The Joe Rogan Experience - JRE MMA Show #108 with Stephen Thompson

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

Joe is joined by Stephen "Wonderboy" Thompson: a mixed martial artist currently competing in the Welterweight division of the UFC.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Wonder Boy in the house, ladies and gentlemen. What's up, brother? What's going on, man? Glad you're coming in. Thank you, man. Appreciate you having me.

Glad to be on with you. Long time coming. Should have had you in a long time ago. I know. You know, schedules schedules time things we had planned on it like last summer or something like that i mean it was one of those things but then obviously the covid the covid the covid yeah but dude you're still rocking at the top of the food chain it's amazing i'm saying i'm people people will say i'm too old i'm 38 well look at your victory over vicente luque and then look what luque just did to tyron woodley you're still

at the top of the fucking food chain because i was real recently that you beat him yeah it was i mean it was what a year it was two years ago two years ago i beat i beat vicente but uh yeah man people saying i'm i'm i'm too old. And I guess once you get knocked out one time, they throw you to the side. That's people that don't understand the human chin. It's just a fact. You get hit with the perfect shot. It wasn't even hard. It wasn't even hard. I've been hit harder. Tyron hit me harder. Jake Ellenberger hit me harder. This was just right on the button.

It's crazy, isn't it? To be honest with you, it was like a relief being knocked out. I mean, I've got close to 80-something fights with kickboxing and MMA together, and I've never been knocked out. It was always one of those, you know, going into a fight, this is going to be it. This is going to be the time I gonna be it mmm this is this is gonna be the time I get knocked out this is always going through my head and now that it happened it's not that bad it's really not that bad I would rather get

knocked out then get just the crap beat out of me for five five and around have you ever been knocked out in training no so that was the only time ever in your whole career been knocked out and it was a wild punch, too, the fact that he caught you with a Superman punch. I know, man. The memes after that were hilarious. I don't know if you saw it, but it was funny. You've got to think, though. You've dished it out so many times.

I know. Through your kickboxing career and MMA. I mean, there's so many times you've flatlined people. And then, yeah, I get knocked out by a guy in a lighter weight class. My dad, my family is pretty rough. They bring it up as much as they can. I was in the hospital that night, and my dad's doing like a Facebook live thing because, you know, we had a bunch of karate families and karate kids there.

We pretty much sold out that arena. Greenville, South Carolina, I mean mean everybody was there to watch me fight and then i get crushed or i get knocked out and then uh you know everybody's want to know how i am so i did it like it was probably 2 a.m did a facebook live and my dad's just eating me alive eat me alive yeah i got knocked out he's like yeah by a guy too. And he just let me have it. But that's how he is. It is what it is. You know, you took it really well in terms of like the way you reacted and social media and the way you reacted when you were asked about it, you know, showed poise. Thank you. I mean, what can you do? I mean, you can't just sit there and cry about it.

You know? Yeah. It bothered me for a while that, you know, why did I not see it coming? I normally see this stuff coming. Do you think you were relaxed when he hit you? Is that what it was? I think it was definitely a distance thing. Cause when I, when I had psychic to watch it over and over and over again, I don't remember any of the second round. I don't remember any of it. All I remember is getting up off the stool, looking across the cage and I seen his his bloody nose he's banged up, and I'm like, all right, time to pick it up. I'm going to finish him this round. This was going through my head.

That's all I remember. And I got knocked out five seconds left in the second round. Wow. I don't remember anything. I don't remember sitting up, talking to him in the cage. People say I was like high-fiving people as I was walking by. All I remember is like these sparkles kind of fade away. And I see Chris Weidman's face right there. He's laughing at me. He's like smiling at me. And he said, if you ask me that again,

I'm going to slap you. I guess I asked him the same question. I kept saying, you know, what happened? How'd I get knocked out? I got knocked out. Just kept saying that. What people do when they get knocked out, they ask the same question, what happened over and over again? It such a weird thing and then you know not remembering any of that and then just being in the back it's like i got teleported there i was fighting and then i was there and i remember him helping me trying to answer the doctor's questions they're like you know what day it is i'm like uh chris is like steven come on you know what day it is he's like trying to help me out answer these questions but uh that's all I remember man is is that but uh it was a relief like I have nothing I mean what else I mean that's like the worst thing that can happen why why why do you

feel like it's a relief well you know it was such a worry you know I've knocked out people I've seen how they are you know getting up off the canvas up off the canvas and what it's done to people psychologically getting knocked out. And that's always been kind of like, how would I handle that? How would I handle that? You've seen people get knocked out, and they try and come back, maybe as soon as possible, which is not a good thing. It's a terrible thing. Yeah, they should give their time for their body to heal up but um you know i've seen people do that it was always a worry for me how would i handle that yeah i always get concerned when i see someone who gets

knocked out they want to get right back in there and like oh you're asking for trouble because you might feel fine but you probably are a little loose yeah it's funny you said that because they ufc wanted me a fight wanted me to fight two months later in my hometown wow and after the day after was going to get some breakfast with some with some friends um still in Knoxville with the fam and I get a call from um Dana I think it was Hunter hey man you still wanting to fight in greenville south carolina of course the athlete in myself said yes like i wanted to jump back in there and yeah but then you know reality kicked in and you know i look over at my pops and he's like that he i think he already know who it was he said that he just shook his head who was it that you were supposed to um

i don't think we had anybody the u UFC should have made it Anthony Pettis. It was only like two months later. It should have been Anthony Pettis in my hometown. And I didn't find out that the UFC was in Greenville. I found that out watching some fights like two months before. So you're saying the UFC should have made a rematch with Anthony Pettis? That should have been when you fought Pettis. Yes. Was in your hometown.

Yes. We would have sold that out. Yeah. My first MMA fight was in the arena the UFC was at. The Bonsagor Wellness Arena. And it was standing room only.

What organization was that for? It was a promotion called Fight Party. And a lot of UFC fighters came up. OSP was on my first card. It was crazy.

OSP was fighting. I think, who else was on my first card it was crazy OSP was fighting I think who else was on that car both Lima brothers were on that card and it was my very first MMA fight in my hometown and the main event I think it was OSP was main event but his fighter ended up not making weight or something that didn't happen so they pushed me to to the main event main event what year was this this was 2010 wow 2010 and i was like what i had no wrestling no i mean blue belt barely blue belt probably in jujitsu and i'm like all right and i'm fighting a wrestler

and i'm knocking them out in the second round and I almost threw up all in the ring that would have been twice that would have happened to me twice because I had no idea how to cut weight I hadn't been 170 since 11th grade in high school what were you weighing when you kickboxing I would actually fight up and wait I would weigh in with keys in my pocket weights in my pocket I fought at 185 fought at 195 I fought for the world combat league I would weigh in with keys in my pocket, weights in my pocket. I fought at 185, fought at 195. I fought for the World Combat League. I would fight up in that, but nobody's grabbing a hold of you there, so you really didn't have to worry about the weight.

I was a lot faster than the guys that were heavier than me, so that was a crazy experience. That World Combat League was an interesting situation. It was wild, right? Yeah. I went to one of them. Which one? I'm trying to remember. I think it was an interesting situation. It was wild, right? Yeah. I went to one of them. Which one? I'm trying to remember.

I think it was in Atlantic City. I'm trying to remember where it was at. I might have been on that card. You might have been on that card. I think I fought a guy named Carlos Tierney. Carlos Tierney? I'm not. I don't remember if you were on that card or not.

I definitely watched you fight in those events, but I watched you a lot when Firas Ahabi was talking well about you. I was like, let me check this dude out. And then I saw some of your kickboxing fights and I saw you in the World Combat League. I was like, oh shit. When you got into the UFC, I got really excited because you represented a style that I had been talking about for a while because everybody was like, you know, for striking it was Muay Thai. For submissions it was jiu-jitsu, and then there was wrestling. That's like kind of everybody had this idea of like what was effective and what wasn't.

And I was like, man, I'm telling you, if you find a guy who really understands karate, who has that sideways stance and a really good front leg, he's going to fuck a lot of people up, and they're not going to know what to leg he's gonna fuck a lot of people up and they're not gonna know what to do with it and a lot of people like dismissed me they're like what are you talking about they thought it was just that I was reminiscing about my traditional martial arts days and I was like no I'm telling you man dudes with a good front leg like that's a totally different animal to get in on when a guy has that sideways stance and then when you were fighting like with your hands down and no one knew what to

do and you lean back like a snake when you go forward I'm like that's a totally different style and it's a fucking really sneaky one it's hard to handle it is definitely a very difficult style to prepare for as well yeah well try finding I know you got like you, Raymond Daniels. There's like a couple guys out there that can emulate that style. And I think it was, because I remember in the early years, especially when Lyoto Machida was coming in. He's a traditional, do I, Kyokushin?

Is it Kyokushin style? I think so. Shodokan. I think it's Shodokan. Okay. I know GSP was Shodokan as well. Yeah. That was kind of his background. I think. Let Kyoji. Shoto-Kan. I think it was Shoto-Kan. Okay, I know GSP was Shoto-Kan as well. That was kind of his background. I think.

Let's find out. What is Lyoto Machida's original karate style? I want to say it's Shoto-Kan. His dad was straight Japanese, right? He married his mom who was Brazilian. Yes. So, and people didn't think karate worked. Karate was just a frou-frou style, McDojo style,

not geared toward real applications. In the early UFCs, it was looked down upon, the karate style. I guess because, I don't know, a karate kid? I think that era, the 80s, a lot of people saw that karate can make them a lot of money. And so they were opening up those McDojo schools schools left and right same with taekwondo same with kung fu there's a lot of traditional martial arts that did have some real-life applications and they got severely watered down yeah because people didn't want to lose a lot of students so they didn't want to make it really difficult for you to advance and to move up.

And even- Shotokan. Shotokan. Shotokan. Yeah. I didn't even notice that. He was 13. This right here. That's ridiculous.

Wow. I love this. I need one of you. There's only one Jamie. I know it. I need a Jamie. You'll find some dude who pretends to be Jamie, and he'll be annoying. Jamie. You'll find some dude who pretends to be Jamie and he'll be annoying.

But this style of this sideways, Michael Venom Page is another really interesting example. He's super unusual because he was an elite well, Raymond Daniels was as well. He was an elite point fighter.

And people were always making fun of point fighting. I'm like, man, you never sparred one of those guys. I fought in a few of those tournaments. Fast. Oh, my God. Their whole thing was just jumping in and blitzing. And even if it wasn't the most powerful or effective techniques, you had to adjust to this new way of fighting.

Because everybody else, like if you're a Muay Thai guy, you're used to fighting in this rhythm, and these guys are moving around and jumping and leaping forward. Get flinch in you know yeah and that's what you know and that's i think that was the reason why and and of course the the point fighting you got schools that kind of gravitated forgot forget all the the self-defense stuff let's just focus on the competition tournaments yeah and then people think a real real fight is going to be like that. Point fighting is, in real life application, it's fairly dumb. But there's real benefits to learning how to win at those things. I agree.

To learning how to blitz. To learning how to leap forward with strikes. You shouldn't do it all the time, but if you have that ability. Use it. The thing is when you see guys who have that ability and then they learn the other stuff like you did. They learn the wrestling. They learn submissions. Then they become very dangerous because you have this

whole range where they thrive in where most people are completely lost. This range on the outside where you're standing there like that doing a lot of this. Throwing a lot of those front leg techniques. You see these guys like shit I gotta get closer to them. That's crazy that they can't compete at a very specific range.

And for 170, you're pretty tall and long too. So you have this height and reach advantage as well. Yeah, the street fighting thing, I agree with you because you YouTube street fights now and it's like 99.9% of them, they end up on the ground. 99, but the ones where a guy can deliver a wheel kick in a street fight, holy shit. You seen that? I've seen a few of those. Oh, it's ridiculous.

Crazy. Oh, I know. And everybody is just going crazy. Yeah, if someone pulls off a real movie martial arts technique in a street fight. And probably killed the guy because he hit his head on the pavement. I know, right? Right. Yeah, that's the scary thing.

I told myself, if I ever in a street situation, hopefully I'm never in one, but I'm like, hey man, let's go to the grass. Let's move over here to the grassy area just in case. Yeah. But yeah, the point fighting thing. The nicest street fighter ever. The NMF, I got to hold that title. That's so funny. Not only the nicest MMA fighter, the nmf i gotta hold that i gotta hold that title you know so funny not only the

nicest mma fighter the nicest street fighter i will tell you i was in some scuffles you know in in high school and i remember beating the crap out of this kid and his mom rolls up you know to pick him up after school this is right after school and i he was my sister was just she's a badass man my older sister she fought kickboxing She kicked my behind for years. I mean, I've seen her knock dudes out. My sister. Really? She married Carlos Machado.

Right. And she fought kickboxing at, you know, amateur. Never went pro. But at a very high level. And she just would just mess people up. And she had gotten a scuffle in school and just beat the crap out of some dude so she was kind of on her last leg and nobody messed with her I mean it you know what she's like when you meet her she's very honest person but she's not the nicest way she doesn't write she's just very straightforward

you know if you look ugly she saw you look ugly she's obviously she's more like my dad and but she was in some heated argument with this guy and this guy comes up to do something i kind of pushed my sister out of the way and i hit this dude i'm i'm walking over from a middle school you know the high school middle school right next to each other so i'd have to walk over and then get picked up from our from my parents so i'm like seventh grade, maybe eighth grade. This kid's probably in tenth grade. And so I, like, sidekick this dude.

He backs, I hit him right in the chest. I'm a lot smaller than him. And I know Lindsey, if she gets in trouble, she's getting expelled. And my dad's a pretty rough dude. You don't want to get expelled living under his household, you know. And then so I end up piecing him up, just, just hit him with a three piece combination, his lips bleeding, he's on the ground. And to be honest, I don't even know what I did. I don't even know how I did it. It was just like such a blur. I've never been in a,

that kind of situation before, maybe once or twice. That was it. And, um, it was just like, just like in a fight, you know, in a, in a fight, um, I'm not thinking about what I'm doing. It's just reaction. So it's just reaction so it's a lot of times i have to go back and watch the fight to remember exactly what i did during the fight and his mom rolls up and i'm sitting here helping this dude up i pat him on the back and i was like good job man you know that's what i said to him good job and he said thanks and like walked off he's like wiping his lip off you know he's bleeding his mom's looking at me she drives off but still i'm like why did i why i help him up good job dude he said good job oh my god good job taking punches yeah to the face and you know this is getting around school of course this

middle school just beat you up right so yeah man i can I don't know. When did you start karate? Three years old. Wow. Mandatory. Mandatory. Mandatory. Wow. There was five of us. I've got two brothers and two sisters, and we started the martial arts at three. My dad started early 70s because of, it's weird, Elvis Presley.

No shit. He was a huge Elvis fan. Wow. That's crazy. Because those videos, we've made fun of those videos of Elvis all pilled up doing karate. Oh, God. Oh, my God. They are some of the wildest videos because he's so clearly high out of his mind.

He's completely disassociated. Yeah. And he's like, hey, man. Hey, man. Grab your neck. Come here, now. Oh, yeah. You ever seen the movie Walk Hard?

No. You haven't seen Walk Hard? No. It's like a- Look at him. Look at him. That's when they put the fist to his neck and he pushes forward. The guys fall down.

You never seen this? Oh, I've never seen this. This is actual video? Oh, you need to watch these videos. Please pull up. I, on multiple occasions on this podcast, have watched and made fun of Elvis on pills doing karate. See, it's a 50-minute video. Oh, okay.

I can watch it. No, no. You've got a lot to do. Well, we could just keep it on for the entire 50 minutes and talk. This is on YouTube. Yeah. There's like a lot of people to watch. Elvis Presley, Gladiators Project 1974.

It's not hurting him because he's high. Meanwhile, he's got like a regular shirt on underneath. Look, look at this collared shirt underneath his gi. Look at how high he is. Look how high he is. You remember the Stars and Stripes gi? Yes, I do. He admitted that.

Really? Elvis Presley admitted that. Oh, no shit. The Stars and Stripes actual gi. Look at these guys. I know. So he was an Ed Parkerer student yes yeah ed parker that's but this is this is so funny man with the fucking he's got a regular shoe right now

he's talking about pulling out your neck look how high he is you can see the passion he loved training with. The guy's on his neck. He says, I can't believe Elvis is rubbing my neck. Yeah, I know. Look at the dude. The dude. I see.

Look at him. He's like blinking his eye. Oh, he's out of his fucking mind. Wow. He's probably on all, I mean, I don't know what kind of pills he's on back then. I've never seen this before in my life. Oh my God. I've seen it a hundred times.

Why? And he was one of those. Look at that. Is that super? No, that's not. That's super Bill Wallace. Yeah, that's Bill Wallace. Yeah.

In the Stars and Stripes Gee. Yeah. Bill Wallace is an interesting character, too, because he shows what's possible with just one leg. No, that's not Chuck Norris. But he shows what's possible because he had a fucked up knee. His right knee was fucked up, and he couldn't really throw kicks with it. So everything he did was with his left leg.

Look how he lifts his leg up like that. Oh, my God. It was nothing. Easy. I can't do that. Well, he had incredible dexterity with that left leg because he only kicked with that leg. Yeah. So his hook kicks were off the chart.

Like, a lot of people would dismiss hook kicks. Even in Taekwondo, they would dismiss hook kicks. And I was a big Bill Wallace fan. I would watch him fight. I was like, I'm telling you, man, that fucking guy throws, I think it's one of those things

where you just have to learn how to do it and then you get the dexterity and then eventually it becomes just like throwing a round kick or a side kick or anything else.

That's what's so special about developing that front leg. Yes. And you don't need a lot of power to knock somebody out whether to do what you need to do to do some damage, right? So that's why I love doing the front leg. Yes. And you don't need a lot of power to knock somebody out whether to do what you need to do it, to do some damage, right?

Yeah. So that's why I love doing the front leg stuff. Yeah. But that is crazy. Front leg round kicks seem like they don't have anything to them. Nothing. But the first time I ever knocked a guy out, it was a front leg roundhouse kick.

And I bet you it wasn't even as hard as you could. It was weird. It felt like I barely hit him. Yeah. And just shut off. It's just, it hit him. Yeah. And he just shut off. It's just, it's fast. And one of the things that I love that you do, and we were taught to do that too,

is you sneak things around the shoulders. Over the shoulders. Yeah. Over the shoulders. So you don't see it coming until it's right here. Oh, shit. Bang. And then it's too late.

Was it the first fight? Yes. The very first fight. And a lot of times I will fight with my hands down. And so I like to lure people in with my face you know i can hit you from there but really they don't realize that you know everybody has a a security their own security force field i would say around them and when you step if if i just plod in to that little security bound you have you get defensive you start bringing your hands up you're more aware but if

you stay to the outside of that you know they start to get more relaxed and start to drop just a little bit even if it's just a little bit that's because you can't be tense all the time right and that's when I got you yeah you know because I can close that gap faster than you can right right I can? I can close that gap, and people aren't used to that. People think it was funny because once that karate style started to get out there, started becoming more popular, especially in the full contact sports, because you're seeing Michael Page Venom, and you start seeing guys with those tendencies. Like when you didn't see him at his last fight because he was doing more boxing,

but Conor McGregor when he fought Jose Aldo, just in those first few minutes of that fight, he was moving like a karate guy. Sideway stance, in and out movement. Side kick, yep. Drew out his left hand and countered him. It was beautiful. But it's nothing that you can do and learn right off the bat.

You know what I'm saying? If I was doing MMA and then I go, all right I'm gonna try and do that distance management or get that karate style, you can't just go into any karate studio and learn that. It takes a lot of time. A lot of time. A lot of time.

I talked about taekwondo kicks to someone once. We were talking about this, about them implementing them in MMA. And I was like, you kind of can, but really you should start with that. Like if you want to learn it, you kind of have to learn it when you're a kid. And then you develop that crazy Bill Wallace-type dexterity. And then once you do that, then learn takedown defense. Then learn a little bit of wrestling.

Then learn all the other shit. It's so hard when you're... If you start right with MMA, say if you're a 15 year old kid and you just go to an MMA academy, there is no way you're going to kick like a guy who's been kicking his whole life. You need to learn how to do it almost first. I think there's a lot of arguments about what you should learn first, but I think there's a real good argument for young kids to learn either karate or some kicking-based style real young. I agree.

Because when they spar, they don't really hurt each other, and then they get used to doing it, so you get used to sparring. I love watching little kids spar because they hit each other, but they don't hurt each other. We do full-on MMA sparring in our schools. Yeah. Kicking, punching, you know. Obviously, in the beginning, when they first get their sparring gear,

you're doing more sparring drills than anything, learning how to block. But you've got to take them through this conditioning process. A lot of schools out there don't even allow contact. Yeah. I think it's crap. But it's also, there's a thing with the style that you do that you almost you're not gonna do it that way if you could do everything else from the beginning you're gonna work you get hit a couple of times you're gonna try to take somebody down you know

you're gonna try to do something different like even like your your style originally you didn't really leg kick like when did you start leg kicking? I did. Pull this thing up to, like, keep it, like, close to your face. Sorry about that. No worries. When did you start leg kicking? I started, my last fight, my last kickboxing fight before I wanted to go MMA, it was a leg kick fight.

It was a Muay Thai fight. So that was your first one. My very first one. So you had, like, 56 above the waist. Above the waist. And then one Muay Thai style. Which it can kind of go both ways. I figured like now that I go back to above the waist, it's so hard. It's so much harder. Right. Because you can't kick the leg. You can't. Yeah. You're not getting kicked, but then you only have this small area that you have to find

an, you know, a spot to kick or find an opening when you can create that by just kicking somebody in the leg. It was so difficult. That was my first experience of full contact to the legs. Our Kenpo style, we go at it, man. My dad's just really old school. I remember in the earlier

days, if you didn't have the natural ability to do the martial arts, he ran you off. Really? Oh, yeah. It was that early 80s. He was very hardcore. He didn't have the natural ability to do the martial arts he ran you off really oh yeah it was that early 80s he was very hardcore he didn't let you learn um he i don't think he wanted he wanted the easier for him to teach you something those are the kind of people he wanted around he didn't want to spend a whole lot of time trying to trying to and this is what i got he may have something different but this is kind of, you know, living in the dojo is what I kind of come up with, you know. And people didn't last long.

He was drill, so he grew up in a military school pretty much. His dad was pretty rough. Put him in military school. His dad owned bars and brothels, man, in Charleston, South Carolina. Oh, wow. And high school, put him in military school. That's when he fell in love with the martial arts and then when he when he was 18 he moved he moved out it's so crazy that elvis is

what inspired him he loved his he loved his uh western movies and he did like yeah he loved him man his mom was a huge elvis fan says you know i can't sing like the guy can't dance like the guy i want to try this karate thing so he had his first fight at the it was in it was in uh Charlotte um I forgot which arena it was but in 1977 I think it was 1977 he had his first kickboxing fight wow and then he fought uh went over in France he fought for the USA team he fought in in Greenville, South Carolina. The baddest man in Greenville is what it was called. It was no-holds-bar.

Really? Yeah, with boxing gloves on. You can take him down, no weight class. Submissions? Yeah, I mean, if you knew them back in those days. I don't think anybody knew submissions. But boxing gloves. Boxing gloves.

How heavy were the gloves? I don't know. They were probably... Eight ounces? Eight, 12, eight ounces. But, I mean, this is how crazy it was. You had a guy, you know, you had a black guy come out into the ring with a Confederate flag, you know. What?

It was wild. He fought. He had to fight that guy. He had to fight a guy who was 300 pounds. We got a picture of him literally with his opponent on the ground, and my dad's up in the air getting ready to stomp this dude's head. I'm like, you didn't realize that you could kill the guy? He was like, no, I had to pay rent. Man, I had to win this thing.

Wow. I had to pay rent. Yeah. He fought on that thing twice before they wouldn't let him compete anymore. Really? They kicked him out? Yeah. And then it changed.

What did they say? You're too good? I don't think they said you were too good. You're going to stop stomping people? Yeah, maybe. I don't know. But then I think the promotion changed hands, and it became the Toughman Contest. There was an event in Hawaii back in the 70s.

I believe that was one of the very first no-holds-barred events that Benny Urquidez competed in. Benny Urquidez, yeah. He was a beast. Yeah. Benny the Jet was a bad man. Dude, I heard the craziest story about him. And this was when I was competing in the Waco World Championships, which was like our kickboxing Olympics, right?

It's held in a different country every two years. We got some kids at point five. They're switching over to MMA. You think that I've got a lead leg man and the conservatives cover some distance. These kids, 17 years old or 18 years old, his brother's 21. Blake and Blake Spence, Trent Spence,

these kids are fast. Boy, they kick me in the face on a reg. On the regular. But they've competed all over the world since they were kids. They're getting ready for the Walker World Championships. They're supposed to be in Moscow or something this year. But I got to hang out with Bill Superfoot Wallace. And he told me this crazy story about being in the jet.

He was asked to fight a guy. The guy's name was Muay Thai. His name was Muay Thai? That was the style. He thought it was the guy's name. Yeah, that was the guy's name. It was in Thailand. And I don't know how true this story is.

Maybe he was just blowing smoke. But Benny the Jet was undefeated. He was fighting this guy named Woi Tai. And he goes out in the first round. It was him. Chuck Norris was there. I think Joe Lewis was there. You know, big heavyweight Joe Lewis.

Yeah. And he was losing the fight. The guy kept kicking him in the legs, kicking him in the legs. So what these three guys did, and this is what's so freaking cool they started a fight in the crowd that went just got nuts that they had to cancel the fight they were throwing chairs they like in the ring just from losing that's what i heard that's what i heard yeah i think i've seen a video of something like that. I definitely have seen videos of Benny fighting like leg kick style.

Yeah, I think after this fight he ended up doing more Muay Thai stuff. But he would still wear the pants, the karate pants. Well, I'm sure you've seen the Rick Rufus fight where Rick Rufus fought that champion from Thailand. Yeah. And he hurt him in the first round with punches, but then the guy just kept chopping at his legs chopping on his legs and eventually they literally had to carry him out of there couldn't walk yeah there's something else about those Thai guys but and also back then nobody understood the

effectiveness of leg kicks and Rick Rufus was a bad mother I mean he was so good and he had the guy really hurt he dropped him in the first round had him in real trouble but the dude got up see if you can they call it it's on youtube the fight that changed kickboxing forever that's the it was like the american kickboxer versus the thai style people just did not understand the effectiveness they didn't understand how vulnerable the legs are when you get a guy who's a Thai who really knows how to slam those shins.

Because back then, all the guys were kicking with their insteps. They were either hitting you with the heel or the instep. Either they were hitting you with hook kicks and wheel kicks and side kicks, or they're hitting you with roundhouse kicks with the instep. But the Thais had figured out a long time ago that the shin- Thousand years ago. It's quick. Thousands.

Isn't it crazy? Oh my gosh. Here it is. So here's the fight. And so this dude had a complete traditional, like, he's a low calf kick. Wow. Way back in the day. And he's still wearing the karate boots.

Like, what the? Oh, yeah, man. He had the karate boots, and that dude is barefoot. But Rick had him hurt. Yeah. And he hit him with some wild shit. Because, you know, the guy had never seen anybody that could throw the kind of techniques that Rick could throw.

Look at the calves on that guy. I know. Something about ties, man. You watch those guys. Their calves are just ridiculous. Look at him. He hit him again on the legs. Look at him just plodding down.

And Rick doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know how to check it. Look at that beautiful jump spinning back kick. And he dropped the dude with a punch, but he just keeps getting lit up with these kicks. And after a while, his legs just became useless. There it is. There it is.

It was like a... Yeah. That was sick. Yeah, threw a kick and then a punch right behind it. He threw a left round kick and then right behind it, he lands a perfect punch. And it's got the guy really fucked up. Guy drops his mouthpiece.

He's in real trouble. And Rick swarms on him. But the dude knows how to survive almost kicked him in the face when he was down too look at the stare down there rick is you know he's out for blood but this dude probably been fighting since he was five yeah you know though they have tie fights when they're really young yeah i've seen them actually on dirt surfaces like they just have like people around, and then they're fighting on dirt. But then these leg kicks started really taking their toll,

and eventually Rick's legs are just chopped meat, and this dude is just attacking the legs. Look at this. Right there, that was it. I mean, he's in fucking agony there. He gets up, and he just gets punished even more. And at this point, the dude's going across the front of the legs. He's going to the back of the legs, like anything he can, and that's it. That was a wrap. He's just in agony I'm wincing because I I feel like you know, I feel for him like I I felt those kicks before especially low calf

Yeah, I wonder if there is that allowed in Muay Thai It is a calf. It is allowed. Yeah, it is allowed But the thing about low calf kick in Muay Thai first of all the guy in the they don't have to worry about takedowns right so that front leg is very light they're very light and they turn on the outside if you watch there's a jimmy rivera pedro muñoz fight is a good example of how you can check that low calf kick if you plan on checking it and you look for it regularly because jimmy rivera is so good at it and he hits it all the time. But in that fight, Petro is aware of it in advance, and Munoz checks it over and over and over again,

but he keeps landing it on Jimmy, and he eventually won the battle of the low calf kick. But it's such a punishing kick. Oh, my goodness. I think it was the Vicente Luque. I took three of them. Oh my goodness. I think it was the Vicente Luque. I took three of them. And I don't know if it has to do a lot with those three kicks or sometimes whenever I kick, I roll my hip over maybe a little too much and I start hitting with the outside of my calf. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, instead of the shin. So that may be why sometimes I'm limping afterwards. Mm-hmm. But those low calf kicks are no joke. They're brutal. I hit Rory McDonald with lead leg low calf kicks in that fight, and he was limping afterwards. He was like, he had to have somebody carry him, walk off with him. That's early on in the calf kick game, right? Because really, Benson Henderson was the first guy I saw use it really effectively and regularly. But then when you get into fights being stopped with low calf kicks,

you're like, wow, this is crazy. Like, guys literally can't walk. And then the Conor McGregor fight was like, I mean, the whole world got to see that because even the casual MMA fan watched that fight and went, that is crazy. I feel like 2019, 2020 was like the years of the low calf kick when it really started to become mainstream, right? Because you don't have a lot of muscle there it's bone on bone you know and that that group of muscle is such a a function for you to move around it's just like you know you hit that one of you know one or two times good spot and you saw with sugar was it o'malley just shut him down was that dead foot was that they call that? That happened also

with Cejudo when he fought Mighty Mouse. Mighty Mouse kicked him. His leg went numb and he's got that drop foot. Drop foot. That's what they call it. But Henry survived.

He survived and he made it through but it happened to Michael Chandler and Bellator. I saw that one. It's a great, it's like those nerves

are so exposed there. You hit that one spot. I thought he broke his ankle but it was just the dead foot. It's really like the button for the calf. Yeah. You hit that one spot. I thought he broke his ankle, but it was just a dead foot. It's really like the button for the calf. Yeah. It's like the version of on the button for your chin. That's kind of the same thing for a calf.

And I think that's the beauty of that karate style as well. You're starting to see more and more people doing it, but switching sides. Sometimes switching sides can just do it for you. Well, you switch up quite a bit. And you're much more, it seems like, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're more comfortable right leg forward with a front leg. With my front leg, yes. I do throw with my left, but my, yeah, I love using my right leg.

You're right-handed. Yeah. I'm right-handed, yeah. Yeah. But, you know, it's funny because I have, you know, little things here I like to do with my left leg, different kicks, different kicks I do with my right leg. And it's, but sometimes preventing somebody from low calf kicking you. So if you had your left foot in front, like when I fought Vicente, I come out, we're in a closed stance, I have my left foot, he had left foot. I can tell he was just trying to shut me down.

Most everybody tries to do with my movement is just try and low calf kick work mm-hmm take my legs out and all it takes for me to switch sides they throw that one hard low calf kick maybe the inside and I check it a lot of times they think twice about doing it cuz I yeah I do a lot I spend a lot of time conditioning my shins my feet and that's just the old school what do you do my dad I start off and actually have a tutorial on this on my on my YouTube channel. And it was one of my most popular videos, to be honest. I didn't think it was going to be that popular,

but everybody wants to know how to condition their shins. But I start off, and this is something my dad has trained a lot of guys, kickboxers, world champions. And he told me, you've got to dents in the bone first. Most guys that are athletes athletes their bones are pretty dense you know you're jumping you're running you're getting those little micro fractures and they heal back up so the bone becomes strong bone becomes dense i don't recommend doing this if you're just coming off of the couch and you you haven't played sports before because you can end up injuring yourself but just you know you get a muay thai bag and you know the

lower part of the muay thai bag is harder than the than the rest everything kind of sinks down you spend a lot of time hitting that boom just over and over and over again you're taking a lot of punishment to that bone and the bone wants to to beef it up then when you go from that you go to i have a maki a maki where you heard yeah so it's in our school my dad's on that thing every day you see my dudes my dad's hands it's ridiculous he used to punish us he just slapped the top of our head there you go there you go there's the you can go check that out find that but yeah there's that's the actual market but you see the tire mm-hmm and that's there to condition the skin not just the bone because your skin's there to condition the skin, not just the bone. Because your skin's got to be conditioned and tough.

Because I don't know if you saw when Luke Rockhold, what was it, during the Yoel Romero fight, he had split the skin from kicking Yoel Romero. And it got Mercer or something. Yeah, he's still fucked up. Really, still. Do you see the fight that he had with Jan Bohovic? Yes.

He had that thing wrapped up. Yeah, still? Do you see the fight that he had with Jan Bohovic? Yes. He had that thing wrapped up. Yeah, he wore like a sleeve over his shin because he's had multiple skin grafts. What? Yeah. Oh, his shin's been fucked. Golly. From that fight. Dude, infections like MRSA, staph, that kind of shit, and a cut and an open wound, you

have to take care of that. Yeah. That is so dangerous. People die from that. That's wild. They probably had to pack it. You've seen that? I'm sure, yeah.

I can sit there and watch that on YouTube all day. Yeah. Pulling those stuff out. Put that video back up again. So what I do is I will condition the skin so that way those splits don't happen. Right? And I've done this for years. I'll go from the top of the foot, from for my toes all the way up to that knee knuckle

on that top of the shin right below your knee. And I'll do – you start off – I tell people start off with doing 10, and you work your way up to doing 50 and then doing 100. And you just do it? Do you do it like – And it's not hard. Yeah, it's not hard. And I try and do it three times a week.

Does it show what you're doing up there? I don't know if it does or not. Yeah, they're right there, Jim. And it's not hard. And I try and do it three times a week. Does it show you doing it there? I don't know if it does or not. Yeah, they're right there, Jim. And it's just tapping. So that's how you do it? Yep, just sit there, pop, and I do both of them. And, you know, obviously the more your skin and shin becomes more conditioned, you know, you can sink it in there a little bit. Now, when you went from above-the-waist kickboxing to incorporating leg kicks,

did you go to a Thai gym? No? No. Just jump right in? Jump right in. Did you think, I'm going to kick him in the legs too, or did you say, I'm just going to do what I do? No.

I knew that the legs were additional targets, so we really focused on that. We really focused on trying. I did a lot of changes, man, from when I went from kickboxing to, and I learned that through training with GSP. I had fought on a card in Montreal. This is when I was in kickboxing. This was before I had torn every ligament in my left leg in the World Combat League when I fought Raymond Daniels.

You tore every ligament? Every ligament in my left leg. What happened? First 30 seconds of the first round, it every ligament? Every ligament in my left leg. What happened? First 30 seconds of the first round, it was, of course, you were in that weird bowl, right? And it was, it wasn't canvas. And I believe it was first 30 seconds in the first round, I had fought Raymond,

and I guess they didn't clean up where somebody had fallen on their back at the fight before. There was some really damp spots. And I knew Raymond Daniels, he liked to spin. I forgot which side forward it was, but he likes to spin off of, I think it might be his left foot in front. So he kicks with his right leg. And I think he was kind of in between switching. And I decided to blitz him then.

I was trying to catch him when he switched and then I had ran in for some reason um I had slipped a little bit as I was coming in he grabs me by the neck and he pulls me to the side so I step with my left foot my leg was straight then he kind of pulls down and I just kind of fold into my leg and it just collapsed inward and that's all she wrote man it just I could, and it just collapsed inward. And that's all she wrote, man. I could just feel it just collapse. Everything just gave way. I just felt everything just break. Just brah.

And I'm sitting on the ground rolling. Here we go. Watch this. Right there. Boom. Oh, my goodness, dude. Oh, my goodness. Oh, look at you.

So that's where I slipped there. He's throwing the blitz. He pulls to the left, and I step, and that's when it collapsed in. Oh, my God. It just went. I remember afterwards, I tried to stand up. That's where I slipped. Boom.

I pull in. He stepped, pulls down. It was almost like this, I guess. Kind of pulls me in. It was terrible. And then. You have to get surgery yeah multiple multiple surgeries i did cadaver how many surgeries well there was only one original surgery where they went in they took 40 of my meniscus out oof uh i did um that's a lot yeah yeah it was uh is that the same leg that darren till was uh side kicking

you on yeah that's i tore my mcl during that fight in the first or second round wow yeah now i actually i showed it and kind of i kind of back up and shake it out a little bit it's kind of pissed but you know it is what it is and then i feel like like after that i did cadaver tissue so they could beef up my acl as much they can make it as thick as they want and then um so they do with the um achilles tendon is that what they use for you um i don't know it was it might have been achilles or i know they use patella and they can they can take as much as they want. Because I know if they take your own, they can take a small portion, but the healing time is elongated. I did both.

I did patella on my left leg and I did cadaver on my right. Yeah. The right they used Achilles tendon from a cadaver and it was great. That one has never been a problem since. The left one was patella tendon graft, and it took a long time to heal. Wow. It took a full year before I felt confident with it, and then even then, if I would do anything where I had to get on one knee, it would hurt.

It would hurt pretty bad. Even two knees. Even stretching. Still? Yeah. No, not anymore. Now it's nothing. Now it feels like 100%.

It doesn't bother me at all. Wow. But if I'm the one who you get on your knees and you lean back? Yeah. Shit, it took forever before I could do that one. It was just so tight. Yeah. That's how mine was.

It hurts so bad to be on your knees. Like when your knees touch, because they have to take a piece of your bone off your kneecap and a piece of bone out of your shin, and they pull it out with the piece of the patella, and they open you up like a fish and drill it in place. Have you seen those surgeries? I watched it. Or knee repair? I watched my surgery because I was hoping I was never going to do surgery again,

so I asked the doctor. I said, can I watch? And he goes, well, I want to put you under. And I go, is there a way where I could watch instead of you putting me under? He goes, well, I could give you an epidural, but I don't recommend it. So you did an epidural? Yeah. He goes, I don't want you to freak out. I go, wow, I could give you an epidural, but I don't recommend it. So you did an epidural? Yeah, he goes, I don't want you to freak out. I go, I'm not going to freak out.

I go, I want to see it. That's awesome. So the doctor was crazy. He let me. He goes, all right. You're fucking crazy. I'm crazy too. Give me knuckles.

Let's go. The doctor, I watched the surgery. The next surgery, I'm watching it. It was pretty weird. I don't know if you can even do it. Yeah, it was pretty weird. Next surgery, I'm watching it. It was pretty weird. I don't know if you can even do it.

Yeah, it was pretty weird. But, you know, it took a while because five months in, that ligament dies, and then your body kind of regenerates. Yeah, your body reprofilerates it. And then the doctor told me, five months in, your knee's going to feel great. Of course, me, before that, man, I felt like I could do anything. You know, I'm sitting here dunking. I can do – I've got it where I'm sitting here dunking I can do I've I've got

it where I can yeah my dad's 6'2 I can jump over my dad you know just doing crazy tricking martial arts tricking and I do some of that if I knock anybody out in the octagon but that was that my first flip that little corkscrew idea I used to do that all the time I don't do that anymore just because it's not worth just not worth the risk the risk. It's crazy because it looks cool but if you fuck, like when Michael Chandler knocked out Dan Hooker and then did that backflip, I was like bro, stop doing that.

What's his name who was doing the body roll on his shoulder? Yes, Johnny Walker. He fucked his shoulder up. He was out forever. He had to get surgery. Hadn't been the same since. He has a giant scar on his shoulder from that. Yeah. No, he hasn't been the same since. So it's like, you know, I didn't listen to him five months in um sparring and I end up my knee it just kind of like moves over back in that's what happened that's what it felt like yeah like this is where my knee bends it just went and then I was like

mess it up I know I guarantee I messed it up I tore it again but I didn't I had stretched it but then I had tore more meniscus oh Jesus so they had to go back in tighten everything up

they had they repaired my meniscus I'm talking six weeks couldn't put any weight on that leg right it was straightened

the whole time it's crazy a lifetime to get your leg to where it is took six weeks for my thigh to be as big as my calf yeah it's crazy a lifetime to get your leg to where it is took six weeks for my thigh to be as big as my calf yeah it's crazy isn't it just that's what I was out for three years three years which was kind of a blessing to be honest with you because I was fighting every all the time and

my dad's been there with me 24 7 7 days a days a week, training. And I wanted to quit. I didn't want to fight anymore. Burn out. I was burnt, man. And I didn't know how to tell him. Didn't know how to tell him. Because he's your dad. And he's scary.

And he's my pops, man. And he's scary, too. And to be honest, you know, I didn't. And he's always told me that. He's always like, man, if you don't want to do this, let me know. But I can always see, you know, there's something in his eyes. Like he really, he wants me to do this. Of course.

And then this happened, right? So in that time, those three years, I just, when the doctor told me I would never do it again, that's when it was like, for real for me. Like, that's when that flame just arose in my in me that i'm doing this freaking screw that dude i'm doing this again what are you talking about you know there's no way he's probably never fight again and uh he's done all my surgeries is funny because i i look at him like see what remember yeah yeah we were just talking the other day about when I got my ACL reconstructed and then I had meniscus damage that had to get scoped out.

They were like, you've got to stop doing martial arts. And I was in my 20s. I was like, what are you talking about? This is my whole life. Yeah. This is my identity. I'm not stopping. I'm like, are you fixing this?

You're fixing it, right? Then we're going. There you go. I'm going back in. I don't know what you're saying? You're fixing it, right? Then we're going. There you go. I'm going back in. I don't know what you're saying. You're just talking nonsense. Yeah. Because I was looking at him with his belly and his pencil arms.

I'm like, shut your fucking hole. Yeah. Like, I'm not going to stop doing this. It was one of the reasons why I ended up injuring it again. Because my physical therapy that I was doing was for normal people who just walked from point A to point B. They're not. So my quad was overdeveloped. My hamstring was weak.

And that was one of the causes of me injuring my knees so much. So in that time, before that injury, I fought in Montreal, back to where we were getting to. I was fighting a guy, very tough kickboxer out of Montreal. And lo and behold, George St. Pierre and Faraz Zahabi was in my opponent's corner. And I ended up knocking that dude out in the fifth round. And then afterwards, I think it was kind of wild. He comes up, GSP comes up, and Faraz, hey, man, we would love to bring in for, you know,

and his student was kind of over there just like this, you know. He was like, we would love to bring you out for GSP's camps. Help him out with the strike. And I'm like, are you kidding me? That's incredible. What year was this? Oh, man. 2000.

Shoot. Seven, eight, six, seven, eight. So this is GSP at the top of the fucking food chain. Right? This was probably around like the Nick Diaz fight. It was probably before that. DJ Penn, really? Because I helped him with John Fitch, Tiago Alves, Matt Serra.

Shoot, I know there was more. But I was up there, and that's when I knew. I was like, I kept getting taken down. Every time I blitzed this dude, just changed his level run right into a level a double leg ended up on my head so i gotta make some changes man i gotta i gotta lower my stance i gotta i can't blitz straight in i gotta angle off because i'm running into these things and that's when he was my inspiration to switch from kickboxing to mma really he was my inspiration yeah man i mean he was my inspiration to switch from kickboxing to MMA. Really? He was my inspiration. Yeah, man. I mean, we became friends, man.

And I was up there helping him out. Well, he was helping me out more than I was helping him out. That's what it felt like to me. I was just at awe that I was up there training with this guy. He's so open-minded, too. He's awesome. The fact that they did that, that you just knocked out their guy, and they're like, hey, man, can we train?

That's so smart. It's so open-minded. And I think it was the style, too. Like, they knew there was, like, something different about that, and maybe I can, I don't know, if I could somehow figure that out, then these other strikers, like Tiago Alves was, I don't know. I don't know what they were thinking. Well, you know, George started out with Shotokan as well.

So because of that style, that was his original style, that karate style. And he always attributes that to his ability to take people down. He said it's his karate blitz. Like the blitz, the ability to close that distance quickly is what allowed him to get really good at double legs. That's awesome. Makes sense, right? It does, 100%. I mean, especially the angles.

You never see me throw it. You did in the earlier days. I mean, when I fought Nishan Burrell, you know, I out-wrestled him, outstruck him, but I was using a lot of wrestling. Chris Clements, I was doing a lot of wrestling. I was taking him down. But I think it was after the Nishan Burrell fight, Joe Silva comes up and was like,

Stephen, just remember, it wasn't your wrestling that got you here I'm like that's all he said I was like yeah got you but um you know

it was the Matt Brown fight that I really after that I really wanted to show my wrestling because everybody thought I didn't have it and I don't think

it was the fact that I didn't have it I was just done 30 seconds in the first round I was the weight cut and everything killed me and what was it about that fight because that was a weird fight for you it was it was different

man i just came off of knocking this dude out in the first round got the bonus you know and it was like the week i got back they were like hey man you want to you want to fight this guy matt brown in a few months i'm like yeah let's make it happen i was like why does that name sound familiar and then i looked him up as i do this dude's got some fights man he's he's been in the game for a while but brown is a savage and he showed it man this is i'll tell you in a second but we rode back in the ambulance together after the fight because we beat each other up so bad but I had hired a new strength and to get a conditioning coach and you know and I was doing a lot of heavy lifting I was walking around about 215 never got up above 200 pounds since then just muscled up and I and I I had you know Nate Marquardt come down from my

camp and I felt great you know and realizing that everything was going great until I had to cut the weight and up to 215 yeah oh my god 210 215 I think my heaviest I was about 215 so you're cutting 40 pounds 40 pounds killed me um after that way how far out did you start the cut man I think a little too late um trying to come down I mean I was eating chicken I hate chicken until this day I don't know but I still felt explosive I guess you know if you are naturally explosive you're gonna keep some of that mm-hmm even if you gain some muscle but I just cut well I started cutting I don't remember when I started it

but I remember almost passing out a few times getting down to that weight Did you check your weight before you got back in the octagon? Like when you fully rehydrated No, I didn't I was up there for sure but still it was like

of course that whole weight cutting process was still new to me. And I know for a fact we didn't rehydrate. Like, my first fight, first fight ever, we went to a Longhorn Steakhouse. I had about a gallon of sweet tea. Like, three baked potatoes, cheese fries. And even though I knocked the guy out in the second round, I almost vomited everywhere. You had so much food in you. Oh, my gosh. That's hilarious. But just drinking sweet tea and not even drinking water. You know what I'm saying? A little bit of glucose is probably good for your muscles. I think so, but no water.

I had zero water. It was wild, man. I don't know what we were thinking. That's crazy. You just drank sweet tea and no water? Yeah, sweet tea. That's like the nectar of the gods in South Carolina. Sweet tea, man.

That's one thing I have a hard time not drinking during fight camps. Really? Oh, yeah. Wow, that's funny. I keep a weight now where I pretty much eat what I want up until about a week before I get up. What do you stay at now? At my heaviest, 195. Oh, okay. 195. That's a big difference that 20 pound

difference and that's trying that's just trying to trying to do it you know is it because you don't lift weights as much anymore or i think the way that we do it though i have a after the tyrant fight good reason because the guy was strong as the Knox. I had hired a, after that experience with Matt Brown, you know, I had stopped lifting weights. Like, you're just kind of not going to do it anymore. Just going to stick with just, you know, bag work and trying to throw bodies around, you know. That'd just be my, it worked for a while until Tyron.

And I've just felt how powerful that dude was i mean he was just he was a different animal when i then he was very smart in how he fought you too i've always said that if you want to look at a good way to fight wonder boy look at what tyron did because he didn't care if people were booing he didn't care people thought it was boring he really was careful running into the buzzsaw. Real careful staying on the outside. Not a lot of activity, but then when he did have activity, it was like super dangerous,

explosive movements. Oh my goodness. And he was. He was quick. But even since then, he kind of fought the same. I don't know if he just felt like that was the ultimate way of doing it

because after that, he just fought the same way. He just kept backing up, backing up. I think Tyron... What do you think? I don't know if he just felt like that was the ultimate way of doing it because he like after that He just fought the same way just kept backing up backing up. I think I don't know, you know, I think tyrant I think there's a certain number of years a guy can compete at the top of his range You know and everybody's different some guys like Randy Couture kept going It was 40s was elite and I think that was like the style that he was fighting to like that greco-roman wrestling that he had that experience he can just tie dudes up and he was

so good at it that he didn't take a whole lot of damage maybe and he was just able to do that i don't know what it is it's like everybody's got their own amount like you know like some guys are toyotas and they can get 200 000 miles on them and some guys are jaguars and 50 000 miles in they're junk yeah you know it's not the jaguars are junk bad example whatever you know i'm saying like some some cars are just range rover how about that they're just not they're not designed as durable as they don't they don't last as long and some guys can just for whatever reason look in bern in Bernard Hopkins fought at a world-class level until he was 50 years old and a world-class level like

beat world champions up until in his late 40s I'm trying to raise on that level crazy trying to be on that well that guy was super super disciplined eight super clean never got out of shape yeah and you know just any fought so defensively responsible yeah like very smart fighter oh yeah just like uses really ever got in crazy Wars you know what as much as I love Marvin Hagler I'm a giant Marvin Hagler fan like to the day I die when Marvin Hagler fought Tommy Hearns he threw everything out the window and it's like I'm gonna fucking kill this guy yeah I don't give a shit. He threw everything out the window and was like, I'm going to fucking kill this guy.

I don't give a shit. And he just waded into the fire. And Tommy was blasting him with big shots, even had him hurt in the first round. You would never see Bernard Hopkins fight like that. Ever. Ever. He would never be defensively irresponsible.

He always fought like super technically and clever. That's why I think Izzy Adesanya so is is the way he is He's very when you walk out there and you see a guy You know getting ready to do battle with somebody and you see do two different types of guys You see the guy that's very jittery and very just like just on edge all the time And mm-hmm and you see somebody like Izzy or even Connor Connor just this is a calmness is a very calmness about him that's a dangerous guy especially now cuz is he's so accustomed to being successful yeah at the highest levels I've had so many people go up and fight him I'm like no

no no I mean Chris Weidman throws me around like a rag doll. You know, it's funny because you got 170, you got 185, and 185 doesn't seem that big, but these dudes. It's big. These dudes are massive. And Izzy, he's so long, and he's a big dude too. He is big. He doesn't look it. He looks like a beanpole yeah but he's he's big

he's just i don't know it's just it's a different different weight throwing around at that level it's ridiculous man i would love to have a sparring you know go up there and spar with him i think that would be a fun experience but when i you know i got chris wyman grasping by my wrist i feel like a three-year-old can't't get away. There's something about that wrestler strength. It's so uncomfortable. It is. But it's funny because I love being in that situation. I love being, and I had to learn to do that. I had to learn to be, to love

to get accustomed to being, just having someone just grinding you all the time. Didn't sound right, but you know what I mean. Yeah, I know what you're saying. You know, you got Chris Wyburn just grinding me. Well, when you were, the thing is like you were so dominant as a striker. That shows tremendous character to be able to kind of start from the ground floor. I mean, obviously every fight starts standing up, so you do have a big advantage there.

But that advantage is, it's diminished quite a bit by takedowns, by the threat of takedowns, by all these different aspects of MMA. And even fighting in a cage is so much different. Oh yeah. And fighting in ropes or in fighting the World Combat League, that sort of bowl, that bowl thing. Did you like that bowl thing? No. Not at all? I mean it looked cool. It looked cool. It looked like a blood sport.

Yeah. You know? They're using that for the boss root in Karate League too. Karate League, yeah. What's it called? Karate Combat League. Karate Combat, yeah. What's it called? Karate Combat League? Karate Combat.

It's got like a... Similar. Very similar, but they have walls so you're not falling off the stage. Right, right, right. Then it was, you were like on that fine line. When you got close to that thing, you could go off of it, and you got like a three-foot drop. I've been fighting forever to have fights take place with no cage. And I'm like, if you can have a football field and you can have all these dudes run around

playing football, there's no fence, there's no cage, and they're running full blast. These are giant super athletes. You're telling me you can't have a fight in the middle of a football arena? How come you can't have it? Like basketball is another example. Basketball. You got all these players, these giant dudes, seven feet tall, they're running around.

They're fine with this basketball floor, but we have to have everybody caged in because that cage is an artificial structure. It stops you from moving that way. You get pressed up against it. You can get up quicker from it. You can utilize it to hold people in place. There's a lot of weirdness to a cage. It also obstructs the view. Wow. I didn't really think about that. It does. And you're better off just kind of like

watching it at home. You get a better view at home. That's right. And you got the commentating. On the grass. Dude, you got my mind rolling right now, dude. You can have more than one. Just more than one fight's going on at once. Yeah, but that's like a gym where guys collide into each other

and someone gets a blown out knee. That's how Rashad Evans lost the fight with Jon Jones. When Rashad Evans, rather, lost the fight with Shogun, he was sparring in the same ring as Diego Sanchez. And Diego Sanchez collided with him and fucked up his knee.

So Rashad had to pull out of the fight with Shogun. Jon Jones steps in, takes the fight. Jon Jones becomes the youngest ever light heavyweight champion, youngest ever UFC champion. Wow. Yeah. Crazy. Look at him now.

He looks massive. Look at him now. He's so big. I feel like he is. I don't think that's a good move. Can you get massive enough for Francis that's the question

yeah or do you want to I mean do you want to right I don't care how much weight you put on

to get up this dude's been carrying that weight around his whole life and it's natural and he's explosive yeah I mean you got some dudes

that just even I've sparred with guys smaller than me but they just have some kind of power about them I fought a pro boxer. I was up there training with GSP, and he was going over to the Howard's Brothers up in Montreal.

And there was a guy, Adonis. Adonis Creed. I don't remember his name. Adonis. He was a world champion. Adonis Stevenson? Boxer. Yes.

Oh, my God. I was in the ring with him. And I know one of the Howard's Brothers, I think the oldest, he was just happy a white boy can go up there and box. He was like, get up there and spar this guy. I didn't know who this guy was. I'm like, yeah, okay. Yeah, sure, thumbs up. And I go out there, I'm sparring this guy.

He's taking it easy on me. But whenever he would throw a punch, I felt it in my bones. I've never been hit like that. And the funny thing is he's probably taking it easy on me. I mean, there's something about a guy, and it doesn't make sense for these MMA fighters to go over to boxing. It's exciting, but still, to do that, it's a different sport. It's something different about it. It's very different. But I think the most interesting crossover is Claressa Shields. Claressa, who was a two-time Olympic gold medalist in boxing,

now she's fighting in MMA, and she's still young, man. And she looks great. She's crushing. I've seen some of her photos, some of the videos she's putting out there. She's getting some work in for sure. And those hands, you don't want no part of those hands. And what weight? Little gloves. She's big. So is that a Nune. And those hands, you don't want no part of those hands. In what weight? Little gloves.

She's big. She, in the Olympics. So is that a Nunez? Yeah, well, she's 55. Oh. Yeah, it's a weight above, really. Is she picked up by anybody yet? PFL.

PFL. Because the PFL. People are picking up everybody. Yeah, they're doing a good thing. They're being very smart. You know, they're getting really good fighters. They got Rory. Now they got Showtime.

Pettis is there. John Doomsday Howard is over there. They've got good fighters over there. They have a good roster, and they're putting more in Kayla Harrison. And she is probably the most exciting female fighter outside of Claressa that's not in the UFC. And, you know, judo gold medalist, beast, beast of an athlete. And so she'll probably wind up fighting Clarissa. And that's, Clarissa's got to, she needs a lot of time to get to that

because obviously you know what it's like when a real world-class judo player grabs a hold of you. Like you're just like, oh, my God. I remember I rolled with Cairo Parisian when Cairo was in his prime. It was like rolling with a chimp. It was really like, just like you just get

thrown around like, what in the fuck? That's how, that's what I heard it was like rolling with Marcelo Garcia. Oh yeah, I'm sure.

Just the gorilla strength that guy has got. Just, he doesn't look it. Yeah. I heard he's just so strong. Ryan Hall told me he was just ridiculous.

Well, his legs are so preposterously big. And Marcelo was so good at utilizing his legs, like his X guard and his sweeps. And then when he would take your back, he would crush you with those legs. His legs were like these crazy tree trunks. Big casp. I mean, he was short.

So he looked like the beast from X-Men. He looked like a champ. Yeah. Like a champ. Yeah. And Ryan told me, he was like, I look at Ryan, he's here,

and he said Marcel. There's a few guys I've rolled with where you're just like, jeez, Jake Shields is another one. Oh my God. Crazy strong.

Ridiculous. Have you rolled with Chris? Weidman, no. I can only imagine. Chris Weidman, in his prime, on his way up to the title, when he smashed

Liotta Machida, when he was smashing people, Chris Weidman was a prime, like on his way up to the title, like when he smashed Lyoto Machida, like when he was smashing people. Chris Weidman was a monster. He competed in, I think, the Abu Dhabi. I think in a— Vitor Belfort, I'm thinking. Okay. Did he fight Lyoto? He did.

Yes, he did. Five fives. I was right. That was his—that was the fight right after the second Anderson Silva fight. They went the distance. Yeah. That was a sick fight. You know what I was actually thinking?

I was thinking of him and Vitor Belfort. Gotcha. Because he destroyed Vitor Belfort. Just crushed him. Yeah. But he competed in Abu Dhabi, I think a year of jiu-jitsu. And I think he made it the, it was controversial. I think he was beating everybody.

And I forgot who he was going up against. But he ended up losing. Well, he was such a powerful wrestler. Yeah. You know, I remember when he knocked out Munoz and when he was on his way up to the title. And, you know, he was just on another level. I remember Ray Longo saying, like after one of his fights, Ray Longo looked at me and goes, The kid's a motherfucker.

I'm telling you, that kid's a motherfucker. We call him the godfather. Because he just looks like a mafia guy the way he talks he's such a character I love him he was in South Carolina not too long ago him and Matt Serra are my all time favorite corner guys to listen to

the two of those guys together they're such characters they're so funny they're awesome the two of them together the energy they feed off of each other oh yeah

it's just that fucking Guido energy they're so hilarious and they're both super just that fucking Guido energy yeah they're so they're so hilarious and they're both like super talented martial artists too they know what they're talking about but they have all this personality and flavor

yeah I feel like the whole team up there is like that well it's what a team I mean just think about like you have Henzo Gracie

that academy has produced more elite grapplers I think than any other academy on earth and still to this day. John Donahue comes out of there. The Donahue Death Squad is dominating no-gi competition.

You've got Gordon Ryan, who is pretty much universally regarded as the best no-gi grappler of all time. He's only 26 years old, 25 years old. He comes out of there. Still? He's 25? Yes. Pull up Gordon Ryan. I think Gordon's 25.

At the most, I think he's 26. And his brother. His brother's nasty. Nicky Ryan, he's nasty. Eddie Cummings came out of there. 25. 25. He hasn't lost in 39 bouts.

In jiu-jitsu, that's crazy. That's unheard of. I watched some of his recent stuff, too, before the whole COVID thing, and it almost looks like he just rolls so slow and like he's playing with these dudes. I watched some of his recent stuff, too, before the whole COVID thing, and it almost looks like he just rolls so slow and like he's playing with these dudes. He's at such an advanced level. They don't take a single day off. I talked to Donaher about that because I'm trying to get them to move out here.

Donaher was— They're in what, Cuba? They're in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico? Yeah, they're in Puerto Rico. Donaher, they had this event out here, and then afterwards we all went to dinner, and we were all hanging out, and Donaher was telling me event out here and then afterwards we all went to dinner and we were all hanging out and Donaher was telling me that

he has people come over and you know they have these brutal training sessions he's like alright I'll see you tomorrow he goes

tomorrow? you guys do this every day? he goes every day he goes seven days a week? seven days a week he goes

what about Christmas? fuck Christmas they're there Christmas they're there every day they don't I go you don't believe in rest days. He goes, no, he goes, just train lighter, active recovery. I'm like, wow. But you

look, the results speak for themselves. Yeah. But I, there's something with that because I train every day, sometimes twice a day. Yeah. Still seven days a week. Don't take a day. Well, Sunday off. I take Sunday off. Church. That and just to take a day off. Well, Sunday off. I take Sunday off. Church? That and filming. Just to take a day off. Filming. Oh, for your YouTube channel. Have you always taken Sunday off? Always.

Yeah. Just to kick back and just do nothing. Yeah. I think you'd need a day of that. Nothing. But these guys are not. I mean, Donaher, he's a strange cat because he's a super genius. I met him through GSP.

When I was going up there to train with him, he was in GSP's corner. And through him is how I met Chris. So think about that combination. You've got Weidman, Ray Longo, Matt Serra, Donaher, Henzo Gracie. You also have Farasa Habi, who I think is the best mind in MMA. Talking to that guy about strategy and about training, and he's without a doubt one of the masterminds of the sport. You got GSP.

You got the whole TriStar. Rory. Did you say Rory? Oh, yeah. I mean, crazy. It's a crazy group of people that all came out of this one sort of group of human beings. Yeah. That's ridiculous.

It's amazing affiliation. Oh, yeah. 100%. That affiliation of all those top schools together. Yeah. I would go up there with Chris, and that first sparring session was crazy. Yeah. You also have Gary Tonin, who's now killing it in 1FC.

He's one of the most elite grapplers on the planet, too. He's a part of that group, too. Where does he fight at? 1FC. 1FC. And what weight? I, he's a part of that group too. What is he fighting at? 1FC. 1FC? And what weight? I think he's, well, you know, 1FC has no, they have a hydration thing. Yeah.

Where they check your hydration. You like that? I like it a lot. It sounds great. I like it a lot. Yeah, I like it a lot. I don't believe in weight cutting. I think it's sanctioned cheating.

That was the big kicker for me too from going from kickboxing too. I didn't cut anyway. I'd go up a weight class. But when I had to learn how to do it, it took some time. It wasn't until probably the Whitaker fight that I finally found a good way of doing it. Really? Yeah. We were just

winging it. We were asking people. So how did you learn how to do it? Weidman didn't show you how to do it? It might have been. Okay, it might have been okay it might have been that's right because I was with I was with Weidman at that way at that fight maybe it was the Chris Clements fight but no I mean we were asking you know I was actually GSP and Fraz they kind of we called them and listen man we're dying here what's we need we need some help now you never thought about like uh getting a George Lockhart or someone like that to come at the time work with you not at the time do you use someone like that now um i used uh tyler minton tyler minton was it i was using perfecting athletes for a while the ladies were great man i loved him but um we ended up going with tyler minton the dude is just he's it's funny i'm fam i mean i'm having full-on meals

and still losing weight really oh yeah how are you doing that what are you doing differently so you know obviously i i think i think a lot helps with just being coming into fight week lighter you know i i during fight camp training through two or three times a day i naturally get to 185 and i stay there up until the Tuesday before the fight. So UFC usually brings us in on Tuesday. I water load on Sunday, so I'll drink three gallons of water, which takes all day. So I naturally get to 185 halfway through camp.

I stay there. The Sunday before fight week, I'll drink three gallons of water. Why on Sunday before fight week? That's when I start my water load. I hate drinking water. I drink maybe a half a gallon. Sweet tea, man. Sweet tea. Or I got to flavor the water with something. I can't stand it. Are you drinking distilled water when you're doing this? With the water load? Just regular water? Regular water. And still taking bottoms of minerals because you can deplete yourself. I had a buddy of mine go through eight hours of body cramps, man, cutting weight and not taking the potassium and the magnesium and things like that.

And then after that, I just saturate my body with water. I cut a half a gallon off each day. So we show up on Tuesday. Tyler Minton's there. He's got my three meals ready and little snacks in between, little butter balls. I don't know what is all one of the ingredients. Like little protein,

like little butter balls, man, with like some kind of seasoning. Like almond butter or something? Maybe almond butter and some of them, and he's got this one now, it's like a chocolate flavor. So if you have any kind of cravings,

it just gets rid of all those cravings. And I'll do like, he'll make like chicken with spaghetti or zucchini spaghetti. Spaghetti squash. Yeah, spaghetti. It's just phenomenal meals, man. I'm still losing weight. Really?

And I'll still work out once a day. Small portions, regular portions? I mean, I wouldn't say your average, maybe a little less than average. But enough. But enough, man. I feel great, yeah. And sometimes it's like, man, I shouldn't be feeling this full right now. wouldn't say you're average maybe a little less than average which but enough but enough man i feel great yeah and sometimes that's like man i shouldn't be feeling this full right now i'm all right just trust the process that he says just trust the process and he's been great so he's been doing this for mma fighters for a long time for a while yeah for a for a long time i think he

started with uh george lockhart i'm not sure When I talked to Lockhart about it and he was explaining the science behind weight cutting, I'm like, whoa, wait a minute. Like he's doing it based on like how much muscle mass you have and how much water they can draw out of your muscle mass and where you're at now versus where you need to be right before they drain you out. And he was explaining that the bigger your muscles are, the more water you can cut. Yeah. So a guy like Yoel Romero.

Or Tyron. Yeah, Tyron can cut a shitload of water. But I got to think that still is depleting you. And if you could just weigh what you weigh. I would agree. Why is that not cheating? How come steroids are cheating, but that's not cheating? Yeah.

Like when you see a guy like, you know, fill in the blank for some guy who cuts a shitload of weight, whoever it is, when they're weighing it at 170, but you know they're really 195, 200 by the time they get on the scale. It's crazy because you're not a 170. The 170-pound champion of the world. Bitch, you're not 170. You were 170 for 10 minutes. You're not 170. I mean, I understand that everyone's doing it, and it's okay because everyone's doing it.

But it's not healthy for the fighter. It's completely lying to the general public. Yeah. You know? Like, when you see these guys, like, some guys, they're cutting weight, and you look at them, you're like, what are you doing to yourself? Like, TJ Dillshaw, perfect example. Yeah. When he goes down to fight Henry Cejudo.

He's walking around like a guy from The Walking Dead. Yeah, he looks like death. And he performed, I mean, I feel like you're not holding the amount of water you should to. I don't know if that was why he got knocked out. I don't know if it was right on the button, but still. It's not good for your brain. Right. None of that's good for your brain. I mean, he was so fucked up before that fight. He clearly should have never gone down to 125.

And that's one of the reasons why I walk around lighter. I just feel like I'm... Smarter. It's smarter. I feel so fast. I feel a lot faster. Even the guys that walk around a lot bigger, they're stronger probably right off the bat, but... You're healthier. Like, a lot of guys, their careers

really flourished once they moved up in weight. You know, Masvidal's a good example, right? Whitaker? Whitaker is a good example, right? Whitaker. Whitaker is a perfect example, right? At 170, he was struggling. He's a big fucking guy. God damn, he looked good against Kelvin. How good did he look? I'm ready for that fight.

I'm ready for the Adesanya fight. Let's pretend the Adesanya fight never happened, and you saw him versus Kelvin, and you saw Stylebender versus Kelvin. You'd go, wow. Whitaker's going to win. That's a great fight. I want to see that fight. I still wouldn't think...

It depends on what else you saw from Stylebender. If you saw Stylebender versus Boricina, then you'd go, oh, okay. Because Paulo Costa looked like a destroyer and Stylebender lit him on fire and pissed on the ashes. That was crazy.

That was crazy. was crazy that was to call it like that and then to to like say i'm just gonna pick this guy apart make him look foolish and he did and he did that's and then dry humped him after we put him away i don't know about that because that just kind of this is weird to me but i'm telling you man i'm in i'm in for the dry humping whatever he does i'm in in and I love the fact that he had the courage to go up and fight Bohovich at 205 I mean that was an interesting thing right

because when he fought Bohovich he didn't even gain any weight but he didn't get beat up no he didn't get beat up he really didn't but he did get dominated in the grappling exchanges which pretty much shut out any talk of him ever fighting Jon Jones. Yeah, the size, I think, the strength at that level.

And also grappling ability. Yeah. You know, the reality is when you have a big guy like Bohowicz, I would like to take Bohowicz's bones and bring them to a scientist. Go, what the fuck is going on with this dude? Dance. Where is he from? Poland.

Legendary Polish power. The Polish power. That motherfucker can punch. Ridiculous. You think about- Rockhold, when he fought Rockhold. Oh my God. One left hook.

Boom. See, I think that's Jon Jones' mistake. He's doing the same thing Rockhold did when he moved up. Putting on- Putting on a lot of weight. A lot of weight. Yeah, and it will slow you the fuck down. 100%.

It'll slow you down. What's interesting about Blachowicz is you watch Jon Jones versus Dominic Reyes. They go five hard rounds. A lot of people thought Reyes might have won the decision. Jon Jones clearly came on the championship rounds, pulled it out, and you go, okay, but close fight. You see Bohovic versus Dominic Reyes. Dominic Reyes is like, what in the fuck is going on? By the time the first round is over, he's got a giant foot on his ribcage.

A body kick. Crazy power that guy has in everything. And then he clips him with one punch, and you see Dominic Reyes give out, and he puts him away. Like, that guy can fucking punch in a weird way. Gotta have something. Yeah, like you said, just the size of him, the density of that guy. Weird power.

He just looks like you couldn't pick him up. Yeah. You know? He's got crazy power. He's talking about fighting Ngannou. Blachowicz? Blachowicz. Blachowicz says he wants to fight Ngannou. Woo!

I would love that fight, actually. That's crazy. I would love to see that fight. I wonder if he would put weight on. I wonder how much he would weigh. I don't know. He's got to cut a little weight to get to 205. He's got to. But I mean... He probably walks around... 220-ish? Yeah. Something like that, probably. You think? He fights at 205. Yeah's got to. He probably walks around. 220-ish. Yeah. Something like that probably. You think he fights at 205.

Yeah. 15 pounds. 15 pounds ain't shit for a big guy like that. Yeah. I think. Maybe 200. He's a big guy, man. Yeah.

He's massive. I mean, Chris at his heaviest. 225. Really? Yeah. Why did Chris fight 205 when he fought Dominic Reyes? I don't know. Did he get tired of cutting weight, or what was that about?

Possibly. Possibly. I mean, he's had 25 something, 24 surgeries. Wow. He's got. 24? Yeah. He's got a titanium plate in his neck, right?

I think he's had two neck surgeries. He's got knee surgeries, but the dude just looks, he's just an animal. Well it's mental toughness. Yeah, I mean I feel like if you wrestle at some point in your life, or especially doing as long as he had, that wrestling instills that mindset in you. Oh yeah. Well you think about

so many all time greats, like we talked about Randy Couture before, Cain Velasquez, he's another example a guy whose mind was stronger than his joints. Like his body just started giving out, his shoulders, back, his knees, everything started giving out. But his mind was just impenetrable. I mean, when that mental toughness meets the actual physical limitations

of your tissue, that's the problem. And that's, man, because I know that, you know, my knees ache every now and then, but I mean, even that, it's like, you know, I get a lower back problem every now and then. I feel like I'm about to die. I can't imagine if your whole body feels like that. He's had 24 surgeries? Yeah. What else has he had?

Knee surgeries. That many knee surgeries? His thumb, sir. He broke his thumb. I forget how much fight it was. He's got this scar that goes from here. I mean, it's just a... That was a long time for him to heal from that one, right?

Yeah. But the guy, man, it's funny because he doesn't move around like it does. He spent some time with me for this camp. He's fighting this weekend and just felt better than he ever has. Well, I talked to Aljamain Sterling before Sterling got his neck surgery because I had heard that he was getting neck surgery, and I've had bulging discs in my neck, so I called him up and I said, hey, tell me what you've got going on.

I was going to see if maybe I could send him to – because he was getting his neck surgery done in California. I said, why don't you talk to my doctor? Maybe they could do Regenequin on your neck and stem cells, and maybe you could postpone it. But apparently his disc was so fucked up that they just had to replace it. He was atrophying one of his arms. What?

He was so pinched. And this was actually before the fight with Pyotr Yan. Wow. And then when he got dumped on his head in that fight in the first round, and then he got kneed in the head, that illegal knee, in the fourth round, he was fucked. And from then on, he said he lost all strength in one of his arms because the nerve was pinched.

Like he couldn't activate his tricep. It was pretty fucked up. That's what Chris was complaining about that too, not being able to lift his arm above shoulder level. Yeah. And it was just, of course, they're both wrestlers. And Aljamain talked to Weidman. Okay.

And that's one of the reasons why he got the disc done in his neck. Gotcha. So they replace it. Yeah, they put an articulating titanium disc in it. Go to Aljamain Sterling's Instagram, please. He's got x-rays of his neck where you can see this disc that's been screwed into his neck. They go in through the front, too. They cut the front of your neck. they push everything out of the way.

They push everything out. They cut the bad disc out, they pull it out, and they put this fake disc in. Eddie Bravo has one of his lower back. Just ease your access to it, I guess, going through the front? Yeah, I guess. So that is in Aljamain Sterling's neck now. Look at that, it's like a rubber, just a rubber sponge, I guess, in there? No, no, no.

It's all titanium. The whole thing is titanium. So it sits. That thing on top sits in like a divot, and it articulates, and it's very strong. And it has those spikes that go through it, and they dig into the bone. So that has to anchor into the bone, so the tissue has to grow around those spikes and then apparently he can do everything yeah he attained he can wrestle he can do all kinds of shit and like I said Eddie Bravo has one in his lower back I have so many discs in my back that are like my my disc meet the

the spongy part is starting to get pushed away. I know. The older you get, too. But still, I mean, obviously when you're an athlete. It's jujitsu more than anything. Is that what happened with you? Yeah. Just spinning, getting dumped on your head? Getting all the above. Just all the years of getting shoved into weird spots.

Punched and kicked and this happening. Yeah, and then you fight off guillotines and then you get stacked in your guard and then you're back. So all it's called is disc degeneration is what they call it, or stenosis. And what's happening is all those discs are getting smaller and smaller and smaller until eventually they start rubbing on each other. Like there's nothing there. With Pat Miletic, this is how tough Pat Miletic is, he never got surgery,

but his discs, he had no more meat in between the bone, and the bones fused together on their own. So what? He can't even look? He's like this. And one of his arms doesn't work right. Like, Pat Miletic, he just didn't do anything about it, just dealt with the pain, and his bones just fucking fused in to get like a

tree growing around a mailbox. Just. and his bones just fucking fuse in to get like a tree growing around a mailbox. I feel like just one day he just needs to go like, ah, just to break everything up. You know what I mean? I don't think he can anymore. I think it's fused together. But I think there was one fight that he was going to do when he was older. I think when he fought Henzo Gracie. I think that's who he fought.

was older i think when he fought henzo gracie i think that's who he fought um but pat someone had said that he had neck surgery and they wanted to make sure that he was still okay to fight after neck surgery he's like hey i never had any fucking neck surgery like i didn't have neck surgery and so there was a rumor going so he had to get a bunch of different mris and tests done so that they could determine whether or not he had had neck surgery just because his neck was so fucked up. They just assumed that he had surgery. Wow. Because I think Boss Rutten had that surgery and he can't.

Yo, Boss is messed up bad. He has one arm that he calls baby arm because his nerves are so shut off that one of his arms had atrophied so small that it's like he has a regular arm for his left, his big-ass bicep, and his right arm is like really small where he can't even hold up a gallon of milk. Stop it. Boss Rootin, one of the greatest fucking martial artists of all time. He picks up a bottle, a jug of milk, and his arm is like. I think it'd still kill you, though.

He'd probably still fuck you up to that left. He'd still just mess you up, bro. His legs are fine. And not even close hand, just open hand slap you. Open hand! Yeah. Because that's how they did it, right? They didn't.

In Pancrase. Pancrase. But he won the heavyweight title, too, remember? Yeah. And fought in the UFC, knocked out Tiosha Kosaka. His neck was already fucked up by then. Because he had been sparring with Rico Rodriguez back when Rico was in his prime and doing a lot of jiu-jitsu. He actually fucked his neck up, though, on Sons of Anarchy on the TV show.

What? Yeah. He told me he was doing a stunt scene. In a stunt scene, you're doing this thing with this fake fight, and he falls on his head, and his neck gets fucking jacked, and then he had to get his discs fused. So he had a bunch of discs fused in his neck, and apparently it impinged upon the nerves, and it became even worse. He's had multiple surgeries.

He had to go and get stem cells. He's gone and got a bunch of different treatments to try to deal with it. And it's getting slowly better and stronger, but over years and years. Like when Bas told me about about this it was four or five years ago it's still not nowhere near full strength yeah it's just you know they're coming up with new stuff every day it's just good before long where you can just replace something well he could have done that but that was available for him back yeah this artificial disc the first guy that I ever heard of is

that bosses look at that yeah like actual screws. That's insane. That's insane. It's like actual carpenter screws. So he has four discs that are screwed together. Look, look at that. Oh my god, five discs. How nervous you gotta be just to go in and do something like that. That is so

crazy. He's got five discs screwed together. Wow. So his whole upper neck is just fused. Like, look how they're, see those bottom ones? Yeah. There's no space in between the bones. Wow. They're all just smooshed together.

Oh. Fucking, that's crazy. So that's why when you see, like, an older man, they start shrinking, and they start, like, their back gets like that. That's what's going on. Like, you're losing all the space in your discs. Have you seen the what is it like the y straps? What's a wise drop? So it's like a chiropractic thing where they just take your neck and Have you seen that

Practice I Think chiropractors incorporate a lot of effective and legitimate physical therapy techniques. But the idea of cracking your neck. This is chiropractic. Ready? I just chiropracted my knuckles. Your knuckles. It's nonsense.

It just looks like it feels so good, though. There it is. Yeah, right here. That feels good, though, when they do that and they pop your neck. The way to do it, the real way to do it, though, is decompression. Like you can hang it upside down no you could pull those chin straps on and it hangs on a door like the the top of a door yeah and then you can literally allow your own body weight to decompress your spine i used to go to a

see i went to a chiropractor and this motherfucker for a year was telling because i had a bulging disc i knew something was wrong and it was like slowly getting worse and slowly getting worse. And I was still doing jiu-jitsu. And he was like, no, you have like a muscle pull. I'm going to subjugate your C5. And they do this little back thing and twist you. You're good. You're good.

And I was not good. It kept getting worse. And this is how the guy told me that I didn't have a bulging disc. He pushed on the top of my head. He's like, does that hurt? I go, no. And he's like, then you don't have a bulging disc. But he's not a doctor this is the thing when they say doctor of chiropractic medicine take a guess at how much time they spent

in medical school zero second you only say like zero zero not a second they didn't even walk in and then leave they did not a doctor the doctor of chiropractic medicine now chiropractic medicine. Now, chiropractic medicine was invented by a guy who was a magnetic healer who came up with the idea of chiropractic science through a fucking seance. He was murdered by his son, who was a con man. Stop it. And his son took over the business. So the con man took over the business?

In the 1800s. Wow. So it's just one of those legacy things. It's been around for a long time. What? Yeah, there's no real evidence that it works. I'm sitting here watching this stuff on YouTube. It feels great.

It feels good. It feels good when they pop it. But as far as it being able to heal you from things, no. There's a lot of chiropractors, though, that are legit physical therapists. No, there's a lot of chiropractors, though, that are legit physical therapists, and they incorporate a lot of deep tissue massage and a lot of real physical therapy techniques that do work. But the whole idea of chiropractic medicine, when they first invented it, was they're going to crack your back and fix blindness, fix leukemia. If you go and listen, there's a great article called Chiropractors Are Bullshit. And it's by this, what's that woman's name that wrote that article? She's been on the podcast.

I'm sorry. I apologize to her right now. My brain is like an overused hard drive. I don't have any space. But it's a great article because it details the whole history of where chiropractors got started. A lot of chiropractors don't even know this. Like a lot of chiropractors, they go to chiropractic school and they think they're going to learn something that's really effective and works.

And some of it's the placebo effect. Some of it is just it feels good just loosening muscles. Like you can break up tissue with your elbow. That's why rolfing is legit, right? You're breaking up fascia and scar tissue and it allows people to move better And it can help them heal. I love that getting those deep tissue massage that Is coming to you coming to you?

How do you say her last name she French no well? She's American, but she's awesome Yeah, and she's really funny too and in there the article is great because the way she writes It's like it's very abusive but hilarious. But it's called chiropractors are bullshit. Yeah. That's the name of the article. And when I remember reading this article, I'm like, motherfucker. So anyway, I wound up going to a real, this is before she said this.

Right. I was having real, I was like, I got to go to a neck specialist. I went to a neck specialist. There it is. That's the article. That's the article. Yeah. How do you say that? Y it is. That's the article. Yeah. How do you say that?

Yvette? Dantremont. Yeah. Yvette Dantremont. Sorry, Yvette. But she's awesome. But that article is excellent. You shouldn't trust them with your spine or any other parts of your body.

But just, you should read that. It's a great article. So I knew something was wrong. I felt like I was being bullshitted. And every time I'd go, it was like 100 bucks. I was like, this is crazy. So then I went to a legit spine specialist. He's like, you have a bulging disc.

He's like, here it is. He shows me the MRI. He's like, see how it's pushing against your nerve? That's why you have elbow pain. That's why your fingers are going numb. He's like, yeah, well, we can use decompression therapy. That'll help you. And they put you in this harness

and you lie on a table. Do you find some relief in that? Yeah, I slowly slowly decompress but it was in Santa Monica and with traffic it was like a fucking hour and a half to get there it was annoying so then I got unless you take something home oh you got what I got one of those things off Amazon you were seeing those things that sits on the top of a door do they're great and you pull it like this click click click click click and it's like you're kind of hanging from it and it just loosens your neck and decompresses. But then I got Regenikine. And Regenikine is like an advanced form of platelet-rich plasma.

And I knew that Peyton Manning had gone to Germany for that and Kobe Bryant did it. And you had to go out of state to do that. You used to have to go to Germany. You used to have to go to Germany. do that? You used to have to go to Germany. You used to have to go to Germany. But I got very fortunate in that as when I was dealing with my injury, they had set up a place in Santa Monica, so you could go there. And I did that. And within two weeks, I had no pain. It's still there. It's lifestyle medicine. And this is legit. This isn't nonsense. I went and got an MRI afterwards. There's no more bulging disc. It relaxed and it reduces. What it is,

is they take your blood, they spin it in a centrifuge. We've talked about how this works before. I don't remember the exact process of... See if you can pull up what Regenikine does. But shout out to my man, Dr. Ben Ruhi. He's taken care of me with a bunch of different... His name is Moshe Ben Ruhi. He's taken care of me with a bunch of different injuries with Regenikine and then later on with biologics like stem cells and stuff like that. But they healed my neck. Like all the problems in my neck went away. It took a while, but I did it smart.

It took many months of no yanking on my neck, no guillotines, no nothing, no craziness. And now I have zero problems with my neck. Really? Yeah. So did you, I mean, is this something you have to kind of keep going back and doing? You do if you injure it again, but one of the things that I also incorporated is a machine called the Iron Neck. Have you ever seen that thing?

Yes. Yes. That's amazing. Really? That strengthened my neck tremendously. That's one thing I'm constantly, I got this giraffe neck, right? Yeah. So everybody's wanting to just guillotine.

Oh, I get it. And next thing you know, I'll walk around the next two weeks. Okay, so here it goes. How does, Dr. Peter Welling is the guy who invented it. Everybody's one. Just guillotine. And next thing you know, I'll walk around the next two weeks. Okay, so here it goes. Dr. Peter Welling is the guy who invented it. Treated Regenikine Serum holds up to 10,000 times the normal concentration of anti-inflammatory protein. This protein, known as Interleukin-1 receptor antagonist, blocks the inflammation-causing counterpart Interleukin-1. Antagonist blocks the inflammation-causing counterpart interleukin-1. Dr. Christopher Evans, director of the Rehabilitation Medicine Center in the Mayo Clinic, explained it this way. The bad interleukin, interleukin-1, combines with a specific receptor on the surface of the cell.

The response to it, it docks there, and after that, all sorts of bad things happen. The good interleukin, continued Evans, is the interleukin 1 receptor antagonist material. This blocks the cell's receptor. The cell doesn't see the interleukin 1 because it's blocked and therefore bad things don't happen. It's the thought that the IL-1RA may also counteract the substances that lead to cartilage and issues, breakdown and tissue breakdown and osteoarthritis. So it says, is RegenerKey effective? I can tell you it's effective.

And he is the founder. He's pretty much- Dr. Peter Welling is. Got you. And he's the guy that's in Germany and most of these guys like Kobe Bryant and even Dana White went over there for his tinnitus, his tinnitus in his knee. But it's great for arthritis. It's great for people with back issues, knee issues, disc issues, anything that involves inflammation.

So for me, the disc and all the tightness and the inflammation, once I got the Regenequin treatment, it all relaxed and the disc tissue went back in. But doctors were telling me to get surgery. relaxed, and the disc tissue went back in. But doctors were telling me to get surgery. They were telling me that they could cut that piece of disc out, and this doctor, Dr. Ben Ruhi, said, well, listen, let's try this first. Well, was this something new? I'm pretty sure.

Yeah, fairly new. Okay. Because a lot of these doctors, they studied these techniques decades ago, right? And they're effective. They can help you if they cut that disc material out. But that disc material is important. That's cushioning. It keeps your discs healthy.

So through this technique, it reduced the inflammation in the area, and then the disc material went back in. So through spinal decompression therapy and through Regenikine and then through this kind of therapy. They just inject it? Yeah. Wow. It's pretty it? Yeah. Wow. It's pretty gnarly.

There's images on my Instagram of me getting it in my back. I've had it done like five times. Wow. I've had it done in my mid back, my lower back, my neck, just because it makes you feel great. In Germany every time? No, Santa Monica. I did it all done in Santa Monica.

Dang. Lifestyle medicine in Santa Monica. How uncomfortable is that needle going into your back? Was it in the muscle or was it actually in the joint? Oh, it's in the fucking juice, baby. Stop it. Yeah. That makes me cringe. There's images of it. Ah, stop, man. Yeah. We can see all these little needles in my back. There it is. What? That's what it looks like. Yeah. And who puts that in? He does. The doctor does. And then they shoot it in there. So I had issues in the mid-back, my lower back, my neck. And after a while, I was like, every time shit was going wrong, I'd just go in there and get it done, and then it would feel better.

Wow. And they do this from your own blood? Yeah, your own blood. Yeah. They just take your blood out. It's like a 10-hour process, and then you go back the next day, and then they would do it. So I was trying to get Al Jermaine to look at that, but apparently he was so far gone. Even Dr. Ben Ruh, he was like, you really should get the surgery. I just already made it a point. Like it's inevitable in about 20 years, I'll probably

need new knees, new hips. How are your hips? My hips are great. Really? No problems at all. So yeah, I've never had any problems with my hips. Yeah. I don't have any problems at all. I know my dad does a little bit, so I don't know if it's something that he had injured years ago or I don't know. I've heard of him, yes. But he's got this whole protocol of strengthening your knees, strengthening your hip flexors, and strengthening all of the connective tissue, everything that stabilizes your knee. Those joints. And it's made a giant difference for me in knee pain. My knee feels stronger.

It just feels stronger. And I've only been doing it a few months. It hasn't been a long time. And I'm dedicated to it. I do it every week now. I still do my physical therapy that I've been doing just to keep my knees strong because I know guys are going to try and take them out. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Well, when a guy like you, when your mobility is such a huge part of your game, they're always going to try to do that. But they can replace knees now, man. It's kind of crazy. They can resurface knees. That's a rough surgery. But you could throw kicks again again and you have no pain.

It's just like these two crazy composite materials together that are on the surface of your knees. Yeah, man. You can run. You can throw kicks. You can do all kinds of shit. You get heel hooked and you don't feel it. You'd feel it in the ligaments, I guess, or the tendons. I mean, what's the law on having a new knee and fighting?

You can have a new knee and fight. Really? Yeah, just like you can have a new neck and fight. God. There's a lot of guys who have been... Chris has a titanium disc in his neck, and he's the one who told Aljamain, but I know guys... Well, Braulio Estima was the first guy that I ever heard of, the jujitsu guy. Braulio was the first guy I ever heard to get one in his neck.

He had a bad bulging disc in his neck and won the world with it like that. That's what a beast that dude is. Golly. And then. Those dudes are just jacked. Yeah. You see some of those. Yeah.

They're all by the end of like when they get into their 40s and they're all, their backs are all fucked up. All of them. Everyone's like. 40s, huh? They're all walking out like this. They're getting out of bed like this. The one time or any time I get injured, it's not sparring, not doing jiu-jitsu, it's wrestling.

Oh, yeah. Guys just snap in my neck. That's the hardest. That's the hardest shit. I'm jacked, man. It's a crazy sport. Just getting picked up and slammed. Oh, my God.

Yeah. That is the hardest sport there is, in terms of physical output, mental toughness. Just listening to these kids at the NCAAs doing their interviews is just hard. Did you see Jordan Burroughs versus Kyle Dake? Yes. Kyle Dake. Kyle Dake is a monster. And every time he's gone up against this dude, he's lost.

Yep. And I think he dry humped him, didn't he? Or teabagged him or something. Didn't he? Yes. There was a teabag moment. Well, it's because Jordan was trying to take him down and Kyle was defending the takedown. And it's apparently a legitimate technique is to bob up and down the dude's neck.

So he went and did it like he was trying to escape. Because it's fucking super uncomfortable when you're driving in and this guy is like jumping up and down and squatting on your head. See if you can find that. As fun as it is to watch as as fun as Jordan Burrows Cuz I love that guy. I know he's all you you've had him on here. I've had he's a brilliant guy really really interesting guy Specimen yes, look at him. So is Kyle Dake. There's also some great videos of Kyle Dake Working out and doing like this really odd strength and conditioning routine that he does online With this guy who used to work with Jeremy Stevens he was Google Kyle Dake fuck we don't need to see the

teabag respect respect to Jordan no need to see the teabag Google Kyle Dake what it's called functional patterns that's this is the guys workout he's a really interesting strength and conditioning coach look how shredded this dude he lost some weight man so I've seen this right here yes the core development and stuff they do a lot of stuff like you know real similar to a lot but it's not as much plyometrics but the idea is they're doing a lot of like weird movements are applicable, like a lot of big kettlebell swings and jumps. See how he's doing these things where he's jumping and twisting?

It reminds me a little bit of some of the stuff that Nick Curzon is doing and some of these other really innovative strength and conditioning trainers. Look at this shit. Wow. Like, really wild stuff, right? Where he's doing these explosive movements off his back with a medicine ball, jumping up in the air, and then slamming that medicine ball down. Who is this guy? The guy's name is, I'm trying to, I remember his program, what's called Functional Patterns. Does it say his name?

Not there, one second. I remember that Jeremy Stevens worked out with him and brought it up on the podcast. Did he like it? Yeah, he loved it. He loved the idea behind it, and he said it was very effective for him, very applicable for MMA training. How much strength and conditioning work do you do? Right now I'm doing twice a week. Twice a week.

Twice a week. And what does it entail? Oh, my goodness. I go through different weeks. So as of right now, I'm trying to get – this guy has got me stronger but not getting any weight, which is – How is that possible? Exactly. I don't even know the science behind it.

But there are weeks where I'm doing like – where I am kind of bulking, right? And then I do a week where it's more a cardio base, where I'm kind of shedding that muscle down, I guess, because I'm not too big. A lot of cardio involved, a lot of body weight stuff. I don't do any Olympic lifts or anything like that. You're just begging for injury, doing that kind of stuff. But I'm loving it, man. I can't believe the – and I found out about this guy through my buddy Carl Reed,

who was one of our fighters. He's been on the Ultimate Contender Series a few times. And I saw how explosive this guy's gotten, how strong he's gotten. Even though he's a bigger guy, he fights at 205. I kind of see how fast and how explosive, how strong, and his cardio is still on point. He's like, yeah, man, working with this guy, Josh Reynolds. I said Ryan Reynolds.

Josh Reynolds. And I was like, I got to try this guy out. Because the guy before that just kind of left a bad taste in my mouth. I was kind of doing my own thing. But I needed to get stronger if I was facing Tyron again. It's hard when you find strength and conditioning coaches are like really good or really bad. Yeah, 100%. I remember this guy.

We had this one strength and conditioning guy, and he just had so many problems, man. He had me doing a lot of Olympic stuff, had me doing a lot of road work. And we had this guy over at house. I think it was Thanksgiving or something like that because the guy's family wasn't in town or he had just moved down here, and the guy was just a nutball. He went through a whole bottle of my dad's crown. Oh, no. Oh, man.

I'm talking like just crying. Oh, no. Got the whole family there, bro. Oh, no. And it was just like, all right, we need to do something. You know, we had to drive him home. Oh, no. Yeah.

Oh, no. All the emotions has been built up. I don't know what it was. It just came out that day my man Josh is awesome this guy's awesome and he's he's I've seen a lot of improvement working with him especially when it comes to just just keeping my body healthy mm-hmm yeah I'm 38 I feel like I'm 25 that's amazing my movement I feel like I'm 25. That's amazing. My movement, I feel like I'm getting better, especially with my striking and wrestling and jiu-jitsu,

even though you don't see it a whole lot. Well, you looked fantastic against Jeff Neal, and Jeff Neal's super talented. Man, getting this fight, I wanted somebody in the top five for the longest, obviously, but it's funny because I was in their shoes at one point, and Johnny Hendricks gave me that opportunity you know I wasn't even ranked I don't think when I faced John maybe I'll do those were that was one of

my favorite fights of yours thank you cuz you you were on fire in that fight you were on fire and that was like to me that was like the perfect example of how difficult that style is to handle and it it was preparing for him, and no disrespect to him, but it was obviously he had good wrestling. He had that one-hitter-quitter type power. But you've seen him fight once. You've seen him fight 100 times. And I'm going to say this, no disrespect.

I feel like that power went away when you saw the showed up I can I could say yes and I there's a lot of people I know GSP had said some he faced him in it when you know he was fighting for the title there's two different versions of Johnny Hendricks there's Johnny Hendricks before there was real testing yeah and then there's later Johnny Hendricks and it could easily be given the benefit of the doubt, that he got burnt out. Yeah. I mean, Johnny had been wrestling since he was a kid,

and he was a fucking monster when he was younger. I mean, he was a monster. When he was putting people away, he would knock guys out and they would go flying. Remember when he knocked Marvin Campman? Yeah, yeah. One hit, just boom, and he went flying. I watched that over and over on the OVN.

John Fitch? Same thing. Johnny Hendricks at one point in time was one of the fucking scariest guys in the sport. And he was just a monster. Just a monster. Crazy wrestler. Super skilled. And then ridiculous one-punch knockout power.

Yeah. But then. But there was no. But even then, like, he fought the exact same. Like, Rory McDonald was very difficult to prepare for. That was one of my favorite fights. Just the whole preparation. That's what makes it fun for me.

I like to try and break guys down. And even there could be trying to adapt to a guy mid-fight. That's what makes it fun for me. You know what I'm saying yeah breaking dudes breaking guys down you know trying to adapt to that if there made any changes mid-fight is fun but he was difficult because he's good everywhere yeah he's got great striking good wrestling and for some reason it was funny cuz I had a hunch he's gonna try for some MNRE roles. Really? Yeah, I had a hunch, man.

So, because, you know, I met Ryan Hall out in Montreal training at TriStar. And I know he's a big fan of that, right? He does it all the time. And I've done some work with him. And he was actually neutral for that fight. He didn't train with any one of us. And then I watched a grappling match he had. It was a few months before the fight, I think. fight he didn't train with any one of us and then i watched a grappling match he had it was like a pretty it was a few months before the fight i think and he was going for him all the time he's

going for those hill hooks and i was like he's going to try and he'll he's going to try to get me out there as quick as possible he's going to try and make a statement because i know he was that was his last fight on the contract and i we worked it over and over and over again in the gym and he went for like several times three or four in the gym and he went for it like several times, three or four times during the fight. But he just knew. He knew it was coming. I knew it was coming.

When Ryan Hall pulled that off on BJ Penn, I was like, holy shit, dude. And he does that in the gym all the time. I see it all the time now, but he's gotten so good with his striking. I know. I'm like, yes, Ryan. He's a fascinating character.

I love that guy. I really want to talk to that guy. I want to get him in here. Get him. He's a wizard. Have you heard him on Lex Friedman's podcast? No, I haven't. He's a fascinating character. I love that guy. I really want to talk to that guy. I want to get him in here. Get him. He's a wizard. Have you heard him on Lex Friedman's podcast? No, I haven't. He's excellent.

Really? Really good. Very intelligent guy. Super intelligent. Maybe a little too smart. Yeah. Some of the things, like he'll sit there and explain stuff to me, and he's like, right? I'm like, huh?

Okay. I'll just nod my head like I know what you- He's one of those guys that's so smart, he blinks a lot when he's talking. His brain is going... Like going a thousand miles an hour and he's like trying to water it down, like cool it off. He's the perfect example of just... He looks like a nerd. Yeah, but he's an assassin.

There's something sinister behind those eyes of Ryan's. I'm serious. I've seen him. I've seen him in just the I'm going to kill you mode. I remember in Montreal, he was doing a seminar while he was there. And some young buck is out there. I don't know if he's just trying to embarrass him or what, but he was going hard. He was trying for that.

He was trying to heel hook Ryan hard. I think he was coming from another gym maybe. And I saw Ryan grabbing by his head, grabbing by his leg, and he had his knees in this guy's face. And he's just driving that knee in. I couldn't help but laugh. Wow. This dude, he doesn't look like it.

He's the sweetest guy ever, but he has got some sinister stuff behind his eyes. If you're going to compete in MMA in the UFC, you must have at least a door that you can open to let the devil out. I don't know why. My dad, I think it upsets him. That you're so nice?

That I'm just like this all the time. You know, I walk out with a smile on my face. I'll high five you. When you were teeing off on Johnny Hendricks, there was some fucking evil in your eyes. Yeah, there was. Yeah. People don't see it, but you know.

I see it. Yeah, I'm smiling at you, but it's like a. The way you're landing combinations, I mean, you have to be vicious to do that You know, there's no other way It's funny because guys are like man, you know, you're not as good anymore because you don't know people out I'm like man who you're fighting the top of the food chain Yeah, there's levels to this thing like who says that to you you get people say fans all the time

Yeah, these guys on social media. You should have done this. You should have done that. You can't read that shit. Oh, I know. I do it, but I laugh at it. You know what I'm saying? I'll even comment back. Just like, oh, thanks, man. Appreciate you. Thanks a lot. I'll keep that in mind next time.

The Jeff Neal fight had to be particularly satisfying, though, because Jeff Neal was, he's a real destroyer. I mean, the way he knocked out Mike Perry, the way, I mean, poof. He's so slick. Yeah. So intelligent in there. Like his his knowing when to move when not like when when the opening's there and his reads so good and that's why that's one of the reasons why i liked to prepare i like that fight and i love the vicente luke these guys are hard

to draw out of their they're hard to draw out out there They they they're keep they're so disciplined to their positioning is in for my style. That's my goal Yeah, I got I want to draw you out right, you know draw your counter out so I can counter that Mm-hmm, you know faints and these guys were on point all the time and to find those openings in that fight You know it was fun for it. I had a great time. I had a blast out there with it. Especially the Vicente fight. Number one, people didn't think I had a chin anymore because I got knocked out by Anthony. That was the fight after.

And I remember getting headbutted in the first round. I couldn't see it on my left eye the whole first and second round. Really? Of that fight. And it was a headbutt. He was coming this way with a hook and i was moving away and then we boom we just clashed heads right on the temple and i couldn't see i i was like i got hit i kind of like went like this and it looked like he he didn't hit me with

anything you know but it was uh but his skull but there were some flurries there and uh i couldn't see man i was, backing up. I was moving. And I just had to stay calm, man, and try and find my shots. But then it was like I got in a flow state, and sometimes when you're out there, I try and find that flow state every time I step out in the cage, or even in sparring.

I try and get in a flow state where I'm not thinking. There's more reaction, but it's just things feel right. My reactions are on point. And I just got there. It was probably the middle of the second round. I just found my range. I knew exactly when he was going to throw a punch. So, you know, the timing was right.

And I had broken my hands in that fight, both of them. Really? Yeah, first round, I think. Really? And I had broken my hands in that fight, both of them. Really? Yeah. First round, I think. Really? Both of them? He's got the hardest head. Wow.

I've hit guys with half of what I hit him with, and they've gone down. I mean, you saw Tyron Woodley. He's one of the hardest hitters. He staggered him. Staggered him. And how fast did he recover? Like that. Just blah.

Yeah. And then he hit Tyron. Tyron couldn't recover. Yeah. But the two was the toughest. Tyron was too anxious. Yeah. It's two was the toughest. Tyron was too anxious. Yeah. It's like Tyron losing all those rounds in a row.

I mean, Tyron had lost every single round. I mean, imagine being Tyron. You go from being, in my opinion still, erase his last fights. He's one of the greatest welterweight champions of all time. You know, beat you, beat Damian Maia. He's just like knocked out Robbie Lawler for the title. He was a killer. Fucking killer.

Tyron's a killer. And then loses every round. Usman smokes him, just dominates him. Gilbert fucked him up. Colby fucked him up. And it's like, Jesus. I know, I was rooting for him for those fights, too. Like, every one of them.

Because, you know, when you share something like And with somebody is it's almost like an intimate Experience when you have you fight somebody and you go and do that experience with each other even though you're fighting each other It's like I want this guy to win. Yeah, I want this guy, but the last one is like That was the first time at last three or four fights You just felt like I just felt like it wasn't there. Well, I felt like he had... He brought Antonio McKee into his camp, who's really good at resurrecting guys.

Dean Thomas is there, who knows him inside and out. And I know he trained real hard for that fight. I felt like if the bomb lands, he could still take people out. And he did hurt him at one point in time but then he just got wild yeah he got wild and luke just stayed poised and calm and found his spot facente's got a a check left hook like no other he's got some great hooks and he was hit me i had him hurt and he was still throwing bombs he's getting better too yes that's the thing about luke yeah and he's so he's so durable. It's so tough

That's the thing like after that fight looking at him like bro You know, I hit him with some shots man over and over and over again He was like he had to continue, you know, he's bumps all in his head I mean, how could you take that and still and still have a good conversation with somebody but Yeah, I think it literally has something to do with him having a big head. He's got a big melon. Well, you think about guys like Mark Hunt. Giant head, takes an incredible shot.

Some of the best, like the guys that took shots better than anybody, have big heads. It makes sense. Yeah. But Vicente is also just, the fact that he stays composed, it's his mind too. It's not just the size of his skull or the ability to take a shot. So disciplined

in there. Yeah, his mind. He's getting better too. And he's only 30. Wow. I'm pretty sure. Vicente Luque? I'm 99% sure he's 30 years old. I think that's one of the reasons why everybody's like, alright, I don't know, maybe the UFC's

not betting on me or fans. 29. He's 29. He's not even 30 yet. Not even 30. That's crazy. I didn't get in the UFC until I was 28. Wow.

Came in late, man. 10 years ago. Isn't that nuts? That's crazy. I remember, who was it? Errol Hawane called me a vet, and I kind of got low-key pissed because I was thinking he was calling me old. He's like, no, you've just been in the game for a while. Because when I think of a vet, I think of somebody who's just old.

Really? Is that what you think? I think of just an old guy. Well, I call Kamaru Usman a vet. Yeah, I know. I mean, for sure in the Gilbert Burns fight, that was veteran shit. When he just weathered that storm in that first round, and then by the end of the first round, I was winning. Yeah.

And then fucked him up in the second. And his striking's getting better, man. Oh, my God, much better. His striking's getting better. That fight this weekend is very interesting, though. You know, I watched the first fight again the other day. And I'm gonna tell you something, man. Masvidal was all over him in that first round.

And that was last minute, correct? Six days notice. He stuffed what, 11 of his takedowns? Which is unheard of with Usman. Yeah, but more importantly, was not in condition. No. Was not prepared for a fight like that. They offered it to him.

He took it. He went there, six days notice. And I mean, that first round, he looked very good. He only won that one round. That's what's important in the fight because Usman made adjustments. Another thing that's important to note is that Usman apparently had shattered his nose two weeks before that fight. Wow. Yeah.

So his nose was fucked. Because after the fight, you know, they had him checked out. He had a broken nose. And he was like, my nose is already broken. Like his nose was fucked up two weeks before the fight. Golly. Yeah. The thing about Usman, man, is that he, some people say he's boring, you know, boring fighter.

I think he's great. I think he's a great. Wasn't boring that Gilbert Burns fight. Oh, no, he wasn't. I think he's great, man. He presses the fight. He's got cardio for days. And a guy that has that kind of physique shouldn't have that kind of cardio.

And he's just, I think he's great. I think he's got charisma, man. His striking's getting better. He freaking knocked out Colby Covington, TKO'd him, broke his jaw. And he beat Burns with a jab. Anybody who says he's boring is an idiot. You get poked in the eye. Just poke yourself in the eye. I mean. You've got to be an idiot to think that guy's boring. That's crazy. Look, he did what he

had to do to win the Masvidal fight. But if you take any consideration of the fact that he had a broken nose going into the fight, and you take any consideration of the fact that Masvidal is, you know, you fought him. He's fucking good. He's game. And he's clever, and he's experienced, and he's a real vet. Masvidal's a real vet. That's somebody who you cannot break this guy's will in a fight. No.

I've seen it. I've broken guys' will guy's will in a fight no I've seen it I've broken guys wills and in there in a fight when a guy like that who comes out just as hard in the last round as he does in the first and still has got power and still is just just a savage just want just want to rip your head off scary dude you hit him he just like he smiles at you yeah and you normally when guys do that they're hurt right but this guy, you know, he's just a G, man. He's slick. And I like him because he is who he is.

He is who he is. He's not faking nobody. He's not trying to be somebody he's not. I love when he dresses like Tony Montana. He's got the whole suit to get up. When I talked to him here, one of my favorite moments on the podcast with him here was when I asked him, I said, well, the question is uh can ben ask her and get a hold of you he goes he can get a hold of these nuts dude that guy boy that's why i love i love that guy and it was funny i was in singapore me and him both were there for as guest fighters and that's where that's where we made that fight

happen oh we had planned it out there He was wanting to work his way up and I had just lost the tire and so, the second time, so I was like, let's make it happen, man. And he's, I think what's changed from him, I wouldn't say so much his style, but his mindset. Yeah, he talked about that, the resurrection. Yeah. Well, you know what had happened?

He went on a reality show. Do you know the story? I think so. Yeah. And was it the preparation or was it? No. He talked about that on this podcast too. He went on this reality show and it was a fucking nightmare. And it was like in the jungle, this reality show.

He had to go into villages, try to get food. It was fucked. It's crazy. It was a South American reality show. And apparently he was there for a long ass time and he had no contact with the outside world. It was a disaster. Hated the show. But it gave him a lot of chance to think about his life, about where he was and then what his future is going to be. And realized that maybe some things had been holding him back. One thing that had been holding him back was he was trying not to lose versus trying to win. And that he was a little bit worried about his condition because maybe he didn't train enough.

Maybe he didn't prepare correctly. And then he just decided, look, I'm going to fucking go for it. So here he is. I mean, Masvidal's got to be your age, right? He's probably 38. He's in the range. I think he's a little bit younger. 36, something like that.

One of the most popular guys in the UFC. Said he was going to do it. He's there. Yeah. Fight for the title twice. But just think about what he did after that. Think about his fight. The fight with Nate Diaz.

Holy shit. How the knockout of Taron Till. Yeah. The Taron Till knockout was fucking crazy. And him getting knocked down early in that fight. He got knocked down. Comes back with that. First round. Oh my goodness. Yeah. The Darren Till knockout was fucking crazy. And him getting knocked down early in that fight. Oh, yeah. He got knocked down. Comes back with that.

Oh, my goodness. Yeah. And KO'd him in the most vicious fashion. And the way he did it, too, where he set it up, that switch where he stepped in and throws the left hook. Well, he grabbed his front hand. I don't know if you saw that. Mm-hmm.

Grabbed his front hand, pulls it down, and hits it with a left. Yep. Yep. That's what it just took him out. Oh, so smooth. Well, he's so clever. He's clever. Like the knockout of Ben Askren.

People think, oh, he just ran at him and threw a flying knee. No, no, no. No. He went to the side. Yeah. And then he came out. Angle change, man, and he went at him. Also, so Askren has to follow him,

which even more activates Askren's natural desire to grab you. Yeah. Right? I mean, it showed him planning for it. And he went to the side where Askren shoots. Yeah. I mean, he went to the side. And then, boom!

The whole lead up to that was awesome. Oh, my God. Him just... Incredible. Yeah. You know, just looking like a freaking G, and then he steps off. And that photo of him in midair landing that knee to Ben's face, jacked. You see his six pack and everything.

Angry look on his face. That's one of the classic all-time MMA photos. See if you can find that photo. And then him saying, was that necessary to hit him? He's like, it's necessary. Super necessary. Super necessary. Yeah him super necessary super necessary yeah super necessary well not only that he like as ben is out cold after he punched talking to him he's talking to him and slapping the table like i told you bitch yeah praising and what's good about him is that he can he can throw something like obviously

there it is wow that's that one in the middle is the one I'm talking about. Yeah, look at that. That is a fucking classic MMA photo. The stiffening up of Ben Asprey. In the middle of the fucking impact. Look at his face. He's so angry. Bam!

I was there. I was there too. I was there sitting in case. And you know what? After that fight, I went up and congratulated him. I was like, man. He's like, thank you, bro. I thank you bro we need to make this fight happen we need to do it again

that was crazy shit he became a superstar that night that's right been at two knockouts crazy knockouts back to back yup and now he has another chance

at Usman with a full camp super interested on paper it's like alright how do you choose against somebody who's been so dominant in the welterweight division?

Usman. But then you get this guy out there who can just, out of nowhere, just do a thought in his head, hit you with a spin, something, or a flying knee. He's so creative, and he's intelligent. I would never count Usman out. I think Usman is one of the most, mentally, he's one of the strongest guys that I've ever seen compete. You never see a weakness from him. He's so strong. And when he dominated Tyron like that to win the belt, this is his first shot at the title. No nerves at all. Just full dominance. Just went at him. Just controlled him. Smashed him. Just beat him up. at him, just controlled him, smashed him, just beat him up, almost tried to take him out at one point in time and emptied the gas tank and realized like, Jesus, Tyron's still here.

We talked about it on the podcast too. I'm like, how tired are you? He's like, bro, I was so tired. He didn't show it. He didn't show it. I could see it a little bit, but I was right next to him. I was right there watching it. I feel like it's like that because I see Chris do that.

He tries to break people. That's his goal. He doesn't want to beat you. He just wants just want to break you yeah that's what it is cain velasquez used to always do that to people break break you i don't care how tired i get you're going to get tired first and that's why like when i spar with him that's what he tries to do he tries to break you i'm not like the first time we sparred i'm coming in one set you know he's looking at me this 170 pound guy he tells me the story all the time you have this guy he's he's such a real funny guy chris and um yeah i think rory mcdonald was up there and was low kicking rory just just i mean he would send his

sparring partners home you know pack their bags and just send them home yeah so i'm in there and he's just like what's this guy gonna teach me so he's literally trying to make me quit just rock he was keeping the lights at the head but he was just ripping bodies to the you know ripping body shots taking me down and then he was like you get back up and you're bouncing just like you were in the first round as you in the second he's like after that first sparring session is like i'm gonna bring know I'm going to bring you back every time. So I was just trying not to get killed, obviously. You know, smiling at him.

Talk about going into the fire, right? Don't have a background in wrestling, and then you start training with a guy like Weidman. I mean, there's no middle ground there. You're just going from nothing to elite. To straight extreme. It was funny because it was Don John Danaher that hooked that up

he was there with GSP when I would go up and train with GSP so he made that happen he needed somebody to uh and that's why

I love this sport I've trained with so many freaking awesome dudes uh I was up there helping Rashad Evans get ready for

Loto Machida and of course he had Nate Marquardt there GSP Cow Cowboy, Brendan Shaw when he was training there. And I was just a kickboxer pretty much. You know, I wasn't even an MMA fighter.

And then through him, you know, I was training with Loto Machida, Anderson Silva, sparred with those guys. What was it like training with Anderson? Because when you trained with Anderson, he was in his prime, right? Yeah, that was the coolest thing ever i did a few rounds with him and he would go from a karate style to a muay thai style to a just kind of go back and forth i talk about elite man elite and i'm just like at all i was afraid to even close the gap on the guy because next thing you know he fights like a karate guy but then he's got you in

a tie clinch and you can't get out i I know you know you any way of getting out of a tie clinch didn't work it was just one of those like just to try and get out of it and when hope he doesn't throw any at the same time well you remember the rich Franklin fight oh yeah he clamped to hold a rich and rich just had no good answer no answer nothing yeah his forearms come down to here on me. What do I do? Well, his technique, though, is so sharp. Beautiful. So beautiful. And he wasn't the fastest guy, but there was no telegraph.

He had very little telegraph. It was just there. No. A lot of guys do that. A lot of MMA fighters, you know, they have, you can find their tells. Anderson was one of those guys who didn't have. When he front kicked.

V-torn in the face. No tell. Boom. It was there. And he was looking down when he did it, too. Like he was looking like he was going to kick him in the stomach. And then it went right up to the chin. And, you know, I had had a conversation with Eddie Bravo before that.

There's actually a video of it where one of those Bob dummies, those century dummies, and he's talking about front kicks. He's like, would you ever throw a front kick to the face like I don't think so it's like the timing would have to be perfect and then once Anderson did it everybody's right I just feel like you could be caught so easy you know it seems like it right but when Anderson did it it was just so picture-. And then Liotto did it too. Yep, Randy. Jumping front kick. His tooth went flying out.

It's like a flying karate. It was like the perfect karate thing ever. It was crazy. It was like a spar with Liotto, which was cool. It was pretty intimidating because I kept hitting him with a side kick, and he's more traditional. So more round kick, roundhouse kick, front kicks. No, not a whole lot of angle things, and I just kept side kicking him.

I could tell he was getting frustrated with it. So afterwards, I showed him just a few things. Scoop and move, get around the side kick. So the next time we sparred, I knew he knew how to get around the side kick because I just showed him. So I let him work it a little bit while we were sparring. And then I faked the hook kick. I hit him with a hook kick.

And he got mad. Next thing – it was a stand-up match only, but he tossed me. He grabbed me and just went, yeah. He apologized after. But he was like, I'm sorry, man. I was like, I didn't mean to. I might have hit him. I don't know if I hit him with my heel or whatever.

But I don't throw hook kicks in sparring anymore either. Because it's too hard to control? yeah and guys can lean into it um i had broke a guy's orbital it was mike king he was on the um the show the ultimate fighter and uh end up breaking his orbital with a hook kick after that that's such a scary injury it. They had to go in behind your eye and fix it and put a plate back there. Yeah, but I'm just like... What's the worst injury, your knee? The left knee? I would say it's my knee.

It's taken years off because of it. My hands took a year to recover. Really? Yeah. Vicente Luque and then December. Vicente Luque and then December. Vicente Luque was 2019. In the Jeff Neal fight,

you broke it again? No. Not the Jeff Neal, but it was a year later before I fought Jeff Neal. Oh, oh, okay. So it took me a year. Wow.

Just not, even still today, I can't get this, this finger to go down and it's painful. Like I wake up in the morning and my, my finger's up here like this.

Right. I mean, you can see this one. You know Ian morning and my finger's up here like this. Right. I mean, you can see this one. You know Ian McCall? It's kind of sunk in. Yeah. Ian McCall flyweight. He can't make a fist. He can't close that finger?

No, he's broken his hand so many times and broken his fingers. He makes a fist like this. Like there's no closing it. Aim for the eye, man. Yeah. I mean, literally. His fingers fuck forever.

And I conditioned my hands. The first time ever broke injured my hands so what do you do to condition your hands Maki really just punching things what about so like grip strength I do grip I do a lot of rice stuff so huh just rice grit more form stuff you know what about like grippers like not really not really grippers I do a lot of uh just uh i'll do um my strength and conditioning coach anytime i'm doing pull-ups or any pulling motion i have wide grips that i'm using so it forces me to really have to use my my grip to strengthen it up in order to be able to do the things i need to do with strength and conditioning so i do that but i don't i haven't just sat there i don't think i have time really to sit there you do when you're driving Yeah I have those captains of crush

Really Yeah I have the 120 pound one I just sit and do this 120 pound Yeah Freak I mean look at your forearm I can see it through your shirt

Yeah but That makes such a big difference I'm gonna have to get me one of those I believe in them so much Yeah I believe in hand strength so much You have to have it Yeah

So for jujitsu It's fucking so critical Grips But also just for protecting your hand Like having muscle around all the bones that holds it all in place. I just think it's one of those things where people overlook it, but you could work it while you're doing other stuff. Yeah. You could drive in the car and just be sitting there like this. Teaching classes.

I do my shin condition while I'm teaching. I'll just ding my shin. You know what captains of crush? You ever see those grippers? They're the shit because they get real fucking heavy. Wow. I do my shin condition while I'm teaching. I'll just ding my shin. You know what captains of crush, ever see those grippers? Yeah. They're the shit because they get real fucking heavy. Wow. I think you can get, see what you can get it up to.

I think you can get up to 150 pounds or more. So I wonder who's, I mean, what, professional arm wrestlers maybe do the, I mean, got to go up to that. Those guys are so weird. You ever see that one guy, he's got one giant forearm. Yes. And the other arm's like normal. Tiny. It's got to be, who's had it been born that way, right? No.

There it is. Wow. They do them by numbers. My dad used to have like a pair of those. They go to 237. Shut up. Oh my God. It goes really high.

Oh my God. They've been around forever, right? There's only three or four people that have ever done this. 365 pounds. I feel like these have been around. I've seen my dad use some of these maybe back in the freaking early 90s maybe. Could be. I don't know about this company. This company only I've been using their stuff for years though captains of crush they

have there if you scroll back up you take a look at them you can see that's that's the shit that I use I love them yeah they go by numbers that that that 365 is their number four it's called seems like you have to be certified I think to like that's a word I guess not that's called. And you have to be certified, I think, to put it. Oh, that's hilarious to order it. Not to order it, but to show that you've done it, because only a few people in the world have ever done it. Scroll up a little bit.

So I'm at, so it says 100 and 140. I definitely have 140, but I thought I had 122. I might have from a different company. Might be a different company. But I definitely have the 140, because I used to bring it to the comedy store and the bouncers would try to squeeze it. So I see like for some reason when I get on stuff, I go down these rabbit holes and one of these arm wrestling rabbit holes.

I was just everything I could get to just watch these guys doing how they train to do this stuff. And it's all technique. It's a lot of technique. It's not actually pulling the hand down or pushing the hand down. It's pulling. The dumbest shit on that Jake Paul fight was the slap fight. Oh, my gosh.

How about Ric Flair? It was awesome. Yeah, that's awesome. No, that's not dumb. Oh, okay. He was like the judge of the slap fight. Oh, that was great. He was the judge. The Ric Flair is always great. That, that's awesome. No, that's not dumb. Oh, okay. He was like the judge of the slap fight. Oh, that was great. He was the judge.

The Ric Flair is always great. That's not the problem. The problem is a guy sitting there letting a guy slap him in the face. That is so crazy. How many times do you get knocked out, right? Did you see the Jake – was it Jake Paul? Yeah. That was – I guess he had this guy for a hire.

I guess people hire him to slap him in the face. Oh, yeah, yeah. There's a guy on Instagram. No, it was Logan Paul that did it. Slaps for cash or some shit like that. But I know he fucked that guy up. Yeah, he knocked him out. Talk about a guy who needs to go MMA.

Wait a minute. Logan knocked the guy out? Logan. Yeah. See, this guy lets people slap him in the face for money. Logan was going to enter a slap fighting competition. Right. So this guy put it out there.

I don't know. Slapped me for however much money. And Logan slapped him and knocked this dude out. So that might have been all set up for the video. Might have been fake? For the video. Maybe for that video. I don't know.

Maybe. Well, maybe set up for a video. Or maybe they just reenacted it with the video. Like, they made a conversation. Like, this is what we're going to do. Well, so this is the video. Okay. Or this is the picture.

Oh, I've seen this. You've seen that? I saw this. Yeah, I saw this. So the guy said it was, like, set up or something. Oh, really? Of course it's set up. But you still got KO'd. Yeah.

No, that was 100% legit. He was done. Let's watch the video, because there's no way it was fake. That guy clearly got KO'd. You can hear, that was 100% legit. Let's watch the video because there's no way it was fake. That guy clearly got KO'd. You can hear it. Oh, look at this. Logan Paul, 100% fake. Shut up.

Look at that face. Watch this. Oh, it's ridiculous. There's not a chance that was fake. There's not a chance in hell. He slaps this dude so hard. Logan's a big boy. Yeah.

Watch this. Watch this. Listen to this. Oh! Oh, shit. Yo, catch him, catch him, catch him. That's not fake. Not at all. Yeah. Watch this. Listen to this. Oh! Oh shit. Yo, catch him, catch him, catch him. That's not fake. Not at all.

That's not fake. 100%. There's no way. When you, here's a little tip, folks. He's out. When guys pretend they catch themselves when they fall. When you fall like that, you fucking face plant, you're out. No one, it's just your instincts would save you.

You would do this, this like oh my god he would fall to your knees first you know what i'm saying but even what you wouldn't face plant yeah when you your instincts are never going to be especially if you're not a stunt guy you're not a guy who does this all the time the way he went out that guy was out not only that the impact of that was crazy logan's a big fucking kid. Did you see him wrestle? Yeah, Paulo Costa. Paulo Costa? Yeah, he's fucking good.

He's a good wrestler. Why box? Yeah. You'd be more entertaining watching doing MMA than boxing. I think it's money. Yeah. There's a lot of money in those crazy... But he only boxed KSI, the other guy who's a YouTube star. They both were YouTube stars and they boxed each other.

Maybe KSI doesn't have a wrestling background. Yeah. But Jake apparently is the more talented boxer. That's what I hear. He always talks about fighting his brother or something. I don't know. On interviews. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, maybe he knows he can fuck his brother up. But Jake has some power. That's real power. I don't give a shit what anybody says. The way he stepped forward and cracked Askren like that. Oh, yeah. That's real legit power. I felt so bad for him. Obviously says. The way he stepped forward and cracked Askren like that, that's real, legit

power. I felt so bad for him. Obviously, I mean, he did it for the money. Come on. Come on, Ben. I think he knew he was not going to go out there and win this fight. Well, Jake knew it, too. Look, the guy's coming off of hip surgery. He had a hip replacement. Ben Askren did. He definitely looked

like he wasn't in the best of shape. And he was never a striker. It was like it was never his thing. His thing was just like, get close to you and grab you. I'm pretty sure he even trained, from what I hear, he didn't train striking before a fight. He just wrestled. That's so crazy. That's what I heard.

That's so crazy. Yeah, he didn't even do any kind of striking training. He just wrestled. He just looked so much different physically than he did when he was in the Olympics. It's just. So much different than when he was in the early stages of his MMA career when he was fresh and young and healthy He just looks like physically spent. Yeah, you know he was done wrestling does that too. He takes years off your life Oh, yeah, years. They're all the punishment these guys go through. I mean everyday grind. Yeah It's just it's such a fucking crazy sport

I feel like I have to take a day off or day day or two off after wrestling training i don't even we don't even do live i don't even do live wrestling i don't need a lot of wrestling more situational stuff i mean i may start in on a leg try to finish it you know we'll do drills where we're you know we're working the you know entering on the double or a single things like that but it's live stuff it's just you're too prone to injury man yeah that's what I think too. I think I wonder about guys who get really in love with wrestling and then they start developing all these injuries

and then they have to kind of work around them. Even in sparring, like I, you know, we have an amateur and pro team. We all spar together. I'll spar kids who are 12 years old, you know, all the way up to elite pro fighters, and I spar everybody the same. There's, there's no egos. There's no, you know, and that's where a lot of these others, you know, Jim's kind of get in trouble with guys like that. You know, you get trying to crush each other. I wanted to, are you, do you real,

are you real careful? Like when you're, especially when you're in camp with guys you train with, you train with anybody or do you only train train with guys that are known to be calm and keep their shit together? Yeah. I mean, in the earlier days, we made some mistakes of just letting anybody come in. You wind up in a fight.

Yeah. And I've had to do that. Lay people out. We've got guys come in from other gyms, and they come in to spar with the general public of our school and try and take everybody out. We've got guys come in from other gyms and they come in to spar with the general public of our school and try and take everybody out. And of course you have those enforcers that you gotta humble them up

a little bit, but dads like Steven. I remember those days. It's crazy. And I hate doing it. Every dojo has those, right? Those situations? Oh yeah. My dad was in a I wish I was around for those days it was dojo wars yeah there was a time where my dad was a brown belt and i guess his instructor was talking

crap about some taekwondo school in the area so uh the instructor and one of their his best students came over to my dad's school uh where he trained at and his instructor had just come off a knee surgery my dad had no idea why they were there so the instructor threw him under the bus he's like i can't fight you but he will like pointed at my dad you know my dad said he looked over and saw him pointing at me but i was like you know hey so and you can tell these taekwondo dudes they were just like pissed you know just and this was knee surgery in the 70s yeah so they use like hammers and shit yeah so this guy might so my dad didn't come off a knee surgery his instructor right so he couldn't fight so he's like but that guy will fight you so my dad thought

it was just a friendly sparring match my dad asked the guy if he needed any gear he's like well we don't use gear he could just tell in the guy's face like all right this guy's gonna try and you know crush me and um so my, they're out there sparring. He said he knew it got real when the guy grabbed me by my headgear and headbutted me, like, real hard, just headbutted. Oh, my God. Boom. And I was like, all right. Next thing you know, dad's still trying to take a lie, and the guy sidekicks him.

And they had a stucco wall, right? Sidekick him. He just kept sidekicking him into the wall until that stucco wall kind of just kind of broke a little, broke, caved in. Dad's like, all right. He's like, I got to end this quick. And my dad had this, you know, crappy dip foam, probably, you know, gear back they had in the 70s and 80s. I don't know what they had. And the guy came in with a sidekick or a front kick.

And my dad parried and hit him with a ridge hand. We call him Papa Ridge Hand, you know, for one of these reasons of these reasons. Cut the guy all the way across his face, knocked him out cold. And what makes that story funny was he had a small airport in Greenville, South Carolina. We're going through the airport and one of the guys there, older fella, kind of a big dude, jacked. He's like, oh yeah, you're Ray Thompson's kid, right? Yes, sir. He's like, tell him blah, blah, blah. hello i'm like all right so i'm about at the karate school i told my dad that what's this you know this guy said hello he's like oh man you know and dad told me that story you know uh you know years ago and he's like that was him they're like

they're like best friends now he comes over to the school all the time, and when the guy's face gets red and he's got like this. Little line on it? Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. From the scar? Yeah, but the guy's awesome. The guy's such a nice guy. The Ridge Hand is a crazy technique that you never see in MMA.

No, my dad's wanting me to throw that Ridge Hand. Really? Yeah. You know who used to talk about the Ridge Hand all the time? Charlie Murphy. There's a hilarious moment that there's actually a photograph of. Charlie Murphy and I did a show together, and Maurice Smith and Ivan Salivary are there, and we're all having dinner.

And Charlie Murphy, who is really good at karate, Charlie Murphy gets out, he's talking about the Chicago Ridge Hand. He's got this technique that, you know, Charlie was really good at karate. He made it. Chicago Ridge Hand. He was really good at throwing the Ridge Hand, and he was saying, like, how come you guys don't throw ridgehands in MMA? And he was talking to Ivan Salivary and Maury Smith.

We were in Seattle, and they're both like, what the fuck? There it is right there. What? There. Why don't y'all throw this, guys? Come on now. So that's Ivan Salivary to the right, and Maury Smith is right next to him in the white shirt.

Heavy weight shirt. And he's talking about the Chicago Ridgehand. Look at the thing is it's like look at his eyes I know Charlie was the best the Ridge hand man oh man it is underestimated it really is yeah oh yeah like I've seen it's a legit technique and you don't really I mean my dad would hit dudes in the head with it okay he he'd condition his. If you don't condition your hands, I recommend not doing it. But, you know, the neck area, you know, you'd knock dudes out. I mean, coming from up underneath, the guy's trying to shoot. Well, think about how many guys have been KO'd on the ground by hammer fists.

Yeah. Right? And then think, like, you can't really, it's hard to do that. To do a chop. Chop. But, like, this, not that hard. Right. It's like throwing a hook.

And sometimes guys get KO'd with a ridge hand accidentally, right? Because a guy will throw a hook with a straight arm and he'll catch him with the side of the hand with a closed fist and KO him. That happens all the time. I don't see why people don't do, I mean, open hand slaps. Like using the palm. Right. Boom.

I feel like when I hit a mitt, I hit harder with an open hand than I do a hook. Well, you know Bryce Mitchell? You know Thug Nasty? Yeah. Bryce Mitchell? He's a wicked jiu-jitsu guy. Awesome fighter. He actually sent me a message recently because I was talking about how good Trevor Whitman's

gloves are. Trevor Whitman has that company, Onyx. They make incredible gloves. His gloves are the shit. And he made a better MMA glove. His MMA gloves are fantastic. And the UFC was doing something to try to work out a deal with Trevor to buy his gloves, but apparently it never came to fruition.

One of the things that I said, what I love about the glove is that it's curved constantly. So when your hand goes in it, it's curved. It makes you have to kind of keep your fist so you can't. Right. And the UFC gloves, they kind of make your hand come open. But Bryce was saying, you know what the problem with that is? When you break your hand, he goes, I want to be able to still slap a guy. And he goes, if it's constantly curved like that and then slapping is out of the question,

like if you can't open it. Well, I guess you could still. You can open it. I've had Trevor you could still— You can open it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've had Trevor's gloves on. You can open them. But they naturally want to close your hand. So when you relax your hand, it almost goes back to that.

When you relax your hand, your hand's like this instead of the UFC gloves, which are kind of trying to extend your hand. Dude's just still going to get poked in the eye with that, I think. That's true. Yeah. I was just super—I'm super impressed with Bryce Mitchell, too, man. That kid is something. That's true. Yeah. I was just super impressed. I'm super impressed with Bryce Mitchell, too, man. That kid is something. He's something. His jiu-jitsu is off the chart, man.

Yeah, we got Chase Hooper coming back in again, and that kid's a little wizard, too. Nasty on the ground. He reminds me of Ryan. He reminds me of Ryan Hall. He just looked like a little kid, and he's 21? Mm-hmm. 21 in the UFC. He got kind of bummed out because I was talking about his striking in his last fight.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's like, man, I like those guys, and they're shitting on me because me and DC were talking about striking. Yeah. But it's purely because I don't want him to get hurt. Yeah. Because when I see him, I see the level of jiu-jitsu that he has is so high. It's so good.

His ground game is so nasty. He's so good at controlling guys. But I worry about him at a young age taking on someone who's nasty, who's got really good striking. It's just like the gap between his – you know, some guys, they're like jiu-jitsu's here and then their striking's here. It's like a little bit better. But his, the gap is so big.

His jiu-jitsu is so much better than his striking. I agree. And he's 145. I don't know how long he's going to be at 145 because he's still growing. He's so long. And he's tall. He's like 6'1". Yeah.

And I know he's got a longer reach than I. I was like, I'm sitting in a spot and I was like, how are people touching you? They should never get in. They should never be getting in on you like that. He's just learning. Yeah, he is. He's still young and still green when it comes to the striking as well. Imagine if he's in there against a real elite striker who finds that chin.

And that's the thing. He needs to move up at a certain rate. I don't think he needs to be thrown out there. You've got to be careful with the UFC because they don't give a fuck. They're like, hey, Chase, we've got a fight for you. Hey! Next thing you know, they'll try you yeah look at with me i mean my first fight you know still learning the wrestling and they throw me with matt brown but but i wouldn't be you're 57 and no as a kickboxer you were one of the elite strikers in the sport yeah it's a

different thing yeah and he's yeah he's been doing jiuitsu, but strictly jujitsu. I don't know how long he's been doing the striking thing. But if he can use that, especially the style that we have, and Ryan's done very well with it. Yeah. You know, I didn't expect him to start throwing hook kicks out there. Crazy. Yeah, I'm like, dude, let's go, man. He throws so many kicks. Yeah.

And the thing is, he's not worried at all about you taking him down. Not at all. So he'll throw head kicks all day long. I mean, I know I'm physically stronger than this guy, Ryan. I know I'm more athletic than him. His jiu-jitsu is so good, though. There's nothing I can do. So good.

Levels of jiu-jitsu are so interesting. Because you see a guy who's a black belt who's really good, and then you see him roll with an elite black belt, and you're like, wow. Yeah. What the fuck, man? That's crazy. And with him, it's like he's doing the belt you're like wow yeah what the fuck man that's crazy it's like and with him it's like you know he's doing the things you're not supposed to do like when you

first started you're just you're not supposed to do this you're not supposed to he wants to turn your back he's doing all of that yeah and he's doing everything you're not supposed to do and still finishing you well one of the beautiful things about the sport is we haven't even begun to see what's possible the elite of the elite of today will not be as good as the elite of the elite of tomorrow. They're getting better. And there's not a sport other than MMA where you can go to 1993 and then you go to 2021 and it's unrecognizable. Yeah.

It's crazy how much better guys are today. The day where you got those guys that are like, has the Iziata Sonja striking. You got the Chris Ryman wrestling. Yes. You have the Ryan hall jujitsu all in one all in one yeah that's crazy crazy thing is i feel like in order to get to that level you would have to start maybe maybe have to start getting into the maybe fighting for the ufc later on yeah when i did because you when you're 21 you're still learning, right? And I think that's one of the reasons why I've survived so long in this game because I had that time to develop.

Yeah, you had so much timing and experience and so much just combat sports experience where you were used to competing. That's big. And also look at Daniel Cormier, how good he did in MMA. But it was also how much time did he have in wrestling? That's combat sport experience. It might not be striking, but it's still combat sport experience. It's learning how to compete.

So by the time he got into MMA, he was already dominating people. I mean, when he dominated Josh Barnett as a heavyweight, he picks up Josh Barnett and slams him and throws him around. And Strikeforce won the heavyweight Grand Prix. I loved him in that, man. I still love DC. I love that guy. I loved him. He picks up Josh Barnett and slams him and throws him around. And Strikeforce won the heavyweight Grand Prix. I loved him in that, man. I still love DC. I love that guy. I love him to death.

And that's something that we try and do with our amateur fighters. If they want to fight MMA, we want you to fight a few kickboxing fights first so you get used to the crowd. You get used to the nerves. You get used to, you know, you got some gems that just throw them out there. It's not smart. It's not. It's interesting the difference between the way boxing handles contenders

versus the way MMA does. Because, look, a guy like Jon Jones who fought Shogun for the title at 22 years old, it turned out Jon is one of the greatest athletes the sport's ever seen. It just turns out. But in boxing, they would have built him up slow before a title shot yeah he would have you know unless he's a mike tyson who's just smoking everybody in front of him and then finally 18 yeah he gets to trevor burbick and they're like yeah he's ready he's 20 you know but he was a really unusual case right but with boxing generally you're given a guy who tests you a little

bit and then there's a guy who tests you a little more and there's a guy who tests you a little bit, and then there's a guy who tests you a little more, and there's a guy who tests you a little more. And they're like, let's see how he does with a guy who can move good. Let's see how he does with a guy who's an inside fighter. And the trainers and the managers will try to figure out your career and then ideally get you to the title as an undefeated prospect. Yeah. That's what they want. In MMA, you get a late call you know sean shelby calls you up hey what are you doing tomorrow yeah we need you here man let's

go make 170 tomorrow i think that's like in the when you're first starting in the ufc that's how it was like especially like for me i feel like the fights they give you you got you need to take them you have to take them and then once you get to the point to where like the the j give you, you need to take them. You have to take them. You have to take them. And then once you get to the point to where, like, the Jake Allenberger and the Hendricks, after that, I was able to kind of make some kind of – they gave me two or three fighters. What do you think about these guys? And I could kind of choose, right? The Jake Allenberger fight, I always wanted to ask you about this

because Jake Allenberger, leading up to that fight, was talking shit about spinning techniques. Is that why you hit him with a wheel kick you know what i want to say yes i really want to say yes but it was one of those things where i was so you know when i'm out there i don't think of anything you know it's just reaction but i do hear my coaches and i hear my opponent's coaches so it made it a little bit easier not having an audience but my last fight i i tuned into both yeah that had to be weird right yeah that was weird that but i it was kind of easy at the same time like i i could they were they were they were saying things hey him them up

i could hear i could hear what you're saying right there you know i'm saying i can you know i know what you're gonna do i'm all right i'm ready right you know it was so weird but uh I mean you didn't fight I'm tuned in but my dad said spin I knew exactly Wow you can hear it do you think your dad said it because your dad wanted to shit about spinning 100% he was talking shit about spinning techniques and karate period yeah you like karate haha just laughed but you couldn't hit anybody more karate than that you know and more clean and i hit him with it twice yeah the first one was the neck i knew he was going to protect that so i went up a little higher and got him right in the temple yeah that

was wild yeah i remember it was i remember watching and looking at chris wyman jumps up he had cj his young son in his hand just fl Just flailing him around like, yeah, let's go. And that was the weekend where Conor McGregor fought Chad Mendes, I believe. Oh, wow. That was that Saturday. That was like International Fight Week maybe. Oh, wow. He fought Chad Mendes on Saturday and I fought on Sunday.

No kidding. Yeah. Yeah, that was one of those weird things. They had a few of those nights where they had fights on Friday night, fights on Saturday night. And how crazy is this? Usman was on the undercard. Was he? Who was he fighting?

Do you remember? It was the contender. Oh, not contenders. The finals of the Ultimate Fighter? Yeah, Ultimate Fighter. Yeah, I think Vicente Luque was on that, right? Did you? No, obviously, I don't remember.

But obviously, you want a fight for the title. And, you know, when you saw Masvidal getting another shot, did that piss you off? No, it just made sense. I mean, the hype the guy, the hype the guys got around him is ridiculous. And he took the fight on short notice. So I guess the UFC might have owed him a favor. He hasn't fought since.

He hasn't fought since he hasn't it was like back to back yeah I know a lot of fans were wanting me to fight him because I'm the only guy he hasn't fought in the top five um but um yeah man it's I'm patient what do you think you have to do to to get that to secure that title fight again because a lot of people kind of counted you out after you you had those two fights with Woodley. But then you worked your way back in, and then obviously the Pettis fight. But then you worked your way back into contendership.

And I think the Jeff Neal fight opened up a lot of people's eyes because a lot of people, me included, were really high on that, and I still am. And he's got a big fight coming up too, right? He does. Neal Magny. That's right. That's a really good fight. Neal Magny. That's a really good fight.

Neal Magny's another guy that people That's a really good fight. Neil Magny. That's a really good fight. Yeah. Good test. Neil Magny's another guy that people like to look past for some strange reason. It's weird because he, it's like, and I can't really say anything because I've, you know, got beat by Darren Till, got knocked out by a guy who I was beating. But it's like a swing or miss for Neil Magny. Like, he does very well against this dude. He's like a different fighter. But then, I don't know if it's just the smaller grapplers because RDA submitted him, right?

Grapplers, he has an issue with Maya. But he's a grappler. Michael Chiesa. How the fuck did that guy ever make 155 pounds? Whenever I give that guy a hug, it's like hugging a door.

He's such a cool dude. I love that guy. He's so nice. I love that guy. He's a great commentator too. When he does the breakdowns on the desk with Alan Joban, those guys are awesome. I love that the UFC does that. They give fighters an opportunity to do stuff outside of just compete even while they're active.

I've done a few things. I think it was for the Tyron fight was one of them. When he knocked out Lawler, I was behind the desk. I was with Corm things. I think it was for the Tyron fight was one of them. When he knocked out Lawler, I was behind the desk. I was with Cormier and I think Dominic Cruz and some of those guys. But I liked it. I had a lot of fun doing it. But those guys prepare, man. They do a lot of – they do their studying.

He does a lot of studying. And for me, like I would love – hey, where are you going to be? You need to do that more often. I was like, it's just too much work. It's a lot of work. I was winging it, for real. I was just going out there just, all right, here I am. Well, when we have a card like this weekend, I think love, hey, where are you going to be? You need to do that more often. I was like, it's just too much work. It's a lot of work. I was winging it, for real. I was just going out there, just, all right, here I am. Well, when we have a card, like this weekend,

I think there's 15 fights on the card this weekend. I got to watch a lot of fights, man. There's a lot of fucking people. Some of these people I never even heard of. I've never seen them fight. Well, a lot of them are debuts. Yeah. So you got to go and find something about them online.

Find footage online. Yeah, this will be the second time Chris has fought Uriah Hall. Oh, that's right. He fought him before the UFC. I think he knocked him out at the same point. Yeah, hit him with a left hook. Yeah, that's right. It was crazy.

We were in Brazil doing a TV show. Laboratorio da Lucha. It was like a fight science thing. It was me versus a CrossFit guy, Chris Weidman versus a Brazilian Olympic wrestler. And he had to wrestle. He was so pissed because he's out of shape, you know, and he had to actually wrestle these guys. But everybody, he was like, you think Joseph Bieber walked in? People love Chris.

Love Chris Weidman for beating Anderson. For beating Anderson. Wow. They were so pissed that Anderson Silva was doing his whole shenanigans out there. Yeah. They did not like him for that. Wow, it was such an unfortunate way to lose when Anderson had this dominant reign and to be like clowning Chris.

And the way Chris set it up was so interesting too because Anderson would go left, right, left, right. So Chris throws a punch and then he throws a back fist. Yeah, it was like a... Yeah, so he already was going to the right. So he had to go to the left and he walks right into that left hook. Boom. Went nuts when that was happening.

It's really funny. I mean, it's not funny, but it's really interesting because a lot of people missed that he threw the punch and he threw a back fist yeah so Anderson was moving away from the back fist and Chris lured him right into the left hook and he and for some reason Chris doesn't he's not the fat like when you look at that punch it doesn't look really fast it's just kind of like moles through his chin his skull and just just takes him out. I don't think he saw it coming. It was perfect.

You know, and what was interesting is Anderson was fucking up Chris's legs. He really was. And if he just stayed disciplined and fucked up his legs, I have a theory about that too, though. I think for some fighters, when they're that dominant for that long, I think the pressure is just overwhelming.

And that's one of the things that Matt Hughes said when he lost to BJ Penn. When BJ tapped him out, he's like, you know, honestly, I'm relieved. It's just like all these guys chasing after me all the time, trying to get to the title. And first of all, I was like, wow, kudos to you in this moment of defeat for being so honest to say, I mean, and one of the greatest fighters of all time, to be that guy and also be like, look, I'm going to be honest with you. I'm happy.

I'm relieved. Yeah. I mean, that pressure can be, I don't see how Conor does it. I don't see any of those guys do at that level. Just the constant, you know, everybody just like this watching you everywhere you go. And I mean, I felt. Everybody training for you. Yeah.

I felt that way, you know, coming up at the kickboxers, being undefeated for so long. And when I got beat by Matt Brown, it was a relief. It was like, now I can just go out there and fight. I don't have to worry about not losing. Being undefeated constantly and holding up that zero. Yeah, that's interesting. Do you ever work with a mental coach or anything?

That's interesting. Yeah. Do you ever work with a mental coach or anything? I did for a little bit, but I felt like these guys were trying to put into my head that I was mentally weak. Really? That's how I felt. That's just me. I don't know.

I don't know why. How so? Just the things that they were saying, hey, you know, what bothers you? I was like, nothing's bothering me. You know, stop saying something's bothering me when nothing's bothering me. I don't want you to focus on this. I'm like, you know, I just like, you know, I've never been, I don't think, I just don't think, like, I've never been a negative thinker. I've always thought positively.

I always thought, like, I'm going to go out there and crush this dude. You know, I'm just going to work my behind off. And that's what gives me confidence going into a fight. Preparation. Preparation, man. Knowing that I did everything I could to prepare for it. If there's any doubts, then if there's any of those doubts out there, like I should have did this, I should have, or I wasn't feeling good. I see guys at the top do this all the time. That's why working with champions, I champions I guess coming up which is a bit have been a privilege with GSB and Chris and these guys they don't if they may have maybe feel a little bit of down whatever no they don't care what's bothering them at home may feel a little bit of

bumps and bruises but they're still in the gym there's always something you can do yeah always so it's just that mindset man I kind of try to be as it's contagious possible yeah oh yeah 100% so is loser mentality it is it is you know you see a lot of those guys who saw it was like a compilation somebody put out there after I lost the Pettis and they showed a bunch of people up there crying and then me I'm just like but it's you know it's you can't go back and change it yeah it is what it is right just go back just go back and change it. Yeah, it is what it is, right? Just go back to the drawing board and get better. Bless yourself, baby.

This is Max Holloway's shirt. Shout out to Max. But that's what he always says. It is what it is. It is what it is. Life's a garden. You got to dig it. Nobody's more relaxed and happy after a loss than that guy.

He just lets it go. Even when he gets robbed, he's like, it is what it is. And that's kind of how I felt with the Till fight. I felt like I had won that fight. But, you know, like I said, at the end, it is what it is. You go back to the drama. You were talking in that fight about those sidekicks to the knee. Yes.

You don't like those kicks. I don't. I guess when you're out there fighting, anything can happen. You have the potential to really damage somebody. But I feel like that's just like somebody getting in your heel hook and really cranking it and sparring. Like Paul Harris. Just a dick move, you know?

I'm like, okay, yeah, we're out here fighting each other, but I'm seriously trying to injure you. I'm seriously trying to put you out of the game. I feel like if I went out there and started a sidekick with my knees, it would just be, I don't know. I couldn't do it. Really? Yeah. Do you remember the first fight with Robert Whitaker and Yoel Romero? Yes. Yoel came out, threw sidekicks to the knee, and really fucked up Robert's knees. The second fight, Robert came out and fucked up Yoel's knees.

Did it the same way. Yeah. Came out and immediately opened up with those sidekicks to the knees. Jon Jones is notorious for that. Who is he? He's so good at that.

He's so good at that. Dudes are out for a year. See, that's the thing. At the end of the fight, I want you still standing. I want us to go have a beer and be cool. I wish there was something

they could do about meniscus. Oh, man. Meniscus and cartilage. Because it seems like when that shit blows out, it's so hard to fix. And then it hinders your movements and sparring and training. So it changes the way you prepare. And it changes the way you think about moving and kicking. And so it makes you think, too, how crazy the human body is.

Because there's not anything out there that could replace that meniscus well other than resurfacing you know yeah right but there's no material like no rubber out there that kiddo replace it you know so when it's gone it's gone it's gone it's gone I mean what they do now is just they they just completely remove the cartilage and put this crazy synthetic material. Really? And they drill it into your kneecap. And that becomes your new knee surface.

What? Yeah, and then you don't feel it. Is it? The guy from the Highland Games, we've talked about him before. Do you remember the gentleman's name? He's a big fucking house of a man who won the Highlands Games and got his knee replaced. Who told me about it? Kelly Star Who told me about it? Kelly Starlett told me about it.

I like your shirt, by the way. Thank you. You're welcome. Matt Vincent. That's it, Matt Vincent. See if you can find his Instagram. There's a video of him moving post-surgery, doing like these, you know, Highland Games.

It's all the crazy shit where they throw fucking cannonballs and stuff. Don't they like toss like big poles? Yeah, yeah, yeah. All that kind of crazy shit. Scottish games? Yeah, the Highland Games they call it. But this guy, Matt Vincent, that's his name? Matt Vincent's a gorilla.

He's just a fucking tank of a man. So it was just a huge change? Yeah, he blew his knee out and blew his ACL out and kept training. What is that? What his knee used to look like? Yeah. And that's what it looks like now? Two years ago.

Yeah, so that's how fucked his left knee is, or it might be his right knee. It's his right knee. You can tell there's no gap between the knees, so it's bone on bone. But watch what he can do now. Watch this. That's not the best video of it. What? There's a great video of him

doing some crazy shit. So you see him running on a treadmill. He can do everything now. Basically. Essentially. He's lost some weight too. This is him. What year is this? What is this?

And this was his right knee, you said? Go a little further than that. There's some videos of him moving really well. No, that's not it. That's him at the Highland Games with his stupid skirt on. Sorry, bro. Yeah, he did a lot of that knees over toes stuff. Oh, so that's what you're talking about

yeah okay but that's just to strengthen all the shit around the knee but if you go a little further down I'll tell you when I see it is him I feel like everybody's dabbled in MMA everybody's doing a little something well it's cause you know

just that's the ultimate yeah I've talked to other athletes man and Yeah. Well, it's because, you know, just that's the ultimate. Yeah. I've talked to other athletes, man, and, you know, just talking to them, they're huge fans. It's like something I wish they could do. No, no, no. Oh, that's me talking about. Hey. Scroll a little down.

I've talked about him several times. That right there. That one in the middle. You can see him moving really well. I mean, this is. That's a big boy, man. And this is with a fucking fake knee. I mean, all of this movement with a fake knee,

that's crazy, right? All the spinning and stuff, yeah. Yeah, what does it say over there? It says, one of my goals next year is to get a free throw. It's been a long time. My goal is to start throwing, but I'm able to move well enough. Pain-free. Teach people the script. That might be old. That might be an free throw. It's been a long time. My goal is to start throwing, but I'm able to move well enough. Pain free. Teach people the script.

That might be old. That might be an old video. That might be an old video. I don't know if that's it. Anyway, there's some videos of him moving around on his Instagram page to show how – so his ACL apparently was completely fucked, and he kept training and kept competing even with his fucked knee and just destroyed the inside of it and then ultimately had to get it resurfaced if you go to the ready

state that's kelly starts page and um he's the author of the supple leopard really smart strength conditioning coach and guy who's a real expert in physiology blew his knee out skiing yeah and then did his best to try to get it fixed and rehab it and all that jazz, but eventually wound up getting it resurfaced. And now he can do everything. It's just not what it used to be. Gotcha. But there's some videos of him doing stuff in there.

If you scroll a little down, you can see some of the movements and stuff that he can do now and he's only four months out of getting his his shit resurfaced so this is definitely something I had to be welcome tomorrow Usman was saying that eventually he's gonna have to do this yeah his knees are pretty fucked you would never tell what he's fighting no so this is him doing rehab this is him rehabilitating his left knee, which was the one that was stuck. It's those stabilizers, right? So stabilizers that actually keep that knee in. So this is a blown out fake knee, and he can go all the way down and do pistol squats on it and all this stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. And again, the inside of it was complete toast. Yeah. Yeah, we live in a- And that going down and up, that's what gets it for me. For me, standing up, I feel like it's grinding. Oh, yeah, well, all the meniscus and everything gets smushed in there.

You could go back to his page. So he can – oh, he can go back up, please. There's a video of him skiing where he talks about how well he can move now. I think that's it. Is that it? I'm taking a guess. I don't know. It looked like it.

It's snowy mountains. That's an ad for a thing. But there's, whatever. It's so hard to go through. Yeah. Everybody posts too much. But he- I found it.

Oh, you found it? Okay. So this is him. Yeah, okay. it? Okay. So this is him. Yeah, okay, there, after surgery. This is him lifting. Look, he's dead lifting a shit ton of weight. And then you see him. He's in his 40s, I believe.

If I had to guess, sorry if I'm wrong. Still a young guy. But there's a video of him skiing. I think it's in the beginning. Yeah, see, so he's mountain biking. Yeah, and right here, just let it play out. So he's doing this and then he's skiing. So this is him with a fucked up fake knee.

Wow. And he's doing jumps. They resurface the knee and it's just whatever that material is that fucking composite stuff it fuses itself to the top of the knee. So it requires, just like Aljamain's neck,

your bones have to sort of take to it and fuse it in. And then there's no meniscus anymore. So is that like a swing or miss if your body takes to it or not? Kind of like a cadaver? That's a good question. I don't think so. I think they have it down now, and they're getting better at it all the time.

Because it used to be once you had those things, you were stiff and you were never going to walk normal again. And you just, you had a fake knee. Now, the way they have it, you could actually compete in athletics. What? Yeah, it's getting interesting. I definitely, something I need to be looking into, for sure, because I got. How long do you think you're going to fight?

I will do it as long as my body will let me i mean i haven't taken a ton of damage you know coming up in the in the even in kickboxing or you know been knocked out once been knocked down a few times though but that was tyron tyron throw throws missiles he had it perfectly timed to that freaking left hand and what was crazy he hit me with like two in a row thank goodness i was blessed with a hard skull because I got back up. And then I was in that guillotine. And learned to breathe out my butthole. It's an ancient Chinese secret.

So you just have a thought in your head just as long as I can do it. Yeah. I mean, until or if my pop says I'm done. As a fighter, I want to be able to compete. I do it for the fun of it. Money is just a bonus. I've been fighting since I was 15 years old, and I just love to compete. What's next for you right now?

Burns. That's right. When is that? July 10th. Interesting. And they just announced that, right? Yeah. Yeah, I've got 12 weeks.

That's a big fight. Yeah. That's a big fight yeah that's a big fight yeah Gilbert this would be his first fight coming off of Usman yeah and you know he's gonna be on point he's gonna want to prove a point so I know I'm gonna be getting the best burns and that's I wouldn't have it any other way I'm sure you wouldn't he's another guy that I'm like how the fuck did you ever make 155 pounds yeah he's me he's that tall, but he's thick, boy. His neck is as wide as my shoulders. I know, he's got that Mike Tyson neck, that 25-inch round neck, man.

I feel like in that fight with Usman, he just had an adrenaline dump, and I think there was moments where he had so much success that I think maybe he just got a little excited. Yeah, earlier on, it looked like he had rocked him. He did rock him. He dropped him. Yeah, okay, he put his hands on him. I remember that. Yeah, he dropped him. Earlier on, it looked like he had rocked him. He did rock him. He dropped him. He did, yeah. Okay, he put his hands on him.

I remember that. He dropped him. And then that's what's cool. That's what that experience and being the champ. He stayed composed. Usman's mind is Fort Knox. I love it. You ain't getting in there.

I love it. I mean, he may lose someday. He's lost before. He lost his pro debut. Really? Yeah, he got strangled. What? Yeah. Who did he fight? Do you remember? I do not

know. Go to Kamaru Usman's Wikipedia. I wonder if he wrestled himself into a submission. Sometimes wrestlers do that. He got caught in the rear naked. Some guy put him in the rear naked. And he really didn't understand jiu-jitsu back then. And got tapped.

Oh, second fight. I'm sorry. Okay. Jose Caceres. Submission rear naked choke in CFA 11. Yeah, Jose Caceres. That's about as Jose, right? That's about as Brazilian sounding a name as possible.

That's the only loss in his entire career. Wow, golly. That's crazy. And then you scroll all the way up. Look at that. It's all just dominance, you know? Pretty fucking interesting. I would love that, yeah. So, Masvidal and then Gilbert.

But I think the Colby-Covington fight was probably the most satisfying for him. Yeah, I think so, too. I think it was the most satisfying for a lot of people. Not for Colby. No. I mean, I hear Colby's a really nice guy he is a nice guy he was great i'm hanging out with him at the comedy store i've never never met him before

do you know the story no the story is interesting this is what happened they had him scheduled to be cut and he was about to fight damian maya and they told him listen your style sucks we don't like you know I don't know who said it to him I don't know what the words were but essentially what he said to me is they told me you're boring and we're gonna cut you even if you win and he's like fuck and so because he was a wrestler and he was you know had kind of a safety first style and he was really good at grinding and incredible gas tank and never did any of this shit before, right? His whole fight before that was just like, I'm going to fight my best.

I'm going to train hard. I'm going to do my best. And then he is in Brazil with Damian Maia and he starts talking mad shit and he starts, fuck you, you fucking filthy animals. I just beat your best guy. And everybody's like, what? They're going crazy. And he talks mad shit. beats Damian Maya and then

the next thing you know the UFC is like okay what's next wow and then you know he's like okay I got a character now and then he starts wearing the fucking MAGA hat yeah and he brings girls around for all these photos and he you know he's out there meanwhile the guy drinks nothing but water trains like a fucking animal you know i mean he's he doesn't party at all i mean that guy is super dedicated he's good friends with my friend cam haynes who's a insane ultra marathon runner slash bow hunter like one of the most disciplined guys i've ever met. He trains with Colby. Colby trains with this fucking animal and does these runs with him and mountain runs. He says the kid is in incredible shape. He's super dedicated.

And he eats clean 24-7, 365. Really? Fully dedicated. No partying. I mean, all he cares about is fighting and winning. That's all he cares about. I've never heard this story. I mean, all he cares about is fighting and winning. That's all he cares about. I've never heard this story. I have no idea.

That story, his character was because of desperation. He created that character. When you talk to him in real life, he's not like that at all. He's a wrestling heel. Like he really is like Ric Flair or like some wrestling guy. But meanwhile, everybody goes crazy. With that situation, he almost got in a fight with somebody outside of one of the hotels. It was Verdum.

I guess because he called it the fourth animals, right? Yes. Yeah. Verdum. Okay. Verdum's a proud Brazilian. Yeah. Brazil's filled with very proud people.

100%. They love Brazil. You know, and they don't like you disrespecting Brazil. Yeah. Look, he fucked up. I was wondering. I was like. Didn't he hit him in the head with a boomerang or some shit?

Yeah, he threw a boomerang at him. And then who was it? Somebody wore a boomerang shirt. I think it was Usman. Oh, that's hilarious. I think Usman wore a boomerang shirt. Yeah. I guess it was one of the press conferences.

Listen, Fabricio Verdum is an enormous man. He's huge. He's also the first guy to ever beat Fedor. So just. I remember that. Stay the fuck away from him. Yeah. Caught him Verdum is an enormous man. He's huge. He's also the first guy to ever beat Fedor. So just stay the fuck away from him. Strike force, right? Yeah. Caught him in a triangle. Golly. What is Fedor doing nowadays? Still fighting, unfortunately. What? In Russia? No, in Bellator.

Yeah. He still fights in Bellator. Ryan Bader Kato'd him in the first round. Ryan Bader caught him with a left hook in the first round. Ryan went, like, faked for a takedown and came up with a left hook and clipped him and knocked him out. You never saw that? See, pull up that.

Because Ryan Bader has reinvented himself as a heavyweight, and he's the heavyweight champion of Bellator. Bader is the heavyweight champ of Bellator. Ryan Bader is a beast as a heavyweight. I don't watch fights. He was. That's incredible. I don't watch fights.

Oh! Watch this. Oh, what? Faked a takedown. don't watch fights he was that's incredible oh watch this oh that's faked and take down like like he was going down to the knee and clipped him perfectly he was a massive he just was a huge yeah Bellator his drug test is a questionnaire agreed look at this dude's neck, man. He's a tank. It's the thing, man. Well, it's also, he doesn't have to cut any weight. Yeah, he doesn't.

It's just like his walk-around weight. But he lost the light heavyweight title. He had the light heavyweight title of Bellator as well. He was a two-division champ. He fought who took it? Nemkov. Okay. Nemkov's a beast.

Nemkov just beat Phil Davis, too. I feel like if you have a name like that, like... Nemkov's legit. Nemkov's a beast. Nemkov just beat Phil Davis, too. I feel like if you have a name like that, like... Nemkov's legit. Nemkov's very legit. There's a few guys over in Bellator that I believe can hang with anybody in the world. Douglas Lima's the biggest one. Oh, Douglas Lima. Douglas Lima, in my opinion.

And then Musashi at 185 is, in my opinion, one of the best fighters on planet Earth. But Douglas Lima is... Scary, dude. One of the scariest leg kickers I've ever seen. Man, that one, I saw a meme when he knocked out Michael Page Venom. Oh, my God. planet Earth. But Douglas Lima is one of the scariest leg kickers I've ever seen. Man, that one, I saw a meme when he knocked out Michael Page Venom. Oh, my God. He had Mjolnir come in and he grabs him by his hands and he just KOs him.

Oh, my gosh. He was the first guy to have any success against Venom. You know, Venom is so slick. And Venom looked like he staggered him early. And then he comes back and just leg kicks the crap out of that. Well, he kicked him low and dropped him. Like, he wobbled he wobbled like he went down and then he caught him with that fucking punch he's coming up yeah brilliant that was awesome yeah there's a few of those guys over there pitbull yeah patricky pitbull i mean i think he's uh as good as anybody on the fucking planet what do you think about my mouth for the first time patricio pitbull which one is her it's

patricia patricky's the brother right yeah patricio's the. Which one is... Patricio's the brother, right? Patricio's the really good one who was two-division champion. Crazy Mighty Mouse losing for the first time. Over there. Yeah, over there. First time by KO. Some of those dudes are...

Yes! Yeah, man. That guy who knocked out Eddie Alvarez? Yeah. Timothy Natsukian Nastyukian How do you say his name? Nastyukian It's like nasty is in his name

It's called nasty Nastyukian Nastyukian He's a fucking animal He's scary Yeah They got some great They have Giorgio Petrosian over there

You know John Wayne Parr is fighting tonight What? John Wayne Parr is fighting Nicky Holskin Wayne Parr is fighting Nikki Holskin tonight. On a Wednesday? On a Wednesday on TNT. This is tomorrow, so if you're listening to this, sorry, fuckers. We'll air this tomorrow. But, yeah, John Wayne Parr is fighting Nikki Holskin tonight.

Yeah. On TNT. One championship is now on TNT. Shout out to my man Michael Chiavello. Big Mike Mike I love that dude Yeah He's fucking great

The big kaposh I love that guy I love when he says that Yeah man He commentated One of my brother's fights When he fought for Legacy I think it was

He calls him the beanpole He called my brother the beanpole The beanpole Yeah He fought My brother Evan fought MMA Before I did Really? He fought at My brother Evan fought MMA before I did. Really?

He fought at 185. How many brothers and sisters did you have to fight? It was me. Well, all the boys did. How many boys? There's three. All of them fought? And I'm the oldest, but I'm the runt.

Really? I'm the runt of the group, yeah. Wow. And the one, my brother Evan fought at 185. He was probably 225 now. 63, 64. The baby, Tony, he's about 62, at 185. He was probably 225 now, 6'3", 6'4". The baby, Tony, he's about 6'2", about 285. Played college football.

Jesus. At one point he was over 300 pounds. Jesus. But he has more talent than I will ever have. Really? He just didn't have a competitive bone in his body. Wow. What does he do?

Teaches at the school. Wow. Yeah, teens program. How old is he? He's just turned 30. Maybe he can fire back up again after he hears this. I've been trying to. I've been trying to, man.

Would he be light heavyweight or heavyweight? No, he would not be heavyweight. Light heavyweight? Yeah, 205 for sure. But those guys at heavyweight are just on another level. Sweet T, what do you think? Come level. Sweet T. What do you think? Come on, Sweet T. What do you think, Sweet T?

But, you know, the guy comes off the couch and just waxes dudes. I feel like I'm going to spar today. No pressure, maybe. Maybe. I don't know. But there's a savagery about him, too. Like, you hit him hard, he's coming after you. There's some guys that just, they're not interested in competition.

I know. That's why I feel like the best fighters in the world, you'll probably never see them. Some of them. I mean, we all know guys in the gym that for whatever reason dominate people in the gym, and then you never see them compete. They're just not interested in whatever it is.

Maybe they wanted to do it with the pressure or the nerves. Maybe they have other interests, they just happen to be super talented. Because sometimes just because someone's really talented at something doesn't mean they want to do it with the pressure or the nerves. Maybe they have other interests. They just happen to be super talented. Because sometimes just because someone's really talented at something doesn't mean they want to do it for a living. I've seen guys like that before in the gym that you watch them roll, and you're like, what the fuck, man? How good is this guy?

And you're like, dude, he's as good as anybody. He just doesn't want to compete. Donahair told me there's a bunch of guys like that that would train at Henzo's. I feel like you have to be that way to train at Henzo's, man. You'd just be trashed on. You've got to be a savage over there. That's a perfect example of a real shark tank where there's so many sharks there. Because you really rise to the level of your training partners,

especially in jiu-jitsu and those environments. If you hear a guy trains at Marcelo Garcia, his gym, you're like, oh. Or a guy trains at John Jock Machado's gym, you're like, oh. There's gyms where you hear about people and you go, oh, Jesus. You have to be good. And Henzo, in my opinion, is like – if you hear some guy got a black belt from Hickson, you go, whoa. There's levels to that.

That's John Jock, man. I haven't seen you know, there's levels to that. You know? That's John Jock, man. I haven't seen him in a while. That's my man. I was in, what, 2005? I was up at the Abu Dhabi. He was going against some heavyweight. It was a super fight. And the guy just laid on him the whole time.

Rico. Yes. Rico Rodriguez. Yeah, I remember that. No, no, no. Dean Lister. Dean Lister. That's right.

That's right. That's right. I think GSP competed there, too. He did. And got submitted. Yes, he did. GSP. He did.

I'm trying to remember who submitted him. The reason why I said Marcelo Garcia, because Marcelo Garcia, or Rico Rodriguez, Marcelo Garcia submitted Rico Rodriguez. Wow. He got him in a heel hook. And Marcelo was there, and he was just crushing people. But then he got, who was it? He was fighting the Open Division, and he was just crushing people but then he got who was it he was fighting the open division and he had somebody's back and he jumps up and just gets

Rodrigo Rodriguez that was him and then he tapped him tapped him of the heel hook after that everybody booed that dude I'm gonna want to kill because Marcello was on his back and reach up Rico's like 260 it was like a d-movie. Yeah, yeah. Just jumps up, lands. And it was Jacare and Roger Gracie. I'm trying to remember who tapped GSP, but the guy was fucking good. Is this it? No, this is- Rio Santos. Oh, really?

Rio Santos. Yes. 2005. Yes. I was there. Yeah, he got him in an armbar. Yeah, I was there. It was a flying one in an armbar. Yeah, I was there. It was a flying one.

Flying armbar. That was in LA, right? Whoop. Yep. Caught him quick. And the good thing about GSP, man, he put himself. He would bring people in. He would go train with the best guys.

Watching him roll with, you know, Roger Gracie. Roger Gracie. Even who was it? I was up there I was watching Roger Gracie and what freaking what's his name I was just talking about him brain fart what does it look like I was helping to get ready for Leo to Machida Rashad Evans Evans. Lord. Those guys were going at it. Yeah?

At it. Savage, man. They were just picking up and slamming him. It was like the craziest scrambles ever. And I don't know. I think Roger was going kind of like this. And Rashad with that wrestle mentality was 100. That was fun.

That was fun to watch. I was like, no, I'm not stepping out there. I'm not stepping out there. I'm not stepping out there. There's been a few gyms I've went to. I went to ATT one time before the Matt Brown fight. And I was getting ready to go out there and spar. And I saw Hector Lombard out there just wailing on dudes. I think he was sparring some guy small and then just dropped him.

I'm like, I'm just going to pack my stuff up. I'm just going to leave. I'll see y'all later. Hector's kind of famous for that. Yeah, for being really, really hard in the gym. I mean, he comes from that old school Cuban mentality. There's no soft sparring. There's none of that. There's no light sparring here.

And that gym, ATT, I mean, you want to talk about an incredible gym. Oh, yeah. I mean, Dan Lambert, shout out to that guy. That guy poured millions of dollars into that gym before he ever saw a penny back. Really? Yeah, and they built that whole new gym that they're at now with the dormitories and an incredible space. He built that. Built the whole building.

Bought land, put up the building just because he loves the sport. Good for him. I mean, he made his money outside of that. He's a businessman. Made his money completely outside of MMA. But just loves it. Just says, hey, here you go, guys. Loves it. Loves it.

Loves it. I need one of those guys. Well, listen, brother, I can't wait to see your fight with Gilbert. And I'm a big fan. Thank you. And I'm glad we finally did this. Are you kidding me? We've been talking for three hours and 20 minutes.

Are you kidding me? I felt like we just sat down. No. How long have we been doing it? 320? What? Yeah. Three hours and 20 minutes.

I think there's more to talk about. What are we doing? Why are we stopping? What else do you? 3.20? What? Yeah, three hours and 20 minutes. I think there's more to talk about. What are we doing? Why are we stopping? What else do you want to talk about? You good? Hey, no. I'm on your time, baby. Thanks, brother.

Appreciate you, man. Thank you very much. Thank you, brother. Bye, everybody. See ya. Thank you.