Joe Rogan - MMA Should Be Bareknuckle

Hello freak bitches. Faces were born for sure they can take more impact. Wider faces, bigger heads, thicker necks. Wow. For sure they can absorb better. Everybody can get knocked out. Right. Because the human body is just so flawed, especially if you have like some crazy ouster orem type character kick you in the head. Anyone can get knocked out. Yeah. But it's less likely to get knocked out if you're shaped a certain way. Yeah. And your hands, the shape of your hands makes a giant difference as well. It's like how much impact you can deliver. Yeah. Do you want bigger hands? Yes. Like George Foreman had enormous hands. Wow. Like there's a guy named Francis Ngannou who's like one of the top UFC heavyweights. Every time I shake his hands I just go, ah! Jesus! He's got these fucking hammers. Like these giant hammers. And he just knocks people just dead. It's a huge advantage. A structural advantage. It's like the difference between having a ball peen hammer, a little tiny hammer for nails, and having a sledge hammer. It literally is a difference. Yeah. It's just having that extra weight on the end, especially if there's a lot of body mass behind it as well. Just a massive advantage. So would you want there to be no gloves? Hey look at his hands. The size of his motherfuckers hands. Jesus! Yeah, they're enormous. That doesn't seem fair. They're enormous. Yeah. It does not seem fair. Ah, that's Brian Stan by the way who was the UFC or the W.E.C. 205 pound champion. He was a UFC fighter, a top UFC fighter at 185 pounds. He's a big boy. He looks deformed. He's get dwarfed by Ingano's hands. His hand looks like a stump. Yeah. So that is an undeniable physical advantage if you can land that punch. Yeah. And then you want a big face and you want a more domed head. Yeah, there's a lot of shit going on. But my point is that if fights had no pads, we would get a more accurate representation of what the body can really do. Instead, we're making fighters get more damaged because you're letting people tee off. I don't think you should be able to tape your wrists either. I think that's unfair too. Because you can't- What is taping your wrists? Gives it stiffer so it doesn't buckle as much when you impact something. Because when you hit something, if your hand goes like that, you can really fuck your wrist up. You really get torn tendons off of shit. Is it true that people put cement in their gloves and stuff? They have. Yeah. Plaster. Margarito did that. Yeah. He was fighting a bunch of different guys and busting them up really bad. And then before his fight with Sugar Shane Mosley, they caught him in the locker room with plaster in the wraps of the gloves. Somebody caught him and then they started putting two and two together and realizing when he beat up Miguel Cotto, when he beat up all these different fighters, it was an unusual beating. He was hitting them and it was just having an inordinate effect on them, hitting people way harder than anybody else was. No one could figure out why. Once they took that padding out of his glove- Just like Lance Armstrong thing. Win but don't win too big. But way worse. Because Lance Armstrong was doing that when everybody else was also doing that. Also, of course. Yeah, yeah. But don't win by too much and people are going to start getting suspicious. He wasn't necessarily beating everybody, but he was beating a lot of guys. And the way he was beating them, he was fucking them up. And then when he got to Sugar Shane, they caught him with the plaster, they took it out, rewrapped his hands and Sugar Shane beat the fuck out of them. And Sugar Shane knew about it. Everybody knew about it. They were talking about it on the broadcast and that they were almost not letting him fight and they let him fight with newly wrapped hands. And Sugar Shane just lit him up like a Christmas tree, fucked him up. And then Manny Pacquiao fucked him up too. Everybody fucked him up after that. And what do you get a fine? Why do you get to- I mean, I guess- He should have been probably retired from boxing. They should have said there's no way you could ever fight again. They were just like, we want to see you get killed a couple times first. Yeah. I mean, he was never the same guy and he actually wound up fighting. He had a really badly torn retina to the point where I think they put an artificial retina from one of the beatings that he took. I think to Sugar Shane, it might've been to Pacquiao. It might've been to Pacquiao beat him bad. There's a couple of guys beat the fuck out of him. But it's just that guy was putting plaster in his gloves. So I don't think gloves are the way to go. I mean, if you want to do it for boxing, I get it. Boxing is a completely different sport and there's an art to catching punches on the gloves. But my thing about MMA in particular is why is it okay to elbow someone in the face? But it's not okay to have gloves that are like bare knuckle? That's crazy. You could literally smash someone's head. What's the difference between this and this? Yeah. You could smash someone's head with an elbow, like right in their eye socket. And that's totally legal. You could smash their nose to a pulp. That's totally legal. But somehow, like a shin, you can hit someone so hard with your shin. It's a razor blade, ultimately. Well, it's a baseball bat. You kick someone in the head with a shin. It's crazy. There's no padding on it at all. But you have to have padding in your fists. That's crazy. Why is that? It's old. We left it when the UFC first came about, it was bare knuckle. And then in some sort of a concerted effort to turn into a legitimized sport and be accepted by athletic commissions. Because everybody's pretty new. Very new. In terms of big time sports, it was started in 1993. That's crazy. Just 20 something years old, 24 years old. So they wanted to make it look like in the beginning, the first fights that I saw in 1997, when I first started working for the UFC, there was a lot of bare knuckle fighters. Guys fought with shoes on. They were bare knuckle. You had to grab people's crotches still. You would rather grab their clothes. R. Kelly's? Yeah, not that. A little different. You were allowed to do a lot of shit. You could pull hair for a long time. Really? Yeah, and then they finally got rid of that. They got rid of grabbing clothes. But you didn't have to have padding on your knuckles back then. And the people that were super successful realized you could hit people way harder if you have padding on your knuckles. Of course. So Vitor Belfort was one of the first. He was 19 years old and he entered the UFC. UFC 12, Doulton, Alabama in 1997, just beat the fuck out of everybody with gloves on. What would it take for them to do a rule that said no gloves anymore? They would just have to listen to me. And listen to a lot of other martial arts fans. Some people wouldn't want it because they'd think you would get cut more, which I think you would. You would get more superficial tissue damage. But I think ultimately you'd get less brain damage. I think- Because you'd get hit less. Yeah, I think you'd get hit less. And especially if you practice correctly, I think you could still run the risk of getting elbowed and kneed and kicked. And it's not safe by any stretch of the imagination. Do you think it has to get to a point where, because MMA's so young, where fighters are 60 and they're blowing their brains out and doing what NFL players are doing? I don't think people would have to know- I don't hear about a concussion crisis in MMA that much. But it's real. I mean, any sort of combat sport, you're going to have it. No, I mean, I know it's there, but it's not like in the zeitgeist really at the moment. It isn't yet, but it certainly could be. And it probably certainly will be when some of the veterans get into their 60s and 70s and we start to see them like, do you ever see Joe Frazier before he died? He was on the, God, my throat. He was on Opie and Anthony show and it was so bad. His slurring and his inability to put- Even when Floyd was on Howard, it was like- Floyd Mayweather? I don't think he's showing any signs. Really? He was stuttering. Maybe it was just 5am. 5am, nervous, talking Howard Strum. Yeah. Trying to get it together. Yeah, good point. Brain damage or talking Howard. And probably has zero cum left in his body. Probably was banging all night long, right? For sure. Or too much cum in his mouth. What is this? They have a CTE test, they think. Boston University, they found a biomarker they think that can let people know now, ahead of time. Ahead of time. But isn't it just you get your belt wrong three times and they sort of know that already? No, because it's not, it varies upon the person. Some people are way more durable for some reason. Really? Yeah, they don't know why. And it could be also connected to what we were talking about before. The actual shape of the head, the thickness of the muscles of the neck, the ability to keep the head from snapping back too much. How many times it actually happens. How good you are at avoiding things and roll. Some people get hit and they learn how to roll with stuff and it takes a tremendous amount of the impact off. So you think when MMA fighters are in their 60s and 70s and it's not looking good, they might consider- I don't think- I don't think they're going to consider it because I think to the general public, gloves mean safer. Gloves mean sport. But do they want safer? Do fans of MMA want safe? They, well you got, I would say if you're talking about public opinion, you're going to have a lot of the people that aren't really fans that are also going to weigh in, right? So if you have public opinion, should they take the gloves off MMA? There's going to be a lot of people out there arguing passionately that have no idea what they're talking about. And they don't understand that gloves mean more dangerous. And they will say, no way, it's already barbaric enough. It's really what we should concentrate on is putting more pads and more safety procedures and stopping fights quicker and looking out for the safety of these athletes. But I think much like how pads and football probably cause more injuries to players than rugby, I think the same thing should be said about MMA. It's so anathema to your logic of helmets and pads cause injuries. Yeah, it really does because- You think they prevent them. That's the only thing that it does any different. If I had to choose between fighting someone with MMA gloves and fighting someone bare knuckle with like I get hand wraps and I'd be like, yeah, wrap me up. Wrap me up. You could just tee off on somebody. It's a totally different experience. If your hands are fragile, a lot of times guys will hit each other with the palms of the hands instead because you don't want to break your hands. When you get on top of someone, you could smash their face with a palm of the hand. Is this the hardest part of your hand? Well, you can hit things hard with a palm and it doesn't hurt at all. It's a different kind of a bone. It's a thick bone and it's used to touching and pushing against things. It's the hardest part of your body. Your elbows? Maybe your knee and your elbow. They're real hard. You can't really break your elbow. People break shit all the time. They break chunks off the bottoms of their elbows from fighting. A lot of guys have to get, yeah, I've had friends that have to get surgery where they have like floating bone chunks from elbow and people in the head. You chip off little pieces of your elbow. That's not great. That's not great.