Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_goUU_KNSn0
[Laughter] [Music] welcome thank you thanks for doing this man appreciate it dream to be here you have first of all as a referee you have one of the most difficult jobs in mma and you're one of the rarest guys because no one complains about you do you know that like i have heard zero complaints about you maybe there's somebody out there that's complained i've never heard it which is crazy it's it's weird you want your name to be called one time and that's what the announcement says refereeing this fight is such and such you don't want any complaints other than that because we know it's a lifetime opportunity for these fighters we don't want to do anything negatively to affect them so that's a good thing well it's such a difficult job because in impul you have an impulse like you don't know when to stop like is it now is he okay is he gonna be okay like sometimes fights get stopped early and it is the worst feeling when a guy is kind of rocked but then someone stops the fight and then the guy complains and that the crowd's like boo and you're like [ __ ] it's you know what's weird because our philosophy and you know i primarily work with two of the commissioners nevada state athletic commission in california two of the top commissions in the world you don't want to fight to go too long to risk long-term injury for the fighters so there's that philosophy of maybe stopping a fight one punch too early versus one punch too late your goal is to stop it right on time but it takes a lot of hard work to get to that point depending upon the history of the fighter you know their ability to come back and you know you got to make that subjective determination right away when is the time to stop that fight but man it's the worst feeling in the world if you think you get to that point you let it go too long or if you mistakenly stop it too early oh god it's a hard feeling trust me such a difficult job it's so
much harder than anything other than fighting like everybody else is like judging is kind of hard but they kind of they can hide like you're on tv that's right you know you're right there if it happens and if it's you that makes a bad call like all the the hate comes your way and you know you got to kind of stay away from you know some of the social media criticism because you got someone there that may not understand the detailed you know specifics of how we officiate and what we do and you're going to have critics not tell everybody going into a fight fans are going to hate you or love you half of the fans are counting for a fighter in the red corner half account for fighters in the blue corner and depend upon the call you make it may be the referee's fault it may be the judge's fault but your goal is to go in there and being as objective as possible and fighter safety is always number one yeah and some guys just want to see people get beaten almost to death they they don't wanna to be stopped even if the guy is covering up and in a turtle they think they should they shouldn't stop the fight if you stop a fight while somebody is standing up you're just gonna get crucified for that so well there's a call like with max uh holloway and calvin kater there was a lot of people thought you could have stopped that fight standing up but herb was like not quite and i think it was the right call i think he gave them but it was touch and go you could tell he was looking at calvin very carefully and there's that you know you obviously go to there's no one better than john mccarthy and herb dean right doing it for it comes down to intelligent defense yeah and not that's not just holding your hands up that needs to translate into doing something offensive and if you could tell that a guy's listening to your verbal commands
and he's doing something to fight back as long as he's showing some good cognitive skills and showing something offensive where he's not looking at long-term injury there's a possibility of him letting that fight go but man if it's starting to stem on a 10-7 round where the fighters just get destroyed and they're going to get hurt now it's our responsibility to step in with fighter safety yeah it's it's a like i said it's a very difficult job but you do it well you do it excellent one of the best and what's crazy is i got a text from pete's brat the og that's why and pete spratt let me know about your background like i did not know you were a fighter pilot i did not know that you did you work at area 51 i cannot confirm or deny that i worked at nellis air force base which is okay in that general vicinity so so you can't talk about like experimental [ __ ] or anything like that you know what i did the first thing i did at nellis was when i flew into thunderbirds right and then i went away for a couple assignments and then when i came back i was an aggressor and if you remember the movie top gun you know viper and all those guys were in the camouflage planes they acted as the enemy forces and trained blue forces before they go off to combat that's what i did the second time around so the nellis ranges are probably up in that general vicinity but as far as being someone that worked at that no i worked at nellis air force base oh we flew in that okay in that general area i don't believe you i think you're lying now now i think you're holding back did you feel it jamie all of a sudden he's like smiling i don't know the answers of the question you guys don't want guys in dark suits and shades to come in here and be like mr smith we needed i already talked to those dudes they're good guys they're just trying to protect us from the aliens
you know the crazy thing is in that area when people used to think they would see ufos and stuff like that you know there's a book that came out a couple years ago called red eagles that explained a lot of that stuff going on what they thought were ufos or you know transportation planes that were landing at some of the bases and stuff up there yeah a lot of people see wacky [ __ ] yeah the first time i ever saw a stealth bomber i was uh i was filming fear factor in um palmdale which is uh near was it edwards right by edwards yeah yeah and i saw a stealth bomber flying overhead i swear to god i thought it was darth vader when you see one of those things in real life you would think especially if you didn't know that the united states was developing one of those like when they were first developing them and flying them before they made it public that thing looks like it's from another world so as part of you say that so when i was on thunderbirds we do incentivize like media personalities and other people and i was out at our training area which is over death valley and we're talking to the navy controllers and they come over and say you know i was thunderbird too t-bird two i needed to fly straight level for five minutes so there's gonna be aircraft off your nose i need you to you know diverge to the right and stay away from it i'm like what in the world is this so i threw my radar out there which should snag anything out there and i'm getting these intermittent hits and i go i don't see anything on the radar next thing you know i look up and i go what the [ __ ] has happened and i look up and it's a b2 that has you know an escort plane right next to it that comes right next to it i looked at it for the first time and i go there's they're aliens out here this is some kind of space that thing yeah i mean look at that that does not look like it's from here yep that absolutely looks like it's from another world yeah like all those when people talk about seeing those triangular spacecrafts in the sky
i mean maybe some of them are from another planet yeah so if you've never seen one of those and like for me as a pilot perspective i've never seen anything like that you know you hear about the f-117 from the gulf war and you see this big thing coming towards you and that's what everybody always reports too a triangular object with like a light on each corner i mean that is a stealth bomber yep that's a crazy looking aircraft man yeah so i had somebody in my back seat that was like oh my god what is that what is that thing coming by i mean if we thought that we were being invaded and then you saw things like that flying overhead that that is what i would imagine they would be flying they came from another planet that thing is out at whiteman air force base you know you see it flying out there all the time so there are folks here in a local area there to see it taking off are there some new ones that they haven't released yet i don't know so i retired about eight years ago right i heard a crazy story one day that someone was hunting up in montana and saw something similar to that that he had never seen before that like came out of the ground in like a vertical type thing and then took off which you know the f-35 and planes like that will take off some of them in a vertical stance and then go forward but to see something that size and that scale do something like that it kind of makes me wish i was still in the military just so you could be in the know that's right what so which one can do that and take off the f-35 yeah so there's a couple of variants so the air force one does traditional rolling takeoff but the marine one you know it's almost like a harrier so the the back engine will rotate so it'll take off vertical and then as it's going forward the engine will rotate back the other way to give it forward propulsion but man just technology wise the stuff
that we're flying now so i will tell you this the first time i fought on the range against the f-22 raptor and i've fought against everything in the world so out of nellis with the aggressors everybody comes there to train to get prepared for combat there's no better plane in the world than the f-22 when that thing passed me and some of the stuff that i saw it could do i go there's no better plane in the world so as far as air superiority f22 is at the top of the food chain what is the difference it's f-22 is primarily air superiority you know so like air-to-air dog fighting long-range short-range missiles uh f-35 is you know command-and-control platform it still has weapons on it can drop bombs shoot missiles etc but the role is a little bit different so yeah that's the f-22 you go to airshow and see that thing you're like is that a plane or a helicopter with some of the stuff that it does but fighting against that you know as a fighter pilot your average fighter pilot is the cockiest person that you would ever meet in the world just like top gun exactly that's all real we're better than everybody that's our philosophy but it's very happy to have that philosophy all right i mean look at that look at that that's insane oh my god that's insane it just shoots straight up in the sky oh my god i mean it doesn't even look like a real a real plane that that is a mean machine right there so i got friends that fly that plane and you know you see it hey it's designed in combat you know the united states is still going to be at top of the food chain as far as the the personnel that we have the men and women that fly these airplanes and then the equipment that we're flying you're not going to find anything to match it that's incredible that turn that it just made in the sky so is that what the the maneuverability of it is that what's superior what the [ __ ] that's insane so thrust vectoring on the back you know plus the flight controls i mean look he just flat plated that and wow the amount of thrust is coming
out of it so you know internal avionics the stealth capability and the maneuverability of it nothing in the world is going to be that but they can't fly very long right you know uh it's a it's a total package so whenever you go to combat or something you're going to have tanker support out there so you're going to meet a you know air refueler up at 20 000 feet and get gas nothing can carry external fuel tanks but the goal is to be able to plan a mission to be able to go in escort have guys drop your bombs or do whatever and get back out with tanker support you know there's always that philosophy without the gas you know no one is going to go so like when i was in iraq and stuff we take off in saudi arabia fly a hour up meet a tanker go fly a five hour mission come back to the tanker get more gas go out and fly for another couple hours and then go back to the base how long can that fly for you know i don't know it obviously depends on how hard you got the gas down right i think in the f-16 if we stayed in full after burner for you know five minutes you probably run out of gas five minutes or it could be quicker than that now the goal is endurance you obviously want to be able to stay out there to maintain uh yeah go the length of your mission um but you look at the length of the mission and fuel capacity and the goal is obviously to have somebody there as a backup because you never want to be out there by yourself you always want to have that support you know so you may have guys that are sitting back here in a cap waiting for their turn to come in you run out of gas up front now you swap out those guys come back in so total protection so until they come up with something superior to internal combustion engines we're always going to be limited by the amount of fuel they can carry just because of the weight right so as far as endurance yes now capabilities of the plane most fighter planes have a g capability of 9 g's and that's you know times a force of gravity do you
wear a g-suit we did wear g-suit so in a fourth generation like an f-15 f-16 is a fourth generation fighter we wore g-suits on the abdomen and down on the legs and basically what that does as you pull g's you're going against gravity and blood starts to drain from your brain down into your lower extremities so the g suit is just a capability to help counter it it's really a tightening restriction of your muscles starting with your calves hamstrings buttocks all the way up and we do the hooking yeah the hook you hook and that's really to hold the oxygen in and what that does is lock everything down to hopefully hold the blood up in your brain as long as possible i told you i flew with the blue angels once and when i did that i i got to seven and a half g's before i couldn't take it anymore so did you start the gray out or yeah it starts to tunnel vision yeah it was like an elevator door was closing yeah and you know i'm doing that so it's weird because people think it's you know two g's would be one greater than one three g's is one greater than two but when you start to get above five it's not a plus one it's exponential oh so when you start to get to seven so six is ten oh yeah that's what it feels like and you can't explain how it feels but nine g's is absolutely i mean you get back home that night from straining and everything you know measles what it looks like little we call them jesus where your blood vessels will actually start to pop oh wow and you get these little specks on from straining so hard that you're popping blood vessels but the goal is obviously not to fall asleep we call it fall asleep in airplane gl uh yes of consciousness uh g-lock is what it's called if you do that and you're in the error it may take you 30 seconds to a minute to be able to come back to any kind of capacity and if that happens you know the majority of time is going to be catastrophic i uh made it through that and then i blacked
out on the way back because i didn't hook on the way back because i thought i got cocky i thought we're good and we made a hard turn and i think i blacked out at like five like four and a half or five wasn't even that much compared to seven and a half yeah if you're not ready at four you know people are like oh i can do g's you get on the roller coaster that's like a half a g or one g that's a black stick and i threw up it was double embarrassing did they make you wear a g suit no no g suit see the reason they don't wear a g suit is because in close formation if you wear a g-suit the g-suit is going to fill with air to help with that restriction on your legs and in the f-18 they have a center control stick and they rest their arm on their right leg and if that g-suit is moving up and down it's going to move your control stick so the f16 has a side stick controller where it doesn't touch your leg at all i mean it's like you recline back in the seat and the side stick controller so we can wear a g suit so it won't affect precision you know moving your arm back and forth is there any other technology that they've invented to deal with gravity like that just the sheer force of the acceleration so not just a g-suit uh but you will have uh induced pressure breathing you know so you wear a specific kind of oxygen mask and that's gonna force air into your system because the one thing you would hate to do is just hold your breath it's like a three second count you know you did that hook and then it's a three second count exhale inhale right quick and as part is that pressure breathing when you exhale and open your mouth it's gonna force air back in with that pressure breathing system so with the two of those together and then we combine it with you've got to be in shape you know you got to lift weights you got to have some kind of cardio conditioning to be able to last because it's one thing to be strong enough to hold that you know g position but then you do a 45 minute you know dog fighting mission your body's going to get tired so you got to
be able to sustain that the entire time so most fighter pilots are going to lift weights they're going to do you know extreme cardio exercises to be able to sustain but anything else other than that it was kind of weird back in the day it would be go drink a coke and a bag of doritos and get that sugar rust for that 45 minute flight and be able to sustain through it really it's more of a health conscious thing now you know the total package staying in shape i guess they're just smarter now about it probably a lot the blue angel guy that i flew with was a tank and the dude was swole he was like joel romero he was jacked you know that was philosophy because when i was on the team i'm 6'1 i probably weighed 230 235 that's large for a fighter pilot right the the cockpit was extremely tight usually they're smaller guys because is that a thing with the the gravity it's easier to sustain gravity it is a it's a height limitation so you can't be so tall when your head is up against the top of the canopy oh that's all it is but you also can't be that short well you can't see over the dashboard but there's a weight limitation too you know you can't be below a minimum weight because if you ever had to eject and you're below let's say 125 pounds that parachute is going to drag you you won't be able to stop or if you're above you know whatever the weight is 250 265 you're going to come down in that parachute pretty hard and you're probably going to get hurt yeah they can't make custom [ __ ] for you nope no and it's the same basic fighter so the thunderbirds it's a you know it's a frontline fighter that they take someone they take the gun out and they put a smoke barrel in it but it's the same basic avionics the same basic controls and it's just painted red white and blue and all the professionals that are the maintenance guys for the thunderbirds the best in the world the finest in the world and i had four of the finances when i was on the team they take them off of active duty lines and bring them nellis air force base and
do all the stuff on the planes but there was there hasn't been a real horrible air show collision in a long time but the last one i remember there was one in 1988 when i first started doing comedy i remember watching on tv and it was uh i think it was in italy yeah so we try to cover for that you will notice there's never any energy coming towards the crowd that's the first thing because those air shows those happen the planes crash they went into the crowd which is catastrophic and accident in the same sense but then if you go into the crowd it's just horrific so there's never any energy coming towards the crowd so if we hit each other you'd go into the crowd now on the thunderbirds we have trim so the plane is trimmed to fly level but like in a diamond where i was we would fly full nose down trim so i'm flying there for some reason what does that mean full nose down so at level trim the plane i can take my hands off it's going to fly straight level okay full nose down trim i have to hold back pressure the entire flight it's about 30 pounds of back pressure the entire flight so it's like doing a bicep curl for 30 minutes and if i were to pass out with that full nose down trim instead of possibly bumping into one of the other planes and making it more catastrophic my plane is going to go straight down into the ground and it'll be at a minimum loss so you know you'll see when guys and gals apply for the team they'll put them through strength tests they'll sit there on a you know a shoulder pull machine and they'll have to hold this 25 to 30 pounds in this little range like this for 15 20 minutes they have to sit there and hold that like that are there women that can do that yeah so the thunderbirds have had five females on the team uh and i was on the team that selected the first female like chris cyborg uh there are variations that are going to be on there
we selected to be strong as [ __ ] though right you got to be and i mean that's the that's the you know the standard for all fighter pilots nicole fifi is her khalsa malikowski was the first uh air force female thunderbird and she was outstanding you know she was a f-15 strike eagle pilot prior to that so she was a combat pilot prior to getting there wow and she had she had an amazing tour on the team a good friend of mine you know gone through some great things she worked at the white house a couple years after i worked there probably more difficult for someone like that to train for that right like what kind of weight training does she have to do to prepare for that kind of physical everybody does their own program so there's no like program that's assigned by you do have to do a air force fitness test which is you know so they do waist circumference and then you have to do sit-ups push-ups and a model and a half-run you do what's a weight circumference waste like waste you know i can't have a size 45 right you can't be fat and it's really um you know a combination of standards that they do for that uh you have to do that and get scoring on it and based upon your age the minimum numbers that you have to get but honestly if you're someone that's in shape and you work out regularly like if you go out to las vegas and go to the base their gym out there looks like one of the best gyms that you've ever seen in the world like the ufc performances exactly like that kind of stuff yeah so you'll have that kind of high level stuff and everyone is encouraged and it can be to the point that if you don't pass that fitness test and that's not just pilots that's everyone across the board you don't pass that fitness test you get another opportunity to do it if it gets to the point where you can't pass it they'll say so long you don't meet the standards you're no longer in the air force i would imagine that it has to be that way
i mean you're flying how much is one of those costs like like the f22 how much is that that's i don't know the exact cost that but like when i was on the team those f-16s are you know 30 40 million dollars a piece so you know if something happens to one you know if so i was on the team in 2002 to 2005. is that accurate oh my god that's a lot f 22 is an estimated what 334 million yeah now that that cost is based upon how many you buy obviously you buy more of them the cost per is gonna go down how many does anybody have so who's buying these things i mean that's obviously the air force yeah the f-22 is only a united states air force platform now the f-35 is navy air force marine and we do have some joint partners in that one that that play has been sold around the world as well yeah that's what i was going to get to they sell those to other countries the f-22 they don't good f-35 they do it may have limited capabilities on it so it may not have all the bells and whistles that our planes have but does anyone have something that's similar to an f-22 in other countries uh i think russia has a stealth-ish looking fighter and china has one but i don't think the capabilities are anywhere near f-22 see what i would imagine that there's got to be a lot of pressure on them to design something that's competitive with that it may look good on the outside but it comes down to the question of you know is it stealth and what kind of capabilities that it has we've never had a uh a war or any kind of combat where those types of planes have fought against each other you know there hadn't been a shooting war really you know in a number of years since iraq and you know maybe some stuff in kosovo and like that but there's as far as dog fighting enemy versus enemy in the sky you haven't had that in a number of years what do you think about all this space force talk it's kind of weird because you had those
capabilities within the air force already yeah and to split it off into a separate force you're essentially just pulling entities out of branches of service that were already there doing the same thing and there are a lot of people that you know we got some great folks that work you know do all the space stuff you know working with nasa and international space entities doing all that but was it necessary i don't quite know well you're on the you're in the know so you have to tell us because we don't know [ __ ] i didn't i didn't personally think it was necessary um you know so this is is the idea that they're preparing for one day when wars are going to be fought in space is that the idea behind i don't think it's just wars you know it's communication capabilities so like when i worked at nasa we were finishing the space shuttle and it's like what's going to be the next generation of going into space and the goal was eventually to get to mars and so my daughter at the time was six seven years old and my boss the nasa administrator he looked at her because my daughter wanted to be an astronaut he's like you're the perfect age of someone that's going to go to mars and the goal was to be able to go back to the moon to build a platform at the moon so we'd launch and go to the moon and we'd have a outpost at the moon and then launch from the moon to be able to get to mars and then it'd be like you know it's like a year to get to mars literally a year go do your stuff there and then a year to travel back now that has changed a little bit because you know you need congressional funding and all that stuff and there has to be a determination of do we need to go back to the moon how much money would it cost to set up a base in the moon a lot and that's the question god it's like you know priorities as far as financial budget what we need right now you got some incredibly smart people that work at nasa and you know some of
the other international space entities but i think the truth of it that came down to and you know you saw those movies hidden figures and they talked about launching to the moon and stuff some of the knowledge and capability to get to the moon was lost because a lot of these professionals that did all their mathematics and calculations to get us there they had that stuff up here they go to a chalkboard and they'd write it down and say okay this math formula this calculation this projection this will get us to the moon but as they started to age off guess what we didn't have that technology written down so with our capabilities today seems so ridiculous it does with our capabilities today you would think oh we we can go back to the moon today my favorite is looking at the the the nasa the room in houston where they're all smoking cigarettes they're all wearing them nerdy glasses with the ties on it's just such a window into the past such a strange time those rooms are still down there you know i got a chance to you know failure is not an option all those discussions you go down there are they updated or are they in the original they still look like an original oh man so nasa's obviously changed a little bit you know it was a sad day with the cancellation of the space shuttle but we had to that thing was starting to age out yeah as we look at the next phase of what's going to you know take us up into space but working there for a year i got to go down there and see all that stuff you know with the yeah oh yeah look at those whack monitors and [ __ ] everything it seems it seems so weird that way everybody the green computer is like in the bottom left down there all that stuff it you know still looks like i wonder how many of those guys died of cancer because they all smoked right they were all smoking in the movies they were i'm looking for cigarettes in the photos oh come on these guys are smoking they
just put their cigarettes away before the for the photos it's the craziest thing when i was working down there i had some friends down there in the space industry and i was talking to one of my friends down there and i had on this little band that said you know failure's not an option there you go and yeah look it's got a cigar well that's because they i think that's yeah that's when they made it and the the lady i was talking to she worked in one of the space industries and she's like oh that's nice she got my dad's band on and i go what she goes yeah my dad's jean krantz he said that i was like oh the cow he's over here you want to go meet him oh wow all those guys you know tell everybody who that is so uh the basically the philosophical head of you know all the launches down there when we had some of the apollo missions that were not successful you know launches that went off that weren't able to do everything or you know i'm not able to get to our destinations he basically threw down with the nasa philosophy that said failure is not an option that's him right there with the vest right yeah we're going to make it to the moon we're going to do this and as you know was a it was a race race to space against russia and we were able to you know they had sputnik that went off first but we were able to successfully make it to the moon first it's weird a lot of people believe that was in the studio somewhere and but man as you work in nasa and get to see all this stuff you go nah well sputnik might not have been in a studio but the the film footage have you ever seen the film footage of uh yuri gagarin that's his name right oh yeah yeah it's kind of crazy because the they fake the footage like they re created it because the the actual thing that he was in what would you call what the russians had the first man in space what was his uh what was the the oh the actual module the actual module do they have a name for it i don't know
their one now it's called the soyuz which you know yes top of the you know roman candle when they shoot you off yeah well they recreated it but it's kind of obvious because it's like he looks like he's acting and it's like a light here and a light here because like the shadows are in different directions and he's like sitting like you could tell it's fake it's kind of weird but they had to have footage of it because just to kind of show that they did it but then like you know actual experts analyze this thing like this is probably not the real footage of the actual module being in space you know what's weird is everyone depicts russian united states as being so adversarial so when the space shuttle ended to get to the international space station there was one way to do it yeah you had to go to russia yeah so we had you know russia and the united states are going head-to-head no if i were an astronaut and were selected to go to the space station i'd go live in star city outside of moscow and they got you know us canada all international forces there you'd live there and do all of your training and you'd launch on the russian soyuz to be able to get up there and it's it's pretty wild it is wild so i got to visit and you know people bring their families and stuff over there and there's a row of like 10 15 town homes you live in year one so it's three stories top two stories are yours you know kitchen and stuff in the middle bedrooms up top and then downstairs everything is joint so there's a weight room there's a game room there's a tv room there's a movie room that everybody shares together but it's at this place called star city on the outside of russia have you been hey i've been there a couple times what was it like hanging out with the russians uh hey the food there is incredible really what do they eat uh so like we would have you know like barbecue meals and so i was told you gotta get your system ready
because they're gonna toast to every kind of success that they could think oh no so i'm not a heavy drinker so my boss was like oh you can tip it back but just don't you know don't get drunk doing anything like that but it's like every two minutes cheers you know to this to that and it's like god man i'm gonna is it vodka mostly it's live vodka yeah vodka is easy to get carried away with because it doesn't seem like you're drinking much so here you are at this you know at their space station thing their headquarters and they're celebrating a successful launch they're celebrating going to stage two stage three et cetera and there was a lot of you know celebration a lot of caviar and stuff like that but i kind of looked at it like the base could my kids live here for a year or two now obviously they're going to take care of you the weirdest thing for me when we travel around you'd have security and stuff with you but we went to russia because there may be some forces that you know are anti-government or other things that you want to deal with we would have like we'd be walking in our group and there would be russian soldiers surrounding us like in a circle that would have you know like their ak-47s and stuff and if anybody thought they were going to interact and get in the middle of this you know those guys are hard the way they keep their security protecting their vips and stuff but it is interesting the relationship between the united states and russia when it comes to space travel that the united states needs the russians they just need them yeah because we had a design to have you know the constellation what was going to be our new rocket system et cetera uh but once again because of budgetary confront constraints and what congress is going to approve if there was another means to be able to do that we said we're just going to send our folks to russia for right now so when i left the white house the boss was like what do you want to go do and he said
narrow down to three places i was either going to go fly to f22 i was going to apply to be an astronaut or as i did i was going to go back to nellis air force base the astronaut program would have been a dream come true but since we had already selected the last crew for flying the space shuttle i said i don't know if i'm going to get the chance to go up in the space or not what if they talk to you about going to the moon and putting the base up there would you have done that i i probably would have done that jesus mark why do you want to go do that as long as i get back it's all good you know what freaks me out the most about a base in the moon there's no there's no atmosphere so like [ __ ] that comes flying out of the sky that we see that's just shooting stars that stuff lands on the moon it just slams right in there so you could be chilling in your little space station that you spent six months to develop and set up and then boom you get hit with a rock going out with the bang though it's it's that you know i've always had the goal of you know achieving something incredible in life what is this jeremy guys going paying money to go oh my citizens god oh to the iss for now axiom oh for now i mean this is the first or not the very first but this is big news like i think the first private crew wasn't it martha stewart's you know a former boyfriend or somebody went to hate he went up on the soyuz he might be going there just to get away from it i think he he already did it though this is a few people have already done it but this was like a new trip they're all paying 55 million a piece jesus to go hang out for eight days there's no room for them to sleep on the iss they just like grab a sleeping bag and float i guess yeah the third guy from the left makes sense he's like [ __ ] it i do that i ain't got much time left in a heartbeat if i were to get the phone call to say hey you want to come join the current space program to go do it oh that ass my bosses over in dallas for a
little hiatus and i'd go do it what is the highest you've ever been in a fighter jet possibly over 50 000 feet possibly you don't want to confirm or deny i understand that seems like the edge of space uh you can start to see some pretty interesting stuff up there the plane is rated to go to 50 000 feet and that's really for pressurization and some other stuff but maybe to expedite get from point a to point b we may have gotten may have gotten over that once or twice so what does it look like up there uh so all the flat earthers out there you can actually you can start to see the curvature you want to take those dummies up there like just get in the plane [ __ ] so i i made a bet some guy was arguing with me on social media which is smart on my part right you were arguing about the flat earth i put it to him i said you go find the point on earth where it ends and you can fall off and i said i will pay for college tuition for all of your children i didn't hear another thing from him ever so it and when i fly now you know our plane you know we'll go up into the you know the low 40s most time we're going to fly in a high you know 39 000 something like that you can start to see the curvature of the earth when you get up there you know especially at dusk and dawn so when you get up at 49 50 000 feet you can you can see the good curvature yeah the the view from the space station you know the just the images that i've seen from there it seems like that would just change your life just the the relationship that you have to the earth the way you look at living on earth being above it and looking down on it like oh down there is home it's just it must be a com like a complete paradigm shifter you know what's amazing so whenever i go fly you know we can't do anything below 10 000 feet but once you get above that
you can take pictures and stuff and you know taking off out of vegas at six o'clock in the morning at sunrise you get some pretty amazing sunrise photos if you're going eastbound so i will post stuff to my social media all the time some of the you know if there's a big thunderstorm right next to us you know i'll film it and post it and people go crazy all that kind of stuff and i'm a beautiful day over the gulf of mexico and i'm snapping pictures and posted on social media and stuff there's no restrictions on like using your phone while you're up there you can't be on wi-fi you know you can't be we don't sit up there and you know watch the game once you can't be arguing with people on twitter while you're flying you so in the back you can but as far as the limitations up front what one thing i will say is we are a very disciplined group so below ten thousand feet unless it has to deal with uh specific flying there can't be any casual conversation and that's a faa mandate we adhere to that 100 percent once you get about 10 000 feet we do have wi-fi up there but we simply use it for navigation and looking at weather and stuff like that can't be you know do you have a is it a satellite link it is a satellite link um so we have a couple communications you know there's a you know satellite link on the back of the plane and hopefully it it's working because that that's our communication as far as back and forth talking to the company looking at weather and you know folks in the back as far as being able to socialize internet social media stuff like that there are capabilities in you know who i work for is it whack is it like airplane wi-fi where it's real slow and you can't really watch youtube um no actually i use it coming out here yesterday and i think it's pretty good now some of the expanded you know things that come with it you may have to pay for that but as far as basic capabilities you can't connect to it and be able to use it
are you talking about on a fighter jet are you talking about on a regular commercial airliner commercial so it's gotten better oh yeah oh yeah i don't even bother anymore if i fly i just just watch a movie on my laptop or something you know i do that and things have changed over the years i used to get on the plane and sit in the back and i would be sleep before we pushed off the gate and that makes that trip but now i'm so conscious of everything going around me because of sitting up front we have to be you know the flight our flight attendants are amazing everything they have to deal with in the back but because of security procedures and stuff like that so i had it i had an incident on the plane about five years ago that i'll never sleep on the plane again um so it's very secure when we come out of the cockpit you know you don't want any kind of cockpit intrusion and you'll notice when we come out of the cockpit pastors cannot use the front restroom and there'll be security procedures in place so i came out of the cockpit and this gentleman got up and started to walk towards me and the flight attendant was like you got to sit down and the guy just stood there and attended to a texas standoff like who's going to win here guy wouldn't sit down so i leaned around the flight attendant very aggressively i was like hey sir you got to sit down and he didn't he had this mean mug on his face about five feet away from the flight attendant wouldn't sit down so what i did now is i picked up the pa got on and said hey sir pilot's out of the cockpit you need to sit down right now and now what that did is i got other passengers involved and everybody's looking around their seat to see what's going to happen i thought he aggressively was going to try to come up and do something so what i did is i put my hand on the back of the flight attendant and i said if he comes forward i just need you to lean about five feet to the left if he aggressively postures
and tries to attack i'm going to put his jaw on the floor you hate for it to come down to that you never want to be able to do that but i thought the guy was drunk i don't think he was um i think it was probably something more to it but you know our goal is safety of you as a passenger you do something more to it so he was thinking about going to the cockpit you never know what someone's you know they're don't know they've been cockpit intrusions yeah you know the doors are really enforced but you know there have been people that have you know before the safety seal at the bottom that have busted that out and try to get into the cockpit and you know other crazy things that have happened over the years my goal is to get you from point a to point b as safely and smoothly as possible and if somebody tries to get into our cockpit i'm going to defend that as much as i can what happened to the guy did authorities meet him at the gate when he landed we don't get involved in any if there is a potential law enforcement engagement we may call them but if there was an incident what we did is we just kept the door closed so they may have met him but we won't get involved in that at all unless there's actual interaction physical did he eventually sit down he did sit down because one thing i noticed after 9 11 a lot of people like not happening on my plane today so when i picked up the pa and said that i had a lot of other pastors turn around i was like you better set the [ __ ] down right now you're not gonna do this and you know you got other people starting to get involved with it they made them sit down he very angrily sat down how weird but now you got other passengers that are you know conscious of it and that's that's one thing we would probably ask you don't want people to engage in it but if something gets out of control everybody better step up and do our part to you know we never want a 911 to happen
again we don't want to ever experience that again it's just some people are just if there's any sort of pushback against them at all they they're almost ready for conflict there's certain people that you know you tell them you have to sit down like or what or what happens if i don't [ __ ] sit down they're gonna land and you're gonna get a nice greeting at the gate so like now the big thing is the mask right you gotta have the mask on yeah so if we're taxing you out you don't have the mask going they will our flight attendants they know where a lady got kicked off a flight because her baby wouldn't keep the mask on which is kind of we were just talking about that that's kind of tough what what age do you you know if it's a two-year-old two-year-olds can't have a [ __ ] mask and by the way if they get sick it's like nothing it just goes in and out of their system i mean the flu is actually very dangerous for them and nobody ever did anything about that but coronavirus for little kids is not statistically speaking yeah it's not a big danger it takes some you know that's how i go back to our flight attendants one of my flight attendants frank you know uh we talk about that all the time they are amazing with what they have to you know deal with so one customer service safety etc and when you start to deal with issues like that man it takes a lot of you know patience and discretion to do the right thing but if it's an adult that simply does not want to comply they'll do everything they can to get that person to comply to the point of having a call up front and tell the captain that we have an issue and then even when it comes to that because it's about safety and customer service we're going to get on a pa and say ladies and gentlemen we have compliance things that you need to follow please do this if you don't do it now we have to go to
the next step some people just don't like following orders man so it's so weird you could see it in their face it's like maybe something they grew up with or whatever they're like no [ __ ] this there's an easy fix of that we'll land and be like have a good day you said that flying over here to do the show was the first time you sat in the back in a long long time was it weird it was weird one because the lady next to me was coughing oh no oh no it was funny everybody around her every time she coughed everybody would look at it like that's not dorona is it so i casually reached down in my bag and i pulled out another mask with my hat on and my shades and i'm kind of sitting in the corner like this and oh my friend reggie watts has this helmet that he's going to wear when he comes here it's the most preposterous thing it's a hepa filter it's a hell it looks like a space suit pull that stupid thing up oh you got it right here we have it we actually have it oh wow we bought a couple of them that's incredible i haven't put it on jamie put it on but this it's it's kind of ridiculous very kind of it's very yeah very ridiculous right yeah yeah you can't hear anything when you're in which one's the top that's it there's only one way to put it on okay like this yep yep so reggie's gonna fly there are aliens and i guess if you seal this [ __ ] up though yeah there's a fan you got to turn on though huh just a fan on the side where's the fan there's a slit on where like we were right here by your jaw yeah i don't know where to go where's it turn on [Music] that's like an astronaut helmet oh there it goes so it's got a fan and it apparently clears the air too right oh man yeah it's like a hepa filter okay sure so reggie's out there flying like this people would freak out if they saw that follow him on instagram he's a great
follower but he's actually flying with one of these things they'll make you take it off at tsa because i got to see your true face yeah like you come up with the mask and stuff yeah they make you pull up once you're on the plane can you wear this i don't see why not i don't see why not it's better than a mouse there was a there was a guy that had a a boba fett helmet on an airport yesterday nah they'll make you take it off because they got to make a determination if you have a true mask on yeah a true mask you know cause like you can't wear the ones with the vents in it right right anymore so they and we never understood those vents like a guy came to the studio once and he had a mask and he had two vents on each side i'm like what are you doing yeah that you have a hole in your mask this is not a real and you know the little like the plastic face shield yes it's about you can't wear anything like that those are ridiculous too there's a whole we can grab up and grab your face yeah i'll just all of it's just so strange because nobody knows what's really working and what doesn't work and then there's these anti-mask people think that nothing works there's no evidence some of them are actually intelligent that's what the real problem is like alex berenson who used to write for the new york times was on this podcast he said there's very little evidence that shows that masks work i wear a double mask like so i got my mask and then i put one of the you know the medical mask on the inside that's what tom cruise does and i kind of look at it like if i can't smell anything that's at least a start you know at least it's at least some i would imagine if someone's coughing there's stuff that's in the air and if you have a mask it's got to stop some of that [ __ ] yeah but that's been the goal to stay as safe as possible now explain to me how you go from being a
fighter pilot to being an mma referee all right so it's weird uh when i was in vegas the first time 2002 to 2005. um part of my physical fitness regime was like everyone has to box i went to the air force academy everyone has to box deer really everyone has to box with the part of that part of the uh pe programs as you go through a boxing program really yeah so fourth semester you've got a box you know that's part of the self-defense skills there are there are other things that they do they make you spar yeah you gotta fill out spar and then whoa we got boxing teams at the academy and i will say that for years the academy boxing team was a you know the best in the world hey ray mercer won the gold medal in the olympics when he was fighting for the army there are a lot of you know a lot of my clients i'm sure that's the case yeah all americans that you know boxed throughout the years yeah and so when i got there you go tour box in the army too yup and that's so that's kind of tied in that's how it started when i went back to vegas i went to a gym called jay sek which is now fight capital sure and jay sack you know what's going on john lewis yeah that's the first gemini shout out to john lewis skipper kell all those guys are amazing so skipper's awesome back in the day that's where randy couture were trained marvin eastman t ortiz chocoladel i went in there and that's where i started doing all my boxing my jiu jitsu and everything else so i was already doing some stuff with the ufc you probably don't remember but some of the old school ufc fights like when um randy couture fought in columbus ohio they would have me come out to the fights and go to a local va hospital there in the area and i'd bring a group of like five or ten vets out to every single ufc fight is columbus when he fought for the title against tim sylvia well against tim sylvia yeah i remember you know that and some of the other ufc fights i bring these guys out so i already had a rapport and a relationship
with a bunch of those guys and here i am doing this training boxing stuff at jsac and we had a couple guys coming there that wanted to spar one day and i was like oh that looks interesting i think i'd like to get in that referee with him and skip was like practice with some of the other guys first while they're doing their live sparring and then when these pros come back i want you to get in the ring and move around with them and see what you think and it was weird because dana came in there one day and i was like man can i have a picture with you we took a picture he's like what the hell are you doing now i was like how's this practice refereeing a little bit so he's like is that something that you're interested in and i said yeah so him or you know somebody to work for him told me i want you to contact these guys i want you to contact barry meyer god rest his soul and the folks over at tough enough jeff his uh younger brother yeah one of the top amateur promotions there uh in las vegas across the world you know mma fighting etc so they had me go to their fight the next day and i sat there next to barry and he's like is this something that you want to do in our practice scoring fights i did that for a little bit and the iska folks brought me on as a judge and i did the judging for about six months while the whole time i'm still going to these gyms extreme couture syndicate jsec getting in the ring and i'm practicing with these guys and i go you know what i love this referee and stuff so i decided to take a formal course so i went and took herb's course and i realized how much i didn't know so i took herb's course and i did really well there and where does herb teach his course out of uh you know he was teaching out like in the glendale area at one of those gyms out there california yeah so how long is a course like if you wanted to learn how to referee oh it seems like it would be very extensive yeah so you have to be qualified to get to that point to accept it you know so
herbs course is over uh two days so you already have to have some experience as an amateur or if you want to pass if you want to pass if you if you want to come there and just you know show up and learn some stuff you're probably not going to pass you got to be proficient when you get there so i took herbs course and i did really well and i made you know herb calls it his dean's list as one of his top officials and then i switched over to refereeing so here i am judging amateur fights and then refereeing amateur fights bill brady who was the chairman of the nevada state athletic commission was coming to the fights and then he knew i was military also he knew i'd done some stuff with the veterans coming to the fights he talked to me one day and he's like how far do you want to progress with this and at the time i did know because i was still active duty military so he came and he watched me do a bunch of fights and he would look at my scores and watch me reference and then i got this phone call one day that says we want you to come to the commission meeting on tuesday and i was oh man it's either good or bad either i did something wrong i'm about to get suspended well i went in and you know you stand up in front of them and uh they ask you these series of questions and i was very lucky so i got licensed in nevada which is obviously the biggest state for the biggest fights in the world yeah they brought me on as first a judge with keith kaiser you know he brought me on for a judge a little bit and i'm still referring amateurs and get more proficient i started to try this again so i went and took big john's course and herbs course is hard big john's course is extremely hard three days to get to that level of proficiency and and big john has a you know pass rate is extremely rare you got to know yeah and you know they work together you know with the commissions and the association of boxing commissions to
get proficiency across the board well i took john's course and i was like god man this is really challenging is he still doing that now that he's doing a commentary i don't know if he's doing it just because of all the virus stuff but one thing i will say is we still do training like uh so i tomorrow the state of nevada has training i run all the training for the state of nevada we're doing that via zoom california did a training last week and john and herb and all the top officials in the world everybody participates so john is still doing that while he's doing commentary for bellator i don't know if john's course is still active at night and he also does that podcast with josh thompson he does a podcast so yeah you know but although he's you know doing the stuff with bellator he's still you know very much involved in the game with that knowledge base you know he essentially wrote the unified rules of mma he's become a very good commentator too yes he's excellent yeah so you can imagine me now having my two mentors in the game uh her dean and john mccarthy you know for folks to say all these referees they mess up or these judges mess up no it's not like that at all if i mess up something i hear from both of them because again the goal is to not affect the outcome of a fight so i do that for a little bit and then the athletic commission goes we think we want you to be a referee as well so at the time there was no one that was doing both they want you to concentrate on one of your expertise so if you know you go back and look at it for a while there i was the only person that was refereeing and judging eventually work my way up to ufc fights now i made a transition so i could focus more on refereeing and then my fights have progressively gotten bigger and bigger as my proficiency has gotten better if you look at that last card that we did i think i had three of the biggest fights of any ufc card i did the cub swanson fight what i did fight that one it was holy [ __ ] i get about a 20-minute break and then i do
kevin holland versus jacare and then i finished my night with tony ferguson and oliveira that was crazy too so it's like man three crazy [ __ ] crazy fight so yeah god that's a great card that kevin holland ko is bananas i think i've done and you know we don't have anything to do with the assignments the athletic commission gives us our fights i've done kevin holland's like the last four fights and you know i tell folks i got the greatest seat in the world sitting there in the octagon with these you know men and women who go in there and do that stuff but i fortunately have with great mentors and guidance and opportunities for the ufc and so many organizations have gotten some of the biggest and best fights in the world i'm very high on kevin holland he's something special he's good he's got crazy power and it's weird like to knock out jacare off your back with a punch like what and we sit there and you know you look at both fighters and see what's happening i go it went down to the ground and you have to know your fighters to know where their expertise is going to happen well he's a travis luther trained uh jiu jitsu practitioner and travis luther one of the best american jiu jitsu practitioners really ever he travis luther you know it's a it comes from a different era but back in his day like the guys that i know that trained with him were like holy [ __ ] is he good and it's great to see him you know there in the corner you get to know some time yeah chat with these guys and hear all the stories but he's out of dallas right yeah when that fight happened worth yeah when that fight happened he's on his back and he throws that first punch and i go okay this is going to be a transition i look at jockery and you know if you go back and watch the fight he's actually rocked yeah when that first happened we'll step a little bit closer and by the time he throws the next three punches and i'm stepping in to try and
stop it you know jacare is out and they'll they'll concentrate on the fighter that wins but you know one you don't want a fighter to come back conscious and take you down to start to do something right that does happen and if there's a language barrier you know so i'm sitting there telling jacare the fight's over the fight's over you know i say stop stop stop so there's no misunderstanding about what's going on and i'm holding the jockery and holding the fence because he's starting to you know come back coherent again right and i want him to understand that he's been knocked out and you know he's like no no i'm good i'm good i'm going ah man you got knocked out you've been out for you know a minute or two isn't that crazy everybody eventually starts to come back they all think they're fine like people think that fighters like they're trying to cheat or something like that like you don't understand what it's like and you get knocked out and especially fighters when they come back they think they're in the fight exactly like they'll try to take a referee down they're holding on to pants legs they don't even think that it's a pants leg and then eventually they go why is this i'm these are black pants it's always what is this what happened yeah what happened they always say what happened yeah or they they get the bright light of the you know the doctors shining the flashlight in our eyes what happened yeah one thing we tried to transition doing you know i've had some fighters get really hurt really bad we normally keep everybody out of the octagon but one thing we're doing is we're allowing a coach to come in with the doctor with the inspectors with myself and give them a familiar voice you know you get knocked out you come back and here's mark telling you now the fight's over you may not recognize but if your coach is there in the corner saying hey such and such you got knocked out calm down it's fine this is coach
touch and such i'm here we're finding that's calming a fighter down just a little bit obviously medical protocols and safety we got to do all that but i like doing that i like asking one of the coaches to come in stand off to my side and kind of give them a familiar voice when oliveira had tony ferguson in that arm bar and he had his arm completely hyper-extended it looked like his arm was breaking like what was your thought there because some guys have stopped fights when a guy has a fully locked out arm bar and it's very controversial like some people think you should just let it keep going other people think like that one of the best examples was herb dean with tim sylvia versus frank muir that went through my mind yeah and see what a lot of people didn't understand at first is herb is looking directly at his arm and he heard it too heard it he heard the crack yeah now he caught a lot of flack for that he only did for a couple seconds once i got in the octagon and i explained it and i explained it to the audience because people were booing like crazy because the fight was stopped tim tilly's like what the [ __ ] what the [ __ ] meanwhile his arm was he had that adrenaline going too well his arm was gone yeah i mean it was and then i explained it on tv and then when i got into the octagon and i said i want you to look at something watch this watch this and then you hear everybody go when you see his forearm bend in half and then everybody's like oh so at that level with the choke i'll tell guys in the rule meeting in the back i'm not going to stop unless you go out you could have someone in a fully compromised position you know who was it the kiessa fight yes you know he was fully compromised but how good could it be how how long can he hold it can he turn his chin to the side and get out yeah you got to let him go out you got to let him go outside kevin lee has a nasty rear naked choke
and he had kiosa fully locked david in that position you got to let him go so i tell guys in my room and we learn as we progress watching fights you know we talk daily weekly about stuff that we got to do so i tell them in the back and rules minnie for a choke at this level i'm not going to stop it unless the fighter goes out good if it's any kind of other submission i got to see a dislocation separation or it has to break or if you scream and there's a difference between a scream and you know a grunt to get out of something if you scream it's a verbal submission and we're going to stop that's a weird one right now verbal submission thing is weird man that was you could saw his leg off with a rusty [ __ ] axe that was beyond human because he will not tap when when charles transitioned from across the chest to under the under arm tony grunted yeah and he bare through it and look at that the hybrid extension i don't know what happened to his elbow you can see my foot there look how close i am so i'm doing two things one i'm looking for a dislocation separation or break but i'm also listening to see if it's going to be cracked a verbal verbal submission he did not he he man he battled through that and there's we got to be conscious of the time so the 10 second clapper had already gone off so i'm counting down in my head and the goal is to write when that horn goes off you'll see when we stop a submission from that we go right to the pressure point push back the opposite way and take off the the pivot point and it's under arm to stop it because some guys are going to try to hold it for an extra second right after bill goes off right as that stops i'm pushing on it and stopping it also verbally telling the guy to stop because you don't want any extra damage after the bill you remember who samara pajar is yes yeah yeah so we saw
and i think he'd fight jake shields or something like that what's that loud noise all of a sudden that thing oh great um i think when he fought jake shields you know there was some extra curricular that was with um kimura and that was in the pfl right yeah he held on to a kimura tap jake but then held it long and then afterwards there was a brawl inside the octagon but yeah and i think i'd referee the fight right before that and you know it's our responsibility as a referee to know your fighter you gotta you know we do you i what i do is i look at the entire card and i'll go back and try to look at their fights so whatever i get assigned and i don't know what i get assigned until i get there to know if anyone has any tendencies you know are they great on stand up are they great on the ground that they have a tendency to foul because we got some guys that like to fight with their fingers extended a lot and i put that into my rules meeting of you know watch fingers just what is going to be fingers straight to the sky or make a fist or someone has a propensity to follow a lot that may be something i'm going to watch out for now when you see something like that if you saw the arm break you would have stopped it i would have stopped you but look how bad it looks yeah it's so crazy how hyper extended that thing is yeah now you got some folks that are super double jointed and they will tell you ahead of time pay them a flexibility i'm double jointed do you remember uh hoyler gracie versus sakaraba um it was that with the he had him in a kimura as well and he got his arm like way wrapped up behind his back but hoiler has crazy joint flexibility like it's really nuts like and he was like i'm fine i'm fine they stopped the fight and he was furious because his arm was like is a catch wrestling guy you know so he's got a lot of those like old-school double wrist lock techniques that are really brutal in the joints and he's got his arm like deep up high on his
back and he's twisting it but whaler was like i'm fine i'm not tapping yeah and he won't tap which is crazy and it depends on the level so like can we do tough enough to amateur fight steer yeah yeah if he keeps going you can see that's only the beginning of it um it got a lot worse if you say hoiler versus no that is that's the beginning of it yeah like at the amateur level somebody could be in a choke and if it's compromised we may stop the fight or if they get stuck in the arm bar or something don't demonstrate the capability right right in the amateurs yeah so this is hoist toys that's hoist this is a different guy spoiler is much smaller that's the problem with sakuraba sakuraba is a big guy and a hoiler is fairly small spoilers like i mean it might be like 160 maybe you know it's different now because they're not fans in the ufc apex or you know wherever some of these other people are doing but if it's like the t-mobile or something and you may hear something you may hear a snap or someone may verbally submit and if we stop it man the crowd will go crazy really ballistic so we you know we count on and one thing i've learned so i did a ufc fight a couple years ago and i had a fighter bite somebody out of you know who is it uh mowgli i think uh benitez he was fighting somebody and the guy bit him you know he's trying to pull his chin up and oh i remember that i stopped and i called tyler and man the fans went ballistic and what i learned from that is the best thing to do is to include you guys yeah as to what happened you know lean over to you know you or dc or anak or somebody and say he bit him or you know you guys the audience doesn't hear that though right that part yeah they don't hear that unless at some of the like pfl and other stuff like that when they mic us up that mic may go out to the crowd but
that would be nice right it in some senses because some stuff you don't want them to be able to hear because you can overwhelm them with you know referee feedback the goal i i really don't want to say anything to them a lot during the fight i want to interact as least as possible you know you say some stuff you know some fans like oh he's in the middle of the fight he's interacting too much but to help the tv audience the pay-per-view audience etc what i've learned i need to do is you know either say it in the microphone where you guys can hear me or to come over to the table and you know kind of tell you what's going on it would help but i think maybe you should have the ability to like press a button and broadcast to the crowd too like he just bit his opponent and have the police go ba you know so we're doing some different things right now you know we just started the instant replay yes which i'm a giant fan of so it's huge so that's mission so important they assigned myself jason herzog jerry vale and herb dean is a committee to build that and we took what the boxing guys had and we developed it into mma and then we had kind of an approval board that we had to present it to so we had to present it to big john mccarthy and mark ratner and what we did is we took the platform told them how we were going to do it and then we actually got their blessing to be able to do it well those are two very reasonable intelligent guys that have a highest amount of experience yep and then once we were done with that we took it to the abc rules committee you know who looks at what's going to be fouls what's not going to be files and we presented it to them about two months ago everybody there you know we got some feedback we're still trying to refine it it used to be you could use instant replay but then once you did it the fight had to be over it had to be for a fight ending sequence i could not restart the fight it needed to progress past that so i can call time now
we have a dedicated instant replay officer that's sitting there at the table and that's all he's looking at he's only looking at potential files he's working with the production truck you know the views that you guys get for instant replay and stuff he has the capability to you'll see they'll put that yellow light on the catwalk of the octagon that's telling me it's going to be an instant replay or if you see the referee do like this that means something just happened where i need an instant replay i think enough people don't understand that now what's going on with the instant replay because for the longest time it stopped the fight even if it was an illegal move and someone was going to get a point deducted once you instituted the instant replay to find for whatever strange reason the fight was automatically stopped had to stop i don't understand that why was that we don't know why but we decided we had to progress past that you know because we had a couple of fouls in the ufc fights earlier that could have constituted the fight continuing to you know make a determination was it a file or not and then we you know you can get to the point that we find if someone is faking an injury if you find that through instant replay i'm just gonna ask you about that what do you do like if a guy pretends he got kicked low and then you see in the instant replay that he got kicked in the liver so if we call time out i want to see the instant replay if if i miss it if i make a mistake i got a man up you know no ego no pride or anything i guess but if a guy's really badly hurt with a body shot and then you go to instant replay you're talking about a minute two minutes three minutes he's got you know that feeling is gone now he's been able to recover and he can actually keep fighting you you as a referee have to make a subjective call there so at the time that you called time out if you feel that the injury warning enough to be a
tko i can't stop the fight if that time has gone by and i think the fight can't continue i have to put the fighter back in that same position you know if he's down on the ground yeah there's going to be a level of recovery there so you are going to lose something but i'm going to put the fighters back in that you know whatever the dominant position oh so if a fighter kicks a guy to the body and the the fighter that is down said he got kicked low and you determined that he did not get kicked low you'll you'll make him down on the ground again wherever he fell so you got to take that snapshot you know if there's a if if someone's in guard and there's a file yes i call stop time and if i need to have a doctor look at them before i bring that doctor in i'm going to take a snapshot of where they are so let's say the bottom guy commits the foul right i want to put him back in that same if it's a dominant position you know at least 51 dominant position i'm going to put him back in that so in that case of if someone fakes an injury i can't get it back to that point where he's 100 hurt but i can put him back as close to i can in a dominant position now if i determine that a guy is intentionally faking an injury or something and i can't put him back in that dominant position i can fix it by saying unsportsmanlike conduct and it can be up to a point deduction or if i determine that nope he would have been done at that point get up and fight right now no i'm still recovering okay fights over tko right so it's it's a tough position yeah because you know some of them are razor thin was the knee down mm-hmm or was the knee knocked down yeah those are really things it's right it's tough and you know as as a referee you got to have you know a little bit of lobster eye going on to a look at the strike i had a had a fight i don't know two or three months ago
well the guy was transitioning what a lot of fans don't understand it's a grounded opponent so anything other than the soles of your feet touching the ground it could be a knee down it could be a hand down but what we do is the hand down has to be flat palm or flat fist it can't just be a finger it can't be fingers anymore you know it has to be weight bearing and the way we determine weight bearing i can't determine weight bearing if he just has his fingers down even though there may be some bending in it so we alleviate it and we say flat palm or flat fist if that fighter is flat palm and they're transitioning coming up and you catch that person you know that if the hand is that close man it's a tough call that's what they pay us for to be able to make that high level subjective call though and a fighter is legally allowed to lift a guy up slightly just enough to get his hand off and then land a knee to the face yeah i you know i tell him in the back if they got him down and you got that flat palm you can lift him back up i think it was a guard massage fight a couple years back he lifted somebody up and threw the knee and he said oh he was grounded he was grounded right that was chris weidman chris weidman yeah he was transitioning yes but his hand was up when that happened was that your fight no that i think they were in new jersey or something like that but yeah i think so referee you know we got some great referees you think about in vegas herb dean jason herzog keith peterson mark goddard dan mugliata oh yeah man that's the best we all work together yeah we got some great guys there and you know it's it's teamwork because the fans don't see it they may see us potentially make a mistake oh that guy's an idiot he's this that man we get out of the ring out of the cage we all talk to each other i'll go over to herb i'll go over to goddard say you know what do you think about this and it's really an education process for us to get better because again the last thing you want to do
is affect the outcome of a fight and we know what this means to you what it means to dana and everybody else me as a referee go back to that i want bruce to call my name at the beginning of the fight and never have to say anything again yeah herb is such an open-minded guy too like he's come up to us before in like after a stoppage and come up and go what do you what do you think about that like he'll ask questions you know and i almost always agree with him i mean it has to be that way yeah there's there's no you know we got to be consummate professionals but there's no pride and ego the worst feeling in the world is as a referee to know that you just made a mistake in front of however many millions of people that just watched that pay-per-view yeah i mean listen if you do enough fights you're going to make a mistake there's no way around it it's just being a human being but the job is so tough i mean it's it's so difficult and you know kudos to you for never getting your name mentioned other than don't jinx me we got fights on saturday let's knock on what yeah we do are you are you um doing those i'm very fortunate it's alistair overeem and volkov right yeah i don't know which fights i got but you know i've been assigned to all the fights for the rest of this month do you find out when you get there what what of what fights you're assigned the only ones you know ahead of time is if it's a big title fight when the athletic commission gets together they will give a selection of potential referees for the title fight and each camp has an opportunity to you know object or oppose you know anyone that's going to be one of those choices so your name for the title fight for the referee and the judges may come out ahead of time otherwise when we get there we have a pre-meeting where we talk about you know anything that we learned from the last show and jeff mullen who's you know our lead there in nevada he
hands out our assignments you know with our executive director bob bennett they make the assignments and you go in there and do your thing we do our pre-fight meeting before the fighters come out to the octagon and talk about any potential issues and you know we've been very lucky having the facilities there at the apex we can have the closed environment be in a bubble you know we used to have the fans there for the tuesday fights and hopefully we get back to that eventually but man what a great venue to have those fights in you know there's something about the venue with no audience that's really special though it's weird so i did the travis brown andre alovsky fight oh my god right now spawn fight out everybody wild fight man you know what scared me in that fight it was i mean you remember it was so loud in that arena i can hear the coaches coaching back and forth i can hear you guys at the table talking but if i can't hear that that tells me i'm not going to hear the horn of the bell oh i was so worried because man these guys are slugfest back and forth i go i was so much into it i didn't have track of how much time was left so i go that horn is going to go off and i'm not going to be able to hear it oh right but the great thing right now is hey you can hear the horn you know with no fans in there but it is so incredible because we can hear you guys with all your commentating and you can hear the coaches and then you can hear the fighters talking back and forth to their coaches they can hear all the specific instruction and as you know this whole season you know back from like march or april whenever we started man we got some hungry fighters in there that you know with the teamwork of their coaches and stuff that closed environment you could hear the punches and the kicks it's just a great venue to be in well the first one i did without any audience was justin gates and tony ferguson which was in florida which was just wild just to be there
and to see a fight with no audience yeah i mean you you really feel first of all you feel very fortunate because there's so few people that are going to get to be there live but also there's a dynamic to the fight it's there's a purity to it where there's no audience and you're just seeing the competitive drive of these fighters just that the two fighters hearing them breathe you know you hear footsteps you hear every the impact of shins you hear everything you hear every punch you know the fans get to hear things they normally wouldn't hear like you know i had that the fighter that kind of quit on the stool a couple months back and the fans with the microphone that we hear that we have on they get the chance to hear me actually talking to the fighter you know i went over to him and said hey do you want to continue to fight and he had the you know the interaction back and forth with his corner a couple times in a normal and like the t-mobile which is a phenomenal arena i may not be able to hear that because you got 20 some thousand fans in there yeah right right but as i go back to the corner i can hear everything that the coaches are saying and if a fighter is given an indication that they no longer want to continue now i can put that back into my equation on how the fight's going to go my interaction with the doctor et cetera and that occasion i heard him going back and forth with his coach you know i don't want to fight i don't want to continue and the coach is trying to encourage him you know and a lot of people got on drysdale for that but you know at the end drysdale said you know he's done he's going to encourage his guy in the corner as much as he can and as much as he can to try and get it right yeah when that 10 second clapper went off it's my determination now unless the corner make they throw in the towel early make that termination
with my doctor you know two feet away from me i go over i look at him physically try to get a mental assessment ask him one question do you want to continue to fight he says no fights done you know i go back to nigel ben versus gerald mclellan which was a tragic boxing fight where gerald mcclellan was one of the best fighters on the planet earth and just a destroyer and he knocked nigel ben out of the ring in the first round just had him badly badly hurt but nigel ben was a warrior and survived and then later on in the fight jerry mcclellan gets hurt takes a knee and winds up stopping and people were going crazy they were booing they were they were pissed at him commentators were you know upset that he was quitting and then it turns out the guy collapses in the ring and winds up having bleeding on the brain never been the same again jerome mcclellan is uh he's you know he's basically i believe he's blind he's partially deaf he can't walk correctly i mean it was a severe injury but at the moment people were criticizing him for quitting yeah the fighter knows how [ __ ] up they are you gotta imagine the the kind of courage that it takes to get into that octagon if they're in a world-class environment like the ufc they're bad [ __ ] i agree and they know they know when something's wrong and sometimes you just gotta live to fight another day yeah and you know you count on having a great corner yeah it's a whole it's a team concept yes you know so the preparation you know the matchmakers matches somebody up with a good fight having a proper preparation training etc to be able to get to that point but i mean you know this the first time i've done hundreds of fights the first time i stepped inside of an octagon it's like man this is surreal and i'm just i'm refereeing it can you imagine what was your first
fight in the ufc it was actually robert drysdale really yeah i did my first fight was a robert drysdale fight he wound up winning and who was he fighting i don't remember who he only fought a couple times in the ufc right yeah i think there were some issues that happened after that but it was that car that i did my my first bomba so my first big fight was at ufc 200. whoa i was the first referee to go and step on that yellow floor oh no and uh i think that was let's see so that night um i can't remember who i did that fight but was that the brock lesnar frank mirror it was a match uh no i think that was the lesbian hunt oh that's right um why did i think it was a rematch that's so much earlier yeah so you know you stepping there for me it was preparation ahead of time and what helped me out is big john pulled me off to the side and he said some crazy stuff to you to prepare you he said one thing to me when you get in there he said mark don't [ __ ] it up i was like yes sir i won't and you know that that may seem very harsh to say that but it's a simple thing of hey we've prepared you you prepared to get to this point go in there and do your thing oh so he's kind of [ __ ] around too yeah it's to loosen you up a little bit now when we got to that my first pay-per-view fight was travis brown and arlovsky so here i want these two giants that's your first trip oh my god first pay-per-view that's so crazy so that was your first pay-per-view fight he pulled me to the side and i didn't know it ahead of time but when i got there he said hey we're going to step it up up a little bit tonight this is what you're going to do and i know you knew it the production team know but a lot of people didn't know about arlovski's injury prior to that fight remember he had the
potentially torn calf muscle mm-hmm so here we are in the back with the athletic commission they weren't even sure if he was going to find him sure so we had to take him through a series of medical tests in the back mr ratner was back there you know the athletic commission was back there a couple of the doctors from the ufc and they were like mark if he demonstrates that he tears that muscle even more if he's hurt you gotta stop the fight so can you imagine in that orlovsky fight with travis brown if i see that calf muscle tear i have to step in the middle of that fight crazy and stop it i'm like i'm nervous like that was one of the best one round heavyweight fights of all time it was of all time it was so wild that was a fight that was fought at such a pace that you knew this fight could not go the distance and they had a history together training at jackson's and arlovski had an incredible confidence coming into this fight because look in training he had gotten the best of travis that was the word and so you know he kind of big brothered him he knew and it seemed like travis kind of knew that too because this was when travis was really in his prime you know travis uh was one of the most athletic heavyweights i think i've ever seen i mean he kind of changed his style at one point and he started fighting more flat footed and and slugging but when he knocked out semi-shield with like a superman punch i was like that guy is the dark horse of the heavyweight division because he's a huge heavyweight but he would move really light on his feet yep look at his you can see his legs are gone and you know remember he has him up against the fence here and i step in and i say travis fight back and i need to see something and then he caught caught him rocking him yeah and you see me start to step in you know because you think about previous fights from the guys like when alaska fought fedor you know was it like was it that kind of
shot but he was able to get right back but i can tell that oh these guys hit me he caught him with a back fist there and heard him yeah we thought the fight was almost over and why in the middle of all this slugging travis catches them and drops them yeah it's coming up right here i just told him to fight back and he's going to catch him this one fight was so crazy right there oh my god i mean he literally spun his head around and it looked like it was over and you got to remember travis came back against alistair overeem right i mean aleister overeem had him battered alistair over him had him up against the cage in in deep deep deep trouble hit him with some nasty body shots really had him [ __ ] up and travis weathered the storm and came back and ko'd yeah it's about right here that i'm thinking the fight's over because he's gonna miss him with the punch and he's right there and he's staggered so much that i'm already at the mind frame that this fight's gonna be over and then he catches them here and then he turns away without any intelligence now see that's the kind of perfect the fans may get mad at you for stopping it standing but everybody knows see what they don't do when you see his body cave in like that like his his body was barely conscious let's see it again like when he hit him with the uppercut like right there in the right hand like he's he's done he covered up i mean it was a good stop but you saved him in that way and my goal is to never get hit by some 260 pound heavyweight must have stopped by you got to worry about that right you know you try to step in it's always protect the fighter fighter safety yeah but i will step in so guys get on me because i yell stop stop stop there is no confusion if the referee is yelling stop stop stop but i also step in definitively to protect myself and the fighter and then sometimes you may have to aggressively push somebody have you been
hit with a stray punch before i've been hit behind the ear before from a heavyweight i went in to stop it right as he stole in the fight now i was lucky i saw it coming and i turned away because can you imagine me as a ufc referee getting knocked down i turned my head away from it and i was able to soak up most of the punch who was it it was actually an amateur fight guy named uh chucky williams you know great fighter a lot of power i went in to stop his fighting he's throwing a punch right as he's doing and he caught me and what i tell the guys if if you know the fighter is done show some professionalism you don't have to sit there and keep punching and you know fighting to the referee tells you to stop but if you can tell that a fighter is out right if someone's unconscious you know do the do the walk off and make sure they're done yeah that's a weird one right like you not like you're taught to keep fighting until the referee pulls you off but when you see guys get ko'd and they're out cold and the guy jumps on them and pounds them a couple more times that's that's unfortunate like the was it the chaos williams fight yes yes i was like whoever catches first here is going to win this yeah he catches them and he goes down and you know he's going in the finish fight and i dive in and stop it you know that kind of stuff you have to do it's fighter safety you got to protect the guy that's been done and he was you know he was out before he even hit the ground yes yeah chaos has got some serious power and he fights like a [ __ ] demon man there's a few of these guys coming up right now that are just so talented they're hungry yes well it's it's you they've realized they see these you know the conor mcgregors the style benders they see these guys that are becoming these gigantic superstars the dustin poiriers and they realize like wow like you know fortune favors the brave like you got to go in there guns blazing we see it with the tuesday night fights and then also the saturday venue there
at the apex you know some people may not realize the impact of what the ufc did in the middle of this pandemic you know bellator did it in their bubble as well but you know ufc kind of led the sports world for everybody you know folks are getting burned down on social media and it's like what else do we do and yeah sitting on the couch doing anything that gave an outlet you know not just for us as officials but athletes and teams and everybody else something exciting to be able to watch you know you know how passionate dana is about and we all kind of follow that lead so we as officials whatever commission you're working for very you know very fortunate he's given us opportunities to do that well listen as fans were all very fortunate because the ufc led the way for the return of live sports they really did i mean dana stuck his neck out there and led the way for the return of live sports and they did it in as safe a way as possible and when we're talking about the athletes there's there was a lot of crazy hyperbole like you're risking their lives like listen man those guys are not dying from coronavirus maybe we thought maybe they were risking their lives at the beginning of the pandemic because we didn't really know what the virus was but now the argument that they're risking their lives now is preposterous you're not gonna kill elite athletes with this virus they may not know the safety protocols that we go through you know no you know the testing you know you test and you go in the bubble and you isolate and also they're alerting the vita the the fighters about vitamin supplementation how to strengthen your immune system and how to check and if if they're paying attention they're monitoring their resting heart rate or you know if you wear something like a woop strap it'll show where you're cardiovascular um like how your body is recovering for things and it can actually give you indications that you might be suffering from this virus exactly you know like for me it's
it's preparation you know so one we study fights and get all the understanding in there but proper nutrition uh you know rest and recovery you know i go through a routine every single time before we do a fight to get myself ready for it and i do that religiously to get ready what's your routine so uh one we do our zoom training um and that's all the top officials in the world you know herb gets on there jason sal damato chris lee you know derek cleary with athletic commissions we do our training there we go over fights and we watch them and then his phone calls back and forth of you know hey hey herzog what'd you think about this fight the other day give me feedback and then what we're doing there in vegas is we go into the bubble you know so we go to our hotel facility they test us when you go into isolation and you have to stay in the hotel right i stay in a hotel that's all so you gotta bring all your food and stuff like that and prep for it and i've kind of gotten used to it you know and to prep us to be able to do that you have to do it they may look at some rapid testing and stuff but for right now this is the way we do it how long do you stay in the hotel it depends some people get there tonight prior on friday and then you know we go to the arena like at one o'clock or two o'clock or like since i lived there local i'll go over saturday morning at seven o'clock test and isolate and go to the would he bring like a yeti cooler with you or something i bring a food bag and um you know i do my meal prep at home so i do all my stuff there uh like i work with you know some folks like the honest plant company and they give me protein supplement an immune booster you know i've heard you talk about the vitamin c the vitamin d the zinc and then i take one of the immune boosters and that helps me out so like for me i had my thyroid removed a couple years ago so you know proper nutrition did you have cancer
no it was i had a hypothyroidism mm-hmm i have that yeah and then what happened for me is my my neck started to get bigger and my thyroid died yeah it was it was like nine and a half centimeters and we decided to have a surgery uh to take it out oh jesus the crazy thing about that is when i had the surgery uh the anesthesiologist made a little mistake and i wasn't completely anesthetized yet when they put the intubation tube in and i had my vocal cords oh jesus so you go back to that arlovski and travis brown fight i took a little hiatus right after that because when they hit my vocal cords i couldn't talk for about six months so they he damaged my left vocal cord and then he stretched my right vocal chord you know your vocal cords essentially touched together to make the tones i couldn't talk for about six months so here i am an airline pilot and a ufc referee and i got to be able to talk or you know mma referee got to be able to talk for both of them oh as a single dad primary income for my kids i was like what do i do i can't talk so i had to go through voice and speech therapy and i eventually got all that back for six months it was about six months it took my voice to get back did they give you any kind of medication or something to help heal the there wasn't really anything they could do i would do the voice therapy you know go to a speech therapist and you know they they she do stuff like she you know had me go over certain tones to be able to get it back and you know never raise my voice they don't even want you to whisper because i guess the whispering would still have you know effects on the vocal cords being able to heal oh my god and my voice has changed a little bit now because i'm still not back to 100 recovery but going through how long ago was this this was uh shoot 2015. you you're not 100 recovered my voice will never be the same sounds good i appreciate that i mean this is your voice from now and that's a good voice
right you can't be hating it no i i'm very fortunate that i got it how is it not recovered though in what way uh so my voice is a little bit scratchier oh just sounds different yeah but you can talk no problem i can talk no problem the only place i notice it if i do a lot of fights where i have to yell a lot at the end of the night my throat can be sore and i you know sound like i lose my voice just a little bit oh okay so in that preparation thing um i take caution to all of that so i bring my food back with all my supplements and stuff uh i do a lot of do you know who norm turner is no no turner he's a strength and conditioning coach has syndicate he's worked with you know gina carano okay i've trained a syndicate before john john woods john wood you know he works with a lot of fighters there he works a lot of good fighters there vinnie margolish so he's my strength and conditioning coach he helps me do all that stuff and in the hotel you know i do a lot of prepping uh stretching and other stuff but i gotta tell you the one thing that religiously whether i'm doing it with the ufc or whether i'm doing my flying i got into tim tammy oh that that thing is incredible i was in yeah one day and it just so happens i got a gift for you what is this that is one of their important products that's their portable that's awesome a pocket massage it's a pocket one so joe i gotta change the name of that i know you know just people but i got into temptation i was in the gym one day and i was you know lower back soreness and some other stuff and i saw this guy he's doing this massager thing i go what is that he goes man that's my tim tam i go let me try that and he said take it home for a couple days and then i didn't realize how magical that thing was as far as you know pressure points and you know active release and stuff like that so i take that thing with me whenever i go fly a trip for the airlines and when i do that preparation for that's
small well you know they got the traditional ones that have the heated tips and pressure points and stuff like that that is part of my everyday routine and i absolutely love it um so i do that and then i sit there and i will call up i got usc fight pass you know i got some of the other stuff i will sit there and watch fights if i know someone is going to be on the card i will sit there and i will shut my phone off i'll put it on do not disturb and i'll get myself in a mind frame of okay this is serious business the world is watching us right now again go back to philosophy of i don't want to have any negative impact on the fight and i'll sit there and i'll watch fights and then you know make sure my body is all warmed up and stretched ready to go and we'll go over to the arena as soon as we step in that door it's game time you you really do have to be warmed up right because you gotta sprint sometimes people don't realize the lateral movement back and forth i am sore when i'm done with the fight side to side movement and if you have to step in and pull somebody off you know it's it can be you know exerting on the body so i lift weights and do other preparation and stuff like that um and just a mental fatigue from you know you go back to that last card with the three big fights that i had all huge fights every fight is important whether it's the first kind fight on the card or whether it's the 12th fight on the card but when you have a night like that just a mental preparation and the letdown when you get done with that you know you realize it's a little bit fatiguing tough on the body etcetera so man there's so many elements that you got to come into to be ready for that and do you train by do you do side to side movements and training like do you do you run sideways or anything like that so when you see me warming up and you know i learned a lesson i watched bruce buffer warm up you know and how what an incredible person i watch him warm up nobody gets the fights more pumped up than that guy
pumped up but i said i'm i'm in great shape i can go in and do this and i realize i'm not doing this good enough so i watched bruce warm up and i had to come up with a routine you know to make sure i'm prepared so i go in the back you know behind the curtains and stuff and i'll do some forward backward sprints i'll do a lot of side to side movement you know stretch hamstrings quads and stuff like that uh you don't want a referee going in and popping a hamstring or something in the middle of a fight blew his acl out in a fight yeah i remember that we've had some referees that have gotten hurt before during fights and you know it affects the rest of the fight you know what do you do you call time out and you know you bring in another referee or what exactly do you do that's a good question what do you do so what do you do if someone accidentally gets ko'd i saw a referee get punched accidentally in the nose before and he was you know he's leaking from the nose and he wasn't able to call time out so one of us ran up and said stop time out and then the doctor's going to give attention you got to make determination is is he or she good enough to continue the fight he put some you know stitch or one of those guys you know they do their thing cut guy went in there put some stuff in his nose doctor made a determination that he was able to continue the fight for the fighter i imagine like that sort of momentum stopping for something outside of the actual fight itself has got to be very annoying i i have never seen knock on wood a ufc fight or bellator fight or anything like that have to be stopped because of that you see all the stuff on youtube and everything if a referee gets hurt yeah most of the fighters you're going to hope at this level they're professional enough they're going to stop it's pretty rare yeah that's pretty rough you're going to let them come in and get the proper medical attention but oh we don't want that to happen but i would imagine like
so flyweights or something like that like man you got to be in shape right i call it getting on my bicycle yeah you know some of the like you know benavidez guys like that that are you know hustling moving around the whole time man you gotta and folks don't know it but we're in a a slightly smaller octagon inside the apex right now yeah so there's not a lot of room to run right you gotta get away from those dudes you gotta stay away from yeah and last thing you wanna do is get pent in a corner and have the fight come into you so we try to maintain that you know 90 degrees off where the fight is directly on your left and right and keep a constant movement with them you're looking for eye pokes and groin shots and stuff like that but you you sit there and watch us you know we're usually sweating by the end of the fight because yeah for sure i mean you have to be in great shape to referee a fight especially with small guys that move a lot and i try to you know so in addition to the strength and conditioning stuff you know i've done some classroom stuff like you know people talk about what they do during the pandemic i was actually crazy enough i went back to grad school during the pandemic and i got masters number three and i went and got a masters in exercise wellness fitness and nutrition and that helps me understand you know do i really know how to meal prep do i really know what proper proteins and supplements and stuff to put in my body so i wanted to learn that side of it and then i'm planning on taking that back to share it with the other officials that work with this and doing some corporate wellness and fitness too so i got grand plans and stuff that's coming out there well that's cool that's cool i would i would think that like it would benefit you to like get to a field and just do some sideways running you know just do some sideways that kind of stuff i do like you know the octagon surface
is one thing to be able to do it but like what i do for preparation back i do a lot of side to side movement to the left and back to the right and then shuffling back and shuffling forward to try to mimic the actual movements that i'm going to do inside the octagon you know i got to be able to practice with the application i'm going to use it for so i try to put myself in that scenario where we stand you know when guys are fighting what am i looking at when they go to the ground and certain submissions come up what position am i going to be able to go in to look at the pressure point to be able to hear and see you know what the fighter's saying so it's a lot that goes into it it's a lot of preparation and getting ready for it is there a fight that stands out for you is like the most difficult fight you ever had a referee um i would say that travis brown and arlovsky because of knowing of arlovski's injury ahead of time the impact of that the number of fans that were there how loud it got and and first pay-per-view first pay-per-view the expectations of my two mentors john mccarthy and herb dean but you know one it it takes a you know a great message like that from a mentor you know he don't don't [ __ ] it up you know how john's personality is he's a great teacher but there's you know no one more knowledgeable about the sport yeah than him but knowing that you got the trust because you know the the athletic commissioners are going to talk to the senior referees as to where to start to put people yeah to make it to a ufc slash bellator level a fight you got to be really hopefully a good judge a good referee or a great judge great referee because of the impact that it could have and then to have that on a pay-per-view to have the expectations of the athletic commission and dana and the rest of the ufc staff there because the last thing you want is to have a fight get messed up and
catch the criticism of the promotion the fans you know fellow referees etc and then because of how loud it got in there but what i try to do is i try to say regardless of its you know amateur fighter a b professional fighter fighting for a title contender etc once that door closes i try to treat everybody the same my routine is the same how i talk to the fighters how i treat them as the same but man just going in and have a good time i may smile a little bit every now when i'm in there because i'm like man that's a credible fight no you boxed but did have you trained in any ground fighting you've done any jiu jitsu or anything i do you know so we have to be careful how we do that uh you know do you want to go train with someone you could potentially do their fight so there is a fine line between how you do that but i've had the best of both worlds you know when i started there at jsec you had john lewis and stuff and then when i went back to dc uh i belonged to lloyd irvine's school which another great school uh lord irvin he he teaches you you know my first interaction he coming in a spa with us you know him 230 pounds and he slammed me down to the ground but just the amount of that doesn't seem fair i didn't let it happen again though what's wrong with you again but you know you get the best stuff there when i came back to vegas um you know i go to a couple of different gyms there and trying to keep that balance of professionalism with training with the guys i go to coutures and i go to syndicate and then you know i was at one point there we had vinnie and fredson and mike powell uh all those guys in the same gym um now i train for application a lot of people train you know to get the belts or to go do a tournament and stuff like that that's not what my focus is one because i don't have the time i try to learn how i can apply that back to me refereeing you know knowing the details of a specific
submission or hold or something like that and at what level amateurs am i going to stop it when the guy's in a good choke and he can't get out of it versus at the next level knowing how somebody's going to transition from one position to the other that's what my focus is going to be there's a benefit to a guy like lloyd irvin throwing you around though and that is that just you recognize the levels yes because sometimes people get a very distorted sense of what they could physically do to a large black belt you you get the you know the guy sitting at home eating wings with the beer in his hands get in there knock it and you hear that the t-mobile i could get in there and kick his ass you know this whatever and they don't realize the level of professionalism proficiency some of these fighters have you know to watch a of any mughalist you know do a stand-up fight and then transition to the ground you're like man you're about to see something incredible his ground game is insane yeah and to train with a guy i've never trained with vinnie but he's one of the best in the world and his ground game is just preposterous and then you know the you know your fighters across the roster in the ufc they may think someone is a stand-up expert and they go to the ground and you see something amazing right there so that's why us as referees you got to be proficient at it you get you know you got to have an understanding of how that's going to apply really our judges as well you know the judges are like they think they just sit there and score the fight but our judge has to be able to determine is that more of a position or is that a scoring type right you have to understand what's going on you have to understand so that's where our training comes into play and we talk about stuff like that well there's a judge i will not name but he told me that he was in the middle of a fight once judging a fight and one of the other judges asked him
what the person was doing oh god the person was it was something simple too like an americana and the person was like what is he doing mm-hmm you won't get that doing you know you got the derrick clery's all these guys this is back in the day this is you know we're talking about more than 10 years ago but it was it was weird back then because you had a lot of people that were refereeing fights that didn't really even understand what they were or excuse me judging fights they really didn't understand what they were judging they didn't understand what they were looking at and you know we you see that criticism out there you know these judges and this jurisdiction or their box of judges and stuff like that now you got folks that have been doing this for you know 15 20 years that they may not be proficient on the ground themselves but they have understanding of it you know some of the judges may be in whatever you know their 60s or the issue is when you go to some smaller commissions that don't have the kind of experience obviously nevada and california are the top of the heap but there's places we've gone to where you've seen judging that you're like oh this is just insanity like this this is not a person that really understands what they're talking about it's really incumbent upon every referee and judge that wants to get into the game like i had somebody uh call me yesterday uh a former fighter at fortis mma you know great guys down there incredible great jim great job that wants to transition into refereeing and we talk about how to start it from step one knowing which one you want to do you want a referee or judge got to understand the unified rules of mma yeah you got to get proficient at it you got to start from the bottom you know go find an amateur organization sit there and watch and start a shadow program with them yeah and then so we do that now like i don't know if you're new to that but like jake ellenberger is making the
transition busy over to officiating you know frank trigg did it a couple years ago is jake going to referee or is he going to judge i think he's going to look at judging and you know like we do our training tomorrow you know i started a process you know with the training with him so he's going to participate with us from tomorrow but being a consummate professional he understands where he has to start so we need amateur fights to come back we need to be in a position where we can do amateur fights because that's really where they got to start no one is ready from day one to step in the seat and do a ufc so that's a thing now with the pandemic that makes it difficult correct it's tough because we can't do in-person training so what i would do before the pandemic is i would go to these gyms just like how i got started in this so in vegas you know you got a lot of gyms i go into syndicate on a saturday or i'd go into coutures when they're doing their sparring and i'd get in there that that's how i keep my proficiency i'd go in there when they're sparring you know you got in ganu at coutures he does his you know sparring with big country i get in randy's octagon with him and practice refereeing i mean can you imagine that just a saturday casual sparring and well i guess no casual sparring with those two you got inganu and roy nelson sparring against each other i couldn't get any better proficiency than that and i treat it just like a fight i treat it as a professional there's no bs with them on the side because who knows i could get one of their fights one day right but what i started doing is hey you got to get the permission of the commissions i bring one or two judges in with me while they're doing their rounds for sparring and i say go sit as you're an a or b judge come out and i want you to score it's a little bit different because they're not going to 100 of course you know some of the places go at 50 75 but they're still getting hands-on
proficiency when you've got two high-level guys like that that are doing it you may see some things that you may not get at a lower level but it's upon each person the commission is not going to force you to go do this training they're not going to make you take herb's course or john's course so like i teach as well they're going to encourage you to do it and if you want to get the top level assignments you want to get these opportunities you got to show proficiency you got to be consistent like our executive director nevada you know bob in it and jeff mullin they're going to make the selections for the you know the top referees and judges in the world they're going to give those opportunities yeah those are great guys and it's a welcome change from the past administration now when you're you're talking about fighters that you you you can't really get close to these guys huh you got kind of a tricky situation for you so if you train with these guys and you're friendly with these guys do you excuse yourself from a fight like or do you just keep it professional with everybody uh you try to keep it professional with everybody that's kind of annoying though like what if someone's cool and you want to be their friend it is it you know and like i will tell you mike powell is one of my i love michael mike's awesome guy and we've been friends for a while i can i have a fight i can pick up the phone afterwards and you know get honest feedback from him um you know it's a little bit easier right now that mike's not fighting and i can get that kind of feedback is he training guys now what do you do yeah i think he's out at syndicate you know he's still like he's doing some of the movie things but he's still rocking the mullet uh off and on i think it depends on what day of the week it is he's such a skillful guy you know he's just such a uh really intelligent well-rounded game
when he was fighting like just consummate professional and you know for me so like when i started it jsec fight capital back in the day he was in there with randy and marvin eastman and all those guys so you know i've taken this transition with him the entire time it would be really tough for me to go in there and do a mike powell fight so what i do is like to you know two primary commissions nevada and california i'll call them ahead of time and say you know hey mr foster i've trained with mike powell before i did this kind of training with him and i'll leave it at that that's something that herb and big john taught me back in the day presented to the commission and tell them and let them make determination yeah that guy andy foster is one of my favorites he's really so ahead of a lot of other commissions that they're so proactive and implementing more weight classes and weight cutting in a lot of the things that they do i'm a big fan of there are a lot of great commissions around the world but you can't get any better than california and nevada you know for me to have the opportunity to be licensed and both i'm very fortunate do you have any championship fights under your belt so i've done some i have not done a ufc title fight yet uh i did some uh in pfl and some of the other organizations um hey you know that would you uh would you call in pfl which title i don't remember i've done i've done like 1500 fights i can't tell you the name of the fight that i did last time yeah so you lose track of that um and because i try to treat every fight as the same it's a level of confidence you know so the ufc has to have confidence in who they're gonna put in the main event and it's not a matter of we're not confident in mark smith but the household names of you know herb dean john mccarthy mark goddard well john's now stephen so you guys mark goddard dan mergliatta those guys
mark goddard and herb dean are going to be the you know top tier yeah guys are getting more more and more of a name the more big fights that they get but yeah those guys get the champions and it's about proficiency i think you know uh john morgan and mma junkie guys did the article a couple months ago and they talked about you know the numbers of fights of the year for 2020 and i think herb was at the top and then like he had 80 some fights and jason had 60 fights i didn't realize i had 57 fights wow and then within those the confidence and the commission and obviously the promotion of which fights that they give you so i think jeff mullen showed a lot of confidence in me with that last card to cub swanson kevin holland and then the you know oliveira uh tony ferguson fight that's showing confidence yes it's about working your way up yeah you know you it's even if it's a title fight and you're like i've done this a thousand times before you got to be mentally prepared for it there's something to be said about you know the the block [ __ ] and honest on your fight coming up you got to be mentally and physically prepared for that one that one you got to be real that card has three title fights on it yeah that's a crazy is that going to be on fight island no i think the next like eight to ten weeks are projected to be in vegas oh jesus louise's yeah so that fight you got those two you got amanda nunez fighting and then you got the uh 35 that's march correct march what do we know i don't i don't remember the exact date i usually look at you know the ufc fight or you know share dog or one of those and style bender's he's special march 6. stylebender is he's something when you see how he picked apart paulo costa you know like that is some that's a special athlete because paulo costa literally erect everyone they put in front of him yeah i did paulo's fight against uh
uri hall and you know two great fighters you know that came down to yeah that last round we caught him with the body shot and heard him yeah but you know folks don't understand you know i'm six one i walk around like 220 you get in there with these giants and even if these guys weigh less than me just you know the they weigh less than you for about five minutes paulo costa he makes 185 by the skin of his teeth this is the big one baby this is the big one yeah my god i'm excited about that's gonna be that's gonna be a great fight that whole card and you know kudos to the you know sean shelby the max matchmakers over at ufc this entire season there have been some great fights the entire time look at that al joe versus pyotr yan is a crazy fight that's going to be wild that is a wild fight right there amanda nunes is in a tough position you know right because she's a two division champion and there's not much competition for her at 145 and you know megan anderson is long and tall and she's got very good strikes but you know holly holm kind of exposed her on the ground i'm sure she's gotten much better than that but there's no like compelling like this is the fight for her you know she's just so terrifying i'm just so dominant i'm excited that you know we took a little break i think our december 19th was our last fight there in vegas and we had the holidays and then they did the three fights over fight island but now they're coming back man oh my god yeah ten weeks coming up and that's you know in addition to doing the tuesday night fights and we're gonna do the ultimate fighter again so well there's so many ufc cards yeah if you're a ufc fan is the best sport to follow because first of all there's no season it goes all year round oh my goodness woodley oh usman and burns is the fight that is the fight right there and i'm i'm excited i'm excited to see you know these guys trained together yeah so they're they're both uh
training down south florida under henry hooved and now usman has moved to um trevor whitman and he's uh training with justin gaichi yep you look at the you know the number of top tier fights that we got coming up you know i think they said a number of champions that we have like 70 percent of them are going to be in title fights coming up in the next couple of months so yeah and you know both guys dominated tyron woodley which is uh crazy to think about that tyrone woodley was literally at the top of the heap destroying everybody and then two guys come along and dominate them back to back and those two guys are now fighting for the title and both guys can do everything i mean both usman and when you look at gilbert burns you're talking about a guy who's a brazilian jiu jitsu black belt like top of the food chain grappling game and all you know like learned how to strike while he was fighting yeah like started training in mma and didn't know how to strike now is one of the scariest strikers in the sport he dominated that fight with striking so dropped woodley in the first round which is crazy well you would thought if anybody has an advantage in the striking it's going to be woodley what a i mean so well-rounded both of those guys and usman is just such a destroyer and you find out that usman fought jorge mosby with a shattered nose that's right which is crazy yeah that just came out recently didn't it he just announced that that guy's mind is a steel vault it really is and i think fans don't understand you know you see we see the fighters afterwards with the physical impact that it has on them you know the fans have their favorites and they watch and they want this and that to happen they don't understand the physical impact on the fighters you know during the fight and after the fight well that's why you know a guy like bring up a guy like tyrone woodley
you know who was on top of the heat for so long and then you go through three brutal fights in a row he has those two fights and then the colby covington fight it's like you you you it's such a [ __ ] hard scrabble game like you're on top and then you're not and then you look at a guy like anderson silva was on top forever and then just lost like eight fights in a row yeah i mean he won one fight like he who who'd he be derek brunson beat derrick brunson with by decision every other fight he lost which is crazy yeah and i got to do the uh you know the inspection of the pit for his last fight you know what you're right hauling what did you think of that fight um he he looked good you know for the first couple of rounds and then you know when he got caught and went down that's when you go ah the you know the skills have depleted a little bit it's crazy to watch you know uriah put it up on his instagram he said when i said i learned from this man i learned from this man and it shows the difference between it shows a contrast in anderson silva's fight with forrest griffin when forrest griffin comes charging at him he picks his spot and lands a right hand and that is exactly the same thing that uriah hall did to anderson silva the exact same move yeah like literally the same punch and you know what impacted me the most was the interaction after the fight yeah he realized this is probably yeah you know the the transition point and really the emotion and thankfulness that you know uriah showed for it that that as officials you know that touched everybody well it's interesting to me that um anderson's not going to hang it up but the ufc doesn't want him anymore they don't want him fighting in the ufc anymore so like where does a guy go and what you know this is just being honest it's probably better if he does go to another organization not not that there's not high level talent in another organization but they don't have high level testing
and i think when you get these older fighters the fighters that are able to sustain their careers outside of the ufc are clearly using hormones you know and so there's protocols obviously for that that you know from the usage in some places yeah some places but what we do is if a fighter has aged or something the commission will talk to you about that ahead of time you know you have two fighters where there's a higher propensity for a knockout when you have fighters a little bit age and they have to go through different testing if they're above a certain age we are you know cognizant of that as officials that we may have to watch someone a little bit closer but you really count on regardless of organization the officials knowing it understanding that that someone's a little bit older it's going to have an impact you better do your part as a referee yeah it's uh it's you have to look at each fight differently don't you you have to look at the you know you see two 22 year old guys you'll do them very differently than two 39 year old guys or a 39 year old guy versus a 22 year old you do you have to treat each one differently every round is looked at differently every impact is looked at differently but you have to have an understanding of the fighter before you step in there you know someone has gotten knocked out a couple times right and you know we have to do you know brain trauma protocols and courses you know because you want like your high school coaches and stuff like that to understand that for their athletes but we as officials have to go through those protocols as well you know to take these courses and understand you know the impact of brain injuries because once again fighter safety is always a top priority i would never want to be part of a fight that someone had a long-term impact injury because of brain trauma or something else because i didn't intervene yeah um what is your thought how do you
feel when you see guys that are fighting like they have these 20 plus year careers like guys like diego sanchez that is you know what i mean he won the ultimate fighter season one in 2005 which is really crazy when you think of the fact that 16 years later he's still fighting in the ufc and then his his actual career fighting career goes back a couple years before that you know he's been fighting a long time you know it's tough because i think at ufc hundred or 200 he fought against joe lauzon yeah and you remember up against the cage he was taking some pretty hard shots and you have to delineate as an official do i step in and stop this or do i know this fighter's history of being able to come back man that was probably one of the tougher fights i had to do um and then looking back at it that was probably a lesson learned for me that i probably should have or could have stopped that fight a little bit earlier do you think so you know i i let him take the shots and then he threw some punches back and then finally when he punched him and he went down i stepped in and diego actually excuse me he thanked me afterwards for when i stopped it you know he came to realization that he could not have uh come back but you think of a guy's resilience you know then i did this fight several years later against kiesa and i mean you know how diego's one of the all-time great fighters when he does stuff his ability to be able to come back so subjectively as a referee there's that fine line balance of man do i make this decision my decision in the best interest of the fighter or do i think about the impact you know the capabilities of this fighter to be able to come back so one you've got to know who it is and they're fighting with you kind of have to look at where they are now because if you go back to the diego that fought marvin campman i mean he was
like indestructible like diego is responsible for some of the greatest third rounds in the history oh my greatest god oh my god well that was from the jump from from the opening round he won the opening round and clay won the second but like another one is a jake ellenberger fight he was losing that that was a 170 fight ellen burger was a destroyer at the time he was knocking everybody out right he he literally gets hit with the all these big shots from ellenberger in the third round diego starts coming on and diego actually had his back when the fight ended and you got to think about those kind of things yeah you know it's one of the worst feelings in the world you going to stop a fight and you stop it too early and the guy gets up and he's fine you know a lot of fighters instinctively are gonna i was fine i was good but if you do make a mistake like that yeah you feel like crap yeah so what's that balance between uh where are they at in their career how's the fight going how are their last couple fights going you know did they take a knockout blow in their previous fight are they still suffering you know from you really i kind of have to be a historian of the sport you got to study it yeah you can't step in the fight and not do your pre-fight studying look the fighters are on the card you can't know anything you know every single thing about all the fighters but it's your responsibility as an official to know as much as you can yeah to know what a guy's capable of whether or not a guy's a big shot lander or whether he's not yeah it's uh it's such a complex sport you know there's so many different things going on because of when you're combining the wrestling and the jiu jitsu and the striking and then powerful guys versus endurance guys and i mean even like i get in my head like oh this is the way to do it and then i see another guy who does it differently i'm like well that way it's pretty goddamn
good too like it changes like there's trends that happen in this sport like some guys are just big time power shot guys and then other guys they hit you with like 50 60 guys like colby covington or guys like nick diaz they don't really throw 100 shots they just pepper you and stay on you guys like neil magne they just stay on you and overwhelm you with volume you know one thing i i try to do in completely different worlds but i try to treat it just like i did you know as a fighter pilot and if you're in a dog fight against someone you know knowing possibly what could happen here think about the predictions so if i'm fighting against a certain type of plane know what their capabilities are i got a certain type of fighter here knowing what their capabilities are is this fighter going to be more apt to want to go to the ground they're going to throw a power shot and doing your study of what the fighter traditionally does you know some people go back to their bread and butter regardless of what's going on the guy's going to want to fall down and you know pull guard or something like that or he's going to go up against the cage and do this but just going with the flow of the fight as we move with the fighters look and see what's happening and you know if it's time to stop the fight it's our responsibility to step in and stop it now when you train if you're training jiu jitsu or what have you are you training just to get better as a referee or do you actually enjoy it i i do enjoy it i would say my foundation is more in stand-up uh like with you know so one of my best friends in the world is chaz mulkey you know one of the great muay thai fighters in the world so that's probably where the basis is uh so i do twofold one you got to be in the position oh yeah yeah that's where my foundation was i started with marvin eastman and oh no kidding yeah so i moved up a little bit more uh you know started training with chaz and
you know a couple other folks in town so that would say that would be more of my foundation but to fully understand you know with the jiu jitsu you know taking a shin to shin kick you gotta you gotta do it at least one time to know what it feels like to see what these fighters are going through with the positions you know to train to get an understanding of yeah that's a good joke right there you know that's a that's a good pressure point submission right there but what i also do in conjunction to get on the mat and actually doing that is i will have two guys get on the mat and roll and it may be a step-by-step process okay put on a kimura and i want you to flex it to the point of knowing when you're gonna tap to be able to equate that to i got a fighter in the cage right now knowing what to look for and when you got vinny and fredson and those guys out there showing you the different types of things so i do a little bit twofold you're going to get on the mat and roll but i also want to stand there next to vinnie and say that's a pressure point right there that's what the guy's going to tap so my methods may be a little bit different but me as a referee i got to understand fully what i'm looking at there from the outside perspective of knowing yeah there's some that are really confusing right like uh von fluchok yes that's a weird one because it doesn't seem like a choke unless someone puts it on you and then you go oh jesus and you've seen some crazy ones yeah i think i had one on a tuesday night fight you remember when when snoop was announcing with uriah faber and it was unique about that sometimes is a guy will go to sleep with their eyes open yes and you don't know they're out so the first time i saw one of those m.a fight the guy's looking at me and he stopped moving and he stopped like this and i realized he was out now you put that into your memory bank yeah and go okay fighters have their apt to go to sleep with their eyes open based on this very unique choke
that's one of the only ones that they're going to do that i had a tuesday night fight that the guy's on the ground he gets put in the von flu and he's looking at i really should rename it to the osp choke yes right he has more than anybody that's right but that tuesday night fight this guy goes out from it and everybody's like what is what is he he's still his eyes open he's awake i go no his eyes are open but he's not awake and then when the fighter lets go of the hole and then you realize that he's out that's the kind of thing you got to train for to be able to understand osp he moves the guy's arm to the guillotine position it's so interesting he like he'll force a guy like he'll they say once you try to choke me he'll like force a guy's yeah and and then he'll tie it up and then he'll sit back and put people to sleep and it's weird because they're in apex everybody can see it and you'll hear the coaches saying no don't do that don't do that because they know what's gonna happen and he'll put you in it but the thing is it's like if a guy's neck is there and your arm's here it's like an instinct there he is see the way he he look at his eyes yep see he's out he's just eyes are wide open how cold well set it up show the setup again because the way ovin sets it up it's really interesting yeah because ovince well they're not going to show the whole setup but the way he clamps it down he does it better than von flu he does it better than anybody it's amazing it's such a good choke it's just weird you know fans and stuff that don't understand that they'll yell at you for stopping the fight and go his eyes are open he's still awakening [ __ ] those people stand them up they'll be yeah they're still jack [ __ ] but that it but that's a great example the von flue chokes a great example of a you know a situation where it's hard to figure out what's going on if you've never been put in that position before
so let anybody do that to you i you know i have and i've actually you know you you didn't training and stuff all the time i try to you know you never from a flying perspective a pilot perspective you don't ever want to get knocked out or passed out so their limitations there you know that could affect your medicals and other stuff like that if you get choked out it could affect your medicals uh you know they'll ask the question that that's a little bit different versus getting knocked out yes you know if you got any kind of brain injury i mean we got a lot of pilots that we work with you know that you know they do train you know for one cockpit defense and you know physical preparedness and stuff but i think to fully understand it you got to be put in those situations like i will tell you for me one of the most painful things i've ever been in was a toe hole i mean i thought i was going to you know break the damn mat i got put in a tow hole before and some of the other you know submissions and stuff like that may not be as effective on you but what about like heel hooks and stuff like that do they show you where it's dangerous yeah i try to get into the the fine details of you know what can potentially break or dislocate or separate what's going to be the pressure point and it's a it's a multi-process you got to look at that to see how deep it's in right but you also got to be able to look at the fighter to see how much agony they're in and be able to hear yeah you know somebody goes ah you know they scream you gotta stop fighting so you have to even if they're in pain they want to keep going you have to stop the fight it depends on what they do a grunt versus a scream and i tell them but if they scream and they're trying to get out if you scream it's a verbal submission god that's so weird because a lot of guys just want to scream because it hurts but they still want to keep fighting and i will i'll explain to them in the back there's a difference
between a grunt to get out of something and a scream if i make determination i say please don't put me in that position wasn't there a fight recently where someone did make a scream and they said it wasn't a verbal submission i thought it was one of the pfl or guys something like that i think it was a bellator fighter one of those guys he screamed that's i think it was a you know knee bar or something and he screamed out of it the referee stopped it yeah he's a no yeah people do that though right what's your opinion on the low calf kick uh it is becoming prevalent you know there are certain camps that everybody isn't it crazy they don't see people don't realize the physical impact of it when you get hit with that thing a couple times it starts to swell and because of where it is that swelling you know the blood doesn't have room to expand like maybe if it's the quad or something like that it can expand out a little bit more but in the calf you know with restricted limitation there that swelling and the you know the blood compact is going to stay there in that area and if you don't learn how to properly check you can hit that thing a couple times let me ask you this though as a muay thai practitioner because i haven't really gotten a good answer why isn't that prevalent in muay thai wasn't it interesting like that's not very common in muay thai that guys get stopped with low calf kicks don't you think it's because of the capability to check i would imagine so i would imagine so you think about the fights where the kicker has gotten hurt you know anderson silva fight you know the corey whatever his last name when he you know broke his leg on that one yeah corey hill you got people that are proficient in checking like you know what chris weidman did against anderson silva was a simple turn of the leg and he tried to catch it you know right on the top yeah and if you do that shin to shin it
could hurt the kicker more often than the person that is getting kicked so if there's proficiency in defending against it guys going to be apt to not do that yeah but it seems to me that like guys are trying to check them but maybe it's in mma the stance is different i was going to say the stance if it's a you know a wider type of stance with that front leg is open to it right and you know you could tell people you know with the fight that happened you know with with connor and dustin that camp is practicing that a lot oh my god and you know we as referees look at what people more may be more apt to do during the fight but also specifically in that fight because conor has that wide stance and he puts a lot of heavy weight on that front leg and they're also south part of southpaw so it opens up that back left leg kick to that front leg of the of connors and we can tell that if somebody gets kicked like there a couple times and then they change the stance you know that's going to alert us on what we got to start to look for and if i think someone's hurt from that we may not interact with them but you know i'll bring the doctor in a couple times and the doctor will sit there and they'll watch them stand up and they'll look at it if it gets to the point like the uh who was it what's the kid's name sean you know the oh sugar uh you know it's it's sugar time baby sean o'malley o'malley you remember when he fought that kid and he heard his foot on his knee if he could not his opponent's mistake was he went down to the ground with him if he stepped back and sean couldn't step back up to get into a fighter stance i would have to stop that fight so i know if you could hear but the coroner was yelling at him and you you refereed that fight i refereed that yeah marlon vera put him out right he put him out with a elbow uh no i don't think it was a marlin verified this was wasn't a cheeto vera no no this was a couple years back
oh so that was the second time he hurt his foot remember this was when we were over at the mgm or t-mobile that he hurt his foot and he went down to the ground oh that's right he won the fight he won the fight he won the fight that's right and i interviewed him when he was down that's right yeah so remember he got hurt he threw a a high kick and it hurt his foot and he went down to the ground yes if he had not been able to stand back up and maintain a standing fighter posture i would have had to stop that fight right so his opponent went down to the ground with him his corner is yelling let him back up let him he never did he stayed on the ground he's able to finish the fight you know that happened in bellator and bellator michael chandler got hit with a low leg kick and he got hit with that calf kick and his foot went numb you know sometimes that does happen and his foot just gave out and when his foot gave out they stopped the fight yeah and uh who was it jamie varner had the same thing happen ufc fight years ago yes so we as referees had the discussion in the debate what does a fighter have to be able to demonstrate to continue to fight yeah and it's you know they're down posture and they're standing posture but a guy has to be able to start or continue to fight up in a standing posture right so if your ankle keeps giving out you fall down we have to step in and stop the fight well it's interesting enough dustin poirier was in that same situation with jim miller jim miller had his leg destroyed but dustin got the fight to the ground like jim was like one kick away from ending the fight yeah justin's like get on the ground keep it there you can continue yes and that's what he did but if there's a stand up and he can't stand up then you got to step in this time it is just bananas to me how that one technique has dominated the sport over the last several years sometimes a technique comes around and a
lot of fires start doing it but it's very rare that a technique that's been around forever just they changed the location of the impact and by the way benson henderson was doing that way back in the day and for whatever reason it didn't have the same impact and you have people that don't know how to defend it because some people simply think lifting your leg no but you're still catching right you got to turn it you got to turn it out yeah it's it's just weird that it's not working um with mma fighters but with muay thai it's just it's not a factor it's not a factor because with more thai fights like a lot of fights get stopped because of leg kicks you know like liam harrison how many how many fights does that guy have stopped from leg kicks a lot you know he's got like highlights all over his uh his instagram of him stopping guys just chopping at their legs and if someone's proficient they chop that enough one a guy is going to probably change their stance yeah which is going to have impact you know if you fight traditional and you now have to switch to southpaw your whole game plan may be going out the window yeah well liam is very good at hiding and he doesn't have his his kit comes out so quick like he doesn't have like a pivot a step it's not there's no telegraph it's just he's in the mid and he's showing you hands and he just chops with the legs before you even know it but not targeting the calf it's interesting because he can land that shot to the thigh like that it just seems to me that he should be able to land it to the calf and other muay thai fighters should be able to as well but they're just not doing it that way does this make sense i'm reading it's because the muay thai stance to your front leg is usually off the ground so like weight bearing this is an argument i'm reading online it's a decent argument it's a decent argument but the problem that argument applies to the thigh kick as well yeah
but die kicks in muay thai are of course one of the most prevalent techniques it's just such a devastating technique it really is a devastating technique when they that shin slams into that calf you got a few of those you got a few of those and with some guys look khabib said that he was in trouble like his leg was in trouble in that fight and then just justin gachi that was as hard as he's ever been hit but he's just so [ __ ] tough that he figured out a way to get through it and get justin to the ground and finish him and people may not understand the impact so it's like you know you got chas that comes out there and kevin ross to train with you mm-hmm if they see you not checking it right they may target it a couple times yes you realize i'm tough i can i tough through it and then you realize after the second or third one like oh that was a mistake there's no toughen through that calf kick man especially not the way dustin was showing it to carl and he took what like you know he threw two of them and that changed the whole impact of the fight yeah i really did well because you could see conor was moving funny like even though he's trying to pretend everything's fine when he would get hit you would see that little because the pain is just it's a weird pain it's nerve pain there's not enough muscle there to absorb it and we have to recognize that yeah you know if we see a fighter changing their traditional game plan because of an impact or injury now that changes so you know i may stand about seven to ten feet away from a fighter right if i see that somebody's hurt like that i may move a little bit closer so i can get a you know a better feel look at their face and you know see what kind of impact or if he changes his stance now i know we could be stepping down the ground to a stoppage of this fight so you as a referee you got to build all that stuff into it you got to understand what the guy just threw the impact that calf kick impact that it
could have on it and honestly go back to that fighter safety again if the guy doesn't know better and he keeps taking all those shots it's our responsibility to help him out what do you do if you think a guy's got a broken hand uh so i won't make a medical assessment i'll make an observation i'll look and see if he or she is stopping to throw it and then what i'll do we've got the best doctors in the world you know nevada in california and i try to never wait uh take away time from if it's during the round there's no injury time out but how do you decide what to do like say if a guy like tony ferguson who his hand could be broken in a million different places he's not even gonna let you know he'll still keep swinging it like how do you know like if you notice that someone did something like that they pulled their hand back or shook it like how do you make that distinction i i'll i'll look at whether to continue to throw it and you gotta look at you know the look on their face so if they make any sounds after they throw it and it's really my responsibility in between the round i'm going to get the coach there for a minute i'll let the timekeepers know i'm going to call timeout i'll bring a doctor in but if it's broken do you stop the fight or do you allow them to keep swaying it it depends on the severity of it you know because you got guys that may be hurt they're gonna continue fighting yeah just change their game plan uh but if the doctor makes a determination you know for the you know the long term longevity their health etc you know you'll see the doctor and i walk off to the side and you know we'll cover the microphone up you know you still can hear what we're saying but you know we want to be able to have a discreet conversation right there in our jurisdiction in nevada it's up to the referee to make a decision with the consultation of the doctor in other places california etc the doctor can stop fights
but we work together as a team so the doctor says mark his hand is messed up we need to stop this fight i'll go back we'll make decision and we'll pass it you know under the advice of the you know medical staff nevada state athletic commission or whatever commission referee such and such is going to stop this i know corners have stopped fights before because of broken hands but i can't remember a time that a referee has stopped to fight for a broken hand i have only stopped fights if i see like compound fractures you know bones stop sticking out something but if i've seen somebody yeah you know which we've had you know at the amateur tough enough where you get some of the best competition we've had fighters that have had you know leg breaks and bones coming out and you know other stuff like that you know we've had fighters get teeth knocked out and you know if a fighter says tooth came out you know they swallowed a tooth or something like that that's automatic stoppage you know stuff like that we i've seen some crazy stuff we had you know fighters that have gotten knocked out and you know defecated on themselves or oh himself or something and yeah you know that that causes bigger problems now you got to sanitize the ring and stuff like that how can you sanitize poop once it's there you call it yeah it seems like if that's in the early fights you got a real problem yeah diarrhea's all over the octagon we've seen it before though you know you haven't try to do what you can but you haven't seen in the ufc well tim sylvia [ __ ] his pants once in the middle of a fight but i think what he didn't get knocked out he just had diarrhea i think there was a female fighter that had some yeah there was an issue right yeah michael kiesa almost [ __ ] himself he was in the middle of he came up to me uh a cage side he goes dude i'm about to [ __ ] oh god i go no and he's like yeah this is
before he fought and he was fine he kept it together but he's like dude i am about to [ __ ] myself so out of respect for the fight yeah we had we had a ufc fight during this season that somebody probably used the bathroom on himself oh okay well unfortunately i'd say don't wear white shorts inside the cage because yeah that's right um when you've had this incredible military career and been a fighter jet pilot and i would imagine that the thrills and the physical demands of that it's probably pretty hard to top um so i've been very lucky with getting to do some great things you know so first i attribute it back to my parents nars and shirley smith who you know older brother nars don't you have like three masters too i graduated from the air force academy so i got a everybody from the air force academy gets a bachelor of science because of the amount of math science and engineering that you do so i did political science there but i focused on like legal studies in pre-law and i got a master's in computer systems management i got a master's in international security and strategic studies which is like state department stuff and then this last one with you know health and wellness nutrition physiology etc then you fly for southwest that's outrageous i fly for a airline in dallas that i believe it might be southwest that's what i heard um so i tell you what it comes down to one my parents always pushed me to do something amazing but you got to have motivating factors to go do stuff one i wanted to be successful and it's kind of an analogy for me you know my parents work too hard for me to not you know keep making them proud of my accomplishments every day but i had somebody years and years ago that looked at me and they said you're never going to amount to be [ __ ] oh one of those guys okay that's a bit awesome isn't it amazing how haters can
motivate some people who's the person this was a so when i went to air force academy you know we got enlisted instructors you know along with the officer instructors that help us do stuff and it was someone i guess didn't like my the way i talked to my persona and you know she pulled me to the side and gave me the you ain't going never amount to be [ __ ] oh one of those okay we'll see how this goes isn't it funny how the people that do that usually ain't [ __ ] you know nobody who's like very accomplished pulls someone aside and says they're you're never gonna accomplish [ __ ] and it was funny because i saw them years later you know and it was pretty big accomplishment as a childhood dream i dreamt of being a thunderbird and when i made it back we you know we always do the show at the air force academy it was a stroke of luck that saw this same person i think she's like i know you from somewhere and i went up to her and i said thank you for what you said to me years ago look where i am right now but it's one of those you told her what she said i did what did she say back i don't believe i said that why would i say something i'm not gonna worry about it but i'm never i love being able to accomplish stuff but it's like what challenge can i take next and one of my friends said matt you have about three or four or five lifetime dreams all of one lifetime you really do thunderbirds and being an airline pilot and then uh you know people call it ufc referee it's a mf uh mma referee and your academic career just the academic accomplishments are pretty goddamn impressive on top of that i've been very lucky dude that's more than come on that's the thing that i love about military vets is that when you become very accomplished in that in in the military like the amount of discipline that's required they just develop superior human beings like i've run into so many guys that are
accomplished military vets and they're just they have more character they have more discipline it's like it's standard it's like you know like some some cars have a v8 with a lot of horsepower like military vets accomplish military vets they just have more character you know so you kind of related to the fight game i had a mentor tell me you know you get championship fights it takes a lot to be able to get there and he said you think about your career military academics you know refereeing fights and he said you begin to hang around champions enough you start to get that championship mentality and i try to look at it on everything you hang around herb dean big john mccarthy all these guys enough that stuff starts to rub off you want your level of proficiency to be that good at nellis air force base where you know it's the home of the fighter pilot the best of the best hang out there you begin to increase your level of proficiency you become one of the best in the world you know you got to have that is it cockiness i rather call it you know confidence yet unassuming you don't want to be too cocky to the point of thinking you're you know you're indestructible but you want to be good enough to be able to declare know that you're the best in the world and if i achieve something yeah i'm satisfied with it but it's like okay what else can i go do now you know finish at the air force academy let's go get a masters go to pilot training let's not just go to pilot train let's finish in the top so i can choose which plane i get and i chose to get a f-16 so here i am this kid from southeast washington dc that you know grew up with my parents taking me down by reagan airport and watching planes take off and then i saw an air show thunderbirds and i said i think i want to do that one day and here we are years later i stand out and the greatest accomplishment greatest thing i think i've ever had
i was in the gym at the base in arizona working out one day and i get paged to the front desk what is this about on the phone it's a four-star general that's in charge of you know all of air combat command and he goes what are you doing six months from now why don't you come out to nellis and be one of my thunderbirds i fell on the floor wow and then my parents were on vacation somewhere and i called them and i said what are you guys doing in about three months i don't know boy what what's going on with you and i said why don't y'all come to one of my air shows and i'm a thunderbird and my parents started crying you know to know that that type of dream has come true for all of us and as we get to do these other things you know my parents are in their 80s and i get them watching ufc fights on saturdays really you know their joy and to respect the fighters but also get to see their son you know smile about this and i guess i don't smile enough inside the octagon that's what my mom tells me but yeah you better smile on that sounds like something to mom would say you just smile more in there you look mean in there why you look so mean in there seriously concentrating on what's going on but man and you know like i told you when i got that message from you about stuff like this is you know we believe in the adage of good things happen to good people and you know a lot of dreams that keep coming true and i try to impress this upon my children as a single dad and i will tell you above all else anything else i've done i'm most proud of being a single dad so that's beautiful that's beautiful you should be a you should be proud of a lot of things that you've done man you've accomplished a lot i'm trying i'm trying keep doing some good things yeah no you certainly have now tell me what like to be a thunderbird when they have those crazy air shows i mean there's so much danger and so much so much coordination between all the jets like how long does
it take to prepare for one of those shows so um the training season is about five to six months pull up a video of one of them thunderbird airship because they're so crazy so give me anxiety i was uh i was on the team probably doing one of the most unfortunate if you look at the uh thunderbird ejection at mountain home look at that you're barely touching huh yeah so if ah i think if you do like like thunderbird ejection and mountain home in in 2003 and everyone has seen you know this video this is one of my teammates so i was in the diamond yeah that's it right there i was in the diamond which is the four planes that stayed together we had just taken off and we go behind the show line and come back around the two solo excuse me the two solos do their take off using an ad blocker that's okay the two solos take off and do their thing so this second guy that takes off he's gonna go do a max climb to get up to about 5000 feet and then roll and then do a split s back in front and he actually winds up rolling too low and that picture that you see right there is the result of it so he actually crashes right in front of us so that's the video from we have this little cockpit camera that sits right here that looks at it so he he rolled too low and then he ejected and we are a half a mile away can you explain what that means he rolled too low so when he rolls inverted to come back the other direction he needs so many thousand feet to be able to make it on the back side of it without impacting the ground so how does he make that incorrect like what what so the f-16 has a radar altimeter on it which tells you you're above ground how many feet you are and let's say on this maneuver he had to be 3000 feet above ground but the antennas are on the bottom of the plane so when you roll inverted the only thing you can look at is your
altitude calculation inside the cockpit and there's above ground level and there's mean sea level so you know like like las vegas is you know 2000 mean sea level whereas washington dc will be like at sea level so you have to make a calculation based on being in mountain home he had to add 2 000 feet to his above ground level to be able to read it properly inside the cockpit so it makes it it makes a transition a termination of how he just had a math problem it was a miscalculation versus where we practice at home versus where we uh are stationed at home and when he rolled he didn't have enough altitude to come around the backside is this a cockpit camera yeah this isn't 4k yeah that's that's gaming but that's exactly what it looks like okay okay okay it's way too fake then all right that's but that's that's a true depiction of what a f-16 cockpit is going to look like so your your air speed will be on one side and your altitude is going to be on the other side do you use one of these simulation machines and practice in it uh so at the bases they have actual simulators that you can get in does it seem like you're actually like is it all hd and yeah it's it's high level stuff so it seems like some of them may not be motion but this is exactly some of them are motion though some of them will sway side to side in the whole deal oh wow yeah so uh so you really do feel like you're flying you don't have the three different physical sensations right the xyz axis so you don't get that part of it but as far as the you know the the ocular stimulation you're gonna get all that you're gonna see everything that you would actually see and it's more of a a hand-eye coordination so you know athletes tend to do very well when we fly because it's a lot of look outside it's not a lot of looking down at your instruments inside the cockpit with the heads-up displays it's designed
to very rarely look inside the cockpit and then your your control stick is going to be on your right hand and then your throttle and everything on your left hand with you know anywhere between five and ten buttons on either one so we used to call it the piccolo drill you know you do all this stuff and you have to manipulate doing shooting missiles and turning the gun on and turning your radar and doing all the stuff so it's like a musical instrument exactly and then the whole time you're fighting against the g-forces and you're looking outside so what's unique about this the solos demonstrate the performance capabilities of the f-16 etc the diamond which i was in we demonstrate uh proficiency close in flying so in a diamond we may be doing 450 miles an hour doing a loop upside down we may be 18 inches apart from each other so our wings are overlapped and then 18 inches apart and the goal is to do everything in unison and in that training program to get used to that it's a step-by-step process so go out and learn how to fly loop get proficient in that then put another plane next to you we start off at about seven feet apart and then as you get more proficient we go into what's called the diamond position so the closest plane there on the left is the position that i would fly and that's about seven feet apart right there we eventually get to the part where your wings are overlapped and the slot is gonna fall down into the slot position in the bottom of the diamond oh [ __ ] that and we get closer your wings are overlapped and you're about 18 inches apart so that's the first solo he may do something like an aileron know exactly where they are so um in the diamond there are two positions that i would look at to put my plane in the right position so the back of his wing i would always line up and i would take the front of the missile rail it has united us air force painted on the side i put the front of the missile
rail on the a in air force okay and then you know for two years my neck would be turned 45 degrees uh to the right i mean you can see right there how close you are and everyone is going off of the movements and the cadence of the lead plane and he's saying you know something like you know left turn and the t in turn is when he's starting to move the stick to turn to the left or you know backhand with the pull to start pulling back you practice that hundreds and hundreds of times before we ever get out in front of a crowd is there video of you doing this uh i don't know if you'll be able to find specifically to me because i mean should we in 69 years of the thunderbirds doing stuff so you'd have to find it but anything between 2003 and 2005 you know that team is a team that i was on is it a an important method of recruiting like what is what is the purpose of the air show other than being awesome it's a primary recruiting tool you know for us the united states air force we're the spokespersons for the air force department of defense etc but it's also in instill you know faith and confidence in your military it's a little bit different than out there dropping bombs and shooting missiles but it's the you know to show the performance capabilities of the men and women in the air force the personnel as far as the performance capabilities of the equipment that we fly you know the f-16 is a fourth generation fighter the best of the best will be the fifth generation plus f-22s f-35s um but that's also to have a little bit of fun and go out and do an air show you know as fans you're living the life of a rock star i mean there's no doubt about that the blue angels thunderbirds you know we did shows in fort lauderdale like over spring break where there are you know a million plus people out there oh my god so and you know you imagine you get back on the ground and your picture and everything is in the paper you may not be able to you think you
know ufc fighter is popular is the same sense you go to a restaurant and you can't even eat because everybody recognizes who you are a million people over spring break and fort lauderdale we fly shows over the water you're going to have that many people there so to prepare for that kind of a show how long do you train uh so the training so we practice in las vegas at the ranges just up north and you start basically right after thanksgiving so the last show of the year is going to be the second week of november they take thanksgiving off and then they get cranking from there and from end of november all the way up into march monday through friday sometimes on saturdays you fly two to three times a day every single day so it's about a hundred you know anywhere 120 150 rides flights to get you prepared for that wow and then it's you start off as a two ship bring in the third plane bringing the fourth plane so the diamond goes and does their thing the solos go and do their thing when they get proficiency up to like 50 of the flights everybody comes back together and the goal is always perfection in an air show we honestly believe we never achieve perfection you know the crowd may be sitting there loving it and crying now that was incredible you've never seen a debrief to talk about a flight until you watched a thunderbird or a blue angel debris if we could be in there for hours talking about you taxied out and you were you know six inches off to the right or you were taxing five knots too fast we want perfection you know the way we salute where your uniform look you can't be fat dumpy and sloppy in your thunderbird uniform it was that goal of perfection because you know you as an american citizen want to have faith and confidence in your military and that's one of the greatest tools that we can have to be able to demonstrate that you know it's fun for
people to go to air shows we want to recruit we want to have that next generation come in and follow in our footsteps you know it's all voluntary force so we got to get people to join but we also want you to have a little bit of fun and you know see something amazing when you come to an air show when there's a disaster like the mountain home crash or some other crashes like what is that like like what's is there a complete revamping of how things are done like what how much uh you know what what happens so the the first thing is you know we hope and it there's this video to it out there and audio sometimes you know the first question that came out was did he get out of the jet and that's what scares everybody our hearts sank and you can't see it at first because there's so much spoken engine goes flying you know down inside a runway but we would practice for stuff like that in off season you say if you ever eject out of the plane we wear red show suits so everybody can see you physically capable if you can stand up wave to the audience and then take care of yourself and that's exactly what he did is there a way you can move like what the horrible thing would be if the plane crashed and then they parachuted down into the fires can they maneuver the parachute in any way you have drawstrings on it but so when he ejected there so when you watch the video inside the cockpit he's going down like this and you could he has his hand on the right stick and you could see his left hand move three times he's thinking about ejecting had he ejected first time he would have gone right into the fireball oh second time he's starting to flat plate the plane a little bit he still would have gone to the fireball so he waited to the perfect time he's actually below the ejection envelope it's a zero zero seat meaning sitting on
the ground no air speed i can eject out of it and it's going to give me a parachute he steps on the rudder which turns the nose of the plane about 10 degrees to the left because he's over the runway when he ejects the drogue shoe comes out which slows him down and he separates from the seat but he does not get a full parachute so you go how does somebody survive without getting a full parachute well the drogue chute pulls him out enough is this him yeah so you can see his his hand see his hand move right there he's actually reaching for the ejection handle and there he ejects and you see him and that's the the camera turns off when he ejects wow but because he stepped on the rudder he's moved a little bit to the left uh he actually misses the runway when he hits the ground he lands on the side where it's it rained you know a day or so before and he uh he lands in some soft dirt right there and that kind of is what saves him but if you're high enough you can grab the string so you can manipulate the parachute but he was not even close to being high enough right so there was no other way for him to pull out of that he had he's full go eject yeah he's full af stick and full power trying to get out of it there's no way he was going to make it he would have missed it i think they did the calculation he missed it by like you know 900 feet a thousand oh my god and they they roll out at the bottom they're at you know the solos are low they're you know 150 feet above the ground when they finish this hit right here oh i'm scared to watch this even though i know he's okay oh wow he's like right before the ground yeah holy [ __ ] and this there was a so that picture there was an air force photographer that was on the catwalk of the tower that this one digital camera start first start coming out he's sitting there click click click getting everything and that's how that that picture now is that get dude get in trouble
after something like this uh he was they'll make a determination of cause and you know unfortunately this one it was deemed to be pilot error and he was removed from the team so that was towards the beginning of the show season so it's always six airplanes and they're only six they're six demonstration pilots they're eight pilots on the team but one is the narrator and others the safety officer we don't have any backups so if i wake up tuesday morning and i got a cold there's no backup for me so he got removed from the team and then you know unique for us we finished the season as a five ship so we changed around some of our formations instead of having a six ship formation we did five ship formations we we had to do some you know downtime there in idaho and then we got a waiver to fly back to vegas and then we sat for a little bit till they made determination there was not actually something wrong with the plane you know because if there's determination there's something wrong with the plane everybody has to be grounded right when they determine all that was fine we started training again and made a transition to a five shift show and we finished the season as a five ship and then they hire odds and evens every year so one three five seven nine will stay on the team while they hire two four six eight and that's to keep consistency on the team every year so that next year when one three five seven are done they'll hire a new one three five seven and now you've got your two fours sixes and eights that are second year consistency and will be the instructors for the team wow but it's uh again at nellis air force base the home of the fighter pilot out in vegas you know you got the best of the best that are out there and you know to be a thunderbird it's a multi-step process you know you got to have great flying capabilities letters of recommendation from a lot of people and you got to look good in uniform you got to look fit you can't be out of shape
and you got to be you know have the nerves to be able to do this to it's one thing to go out and fly a fighter plane all the basic maneuvers that we're doing are the same as every air force pilot learns but now you're doing this in tune to music you know sitting 18 inches away from another plane you know in front of a crowd of however many hundreds of thousands of people and it was fun though you know it's high stress you know my instructor's like wiggle your fingers and wiggle your toes because you know you start to tense up and you do that you're gonna relax a little bit but you know my neck was stuck like this for about two and a half years because that's you know they were like oh we're going past mount rushmore how did it look and i go it looked like 132 bolts on the left side of thunderbird one because that's all i can see it's all you can concentrate on yeah how many different jets have you piloted so i started in gliders at the air force academy and then we flew do they teach you how to do it in a plane with no engine yeah yeah so you a tow plane you're being pulled behind another plane and they take you up to five ten thousand feet and you start off on the glider wow very capable and then we went why do they do that you start with the basics you know so it's a two seaters you know you got the instructor sitting behind you you know so it's it's safe but you want to start with the basics of learning the concepts of flight you know aerodynamics of flight and then from there you move into it's a little bit different now but when i did it they had a you know a single engine cessna and then when i went to air force pilot training we went into a t-37 tweet and then from there we tracked based upon how well you did so we went fighter bomber track or tanker transport i went fighter bomber so i flew the t-38 and that was the first you know really sleek fast training type of airplane how many years into training is this
uh so you do the t37 for so at the academy you flew the glider for i don't know 10 rides and then the t-41 for you know 10 20 rides until you solo you know they put you in a plane when you're proficient you go out in solo and then in pilot training this is a formal after you graduate rotc the academy you do six months in the t-37 decide what track you go on and you do six months in the t-38 and then i did well enough in the t-38 that i was able to pick i selected f-16s and then i went to luke air force base out in arizona and became proficient in f-16s and then from there i went to combat squadrons all around the world south carolina korea you know back to arizona nellis so i've flown i think six different versions of the f-16 and then flew to thunderbirds where they fly f-16s went away to do the tour at the white house and then came back and finished up on f-16s again and the tour of the white house were you secret service what were you doing no so i was actually a white house fellow so in 1964 president johnson formed a program called the white house fellowship where the it's actually the president united states will select anywhere between 12 and 15 young americans doesn't military civilian anything to come and serve in their administration and what it is is the highest level mentorship leadership program that you can be a part of in our country and the president places you somewhere in their cabinet to be a senior advisor to like a cabinet secretary or like for me i was a senior white house advisor at nasa so i work directly for the nasa administrator and you're a you know essentially a senior white house you know advisor or consultant or whatever task that cabinet secretary wants to have from you at nasa and what i did for uh you know nasa administrator mike griffin one of the smartest guys you'll ever meet in your
life like he had seven degrees a couple doctorates in there i was in a lot of capacities his right hand man so he would have me do all the programming for his stuff at nasa he would take me on trips with him to russia and you know discussions about the international space station and i prepared a budgetary book for congress 2007 and was presented to congress to talk about the you know the compartmental programs for nasa moving forward with the cancellation of the space shuttle where is nasa's budget gonna go so that was my you know kind of summary project for working at nasa for the year and then i got to interact with all the agencies that work with nasa you know the international space station working on the soyuz gonna fly and essentially getting to see things at that level now part two of it was back on the white house side they bring us in a couple days a week and we'd have you know one-on-one private meetings with cabinet secretaries or you know chief of staff of the air force and folks like that what's it like just being in the white house how bizarre does that feel so i grew up in washington dc and you get these tours of the east wing otherwise you know you can walk through and see all the stuff on the east side but it's surreal to be in the west wing because you they meet outside and you know you got to do all the safety protocols and everything and then they take you in and you take the elevator up to that like what are the safety protocols they check you for weapons yeah you gotta do all that you know you can't bring cell phones and all that kind of stuff no you can't you know right just all the protection stuff are going in they take you in the elevator and you go up and you're like man that's the floor right here and they walk you down the hallway and they open up that door into the oval office and you're like wow god man i've seen this on all the movies i heard it's small um it it i think it it's not really huge but it depends on how much furniture and
stuff that they have in there but i mean i heard it it feels small maybe because it's just so grand the idea of being in the oval office where the president sits it's so crazy but when you're actually in there like oh it's like a regular room yeah it's i mean it's obviously circular um i guess oval in shape and like so i work for president bush i would say the best part of it is that program is a bipartisan position so you don't have to deal with the partisan politics and all the nonsense in dc right um but i work for you know president uh george w bush and what a incredible person because your perception is he a nice guy what awesome guy really you know some outside of you know politics everyone has their opinion there right but a lot of times regardless of whatever administration they only know what we see on you know the news media also like 50 of the country's going to hate you exactly no matter who you are you know but as a as a husband as a father you know how passionate he was about you know his incredible spouse and you know his his children to see that side of a person and you know a lot of stuff we can't disclose just because his private conversation is non-disclosure but to see the emotion you know of a father talking about his daughters you know who are in college and you know his hopes and dreams for them and to be able to really respectfully ask any question you know that you want we'd have these sessions like with the president we meet in the roosevelt room and over office and it's tough as a cabinet secretary to get five 10 15 minutes with the president we'd sit in there with him for an hour and a half wow and talk about stuff you know ask is the country ready for a female president you know you asked us what did he think uh he had people that he looked at leadership that he thought would be candidates for you know presidency like condoleezza rice was on you know his administration
and and obviously uh you know hillary clinton was there so the the level of people that were out there to have these discussions of these are the type of people that we think regardless of political affiliation that you know could be looked at for leadership in our country and with us the people that they select to be in that program you know to be future leaders military non-military uh you know you're sitting around some of the finest people in the world people that i still talk to and associate with and you know have discussions with today so here we are years later that these are still some of my best friends in the world that you talk about goals and dreams and you know you think about stepping into politics and stuff like that and you know you get some sound advice to these people but i'd already seen and been around the president before because when we did some of the air shows you know the president or vice president someone comes you know they come and speak and we did a show at the air force academy uh president bush is there so i got you know pictures and stuff with him and you know getting to talk to him and it's weird because we have military call signs you know with like maverick and goose my military call sign was chappy chappie chappie after after general chappy jenny is the first black four star in the air force so we go back and do this white house stuff and we're at a christmas party and there's a formal greeting line to go and meet the president first lady and the aide is standing there and he says you know major mark smith and he goes chappie come on in meet the wife and i was like how the heck did he remember you know what my military call sign was but that's the type of personal relationship in that ultra professional environment that you
get so you know so here i'm growing up in southeast washington dc go away to school and the proudest moment i think i've ever had is we would get to give tours and stuff for the white house so i get to bring my parents down wow and give them a tour of the west wing at the white house so you know people talk about dreams come true hard work and stuff like that man i've had a you've had a wild life man it's it's been good so and still going i should say like it's over i didn't didn't mean it that way no no we don't want that to happen no i got a lot of stuff i'm still trying to accomplish so now you were talking about all the various jets that you flew did you ever like fly uh did you ever test fly anything like how do they what do they do with like when they're testing out new vehicles so we do have test pilots you know edwards air force base out there in california does a lot of testing with you know current inventory and potential future inventory and then we do have a test and evaluation there at nellis air force base testing planes and you know weapons and stuff like that i never did that i traditionally stayed in uh combat roles at combat coded squadrons uh or training you know they're like i was an instructor teaching kids how to fly f-16s at luke air force base the reason why i brought it up is like i've always been curious like when they develop a new vehicle they must have to talk to pilots right i mean that has to be an integral part of the design of it like you have to talk to someone who has a lot of experience flying a fighter jet like what is missing what what could be done better like how do they do that so as part of the design program uh we have pilots that will be coded as test pilots you know so they may be stationed at
edwards or they may be stationary at nellis air force base that that's their active role you know they look at development of it based on historical platforms you know you go from the f-16 f-15 to the f-22 to the f-35 you get all that kind of input so they're guys that instead of being in a combat coded squadron they're actually in a test and evaluation squadron they get to do all that stuff and they go out and test uh what are the capabilities of this missile uh it's not doing exactly what we wanted to do and they take all that feedback to the design folks you know lockheed martin or you know general dynamics back in the day when they're building stuff because you know for the longest time the f-15s and f-16s for us that production line was done but you go to st louis and you look on the opposite side of the runway they're building f-15s there again and we just announced that the air force is going to start buying the next block of f-16s the block 70s which is man that's a really advanced plane and guys that are active duty they get to go out and fly that thing and test it now when you have you said the f-22 is the most capable uh it depends on what it is you know yeah between the f-22 and f-35 those are you know what is what does the f-35 do better than the f-22 command and control so you know like maybe communications with the other system the f-22 is by far the air superiority dogfighting air-to-air it's the most advanced plane in the world so why don't they just make only f-22s um budgetary constraints oh is that the amount that it cost you know when the agreement came down to how many we were going to buy um i think it's probably in the hundreds now you know that we have congress is going to allocate a certain amount of funds to okay you can have this much money to buy this money f22s and the more you buy the you know per price may go down but because we have a limited amount budgetary-wise that's what we stopped
with and then we got congressional approval for the f-35 and you know their competitions the f-22 versus the you know yf22 back in the day versus yf23 which company makes it they're gonna have you know fly-offs and make a determination of which one we're gonna get but so it's only communication that makes the f-35 that the f-35 does better than the f-22 it probably has a lot more than that but i can tell you i've never flown it i haven't had a chance to fly it but um advanced avionics weapon systems stealth capability all that stuff is probably encompassed in the package don't you want to fly one i would but they're going to have to make some concessions and things to allow me to go back into the air force man i would feel like someone like you that would drive me crazy if i never flew one of those things uh yeah but that thing looks insane i'm living a pretty good life as an airline pilot right now and you know mma referee so i got a pretty good right down no you do have a pretty good i'm not saying you don't i'm just saying that out of all the jets like watching that thing maneuver i mean i didn't know it could do all that yeah it's insane it's like it doesn't make sense it's not a plane or a helicopter first time i fought against an air i was like i'll sit there i probably got lost for a second like is that a plane or a helicopter with some of the stuff that it's doing but is there a way to improve upon that um i think with there are probably limitations in the capability of the pilot that's flying it you know like i think the most i've ever pulled is 10.3 g's the the plane is designed yeah so if you think about the concept of a g if you're the amount of g that you pull you take the body weight or whatever it is and multiply it times that so if my hand weighs 10 pounds i'm pulling you know seven g's my hand feels like it weighs 70 pounds so it's a 200 pound guy you pull 9gs your body feels like it weighs 1800
pounds and you're trying to maneuver the plane keep side of the other plane you know maybe deploy weapons control avionics control your radar and stuff like that as you're doing all that so their physical limitations of the person that's flying the plane that's why they looked at you know pilotless aircraft you know i think some of the cargo companies have talked about that there's a human element that i believe you always have to have there because of unknown conditions you know emergencies and stuff like that they've looked at single pilot you know cargo airplanes and stuff like that but i can tell you when you have emergencies up there it's nothing like having a person sitting in the seat next to you where somebody can handle the emergency while the other person's flying the plane you can't get around that right but as technology advances you know we got drones and stuff that are out there and you may have a pilot or controller that's on the ground that's controlling a single drone or multiple drones so yeah we're probably going to advance to that uh because the physical limitations of the limitations of the human body because watching that thing the way it just changes direction and shoots straight up in the air you're like what is that like on a human body yeah you got to get over the air sickness and the fear of you know moving in the the third dimension and really combating against the g-forces but in a dog fight scenario you may get maneuvers like that but in a you know a long-range fight you're going to be flying straight level and maybe shoot a missile you may not do stuff like that but my body eventually got used to it it was tough at first you know fighting against because i'd never experienced anything like that before you get on a roller coaster it's like one or two g's like that's nothing right when you get up to nine you're like oh my god this is you know sinking down into the scene then you've seen like a footage of uh
they call it the uh like the the g chamber where guys go and yeah let's do this stuff yeah like that you can see the physical toll that it has on the body uh and what it does to you now you put that up in the air moving in three dimensions while you've got the g-forces on you if they do that with you that's special you have to go through training for that uh you know when i finish pilot training uh it's down at holloman air force base in new mexico you got to do that to be able to go into your fighter and then once you're done to be able to prove that you're combat ready you got to go down there and you do that you sit in a seat and you got to be able to pull 9gs or whatever it is for a certain amount of time if you don't pass it to you how much time do you have to do nine g's for you got to do like a series of different exercises so i think the longest one was off and on anywhere between 30 and 45 seconds they have you looking over the shoulder to do it to look at a plane back behind you they put a plane out in front of you on the screen and you're like you got to stay with him you got to keep him in that pocket which means you got to pull back on the stick a certain amount and that determines the amount of g that you got to pull you got on your g suit and everything like that but if you don't pass it 45 seconds sounds so crazy yes it's an eternity when you're sitting there in the seat and it's the weird thing is in the centrifuge because you're at the end of a pendulum it doesn't feel the same as it does in a plane you know because the the shorter the pendulum the higher the force is going to feel if you're sitting at the end of a you know 50-foot pendulum it's going to feel a little bit different but a shorter pendulum it's going to be exponential so guys hate going to the centrifuge guys and gals hate doing that just because it's so tough when you make
it through the centrifuge there's probably going to be a little bit of party in this celebration after that well listen man i appreciate you i respect you tremendously you're a great referee and thank you your accomplishments are incredible and i just it was fun talking to you bro thank you joe i appreciate you i'll see you in like two weeks right which one are you coming back for you're coming on the sixth or the third the 13th i think i'm there for both of them but i'm there for the 13th for sure absolutely i'll be there all month so all right just uh very much thank you appreciate it bye everybody