Joe Rogan | Forrest Griffin on Being Involved with the UFC Performance Institute

They've got their own guys. That's great. Jackson. They've got their own people. But, you know, there's plenty of people on the roster that have an MMA coach and a grappling coach. And that's it. So the Performance Institute, we feel we can help and support those guys as well. You can bridge the gaps. And we're not trying to displace the programs where athletes already have resources, but I don't know of another MMA gym globally that has the capacity around assessment that we do. So, yeah, we have some really great practitioners, but Bo Sandoval, our strength coach, and his team cannot write programs for 570 athletes. It's not possible. But what we can do is assess those athletes, provide that feedback back to their strength coaches, and have conversations about how those coaches can use that data to support the development of that athlete. And that goes across the board for all of our performance services. Well, it's a pretty amazing resource because if you're a young fighter and all you have is access to the people around you, if you're fighting in the UFC, you get to have access instantaneously to this gigantic group of people. When Forrest, when you were coming up, you were a real pioneer. That was not available to a guy like you. No, I mean, I tell the story all the time. So I was actually a little bit ahead of my time. I had an actual strength coach that had letters behind his name. He went to college to be a strength coach. There was like an ex-bodybuilder. I had a relatively good nutritionist who had a degree in chemical biology. I had a good physical therapist, but I didn't really have, like I was my coach. At the end of the day, I was the head of performance. So I'd go do jujitsu. And the coach wants you to go hard and then you go kickbox, but you're going to go light, but it's kickbox. So you don't. And then, and now nobody's the strength coach and nutritionist on different pages. So I think just understanding that everything has to work together, which I didn't really understand. Well, what I'm saying is that you kind of had to pave a path because when a guy like you was doing all that stuff with a real legitimate strength and condition coach, real legitimate nutritionist, how many other people were doing that at your time? Not that many, but I got to be around good people like Randy Couture, Chuck Liddell. Those were kind of guys I got to hang out with and say, well, he does this, he does that. Chuck actually went into that much of this stuff, but Randy was. Chuck was like, I know what I'm doing, kid. All right. Yes, sir. Yeah, he just existed on pure savagery. When you step back and look at your career, how amazing is it to be able to step off from there and do something like you're doing now for the UFC performance Institute, which is very meaningful for young fighters. I mean, you really do get a chance to give back with your experience and your understanding of the right way and the wrong way, the mistakes that you've made. I mean, it's huge. Well, that, I mean, that's the whole, I mean, that's the whole Genesis kind of from, from my involvement in the PI. Like, oh, look, here's the 10,000 mistakes I made. Yeah. You're going to make mistakes too, but these are the ones you don't need to make, you know, again, the sports change, man. It's 25 years old. Every other sports so evolved and around so long, our sport changes all the time. I forget who was talking about it, but you know, even the guys fighting 10 years ago, probably couldn't compete with guys fighting today. You know? But I mean, what I would say as well, is not only for the fighters, forest is a huge resource for us. The best piece of technology we have is the door handle that leads from my office to, to forest office, right? Because ultimately he's a massive resource for us that are not necessarily coming from an MMA background and are trying to support the MMA community to, to, to bounce ideas off, to essentially beta test things from a thought process perspective. And he's a huge part of the performance Institute philosophy because we can use and call upon his expertise. So here's another funny thing when we were putting together the, the, the team for the PI, I kind of shied away from people already doing MMA. I wanted combat sports. Everybody that's done it has done judo boxing on an Olympic level. They've done combat sports, but I wanted like a fresh set of eyes coming from a different, you know, than just, you know, cause I know really good MMA strength coaches. I know pretty good, you know, you, you know, good, but get, get that fresh set of eyes. You know, nutrition actually was a little different because the rest of the world does not understand a weight cut for an MMA fight. It's not like it, you know, we go to XOs, you go to any high level facility and then you say, I'm going to lose 8% of my body weight and then compete on Saturday. They're like, no, don't just fight in the high weight class. I'm like, yeah, that actually isn't going to work out for me. They just won't comprehend it. They're like, no, no, you'll perform better. Like, no.