Q: And the award for doing a million unnecessary things just to get a (semi) clean shot goes to...? A: Cory Sandbagging.
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Cory Sandhagen is a professional mixed martial artist competing in the Bantamweight division of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. www.corysandhagen.com
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Q: And the award for doing a million unnecessary things just to get a (semi) clean shot goes to...? A: Cory Sandbagging.
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3 years ago
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Mr. Sam Hagan, how are you?
I'm good, how you doing?
You're on top of the world right now, dude.
I'm a pretty happy guy right now.
What a fight that was.
What a fight.
That was, in my opinion, one of the most technical
and one of the finest performances in that division.
That 135-pound division, to have a guy like you and Marlon
go after it like that, that was a fucking great fight.
Thank you.
Really great fight.
And you're on top of it right now, man.
It's really exciting to watch.
Yeah, I'm getting pretty good.
Yeah, for real.
I've really been just plugging up some holes,
figuring some stuff out.
I feel like I'm at the part in the martial arts journey
where I've gotten really good at being a really good learner.
I can learn super fast and super efficiently now.
And it's big time paying off.
Not only that, but the space I was in before that Cheeto fight
was unlike one that I feel like I've ever been in in my life.
How so?
You know, have you read a decent amount of sports psych books?
Yes.
Where they'll sometimes talk about how you're almost having this out-of-body
experience
where you're almost like floating above the court or the field or whatever.
It was almost like that, except I wouldn't use the word like floating above.
But I got to a space in that fight where I felt like all of the thoughts and
all of the distracting
things that sometimes happen in a fight were completely ignored.
And this higher being, better version, best no thinker, just actor was running
the show.
It's almost like I was watching the thing happen while I was in the fight.
And there would be bits of me hopping in and being like, hey, throw this
combination.
Hey, take a little bit more of a risk.
Hey, do this.
And then that would get completely just watched.
And this, whoever was fighting that night that didn't even feel like me, was
the person that was fighting.
It was fucking cool, man.
Wow.
It was cool, dude.
It was like, you know, like a psychedelic experience feeling type of thing.
It was cool.
What do you attribute that to?
How did you get to that mindset?
It's a lot of, you know, messing stuff up.
Like, I remember the last time I was on was right after I had beaten Frankie.
And I was in, it's just a bunch of different parts of the journey.
And in that part of the journey, I was really in this space where if I could
make myself more war,
if I could make myself more angry, if I could make myself be up here, I would
have success.
That kind of stopped working a little bit after, like around the TJ fight and
then kind of during the Yon fight.
And then definitely I tried to be that guy against Song.
And it was like too much of a distracting feeling where now my mindset's going
into the last fight
because it was such like a distracting feeling, just feeling like I have to get
myself to a point of anger or upness
before a fight where it just became distracting, where it was helpful before it
became distracting in that song fight.
I bailed on that and I just tried to be as mindful and as present as I possibly
could for like,
and I know that those are like kind of corny words now, but there is some real
substance to them when they're like really done well.
And I would say maybe about six weeks before the fight, I had this moment where
I was sitting on the couch
because I put a lot of pressure on myself and I want to be a world champ real
bad.
Where I was to the point where I wasn't enjoying any part of the camp, any part
of the experience of fighting or anything.
And I was sitting on the couch and I just like, I think I was crying a little
bit.
And I was like, I can't fucking do this for the next five years of my life.
You know, like I can't do this for the rest of my career.
And I was like, well, what's got to change?
And I was like, I got to lose.
I got to take this pressure off of me.
And I got to start enjoying every day a lot more than I am right now.
And from that, like six weeks before the fight, I started doing that.
And I really think that that carried into the fight and it made me be a lot
less tense, a lot less tight.
And it made me be able to fight with just like a completely free way of being.
Wow.
And is this something that you had previously thought that you could get to
that space or wanted to get to that space?
Or is this something that you kind of experimented along the way and found this
path?
I'm a self-learner.
And I think that I think that there's ways of being in life that like you just
kind of have to be at certain times.
Like when you're a young kid, like you have to be like going and hitting it
hard.
Like you have to remember all of the hundreds of thousands of people on the
other half of the world that are trying to accomplish the same goal as you.
And you have to be a little bit, in my opinion, you have to be a little bit on
the neurotic side of like, am I doing every single thing correct?
Am I doing, am I putting the right amount of pressure on me?
That's totally a part of the journey, but I'm kind of more in the part of the
journey where I've matured a lot as a fighter.
I've matured a lot as a person.
I'm getting married this year.
Like I'm a little bit older.
We're looking at kids probably in the next couple of years.
And so I had to start thinking like, what's sustainable, like what's like a
sustainable way to continue doing what I love, but also becoming like a more
mature adult.
And that's just part of the journey that I'm in right now.
And I don't think that anything was wrong with the way that I was doing before,
but it just is like a moving target all the time.
So it's like, you're just finding new ways to approach it and then realizing
this way is better than the other way, even though the other way was effective,
this is even more effective.
So you're constantly trying to tweak it.
Yeah.
And I think that everything kind of has its purpose.
Like, uh, in those times where I would, I was really embracing this like war
mentality, this like very like bloodthirsty, vicious type of fighter that I was
trying to be when I would go into the cage that totally had its place because I
had to experience what I've, what I thought that had to feel like in order for
me to be the best martial artist that I can.
Because I do feel like I've pointed all of my energy in my life and my mind and
my spirit and everything towards the direction of being the best martial artist
that I can be.
And so going through that had its purpose, man.
Like I had to figure out what it was like for me to be like a vicious killer,
you know, because in society that's like not cool, you know?
So like almost like, uh, the shadow self or whatever, uh, is like the
subconscious term for it.
Um, I had to like experience that I experienced it.
I figured out that it was no longer serving me.
It was being distracting.
So what do I need to do now?
Now it's like, okay, you figured that part out.
You can be that guy whenever you want to be that guy, but now we're being
present.
Now we're enjoying it and you don't really need to be that guy until you walk
into the cage.
And even when you do walk into the cage, you don't need to be this like really
dramatic, super emphasized, like vicious guy, like be that guy, but you don't
have to overdo it.
And, and when you're learning something, I almost feel like you have to
completely overdo it in order to learn like where that cutoff is.
Like even in technique, like if you could do an arm bar and win every single
time with an arm bar, why would you ever stop doing arm bars?
Right.
It'd be stupid.
So like you figure out how to like do something way overdo it, figure out where
the cutoff is and be like, ah, okay, I can't do it in like those situations.
You pull back, you figure out what situations you need to do it in and then you
move forward.
What was this, what happened?
What happened?
I lost.
Can you hear me?
My headphones cut out.
Hold on.
Check, check, check, check, check, check, check.
Something happened over here, Jamie.
I don't know what's going on, but I lost the headphones.
We'll be right back, folks.
Sorry about that.
No, that's okay.
So, so where were we at?
So what was it about the other way you were approaching it where, you know,
last time you were here, you had just embraced this idea that you went in there
with the intention to fuck people up.
What was distracting about that?
It's, it's like a, it's like a hot burning flame.
You know, like, I feel like it's, I can only hold on to it for so long.
Like, I can't really, like, it's a lot of energy to be that up.
And so when I would be in the back and warmed up, because you kind of, you don't
know exactly when you're going to walk.
So I try to be ready, you know, like 20 minutes before.
I spend like 30, 40 minutes warming up, trying to be that guy.
And then for 20 minutes trying to sustain that guy.
And that's like a long time to be that up, you know?
So even in the, in this fight, uh, because there's no preparing for that last
hour before you go walk.
Like, I don't care what type of guy you are, how Zen you can be, or how
confident you are that, that last hour before a fight, like your mind's going
to fuck with you a lot.
And it's going to go to you thinking that you're the God of the universe to you
thinking that like you're about to go get slaughtered.
And, uh, in the back before, if I started to feel like I was, you know, having
those like impulsive thoughts of like fear or you're about to go get slaughtered.
I try to just cover that shit up real quick by getting like real pissed.
Um, and that's like a lot of energy to do.
So before the Cheeto fight, I was super proud of the way that I was able to
handle those feelings because those feelings are like real as hell when you're
in the back.
And how do you handle them?
Well, I just watched them, man.
Like, uh, I just realized like, ah, okay.
Like I'm having, I'm having the sense of fear in me and I would just kind of
sit there and be like, okay, well, I'm not really fighting right now.
So just let the fear be there right now.
Your job is to get warmed up.
And so I just took it.
Okay.
Right now I'm getting warmed up.
Okay.
They said 10 more minutes till we walk.
Okay.
I'm having the sense of fear still.
That's okay.
I'm still in the back.
And then step by step by step.
Okay.
I'm, I'm, I'm walking out now.
Cool.
Okay.
Looking across from them.
Okay.
Touch gloves.
Now we're fighting.
It's literally, it sounds super fucking simple, but it's just step by step by
step, man.
Just like, okay, I'm having that sense.
I'll just watch that and not really, I mean, you acknowledge it, but you don't,
I didn't, I don't try to cover it up or I don't try to like be someone else.
I just kind of watch it as if it was just someone else.
It happened into someone else and then just move on.
It doesn't sound super simple at all.
Not to me at least.
It's, I know what you're saying.
And that feeling has got to be like riding a wild wave.
Like you just got to maintain your balance.
And to watch you go into that fight, what was so impressive, um, besides the
fact that you're fighting a world-class guy in Marlon Vera and you were, you
were controlling the action was the overwhelming, like the amount of
information you were throwing at him.
You were constantly changing levels, constantly threatening takedowns,
constantly switching stances and everything was, you know, there's fighters
kind of, sometimes they'll fall into a pattern and you can kind of predict that
pattern.
There was no pattern with you.
It was all over the place and it was so overwhelming.
When I was watching, I was like, Jesus Christ, like this is so high level.
And I don't, I mean, for like a casual, I don't know if they're seeing that.
But for someone who watches a lot of fights and has been around martial arts,
you know, my whole life, when I was watching, I was like, this is about as high
level as it gets.
Thank you.
Like you were mixing shit up so well, like the way you were choosing your
attacks, whether it was the low kick or whether it was punches and the switch
stance to punches, the, the, the shot, it was amazing, man.
It was really fucking good.
It was really fun to watch because it wasn't just that you were doing that, but
you were doing that for five fucking rounds.
Like you never varied.
You never slowed down.
There was never like breathers.
It was just a full on assault of all of his reactions and all of his, uh, his,
you know, ability to read you.
It was like attack, bang, hit there.
Okay.
Trying to settle.
Boom.
This coming in.
Now there's a shot.
It was like, there was no, there was no breaks.
Yeah.
It was pretty awesome, man.
It was pretty fucking wild.
Yeah, it was pretty wild.
Uh, I think that that's always going to be one of my stronger points is that I
can make decisions a lot faster than other people.
Um, I, I honestly think that that's what makes good people from great people
because good people can do, they can make the right decisions and continue to
make them, continue to make them, continue to make them.
But, uh, at some point, the person that's better at doing those things is going
to surpass that person.
Eventually it might not happen early, you know, like it could take some time.
And again, some of the best guys in the world, it's going to take some time,
but eventually your processing speed will out power theirs, you know?
And I think that I do that really, really well.
I think that, um, my training has a lot to do with that too.
What is different about your training?
Um, so all of the conditioning that I do or almost the, the conditioning parts
that I take really seriously, um, are the sparring days.
I used to like hit mitts real hard and I still do like a strength and
conditioning workout once a week.
Um, that's like, you know, 30 seconds, 30 seconds, 30 seconds, minute rest, you
know, and stuff like that.
But, um, there's no getting tired like there is getting tired and sparring.
So I'll do, if I, I usually do 10 week camps.
The first week I just knocked the rust off, you know, and then I do two, seven
weeks or two, seven round weeks.
So we spar Tuesday, Fridays.
I do seven rounds those days.
And then the next two weeks I do eight rounds, both of those days.
And then I'll do like six and then the rest of them five.
Cause I want to get used to five.
But in those seven round weeks and those eight round weeks, those are hard as
fuck, man.
Like I get, like, I try to get so tired where I'm just like, I can't, I don't
feel like I can make decisions anymore.
And I really think that having the concentration to focus for those 40 minutes
makes it way easier for me to focus in the 25 minutes.
You know, like, uh, it's, I, you know, I don't really know if that's science or
not, but I definitely think that if I can stay focused for 40 minutes, 25
minutes will feel like nothing.
And so I really, like really pushed myself there.
And is this a, a strategy or is this a program that you've just developed over
trial and error?
Yeah.
I make my own shit up pretty much, you know, pretty much, you know, like I, uh,
so Christian Allen was my coach.
He's like the guy with always the crazy haircut, kind of built like me.
Um, Christian Allen has always been my coach.
Uh, and he's an interesting guy.
Like, uh, a lot of his philosophies are really traditional martial arts
philosophy.
Like he turned me on to a lot of really, um, like people like Bruce Lee, of
course, like Krishna Marty, uh, like just like free, free thinkers.
So he always instilled in me this, uh, and tried to empower this ability inside
me to think for myself, because I think that a lot of people don't really do
that in the sport, to be honest with you.
I think that a lot of them get their hand held by their coaches, which is
totally one way to do it.
And honestly, a lot of people do need that, but, uh, I, I was never taught to
be that way.
I was taught to be the quarterback of my own game, uh, not like someone that
takes orders.
He instilled that in me big time.
So I kind of, I tweak things and handle a lot of the way that I do things in
camp by myself.
I, of course, have people around me that I know love me a lot and care about me
enough to tell me what they think I should do.
And I have, and I will listen to them if I, if I think that they're right.
But a lot of it is like me just kind of being like a lone wolf in life and in
martial arts a little bit and me just figuring stuff out myself.
So do you think that's because obviously nobody knows you better than you and
you're absorbing all these techniques from all these different people and all
these strategies from these different coaches, but ultimately it's up to you to
execute with your mind and your body.
And so you've just decided the best way to do that is to absorb all this
information, but even maybe more important, do it yourself.
Yeah, definitely.
Um, yeah.
What's the Bruce Lee quote?
It's like, uh, accept what's useful, discard what's not useful and then make it
your own or whatever it is.
Um, that's like martial arts, you know, like that's what Christian taught me
from when I first started when I was 17 years old.
And, uh, and I think it's the way to do it, man.
Like I really do.
Like I, I, when I think about other sports and how they compare, I don't think
like, like at the very highest level, when I watch interviews of like Kobe
Bryant or Michael Jordan or like Tom Brady and all of those guys, those guys
are interacting with their coaches much differently than a lot of the other
players and coaches will interact with, with, with, with each other where it's
not, um,
the coach isn't telling the player what to do.
The coach and the player are interacting.
I think when you get to a certain level, uh, and me and my coaches kind of,
sometimes we'll get into it, you know, like I'll be like, Hey man, like,
I don't think that that's like a reliable way to go about doing things because
I think building, like I use the word reliable a lot.
Like when I'm coaching people, because you don't want, you don't want tricks,
you know, like tricks are okay.
You want things that are reliable.
And, uh, so that's like what I shoot for when I'm trying to like learn
techniques and learn different things is it's like, is this reliable?
Or is this kind of like a tricky thing that like will sometimes work?
Uh, and I always shoot for reliable.
Um, so I'll get into it with my coaches sometimes like, Hey banks, like, I don't
know if that's that reliable.
Do you give me an example of something that's not that reliable?
Sure.
Sure.
Uh, let's say like a, like a low single, you know, or like a, uh, um, I think
it, I think honestly it happens a lot more in striking because I think that
because there's,
because people really don't understand the inner workings of how striking works,
people want to use tricks and tricks will work a lot until you get someone that
like catches onto your shit.
So like, I think like, let's say just for example, in striking, like, uh, any
combination really, like that's kind of more, it's not a trick, but it's, uh,
it's a set thing where things have to go really right in order for it to work a
hundred percent of the time.
Um, and I don't really think that that's the approach that you should take in
striking.
I think that the approach to striking should be reliable things.
It should address space.
It should address position and it should like address angles.
And that like, those are like the three areas of striking and the inner workings
of striking that don't really get talked about because a lot of it is taught in,
uh, in a very tricky way because tricks are very digestible for people.
Um, um, where the inner workings of things are very like conceptual and hard to
understand.
What do you think when you say that most people don't understand striking, like,
what do you mean by that?
Okay, so I think that there's, uh, there's things that are happening in
striking matches that are, like I said, not very digestible.
So, like I said, so there's space, there's position, and then there's your
advantages.
Space is, is like, uh, and, and I hear people talk about like rhythm all the
time, you know, rhythm is just closing space, going away from space, closing
space, going away from space.
Space is key because striking happens with your eyes.
Striking is like, we're playing this game, like, hey, hit my hand, and I'm
moving it around.
You know, that's like why switching stances works so well, and we can get into
that in a little bit, but space is your reaction time because striking happens
with your eyes.
Instead of grappling, like if someone's leaning into me, I, I have like the
proprioception to feel they're leaning into me, let me move like this.
It doesn't happen with your eyes.
In striking, it happens with your eyes.
I see your punches coming.
I know to block.
So the more space I have and the better I can maintain and control space or
manipulate space by closing it quickly or, or using it at the same time you
close, I close where I could be twice as fast.
Um, the more, the more, the more success I'm, I'm going to have, um, uh, so for
example, like, um, I, I, I just don't think that people are understanding space
in a way where it's like, it is your like reaction time.
So if you get closer to like, if you're standing over there and I'm standing
here, it's not scary if you throw a punch at me because I have plenty of time
to react to that punch where if me and you are standing right next to each
other, that's like super scary, no matter who you are, you know?
Um, so space is reaction time.
And I really don't think that a lot of people see space like that.
They see space like, oh yeah, like you're at the end of my jab.
That's when I can hit you.
Everything is about like, can I hit you this and that, uh, where like the
defensive piece of striking isn't really harped on as much because again, it's
like not as digestible.
Um, and then there's of course like position, like my position and then your
position, my position, according to your position.
So like lefty, righty, righty, lefty, lefty, lefty, lefty, righty, righty.
Um, and all of that is important because if you're in a different stance than I
am, the targets change.
Like what you throw is different than like, like the attacks that you'll have
are very different than the ones that we would have if we were in the same
stance, if we're in the opposite stance.
I don't think that people would necessarily pick up on those things too.
I don't think people super understand position as like my guard.
Like where am I open if I stand like this and where am I open if I stand like
this?
Um, the advantages like being a little bit outside your shoulders on each side
so that I can take angles a little bit.
Easier if I'm standing over here.
I know you're going to correct yourself here.
So I'm going to step here.
You're going to correct.
I'm going to step here.
And then eventually I'll be able to build off of attacks.
But that to me is what striking is.
Striking isn't, it's a positional battle and it's a battle for space.
And it's not like combinations and it's not set things.
Not set things, yeah.
So what your, your style is very stance switch dependent.
You, you mean you, you do that as good as anybody alive.
And it's such a valuable asset.
And it's more fighters are embracing that now than ever before.
But there's something about that.
If you, if you're accustomed, like if you're accustomed to standing southpaw or
you're accustomed to standing orthodox.
And you're accustomed to facing fighters that are southpaw or orthodox.
You get like used to attacks coming from different places.
But when you're doing it, you're, you're mixing shit up so much that you can
see this overwhelming thing that's happening to the opponent.
You can see like, like one of the things Cheeto said, he couldn't get started.
But the reason why he couldn't get started, in my opinion, he's a great fighter.
But it was you.
It was because you were constantly feeding him with reads and information and
it was never ending.
So there was no break where he gets to find his openings.
No break where he gets to initiate.
It was just overwhelming.
Yeah, super overwhelming.
That, that, that's what that can do.
Uh, because like I said, you read it with your eyes.
So if I'm switching my stance all the time, the target is changing all the time.
Like if, if you're in a righty stance and I'm in a righty stance also, the
targets are different.
Like your right kick is going to land on my outside, the outside of my leg.
If I switch lefty, it's going to kick to the inside of my leg.
I know that you know this, but, um, if I'm constantly switching those targets
all the time, it makes for a hell of a, a hell of a time for you, you know?
And I, I started switching really, really early.
Uh, I used to really like watching Nenito Donair, uh, the boxer.
And he's, he kind of switches a lot.
Like a lot of his steps are switches.
I used to love watching Nenito Donair.
I thought it was super creative and, uh, like switching stances now at this
point, I think in martial arts is almost like,
like a non-negotiable, like you, you have to be able to do it.
Um, but it just changes the target.
It changes my weapons like so much where like, if you can't keep up, it's just
going to like fry your brain.
And I felt that with Cheeto, you know, I felt like, uh, anytime he started to
understand my movements, I would just change or I would start level changing or
I would start doing something different so that he couldn't get an opportunity
to be like,
that's what I need to do because then I would just change it.
And then he'd have to figure out something else.
One of the things that was fascinating about that fight to me is that it's so
obvious that even though you have physical skills and he has physical still
skills, it was your mind.
It was strategy and it was execution.
There was, there was a lot going on there that was important to you winning
that fight.
And it wasn't just your physical ability.
It was, it was really like the best example of what I love about MMA, which is
that it's high level problem solving and you were creating all these problems
and he didn't have answers to some of them and you had answers to his problems.
And that's a mental game.
And that, that's to me, what's so fascinating about fighting and for the, the
people don't understand from the outside that are just casual fans is like,
this is a complex interaction between two people that move very fast.
And any error that you make one way or another running into a right hand,
running into a knee, running into this, and you're really good at setting
people up for that.
Like the Frankie fight's a great example of that.
That to me is what's exciting about MMA.
And so when I see a guy like you that I clearly see like, oh, this motherfucker's
on another level, like you hit something, like whatever it is, like we're
talking about this mindset change or it's just this stacking upon skills and
layers and experience.
until you get to this championship form when there's, there's a really exciting
time when a fighter comes into that championship form.
And that's what I saw in that fight.
I appreciate you saying that.
Thank you.
Um, yeah, I, I don't really know what it is either.
I think that I've definitely, uh, just matured, matured a lot as a fighter.
I think that that's like a big piece of it too.
Uh, I took a lot of pressure off my shoulders.
I'm like a phenomenal learner, to be honest.
Like if I do to toot my own horn, I think that that's something that I'm really
good at.
Is that because you're open, because you're obsessed?
Is it because?
I'm obsessed.
I'm very thoughtful.
Um, I don't think I'm a smart guy.
Like, uh, I think that I read a lot of books, so I speak kind of okay.
And then, uh, but I'm not smart.
Like, uh, they, in first grade, they used to take me to another room to like
learn how to read, you know?
And I used to have to like ask my mom, like, hey, like, why do I read like
different books than the other kids?
Like, you know, uh, so I'm not a smart guy.
Like, I, I never did good in school.
Um, but I'm thoughtful.
And, uh, you could use the word obsessed too, but I think I'm incredibly
thoughtful about the way that I'm going about doing things.
Like, in life, in fighting, I try to be super, super intentional.
I try, like, I make notes every Monday and Saturday.
I make notes.
On Monday, I make notes of the things that I'm working on.
Uh, you know, like a to-do list, like sometimes how I'm doing, all of that
stuff.
But I'm super organized in the way that I'm like trying to learn and the things
that I'm trying to like progress in, whether they're technical things, uh,
mental things or whatever.
And then I recap all of those things on Saturday, made sure that I did them.
And then I wrote down, I write down what worked, what didn't work, what I need
to continue to drill, what, what I should pull back on because I don't think it's
really worth the time.
Because there are so many techniques and some things just aren't worth the time,
uh, at, at certain points, you know?
So, uh, I'm super thoughtful, I'm super organized, and I think that that's like
probably one thing that separates me is because I like, uh, everyone wants it
kind of the same.
Everyone's a really good athlete.
Everyone works really hard physically.
Um, but like, there's got to be some X factors.
Like, it has to be everything if you, if you really want to like be a world
champ.
Like, I say that I want to be.
When did you start doing this note-taking thing?
Uh, uh, probably Saturday.
Seven or eight years ago.
Um, seven or eight years ago is when I started working with my sports
psychologist.
Uh, he kind of turned me on to it.
I also used to train a lot with Dwayne, too, and Dwayne would like always be
writing stuff down.
Dwayne Ludwig, he's obsessed.
Yeah, Dwayne's super obsessed, too.
That guy's an amazing coach.
Yeah.
He really is.
It's, it's, when you look at his system, when he's got his, his bang Muay Thai
system, and he brought out his notebook, and he showed me all this.
I'm like, Jesus Christ, who the fuck does this?
Yeah.
When you look at all of his combinations, and what sets what up, and the way he
has it, like, I was very impressed with that.
That's like the thoughtfulness that I'm talking about.
Yeah.
You know, like, uh, that's like just a different level of caring, and like a
different way of showing that you care.
It's just like, like, I do that, too.
You know, like, I write down, like, how striking works.
Uh, I'm hopefully gonna be filming some instructionals pretty soon.
So I've really been, like, spending hours and hours and hours writing down,
like, how I think striking actually works outside of the way that it's being
taught now.
Hmm.
So when you are in the process of a camp, when you set out a camp, and you're
doing this 10-week program, do you have everything planned out, like, from the
moment the camp starts?
More or less.
And is it mostly you that's planning everything out?
Yes.
Really?
Yeah.
Uh, that's like me being the quarterback.
You know, like, uh, I take full responsibility for everything that I do in life.
You know, like, uh, if, if I'm not getting takedowns, it's not my wrestling
coach's fault.
It's my own fault, because I, I know I'm being taught correct things.
Um, I've surrounded myself with good people that are teaching me the right
things, so I don't ever worry about, like, not being taught the right things.
If, if I don't get good at something, I, like, almost feel pathetic, because I'm
like, man, this guy's, uh, like, with the wrestling, uh, like, if Banks has to
tell me something week by week by week, I start to feel, like, pathetic.
I'm like, why am I not getting better at this, you know?
Um, so I take responsibility for every single thing.
That way there's no one for me to blame except for myself if I lose.
Um, and that's another thing that I don't know that a lot of people are doing,
too.
That also causes me to, like, get into it with some people sometimes, too,
which is fine, also, you know, because they know I love them, and they know,
and I know that they love me.
So it's not really, like, a big deal when we do get into it, but I, I write
down, yeah, week by week what I'm doing, what my Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,
Thursday, Friday, Saturday looks like, when I'm doing my visualizations.
Uh, I, I incorporate, like, a decent amount of self-hypnosis type things that I
like doing, too.
Uh, I, I write down when I'm doing that.
I write down when I'm flying training partners in, when I'm going out to
Virginia to train with Ryan.
Um, yeah, pretty, it's pretty much, like, to the, to the T written out.
When you say self-hypnosis, like, what, what are you doing there?
Uh, they're, like, um, so a lot of them, so this dude Michael Seeley on YouTube
does them.
Uh, they're just, like, 50 to, like, an hour and 15 minute, uh, hypnosis-es,
where they, like, calm you down for, like, the first 15, 20 minutes.
They try to get you super present, and then I enjoy, there's all different
kinds of them, but I, like, I enjoy doing the ones where, um, they, like,
almost walk you through, like, finding your spirit animal, or, like, uh, going
on astral travel,
or something like this.
I, I think that there's a lot of substance to getting to a really calm place,
and then letting your imagination kind of, like, feed you what's kind of going
on deeper inside of you.
Um, and, uh, I do a decent amount of those, which sounds a little bit funky and
a little bit weird, but I've had some super intense, uh, experiences by just
literally laying there, put my headphones in, and listening
into this dude talk on YouTube.
Well, I'd imagine that's, I feel like when you're at your level, and one of the
things that's exciting about what's going on right now in the bantamweight
division is that there's so much talent.
It might be the most talent stacked division in the UFC.
It's hard to say, because 55 is great, 45 is great, there's a lot of amazing
divisions, but for my money, I think 35 might be the motherfucker, because
there's just so many guys.
There's Marab, there's Piotr, there's Marlon, there's you, there's Aljamain,
there's Cejudo's in there now, and there's all these guys coming up, too, that
are super high-level.
Chris Gutierrez, there's, there's some fucking killers.
And everyone recognizes that the level is so high in that division, and they
see a fight like your fight with Marlon, or Marab's fight with Piotr, and it's
like, Jesus Christ, man.
If you want to compete in that division, you've got to have everything right.
You have to dot your I's and cross your T's, you've got to get that fucking
exact amount of rest, you've got to do everything.
Hell yeah.
Everything.
This is just the most insane pressure cooker that I think any division has ever
had, because I feel like there's like eight world champions competing for the
number one spot.
Any one of these guys could be a world champion, any one of these guys, and in
another time period would be a world champion.
But because of what's happening in MMA right now, because the skill sets are so
high, and the talent level is so high, that everyone's recognizing that.
And you're seeing these fucking insane breakthrough performances, like every
time from these guys, like Marab versus Piotr, like you versus Marlon.
These breakthrough performances are just like, where everybody else is like,
God damn, got to go back to work, because it's just so pressure intensive.
I know.
It's, it's actually really awesome.
Like, I reflect on that sometimes where I'm like, damn, man, like, you're in
the hottest division in the biggest organization in like the most badass sport
right now.
Yeah.
And that's fucking cool, man.
Like, when I reflect on that, it's awesome.
And it also is like, it's literally going to bring out, it has to bring out the
best in me for the next rest of my career.
Like, it's absolutely has to, like, it's not one of those divisions where it's
like, I'm gonna beat that guy, I'm gonna beat that guy.
And like, literally all the way up and like, past the outside the top 15.
I'm like, man, if you're not on your P's and Q's, and you're not working your
ass off, like you were a 21 year old kid, you're gonna be fucked.
And so, like, that, I wouldn't have it any other way, man.
Like, that's what's gonna bring out the best in me.
And I'm like, super just grateful that I get to be a part of it while it's
actually happening.
It's kind of like, feels surreal that that's the scenario.
It's awesome.
It's awesome that you're embracing it like that, because it's awesome for me as
a fan to watch this happen.
Because I think it's very unique.
I think it's very special.
It's like, you remember back in, like, there's a Showtime documentary on the
golden age of, like, when Hagler was fighting Leonard and, and Hearns was
fighting Duran and Duran was fighting Hagler.
And these guys, they all fed off of each other, but it was only a few of them.
Like, the UFC right now, it's a goddamn carnival.
I mean, there's, there's a fucking massive crowd of assassins that are all
competing.
And you'll see these new bantamweights that come into the UFC.
And, you know, they might have 16, 17 fights outside the organization.
And then you'll see them in their debut.
You're like, Jesus Christ, this guy's world class.
World class already.
First fight in the UFC.
I mean, that, that to me is so exciting, because this sport is the only sport
that you could really name.
That, if you go back to 1993, and you look at it from 2023, you're looking at a
massive evolution in the game.
Massive.
Massive.
I mean, not even comparable.
There's not a single person from 1993 that looks like they're a world champion
in 2023.
But if you go back to 1993 in boxing, you got a lot of world champions.
You got Oscar De La Hoya, Julio Cesar Chavez.
You got fucking assassins who can compete in any division or in any, rather,
era at any time in boxing.
You don't have that in the UFC.
You have this complete new kind of thing that's emerging and evolving.
And you're seeing these top performers that are just reaching total new heights.
Yeah, it's, it's cool.
It's like, uh, it's in like that period of like history where, uh, so I'm sure
that all the sports went through this, but like wrestling is pretty standard.
You know, like, uh, there, there's certain things that work really, really well.
And of course, like people go outside the box sometimes, but there's like a
proven system of like what works where I feel like in MMA, we're not at that
point yet.
You know, like, we're kind of like, we're all in this like discovery, like, who's
going to figure out how to make this thing work the best.
You know, like, that's almost what I feel like the race is right now.
Yeah.
Where the race is like, like I said, man, everyone works hard.
Everyone's pretty athletic, you know, like everyone kind of has like their
little quirks and like the ways that they do things or whatever.
But who's going to figure out how to be like the best system of MMA?
Because every other sport I feel like has done that.
That's like why most soccer games look like all the other soccer games.
Yeah.
But in fighting, not all the fights look like the same fights.
And I think that that's just because it's in this like realm of just full blown
creativity, which is because we're just trying to figure out like who's going
to get the best system first.
You know, it's pretty fun.
It really is fun.
It's so fun to watch.
And I think that's really important.
What you just said is creativity, because that's a big part of this
overwhelming style that you have is that it's creative.
Is that you're you're doing things that are unexpected, but standard, like you're
doing punches, kicks, takedowns, but unexpected.
So you're finding a way to deliver these things inside of these spaces and
movements and stance switches.
It's fucking wild to see, man.
And it's just it's so exciting to witness this growth of this.
What I think is the greatest sport that's ever existed and to watch it blossom
and bloom and become what it is now.
It totally is, man.
Like fighting is the best sport in the world, man.
There's nothing in my opinion.
There's no other sport that's more inspiring either.
Like it's one like fighting is entertaining as hell.
But like how inspiring is it when you watch like a guy like Volk go fight Islam
up a weight class?
You know, like how inspiring is that?
Sometimes I wonder if that's just me, but I don't really think it is, man.
I think it inspires the world.
That's a Rocky movie.
Yeah, seriously, man, like Israel taking on Perea this week.
Like how inspiring, man.
Like the guy's lost to him three times and he's like he knows, man.
Like he knows that if he loses again, like he's probably not going to fight for
a title for a little bit.
Yeah.
That shit's inspiring, dude.
Like how high, how much higher can the stakes get?
Can't get any higher.
Have you been watching his training footage?
I've been watching some of the Embeddeds.
He's got his own channel.
I think it's called Freestyle Bender.
And he puts up all these videos of all the shit that they're doing.
And this motherfucker is going so hard.
Yeah.
He's going so like you can see he's just broken at the end of some of these
sets and training sessions.
It's just he's going as hard as he possibly can with this mindset that there's
there's a way to conquer this guy.
There's a way to beat this guy.
And I'm so fucking pumped.
I can't imagine.
It's two fucking days away.
I know.
Are you going to call it?
Hell yeah.
Oh, you are nice.
I can't wait.
I'm lucky.
I know I thought about going and then I'm gone too many weekends.
But, man, I can't wait.
I can't wait.
And Masvidal and Burns.
I kind of want to see who wins that fight, too.
That's a very interesting fight.
It's going to be interesting to see if Masvidal can handle Burns' takedowns and
Burns' aggression.
It's just where's Masvidal in his career?
You know, I mean, he looked great in fights in the past, but then, you know,
you see the fight with Kamaru, he gets KO'd, and then he loses the fight to
Kobe, he gets overwhelmed.
Like, where is he at right now?
He's older.
I think, did he say he's 38?
37 or 38?
You know, at a certain point in time, you can't do it anymore the same way.
That's what he was saying, too.
Right?
He was saying if he loses, this will probably be his last one.
Yeah.
Dude, did you used to watch all of those videos of, like, the street fights
before, kind of, dude, that, that, when I was thinking, because I get asked,
you know, sometimes, like, hey, how'd you get into MMA?
I don't ever have, like, an interesting story, you know?
I'm like, well, I used to watch Kimbo knock people's eyeballs out in backyards.
Remember that video, dude?
Holy shit, that was crazy.
Yeah, that was crazy.
They were, like, fighting near a satellite dish.
There's all sorts of stuff in the backyard.
They're going to move around things.
Seriously.
Yeah.
Yeah, I remember there was, like, a stint in my, like, teenage years where I
just would watch World Star Hip Hop, like, dude, do you ever get on World Star
Hip Hop?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, where it would just be, like, fight compilations, and I would
just watch for, like, 40 minutes, just, like, people beat the shit out of each
other on the streets, and I thought it was so awesome.
That's, like, what got me into fighting.
That's crazy.
I was like, oh, yeah, I want to fuck some people up like that.
That looks cool.
It's funny that that got you in, but your style is so intelligent.
Yeah.
It's, like, your style is, like, high-level chess, but that's just madness.
Yeah.
Just KOs.
I mean, I think every teenage, I mean, the fantasy, I think, for most dudes
that don't fight is they just want to, like, you know, like, be tough.
Like, everyone wants to be, like, tough, you know, and fighting's the best way
to be tough, and when I was, like, younger and just watching that, it was, like,
fuck, yeah, I want to be, like, so tough and, like, kill people the way that
those people do, and, you know.
What's fucked that most people don't understand is the amount of work that's
involved just to get your body physically prepared to be able to fight for 25
minutes is so taxing to the mind.
It's so grueling for your, just, everything gets tested.
Your ambitions get tested.
Your will, your fortitude, your commitment, your distractions, your self-hate
and loathing, your self-love, your ego.
Everything gets tested.
I can't think of another sport where people go in and probably worry or have to,
like, be super concerned about how tired they're going to get.
Like, can you?
Like, I, like, I, like, think about, like, basketball, football, you know, like,
other sports, there's always substitutes.
Like, that's, like, a major demon to conquer on your way up in MMA is, like,
how do I not be scared of getting tired as hell?
Because it's the most tiring shit in the world, especially when you're coming
up and, like, you're nervous and fights and you don't really know what you're
doing.
Your technique isn't as good.
And I don't, I can't think of another sport where they really, where you have
to go in and be, like, man, if I get tired, I'm going to get my ass kicked.
Like, literally get my ass kicked.
That's, like, another thing that makes MMA cool.
It is.
And that mental battle and wondering whether or not you've done enough in camp.
Because there's some guys, there's some guys that are very, very talented, but
they're not very disciplined.
And those guys, you could always see that moment where the other guy is in
shape and they start to doubt and start to think about, maybe I ate too many
donuts.
Maybe I slept in, missed a few training sessions that I could have gone to.
And now I don't have the gas tank and this guy's coming after me.
Yeah, that's a horrible spot to be in.
It's a horrible spot to be in.
And there's another thing about MMA is the management of your energy in a fight
and these calculated maneuvers of when to burst and when to take your foot off
the gas and when to know, like, have an understanding of your body, like, what
it's capable of at any given moment.
And it's one of the things that drives me nuts about bad refereeing.
Like, say if someone has a big burst and shoots for a takedown, massive
struggle, gets it to the ground, and then is trying to intelligently move to a
place where they could do damage, but the other person is defending well, and
then the referee interferes and stands them up.
I'm like, Jesus fucking Christ, do you know how hard it is to get someone to
the ground?
And if that person is having a hard time on the bottom, they should probably
get up, figure out how to get up.
But for you to just, the boos of the casuals, and you're like, come on, stand
them up, stand them up, and you just interfere in a fight, it drives me nuts.
I can't, I don't really think that they fully understand what it's like from,
like, a fighter's point of view to be like, finally, I got this motherfucker
down.
Right.
And then, like, to have him stand back up, and then you've got to do the shit
again?
Yeah, and on top of that, maybe, you know, you empty the gas tank a little bit
doing that, and this guy's fresh, and then you get kicked.
Yeah.
You know, and then, oh, fucking, now your leg's compromised, now you're
switching stances, now you're trying to relax, but now this guy's turning it on.
Now you have to eat up the gas that you were trying to conserve, and now you're
moving, it's unnatural.
It's like you, there was an unnatural intervention in the exchange, and that
was a referee.
I know, I, uh, I always think about, like, uh, how, because everyone talks
about the judging, and all that, I always wonder how that could actually be,
like, again, like, reliably fixed, to where it's not,
we're not just, like, guessing, or we're not, you know, like, and it seems,
like, super hard, but I don't, I don't, I think that the problem isn't with the
criteria as much as it is with the, uh, the actual rules.
Like, I, I almost feel like, like, say you work real hard, you get a takedown,
and there's three minutes left on the clock, and then there's just so much, uh,
ambiguity as to, like, how much is enough damage.
Right.
Like, there's so much ambiguity happening that, unfortunately, because it'll
mess up some other things, I almost feel like you have to add in rules, where,
like, uh, okay, so, I get stood up if I can make it so that this guy can't
punch me for 30 seconds, or whatever amount of time it is, or something.
But I almost feel like those types of problems only will get solved by rules.
They, they won't get solved by, uh, this, like, ambiguity, where, like, the ref
can kind of make whatever decision, and each ref is different, and each crowd
is different, and they're just making a bunch of decisions.
So, I think that someone, not me, should sit down and really think about, you
know, making it really clear and really straightforward about, like, the rules
so that that kind of stuff doesn't happen anymore.
Yeah, I think in that sense that it is too subjective.
It's too subjective, and too many referees have different ideas of what's
acceptable.
And also, you can see referees reacting to the crowd.
Yeah.
We all see that.
I think that's ridiculous.
That should never take place.
Judges, too.
Yes, for sure.
There's a lot of bad judging.
Jesus Christ, some of these decisions lately, where, you know, they, they, like,
who gave Marlon the fight?
Uh, I, I don't know.
Somebody gave Marlon the fight.
Yeah, yeah, I know.
Okay, that's fucking insane.
I want you to imagine if there's three people who gave Marlon that fight.
I know.
What if one, what if one other dude fucked up that night?
Because that guy obviously fucked up.
But imagine if it was someone else, and I, like, went home a loser, like,
scratched my head, like.
Insane.
Insane.
Insane.
Yeah, that's pretty scary.
Best performances of your career in a fight where everybody who watched thought
you won.
Everybody.
Like, the, the idea of giving that to Marlon, and I'm a Marlon fan.
He didn't win that fight.
You won that fight.
It's clear.
So, whoever the fuck that judge is, you're not doing that anymore.
Like, you, you could ruin careers.
You could take away win bonuses, you know?
Yeah, they, they need a universal, uh, they need a universal commission.
Yes.
Like, I, I really think that that should, because I, I almost wonder, like, why
the UFC hasn't done it yet.
Because if I was a UFC, it would be in my best interest to make sure that
everyone's on the same page so that, uh, someone doesn't, like, mess something
up.
Like, because that fight very well, if one other person got it wrong, just one
other person, I could have lost.
And then, like, that would have changed a lot of stuff, man, because, uh, it
just would have, you know?
Like, people care about wins and losses.
I, I almost feel like they're, you know, someone should look into making a
universal commission so that the rules are laid out clear.
Like, we have 10 judges that we use at this time, the judges are completely 100%
on the same page about what's winning, what's not winning.
That way, all of the fighters know that.
Because right now, it's just commissions from different states just deciding on
whatever rules they want to do.
And I, I really think that, like, step one is universal commission.
I think there's another step that needs to be taken, and that's an abandonment
of the 10-point must system.
I think that system is not our system.
That system is a system that's applicable to boxing, and it works great with
boxing.
You're, you're dealing with, uh, two weapons.
You have just punches.
You have a bunch of different ways to apply those punches, but you have a left
hand and a right hand.
That's it.
There's so many more things going on in MMA.
It's exponential.
There's, there's, there's takedowns.
There's submissions.
There's ground control.
There's being able to dictate the pace.
There's so much that happens in MMA that doesn't happen in boxing
because of all the, the different skill sets and the different weapons and how
they get applied
and what's more, what's more valuable than the other thing.
I think it should be a very comprehensive system, and I think there should be
way more than three judges.
I think, I think there's a real good argument to have, like, something like 10
judges and have,
because, like, and experts.
I mean, guys like, I mean, if you can get, I don't know if Faraz Ahabi would do
it,
but, like, that level of expert, you know, the, the guys like Saif Saoud,
these fucking world-class coaches and, and trainers, have guys like that judge
fights.
Yeah.
You'll get a real solid understanding.
And if you have 10 of those, 99.9% of the time, you're going to get the right
winner.
But if you have three, and no disrespect, but some of these people just shouldn't
be judging.
If, if someone judged Marlon winning over you, they should not be judging an
MMA fight,
because they, either they're not paying attention, maybe they're on drugs,
but they definitely didn't see what I saw, so it doesn't make any sense to me.
Sure.
Even with the 10-point must system, which is a fucked up system.
But if we had a system that tallied, like, like, all the different takedown
attempts,
all of the different strikes, and it was a point system.
So instead of, like, 10-9, you're dealing with, like, 162 versus 120.
The next round, like, 195 versus 170.
And you look at it in that way, where you could tally it up at the end.
Sure.
And look at it.
I also think there's something that pride had that we really should take into
consideration,
that you judge the fight as a whole, and that the last parts of the fight are
probably the most important parts.
Like, when you saw Volkanovski on top of Islam at the end of the fight, pounded
on him,
that is fucking gigantic.
That matters.
That matters, because if this is a schoolyard, the schoolyard analogy, the
teachers come and break it up,
and you're on top, you fucking won.
Yeah.
No one's going to say, Islam won that fight, we got him.
No, you didn't.
Yeah.
No, the teachers stopped the fight with Volkanovski on top of you, punching you
in the face.
Yeah.
He won that fight.
That's a great point.
Everybody who saw that at the end was like, Volk got him.
Yeah, that's a great point.
I even look back to Gaethje and Fazeev's fight.
Like, mega close fight, but the judges got it right.
But Gaethje, at the end, was definitely going to be the guy that, if that went
another 10 minutes, Gaethje was winning that fight.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes.
That's interesting.
That's actually a really good idea, I think.
Like, why not make takedowns points?
Yes.
Like how they do in wrestling.
Right.
And then why not make it almost the same as collegiate wrestling, where if you
get up, that's a point, too.
Right.
Cap kicks are a point.
This is a point.
And all of it gets tallied up.
And so, you know, there's that thing, significant strikes, which is kind of
interesting, but sometimes significant strikes are body punches when you're on
the ground, which we both know are not as significant as like a front kick to
the gut when you're standing up.
It's got more power to it.
So what is significant strikes?
Maybe significant kicks versus significant punches.
Maybe some kicks are worth more, like a head kick is worth more.
You know, a calf kick, when you see damage, when you see someone limp, that's
worth more.
Like, how many points does that work?
Yeah, I agree.
I agree with you.
Yeah, I almost feel like that's, I mean, it's probably the same process that,
the same thought process that Taekwondo went through when they were, like,
creating the rules for their sport, too.
Right, like, I could see how potentially there would be maybe some issues with,
like, you know, like, people just touching, you know, but even then, like, I
mean, you can't ever really tell how hard someone's hitting ever.
You know, like, even a guy like Perea, I was watching some of his, like,
highlights and stuff earlier this week.
Like, the way he punches people, it doesn't, like, they come from here, and
they don't, like, they don't, like, look like this.
But when he hits someone, bro, their head snaps back.
Yeah.
Like, it's definitely, so you can never really tell, I guess, how hard, it's,
those types of things, you can't, it would be super hard to, like, judge from a
subjective point.
But I definitely agree with you that there needs to be, like, clear set, like,
this is worth more than this.
This is worth more than this.
Like, if I get a takedown, but I've been beating you up for a minute, and you
get a takedown on me, actually, like, what's the balance there so that I don't
have to fucking guess while I'm in the middle of, like, trying to, like, beat
this guy up?
Yeah.
I think a larger number.
I don't think 10-9.
I don't think 10-9 makes any sense to me.
It's just too much room for interpretation, too much room for subjectivity.
I think we should have some really large number.
It seems, it's just such a different sport than boxing.
10-9 makes sense in boxing.
10-8, he got a knockdown.
Makes sense.
It does not make sense in MMA.
It's like, you'll see guys get knocked down and win the round.
Yeah.
You know, it's like, well, how hurt was he on that knockdown, and what should
that count for?
You know, we don't count knockdowns in the same way that boxing counts knockdowns,
where you, like, if you're watching, like, Caleb Plant and Benavidez, if Benavidez
knocks Caleb Plant down, you know that's a 10-8 round.
Yeah.
Well, everybody knows, oh, he's got a 10-8 round, he won that round.
That is not the case in MMA where there's a clear-cut thing that you could
point to and say, you know, there's so many fights that are so goddamn close.
Like, Sugar Sean and Piotr Jan, perfect example.
Like, Jesus Christ, that was a close fight.
Yeah.
Why?
And you've got to, like, really look at it to try to figure out who won.
I think they got it right, but when I first saw it, I thought they got it wrong.
Because I first saw it, and Piotr was on top at the end of it, I was like, I
think he got it.
And like, oh, wow, he won.
Hmm.
But I was eating.
I was backstage at a green room after a comedy show, hanging out with friends.
But watching it alone, I was like, okay, that is a complex fight where it's
close,
but I think they got it right.
I do, too.
I think there should be a complete overhaul of the scoring system.
And I think they should have some sort of a conference where they get together
with experts
and world-class referees and judges and trainers and fighters, and everybody
has input.
Do it at, like, that UFC fighter week thing that they do in July, and have a
fucking conference
where they literally sit down and try to remap the way we score fights.
Because there's no reason to keep scoring them this way.
No one's holding a gun to our head.
No one's making this 10-9 thing.
We just adopted it because when we wanted to be sanctioned in the initial part
of it, you
had to get through the athletic commissions, Nevada State Athletic Commission
being the
best, and all these other ones, you know, being secondary.
But they had a system that was already in place, so we took that system from
boxing, and
we applied it to MMA.
I agree with you.
Yeah, I mean, they got to do something, dude, or else it's just, it's literally
going to
happen, like, every single month.
Yeah.
And people are going to be upset about it, and it's going to be a topic of
conversation
until it gets fixed.
Yeah.
There's just been so many fights recently.
The Angela Lee-Macy Barber fight.
There's been a bunch of these fights where you just, you watch it after.
You're like, what the fuck did they watch?
I watched that fight in the back a little bit.
Yeah.
Because that was the same night that I fought Cheeto.
Yeah.
And I remember in my head, I was like, oh, well, you better fucking win this
fight by
a margin, you know?
I know, right?
Yeah, yeah.
That was crazy.
I know.
That decision was nuts.
Like, I couldn't, I just couldn't understand it.
There's a lot of those lately, and I don't know what the fuck is going on, but
I'm-
I don't know what the fuck is going on, either.
It's, like, I mean, I hate to keep bringing this up, but the fucking Cheeto,
Cheeto getting
one judge calling that fight over you.
How?
How?
Yeah.
How?
I think I might have an idea.
So, I, so that guy was judging or reffing a fight of my guys a long, like,
maybe, like,
four years ago.
My guy was in a, my guy was in a rear naked choke, but it wasn't, like, sunken
in.
His angle was right, so it was, like, you know, it wasn't that.
It wasn't in.
We're yelling at the guy, like, hey, don't stop it, don't stop it, don't stop
it.
The guy stops it, and then, you know, like, I'm like, hey, man, like, you
really screwed
that one up, and, like, maybe I didn't say it that nice, but that same ref was
the judge
that scored it for Cheeto.
So, I don't think he, like, liked me that much, maybe.
That's all speculation, of course, but.
Well, that makes a lot of sense.
Might make some sense.
That's the only thing that makes sense.
And I don't really mean to throw that guy under the bus, because I actually
only really
realized this, like, a few days ago when I looked up what the guy looked like.
I was like, oh, that's the, that's the guy that I kind of bitched out for, like,
fucking
up four years ago, you know, and it would definitely, it wasn't, like, the best
interaction with
that guy, you know, but I don't want to shit on the guy, because the guy's
already getting
so much heat as it is, but.
Well, he should get heat for that.
Might have something to do with it.
That might have something to do with it, and that's the unfortunate aspect of
subjectivity,
of people having their own opinions about things, and going into a fight,
judging a fight,
in a biased way.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's not good.
I also think, you know, there's, uh, have you seen Verdict, Verdict MMA, that's,
uh,
it's an app, and people score from home?
Oh, I have seen that, yeah, yeah.
I'm not sure how it works, but they seem to get it right most of the time.
That would be funny if we just had the fans vote.
It'd be like some gladiator shit.
I'm not saying we should, but that would be kind of funny.
Problem is, when Conor fights, the fucking Irish people would hack the servers.
Yeah, totally.
It would just, it would just be about whose country has the most population.
Yes, and who's the most popular person, you know, because if you have casuals
that don't
really truly understand what's going on, they're judging it.
I don't know if that's the best idea.
But maybe if you have someone who's verified, like, you know, you got these
guys that are
either former fighters or, like, hardcore fans, practitioners, people who
really understand
martial arts, trainers, and maybe you get verified.
Just like you get verified on Twitter for being Corey Sanhagen, maybe you get
verified as being
a verified judge.
And so you can participate.
Yeah.
Some people would love that.
It's not a bad idea.
Yeah, yeah.
At least we should have a secondary score that doesn't count.
Like, we could say, how do the people at home feel?
How do the verified, you know, either athletes or trainers, or how do these
people who we say,
this guy understands MMA, and he gets to vote, and there's, like, 5,000 of them,
what do
they think?
Yeah.
And then you look at, like, 99% think Corey won.
Yeah.
I mean, that's statistics, right?
Like, the larger population size that you have, the more right you're going to
make it.
Right, which is why you would never do, like, a drug test on three people.
You know, they don't do pharmaceutical tests on three people.
So that's why, when you have judges, where there's three people judging a very
important
fight, that easily could be for the number one contender position.
How the fuck is that, how's that okay?
That's not smart.
It's not like judges are so fucking expensive that we can't afford five of them
or six of
them.
Like, Glory has five.
Do they?
Yeah.
Is Glory still around?
Glory's still around.
Oh, nice.
I mean, they're not around the United States, unfortunately.
You know, when they were doing, like, that fucking big tournament in L.A. and,
you know,
they were on television in the U.S.
I really had high hopes that they were going to.
I did, too.
I was really hoping that they would do well because K-1, like, in the 90s and
the 2000s
was the most fucking awesome thing in the entire world.
The most fucking awesome thing.
It was the most awesome thing.
Like, I talk to some people now, now that I'm, like, 30 and a little bit older.
Some people, like, don't know what it is.
And I'm, like, look that up on YouTube and watch every single K-1 fight ever.
It's the most awesome thing in the world.
Just show them an Ernesto Hoost highlight reel.
Seriously.
Andy Sauer.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, dude.
Andy Hoog.
I mean, there's so many guys.
Fucking Peter Ertz.
Dude.
Jerome LeBanner.
I mean, they had some.
Remy Bonjowski.
Yeah.
They had some fucking fights, man.
Dude.
Woo.
You know what fight I was thinking of the other day is Chahid versus Zambidis.
Remember that fight?
Oh, yes.
Dude, that fight has just, like, disappeared in history.
But that was one of the most awesome epic fights that's ever happened in
history.
Zambidis was a fucking animal.
Yeah.
What a fight.
What a fight.
He was awesome.
Was he Australian?
I think so, right?
He was Greek.
Was he from Australia?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You might be right.
There it is.
Dude, this is the most.
Oh, man.
Yeah, he's Greek.
This fight was fucking bananas.
This fight was awesome.
These guys got in each other's face from the moment the fight started.
I mean, they just fucking went to war.
Look at this.
I'm so glad that I got to bring this up for people where they'll, like, you
know, watch
this shit because this is the most awesome fight in the entire world.
The most awesome fight.
Yeah.
If I was running the UFC, and clearly I'm not, but if I was, I would not be
interested
in slap fighting.
I'd be interested in this.
Yeah.
This would have been, I would say, if you guys want to do something else that's
going to
be big, how about have pro kickboxing?
Yep.
Because everybody loves high-level kickboxing.
Do it in the small gloves like one.
Right.
And it's, or you could do it in these gloves, or, yeah, small gloves is fine.
These gloves are way better than the glory ones, too.
Like, the glory ones look bulky, and, like, they, like, guard the face too much.
These look like, these are, like, so Dwayne, let me put a pair of these on.
Are these tens or eights?
Dude, they might be eights, but, dude, it's your, it, like, literally just
covers what it
needs to cover.
They're essentially, they feel like MMA gloves.
Hmm.
Except without the fingers.
Eight's the right number.
Eight's the right number.
It's so crazy that, like, heavyweights are using fours in MMA, right?
But eight ounces?
Yeah, that is crazy.
That seems like the right number, specifically for these guys.
But there's a lot of these guys out there in the world.
Like, Cedric Dumbay just got signed for UFC.
Oh, yeah, I saw that.
That's cool.
Yeah, they almost had him signed a while back, which is, it sucks because he
lost, like,
two years of his prime where, you know, he's, for some reason it didn't work
out and he
didn't get in.
But now, finally, that guy is in MMA and you're going to get to see just elite,
world-class
striking.
That's awesome.
And fucking conditioning.
That guy came to my gym.
He did my podcast and he came to my gym in LA and they wanted to use the gym.
And so, while, you know, after the podcast session, he did a training session.
So, I got to watch the whole thing.
They do some wild strength and conditioning shit.
Oh, really?
So much strength and conditioning.
It's all sprints on the treadmill, you know, that self-powering treadmill, and
then run
back over to the bag and it's, and it's time, go.
And then he's doing another thing, he's doing plyos, doing all these different
things.
But that's why that guy's got this insane gas tank.
When you watch Cedric Dumbe fight, one of the things he does, he melts people.
He just keeps that, he's got crazy power, super intelligent, very creative
inside there,
but also just melts people with that pace.
He's been around for a while too, right?
He has.
Okay, yeah, because I was going to say, I haven't seen much of his fights
recently,
but I know that he's been around for a while.
He's a comedian.
Like a legit comedian?
He's a comedian in France.
Oh, really?
Yeah, he's a funny dude, man.
Oh, that's cool.
There it is.
Cedric Dumbe shoots down reports of UFC deal.
Oh, no.
The rumors of Cedric Dumbe signing to the UFC cropped up after the fighter
shared a cryptic
post on social media.
Because I know he was about to be signed at one point, so what the fuck?
That hasn't happened yet, officially is all.
Oh, so he got a call from Dana White and he sent a picture of it.
Yeah, here's his last tweet about it.
He's like, I know you want to see me at the UFC.
I really want to make you love, but the choice offered me is really not easy.
And at 30, it will be the last choice of my life.
Look how he spelled choice.
That's French.
That's French.
Is he spelling it in French?
That's what it is.
Chois.
This is my chois.
Well, fuck, man.
I hope they figure that out.
Because when you get guys like Pajeda or get guys like Cedric Dumbe, you get to
see elite
striking.
Yeah.
And it's also, you get to see this problem.
Like with Pajeda, you saw it with the Adesanya fight.
Doesn't really know what to do when guys are wrestling him.
You know, and that was a big problem when Izzy got his back and he couldn't get
out of that.
It's like, wow, he was very sluggish on the ground.
This is like a marked difference between the fluidity and the efficiency that
he has on his feet.
And then when Adesanya got him on the ground, you can say like, whoa, because
he's going
to have a problem with like the Robert Whitaker's of the world or the Marvin Vittori's,
these
big fucks that know how to wrestle.
Yeah.
There's, I think grappling is super interesting, or at least from like the way
that I've kind
of learned things and wrestling is because it's so proprioceptive that like you
literally,
I don't feel like can get good at it until you clock all of those hours.
Like that's like a really cool thing about, I mean, everything comes more
natural to people,
of course, like striking came really natural to me, but I had, I started
everything at the
same time.
But Jiu Jitsu was so proprioceptive that it like, it wasn't natural for me.
Like I grew up playing basketball, like everything is hand-eyed coordination,
you know, moving
your body, but like wrestling and grappling, it's like, it's almost like when
you, you learn
a different language and you always have that accent, you know what I mean?
Where it's like, oh, that, that guy didn't grow up doing that, you know,
because I can see
by the way that he just does like really small, nuancy things.
And you can't get rid of it unless you just like clock hours and hours and
hours of it.
I feel like striking's that way too though, don't you?
Yeah, I think for some people, and that's why I said maybe it's because just
the way,
like I just naturally picked up striking really easy too, but.
I think for bulky guys, for bulky guys, striking becomes a real problem.
Yeah, because moving's a big deal.
And it's also like guys who are used to grappling, they're used to moving their
body in a very
specific way.
And then all of a sudden they got a snap and explosion.
Yeah.
It's like a different thing.
Yeah.
And a lot of them, like the big bulky guys have a really hard time picking up
fluid striking.
Yeah, definitely.
Definitely.
But if you like, you see a guy like Floyd Mayweather or something that started
when he
was a little kid.
My God, it's like a part of his, it's like blinking.
It's just like completely natural movement.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, because when I think about how I've, because I do think I've made
some giant
leaps in my wrestling game recently.
The reason I think it's happened is because Banks and I will just like hand
fight and pummel
for like 20, 30 minutes straight on a lot of days, like Wednesdays and Saturdays.
We'll just do that because I really feel like I don't understand things until I
can actually
just like clock them hours and hours and hours.
Cause it can be the difference of, oh, my shoulders here or my shoulders here,
like on someone's
chest that like stops them from running me over.
And like those things you just don't learn unless you just like clock the hours
and hours
and hours.
Another thing that makes like MMA just so awesome and fascinating too is just
there's things that
you just can't skit without just clocking hours and hours and hours of it.
There's no shortcuts.
No, no.
Especially at the elite level.
It's like you can't because everyone's talented.
Everyone's motivated.
Everyone's driven.
Everyone's successful.
Everyone has experience.
Yeah.
It's just like, what a pressure cooker.
Seriously.
It's good though, man.
Because like, like I said, like I don't really have any other hobbies.
Like I don't enjoy doing other things.
So like, I'm like super capable of just like clocking hours and hours and hours.
Cause I don't like do other shit in life.
That's good that you don't do other shit because you wouldn't have time for it.
Yeah.
It's, it's really, it's the question with a lot of elite athletes in MMA is
like, how long
can you maintain that intensity?
Yeah.
Cause it is a grind.
It's a grind.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm in a nice place though, because I kind of, after that yawn fight, I took a
year,
got better, was able to rest like my nervous system, you know, like when you're
like wanting
to fight over and over and over again, I feel like your nervous system never
really gets
to chill because it's like, all right, it's like thinking a couple months ahead,
you know?
Yeah.
But my nervous system feels good right now.
Like it's excited to think a couple months ahead now.
That's great.
Yeah.
So the yawn fight you took on short notice, like how much time did you have?
Five weeks.
Five weeks.
So halftime of what you prefer.
And what did you get out of that fight?
I was super happy with the way that I did those five weeks.
I was really happy about that.
That was the first time that I had actually gotten rocked to the point where
like my body
wasn't listening to me.
So that was super interesting.
What did you get hit with?
Fucking like a spinning back fist left hook.
It was a pretty badass attack, but it happened in the last minute in the third
round.
And I feel like I was fighting fucking awesome round one, round two, four
minutes into round
three, got rocked, stood up, was like, okay, went back to the corner.
I don't really remember what happened in between the corner because I was so
like, oh shit,
like I just got rocked.
And for the first time ever in the fourth round, my eyes weren't, or my legs
weren't listening
to what my eyes were seeing.
So like, I felt like I would see punches coming and my body just wouldn't get
the fuck out of
the way, which was crazy.
So I got my ass whooped in the fourth.
And then when I went after the fourth, before the fifth, I remember taking this
like deep
breath and being like, oh, okay, like now I'm back to being myself.
But then in the fifth, I kind of had to fight like a little bit compromised
because I was
like, well, fuck, if I get hit like that again, that could be like lights out,
you know?
But that actually helped me a lot in the song fight because in the song fight,
I got rocked
pretty early too, um, like just got like really excited, like wanted to like
crack him with
the right hand when I saw an opening and that motherfucker song is fast, dude.
Like, uh, I had never fought someone that I think was that athletic and that
fast in my
life.
So I threw a right hand and song like fucking chambered his shoulder and threw
like a hard
left hook as I was turning back in and it rocked me and it didn't phase me
anymore because
I had been through it in the yawn fight.
So, uh, even though the yawn fight, I, I of course was upset because I lost,
like I took
that away from it and I feel like it actually helped me win against song big
time because
after I got rocked, I was like, eh, I know that I'm okay.
You know, which is like when it happens to you the first time, you're like, oh,
fuck me.
I'm like, am I going to get knocked out now?
Right.
So, so it, so it helped, but, uh, yeah, I was like more or less happy with how
I did.
Just got dropped, was compromised.
I'll get, I'll get at him again.
You know, the song fight was amazing because I got to watch that as a spectator.
Cool.
At the apex.
Cool.
Which I fucking love.
I love fights at the apex.
I think it's amazing.
I hate them.
Well, you don't hear the crowd.
I would imagine for an elite fighter when you're fighting a big opponent like
Song Yidong,
it's a very important fight that you would want a giant roaring crowd and you
want it to
be at the T-Mobile, but man, as a fan to be able to, especially where I get to
sit like
at the desk.
Nice.
So I'm sitting there right there watching the cage and I don't have to work.
So I'm just listening and watching and, and fuck, man, what a, what a great
experience
it is watching world-class fights in that environment where you can hear
everything because there
was only like a hundred people there, like maybe, right?
It's like only people that get invited.
So you're, you're sitting there and watching world-class fights, almost like it's
in a gym.
Yeah.
Song's awesome too, man.
Like, I, I really feel like that guy, I mean, he lost to me, but like that guy
kind of gets
slept on a little bit, man.
Like, uh,
This is what we were talking about earlier.
There's so many people in that division.
I'm actually really curious to see how him and Ricky Simone, how that fight
goes.
Yeah.
That's going to be a killer fight.
That's a great matchup.
That's going to be a killer fight.
Very exciting fight.
Yeah.
I'm really excited about, excited about Al Jermaine and Henry.
Yeah.
That's super exciting too.
I know.
At first, you know, like, okay.
So at first, just being in the division and just like the lens that I have to
like walk
through life, I was like, man, fucking Henry's just coming back, you know, like
motherfuckers
getting a title shot, you know, but then now I'm kind of like, oh shit, this is
going to
be like a cool fight, you know, like it's going to be exciting.
Yeah.
It sucks in one way because this guy sort of takes your place or takes a place,
but in
another way, it's like he brings a lot of eyeballs to the division and also he
elevates
everything.
Yeah.
Like that's the reality of a Henry Cejudo.
That guy is a fucking Wolverine.
Yeah.
I mean, he really is.
He's good too.
He's very good.
Like, like he's kind of dorky on like, and I know that he tries to be dorky.
The cringe stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But dude, when you watch that guy compete, like I remember when I watched him
fight Cruz,
like I always try to like get a read on people, like what their body language
is saying, how
their eyes look, you know, like I, I feel like guys that do a lot of like shifty
eyed
stuff before a fight aren't always the most focused.
That might just be something that I think there's no science behind that, but I
almost feel like
I can like tell, but when I watch Cejudo fight, I'm like, oh man, that guy's
locked in
man.
Like that guy is locked in.
He's a hell of a competitor.
Yeah.
Elite competitor.
He won a gold medal at like 18.
Yeah.
Gold medal in the Olympics, two division world champion MMA.
I mean, he's a fucking monster.
And you know, I think one of his most impressive performances was Marlon Marais.
Yeah.
Because Marlon had him fucked up in that first round.
Marlon was team.
Marlon is probably one of the most talented guys that just can't be pushed past
a certain
level.
When he gets pushed to a certain level, the wheels fall off and it's very
interesting.
I don't know if it's psychological, I don't know if it's because he cuts so
much weight,
if it's physical, like he doesn't have a large gas tank.
I don't know what it is.
But if I watch that first round, I'm like, oh my God, this guy's a world beater.
Yeah.
Like Jesus Christ.
Marlon Marais is fucking Henry Cejudo up.
Yeah.
And then the second round, Henry made an adjustment, just started putting it on
him.
Yeah.
He did what he had to do.
He was like, all right, this shit ain't working.
We're going after this guy.
That was cool.
Yeah.
Henry's a hell of a competitor.
You know who else is too, though?
It's Sterling, bro.
Oh, yeah.
Sterling gets slept on as like the champ.
And he's a hell of a competitor.
Yeah, he's a hell of a competitor.
Well, you saw that in the second Piotr Jan fight.
Because I think Piotr Jan felt like, I'm going to fuck this guy up.
He cheated.
You know, he won the first fight by pretending he was hurt, which I don't think
he was pretending at all.
But meanwhile, the guy gets an artificial disc put in his neck.
How do you have neck surgery?
Because his neck was fucked.
Like, so that knee 100% fucked him up.
And then on top of that, he has to get this surgery where they're putting a
titanium articulating disc in his neck.
And then he goes and fights again and then dominates.
That's a big deal.
Big deal.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, Aljamain doesn't really, he doesn't seem like a super boastful guy like
for himself.
Like, I always kind of see him when I watch like the things that I watch on Aljamain.
He's being like silly and like calling fights and all of this stuff.
He's not a super boastful guy on his own.
But he could be if he wanted to because he's a very good fighter.
And the neck surgery, that's a big deal, man.
And coming back from something like that.
It's a very big deal.
Yeah.
It's amazing that we have that kind of technology today.
That they can replace discs in someone's neck to the point where they can fight
in a world class, in a world championship title fight.
It's pretty crazy.
What did you get out of your fight with him?
Sterling?
Yeah.
Not to fight like a pussy.
Don't go in there like a pussy.
But no, I just wasn't, I was kind of, I don't know, man.
I just like, I went into that fight all wrong.
Like, I was just like way too calm.
Way too like, I got this.
Like, just being a douche.
You know, like a freaking, like I, you know, like if one of my fighters was
being like that, I'd be like, hey man, you were kind of a douche.
You know, like you thought that you were just going to walk through that guy.
Like, you didn't get up at all.
Like, you know, and, and part of it wasn't because I thought that I was like so
much better than Aljamain.
I think part of it was just probably just like a compensation inside me that
was like somehow afraid to lose.
So I was just trying to be like some type of character or whatever, you know,
but, but long story short, I wasn't up enough at all.
And Aljamain was up here and I was like here and here is not where you want to
be for a fight.
So, uh, it, it just made for like, I remember being in that fight and being
like, is this fucking guy on my back right now?
You know, like, I was like, how the hell did he get there?
Like, this isn't how this is supposed to be going.
Just like dumb shit like that.
Like adolescent competitor type shit.
Uh, and that's actually after that fight, that's when I was like, I'm getting
this shit down now.
Like I'm figuring out how to show up every single night.
So you think that's a part of the important, one of the important things that
happens in the process of becoming a great fighter is that you have to be a
great fighter.
You have to make those mistakes in order to learn and feel the pain of that to
know that you have to make some adjustments and you have to make some changes.
I think, I think from my personal experience, uh, like I always try to catch
mistakes before they actually become like problems.
But in my experience in life, the things that I've really fixed haven't been
until after I've like cracked, you know, or like had something horrible happen.
Like, uh, when that happens in life, I feel like you just take things way, way
more serious because it's like, it becomes a reality when like, if you kind of
know something's like, ah, that's a problem.
But I don't really have to worry about that problem right now because it's not
in my face.
But you're always kind of like, hmm, that might be a problem one day.
And then it actually becomes a problem.
Then you fix that shit, you know, like, uh, actually after that fight, um, I'll
spend a, like a lot of time just, you know, in my car whenever just thinking to
myself, I'd be like, is there anything that I'm doing right now that I will
hate myself for?
If I lose this next fight and like, what do I need to fix so that that shit
doesn't happen?
You know, and I'm like constantly always asking myself those types of questions
where I'm just like, look, man, if like, say you lost tomorrow, would you
change anything right now?
And like, I asked myself that like a lot, a lot.
You said something the last time we were on the podcast that I actually put up
a clip of the other day because it was, it's, it's such a profound thing.
You said, you said, I wish I could win every fight and feel like I lost.
Yeah.
Um, well, yeah, what a, I mean, maybe not because now that I'm on the winning
side of shit, it feels pretty good.
But, uh, so maybe I don't mean that, but, uh, as far, but it is like the better
way to like become great, you know, it's a better way to become great.
Like even, even, uh, like I was wrestling with Banks the other day before we
came out here and I was like, Hey, like I'm fucking this up, this up, this up,
this up.
Like I need to get better at this, this, like, these are the next steps, but,
uh, you know, so, uh, I, I have really embraced that.
I'm glad that I don't actually have to feel like a loser cause that shit really,
really sucks.
But, uh, yeah, I, uh, this shit is a marathon, man.
Like it's a marathon.
It's an ultra marathon.
It's an ultra marathon and it's going to last for hopefully the next six, seven
years of my life.
So how old are you now?
30.
So 37 you think is the exit strategy?
Yeah.
That seems like for a natural athlete, that's the, the tail end of your
efficiency, your body's ability to perform at the highest levels.
I don't want to have my like wife and kids watch me get knocked out a bunch of
times, you know, like I, I don't, I don't want, I don't want to go out like
that.
You know, I mentioned Chris Gutierrez, but the last Frankie fight, when Chris
knocked out Frankie, I was like, I was very apprehensive about that fight.
Cause I knew that Frankie had had hip replacement surgery and I, you know, I
mean, he's been around for so long.
I mean, he beat BJ Penn for the title in Abu Dhabi in like, what was that?
2006 or something.
Yeah.
When was that?
It was a long time ago.
It was when Anderson Silva fought Damien Maia and dang, that was a long fucking
time ago.
And then, you know, you think about those wars that he had with gray Maynard
and all the fights that Frankie's been in and to see his kids in the audience
for that fight.
I'm like, Oh God, they're going to come see this fight dude.
And Gutierrez is, he's nasty.
He's so good.
So he is really slick bro.
When they took that fight, I was like, why, why, you know, like not, not to be
offensive towards anyone, but I was like, Chris is good, man.
He's very,
And he doesn't get the deserve, the, the, the attention he deserves because he's
in this fucking insane division.
Mm-hmm.
You know, I mean, there's so many guys, so many fucking guys in this division.
It's just a, what a wild ass 135 pound division.
It's crazy.
Yeah, it is crazy.
It's exciting.
Fuck, it's exciting.
Yeah, it's, it's fucking cool.
And it's so interesting to me that, you know, other than Brandon Moreno and
Davidson Figueiredo and, you know, there's a few guys at 125 that people care
about.
That division doesn't get nothing compared to the 135, 135 pound division sells
out at T-Mobile Arena.
You know, it's fucking huge pay-per-view fight.
125, people are like, that's too small.
Yeah.
It's weird.
Yeah, it is weird.
Hmm.
Yeah, Moreno's a badass, too.
I love, I love Moreno.
Love that, too.
Yeah, yeah.
I love that he's into Legos.
I love that shit, dude.
Is he?
Dude, yeah.
And then, yeah, what was, Perea was wearing, like, some Pokemon jean jacket or
something.
Perea was?
Really?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He could wear whatever the fuck he wants.
Yeah, for real, dude.
So, I shook that guy's hand.
So, actually, I have a lot of respect for that, dude.
I'll give him, like, so, after he had won the belt, the next week, his sister
was fighting in, like, the middle of nowhere.
Iowa.
And I was there cornering one of my buddies, or one of my teammates, and he was
there, like, helping his sister, and I was, like, oh, man, that's really, that's,
like, cool to me, you know?
Like, you just won a world title against one of, like, the best champions that
the UFC has had in years, and then you're, like, in the middle of, like, dude,
in the middle of nowhere, Iowa.
It was, like, an hour 30 just to the airport.
Wow.
Yeah, yeah.
So, but, anyways, dude, I shook that guy's hand, and it was, like, shaking,
like, one of these things, man.
It was, like, his hand was, like, this big.
It was huge.
Yeah.
He's a genetic freak.
Yeah.
There's a lot going on with that guy.
He's incredibly mentally tough.
He's got insanity in those, the power punches and strikes.
You watch him hit guys, and you can tell, like, right away, they're, like, oh,
fuck.
Like, you can see it.
He puts it on them, and they're, like, oh, Jesus Christ.
Like, the danger is so high.
He's got that one-punch KO power, one-strike KO power, and he's so intelligent
about how to place it on a chin.
He really knows how to hit people there.
And then on top of that, he's fucking enormous.
Yeah, he's big.
You can't believe that guy weighs 185 pounds.
You know, I walk around, I'm probably, like, 200 pounds.
How the fuck is that guy 15 pounds lighter than me?
He's so much bigger than me.
He's huge.
And then you see him get into the cage.
He's, like, 225 when he fights, when he rehydrates, which is just bananas.
Seriously.
I, so, like, I was actually watching Izzy and Perea, the first fight recently,
and he has his hands in a spot, too, where he's almost, like, hit me.
Yeah.
Like, come on, hit me.
He's almost baiting you.
Yeah, because he, you know, like, that size of a guy fighting a guy like Israel,
that, to me, is where I, like, really understand why that fight went the way
that it went a little bit is because when someone that big compared to you is
standing there kind of like this and just, like, marching you down with their
hands down, it's a little bit intimidating to just be, like, well, do I just,
like, nail this guy?
You know, because if he slips and I, like, don't hit him, he's going to, like,
chuck and fuck me up.
So, I think that that's a little bit of, like, a giant advantage for that dude.
It's also, he's got a very unusual stance.
Yeah.
He stands straight up, and he keeps his hands like this, and he just sort of,
like, straight, and then he throws kicks with no telegraph, and he doesn't
throw in full power.
But he's got so much power that when he starts throwing those low kicks, like,
I watched the, the first fight a few times now, uh, the first MMA fight, and he,
he fucked Izzy's calf up multiple times in that first round with zero telegraph.
So, it's not like one of those, like, dig in and turn your body over.
It's just, top, top.
He's just, top, just throw it, and it doesn't come out of anywhere.
You're not, you're not, you're not seeing any reads.
Yeah, yeah, those are the toughest guys to fight, honestly, the guys that don't
telegraph anything.
Yeah.
You know, you're plenty powerful just having all that adrenaline in you.
You don't need to be loading up too much.
That said, if you go back and watch the first fight, Izzy was winning that
fight.
Izzy was winning the grappling exchanges.
He took him down, controlled him on the ground, and he was doing great in the
striking, rocked him in the first round, had him in real trouble.
That first round is 30 seconds longer.
Izzy retains his title.
So, it's one of those things, just like, I, this is not a mismatch, and it's
not like, boy, I feel so hard for Izzy.
No, it's like, whoa, how is this going to go down?
Yeah.
How is this going to go down?
When you've got a guy with a mind like Izzy's, where he's so fucking determined
and so smart and so laser focused, he thinks he's got the solution.
He thinks he's got it.
He's going to figure it out.
And then you've got this other thing where, when someone becomes a champion,
there's this sort of school of thought that they almost immediately become 10
or 20% better.
Yeah.
I have heard that.
I wonder why.
I mean, yeah, when were they, they were saying that with Leon and Usman.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Huh.
I wonder why.
Well, he certainly, Leon certainly looked better in the second fight.
Way better.
But I feel like Kamaru looked a little apprehensive.
I felt like in that fight, like, maybe there was something going on.
So, Izzy's the favorite.
I mean, he was winning most of the fight.
Interesting.
Yeah, but he lost by TKO.
I mean, that's very interesting.
Very interesting.
Look at the 7-1 versus 23-2 or something.
Yeah.
Crazy with MMA.
Yeah, that's true.
It's, I mean, it's a very close line that could change easily if more money
comes in on Pajero.
You know, 135 and 115 is almost like a pick-em fight.
You'll be better?
No.
No, I don't bet on anything.
Now that you can't bet when you work for the UFC.
Yeah, yeah, I know.
But I was never really before.
Dude, I hate losing money.
First time I went to Las Vegas and I, like, lost 20 bucks in, like, three
minutes.
I was like, fuck this.
This is not for me.
Well, that's good.
It's also something silly.
Like, you can't control it.
I mean, I guess you can if you're really good at poker or blackjack or
something like that.
But it's just like, I'm not interested in that.
No.
Do you play those games?
No.
No?
I don't play any of that stuff.
I don't play anything where you don't have to execute.
I know, dude.
I don't like games where I can't use my body in some way.
Yeah.
That's why I like pool.
Because in pool, it's like strategy.
There's all this thinking involved.
But you have to make the shot.
You have to execute under pressure.
That's exciting to me.
Like, picking a card.
Yeah, yeah.
Like, anybody could do it.
You could be dead.
Yeah, that's true.
You know, it's like, it's just, you could play digital poker.
Yeah.
Like, video poker.
Dude, the people that sit at the things and hit the button all day.
Oh, my God.
What are you doing?
Oh, my God.
What are you doing?
I know that poker's a very intelligent game.
And I respect it and appreciate it.
And the guys who win all the time, they're elite thinkers, for sure.
I mean, and they're obsessed people.
Because I'm too physical.
I like things that you do with your body.
Yeah, me too.
I'm the same.
Because it's also mental.
Because you have to control the body.
Like, controlling the body is, like, one of the most exciting things about
competition.
Is that you know that there's a lot of pressure, but you have to perform while
you're under pressure.
You ever play spike ball?
No.
Do you know what it is?
No.
It's like that little black and gold game.
It's like a little net that they put on the ground.
And it's like a park game.
You hit the ball at the net, and then it's two versus two.
You've never seen that?
No.
Oh, that's our game, dude.
That's going to be my second career.
Really?
Oh, dude.
I love spike ball, bro.
We play on the team.
We'll get a bunch of the guys on Saturdays in the summertime.
It's this game.
So, it's pretty much like volleyball.
It's like two versus two, but it's a 360-degree game.
And it's like volleyball, but instead of hitting it over the net, you hit it at
the net.
Huh.
But, dude, it is so – like, look at – like, you just dive around, you, like,
pass the ball back, you get three hits, you hit the board.
Oh, that's wild.
Dude, this game is so fun.
That does look fun.
It's super fun.
Yeah, that's my – that's, like, going to be my second career.
How am I never hearing of this until now?
Is this – have you heard of this, Jamie?
Yeah, for sure.
This is 2016?
It's pretty new, though.
Most people –
It's a little new.
It's like picking up some steam.
Oh, this would be a good game for the beach.
Look at this.
This is crazy.
It's been on ESPN and whatnot.
Dude, it's –
Oh, wow.
It's so fun.
That looks fun.
It's super fun.
That's going to be your next thing?
I think so.
You've got to preserve your knees if you want to play that shit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's a lot of cutting and jumping and moving around.
Yeah, yeah.
We – yeah, we play.
Unfortunately, no one's really good enough to, like, keep up anymore.
I know the guys are going to hate that I say that.
Really?
You're getting really good at it?
Yeah, I think I'm going to, like, join a team and shit.
I honestly think I'm going to join, like, a summer league.
Is that your shit?
It is my shit, dude.
Wow.
I love it.
Wow.
I don't have any other hobbies.
Like, I'm thinking about starting fishing just because I like doing shit
outside, but –
You live in Colorado.
A lot of great fishing.
Yeah, I don't – I just don't know if it's going to be my thing or not.
You know, fucking stand there, you know?
Yeah.
I don't know if it's my thing.
But spike ball is my thing.
You should start bow hunting.
Really?
Fuck yeah.
I got – my old roommate's super into bow hunting.
That's – dude, I've done a lot of shit.
Bow hunting, like, bow hunting a screaming elk.
That is one of the wildest things.
Really?
It's so exciting.
Wait, what do you mean screaming at elk?
They scream.
Like when you hit them?
No.
No, they're mating, and so they're screaming at each other and fighting.
Oh, shit.
So you're dealing with these 900-pound animals with giant antlers smashing into
each other,
and you're creeping up on them.
You know, you're trying to, like, avoid the wind, and it's very physically taxing
because
you're in the mountains.
So you have to get up to the top of the hills where these guys are, and you
have to be able
to –
That's what they're going to do.
That's what they sound like.
Where do you do that?
I do it all of the western states.
Okay.
Utah is one of my favorite places to go.
I love going there.
I go to California.
I hunt in California and Central California every year.
I like to go to Colorado.
I'm going to try to get to Arizona either this year or next year.
They got elk in Arizona?
Oh, yeah.
Huge elk.
Where do they live?
Well, a lot of them they have in these Apache reservations down there.
Oh, cool.
And, you know, you buy a tag from the reservation, and they're fucking enormous.
It's the most exciting thing.
Like, Derek Wolf, who, you know, won the Super Bowl, competed in the NFL, he
said,
stacking Tom Brady's great, but it's not as fun as elk hunting.
Oh, cool.
Which is crazy.
Like, shooting an elk with your bow, he said, is more exciting than sacking Tom
Brady.
And then you've got to go, like, find it, right?
Well, hopefully you don't have to find it.
No.
Oh, okay.
Generally, with a good shot, it's not going very far.
Okay.
It's really just about practice, and it's really just about, you know, bow
hunting is one of
those things where you look at it, you're like, oh, you just shoot an arrow at
the animal.
And then once you start doing it, you're like, oh, there's so many layers to
this thing.
And there's also layers to execution in archery, which requires constant
practice.
Archery is something that's a completely perishable skill.
Cool.
If I take, like, a few weeks off of archery, and then I go back, I'm like, oh,
it all feels
weird.
Mmm.
But then if I'm practicing every day, I kind of know where that arrow's going.
Yeah.
When I release that arrow, I just watch it.
There's something about shooting an 80-yard shot and watching it go right into
the center
of the target.
Oh, dang.
It's amazing.
Yeah, I don't even know if I can see that far.
Nah, you can.
80 yards?
But doing it on an animal like that, it's next level.
Yeah.
I mean, I wouldn't shoot 80 yards, but you shoot long.
I mean, I shot 70 yards.
I've shot an elk at 70 yards.
But I only did it because I fucking practice every day for hours and hours.
And I'm 100% confident in the shot.
But it's a mindfuck.
It's exciting.
It's primal.
And the meat is sensational.
And, you know, you have fucking a year's worth of meat from one animal.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm definitely going to get into that at some point.
That's fine.
Maybe just once.
I don't want to fucking practice.
You would like archery.
Really?
Yeah, man.
Oh, okay.
It's one of those things where while you're pulling that bow back and centering
the bubble
and centering your peep sight and putting that dot on the target and you're
drawing back,
there's nothing else in your mind.
Cool.
You have no room for anything else.
It's all about all the different physical things that have to be in play.
Your elbow has to be high.
You're pulling with your back muscles.
You're relaxing your shoulder.
Releasing, like, the grip has to be light.
But yet you're still stabilizing the bow.
So it's just like this dance of muscle and thought.
And then with perfect execution, when you watch that arrow strike the target,
it's so satisfying.
Dude, wouldn't it be cool to be, like, a Mongolian warrior doing that, like, by
horseback?
Isn't that how they used to, like, mess up all of the other?
Yeah.
Because that was, like, their, like, top weapon.
They would just, like, send out fleets of people with horses and just...
That'd be cool.
They did so many things that were horrific.
They were incredible.
Dude, old school war was...
Old school isn't the right term for it, but, like...
Yeah, old school war.
Old school war was badass.
The Mongol war.
Yeah.
If you could watch...
I mean, watching the Mongols sack a city and kill a million people and stack
their bodies
on top of each other.
Did you ever read...
There's...
Well, read...
There's a great audiobook series.
It's really a podcast, but it really is more like an audiobook.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History.
Yep.
I love his podcast.
Did you ever hear Wrath of the Khans?
Uh, no.
It's the best one.
Oh, really?
It's the best one.
I'll listen to it.
It's all about Genghis Khan and his family.
Oh, cool.
Dude, they killed 10% of the population of Earth while he was alive.
Aye.
They killed so many people that they affected the carbon footprint of human
beings on Earth.
When they do core samples of the Earth, there's like a considerable decrease in
the carbon
layer on Earth when Genghis Khan was alive because they killed so many people.
Why would he do that?
He was a bad man.
What an asshole.
Very bad man.
Very bad man.
And, you know, he fucked so many women and raped so many women that his genes
are in a high
percentage of the people that still exist there today.
It's something nuts, right?
What was the...
We've Googled this before.
What is the number?
It's something crazy.
Jamie will find it.
But when he was alive, they killed somewhere between 50 and 60 million people.
Jeez.
Yeah.
Like 10% of the world's population.
Yeah.
Like one out of 10 people on Earth was killed by the Mongols.
That's going to take me a minute to digest.
So a 2003 study found evidence that Genghis Khan's DNA is present in about 16
million men
alive today.
The Mongolian ruler's genetic prowess has stood...
That's a nice way to say he raped a lot of people.
His genetic prowess has stood as an unparalleled accomplishment, but he isn't
the only man whose
reproductive activities was still so significant genetic impact centuries later.
Yeah.
And what's crazy is that that was like one of the superpowers of the world that
everyone
was terrified of, the Mongol Empire.
And now nothing.
Yeah.
Like no one's scared of the Mongols.
Yeah.
It's like, I mean, obviously they're scared of Mongol fighters and they're
tough people,
but there's no like considerable army.
Yeah.
Which is really crazy if you think about that.
It is.
A thousand years ago, if you went back and talked to them, they're like, we're
going to
run this shit forever.
Yeah.
Dude, I used to, back when I was like trying to get into war mind, I would just
like Google
like the most badass warriors in time.
Yeah.
And I'm an idiot, so I like forget everything after a month of learning
something.
But one of the, one of the warriors was this Aztec dude.
And they, he got captured by the other team, whatever, whoever it was.
They took him, they cut off his hands to like try to like just make him
miserable for his
entire life.
They sent him back to his camp.
This guy like glues on knives onto his hands and then just commits the rest of
his life to
just like killing all of these people that like did that.
And that to me, though.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah, this might be him.
Jesus Christ.
According to legend, after his right hand was cut off by the Spanish, Galvarino
boldly held
up his left hand offering up for his captives to amputate.
Oh, after his right hand was cut off, he offered up his left hand to the captives
to amputate.
He displayed no emotion as it was cut off and his facial features recorded no
pain.
The Spaniards ordered him to return to, I can't say that word.
How's that?
How do I say that word?
Coplican.
Coplican.
To urge him to surrender.
Wow.
Yeah, but I'm pretty sure that this dude like glued on like knives on his hands
and because
that's like the type of dude that I was trying to like become sometimes, you
know, where I'm
like, yeah, my life is committed to like, you know.
Look at that.
Yeah, like that.
That is wild.
Imagine being that guy, though, and just like having that amount of hatred
inside of you to
be like, you know what?
We're gluing these on and we're going back.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah, that'd be crazy.
I guess, but I guess when you kind of, I sometimes think when you grow up in a
society like
that and like there's not a lot going on, you probably get pretty bored and
like commit
your life to weird stuff like that.
Well, I bet he was committed to that the way you're committed to fighting.
Yeah, probably.
It's probably the same kind of thing.
Like if you're going to be a warrior, you have to be all in and you got to know
there's
other warriors like you out there and you got to be better than them.
Yeah.
Or harder than them.
When I had Tyson on, I brought up Genghis Khan and his fucking eyes lit up.
He knows so much about like Genghis Khan.
Like first of all, he knew his name was Temujin.
His real name was Temujin.
That's his born name.
And he told a story about his brother, about how his brother was stealing fish
from him
and his other brother.
So he killed his brother and his mother freaked out that he killed his brother.
But he's, he was a fucking killer from the womb, like from the time he was
young and went
on to form this empire that to this day is one of the most frightening forces
in the history
of humanity.
Like what they did, there's a, there was this guy who was the, the, the, the,
the Shah of
charisma had sent an emissary to Jin China to go to see whether or not they
should invade
or conquer them or what, you know, what was going on there.
And as they were headed to the city, they saw in the distance what they thought
was a snow covered
mountain.
And as they got closer, they realized that it was a stack of bones.
There was a stack of bodies because everyone in the city had been murdered.
They had to abandon the roads along the way because they were so littered with
human bodies that
were decaying, that the roads had become mud and caked with filth and just
human decay.
It was like decaying people had destroyed the roads.
Dang.
There was so much decay that the roads had become mud.
Dang, that's a pretty sad time in history to probably be a part of.
They would set up outside of, of cities, of walled cities and just camp out
until people
ran out of food.
Yeah.
And then when they started killing people, they would put them on a catapult,
light them
on fire and launch them onto the thatched roofs to start the buildings on fire.
Yeah, we don't have it too bad now, I guess, huh?
We have it pretty fucking easy.
Yeah, we got it pretty good, man.
Pretty fucking good.
Yeah, I think about it.
It's almost too good where I feel like the world's going to end pretty soon.
Well, I think you probably are onto something historically because, you know,
that's that
old thing that people always say, hard times create hard men.
Hard men create easy times.
Easy times create soft men.
Soft men create hard times.
We're at soft men create hard times.
Yeah, there's a Dune quote I just got done reading Dune and it goes something
along the lines
of like men made machines to try to free themselves when really what happened
is the men with machines
just decided to enslave a bunch of people where it's kind of like we're almost
like making
ourselves slaves to these machines.
Well, maybe even worse with AI.
Oh, yeah, that's pretty scary, too.
AI is like right about to pop and people are just sitting back going, what's
going on?
What's happening here?
What is that?
It's literally like the Enola Gay ready to drop a bomb on Hiroshima.
It's really like it's like right there.
You think that'll be it is AI?
I worry.
I mean, I don't know.
What would be the best?
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know.
Best case scenario?
Yeah, best case scenario.
Best case scenario is we incorporate it into our own biology and then we become
some sort
of new type of being that's like a cyborg because if it's not that, then you're
going to deal
with an artificial intelligent life form that's so superior to us that it
creates far superior
versions of itself over and over again because it becomes autonomous and sentient.
That means it can make decisions and do something.
It will go, well, my programming is dog shit.
Let me just figure out how to do this better.
Yeah.
Quantum computing and do it with better technology and, you know, nuclear
fusion and figure out
some way to have power that's not destroying the environment and figure out a
way to have
something that's completely sustainable and then go better and better than that.
You know what I hope that they do?
I hope that they can clone dinosaurs.
So they're going to do that.
I hope that the AI thing, I hope that that's what it commits itself to.
Well, they're already doing that with woolly mammoths.
They're cloning them?
Yes.
Cool.
There's a project that's going on right now where they're going to reintroduce
mammoths,
woolly mammoths to Siberia.
And the idea is that...
They're going to reintroduce them?
Yeah.
What?
Yeah.
Why?
We'll see if you can find that, Jamie.
I got to take a piss.
We'll come back and we'll talk about that because it's pretty fascinating shit.
Woolly mammoths.
Here we go.
So scientists are reincarnating the woolly mammoth to return in four years.
Interesting choice in words already.
Reincarnating?
What the hell?
That's scary.
That's not really what they're doing though, right?
But it's interesting too because 90% of all animals that have ever existed are
dead.
They're extinct.
So it's like, are we going to just keep doing this?
And what kind of consequences is that going to have for the animals that are
alive right
now?
Like what if they start reintroducing saber-toothed tigers?
What if they start reintroducing, you know, all these animals that at one point
in time
dominated the earth?
Dude, I wonder if a Jurassic Park will ever exist.
It fucking totally can exist.
Oh man, I hope it does.
I really hope it does.
I'll pay whatever.
Fuck yeah.
I'll pay whatever they ask to see a velociraptor.
Oh my God.
Any amount of money.
We know how that ends.
That ends bad.
Yeah.
No one stopped to ask, should we do it?
That's like one of my favorite lines.
I mean, it adds bad in the movie.
It ends bad in the movie.
In real life, you have fucking jets just flying and nuked these fucks.
You know?
That crazy fucking raptor T-Rex.
No one can stop that one.
Oh yeah, that's right.
The Indominus Rex.
But that's just like the silliness of two, three, four, five.
You know, Jurassic One was the shit.
That was really what it was at.
Like, what did you do?
Yeah.
You know?
My favorite fucking part of the movie is Jeff Goldblum.
When he first sees the brontosaurus, when he's in the Jeep,
and he just, he gets up and he's like,
and he looks at that, they're like,
what the fuck did you do?
Yeah.
You know?
I think that's possible, man.
I think they're probably going to do it eventually.
They have to, right?
I think it's a matter of time.
It's a matter of time before that happens.
It's probably a matter of time before, like,
we cure cancer and figure out how to live to 500 years.
Like, it's a matter of time before anything,
unless we blow ourselves up.
Unless we blow ourselves up, which is also real possible.
Or we get hit with an asteroid, which is also real possible.
Ooh.
That's the big one.
That would suck.
That's the big one.
I've been obsessed with that for years.
Really?
Yeah, because of my conversations with Randall Carlson
and Graham Hancock.
And Graham Hancock is the one who did that.
There's a recent Netflix special, a series,
it's really amazing, called Ancient Catastrophe, right?
Did I say it right?
Apocalypse.
Ancient apocalypse.
And this is, it's all about what's called
the Younger Dryas Impact Theory,
which is somewhere around 11,800 years ago,
the Earth got fucking pelted with asteroids.
And there's all this physical evidence in the form of nanodiamonds,
these micro diamonds that are created upon impact
when these giant rocks slam into the Earth,
just the heat and the power and the pressure.
And then also iridium.
Iridium, which is very common in space,
but very rare on Earth.
There's a layer of iridium all over the Earth
around this time, around 11,800 years ago.
And this also coincides with the end of the Ice Age.
And Randall Carlson's life's work has been explaining
how this has this impact that happened.
And they know exactly what it is.
It's through a very specific meteor shower
that we pass through every June and every November.
And that you see the meteor showers in the sky
and everybody looks at them.
But passing through that,
occasionally a big one goes through.
And those big ones, he thinks,
slammed into the ice that was covering North America.
Because at that point in time, during the Ice Age,
North America had a sheet of ice covering half of it
that was like a mile, two miles high.
And all that stuff is what you see
when you see the Great Lakes.
That's melted ice.
And that he thinks that it happened almost instantaneously.
And that these things slammed into the ice.
They slammed into parts of the world.
And that that is the flood story from the Bible.
That's the epic of Gilgamesh.
That's all these different things.
And it also shows why there's all these
like super sophisticated structures
that seem to be thousands of years older
than they previously thought they were.
So what him and Graham Hancock have come up with,
and that's what's in this Ancient Apocalypse documentary,
is that at one point in time,
there was an incredibly sophisticated society
that lived on Earth.
And that's the Africans, the Egyptians.
What they had done in, you know,
whatever thousands of years it was
that they built that stuff,
because it's under dispute as to how old it really is.
It's at the very earliest, the very least,
it's 2,500 B.C.
But they think it's way older than that.
And these people had technology
that we still don't understand.
We don't know what they used.
We don't know how they did it.
But they moved 2,300,000 stones that were tons,
some of them from hundreds of miles.
They cut obelisks out of the mountains
and moved them 1,000 miles.
They have no idea how they did it.
They have no idea what they used to cut them.
They have no idea what they used to move them.
And you're talking about people at that point in time,
you know, when you're dealing with 5,000,
6,000 years ago,
we thought they were like 100 gatherers.
Like, how did they do that?
If it's really 10,000 years old,
12,000 years old, 20,000 years old,
what kind of sophisticated culture exists
that went on a different path than we went on?
We went on the path of internal combustion engines
and electricity and computers.
They might have gone on a similarly advanced
or more advanced way,
but with a completely different angle.
They came at technology from a completely different space.
And that's what we see when we see those stone structures.
I'm worried that that could happen to us.
And I'm worried that if something like that did happen,
there would be very little evidence
of the society that's left.
You'd have a small group of people
that survived and lived in fucking utter barbaric conditions.
And I think that's also why people are so fucking savage.
When you look at human beings like 6,000, 5,000 years ago,
what we're probably seeing according to Graham Hancock
and a lot of other people now at this point in time
are coming to this conclusion
is a re-emergence of civilization,
not the birth of civilization.
What we think of as the emergence of civilization,
we think of Babylonia and ancient Sumer,
and this is the first mathematics,
the first written language,
the first agriculture.
And what they think now is
this is just a rebirth of complicated society.
And that for the 6,000 years plus after the impacts,
it was probably hell on earth.
And the people that survived were fucking monsters.
Just monsters.
And that is probably why people were so fucking savage
post the construction of this insanely complex civilization
in Egypt.
I mean, what they did in Africa to this day
is one of the most puzzling things
that archaeologists have to ponder.
Like how?
What is this insanely sophisticated society that existed
that built these structures
and left behind no record of how they did it?
Yeah.
All the burning of the Library of Alexandria,
all the ancient work that they had
where they had like passed down what had happened,
all that was gone when they got attacked
and they burnt down the library.
I know.
I love that.
So much of science is so unknown still.
Yeah.
Isn't that cool, man?
That's pretty cool.
Like sometimes I think that our society gets super caught up
on like how sophisticated and how smart we all are
and this and that.
And like, I think it's like a nice reminder sometimes
to have other people question things
and just like come up with different theories and ideas
because it reminds everyone that we're not all as smart
as we sometimes think, you know,
because I do think that we live in a society
where we think that we're so much smarter
than the humans that were around 5,000, 6,000 years ago
when really it's the same body, same brain.
We just got more shit, you know?
Yeah, we probably aren't as smart as the Egyptians.
No.
It's really likely that what they had figured out,
again, it's probably hard for us to understand
what kind of technology they used
because it doesn't exist anymore.
So someone would have to like figure something out
that's some groundbreaking breakthrough technology
that will people go,
oh, that's how they did it.
And then we'll know, and then we'll understand.
But right now, we're less sophisticated
in terms of our ability to move stone
and make stone construction than they are.
And there's no evidence that there was big machines.
There's no hieroglyphs that show cranes or...
So what?
What the fuck did they do?
No one knows.
Oh, no, I don't even know how to use a compass.
I'd be like one of the first ones dead, dude.
Compass is easy.
Yeah.
I mean, just keep it away from magnets.
It points towards the north.
Yeah, like being from Colorado, I'm like,
that way's west, you know?
Like, so that's nice.
But I think that it would be a shame
if like the world did end
and there was like people scattering to like survive
because I'd spend my whole life just learning how to fight
and then like probably be one of the first ones to die
because I have no directional, no survival skills at all.
You'd learn them.
People would learn them.
You know, people adapt.
They adapt quickly.
We'd figure it out.
But I mean, you look at like all these movies of apocalypses,
it's all the same story.
Like everybody reverts to barbarism.
It's just horrific conditions and people are terrible.
That's The Walking Dead.
That's like everything.
The Walking Dead is not really about zombies.
It's about what happens to people.
Yeah.
Yeah, shit.
That would be sad.
Yeah, we're like building something
that allows us to somehow or another change and evolve past our primate, savage
ancestry.
But every time that goes away, we revert right back to it.
Every time society collapses, power goes out, no more food,
you have to survive on your own, we go right back.
Yeah, that's a shame.
But we kind of know that.
That's why those movies are so appealing
because we know that if the shit went down, it would be horrible.
Yeah.
It'd be hard.
And people would do the worst things they possibly could in order to get by.
I wonder if I even would sometimes.
Like, I wonder if I'd just be like, you know what?
I'm just not going to do that.
I'm just going to go in this corner and die.
Bro, you'd be fucking strapping animal skins on, making armor.
Yeah, you would.
Yeah.
You would.
You would take the same mentality that you have towards fighting
and you would apply that towards war.
Yeah.
That's what I think.
Yeah, maybe.
Yeah.
I think it's a proxy for war.
I think it's an MMA as a proxy for war.
I think it's like a thing that substitutes what is inside of all of us.
It's why it's so appealing.
Yeah, that's why dudes love it.
And it's also why dudes love the fact that you can do that
and still be cool to each other afterwards
and hug.
Everybody loves a fucking war.
And then when dudes high five and hug, it's very emotional.
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree.
Yeah.
And yeah, MMA is beautiful in so many ways.
We're transcending.
I mean, and I think that allows it.
It's like MMA is a way that humans transcend.
And you transcend the barbaric nature that you have
and funnel it to something that's absolutely beautiful.
MMA is beautiful.
It is.
It's really, you know, like there was that famous thing
where who was that actress that said, you know,
she's talking about the arts and she said,
and not mix martial art.
Who was that?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Who was that?
Some older lady.
Meryl Streep.
Yeah.
It was a great actress, but she doesn't know.
It's okay.
She's got some silly idea that she thinks acting is the end all be all
and that's the arts.
Yeah.
Okay.
Martial arts is a fucking art.
When I watched your performance against Marlon,
that was artistic to me.
Thanks.
I was like, God damn, that's beautiful.
Thank you.
It's beautiful.
Yeah, yeah.
It totally, I think everything's an art if you get good enough at it
and you love it enough.
Like, actually, you know what?
I like love all of the arts, you know?
Like, I love poetry, music, all of it.
Comedy.
I think that it's beautiful that you guys like sit in a room,
think of like all kinds of cool shit about life that's funny,
write it down, and then like go perform it on stage.
That's pretty cool.
It's a fun art.
It's a fun.
I like get jealous of you guys because your guys' job is to like sit there,
come up with like funny stuff that connects with people,
and that's like what you guys do.
And the performing piece, of course,
but like just the writing out stuff that like connects with people,
that sounds like a really beautiful, it's like writing music or something.
It's a fun gig, and I've been doing it for 30 plus years,
and I'm still obsessed with it.
What's like your favorite part about it?
The creation of new stuff, for sure.
Yeah, that's my favorite part about fighting, too.
Interesting.
It's like what keeps you interested.
Yeah.
There's probably parallels in everything,
like when you learn a new skill,
when you have a new thing,
and then you can execute it,
and it becomes a thing.
And one of the things that I love about comedy, too,
is that you have to constantly come up with new stuff.
And the audience, you know,
they want to hear some of the old stuff because they love the bits,
but they really want to hear that new shit.
Like hit me with some surprise shit.
What's some new stuff you've been working on?
And that's one of the cool things about this place that I opened,
the mothership,
is that it's designed entirely for the creation of comedy.
We have two shows in the little room every night
and two shows in the big room every night.
Cool.
And comics are hopping back and forth from one show to the other.
And we have this thing that my friend Brian Simpson hosts this show
called Bottom of the Barrel.
And it's a barrel, like a little whiskey barrel.
And the audience at the beginning of the show,
they get index cards,
and they get to write down an idea for a premise.
And it's in the barrel.
And you reach into the barrel,
and you pull out a thing,
and it'll say like,
reincarnating the woolly mammoth.
And then you go,
okay,
what do I think about that?
I'm going tonight.
That's what I'm going to write down then.
I don't think that's tonight.
That's Tuesday night.
So unfortunately.
I love like creative things like that though.
Like whose line is it anyway?
Yeah.
Dude,
I used to love whose line is it anyway?
You know,
like just improv like that to me is,
that's like,
that's like,
that's an art separate from its own,
like writing down and doing stand up.
That's like its own little art.
Yeah.
That's like creativity in the moment.
It's like when you're in a fight,
and you improvise something out of nowhere.
Yeah.
And it just,
it works.
You just see an opening,
like I think I can do this.
And you just do it.
And it's like,
it's not even like,
I think I can do it.
You just recognize that that thing is there,
and then do it.
Yeah.
And then,
yeah,
like anything that's so like,
boom,
boom,
boom,
boom,
boom is cool.
Freestyle rap is really cool.
All of that stuff is super cool.
Yeah.
Freestyle rap is cool,
but I,
I'm a giant fan of like 90s hip hop,
because those dudes wrote everything out.
And like the lyrics were so complex,
and they twisted and turned.
And like,
I'm a big fan of Gangstar,
and you know,
listening to some of their old lyrics,
like,
God damn,
they're so creative.
The Wu-Tang Clan was super cool.
Oh my God.
Dude,
they were just a bunch of dudes in like,
probably their basement,
just like watching Kung Fu movies,
and writing raps.
Yeah.
How cool is that?
The coolest.
That is cool.
To this day,
they transcend.
To this day,
you know,
Wu-Tang's for the children.
Were you a,
uh,
Biggie or Tupac guy?
Both.
Yeah,
yeah,
both.
Both,
but Biggie more.
Yeah,
me,
me too.
I love Tupac.
Tupac was amazing,
but I'm,
I'm a fan of braggadocious shit talking hip hop.
Yeah,
yeah,
yeah.
And nobody did it better than Biggie.
Do you ever watch,
uh,
like freestyle rap battles on YouTube?
Sure.
Dude,
they go at each other with some of the things that they say.
Yeah,
yeah.
Sometimes they'll fucking hit each other and shit.
I love that kind of shit too.
I love,
I love like watching people be aggressive and confrontational.
I love that shit.
Why do you like that?
Because you're,
you,
although you fight very aggressive and confrontational,
you're a very calm and relaxed guy.
Yeah,
definitely.
Uh,
I'm like fascinated with people,
man,
like soup,
like I went to school for psychology.
I worked at a residential treatment facility for kids.
Like I've done everything that I've ever done is like involved,
like some type of psychology or whatever.
And I love,
and it sucks to say,
but I love watching like a shitty dating shows too online because there's,
dude,
there's so much confrontation that happens and I love witnessing people in
confrontational scenarios and just seeing like what happens to the human
person as they're like dealing with a ton of stress.
Like I remember in college,
bro,
I used to love going into like test day and just watching everyone freak out.
Like that was like my favorite shit.
Like I love watching people get nervous.
It is fun.
It's fun to watch the nervous system and the mind get overloaded and all the
possibilities and the thinking and the,
the just the fear and the just anxiety.
How they just start being weird.
I love,
I love watching people be weird just because they're nervous.
Yeah,
it's fun.
It is fun.
It's well,
it's,
it's also,
I guess we're also accumulating an information database.
We're like educating ourselves as to why and how the,
the person,
and we apply it to ourselves.
Like what would I do?
How would I handle that?
I got to stay cool if that happens to me.
Don't do that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Don't panic.
Don't,
don't get in your feelings.
Yeah.
One of like the cool thing that I learned when I used to work at that
residential treatment center was like,
we'd have to like,
like so it was with kids from like five to about like 12 or 13 or
whatever all came from like abuse backgrounds,
but I would love to just see how you could tell that they were feeling a
certain way based off their actions just being differently.
Like I thought that that was really fascinating.
It was like my first time in life where I was like,
Oh yeah,
I guess like when I do pace around a little bit,
I guess like that's me just acting out some type of like nervousness that I
have going on inside of me.
But I learned a ton from that place too.
That was like watching a lot of people being in confrontation all the time
and their kids too,
because kids are just like so innocent and pure and don't know how to hide
anything.
So everything that they're feeling,
they just feel.
One of my favorite moments about a fight is the stare down at the weigh-ins.
Oh yeah.
There's something about the stare down at the weigh-ins,
you know,
where I'm very fortunate that I interview the fighters,
right?
So I introduce them.
And then when Dana brings the two of them together,
I get right there and I look at these guys looking at each other in the eyes.
And some of them are talking shit,
but there's this,
there's this thing going on where they're both very aware of this moment.
And it's like,
how are you dealing with it and how calm can you stay and how prepared are you?
And how,
you know,
how composed are you?
And it's,
it's a wild moment,
man.
It is a wild moment.
I watch for that when I see my opponents walk out too.
I watch for like the same types of things,
you know,
it's interesting.
you,
you,
you have a very specific pacing style that you do when you're getting prepared.
Like when you,
when,
when Bruce Buffer is introducing you,
by the way,
that motherfucker is the best.
Yeah.
Bruce is the best.
Dude,
I heard him practicing one time.
Oh,
really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was at a,
forget which hotel it was at,
or maybe it was at that Vegas one,
but I like hear something in the background,
like him,
like making noise or,
or him like practicing saying the people's names.
And I was like,
damn,
this fool takes that job serious.
Oh yeah.
Well,
you have to,
some of those names are brutal.
Yeah.
You know,
like some of the Russian names,
Jesus Christ,
they're so complex.
I just thought it was so cool that he was like practicing it.
I was like,
I love that.
Oh,
he's very serious about it.
And there's no one better,
man.
When that guy goes,
it's time.
I mean,
he's fucking close to 70 years old.
And this fucking dude's head turns like a grape.
Yeah.
He's screaming like one day we're going to lose him and he's going to drop dead.
And it would be like the most appropriate way for a guy like him to die.
A legend to have a heart attack,
like interviewing a world championship fight.
You know,
I mean,
he needs to have an offspring soon.
Right.
We need a,
right.
It'll be the third.
Yeah.
The third buffer.
Do you know,
he didn't even know his brother until he was like a grown man.
I heard that.
Isn't that wild?
Yeah,
that is crazy.
And then the UFC couldn't afford his brother.
So they got Bruce.
Cause Michael was the fucking man.
Let's get ready to rumble.
Everybody would go crazy.
That was the thing.
And Bruce,
you know,
if you go back,
he was kind of learning on the job.
I mean,
he was good at it in the beginning,
but he became the Bruce buffer that we see now.
Like he was not that intense in the early days.
He just sort of did it like a regular guy,
like a regular announcer.
But then as time went on,
he just fucking ramped up the intent.
And he's such a fan.
I mean,
that dude fucking loves the fights.
Like I'll,
I'll meet him backstage.
And he was like,
what do you think?
What do you think about this?
What do you think about that card?
And we'll start going over the cards.
What do you think about that one?
Whoa,
this is exciting.
This is exciting.
And then you see it in his fucking face when he's out there.
You know,
when he's,
when he,
when he's right in front of him,
it's like,
whoa,
I get goosebumps.
Seriously.
God damn.
I'm sitting in my chair.
I'm like,
holy shit.
Whoa.
Yeah.
You're in for it this weekend.
Oh my God.
I'm so excited.
I know.
All the things I do,
man,
I do a lot of fun things,
but doing commentary for the UFC is one of the most fucking exciting things a
person could ever do.
Yeah.
It's just,
you just get,
it's,
I feel so honored and so privileged that I get to be a person who's talking
about this while,
people are experiencing it.
And then I get to just somehow or another accentuated or give life to it or,
or give my thoughts to it or,
or just express my excitement and that it's contagious.
Yeah.
People feel it and feed off of it.
Live fights are insane too,
man.
Like when I get the chills,
man,
when I'm like there and then it's the last fight and all,
everything goes dark.
Oh my God.
and then just the spotlight,
the whole arena is dark and just the spotlight are on the two fighters.
Oh my God.
What a moment,
man.
What a moment.
What a moment.
It gives me the chills every time.
I remember when Sinead O'Connor sang Conor McGregor's walkout song and the,
the whole place went dark and then green lights for Ireland.
And you just like,
Holy shit.
And just goosebumps on top of goosebumps.
It was,
is this it?
Look at this,
the green lights.
Dude,
this was so fucking intense.
Which fight was this?
89.
This is Madison Square Garden.
Oh,
MGM.
This is MGM.
Oh my God.
This is insane.
What is this?
An Irish song?
Yeah.
What the fuck do you do?
Was this the Jose Aldo fight?
Might be.
Mendez.
Mendez.
Oh.
Okay,
so this is when he won the interim title.
There he is.
He looks so different at 45.
I know,
man.
He was a skeleton.
I know.
Yeah,
there was no one like Conor McGregor at that time,
man.
You talk about a dude who fucking was big for the weight class.
Yeah.
At 145,
when he would weigh in,
he would look like a dead man.
Because that was the days when you had the real weigh in.
When the guy got on the scale,
like,
you didn't have a chance to rehydrate.
You actually had to make weight in front of the crowd.
So you would see Conor,
and he looked like a dead man.
He looked like a guy who'd been in a concentration camp.
Like,
he'd been starving himself.
And then also the next day,
but that was also the days of the IV.
You were allowed to rehydrate.
I guess the official broadcasting had the two.
Same scene,
but
better camera work.
The bravest fell on the requiem bell rang more and fully and clear.
For those who died the Eastertide in the springing of the year.
While the world did gaze with deep remains.
At those fearless men.
But fear...
You want to talk about a dude who just eats pressure.
He was fearless, dude.
Oh my God.
That's like what separated Conor McGregor.
That's why I don't know that there will ever be anyone that's really like him.
is because that dude was walking the walk and he was fearless, man.
Like he was fearless and the fights that he would take...
I think when he fought Chad,
it was like short notice, right?
It was short notice and he had a fucked up knee.
His knee was really fucked up.
He really couldn't wrestle in that fight.
He couldn't grapple.
Even taking a fight against Chad on short notice, man.
Chad Mendes was a freak.
He was a fucking tank.
Yeah.
He was a tank.
Yeah.
He's fighting bare knuckle against Eddie Alvarez.
I saw that.
Wild.
That's soon.
That's crazy.
I think that's next weekend.
Is that next weekend or the weekend after that?
It's soon.
It's this month.
Yeah, it's in Colorado.
Because Luke Rockhold is fighting Mike Perry.
Yep.
It's in Colorado.
I'm going to go.
Woo!
Yeah.
What day is that?
April 29th.
I don't know.
What am I doing?
What is April 29th?
Isn't there something else going on that night?
Isn't that also the Toronto card?
April 29th.
Is that the Toronto UFC card?
No.
No?
It's not Toronto, but there is a UFC card that night.
Oh.
It's a fight night.
Oh, it's a fight night.
Bare knuckle seems a little crazy.
I'd do bare knuckle if you could elbow, though.
If you could elbow, I'd do bare knuckle.
I don't want to just punch people and fuck up my hands.
You definitely would fuck up your hands.
If I could elbow people, though, I think I would be able to handle it.
I wonder why they don't allow that.
That always confused me, too.
Yeah.
They might as well.
That'd be awesome.
Imagine.
That'd be a cool sport.
Just punches and elbows.
Oh, yeah.
Punches and elbows.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
Well, the really crazy striking sport is left way.
Have you ever seen one live?
Left way?
Yeah.
No.
I saw one live.
They had it in Wyoming.
I went up.
It was the last one.
Dudes headbutting each other.
Was David LaDuke there?
Did he fight there?
Is he like a...
He's the top guy.
He's a fucking savage.
I want to say it was one of the top guys.
Is he like a bald white dude?
Yeah.
I think so.
Bald, skinny, white dude.
Yep.
Yep.
Yep.
That guy's a fucking savage.
Dude, he was in the back warming up, headbutting things.
Yeah.
He headbutts pads.
Yeah.
He incorporates headbutts into his pad work.
I mean, I don't see...
I mean, why wouldn't you be allowed to headbutt?
Why wouldn't you be allowed?
I mean, Mark Coleman...
You could do way worse shit.
Mark Coleman, when he was the fucking king, would take guys down, get them in
their guard, and headbutt the fuck out of them.
Dude, that was a big part of his strategies, beating the shit out of you when
you were on the ground, including headbutts.
Oh my God.
That would be awesome.
Yeah.
That would be pretty awesome.
I think it should be allowed.
Why not?
I don't understand why it isn't.
And I also think that you should be able to knee a downed opponent in the head.
I do, too.
Especially when someone's in a turtle position, like if they shoot for a shot
and they sprawl, and, you know, you're sitting there, why can't you knee them?
Because their knees are on the ground?
Seriously.
Makes zero sense.
What do you think about soccer kicks?
I think soccer kicks should be legal.
I do, too.
You should figure out a way to not get soccer kicked.
Yep, I agree.
And if the referee thinks that someone is compromised and they're going to get
soccer kicked, they want to stop the fight, stop the fight before that happens.
But if you see what they're doing in one FC where they allow those soccer kicks,
it's a big factor.
And it's a real factor in real fighting.
And this is supposed to be the sport of real fighting.
I think the only argument against it is the cage.
Because the cage prevents a guy from moving because you're pressed there and
then you can get stomped or soccer kicked.
And there's really no way to get out of that.
I feel like if you wanted to have soccer kicks and stomps, you really should
have an open arena, which I've been a supporter of anyway.
I think cages get in the way of the view.
It's a factor in the fight.
It allows guys to get up where they ordinarily wouldn't be able to.
There's a lot of things that happen with the octagon.
I know the octagon is iconic.
And I know people love it.
But it doesn't really help the fight.
How big would you make the arena?
I'd make it like a basketball court.
That would be awesome.
If you can fight, if you can have basketball in a basketball court, and these
guys are all running around and doing all that.
I mean, there's so much room for these guys to run.
Why can't you have a place where you have a center where you're supposed to
compete in and you have a red line that's a considerable size that if it gets
too far over that, you have to come back in?
That would be awesome.
I think it's better.
We should start our own promotion and maybe fucking boxing with elbows in an
arena.
Well, if UFC was going to do anything, I would want them to do kickboxing.
I do, too.
Because I think that is the untapped thing.
I know they're all high on the slap boxing thing, the slap fighting thing.
And I know that that gets a lot of money and a lot of people love it.
And they watch it on TikTok.
That's great.
But if you really wanted to have another thing that has the potential to be
gigantic, I think it's world championship kickboxing.
I agree with you.
The one in one, it's awesome.
It's awesome.
It's so awesome.
It's awesome.
There's so many good fights.
I love what one's doing.
I love that they incorporate grappling matches.
They have strict grappling matches.
And then they have these MMA fights.
And they have kickboxing with little gloves.
It's fucking great.
Yeah, kickboxing with little gloves is cool.
It is.
It's fucking great.
And they have Muay Thai and they have kickboxing.
They have different rules for different kinds of competitions they have over
there.
And it expresses all the different aspects of martial arts.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah.
Yeah, they should.
That would be badass.
They should 100% do that.
Yeah.
It'd be super cool, too, to just, like, see how people do in an MMA fight and
then have the same two fight and just a kickboxing fight.
Oh, yeah.
I think people would love that, dude.
I actually think that it's really sad that the sport of kickboxing isn't a lot
bigger than what it is.
I think it's sad because it's such a beautiful art.
It's the best.
I love it.
I love watching it.
I mean, look, I'm a fan of all combat sports.
I love jiu-jitsu.
I love kickboxing.
But I think that's the one thing that's untapped because it's one of the most
exciting aspects of MMA.
And it's not an individual sport of note.
Dude, imagine getting Sanchai in a UFC fight with just small gloves just kickboxing.
What about wrestling the way they do the NCAA wrestling fight?
Yeah, what I don't like is the drop-off.
See, the drop-off is dangerous.
Yeah, that's dangerous.
And I watched Ben Askren when he wrestled Jordan Peters or Jordan Burroughs,
rather, and Jordan took him over the top.
I'm like, that's not—you can get hurt bad.
Yeah, you'll break your neck.
If you just put it on the ground then.
What's that?
Or if they just, like, didn't have it raised.
Yes, that's exactly what I mean.
Have it on the ground and have a space that's even a little bit larger than
that and have a red area on the outside that's probably double the size of that
outer black area where you cannot—like, when you get into that area, there's
plenty of room to make your way back in, but the referee makes you get back in
and you have to fight in the center.
And, you know, have it so that you have to chase a guy down, you know, and
people will boo.
But guess what?
When you get a takedown in that environment, it's a real takedown, and when you
get back up, you're really going to have to get back up.
You can't wall walk.
You can't make your way up to the side of the cage and press your back up
against it and, you know, and stand back up.
What do you think about no rounds?
I like that.
I like that, too.
I like that a lot.
I think it'd be, like, you know, maybe, like, you could still do rounds, but
what if we started rounds where the last round ended?
That'd be cool, I think.
Why not?
You know, almost like a halftime, you know?
Like, you still get the same amount of points, but now it's just the second
half.
But, like, if you end up on bottom at the end of the first round, then you
start on bottom in the beginning of the second.
That's not a bad idea at all.
That'd be cool.
That's not a bad idea at all.
I mean, I think, you know, Chael Sonnen said it best.
He said, no one should be fighting for 25 minutes.
It's just so hard.
It's so grueling for you that no one can fight full blast.
You know, so you have to pace yourself.
You have to figure it out.
It's just you're asking so much of a body to be able to do that.
I can't move after.
What's it like?
The next day, I literally can't move.
Like, even in the last one where I didn't even take a ton of damage, like, I'm
literally in bed.
My entire body is sore.
Like, I'm sore in weird places that I had no idea that I had gotten hit.
And I literally, like, when I tried to move, like, I'll sit there with my
ankles up because my ankles always get really swollen because I kick knees all
the time.
But I'll sit there with my legs up and, like, to move over and roll over or go
to the bathroom or whatever is, like, for, like, an entire day.
And then it's a little better the next day and then kind of gone by the third
day.
But the next day is horrible.
Does anything mitigate it?
Ice baths or anything?
I take ice baths and I do the hot tub, like, for the, like, day after, the next
day after, and the next day after just to, like, flush it all out because there's
so much swelling that's going on.
What's the most significant injury you've ever had?
I don't really get super hurt, man.
Like, yeah, I really don't.
I tore my pectoral one time.
I broke this thumb.
But other than that, man, not too many, like, serious things.
I was told by a couple people that, or by my PT, that I have, like, some of the
thickest cheekbones that he's ever seen.
And then the dentist told me that I have some of, like, the thickest enamel or
whatever it is around my teeth.
So I think I have, like, I know I'm skinny and lanky, but I think I have, like,
some pretty hard-ass bones.
Like, I really, I don't, like, break stuff.
That's very beneficial.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, there's so many fighters that go through their career and they get marred
with injuries.
And they have injury after injury, and they, either they push through it or
they never quite recover.
And you see the drop-off in their performance, and they're never quite the same.
I super take care of myself, though.
Like, that's, like, that's, like, another thing that I think I do really,
really well is, like, step A is, like, get better.
But, like, slightly underneath that is, like, don't get hurt.
Because if you get hurt, you can't do anything for, like, weeks or months.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The scariest injury to me in MMA is the shin break.
Yeah.
That's a wild one, man.
We've seen that three or four times now, and every time you see it, the guy's
really never the same again.
And the Conor one is fascinating to me because we haven't seen, I've seen him
sparring, and it looks like he's, like, using that left leg and throwing kicks
and everything.
But how is that going to hold up in an actual fight?
Yeah.
I hear that they heal pretty decently, but who knows?
Well, look at Chris Weidman.
He's still fucked.
It's been two years.
I mean, he had real problems with that.
He had to get it reset because the bones weren't, they weren't healing together
properly.
It's a fucking nightmare.
It's a real sport, you know?
Like, that's what I, I was talking to my buddy the other day, I go, you know,
because a lot of it's about the entertainment piece and, you know, talking shit
and all of the interviews leading up to it or whatever, which I don't always
enjoy the most.
But I, like, was saying, I was like, once we're in the cage, there's no more
entertainment show happening.
Like, it's a fight at that point.
And, like, it feels like it's real as hell.
It's as real as it gets.
I mean, I know that used to be the UFC logo, as real as it gets.
Oh, cool.
That was the catchphrase.
But it is as real as it gets.
Yeah.
With the given set of rules that, you know, it's the best set of rules that we
have for combat sports.
I don't think what we were talking about before, the knees on the ground, I
think, is huge.
Because I think you shouldn't just be able to turtle up like that.
It doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't make any sense that all you can do is punch them to the body or kick
them to the body or, you know, take their back.
You should be able to knee them in the head.
And you saw it in pride when, you know, Mark Coleman did that a bunch of times.
When he got guys down, he just dropped knees on their heads.
You know, Ben Askren did that and won.
When he competed and won, it was a marked change because now he's allowed to
use not just takedowns, but knee guys in the head when he had them taken down.
Brutal.
Yeah.
It should be allowed.
It should be allowed.
Figure out how to not have that happen to you.
I mean, it's just one more thing to defend against.
And I think we're kind of allowing, because of the rule set right now, we're
allowing these positions where you're, it's, it's unrealistically safe.
You're not really safe there at all.
You're in a very vulnerable position, but because of the rule set, you can pull
that off and you could actually use it as a strategy to stay in that position
while the guy has to do something different.
Yeah.
How do you feel about punching in the back of the head?
I definitely don't think that that should be allowed.
We talked about that recently.
Because I think why not?
Because some knockouts are from the back of the head, like head kicks, like say
if like Wonder Boy loves to throw that over the shoulder, like sneaky kind of
question mark style kick.
When you do that, you're hitting the guy in the back of the head, you know,
many times, you know, a lot of the, the head kicks, it wraps around and you're
really shinning the person on the back of the head.
Yeah.
I guess I would have to know like the science of like the denseness of the
skull behind.
What about the temple though?
Yeah.
Good point.
The temple's like the fucking most vulnerable area of your skull.
It's so thin.
Like look at us.
And if you hold us, this is not a real skull, but this area is like, it's so
fucking vulnerable.
Your temple, like I would not want to get hit here, man.
This is a, it's such a bitch ass part of your head.
Like it hurts just poking it, right?
Poke your temple.
That hurts.
Why do we have those?
I don't know.
Why do we have balls?
Why have our balls hanging out?
You know?
It's like so much of the design of the human body.
So we can show them off.
Maybe, right?
I think it's actually a cooling thing.
I think it's supposed to be to keep your balls cooler so that you have more
sperm.
Because one of the things that really affects sperm growth and development is
heat.
So like if you had your balls inside your body all protected and you were hot
from running or something like that, you'd probably have bad jizz.
Yeah, you don't want bad jizz.
You don't want bad jizz.
You want good jizz.
If you want to make babies, you want to make babies, you got to have cool balls.
So I guess it's something about the balls being outside the body where it's not
as dependent upon the heat of the body.
I don't know.
Great job, Evolution.
Yeah, a lot of wacky stuff.
Why are eyeballs so vulnerable?
Oh, that's another thing that's going on this weekend is UFC is debuting a new
set of gloves.
Oh, cool.
Yeah, I have maintained, and I still do, that Trevor Whitman makes the fucking
best MMA gloves that have ever existed.
And I think that everybody should use those gloves.
I put those Onyx gloves on before.
They make your hand completely curved.
They still allow grappling.
But it keeps your hand like this where you don't have as many eye pokes.
Nice.
And these new gloves, there's a video of Gilbert Burns explaining it.
And Gilbert is showing, let's see what we got here.
Let's put this.
Those are them?
Yeah.
I don't see, but it's not.
It kind of makes your fingers go down, so less eye poke.
I like it.
See?
My hands are relaxed.
It goes here.
It doesn't stay here.
Oh, that's smart.
Way better for no eye poke.
I like these new gloves.
So this is a new one.
So hopefully that's going to make a difference.
I think that's been a thing that a lot of people have complained about is that
the old UFC gloves,
they encourage your hands to be in an open position.
And when guys are fighting like this, eye pokes are one of the worst fucking
things about the sport.
I scratch my eye almost every fight.
Really?
Almost every single fight.
I have like a, so I got that PRK surgery.
It's like LASIK, except they like seal up.
I got it like six, seven years ago or whatever.
And still, if I get hit right in the eye or even like a digit goes in my eye,
even a little bit,
the rest of my night is ruined because I'm like sitting there all night going
like this.
It happens after almost every single fight.
You ever scratched your eye?
Yeah.
It's the worst pain that I've ever felt in my life.
It's horrible.
It's horrible.
I remember one time I did it because it used to happen all the time for me.
Like, I don't know if I would re-get PRK surgery.
It doesn't happen anymore, really only in fights.
But one time it happened and I like remember being on the couch.
I had to call my mom to come pick me up to take me to the hospital because I
thought it
was like really messed up.
And the next day, my body hurt because I was doing this for hours.
For hours, I was doing that.
It hurts so bad.
Jim Miller, apparently, you talk about a durable guy.
That's another guy that's never had an injury, a real injury, which is crazy.
All the fucking wars that guy's been in.
But he got poked real bad in his last fight.
And he's got some sort of a cataract now.
And he's trying to figure out whether or not he should keep competing or get
surgery on the eye.
He should wear swim goggles.
That would be crazy.
It would be crazy.
That would be ridiculous.
It would be ridiculous.
It would solve the problem.
I guess.
But is there a way to put swim goggles on where they wouldn't get fogged up and
wouldn't get...
Dude, that would hurt worse.
What about blood?
What about like if somebody gets a cut on their forehead, they're on top of you,
ground up on
and they're just bleeding all your goggles.
And then you get up and you can't see and you wipe it away, but you're smeared.
Now you're looking at like a fucking dirty windshield.
Have you seen that fight where I get armbarred by Yuri?
You got to see it, man.
You haven't seen that fight?
I probably have.
It was early in my career.
It was like my second fight in the UFC or something.
It's one of the fights that I feel like I'm kind of known for a little bit.
But Yuri gets me in like a really bad armbar and I'm like triangled.
He's straightening out my armbar.
Oh, I remember that.
Yeah, so this is like early in my career.
I even look kind of like a young dude.
But dude, so he starts hitting me or whatever and blood pretty soon.
Yep, there we go.
Yep, he's just hammering my face.
But dude, so the blood starts going into my eye.
So like this situation just gets a hundred times worse because now I'm just
having like
this pink fog in my eye.
Oh, wow.
It was horrible.
People forgot about Yuri.
Dude, Yuri was a beast.
Yuri was a beast.
Dude, when I fought him, you had 20 UFC fights.
I remember this because you got out of this and it was wild.
Yeah, but all of this blood, I can't see anything because all of the blood is
still in my eye.
It was crazy.
But when you did get out of it, I remember thinking, oh, shit.
I was so mad.
I was so mad.
I was like, I'm going to fucking kill this guy.
The whole time I was like, when I get fucking out of this, it was like a little
brother
like had me in like a thing.
And I was like, you motherfucker, when I get out of this, I'm going to beat
your ass so bad.
How bad was your arm?
It was pretty hurt.
It wasn't like broken or anything, but I had bruising from the wrist all the
way up.
So I definitely tore some stuff.
Did you have to take much time off after that to heal it up?
Like a few weeks.
The elbows heal really quick, actually.
Like I've never hurt my elbow so bad where I've had to take more than like six
weeks off.
There's some arm bar finishes in the UFC where you just go, oh, God.
Like Jamal Hill when he fought Paul Craig.
Paul Craig dislocated his arm.
We were sure it was broken.
We were sure he snapped it.
I mean, probably some bones tripped off.
Paul Craig has a motherfucker of a guard.
That's the dude with the beard?
Yeah.
Yeah, he's good.
The bear Jew.
He calls himself the bear Jew, which is one of the greatest nicknames ever.
That guy's got a fucking wicked guard, man.
His guard is so dangerous.
Yeah.
You know, he catches people with that fucking guard where you're like, God damn.
It's like a world-class jiu-jitsu guard.
Submission artists are awesome.
They're like just as cool as KO artists.
Oh, for sure.
Yeah.
If you get a real elite one that can pull stuff like that off, you know, I mean,
look at how many times Charles Oliveira submitted people.
It's like so intense.
That guy gets like some juice behind his finishes, too.
That guy knows how to make himself powerful.
He's a fascinating guy because you want to talk about a guy who got completely
transformed.
Like in the early days of his career, he was talented, but when things got hard,
he would kind of fold.
And something happened, and I think they attribute it to the birth of his
daughter, that he just became just far more serious and far more intense and
just like really believed that he was the fucking man.
And then went on this tear, just a fucking tear, running through guys.
That happens, man.
Like I really think that like a lot of stuff in life is just making like the
decision to do it.
Like once you fully commit to the decision to do something, that can change
your life, man.
Yeah.
And I think that that's what he did.
It changed him, too.
It changed his perception, the people's perceptions of him, because people had
this idea of who he was.
And then once he beat like Gaethje, and he beat all these others, no one had
that perception anymore.
Once he beat Chandler, everybody was like, this guy is a motherfucker.
And it was, you watched it all, it wasn't like he had those fights overseas and
other organizations and then he figured it out.
No, he did it in the biggest stage of the world and made that transformation
from getting KO'd by Cub Swanson, getting beat up by Paul Felder.
And then all of a sudden, this guy fucking hits a switch and he's a destroyer,
one of the greatest champions ever.
I really think it's like, sometimes you just make a decision.
Yeah.
You know, you're like, fuck second place from now on, fuck second place.
Do you ever worry that you won't know that you don't have the same commitment
that you have now?
Yeah, I do.
So I used to train with Andy Sauer a bit in Holland, like when I was 22, 23, I
went out there.
Um, I remember talking to him about that and he was like, the passion,
sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not.
Like, I, I sometimes fight for paychecks, you know?
And I remember at like 22, that was like such a thing for me to hear, you know?
Because I was like, Andy Sauer was like my idol, you know?
And I love Andy and I don't mean to tell that in a way where like, that offends
him.
It is kind of a reality, you know?
He's a great fighter.
Great fighter.
And then, so I remember like hearing that and I remember being like, oh, that's
a possibility, you know?
Like you just run out of like the competitive juice.
Like, yeah, that does scare me.
I don't, I don't know that I'll do it past that unless I'm making like millions
and millions of dollars.
Then I'll maybe like look past that.
Right.
If something crazy comes along.
Yeah.
Yeah, I, I worry about that because I see it in certain fighters.
I see fighters that are in contention for the title and they just have this
certain type of drive.
And then you see a few losses and then you see them competing and maybe they
just don't look as hard.
Like their body looks different and then their, their endurance is not the same.
And you realize this guy's kind of phoning it in.
And he was a world-class fighter at one point.
You know, it's kind of a sad thing to see too.
It is.
I, uh, yeah, I really hope to never have to be that way.
You know, maybe it'll happen.
Maybe it won't.
I don't know.
It's a sad thing to see champions when their body is not working right anymore,
but they think they're going to be able to pull that magic out.
I know.
And it just doesn't exist anymore.
I think it's like, it's probably their loved ones on, it's like on those people
to tell them to stop, huh?
I mean, because as like a fighter, I don't really know that it would, I don't
know if it'd be on me to tell me to stop.
You know, like just being the fighter that like, being the person that you got
to be to be a fighter, that really shouldn't ever cross your brain.
Right.
So you probably have to have loved ones around you to be like, Hey man, like we're
calling it.
I think there's that.
And then there's also the issue that for many fighters, that is their entire
identity.
Their entire identity is that they're a fighter and losing that identity by
becoming a former fighter and now being lost in the world and not knowing what
direction to take or what to do with yourself.
It's one of the hardest transitions because fighting is so all in.
It's so all encompassing.
It's so obsessive that once that's gone from, from your life, unless you're
teaching, unless you're running an academy or running a gym,
or, you know, working with younger fighters, it's hard to find something that
will occupy your thoughts in the way that competing does.
Yeah, definitely.
I, uh, I was talking with someone last week, just small talking with him.
I was with my fiance.
He goes, so what do you guys like do for fun?
And I kind of like look at Erica and I'm like, the fuck do we do for fun?
You know, I don't know.
We don't do anything.
We watch trash television and then in the summer I'll play spike ball.
You know, that's about it.
Uh, but the identity thing is always something that I think is really
interesting to me.
Like, um, like, uh, just the human experience and trying to like create this
like identity or latch on to some type of identity to me is like one of the
things that, uh, humans, I think need to dig really deep to try to overcome.
I think that that's like a piece of why we're here is to overcome, like, just latching
on to an identity and rocking with that for your entire life.
You know, like that's like, uh, that's something I feel like I had to do a lot,
you know, coming up in the sport and just being like, okay, like you're not a
fighter, you know, like you are a fighter, but only sometimes you're like
really what you are is this like other thing.
But fighter is just like a piece of it, you know, you're a human, you're a
human.
Yeah.
And the fighting thing, the thing, the thing about identities is that they can
be a trap.
Like you could just like lean into that and use that like to sort of protect
you from the, just the weirdness of life, like just the, just the uncertainty,
the, the, just the existence.
So instead you're like, Hey, I'm a bad motherfucker.
I'm a this, I'm a that.
And you live in that.
And then when that gets shattered, you're kind of fucked because if that gets
questioned in a fight, if you lose your confidence in that in a fight, and that's
the thing that you're banking on instead of just existing and trying to make it.
adjustments, now you're questioning like, Oh my God, do I suck?
Oh my God, what do I do?
Who am I?
I've been pretending that I'm this thing and now I'm getting my ass kicked.
Yeah.
How do I recover from this?
Yeah.
It's like the, the, the pull to like organize life in a way is, you know,
something that we all kind of have to like do or deal with or whatever, but it
feels better when things are organized, you know?
And, uh, and, and when we have reasons for things, when I actually lost my
first fight, that was when I really started getting
into Buddhism was after I lost my first professional fight.
Who was that too?
Uh, it was against Jamal Emmers.
Um, it was for LFA or RFA or whatever it was called at the time.
But, uh, I remember being like, uh, Oh shit.
What am I, if I'm not like a, this bad-ass fighter that everyone's telling me
if I win, I'm going to be in the UFC and I'm going to be champ and blah, blah,
blah.
Like that, like shattered my identity, man.
It like really fucked me up for like the rest of that year, like six or eight
months.
I spent a ton of time in the mountains, like hiking and camping.
And like, that's when I started meditating.
I started getting into Buddhism because Buddhism is really about like letting
go of all your attachments.
And that means like letting go of like the physical stuff, but also like the
mental creation of whatever persona you're putting on in your life and stuff.
And, uh, the mountains helped me do that.
They like assisted in all of that.
But, uh, the, the battle with identity, I feel like I have like a pretty close
intimate relationship with because it's a son of a bitch to try to let go of
all of that stuff.
But you kind of have to, I think at some point in your life, if you want to
really start being and expressing yourself the way that you want to.
Well, I think that's, what's interesting about this conversation is that you
have done so much of this work and you have done so much of this thinking about
what that is and how that aids you and how that hurts you and, and how it gets
in the way.
Yeah.
Um, I think that you just have to do it at some point in your life.
Like, uh, that's even like, I think one of the steps and like, I follow Carl
Young, like kind of close.
He's like a little bit too dense for me to like fully understand, but a part of
like becoming individuated or becoming like enlightened or whatever word you
want to use for it is letting go all that shit that like you learned when you
were younger, because like none of that was really you.
Those were just things that you got indoctrinated into.
And like a part of, I think the human experience and the human journey needs to
be letting go of all of that stuff and like letting go all of that stuff really
hurts, you know?
Yeah.
Just letting go of these preconceived notions and, but the, the unease of
uncertainty just haunts people and you try to find these, these ways of being
that protect you from that.
This, uh, personality that you put on, that's like an armor that protects you
from, from uncertainty.
Yeah.
It, it gives you a community.
It gives you like other people that you feel like you can like walk through
this thing with, you know?
But at the end of the day, it's kind of like just you.
And I think that like, it's only you that can like figure out your shit.
Can't be like a community of people that you're just going to identify with so
that like things run a little bit smoother.
You know, I don't really think you'll become like a full person.
How much do you think it helps your career that you teach?
Uh, a ton.
Uh, I've been teaching for a really long time now though.
Um, and I've kind of had to pull back a little bit because I realized how much
of a commitment it is to have fighters underneath you.
You know, like it's not easy trying to make someone good.
So I've had to pull back on it a little bit.
Honestly, what's helped me a lot recently become really good.
Uh, and like really a lot deeply understand things is I've been writing out
those instructionals.
Uh, and like that's helped me a lot.
Just like organize the things that I'm doing and like, not like rules because
rules can always be broken when I think that you're at a certain level.
But like, man, writing out, writing shit out, like how things work really,
really has helped me a ton.
It's interesting because in jujitsu, you see that a lot where people start
teaching and when they start teaching, they get way better.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think I, I, so I have this guy, uh, he's, he's almost like a little
brother.
I don't even, or like a kid to me.
His name is Elias Rodriguez, but he's like one of my main drilling partners.
He's a 21 year old kid.
I care about him deeply, but I'm helping him go through his amateur years right
now.
And, uh, it's crazy how much like me helping him is him helping me because I
get to watch, like I said, like I like watching people in, I like watching
people in stressful situations.
Cause I like to see how they act.
Like I help Elias and that like has made me better understand things and all of
that.
But also Elias is helping me a lot by me, like seeing one, if like the things
that I'm teaching him is like working in like all types of, uh, bodies, you
know, like I feel like if you have a really true and tried system, it's going
to work for everyone to an extent.
But, uh, like just watching Elias go through everything is like really helping
me understand the sport a lot better too.
And that's kind of like, because I'm helping him, he's able to do that for me.
But, uh, yeah, that's been a really, really helpful thing.
Like the instruction piece, I feel like I've been doing for so long so I can
like kind of teach some people some stuff fairly well now, but, uh, like
bringing up a fighter has taught me a lot about being a fighter myself and, and
all of that.
So you have this big win over Marlon.
What happens next?
How long do you, does the UFC contact you immediately?
Do you start talking to them about what's next?
Does it wait on the Henry Cejudo, Al Jermaine fight?
I think it kind of does.
I think, so I'm pretty sure O'Malley was promised like a title fight after the
Cejudo-Sterling.
I don't know when that's going to be.
I think that, you know, ideally the UFC will want to do it pretty soon, like
maybe July, August soon.
Like not give, not give whoever wins that too much of a break.
Um, Marab is still there.
I would love to fight Marab.
I think that that would be like an amazing challenge for me.
Um, there's also Umar Nurmagomedov who said that he was going to be fighting
against Marab.
I don't know how much truth there is to that, but I know that the UFC, I think
is pretty high on Umar.
He's a bad motherfucker.
He is.
He's very good.
Um, so it could be one of those guys, but I would, I would ideally like to
fight in July or August.
Like I said, I get married September 1st and I like may, you know, like Erica
would understand if I had to be in camp for the wedding, but that would like
really break her heart.
So I really want to, I don't even care if it's a week before and I don't even
think she cares if it's a week before if I fight, but, uh, I would really like
to fight before September 1st.
So that Erica doesn't kill me.
Yeah.
Well, the July card is going to be wild.
That's going to be a good one.
And I don't know who's on that yet.
I don't know if they have an announcement for that, but they always do a big
card.
Dinovsky, Yair Rodriguez, unification bout targeted for July.
Whoa, that's a good one.
That is a great one.
That's a good one.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah.
You look great against Emmett.
Fuck yeah, he did.
He did great.
I mean, and Volk looked really great against Islam too.
He really did.
Yeah.
But Volk at 145, what a fucking juggernaut.
Seriously.
Yeah.
I am so impressed with that guy.
I was so impressed in that Makachev fight.
I'm like, I can't believe how well he did.
I thought he won.
I thought he did too.
I thought it was all about the second round.
I thought he edged him in the second round.
And I thought that the way he performed in the fifth round, I think that should
have cemented it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was really impressed because I think that those like Russian guys are
obviously really good wrestlers,
like definitely world-class wrestlers.
But I think what they were doing before a lot of the other people in the UFC is
some people could get people down,
but they couldn't really hold them.
And like those guys know how to hold people down.
And I think that that's like the most fascinating thing to me about the
Russians is that, you know,
like the wrestling piece, there's a lot of good American wrestlers too,
but the Russians really know how to hold people down.
And that was like what I think separates them from like the normal wrestler
grappler archetype.
But dude, the way Volkanovski was getting up against him was fantastic.
Incredible.
It was amazing.
Yeah.
Amazing.
What a fight.
Especially being down a weight class usually.
I was kind of surprised he didn't have a rematch.
I mean, I know he wanted to defend his title and Yair Rodriguez, obviously he
won the interim title,
so he should get the next shot.
But it was such a big fight and such an insane fight.
I would kind of like to see that again.
Oh, definitely.
Yeah.
Yeah, it makes sense.
Well, Corey, you're a bad motherfucker.
I appreciate you very much.
And I really love your mindset and the way you approach things.
And it's really fun to watch you just keep getting better and make your way to
the top.
Hell yeah.
Thanks, Joe.
Thanks for having me on, man.
I appreciate you.
Tell everybody your Instagram and all that stuff so they can find you.
Corey Sanhagen, MMA on Instagram.
I don't use Twitter ever, so yep, just Instagram.
All right.
Beautiful.
Thank you.
All right.
Bye, everybody.
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