exhausted. Well, he's used to doing that all the time. For sure.

That's the thing about training is you're used to struggling essentially for your life. Yeah. What is a tap? Tap is a way that you can train where it's safe and someone taps. And what that means is you got me. But what does got me mean? It means you're dead. I would have died.

Or my arm would have broken in half and then you'd have killed me. Then you'd kill them. I mean, it's essentially you're playing a game called I kill you with my body. Or you kill me. Or we kill each other several times over the course of a seven-minute rolling session. And then we shake hands. Thanks, man. That was great.

And then you move on to the next guy who's going to kill you. And be a better person out into the world. And walk out into the world and be a better person. I agree 100%. It exercises that stuff out of your system. And that's the frustrating thing when all of a sudden, you know, I come to town and my wife's here. And her friends are like, what's the deal with this war machine and Christy Mack? They don't know about any of this stuff.

They don't know about any of the good things about martial arts. They don't know about any of the good things it does that makes people a better person. They just come in and they're like, hey, some MMA fighter beat up a porn star. Like, you know what I mean? They don't know about any of the good things it doesn't makes people a better person they just come in and they're like hey some some mma fighter beat up a porn star like you know what i mean they don't know like they don't know that there's that side to it yeah that's a fucked up story i don't you know i don't know what exactly went down like people keep asking me to comment on it this is the only thing i would ever say any any time. Anytime there's an altercation like that between a man and a woman and a man hits a woman, it's never correct. It's always evil. It's always wrong.

It's beyond fucked that a guy could beat a woman. It's beyond fucked. And it should be a heinous crime that's punishable in the worst ways possible. But I don't know what happened. All I know is it appears, according to her story, that he beat the shit out of her. That's what it looks like. There's no evidence to the contrary. And that's awful.

So that's all I could say. I mean, I'm not commenting on it until i mean really commenting on until i know more of what exactly happened i don't know what the fuck went down but i don't know how a guy could do that i literally do not know how a man especially a martial artist he always likes to think of himself as not a martial artist he's a fighter you know yeah and that's probably true he's an animal you know and there are those guys typically in the gym you don't get guys get that good that are animals like that. They don't have enough. They have too much ego to go, I'm not good at this, so I have to train that to get better.

So these guys come into a big gym, and they're new, and they're tough guys. They're gone in a year. They won't have the absence of ego enough to train the things they're not good at, and then they end up leaving. So it's rare that somebody has to be very driven of an animal-style fighter type to get past that, to get to that level, or just be genetically really superior or whatever. It's rare that that style of person becomes a high-level MMA fighter. Yeah, it is rare because if you're that fucked in the head, usually you're not strong enough mentally to keep going and to get to that. War Machine's a

high level MMA fighter. You know, I mean, it's just so disappointing. I had him in the podcast six months ago maybe, something like that. It's a weird thing. It's unbelievably sad. Like you said, we don't really know. And his life's over. His fucking life is over. I mean, I don't know what he's going to do because he's been in jail twice now.

And this is the third one. And a girl, a pretty little girl like that. She's tiny, man. She's 100 pounds. Yeah. You don't like to speculate on how this will end. That's a changed subject. It is disturbing.

It's a weird one, too. You know, not just this topic, but it's strange. Like, I like to analyze fighting i don't really like to be an mma journalist because a lot of that time you're not talking about fighting guys are talking about this guy said that thing or this sold that many things or you know why is this guy not a star i don't care really about that shit so much like to me i'm just so unbelievably curious as what is going to happen when demetrius Johnson fights this guy. And then after he fights that guy,

sitting there and trying to figure out what the thing was that made that one moment like that. Do you know Jaron Villal? Yes. Yeah. Jaron Villal was reffing that match. We talk about bad refs. We talk about bad judges.

Jaron's cool. And I ran into him in Winnipeg. Actually, Joe Dirksen was at this party, and you were talking about guys that kind of you know are cool Dirksen works now in a prison and he said guys

will be like I think I could beat you and he'll be like yeah you probably could Joe doesn't give a shit but Jaron Villal's there and he was saying oh I really like

your Demetrius Johnson break I'm like thanks man whenever anybody likes those it means a lot to me because I love doing them and so we're talking about it

he goes well you know tell me what else you saw and where i'm having a beer and whatever and uh i said why and he goes well i was i was reffing that one so i did i looked at a lot of tape too and i'm like really that's cool man he goes yeah me and big john him and john are very good friends they'll go on skype and look at tape together and stuff like oh that's fucking cool that you do that and he goes yeah i saw a couple things oh. Oh, one thing you didn't, he didn't say you missed, but he suggested, and it was fucking brilliant.

Like this referee that was reffing the main event picked up on this one that basically when the two guys, when, when Demetrius Johnson ends up kind of in that center zone, not quite in the clinch and not quite at, at, uh, you know,

in the pocket, kind of in that middle zone, he'll give you a little shove. To put you in a position. Well, he is looking for one of your only two logical responses. You're going to back up and he backs all the way out or you're going to push against his and he goes to the clinch. So he goes in as a little sample test and he does it all after Jaron pointed it out. I'm like, holy fuck.

I looked at his fights. He always does that and for a referee to go and spend that much time and find that little moment because and i said why did you do that because well i just wanted to be in the right moment right places and be aware of what was going on i'm like that's a fucking good that's a great referee that's what we need yeah that is what we need and that's an excellent example in demetrius johnson of a guy who's trained by one of the best in the world in Matt Hume. I did a breakdown of Matt Hume's first fight in Pancrase. Oh, yeah.

I'm a big Matt Hume fan. I really like him in the corner, too. He's great at giving technical instructions in between rounds. I think there's a few guys that are just really good trainers, and you just see it in the examples. Dwayne Ludwig, I think, right now is the best. Dude. I don't think there's a better striking coach on earth. Duke is in the...

Duke is right up there with him. Right up there with him. Duke and Henry Hooft are in this world of perfection, and Bang Ludwig is pushing the boundaries a little. He's trying to test. He's taking new things. Even just the simplest shit that he was showing me after... Was was it after or before tj's fight i think it was before and he was showing me the elements of when guys will go to enter and you know how like i'll use punches to get you to think

up and down and you start responding up and down he makes you believe that he is playing with your up and down and while your brain is focusing in on that he camouflages his footwork in so some of the punches are bullshit to make you think about them while he steps off into different places yeah shit like that like and it's and he's oh man and he is operating like he's got 700 cups of coffee and i mean he's yelling and he's thinking fast and you can see talk about flow when he's teaching and he's thinking fast. And you can see, talk about flow. When he's teaching, this guy's in a different place. Yeah, he really is.

Dwayne Ludwig chugs Alpha Brain. He eats that shit like candy. He eats it all day long. He's obsessed with analyzing fights and training fighters. It's such a huge part of his daily thought process. It's engrossing. It's his a huge part of his daily thought process. It's engrossing. It's his whole being. And that's why he's so goddamn good.

I sat down with him at lunch the day TJ fought Burrow. And when TJ Dillashaw beat Hennon Burrow, who at the time was thought of as the best pound-for-pound fighter or one of the best pound-for-pound fighters in the world, TJ was a big underdog. And TJ went into that fight and dominated Hennon Burrell, knocked him out in the fifth round after dropping him in the first, dominating him for five rounds and then stopped him. But what was crazy was when I had lunch with Dwayne, Dwayne told me exactly what the plan was. And then he went out and did it exactly that way. A lot of switching stances, a lot of capitalizing on Burrell loading up and standing flat-footed, a lot of stepping to the outside and immediately countering, and he did it over and over and over again.

And TJ's a sponge, man. I had a chance to watch those two work out together, and TJ is just a sponge. He's a sponge. Everything Dwayne teaches him. Yeah. Sometimes it's like you've got the brilliant teacher and the brilliant fighter, and then the two together make an even bigger thing. And there's no conflict between those guys. They're really good friends. And TJ is a completely open book.

Yeah. His cup is empty. And Dwayne is completely ego free when it comes to teaching him. He's all about getting TJ better. TJ is all about getting better. And they're great friends. These guys love each other. Yeah. So they're always laughing and joking and palling around together. Like when TJ beat Hennon Burrow and there was this moment after the fight where they hugged and they're both crying.

It was real. Woo! Yeah, fucking real, man. I was tearing up when I was watching it. Cage side. It was crazy. Amazing.

Yeah, it was incredible. It really was. And Demetrius and Matt Hume, similar thing. I looked back. It was 1994. It was like four months after UFC won. And I went back and reanalyzed because up at Fight Network,

we're calling classic pancreas. So we got all the old pancreas and we're commentating them through the lens of today. So we're going, you know, this guy does this. Wow, you know, in 2014, that couldn't happen because of this, this, and this. So we're looking at him historically in the context of today.

It's super cool, man. That is cool. It's the funnest thing. Like, guys, don't – there's no such thing as – like, if a guy wants to pass your guard, he just passes it. Right. Like, in the 90s, everyone's good at foot locks for some reason. People change – you get a mount, and you'll, like, swing your leg over the top to go back to side. So I'm in the mount, my leg over to end up inside.

You'll be in eight, ten different positions. Always kind of they were chaining together submission attempts and positions to try to make you keep guessing. But it didn't, like it had overstayed its welcome. You're looking at it and going, this doesn't work, but they're still doing it. You know, it's fascinating. Dog shit jujitsu is what it is. I watched Coliseum 2000 with Hicks and Gracie over his house. Like way back in, I gotta say, it was probably like 2004 or 2005 or something like that.

It was back when Hicks was still thinking about fighting. And it was a few years after he had fought Funaki in Coliseum. And we were watching fights together. We watched the entire event. And Hicks would break down the movements and he's like look at all this space all this you can have this space you know like this like space to him that's just evil like what is this you know cuz Hickson's jiu-jitsu has always been the elite of the elite so when he watches like these errors and these

things like big goofy movements you know with big openings he would just drive him crazy like he would just be talking about all these errors and what's wrong with this and and so focused on it and if you watch jujitsu or you watch MMA from 93 and then watch like say Demetrius Johnson in 2014 you're like boy this is like no sport has evolved this quickly never and you those two examples it's when i looked at matt hume he was better than everybody him and evan tanner were better than everybody just because they were fighting like today and you look back matt hume was doing this kind of leg ride and side ride like wrestling position that that chris weidman was teaching at a seminar i was at like

two years ago he was doing it in 1994 well he had good muay thai too matt hume had very good muay thai remember he fought pat miletic and broke his nose and they stopped the fight that was crazy like stop the fight for a broken nose i know i remember like thinking like what kind of goofy shit is that you look back at these pancreas ones too and it's like there were rope escapes like if you go and you grab a rope, it's like you've got it. I'm fucking tapping. Instead of tapping, I grabbed the rope. And then we're stood up.

And it's like if it is not finished, you win because I grabbed the rope once. But we tried to figure that out. I was going to talk to Dave Meltzer, who I don't really know good, but we've chatted online and stuff, because he understands that history moment because there's also a lot of works back then. Like, legitimately. And you have to. When you say works, for folks who don't know what we're talking about, we mean fixed fights. Yeah.

And that's, a lot of that has a history because of pro wrestling. Pro wrestling in Japan was huge. And that's also where the rope escape came from. Yeah. That was always a big thing in pro wrestling. A guy would have a hold on a guy, the guy would grab the rope, and the referee would make them break. It was a way to keep pro wrestling. A guy would have a hold on a guy, the guy would grab the rope and the referee would make them break. It was a way to keep pro wrestling interesting. Well, when we look back at it,

we suddenly, Ram Dean and I are colonies and we look at each other, fuck, that's fake. And the first time that happened, we were like, well, like, I mean, we have to address that. Like your credibility demands that you don't go, oh, and he power bombed him.

I mean, you can't do that. And you're talking about history. We're trying to make this series a history lesson as well, right? So you have to talk about it. So the reason it looks the way it looks, you nailed it. It's like basically wrestling was fake. Once upon a time, wrestling was real. Guys went to towns and they wrestled each other,

and the winner was the winner who could wrestle. But guys got so good and it got so boring that they had to fix them and became pro wrestling is that why they did it is it because guys got so good or is it just because people wanted to control the outcomes i think a bit of both i bet it's more gambling than anything maybe so maybe so yeah uh and then the pro wrestling over there these two guys funaki and suzuki went and said we're gonna take pro wrestling which we love and everyone loves we're gonna make it pro wrestling, which we love and everyone loves, and we're going to make it real. And so when they made it real,

that was Pancrase. So suddenly it's like wrestling was real, then it was fake, and now we're going to make it real again. So there were things like rope escapes left in there as you transferred from fake to real again, they stayed there for a bit. Yeah, that's interesting.

That's really interesting. And they were so obsessed with the storylines because they were originally wrestling performers that the most of the works involved them and involved them losing so in this in its own way it was only there to create entertainment but it's a weird time in there like for purists and i fucking love the sport you have to make sense of why that was for people so that they're not just it doesn't color MMA in a way. Right. But it was that moment where MMA and wrestling sort of touched each other in the early 90s. Yeah, that is an interesting thing, man.

It's also an interesting thing that we were saying this that I don't think there's ever been a sport that has changed so much and grown so much in just a period of 20 years. Like this 20, if you go to UFC 1 and then go to, I don't know, what number are we on now? 180, 78, 78, 77. If you go and just go to 2014, 2003 or 1993 to 2014, it's gone through like a thousand years of evolution. The level is so different. The level of athleticism,

the level of endurance, the martial arts skill, like everything's different. Everything's different. I think it's one of the things I love about it the most. And like people will talk, John Jones and Cormier are like having all this heat. And they ask me about it.

It's like, I don't care. It's interesting. But for me, the biggest thing about one of the, I always say the biggest thing, because I also love the science. I also love the brain chemistry. I love the beauty of the dance, all of it. But one of the things I'm most interested in is it's basically one global science experiment in real time using thousands and thousands and thousands of fights to distill down to the nugget of what's the best. And it still is that. Every 500 fights, the best coaches are going,

okay, well, that doesn't work anymore. Well, we've added that. That works. And it's this ongoing distillation down to the purest way to beat other guys. That changes slightly now because of this sort of demand for entertainment from the audience and stuff.

That changes. Like, you know know guys are rewarded more for standing now than in certain things so that alters it but you you take that out of it and basically we just have thousands and thousands of contests all there to help us determine the research of how to be the best fighter ever yeah i have issue with that aspect of it the where the technical aspect of fights changes for it to be more entertaining i think it's not good i think it's not smart and i think it takes away from the purity of mixed martial arts expression like what what is martial arts it's all about doing the very best thing in order

to win a fight and if you put yourself more in danger so the crowd roars and you know like we'll just drop our hands duke it out i remember a guy who's a friend of mine wrote something on twitter and he wrote uh you know fuck technical striking you know just stand in the center of the cage and let it bang and meanwhile that the guy who wrote that is all fucked up now he's got all sorts of physical problems he's had a bunch of fights he's all banged up it's like no don't no don't think that don't say that like put that's the that is like you know like uh you know fuck fuck thinking i'm just gonna hit this with a hammer no no you have to think like that's the whole thing the whole thing is solving the puzzle and solving

the puzzle in striking is about technical striking it doesn't't mean no knockouts. There's a lot of knockouts that come from tactical strikers. It means doing it the right way where you have the most amount of success, the least amount of risk, and you're doing things based on the amount of knowledge that's been accumulated over thousands of years of martial arts. You're applying that in an intelligent way. Johnson, Demetrius Johnson, in my opinion, is the best example of that. That fucking guy does everything right. Everything he does is perfect. He doesn't rush anything.

You never see him slugging it out and fucking dropping his hands and like, come on, bitch, come on. There's none of that stupidity. It's all brilliant martial arts. And he's so exciting to watch. I mean, sometimes people say it's not as exciting because he's not finishing guys as much but he fucking finished john maraga in the fourth round of a fight that he was dominating he finished joseph benavidez with one punch in the world in his weight exactly you know he's a beast yeah and bago tinoff the only reason why he didn't finish

him because he's epo to the fucking gills and who knows what else fatigue yeah why he didn't finish him is because he's EPO'd to the fucking gills. And who knows what else. They didn't fatigue. Yeah. Yeah, he didn't fatigue. Fatigue is such a part of it. Yes. Like it's such an enormous part of it. If you are, you know, if everything else is equal, but you're in better shape than the guy, eventually it's no longer equal. It's really that simple.

Well, that's the Nick Diaz strategy. Nick Diaz strategy. Nick is obviously a very high level martial artist when it comes to his technique and his experience and he's obviously a very, very tough guy, but he's also in fucking phenomenal shape. Nick Diaz has swam back from Alcatraz twice in

the fucking Pacific Ocean outside San Francisco filled with sharks. He swam back twice. He's done triathletes, he's triathlons, he's done triathletes he's triathlons he's done marathons i mean he's a fucking beast when it comes to his physical conditioning and what he does is just puts a pace he just makes you run with him like come on let's go we're going running we're going running and he starts throwing these punches that are like 50 speed hey come and catch me come and

get like he'll even mentally get you pulled in there. He's good at that, too. Oh, yeah. He starts, come on, bitch. Come on, bitch. That gets you riled. Oh, it's brilliant. Oh, yeah.

You know Jack Slack? Sure. Yeah, yeah. Oh, man. That guy is doing killer stuff. Excellent stuff. Yeah. Great breakdowns.

There's a little group of people out there. It's a niche in a niche. I'm proud to be part of it. I stand there and do mine, but Jack is fucking good. And there's this young guy, Lawrence Kenshin. Yeah. So I was going to mention him. I'm glad to be part of it. I stand there and do mine, but Jack is fucking good. And there's this young guy, Lawrence Kenshin. Yeah, so I was going to mention him. I'm glad you did. He's excellent.

He does great breakdowns. And I'm so happy that there's these guys doing it. And instead of going, who's that fucking guy? I'm better than him. Good for you. We end up kind of we're friends and we're kind of pushing each other. It's really cool. Well, that's an interesting thing about MMA commentary.

It's like that as well. I'm really good friends with Michael Ciavello, really good friends with Jimmy Smith. I worked with Mike twice. Good friends with Jason Chambers as well. He's a great buddy. And because I'm friends with all these guys that also do my job, like there's no like competition amongst each other. Like I try to get Jimmy Smith hired by the UFC.

When Jimmy Smith, his contract was going up with Bellator, I called Dana White and I said, dude, this guy's the best. He's fucking good, man. He's great. He's really good. He's a real martial artist. He's a real good guy.

I go, he should work for us. He's fucking great. But Bellator must have understood he was so valuable. Well, they were worried. Also, they would worry that who the fuck else is out there.

I mean, it's a really tough gig to have a person who's very passionate and very articulate, which Jimmy is both, and is really good at breaking down scenarios and situations, and is legitimately passionate while the fight's going on, like you could see it. And also, not afraid to call out bad refereeing, bad calls, bad judgments. He's really like, it's very important to him to be honest about the whole scene.

There's not that many guys out there. So if Bellator did lose Jimmy, who the fuck else, who do they get? Maybe they'd call me. Yeah, they probably would call you. And you would do a great job, I'm sure. Brian Stan does a great job. Brian's good. Kenny Florian, of course, does a great job.

The guy, he's always been one of my favorites because he's a regular guy who just figured out How to get the answers To the shit he needed to get to Yeah You know what I mean? Like he wasn't some big Powerful genetic specimen Right He was kind of a nerd Who's like

If I can just figure out How to do this Okay that worked But this didn't And over time And he analyzes the same way But where I was going with Jack Talking about Jack

Is he did this I'm sure it's him I'm remembering this Amazing breakdown On Nick Diaz Yes And I'm pretty sure it was Jack. If it isn't, if it was a different guy, I apologize. But it's looking at Nick Diaz

striking compared to old school bare knuckle boxers. You know, the guys with the mustaches fighting like this? And it looks at it, and there's so many comparisons. Wade on the front leg, catching punches with the top of his head. It's so brilliant. It must be Jack, because punches with the top of his head. It's so brilliant.

It must be Jack because Jack's the best guy out there. Yeah, he's done a bunch of great stuff. He even wrote a whole piece on Georges St-Pierre versus Nick Diaz. In advance of it or after? I believe it was in advance. And he wrote a breakdown afterwards. He writes a bunch of those things, man. Part of the reason he's so good is he's working so much he's in that zone you know yeah

but nobody knows who he really is and uh does anybody know what he looks like no i think he and he doesn't want that and i think that's super cool i think he's british i'm pretty sure he's yeah i believe he is too um but uh it's, man. It's a little niche, but people are finding it interesting. I always feel like, you know, you look at other sports, and on Monday the ESPN will have a two-hour show, and they will go into what happened. And it won't be like, well, this guy threw a thing, and the highlight will only be the catch.

They'll show what happened at the line. They'll show, they'll talk about what kind of plays these guys called and stuff. That kind of analysis. Like, all you guys do a fucking killer job. But the before and the after and stuff, that's an area I always wish the UFC concentrated on more, especially during the really passion years. Like the heavy work has always been on the hype and the excitement and this guy hates and these two are the best and stuff. guy hates and these two are the best and stuff but during that era you feel like if you got 20 or 30 or 40 of the audience to be obsessed with the technique and i think a lot of times people went and showed how to do a triangle not how to watch a triangle right you know what i mean

you know but it feels like in a lot of other sports there are they have spent time to develop a a certain percentage of the audience that is there because baseball does some crazy shit i don't know what happens in baseball but there are guys that talk about how the field moves and what guys do when they're like with rosin and shit and in football they talk about how the plays are called what the subtleties are and you don't see that before and after in the ufc right and yeah i agree with you you know it'd be nice to see that um there's some they're doing a lot of that though on the uh the breakdowns that they do on fox on fox sports you know like carlos condit does a fantastic job of that i haven't seen his no i'm sorry did i say carlos condit i didn't mean carlos condit who the fuck that but who the

who does that um dominic cruz dominic cruz does a great job of it to speak and like you're talking about um demetrius Johnson, Dominic Cruz, if he can come back the way that he was, he's one of those super brilliant, mind-blowing performers too. Yeah, he's great as far as movement and footwork, and his conditioning is always top-notch too. Dominic is just so good at not being there. You swing for him, and he's off to the left,

and then he's countering you off to the right, and you're like, fuck him, where is this guy? But he does a great job. He did a great breakdown of Kung Lee versus Rich Franklin. Yeah, with the right hook, I think. Yeah, right hook. Drew out the right hook. Yeah, he did a great job of explaining.

When someone is head straight up in the air, and they don't move off the center line, that shit drives me crazy. I watched it. I was like, fucking who's training you? Like what's going on here? And then you watch a guy like TJ Dillashaw so satisfying because he does all the right things, because he's constantly moving off the center line, because he's completely unpredictable.

So like when Dominic did a great breakdown of what Franklin did wrong and where the errors were. And he's done that for a bunch of different fights. So Dominic is really good at that. He's fucking talented. When we're talking about Dwayne Ludwig, when he's teaching, he'll say, you make no errors unless you're making them on purpose. And what he means by that is, obviously, you show, well, this is here. The guy will throw a punch. We want him to do that and we'll respond.

And there's a really wild, heavy case of it where you see, and I broke it down and if you even just look at the fight itself, you see it as soon as somebody mentions it was Jacare versus Okami, right? So Jacare, the whole fight, all he's got in mind is the overhand right.

And the way for him to draw that out is you know how everybody, when they talk about where the front foot goes against the southpaw, he's got his front foot intentionally inside and he's offering a straight line to his chin for the straight left. And Okami, you can see him seeing it

and going, no no shit he wants me to throw that oh shit he's doing he's ready to counter it and the hesitation on okami is like it's such a fascinating moment as a guy's going look i'm out here you can hit me with it and he's going oh he's telling me i can hit him with it but he's got that right hand ready and then just those moments to me are the fascinating shit well it's also even more fascinating when it comes to a guy like Jacare because if you do engage, the real fear is that he's going to take you down. So there's always this thing when you're striking with a guy

who's such an elite grappler. It's like this guy is trying to goad me into a slugfest, but I know that he's going to change levels and take me down at any moment. So you're always hesitant to really commit to shots and extend yourself because if you extend yourself, it makes it much more difficult to defend the takedown. A guy like Okami is also, or a guy like Jacare, rather, is also fascinating because started out his career as one of the elite of the elite in grappling

and really had bad striking in the beginning. Like, you watch his, when he got knocked out by Makako, his striking was just very rudimentary, which wasn't very good. But now he's destroying guys with striking like he beat the fucking shit out of yukino yushin okami with striking and like that's terrifying to people because now you take this guy who is this just phenomenal top one percent of all grapplers ever i mean i think jacare like out of elitejitsu guys, he's like top 1% ever.

And now destroying people with stand-up. It's like the focus that made him a great jiu-jitsu fighter and the athleticism is now making him an elite striker. And that's terrifying. It's always kind of additional terrifying is that you don't see him for like a year. When a guy's not around for a year, you're like, what the fuck is he doing right like what does he have now what new things does he have what does he do better what's way faster than it was a year ago that always scares the shit out of me like excites you and there's a fight coming but you're like shit man what has this guy been doing in the lab for the last year maybe he's got some crazy shit we don't even know about yeah well he's definitely getting better he's not slacking off i guarantee you that but did you see when he got elbow surgery and they cleaned out his

elbow did you see that oh pull that up jamie jacare elbow surgery pictures he had um before he fought francis carmont um he had uh like like really bad like bone spurs and chips and shit inside of his elbow. It was like all the years of elbowing people and also of getting arm barred, like things break off inside your elbow and it becomes like crunchy and you're moving it around. It's just all inflammation and tissue damage. And look, we'll show it to you up on the big screen, but it's really fucking crazy.

Like there's a cup of all the things that they removed from his elbow. He's got teeth in his elbow. It looks like teeth. Oh, that's disgusting. Chunks of bone and cartilage. And all ripping apart all the stuff around it all the time. You know, people don't, you know, how could they? But nobody really sees a guy like a black belt level guy

who's been training you and Eddie and shot. These black belt level guys train all their life. They have no idea what that does to their joints and their bodies. Like, jujitsu is a fucking vicious sport. Like, it's a hard, vicious sport. Guys will, kickboxers will look over at the jiu-jitsu area and they see the guys stretching and stuff and i go look at these guys they won't they don't want no part of that they don't want to go in there have their skeleton all stacked by a guy like

it's a vicious sport well it's a sport that i'm realizing like one of the things that i did i made some mistakes with my jiu-jitsu training and one of the mistakes that i made was for a long time i didn't do any strength and conditioning equipment there's strength and conditioning training i did mostly just jujitsu like for years and years i would lift weights like maybe once a week or something like that i get a little lift in just to kind of maintain my strength and size but i didn't specifically like strengthen my core strengthen my, strengthen certain areas and stretch, constantly stretch. You got to put as much time almost into that as you do in your jiu-jitsu training just

to armor up your body, just to armor up your joints. Not so that you can overpower guys and not concentrate on technique, which a lot of people do have a problem with. Really strong football players, big guys guys tend to try to muscle things. The really technical guys are always the really small guys because they don't have the muscle-up option. So their option is only to use the proper technique and leverage. But strengthening your body is important just to prevent injuries.

Strengthening your hamstrings to prevent knee injuries, strengthening your quads to prevent knee injuries, strengthening your neck, strengthening your back, like strengthening lower back, stretching. All that's like a lot of guys slack off on that shit. And I did too. And I got some pretty serious back injuries because of that, because I wasn't strengthening those areas. You know, like for the longest time, I very rarely worked my back. I didn't do like rows or any like exercises specifically. So having like an issue with discs and stuff like that forced me to really

concentrate on that. Yeah. That's nasty stuff. Yeah. And then, you know, guys get back injuries and it gets, doctors give them like opiates and stuff. That shit can wreck their lives. Oh,

bad back injury leads to something like that. And next thing you know, you're, you're, you're, yeah, you're filleting dudes for money for heroin. Hey, for sure. A bad back injury leads to something like that. And next thing you know, you're a junkie. Yeah, you're filleting dudes for money for heroin. Hey, how'd you get there? It was a bit of a leap, I recognize. What is your martial arts background? When did you start doing martial arts? I started about nine Taekwondo.

I have a black belt in Taekwondo. I trained through high school. All in Canada? All in Toronto? Yeah. KS Cho College. I grew up in Manitoba. You know what? My parents are the coolest

people ever on Earth. I was just like a weird kid, and I really liked Bruce Lee and stuff. I was really interested in martial arts, and I was pretty hyper and odd, and I didn't have a lot of focus. Once they said, if you're serious about this, we'll do it, they would drive me an hour and a half each direction to

Winnipeg to go train three times a week for my whole – as a kid, teenager. That's amazing. It was amazing. You've got great parents, man. Holy shit. It changed my whole life. And I competed. I did really well and stuff.

And I enjoyed it. And I did a little – I had interest in every martial art. So I did a little Sikaran, which is like a Filipino martial art. What's it called? Sikaran. How do you spell that? It's S-I-K-A-R-A-N and do you know it's like khali uh no arnis and khali are an offshoot of sicaran it's a filipino martial art and it's very much like taekwondo but when they compete

they stick their hands in their belt and it's all spin kicks and hook kicks and shit it's super cool they put their hands in their belt they compete like wide stance with their head far back. Lots of hook kicks off the front and no hands. It's a kicking. It's like Savat almost. Wow. But Savat does have hands now. It's modified to have hands over time.

But so I did a lot of that. No blocking either? No. All moving your head and your body. It was just a very Winnipeg thing. This one central area of Canada, this Filipino master of it came there and he started a school. He's a really good businessman. So it ended up being on, in the whole world, if you looked at where Sikaran was taught,

the Philippines, and there was a chunk, a little red dot in the middle of Canada. Because this guy was there and he had a bunch of schools and people to study. And a lot of Filipino population. So I did a little of that. Wow, that's crazy. A bit of Muay Thai then. Yeah, Sikaran's really cool. Check it out. Filipino population. So I did a little of that and a bit of weight tie then. Yeah. Stick around. It's really cool.

Check it out. I don't know how much there'll be of modern stuff on the internet, but it's basically a ton of round kicks, hook kicks, and spin kicks with your weight heavy on the back leg. So it's sort of like kicking like a martial arts version of soccer. Yeah. You can't use your hands. Like fencing with your feet. Yeah.

I mean, like you can't even like block. No. That's so ridiculous. Yeah. It's really weird. I i mean but is boxing ridiculous you can only punch yeah but at least you can block yeah yeah i guess that what actually you would see a lot of because over the i always found it interesting even just as a kid i was curious guys would be doing you'd go to the tournaments and guys are all doing hook kicks and then shift forward and spin kick all of a sudden guys started doing this from there where they would just bounce on their back leg hooking and round kicking so they bounce towards each other doing that so they're tapping it's just

an interesting thing as a teenager to see and then i got i started playing in a rock band in my 20s and so i didn't do much martial arts at all did you did you practice music before that like when did you get involved in music i was uh, like, growing up as a kid, Bruce Lee and Alice Cooper were, like, my two hands. Ah, okay. So that's where the glam rock came from, like, the makeup and... Yeah.

And late, mid-20s, I started playing in a band, and I really liked performing. And I did a lot of jumping and kicking and wearing tight pants and, you know, and, like, it was super fun. Like David Lee Roth style. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

And somewhere between David Lee Roth and the New York Dolls, you know? like it was super like David Lee Roth style yeah exactly exactly and somewhere between David Lee Roth and the New York Dolls you know and very drunk very very fucked up like through the whole era like we would go

and we oh man and I told Eddie this story I haven't told a lot of people this story but people asked me about it my friends asked me about it recently but I was basically on tour

so I could do that for like 10 12 14 years and we were touring England and the UK and Italy and a few places like that. We did really well over there. And I had a seizure from just doing so much drugs and drinking so much.

Whoa. And like a bad, like you basically, I had been, when I came back, the doctor said the vodka and Red Bull was actually the biggest component. The fact that I took a lot of speed over the three days without sleeping let me drink more vodka and Red Bull. But basically, as the sugar leaves your body, it goes down and you get sick. And when the alcohol then leaves your body, it draws more sugar out and you have a hypoglycemic seizure. So I'm laying on the couch. I felt terrible for like 10 hours. So I'm laying on the couch.

I felt terrible for like 10 hours. And then all of a sudden, apparently, I just yelled something and people came over. And I felt this electricity shoot down my arms into my hands. And they just locked up. And I rolled back down. My eyes rolled in my head. I thought it was 10 seconds later. And everyone's looking at me like I just got knocked out.

And then apparently, it was like a minute or something. And I went back. And the doctor said, dude, you got to get your life together. Wow. And then I started training martial arts again, pretty much that day. And then I trained, you know, three times a week, then five, then seven. Then I was doing jujitsu Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 7am, noon and 6pm. And Tuesday and Thursday, noon and 6pm. Wait a minute, you were training jujitsu three times a day? Three times a day, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, twice a day, Tuesday, Thursday for about six

months. And then people kind of knew me a little in Canada, like on television doing stuff. I was like a reality show judge. And the network said, oh, you're going to fight? Well, why don't we do a TV show about that? Wow. And that kind of allowed me. I really wanted to be in the fight world. That's what I loved.

The second I kind of had been not living a crazy lifestyle, all I wanted to do was martial arts. And then really from that minute on, that's all I kind of did. That's all I was interested in. Wow. Wow. It's crazy that you blacked out from Red Bull and vodka. So the hypoglycemic aspect of it is just super bad for you. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. In fact, my wife just told me this morning unrelated she said uh she was on the internet and she said uh toronto looking to ban vodka or alcohol and red bull served in bars just just popped up this morning on the internet that's so crazy i never thought of that as a bad drink yeah yeah very dangerous there's apparently a lot once you something like that happens to you you look it up on the internet there's a lot of that going on hypoglycemic seizures as a result of vodka red bulls that's so funny i well when it's hypoglycemic what if you use sugar-free red bull does it have a lesson could help i'm trying to

give me i'm enabling folks give it a go i i feel like um it's always like a weird thing when you mix an upper and a downer too, right? And that's what you're doing with alcohol and Red Bull. If you smoke a bit of weed and you drink a coffee, it's kind of the same thing. Not really though because I don't think weed is a downer. It's not a downer in terms of like a depressant. Alcohol is a true depressant. Weed, like you could smoke a joint and lift weights and have a great workout. I can't.

You can't? No, man. You need to hang out with me more. Yeah, maybe so. Oh, man. All I want to do is like chill out. I'll watch fights. I'll do a bit of writing or whatever, but I tend to get a little introverted and a little mellow.

I don't know. It's just. You know what's fantastic? Weed and yoga. Yeah, that would make sense to me for sure. It's amazing. Stretching. Like I was talking to my to me for sure. It's amazing. Stretching. I was talking to my friend Aubrey about this the other day.

There's this buddy that we know that makes these, they're called jambos, these organic edibles. He uses honey instead of processed sugar, and they're really delicious. And they're super strong. processed sugar and they're really delicious and they're super strong and you know aubrey ate one and then went on this like two hour stretching and like rampage was like like using a lacrosse ball to roll out all the the tight tissue and that makes just makes you really in tune it makes you feel like i like lifting weights on it because it makes me like feel like what my body's doing. I feel like I can get a sense, a better, I'm more in tune, more sensitive. Yeah. I'd be afraid of, not afraid, but I don't feel like doing something physical, but I'd definitely give it a try. Is weightlifting for you, that's

become like a martial art, right? It is to me. I think of, especially Olympic lifting, that's a martial art. In what way? Like at Olympic lifts, like say, you know, a clean or a snatch, you work forever on the little details to try to make yourself calm enough to be able to express yourself with the lift. Like to be able to really put it all together. You move one way wrong, you don't nail the lift. You distribute your weight different in your feet, you don't nail the lift. You don't drive and tie your hips together with the same time that you're supposed to go up on your toes and shrug you don't hit the lift so it becomes this ongoing work to try to make this thing better i see what you're saying yeah and uh man like to doing an olympic clean to me is one of the great

things in the world to be able to just really hit one it's such a full body exercise too it's such it's like really enhances your ability to explode. Anytime you're doing anything where you're pushing up from your toes, from the ground, and extending and lifting it up over your head and forcing your whole body to fucking power that up. Everything, your whole chain, your posterior, your core, your spine, everything. Your shoulder, your delts, your quads, your toes. Your toes are pushing. That's why Steve Maxwell is a big proponent of lifting weights barefoot.

Yeah. He thinks that when you have especially a spongy sort of like a running shoe on where it's like a lot of give, that you're not feeling, you're not engaging your toes, pushing off the ground. I think it also take a lot of give that you're not feeling you know you're you're not engaging your toes pushing off the ground i think it also take away some of your force some of the force you're exerting it will kind of absorb it a little bit i definitely they a lot of the olympic lifters around where i go i go this place bang fitness in toronto and it's just like it's the best part of my week to go in there and um most of the guys who olympic lift just use the tiny tiny tiny shoe yeah really thin sole yeah i like those a lot of people criticize those toe shoes you know

apparently they made a bunch of ridiculous claims that aren't necessarily true but i still like them i love them for lifting weights they're so comfortable for lifting weights and again the same thing they're really flat and they they make you feel i like the fact that the toes are all free moving because you can push off with those things you feel like your connection to the ground but yeah i'm a big fan of olympic lifts i'm a big fan of obviously of kettlebells i'm a big fan of anything where you're doing these explosive strength exercises they just make your body so much goddamn stronger. You just feel good doing them. You know, you talk about drugs or whatever. It's like you get endorphins from doing full body lifts.

Hey, have you ever seen that on the internet? These kinesiologists broke down in like milliseconds Bruce Lee's one-inch punch. Yeah, I've seen that. Isn't that crazy? And they show that it's actually the order in which his body fires. And it's like the millisecond, the shred of a millisecond in between the different body parts kind of firing one after the other. It's fascinating.

It is fascinating. You know, I used to be a, well, I still am a huge fan of Mike Tyson. But one of the things that I used to always be fascinated about Tyson that people didn't comment on is the size of his fucking legs. Like that's where all the power was coming from he was like pushing off the floor constantly like pushing off the floor and just Everything was like thrusting from the bottom and when you see a guy Punching you assume like oh, it's his body his upper body his arms are throwing the punch But really with like a guy like tyson those vicious power punches it

was all coming from his ass it was called from his toes down pushing off and all his quads and his upper body throwing it into it it's amazing how much of that is and how much of your your full body is involved in techniques well and kettlebells olympic lifts stuff like that that way that that that the bottom half attaches to the top half, that strength in between those two. That's the big, definitely the big. When you compete, what weight do you compete at? 135. Whoa.

How do you make, what do you walk around at? Probably 158 right now. Wow. That's a lot. You drain yourself, huh? Yeah. I mean, when I was fighting for me, even at at the beginning was trying to figure out what's going on like really understand it to the point that i can fairly analyze it and i really felt

like that i had to go in and do it also you want to you become a better person going and doing that you know pushing you talked about it just today we're pushing taking risks going and putting yourself in harm's way putting yourself at risk of failure. I mean, that's part of it. But really, it's to figure out stuff. Being forced to make heavy weight is tough. Going to a weigh-in and seeing a guy want to kill you. That's all of those experiences, I think, help my real calling of analyzing fights. Why did you decide to cut so much weight? It started out, my first fight, I probably walked around at 145 pounds.

And then you cut weight. And your next fight, you're 148 pounds. And then you cut all that weight and you come weight and your next fight you're 148 pounds and then you cut all that weight and you come back and you gain you're 150 pounds and over i was also 39 when i took my first fight now i'm 45 so over the six years i gained three pounds a year just muscle just yeah lifting weights working really hard changing my life from you know eating burgers and shit and drinking beer at lunch to working out twice a day. All of that just added three, four pounds of muscle a year. And each time you cut weight, after you've gained the weight back, you fought.

And then you've had your couple of days to eat pizza and burgers and stuff. The weight that you are then is a pound or two heavier than it was the last time you were there. Really? Yeah. At least it was for me. So these guys, at least maybe in your 30s and 40s, so a lot of these guys, they either have a perfect, and I was going to say they have a perfect diet,

but a lot of these guys celebrate the way that you deserve to celebrate after you fought a fight, and they don't have the perfect diet right after. But that walking around weight creeps up a little bit, at least it did for me. Well, the lighter weight guys, traditionally, those have been the guys that have the shortest careers. The lighter weight guys, when they get into their 30s, it starts to drop off, whereas heavyweights in their 30s, a lot of times, they're just hitting their prime. You know, like you could have a heavyweight.

Like, look, George Foreman won the heavyweight title at 45 years old, 46 actually, and was the oldest heavyweight champion. It was the oldest boxing champion at 45 years old. 46, actually. And was the oldest heavyweight champion and was the oldest boxing champion until Bernard Hopkins recently, which is just the freakiest of freaks. He's the strangest guy ever. He's amazing to me. Do you know him?

Have you got to know him? No, no, no, no. I need to meet him. I've never met him, but I've admired his style. I just love... I was amazed back when he beat Kelly Pavlik, which was like, what was that?

Like 2007 or something like that? Seven years later, he's still blowing people away. It's wild. It is wild. Who's that football player that was fighting in... Was it Bellator? Herschel Walker. Herschel Walker.

Jesus Christ. 50-something. Yeah. You know? He was 48 when he was fighting in Strike Force. Yeah, right. Oh, yeah, in Strike Force, of course. Shredded.

I mean, he was goddamn shredded and just a beast at 48. But Herschel Walker is something going on there that's not kosher. I mean, with his brain. Because, like, he says that he eats, like, a salad and drinks a bowl of soup in a day and that's it. That's not even possible to keep that kind of mass. Well, I mean, we could get some doctors and dieticians and they would 100% tell us there's no way that could be true. Right. So when a guy tells you that all he eats is a salad and drinks a cup of soup every day, you're like, okay, I don't know what he's doing.

He might be fucking with people. Yeah, I don't know. There's something not kosher about that, though. Yeah, it's weird. He might be fucking with people. There's something not kosher about that, though. Yeah, it's weird. But he's so yoked. It's also crazy to see that kind of muscle mass on a 48-year-old guy. Like, no loss of muscle mass.

In fact, he looks like a 25-year-old guy in his prime. Well, the science. I mean, it is not cool to suggest that somebody's doing something, but not talking about him necessarily. You mean performance enhancing drugs or something. Yeah, the science of many guys in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. The science is there to make a 65. I mean, we've all seen photos of those 70-year-old guys just shredded. Look at Stallone.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Stallone is like 67 years old now, and he's ripped. I wish I had his body. No, crazy. It's ridiculous. It would be fascinating to get a real, one of these guys on the front end of anti-aging and human performance, that science, to figure out like, okay, a bodybuilder uses this much growth hormone. A guy like, say, an actor on CSI maybe uses like this much, you know, like anti-aging. How much is this 70, How much is Stallone using?

You know what I mean? To get a sense of where the chemistry is happening. Like, is this more? Is this different? Do you have the new shit that we don't know about? Like what's going on at the elite level? Like Stallone was, I don't, I mean, he's not an athlete, so it's not a big deal, but he was caught at an airport once with a whole bunch of- It was in Australia because it's illegal in Australia.

They have weird laws when it comes to hormones, even hormones that are prescribed by doctors that don't show any negative effects on the body. When used at normal doses, meanwhile, they have alcohol at every fucking store, every bar in every corner. Yeah, it's all crazy. Science is fucking weird. Medicine's weird. It's ignorance. It's not the science or medicine that's weird. It's the ignorance.

Interpretation. Medicine's weird. It's ignorance. It's not the science or medicine that's weird. It's the ignorance. No, it's essentially the people that are dictating the rules, the people that are writing the laws, their ignorance about understanding the effects on the human body that these substances have. If it's done correctly and if it's done through proper medical supervision, it enhances the body, and that's what people don't understand. When you arrest a guy like Stallone who's showing up with growth hormone and he's, why don't you just let him take his shirt off and look.

Exactly. Does he look bad? He's healthy. He's performing well. He's happy. His life is good. What exactly is going on here? Well, it's also, it's not like he's competing in some sport

where he has some unfair advantage. No, he's an old guy who wants to have a body that works good. For sure. And why is it okay that that old guy could go to the bar and just do shot after shot until his fucking liver collapses, and no one stops that, but you have a problem with him bringing in boxes of human growth hormone. It's weird.

It is weird. For some reason, when something happens that people decide something is a law or bad or they've made a decision on something, it takes forever to change it. And people are anti-science, right? They're anti-science. So it's like you go, no, look, this is why this is good. No, because since the 60s, we've said this is bad therefore it's bad well i think when it comes to growth hormone and testosterone and all these different things where the real where people have an issue is because the way it's played out in the public eye has been all about illegal use in sports right it's been

about the barry bond situation it's been about mark mcguire it's been about all these people that are taking these things and cheating in sports. So because our associations have been all about people getting unfair advantages in sports, people automatically assume that these substances are bad for you. When you look at cigarettes, which are one of the worst things for you ever, no one's stopping that from being legal. Those are everywhere. It's people that make hundreds of billions lobby to make that stay legal you know like it's like i'm making a hundred billion dollars i gotta get some some government person to say cigarettes is okay let's keep that

cool you know that's it's motivated by finance what a commerce yeah but i mean i don't that's why i don't understand i mean so is you could sell testosterone too i mean that could be motivated by finance as well. It's just there's a big difference between the way people look at – there should be a big difference between the way people look at someone who's doing something that's a performance-enhancing drug that's allowing them to compete with an unfair advantage in a sport and doing it where if you're a guy like Sylvester Stallone and you're doing it to enhance your life and you're 70 years old or whatever

and you're shredded, like who gives a a shit let the guy do whatever he wants well what if you know there's an element of trying to let to keep a difference between the people at the top and the people at the bottom what if all the people at the bottom got testosterone that would be harder to manage them harder to kind of what do you mean you know like the societal difference between you know the oppressed the people who are kind of keep them. What do you mean? You know, like the societal difference between, you know, the oppressed, the people who are kind of at the bottom of the food chain, the people who run shit, the kind of people who kind of monitor how the world kind of works, prefer to keep people watching TV, not really, you know, eating bad food.

Smoke and cigarettes, there's a direction to keeping some a society not super active and those people don't want those people to take performance enhancing drugs they want them to smoke cigarettes and eat hamburgers and shit i wonder if that's a real conscious decision you know there's that's a that's a thing that gets thrown around a lot that accusation gets thrown around there's some sort of a international cabal that's like looking out to keep the proletariat down but not not sort of so much saying that that's looking out to keep the proletariat down. But not so much saying that there's some room somewhere where 20 guys are in there making decisions, just the feeling, the way that society kind of breaks itself up.

These laws happen for this reason. It keeps these guys rich. The way that society kind of divvies shit out, it kind of ends up being that way. I think it kind of ends up being that way more than anybody's trying to make it that way i think that what would people have when it comes to testosterone and human growth hormone and anti-aging and all these the stigmas that people have on the whether it's the efficacy of them or the the dangers of them is a lot of it is based on sports it's a lot of is based on all the negative press that we've heard about guys taking steroids in sports. And then in MMA, there's this huge issue with testosterone replacement therapy, which was up until very recently legal. Now, human growth hormone has always been illegal,

but they were never testing for it until recently. When Chael Sonnen got popped for human growth hormone, it was a big deal because it let Because it let everybody know, like, oh, boy, these new tests. Like, I had a conversation with Chael about it right after he got popped. He's like, well, turns out these new tests are really good. Yeah. You know, and that's really what it was. They're doing these tests that cost $45,000 per athlete. Wow.

Yep. It's all financed by the UFC. Lorenzo pays for all this shit. And, you know, they're testing the blood. I guess either do it or don't pays for all this shit and you know they're they're testing I guess either do it or don't and they're doing it and they're doing it they have this like really intense chain of uh evidence where like the guy will show up at your house take your blood and it's like you know fucking suitcase he's got chained to his wrist like it's one of those type of deals the guy travels with it to wherever the lab is like it's in his his custody the entire

time and they take the blood from your body. He signs off on it. And they bring it to the laboratory. And then the laboratory analyzes it. And you're finding, they're going to find out a lot of guys are taking shit. Of course. It's a really interesting one.

It's such a large thing. It's like people will try to talk about it in a three-minute chunk on TV or write one article about it. But it's such a large philosophical thing, right? We have to look back at what it means to strive and want to succeed and want to win and the desire to be great and all that. I mean, shit, we can go and train at elevation, which will increase your red blood cell count,

but you can't take EPO, which will do the same thing. And for a lot of guys, it's like they want to be great. And it's like at the low levels or the mid-levels, guys are broke. Maybe it's not as vital. But at the top, if it means $5 or $10 million and that chasing greatness has always been there. And this doctor is like, I can help you chase greatness. That's naturally, instinctively there to go, well, let's explore everything. Right.

Well, that's where like the Balco guy came in. Yeah, right. You know, the Victor Conte guy who came along and came up with some different strategies for avoiding tests, some drugs that hadn't been detected yet that they found were effective. They sort of manipulated the components of some various performance enhancing drugs. And that's where they got that stuff that they called the clear that they were giving allegedly to Barry Bonds and a bunch of different people and i had conte on the podcast and he sort of explained the whole process behind all that stuff he's he's a fascinating cat because

now he's kind of working hard to stop doping in sports which is like really a weird position to take when that was your whole career was like juicing guys up i think i saw him on like dateline or something yeah i mean i don't know recently i don't know how i feel about that it's weird it is very strange but i also don't know how i feel i mean these guys that were on the testosterone guys like vitor vitor is the poster boy right for test because if you've seen the photos of him now like pre and post man is really crazy dude yeah pull this photo of uh vitor uh pre and post trt because uh you know he's been saying you know i'm not on trt anymore now it's just tnt and so then chris weidman posts hold on is this what happens when you replace trt with tnt and he shows a picture of trt vitor

versus the recent vitor who's off testosterone, and he has shrunken. I mean, he has really, like Luke Rockhold just said that he has a chicken neck now. I mean, it's weird. And that's going to get to him. You know what the easiest thing to do to get a guy in the gym, a big, like... Now, that's the wrong photos because that's a photo of him before testosterone replacement and after. What you want to see is... During and after.

Chris Weidman comments on Vitor Belfort TRT and look for a photo. The guys will be like, well, I didn't really need it. It's like, then why were you taking it? Yeah, how can you say that? Yeah, of course. And you look at him. But there's definitely all kinds of stuff at play. That will dramatically affect his confidence.

Oh, yeah. And his confidence. How you throw in spinning head kicks at a guy, because you've got this level of confidence. He says, I can do it. That's not going to just affect how he looks and what he can do. It will affect the way he performs without question. Yeah, shrink that down so we can see the full image. Yeah, wow.

Look at this. Look at his body. Like on the right-hand side, it looks like he's lost at least 15 pounds. Yeah, and his neck and the swelling under his chin that's crazy his neck has shrunk his traps look at the difference in the left picture like how high his traps are and the right picture it's nuts i mean his body is shrinking but it looks so different yeah it uh it's a strange one too because you go into a gym with bodybuilders, you want to get a guy just freaking out. He's like, oh, he looks smaller today.

Don't lose that shit. Those guys especially. Yeah. But, I mean, a guy's been walking around in the world with the craziest body that you've ever seen. And now people online go, and he's got a chicken neck. That's going to affect his choices from here. It's a tough place to be for him. You've got to stay offline.

Yeah, yeah. For sure. For sure. He's definitely going to hear about all these things it's a tough place to stay offline yeah yeah for sure for sure yeah he's definitely going to hear about all these things that people are saying about him and it's interesting because people are saying like on the underground people are speculating like maybe this is going to make vitor start using again and if he does start using again then he's going to piss hot you know and it's all also about like they're testing these guys. Who's testing them? Where are they testing them? How are they being tested? You know, is it going to come down to the UFC has to show up at the gym every day while a fighter's training and have them pee in a cup every day?

I mean, is that— Yeah, good point. What is the way to tell if a guy's taking anything? Right. Because you can—the problem with urine tests especially because like guys would joke around about it they would say it's not even a drug test it's an intelligence test you know that if you if you test positive when they're testing your urine you're a fucking idiot because the ls stuff like oral testosterone is out of your system within 24

hours uh human growth hormone is out of your system within 10 hours. You can't even test, I don't think, human growth hormone without using blood. I don't even think you can test in urine. So these guys that were getting popped, they were just doing it completely wrong. So now that there's this really stringent testing, you got to think, well, guys are cheating in the Olympics. If they're cheating in the Olympics, how are they getting away away with it that's like some of the most stringent testing ever they're because they know when they're going to be tested it's a new protocol yeah a new thing it's like okay at three o'clock in the morning you set your alarm you take this one at three you know you drink this many liters of something before you do that yeah they'll find a way i mean it's because the game is to try

to win then try to win every little scenario. And the doctor who's trying to fix this thing, he's got a game to try to win too. People are motivated to try to do great things. And this doctor's assignment in life, your assignment in life, well, you have 20, you know, you'll make people laugh and call fights and do a million things. But his is to beat drug tests. This doctor, this one doctor here, his his is to beat drug tests this doctor this one doctor here his goal is to go out there wake up tomorrow and fucking figure out how to win this contest of beating this test you know yeah i'm i'm really curious to see what's going to happen to these guys that were on testosterone replacement and now they're off because chael sundin's retired he's he's out of

the business but vitor still in it and vitor is one of the few guys from 1997 when he made his debut that is at the elite level today in 2014 and is ready to fight for a title so it's it's really interesting it's really really interesting but hormones are a weird thing too i uh thyroid burned out. And I never thought of this until like – this is how stupid. Like I grew up by a nuclear power plant like in this town called Pinawa, Manitoba. There's like a nuclear research plant there. If they fixed it up, you take a hormone, two hormones that take your T3 and T4, and the other one is thyroid, TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone. Those three things go out of whack when your thyroid is off. You feel like shit, like you can't function when your hormones go out of whack like that.

So imagine somebody, I don't know what it would be like to have your testosterone at that level, but it's got to throw you the fuck out of whack. Yeah, well, these guys that get off of it, the thing is when you take testosterone, you put this artificial testosterone in your body, your body stops producing regular testosterone. So if they had low tests before, it's even lower now because your body stops taking it. You're injecting all this stuff into your system. And, you know, he's only 37 years old. taking it you're injecting all the stuff into your system and you know he's only 37 years old this is it's a weird thing to have like old man testosterone levels at 36 37 years old and then to have to face a fucking beast like chris weidman knowing that vitor belfort like when he fought um michael bisping when he fought luke rockhold when he fought Dan Henderson, all these guys, he was on this artificial stuff.

And it was making him super confident. He was built. He was strong. He was super explosive. And now all that's gone. And now he's still got technique. And Weidman's a motherfucker. He's a motherfucker.

And he's like, man, you look at that guy. You look at what... He's a weird one, too. You don't even look at him and think he's just a modern amalgamation. He's just genetically better than us. He's more handsome than us. He's funnier than us. He's more confident than us.

He's genetically better than 97, 99% of all men on earth. And he learns fast and he's incredibly driven. And he grew up wrestling. And just the thing about wrestlers, they just spend their whole time dominating other men. That's all they're about growing up. They dominate other men physically. That's who that guy grew up with. Then he learns well.

He's got the best coaches. Everyone believes in him. A guy like that. We called that he was going to beat Anderson Silva. He was in our studio and we're talking to him. And you talked to this guy in advance. And he fucking believed without a shadow of a doubt he was going to beat him. Even turned down, remember this, he turned down his contract renewal and said, no, I'll beat him, and then I'll sign my new contract.

I know I'll have to beat him twice. Everything he said came true. Everything. Yeah, he's an animal. Yeah, that's crazy. And he did it all with his knees all fucked up. A lot of people don't know, he couldn't even bring his heel up to his ass. His knees were so arthritic.

And then he went and got that Regenikine done in Germany. And then after he had that done, he still had to get his knees scoped. But against Liotto, his knees were great. And now he's throwing kicks at him and shit. And he's a different animal. He's an unusual dude. He really is. He can take it, too.

That's the other thing about Weidman. Like, Liotto unloaded on him in the fifth round, and he was still there. Kind of asking for more. Yeah, fourth and fifth round. When he was at Fight Network, he had a couple hours to kill until he went to the airport, and he was hanging out, and Ram Dean started playing him in ping pong. And Ram Dean was getting a slight better of him. He fucking got dead serious.

I want a better paddle. I'm not fucking around here. Dead serious. And he's like, I don't like to lose. He's pacing. He's still having serious. I want a better paddle. I'm not fucking around here. Dead serious. And he's like, I don't like to lose. He's pacing. Still having fun. We're having a great time. But he did not want to lose that game. It was not in him to let this guy beat him at ping pong.

He's not a ping pong guy even. He just is not having it. Just not having it. There's a lot of guys like that. I played Jake Ellenberger pool once. And Ellenberger who's a fucking stud. He's not very good at pool. and i've been playing pool a long time and he's fucking every time i was winning he's like shit damn it like you can see like he was handling it but he didn't like it yeah you know like but that's the quality that makes them great fighters that that unwillingness to lose you know the guy who wants to fight you if you fucking beat him at pinball

you know like that that's that quality that makes them a great fighter hating losing yeah once you're getting at this point where these guys are the top top guys they have to have all of it they have to have that quality they have to have that genetics they have to have those coaches they have to have that mental game or else there's just no way that That's how good the whole level is now. It's still getting better. It's shocking. Ellen Berger had that fight with Rory and he's never been a shit talker. And all of a sudden he was talking all kinds of shit on Twitter

and stuff. And when he got in there it raised that pressure so high that it wasn't that I gotta beat this guy. It was I just can't lose bad to a guy I called a fruit stick on the internet. And the pressure of it. That's why when people are so excited about Jon Jones and Daniel Cormier, I'm like, although it's great.

I love that people are into a fight. I love that there'll be a million more people than normally watching a fight. I love that. That's awesome. But for me personally, I just want to see them fight. They're going to fight whether they hate each other or not. They're going to go in there and we're going to see 25 minutes or less of these two

guys putting together their lifetime of everything to fight. Whether or not that guy hates that guy isn't really all that relevant to me. Yeah, I agree with you. I was torn on that whole thing because part of me loves the fact they're fucking with each other and getting into each other's heads

but i think that it it does it's not a good representation of mixed martial arts to see two guys who are at the elite level have a street fight like that i hated that i loved when they were talking with no mic on yeah because that was real that was funny when john jones puts the microphone he goes hey pussy are you there that's amazing him and then i would kill you i would kill you i would literally kill you literally kill you and he's like john you think i would kill you i would kill you i would literally kill you literally kill you but when they john you think i would just let you kill me yeah that's come on daniel you can do better i'm a big cormier guy man i'm although john jones is absolutely brilliant but when they fought

each other on a stage i hated that stupid like like two of the best athletes in the world and that's the worst fight i've ever seen i don't want no part of that it's bad people are going oh you watch that show you work in that business look at these idiots that's terrible but when they were talking about each other with the camera on that's real and there's so little real in the world you fucking win some some uh like hip-hop award and you got to thank god and your fucking producer and you and you know i just feel so blessed and i want to thank the fans it's like fucking bullshit. Let me see what you say when there's not everybody there.

Yeah, that's the thing about that, getting John and Daniel. Apparently that video was pulled. Yeah, it was more. Apparently when they said, guys, you're on the internet. I think again it's Melcher might have that. Hey guys, you're being shot.

This could be around the world. And Jones' face just went like holy shit he was like he realized you know that was the that's the best part i don't know why that part didn't get shared well they you know everybody's trying to put up an image like john's his depiction of what happened when he first met daniel i was just trying to make a new friend like what they both told the exact same story only he said he i did this this this he did that this happened he was a dick and i got yeah i did this this this happened but i was just fucking around but it's they tell the exact same story well he wasn't even saying he was fucking around he's like i was just trying to form a new friendship like what the fuck you were you're trying to let some

dudes in your division know that you're the fucking king. You ain't taking me down. He was trying to let him know. He was trying to fuck with his head and let the gamesmanship begin. And that stuff is definitely, that's all interesting because that's all real too. That's all having a real effect on the outcome of a fight. All of that mental stuff. Guys at the weigh-ins, how they act.

I mean, you've seen the science where they looked at the smiles at the weigh-ins. No, there's a science to it? Yeah, these guys. So check that out on the internet. These researchers, these sociologists go, and they looked at hundreds or thousands of UFC weigh-ins, and they found that guys who smiled lost an extremely large percentage of them. Really? Yeah, for real. Wow.

For real. And because that moment is a moment of the starting of the conflict between the two males, between the two alpha males. It doesn't start when the cage chorus starts. It starts when we're setting the tone of who's who in there. And when the smile is a giveaway of a certain kind. There's two kinds of smile. One's called the Cheshire smile.

And it is a smile of I'm going to fucking kill you. And that one doesn't count. They look at the actual types of smiles. It's real. It's fascinating. That one doesn't count. No, because it's a different expression. You can look at slivers of expression in psychology and what they mean, and that one means something different.

Isn't that fascinating, the difference in like understanding the facial expressions like human beings kind of get when someone's creepy but like would a robot be able to figure that out you know study finds smiling fighters are losing fighters yeah but that's not always true john dodson smiles every fight that's not a good example no but he smiled before he fucks people up, too. The math. You look at the math, and it's like whatever the numbers are. There are exceptions. They might lose whatever, 68% of the time, or 63. That's higher than the 50 that you would think,

but that still means there's 32% of other guys who smile and kick ass. It just shows that there is a sway in the statistical truth of that. That's funny. Donald Cerrone and Anthony Pettis. Actually, I did a breakdown. I'll send it to you of what the impression of alpha male posturing,

the effect that that has on fighting. So, you know, like guys will stand there and they'll project a certain posture. There was research done at the University of Harvard, Harvard University, about alpha posture and what happens if you're interviewing me for a job and I have a certain posture and they talk to you after, you'll score me much higher of your opinion of me. Also, yeah, and that affects your – when we go to fight and I – like Uriah Faber has that a lot and he projects a certain thing and that will affect your performance but the math the science actually shows that it affects his performance as well because there's certain postures that when you do them your testosterone raises a measurable amount and your cortisol drops a measurable amount just by doing a certain physical posture what yeah it's real physical posture makes your cortisol drop and your testosterone well instead of testosterone

therapy why don't guys just posture all day? Some guys do. Would that really work? Well, there's a few of them and a big one. Somebody tell Vitor. Yeah, exactly. Just drive that shit all the way up. His neck will swell up again.

There's traps. It's a Harvard research. And they did it to measure your biological responses to your own physical posture, but also there's an interpretation of the other guy. So I broke that down, and then I took a piece of Donald Cerrone standing there looking over at Pettis, and then I've superimposed what Cerrone said after, and he said, I looked across the cage at him, and I looked at him, and I thought, dang, I pissed him off, and he's coming hard.

And it was the worst performance he's ever had. And he talks openly. Cerrone's fascinating because Cerrone's a regular guy who deals with fear and uses it appropriately. And he talked about looking over and he literally said, I saw that guy. And he said, after I knew I had to see a psychiatrist, like a sports psychologist or a psychologist, because there's no way I should be about to fight a guy. And the thing that's going through my mind is, oh, man, I pissed him off. Never should happen. But it was in part the posture of Pettis that projected that on him. That's interesting.

All each of these guys who wear red win a slight percentage larger. All of a sudden, GSP is wearing red every time. Really? Because guys are looking for 1% and 2% incremental raises. And there are certain guys anyways. Why does red make you win more? I don't know Oh, but I mean Mike Tyson always wore black. Yeah. Well Mike Tyson was Mike That's okay

It's probably something that you see in the wild when you see, you know a certain color in nature and it has an effect on you Red yes. Yeah, each of these things might be one or two percent. In the end, if you can't fucking fight, it doesn't matter. Right. So if you have the physical skills and you have the technique

and then you add on those other things. Yeah, imagine both guys at the top level have all that. They both have the best strength and conditioning on earth.

They both have the entire human history of fighting skills. They both have all the mental training. They have all that shit. Shit, man, if I could get

half a percentage of increase on my side in any way, let's stack up two or three of those half percentages. I wonder what the red thing is. That's a weird one. It's true in all sports. Really? Sports teams that wear red have won

a slightly larger percentage of time than any other color. Really? Yeah. Wow. Why red? I don't know, man. This is the kind of shit that fascinates me. You know, they also say that red sports cars get pulled over more. Yeah. Wow. Why red? I don't know, man. This is the kind of shit that fascinates me.

They also say that red sports cars get pulled over more. It's something in nature. It's something that we probably had to deal with as a threat evolutionary. Well, red is a threatening thing. If you see an animal that's red, like a snake that's red, you assume that that's a snake that could poison you. But animals, there's no red predators, are there? Are there? There might have been certain thousands of years ago.

T-Rex or some shit. Yeah, of course. And sports red is a winning color. Fascinating. So they start stacking up all these sciences. So now I got years worth of fucking breakdowns I can do just from all these things, reading and looking.

It's like you start to combine them. You got the evolutionary the evolutionary hand and you got the jaw and you got red winning you got alpha posture you put all that shit together what the fuck does that mean that's what I'm doing with my life that's interesting you know I also am fascinated and I want to bring this back to you um competing at such a lightweight I'm fascinated by the science of weight cutting and the negative aspects of weight cutting. This is an important part of MMA. And one of the best examples, in my opinion, is Anthony Rumble Johnson.

Anthony Rumble Johnson, who fought at 170 for the majority of the first stint of his UFC career, fought one fight at 185 with Vitor Belfort, actually didn't even make the weight, was overweight, got cut from the UFC. And then started fighting heavyweight. Fucked up Andrzej Orlowski as a heavyweight. Was destroying guys.

Broke his jaw, I think. Yeah, in the first round. Almost stopped him. Really, probably they should have stopped that fight. Then fought in the UFC as a light heavyweight. Two fights in a row. Has just been a murderer. Phil Davis is a world-class dude.

Couldn't take Phil Davis, couldn't take him down, and just got battered on the feet, and then destroyed Little Nog in the first round, 40 seconds of the first round, just lit him up like a Christmas tree. And looks like the scariest guy in the world at 205 pounds when his first career was 35 pounds lighter than that. That's crazy.

I remember seeing him in Ohio, and I was sitting in the stands. It was Rampage versus Keith Jardine. And I was sitting in the stands, and there's these pretty girls. Look at the size of him. What the fuck? He's amazing, man. What fight is that? Staples Center.

It's probably... Was that Phil Davis? No. I didn't see it. It's Anthony Jones. No, Staples Center. It's probably... Was that Phil Davis? No. I didn't see. It's Anthony Jones. No, it's Staples Center. That might have been him when he fought at 170, which is ridiculous. Crazy.

But I saw him, and there was these hot girls, and like eight UFC fighters walked over. Oh, hi. Great to see you. And I was like, oh, okay. Those are the Ohio chicks, right? Mm-hmm. And Anthony walks over just to say hello. I don't know how...

They might have fucking had a real job. I don't know. I projected that on him because they were pretty. And he goes over. That's him at 170. I turned to my buddy and I'm like, that huge guy, that fucking enormous guy looks a lot like Anthony Johnson. And it was Anthony Johnson at like 240 pounds when he was at 170. Yeah.

So, but yeah, I mean, the weight cutting thing. I don't know how he did that. Yeah, I don't know. He almost killed himself probably doing it. And I mean, if we're talking about measuring things

that really work, looking at the math of like, is this better than this? Okay, great. You're eight pounds heavier than the other guy. That raises your, let's say your,

if we're going to score your likelihood of winning, it raises it 6%. Well, it's the point of diminishing returns. Yeah. What if it drops you 8% because's the point of diminishing returns. Yeah. What if it drops you 8% because of the weight cut and stuff? It's true.

For me, I mean, all of this was a learning experience so I could be a real analyst. That's what I wanted to do. So cutting weight was an experience that I really needed to have and understand it. But it just, wrestlers did it. They were good at it. Wrestlers were beating everybody and they were bigger

and everyone else was like, we got to do this. And I think you're right. I think you're absolutely right. You've got to see guys get away from it eventually. Get away from that huge weight cut. Well, I wish guys didn't cut weight at all. I mean, I really wish they fought and everyone made an agreement to fight at what you weigh.

But everybody wants this advantage. But the problem is when both guys are seeking an advantage and they both try to achieve that advantage, what you actually wind up happening is you have both guys that are fighting not to the best extent of their abilities. And so instead, neither guy has an advantage and both guys are compromised. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. And it's also dangerous when it comes to combat sports. The difference between wrestling, which is a combat sport,

but it's not a contact sport in terms of concussive blows. Where you're dealing with striking, there's a big difference. Almost all of the instances of brain damage and death that occurred in boxing because of boxing matches were lighter weight fights, not brain damage. The heavyweight guys, of course, got that as well. But in fights where guys had bleeding on the brain and then wound up dying. Almost all of them.

There was one recent one that was a heavyweight bout with Eric Perez, a fought a Russian guy, and the guy had some swelling of the brain and his career's probably over. That was just a prolonged beating, an unusual situation. Whereas like Boom Boom Mancini and Duck Kukim, that was a a prolonged beating unusual situation whereas like boom boom mancini and duck who kim that was a severe weight cut um gerald mcclellan severe weight cut a lot of fighters who wound up having like horrible tragedies inside the ring it was because they

had depleted themselves they dehydrated themselves and then they got beat up yeah if there's there's got to be a death in you know a high level mma one day and and you'd have you would guess that if there was dehydration in the brain that would add to it for sure well a guy died in brazil from cutting weight yeah yeah right right yeah yeah yeah it's true it was liver or kidney failure kidney failure yeah which almost happened to daniel cormier when he competed in the olympics he had kidney failure and they pulled him out of the olympics yeah and that big weight cut that do, one of the tools they use is hyperhydration, where you use a ton of distilled water to flush all your sodium.

But it also is like a kidney trick, where it's actually tricking your kidney to perform a certain way. It's really risky. Yeah, I think in the long run, if everybody just said, yeah, let's just fight it. Sam Stout and KJ Nunes had a fight up in Quebec City. And they just like two days out, they're like, how much you weighing, man? I'm weighing about 171. What about you? Like 170.

You want to just fight at 170? And they just did it. Yeah, that's smart. Yeah. It is smart. I mean, why torture yourself? Especially you're both doing it. Yeah.

It just doesn't make any sense. If you're both walking around at 185 and you're both cutting down to 175, fight at 185. You know, you probably both fight better. The trick is that everything's that arms race we were talking about. Everything is somebody looking for an advantage to win. So we agree to do it, but then I'm lying and I actually cut 15 pounds and now I'm way bigger than you. You know what I mean? Until you find a way to make it have to happen or make something that both guys adhere to

for some reason that's safe, this is the way they're going to do it. Yeah. It's interesting. BJ Penn has a weird way of looking at things because BJ, although he dropped down to 145 pounds when he fought Frankie Edgar in his last fight, would not IV. Yeah. And Dolce tried to get him to IV. He wouldn't do it. He feels like IVs are cheating. would not IV. Yeah. And, you know, and Dolce tried to get him to IV. He wouldn't do it.

He feels like IVs are cheating. That's weird. Yeah. The IV's cheating, but cutting weight's not cheating? Yeah, I know. It's weird. So, like, dehydrating yourself, getting on the scale at 145, and then drinking water's okay, but...

Yeah, but putting it into you a different route is not okay. Yeah, there's something about, like, needles. It's not natural, I like needles it's not natural i guess the idea i think most guys wouldn't agree he's a unique one though man but a lot of debate over in our office with a few friends and stuff about his place in the world personally like i think bj penn's one of the greats ever for a million reasons and other guys like certain people will say well his record says this or he never beat you know there's reasons to that people argue it but i think the biggest thing is pure talent and one thing i think people sort of forget you see a guy and you go to a guy's back and you trap his arm in there with the hook that's a bj pen you take a guy on the fence and you turn your body

sideways and you elbow him when you're defending the single, that's a BJ Penn. Did we really see that at all before he fought Diego Sanchez? When you've got a guy in a triangle but he hides his arm over here and you press the straight armbar against your face until he gives you the triangle, that's a BJ Penn. There's all of these things that he did. I don't know. It's a weird one. At the very least, he should be considered one of the most beloved fighters of all time. Well, he is a great fighter, for sure.

And he's a, you know, two-division champion. He's, without a doubt, he's an all-time great. What I think about BJ is that BJ, at his very best, was outside of his comfort zone. He brought in Marinovich to do strength and conditioning, and he just got in this unbelievable condition. And when he fought Diego Sanchez, he was probably at his best. He was just a destroyer. And he had incredible endurance. I mean, he fought and, you know, he had the same, like, pace

deep into the fight that he did at the beginning of the fight. And that's what plagued BJ. BJ's just extremely, extremely talented, extremely game, very aggressive, but didn't like to train hard, didn't like to push himself, didn't like to get outside. I mean, you know, he'll dispute that. Of course he trained hard. But did he train the way he trained when he was with the Marinoviches? Like you would talk about how he couldn't even hold his kid at night because he was so tired. But that's what it takes to be at that kind of level. And he didn't like that. And we're sort of on this hand saying absolutely one of the greats ever.

And the other side of the debate, that's one of them. And another one was I think his choices, his career choices, misunderstanding messages that I think were given to him when fighting. And I think the biggest one, he fought Frankie Edgar and he lost. And a big thing in his brain was, see, he doesn't cut weight. He's the smaller man and he's faster. I'm going to go back up to 170 and I'll be the Frankie Edgar of 170. You know what I mean?

Frankie Edgar at 155, him at 170 is theoretically his interpretation of the same approach. I'm the smaller guy. I'm the quicker guy. Enough with this other bullshit. I'm just smaller guy. I'm the quicker guy. Enough with this other bullshit. I'm just better. I'm going to beat guys. And then he fought guys like Rory and fucking Nick Diaz and these monsters. There's no way this 145 pounder should be in there with Rory McDonald,

just size and athleticism. He should have never been a 145er either, I don't think. I think he looked like this skinny, emaciated version of BJ Penn when he was there. I mean, yeah, you can make the weight if you just don't eat any food, but then your body eats itself. Like, that's not smart either. And then him at 170 was not like Frankie Edgar at 155. Frankie Edgar at 155 is ripped.

He's in shape. He's moving fast. BJ had a role. You know, he looked pudgy. He looked soft. He just didn't look like the same guy. And he fought well. He's a very good fighter.

But his physical, the correct weight for him, I will always think is 155 pounds. Or if there was a 150 maybe, if that existed. Well, I think 55 is fine. When he fought Diego Sanchez at 55, it was perfect. I think the issue was that BJ needed to be outside of his comfort zone. The issue was that BJ needed to be outside of his comfort zone. He needed to be away from that camp and be with a Matt Hume-type guy who organized his entire camp, brought in high-level guys, dictated his training, and took him outside of his comfort zone.

Yeah. But he also likes being in Hawaii. He likes training in Hawaii. There's a lot there. There's that 10,000 hours theory, right? There's a couple of guys who have done hard research under this. And one guy, there's a book called Talent is Overrated. And it's buying that.

It doesn't matter what you were born with. If you outwork everybody, you'll be the man. And the other one is called the sports gene, right? And it's the opposite. It doesn't matter how fucking hard you work. If you don't have that gene, you can't do it. Of course, the truth is somewhere probably in the middle. Well, the truth is most certainly in the middle. The issue is when you got a guy who's got excellent genetics and is working hard, then you get a John Jones. You get a guy who has fantastic genetics and is super disciplined and focused and trains very hard. That's when you get true elite athletes like Jose Aldo.

You get the elite of the elite when you have the best of both worlds. When you got a guy who works really hard, but he has shit genetics, he will never achieve greatness. They just don't. I think you could get close to it even five years ago. Like we mentioned Florian. Florian doesn't have no genes. He was just really smart smart and he worked really,

really hard. And look how close he got. Close, but not quite there because he just didn't have the genetics to do it. But he sure as fuck got close for a nerdy little cat from Boston. Well, he didn't have terrible genetics. I mean, he was fast. He had good kicks. He had great jujitsu. It's just these elite of the elite the bj pen guys the guys who just he they have that little something extra you know these these leota machitas these you know there's there's guys that just have they have everything they have genetics like weidman genetics and hard work and focus and mental toughness and breeding his family was good his family took care of him pointed taught him the things he needed to learn.

Like, he had all of it. His dad was an NFL player. You know, so it's like, those genetics are strong. You know, that's all a big thing. And also, I think growing up with brothers. There's a lot of fighters that grow up with big brothers. They're used to fighting in the house all the time. And those guys wind up being motherfuckers, man, like Matt Hughes.

Matt Hughes and his brother. His brother was a mirror. He's got a twin brother who's also a savage, and they beat the fuck out of each other all the time. And when you have that sort of an environment, man, you're extra tough. You're extra strong. John Jones, he has two super athlete brothers.

And one of them is just so big. 340. He weighs 340. And he's still to this day. And it's vertical. You see this guy's vertical. It's crazy. That's not human.

Super athlete. Certainly not. If you came from outer space and you looked down and you saw a pit bull and a chihuahua, you wouldn't think those are the same animals. Right. You saw me and John Jones' big brother, you wouldn't think we're the same thing. Exactly. You would just be like, oh, look, there's two different

kinds of stuff. This one's small and this one's 340. Yeah, Bridget the Midget and Shaquille O'Neal. They're two completely different things. Yeah, but they're the same species. Yeah, there's genetics that are just undeniable. And if you've got a guy who's got those fantastic genetics and he is

just engrossed in MMA, I mean, his body, his mind, his focus, he lives it, breathes it, eats it, sleeps it, gets up in the morning and thinks, how do I get better? That guy's going to be better than you. And also there's physical power, especially when it comes to striking. Physical power when it comes to striking is something you're either born with or you're not. Dominic Cruz is not born with it.

He breaks his hands all the time, and his body's kind of fragile in a way. He's got the mind for it. Yes, but will he be able to beat a guy like Barau? Will he be able to beat the guys who have the genetics and have that physical power as well?

There's these guys that have that knockout power. Anthony Rebel Johnson. There's a God-given gift. The world has given him a hand of cards, and it is excellent. And then you put him with Henry Hooft, who has a God-given gift to take guys like that and make them better. And now we're terrified. It's fucking scary. And, man, the beauty of how he moves is, like, I trained with a guy, Evan Boris, who's a kickboxing coach who trained with Henry.

He was one of the guys carrying his bucket and learning from him. And he's just as passionate. Young guy up in Toronto. And he tells me all. He gives me insight into how Henry thinks and, you know, tries to show me stuff to, you know, in through Henry's eyes. So you feel like you're learning, you know, one step down from this master, right? Through Henry's eyes. So you feel like you're learning one step down from this master, right?

And so his thing is with a guy like Anthony Johnson is that Henry Hooft is – we'll say to him, you know, you got to be ready. If you are ready, you don't got to get ready. That's the essential fundamental plan of Anthony Johnson, the way he stands and the way he moves is at all times you're in a type of balance where you can deliver power. Because you have power, and we just need to keep you in a spot where you can deliver it all the time. So his takedown defense revolves around that, the way his footwork works revolves around that. It's all built so that at any moment in time,

when you throw a punch, you're in the state to be able to smash with it because you have that gift. Yeah, and also when you see a guy like Hooft or anyone who teaches that classic dutch style of kickboxing it's such a technical style and that style can be lost on someone who doesn't understand what's going on is that every movement has a purpose every technique has a purpose every technique chains into another technique the left hook leads to the right low kick and all these

these techniques they go together like bread and butter they just they they they're they're a part of a system you know and duane ludwig is the best at breaking down it says like he's got books like he was over my house the other day and he had all these books of detail all his techniques and how they intertwine together and what's his steps and levels and he has a whole belt system based around these techniques i mean he's spent countless hours analyzing and and and categorizing and putting all this stuff together and that's what sort of lost on a lot of people that you illuminate very well with your breakdowns thank you i appreciate that man i can't tell you like how when when i wanted to do that i wanted to do it for people

like you and bang ledwig and fighters and and people in the i wanted them to do it for people like you and Bang Ledwig and fighters and people in the business. I wanted them to like it. You know what? And it fucking means the world to me that people like it. Well, you break down jiu-jitsu, too. You broke down Eddie's match with Hoyler. Yeah. Yeah.

Jiu-jitsu is something I trained a lot for a while. And then I was in an environment where I was literally in one day heel hooked by three guys who intended to injure me. It was a really bad environment. Who were you rolling with? Not a rat, but it was like you know people and there were just guys in the gym but there was a little culture of guys who like who's that fucking guy wears makeup he's on tv he thinks he's a fucking and they like came after me one day and so i started and they were trying to hurt you yeah on purpose for sure going for heel hooks specifically two of them were specifically heel hooks for the purpose of trying to injure me one day.

Wow. And later I heard, I'd heard from a number of people that that was a bit of the MO of a couple. Anyways, it's one of those things. So I kind of got away from it for a while. And then I started reading Eddie's books, actually. I'm going to train at his place tomorrow night. Eddie's? Yeah.

And I trained. Last time I was in LA, I trained over there. Fuck, you take one class with Eddie Bravo and your whole understanding of everything you think you know about jiu-jitsu,

the whole thing fucking falls apart. Like, it's so crazy that you sit there and it's like, these are positions people use.

You know, whatever, we'll take 10 or 15 of them. And the guy goes and in between, as you know, obviously, in between each of those

there's an entire universe of stuff to do. In between the positions that people already know as positions, entire worlds. Eddie has done a fantastic job of not just incorporating his own techniques, but incorporating other people's techniques into his style as well. other people's techniques into his style as well and just spent just like Dwayne countless hours analyzing positions and using them in the lab using them in the gym and using them with high-level guys and figuring out like a guy in his gym will come up with some new variation on a specific technique and then they'll add it to the rotation and then the right they'll drill it and then they'll try from another angle and yeah yeah yeah I remember when I was there just that one time,

and I had trained with Eddie. We met in Toronto one time, and I took him out for a bunch of drinks. It was funny. He's a really cool dude. It's really cool to have a buddy like that. And have him invite me to his gym and stuff. And I got his books, and you see, okay, I understand mission control. Make sure you got the leg locked, the invisible collar, dewclaw,

all that kind of basic stuff. You read a little bit about his basics. You read a little bit about Twister side control and the Twister. And then you think you have an idea of what the Eddie Bravo system is if you read that. I thought, well, in the world of guys who know about MMA, I think I know.

You take one class with him, you don't know fucking anything. There was something we did from some truck position, and my first curiosity was, I need to know how this guy's brain thinks, like why he thinks these, how he comes up with this shit,

because there was something that felt a lot like a lockdown position from another angle upside down while holding a leg. And I'm like, okay, well, his brain. Well, there's a lot of techniques. You can reverse the positions of the bodies and just say, well, if I'm on my back i get a guy with a triangle what happens if i'm not on my back

but i'm on his back right and i'm behind him and then i can i catch triangle there yeah it's kind of the same thing the arm is there it's like um remember when matt hughes choked out ricardo almeida yeah yeah that front choke and that they they TP'd up with his head, I think. And that's essentially an arm triangle, but it's an arm triangle from a completely different position, from a head-to-head position. It's a weird thing, but it's the same position. It's still choking off the neck on one side with the forearm and then with your own neck and your own body pressing against it on the other side. And that element of wrestling where that was sort of a bulldog kind of wrestling kind of stuff. The Schultz headlock.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the weird, like to either in the moment or have trained at either one is amazing. To figure out that the angle of elevating your hips so high drove that extra thing. Like all those little elements made it beautiful. But you have a black belt under Machado as well yes that's fucking crazy yeah you have two you have a gi black belt and a black belt in the system well i started training in 96 you know and so when you were training in 96 and guys would say oh there's some purple belt coming through town everybody was blown away back then right like was that the level no no not in 96 in

96 um well there was a few purple belts i mean i started out at um um carlson gracie's yeah so i took one class at hickson's see back then in 96 i didn't know that there was a difference between carlson gracie and hickson gracie it was just gracie jujitsu and the only reason why i went from carlson's to hickson's that hickson's was all the way across town. Carlson's is much closer to me. It was like a 20-minute difference in the drive, so I just started going to Carlson's. And that was when Vitor had just made his debut against John Hess, and they were actually calling him Victor Gracie. And I even accidentally referred to him as Victor Gracie during one of the things that I did for the UFC in 1997, UFC 12, when I first

started working for him, baby-faced. That's fucking crazy. UFC 12, yeah, think about that, man. How long have you been doing that? I've said this a few times. I don't know if you probably don't realize it because when you're in stuff, you don't do often, people that are driven don't often pause to look and be proud of what they've done.

Maybe, hopefully you do that but that you actually invented this the idea of commentating the sport which is very different than any other one and there's so many things that people you think are just terms but they're terms that you said do you know what i mean things that you said that are common descriptive things they think they've always existed but they didn't exist before you said them in a lot of cases. And that's really a wild thing, the influence in how people observe this great sport and how big an influence that is. Well, I definitely don't think about it. But the difference between this sport and a lot of other sports is that this sport, the play-by-play guy is not the play-by-play guy the color guy is the guy who's the expert the martial arts expert essentially has to be the play-by-play guy as well because he has to break down the subtle

nuances of positions to people that are watching at home especially when it comes to the ground there's a big issue with explaining jujitsu to people that don't know jujitsu so they can enjoy it because if someone doesn't know like why is that guy hurting like what's what's what's going on there ufc one what happened there exactly there's especially when it comes to the ground game there's a bunch of positions that need to be illuminated so when when fights are happening i'm calling like i'm doing a play-by-play slash color job like i'm also i'm giving like if you watch boxing the color guy will say you know they'll sort of like give you like an overall assessment of what's going on but jim lampley who's the play by play guy will explain like the shots that are landing and this and that that's going on and then

the color guy will say well he needs to do that or he says the what and he says the how and the why yes and when i worked with morrow i did like a few dozen shows with morrow and uh he uh explains to you that in his case he knows it so he will do the what and your job is the how and the why so when you do color with morrow it is he does it old school which is why he's so natural at boxing right you know he transitioned into boxing so naturally because he was an actual play-by-play guy. But the odd thing, and I'm a fucking full-on moral fan, and he had a huge influence in helping with a lot of stuff. But because if you're a play-by-play guy and you're not really obsessed, if you're not deep into it, you will start to get certain things where you are missing out on stuff. So he might say, you know, he's on his back.

Why doesn't he put the hooks in? Well, he wants to ride heavy on the hip. He doesn't want the hooks. He wants to ride, you know. And so you start to sort of project what you think is next. And that's why when you do color, you're saying what is happening and what might happen. Well, there's a difference between, Mauro doesn't train. train right he's not a black belt he doesn't you you you have to be i really believe that you have well i don't know if you have to be a black belt but you have to be a high level

grappler to understand the nuances and you've i think you also should have some competition in your life some form of it where you understand the psychology behind competing, rising to the occasion, what's going on in that moment, when you see a guy who's breaking. You can learn a lot by watching, but I think doing is really important and critical when it comes to breaking down jujitsu. I've seen, like I was watching a Pride the other day, and someone, one of the guys, it wasn't Boss, it was whoever he was doing it with was um talking about a position and it was saying that he couldn't choke this guy out because the arm is in on the

guillotine like he didn't know one time guys didn't know yeah but that's hilarious it's crazy but what time was that it was like 93 like people knew in 93 that arm and guillotines were legit so like watching this this was clearly a guy who doesn't grab. I think it was Quadros. It was a guy who doesn't grapple. He doesn't understand. And he's just going on his limited book of knowledge. But it's not based on, it's not an extensive, comprehensive, like encyclopedia of training and knowledge and of being obsessed with combat sports.

For sure. Chiavello I worked with too. And fuck is that guy that guy fun he's great he's so fucking fun to work with dude he's such a good dude and he's having so much fun and trust me i'd like if if moro hears me talking about him and he thinks i'm being critical it will hurt him he's a fucking very tender dude but i'm not i think moro's a fucking genius i think he's's killing boxing. I think he's absolutely great. He's amazing. He's great at glory, too Yeah, he was a good dude. I like more. Oh, yes He really does love fighting, you know It's just what we're saying is just there's a reality of the difference between a play-by-play guy and the color expert position

yeah, and that's why he's such a good play-by-play guy and And just you know, he can call it and you're right The expert color is what's really going on. If you were in this place, what would it feel like? I think that guy on the couch, he doesn't know what it feels like. Even just to have a guy drive his shoulder under your face to turn you sideways, he doesn't know what that feels like. It's fucking terrible.

And you've got to take care of that before you take care of any other thing. And there's certain positions, like the Von Fluh choke. Remember when OSP fought Nikita Krylov and he choked him out with that Von Fluh choke and like a lot of people didn't even know

what the fuck was going on. But because I've been around for so long, I've seen that choke before. I remember when Von Fluh started doing it on people. And then we started trying it out in the gym.

Really? Fuck it. Oh, that's so cool, man. It's a weird technique. Seeing history like that, being, because like, you know, there's a weird seeing history like that being because like you know there's a big difference between then later going what was that oh it's a von flu choking going oh yeah i remember when fire when von flu was in the gym doing it that's fucking

cool well there was also a scene recently where someone was trying this old boss root and neck crank boss root and has this like fireman's neck crank that he would do side on yeah it's like from from like almost like he has a head on one side and the leg on the other side he tries to connect the two of them together and boss used to tap guys with that boss is a fucking physical beast you know he's such a specimen but somebody tried it in a recent mma fight i remember in the middle of the fight going well i've seen this before where what the fucking joke it's like you never see that technique. Then all of a sudden it's there.

It didn't work, but it could. When I was talking about Pancrase, Boss was the other guy that it was like, he's walking in the ring and you looked at that

and you didn't want to be in there with this guy. You see the Boss in Pancrase, that would have been as terrifying a human being as anybody had ever seen.

The intensity, that's what I thought about him and evan tanner these guys were kind of competing and then him and evan tanner came in there and they just fucking went crazy like they just put it on people like they put a level of hurt on people that would have been terrifying had you never seen that before well boss was the first like really high level striker in in mma i feel like boss was the first really high-level striker in MMA. I feel like Boss was the first guy, if you watch his Pancrase fights, he was blasting guys with kicks. You hadn't seen anybody kick that hard before.

It was more about jiu-jitsu before then. You had Orlando Veit, who was a high-level kickboxer, was in the early UFCs, but he was only 165 pounds or something like that. He was a small guy. And he got manhandled by grapplers. You know, he fought, what was his fucking name? The big judo black belt guy. His name escapes me. He wound up fighting, the same guy wound up fighting Marco Huas. And Marco Huas mounted him and he tapped when Marco Huas mounted him.

Right. Oh, yeah, yeah. But fear? Tap from fear? Well, it was also because he thought that the position was lost right like once a guy got you into that position yeah yeah and for him it probably was for him it probably was he probably didn't have an answer for that so it's like i can tap now or i can tap after you hit me six times or i can tap if you hit me 20 times or i can go unconscious yeah yeah there was a lot of like shit back then too where people

didn't know that you could get out of positions and he thought that when you got into a position like that was it it was over you know must have been a wild time in the 90s to be trained in that and and uh because it was foreign to people like if you told somebody you were training jujitsu did they know what the hell you were talking about no they didn't know what it was remco pardue was oh yeah yeah yeah i think we might have called that one recently. Remember he fought Orlando V and got him in side control and blasted him with elbows? He was in that judo side control,

like holding the head there and just boom, elbowed him unconscious. Yeah. That was fascinating. Fascinating, fascinating. Just watching those guys, like watching that sport evolve like that to like in the beginnings were just people trying their style out and finding out It's watching those guys, watching that sport evolve like that.

In the beginnings were just people trying their style out and finding out that it didn't work at all. Remember there was that ninja guy who fought Pat Smith? Yeah, and doing those in-step kicks, which John Jones kind of brought back. If you have enough reach, you know what I mean? But you've got to have all that other stuff too. These guys thought they were going to kick you once and take your knee out. Smoke bomb. Well, there's a lot of people that say that. Hey, man, if we fought, I'd just kick somebody in the knee and take him out.

Yeah, okay, really? You really think that it works that way? Because you know the guy tries to not have you kick him in the knee. Not only that, he might see you winding up and going towards his knee. What was this motherfucker doing? Move his knee out of the way. And then you're missing things. Then you're all confused.

Your go-to move didn't work. Yeah, and that's sort of the thing you've seen it definitely a guy goes in you know at the low levels kind of where i get to compete and call fights and stuff sometimes brand new guys sometimes go in their first thing in their mind this was going to knock a guy out the second that doesn't happen they just didn't really think past that now it's a scary and horrifying place to be well i remember pat smith fought recently in glory and one of the things that really troubled me before his fight he said i'm a one round fighter you know like uh i fight for one round you know this is i'm there to win or lose but it's all going out in one round and i'm like you can't

say that that guy's only job is to survive one round and he's got it well not only that it's a crazy way of thinking this fight schedule for three rounds if that guy's only job is to survive one round and he's got it. Well, not only that, it's a crazy way of thinking. This fight's scheduled for three rounds. If the guy's exactly the skill level of you, it's going to take some time, man. Like, you can't... I don't know why he decides to do that. I mean, he's one of those guys that, like, really likes to put on a show.

Really likes to have an exciting fight. And that's one of the things we were talking about earlier is these guys that sort of sacrifice technical style fighting in order to make things more exciting. But in the long run, that's not good. It's not good for you. It's not good. It's just not the way to do it.

Yeah, and it changes things. Like that idea that we're – the whole thing is going on to try to figure out who's the best. Not to figure out who's the best not to figure out who's close to the best but the most exciting or not to figure out who can if we all agree that takedown defense is going to be the most important thing for the next two years who gets good at that and landing right hands like it's not a it's not a worldwide game to figure out who's the most exciting it's to figure out who's the baddest dude on the planet who's the best fighter in the world Yeah, yeah And the only way you find that is guys

competing at their very best like using all of your like if guys played chess and they just said you know fuck all this Strategy and shit. I'm just gonna get gangster with my rook You know I mean that's really essentially the same sort of decision-. It doesn't work that way. It's all about using all of your talents, your mental talents, your emotional control, your endurance, all of those things. Knowing when to push, when to back off, managing your energy during a fight. That's a huge aspect of it as well. Sure. Managing your energy is absolutely critical. Managing like when do you pour it on?

When do you back off? And do you have that under control? Like, is that taking care of itself out of stress or out of fear or out of danger or because he pushed you? I mean, you talked about one round. Kevin Randleman was, like, going to fight you for three minutes. It was going to be the worst hell of three minutes that you've ever had in your life. But if you could get past it, you've got a chance of beating him now. Yeah.

You know? Yeah, there's a lot of those fast twitch muscle fiber guys that just they have a lot of fucking explosion in the beginning but they just slowly wear themselves out and then there's nothing left at the end tyron woodley yeah it's a great example of that he hates it when you talk about that i know tough shit yeah it's it's important it's my job and i'm a fan of his and i think that he's too big i think he carries too much weight i mean the guy's got he's got essentially he's running a race that's an endurance race and he's got this monster truck engine and he you know he's getting two miles to the gallon but for that first two miles he's a motherfucker. You know, I mean, Tyron is one of the best athletes in MMA.

His wrestling, his physical strength. His blitzes. Those blitzes. Remember what he did, too? What's his name? The thoroughbred. Jay Huron. Jay Huron.

Fuck. And even Carlos Condit in the beginning. Yeah. You know, Condit. Like, until that leg went, you were like, how the fuck did he survive that blitz? That was crazy. Well, his lead right hand is so fast. He's so fast so explosive

travels we talk about uh hendrix and how he can close distance this guy even more so yeah um but uh the what some i think athletic guys will try to do is make it not an endurance sport they'll make it a sport of sprints and comms and sprints and comms and sprints and comms and that would be the way to try to be that athlete. We haven't seen anyone make that work. But I think that's what guys are trying to do is, you know, everything is a 30-second on and a 20-second recovery and fight that way. And, you know, and train that way and train to recover that way. But I can't think of anybody we've seen sort of make that really work yet.

But I think that's how that level of athletes trying to do it well it's also chael sun and uh had a comment on mma and about just the physical demands of the body he's like the reality is that 25 minutes is too long he's like it's too long to fight he goes you can't fight at your best for 25 minutes so it all becomes about managing when you explode, when you go after the guy, when you, you know. And for Chael to say that, especially, I mean, you think about like his fight with Anderson Silva was a crazy endurance test.

I mean, he just went after Anderson that first fight for four and a half rounds, just full clip, took him down at will, just pushed the pace constantly. Most likely he was on EPO at the time. At least we knew he was later. Yeah. And still, that's his thoughts, is that it's just too long. It's just too long.

Except for a guy like Mighty Mouse, which is crazy. Why is that? 130 pounds. The 125-pound guy does not have the same requirements when it comes to gravity, and there's nothing pulling on him. That book I was telling you about that I'm in the process of reading, that Rise of Superman, they talk about how some of these guys in these states, a lot of the analysis is guys in skateboards,

the guy in the skateboard who jumped over the Great Wall of China, and guys who are flipping and downhill skiing and stuff, that they start to believe that gravity applies to them differently. You know what I mean? They start to take action as if gravity does not apply to them the same way. I mean, look at these guys. He jumps the fucking Great Wall of China on a skateboard. Part of his belief when he's in the state to try this

is he has to suspend reality to even fucking give that a go because any normal person looks at that and goes, there's no fucking way I can jump the Great Wall of China on a skateboard. But this guy has to put himself into a state where that truth becomes not true. Yeah, fuck that. That's so strange. I know, right? How does that work?

I don't know. That's so crazy. But this guy, you'll like the book a lot, man. I know I will. The guy compares certain psychedelic trips. He looks at how that also alters the brain chemistry. And those times where people are at one with something, where they've actually, in some ways, reality is just that thing we each have. And yours is different now.

Yours is different in the moments where you bring this brain chemistry together in a state of flow. And when you're in that state, your reality is different. And if your reality is different and if your reality is different maybe the fuck you can jump the great wall of china makes sense right because isn't reality in a sense subjective in that like how you feel about a moment changes what that moment means to you so it changes your reaction to that moment and i think that like those guys that do that park parkour yeah those Yeah. Those guys have to be like that too. That is exactly right.

I'm fascinated by that shit. How the fuck do you think you can do that? Those guys are nuts, man. But they, I mean, you hesitate for one second, you die. Yeah. And that's the same with those flipping motorcycles. Same with free climbing, fucking mount, whatever. You get it.

You create a state where if you do not believe for one moment, you're dead. Not, well, shit, I lost a fight. Or, oh man, that cost me some money. Death. Yeah. Death. And these guys, you know, and some of them will say,

I could spend months learning how to spend 20 minutes of yoga to get a taste of that state for a second. Or I can put myself on a rock face and have it for three hours out of necessity. Yeah. And that's what some fighters are doing that's i mean all the top guys are operating in that state all of them yeah rock the rock face thing is really interesting isn't it when you see those fucking alex honnold crazy

fuckers and they climb up these things free climbing it's almost like a different animal like human animals walk around sometimes we swim and stuff we don't do that no you know well he does yeah but he's a human i mean it is i mean it's essentially like putting your focus into something and taking that something whatever it is to the highest level that's possible and the mind is a big part of it i mean he was talking about how when you're um when you're rock climbing i had him on the podcast he was talking about rock climbing that when you're you're doing it you're really pretty chill he goes you you don't you don't really feel crazy unless something's really wrong right he goes most of the time everything is really calm and really chill and you just sort of zen and you're just this is what you're doing and you're just

going through it and you're putting the the powder in your hands you're sticking your hands in cracks and you're just pulling yourself up he goes then you're sticking your hands in cracks and you're just pulling yourself up. He goes, then you kind of get to the top. Yeah, for hours. Yeah. And doing shit that, in his case, doing shit that no one else does. Jumping over and grabbing something with a finger and stuff.

Well, I don't think they do that too much. They try to just crawl. I think the jumping up guys are fucking nuts. It's all levels of nuts. Yeah. Well, you know, there was a piece that they did in one of those television shows where they talked about alex where this guy who was also a free climber was like look it's a matter it's not a matter of if he's gonna fall it's a matter of when he's gonna

fall and he's going to die when he does and you know this guy's kind of freaking the fuck out but then he talked to alex about it like man maybe. I don't know if he's going to fall. This motherfucker might just keep doing that. I mean, he's a guy, Alex Honnold, that just, that's what he does. He lives in his van. I mean, he's got a van with all these, like, drawers in it. This is where I put my toiletries. This is where I put my underwear. He's got, like, he has a bed in the back of it.

He sleeps in the bed. And then he just climbs everywhere. He has a bed in the back of it. He sleeps in the bed. And then he just climbs everywhere. The guys who get to that point of human performance, there is a level. It's so weird we discourage obsessive compulsiveness. We discourage it.

I'm sure there are damaging things about it. But, I mean, you tell me that fucking guy isn't the extremist version of that. And yet it's been focused in a way that stretches human performance. it's all about how much focus you have on that goal how much intent you have on that action and if you're if you're not completely obsessed i've always said that greatness and madness are next door neighbors and they borrow each other's sugar because you don't you don't get there without the other you have to be i know when i was competing when i was at my best when i was a four-time state champion in taekwondo and i won the U.S. Open and a bunch of other tournaments, I was crazy. That's all I did.

I would train in the middle of the night because I knew that no one else was training. I used to have the keys to the gym. So I used to go to the Dojangs, what the Koreans call it. I used to go there at 2 o'clock in the morning because I had the keys, and I would train knowing that no one else was training. And I felt like I got an edge that way. I'd seen Mike Tyson talk about how he would run when everyone was asleep because he think he felt like his opponent was sleeping so that felt like that gave him an edge so you know i would like that i would

and that kind of insanity like i didn't have anything else going on in my life everything else i was a loser in but i knew i was really good at taekwondo so that was what i i was i sucked at relationships i sucked at work i sucked at school i sucked at everything except taekwondo so that became my 100 of my focus and i know i was insane at that time i know something there was something wrong with me it was a terrible way to live your life unless that's your only goal the scary thing is let's say there's you know 10 000 guys who are living that way at anything comedy fighting anything only one of them's actually we're gonna get the 10 000 most obsessed and we're gonna find out who the very best most obsessed or genetic you know

what i mean the genetics and the obsession must come together in the perfect storm because if you're competing and you have the same amount of obsession as some Jon Jones character, fuck, that guy's just too goddamn strong, too big. You see guys get in there with Jon, and then when Jon locks up with them and then sends them flying through the air, they realize, oh, there's another level to this thing. When he almost took off to share his arm, that must have been fucking terrifying. He's been in there with Chuck Liddell and every great fighter at 205 pounds over the last 10 years of not losing and training every day. And this guy does this to him?

Tears his shoulder apart in the first round with some new move that he had been thinking about doing. John had just been thinking about it. John is so brilliant in his ability to improvise in the heat of battle. He saw that Glover was loading up, so he decided to stand, like, right on top of him, and then he would anticipate, he would feel him loading up, and then avoid those shots and counter with elbows in tight. And he was fucking Glover up

in the place where Glover thought that he was going to dominate. Yeah, and he went in there, and the things that just he never even planned to use, but a lifetime of Greco-Roman playing in there, and I thought, oh, shit, I win this position. Fuck it. We're going to win it here then. Well, that loose underhook, that was what allowed him.

You know, Glover had this loose underhook, so John just wrenched it, just yanked on it with the overhook and tore his shoulder up, man. And it must have been mentally freaky too. It's like, what the hell am I in here with? I thought I was just in here with a guy who punches and kicks and chokes like the rest of us. Right. And what is he doing? He's tearing off part of my body.

Well, John is just, he's always adding new wrinkles. Like, John is one of the first guys to really get good at that front leg side kick to the thigh. I mean, he's really, and even to the body. On a downward angle, too. It's scary. Because he's so tall, yeah. And also, he's shooting down at your knee. And John dropped Vitor with a front leg side kick to the body.

That's right. Those long legs, man, that's a huge advantage. We only measure reach with arms in MMA because we have this goofy system where all we do is copy boxing because it's such a young sport. We copy boxing when it comes to reach. We copy boxing when it comes to the 10-point must scoring system. Both things are woefully inadequate when it comes to MMA. But a big one is the reach of kicks. For sure.

Because John can kick you from a range where you can't even touch him. And he's hitting you with his best weapon. Yeah. From an outside distance that he owns. Yeah. And your only way to get past that is to go through that. Come on That's it's barely fair and his legs are so much strong. Everybody kicks harder than you punch Everybody does and John's an excellent kicker

So he's out there kicking the shit out of you and you can't even touch him And what are you gonna start doing? You're gonna start doing what Rashad did try to clear out of that range. Yep, you can't I mean You the way to handle it if it's humanly mentally possible is to pass it and get in there but he's training you the way you touch an element you never touch it again he's doing that with his fucking kick in front of you also I think it's fascinating that John is now at this level where he's been the champion for several years now and he's very confident and he's also used to these championship contests. He's used to the bright lights.

He's used to the big event. It becomes a part of his every, he understands that experience very intimately. So when he gets in those championship fights with a guy like Glover, this is the big show for Glover. Holy shit, this is it. And for John, like, here we go again. And here we go again is very different

than, oh my God, this is it. Here we go again is very different than, oh, my God, this is it. Here we go again is a much more comfortable place. Because every other time I've been in this place, I won. People went crazy. I made a bunch of money, and I got even bigger. Oh, I'm in this place again. Okay. Yeah.

And I love his attitude after the Gustafson fight. Like, his attitude was, I've always been asking for a dog fight, and I got what I asked for. You know, and this is a blessing. Yeah, what I asked for. And this is a blessing. And you know it is. It is a blessing. You don't know. If you're just wrecking every guy, well, what happens the one day where I can't wreck you for four rounds? Well, now he knows.

He knows what happens. He fucking wins. He dug deep. One of the most important aspects of that fight is that he faced a guy, first of all, with the same sort of physical advantages that he has, a guy with a really long reach, a guy who's an excellent striker, a better, smoother, more efficient striker than he is. Who took him down, added confusion to the equation. Yep, did something unpredictable, and then on top of that, he still won. And then, man, I was really looking forward to that rematch.

It was a bummer when Gustafsson hurt his knee. But what's interesting is Gustafsson hurt his knee. What's interesting is Gustafson hurt his knee. They canceled the fight, but now John hurt his knee, but the Cormier fight is still on. It's run by commerce. We have to. We're in the business. I don't own the UFC.

What's the bigger fight, though, in your opinion? They're both pretty fucking good. I think they're both 10s. Yeah. Cormier is so fascinating because we haven't seen it. You know, you see, all you got to do is flash up what he did to Dan Henderson, throwing him up in the air.

No one's ever done that to Dan Henderson. And then you got all this heat that gets regular people excited. But, I mean, what happens when a guy got that close and Gustafson's confident he's he believes he's going to win this time he thinks he's learned some things like that's real you got to do them both but i think you got to do the one that the people are most excited about which is the one where guys fight on a stage and then say they're going to kill each other off right i think now it's more exciting it's like almost like when when daniel cormier grabbed john's neck and threw him back he ensured that that fight was going to take place yeah you know because you know if gustafson got knee surgery and john can't fight

until january i mean we should go back to that yeah in theory that should be the fight but everyone is so hyped up on the the cormier fight now but you know cormier went into that fight like he agreed to that fight with a pre-existing injury that he was pretty vocal about. He has a partially torn ACL. He's got an MCL strain or a tear in his MCL. And he's, you know, now he has more of an opportunity to rehab it. But when you have a partially torn ligament, like especially an ACL ligament, I don't know how much rehab you can do. Yeah.

You know? You either get the surgery or you live with it in that whatever 75% state it's in until you get the surgery. I think it's a 50% state. I think it's 50% torn. All three of those guys, it's knee issues. I don't know if that's a 205 thing. It's a height thing. It's a wrestling thing.

It's a wrestling thing. Wrestling and jujitsu. I mean, even kickboxing, you're going to have knee issues. But just the knee sucks. It's a shitty design shoulders sucks too well it's not that they suck it's that the human body is not designed for mma not for that especially not for jujitsu i mean jujitsu is all about testing the boundaries of your joints yeah oh my planet guys over that's shitty it's supposed to do that yeah it's supposed

to do that yeah and there's a few guys like keenan cornelius that have just unbelievably ridiculous flexibility of their joints like what is that from is that from straining them all the time and testing it like you know pushing the limit yeah like in theory how do you stretch your neck you add those circles if you're you know or you stretch your lip or whatever right can we do that with with ligaments and soft tissue i guess they can but look at hoyla gracie when he fought Eddie. I'm going to tell you something. I've been in that position before.

You know, that is a brute. When Eddie had that leg and he was twisting Hoyler's leg like that, that's called a vaporizer. It is an unbelievably painful position. I do not know how Hoyler didn't tap. Yeah, mental. I don't think that was some biological thing he's altered. I think that was a guy just saying, my life depends on his reputation, who he is as a person, his business.

All of those things depended so heavily on him not giving in to pain. And I think he was capable of doing that. But he has a history of having incredibly flexible joints. Like when he fought Sakuraba, Sakuraba had him in that deep, deep Kimura and the referee stopped the fight. And he was furious.

He's like, I'm fine. He had his arm cranked up behind his back. Sakuraba had him in that deep, deep Kimura, and the referee stopped the fight, and he was furious. He's like, I'm fine. He had his arm cranked up behind his back. First of all, it's crazy when you think of the fact that Hoyler Gracie fought Sakuraba, and Sakuraba fought Vitor Belfort and Vanderlei Sova. Think about the difference in size between those guys. I mean, incredible. I mean, just unbelievable.

He won the fucking Abu Dhabi's at 145. How the fuck? And fought those giants, incredible. I mean, just unbelievable. He won the fucking Abu Dhabi's at 145. Yeah. You know, how the fuck? And fought those giants, yeah. How the fuck? That was another time. And I mean, I love hearing stories from guys that were around in the early days when they're like, yeah, well, you know, we drove nine hours because they said we were going to have an MMA fight. And we got there and they said, well, your opponent's not here. You got this guy.

And it's like, I weigh 140. He's 175. They're like, close enough. enough. Fight him. You know, that's how it was. And well, who is that guy? Where does he train? I don't know. He just got out of prison or do you want the bouncer? I mean, and that's who you fought. And these lunatics on the front end of the sport were driving around for a hundred dollars, spending 300 to get there. Not knowing. I mean, you didn't know if a guy knew the death touch or something. You didn't know if there was some other thing he could do. Yeah, people believed in the death touch

back then. What if they knew it? There's people still teaching that stupid shit. And there's people out there that are also still teaching what we do works on the streets. The streets are very different. What you do is a sport. That nonsense drives me fucking bananas. I was on the Oie and anthony show and

they used to have this guy that like did their security he was this fucking fake karate guy and he would always talk about like uh street techniques what we're doing is all about street street defense and i go let me let me tell you something dude what works on train killers is the best shit yeah all this nonsense about like street techniques like you're gonna do that and do this and that's gonna work better and're going to fucking death touch somebody in their solar plexus and go after their pressure points. Bullshit. It's all nonsense. And if you try to bite somebody, let me tell you something.

If a guy gets on top of you and mounts you and you just bit him, he's going to fucking kill you. He's going to take your eyes out. He's going to kill you. He's going to break your jaw. He's going to tear your arms out of their sockets and leave you. He's going to break your jaw. He's going to tear your arms out of their sockets and leave you a cripple. A guy could do that. If you get all this street shit in your head,

it's dangerous. But if you train Sistema or Krav Maga or whatever and you're up against some dumbass, it'll be valuable. But if you're up against a trained fighter, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. But you should always prepare for a trained fighter. And that's the difference between these street systems versus

real MMA. Real MMA is the stuff that works. It's the best application the human body has when it comes to using your body in a combat sport scenario. It's the best. That's the reason why you don't see Kung Fu in MMA. I mean, Roy Nelson jokingly

calls himself a kung fu fighter and i know he has actually done some kung fu training but the reality is roy's throwing a fucking heavy overhand right and he's got a black belt in jiu-jitsu to back it up yeah exactly and if i mean hey if for whatever reason you like wearing a kung fu outfit and doing all this stuff it makes you feel good fuck it go train it for sure. But don't try to tell professional athletes and people who analyze it all day every day that this thing is going to be the thing. Because why the fuck isn't George St. Pierre using it? George used to, he told me one time, that he just, he said it, and I'm sure it happens

to you a lot too, that people will come up to him and say, hey, George, you know, you do really good, man. Hey, we should train together. I have Kung Fu Studio down the street. And they would literally, I could teach you some shit. And really, literally believe that when they're talking to the greatest fighter in the world at the time, that they got some secret shit back on St. Denis Street in Quebec, in Montreal, that he could teach George St. Pierre.

This guy really fucking believes that. They really believe they got some death touch they got to pull out. And George is going to go, this is going to change my whole career. Thank you for teaching me death touch. That's just got to happen to you too, right? Oh, yeah. Well, there's always some guy that says that he has some new thing that no one's ever seen before. He has his master can't be defeated.

There's a bunch of knuckleheads out there, man. But George is an amazingly patient guy. I've george deal with a lot of fucking people he's the one of the nicest guys that's ever reached like a super high level of any combat sport and really open-minded like he'll listen to it i've seen him exchange techniques with people i've trained with him turning sidekick with him and he had his knee low yeah he was using his knee low and without question you train fucking taekwondo for 10 years competing all over that's how you do a turning sidekick yeah and he got and he understood that yeah well it was out that was a weird moment because john donahue was a friend of mine uh was talking and we were out to eat after a fight me him, him, and Eddie. And he said, do you guys know any good Taekwondo guys?

George wants to work on the mechanics of his spinning back kick. And I said, this is going to sound so stupid, but I have to say it. Like, I have a great spinning back kick. Like, my spinning back kick, I really know how to do it better than anybody. And, you know, you say that

and people go, get the fuck out of here. But, I mean, you're a fucking lifetime martial arts expert. I mean, why the fuck can't you say that? It's still because I'm a comedian and a fucking commentator. I'm not a fighter of here. But I mean, you're a fucking lifetime martial arts expert. I mean, why the fuck can't you say that? It's still because I'm a comedian and a fucking commentator. I'm not a fighter. I mean, those days are long gone. Yeah, but that doesn't mean that a lifetime mastery of a technique isn't, you know?

That's true. But so many people have ridiculous egos. And I'm not going to name any names, but I know a lot of guys that are involved in the same sort of thing that I'm involved in. And they'll tell you that they're great. And then you train with them. You're like, oh, fucking Christ, I'm wasting my time. So I had this moment where I was like, tell George if he wants to train. And then Eddie told him, like, dude, seriously, you've got to see this guy kick.

And I'm like, this sounds so stupid. Like, no one's going to believe me. And so then George showed up. So I was hoping, you know, when George showed up, like, that he wasn't like, okay, come on, show me. You know, this is stupid. Why am I wasting my time? He was focused. Well, once I kicked the bag once.

Yeah, right. And then he went, oh, shit. Like, this is real. And then you could see, like, he got this, like, I'm actually going to get something out of this. As opposed to, like, I'm just being nice to Joe because we're friends. And I'm going to go humor him. And, you know, he's going to throw some pussy ass kicks. Yeah, right.

But when he saw me kick a bag, when you kick a 200 pound bag and it goes flying and then it puts it in your head, you go, oh, I get it. I get it now. But it was his open mindedness was so impressive because I wouldn't have listened to me. I would have been like, bitch, get the fuck out of here. Like George is going to give you advice on your job exactly you know what i mean exactly but you know if you have an open mind but uh i uh when i did that tv show where i was learning to fight i trained with george and uh we'd use that on the show and i was terrible like i mean i literally was trying to take playing uh doing taekwondo growing up and add kind of boxing my head.

Like, I'm fucking horrible. And I'd never wrestled a day in my life. I was doing jujitsu like 10 times a week for whatever number of months. Never. And that will forever. People will just put that on and go, oh, fuck, this guy's terrible. This guy's, and it is bad. But, I mean, what the fuck?

You're doing a TV show about taking some guy who wears eye makeup and trying to teach him to fight. He happens to be there with George. Of course he's terrible. You know? Yeah. You know? Well, that's the beautiful thing about martial arts or any difficult endeavor is that you start off, everybody starts off, they suck.

Yeah. If you don't have those techniques, you don't know what you're doing, you're not going to be good. And then as you train, you get better. And when you get better, it's like you go down a path. And then you can stop and pause and look back and go look where i started i started way back there and now here i am i'm getting better and then you turn around you go but look how far i got to go

and that's exciting yeah well that's the beautiful thing about martial arts is that there are so many levels and when we're seeing in mixed martial arts it's like the jujitsu is still at a fairly low level i think the jujitsu is still like purple fairly low level i think the jiu-jitsu is still like purple belt level at even like a high level it's not like marcelo garcia like high level black belt the striking is still at a fairly low level we're not seeing ernesto hoost yet we're not seeing these like ridiculously technical absolutely perfect executions of striking technique we're getting closer we're getting closer with the jiu-jitsu we're getting closer with the striking but there's room to grow and that's one of the reasons why we're seeing new techniques now like how many people are throwing wheel kicks now there

was no wheel kicks up until terry edam fought edson barboza but you know there is a there is a like this has been this been seen before like when tony Tony Hawk did the four things. Right, right, right. Within a year, 10 guys could do it and did it in training. The quad and figure skating, nobody could do it. Now fucking college level figure skaters do the quad. Four minute mile. Yeah, yeah. When it happens once, suddenly it's now real.

Humans do this. Just because, I mean, just because that guy did it, not every guy thinks he can do it, but some guys think they can do it. Yeah, it's an amazing thing to watch the actual growth. I love it. I'm so fascinated by it. Yeah, me too, man. Me too. It's such a cool aspect of martial arts to be there while this is all going down and see this thing evolving and getting better.

Front kicks to the face now. Same thing. All of a sudden, there's the quad and figure skating. Front kicks to the face now. Same thing. All of a sudden, there's the quad and figure skating. They're all doing it. Front kicks in play for almost every good striker now. That's in play for real. We're also seeing a lot of that sideways karate stance like Ryan Jimmo does and Gunnar Nelson does and Lyoto does.

That sideways karate stance is a totally different thing. Some guys you see are using it. They grew up using it. And for a right-handed guy, whenever they switch the stance and the right foot is in the front is when you're going to see it. You know what I mean? Yes. It's suddenly not as camouflaged anymore. Not only are guys using it, but it's like, oh, shit, he's in that stance.

I better watch out for the side kick. Well, you see a lot of front leg kicks off the dominant stance, the dominant leg yeah it's it's there's not a lot of guys who develop that powerful front leg left side kick they develop it off the right leg do you remember when chris clements did a did a spinning thing on that i broke that down yeah the big question people had was how did he know to do that and when you look at it you see wonder boy and he turned sideways and chris and me and i froze it and said look at here there this is a moment chris grew up doing taekwondo chris is a traditional martial artist as well so he knows when this right leg comes forward and the stance is distributed this way either a side kick is coming or a hook kick is coming or a round kick front leg round

kick and it was the hip was flared enough that he was probably you didn't it was the round kick wasn't as in play because of the position of how far shoulder or hip was so then we freeze it and say that's what he knows but he knows from a lifetime of that that both of those are in play now what let's watch he throws the sidekick and go freeze now Chris in his mind would know if this still happens the next option since he's just giving me a sidekick his point is hoping to drop my hands and hook kick me in the head when he saw that happen there was a little flare of the hip and his brain goes, oh yeah, that's coming. And then he timed it on the hook kick. But it was his ability to kind of see the future. You know what I mean?

And we predict the future all the time. When you go to open a door handle, the reason if it was really hot or if it was spongy, that you'd be surprised is because your brain was predicting what a door handle would feel like. Yeah, and that's what you were talking about earlier when it comes to pattern recognition. That that's a big thing with pattern recognition. Yeah, it is. Yeah, and it's definitely what guys are playing with. Do you know Adam Zuchek?

He trains Sarah Kaufman, but he's also kind of a secret weapon for Greg Jackson. He's up in Victoria, B.C., and he sends guys up there to do certain things. He's very talented. And we were talking about after Sarah's fight, Kaufman's fight, her last one in Quebec City, she was throwing a lot of off-tempo things, which he taught her because she's a dancer. So he can work footwork off-time and different rhythms with her. But he was also talking about pattern recognition and how him and Greg Jackson, that's one of

the things they're on heavy, is training you to expect certain patterns, chunking those patterns that your brain anticipates and then giving you a surprise. And that's on the front end of some of their thinking right now. So fascinating. Fuck yeah, man. So cool. And what's so cool is when you have that many great minds doing it. Now, you've got one of these guys thinking that, but you've got Dwayne over here fucking

thinking this. And you've got Matt Humes over there. And there's all these different guys. And Duke Rufus is in Wisconsin, and he's looking at it and trying to break it down. And then put them against each other, and the lessons that we learn there, everybody's going to go back in their labs and prepare for the next one. Yeah. Amazing stuff.

Dude, we're out of time. Yeah. But this was a lot of fun. Thank you, Robin. A lot of fun, man. Hey, man, really thank you for having me. It's a real thrill, and thanks for digging my stuff. Hey, I appreciate that you're doing it.

I really appreciate you doing the podcast, too, and we've got to do this again, man. I'd love to. How often are you in L.A.? My wife's working here right now, so I'm visiting a little bit. She's in theater. So not all that often, a couple times a year, but I'd love to. I'll come back. I'll bring some beer.

We'll do it again. We'll do it again for sure. Follow him, RobinBlackMMA on Twitter. Where can people see the videos? Check out Fight Network. FightNetwork.com. We've got some stuff. Fight Network is a 24-hour television station.

It's in Canada. It's now in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Texas. It's on Roku. You can call up any cable provider and say, I want Fight Network. And it's a 24-hour fight channel. And that's where I'm at. Beautiful. All right.

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