Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sFl7J3xskY
[Laughter] [Music] hello luke hi joe we did it we made it we finally made it i wasn't sure it was gonna happen yeah well uh kudos to you for taking the chance to come here during the pan dammit i know the all very oppressive pandemic well we were supposed to do it in march yeah and then the world turned upside down literally uh basically but we figured out a way yeah we're here yeah it's um is it you said you did some traveling what did you do traveling for before this so i went to the charlo brothers double header uh uh which was interesting because i got there early in the week and the casino was empty that [ __ ] was slamming by saturday night i was not i'd not been in crowds since march right so that was a little bit weird but so the casinos packed it was packed yeah not like not like to the rafters but crowded do they have rules like it's native american territory they make their rules so yes i mean they do have the normal protocol like there's uh hand sanitizing stations everywhere you have to wear a mask but if you're at the table and you're drinking they just pull the mask right down yeah i'm like even if it wasn't that's like can you imagine how [ __ ] dirty those poker chips are it's like the excalibur you ever seen chips at the excalibur holy [ __ ] um but anyway so i was just you know i minded my business because it was actually in the sun the mohegan sun arena so we would just like be lined to the uh to the place there and then last week i went back to jersey city which is where the studios are for my showtime gig so so that that is interesting that if it's on native american ground they can kind of do whatever they want pretty much which is why the casino's there in the first place right and they again i would say you know what most people were
they were pretty good about compliance i did not feel like like honestly i thought people were more compliant than like the airport yesterday all these [ __ ] weak constituted people that pull the mask below their nose i want to [ __ ] hit all of them with a car antenna i hate every single one of them it's not i just want to look at him it's like it's not a hardship just put on the [ __ ] mask not like that if you have it below your nose you're not doing anything i was like just take it off yeah i feel better if you had it off right because at least you're like you're an honest broker in this exchange you know what i mean but so it was fine you know they tested us a bunch of times when we were there have you seen the new things like the these new hazmat suits they're selling like it's literally like go to john joseph uh john joseph cromag go to his uh instagram page do you know john joseph i don't know if you forgive me uh he was he's a lead singer of the crow mags he's also a triathlete and you know he is a firm believer in strengthening your own immune system and yeah yeah he's something to be said for that look at this look at this holy mother of jesus we're in space i mean this is this is the future and it apparently has some fog proof uh attachment some way somehow or another and you you put your hand if you have to scratch your face there's little uh zips on the side and you put your hand through you know i i appreciate the spirit of innovation here but this is a black uh mirror episode right it is it is it is well you know you talk how many people do you know that have gotten it a bunch yeah me too jamie's the the latest jamie uh but they're saying it's which was which is very interesting they're saying it really depends upon what kind of dose you're getting right you obviously got a very mild dose you had a very mild case of it
that's what the mass are important right because even if you get it someone has it you know they're not wearing it properly they're not they're not getting sprayed right with this huge amount especially if someone sneezes on you or something or that's the thing with drunks like bars or super spreader events right because everyone's like drunk talk that's what i miss i missed the bars a little bit i missed the movie theater and i missed the bar and i'm not like you know till 4 a.m i got a kid but you know just saddling up a little bit having a couple cocktails yes i missed that a little bit to be honest with you i did well me too i just got through sober october i've had it hey it's november 2nd yeah you want a drink i'll drink uh i was gonna lift after this but i'll have a drink if you haven't have a couple of drinks and still lift listen i'm 40. i can't have a couple drinks and think right much less lift weights but i'll try i'll try uh but you know what you know it never gets talked about i deserve to be mentioned here send in some whiskey i know a guy who was a uh an er doctor in new york and he's still there now obviously but through march this doesn't get talked about but it's worth mentioning there is we so i i knew a bunch of people that went to iraq because i was in the marine corps but i got out right before my unit sent so i was very very lucky in that regard but a bunch of them came back super [ __ ] up you know they're all fine now but super [ __ ] up these doctors who were in new york in march they all have ptsd watching day after day remember there's there was times when new york was losing 800 people a day and he was telling me like you know you hold up enough phones to someone who's dying and so their kids are crying on the other end of face time and you do that day after day after day he started smoking the whole thing uh we don't talk enough about that i don't think it's bad enough now and he was even saying is like if you're 25 you're fine
but like all of these at-risk folks just coming in and collapsing one after the other it [ __ ] him up you know this is the also falls in line with the the conversation then i've been having a lot about cops like oh god it doesn't people don't understand what it is to be a cop like you all you see is these terrible videos like george floyd you know just imagine being a person who every day you're seeing suicide murder rape car accidents you're constantly worried that the next car you pull over is going to be the guy that shoots you in the head right and you've had improper training probably oh yeah you're asked you're asked to do responsibilities you couldn't possibly handle yeah the policy failures of the world are just pushed onto you and uh you know you pro you have to deal with the dregs of society like certainly obviously the george floyd murder is horrific horrific in every way imaginable but my stepfather my mom eventually got divorced but i had a stepfather for a time and he was a cop for 30 years in washington dc you know i'm not saying he had the most enlightened ideas of the world but when you spend a few months in the hospital because they broke all your ribs and you had to deal with you know two-year-old with a gun and you know every other situation it will warp you it will affect your moral calculations and if you have improper training and improper funding it only exacerbates the problem like we asked cops to do way too much [ __ ] and it results in a lot of problems and the job that like now good luck trying to find really intelligent people that could do other things you know right now no one wants to be a cop because the cops are the bad guys right they're the enemies and you know it's like defunding the police is now like a mantra that the left likes to use right right which they use by the way i'm a member of the left and so i i
when i first heard it i was like i didn't know what it meant and they like to tell you that it means one thing i don't think that it means one thing it means a series of different things to some it means actually what they stay which is which is what they claim which is utterly demolish it and start from scratch for others thank you for others it means uh uh not going to that nuclear option but sort of rearranging funds to go to different uh policy or other kind of intervention projects you ice or noise um it depends on how good the whiskey is there joe rogan it's uh still austin i've not tried it because we'll try it i'll try it neat all right there you go we tried it when i was uh doing the cheer sir salute so ooh smells nice it's pretty damn good um that does not need ice that's good yeah it's a bummer and you know it's really a bummer when you see cops scrap and they can't and they're like how did you get this far like your actual police officer and you never learn how to you don't even know how to distribute your weight on the ground i understand that quite frankly i was in i was like i told you i did six years in the marine corps the uh the marine corps has its reputation somewhat deserving about there being super macho and [ __ ] relative to the other forces and some of that is true and some of that is deserved i had never seen i remember the first time you've been to uh the mojave desert at all yeah so there's the the 29 palms is out there i'll never forget for someone to 29 palms because there is there is [ __ ] all to do at 29 palms and so the marine corps wisely just invests in weight rooms it was the nicest gym i'd ever been in in my life and it was nothing but horse marine after that i mean they're all on steroids they had to be i don't think i don't think any commanding officer gave a [ __ ] and they were all huge and they lived this gung-ho life and blah blah blah but then when it came time for hand-to-hand
combatives training mcmap is [ __ ] it's not good it's better than nothing but if you unless you do straight-up army combatives like which is a best thing maybe the army's ever done for themselves in terms of um that kind of uh uh aim a policy game you get nothing and every cop i know who has ever trained there's a bunch of guys who uh um i know from various different martial arts schools they took the initiative to go train outside of what law enforcement was providing them but like they that's what i mean they don't get any of this [ __ ] or if they do it's like you know here's how to get out of if someone's choking you in this very it's almost like a women's self-defense class is really the extent of which they learn that's ridiculous yeah it's not much it should be mandatory and not only should it be mandatory it should be like a part of the curriculum you know jocko willing said that they should spend 20 of their time training and i think he's right i think he's got the money for that though that's a good question i mean the real [Music] real consideration should be put to why don't we have the money for that also i would challenge a little bit if i may which is i saw in the wake of the george floyd thing there was a lot of people like how do we most people were basically horrified by that but the question is what do you do about it and so i saw some op-eds i think mma junkie published one from the sky i'm sure he was well intentioned but he was like i think henry gracie had some similar ideas because he really believes in the transformative power of jiu jitsu right um i do i i do to an extent i mean here's what i would say it was it's the same thing going through the military like if you don't if you don't succumb to the process it will not redevelop your character right you have to willingly give yourself to that
just giving cops jiu jitsu training does not force that transformation so while i think it would help in certain situations it could exacerbate existing problems with whatever cop has deranged or bad training about the world and now oh wait now you know kimura's and you're a [ __ ] [ __ ] right that's a problem that is a problem yeah you're right in that respect if you do get an [ __ ] and you just teach him a few moves you could create a worse [ __ ] um but i would hope but the problem is like in normal jujitsu the way jiu jitsu transforms your life it's not transforming your life in the stress of you being a police officer and people we're in all the things we talked about ptsd wearing people shooting you dealing with all the horrific things you see every day you're essentially you're going through this struggle and that struggle sort of steals you and makes you a better person yeah if you went through that struggle along with the chaos of the police academy or or of uh rather police duty i would imagine best case scenario is it alleviates some stress it helps you get past a lot of the [ __ ] that you would normally it would normally eat at you and it also allows you to relieve some tension and yeah i just i don't know that i would for cost reasons i don't know that i would mandate that kind of training i think it would offer particular forms of incentives to get it to the right kind of folks i would mandate it just because you're gonna have situations where people have hand-to-hand experiences you should know how to distribute your weight fair enough but but i would say doing that by itself would not be sufficient that along with other forms of reform so that we're asking police to do the things that police are supposed to do and not the things they're not supposed to do i think in conjunction it's never one solution right most problems in the world require a series of interventions
yeah do those in conjunction you're probably gonna get a better policing when i was 19 i worked as a security guard at a concert place called great woods in mansfield massachusetts and uh it was a short amount of time i wasn't there for about a few months over the summer but during that time i recognized a really clear us versus them mentality between the police or the the security force rather and the concert goers and it happened pretty quickly really quickly where you know i saw security guys beat the [ __ ] out of the first day on the job i saw this guy get beaten up with a walkie-talkie because he stole a golf cart like i was a 19 year old fresh-faced kid like what is going on here and this guy his name is alicat tackles this kid who had stolen one of their golf carts and he's hitting him in the face with a walkie-talkie and i'm like what kind of job did i [ __ ] sign up for i mean and it was only like you know 15 bucks an hour i would imagine i don't really remember but i remember thinking real early on like this is a this is a very strange how i've like very quickly developed this us versus them mentality i've also noticed um you know back when i was 24 i was working doors at various bars in new york city to make some money to make ends meet because new york city is crazy expensive and uh people and i was lifting weights like crazy i was huge you know the whole bit and i'll never forget people would always tell me they're like oh i bet people don't want to mess with you and i was like it is totally the opposite drunks right if you got a badge on they want to [ __ ] with you so a bunch don't but there's going to be a certain kind of person oh he's big and tall and muscly or whoever anybody you know you got sleeves of tattoos that is exactly who they target there's a certain kind of guy
who's like you know what i'd like to see what happened if i tried to to ride that ride you know yeah chuck liddell said that like when he was in his prime guys would [ __ ] with him not not the least a bit surprised you're like dude are you a [ __ ] death wish like what did what's wrong with you they have a death wish well some people are just really stupid you ever seen that onion article it's like average study average man overestimates fighting ability by four thousand percent you ever seen that most people think they know yeah look if push came to shove i know a little something something yeah you don't know [ __ ] no no [ __ ] off the the humiliation of seeing those guys on the mat is really adorable when you see a person who thinks they're fairly tough just get manhandled and ragdolled yeah that's the tragedy of modern mma because there was a time where it was like is jiu jitsu really all that good and then make videos of some guy coming in being like i'ma [ __ ] all these black belts up and then he goes in there and they wear him out like a they work him like a summer job you know what i mean for the gracies it was like the greatest promotional scheme ever amazing like to have people come in and fight them yeah come on guys and they would be pretty gentle with those guys when you really think about it i mean they hit them a little bit but mostly they just strangled them yeah basically that's true but we don't really see that anymore because basically the word got out like maybe don't do that but it's kind of crazy when you think about the history of martial arts and martial arts were around for since the dawn of time people have been trying to figure out better ways to [ __ ] people up since they they figured out language and figured out how to teach skills they've been working on techniques right and not until 1993 did we really know what worked you have a quote i i have an old dvd back when it was really mattered
i bought it in i want to see 2004 so this must have been one of the early editions of like ultimate knockouts and you know i think phil barone [ __ ] up dave monet was on the cover something like that and you had a quote and it was um maybe it was like 2003. i think that's what it was so i forget what maybe it was like one of the miami shows whatever it was you had a quote and it was martial arts has evolved more in the last 20 years than it has in the last 2000. yeah uh with the exception of weaponry that is one thousand percent true yeah a million percent true in weaponry really like it's guns you want to have a weapon guns and knives you know knives been around forever swords i guess they used to be better at swords i don't know enough about hand-to-hand combat with weapons to say one way or the other but i just know as it relates to martial arts the the fast forwarding that happened from 93 on relative to before it it was this sort of slow process and then it hit overdrive you know what's really very satisfying to me is that when i first got involved in the ufc in 1997 it was when i was on news radio and the people on news radio literally look at me like i was doing porn they were like what are you doing like why are you doing this like you're going to ruin your career yeah and i was like i like i don't know i don't know what to tell you i like it you know yeah my whole life i've been a martial artist now finally someone did the thing that i've always asked them to do right my whole life i was like i want to know what would happen if you got a judo guy with a boxer if you got to this with that and then the ufc is like let's let's find out and then i'm like oh my god it's real it's happening to me it was like someone came along with like the willy wonka golden ticket like it's it was happening it was real and then when they offered me a job i
was like [ __ ] yeah i'm going how did you get that job how did they know you was you did your agent put in a word my manager was friends with campbell mclaren and campbell mclaren campbell's amazing he's a great guy yeah and he's been on the podcast and campbell had uh he had an opening and he said we need someone to do the post-fight interviews and uh it was you know very little money and you have to take little little those little buddy holly killing planes you [ __ ] fly to dothan alabama that was the first gig i did i was actually supposed to be in albany but then they kicked it out in new york and then last minute they moved the octagon to dothan alabama and uh i was so happy it was the debut of vitor belfort back when we were calling him victor he was they were calling him victor gracie and i was trained this is when i was training at crossing gracie's and they were calling vitor victor i mean the early posters were v-i-k-t-o-r gracie like he was russian or something um i don't know why they call him victor like i didn't i don't understand why they did that but he was he was using the last name gracie and so uh he was fighting uh he fight fought john hess over in uh hawaii and beat the [ __ ] out of john house and you know i was training at his school and i thought he was like impossible to stop and he was 19. and when he was 19 his hands were a blur of light he was so fast and so aggressive and so different than any other brazilian jiu jitsu guy because we thought of brazilian jiu jitsu guys and he was a black belt but we thought of black belts as being someone who just wants to get a hold of you drag you to the ground and strangle you or get you in an arm bar and all of a sudden you got this guy who's wearing gloves because nobody else is wearing gloves or very few people tent cabinet wear gloves and just lighting people up with punches and we're like holy [ __ ]
and so just by chance and fortune i was training at his school and got to be on the card and doing the post-fight interviews the very first time that he fought in the ufc wow yeah so i got to see him um he fought uh trey telligman remember trey how's that in the pack yeah he got a car accident when he's a little kid yeah he could still strike his ass off there okay he could he was tough as [ __ ] and he he had no idea no one knew what victor what vitor i'm going back in time yeah but we called it like yeah i think i may even even said victor a couple of times during the broadcast because that's what we called him at the school everybody called him victor wow and then all sudden it was vitor so you had anglicized his name a little bit because no one i don't know actually they call it it's like they call kamaru marty well how about fedor his real name is fyodor yeah yeah i mean uh peorian like no one like peter everybody called him peter for a long time in the ufc it was a couple of years and then finally they were like oh it's pyotr i'm like well i could say that why didn't you tell me that earlier like they just decided to anglify it but um fedor is probably the biggest example of that right right because like fuel theodore is not a hard name to say i think that's the biggest example that's one of them but he's the great right i mean if you want to think about heavyweight greats you've got steep a kane and fedor those are the three you got to choose between to have the mount rush more of heavyweights you have to have fedor yeah he wasn't some anonymous figure but you get introduced to him the wrong way it's hard to undo that right like so i got introduced to him and probably as fedor yeah i'm still saying it and that will just stick forever despite how it actually supposed to be i know it's if i was friends with him i'd probably
say it right but if you uh met him no i've never have i had him in studio not the most thrilling interview ever wow he didn't give much he's not there to give no i found that out later i'm like i don't think he wanted to be here no no he's known to give ass kickings uh but you know to your point about like uh the origin of things i remember like most people were like i've been watching ufc since ufc one well i didn't because i just didn't know i was a 12 year old kid at the time i'd you know i you'll only know what someone shows you for the most part this is pre-internet so you definitely only know that [ __ ] and i had a family friend who was involved in a martial art that was south korean called tukong which would apparently was the official so taekwondo is as i understand it and someone's going to correct me on this but as i understand it what was explained to me was that uh taekwondo is the official sport of south korea but tukong was the official martial art or self-defense system of the military well it's ty ty kyon t-a-e-k-y-o-n is what we were taught was like a an earlier version of taekwondo i don't know anything about it general chase general che yong-yi he was the guy i was a i used to teach and general chae young yi was the guy who really formulated taekwondo into a system and my instructor jehon kim was one of che young yi's original students so i got real lucky that i got it like from the root i got like early taekwondo like rough like attacking taekwondo before it was like more of a point fighting sort of a thing well whatever his background i can't speak to too accurately all i know is that i remember it was the summer of god was it 95 96 something like that and he was like have you seen the skinny brazilian dudes out
here [ __ ] people up that's always how they introduce it right yeah and i didn't believe it and he's like let's go to blockbuster went down to blockbuster it's the one down there by barracks row for folks from washington dc listening it's now a farmer's market or a yes market and i used to be a blockbuster i went down in there and i got uh ufc four was the first one i ever saw for me it was two it was two yeah it was four and uh obviously he had four i think it was was three he had skipped before he come back and fought chemo what was the one where he had i forget the the genesis but there was enough in the video where he was just like lighting these people up in the way like how the [ __ ] is this possible and it's been politicized now it takes a different meaning but that truly was red pill at that moment like there was a eureka moment and the lights go on you're like wow that's really bummer that red pill has been politicized i know because it's such a great term isn't it a great term like you just see fans you you know yeah it's been really uh co-opted because uh that was the name that radio raheem came up with for the radio raheem the uh boxing commentator he came up with that for this room to this day and i'm like yeah that guy yeah i'm not sure if you see that's a bummer man the deontay wilder stuff that's going on right now he's he's released three different excuses the first one was the weight vest the the thing that he was wearing that crazy costume weighed 40 pounds apparently it wore his legs out the next one was that there was a bunch of people saying that tyson fury's gloves um weren't attached correctly so the gloves were extended so he was hitting him with the knuckles and the the glove part was not really attached it was like so he was catching them like with the part that's supposed to be over the wrist not correct not true and easily provable the next one he said
egg weights he said he had egg weights in his hand this is recent like a couple days ago then yesterday there was an article that said that he believes that he was his water was poisoned by his own trainer and mark breeland right was a part of that understand for folks you've been i don't know who mark breenland is former uh uh i think olympic gold medalist yes world champion uh across two different weight divisions if i'm not mistaken he is the voice of sanity or was until he was dismissed in that corner that was the guy that threw the towel for him who how i mean breeland should be thanked yes by wilder and his camp until the end of time his other trainer um uh i forget his last name starts with a d he was out there at the post fight press conference being like you know i don't know if i would have thrown that towel it's like you [ __ ] yes man are you kidding me yeah breeland took it upon himself to uh i don't save the guy's life but certainly make the right call for halting the contest he was thanked by being dismissed and now essentially dragged through the mud with utterly what i'm guessing or utterly baseless accusations about poisoning his own fighter i mean maybe tyson fury's [ __ ] awesome that seems like the simplest explanation well for all of us tyson fury changed his strategy and also you have to realize that tyson fury in the first fight was coming off of a multiple year battle with depression mental illness drinking got suicidal thoughts he talked on my podcast about driving his ferrari and almost slamming into a bridge he was like i was i was peddled to the metal and i was thinking about slamming into this bridge and they changed his mind and it just slowly worked his way into shape got healthy again got his mind right again and pulled it back around but when he fought deante wilder the first time
his father didn't want him to take the fight he's like you're not healthy enough yet you're not ready yet and he did his best he fought well but it was a draw by the time they fought the second time he was in tip-top condition he had gone through the camp for the first fight his body was completely recovered from all the abuse of alcohol and cocaine and all the [ __ ] that he was doing and then he took on um the cronk trainer sugar hill and then his whole strategy changed he's like the guy does not fight well off the heel off the back foot let's let's move him back and tyson fury is [ __ ] enormous you know he's huge six nine yeah and he came into the fight i think like 280 and so he just pressed him and pressed him and just was throwing bombs and i don't think deande wilder expected that yeah deontay wilder expected him to run and move and jab and fight the same way he fought in the first fight instead tyson fury just came right at him and just clipped him hard and often and i think if you go back to their first fight and you look at how when tyson fury got dropped in the 12th rose like lazarus and then came back survived and then started winning the round right and then i think he realized from that moment on oh the way to beat this guy is to back him up right and then he took that strategy sugar hill of course like cronk legendary aggressive attack i mean they're like the if people are mma fans who love shoot the box they like to shoot the box of boxing right if you think about it yeah aggressive attacking multiple champions gerald mcclellan tommy hearns i mean the list goes on and on and he employed that sort of attacking strategy and he's a [ __ ] masterful boxer too right that's the other part about i mean folks don't realize he can play the defensive game i think you saw it in the auto violin fight he's so long and has such good trunk movement he can actually lean on the
ropes and the punches go in front because he's so tall and long he can he can play that game what the the klitschko fight right exactly southbox vladimir klitschko was one of the greatest ever one of the most a thrilling fight i mean the wilder fight was much better but um i did a whole video on it and too i was like amazed he from the stance he took he had a little bit of an a-frame stance so he could say just the way and he was always um a double jab away so he was long enough where he was outside of anything that wilder could have put together his real one-two kind of guy or you know you know walter would just come lunging in with the punch and he was good enough to back him up and then steer him into punches and i always talk about this eugene bearman who is the you know and everyone gets on because i'm always promoting city kickboxing but it's like he's a masterful trainer it's like well not only that i mean every once in a while you come around to a guy who not only can train fighters to a high degree but has an idea about what the game is missing how to fill that gap and they are big believers in fainting they they they make a point they basically say like how is it possible you can have people come from this little tiny island and you know otto sign is the very best version of that but like they've got good fighter brad riddell uh shane young man hooker dan hooker they got a lot of guys and volkanovsky has trained under brad who trained under uh eugene but basically what they believe is that what has been missing for a long time in mma striking is effective thinking faking and fainting and that they do shadow boxing drills for hours just on fainting no punches thrown just fainting just to set it all up because they basically say if you look at the way which a lot of american and even european strikers throw it's a lot of sit down and throw combinations uh which you can do but they don't really believe that's the best way to do
it the best gap to fill is that fury to circle the point here is excellent he is such a brilliant fainter and he had deontay wilder dead to rights over and over and over again which he didn't really do the first time around and so you know all these excuses about my trainer poisoning it's like it's like that's not what the tape shows bro well he got it he was making excuses when he got dropped with the first punch he was like pointing to the back of his head and he was upset and you could see it's like it's really weird it's really weird when you see a guy who's so utterly dominant and who has what teddy atlas calls the great eraser that right hand because it really is it erases all your problems you [ __ ] up a little bit watch this all your mistakes gone with that his right hand is a force of nature it's one of the best right hands in the history ever ever the lewis ortiz fight like what the [ __ ] man yeah what the [ __ ] hit him on the forehead and ortiz is down like with a look in his face like what the what happened ortiz is not some chump he's huge he's a cuban boxer yeah you know who has great pedigree one shot set his ass down and he was winning the fight yeah exactly yeah he was winning the fight and all of a sudden if you look at the my my view on his power is that for straight rights right which is really what he basically throws or maybe a little bit over handy because it's a little bit looping that's one of the best if not the best right hands in all of boxing if you're talking about full on power punchers though i don't know that he's got the full repertoire like is his uppercut was his right hand as good as his straight i don't know that it is you see you got like ernie shavers right [ __ ] bro yeah go look up ernie shaver's highlights on youtube and then smoke some weed beforehand you will literally laugh at what he does to men for shocking to watch his power and he has the full repertoire of it you know yeah a lot of
fighters who fought him said he was the most powerful punch they ever faced a lot of fighters someone told me i forget who it was but they uh they got hit by shavers and then they felt it in the um in the roof of their foot the what's the what's the arch the arch they felt in the arch of their it like radiated into the arch of their foot what the [ __ ] is that i never heard some [ __ ] like that you know what i mean yeah well power's a weird thing right like you're the born with it or you're not i mean i've seen so many guys who you'd look at and they're big and strong and you would say wow but that guy hits hard and they can't crack an egg no there's there's like there's a bunch of them there's always been a bunch of them in boxing there's been a bunch of them like you see him in the gym and then you see guys like do you remember michael mcdonald when he was a kid when he was coming up yes skinny looks like a little boy knock people into another dimension and you're like whoa this is crazy do you follow boxing currently yes yes so how about this kid jaime mungia you seen him i have nothing he fought last friday night holy mother god you look at him he obviously is an athlete right he's in good shape you would look at him and think yeah you know i'm not going to say average but there's nothing that stands out about him at least wilder is huge right he's bricked up makes sense in is in is in fight shape but he's not bricked up and this [ __ ] guy i mean he's rearranging i mean he is keeping dentists in business was he on show time he was on de zone he was on his own and what was the undercard of which fight oh god i don't i don't remember i only tuned in because i was like i have an alert for hamilton whenever he fights really yeah he's that good yeah uh there's munguia the guy on the left this [ __ ] look at him does he look like a power puncher normal he is arguably the biggest power
puncher in boxing wow by the way arguably yeah that's crazy that [ __ ] guy can correct and i think he rearranges oh so you remember the lip split that overeem had when he fought rosenstruck wait you see what he does to this [ __ ] guy's face he uppercuts him to the point where a piece of his face goes flying off this was last friday it was just a couple of days ago look at that [ __ ] look at that that was from one uppercut oh god look at his face joe that's pretty crazy he looks like he got attacked by a bear no do they let fights go on in boxing with a split no they called it eventually here that's interesting because like you remember robbie lawler with that crazy split lip when you fought rory mcdonald but but it was right at the end interesting and then uh yeah i mean look at that about the girvanta davis knockout bro [Music] how beautiful is that uppercut that was a thing of the same uppercut that povetkin used uh yeah a little bit similar that same like if you go and look closely uh javante is uh squared and so he's leaning to either side and so when the punch comes he's able to slip this direction so he's left-handed joe but he is so watch see look at it look how he's square oh yeah he's totally square so see how see how that left hand can you go back and pause it for just a second i want to show you something pause it right the moment of impact if you can if it's at all possible that's what he's going to throw here so he slips now watch first of all the povecking one the arm was extended so it came under the arm this is in front it's on the inside angle but notice jovante is left handed he is left hand forward here so he's squared and he's you know how some guys jab with their power hand to like throw people off or just stick them with it de la hoya so he exactly so he sat in square and then gave this guy every
inch of a lead uppercut from his power hand god damn that was a beautiful shot look at that al bernstein got saved too because albertson's the man i love out every time i've interacted with him he's the sweetest guy he's a great guy he was about to say you know if if uh he was like right in the middle of saying you know if uh javonte davis thinks that his power is going to put you know santa cruz down and then he cracked him with it so he stopped mid-sentence wouldn't have been his fault because the point was like santa cruz opened up like he was engaging with the guys like i think he's what's he got 23 knockouts something he's only had one person go the distance yeah yeah which goes back to the wilder fight like wilder deontay before tyson fiore beat him had only gone to decision two times tyson fury and uh dominic brazil was that what it was brazil he knocked out in the first round in the rematch rematch oh no bourbon stavern right that's right diverse de verne was in the first fight he beat him by decision right and so he had been used and he had gotten so confident towards the end of his career i remember there's a photo of him walking um to the fight or walking through uh a casino in vegas it's an amazing photo he's wearing a fur coat with an open shirt holding his wife's hand and he just looks like the ultimate heavyweight champion in the world yeah like you seem like that is what i want from a heavyweight champion just top of the game just wearing these crazy sunglasses fully shredded fur coat holding his wife and i'm like that that's a heavyweight champion connor has that in his head yeah connor's the heavyweight champion of the world in his head you know which i don't like i'm not bashing him for it like i want i want that yeah you should be resplendent and ignorant and amazing all at once see if you can find that photo of
deontay wilder holding his wife's hand wearing a fur coat he's one of my favorite fighter photos like getting ready for a fight of all time because it's so just aggressively confident just and on top of the world how do you do that it's almost like a [ __ ] you to everybody you know i mean he was basically he was being the baddest man on the planet i don't think i've ever had that kind of self-confidence ever you know what i mean well you'd have i mean you have to have that to be that guy right right especially when you have you know he doesn't have the widest skill set you know what i mean i mean what literally came into the game i mean i i had the privilege of that's one of them is that the one there's one where he's got no shirt on uh up in the is it for the first or second he doesn't have a shirt on it's just oh okay okay there it is yeah there it is that's it there's a few of those he looks like mr t with all the chains too yeah i mean come on man you got a white guy getting your luggage even better [Laughter] he just i mean i'm a fan of his i really am and i'm a fan of his as a human being i really enjoyed talking to him and he told me his story he's a great interview he's a great guy he got into boxing because his daughter was sick and he was right yeah he and he's a delivery guy for like was it budweiser or something like that or coca-cola yeah some liquid and he was like look i got to make some [ __ ] money and he knew he wasn't going to be able to play uh in a college sport or in a professional sport without a college background she's like i'm going to get into boxing a year and a half in wins a bronze medal in the olympics right like what the [ __ ] just dumb power damn power crazy like like a one in a billion human power
but if you've ever seen him interact with his kids like the the nobility of trying to do that for your daughter is one thing he's got like a bunch of kids there's like five or six of them and i've like uh i didn't i just had a kid about 18 months ago and i didn't understand it when i would watch but like i don't think he's happier than when he's with his children and it's not even there's not even a close second like a doting family man it's really unfortunate he's made these excuses because as a person he seems like such a sweet guy it's a bummer and i wish someone was there to advise him breeland he was well i should bring you know i don't know maybe mark doesn't have the kind of relationship with him that he can call him my understanding is uh his uh his manager deontay's manager was the one who brought in breeland years ago it's like a wave like we need somebody here who's like a high level trainer uh and brought him in and it worked for a time anyway but here we are i talked to roy jones about him and roy jones was saying if he trained him what he would train him is he would concentrate on his left hand he was like you where you know you can put people to sleep with your right hand he goes what about your left hand he goes i want you keep people distance use the jab use the hook it goes i would concentrate on just working that left hand he goes that would fix so many of his problems because his left hand is just like here comes the right here comes the right boom i mean he'll throw jabs but you're not terrified of it the way you're terrified of roy jones left hand you know roy jones have you ever seen roy jones left bicep is it the one that splits down the middle like a perfect he'll show you like his right bicep is like a normal bicep and his left bicep's like twice the size it's crazy it's huge you got the stage north cut bicep because he throws so many left hooks
like he was flexing he's like look at this and i was like that's crazy right he was like this one's normal but you look at this one his left look at his left body yeah he's got that sage north cut splitter down the middle dude it's enormous i mean it's enormous it's it's it's crazy how much bigger it is like legitimately 50 larger wow yeah no idea well his left hook is just a thing of beauty when he was in his prime he barely jabbed people he was just leaping left hook him and and crack him and his speed his his foot speed and his hand speed were so incredible that he can get away with that you know folks of this modern era they know the name but they don't really know what he meant to the game you know like if someone asked me who's the modern roy jones jr in boxing there isn't one there's not one there's one there's this guy to take risks and liberties and had crazy athleticism and pinpoint punching and showman he was a showman too there's great boxers there's boxing's in a great place in many ways there's nobody who does what he did roy made world champions look like they had no business in there and people were like oh he didn't fight anybody oh [ __ ] he [ __ ] five world champions he fought really tough guys but he [ __ ] them all up i mean it's the same with khabib yeah oh khabib didn't find anybody no [ __ ] yeah he makes them look like he they're fighting me that's the difference look what he did to justin gateshead that's all you need to know if you say justin gage is a nobody you're crazy you watch that tony ferguson fight justin gage he's a [ __ ] animal savage and he just closed that gap and he ate a lot of leg kicks too man he had a lot of leg kicks that would i mean i don't know how many of those you can eat from justin right maybe he had like five or six more in the tank right you're on e but he closed the gap and then one finishing with a triangle off of his back i mean god damn it's a serious
question about this because i went through it a couple times so from the moment he got kicked then he initiates the take down so as a kick he tried the first round he did it on a head inside single didn't work second round he tried it off a double from the outside leg kick first round was an inside leg kick against the inside single didn't work so then he goes to the double it's 22 seconds from that till the finish so 22 seconds we're apart 22 seconds later you're unconscious i mean this is my question to you is that the best back take you've ever seen in mma because what he does is when geichi is sprawling in this contest he's not just sprawling he is sprawling and turning so he doesn't get pushed into the fence he was very diligent about that in the alvarez and the gaichi fights you can go back and you can watch it so in this fight when you see the level change that khabib hits you see automatically gaichi turn because he doesn't want to get turned that direction but what khabib does is he actually scoots under him pulls him up and then with his head posts him over gets the hands to plant well once the hands are planted the double is over he doesn't care about it anymore now he just wants the tight waist and from the tight waist he's holding his elbows aren't flared they're tight here right like he's t-rexing inside at that point you have created if you're just in gaichi putting your hands you've created a stable structure for this guy to now mount plus if you want to escape to the fence to like stand he can control the ascent so he goes double turns pushes hands to the mat forces gaichi down and then with his uh his gable grip then keeps it there and then replaces it with the hooks and then turns into a head uh turns it to a fake not a real joe rogan a fake uh head and arm triangle attempt just so gaichi gets his elbows away from his body then he chair sits to occupy the space
then throws the leg over and then sits back and takes mercy upon him as we learn later from daniel cormier rather than armbar him from his mom's i'm just gonna triangle you because that's the merciful this guy is out here taking [ __ ] pity on his opponents and he's doing back takes like that he is jon jones to me is the most accomplished fighter we've ever seen like the the things accumulate over time no one is as flawless as khabib nurmagomedov not even close i think that is the argument right like who is the goat i think if you look at jon jones's early career right jon jones wins the title in 2011 and from then on has fought more fights as championship fights than he has other fights so he's the most accomplished for sure wins the title earliest youngest guy to ever win the title in the ufc beats mauricio shogun hua who's a legend and then the way he dominates all these other fighters up until you get to alexander gustafson you could make the argument that he had a similar career you could make the argument like if you look at what he did john didn't lose any rounds john was smashing people you look what he did to rashad evans he's looking to do the rampage jackson look what he did leota machida look what he did to everybody all everybody he fought up until the gustafson fight but the gustafson fight then you have to say well how much slack do you give him for admittedly not training because it was a really close fight he pulls it out in the championship round even though he's out of shape even though you talked to greg jackson he didn't train for that fight didn't [ __ ] train like barely worked out but definitely didn't go through a training camp still managed to beat one of the best guys in the division after getting taken down for the first time in his career then goes on a tear right beats look at the way he beat daniel cormier in the first fight took him down like
who the [ __ ] takes daniel cormier down right and then you look at him in the second fight even though he's ruled in no contest we know what the [ __ ] happened he had kicked him and stopped him you know it was spectacular you look at what john has done then you have to take into account the things that didn't go that well and we haven't seen those from khabib yet you have to take into account the fight like thiago santos right that [ __ ] goes to a split decision you're like whoa dominic reyes dominic reyes thought he won the fight right real close real close fight so those fights haven't happened with khabib yet and we don't know if they ever could we don't know right like right now would you see flawless victory after flawless victory you could maybe make the argument that khabib lost two rounds his entire career maybe the second round against justin or uh maybe first round rather against justin and maybe the third round with connor that's right that's it and either one of those didn't get cut didn't get dropped didn't get hurt to never get cut and to never get dropped i don't think folks understand what that means in a sport filled with it's not a scientific measurement per se right who gets cut the most or something but in a sport built on unpredictability yeah on violence uh you know saint pierre went to wrestling to get away from all of that enlarged in large part and then to never experience that it's like it is shocking beyond description shocking i don't know how to explain that to folks it's uh but to your point the thing about khabib where he falls short is that it's just an inevitability like your run through 29 fights is the best run i've seen through 29 fights ever ever ever but i you know and john's not my best friend or anything but i just don't that is the best total resume i've ever seen john is the best resume it's just it's not i mean i know he got he was he was getting all salty on twitter being like these [ __ ]
cubby fans it's like dude here she didn't do that well he shouldn't do it here's my point to john it's like dude put the keyboard down for just a second here's what's going to happen you're going to go to heavyweight and you're going to probably win i mean i don't know that's a guarantee but let's assume that you do all of the conversa everything that happens right now is just recency bias and could be retired and his father died and was just incredibly sad and like yeah inspiring moment let the [ __ ] guy have his moment because when you have your moment all of the con the worm is going to turn yeah and then everyone's gonna be like john's the [ __ ] greatest he's going to get his just not today at this moment recency bias that's real recent biases that's that's a real thing like you know we just watched khabib and then the fact that khabib did supposedly retire come on son now you want some more yeah i know i haven't eaten much so my head is spinning a little bit that's all right everyone asks me like when i go on i was like are you going to smoke weed i'm like there's no chance i'm smoking joe rogan's [ __ ] super weed there's no chance i'm smoking it right now i haven't done anything in a month i had a couple glass of wine last night i was like yeah i'm feeling it a little bit gotta be careful the um the john joad situation is also uh it's a contrast in personalities right khabib who's this really religious very moral ethical person who doesn't drink he doesn't party doesn't do anything he just trains he's always in phenomenal shape he takes every fight incredibly serious he's never been out of shape he's never been fat he's never i mean he's missed weight a couple of times earlier in his career but he got that dialed in he's he's just uh so dedicated whereas john is a wild man he's just wild i mean you talk about not training for the mat so excuse me for the uh the gust of some fight buddy
that ain't the only fight he didn't train for how about what he said to cormier i did coke and i still beat you and i'm like i don't think he's lying i mean the stories i've heard i don't want to repeat them because i cannot verify them no but i've heard stories like if y'all think that was the one fight he just like oh i'm gonna take i'm gonna pump the brakes this time no [ __ ] i mean uh here's the other part about it it's like um when you so who's a guy for example who maintained dominance through the game and took you know significant amounts of time off in boxing floyd mayweather would be a great example of that but floyd has been training as a family affair from adolescence right for the long part of his life and he is so gifted that he can take time off and the game is so developed that people aren't going to make warp speed development in his absence and so they got a little bit better every time he took a little bit of time off like the madonna first fight with the corkscrew punch that was a little bit of a of a wild card there but in general he was able to maintain that dominance in mma the game changes rapidly super fast because people are still discovering best practices in two years people will not be doing the same kinds of things to the same degree they do now the calf kick and its explosion is sort of an obvious example of that john was doing things like not training between camps i mean that's something only elite boxers do because they've been doing this since they were five six years old and they can take the time to not necessarily do that whereas most mma fighters are like i'm a everyday martial artist i just ramp it up he would do nothing and then something and still go out there and beat world [ __ ] champions and at the time was the ufc's marquee division that is out of this [ __ ] world bonkers i'm gonna train i'm gonna beat you as
like a part-time guy yeah what yeah you just couldn't wrap your head around it i wonder if maybe there's some benefit because it's not like he got totally out of shape but i wonder if there's some benefit to that and that he's not getting beat up he's not getting his joints wrecked and you know there's probably there's a launch yeah it's a real question of like what is what's the best way to approach it we're still trying to figure that out right if you go back to the early days of like say like hammer house and like the military fighting systems guys like those guys used to beat the [ __ ] out of each other cortiba shoot the box are you talking about those guys beat the [ __ ] out it was hazing let's call it what it was sure well you know that's a famous uh story about bj penn like b.j penn's crew like they would just scrap they would fight they would get together in the afternoon they'd beat the [ __ ] out of each other and that would be training like whoa and you know that was how everybody did it and now they realize like hey you can't really do that if you do that it's going to really [ __ ] with your longevity my sense about it is is i mean even then in jiu jitsu too like the old health gracie school like you talked to dave camarillo or whatever those guys back then i mean health you know savage they were not [ __ ] around no not [ __ ] around this is not like hey you want to get better at self-defense dude not that kind of school but um my answer to the question about like is it better to do what john did my hunch is that there are probably some net benefits to it right on balance there's going to be some downsides and some upsides the downsides are going to be that this development that you might need as a martial artist will be somewhat impeded however there'll be some longevity issues you may not have to worry about by consequence in fact you look at him tearing his toe
in the chael sonnen fight now i [ __ ] up my toe similarly not not to the extent where i was through the skin but you know he has a buddy system with the wrap on the toe um and i had to use the exact same thing for a long time because every even now if i step on my right foot just right it sends fire through my toe it hurts like [ __ ] you know yeah john still tapes he still tapes it and so my point being is to that extent he's probably minimized some of the long-term impacts it's just he was so far ahead of the game so naturally talented so athletic he could just get away with it you could not be average and do what he does no you have to be very v i mean the day he fought shogun could be wrong it was either the beta fire the shogun fight that morning he chased down a robber yeah uh in in newark new jersey which is i had worked there one time it [ __ ] sucks i was born there is that where you were born in newark yeah wow joe you've come up a long way newark sucks sucks uh anyway and he said he chased down a robber there and the whole nine yards and you know i mean just things about distraction and blah blah and it had zero impact on any [ __ ] and everyone wants to say by the way i don't follow closely mma twitter i'm a little bit more you know in the weeds on that kind of thing uh by virtue of my media placement everyone wants to say oh shogun was washed [ __ ] he was the belt holder at the time john took it yeah i just knocked out the other machine what the [ __ ] are you talking about was that prime shogun from uh the the 2005 middleweight tournament in pride no but was he some kind of washed afterthought what the [ __ ] what kind of revisionist nonsense is this he's one of the best fighters in the world right yeah right it's it's hard to say he's washed up just because jon comes along first of all john opens up with a flying knee who the [ __ ] does that you know what young kid what is he 23
right if he opens with a flying knee on a legend you almost watch it and here's what he really did at the time he was just disrespectful not like in the [ __ ] you kind of sense but like i'm gonna fight you in a way where like all these stories that they told me about you it's like the buzzing of flies to me didn't matter he was so confident he just was a a guy who first of all when you look at just the genetics in his family are phenomenal his father is a massive man both of his brothers are nfl players elite nfl players there's just tremendous athletes in the house and then they grew up together if you watch guys who grew up with athletic brothers like they all beat the [ __ ] out of each other right like matt hughes and mark hughes they beat each other's asses like that is the k like joe lowe's on and downloads on beat each other's asses there's so many examples of guys growing up with tough brothers and they are [ __ ] hardened you know by the time they get into the octagon this is just like there's there's so many of them like that i think there's something to that right having two bad [ __ ] as brothers and like constantly competing with each other i think but it doesn't also say something that like okay uh noguera exception aside most of the brother tandems or even the sister tandems one is clearly better than the other though like matt better than mark right valentina anthony joe better than dan joe better than dan right the new guerrilla brothers i might say that uh uh big nog a little bit better than little nog although a little knock was pretty [ __ ] great you know it wasn't like a tremendous difference but in general usually one like kind of kind of puts it on the other one for a little bit yeah that's true yeah well sometimes that is what makes a really tough fighter too like um chris weidman's story and him and his brother's brother used to beat his ass his brother was bullying him and chris weidman became a [ __ ] savage
because he was just so tough from dealing with his [ __ ] brother you know like do you have any siblings i only have a sister freaking migrants i have a brother um not the same kind of thing my brother was a super hardcore uh academic nerd and so i don't have any like like i have a brother and like you're telling me these stories and it's like that is so divorced from like my reality from having a a brother as a sibling you know really we're we're talking about like a lack of observation like parents should be there like hey you [ __ ] stop beating each other up like this separate or you know probably parents didn't have the time or the uh there's only so much you can do when you've got can you imagine if you had arthur jones chandler jones and jon jones in the back seat of the car and they want to slap each other the [ __ ] are you gonna do what are you gonna do i mean that's something so [ __ ] so powerful i don't know if i don't know if arthur is still in the nfl i think he is out now i don't know if he still is in there but his brother on the right is chandler uh chandler i don't know if you follow him you i don't you don't you don't watch team sports right no you're missing out joe you got i gotta go i gotta get you one much to do i hear you i hear you chandler is like a legitimate multiple-time all-pro he is the [ __ ] man um he's at the little bit of the latter stage of his career at this point obviously they're all kind of aging a little bit but chandler of the three well i guess well john had a great career but of the two in the nfl arthur had had a good career i think you could say but chandler is i mean pretty much arthur trains quite a bit yes he was a wrestler for a time i wonder if he's thought about fighting in mma now that he's not doing an nfl anymore i mean he's probably a better athlete you know again he doesn't like you know
he's got the paul buentello syndrome a little bit where they don't look like it you know but i bet he can go in there [ __ ] people up fedor right better than anybody arguably the greatest heavyweight of all time and then the second i mean the other two besides uh stipe is kane who also didn't have the best body in the world although kane he looks menacing oh his face yeah i mean he's got a big ass [ __ ] head too you know looks hard as [ __ ] i i re-watched um kane versus junior three the other day god damn it that's hard to watch that's hard to watch he changed jds yeah he changed him he changed him it's hard to watch you ever seen uh this is documentary um um i think it's called the season but if i'm getting it wrong i know your listeners are going to [ __ ] kill me if i get it wrong i forget the exact name but they you know steve mako he's the att wrestling coach i'm not sure exactly he was for a long time steve maco's hilarious i one time speaking of jon jones john was fighting glover in baltimore and steve definitely did not want me to interview him but he didn't say no i was like steve can i get a couple you know seconds with you or whatever and i stuck a microphone in his face and i'm like so you know specifically what kind of strategies around glover have you trained here he's like you know some particular strategies around glover for john like he would just literally repeat the exact words back to me four questions and i'm like you don't want to do this he's like i don't want to do this it's like you could have said it in front anyway john has an issue with you you guys have a well uh well real quickly i'll tell you real quick because it was a funny time where yeah he [ __ ] he sent me to hell on a press conference but real quickly um when it comes to steve macko steve was he wrestled at oklahoma and then iowa i think iowa first in oklahoma and they had i think it was espn had done a documentary and they had gone to
you know iowa wrestling is like you know if not penn state is now the best program in the country it has been for some time because of kale sanderson and the recruiting and the great work that they've done but in general for a long time iowa is sort of one of these titans of college wrestling and they ask steve macko as a college student why do you like wrestling like why do you want to compete so hard he's like because when i really win and i dominate i change people they're not the same after i get done with them they realize they're not who they think they are and i'm everything that they feared i would be well and it's like and he is and he is dead [ __ ] serious about it so anyway that was the thing about steve marcus so when i was putting a microphone in his face it was kind of funny but about john so i don't know what the issue is candidly i actually what best thing ended up happening was he i had a good a very good relationship with him and his management for a long time and i still have a decent relationship with his management but uh he had so the fight back with cormier at 214 i think it was whatever the number was the rematch he had a press conference he had shaved head he was in a mood you know and i'd asked him some totally softball innocuous question and to the public he goes um you know look i don't like you so i'm not going to answer your question was that right right yeah and it was a shock to me because his coach brandon gibson i'm like very tight with you know and a bunch of other people and they didn't know either in fact i talked to his manager malki at the time i met him at the host hotel and i go bro what the [ __ ] was that like it was totally out of nowhere he's like he's like you know you know monkey right you've talked to him yeah he's like he's like i don't know he's like but you got a big mouth that's your prop you got a big mouth and i was like okay but what specifically was the issue he didn't know and uh and uh
i didn't get a chance to follow up with john obviously and brandon gibson didn't know but nobody [ __ ] knew so here's my hunch my hunch is that we were reasonably in good terms then he had all those fuck-ups where you know he got into the car accident and everything else and i probably said something he didn't like and i just it's not they don't tell you you know they don't call you up and be like i'm really mad at you they just wait to some other opportunity i had a discussion with john where he was uh he was thinking like why did i go bad on him like what was i saying and cause one of the things that i said that i i speculated that maybe one of the reasons why he was behaving the way he was behaving was p was was cte and i i still kind of stand by that i think um one of the things that happens with cte and not that i think john should get out of the game not saying this at all but i'm saying that there's a inevitable consequence of getting hit in the head right we've seen the video of john getting pulled over drunk driving and he says i forget a lot of things i get hit in the head for a living there there's an inevitable inevitable consequence of getting punched in the head where fighters experience some sort of negative effect of it and some of them become very impulsive it's just one of the side effects of head trauma and even head trauma that's like acceptable they get impulsive they they do wild [ __ ] i mean they do more wild [ __ ] right they have a harder uh it's harder for them to control their impulses well in the case of john i don't um as it relates to my interaction with him and i hold no ill will believe it or not because frankly actually i almost prefer that you know because here's what ends up happening if you're too friendly then you you could not even
hold back a little bit but that's that's less my issue like i always tell fighters like i'm not your friend but i'm definitely not your enemy like you have to understand that like i mean it's truly you cannot work in mma media you cannot work in mma media it's not possible to do the job correctly such as the job can be done correctly which i'm not sure that's even true anymore but if if you don't understand that the fighter doesn't owe you anything and that the fighter is uniquely disadvantaged relative to the power structures inside mma you cannot do the job effectively you cannot so to the extent that he gets mad he's okay does he want to answer he doesn't he is not he does not have to answer my question i'd have [ __ ] preferred a different result you know right than him saying this is this in a press conference jesus all right there's a better way to handle this but but at the end it's like you know uh i can't tell you how many fighters get mad at me and then won't talk and like i've had intermediaries reach out and be like hey man like what's the issue and they won't even tell their friend intermediaries who are often coaches fighters blah blah dude they're incredibly sensitive and which i understand uh and they're incredibly you know they they don't suffer [ __ ] gladly which i also understand but it's like i've got a job to do you think i can watch somebody do the [ __ ] that john was doing at the time in his life and just like constantly reflexively defend all of it it's not possible i have to have a job to do so if he doesn't like that that's okay but um you know what am i like if that causes a a division then that causes a division there's nothing i can do about that you know well i think fighting is uniquely personal right it's not like calling it like saying bill buckner's a loser because
you let that ball go between his legs it's a different thing like when a fighter loses it's uh i i almost feel like they put themselves out there more than any other athlete and they deserve more respect than any other athlete this is my personal opinion obviously i'm incredibly biased because that's the only sport that i've ever covered right right but i i get why they feel the way they feel i get it and i try to be as respectful as possible while still being accurate and that's a fine line to draw you know but i'm an employee of the ufc you're not you know and one of the things that i would love to get into with you you said that you was the way you phrased it that they're uniquely disadvantaged within the power structure of them yeah there's no way to i don't i don't think you can like if your job is to cover the sport right your job is different your job is to commentate for ufc and then do your podcast and um you know in my position i come to a little bit differently right so for me if you're looking at the world and your job is to the best approximation that you can tell the truth about it how do you tell the truth about the world and say that the fighters um don't have every power structure pushing against them because they basically do that doesn't mean they don't act petulantly at times that doesn't mean they don't bring [ __ ] on themselves at times or that everything they do is above reproach that's not what i'm here to say but let's let's go through it here a little bit all right um in the case of uh fighter pay the debate is over it is settled there is no argument anymore we now have court documents to this effect um they get paid roughly 18 to 20 by the ufc year over year as a more or less fixed position now now as the ufc makes more money 20 but the percentage might stay fixed
but the amount of money can go up so money is going up but it's relative it's all a function of this uh continued amount 20 okay that doesn't seem to me quite equitable that's a personal opinion but that's the way i look at it then you want to look at their management there are no barriers to entry for management i cannot tell you half of these guys listen some of these guys interact with they're great i disagree with them at times i agree with them at times i think they really have the fighter's best interest at heart but there's a lot of them there that are [ __ ] snakes that's just the way that it goes and they are uh not always acting in their uh clients best interest and i don't think the fighters are necessarily the best stewards of understanding what's in their rights and interests it's my personal opinion uh but anti-doping to me is to me i won't call it a fraud but i think it's a tragic mistake in the way that we are doing it how so well in the case of the fighters they had no say it was forced upon them all right here's another thing where it's like to what extent did the fighters support it there could be high support for it but we don't know because it's a compulsory uh demand that they have to give into it that's the first thing there's many issues that i have with it right we can get into that i have but let me let you go through your list and then we'll come back because there's a bunch of so then it goes to the sponsors and then they take away all of them which is the ufc is right by the way it totally is they're right but it again to me i never understood it from just a pragmatic standpoint because this was a way to offset complaints about fighter pay you know because you have now uh venom at the time or you know name any brand or whatever the [ __ ] that was sponsored ryu you know whatever every brand that's coming on was a way to offset fighter pace so they are restricted in and by the way the media i think doesn't treat them fairly in the sense
that and i'm a member of the mma media and i have been for almost 15 years they you are you are expected to be either friend or foe with them and i don't want to be either you know i want to be friendly i want to be professional but i don't want to be like your buddy because it causes all kinds of problems down the road when [ __ ] starts to go south for you and by the way it will you know every fighter who's young thinks that they're going to live like off these wins forever and it's like dude i've i've been around long enough to see the downside it's coming for you you know so you begin to add up all of these factors and you can say well what is the what is the moment we can create to fix all of this that is the responsibility of the fighters it used to be the case that you can make an argument that mma media was not covering enough of these issues with full-throatedness that is no longer the case they have aired out all of this they have covered this uh uh multi-billion dollar lawsuit that is happening they have covered what is which multi-billion dollar losses oh there's a there's a storm a coming joe rogan so there is a uh the nate quarry um uh kyle kingsbury uh kung li lawsuits many others as well they are basically suing the ufc for the to put it in layman's terms the the the bad effects of monopoly and they believe they are entitled to uh compensation and other forms of uh change in the industry as a consequence we are going to get a result i think on the 19th of this month from the judge in the case that if he allows it to go forward he will have to certify them as a class um and all indications are he's going to which means that trial will proceed now it still has a long way to go but that is a major institutional hurdle on behalf of the plaintiffs i'm not hearing anything about this because mma media right yeah right are you talking about this oh like a [ __ ] parrot here it goes john fitch isn't yeah this is it got launched in 2014. uh let me can i shout out a couple
people who are tremendous reporters in this regard there's a guy by the name of john nash he goes by the name of uh you want to follow him on twitter it's at hey not the face [Laughter] i don't understand it he has done absolutely fantastic work and as a professor at pepperdine he's an economist who's a professional economist who is a he teaches economics there uh he goes by the name of mma analytics but his name is um i'm blanking now because i've been drinking but i've had them on my show a million times these two guys and also um mma payout has done a good job of covering this uh josh gross to an extent i know you know josh josh has done some good work for the athletic although he's no longer with them but um these are basically the only folks really talking about it no one else is really doing it it's hard to focus on the lawsuit because if the judge denies them class certification or it gets thrown out at any moment then the whole thing goes away and it's a long-term projection like we're not anywhere close to any kind of end on this for the next five years what is the argument what is um basically that the ufc is not a monopoly is a monopsony which instead of sort of one um uh seller it's one buyer it's it's a different kind of monopoly and that has resulted in depressed wages it's resulted in unfair contracts it's resulted in any number of harms related to the fighter and their ability to negotiate i mean most of that is not arguable right you cannot argue that the ufc and the fighter go to contract negotiations with equal amounts of leverage that is not true now what the solution to that is is very debatable how do you want to fix that what kind of policy prescriptions do you want to pass do you want to pass the olli act and extend it to mma there are some problems with that as well let's explain the aliac to people um the ali act is an act
that exists in boxing it currently is a thing it was passed i think by john mccain i want to say around 2000 or so i might be getting the date wrong but basically the idea behind the ali act is that it provides a series of protections for the boxer against the promoter and or the industry in the form of disclosure so for example by virtue of the ali act they have to disclose to the fighter to the boxer like teo female lopez just won right top rank has to disclose to him who's making what margins on the costs um um sales on pay-per-view or it was on on tv but you know to the extent that it's relevant so they have to disclose that kind of thing um the olly act prevents any promoter from having the title so it's a strikeforce title it's a bellator title it's a ufc title you can have a problem with the alphabet soup but that really is the crux of the issue is to the extent that the promoter holds the title they hold everything that is a weird issue right and it is with bellator with strikeforce it was it is with one fc with all these organizations it's like it's the it's a mix between the boxing and pro wrestling model to an extent yeah anyway i'm not i'm not suggesting that the olly act is the cure to everything but yeah see because the other thing is like promoters and then the sanctioning body like then the fighters are paying the sanctioning body and they're paying the promoter and the sanctioning bodies are you know they're trying to get mandatories that nobody gives a [ __ ] about and if you don't you know what i mean and even wba like i've been i've been you know i i i covered boxing for a long time then i stopped because the nature of my job changed and i didn't have the opportunity to really i was just so engrossed in the mma world i had missed a lot of time and um i remember i was catching up with my co-host for the show i do on showtime one in combat and my co-host was like i was like okay so this guy has the wba
regular title and then this one has the wba franchise title and then this one has the wba latino title like what's the difference he's like do you see what mike tyson roy jones jr fighting for yeah like the old man belt or some [ __ ] it's some crazy thing but it has black lives matter on the belt like they're just trying to capitalize on this moment and i i forget what it's called i forget but it's some bizarre name for the belt but both of those fighters are very upset that they're making them fight two minute rounds but this we're going to get off and didn't get to that long story long story short is i don't i'm not presenting to you the ali that i'm a huge fan of it i think it's the cure all right basically my view on what would be more equitable this is my personal view an economist will debate this my view is that they should be there should be a union and or trade association depending on how you want to view it um there's a debate about that as well and that that will negotiate on behalf of the fighters interests with some additional leverage by virtue of law the ufc at that point if they're an actual union the ufc has a legal obligation to negotiate on their behalf and so i can as media stop [ __ ] talking about how i think the reebok deal is unfair or the rankings are unfair or pay is unfair at that point it becomes the union's responsibility and and then you can just go into that does the nba have a deal with like a particular sneaker brand or forgive me my i don't believe so i believe you're allowed to through but the collective bargaining agreement through the nba uh certifies all of this you are allowed to have your own endorsement the teams might have some kind of individual sponsor but if you're a lebron you can wear whatever the [ __ ] you want but that's also if you're conor mcgregor you can negotiate in any way you want as well right there are some carve outs when there's superstars but here's the key is this it's like um
i don't people think that if there's a union the fighters are going to get 50 of everything which they would not it's not true there's enough the way that what do they get in boxing boxing purses are on average through the range of things and again john nash has looked at this through the regional circuit basically if you look at the two curves there is a moment in time in the curve where boxing is less than the mma fighters it's that middle class but before that and then after that it's all boxing pays higher well for sure when you get to guys like floyd mayweather who's the highest paid boxer of all time yeah but there's no one that's really commensurate other than connor in mma like floyd and really not commensurate because conor's lost right but let me give you a better example two guys who are roughly similar positions in their division actually from the same area okay regis prograde just fought juan geraldes on showtime he was the number one guy 140 he's probably number two now right josh taylor's probably number one he got dustin partier he's number two ish or close in his division just if you look at the google analytics dustin poirier is eminently more popular than regis program like it's not even close okay he's four or five times to one in terms of how people are interested in what he's doing and looking at for him regis pro-gray makes you know seven or eight times what dustin poirier makes so you have two people that roughly come in seven or eight times i mean i think he made i have to look at his last i don't know what he made for the gerald's fight before the fight where he was trying to fight josh taylor it was orders of magnitude different i think it was 400 000 versus a couple of million or more right significantly different so um you can make an argument that there are sections of the boxing world that don't take care of the middle class as well as the ufc and that is very very true again i'm not here to make paint ufc as criminals the ufc is a business
they're going to run it like a business and the only way to fix this is for the fighters to decide they want to do something about it that is it media there's no cavalry coming the the fighters have to decide so hard for fighters to do that because another fighter will come in and say i'll take that fight right and then then you have no yeah hence the lawsuit being a bit of a game changer because it could again this is very much speculating it could change the procedure for how this goes forward it could result there's a couple of outcomes where it could result in um a union or trade association and then that sort of fixes the problem yeah there's it's interesting right there's fighters that get to a position where they are you know world-class or they're challenging from it for a title and they're really they they never quite make enough money where you feel like it was worth it right is this like sometimes you read some of the statistics he reads the fighter payouts you go right here's the thing it's like you always hear these stories and bellator by the way if you're asking what percentage they pay out it's mid 40s mid 40s to well to their uh so that's what they pay right which you could say is like you know who pays more you gain but they make a lot less so and you can keep your sponsors there i don't know how much that matters but it matters in some cases right i'm sure it matters with like michael venom page really popular guys right douglas lima douglas right yeah really popular guys i'm sure it's it's a value this is what i try to explain to people it's like there used to be this debate because you hear these fighters come out and be like you know i got this bonus one time and it wasn't expected it was huge and it's like listen man i've if you've ever been broke and someone came in with a lifeline it is i mean you can't get anything but teared up thinking about it especially if you have kids
and now you can have a christmas with your kids i take what the gesture of money to a person who needs it i take it very seriously i mean i mean that absolutely sincerely i really do but the debate is over it is not there is no more debate about fighter pay we have court documents year over year over a year with express intent written in language by ufc to say we want to keep it at roughly 20 percent and they include the fighter expense of usada as fighter compensation that's called fighter compensation so it's really a little bit closer to 18 or 19. what usada fighter compensation i'm not i wish i was making that up i'm not making that up oh that's unfortunate so here's my but please i've been rambling i apologize you you brought this that's okay uh okay keep going the last thing i would say is i i appreciate the stories of locker room bonuses and helping people out of christmas but the fundamental question is do if you're a fighter do you get half of the ufc's money from espn do you get what kind of cut do you get from pay-per-view and how much leverage do you have to negotiate that that is all that matters anymore and we know what the documents say the ufc is obviously a different kind of an organization than say boxing where you just have a promoter and the promoter promotes the fights they promote and they don't have obligations to 500 fighters they have on roster there's obviously a much higher overhead for the ufc the ufc runs multiple performance centers all over the world the ufc has this promotion machine built into it right which is very expensive the ufc has a tremendous staff which they've kept employed even during the pandemic they never let anybody go which to me is very admirable i feel what you're saying i have always been the person like i'm obviously i'm an employee a long term
started for the ufc in 1997 was a different organization i'm pre zuffa right but they they do they have something that doesn't exist anywhere else where you can go through the system become a champion and be a multi-multi-millionaire sure that's not really available anywhere else here's the thing i'm not advocating for a world where we make ufc suffer the the the ufc suffering is bad for all of us it's bad for i'd lose my livelihood why would i want that that's bad for me you just want the fighters to get a bigger piece of the pie it's just when it's all over man you know and you see him at the end there and they got [ __ ] to show for it and part of that's their by the way to be clear uh if not part of it a huge portion of it is their own fault agree there's no doubt about it listen it bothers me more than anything in the sport watching guys at the end of nothing it's like and then you see what they lost it on they got scammed or they bought a car and or you know some seven hundred thousand dollar maybach or whatever and you're like holy [ __ ] how did we get here how did we get here but i'm just saying on some level it's like with usada which we kind of got lost track on like what i get up and i think about before i hit publish or whatever like what do i owe these people what do i owe the fighters what do i owe ufc what do i owe the public what do i owe right and i owe it to the fighters to say there is a situation where you could be making more i do not think it would be fifty percent because to get that what do you think the numbers what's the right number i think probably around 35 35 35 seems like the sweet spot because to get the 50 joe you have to have a situation where like you play for um pick a major league baseball you play for the royals and they don't want you but the oakland athletics might want you or blah blah and so
teams are competing that is what gets you to 50 right but if you have just one promoter and you have one union that mechanism to drive pay doesn't exist what might exist is enough at initial cba negotiations just push it a little bit higher do you factor in all that overhead do you factor in all the employees do you factor in the machine that's behind the ufc that doesn't exist in boxing right sort of it's hard to it's hard to parse that because you have to ask yourself to what extent is that kind of it's vertical integration right they want their own hotel which they're building they want their own apex facility which they have they want their own broadcast they want their own they have ufc fight pass like if espn went away ufc just still puts on fights they have their own they're going to have their own hotel they have their own facility they have their own broadcast network with the fight pass whatever they have this total not total but they have near vertical integration across the industry and so in many ways that is a great way to keep fights going but it's like you hear eddie hearn who runs matchroom boxing he always sort of laments he's like there's got to be a better model that you know the ufc model really has figured it out but you don't get that if the fighters have rights you don't get that you don't get a model where you can have all this extra stuff if the fighters get a significantly greater share so my answer to that would be um i don't know how it will all shake out and i don't know that i have the right answer i would like a union to decide this i would like a trade association to decide this not me this is not me deciding it but i just you know getting to a place where it's like oh we can just keep fights going you do that because you have the leverage to keep it going when you don't it's significantly harder yeah um have you talked to someone who has parsed out the numbers has looked at the expenses like would it
cost to run the ufc sure john nash has done this extensively through all the court documents he'd be better to talk about the overhead and how significantly that impacts i'd be speaking a little bit out of turn this is a significant factor because it doesn't really exist in boxing in relationship to promoters they don't really have the staff or right the promotion machine they don't have the amount of overhead and you have to ask yourself a question like in defense of the ufc they're going to have this you know again let's imagine the pandemic doesn't exist for a moment they're going to they either have or it's already opened the uh institute in china right right so they are they are forcing that market to begin to recruit and develop and recruit development i don't know if it'd be successful but no one in boxing has that kind of hand in the pot to begin to make things happen in the way that ufc could for the betterment of mma that's a real thing i give them absolute credit for it's just you have to decide what you want right do you want to institute in shanghai or do you want diego sanchez to be paid what he should have been paid like there's a question you have to ask yourself there a little bit um i want to get to diego and i want to get to anderson and i want to get to a bunch of other fighters as well um the argument if i was uh arguing on behalf of the ufc which of course so i don't mean to put you on the spot for no and i'm happy to be put on the spot i'm not i'm never anti-ufc i just i think about the fighters what do i owe them listen man i'm on your team when it comes to fighter pay like i don't i don't dictate it i don't i'm not an accountant i'm not the guy who gets to decide what the checks are but i think they should be paid as much as they can be paid i mean i think it's the [ __ ] hardest job outside of being a cop or a soldier a firefighter or a first responder or a [ __ ]
surgeon in the emergency room it's one of the hardest goddamn jobs on the planet earth crazy i mean i don't want to quantify whose job is tougher but it's to me i'm obviously a massive fan and uh it means everything to me that these guys make as much as they can but it also the ufc has to be profitable in order to be sold to someone like wme it has to be valuable in order for it to be valuable it has to be profitable in order for it to be something that they can promote and get behind and make it as big as they've made it there has to be some sort of pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for these people when you're dealing with business folks like you know like the wme i mean these are big time players in the entertainment business for them to come along and fork out billions of dollars literally billions for the ufc it has to be a valuable thing and from that people have clearly profited from that stars have been born and when it gets when you get to a guy who's a superstar like a conor mcgregor or nurmagomedov or uh israel arasano or jon jones they're going to make a shitload of money the argument is do the guys below them you know do the um you know do do the journeymen journey women do they make enough for cal pennington well i cannot i would disagree a little bit if i if i may so let's talk about jon jones for a second okay so again not my best friend but i take his side on this one which is do you remember when john was beefing with ufc about going to heavyweights yeah i'm retired yes right okay uh and he was like you know he was asking for deante wilder money yeah he should i agree but there's no crowds the problem with the asking for deontay wilder money when there's not a stadium obviously you realize that stadiums bring in a significant amount of revenue it's a big deal right i mean it's millions and millions and millions of dollars for a [ __ ] if you you're jon jones you sell out the
t-mobile arena that is a [ __ ] load of money but john doesn't see a cut of that he doesn't see a cut of that but it makes sense that they pay him more because of that so here's what i would be sympathetic to the argument if the problem was the song was the same pre-pandemic as it was during the pandemic pre-pandemic it was the same thing this money is outrageous we don't possibly have it we couldn't manufacture this if we wanted to postp during the pandemic it's the exact same argument i'd be more sympathetic to it if the song had changed but the song was the same the other point about here is this if you want to talk about the numbers deontay wilder has had what one or two two paper views in his whole life the first and second um fury fights well first one was about 300 000 or so second one was about 850 and k and some change then the second one's a very good number but it's like john has been outselling deontay wilder on pay-per-view and this is not an exaggeration for a decade for a full decade he has been logging for five six seven hundred thousand pay-per-view buys now has he cost the ufc month gives you some money with his variety of you know indiscretions along the way maybe but you're asking who sells more between the two and who has sold more it's not even a contest especially cumulative right oh my god it's very easy here's the question though when deontay wilder makes that money everybody's tuning in just to see deontay wilder and tyson fury the undercard makes a fraction a tiny tiny fraction of that whereas the undercard of a huge ufc event you will have four big fights on the card then you will have overall 12 fights sure usually 11 or 12. you have to pay all those fighters this is what i mean though i'm not asking for the guys to get 50. i don't think 50 is realistic for the reasons you mentioned there is a the what the ufc has done spectacularly well is create a fighter middle class
where guys can make six figures a year i don't know how many of them but there's a there's a portion of them where they can make six figures they at least have some accident insurance and there's ways to leverage that and there's a whole lot of them relative to what there is in boxing that's the sweet spot there but when you talk about the argument about like who's most underpaid the people point to the guy who's making 10 and 10 because he's a sob story right but if you're asking who has generated the most versus what they were paid yes for the reasons you articulated john shouldn't be getting whatever he got for deontay got for the second fury fight no it would be a little bit less than that but relative to what he got no he is conor mcgregor is underpaid relative to what he generates for the company you think he got 50 of that i don't think he got 50 of that i have zero idea i've never looked into it even for a second but when you get to a point where you're talking about like a world championship fighter um at least they have the leverage of people knowing that this is going to sell a shitload of papers what levers does connor have let me ask you it's a good question he has no not right now right now i would say he doesn't have a lot of leverage but post jose aldo and then post eddie alvarez i would say at a lot of levels so here's why connor's in a bit of a problem one you may not realize this but uh the ufc over the years they're they're smart businessmen here usc is very sm that's what i mean a business is gonna do what a business is gonna do you can get mad at him for it i don't get mad at him for it i understand they took advantage of the ufc didn't break any laws right they took advantage of what the laws were they were smart businessmen i completely understand it but they're very good now about having contractual revenue right so it used to be
for example the espn pay-per-view deal is a very good example of this where you know you know as well as i do 2014 john fights glover may sell okay but not great jon fights uh cormier it's gonna be much higher numbers and that's still true to this day because star power sells but what cut the ufc takes or how much money they can get is a function that's very volatile by virtue of the star power involved the espn deal cuts out a shitload of that one so i'll say so a couple reasons why i really am ignorant to the us espn so there's a couple of different factors one is to the extent they meet their total quota so i think it's like 40 something shows a year they get 750 million okay it's a shitload of money that's contracted so you cross the finish line money's yours and they're going to meet that quite easily this year and good for them i'm glad again the ufc staying in business and doing well everybody wins when that's the case including me i recognize that so that's the first one the second part is what they did with espn was they took it away like if you have a cable subscription through directv or comcast you can't order ufc paper reviews anymore you have to go to espn plus the way that works is that espn plus or espn rather gives them a flat check for every pay-per-view my understanding is this is not confirmed and i hope your audience understands this so double check it it's believed to be around what they would get for a 500 000 pay-per-view buy which is where are you getting that from again various reports that we've seen from sports business generally weird though like just to come out with a number okay some various reports have you ever asked the ufc to substantiate that i asked the guy who wrote the article yeah what did he say again it's a little bit off the record but there's a reasonable reason to believe it um again or double check it or don't i'm just going to give you what i know okay yeah but that seems like a weird one i mean i'm with you on all this but that's
a weird one to if you don't have the fact if i have not seen the documents myself well here's what i can say for certain they get a stipend for each individual pay-per-view and then on top of that if it sells past a certain point they get a cut of every per they get a percentage of everyone past a certain threshold the khabib fight sold 500 is that what it is i think domestically plus an additional amount uh do you know what it sold internationally i think around 150 200 extra okay which is a great i mean that's a huge seven it's not at 2 pm and you're right that's a shitload that's very very good anyway so the point being is what they have done intentionally again quite wisely is they've removed volatility they're going to have a certain amount of and then through overseas deals with kombucha in brazil or european uh um providers they've got a series of contracted pieces of revenue that take out the volatility provided they can meet the overall inventory of content that they have to meet this is very very smart but what it has done is has reduced the amount of leverage that any one individual fighter may have plus conor pulls out and they go okay jorge you're on deck and jorge has just [ __ ] exploded to a mega star and he's all too willing to to play ball until he had his own moment but you know they have a ton of different resources to go to so that you fighters think oh i'll just retire i'll just retire and that'll step that'll show them it's not going to show them [ __ ] well the jon jones thing um wasn't he contractually obligated to fight like he he had a contract for x amount of money per fight and he wanted substantially more to fight it heavyweight because he said the risk was higher and that was where the negotiation broke down why is that why is that crazy that's what would any other person in any other combative sport
or certainly in boxing what you would get you would get higher paydays for a move up in weight you would um if there was a fight there that would generate substantial revenue you know i think john moving up to heavyweight you could make the look what was how how well did stipe versus uh dc do the second fight third fight rather you know that that would be the argument whether steep a is a big enough challenge for john to uh to generate x amount of pay-per-view buys which would which would justify the risk but this is my point joe it's like i see your point though it makes sense i'm just trying to say this i don't i don't know six hundred thousand seven hundred dollars where is it where do you see that 500 oh i'm sorry so again 500 000 take take these numbers with a little bit of grands from topology which is a great site but um these are these are not double checked to some degree actually you know what some of them might be uh but the point being is this joe it's like what what is jon jones entitled to here's what i would like it to be i would like to be a case where i don't know the answer to that i'd like to let the union figure it out like y'all [ __ ] figure this out let it go i feel you on this union thing i understand the position and like i said i'm i'm always for fighters getting paid more money but i just i don't know if that would ever work it will work you think it will work yeah doesn't think it's gonna work yes really so you think the future is a union how we get there i don't know now that is i couldn't i'm with you it's like their reluctance because i know for a long time you know privately fighters would be like to me they'd be like y'all never talk about this [ __ ] you'll never talk about it and i was like you know what's a fair point we never talk about it and then we spent the last seven eight years talking about it and it hasn't
moved the needle and so it's like i don't think it's up to media i don't think we can solve this problem you know it's really if you guys want it to be better uh it's up to you because again ufc is going to do what they are allowed to do right and they're just going to keep doing it so like for example we had this whole issue with leon edwards he got removed from the rankings and everyone was like fire and brimstone fire and brimstone i'm like dude what do you want me to say man it's their rankings yeah they're gonna do what they're gonna do like either well the leon edwards one was weird because like is there anyone that gets less respect for being that good than leon edwards like no one is calling out leon edwards no one is asking to fight leon edwards like leon edwards is a top five guy right is he easy top five he's world [ __ ] class he's supposed to be fighting jorge mas vidal right after that scrap that they had uh backstage where mazvidal sucker punched him three piece in the soda that's supposed to be a fight that gets made right and everyone knows i mean you look at how good he is beats donald cerrone you know uh beats uh rafael dos anjos i mean he's a world-class fighter and gunner nelson yeah don't forget gutter nelson one of the best jiu jitsu guys in the division you don't hear his name being brought up it's kind of crazy like for whatever reason he's fallen into this kind of like weird spot where he's really good but he doesn't get the attention i feel bad i feel bad for him oh leon edwards yeah come out your mouth that's that's a big step up for chameleon that is a big step you know what's funny is uh did you watch the card [ __ ] not the last one maybe two cards ago they had this dude from kazakhstan you know you know people i don't care where you're from tennessee or kazakhstan
if uh if you wear dead animals on your head [ __ ] dude you mean business right this dude how you beat cowboy oliveira remember that guy yes yes uh rakhmanov i think is his last name yes and uh and uh he guillotined him yeah it's like that dude guillotined uh cowboy oliveira who is better than anyone chimaya has fought and there's no [ __ ] buzz about the guy part of it is for leon edwards is that and here's the other part like he beat good guys he beat him like on fight pass events or like you know cards that just didn't have a ton of buzz on them um and he has good management he's with paradigm which is a big company but up until recently he hasn't done a lot of like vocalization about like he hasn't he did he like when was the last time we did like a big interview with the big guy i don't know man but i hate that that's a factor i hate that fighters have to talk [ __ ] it drives me crazy not even that he just doesn't do a lot of talking here he goes rachmaninoff look at this [ __ ] animal oh he's very very good very good yeah cowboy devera you know is he the best fighter in the world no but he's not a chump by any stretchy match look at that this guy has a [ __ ] nasty guillotine yeah squeeze yeah and then he goes and puts on dead animals on his head bro look at him you know i mean he's probably directly related to genghis khan look at him like that's genes here's what really got leon you know everyone took an l with the pandemic one way or the other he took a major l sure being in europe well able to remember so the ufc had that show the i think it was a sao paulo show after every sport was like we're done they went down to sao paulo and then they were gonna follow it open london and that's when the world began closing airports and everything else and here was the key man he was supposed to fight tyron woodley at that fight that was gonna be the main event for ufc london and bt sport shouts to bt sport because they do
an unbelievable job with promotional fighter packages they did one talking about leon's story being bullied i think his parents could be getting this wrong i believe they're from their jamaican by heritage or his as a as a family lineage whatever it was they have the story about him growing up you know tough situation it was all um illustrated like a cartoon and how he had arrived at this position that was his big breakout moment and i think he definitely would have beaten tyron especially the current condition that tyron is in as a fighter and he lost all of it this is it look at this i mean the bt sport does such an incredible job look at this thing oh wow yes i was right he's from jamaica i mean they they show the story and you feel like all at once i don't know who leon edwards is but i want to know more i understand his story there's a lot of jamaican immigrants certainly in the uk and you know growing up hardscrabble and getting [ __ ] up and being in fights and [ __ ] and then finally arriving at this moment look at this ship joe isn't that incredible that's a great piece and he lost he lost the momentum from all of this well you know the good news is he's still in his prime and once all this [ __ ] blows over there's still a lot of big fights to be had at 170 and there's also the opportunity that comes with guys inevitably getting injured and fights falling out and the chimaya fight if you can shut down the hype train that will put him right in the driver's seat yes chemie of i mean it's really quick that this guy has all the hype on him and the mir sharp fight just [ __ ] put a candle on that cake didn't it you ever watched the uh regional tape on this kid chimaya yeah oh he's a monster there was this dude i uh i was like because people like he's just like khabib and i'm like let me see this [ __ ] striking is a different level exactly so there was this dude he fought in he's he made most of his
fights in brave which is the uh the promotion of bahrain and um he fought this dude who was a world champion in [ __ ] no no sl no no [ __ ] at all like this guy is all dude and uh chimaev couldn't take him down like for a full round could not take this guy down and then said you know what [ __ ] it let's strike and punched his [ __ ] lights out like the mirror shot he has one punch ko power yeah that mirror shot fight and also at 185. yeah he's a seventy that's the crazy thing he's a 170 fighter yeah i mean at 170s world class i think i mean i'm really interested to find out we'll see we'll see with leon edwards i might spoke too soon we're going to find out it's a very very intriguing fight this is the guy i was telling you about this guy he's knocking out is not a chump at all he is very very good fake slow boom oh man yeah he's got legit power and was this a 170 fight when the guy says one arm frozen up in the air or a leg anytime there's something frozen in the air you know it's a bad knocking my uh my go-to on this is um what we call it testifying in church when they throw their hands up and they come back and they have [ __ ] slams like testifying in church the head banging off the ground is always scary you see that muay thai ref who caught the head yes isn't that amazing what a humanitarian [ __ ] mother teresa of this guy he's probably a fighter that's probably why yeah it's probably a former just the agility and wherewithal to like catch the heads when you talk about guys that have been ko'd who has been ko'd more than alistair overeem but shows less results like less effects of it thinking about that um amazing you'd be like full on out well he's been flatlined multiple times he's been ko'd in
pride he's been ko'd in k1 he's been ko'd like in multiple organizations you look but you look at him and he seems fine yeah i talked to him at ufc dc which was in what no about a year ago seems lucid um yeah right i mean how even van der lee silva is like sort of starting to be that kind of i don't think headaches thing portuguese but the people that i do for that i'm friends with that do speak it his the way he communicates in portuguese is all [ __ ] up now sorry to hear that listen this is how it is you know we know multiple fighters that that slur their words and don't sound like they used to sound so overeem in bisping michael bisping i don't think he's been ko'd as many times but certainly he's had a number of setbacks yeah if you got one-armed guillotine against luke rockhold and the dan henderson knockout's pretty bad and whatever like to me dan henderson knockout was clearly the worst really really bad uh but michael both those guys have an incredible resolve in fact you know michael bisping i always this is like my sort of like a standard michael bisping point is that you know round three he fought um anderson oh and he got yes oh yeah and then if you look at the numbers the best round bisping had in any round in that fight was the next round oh he's a [ __ ] animal it's just first of all he got killed because he was pointing that he lost his mouthpiece he's trying to get the judge to give him his [ __ ] mouthpiece and he let his guard down and anderson hit him with a flying knee right caught him right on the chin and looked like the fight was over anderson walked away like the fight was over and could have ended the fight but thought the referee was going to step in and and stop it didn't i think it was herb dean i believe i might be wrong i think that's right um gold standard herb dean you know now that john mccarthy is not referring that's the gold standard so anderson walks away and bisp being like you got to put that [ __ ]
away like there's no quit in that dude zero quit in that guy i don't think folks understand to get when you if you lose enough at something another they've lost a tremendous amount of means a hall of famer and a champion but i'm just saying at the elite level when you lose like there it is it is a psychological barrier to overcome it yeah you know it's not people think it's all we just get back up and well listen this is small potatoes how about the fact that he fought most of the last half of his career with one eye it's just shocking that's what's insane he's completely shocked i mean he kind of faked his [ __ ] eye tests yeah and another part is like what would you say is like his ace in the hole as a skill this is just tough just his mind he had good good everything yeah but like he wasn't like demi and maya or whatever he just had a relentless [ __ ] you in your face abilities he's tough as [ __ ] uh does it get any tougher i've said it up here bulletproof totally bulletproof you got to beat him you know he hasn't beat himself i mean the knockout of luke rockhold was goddamn sensational i remember being there for that and like seeing the the joy on his face have finally achieved what seemed a little surprised a little surprise on that right at first and then smile like remember he looked around like this like holy [ __ ] yeah i'm the champion yeah i did it yeah and the fact that he ko'd rock hold with that beautiful left over the top like that and that him and jason perello saw that as a flaw in rock hall's defense but i mean i i think that i mean that was an amazing performance clearly the performance of his life because it won him the title but i say you go to the kung lee fight the kung lee fight he beat the [ __ ] breaks off of khan lee and that was when kong lee was kung lee and kung lee was like a scary guy he had these wild taekwondo kicks he'd throw spinning back kicks and wheel
kicks and you know was had a dangerous style hard to figure out and michael bisping just beat the [ __ ] out of him at the end of the fight in retrospect i'm a little less surprised by that by virtue of the scott smith fights that he had in strikeforce congley mm-hmm um but to your point but conley in that fight also didn't need to have put tests positive oh i mean i think he was like cause he looks soft he was [ __ ] shredded yeah he had a beautiful six-pack and then bisping was like what the [ __ ] is going on here yeah it's still which by the way for bisping is like extra oh yeah well that was the vitor thing too he said you know when vitor stopped him vitor was on just who knows full whatever the [ __ ] he was on that was when there was a moment for people who don't understand this there was a moment of madness in mma where you were allowed to take testosterone right and all you had to do was show low testosterone well guess what if you've been doing steroids you show low testosterone just get off the steroids and then your endocrine system's all [ __ ] up so you go to a doctor the doctor blood tests you says yup you have low testosterone you need trt so testosterone replacement therapy is on the menu and then all sudden you go from vitor balfour to get front kicked in the face by anderson silva who had if you go pull that up because it's one of anderson's most spectacular knockouts um and the first time ever i saw someone get ko'd by a front kick to the face because i remember i had a conversation with eddie bravo once in my gym where i had like one of those little rubber dummies that looks like a person and he goes could you throw a front kick to the face i was like yeah you could but you'd have to time it perfect it's really not the best place for it my place for it meanwhile you know front kick but look at vitor vitor then you know he just looked normal this
looks like an athlete you know it wasn't particularly shredded particularly ripped now go to vitor belfort ver yeah yeah i mean what in the [ __ ] holy [ __ ] you go 2012 was the year he was like super saucy go to vitor belfort versus uh michael bisping if you could find that because there was a time where they let vitor take whatever he wanted and the problem with that is they did a test once and uh when they did a test on him like look at that picture where they're touching gloves that no one's ever been like you know what your traps are too big look at that picture like god damn that's making weight right that's that's when you had to make weight that wasn't the unofficial weigh-ins where you weighed in and rehydrated and then you got to step on this you know and i would say the official weight for vitor bell for 185 but really he'd be 195 plus right when he would stand at least but look how shredded he was and that's when he was on testosterone replacement therapy so bisping fights him all natural and and vitor when he was on tr is like the best god damn if you want to do an ad for trt you would have vtor during those dominant years yeah you didn't even to your point you didn't have to take uh steroids to get trt you could just have a bad night of sleep yeah yeah bad night of sleep or eat by the way if you just ate like a bunch of shitty food and they'd be like yeah you're on the low side of things and then you you literally allowed to self-administer and this is where it got crazy because vitor tested one time one of the reasons why they stopped the testosterone replacement therapies they tested him one time when he was in vegas and he was just off the charts and they were like what in the [ __ ] man and then you know they're like he was off the charts for the uh john jones fight
that's true too and john was upset with that right because well that was a fight at 205 right that was a fight that really tested jon jones medal and that's that's a fight where a lot of people forget jon jones had a fully hyper-extended arm bar on him i mean his arm was [ __ ] and most people would have tapped i mean that arm was gonzo to the point where john decided to coach the ultimate fighter because he knew he was going to be able to train for a long time because his arm was so [ __ ] from the vitor fight right vitor in his guard threw up an arm bar and had it fully hyper-extended and i think vitor might have let it go or something i mean i don't know what happened there either john just gutted it out and vitor got tired but his arm was [ __ ] where if you're watching it you're cringing because you're waiting for that like frank mir um tim sylvia snap but that that was actually low on the arm that was here right on the forearm yeah i remember that god damn but like i donated to uh tim's gofundme for that did you oh where you get the medal pulled out of the arm fell back so i gave him some money yeah yeah how crazy is that right world champion the the why doesn't the ufc pay for that that's something i'm not sure what the part of the article he tried and i think it's a i i don't know is the answer i don't know so so what they have to do they have to cut them open take out the yeah so apparently the screws were getting pushed out naturally and he was poor like you could see he poor hydrox what's it um um what's the clear hydrogen peroxide hydrogen peroxide and you'd see all the bubbles and [ __ ] from the infection oh boy so he had i think he i think he got like 15 grand off gofundme so i think he more or less got the surgery that he needed um but yeah from that jesus christ i know it's like why yeah why would you fight why would you fight for a living it's so like well how about frank mir remember
when frank mirror got hit by a car when he was on his motorcycle he's got screws and plates in his [ __ ] thigh his his femur was snapped in half which is real touch and go like you could lose a leg there easily because the blood flow and like that that injury's super dangerous like a femur break is really dangerous i know you ha i know you don't follow um team sports did you follow the case at all though because this got a wider view of things uh alex smith quarterback for the formerly the washington redskins okay so alex smith um it was a recent quarterback it wasn't i think a season or two ago he got tackled but the way he got tackled was very different he broke his uh shin bone okay but it wasn't a snap like this right they didn't break it like spaghetti they so this is known as a spiral fracture yeah they twisted it like a sponge and not only that you can see upper there you see the upper left right there that's his leg he had to get i think a dozen look at that picture oh well they held it they made a whole documentary on this guy joe look at this yeah jamie told me about him and that he's playing again now right are you a football fan jamie jamie go to that full full picture the upper top one the one right there that you got up there on the right-hand side no the one you just had just before just before yeah yeah go go make that large jesus so he had to get look at that that looks like a dog's chew toy okay ready he uh i thought he wasn't gonna walk again and he got infected and he almost lost his leg a couple of weeks ago he made his return to the nfl that's insane can you believe that look at that look at that calf yeah 17 or so surgeries i think is what he had over the course of how long uh a year and a half or two look at that picture make that picture bigger that is insane you gotta watch the documentary they made on him joe it is i mean again i love fighters but there's
there's more profiles in athletic courage than just what they do they had to take muscle and reattach it down low that's like an american wear off in london when he starts to change it's like are you are you teen wolf that's so crazy he made his return oh my god that's a oh my god look how bad that break is yeah again it wasn't in half it was a rotating break that's rough isn't that crazy well you know there's only been two ufc leg breaks oh my god look at that show the drills you could so if they got the video you could see him do the drills by the way he made 18 million on his year off by the way so you know nice for him yeah good for him it's just this video and how did he do when he came back he sucked he wasn't very good but uh and every time you got tackled you were like oh my god imagine him and his and dude he had his little kids there and his wife and they were like yeah but i was like [ __ ] that dude i could i had a hard time watching he's fine but he's not very good right now is he compromised like to the point will never be the same again to the full extent of that i don't know i mean they put him on the roster and he started that because the the initial quarterback they is young and he's not very good they're gonna get rid of him then the backup got a concussion so he was third string and they're like you're active so i think we have to go back over all the different things you were you were breaking down because i let you go on this long run about the ufc no no no it was excellent but there was a long run on the ufc and uh all the different things that you think are uh disadvantages for fighters yeah mma in general i don't yeah but mma engineers want to make sure i don't blame just ufc for all these problems there's there's the argument there's the monopoly argument right well obviously there's other organizations right
there is um the professional fighters league they still call it that i believe so which uh you win the tournament you want a million dollars and that's on nbc sports right uh espn uh two and espn plus now oh okay so it was on nbc they saw that's good good for them that's excellent um that's where justin gates you came from back when it was the pfl no it wasn't the pfl it was it was a world series of fighting that's right um so you have one fc which pays a lot of money and they brought over mighty mouse johnson and eddie alvarez and brandon vera's over there i think he's still their heavyweight champion cut down to light heavyweight and lost and just really looked drained what's his face i forgot the uh the malay guy paul i forgot i don't know how i think that's the song you sing at uh new year's the guy's a really good fighter sorry i forget his i don't know how to say his name um we should find out his name find out what is um the guy who just beat brandon vera for the light heavyweight crown um branavara by the way heavyweight looks [ __ ] phenomenal over there buddy yeah they're letting them take all the mexicans yeah you know what good for him look good for him yeah i mean he's been around a long time yeah and he's a [ __ ] jack mfide over there at heavyweight he looked really good with soccer kicks and all that [ __ ] on the ground like brandon vera is a threat i remember him um i saw him at lloyd irvine's gym 2005. say that yeah on la i don't know i don't [ __ ] la he's burmese so you know he's tough he's tough as [ __ ] he's really good he's a and he is a henry hoofed student right oh is he really i believe so i believe he trains with the uh the artist formerly known as the black zillions like what do they call themselves now so now they're sanford mma because they got a healthcare sponsor
oh so it was hard knocks 365. and now it's uh sanford mma yeah that's an interesting camp right because you got gilbert burns and who's a [ __ ] monster and uh then you got camaro usman who is now with trevor whitman and and he realizes that him and gilbert burns are going to have to go after it right and that's that's going to be really interesting because they're longtime training partners i can't wait for that one gilbert burns is complete you know what's amazing do you remember the quintet that ufc did i think it was like early in the the grappling tournament yeah so it's like a five on five and it was like it was like sean o'malley anthony smith who are all good grapplers and then it was like a bunch of um i forget i forget who they were going against but every once in a while you'll see like an mma guy and some of my guys usually pretty good at this point like not like world class but like they're very very good and then gilbert gets down there oh yeah and you're like oh right he's one of them he's one of the elite he's a world champion of course but i mean like he hasn't like i'm sure he's jiu jitsu has fallen off a little bit relative to what it was when he was just jujitsu but you can tell like some of these guys you know he's not like one of these meow brothers who is you know a gripping heavy kind of leg entanglement strategic kind of guy gilbert's athletic as [ __ ] he can pass he can go underneath he's got a good guard he can wrestle he can do the whole nine yards when i stand next to him i have a hard time believing he ever made 155. it's shocking like he was really compromised he's one of those guys that was really compromised at 155 because he's so thick like he's walking around well over 200 pounds i mean he's thick as [ __ ] right and you know and has zero problem competing with guys like tyron woodley at 170 and once he's a [ __ ] monster man his striking is
nasty too that's what's interesting about gilbert is that he is an elite brazilian jiu jitsu black belt but his striking is [ __ ] world class that woodley fight was an eye opener oh my god dude his striking's terrifying it's really really good right and i mean here's the thing about it it's like you know i mean can you imagine it's like what's your ace in the hole like what's the thing you can go to if you need it oh you're a world champion black belt that's the thing you have if you need it because everything else is good enough to win a ufc title yeah that is [ __ ] frightening yeah if you don't want to stand with him he's terrifying standing by all i mean because he and he could barrel down on tyron because it's like i mean maybe he'll fight the takedown if it's there but probably not because on the ground you know i mean his ability to sweep or just create space or threaten you or uma plaza or whatever good luck fighting that [ __ ] guy on the ground you know probably at welterweight at welterweight let's let's think about this you have kobe komoru uh uh massive by the way very underrated ground game for mass at all oh yeah i'm sure you know that i'm just saying for the audience's sake very underrated wrestling everything everything everything uh but all those guys in the top five gilbert is your biggest submission threat by a countryman oh a country mile i would have really loved to have seen jorge masadan camaro usman of jorge had a camp because he did not have a camp for that fight and still presented some real big problems for camaro don't you find the ascension of jorge kind of funny i love it i went to a do you remember when he fought alaikum at 1 55 i do so i was at that fight it was in fairfax virginia and i'll never forget fight week was at one of these ufc gyms in uh somewhere in the suburbs of dc i don't remember where i lived in city property so i'd like you know go out to the suburbs and uh it
was decently attended it was not a super well attended open workout there was you know there was enough people there and al got a huge you know whatever and uh i think it was frankie no it was um chad mendes and ricardo llamas in the main event and uh chad was a big alpha male guy at the time and you know he got a big applause jorge came out and maybe 10 people knew who he was media the the latin media that was there wanted to talk to him but like most of the media you know was kind of like give or take on it and i remember thinking to myself i'm like do you do y'all not know how [ __ ] good this guy is by the way i thought he won that fight too and then years later crowd did as well remember yeah and then i was like you're gonna [ __ ] move me you're gonna [ __ ] boo me uh you gotta live out else that was hilarious uh but you know to see later it's like it's amazing it's like you're nothing you're nothing you're nothing all of a sudden something well you know the resurrection you know he talks about how he went on that stupid reality show where they made him live in the jungle for a couple of weeks on yeah whatever it was and he was like what the [ __ ] am i doing with my life and then he had a chance to think about all those fights where he just fell short and why did he fall short you know what did he do was he playing it safe he decided he's going to start baptizing people as he puts it and man you talk about a guy who turned the corner and changed i mean the ben askren fight though that was it that was the cherry on top and then of course the the murking of nate diaz i mean he beat the [ __ ] out of nate diaz i mean that was a crazy fight and they were talking about running that back i was like for what yeah i was confused i was like don't forget darren till put his lights out too yes with a beautiful step forward left hook combination i mean he's a monster he's a monster
he's hard for anybody to deal with and the fact that he stopped darren till when darren tells this terrifying striker that just beat down donald cerrone you know daryntell was a scary guy and to see him put him away that way and you know obviously it was after tyron had beaten him but it was still like a stunning stunning ko and he's just a fun guy like everything's fun about him talk like like i had him on the podcast and i said the real question is whether or not ben asks can get a hold of you he's like he can get a hold of these nuts that's that's him you know i mean that's him he's just a real fun dude he's a fun dude to watch fight he's a fun dude to listen to him talk he's been he can do uh he sort of cut you off but like uh dan levitt is a big national sports radio guy based out of miami it's like a couple of miami guys couple cuban americans and they're on opposite sides politically very much so oh he's all trump right yeah super dan libertar's very left but like i i they have this camaraderie through heritage and identity and sort of shared experiences you just can't fake you know yeah he's awesome i'm a big fan but i'm a big fan of him skillfully i think he's a really exceptional fighter he's very clever he also has a very unusual stance like he stands straight up like he stands like a muay thai fighter and it's one of the reasons why is his takedown defense is so good he's confident that he could stand straight up like that and his striking is very crisp very clean and he's clever like he sets traps he you know he catches you like that [ __ ] ben askren thing was goddamn genius and when you see him prep for it when you watch the training footage that he did that over and not only that he prepped for the angle right leaned against the cage so he like presented this and then turned the corner went to the right and then charged at
him so that ben asked him like i'm just going to grab this guy like literally he he set two different traps the running at him and then the turning the corner and then running at him and ben asked her like instincts just dove in and he couldn't help himself i call it the jorge mazel test go through any of his fights pre-tilt win or lose doesn't matter and watch how many times when you know they're getting the mouthpiece put in and the vaseline put on at the beginning watch how many times the commentator says folks don't understand how good he is folks don't know how smart he is this is one of the most well-rounded fighters in all the ufc and they do it in this kind of way to like almost plead with the audience to understand the fighter as they do yeah that would be me brian stan's done in a million times the thing is if you and bryan stand are doing it you're not coordinating it something is happening here well i remember when he knocked out eve edwards with a head kick when eve edwards is one of the best 155 pounders of the world after eve edwards had beaten josh thompson who's another guy who doesn't get nearly the respect that he deserves the first guy to ever knock out nate diaz right i mean josh thompson at one point in time was the [ __ ] man right and so he knocks out eve edwards in bow dog remember beau dog i have all the dvds at home i have them all at home beau dog for people don't remember uh calvin iris who's like this big gambling guy who that their i think what they were trying to do was boom god damn that was beautiful and total finishing and then look at this look at that look at this he poses like he's a male model yeah um but they put down a bunch of fights like good fights that was where cain velasquez made his debut um that was where matt lindland fought fedor remember that like but i think their idea was uh online gambling they were gonna do it
and they were gonna be compensated through online gambling but then that was right when online gambling got shut down in the united states which is really weird because we're like why are you shutting online gambling down we can be in person and gambling like what why are you deciding where people can gamble like what is this and the company went under and i think calvin irons like i think he's like a fugitive i think he has to like live in other countries i don't know i'm not going to so you might be right because dana and him were going back and forth and yeah because calvin are when he had the beaudog thing had a big billboard for bow dog fight but it was him like calvin ir like in vegas like looking slick with a nice tailored expensive suit and uh he was talking [ __ ] about dana white and dana white's like you can't even get in this country like you're a [ __ ] fugitive for the love if you come in this country they'll arrest you like i don't remember what it was but i think it was one of those things where he was doing this online gambling thing and they were like this is illegal and he's like [ __ ] you i'll do it in belize or some [ __ ] costa rica i think something like that i think he lives there now he has to i don't think he's i don't think he can step foot in america i might be talking that turn please don't sue me yeah but see see if he can find that but he's a big he's a big gambling guy i mean he's a big online gambling guy and i think there was some weird [ __ ] that went down which uh look i'm a big fan of personal freedom and i'm a big fan of people to be able to being able to gamble wherever the [ __ ] they want and i'm not a big fan of people regulating things like unless you can prove that someone's getting robbed unless you can prove they're stealing money from people i think they should be able to gamble sure and i think that was uh that was one of the things that happened with that bow dog
organization but they threw around a lot of money and put together what is it i thought what happened currency afterwards that sounds about right yeah um that case who initially i think has been settled though the cryptocurrency no no the initial uh the bow dog thing oh so he's allowed to come to america i don't know about that sorry calvin that thing again don't sue me [Laughter] well he put together got to say he put together some great [ __ ] fights there that's right jake hellenberger fox right yep tons of good guys yeah and they did on the beach with hot chicks who was her name uh you know who fought there was the brother and sister combo um karina and hodrigo dam oh that's right they did the capoeira [ __ ] you know they would be in the middle and they would do this [ __ ] during the middle of a fight yeah they would [ __ ] people up too well you know the interesting thing is like i don't know what what happened with that organization but they put together a small number of fights i think it was maybe three or four fights three or four cards but if you go back and look at those three or four cards like they [ __ ] hold up they hold up like any affliction event you know which is another organization that threw a lot of money into big fights you ever heard you ever talked to jeff osborne sure jeff osborne and i did commentary on the very first ufc i'm a big fan of his nobody i mean like recently no i haven't so out of nowhere i'm not no longer with siriusxm they they uh i moved on but i had a show once and they were like jeff osborne's on line one i'm like wait the jeff osborne so jeff has a memorabilia shop of like all mma [ __ ] in his hometown and he called in and we talked about a bunch of shoot who can shoot right that's him but also with do you realize this the cane fight that they had was in a ice rink in the middle of an ice rink and they actually built a studio
slash like stage presence for it in the middle of an ice rink and like wherever the [ __ ] it was st petersburg and then a ring to make it look like they were like somewhere else meanwhile they're in the middle of a [ __ ] ice rink really yeah all dude his story which fight was this kane's fight there i thought kane fought on the beach no no who did kane fight i couldn't tell you who the [ __ ] knows but um i could probably i mean this is beaudog so was this the same card where linlin fought fedor i don't think so but again i can't be sure okay but you got to reconnect with him sometime because this [ __ ] i'd love to i'd love to his bow dog stories are like out of control see this this is this is in the middle of an ice rink jeremiah constance oh he's about to get you got you got fat tattooed guy versus kane kane about to work you like dude it's no kane was a force of nature he's the best heavyweight i've ever seen i'm not saying he's the best heavyweight ever but in terms of the eye test and what he could do nobody was better than him you know the thing is it's like how long can you be at that level that's the real question it's it's not sometimes you want to look at a guy like you look at anderson right and you look at the jarrod cannoneer fight or you look at the second chris weidman fight it's really interesting you look at anderson's career and actually went over it last night because i knew i was going to talk to you today and i was i was thinking you know there's one point time where i was convinced that anderson was a goat and i think he was at his time i think in his in his in his prime he was the goat at the time and um you go from the chris weidman fight where he's the baddest [ __ ] on earth chris brown and chaos him and then he loses every fight afterwards except derek brunson except derrick
brunson he beats derrick brunson by decision but he loses every other fight it's crazy i mean you look at him you go from chris levin starch and chris lieben you look at his fights i mean there's a few that people forget there's a few that were boring right there was a there was um you know the uh uh telus lights ladies the cote fight wasn't that good either patrick cote was very cautious because patrick cote knew that anderson still was a counter fighter and patrick had a powerful [ __ ] right hand and patrick was like i'll let you come to me [ __ ] and then patrick with a weird thing like he hopped on his knee to throw a kick and his knee just blew out and he fell and held his knee and that was a really la but the damian maya fight people forget that that was in abu dhabi and he came [ __ ] like hell on wheels in the first couple of rounds trying to take damian maya out and damien maya survived and then he just coasted for the last few rounds and everybody was terribly upset it was really anderson silva like i remember dana white was like if he does that again i'll cut him and everybody's like whoa this is crazy like everyone was so furious because this was the big fight in abu dhabi b.j penn fought frankie edgar and frankie edgar upset him and everyone's like this is crazy bj penn lost and then anderson silva comes out like a demon and he was like screaming at damien mai and but damien maya is probably the nicest most respectful person i don't know what their beef was about i just still to this day i don't understand what it was but for whatever it was anderson had in his head he was angry at damian meyer and fought very emotionally and tried to take him out and didn't i also think in that fourth maybe was the fifth round damien heard him yeah there's a big punch that lands and you watch the body language and the sort of tactical approach begin to change almost instantly
after he gets drilled with one now maybe i'm not saying he's the best writer i'm just saying at that moment it was hot out too by the way you were there outside yeah we were outside it was [ __ ] hot and i think and there also bugs flying around like the size of birds it was weird like what is that thing like it was like weird because we're outside and damien survived he survived the initial onslaught and then you know but just could never be fast enough to take anderson you know to get a hold of him right it was just take him down he never felt like he was meaningfully moving the knee right he just wasn't at that level like striking was just he but he did threaten him he did hit him and then anderson decided to coast but dame and dana was so mad and folks understand too this was i think two things were happening at the time one that was when they had made the sale to flash entertainment and they had sold 10 of the company i believe that's why they had gone to abu dhabi it was partly of those reasons that was sort of an internal thing that was an external thing but folks don't realize this this was in the ufc was [ __ ] red hot red hot i mean they could not miss every time they come out maybe the pay-per-view wasn't great but it wouldn't sell poorly you know this was at the time where i don't think it was too far removed from i remember when i was in new orleans once with now my wife my then girlfriend and we watched i remember this card got super [ __ ] up i don't even know what the initial one was supposed to be it ended up as rashad versus thiago silva remember that it was three rounds and it sucked yeah that thing still did almost 400 000 buys i mean they could not miss and they had anderson silva they had all these sort of important guests there this was this coronation moment for this like new opportunity and it kind of shift the bed a little bit and dana was
[ __ ] heated after that i can understand that too i could understand it too yeah it was uh it was not a good fight uh but anderson when he was in his prime there was moments like the forest griffin fight where you walked away and just go who's better than that [ __ ] guy you know but obviously it was a tailor-made kind of style for anderson forrest was like a blood and guts come forward you know doesn't hide anything just really charges and anderson would just like see everything he was so relaxed he would find openings and the the famous step back away from those punches and then just hit him with a right hand a fade away right hand and knock him out that's what hall hit him with did you see that fight over the weekend which fight holster oh ryan hall yes exactly yeah i was like it was slightly different but i saw and i was like dude this is a game where you stay around long enough and the elderly get eaten well it was also like when you're watching anderson move he's doing things that he would have never done when he was younger it's almost like he's trying to like get the sparks flying like crank the engine over but it doesn't want to you know he's moving forward in a way that like you're like ah like you would never see the anderson silva that [ __ ] up rich franklin twice you would never see him fight like that the anderson silva that stopped chris lieben he would never fight like that you know that that anderson was a clever tactician that that anderson was a was a a technical fighter whereas like he fought really aggressive in the first round but if you don't go back to vitor being on trt you give anderson trt you'll see a different fighter but if you want to make him fight on the natch you're you're 45 man this is 45 it's 45. it's like unless you're bernard hopkins unless you're a guy that's so [ __ ] good at boxing where you're clever
and you don't waste any energy and you're so disciplined and so technical and so defensive oriented that you can take these like world championship caliber young guys and drag him into seven eight nine rounds and then set traps for him and eventually capitalize on them there's very few guys that get to the point like bernard got into his 50s it's it's when he changed his nickname to the alien yeah i didn't think it was a better nickname but it was maybe a more appropriate one you know but then when he fought joe smith and he got knocked out through the ropes and fell and landed on his head right i was like oh jesus christ this is but the difference is you highlight i think it's really important between hopkins and and um and silva which is that it would not be accurate to say that silva lived on his chin that is not true but it would be accurate to say there was a couple of times he let it slide you'd see times in fights where he would kind of just take one and then like just his head would whip but he'd still be right there about the jorge rivera fight right remember the cage rage fight he let him punch him in the face right this is i mean that was the more it was a little more demonstrative but it was crazy okay but there's there was all these moments where he would kind of let it go and uh he just at 45 you just do not have the capacity for that yeah at all you don't yeah and also again we're talking about a natural 45 a guy who can't you know you're you know you have a very low testosterone level bro my back hurts i'm 41. my back hurts when i gotta [ __ ] bet i know i'm not a world-class athlete but i'm just saying like full training camp but even if you watch him train it's it's not what you want to see you know i've watched training footage of anderson it's oh it's hard to say unless you're in the gym with him day in day out like what what kind of output he's he's really doing but when i'm watching him hit the mitts and hit the pads and it's just not it's not
what i used to see he is uh he is one of i think three there may be more but if i had to ask how many fighters currently competing in the ultimate fighting championship have pro mma wins that predate 911 robbie lawler him and overeem are the ones that come to mind that's about it there might be a couple diego but diego's out of the mix now right i'm sure he has a win that predates 911. he might but um but the point is not in the ufc you're right because his debut was 205. oh none of us i mean just pure thousand feet does he have one that pre-dates 911 really diego i don't know he's 2005 he was his debut in the ufc when he won ultimate fighter season one okay right that's 2005 correct there's a certain there's a certain beauty to it which is i know you appreciate this you know i was thinking about i was like there's a lot of strikers and a lot of great fighters folks don't remember and still but i don't even fought him but like you know mark weir folks of luck told you mark was a great fighter dude silva's maybe best fight and this is debatable because of the chael sonnen comeback but you asked me like my favorite anderson silva fight he fought lightning lee murray lee murray hatred in cage rage in london when by the way everyone knows lee murray as like oh the guy who robbed the bank because it's such an incredible story and i recognize that but put that aside for just a minute lightning lee murray was a bad [ __ ] bad man he could fight his ass off he was very good vicious power and athletic and quick and like yeah super [ __ ] just elegantly evil okay and anderson silva beat the [ __ ] brakes off of the brakes in london in front of lee murray's hometown crowd and did it and did it with a certain gusto and no one knows that [ __ ] yeah uh because you can imagine if you just joined i listen you come to mma when you come to mma you can't you can't be one of these fans like beats up on newer fans because they didn't
i got lucky someone introduced me yeah but can you imagine understanding anderson silva as a function of like conor mcgregor popularity like you came to ufc because of him and that's all you know oh my [ __ ] god you missed the whole show yeah you missed the evolution because there was times where like if you go back do you remember uh alex diebling the brazilian killer they didn't like that nickname too much did they did it anderson caught him with a high kick and busted open his eyebrow and stopped him um but i believe and someone correct me if i'm wrong jamie look at pulled up anderson silva's record i think rio chonan beat him after lee murray yes he did the leo rio chonin man that was a crazy fight so did what he said was that flying scissors hold yeah that was his last fight and pride he went from that i think too maybe he had the otsuka fight i have to go look it up but um he went from that to the lieben fight i believe so something something like that i think he might have fought one more time in cage rage curtis that's right curtis stout another good striker that folks don't remember 14. so that's what's interesting right so he loses to rio china and then beats the [ __ ] out of jorge rivera but that was after the lee murray fight right so he went from lee murray which was arguably i agree with you one of his most impressive decisions one of the most impressive victories rather and then rio chonin beats him people forgot about rio chonan and then the you should okami win is disqualified he up kicked him on his knees that was bj's promotion and then the tony frickland crazy upward elbow remember that yeah and then he went and fought chris lee but after that remember when levin said he was going to send him back to japan yeah hi i'll never forget i was at so i had a job in washington dc in this job i hated i used to work in a little bit in
politics and i hate i hated this [ __ ] job and i'll never forget it was the night of uh silva versus lieben and i everyone was like hey we got a bunch of work to do blah blah blah and i was like i had to make up some excuse i'm like i think i have aids i'm sick i don't know something's wrong and i was like i had to go home and i sprinted home and then i was like i don't want to watch this alone and i went to a bar um that was near where i was living at the time and i watched it and it was one of the most i i've never like drinking alone stories usually don't end with like a smile and glee but i know when i none of my friends like mma i'm just the only one and uh so i didn't have anybody to call so i was like [ __ ] i was gonna go to the bar and i watched it and it was one of the truly like great sports memories of my life you know yeah i remember i had friends come into that and that was back when you you could bet i mean you still can bet but uh you i used to bet on fights i used to bet on fights before i didn't nobody told me not to but i decided at a certain point i probably should stop and uh i don't think i'd bet on that i think that was like the last one i didn't bet on because like this is stealing money because whatever the line was it wasn't big enough i was like listen to me and i was talking to my friends i go that [ __ ] can't lose can i go this guy's an assassin can i make a request to jimmy look it up can you go to bestfightodds.com i'm not paid it's just a repository for good information sure you can look up someone's eyes throughout their career oh okay how it open how close let's go best uh best odds dot com that's what it is best fight odds fight odds dot com and try to find the chris stevenson anderson silver just punch in someone's name like wikipedia and it'll show you all their odds but i remember telling my friend this is stealing money i'm like this
[ __ ] is an assassin i'm like he's so good he's so good i thought it might be competitive in the sense that silva was better here we go so do they have it ah [ __ ] i don't think they have it it goes all the way back to nate marquart how's that 2000's how is it that close jesus yeah that's crazy well nate was really [ __ ] good that's why i mean anderson was only a two-to-one favorite back then but you gotta remember that's nate marquardt when he was in his prime and named marquardt a pancreas bro when i talked to brendan shaw when brendan shaw was training with nate marquardt he goes dude let me tell you something goes i never saw that [ __ ] lose around in sparring nate marquardt is a guy who at one point in time was one of the elite of the elite remember he knocked out damien meyer with one punch i mean in the air yeah he was a [ __ ] killer man but he and he knocked out tyron woodley with like one of the most nasty elbows video game combinations you've ever seen it was like right out of mortal combat he hit uh what's his face uh who's the striking ghost christian allen is that his name the striking coach over there for him he's the striking coach of elevation now i think he's like uh corey sandhagen's guy i think it's christian allen who ever i've never talked to him but everyone tells me he's a [ __ ] genius he hit uh wilson gouveia remember this he hit him with the um he hit him with the punch punch high kick spin uh back fist oh yeah he hit him with that god i forgot about that guy too wilson gouveia another good guy there's so many fighters that just like you like you forget about travis luther like oh yeah yeah but he's training the next gen up guys is kevin kevin holland's out of travis luther's gym is he really kevin holland's [ __ ] good man he's [ __ ] good travis luther is one of those guys where uh i remember you know i remember when
he fought silva i was like this one might be worth watching and then you might have to tell me this dude i've never seen anybody closer to death than i did travis luther on his way to making the weight when he missed the weight and then he was going to the scale and i saw him shuffling because he couldn't walk couldn't pick his legs up he was shuffling like he was snow skiing right and then his left his lips were cracked like you could see like the red in between the cracks like his like he had no water in his body and he was trying to make weight and he couldn't make weight that's how habib was i interviewed him we had media day before the ferguson fight at 209 which obviously did not happen we did media day and i it was my turn to talk to khabib and i stuck a uh microphone in his face and he had the worst i've seen i've seen you know in 15 years in the fight business and i've covered you know uh collegiate and olympic wrestling a little bit i've seen cottonmouth okay i've seen a lot of it that is the worst cottonmouth i have ever seen in my life i mean he could barely separate the tongue from the inside of his mouth it's crazy to make guys talk like that you know it's also crazy that we allow that you know i applaud one fc for their weight cutting measures i think what they're done with their their whole hydration thing i think it's the most important thing in mma i think we need to do that across the board but i think there needs to be more options for fighters i think there should be more weight classes i really really really do i'd be a little bit skeptical of them yeah here's what i'm saying the weight hydration system as we understand it through collegiate wrestling appears to be a godsend right so what we understand of it works now i am i want to be very clear about what i'm about to tell you i am not declaring to you that what they are telling us about their weight cutting system is wrong because like you i've talked to ben askren i've talked to gary tonin and they really enjoyed it
what i'm telling you is i'm a little bit skeptical of the veracity of the claims that aren't independently verified they have only recently begun to stream their weigh-ins and even then you can't see what's on the scale you have no idea about if someone is missing weight and there could be any number of factors related to whether or not they actually made it i'm just telling you i personally as a guy in media i do not take promoter's word for it and so this does not mean declaring to you that their weigh-ins are fugazi this is me declaring to you until we get independent verification of them i would pause a little bit on some of their claims do you know what fugazi really means do you know where it comes from i know the band and i know it's supposed to mean like because i'm from dc fugazi is actually how i pronounce the ban i say fugizi but it means sort of uh counterfeit it was a company that was writing bad checks i'm pretty sure it was a limo company and they were writing that sounds perfect they were writing bad checks and so it became like synonymous a fugazi check i i found my my friend mike starr was a was in the godfather or a good fellow it's been a bunch of movies he was in dumb and dumber he told me about i was like what the [ __ ] is fugazi yeah i'm from dc so we know waiting room there's a there's a bit of i have a bit of skepticism about their drug policy because yeah quite a bit quite a bit and now now that vitor is over there and they got a few guys over there they look pretty juicy yeah good i don't care it doesn't bother me i don't care if it's known you know the the thing is it's it's like i wish there was a policy like there's an argument that could be made when it comes to things like um tour de france that you could argue that it's safer to do it with the steroids than it is without right with the blood it kills the human body yeah it's destructive and like there's an argument that like doing that
with it is actually healthier the problem is in this country we have this idea that you're cheating and it's un-american right we have it from baseball and mark mcguire all the way what's happening stupid ideas yeah there's a lot of weirdness when it comes to that so the last few years i remember i used to talk to travis tiger who runs usada pretty regularly back in 2015 or so and uh i found him to be a very earnest guy very nice um i think he's very committed to his mission this is not i have nothing bad to say about him and personally other than now i couldn't find more disagreement with him if my life depended on it basically sent me down a rabbit hole and let me tell what i've been doing the last five years of my life no one will tell you this i don't know why but there is this entire movement and i don't mean of weirdos and people of ill repute and people who haven't done their homework i'm talking academic scholars with research who have done the homework in the most complex of ways right there is this entire body of work around anti-doping and if you follow the rabbit hole that i went down this is not some youtube rabbit hole you in fact if you look you can't you can't find it this is it's it's dense reading quite candidly the history of anti-doping where it come from where it comes from how it developed and what the status is today you can only come away with a couple of conclusions one anti-doping globally is a dramatic failure it has not worked and number two the major problem that i have is i'm not expecting everyone to agree with what i say about anti-doping many of my views are outside of the overton window but the debate around anti-doping is so incomplete and so dishonest that it's hard to get in a word edgewise it's hard to get people to understand that like you're just repeating 1980s drug war nonsense without even really realizing that's what you're doing if you actually examine the facts of the
case again maybe you'll come to the conclusion that i come to maybe you won't what is the conclusion you've come to that here is basically what we should do with drugs and sport they are not going away there is nothing we can do about it they are not going away and to the extent they go away genetic manipulation will happen with the crispr or technology or some other version of it or there's things called financial doping which big clubs get involved in in europe it's been a big problem over there as well what does that mean financial doping is basically a way to cook it's a they call it doping because it's a way to make things sound bad in fact the word doping comes from the early 20th century when they were trying to figure out a name for giving horses drugs they called it doping and then they used that they ported it over to um human athletics to sort of make it sound and by the way in fairness it was the mafia doing a lot of that so they took this sort of like organized crime human on animal crime and then they brought it over to a human sport the biscuits idea of like oh we have certain um limits you can't pay more in salary than this we'll find ways to sort of manipulate the books to make sure that you get paid more and i get paid more it won't show up on the ledger in the way that it normally would when you actually calculate the total we're not meeting the demands of keeping the payload restricted so that we can remain competitive across the league it's called financial doping but there's a couple of scholars werner muller out of uh i think he's out of denmark and then uh paul demio out of scotland they have written a couple of books on the history of anti-doping on the state of anti-doping on the ethics of doping and anti-doping these are not guys who think that steroids should just be legal people think that like this is one of the major problems with being the position that i'm in
people like oh you just think everyone should take steroids no that's not what i think i think if you're an athlete and you say listen man i'm really good and i don't want to take drugs to compete i i think that's perfectly reasonable i don't think there's anything wrong with that but when you begin to drill down how you solve that problem no one really wants to get to what the heart of the issue is first the issue is this everyone you cannot understand drugs in america without understanding media hysteria and how it has changed things and no one should appreciate this more than you think of any drug we've ever had to what extent have false media narratives exaggerated claims totally uh ridiculous things have had to been year over year pulled back by virtue of evidence that has weighed in or you know whatever the case reefer madness is sort of like the common example steroids is exactly that way the claims of harms related to them are totally overstated it doesn't mean there are no harms it means relative to what people have claimed it is simply not true in fact the australian government did a study uh over like what would be the most sort of harmful drugs in a human experience and it was behind tobacco it was behind numerous other drugs well in advance that are perfectly legal um and have a deeper societal exception or acceptance excuse me so that's for harm though right it's for harmony in terms of actual performance yeah i'll get to that the argument about steroids especially as relates to combative sports if you wanted to make the claim that if you and i were fighting and were let's say reasonably equal and i took it and you didn't it tilts the competitive balance and that makes it unfair i would agree i think that is actually true i don't think there's much argument about that but that is not really fully what they claim what they claim as it relates to mma is
that or any other combative sport is that it makes mma safer there is literally not a shred of evidence they have ever presented not one time that makes that true joe you've been watching mma a long time it looks safer to you i wouldn't imagine it makes it safer i wouldn't imagine that was a key selling ingredient when usada was sold to the public about why it was necessary i think the the argument is that if someone is on it and the other person isn't allah vitor versus michael bisping right that michael bisping winds up blind in one eye from a high kick by vtor right so let's let's remove that example for one second because it's such a it's such a powerful example it's like the it's like the ben johnson of examples yeah show me oh by the way carl lewis was on some [ __ ] of course yeah of course he was he was on some [ __ ] show me the evidence that since the introduction of you allegedly don't sue me carl yeah don't carl be friendly get together with calvin show me the evidence show me the evidence that mma has become safer as a virtue because uh what everyone had said at the time was this is not like hitting a baseball this is not like dunking a basketball we need to protect the health and safety of athletes right the the vitor belfort incident doesn't even come close to the cyborg versus mvp incident where he cracked the skull which was ostensibly totally done naturally yes okay the idea that was crazy it was super [ __ ] crazy fighting is like smoking you can smoke marble reds you can smoke menthols you can smoke lights at the end of the day you're putting yourself at risk at a pretty significant degree it does not matter what kind of filter you put on the cigarette and you can make the argument that if you are taking epo and if you are taking testosterone you'd have more energy to get away from shots as much as you would have energy to land them i think the argument could be safe here's the issue i think the argument about taking what is
complex and i think ultimately the athletes should decide right so who should decide who takes what in the ufc i think the athletes should work with the ufc to make a broader decision and by the way they might decide that usada is what they want i cannot preclude that as a possibility but to me it's like let's take the pepsi challenge let's bring in vada and let's see how many to a man decide this is something that they want i bet you you get the numbers drop off fairly significantly do you think there's a way to skirt the system right now even with usada do you think there's some some therapeutic some [ __ ] that people aren't do you think so of course i would imagine but i'm not let me let me i'm ignorant to it so i'm just guessing let's let's say something outright right okay this will get me in trouble with the with the puritans but i think it deserves to be said drumroll please when i watch athletes who i think or know are on something the sport tends to be better okay when i watch mark maguire hit balls into [ __ ] mars i love it i think it's great well especially baseball because that's the only good thing about that stupid [ __ ] sport it's not my favorite sports meat heads it's a ball into another dimension right but when i watch it when i watch any other sport where i know it's drug-addled it does not reduce my enjoyment of it and that's you're supposed to have this moralistic puritanical idea about drugs i do not because i understand this is complex but the basic idea is this um all the claims that folks want to make about mma as it relates to safety there is no indication that if you say usada is working it's any safer you're asking about how it's being used now it's a little hard to say because again usada claims a lot of victories without providing any evidence about them right i mean i've never i've never in my life can you imagine you're
somebody who hired to do some kind of service for you claiming all the victories they claim and then when you ask to see the receipts they don't have any i mean it's really i know i know jeff nowitzki came on your show and i'm sure he means well but saying that the testosterone has been lowered i actually asked paul demio about it it means nothing it doesn't in any way there's no way to draw any conclusion about usage there's a guy by the way has a youtube channel more plates more dates he's been a long time steroid user and ped user he has gone through several ufc fighters he has shown there was a recent study that was done you can still take all kinds of testosterone exogenously and come way under the limit for what usada is looking for more to the point what we know from academic research is that but did they do carbon isotope tests it's easy to beat all this stuff really yeah here is the key uh what we know from academic research is that is there a reason to believe that relative to what commissions were doing that the introduction of usada has overall depressed usage there is some reason to believe that whether it's physique changes yes but again here it goes again everyone doesn't respond to physique changes normally or equally in other words you could have genetics that make real major pronouncements and change related to physique change and i can take the exact same thing you're taking and not have the same result but the point the point is is is this is that as it relates to these considerations what ends up happening is you might depress overall usage but what you do is you end up empowering the folks at the higher end i mean since 1960 the growth in pharmaceuticals which the antidoping world basically displays ketchup on all the time i mean they didn't catch marion jones right the way they got her was somebody mailed some [ __ ] anonymously then they developed a test for it and all of a
sudden eureka but the amount of independent stuff they can find to catch everyone they have to wait until someone basically tells them about it you what you end up doing is you end up codifying a system where the rich are able to avoid detection and entrench their uh relative advantages over those who don't have those economic resources so you might have prevented overall amounts of use that's one plausible explanation but by doing that you have only made those who had more money to begin with solidify their position but what is the alternative the alternative is you let people get juicy as they want no do you have limitations so here's my view on things okay number one you look at american football and this is what kills me and mma fans try to defend usada it's like this this ain't the hill to die on folks in american football we have multiple deaths and fatalities every year i'm sorry deaths or paralysis every year not just that we have multiple deaths at the high school level annually annually these kids die if you look at the health outcomes from american football relative to a fighting it is much worse across the board in american football and that is a sport where you can get caught taking something and they'll suspend you for four [ __ ] games you are watching in the nfl and i don't want to name names because i don't want to be sued but you see a lot of guys in their 40s or late 30s continuing to do [ __ ] that they're not supposed to be able to do or they look like [ __ ] he-man it's because it is very easy to take something in the nfl and avoid detection and the fans simply do not care the idea that they're really concerned about the health and safety given the outcomes and given the nature of the sport is simply does does not mean match the reality at all so what do i think is best couple of things one if you have a system where the athletes have a say and they work with the organization and
they carve out a system where it may not be as rigorous as possible because by the way there's a study at the university of adelaide testing is basically low information it's basically theater for low information fans it's not it does something but not really all that much the real big [ __ ] fish that usada gets or any other anti-doping agency is a function of investigations through snitching which mma fans don't like i'm like folks that's how the sausage is made i don't know what to tell you so if you wanted to do testing you'd have to do it literally the university of adelaide has a study that came out said it'd have to be basically every day but that would require privacy invasions right so you have this enormous amount of privacy invasions where they have no life they would constantly be under rigorous control be different though with testing every day versus testing randomly like how would you catch someone like what are they obviously there's if they're taking something and you just wake them up at six o'clock in the morning hey frankie edgar i go check your piss like you're you're gonna catch them if they're taking something on a daily basis right yeah you mean through random or through random random is the idea is that it would happen frequently enough that there would be no method of uh or at least very few methods of avoiding detection the idea though is that there are sufficient things you can take to gain real clear advantages that even randomized testing simply could not account for uh again you it would be uh some kind of proprietary drug that a rich person could make that there'd be no test for as a clear example so but if you did okay so something that doesn't have a test for it currently right something like the clear something like what balco came up with yeah something like that but there's a couple of examples so here's what i'm saying to you
one is like what's what's a suitable model well nba mlb to a lesser extent but mlb and then nfl we already exist in a world where basically a pretty significant chunk of those guys or taking something and nobody seems to care and it works out well for everyone what the people claim they don't like is the sort of the scandalization of it all what is the billy corbin documentary on alex rodriguez oh i've seen it screwball it's [ __ ] [ __ ] amazing it's [ __ ] great isn't it those little kids actually little kids are acting the part of billy corbin or or excuse me alex rodriguez and the the other players and all these like low level mafioso types you know but what a genius idea to do it that way yeah well let me just get this out sorry i'm sorry i know i'm ranting but the last thing is this is there's a couple different methods you can pick you can just decide that the existing professional sports leagues and my judgment have totally figured it out which is that you get a union to organize basic protections you put kind of a lid on the lobster and you just let it cook there without sort of really being super inside the details about it which means you will allow for some but you basically get to a point where there's not too many violations you're not giving too much of an advantage and you just let it rock because it the the general for-profit sports world tends to prefer that yeah but then we're just we're agreeing to deception we're agreeing on deception we already agreed to deception right but why do that is not the same you saw that is not the cure today well listen i'm not a i'm not a fan of some of the practices the big one is things like josh barnett right josh barnett gets hit for a tainted supplement he disputes it he's out for i believe he was more than nine months yeah uh they say tons of money we [ __ ] up it's a mistake you're free to fight but what what happens to all that time and money that he's missing nothing no one compensates
him it gets worse than they don't exonerate him how about tom lawyer tom lawler i mean they took his career from him it needs to be said out loud usada tested tom lawler and they said you tested positive for it was a osterian at the time and you tested at such a level we're going to ban you for two years two years later they come up with a test that makes them give more refined results and they come back and they say if you had tested at this level you'd have been totally exonerated they took that [ __ ] guy's career from him and they never apologized and they never acknowledged that basically they had too much belief in their scientific uh instrumentation to ever say sorry dude that is [ __ ] evil that's evil that is evil you cannot do that to a person so this is my point here's what i think the health there's one system is which is let the basically let a union decide and work the with the union decides with the uh sports organization the other one is basically what the um but the the strength and fitness world has done which is that you have some competitions where you just don't test and you have some where you do and that's not a perfect solution either right because you can still take it and try to take the one that's sort of yeah but again we're agreeing to deception this is why i i i what is the most of the way there there is no alternative well isn't the alternative let them do whatever they want sort of and not test sort of i mean at that point because i i just don't i don't imagine a world where we're going to agree that you're allowed to lie that doesn't make any sense to me because that's the world we live in i understand but but to to legislate to mandate this you're saying like it's some kind of harm to it it's if you have an organization like the ufc that's this multi-billion dollar organization they're never going to come up with rules or say hey guys we know you're
going to lie so we're going to allow you to lie and we're going to talk to your unions and we're going to set it up so you can lie they're not going to do that no no but what they will agree to is certain amounts of protections for the rights of athletes and through those protections they could lie that seems so ridiculous that's the world we live in is it everywhere every lawyer in the world has used that let's let's assume let's let's go from where we are now to the future where i agree with you we will have things like crispr and genetic manipulation and some other methods that we probably haven't even invented yet right and they're going to invent them and they're going to have perfect physical specimens what do we do then then it's going to be ridiculous to say that you can't do certain things because it's going to be undetectable it's going to be unstoppable you're going to have people in china that are they're making designer babies that are seven feet tall and they're they're they're built like he-man we're gonna get to that point eventually right so here's the deal you have to have stratified sports is the answer and people don't want that balkanized world is that stratified household in the sense that um basically what happens now is that like let's say you want to compete in elite weightlifting right that's what you want to do you don't really have much of a choice to do it other than through the olympics but if you want to do it through the olympics then it involves a series of procedures that relate to antidoping and blah blah blah okay but what if you want to do like strong man for example people kind of clown it because they do it in a circusy way but to me it's a perfectly legitimate sport by any other sports measurements i agree and you can't compete at world's strongest mans unless you are juiced to the [ __ ] guild or gills it's phenomenal to watch but what strongman has figured out is the average person men or women by the way they may want to train strongman
they want to compete in their local tournament they want to compete nationally they have a series of all different kinds of competitions for those who do want to do drugs and for those who don't for weight classes for age for gender and everything else in between now you don't get the satisfaction of saying that you won tour de france the only competition as relates to that there's no i mean there's other ones to you know the races but there's only one tour de france but you have to live in a world where you just understand um some of these are gonna everyone wants to make it like oh i'm the athlete who doesn't want to take drugs what about me right what about the two athletes who both don't mind taking drugs right what are we supposed to do for them people say you can't take drugs why imagine a world where they never did put any restrictions on testosterone replacement use in vitor belford still around okay see i'm actually against trt yeah for a couple of reasons who the [ __ ] are you and what have you done with luke for a couple of reasons one is that um the easiness of it was a little too much for me there should be some hurdles to taking some kind of drug you should be able to lie like cleverly you should put some effort into your life there should be a little bit of hurt and just be able to go to a doctor no that that's the problem if it's that easy and it's that ubiquitous and it's that easy to hide you've not created enough stumbling blocks and obstacles along the way to deter some usage the whole point is to deter the low-hanging fruit that's what you really want to sort of uh doesn't that set it up so that the rich guys and the guys that are the big camps that are funded by major sponsors they're the ones that are going to have the best athletes it's the opposite now you have that now is what you have because the other ones are super restricted they don't really have much of an opportunity to fight back against any kind of other
form of testing they're really sort of subject to it they can afford a lawyer you are of the opinion and we don't need to name camps but the top camps employ scientists or doctors or someone who knows how to get around the system i don't know about top camps i don't know how it would work that way but you know like top top athletes more plates more dates guys i know that guy looked at yoel romero yeah and uh paulo costa yeah and a bunch of stuff a bunch of stuff yeah and again is everything he says gospel i don't think so but it's worth it i think his take on yoel romero was that he's a genetic freak right he got [ __ ] by usada too yes he did right well so did tim means right another guy who doesn't look like he's on steroids at all right there's a bunch of guys a bunch of female fighters too right haven't they been popped sure for tainted supplements sure it's they have no one protecting them yeah but it's also like you're not supposed to take that stuff okay i mean listen i've dealt with fighters for a long time they're not the most organized people in the world i love them god bless them they're the most inspiring people i know preaching to the guard buddy i can't tell how many times i'm like okay 1 p.m east coast time we have an interview yeah yeah and they they just they just oh they're like i was napping like you think they're going to take they're going to look on the [ __ ] bottle i mean come on no and let's be honest also there's a lot of guys who say they took a tainted supplement when really they were probably micro dosing and they got busted right there's also that as well yeah there's there's that as well so i think you have to look at two situations one do you want a professional sports world like we have where people claim they care very much about health outcomes but they really don't where people are obviously using in the nfl which by the way i mean how do you get through an nfl
season without growth hormone i would love to know probably very difficult to do that tides okay but here's my point something vicious and then on the other side or you can just you can balkanize it a little bit you can have divisions for older people you can have divisions for um uh people who don't want to take drugs and for the ones who do again does this solve all the problems joe it does not solve all the problems but it's a much more honest and uh policeable world when i talked to roy jones and talked about the mike tyson fight he told me that they're testing they're doing vada testing and i was like man like roy's 51 and mike is 54. and i'm like hmm boy i would have swore that's not the case if you looked at mike's physique he looks ripped he looks so shredded but he might be one of those outliers one of those rare herschel walker type dudes right that can be 54 years old and be shredded i mean there are guys like out that out there that have just unbelievable genetics and maintain their physique deep into their 50s you well is what 45 i think something three he looks ridiculous i mean he's insane he's a he's a he's the epitome of specimen he's a specimen do you know what happened with him once want to hear this story i told it before forgive me if you've heard it folks uh he got uh a fracture i think he was in australia um he had an orbital fracture and uh the the after the fight doctor i think it was the whitaker fight um doctors examine them and the doctor calls up the ufc and goes where did you get this guy and he goes well yeah he's one of the ufc fighters he's like he's like this guy is a specimen he goes yeah yeah he's amazing right he's a top fighter goes no no no no no no no like i've never seen a person like this he's like i've been doing i've been a doctor for decades he goes his tendons and his eyes are three times larger than a normal
person's and he goes in that fracture is already healing wow yeah and so dana was telling me about this he was saying that you know cubans had this crazy athletic program and they were doing all kinds of experiments with people and he thinks that they did some experiments with athletes to create super athletes like you remember corellon you know corellon uh was they they called him the experiment that was his ex that was his nickname because his parents were both like five five five seven and he's a [ __ ] giant refrigerator who moves like a panther you know literally a 300-pound man who moves like a panther and you know obviously cuba had a a deep relationship with russia and if you've seen the movie icarus you've seen that movie right which is an amazing movie on doping like russians don't [ __ ] around when it comes to doping i mean they had a very specific program no corner cutting with them no corner cutting it was like super scientific and everyone's on board like you're not going to compete on the natch like no no no no we're here to win [ __ ] and uh you know i don't know what they did to make joel romero but that's not a normal human and everybody who fights him says the same thing luke rockhold said it feels like he's made out of metal it's like you fight the guy it's like he's made out of steel yeah here's the funny the guy so i uh tore my labrum lifting weights uh maybe 10 years ago or something and uh the guy who ended up doing my surgery by the mma fan he loved talking mma whenever i would go see him uh was the previous orthopedic surgeon years ago for at the time the washington redskins have since changed her name but nfl football team and i was like what are they like like cutting these dudes open he's like this is exactly what he told me he goes they're not built like you and me you know he was like saying you cut them open and you can't believe that the muscle fibers look the way they look
or that the tendons attached with the same kind of like tensile strength whatever the proper terminology is he's like it was just like everything you understand about the human uh anatomy you know it from a sort of averaged position and then you see these herculean monsters and you're like oh so that's what mothra looks like when you cut them open or some [ __ ] well that's what i'm thinking is going to happen eventually in mma if the money does get higher you're gonna see more of these next level joel romero type athletes because they exist more in nfl and nba like imagine you know a guy like lebron james fighting an mma who's like just a perfect specimen imagine these michael jordans imagine these next level athletes which unfortunately a lot of those guys wind up going to sports like basketball or baseball because there's more money there's more money in those sports and you don't get kicked in the face you know and then the football guys like like there's more money in football like you can make a [ __ ] insane amount of money in football like i was just reading about some guy whose contract was like 400 million dollars like some crazy [ __ ] like football yeah that's i'm not sure who that would be who's the who's the mo who's got the most money in football patrick mahomes maybe it was baseball this is how little i pay attention to sports you're missing out there's an article yesterday about a guy who uh is getting his full contract in baseball and it's a lot of money so that's a 300 yeah that's that's that's that's right maybe a second bro have you seen dk metcalf no holy who's that guy a [ __ ] yeah you think yoel romero is a specimen can you pull up yeah have we talked about him before hello pull up dk metcalf at the combine oh my god here's the thing i'll disagree
with you guys halfway which is to say to the extent you get this kind of athlete you're probably going to get on average better results the one caveat look at this [ __ ] bro he's a guy he's a joe joe he's a pass catcher how much does he weigh he's four to twenty nine what was his what was it he's 229 yeah dude what were his what were his combine numbers his uh his bench in his uh his run he is six three two the one percent the one percent uh body fat is not real but he did run a four three three he benched 225 27 times he had a 40 inch vertical look at that [ __ ] he can't be one percent body fat no that part part's not right holy [ __ ] is he shredded look at that whoa i mean try try tackling this [ __ ] wall the thing about fighting though that separates the men from the boys is the mind right and the difference between being able to perform in a sport and being able to fight another man is trying to separate you from consciousness is a very different thing it's like some guys just can't rise to the occasion big thing he did last week while he went viral he is right here watching the top of the screen i'm gonna start watching him again though watch him at the top of the screen right here top of the screen here he comes middle look at him run this [ __ ] guy down oh my god look at him dude he's 240 pounds and he runs the guy down that guy should be very fast also he's known yeah by the way the guy he's running down smaller than that yeah it's like a wide receiver super fast that's amazing that's amazing it's just amazing how many times these guys get tackled and it doesn't just rip their [ __ ] legs sorry it was an interception so it'd be a cornerback who got this i believe watch dk metcalf he goes for it misses and then comes back around and chases this [ __ ] guy down that's amazing it's unheard of for a guy this big there he is there's dk right here look at him [ __ ] joking look at him
go dude dk metcalf is so impressive you ever watch the combine dude when the combine comes on dude i'll turn off everything my wife is like you're watching a bunch of dudes run i'm like not dudes heroes superheroes but to your to your point about the uh the fighting yeah mark ellis you remember mark ellis yeah like he was like a division one national champion wrestler he had a i think he had one fight in pro elite and he was like no moss yeah this is the one caveat i don't know about dk mecca for anybody else but you see these guys and they're just all like in terms of athletic ability they're they're beyond comparison yeah but there is something about two things one people i was like oh with with fighting it's like you gotta learn how to like be punched in the face yes that's half of it the other half is and i think people overlook this you have to have something constitutionally where you're willing to hurt another person and not everyone has that not to the same amount that is not an automatic response it might be in the case of it's not just that you have to solve a puzzle you have to solve a puzzle and reason through it yeah there's a lot going on there's creativity that's involved in fighting that may not be involved in a lot of other sports that are just pure strength and speed and athleticism and the knowledge of moves and understanding of positions but there's a different thing that's going on where you're trying to create an opening when you're trying to create an opening fighting you know there's there's just there's things that people can do in fighting that also you have to commit to that at a very young age if you want to be elite like you can be a guy like greg hardy who has a reasonably successful career as a heavyweight just because he's a tough [ __ ] who hits really hard and he's a very good athlete but are you ever going to be francis and gano you know are you ever going to be stipe miocic are you ever going to be
it's like there's there's a there's a level that you reach where you only reach that level if you've been training it most of your life and particularly for striking for some reason there's exceptions to that rule where some people can figure it out but not in boxing in boxing it's very rare that someone even picks it up after their teenage years and reaches the elite world championship level right there's something about the timing and the understanding of it's like to someone who's looking out on the outside it's a guy trying to punch another guy the guy's trying to punch you you're trying to punch him but there's a there's so much more to it that's why a guy like floyd mayweather always wins like he's got a vocabulary that's just [ __ ] volumes and volumes of books and you got a little pamphlet you got a little pamphlet of ideas you know and he's standing in front of you with his shoulders like this and you think oh i i see i can hit this guy you you don't have a [ __ ] chance in hell he's so many steps ahead of you that's what you saw in the conor mcgregor fight he just slowly lures conor into his web and so relaxed and composed and eventually starts piecing them up and taking him out but there's there's levels that i think you only achieve if you start while your body's developing there's something that happens where your body is maturing and growing with striking when you that's where the real speed and timing and power comes from and again there's there's exceptions there's some people that are just sensational athletes they just learn like i don't think gilbert byrne started out as a striker i don't think he started out doing any striking i think he learned how to do that [ __ ] as a world champion jiu jitsu player who got into mma but he's a rare freak you know but it's also he's already a champion martial artist or also no already knows how to smash men right there's a thing about that so
think about knowing how to solve a puzzle knowing how to figure a man out getting a hold of a man's neck and putting him to sleep he knows how to do that already so to figure out that i just needed to know how to put knuckles to chin and he's already a fast guy he's already explosive guy and the dedication that allows someone to get to a world championship level in jiu jitsu it's the same thing in striking if he just puts the time in and has the focus the intensity and and figures out how to put end with the right coaching which is also huge the wrong coaching can set a guy back for i mean it could ruin you the wrong coaching can ruin you someone with bad ideas and piss poor strategy and execution you could [ __ ] or you can get you can run into a guy like duke rufus and he can create a world champion out of you i mean it's it's there's so many factors that play into it but if you can get a guy who has that mentality has a fighter's mentality a a person who wants to risk it all you know and not have the protection of other players not have the the you know the caveat well you know the team we didn't put together defensively and we'll be back next sunday [ __ ] there's no next sunday when you get head kicked right you know like you're not fighting again for a long time you get you're suspended for 90 days you're not even supposed to be sparring you know and then when you come back you're probably still going to be a little bit [ __ ] up from that fight there's a thing about fighting that separates us from all the other sports i i hate to say it again but i call it high level problem solving with dire physical consequences it's different than anything else because it's it's there's so much going on it's just two people and there's so much going on in that in that then those exchanges and it's so hard to read unless you know it and understand it
that's like the ground game like one of the things that meant so much to me when i first started doing commentary was expressing what i know about the ground game so that a person who's never trained at all can understand it so when people are going through positions and like a guy gets to a position and i know they're close to a finish or i know they've reached a pivotal point where the i started i would get excited and explain it it was so i wanted to explain it so descriptively like now he's got to get the arm and once he gets that arm past his leg now he's [ __ ] and and being able to do that to people so they could piece it together and watch it at home like oh when khabib mounted him and sat on top of him and put his leg around oh that's how he's heading up the triangle and then he finishes justin with it oh i wanted to be able to show people what i feel when i see a guy do a mounted triangle in a [ __ ] world championship mma fight and then find out the guy had a [ __ ] broken foot when he did it madness just madness not every baseball player can do that not every soccer player can do that not every football player can do that it takes a man with a a gladiator's mind like khabib nurmagomedov to do something like that that's a unusual human it's the one percent of the one percent well i would say for me uh i i often view the combative arts like a language which is why learning them five six seven that's actually teach someone a second language right yes if you teach them at two they don't actually pick it up they have to wait a few years and then they begin to get it and then they learn to speak you can't force it on them when they're young yeah i'm trying with my daughter it's not you know she prefers apple to manzana we're working on it but okay the point being is you know you wait till they're 567 and they begin to begin to get absorbing and and then once it becomes the language and the fluency and everything begins by the time they're 14 15 16 20 21 my
god the fluency is sort of incredible at that point that's part of it wrestling is the same as boxing in that way yeah you have to start very very young to actually want to compete later on but the other part is like the problem solving i would say that someone who's like a quarterback dude that is high level problems for sure you know it's not the same kind of situation where and this is why again everyone's going to focus on a different aspect of fighting that really appeals to them the problem solving is interesting and that's why i like otasanya faking and fainting because he keeps him at a distance so he can watch everything i hate to have favorite fighters but right now he's my favorite guy to watch next to khabib because there's something about stylebender man especially that out of sanya the uh polo costa fight god damn did he shut down the hype he changed the way i broke down fights ever tell you this i guess i haven't because of the first time i'm talking to you but i was just thinking about this the other day he did something in the silva fight where i was watching and i was like i don't know what the [ __ ] he is doing here i can't make it like you just watch it even in slow motion i can't make heads or tails of it like i don't understand what what the point of it is so because of because of him now when i break down fights i actually start i go round by round and i make notes every time any kind of strike lands or misses and then i begin to go back and i piece together a narrative based on what if there's a narrative sometimes there's not but more often than not there is about what is happening and i had to do it from this stance and then that stance because he was switching stances close distance far distance inside distance he is so meticulous and so thoughtful but so effortless that i had to peel everything apart before i could even begin to comprehend it people go and look at that fight they go oh well he only won 29 28. that's not the story there the story
there is that yes it was a little bit on the defensive side that is true but he is so smart and so he's the smartest fighter we have right now i think i agree he is so smart that he can watch what is happening set things up and do things in terms of manipulation distance timing and everything else it's a trap setting to the nth degree that there's he doesn't have a peer in that particular i really enjoyed your breakdown the paul costa fight thanks yeah particularly that one where you you you broke down how he pointed the fake like he faked pointed out that paul fell for it and then kicked his leg right afterwards you bid on it dude he [ __ ] that guy's mind up afterwards like you signed the contract started like contract contract did you just not watch what happened right you got torn apart for two rounds well you landed uh two body kicks and one leg kick for two rounds and you got dismantled and and and dropped the left hook and then beaten down and dry humped that was the and you're talking about a guy in palo alto that everyone was terrified of the guy who walked down yoel romero the guy who was smashing everybody they put in front of him he's a destroyer i mean holocaust is a [ __ ] terrifying force super terrifying adesanya just had all the answers and he knew he had all the answers coming in what do you think about adessana jones where are you i love it yeah everyone loves it what do you how competitive do you think it is well he's got to get past yamahobic first of all that that [ __ ] hits hard he had scared when he put out dominic reyes i was like holy [ __ ] when he ended with a weird punch too a weird left hand over the top that [ __ ] him up he's a beast man and he's another guy that was killing himself making 185 right goes up to 205 and starts nuking
[ __ ] he's a dangerous dangerous guy you can't make any mistakes with that guy gustavson out wrestled him for three rounds and at the time i remember being like oh he had to wrestle him he ain't that good i'm like in retrospect that's a great win by gustafson great win a great win yeah look you know that that guy moving up to 205 is going to be some growing pains but now he's the champion and he knows that he can nuke a guy like dominic reyes who went five hard rounds with jon jones and your eyes won the fight against the only time i've ever scored against jones the only time [ __ ] tight it was tight it was arguable for sure um i'd have to go over and watch it again if i wanted to score it but i remember thinking god damn this guy is ahead deep going and then john came on strong in the fourth and fifth but he nuked that guy he nuked reyes and and it's not like reyes wasn't in the fight but when he started hitting that left kick to the body and left that gigantic brew you'll realize like this dude hits so hard and his game is all power he's just a big power striker and just durable and tough just a bad [ __ ] he's impressive he's i had dominic reyes on my show after the the loss to jon jones and we talked about his game plan and his game plan was pretty smart if you think about it which is you're not going to barrel down on john it's really not going to happen john i think his offense is not the same as it used to be but his defense if you look at the numbers and just what the tape shows you john's defense is excellent why why do you think is offense not what it used to be what do you think is different so do yourself a favor if you have five pass if i pass i just i can't say enough good things about five pass i think they need to update their interface but in terms of like the service it does for someone like me like because you think you see a fight in your head one way then you go back and you watch it like oh my god i totally forgot half the [ __ ] you know
so it's a great way to remind yourself but if you go back and you look he had a certain kind of wrestling dominance from the shogun to the rashad really even up through most portions of his career that has begun to wane his his takedown ability has gone from about the mid 50s uh a little higher than i might say the 60s to about the 30s it's dropped off a cliff what do you think's happened the game has just gotten better i mean if you think about it dominic reyes didn't make his pro debut until 2014. now jon jones was the [ __ ] man already by then right i mean long since been the man by 2014 so how could it be that a guy can be training that long at least make it that competitive on paper it's because best practices have gotten much much better so what what dominic reyes wanted to do was create motion the idea was to get john moving because if he's stationary or he's barreling down on you he's much harder to hit but to the extent you can get the guy moving he's open to the body and to the legs now that's a hard way to win because really the head contest is what wins and loses fights more often than not whether or not that's fair it's just it's hard to win a fight on body shots unless you drop them but uh i thought he did win it so he tried the same kind of thing against yanbolhovich he was trying to bait motion he was trying to bait activity blochovich no sold it completely he was just standing there going nope not but not playing any of this [ __ ] whatsoever yeah come close get nuked yeah that was his game and so reyes couldn't he had no i don't i don't think he was expecting that i think he had a hard time adjusting well also when he smashed reyes's nose like reyes was in deep trouble he had shattered his nose before that big overhand he's just a beast of a man i think that's an interesting fight to watch don bender fight him and apparently that's the next fight for stylebender is going to be at light heavyweight
i don't know if it's going to be for the title does he say oh yeah it is going to be for the title is this confirmed no no it has confirmed james so so dana white announced it we've not had a full-on confirmation but you know the stylebender did an interview with submission radio there's a couple guys out of australia and he was talking like it was a done deal so i mean that you know they haven't formally announced it but i would expect it i am very interested to see that because belhovic has that power style and stylebender is in my opinion the most sophisticated striker the sport's ever seen and he's so clever and that you look no further than the polo costa fight i mean paulo costa is a [ __ ] gorilla it's just a attacking smashing dude and he he had nothing for him he had nothing for him and then afterwards to see paulo costa i was injured i was this i was that signed the contract it's like bro stop talking take away his iphone stop stop talking what is happening here opens as heavy favorite over ufc light heavyweight champion jan volkovic oh my goodness you know what though but belhovich has been slept on forever there's nothing new there i've been wrong about him a million times too you know yeah well it's very very interesting can you pull up his record though real quickly last thing on this can you pull up blhovich's record because he he here's a guy who i think lost the majority of his first six ufc fights i think he lost like three or four of them or some [ __ ] he had like a really not a great run at first but dude you know what's amazing these guys like michael bisping or whatever it's one thing to persevere in the moment it's another one to have just like long-term relentlessness yeah so let's go scroll down here if you can for just a second so he starts he starts there he wins against elirativi which is a nice win and then he loses to manawa and anderson he beats igor prakayak then he loses to gustafsson and cummins so he's losing four of his first six
but then he's like you know what [ __ ] all you hoes and then he just started he lost to thiago santos i believe that was the last fight at 85 right and he was a beast okay no harm no foul and then he kills rock hold and then fight was not no but the corey anderson fight is a perfect example corey anderson bodied him in the first fight you know the fact that he ko'd him with one punch like that and that is crazy yeah that was that was a really interesting thing because corey can take a shot too and corey was coming off of that big win off of johnny walker you know it's look there's a lot of great [ __ ] you know what i'm really interested in alex pereira alex pereira who is the glory uh i believe he's a two division champion yeah he's what is he fighting for lfa he's a fighter that's right yeah he's [ __ ] terrifying and he's the last guy to ko adasanja he's on my radar i'm really interested he's a champ champ over at glory too it was that guy is terrifying terrified that guy is almost like you want to grab his arm and feel what it feels like like what are you made out of that [ __ ] just puts people into orbit he he ko's everybody i mean when he knocked out jason wellness watch this flying knee ko and willingness by the way a beast by the way beat adasanya i believe and it was a close it shouldn't have okay i gave it to out of sonia i gave it out assigned as well but it was close enough but look at that i mean he's just but this is this is pereira look at this [ __ ] but he does this to everybody is there something about this guy it's like you you see him hit guys and it looks like normal punches and they just go unconscious like that [ __ ] i mean these are world-class kickboxers and this [ __ ] just puts them into another dimension he just put out an instructional with uh bjj fanatics have you seen it no but he has been training a lot with
glover chachera he's in connecticut training with glover and i think is one of the reasons why glover has made this resurgence like glover has looked sensational as of late glover i love glover and i think one of the reasons why glover at 40 plus years old has made this resurgence is he's training with pereira i think that i mean look iron sharpens iron we all know that and there's something about exchanging ideas with one of the best kickboxers on planet earth not just the best kickboxer but a weirdly powerful one he's a freak man there's something about pereira he he's astonishing and i think him moving into the lfa and if he gets through a few fights there and you know i have zero idea what his ground game is zero idea with his wrestling zero idea what his takedown defense is but he nukes [ __ ] i mean in a weird way i mean when he knocked out um a style bender it was like jesus one left hook he does it to everybody i know with the big gloves he's got a lot of different ways to do it it's not like it's just this oh he does it with everything knees kicks punches yeah and now he can throw elbows he couldn't even throw elbows in glory now he could throw elbows and he can grab you and throw knees everyone's gonna try and take this [ __ ] down oh they have to you [ __ ] better you better you're standing up with that guy that's death that's death i know i'm just like it's like i don't i want to get excited he beat he beat staubender twice in kickboxing i know but i'm just i decisioned him by k.o i'm just dying to see i understand the rest of it looks because of the well how old is he how old is that alex i don't know he might be like 34 ish 35 i was there at the last man standing tournament when he was uh right before he peaked he was he was pre-peak at that point um and he was still a formidable 33 years so he still got some time
and it literally completely depends on how much time he has spent on the ground how much time he spent drilling takedown defense how much time because it's relatively late to enter the game in mma you know he's had a couple of mma fights but as a kick but it's just a [ __ ] shame that he can't get the love and the money as a kickboxer because as a kickboxer you're just watching executions like when does he land i know and gloria was a shame because did you watch the uh still exists i know but uh they had their they had some issues obviously due to the pandemic but did you watch the uh batter hari enrique verhoeven yes crazy [ __ ] that was so fun that was they did such a great job how weird was the stoppage like he fall he throws a wheel kick and then did he get injured in the process yeah but i mean just the [ __ ] feel of it you've been to the netherlands i'm sure right no i haven't never never you don't know what you're missing really uh i would say it's funny i tell this to the dutch and they're like you're totally over selling it so i'm sure that i am but i went there with my wife and you know she comes from a different place my wife was an immigrant so she came from a different background and i have a different background and we went there and we both looked at each other and we go this is how society should be organized really yeah it's a homogeneous society to a large degree obviously part of the reason why they have some problems is because to the extent it's not homogeneous they have some issues but just the way you see the municipal planning and how life looks like in this in the cities there it's peaceful and it's happy it's like how did a place that is so tranquil and so lovable and so nice produce you savage [ __ ] i mean it's just shocking i know the story because of the dutch went down to thailand and brought it back and blah blah blah blah
dude it is i i don't it's a i if i had if someone's like you had to leave america because it got set on fire where are you going to go canada a little too cold i'm going to the [ __ ] netherlands really yeah wow that's where i'm headed well they certainly have an insane history of kickboxers right rob cayman ernesto hoost you know i mean there's just so many this is endless yeah there's so many raymond deckers ramon deckers decker's like one of the all-time greats and he may be even more impressive because he was small he was the size of the ties and he would go up there and light him on fire he was they didn't like that too much dude he he fought so hard he he shattered his ankle and had to have it fused so like he and he still fought and still kicked when they were like you can't kick with his ankle you'll have to have your foot amputated he's like [ __ ] you just kept kicking with it he was an animal he was like literally the gold standard for uh european western guys who went over and fought the tie what's the word farong farang what's what's yeah that's what they call it something like that but it's amazing too like you know one thing about the dutch is kind of funny if you've picked up on this the dutch will fight their teammates without a whole lot of consternation especially in kickboxing where it'll be like you wait you're from mike's gym and you're from mike's gym how come you're fighting they're like business you know they're not personal i'm like yeah in america that's like the most personal they don't seem to have a hard time getting knocked out and getting back in there again either it brings you back to alistair overeem who's a a dutchman who's just got this crazy record i mean you want to talk about a guy who's had what an insane record right k1 grand prix champion dream heavyweight champion strike force heavyweight champion at the same time yeah and he's just gotten so close to ufc gold you know hurt stipe dropped him had him hurt and just eventually wound up losing the
fight but he's a guy when he was juicy you couldn't stop him when he beat alistair or when he beat brock lesnar yeah that's as juicy as the world gets do you remember when he was fighting in like dreaming k1 at that time what michael chiavello said about his back no what do you say he said you could screen a movie on it that's perfect dude when he fought todd duffy i'm like oh my god when but when he fought brock lesnar that's probably the most impressive because he he muscled brock lesnar around like brock lesnar was the guy and obviously brock lesnar coming off a diverticulitis he had his giant section of his uh small is a small intestine or something like that digestive organs yeah sure some serious stomach surgery right so he's got gut surgery and not that many months removed from that less than a year he's getting kicked by aleister over him i remember alistair hit him with his shin to the body you seem like grab his body and go down and get beaten up but it was the way he beat him up before that it was just everything about it he muscled him he moved him around it's like and he was just the that was the ream when he was like full ubeream when he was 265 pounds shredded bit like a tank look like a comic book superhero god damn if you want to make an argument for steroids that's the argument well again he should be doing it against other people who know what they're in for i'm totally okay with that but uh well don't you think brock knows what he's in for yeah i mean again you think i have sympathy for brock lesnar in this case no we're talking juicy uh but here's my point about overeem is i remember when um when rhonda got knocked out by holly and max kellerman was on twitter at the time love max and max had said you know i don't think ron is ever going to recover from this mentally and at the time i was thinking like max you don't know [ __ ] now he ended up
being right but the reason why i felt that way was because i had seen guys like overeem get viciously ko'd or michael bisping or michael bisping and come right back yeah some people can come they are special special guys man yeah some people can come back and some people are never the same um before we wrap this up there was a few other things you were saying about the ufc i know that we this has been so much fun we've been going all these different rants but there was a few things specifically that i think we'd be doing a disservice if we didn't cover one of them you think is usada which uh i can agree with you i just don't can i make one final point about that we'll wrap up on this the one thing i want folks to understand is if you look at the history of anti-doping and again the scholarship on this is quite clear pre usada ufc i mean long into the 20th century and then really beginning around 1968 the the way in which anti-doping has moved itself forward is through there's been reports in the media that drive further forms of hysteria and then that forces the institutions to act and so you have to understand you can't talk about a anti-doping without media hysteria around drugs and b a lot of times when you see these developments in anti-doping protocol it's institutions protecting themselves like when the ufc really went to usada was it on behalf of the athletes if you want to believe that you can i cannot say it is wrong but what the scholarship is pretty clear about anti-doping is that institutions do it for their own protection which i understand there's nothing wrong with ufc being like you know what if we have a scandal here we're going to get [ __ ] if we don't do more i totally get it but that's a part of the argument that deserves to be noted and should not be forgotten yeah i don't know what the argument was that forced them to
institute crt trt caused all the problems it was over drt was a problem the question is how you solve it right and we went overboard in my judgment that's the problem i think we had now that's debatable but that is that is the cause of everything do you think that a certain level of trt would be acceptable like a doctor administered in a tr i i i tend to think that like that it's such an uh oh listen if you're going to have a system where folks are going to use then the way to screen that is through health outcomes right so you're looking at um forms of screening not so much for what they're taking but how you know their blood enzymes look and digestive organs and what kind of damage they're taking blah blah blah to me trt is one of these things where it's like um we're gonna make it super easy and we're going to [Music] like i said the readiness of it is too easy for me is is part of the issue that testing is random and that testing is you know you might get tested four times a year you might get tested ten times a year no one knows no one can tell what if there was a way where every fighter had like something like almost like an app and it it's somehow another you put it on you and it screens you like there's something that you could do where it can't be faked you check in maybe you checking on your computer like a facetime thing and it does something like if there was a way i'm obviously i don't know what i'm talking about but if there was some sort of technology that allowed them to see every day twice a day check you in the morning check you at night okay luke it looks like you're good you're like you're you're in the range everything's fine so a couple things is like every employee that i know who's not an athlete gets to have time off except an athlete we
ask certain things of athletes that we don't ask of anyone else in the world and the reason why is supposed to be to combat these harms but if you can't prove to me that these harms are existing or that you're meaningfully doing anything about it then why are we engaging in these privacy invasions well how about wasting time with conor mcgregor when he's he's in on in a [ __ ] yacht somewhere right they show up in a buggy like hey man you gotta give me a piss test he's like i'm [ __ ] retired right right so there's a lot of problems there it's like if you can't prove what you're doing yeah or stopping why are we engaging in all these privacy invasions but it gets to a larger point remember when tim kennedy got back from practice and he didn't want to get ringworm so he showered and usada folks were like we gotta test you once we're here we can't like give you time so they watched the [ __ ] guy showered which is deranged to the nth degree yeah but the point being is here's what anti-doping folks don't want to tell you there is a natural tension between what privacy exists and what solutions there are and there's a lot of good solutions or not good solutions there's a lot of better solutions if you just decide that people don't have any right to privacy if you decide that you have some options at that point but if you at all care about athletes and what they are entitled to as human beings um and what by the way problems might be like whereas don't you have to look at a guy's dick to make sure it's not rubber oh yeah dude you got he he he showered with the curtain open and then even you know tim kennedy was like all balls and everything yeah he's like watch my back come wash my back but when you when you pee do they have to look at your dick i think they do look at everything because you can have the wizonator yeah yeah yeah and guys didn't kevin random do that and he they said is non-human urine yeah it's like you
have like a dead man's piss how did you do that yeah i just it's it is weird whenever someone's allowed to look at your dick because they're thinking you're gonna cheat how about you see if they're cheating first and then you go hey i gotta see your dick next time right like it just seems it seems like a first step to just look at your dick while your pee is pretty good if you moralize doping which they have done if you moralize it which is not a moral issue it's a strategic issue if you moralize it you've decided that it's a evil worth combating to the point now uh well this is rod chenkov act as being floated through congress yeah i mean do i think i am right about doping i think i have some right ideas but here's the future of doping they're going to start putting more and more people in jail this is the way it's all headed because every time i've tried to make an argument everything has escalated i've just noticed it's falling totally on deaf ears and i suspect it'll be the same here even though i've tried to make an earnest argument they're gonna start putting people in jail and they already have in europe to a degree now what they've done is they've carved out if you're an athlete you won't get put in jail but if you're anyone who is aided in that process you're going to go but they're eventually going to realize what they've always realized which is that the punishment the sociological research on this is pretty clear it's really not the punishment that really uh concerns them it's the it's their um to what extent they'll be they'll be caught they think they'll be caught but if you're rich and you can avoid it or you're willing to take risks because that's inherently in the job that you're in you don't really think about these kinds of things and by the way you might have good methods of evasion so they're going to put people in jail and i think honestly we're they're going to put a lot of people in jail i think almost like we need a separate podcast just about this and i feel like it
almost should be a round table discussion with like someone like you as a proponent of this someone like me who's i i kind of see your point i agree with you and maybe some doctors and maybe someone from usada that would argue against it i think that would be an interesting discussion right because my arguments against usada are the josh barnett arguments you know the the tom lawler arguments this the arguments where you you're ruining guys careers and there's no repercussion and they're they're ruined financially they lose so much money they don't get any of it back you've made mistakes it doesn't matter and i get what you're doing i get you're trying to make the sport safer you're doing your job you are hired to do it but is it the most effective use of time and resources right and can also can you prove what you're doing show me show me the results of what you have done and they will be like oh but you know probabilistically we should rely on us i have never seen an institution in my life more than anti-doping institutions who just will are begging you and frankly demanding of you to take their word for it [ __ ] show your work i have to show my work show your work when you say show your work like what do you want to see prove to me that what you are doing is having an effect and don't give me all this [ __ ] about well we can't really do this and we can't really do that you are demanding money you are demanding that athletes give in to privacy invasions you are ruining people's careers which we've already shown so it better be [ __ ] worth it this juice better be worth the squeeze show me the squeeze what could possibly what could they possibly show that would make it that is their concern that is not mine i i the burden of proof is not on me the only thing you could say is you've caught people and you've stopped people and you could look at physique changes and saying yeah means nothing
means a little bit of that but i'm just saying you have anecdotal evidence yeah and what other world can you say i've got anecdotal evidence for my broad-based claims you go [ __ ] yourself there's no other world where you can do that except theirs i'm saying to you if what you are saying is working and what you really believe in is true show your work if there was a lawsuit and if someone won a substantial financial reward for some of these fuck-ups i think we'd see a big change i think that that would make if if someone like tom lawler won in court and got really paid because of this well they don't have money for that tom doesn't have money for that it's unfortunate because that he's i think he's you know but john john jones is the future right so the the scholarship on this is clear if you want after this is over i'll give you a couple of things you can read okay it's a little bit dense but it is pretend to read it i'll skip it keep it on your bookshelf because even if it's a reference tool you maybe you may find some value in it again did you read the [ __ ] you're like i had no idea i had no idea i had no idea it just keeps going you know but uh what they found through scholarship is that um so they've upped the punishments from a year to two years to four years so first of all someone explain to me why ufc athletes are on olympic cycles number one number two that's number one so the second one is beyond that um uh in in putting together this sort of um uh portfolio of of of punishments beyond the sort of olympic cycle um i think i said this already like they there's no evidence that indicates that the severity of it forces the behavior change it's only the sort of surveillance of it all as a function of um sort of fear but you can only do that if you abridge the rights of athletes so the point is this you'll hear them talk a lot about we have to protect the rights of clean
athletes clean athletes deserve to have their rights protected joe let me ask you a question how do you protect the rights of clean athletes by overrunning the rights of athletes generally that seems like a contradiction in terms doesn't it the ufc fighters did not sign up for it right and you have a situation where jon jones for example he got the whole torinoball thing we don't have to get into it but there's another athlete in the olympics elect from the ukraine alexei torikidi had the exact same problem tested the b sample it was totally negligible amounts and they took that [ __ ] guy's gold medal from him so wait a second why do we have one standard for the olympics we've got one standard for a private client for an underfunded organization which is about 20 million is their budget for usada and results in this sort of different world punishments john is the future because the research shows that the more severe punishment you get the more that you have to take uh precautions to not [ __ ] someone over right because if you're gonna ban a guy for eight years you're gonna ban a guy for life man you better be damn sure you're doing it but that has opened the door to fighters like john who have money and elite legal team and of course there may be the science on his side as well but it shows that you can take that opportunity and you can say aha you were trying to ban me for four years man what is your evidence and they can poke holes through all of it when your punishment is a year it doesn't really matter what mitigating circumstance you can show well his case is so weird too because it showed positive and the negative and the negative and positive but in such trace amounts there's no way he could have tested it and then had it go out of his system in time so the argument is that he has the long-term metabolite but not the short and medium term yeah so it's showing this weird
pulsating effect where it comes and goes particularly during weight cuts right which is apparently what uh alexi uh torah kitty had and he got [ __ ] all right luke this is a lot of fun man i'm glad we did this i think i talked too much no you were awesome it was great i really appreciate it i appreciate you i appreciate your show i really enjoy your breakdowns i enjoy your mma show i think you have a very unique perspective and uh thanks for coming man thanks for the invite and uh let's do it again the whiskey was great i'm happy to come on anytime it was fun thank you thank you bye everybody [Music] [Applause] [Music] you