#2384 - Mark Kerr

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Mark, what's happening?

Yo.

Dude, the movie's fantastic.

And I told you outside, but I wanted to save it.

I kind of had a little bit of a prejudice when I went to see the movie.

I was like, okay, it's going to be an MMA movie.

Yeah.

But it's not.

It's a movie that happens to be about MMA, but it's a great movie.

Oh, I appreciate it.

It's really good, man.

It's, it's like, you know, it's very gripping, and the performances are fantastic.

And the way The Rock did you was nuts.

I, like,

I can't explain it.

I keep using the word surreal, but it doesn't describe it.

Um,

like I was saying,

my son, when he watched it, and just flipping out, like talking to me, like on the side, like I was saying, like literally, just going, Dad, Dad, he's got your mannerisms.

He's got your speech pattern.

But you imagine, like, I'm picturing my son.

He's in New York when he watched that.

And so I'm picturing him in the corner of the lobby of the theater talking with his back to everybody, going, oh my God, Dad, like, it's like a doppelganger.

He's got all of it, you know, like full-blown.

Like, it was like the, the, the, because a lot of my saying for myself is I'm, I can't see the forest through the trees.

I'm in the middle of it.

Am I looking at it objectively?

Am I really looking at it or am I seeing something?

And hear my son say, oh my gosh, dad, he nailed it.

Right.

No, unbelievable.

He really did nail it.

Like we were saying in the lobby, like, I didn't know the rock could act that well.

You know, it's really good acting.

It's not like blockbuster movie acting, which is, he's great at that, but it's a different thing.

It's completely.

So

with DJ, I kept trying to say to him, you don't have to do this, dude.

Like, you don't have to do this.

And he would stop me and he would go, yeah, I do.

What do you mean by you don't have to do this?

So meaning that, like, he's at least

at a place in his life where he can just keep doing blockbusters and be perfectly fine with it.

There's, there, I mean, he says it himself.

There's always a place for that.

There's always going to be a place for blockbuster movies and for that.

But he needed to do something different.

He needed to do something different.

Well, it's a perfect role if you want to do something different for him because it's a very complex role and it's about a giant dude.

And that's him.

So it's like really like the perfect way.

Because otherwise, if you're built like he is, it's very hard to get work as a serious actor.

This might be like the only opportunity to show people like, hey, I can actually act.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think he did it.

He did an amazing job.

I mean, amazing.

To the point where,

like, Emily, unbelievable.

She's great.

She plays such a great game.

Oh, my God, man.

She's so good at it.

Oh, my God.

She's so good at playing crazy.

Oh, my God.

It gave me anxiety.

Sometimes, like, when you're getting ready to fight, she's starting arguments.

I'm like, oh, my God, I'm getting anxiety.

So here's what was even, so it vet.

So I saw a 80% complete version of the film in January of this year.

And then the first time I see a complete version of it was in Venice.

And so I'm in Venice and there's Benny on my right and there's DJ on my left and there's Emily next to DJ.

And the last scene of the movie, right?

That intensity of that scene,

I'm just telling you, it was like...

I said it was therapy for me because I think for the first time I could actually, I could actually see my part in it like I could see my part how fucking hard I was on the people around me you know how just singularly driven I was to accomplish something at at all cost

and the person that paid it the most was Dawn she paid a heavy price you know and you know anybody that's successful you know for me I was trying to raise everybody up you know everybody around me and it was just a selfish endeavor and I could see it in those moments.

I could see it in what, who DJ was, you know, and who Emily was and the intensity of it.

I was like, fuck.

Well, it's such a crazy task to try to be an elite MMA fighter at a time where there was no, no one even knew what it was.

No.

I mean, you, when you first, I met you in 97.

There's a crazy photo of us together.

I saw that.

Dude, 97, that's like 30 years ago almost.

Isn't that nuts?

So this is what's fucking crazy.

So trying to describe what I did back then, like people, their jaws would hang open.

Right.

They would go, you do what?

Like, why would you do that?

That's us.

Oh, my God.

1997, dude.

That's so crazy.

Oh, my God.

So crazy.

Oh, my God.

Were they even paying you back then?

A little bit.

They paid me a little bit.

It wasn't a lot of money.

But it was for me.

It was just for fun.

It was like I was a giant fan of the sport.

And what happened was Campbell McLaren, do you remember Campbell?

Yeah.

He was good friends with my manager, Jeff.

And they were just talking and he said, we need a guy to do backstage interviews, post-fight interviews.

And he goes, Joe really loves the sport.

He's like, really?

He goes like, oh, yeah.

He follows all the fights in Japan.

And so for me, it was just fun.

I mean, it wasn't, it was actually costing me money, which is why I wound up quitting.

Because I quit.

And I did it for like a year and a half, two years maybe.

And then in 98, I was like, I can't do this anymore.

I'm just, it's just actually costing me money.

And so then when I

started doing Fear Factor, that's when Zufa bought it.

I wound up working for them again.

But in those days, it was, it was.

For me, it was a dream because as a lifelong martial artist, when I was a kid, there was always the big question, what was the best style?

And no one knew until Hori and Gracie put it all together and decided to create the UFC.

And then all of a sudden we get to see it.

And then obviously you had Japan Valley Tuto and then Pride and all these big events over in Japan.

And

it became, to me, it was like, finally, someone did it.

That was, so part of my first fights in Brazil, I was still brainwashed by the idea that, oh, shit, he's seven foot tall or six, nine.

He's the toughest dude in the room.

Right.

Because you, because that's how I grew up, right?

Or 10th degree black belt, same thing.

Right, right, right.

Oh, no, no, no, no, don't mess with him.

Yeah.

And in one,

where that first time I fought, I was still under the delusion that that was the truth.

And so my trainer kept going, trust me,

you're going to do fine.

Trust me, you're going to do fine.

And it's just like he understood what what I was as a wrestler, you know, that I can impose, like I said, to tell you the best definition I've ever had for a wrestler is I can hold a grown-ass man where he doesn't want to be held for as long as I want to hold him there and he can't do a fucking thing about it.

Exactly.

That's a wrestler.

And you can dictate where the fight takes place always.

So if you come a wrestler like Chuck Liddell,

then you say, No, no, no, you can't take me down.

So I'm just going to beat the fuck out of you standing, and there's nothing you could do about it.

Not a single thing.

It's the most important skill.

Oh my God, it's foundational.

It's foundational.

And that's why there's so much success for the deck.

I'm going to blank on the names, but

the wrestlers are, it's a resurgence of like really what a foundational piece it is yeah and how important it is when you have a high high you know what they're able to do too as a wrestler i always just look at the russian wrestlers and go what makes them so good they could flurry in succession more times than i could like kurt angle right when i wrestled against kurt kurt trained at a level that i wasn't training at He could sustain a flurry to the point where I would just make mistakes because I would be to exhaustion.

And you watch him,

they'll string these moves together and string them.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

Unbelievable.

Unbelievable because you'll see him shoot, reshoot, shoot again, get up, stand up, fake, shoot again.

And you can't keep up with it.

You just, inevitably, you just make mistakes or you just give into the exhaustion of the moment, right?

Yeah.

And it's just like, okay,

nothing.

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What can you do about it?

When a guy has an insane cardio with those kind of skills, it is the toughest combination to beat.

Like Kane Velasquez in his prime.

Oh, my God.

Insane cardio, elite wrestling, and then elite MMA stand-up skills as well.

Like, get everything.

Scary.

The cardio is the scariest thing because when you're scared to hit the gas, like three more minutes in the round, and you see Kane is just fucking bobbing around.

Like, he's not even breathing heavy.

In between rounds, his stomach's not even heaving.

He's a big dude.

He's 240, and he's not even tired.

It doesn't make any sense.

Yeah, it defies logic.

But there's guys like that that have that fucking insane cardio.

You know, I mean, I don't know how much you follow in the UFC, but this is kid Anthony Hernandez in the middleweight division.

That's nuts.

And then you got Marab, Marob Daubish Willie, who's like the best example of it.

Unstoppable.

So this is kind of, again, one of these things where there are certain athletes that have a gear that nobody else has.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's just how they're built.

It's just how they're built.

Well, I remember when you came along and when Coleman came along, all of a sudden everybody's like, I got to get on steroids.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

Everybody's like, I got to get bigger.

I got to get bigger.

That's when Vitor got up to like 200.

Oh, my God.

He was big.

He was big.

Way too big for his frame.

And you're talking about a guy who eventually wound up fighting at 185.

Yeah.

Right.

I mean, he finished his career up at 85, and he was there at 240 when he fought Randy the first time, which was bananas.

So that night was my last UFC, that was UFC 15.

Wow, wow.

And that's when Randy beat Vitor.

Mm-hmm.

And it was one of those where I'm like, oh, just wait.

Because I know what Randy is.

Right.

Randy's cardio.

Randy's like, he can take it.

And it was one of those things where I was like, I don't think Victor's going to win.

Right.

It's just the next time we're going to be able to do it.

That's what we call him back then.

His name was Victor.

Yeah.

When he first came into the UFC, his first fight when he was fighting in Hawaii, he was Victor Gracie.

Oh, snap.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He was going by the last name Gracie.

And then I think he got sued or threatened with a lawsuit.

And then he changed it to Victor Buffer because, like, Horian was very litigious.

Yeah.

He was very protective of the Gracie name.

And so he fought John Hess in Hawaii and beat the living shit.

Rumble on the Rock stuff or whatever?

I don't think it was Rumble on the Rock.

That was BJ's promotion, and that was later.

this was like really early on this was uh i don't know who the was doing that event but it was just in a ring and vitor came out and blitzed him with punches and nobody had seen anything like that before like oh god this is a because everybody thought brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt yeah you need you don't think you're gonna have a guy who has hands like that oh my god his hand speed was unreal he was so fast unreal and accurate yeah Like you can be fast, and that's one thing, but fast and actually hitting the target when the target's bobbing and weaving, it's like, oh, my god, man.

He's an interesting case study because he's

like, first of all, pioneer, right?

First fought in the UFC when he was 19 years old.

Crazy.

And went through, won the tournament at 19, which is just bananas.

And then when we got to see him, kind of...

He got off the sauce and his body kind of faded out.

And then they brought back testosterone replacement.

And then when testosterone replacement came in, all the sudden it was TRT Vitor.

and he was the scariest motherfucker alive for like five fights or whatever it was before they killed the TRT exemptions and then it all went away for him.

It's just like that should be a commercial for testosterone replacement.

Yeah, I mean, it really could be.

You know, part, you know, back then,

because there was so much myth surrounding mixed martial arts that you felt like if you didn't do something, it was like the saying is like, oh, you're going to a gunfight with a knife, right?

It was that type of mentality back then.

Well, it was also everyone was on it and there was no testing.

Yep.

Yeah.

And in fact, in Pride, when Ensign was on the podcast, he told me that in large letters it said, we do not test for steel.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

They're like,

so they

would literally.

They would do this.

They would hand you a cup and go, urine.

And you would go,

who's clean?

You just look around and you just hand the cup off going, can you piss from here?

And you literally walk back to the medical and go,

here's the piece.

Yeah, here.

And I mean, that's the,

but that's the era it was.

So your first fight was it was it in Brazil?

In Brazil, yeah.

And the crazy thing is they reproduced that arena, that, that conference room perfectly.

Yeah.

Like, because I saw your first fight.

I saw all those early fights.

And then to see that in like the movie, I was like, oh, they did it.

it this is perfect yeah because you know sometimes they fudge a little you know they so so here's what

so I was in Vancouver for the set when they had the setup and I was sitting there I was laughing with Benny about it going all right who came up with the pyramid and the door opening with fog machines

because it's like like I can't even imagine the brainstorm going you got any bright ideas of how to introduce the yeah let's do a pyramid and let's have a trapdoor fog you know it's like, what the fuck?

Like, where, where in the bigger picture of stuff it going?

But they reproduced it to the T.

It was perfect.

Oh, my God.

It was amazing.

It was really great because in the movie they did about Mark Schultz, what was that movie again?

Fucking...

Foxcatcher.

That's right.

That movie had a lot of shenanigans in it.

There was a lot of stuff that wasn't

accurate to it.

It wasn't accurate.

Like, he fought Big Daddy Goodrich in his one MMA fight, but in the movie, he's fighting some Russian dude.

Didn't make any sense.

No.

Completely different cat.

Fought a white guy in the movie.

Wow.

Yeah.

He fought Big Daddy Goodrich and Big Daddy was wearing the gi.

Wow.

Yeah.

Remember?

I mean, not only that, but it was a Big Daddy Goodrich is a legend.

Yeah.

Like, how do you leave him out when that was his only MMA fight?

Like, why did you change the guy he fought?

That doesn't even make any sense.

But they just did Hollywood shenanigans.

Yo, so, you know, that was a huge part from the beginning of this when DJ and I, DJ and I talked back in 2019 is just the like the trust factors.

You guys started talking about this in 2019?

2019.

Wow.

Yeah.

Six fucking years.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

Here's what's crazy.

So

he says, hey, you know, we're going to move forward with this.

And

so for me, I hadn't even thought about any of this.

Like it being a movie.

He wants to play me in a movie.

And he goes, I'm going to make the announcement.

Madison Square Garden at the BMF Belt.

He goes,

We had this beautiful conversation.

And it was just like this, do you trust me?

And it was like,

yeah, yeah, I do.

He's a fucking great dude.

Oh, my God.

Solid.

By the way, he says, say hi.

He left me a great message on the way over here.

I was listening to him, and he's just, he's, he's a rare human being.

He is.

I'm going to call him after this just to tell tell him what a fucking amazing job he did.

Because I wanted to watch it right before I saw you.

Okay.

So I watched it today.

And I was like, God damn, this is a good movie, man.

And I was just blown away by how well he captured the chaos of the Pride organization, all the weirdness of the contract negotiations, everything.

So Benny from the beginning said the only way we were going to be able to do this is have that authenticity to the point where I sent them

watches, rings, necklaces, posters, everything I could find, picture-wise, everything to their props in production.

Oh, wow.

And they reproduced everything.

Oh, wow.

So, Joe, and when I, I mean, like, when I went up to Vancouver, like, and walked into some of these sets, like, literally going, holy fucking shit.

Did he flash back?

Oh, my God.

Like, like, you'd walk into a room and there, there'd be from one corner all the way to the other on the wall, just pictures of me and my house and my, this, and this outfit, and this, and these, in my house, and this, and, and then production saying, okay, was this accurate?

How did this, it was this,

it was this unbelievable, painstaking, they rebuilt my life 25 years ago.

So when DJ got into character, got into me, he actually was, that was, he was me.

wow yeah it seemed like it man i mean it really did because you know

it's just

it's hard when a guy's so famous to pretend that he's someone else yeah he has to like be really good to get you convinced and i was all in i was all in so first time i saw him in uh in vancouver like nobody told me nobody said hey listen we're gonna do prosthetics we're gonna give him your cauliflower ear we're gonna make his brow and

nobody told me this.

So I was up there for fight week, and uh, they're getting ready to shoot the scene where they're introducing everybody to the finalists for the Grand Prix and so DJ is the last one to walk in.

And I'm watching the ring.

I don't know he's behind me.

And I turn around and it's like this,

like I see him as me.

Like,

this is Joe.

This is what I did.

I'm like, fuck you.

Like, fuck you.

Like, oh my God.

And it's this moment where I'm looking at him and I'm looking at my, like myself.

Yeah.

I could still see him in there, but I'm like looking at a mirror picture myself.

And it's this experience where I'm like, oh my God, man.

Like.

Wow, like you, like you're going.

Like this is you going to a place that nobody even thought you could get to.

Right.

Like it was, it was incredible.

Well, you're, you're such an important part of the history of MMA that I think this movie did that.

It really honored that.

It really did it justice because at the end of the movie, when it talks about how fighters today make millions of dollars, I'll cry.

Go on, I'm sorry.

No, it's okay.

It's like, but you guys paved the way.

If it wasn't for you guys, just doing it for very little money, like barely getting by,

putting your whole life on the line and barely getting by.

Oh, and I love that you had Alexander Usik.

Oh my God, it's

a good idea.

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malt alcohol orange county california it was amazing

so many signed him before he beat before he became the undisputed champ oh wow right 2019 yeah wow so so it's one of those things where um

everything just kind of lined up in a way where you're like all right this is like this is manifest destiny right this is like this is like joe dispenza you know like like, really, like,

you're really tapping into something that's bigger because it's pulled all these people together.

Uzik did a great job.

Oh, he did

a lot of job channels.

Oh, my God.

He did that spinning back.

I'm like, he's a boxer.

He's not supposed to.

Yeah.

I mean, I didn't even know he could do that.

No, neither die.

That's kind of crazy.

Yeah.

Well, I guess that guy could kind of do anything.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

You know how many rounds he trained prior to

fighting Tyson Fury?

No.

600.

Jesus.

With three different training partners.

So every dude came in every third round.

He had a fresh guy on him.

I know that he was doing 15 rounds a day and he made a deal with himself that his back touched the ropes.

He would have to do another round.

An extra round.

So that's one that I didn't hear that, but he said he would do rounds where he wasn't allowed to punch.

Oh, wow.

At all.

He just had to do defense.

He was mobbing even defense.

I'm like, okay.

Like,

like, he, he takes, he's like one of us.

Like, he just takes it to a level that is just unbelievable.

He's a genius.

Like, a literal boxing genius.

Like, and I don't use that term lightly.

Like, what he did to Dubois, I was like, oh, my God.

Because when you see Dubois, when Dubois knocked out Anthony Joshua, you're like, wow, this kid might be the future.

He is a fucking destroyer.

He's seeking destroy, brutal power, giant guy, incredible athlete.

And Usuk just pieced him up, just took him, dismantled him, and took him apart, and did it with all skill.

Like, literally, like, understanding.

He's not the biggest dude in the world.

No.

He's big, but he's not, like, 6'9.

No, he's not Tyson Fury.

He's not Dubois.

He's not Dubois.

He's not Turkey.

He's not Anthony Joshua.

Not Joshua, none of them.

No.

No, he's a cruiserweight.

Oh.

He's a cruiserweight that beat everybody and knew that the only way to make real money is to go up to heavyweight.

Yeah.

And really leave a real legacy.

Because he could have been one of those guys that retired as an undefeated cruiserweight, and boxing fans like myself would talk about him, but everybody else would be like, Who?

Who?

Yeah.

Meanwhile, now he's in the conversation of one of the greatest.

Oh, sure.

Tyson, Ali.

He's like, he's in there with that conversation.

And it's just consistently an overachiever.

Consistently an overachiever.

And he's fucking 38.

Right.

Which is even

crazier because it's like he hasn't shown any slipping in his skill level at all or his endurance or his enthusiasm or his discipline.

None None of it.

Well, also, it's like

he

was so fortunate to have been trained by Lomachenko's dad.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, so he's like a giant Lomachenko.

Oh, my God.

Because Lomachenko is so agile, so much footwork and movement.

And

he's basically like the heavyweight version of it.

Wow.

Yeah.

That makes actually more sense.

Makes more sense, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because

his movement for such a big guy is just extraordinary.

It just doesn't exist anywhere else because it's not just the light on the feet.

It's the angles he takes after punches and then the shifting of the weight back to center when you don't expect it.

Yeah.

And that's like my son.

Actually, it's my son's birthday today.

Happy birthday.

What's his name?

Bryce.

Happy birthday, Bryce.

Yeah.

21.

I go, it's a birthday to wait for, but he's already doing all this stuff that you, you know.

They all do.

Yeah, I know, right?

It's that age record.

So my son loves the science of boxing.

You know, even even 10 years ago when he was like 11 12 years old he'd be on youtube watching the footwork of boxers and i'm like

i because i didn't get into that science of it and footwork and all that until i started doing mma like understanding like i understood wrestling but boxing on that level is just it's a whole nother complex set of skills well you were so deep in wrestling though it's almost impossible to pay attention to anything else at the level that you were competing at yeah you have to that has to be everything you eat, breathe, sleep,

singular.

Yeah, it has to be singular.

It has to be.

It's almost like you can't go down any rabbit holes.

No, and that's one of those where, you know, my mentor, the guy that

that really brought me to another level is a guy named Chris Campbell.

He was Dan Gable's first NCA champ when Dan Gable was a coach at Iowa.

He made the 1980 Olympic team that was boycotted, won the 1981 World Championships, voted best technician in the world, and then retires and then decides he's going to make the

1992 Olympics in Barcelona.

So he's at 37 years old, he wins a bronze medal that year in Barcelona.

37.

That's pretty impressive.

For amateur wrestling

people don't know.

That's unheard of.

I think still to this day, he's the oldest Olympic medalist.

Wow.

Because you just don't, you just, I mean, wrestling's just so demanding.

It's such a young sport.

Oh, yeah, it is.

It is.

So he ends up, he ends up, he ends up

just really taking me by the hand and understanding like singular devotion to something.

Back then, he did tape study, which wasn't a huge, huge deal.

But literally watching the Russians wrestle in some of the tapes, his nemesis was this guy, Kdartsev.

And you look and watch the tapes and you go, I don't see anything.

Once you slowed it down, you go, you can't move him out of position.

He doesn't, when he attacks and retreats, he's never out of position and you know you look at it and go wow because it was just these little things little things that made it so amazing that the russians achieved that level in not just wrestling but also in mma also in

any combat sport name yeah boxing yeah russian kickboxers are super technical they're all known for being so technical it's really interesting

you know like and it's and again i would think that somewhere in there there's a route there's a a common, like, there's coaches and mentors because the only way I've learned how to wrestle or MMA is through mentorship.

You know, somebody really going, hey, let me show you.

And they had a mentor and they had a mentor.

It's this lineage that's passed along.

And I know I went from being a good wrestler to being a really good wrestler when Chris took me under his wing.

You know, we drilled the same thing thousands of times and it would be like the difference between holding my hand here and holding it here.

And I'd go, It's two inches.

Right.

What's the difference?

And he would go,

when you speed it up to full speed, those two inches become six, right?

And so the leverage points.

Yeah.

And so I need him to be here perfect because once you go full speed, you're going to miss it, but you're only going to miss it by this much.

You know, it's interesting that George St.

Pierre, although he never wrestled in high school or college, his training in Montreal was with Russian wrestlers.

It was all Russian nationals who had moved to Canada.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

GSP, I was just talking to a friend of mine, and

I said he's probably in my book, one or two.

Yeah, of all time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's certainly in the conversation.

It's so hard to say who because, you know, Mighty Mouse, I think, never got the credit that he deserved because he was a 125er.

And then people forget how good Anderson was when he was in his prime.

And then B.J.

Penn.

BJ Penn, when he was in his prime.

I feel like you really have to look at a guy when he's redlining, like when he's really at the peak of his abilities.

You can't judge him by the fights they fight after their prime.

You can't, because it's not fair.

You just got to say, like, who, when they were champion, when they were running shit,

who exhibited a level of MMA that's above and beyond everyone else?

And George is certainly in that conversation.

Oh, he's for sure.

I mean, part of

what I like, John Jones, right?

Like,

like when you get somebody that at that level at his peak, right?

And he can make other professional fighters look like they're amateurs.

They look silly.

Yeah.

They don't belong in there.

And he was doing that to guys when he wasn't training.

That was crazy.

He was fucking off and barely in the gym and still dominating in world title fights.

Sometimes I get a little upset because I'm like, you know how many fights he probably rocked as a spectator, as a fan?

Like how many fights we missed because of his shenanigans.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just like,

but it's also, I mean, you know, what happened with you and what happened with him and what happens with a lot of guys is like the pressure of life sometimes

and what makes you a great fighter in the first place, there's a certain wildness.

Yeah.

And with a guy like John, that wildness, it's like, it's hard to keep on a leash.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I know how that feels.

Yeah, I'm sure you do.

Well, I remember I had no idea, and I don't think anybody had any idea until the Smashing Machine documentary came out.

And when that documentary came out, everybody was like, holy shit.

First of all, kudos to you for allowing people to see you like that, raw,

completely...

honest about all of the addiction problems, all everything.

And no one would have expected it.

Then when they saw you, they just saw this fucking dominant destroyer, this guy who was like smashing everybody.

And you just thought, oh, well, that guy is just, he's just a machine and just so mentally strong.

And he just gets out there and gets it done.

And then you allowed them to show you where in the making of the documentary, it was what they were essentially trying to capture was you at your prime.

Yeah.

And what they caught you was you where your life was falling apart just fortuitously.

Yeah.

It was just

kind of random luck they caught you at that time.

So

when John Greenholt, who's the producer uh i went to syracuse with him i was we were on the wrestling team together he's the one that called me said hey um

i want to do a documentary at that point my

vision of what it was was a little best-buy camera where they're like little flip screen and they show up and they go okay we're filming their documentary i know i got changed tape you know and they show up in japan for my volchanchin fight with two 10 000 15 000 whatever they were digital Sony cameras, a boom mic, and like five people.

I'm like, oh, fuck,

you're really going to make a, like, you're going to make a documentary.

And so he was right from the get-go, John could see, John could see what was the contrast, like me as a fighter and me as a person, that contrast.

And so that's what he was after is like to really show this contrast.

And like you can do this for a living and be this kind, sensitive.

But that was what was weird about you.

It was a very weird contrast.

Because you're very soft-spoken, very kind, always very considerate to people, very nice.

And then you get into the cage and it's like, who the fuck is that guy?

You know what the feeling is?

The feeling is like, the question I always had in my head is going, okay, if somebody's going to go you, me, in a room, who the fuck's coming out?

And I never was able to answer that question for myself.

I know I was competitive, right?

But I didn't know if I had that switch, that thing, and then start fighting and going, oh, fuck, man,

there's a switch in there.

And I figured through that process, what I was really trying to get is your will.

I was trying to take your fucking will.

And most people don't want to give it.

Right.

Like when you get a high-level fighter, it's like Fabio Gajel didn't want to give me his will.

Head-butted him, dug into cuts, did all this, beat him mercilessly, and he didn't want to give me his will.

He wouldn't give it to to me and it frustrated me i didn't know how to take it from him i'm going i'm out of answer you're waiting for him to break yeah he doesn't break he doesn't break yeah some people don't break you can break their body but their will you can't break no he was one of them he was one of them and it's just still to this day i mean the next day his wife calls me and i have lunch at his house wow

which was crazy because my first fights don't know

Everybody in the audience was there for him.

And when his wife calls me the next day, I literally go, oh, fuck, man, here it is.

He's going to have all his boys up at the house.

He's going to fucking get his due, right?

Like, because I didn't know.

Right.

And so I go, okay, what do I got to lose?

And so I go up and we sit down just like we're sitting here.

And his wife interprets the whole entire time.

And it was this,

it was actually beautiful.

It was beautiful.

That's awesome.

Here's what it set for me.

It set a standard of how I was going to carry myself as a fighter.

What happened in the ring is in the ring.

The second you're out,

that's different.

Well, that speaks to his character, why you couldn't break his will in the first place.

Absolutely.

Because he's such locked down.

Absolutely.

For me, it was one of those

revelations of like, okay, this is how you do this.

As a professional.

Yeah.

Well, you know, also, Brazil had a much longer history of these kind of fights, like going way back to the Elio Gracie days.

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That's better H-E-L-P l p dot com slash j r e i mean a culturally understanding way different and that's like the okay i'm gonna carry myself you know part of it was you know i wanted to change the narrative of like when you looked at the early ufcs it looked like some some guys were just scraped off a bar stool and thrown into the octagon right and so when i came there i was like okay i want to be considered professional right right?

I want to carry myself as a professional.

I'm going to be articulate.

I'm going to dress as a professional.

Because I wanted to up the ante.

I wanted to like raise the standard.

Right.

And especially when I went to Japan, it's like, you know, press conference, everybody's in sweatsuits.

I'm in a, you know, I couldn't afford it, but I was in a $1,000 Calvin Klein suit that I had to put on a charge card, right?

But I wanted to change the narrative.

I wanted to be, I wanted to be a professional.

Because if I was a professional and treated like a professional, I could ask for pay like a professional.

Not like some dude that was just scraped off a barstool and thrown into a ring.

So what was what was the pride experience like?

So you had fought in the UFC and then

did you have a contract that expired?

Like what happened?

So, oh boy, this is

so

I signed a three-fight tournament deal with the UFC.

I did 14 and 15, and I still had one tournament obligation on the contract.

So after 15, the Japanese had seen enough footage, and I got contacted by Pride, and they're like, hey, we want to fly you over.

We want to have

you as a key piece to build this organization.

So I'm like, okay.

So they fly me first class over, first class hotel.

I meet with

I meet with a guy named Mr.

Ishiaka, who his real name is Kim Dukso.

He's He's a Korean guy.

And

Mr.

Ishi, who owned K1.

Wait a minute.

A Korean dude was pretending to be Japanese?

You had to have a Japanese name.

Whoa.

You couldn't do business in Japan without a Japanese name.

That's crazy.

So he signed all of his documents, signed all of his documents, legal documents, Kim Duk Tzu.

Wow.

But every single person called him Mr.

Ishijaka.

Wow.

So he had to learn Japanese.

Yeah.

And it's still with an accent because he spoke Korean too.

So it's just one of those where understanding like the culture back then just it was still stuck, you know, and hadn't really progressed.

Wow.

So Mr.

Ishi owned K1 and Mr.

Xhaka started Pride.

And it was called KRS at the beginning before it turned into dream stage.

Oh.

And so here's, here's where it gets a little sticky.

So I go over there.

I take for Pride 2, it's supposed to be me and Hoyce Gracie, him and I.

There's still fight posters that have signed of him and I facing off with each other, signed the contract to fight for way more money than was being paid for in the UFC.

And

when I get back to the States,

I get served with papers to appear in court in New York City, the UFC suing me.

It's when Bob Meyerwitz still owned it and Art Davis was involved.

And so they were suing me for breach of contract.

And it was like one of those things where I was like,

okay, I didn't, you know, like one of those experiences where I was like, oh, shit, you know, and the Japanese said, okay, we still want you.

You need to sort this out.

So it took,

it took four months, five months to sort out the differences between what the UFC needed and if they're going to let me go and all this other stuff.

And in that timeframe, Hoist got hurt.

And so Hoist had to step out and they put Bronco Sigote in there.

And I ended up fighting Bronco in Pride 2.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

So

if everything would have went as everything, I would have fought Hoist Gracie in the Tokyo Dome, him and I main event, me at my peak, Hoist still in his prime.

Wow.

That would have been insane.

Oh, my God.

It would have been like thinking about it going, because people have asked, like, who would have won?

I'm like.

I don't fucking know, but I would have given it every single thing I could.

That's it.

That's the poster.

Wow.

Yeah.

Signed, inked, everything.

You had at least 80 pounds on them.

Oh, at least that.

Yeah.

But, but this is it.

This is the transition from not knowing what I was getting into, going, I can't fucking carry that much weight at all and be cardiovascularly.

I just can't.

What were you at your heaviest?

280, 285.

Jeez.

Like 6% body fat.

Woof.

Yeah.

That's hard to breathe.

Yeah, brutal.

Like, if I didn't fucking get a hold of you and fucking squeeze the life out of you in the first like couple minutes, I was fucked.

I was completely fucked.

Yeah.

Well, that was kind of the case with Coleman as well.

Like when he was really, really big.

I was in the corner when he lost.

I was cornering him when he lost to Maurice Smith.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Yeah, I was there for that one.

That was a real game changer.

Oh, that changed the narrative for everything.

Because Maurice, what Maurice brought to the game was Maurice was training with Frank Shamrock at the time, and so he had extreme cardio.

He was doing a lot of swimming.

He was running hills.

I mean, he was really cardiovascularly at an elite level for an MMA fighter at the time.

Frank and I used to talk about heart rate training

way back when.

Like literally like functional training.

and going, okay,

how do you approach something and come up with a formula where you can get through a training camp and still be viable at the end of that training camp when you have five-minute rounds?

How do you do it?

There wasn't a formula for it.

So Frank was like, I started doing this heart rate training and heart rate recovery and all this stuff.

And I was like, oh, shit.

And then I run into these trainers when I was in California at Gold's Venice.

There was a guy named T.R.

Goodman, and he was training hockey players.

And hockey players have to have that burst recovery, burst recovery.

Wow.

Very similar cardiovascular system to fighters.

So TR took over my training when I was in California, and that was a whole nother level because I'd never really had the functional training implemented the way he did.

And that's when my weight came down.

It's like I

really tried to fight between like 230,

235 and 240 was ideal.

Yeah, that's much better.

That seems like the ideal heavyweight.

It is.

It is.

It's very weird that, first of all, that the heavyweight division has a weight limit.

Yeah.

Oh, my God, it's really weird.

Especially the UFC.

Yeah.

Because it doesn't really in Japan and some other organizations.

They allow the super heavyweight division.

And in boxing, you can be as heavy as you want.

Like Tyson Fury's been 290 before.

But when the UFC has this 265-pound weight division, it seems like the best elite guys are like that 240 range.

For me, that was like I knew I had a good training camp.

If I came in 235, 240, if I didn't train hard enough I was 250 if I overtrained I was under 230

you know like for Pride Grand Prix I think I weighed in at 229

because right before you felt overtrained I felt overtrained because in between when I fought Ensign and the Pride Grand Prix I did Abu Dhabi

And so I won my weight class that year and I won the all-around.

So you got super conditioned.

Oh my God, super conditioned.

But you lose.

I lost a little bit of what I needed was that physical dominance.

You know, I could have the endurance, but again, it's one of those where it's like going into it when I fought Fegeta.

There's so many factors that were just, you know, that I didn't account for.

And my calorie intake just wasn't where it needed to be.

And like a lot of times leading up to a fight, like my appetite just diminishes as I get towards it, especially that fight week.

And that's interesting.

Why do you think that is?

Nerves.

nerves right it gets to a point where it's like that that morning i know like fight morning i have a small little window where i could digest food where i could take food in it's not like i could sit and eat all day and then as the nerves start kicking yeah it just starts kicking in like my like like literally and it's controlled focus right because it's like it can't have all my nerves running everywhere but it's controlled focus it but that control focus my body goes i don't need digestion fuck i'm about to fight what the fuck do i need to digest food for right right right you know Yeah, a lot of guys have made those mistakes.

Aljermain Sterling said he made that mistake when he first fought Pyotr Yan.

He just, he didn't eat.

It's brutal.

So that last scene against Fujita is 100%

hypoglycemic crash, laying there, can't move my body.

And if you watch the documentary, what I'm saying on the way back is, I need sugar, I need sugar, I need sugar.

That's all I could think about.

It was like, I need sugar, I need sugar, I need sugar.

Because my blood sugar levels had just crashed to this, like, I can't fucking move geez it's so crazy to the watch the evolution of the training methods from back then from 97 to like what we're seeing today yeah oh incredible it is really extraordinary because there's not a real another sport that has gone through that much of a metamorphosis not not even close really in that time frame because it's a short it's a short time frame because because again it's asking the question of like okay championship fight 25 minutes five five minute rounds How do you train for it?

Right.

Because the reality is, no one can go full blast for five, five-minute rounds.

Can't do it.

Maybe Marab can.

I wouldn't fucking doubt that.

He might be the one.

He's probably the only guy because he doesn't seem to get tired.

You get, so this is, this is like observationally, usually in that championship fight, if it's a striker against a wrestler, usually the first two rounds, strikers usually have that advantage.

And then third round, if you go back and watch this third round the grappler starts to impose a little bit more on him right they go and then fourth takedown fourth and fifth round is the grappler completely just takes that fight over because it's one of those things where

you it's that grind yes it's that it's also

a big part of being able to stuff takedowns of coffee yeah a big part of being able to stuff takedowns is having energy oh my god it's everything guys trying to fuck you up and take you down there's so much energy involved in trying to stuff a takedown and then when you don't have it you're like i'm gonna just let him take me down and i'll just like take a break here and then work back to the but no like with some guys like you're not getting back up no elbowed in the face that i'm just gonna grind you into a pulp and that's that control thing right part of part of what i i go like if i look at my finding going i was never going to be the best striker like never going to be the best kicker puncher but if i could turn you into a wrestler that's that was the secret sauce for me yeah i just need to make you wrestle me.

Yeah.

And I'm good.

Right?

Because I know I can fucking beat the fuck out of you wrestling.

Yeah.

The key was transitioning to make you wrestle me.

Yeah.

It's the specialist, specialist thing.

It's like, if you want to be a specialist, being a specialist at wrestling is by far.

By far.

When you see what Hamzad did to Drickus.

Oh my God.

And that's the example I get.

Perfect.

Elite, elite, elite wrestler.

Against a world champion, MMA fighter who's been dominating everybody and who's very difficult to take down.

And Hamza just ramped it up, kept it up.

Attack.

And like I'm a sin, that Russian Dagestan, Uzbekistan, it's this ability to sustain an attack repeatedly.

Because it's that cardiovascular system.

I'm born at 6,000 feet in altitude, 7,000 feet in altitude, a little bit more of an advantage, right?

And so you end up with these attacks where you can sustain them beyond your ability to defend them.

It's also having such a technical game that as you're implementing the first attack, you've already got three attacks on standby.

And then as he counters, you've anticipated the counter.

You have a counter to his counter, and then a counter to his readjusting after your counter.

And you're just hitting him over and over.

He just can't keep the rhythm.

I literally, I text my son.

I was at that fight.

I text my son.

I go, this is what an elite wrestler could do to a professional fighter.

It's nuts.

It's nuts because it was like,

a lot of people thought it was boring because it just didn't get to a decision.

It just went to a decision.

But you just kind of appreciate that level of dominance against a world champion.

It's kind of crazy.

Where the guy before the fight, Dricus was being looked at as one of the greatest middleweights of all time.

I mean, look at what he did to all these guys.

He knocks out Robert Whitaker.

He beats out Asanya.

He fucking beats Sean Strickland twice.

Like, oh, my God, he might be one of the greatest of all time.

And then after that fight, you're like, I don't think he's ever going to beat that guy.

I don't think he's ever going to beat that guy.

Isn't that crazy?

It was like, I don't think there's enough time in the world.

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Tacovas, point your toes west.

Bridge that gap.

You can't, you can never catch up.

You know, like I would never pretend stepping into the octagon that I would be able to get elite striking skills, right?

You know, like that gap could just, it's constantly just something you never can get to.

It's also

like Sean O'Malley, right?

Uh-huh.

He's going to, the only way that he's going to be able to get a championship back is somebody else needs to beat Murab.

Yeah, Murab.

Yeah.

And then it's got to be stylistically.

Stylistically match up, right?

That's that conflict of match up.

Because skills, you're not going to do that.

You mean he got better for the second fifth?

He did a lot better, but still.

So did Murab, though.

That was part of the problem.

That guy's not, he's not stopping.

God, how old is he?

Murab?

I think he's 34.

How old is Murab?

Murab Dwavish Willie.

34.

34.

I was 34.

So he's, you know, he's in his prime right now.

In his prime for another few years at least.

Yeah.

I would think that it's one where there's going to be a lot of people that think they can, but that's just a different animal.

Yeah, it's going to take someone who's that kind of a wrestler who maybe has a striking advantage.

Yeah.

Who could beat him.

Yeah.

But then, you know that's an anomaly it's just

it's such a crazy sport to watch that

you know from 1994 to 2025 it's almost unrecognizable the difference in the game

like

like there was a period of time where i couldn't i couldn't watch uh i didn't watch the ufc probably about like seven eight nine years and uh over the last five six years i've watched it almost religiously right and just

realizing the fighters today, oh my God, man, they hit a level.

And it's that mutation.

It's like this first generation, second generation.

And they're advancing so fast that you're looking at these new fighters.

You're like,

it's such a unique set of skills to do this.

Incredible set of skills.

Unique to any other sport in the world.

And it's also, you're really fighting three different sports as one sport,

which is really nuts.

You're fighting grappling, you're fighting jiu-jitsu, and you're fighting striking all together in one sport.

It's like, wow.

It's like playing soccer, football, and baseball at the same time.

It's like, how the fuck would you do it?

Yeah.

While getting kicked.

While getting kicked.

While getting kicked and punched and elbowed.

But without guys like you, it would have never gotten here.

Because if there weren't people that were willing to fight for very little money, travel overseas, have these crazy events

and, you know, and beat your body up and do what you did and what Coleman did and a lot of those guys did in the beginning.

Without you guys,

there is no UFC today.

It's just not the same.

It was, you know, one, like being in the Hall of Fame and being in the Pioneer Wing and understanding that,

like I said to myself, you know, even if I advance a sport, you know, this much, it needed this much at the time to get to where it is today, right?

Like, Coleman advances sport this much.

Well, you guys brought in the new element, and the new element was elite wrestling with enormous muscles.

Yeah.

And everyone was like, oh, this is a real problem.

And especially in the early, early days, because Coleman would get in your guard and just headbutt the fuck out of you.

Because headbutts were legal.

Legal.

Yeah.

Legal.

Like, and bare knuckle.

Like when I first did his,

I interviewed him after he beat Dan Severn, when he became the first UFC heavyweight champion.

Total bare knuckle.

Yeah, he had a little bit of tape on the on the hands, try to keep the bones from snapping in half.

So, that was it, frightening.

Why?

Like, people, I, I, you know, they watch it now, and and you know, this, this film, right,

it gives it gives people a little bit of a look inside of like what it was.

And, and,

you know, for

me,

the

cool part about it is understanding, like, I'm, like I said, I'm just a little piece.

But that little piece is necessary to be able for me to watch some of the guys do what they do now.

Well, it's different than any other sport in that these little pieces had to be there before people could figure out what to do.

Yeah.

Well, Dana put them all together.

Yeah.

You know, when I actually talked to him when I was in Newark, that's one thing I said.

I said, look what you built.

You can feel however you want about, you know, him personally.

I'd go, look what you built.

Yeah.

Like, no one could even imagine this.

Well, you have to be a madman to do what he does.

Like, that guy works so hard and he works so many hours and he fucking loves it.

And he loves the sport.

Like, truly loves the sport.

He and I have like long conversations on the phone.

I would imagine.

About fights.

I would imagine.

Just about like, I'll go, what are you going to do about this guy?

Oh.

When's that?

When's this happening?

You know,

is this true?

Does this guy really get hurt?

He did.

Fuck.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

Oh, it's minor.

Okay, six weeks.

So you're rescheduling it?

Okay, good.

Yeah.

You know, we have these long-ass conversations, and I'll tell him about kickboxers that I've been watching or tell him about these guys.

I mean, that's one of the ways that we became friends.

And one of the ways that I started working for him in the first place is because...

We would have conversations when I first met him when I was on Fear Factor and I wasn't even working for the UFC.

I'd be like, you watch the fights in Japan?

Do you ever watch Japan Valley 2?

Do you know about this guy?

Do you know about Hicks and Gracie?

Do you know about this guy?

And I would be just rattling off different names.

And he was like, what do you,

how do you know all this?

I don't even know the rules to basketball.

I don't know what's happening.

I know when the ball goes in the net, it's good.

I don't know the rules to football.

I don't know the rules to anybody.

Yeah, exactly.

I only have room for combat sports.

But, you know, ask me about Marcelo Garcia.

Ask me,

I can answer.

I'll rattle off some stats.

I know some shit about fighting.

But to me, it was like, it was a, Eddie Bravo and I, when we were kids, when we were young fellas, when we were hanging around, working out, we would say to ourselves, like, you know, what this sport needs some crazy billionaires who love the sport.

They're just going to dump a bunch of money.

Because we knew at the time, we were like, this is the most exciting sport in the world, right?

So all it needs is for these really rich guys to be fans of the sport.

And it's almost like it manifested itself because that's what happened.

The Fertidas came along, and they were just really rich guys who love the sport, and they took a crazy chance.

They were $40 million dollars in the hole

yeah 40 million in the hole on the ufc and it was just losing money losing money and they just hung in there year after year after year until they were almost ready to sell and then they decided to go forward with the ultimate fighter that's the game changer that was it that 2005 personalized it yeah that personalized it well people got to see it on spike tv and then it became the fights were so wild that people were calling their friends yeah and they were saying you got to watch this.

So, as the show is on, and this is like before social media was really all that.

So, as the fight was on, the ratings kept going up and up and up and up.

And it was like Spike TV was like, holy shit, we got a fucking hit.

We got a hit.

And Diego Sanchez won the 185-pound division.

And then the fight between Stefan Bonner and Forrest Griffith.

That's the fight that changed everything.

Changed the game.

Because that's one of those, if you ask just a marginal fan, they'll refer to that.

Exactly.

They'll refer to that.

Because at the time, it was nobody had ever seen anything like it.

They didn't know what MMA was.

And here it is on TV.

And these two guys were so evenly matched.

That was the best part about it.

They both had trained together in the house for all those fucking weeks.

They'd all be talking shit to each other and all that.

And they knew they were going to fight in the finals.

So it was like this long buildup.

And they were perfectly matched.

And it was just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, fucking swing, wheel kick, punch, take off.

That's what I'm saying.

I mean, there's so much shit in there.

That fight just went on and on.

And at the end of it, the whole crowd was like, oh, yes.

And, you know, I was the one, I was the first person to suggest.

I was like, they both should have a fucking contract.

This is crazy.

You can't take a contract away from one of these guys for this fight.

And Dana, to his credit, gave both those guys the contract.

And it was all of a sudden, the sport was hot.

And then Chuck Liddell was the poster boy because he was the perfect guy to be the most famous champion at the time because he was a destroyer.

Oh, God.

He could just seek and destroy.

And he had an iron chin, and he just, and he would just stare at you with a fucking serial killer's eyes.

And just

when you watched him, like me watching him, he was so awkward when he held his hands and punched.

It was so, like, even watch it now.

He was just hunting.

He was just hunting.

Yeah.

And hunting.

And loading up.

He would hunt.

And it wasn't like.

No.

It was every single thing was thrown with intent.

Yeah.

Everything was shown, thrown to shut you off.

Oh.

And he could do it.

And he could do it for five fucking rounds, too, which was crazy.

Which is in his prime.

The thing about that style is it's unsustainable.

He never ducked a punch in his life.

He took a run in the chin

and blasted right through.

He had an iron jaw.

It was fucking iron.

Yeah.

But everybody's iron jaw gives out after it.

It just, you can't.

And you can't.

You can't sustain it.

It's just one where, yeah.

So when the Fertidas first bought the UFC,

I was living in California and a friend of mine who was helping me at the time said, Hey, listen,

they're up at Big Bear having a training camp.

I'm like, okay, let's go up.

So get my truck, drive up.

It starts snowing.

It was like February.

They were going to do their first big push with Tito, right?

And I get hit by a drunk driver at 11 a.m.

in the morning on the way up.

So

my attorney was in the car with us.

Literally, the tow truck takes us up to the top of the hill.

I still get to talk to Dana.

I still get to talk to Frank and Lorenzo.

And I'm like, yeah, I got hit by a drunk driver.

He's like, well, we're going to Beverly Hills Wilshire tomorrow.

Why don't you just jump in the limo with us and we'll take you down?

I'm like, okay.

So I get like this three-hour drive down the mountain with Frank and Lorenzo, the new owners of the UFC.

Wow.

And we're just sitting there talking.

They're like, hey, hey, you know, how is it working in Japan?

They knew everything about me.

Yeah, how is it working in Japan?

How do they do this?

How do they do that?

And it was just this really cool conversation, really cool experience to be able to go, okay, maybe this has landed in the right spot.

Oh, they were the right guys.

They were the right guys because they were like Frank and Lorenzo are rabid fans.

Yeah.

Like rabid.

Yeah.

And they would train and they would beat the fuck out of each other.

And that's where they met Frank.

Frank, they brought Frank in to help them.

They've kind of erased Frank.

So Frank Shamrock, in my opinion, is one of the all-time greats.

And also

one of the most important in terms of the metamorphosis, in terms of the evolution of the sport.

Because Frank was the first guy with elite cardio that could do everything.

He could submit you off his back.

Like, remember when he fought Kevin Jackson?

Yep, yep.

Caught him in an arm bar.

Bang.

First round.

He was elite everywhere.

And his cardio was off the charts.

When he fought Tito Ortiz, Tito was much bigger than him.

Not just a little bit bigger than him.

Frank's not a big frame guy.

And Tito is a fucking house.

Tito is.

And he just overwhelmed him, beat him down with cardio.

And then after that fight, Tito taught everybody.

Cardio is number one.

It's number one.

When he was teaching, when he was coaching on the Ultimate Fighter, he told everybody, it's fucking cardio.

Without cardio, you have nothing.

And his cardio was legendary, too.

I mean, they say what, fatigue fatigue makes cowards of us all.

It's true.

Yeah.

It's true.

I mean, it's just one of those.

And again, this goes back to what I was saying about Frank and I having conversations back then about heart rate training.

25 years ago, you go, heart rate, what?

Little polar, you know, watch and, you know, keep and like, oh, we need to recover this many beats in a minute, but actively recover.

Right.

Like, yeah, to still continue to do shit and recover.

And this is what Frank was saying.

Yeah, I started doing this.

I'm like, what the fuck?

He was a very smart.

Well, he is a very smart guy.

Yeah.

And I don't know why they had some kind of a falling out, but they don't highlight him anymore.

They don't talk about him at all.

Pivotal.

Pivotal.

I think you got to let that go just for the honor of what happened.

The honor of the sport.

Because for the honor of the sport, when you look at Frank, like when you look at his fights, like he was elite, man.

He was

ahead of his time.

He was ahead of his time.

By far.

He was the first really, truly complete mixed martial artist.

I agree.

You know, and people see him like the fight that he fought when he was fighting in Strike Force.

You're not seeing the same guy.

You're seeing him, it's later in his life.

You see when he fought Nick Diaz.

You can't.

It's like what I said about goats.

Yeah.

You want to look at BJ Penn?

You look at BJ Penn when he fought Sean Shirk.

Yeah.

Look at BJ Penn when he fought Big Daddy Stevenson.

That's one of the scariest fucking guys who's ever stepped in an octagon at 155 pounds.

Period.

I put him with all of them, and I don't know what happens.

And then there's Khabib.

Same, same.

You put that guy with any 155-pounder who's ever existed, and I don't know what's going to happen.

How are you going to beat that guy?

You know, there's a few guys like that, and Khabib has to be in that conversation too.

When you look at his dominance over

the way he was winning fights, I'll never forget when he fought Edson Barbosa.

It was in the first round, and Edson had this look in his eyes: like, oh my God, I've got to get you how many more rounds with this motherfucker?

Because he was just already exhausted, and this fucking animal from Dagestan was just on him on him dragging him to the ground.

I'll never forget we had Michael Johnson down the ground.

He's beating Michael Johnson up and he's like quit quit.

You know I need title shot.

It's mine.

You know title shot is mine.

You know I deserve this.

Quit.

And he's just beating the fuck out of him, trying to be nice.

He gets him in Kimura and I'm going.

Please tap.

I'm like, please tap.

Please tap.

Because I'm seeing that spiral fracture when they get that spiral fracture.

I'm seeing it it coming.

I'm like, please tap.

We didn't even been through that with Frank.

When Frank got Minotaro in that, here it is.

He's talking to him.

He's like, listen, give me some volume.

I need to fight for the title.

You know I deserve this.

Come on, buddy.

I don't want to have to hurt you.

Oh, my God.

Look at this.

I mean, he's doing whatever.

But this speaks to your point.

See, everybody agrees.

The people are cheering.

Look.

I need to fight for it.

Look at it.

He's trying to be nice to him.

That's

such dominance.

It is.

Trying to be nice to a nice guy.

Like, come on, you know what the fuck is going on?

Yeah.

And again, to his credit, he didn't.

I think he could have just fucking ripped that arm apart.

He let him tap.

He let him tap.

I think.

Wow.

Wow.

So this is like, again, we're saying like.

taking somebody fucking will.

He was a will taker.

Like when he was in TeConnor, when he got on top of Connor, he's like, let's talk now.

Let's talk now.

Just beating his face in, going, come on, you want to talk?

Let's talk now.

You talk about humble pie, like fucking having to sit back and like.

Yeah.

Because that's at a level where, where, because you're a bad motherfucker to begin with.

And somebody that's even a batter motherfucker.

Who just dominates you?

Just, oh, my God.

Just could kill you.

Same size as you, and basically he could kill you.

If he wanted to, you're dead.

Yeah.

You're not going to live.

He's going to live.

He could just literally choke you unconscious and just keep choking you until you're...

He was going to break his neck.

He had him in that fulcrum choke.

That is such a nasty choke.

Look, here's where he gets it.

So he's getting it and he's holding on to it.

Look,

he's not going all through.

No.

If he wanted to, he could have just ripped your head off.

Drop that right hip down, pull that left arm up, and that thing's snapping like a twig.

It's so scary.

That's my scariest tech.

Other than guys when they break their shins.

Yeah.

When they go shin to knee and the shin snaps in half.

Like

Silva breaking it.

Oh, it was horrible.

Widemann was the worst.

That, like, that stuff, I, one watch is, is good enough.

It was so when Wideman's.

You don't need to pull.

You don't need to pull that one.

And Wideman's, yeah, don't pull that one.

Widemanns went through his calf.

His bones snapped through and poked out of his calf.

Oh,

which is real dangerous, too, because then you run the risk of heavy infection.

Yeah, all of that.

All that.

You're on the dirty mat.

You got an open wound.

And oh.

no some of that stuff is just like gosh man it's other do you feel weird that you did it like now when you look back how you've been removed for so long do you're like you beat the out of somebody

i remember when you took dan bovish down you stuck your chin in his eyeball god man first and the only one still exist yeah is this mission by uh chin and eyeball choke yeah i don't know if you call it choke i had never seen anybody do that before i'm like that's genius yeah you know what it wasn't illegal it wasn't illegal and it i know it hurt like a motherfucker for him.

Why would it be illegal?

Why is it okay to elbow the eyeball when it's not okay to shove your chin in there?

I don't know.

You know, and those are the headbutt days.

So headbutts were legal.

So why wouldn't it be legal to shoot...

You could chin butt a guy if you wanted to, I guess.

Yeah.

So if you use, I mean, but the thing is, it's a real weapon.

Yeah.

It is real.

It's very effective.

Like, I don't think we should poke to eyes because

eyes are so vulnerable.

But that is also obviously a real weapon.

Like, kung fu guys point to that all the the time.

They go look these guys are the toughest fighters in the world.

You poke them in the eyes and they're fucked.

They're right.

Yeah,

absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't know how good you are at eye poking.

You have to be pretty fucking accurate.

Yeah, it's not something you can count on.

No, no.

Yeah, here it is.

Yeah.

You shoved your fucking shit right in his eyeball.

He's just like, bro.

And I know, so

when I'm down there, I could hear him.

Oh,

like,

fuck, that hurt.

Oh, it was horrible, dude.

It was horrible.

But it's, again, it speaks to what we're talking about, the dominance of elite wrestling and how elite wrestling it surpasses all martial arts it's the number one most and an elite wrestler can lure jiu-jitsu okay an elite grappler can you can easily teach them how to do head and arm chokes triangles all that all that that's not you're already used to manipulating so part so part of uh my participation adcc

was was to

represent wrestling.

Right?

Yeah.

Because the first year when I got approached to go over there, I'm like,

what is that?

Like submission grappling?

Like

Giles grappling or Gee List Jiu-Jitsu?

They're like, hey, listen, here's what we're going to do.

We're going to give you X, you know, come over.

And it wasn't a ton.

It was like $15,000 to go over.

And I was like,

okay.

I was like, all right.

He's like, fuck it.

I don't know.

And while you were fighting.

Yeah.

While I was fighting.

And so I'm like, okay.

I just go.

Just as a sort of surprise.

It was one of those where I was like, okay, now that it's it's explained to me, I go, well, wrestlers need to be represented there, right?

Yes.

And so I go over there and it was one of those things where it was like, well, I can actually show everybody here in this world that thinks their shit's dominant.

Like, no.

This is a skill set you need.

You need elite wrestling skills, right?

You can have jiu-jitsu black belt and all this stuff.

This episode is brought to you by the smashing machine from A24.

Dwayne The Rock Johnson, an Academy Award nominee Emily Blunt star in The Smashing Machine in Theaters Everywhere October 3rd.

The new film from writer-director Benny Safde about pioneering UFC fighter Mark Kerr is both high-pressure sports biography and high-octane emotional spectacle, transporting viewers to the dawn of a new era as it follows the strongest fighter the sport had ever seen from the heights of fame to rock bottom and back again watch the smashing machine in theaters everywhere october 3rd missing this piece component to it you're fucked you're fucked you're fucked and so it was all about control did you see um the most recent fight with uh mauricio ruffi no

okay so mauricio ruffi who is one of the most dynamic strikers in the sport he's literally like a big connor i mean it doesn't make sense that he's in the same weight class as connor because i think he's 6'1.

Oh.

But he's real tall.

He's at least 6 feet tall.

He's real tall and long and just elite striker.

But he fought this cat, Benoit Saint-Denis, who is a judo black belt, elite on the ground, super fucking strong, and he just dominated him, man.

He got a hold of him, ragdolled him, got him to the ground.

And Mauricio had his moments in the fight standing because Benoit Saint-Denis is a French special forces guy.

He's a hard motherfucker.

And so he did stand with Mauricio for a little bit, but he got dinged up a little bit but once he got him to the ground it was just full domination and then it left everybody in this position where we were looking at mauricio ruffi as being like that guy's a future world champion yeah to like oh no like that gap's too wide yeah like he's got to learn so much to be competitive with the elite now they're going to know yeah imagine like kamaro in his prime no for you know yeah

that's that gap we were talking about like you can't leave no way to make that up there's no there's not enough time in your career.

Well, we got to see

Kamara was like 38 now, okay?

And he just fought Joaquin Buckley and dominated him.

Wow.

Dominic.

And Buckley is another one who is this guy who is dominating everybody at 170.

He just knocked out Wonderboy.

And we're like, this fucking guy might be the one.

Yeah.

And then all of a sudden, 38-year-old Kamaro Usman shows how fucking important wrestling is.

It's everything.

It's everything.

Because you can be defensively responsible.

Like, he's very defensively responsible responsible standing.

Other than the Leon Edwards kick, he very rarely gets cracked.

Gilbert got him a little and dropped him, but very rarely gets in trouble standing.

But once he gets you, the gap is so big.

You can't make it there.

The gap's so big.

Yeah, that's, you know, and again, this is one of these things where fundamentally also wrestling gives you a cardio base.

that you can build off of.

Not only, because that's the other missing component, right?

It's like this,

because at an elite level, it's fucking intense.

It is really intense.

Like Kurt, when he was on your show, he's talking about, yeah, I trained till exhaustion and then I trained.

Yeah.

You know, it's like, that's how he, because at one point when Kurt and I were competing against each other, like 93, 94, I just, I just was bigger, stronger, and, and I could just defend his attacks.

Bro, you won the Olympics with a broken neck.

Yeah, fuck, man.

With a broken neck.

Come on.

With a broken neck.

I was there at nationals when he literally hit the mat.

And I'm like,

literally, I watched

when his neck broke at Freestyle Nationals.

And he got hit with an arm spin.

And he gets arm thrown.

And his head gets almost like separated.

It was nasty.

And I'm in the stands going, oh, fuck.

He's not going to be in the trials.

Like, there's no fucking way he's going to be in the trials.

And sure enough, fucking like five weeks later, he's in the trials.

I'm like, what the fuck, man?

There's no way he should be fucking able to wrestle.

That there are guys like that in the world, and people need to know.

You need to know there's levels to everything, and there's levels to mental strength.

There's levels to guys who just will go, and it's really kind of a crying shame.

Look, he had an amazing career in WWE.

He's loved by everyone.

Everybody loves him.

That's great.

But it's kind of sucks that people don't know.

Like at real wrestling.

Yeah.

That guy was the shit.

Oh my God, man.

He was the shit.

He was so good and small for a heavyweight.

He was, so, so he was always undersized.

Yeah.

But

the years that I beat him and then 95 when we wrestled in the freestyle nationals, and I had beat him four, four times in a row at that point.

So we wrestle in the 95 Freestyle Nationals, and I get a hold of him for the first time, and something was different.

I was like, oh, fuck.

Like wrestling going, oh, man, something's different with Kurt.

And he ends up beating me.

And then in the Freestyle Nationals in 95.

And I'm like, oh, fuck.

There was just something different.

I'm like, because he, he could stay on an attack longer, stay on an attack longer.

He was stronger.

He hit a gear that I didn't fucking have.

Wow.

Like, I go, oh, fuck.

Like looking back on it, I'm going, oh, shit, I totally missed that.

Like most guys at, at 220 pounds, which you're wrestling at, they, they would have these attacks that they would initiate.

It's like grab a hold of you, hold on to you, and then initiate an attack.

Kurt was constantly probing and attacking and attacking.

Which was the benefit of being lighter.

Yes.

Yeah.

And lighter and quicker.

Lighter and quicker.

But still wicked stronger.

Oh my God.

He could still get in.

So it's these attacks that he just sustained and he just wear you out of position.

So this counts and attack, attack, attack.

And all of a sudden it was just this little angle that he was hunting for the whole time.

And then he hits that attack and fucking takes you down.

You're like, fuck.

Like, what the fuck?

It's just, there's levels of

drive.

There's levels of discipline.

There's levels of will.

There's levels of wanting something.

And that's what scares people, I think.

That's why people get really terrified of like truly special athletes because they don't want to know how lazy they really are.

I think it's one of the things that drives people nuts about seeing like some insanely disciplined, like elite top of the food chain grappler or striker or whatever it is yeah mma fighter because it's like you don't want to know that someone's willing to work that much harder

than you ever have than you ever have at anything i know at anything

that's i mean kurt kurt was one of the where where he opened my eyes or i was like fuck there's there's another gear yeah i thought i was training fucking hard that's what's crazy it's we're kind of seeing that we we've had this conversation recently in regards to murab because we're saying okay

is Murab

just physically gifted?

Because I think Kane had some sort of a genetic advantage with cardio because DC would talk about how he would take three months off and come back in the gym and fuck everybody up.

With cardio.

For somebody that size, it's an anomaly.

It's an anomaly.

It's an anomaly.

But Murab swears that when he was young, he had bad cardio.

He said, no, I smoked cigarette.

I can imagine that.

It's like Sakuraba smoking cigarettes.

He said he didn't take care of himself at all.

I'm like, really?

And it's just hard work and discipline.

And then, so I have a bunch of friends who do 100 milers.

And, you know, I'm real good friends with my friend Cam Haynes.

And Cam Haynes, he just did a 100-miler like two weeks before we went elk hunting.

Like he does 100 milers all the time.

He's done a 240.

What is the Bigfoot 240?

Is that what it is?

He's done a bunch of these through the mountains with thousands of feet of elevation and decline.

He's done a bunch of these that are 200 plus miles.

God, that's not.

And you got to build up to that.

But once you get to that, if you're sustaining it, you can do those things.

So he does those things on a regular basis.

He does multiple ones a year.

So that didn't, you didn't used to think that that was possible.

They used to say that if you ran a marathon, like you were destroyed for like two weeks.

No, he was running a marathon a day while he worked a full-time job.

So he was getting up in the morning at dark.

He was running 13 miles.

He was going to work.

During his lunchtime, he would eat.

After lunch, after work, he runs another 13 fucking miles.

He would be one where I wouldn't want to look at him because I'd think I'm lazy.

That's the thing.

That's why there's a thing about, like, I think I'm lazy and I love him.

He's my friends, but I think I'm lazy when I watch what he's doing.

And Goggins is another one.

Yeah, oh my God.

Goggins is even more insane because he ain't doing it for nothing.

He's not preparing for elk hunting.

He rarely even competes in races, but yet he's doing

a level of cardio where he brings world champions like Israel Adesanya comes to train with him and he's throwing up in a bucket.

He can't keep up with him.

Goggins is 50.

Oh my God.

He's 50.

Wow.

How old is Goggins?

50.

50.

50!

Oh my God.

And he's got two terrible knees.

Oh my God.

He's had many knee surgeries.

His knees are destroyed and he does not give a fuck.

He forces them to work.

work.

Golly.

So again, this is like, that's a level which is just exceptional.

Yeah.

Because there's just a weird level.

It is, because that's a pocket.

It's just a pocket of people that have that.

There's only a handful.

There's only a handful like that guy because it's not just that.

He broke the world record chin-up competition once.

Like he's, he's done.

He's done a ton of things that are just like physically insane.

You know, he was a smoke jumper.

He didn't even tell anybody about it.

it.

He did it just because it was hard.

This is why he's famous.

So while he was famous, they'd take him up in a helicopter and you fucking parachute him to fight forest fires because it was hard to do.

Yeah.

I'm not shitting you, man.

Oh, my God.

He sent me a photo once.

He texts me a photo of a grizzly bear track.

And he goes, we just landed near this.

I mean, it's a fucking track like that big.

And he's out there with a backpack.

A fucking fucking shovel

fighting fires.

And only because it's hard.

He's a multi-millionaire.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

He's a multi-millionaire who's getting parachuted to fight fires.

And here's the thing, man.

If I didn't talk about it and baby, I'm out of school, people wouldn't even know.

You have to know that.

Maybe he doesn't want people to know.

They need to know that.

That's fucking insane.

That is beyond insane.

That's like one of those where it's like, you know, the wiring that exists in him,

it doesn't happen by chance.

That's, you have this genetic ability.

But he was fat when he was young and he was lazy.

He was drinking milkshakes.

He talks about it openly.

He said the first time he decided to enlist, when he went to run, to go running, he couldn't even run around the block.

He was totally out of shape.

He has photos of it.

He shows you.

He's like, this is like, no, I made myself this.

So this is my thinking about fighting.

Have we just accepted that you can't really fight full blast for five, five minute rounds?

Or is it that no one has built themselves up to a level where you can, like when you were talking about how Kurt did a new gear or the gear that Murab is clearly on right now or Hamza, there's that gear.

What if we're going to push that even further where there's guys that can sprint for five, five minute rounds?

Like there's a few flyways that can do that.

Like Pantosha can kind of sprint for five, five minute rounds.

You can go.

So they'll eventually be a fighter that can do that.

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking, too.

And because because it's just one where, like I was saying, from where I started from 25 years ago and the training methods and how archaic they were and how little knowledge was out there.

Right.

Now knowledge is advancing at such a rapid rate and they're understanding how to recover.

They're understanding all these different factors that just weren't there.

Yeah.

And if you add in a bunch of stuff like hyperbaric chambers, so if these guys have access to hyperbaric chambers and training with hypoxic

chambers and shit like that,

There's levels and levels and levels that can be reached.

You just have to be a complete fucking psycho and go through all the levels.

Yeah.

And get

like Donkey Kong.

Like, measure all your food, all your electrolytes, everything throughout the day.

Have your sleep environment perfect.

Wear a mask.

I'm telling you, there's guys out there that'll do it.

There's guys that'll do it.

They'll do it.

Well, they have to if that's where you get the edge.

Yeah.

I mean, it's becoming, it's becoming to a point now where the financial benefit is worth the sacrifice, right?

Yes.

That you'll end up going, okay.

Because what what started to happen when I was fighting is that once the financial piece started getting in there, it started attracting more talent.

Right.

Right.

Right.

So that talent, it brings the level of everybody up.

Yeah.

And then all of a sudden it's like a little bit more money, talent that could have maybe went and did something else.

They're going, no, I'm going to go do this because I can make money.

Yeah, this is the thing, right?

If you're a young kid and you're really good at baseball, but you also like jiu-jitsu and MMA, and you, you know, have an amateur fight, maybe, and you're thinking about what you're going to do with your career.

You could be so rich playing baseball.

Oh, God, you could be so rich.

If you're really good at baseball, you can be rich as fuck, and nobody's trying to kill you.

Yeah.

Nobody's trying to beat you over the head with elbows.

Nobody's taking you down in front of everybody and humiliating you.

Well,

fuck this.

Let's play ball.

Battle.

Seriously, I fucking play baseball on a hard feed, man.

Fuck yeah.

So that's the problem with MMA:

you hear, like, what is it to fight in the UFC?

Like, what is the bottom scale?

What's like the lowest contract that you can get in the UFC in 2025?

And this is not even saying they deserve more because this is just how the sport works.

Yeah.

And it's way better in the UFC, by the way, than it is in boxing.

When you watch a boxing card, most of the money's at the top.

There's very little spread out.

There's guys that fight in the UFC undercard that make excellent money.

But when you first start, you don't.

I think it's like 10.

It's one of those things where it's like would I expect this like start at Microsoft right yeah and go on yeah I get a million dollars a year fuck no you work your way into and that's one of one of the things about the sport as long as it has the opportunity to let somebody grow into it you know and still gives them financial incentive to grow into it right right and just one where it's like I wouldn't expect like hey I'm a good fighter pay me a million dollars it's like well that's not how fucking works now I wouldn't say a million dollars but wouldn't you say, like, let's make this argument, wouldn't you think that for young struggling fighters, if they got paid more for fights, they could put together better camps.

They could.

They could get better recovery and nutrition, have less stress,

and be able to perform better so it would make the product better.

So here, here's where, here's where my career transitioned.

I call it internally funded.

My first four fights, I was using that money to get to the next fight, to get to the next fight, to get to the next fight.

Then all of a sudden, I get in Japan and they pay me enough money for the one fight that the next day I woke up and I was a professional fighter because it was the only thing I had to do was train as a fighter.

What was the biggest check you got in Japan?

A little over half a million.

Damn.

Back then, that was

cash.

Yeah, fucking cash.

How did you get it out of the country?

Dude, that was.

How did you get it out of it?

So

here's what's fucked up about it, right?

So so my first couple times over there, I'm like, I put like first time I got, I put 40 something thousand in one cowboy boot with two socks.

I put 40,000 in the other cowboy boot with the two socks.

I'm serious.

It was straight out of the fucking cartoons how you got paid because the next day you would go up to a room.

And you literally would have a room.

You'd have an adjacent room, usually with Japanese guys in black suits smoking.

And then you'd have this room, which is where you get paid.

They had these, you know, suitcases that had your pay.

You could choose your currency, right?

I'm getting paid in American dollars.

So they would have your contract, slide your contract over, and they'd go, okay, this fight, you get paid.

This is the dollar amount, blah, blah, blah.

And they would literally take it out, count it.

You would sign on it.

And then they would just hand you the cash.

First time they ever did that, I'm like, it's $150,000 in cash.

And I'm like, fuck.

I'm like, I'll be right back.

I go to the bedroom that's it's in the hotel room, and I grab the fucking

case to the pillow, and I go over and I fucking just scrape the fucking money, put it in the pillowcase, and I go, Okay, thank you.

It's just started fucking go head out.

I don't know what to fucking do.

You know, I'm like, down, I'm like down in the elevator, like fucking holding the money.

Like, I don't know what to fucking do.

150 crand in a pillow case, like, who doesn't know what to fucking do?

Big giant guy with 150 grand.

No, no, it does not, man.

It's like.

What did they expect you to do with it?

Did they give you any advice on how to get it out of the country?

Oh, no, no.

That was not.

That was, it was your responsibility.

Oh, my God.

So literally, I'm like, oh, fuck, man.

I like get on it.

And like in my head, I'm playing all these movies, right?

Like, on this movie, he got caught at the border.

You know, I'm like, fuck.

You know, I know that's going to be this one.

You know, it's like, so I end up fucking just going, oh, cowboy boots, tube socks.

like fucking 40 grand in one boot 40 grand in the other put it in a fucking and like walk and like you got anything to declare no you just like walk through but realizing that eventually when i claim the money um they hand a claim form they go okay you're claiming 140 000

okay thank you have a good day oh you just have to claim it you have to claim it because they want to send it they want to send that receipt to the irs Oh

so when you go through customs.

I thought it was just a function of not being able to take that much cash.

So no, when you declare it, when you declare it, there's that situation too, right?

But when everybody's going to go, where's it going to have to be

exact?

I guess back then, could you even go?

No, you couldn't even let YouTube yourself.

No, there's no.

You couldn't say, look, this is me, man.

I just won.

No.

Look, aren't I awesome?

Exactly.

This is how I really did win.

Back then, it was hard to get teams, man.

You know what?

The

example I give is like the corner video store next to the shutters that where all the porn was yep right next to that was the vhs tapes

so nobody can hear it when you went through you dirty pervert you got to go see face and death

that's facing death

yeah yeah that was right literally those were where the ufc tapes were those where the pride tapes were i remember i remember i was living in hollywood i just moved there it was 94 it was when ufc 2 was available on VHS.

Yeah.

So I had heard about UFC 1, but I didn't see it.

And then UFC 2, I saw on tape.

I rented it from

one of those video stores.

And I was like, holy shit, they did it.

I couldn't believe it.

I'm like, holy shit, they did it.

Because

this was always the dream.

This was literally Bruce Lee's conversation.

Bruce Lee's conversation.

I mean, his whole, he was the first guy to be completely outside of the norm in terms of like sticking to your style.

Yeah.

Because that you were like a traitor if you allow

certain kung fu styles or certain karate styles.

He was the first guy to say, no, use use what's useful.

Put it all together.

Judo Jean LaBelle, he got with.

Yeah.

Yeah.

With Chuck Norris.

He got with all these other.

That was the first thing, like the symbols of kanji for a dragon, right?

Bruce Lee was enter the dragon, right?

Dragon is all these parts to make one mythical thing.

Yes.

And that's that enter the dragon.

That's that.

Bruce Lee was the first one.

If people don't realize it, he was the first one to go, fuck, this is incomplete.

Exactly.

And so fortuitous that he ran into Judo Gene LaBelle.

Yeah.

And because I think once you grapple with that guy, you're like, oh my God, I'm fucking helpless.

And then it's just like, oh, this is super important.

Yeah.

You know, because like Gene was one of the first guys to ever have like a mixed fight.

So there was a guy who was a boxer and he had a judo gi on.

And he chases the guy and gets the guy into a grappling exchange and then strangles him.

But

he had like a boxer versus judo.

You never saw that?

No.

See if you can find it, Jamie.

I want to say it's in the

way back 60s.

So this is going to be way back when.

Way back when.

So this is Mark Coleman and I did a clinic in North Carolina that was a Judo Jean LaBelle clinic that he brought us in for.

What year is this?

63.

Oh, my God.

So Milo Savage.

So, the boxer looks like he's, okay, I remembered it wrong.

The boxer's bare knuckle.

And he made him wear a judo gi, though, which I would have said, fuck you.

I'm not wearing this gi.

He probably doesn't understand that that's a weapon for Gene.

Oh my god, it's an extra set of hands.

We didn't see him take him down.

Oh, that's just.

Did they show him taking him down?

I just skipped.

Oh, my God.

Oh, don't skip through it.

I'm going to see the technique.

Because once he grabs it, here it is.

So Milo throws up.

That's it.

So once Gene's got a hold of him.

Oh, it's over.

It's fucksville.

It's over.

I mean, you don't know what that even feels like until you feel it.

Oh, my God.

So I rolled with Higgin Machado.

And,

oh, my God.

He's just putting him to sleep with a collar choker.

Oh, my God.

He's just brutal.

Yeah, he's mangling him.

He's just mangling him.

This poor guy.

Oh my God.

And Gene is his style was very, very brutal.

Oh, my God.

Like, he had a very almost like catch wrestling style, base based submission.

He had a lot of like very, very painful moves that he would do on you.

Oh my God.

Can you imagine just not understanding what you're agreeing to?

No, he just got choked unconscious.

No, I mean, you can't know until it happens.

And I mean, I don't know how much cross-training people did.

I bet he probably thought I was just going to go in there and use my boxing.

Yeah.

And we go.

Oh, my gosh.

It's just,

you don't know until you know.

And then you go, wow.

But it's just so wild that even at the highest levels like at the wrestle that the level that you were wrestling at a guy like Kurt Angle can go well, let's check it out

Another notch man

and that's the crazy part you always find like like me being a fan of MMA and UFC and watching it there's there's always an outlier, right?

Always always an outlier that you go that doesn't make sense.

How the fuck is he getting to there?

Yep.

Yep.

Right.

And that's like, fuck, he's just found a new way to do it.

He's found a new gear.

He's found a new, you know,

way to just go, okay, this is what I'm going to do.

It's like a David Goggins thing.

Oh, I'm just going to run 125 miles.

Yeah.

And to be able to maintain that drive, that's what's probably one of the hardest things because you have to have almost no rest.

And you're maintaining an insane drive for years and years and years while sharks are nipping at your ankles.

All of it.

Because they're all coming up.

Yeah, all chasing you.

All chasing you.

All chasing you, yeah.

And everybody's scary.

Well, I used to tell my fucking training partner, I go, fuck, the getting there, that's one thing.

Fucking staying there, that's the secret.

Yeah.

That's the fucking, it's so hard to stay at that level because everybody else is building on your, your experience, right?

They're going, well, this is what he did.

This is what he's incorporated.

These are the things he's doing.

You know, I'm just going to build on it.

Yeah.

You know, there's some weird rules to this fight that they had agreed upon, too.

And Jean Labelle said that Savage had brass knuckles in his gloves.

Oh.

Oh, what?

Yeah, I start reading, like, here, the rules he couldn't punch or tackle, or sorry, he couldn't kick or tackle them.

And in exchange for that, Savage offered to wear a judogi.

A judoge.

Oh, sorry.

Oh, that's how they wrote it up.

Yeah, no, it's a judogi.

That's a new outfit.

So they wrote a karate one instead because they didn't know the difference.

Okay, so in the parent belief that LaBelle was a karateka,

so

that's interesting.

So he made a rule that

Gene couldn't kick him.

So because he thought

that he was going to use it, he couldn't tackle him and he couldn't take him.

So echidna

tackles or takedowns under the waist.

Ooh.

So you had to only hip toss him.

Or only drag him to the ground.

Everything had to be above waist.

That's kind of silly.

Yeah, it's really silly.

Because it's one of those things where like, it's like Greco.

Yeah.

They're doing like a Greco bet.

Yeah.

A thousand-dollar bet.

Yeah, it's anyone who could prove that a boxer would be beat by a martial artist, I think, in a straight fight.

Wow.

This is way ahead of its time.

Yeah, I wonder if the Brass Knuckles thing is true.

Yeah, I don't know.

I'll try to look that up.

According to LaBelle, another source.

He was a bad motherfucker, Gene LaBelle.

Woof.

Ahead of his time.

Again.

And

again, that fortuitous meeting, him and Bruce Lee getting together where Bruce Lee was like, you know, the most famous martial artists on earth, the guys who's turning people on to martial arts, had the most open mind and had this philosophy of using everything that's useful, and then meets this guy and it's like, oh, oh,

here it is.

Yeah.

He would have loved MMS.

Oh, my God.

He would have been alive.

He would have totally jazzed on him.

Oh, my God.

He'd be at every fight.

Yeah.

That's one of those things where,

you know, again, it's just somebody being ahead of their time.

Way.

Yeah.

Way ahead of his time.

But not just that, but like the first guy that became a world-famous martial arts person.

Like there was no real world famous martial arts people before Bruce Lee.

I mean, you'd have to be into martial arts to know

martial arts person.

Yeah.

But Bruce Lee, like everybody knew Bruce Lee.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Changed martial arts, igniting martial arts all over the world.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's one of those things where I look back on it and I've read like part of part of the history and stuff and you understand it obviously way better than I do.

But, you know, like ahead of his time, just like when Gracie came along, ahead of his time, you know, and presenting something where he's knocking down all these stereotypes.

Yeah, and they had rigid stereotypes back then.

You'd have to like get in gang fights to protect the style that you were in.

Do you know, like, like, so I started training at Beverly Hiju Jitsu Club, right?

In California.

I remember that spot.

So, so, so, uh, so boss would have me, boss would have me out there.

Avi Rubin is the guy that owned it.

And I would go out there and I would teach wrestling a couple days out of the week.

It's how I got introduced to boss, Olek the Tariff, Marca Juas, and Pedro Hiso.

They were training out of there as well.

So you would get these guys, Jiu-Jitsu guys, that would sit on the outside, wait until the other students were gone, draw all the blinds, lock the doors, and go, Can you teach us wrestling?

Because they were so afraid that if they got caught there with me, it was like a traitor.

Oh, that's hilarious.

Yeah, that's hilarious.

So you would get like that's so crazy.

It was one of it didn't make any sense to me because you would figure sharing information would be better.

Yeah.

And it was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Jiu-Jitsu, we're not sharing shit.

We're not, you can't participate.

You can't.

It was so fucking archaic, like the outlook.

And it's like, like, looking back on it, going, God, damn, like,

wow, that's dogma.

That's like this, like,

it's weird.

Yeah.

They didn't all have that, though.

No, they didn't.

There's some guys who were open to teaching people everything, but there was definitely some schools for a while that were holding back techniques.

100%.

Like, I remember when Hoyce Gracie, one of my friends said that when Hoyce Gracie caught Dan Severn in a triangle, that he asked his instructor to show it to him.

He's like, you're not ready for that.

I'm not going to show you that.

Like, why don't you just show him something that works?

I reround that tape probably 50 times and i still can't i'm like what the fuck is he doing like what the fuck is he doing like i could figure it out like what the fuck is he doing because all of a sudden severin goes from beating the shit out of him going he's fucking tapping out yeah nuts we couldn't believe it i didn't i didn't know there's a name for it you could submit a guy off your back

like what the fuck

but if you look at it like the space where he had dance head and arm is like that big yeah it's like that fuck like when you when you do a triangle like this going that's not a very big space it's like to have dan because he's a big dude going oh i get it and your legs you could hold your legs in place for a long time your legs carry you around all day oh that's like especially if you actually get that foot under the knee where it's like really locked in it's not pressing on the end of your foot you could hold on to that for a long time oh my god and then he's like pulling on the fuck i'm like pulling on the

nuts changed everybody like oh my god you could win off your back.

It literally, I'm, I still remember to this day just looking at it with my mouth hanging open, going,

oh, fuck.

I think it was one of the things that made MMA so popular because Hoyce wasn't a big, like, he didn't look like you, right?

So, like, if you were dominating everybody, it would be like, geez, look at him.

Yeah.

But Hoyst

looked like an athlete.

Just like a thin, he was 175 pounds.

Oh, God.

Which is so crazy.

So, you know what?

So crazy.

I had a conversation with Hoyce probably about four or five years ago, and I'd never spoken with him outside of a competition or event or anything like that.

I cried.

He's such a good person.

Oh, he's a great guy.

He's a great guy.

Like, he was so just like talking to him, and he was just so...

powerful and so inspirational and just having this conversation with him was just like amazing.

I was just left the conversation, hung the phone with him.

I'm going, wow, what a, what a, just an amazing human being.

Yeah, he's he's a, he's a really good guy.

And the most important guy ever in terms of like the spread of MMA.

He's the most important guy ever.

Oh, prolific.

Because he's the guy when he won the first one and you looked at the way he did it.

Everybody was like, that guy?

Yeah.

And everyone was like, what's he doing?

Yeah.

No one knew what it was.

What is this stuff he's doing to these people?

Bam!

Changed everything.

Yeah.

Made everybody instead.

Because

it went from this idea that it was just the most brutal person to win.

It was the tank abbots.

But no, no, no, there's this one guy, and he's doing everything with technique, and he's not physically imposing at all.

And he's handsome.

He didn't make, yeah, he's good.

Handsome fella.

And he wears that fancy gee thing.

You know,

he's a bad motherfucker, and he's choking everybody out.

It's

incredible.

Watching that for the first time, I said, like, literally, it was like, oh, this is fucking new.

Yeah.

Like, this is, I've, because you've never seen it before.

No, nothing like it.

And then this, the sport explodes.

But the sport was getting fucked so hard back then by all these organizations that didn't want it ever to become sanctioned.

Yeah.

Like, because boxing was very threatened by it, and everybody had businesses with people.

And then there was so much bullshit that kept it.

Like, it was out of New York until like 10 years ago.

So we were on, me and my brothers, we were on our way to see

a UFC event in New York, and it got canceled and it got moved down south.

Yes, to Dothan, Alabama.

Yes.

UFC 12.

Yeah.

We were on our way.

We were on our way to go see it.

I was on my way to work at it.

Oh my god.

That was the first one I was going to work at.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

And it got moved.

Yeah.

It got moved and so me.

New York was like, nope.

Nope.

Ain't having it.

Ain't having it.

Ain't having it.

Well, they kept it out for the longest time, though.

There was the guy who took, who was really fighting to keep the UFC out of New York eventually he got brought up on corruption corruption charges.

No.

Yeah.

Shocker.

But it was like it had more to do with like unions and the fact that Zufa, who owned it, they also

owned hotels.

And didn't have unions.

Exactly.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So there was a lot.

A lot going on.

A lot that makes sense.

You know, I went to the first sanctioned, the UFC flew me out to go to, in New Jersey, when they had their main, main, main card in New Jersey.

Their first big event that was sanctioned by the New Jersey Boxing Commission with Tito.

And

they flew me out to that event.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Flew me out to that event.

And actually,

this is at the time they offered me to fight.

After that, they offered me to fight Pete Williams.

And it was one of those where they go, yeah, we're offered to fight Pete Williams.

You might have to take a little bit of pay cut, but you have to believe in what we're doing.

And I'm like, okay, let's pay cut.

They're like, we'll give you like an appearance fee of like 15 grand.

To fight to fight 15 grand to show up and then it would be doubled if i won and i'm like i'm making you know a lot more in japan like why would i go do it like

that's crazy yeah yeah that's a terrible offer yeah

that's one of the worst offers i've ever heard and it's one where where the whole idea behind it would be hey we just if you believe in us and you believe in directs you're going look we just got sanctioned in new jersey right yeah

So that's

the steps we're taking to move this to Vegas and to do this.

And one is like, you know, like most fighters, it's like, I have X amount of fights and I don't have more.

Right.

Right.

I only have X.

So that would have been one off my X number.

Right.

And I'm like, oh, man, I can't do it.

And they only ask once.

At that time, the UFC was like, we're going to ask once.

And that's it.

Okay.

Yeah.

Just leaving that alone.

Just leave that one alone.

That one's one of the like, okay.

Yeah.

Why not?

Why not ask me a second time?

Why aren't we negotiating?

I don't know.

If you were at Pride then, right?

So what year are we talking about?

2002.

Okay, so this was when the UFC was still hemorrhaging money.

Yeah.

And isn't that crazy?

Hemorrhaging money is still.

Oh, gosh, man.

It should have failed.

It could have.

I mean, one, if they didn't have charges.

Yeah, if anybody else was killed.

Yeah.

Because that's crazy.

They had no idea how much money you were getting in Japan.

Oh, they had no clue.

They had no clue.

So, you know what's crazy with Japan?

Here's what I ended up doing.

I said, listen, I said, they said, what do you need?

And I said, I need consistency.

And they go, okay, what does that look like?

And I said, pay me X dollars per month.

And then every time I fight, pay me a bonus on top of that.

And they go,

okay, how much do you need?

And I said, okay, I need this amount per month.

And they go, okay.

And that was just another stabilizing thing where I knew that every month I had X amount of dollars coming in that I could pay my bills.

I could do my stuff, not worry about that because it allowed me to transition to like, it's not a hobby.

You know, I'm not like fighting and then I go to work.

You know, it's like, this is what I do for a living.

Yeah.

That was the point of thinking about money investment.

Like by giving them more money and they get better camps.

Wouldn't you think the product would be better?

Yeah.

I mean, I don't like to think of people as products, but it is a show.

It's the program.

The program.

Now, I guess you don't have to pay for it.

You're going to just pay for the subscription to Paramount, which is pretty badass.

Yeah.

We don't have to pay for a pay-per-view every time.

But,

you know,

if they had more money, they'd be able to do a better camp.

They'd be in better shape.

All the way around.

All the way around.

They'd be better recovered.

They have better nutrition.

It's investing in what your product is.

And your product is elite athletes.

Elite athletes.

In order to get elite athletes, they need funding.

Right.

They need tools.

The only way they can get tools is through money.

You know, better coaches, better recovery facilities.

And I don't know the,

you know, I obviously.

Let me ask you this.

If you were like looking, like, say if your son wanted to start fighting or someone wanted to look to you,

would you...

If you were giving a young fighter advice, would you say go right into the UFC?

Or would you say, no, the best case case scenario is go into another organization like the PFL,

build your style up, build it up on maybe a little slightly lower level of competition, although not necessarily.

Yeah.

Still elite guys.

Submission grappling.

That's literally, I go,

you fundamentally, you need to build a base.

of what you what you're going to become, right?

So submission grappling.

ADCC, if a young kid, like 16, 17-year-old kid, even 18, 19, 20 year old kid, I go, you need submission grappling because you can participate in those at a competitive level that teaches you how to compete.

It teaches you how to prepare to compete, right?

And it teaches you without the impact of striking and punching and all of this.

So that's like the first foundational piece.

And this is just my opinion, right?

Foundationally is like if you, you have to have a mechanism out there, which allows you to compete without having the physical impact that fighting does.

So that would be the first thing, like submission grappling, ADCC stuff, you know, all of that really teaches you how to compete, to train to compete, and it starts building that base.

And then you start adding pieces in, going, okay, I understand this.

Let's add the striking components into it now.

And let's do these little like PFLs or let's do this.

Let's do that.

And it just allows you to build out something where you're not just thrown into the fire because that shit doesn't work.

I mean, the fighters have become so good now that you can't just throw somebody in there because it fuck, you get fucked up.

It might fuck your confidence up.

And

I'm done.

I ain't ever doing this.

Yeah, you could definitely reach an opponent that you shouldn't be reaching.

Yeah, for sure.

For sure.

I wonder that if you also, if you build yourself up in another organization, then obviously you have at least a name and the hardcore fans know who you are.

So like Rainer DeRitter, another example.

Okay.

Who's elite elite right now.

I say middleweight, but I can't believe he's really a middleweight.

He's so fucking big.

But he's a fantastic grappler, but he was already a champion in one.

So, he's a champion in one FC.

And then when he comes over to America and he starts fighting for the UFC, people are already hyped for it.

So, he's like immediately

getting tossed in there with Kevin Holland, immediately getting tossed in there with like very elite fighters.

And so, like, maybe there's

an argument for if you were like managing a fighter.

Saying like, don't just, if you're, if you fight well in the UFC, you might be three fights in and in the waters that you really can't swim in.

Yeah.

Because the level gets high very fast.

It does.

It does.

Like maybe you'd be better off getting a few years in at a different level of competition to really tighten your skills up and make sure that when you finally do,

you've been bringside for this.

You see when a young fighter, when he clicks and he gets it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he understands how to compete at that level.

It's brilliant.

It's amazing.

Like watching it, you're like, oh my God, he's like, he's in there.

Oh, my God.

It gives me goosebumps to think about it because it's that moments that I can look at and go, oh, fuck.

And, you know, it's a beautiful creation.

It's like a testament to the amount of hours worked.

Like, you know, it better than anybody alive.

When you see someone perform at like a super elite championship level, you go, you know how hard that motherfucker had to work to get to what you're seeing right now.

It's even, and this just brought this up just as a thing, like DJ playing me in the movie.

You just don't get there.

Right, right.

It doesn't happen by magic, right?

Right, right, right.

That's fucking work.

That's work.

For him, he fucking work.

Oh, my God.

He became you.

Like, he got all of your mannerisms down.

Like, down.

Not like an assimile, a facsimile.

Like,

creepy down.

Like, he even said he fucking walks like me he even got my little fucking walk i'm like

i'm like where like where do you hire a walk coach well the crazy thing is like that story was made for him yeah that it was made for him because you have to be that big to sell that yeah and you can't get that big that quick it's it takes you forever no we so we were talking about this the other day uh with dj is that like there's like uh

you know through the history of like you know movie making there's been actors that have like I'm getting big.

And they go eat, you know, Ben and Jerry's ice cream.

And then there's like watching the whole transition of what DJ was doing and how he's like, well, I just don't need to be big because that's one thing.

I need to be big, but put on quality of what I'm doing.

And so it's these fast Twitch.

It's like a wrestler, fast Twitch fibers.

You look at him and go, oh shit, he just didn't get big.

He put on specific muscle for what he was doing.

You know, and to be able to go through everything and understand going, he secluded himself.

He literally locked himself away uh for 11 weeks up in vancouver and didn't bring his family up which i guess he normally does and just went through his training camp jesus like going like going fuck okay you know like every day same routine get up do the same routine do this i was up there for fight week got all of his stunt guys all like this is this is foundationally because i'm not going to teach him wrestling 25 years of wrestling in fucking a month right or two weeks or a week or an hour it's like okay but let's get foundational pieces right because the people are gonna watch it They can look at the film and tell whether you put the work in or not right Especially someone like you.

Oh God.

Yeah, it was one where where that was the biggest deal For Benny is to be able to shoot these scenes without a stunt double

going how because because it just detracts from what he's trying to do as a filmmaker.

Right.

How do you shoot this whole entire well?

I'm going to give DJ foundational pieces of like changing your level for a double.

Here's where you get.

And like certain foundational pieces you have to have.

And then, like I told them, once you get to a certain point, everything from that point on is your own.

It's like when you watch wrestlers going, oh, he changes his level.

And then all these little nuances, that's individual.

That's individualized.

Like Michael Jordan, it's like the structure for a jump shot is the same, right?

But all these little nuances of like how to get to the position to hit a jump shot, that's Michael Jordan.

Right.

Right.

So I go, like a, like when I shoot a a double egg, like lowering your level, that's foundational, fundamental, right?

It's like attacking without my arms out, in tight.

That's fundamental.

But once I hit the person with, with the attack, right, double egg, everything from that point going on is my own.

Whether I tip him this way, tilt him this way, run them forward, run them backwards, sit down, change it.

It's all these little nuances.

I go, we need to do foundational and then you're good.

So it was a lot of work for him to get to that foundational point.

And once he got there, it's like, okay, you're good.

It looked very realistic.

The fight scenes were excellent.

Yeah.

It was like really well done to the point where it looked like the historical fight.

Yeah, they did.

And again, this is Benny, you know, just like him and how he wanted to shoot it.

I really appreciate that because it's like, that's hard to do.

It's hard to really capture.

Like, you watch a documentary or a docu drama, rather, on a person's real life when that person's a famous person like yourself.

And I've seen you compete for decades.

I'm like, I've seen it.

I mean, I remember those fights.

They got it.

They got it real close to the point, like, wow.

Yeah.

This is,

it's really well done.

And it also, like, it looks realistic.

It doesn't look, you know, sometimes fights look a little corny.

Oh, my God.

That was the one thing we're talking about.

There's always going to be a space for a Rocky fight.

Sure, right?

Sure, right.

Sure.

Literally.

Nothing wrong with Rocky.

Nothing wrong at all.

But that's not the film they were shooting.

They were shooting.

Like, this is how do we create something that pays homage to?

Yeah.

And something you can build off of and somebody can look at and go, oh, wow.

I think it's important if we're talking about Rocky, though, we have to say Rocky 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, whatever the fuck they got to.

But Rocky 1 was real.

Oh, my God.

I literally, I remember being in the theater and literally watching it and just like as a kid,

watching it and like, I wanted to be Rocky.

Dude, I drank a raw egg and I ran around the block as soon as I got home.

Oh, yeah.

100 fucking percent.

I mean, you're like, that's.

You're like, holy shit.

That was a great movie.

Oh, thank you.

And they tried to push him out.

They didn't want him to play the lead.

He wrote that movie.

Oh, my God.

He won an Oscar for that, right?

It was amazing.

Yeah.

It's a great movie, and it's a weird movie.

It's a weird movie.

It is.

It is.

Because

that's the classic underdog.

Yeah.

Overachiever, you know, but he doesn't win.

There are guys like that, man.

And that's what's crazy.

There's guys that are hyper fucking talented, but for whatever reason, they just never

Buster Douglas.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

Buster Douglas.

Buster Douglas got it together for one fight against Mike Tyson and pieced him up and did it artistically.

Yeah.

He was hitting him with a jab followed by a left hook, just whap, whap.

And it was beautiful.

The movement.

Wasn't that in Tokyo?

I believe it was.

Yeah, Tokyo Dome.

Yeah, I believe you're right.

Yeah.

That was one of the craziest

fights.

I'll never forget that.

I'll never forget that.

Because his mom had died.

Yeah.

And he just got it together for this one fight.

Wow.

And if it was one fight, he showed everybody what he had.

Yeah.

It was amazing.

Never to be repeated.

And then Holyfield knocked him out in the next fight.

Yeah, gosh damn.

But like

that one fight, man, he got it together.

And you go, wow.

So there's guys like that out there

that are supremely talented, but for whatever reason, they just never sustain, never can keep it together.

It's a mental thing.

I mean, all of it is, right?

I mean, just like you're saying, like the outliers, it's a mental thing that they have

a level or a gear they can get to, but everybody else just can't.

It has to be, or

there's got to be something, something they're doing that's so different.

And everybody's trying to figure it out.

Like, what is he doing?

Yeah.

And it seems to boil down to almost always dedication.

It's like, how dedicated are you to it?

And are you so dedicated that you're really willing to objectively look at what you do good and what you're not so good and change that and fix it and really tighten down your diet and really

get religious with yourself?

That's the ability

to be able to be...

just have the self-perspective, right?

This in-depth honesty.

Because a lot of it, like I literally, before Chris Campbell, right, I was just talking about, I thought I was training fucking hard.

I thought I fucking, I thought, like, I'm training fucking hard.

And he just grabbed me by the hand and goes, no, let me show you what hard is, right?

And so it was this routine where it's like, it's in college, my senior year, 6 a.m., I get up.

He would pick me up.

And I wouldn't be a minute late.

I had a chair that I put next to the door that I slept in for the last, because one time being late, he just throttled me.

And I'm like, it ain't ever happened again.

I ain't fucking ever happening again.

Man, it's right.

I just slept in the chair next to the door.

You know, I'd be like, all right, I'm fucking, because he would just give two beeps, beep, beep.

And like, all right, I'm up, you know, and fucking out the front door.

We'd go to the gym.

We would train in the morning.

So we'd do wrestling drills, stuff like that.

And then I would do cardio or strength.

He would go to work.

He was a full-time attorney.

He'd go to work all day.

I would start practicing with the wrestling team, warm up, and then I'd wait for him to get off of work five o'clock.

And then we'd train for a a couple hours and then get up and repeat.

But it's this level of intensity with everything had intention.

There wasn't anything that was left without intent.

Right.

You know, from how we drilled, how we trained, everything was very focused and intentional.

There wasn't anything like, I'm going to do this today.

You know, it's like, no, no, no, no, no.

Everything has intention.

This is why you're doing this.

This is why you're doing that.

This is why you're doing this.

And that's the difference.

That's the difference.

It's this intention of every single thing you're doing has this intention for an end purpose.

You know who Gordon Ryan is, right?

Yeah.

That's Gordon's belt up there.

Gordon trains 365 days a year.

Yeah.

He doesn't take any days off unless he's injured.

And if he's injured, he'll still be on the mats watching.

Watches everybody.

He says, I'm still thinking about jiu-jitsu.

That's his intention.

And it's not just training like hard sparring.

It's going over technique, going over counters, tape style

all day.

And that is

somebody who's living their life intentional, right?

Everything has end purpose.

Everything.

And it's why he's been able to do what he's been able to do.

I mean, I've looked at it going, if he existed when I was doing ADCC, I would have never won.

You know, because it's just a different level.

And

that's a skill set I had wrestling, but he's got a skill set that incorporates that plus 20 things more.

And it's nuts because he gives gives away the formula.

He's like, no one's willing to do it.

No.

And he just says it with confidence.

He goes, I put on all my videos out there for free.

You're going to watch it.

Isn't that fucking funny, though?

I mean, he puts techniques up all the time and shows you how to do stuff.

And he sells DVDs still.

He makes millions just selling instructionals because that's how much he knows about jiu-jitsu.

Oh, my God.

And he's only 30.

Yeah.

And

everybody considers him the greatest of all time.

You know, it's crazy.

It's funny to brought this up.

So, so when DJ and I connected again in 2023, when this got kicked off, green light for the film, he sends me this picture of Panther videos, Panther martial arts, seek and destroy videos

that are in a VHS tape.

He's got like 10 of them in the picture, right?

And it's Mark Kerr, seek and destroy.

Benny had found them and sent them to DJ, and he's like, study him.

So it's this videotape series that I did for Panther Production here, Sam.

Whoa.

So this is one of these things.

Yep.

And so, so DJ sends me this picture, and it was fucking, I was literally like, okay, I'm in.

Dude, look at the size of you.

You look like a superhero.

Oh, dude, I had such.

This is, I call it, I call it phone, I call it phone booth fighting, right like i like and it's like i could in a very small space i could generate a fucking shit ton of power oh dude you were a freak shit ton of power you were a legitimate freak and i remember like watching you fight the first time i was like that's gonna be a real problem

like that's gonna be a real problem

what he's doing it's one thing that you're giant but it's also that you got elite wrestling skills on top of that like oh

yeah this this might be a problem yeah oh my god all these dudes in karate gaze are like god damn it.

Yeah.

Oh, my gosh.

You're like, Phil, I'm turning in my gi.

And then the gi, the problem with the gi is anyone can grab it.

Yeah.

You know, it makes wrestling even easier.

If you allowed the gi still, I think there'd probably be a few people that get choked out.

But also, a lot of people get taken down a lot easier.

Yeah.

So even so.

He can grab the gi.

Higgin Machado.

Higgin Machado, I've rolled with him.

Right.

Jean-Jacques and Higgin.

And Higgin, it was like giving him an extra set of hands.

Yeah.

I go, dude, dude, I literally sewed the, so in Torrance, when I trained with him, there was like, there was one room and then another room and there was a door between them.

And so he had half of his class kind of all stacked up in the door watching us train.

And it was like five minutes with a gi.

And I just looked at Higgins and I go,

I ain't never fucking wearing this thing again.

See her take the gi off, man.

Fuck it here, have it back.

It was like, fuck.

It's a weapon.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, it's a weapon.

Especially a guy who's got really good collar chokes those guys are terrifying they get that thumb behind your neck and you're like oh christ it was like he was getting me in position he would tie up an arm like with a gi and i'd be like fuck now now he's got like like yeah like what the fuck dude it's a totally different thing you have to really be aware of grips and position and you gotta you can't explode your way out of stuff that's the that's what the argument for the gi is defensively that you have to get out of every position with technique you can't just pull your arm out your arm's stuck so you have to figure out the right way to do this.

Yeah, where you don't expose yourself because they have too much friction.

It's been a minute since I've been.

I'm like, no friction.

I mean, you literally, it's all friction.

I mean, it's like you slip.

Yeah, it's a problem.

If you have one, but the thing, Eddie Bravo always used to say, why would you want to train in that for MMA, though?

He's like, that would be crazy.

That would be like saying, if you play racquetball, you're going to be better at tennis.

No, play tennis.

You have to play tennis at an elite level.

You should be all your grips should be based on control of the body gable grips and yeah all that under hooks and over hooks and like you can't you're because that's the one thing that we saw with a lot of jiu-jitsu guys in the early days they were so used to grabbing collars and grabbing sleeves yeah that when they went to the ground they lost 30 of their game yeah yeah and that's again that's the evolution of

it's why like foundationally gieless grappling, right?

Because it just teaches you fundamentally what you're about to do if you're going to get an MMA.

Yes.

Right.

For sure.

Foundationally, it's like that's where you need to start.

Yeah, I think so.

You know, because even to the point where it's like you have, because you have a lot of wrestling in there and you have a lot of moves.

Like my first times at Abu Dhabi, the only thing I kept saying is small moves, small moves, small moves.

Like I didn't, like, like I literally, if I felt uncomfortable, it was these small, tiny moves.

Right.

And it wasn't this like explosion because it's like, fuck, I don't know what I'm going to explode into.

Right.

Right.

You know, so it's foundationally, it's, it's, yeah, gi's are, it's a different sport.

It's a totally different sport, but I think there's something to be gained from cross-training with the gi.

I think the gi is like, it's a fun thing to do.

And in most street fights, the realistic thing is you're going to be wearing clothes, especially if you're fighting in a place that is a, where people are wearing winter coats.

Oh, God.

Oh, my God.

That would be amazing.

So much stuff to be.

The smorgasbord.

So many things to choose from.

So much control available.

But for the, if you, if you really ever wanted to think about competing, I would say just go right into wrestling.

Wrestling and jiu-jitsu, learn that stuff first.

That's foundational.

Yeah.

You have to.

God, man, I can't believe you've been involved in this this long, Joe.

I know, it's so long.

I mean, you're a spectator to history.

I know.

I know.

I feel super lucky, incredibly fortunate.

You know, when I felt the most fortunate during COVID, because everything was locked down, you couldn't do anything, but the UFC was still putting on shows and you'd get tested and you'd have to get tested when you got there.

Everybody's wearing a mask until you get to sit down next to each other.

But we were in the Apex Center, and I got to watch like world championship fights with no audience.

I was like, this is crazy.

And there's only one of maybe, maybe there's 100 people in the whole room that are getting to watch these fights.

Like when we saw Stipe fight Francis and Guy, Francis beat him for the world title.

There was no one in that room, man.

Wow.

It's crazy to watch.

If you watch it today, it's such a weird video because it's an elite performance by Francis in his prime where he's like seeking destroy, going after Steve and Patient.

You know, it's when DC started calling him Patient Francis.

Yeah.

And dude, there's no crowd.

And it's kind of eerie.

Wow.

It's eerie.

Because when he KOs him and you hear people go, whoa, whoa, whoa.

It's like people are kind of freaked out.

Wow.

That's unique.

It's very unique.

And I was like, wow, there's so few people that get to be here

while this fight is happening.

Like when Justin Gagey fought Tony Ferguson.

Oh my gosh.

We were in an empty arena.

Wow.

The arena was completely empty.

It was only the UFC crew and only the people that were working around with the UFC.

Oh, my God.

There was no crowd.

Wow.

And if you watch that today, it's bizarre.

Oh, my God.

So I even thought, like, my first fights in Japan, how quiet the crowd was.

But not that quiet.

There was no one there.

The Justin Gage, Tony Ferguson fight, there might have been, I don't know, a hundred people, 200 people in the whole fucking arena.

It was nuts.

It was like totally

so spooky.

It was eerie because

you heard the slaps of the punches and kicks way different.

Oh, I bet.

Because there's no people cheering.

Because there's always people cheering.

It's always this background noise the UFC like.

Yeah.

And you hear thuds and stuff.

And I hear it a little better than most people because I'm wearing the headphones and the microphones are in the...

But you don't hear it like you hear it when there's an empty arena.

Wow.

There's an empty area.

You hear the thug.

I need to go back and watch that to see if I can get it.

It's a budget of shins.

It's getting me.

Oh, my God.

So I've sat there with a group of people that like watching somebody check a kick in here shin on shin and just me, nobody in the room getting it, but me going, oh, Jesus.

Yeah.

I don't care.

Like, I don't care.

That fucking hurt.

That hurt.

I don't care.

You can poker face that shit all you want.

Oh, dude.

It fucking hurt.

That's like a big fuck you.

Like, I know that hurt, dude.

I know that hurt.

I know that hurt.

I mean, the COVID times were dark times, but it did make me feel very fortunate to be working for the UFC because to be there live as a, you know, a person who's like, just loved this sport since it first started.

To be there live while those fights were going on, like, this is nuts.

That is just one of those where, you know, again, money can't buy that.

I mean, it's just one of those experiences, like, like, I've I've had a couple through this process of filmmaking where it's like

no money on earth could buy that experience.

Like in Venice, standing there, like literally, like I'm crying because, like I said, it was at the end of that, it was like therapy

watching me and literally settling into like, wow, man, I was a dick.

You know, I just was really hard on everybody around me.

And then having Benny next to me, DJ next to me, feeling their emotions and feeling DJ's emotions because they'd never experienced anything like it either.

You know?

Well, I think anybody trying to do what you were trying to do has got to be a bit of a dick.

I don't think, as nice as you were and you were always super friendly, there's you're doing something that's really insane.

You know,

you're cage fighting for a living in front of the world in your underwear.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

I tell people it's hot pants.

No fucking arm is in hot pants.

You want to know the truth?

Fucking hot pants.

You know?

I mean, you were a human superhero, built like a human superhero, and you're fighting for who the fuck expects you to be normal?

No, they do, though.

That's the point where I'm like, I'm like, no, I was a selfish, self-absorbed.

And I look at it, I go, okay, all right, I can accept that and understand that I was trying to raise everybody up.

And if you couldn't get with a fucking program, I didn't have patience for you.

Well, you had gone through, like what you were talking about, these camps, and you had gone through the kind of training that's required to reach the level that you were reached, that you had reached.

You know that, you know, what's in there for everybody.

And people that don't want to come aboard, you get mad at them.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

It's like, you're going to hold me back.

Yeah.

And that's part, that's part of it, like understanding, like, like, I just didn't have patience for it because I didn't have time.

I didn't have time for it.

Right.

Yeah.

It's understanding like.

like i know that x i only have x amount of fucking fights in me and i got to try to maximize and that's not going to work you know because a lot of that was assembling people that were accountable to me right and and you know money can hold people accountable in a certain degree but at a certain point it's like you know the training partners i had around me um it was like hey i can help you get to the next level

right that was kind of the enticement yeah you just need to make a commitment to me right right right right make a commitment to me and i'll give you that little piece that you're missing you know and that was kind of the the the part that i helped you know, go, okay, my training partners be accountable to me and, and I'll help you with that little missing piece of how to be professional, you know, and so

I just didn't have patience.

I didn't have patience.

And it's one where I'm nice, I'm cordial, all this other stuff.

But, you know, at the end of the day, I was like, I was demanding.

Do you think that maybe that

kind of drive played a factor in you having an issue with substances?

Yeah.

Because you just wanted relief.

Yeah.

Maybe relief from the mindset.

Yeah.

I, you know, part of it was that,

you know, you almost like I almost buy into the bullshit and I can never be this perfect being that I was trying to be.

And so I'm always falling short.

And that feeling of always falling short and this just like,

you know, I couldn't live up to what I thought I needed to live up to.

Right.

And so that was hiding.

And, you know, I'm just going to get a little relief from it.

You know, it's going to, so I can unplug.

Right.

You know, and it was just one of those where it started with pain, you you know, realistically.

It started like, ah fuck, I'm doing something that inherently I'm going to have pain.

Yeah.

You know, and it was this progression from that of like,

you know, from pain to,

I didn't know what an opiate addiction was.

Yeah, in all fairness, I think we should tell people to

back when this was all going on, the opiate epidemic had not occurred yet.

Yeah.

And people did not know.

And they were also telling a lot of people when they were taking these pain medications that they were not addictive.

Not addictive.

Yeah, they argued it in court.

They argued it in court that it was not addictive.

Oh, my God.

Which is really crazy.

Which I didn't understand.

Fuck, I didn't understand.

Like, I didn't understand.

Like, when I took it to the level that I took it, when I stopped or tried to stop, I didn't understand what being dope sick was.

I didn't understand like getting like physically sick because I don't have the substance in my body.

Like, I would get diarrhea.

I couldn't walk from here to the end of the room without having to sit down for a half hour.

It's almost like a parasite.

It is.

It's almost like a parasite that needs you to keep feeding it to stay alive.

Because like, how else could getting poison out of your body be bad?

Yeah.

How nuts is that?

Yeah.

That you want it bad.

You want to get it.

You want to get the poison back in you?

Like what kind of weird

biological mechanism is that?

The crazy part is the first recognition of like, that I'm stuck, that I don't know the answer of like, because I'm caught between, you know, like, all right, I'm going through this physical withdrawal and everything else that comes with it, or I'm just going to go seek the thing that's causing the physical withdrawal because it makes me feel better.

You know, so you're caught in this loop of just bullshit, right?

And then you go, I'll just have a little.

Yeah, just that's it.

I just need to feel better, just a little bit.

And, you know, so it's one of those where it's like, there wasn't the internet back then.

I couldn't fucking get on and like, oh, let's Google something.

You know, it's like, wasn't that?

So how did you figure out that, when did you realize, like i've got a problem um

god man

i always from probably age 14 really yeah i knew i knew when i first drank

first had a drink that i drank until i was drunk

Like because that was this taste of Jack Daniels and it was like, oh, this feels good.

It was like not a normal reaction

looking back on it going oh so I've always had a propensity towards it and then you know it functions both ways because I get addicted to the sport I get addicted to the routine I get addicted to getting in a ring and taking someone's will I get addicted to the crowd the championship the adulations the this it's like that's who I am right and it's a it's a contributor to my success but it's also a contributor to my to my demise you know in both ways it's like you you know from an early age i understood like hey you know this could be a problem you know and then when wrestling came along i didn't drink during wrestling like during that whole season i didn't drink you know in college i didn't drink during wrestling season like when you know when it's like okay uh you know i'm in recovery i have seven years of sobriety now congratulations yeah that's awesome it's it's for me it's it's one of those foundational things of like, oh, that's what I've been missing my whole life.

Yeah.

And you keep repeating that term for a good reason.

Foundational is everything.

Yeah.

Like having like, like morals and ethics, that's foundational.

That's foundational.

Having your health, that's foundational.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, because it's one of those where understanding like,

like

those are the building blocks.

Because if I don't have those things in place, nothing else fucking stands up.

Right.

Of course.

You know, I mean, it sounds like the duh.

No, but it's an important thing to reiterate because everybody should hear it.

You know, and comes.

It's a huge part.

It's a huge part.

It's it with most things in life.

Most things in life.

You have to have structure, some kind of structure.

You know, figuring out like my son, what, like what makes him function, structure.

He, he's told me this.

He goes, you should have been harder on me.

I'm like, fuck.

I'm like, okay.

I'm like, all right.

I didn't, I didn't know.

Hilarious.

You know, I didn't know.

I'm going to give you four stars, dad.

Yeah.

Could have given you five, but you weren't fucking hard on them.

I'm like, fuck up.

That's hilarious.

But he functions best with structure.

He's just one of those individuals that are built like that.

Right.

Well, I think part of that is kind of probably have seen what you did and genetics.

And there's like some learned memory in there, probably.

I think there is.

I don't think we totally understand where personalities come from.

It's a mixture of like

spirits and

hormones and genetics and where you are born and what part of the fucking moon's facing this world.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

I always wondered if that shit's real.

Oh my gosh.

It's like, yeah, well, Jupiter's orbiting around my Saturn.

And I always wondered, like, why are they so into this?

Is there something to this?

Because if there is, I would feel real stupid if I was ignoring it the whole time.

You know what?

Listening to Joe Dispenza, some of his stuff,

it changed my whole, it's changed some of my perspective of how, like just having, we're energy, right?

We're energy.

And your emotional energy is transferred to me.

It's like why I was addicted to dawn because of that exchange of negative energy, right?

Yeah, back and forth.

It's like being an addict, right?

I'm addicted to the drama.

You're also addicted to making up.

Yeah, that's the other one.

Yeah.

Because that's a feel-good, too.

Yeah.

Right?

Sometimes people want to get in fights just so that's just to make up.

Hell yeah.

I mean, it's the whole process of that fucked up shit.

It's how fucked up.

It's called fun.

No, my friend.

Buddy, I hate fun.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

So it's that really fucked up part of like understanding, like looking back on it going, oh shit.

Bro, when you guys were fighting in the movie right before you were about to fight Fuffchench and

it is such a crazy scene.

It's really well done, man.

Oh my God.

It's really well done.

It's how Emily flips that switch of like, fuck you, motherfucker.

Yeah.

Well, you wanted me to come?

It's like, oh, my God.

It's like, fuck.

That's what does it every fucking time.

It's amazing.

Like that little, like, oh, God, I guess they did want her to come.

I'm fucking asshole.

It's amazing.

It's so realistic.

I mean, they nailed it.

They really nailed it.

How weird is it for you to watch like a segment of your life be recreated?

in a movie is it surreal i mean it's it's so surreal i've used i've like i haven't found another word to explain right it seems like there's not a word that they figured out for that one there's not because it's just one where it's like you know what on the other side of it and this is just me going you know what I'm grateful.

I have a sense of humility.

I have a sense of just being like deep, profound gratitude that DJ, Emily, Benny, everybody involved in the film wanted to take this on.

Yeah.

Like

amazing.

Because I looked at it going, like a lot of it's self-worth going, you really want to do a movie about my life?

About me?

Like, what the fuck?

Like,

really?

And then understanding like what they see in me and the belief they have in the story and everything that's around it.

Because at the end of it, it's redemption.

It's like where I am today.

I'm so thankful that I have my health.

I'm so thankful that I have my sobriety.

I'm so thankful that I get to experience these things and share, you know, my experience, strength, and hope, they call it, right?

You know, with other people and give them going, look, look at all the fucking bullshit I went through and I'm on the other side of it.

You know, so whatever you're going through, anything's possible.

Yeah.

Anything.

Truly.

I mean, and

the thing about what you did is that, like I said, I thought it was so brave that you did it publicly when you did the Smashing Machine documentary.

And I was thinking, like, did you, were you

happy that you were getting on film?

So, like, maybe this like would make you get clean.

Was there any of that?

Ooh, there's a little bit of that.

Yeah.

Because part of it is that I didn't, I didn't, at that point, the only person on the planet that knew what I was doing was Don

right

nobody else on the planet knew what I was doing

and

so when John had put the camera down and he's he's like dude what the fuck are you doing like you're not being true full with us and I'm like well at that moment I could have went fuck you get the fuck out of my house you're done filming and there was this there was this moment where it was like I needed to tell somebody and I go

okay

like here's what I've been doing and I don't know who to tell I don't know how to tell it I'm just gonna show you and that's when it shows me shooting up it was that moment where I'm like you want to know what I'm doing well

I'm gonna show you

because it was one of those where it's like it felt like a weight got lifted right like all of a sudden it's just like oh fuck Did you ever think about not going through with the documentary?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So here here's what they ended up doing.

So I didn't see one stitch of footage at all until I saw the complete documentary in Los Angeles at the Dolby Sound Studios.

So it was like a couple of years.

Wow.

Not a second of footage.

So I sit down, the documentary as it appeared on HBO, right?

And the filmmakers aren't watching the fucking film.

They're watching me watch the film.

Right?

Wow.

There's like eight of us in the, in the movie theater.

I get

films done, lights come up, and I literally stand up and John Greenhall goes, what do you think?

And I go, I would have to get back with you.

And I just walk straight out, don't say another fucking word, get in my truck, start driving.

Back then, the phones, you know, like in the car, he's calling me on the phone, and he goes, you're going to be okay?

I go, I have no fucking clue.

I don't know.

I honestly don't know.

Because

the agreement we had in place was I had final veto over the content of of it.

But you never showed you the content?

Until that day I saw it in the Dolby Sound Studios in Los Angeles.

The content, the whole film, I didn't see any of it until that moment.

So literally, I drove home and John was like,

I go,

you have to give me a day.

You have to fucking give me a day.

I just fuck.

I said, I don't know.

I don't know if I can go forward with that.

I don't think I can.

I don't think I can.

It's just too fucking much.

Okay, so you did have the power to veto it.

Yeah, I did.

I did.

At the very end.

What made you decide not to?

John had said something to me like,

I guess it's like a parable where it's like, if you've lived your life and you've saved one person's life, you've had a worthy life.

Meaning that if somebody watches this, and sees your struggles that you've gone through and sees the hope that you

have in that in your recovery, it gives them hope or gives them, because what keeps you addicted is shame.

The shame of what I was doing.

It kept me, kept me quiet.

I didn't fuck it.

Who the fuck am I going to tell?

Right.

Right.

You don't

want them to know.

No, you don't want them to know.

Like, fuck no.

And so that shame is what usually keeps people.

But if they see me in the film go through this process and this deep revealing process of what was going on with me, it gives them an opportunity to go, well,

I can ask for help too.

When you got through the film, how long did it take you to get clean?

I got clean

off of morphine, off of the Nubane I was doing.

Right after all the way through the Volchanchin or all the way through the Fujita fight.

And I was clean for,

I started drinking, which is a whole nother topic.

But, you know, I hadn't done narcotics in,

you know, probably like three years after that.

And then I started up again.

And then it was this process of like start, stop, start, stop, start, stop.

And then the thing that predominantly dominated me was alcohol.

Because it's socially acceptable, easily accessible, you know, all these different factors of it.

And so that's eventually, like I've, like I've said,

so my mom passed away September 3rd,

1996.

And

so my son knows this.

And so my sobriety date is September 4th.

And so my son asked me that day, September 3rd, he's like, dad, I know you need to drink today

because your mom died, but would you stop tomorrow?

And at the time, I thought it was just another empty promise of like yeah yeah i'll stop i'll stop and next day i got up and there's just something a little different or whatever it was that day and i stopped asking the questions why because it's irrelevant right

um

and from that day till today i'm sober wow yeah

makes no fucking sense but it does it's like you get better at sobriety just like you get better at all other things in life yeah right yeah you get better at figuring out why And, you know, there's also the reality that I think a lot of people need to take into consideration when it comes to fighting is that

a lot of guys are self-diagnosing or self-dispensing something to make themselves feel better because they've taken a lot of damage.

Oh, yeah.

And they feel like shit.

And that's alcohol is a big one.

A big contributing factor.

A lot of former fighters become alcoholics.

Cocaine's another one.

Yeah.

Because it's one of those where I thought, I literally woke up, Joe, and this is no shit, like waking up going, okay, I don't know what's wrong with me, but there's something fucking wrong.

Like there's something wrong with me.

And understanding like all this different stuff, head trauma and all these different things and factors.

I literally thought I was like going off the deep end.

Like I was like, okay, alcohol or drugs was the only relief I got for what the fuck was going on in my head.

So the thing, what did it, was it past a specific fight?

Um, it was, it was literally towards, it was after 2006.

It's like 2006, 2007, 2008.

I stopped fighting in 2009.

I didn't know what else to do.

All my identity was tied up in being a fighter, you know, and understanding like these simple words of like, fighting is what I did.

It's not who I am.

Right.

I'm much more than that, right?

I'm much more than a fighter.

And understanding once I got to that point, you know, it's like that's when some of the relief came in.

But part of it, my head, like, there's something fucking i don't know what it is

and so i was just seeking relief because of like there's something that's fucked up in my head and i didn't know what it was didn't know what it was still to this day i look at it like

you know it was i call it a god shot because it was one where it's like something needs to change because this is unsustainable you know unsustainable with the alcohol unsustainable with what's going on in my head and you know get sober things quiet down you know it's actually quiet down that first year, it took that of sobriety.

It took to clear out all the bullshit that was in my head, going, I just need neutral.

Right.

And once I hit neutral, it's like, oh, wow, I can build on this.

You know, so

it's been incredible.

It makes no sense at all, but it makes perfect sense.

No, it does make sense because you're willing to articulate your deep thoughts.

your very vulnerable thoughts on, you know, who you are as a guy who was, you know, at one point in time one of the scariest fucking human beings walking the face of the earth.

And you're, you know, that's important for people to know and to hear and

to recognize that, like, man, a lot of people can get caught in that trap.

Don't think you couldn't.

Yeah.

You know, just be a little bit more compassionate and understanding and appreciate people for telling a very difficult truth about their life.

Because I think people need to hear that stuff.

They do.

They do.

Like I said, you know, what I understood, like giving them the permission for the documentary, saying to John, going, okay, if this could change or help one person, then my life has value, right?

Because I helped another person.

And then when it premiered at HBO at the studios,

this was like the whole crowning moment is having like a 65-year-old grandmother come over to me who I would have nothing in common with.

and say to me, you know what?

That was beautiful.

My grandson, he's got a drinking problem and I don't know what to do.

Wow.

You know, it's like this door had been opened where she felt comfortable to sit down and talk with me about her grandson.

And it was like this moment of like, oh, fuck,

this is what it's about.

It's about opening that door up so people can connect and go, well, if he can do it,

I can tell my truth.

Right.

You know, because it's difficult, man.

Addictions are just, I mean, shaming and they keep you in a box.

And it's just this, it's a horrible existence.

Did anybody ever recommend ibogaine to you?

No.

I've heard of that, though.

So they're doing that now in Texas.

The Ibogaine initiative passed through thanks to former Governor Rick Perry, Republican.

Wow.

Who, through working with veterans, found that a lot of veterans who struggle with addiction and PTSD, that ibogaine is incredibly effective.

Wow.

And it's not a recreational drug.

It's not funny.

No, no, no.

But it's a psychedelic that takes 24 hours and it's apparently like brutally introspective, but literally corrects addictive pathways, like whatever the connection is in the brain that causes you to be addicted to things.

It can disrupt those in a very bizarre and unique way.

And it's something like 80 plus percent effective with one dose of getting people to stay off of narcotics, cigarettes, alcohol.

And I think with two doses, it's in the 90s.

So if you do two different

Ibogaine ceremonies,

it was in,

most people were going, my friend Ed Clay did it down in Mexico, and he even had a place that he was running down in Mexico because you couldn't do it in America because it's illegal here.

But it literally stops the train of addiction dead in its tracks.

They don't totally understand how it does it, but it's very effective.

I know a lot of veterans who have

taught really like the neuroplasticity of drugs like that to create new pathways instantaneously.

I'd like to say those words, but I don't really know what they mean.

You know what I mean?

When I say them?

I'm just faking.

I know that's how you're supposed to say it, so I'll say it respectfully.

I don't know what the fuck's going on.

Neuroplasticity.

What I do know is my friends that I know that have gone and donned the Avagan, it's been massively effective.

Wow.

Get them off drugs, get them off drinking.

Wow.

Get them, you know, they just change their perspective.

They go, okay, I get it now.

They just realize where they were tripping over their own dick, like what they were doing wrong.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

Quick.

I mean, what else is like that?

Where like 24 hours later, you can get a totally new perspective in life and be cured of addiction.

And somehow another, that's illegal.

That's illegal, but the stuff that they're addicted to is not.

It's not.

Oh, my God.

That's like, yeah, that's fucking bizarro land, right?

Oh, my God.

Total bizarro world.

Yeah, none of that makes sense, man.

I mean, it just, that's, so that's a whole nother rabbit hole.

It really doesn't make any sense.

Yeah.

No.

Like, what we just said makes no.

It's just like, no, it should be the opposite.

Yeah.

It should be the opposite.

This is so stupid.

Because it's just one where it's like, if that stuff existed back then, it would have cut short.

Yeah.

It did exist, but it just didn't exist here because we're corrupt.

And so

again, kudos to Governor Rick Berry because what he's done is like open the doorway to right-wing leaning people going, oh, maybe we shouldn't dismiss all these things that God put here on earth.

Oh, my God.

Maybe some of these things are actually here to heal your brain and we're ignoring them because you can't patent them.

Like that might be the thing, too.

Not saying there's anything wrong with causing drugs.

But I'm saying that this also might cure you, and it's relatively, it's a plan.

So that's, again, in the last five, six years, alternative perspectives has been just

paramount in my,

just in opening me up, you know, to

having a better understanding of like how rigid I was and how, how just this thin line of thinking I had had for so long about stuff like this.

You know, and so you know, it's just been this incredible

experience to get to here because I've had to open up.

I've had to go, okay, I'm gonna do meditation.

I'm gonna do this.

I did, I did meditation for fighting, but it was visual meditation.

How the fuck I was going to dismantle a dude in the ring, right?

I would sit and do, but this is meditation to access different parts of my brain, right?

To try to get into delta waves and, you know, theta, beta, you know, all these different things so I can open different spots in my brain up.

Right.

You know, and so it's just been this, you know, my wife, she's Nichiren Buddhist.

You know,

Num Yo Ho Renge Ko.

She chants every morning.

Duncan does that.

Yeah, Num Yo Ho Rengeko.

So the buddha you have, the buddha, the gold buddha you have, we have one in our house, not quite that big,

but we have one.

Yeah, so she's nichiren Buddhist, and it's one of those things where she got me to start chanting.

Um, I don't do it as much now, but the first three, four years we were together, it's like I chanted with her regularly.

And it's one of those where it's like harmonics and vibrations and frequencies, you know, and understanding like, man, we know so little,

but realistically, all this stuff through like all the different stuff they discovered in Egypt with the sound chambers and all the different things.

I mean, it's a whole different thing where we just ignored.

Yeah.

And it's like, well, shit, we don't even,

we're so archaic in our thinking.

Well, I think what happens sometimes is thinking and ideas get connected to people.

And you think that the ideas and

whatever you think you know about history or about the way things can be done.

Yeah.

Like it's all it's all been solved, kids.

Yeah.

Like settle down.

Everybody knows.

No, no, no, no.

I don't think they do.

I don't think they do.

You should show me how they built that.

Show me who the fuck figured this out.

Like maybe they knew about medicine that you're ignoring because you can't patent it.

Yeah.

These people have been making ayahuasca for 10,000 years in the jungle.

Don't tell me.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

Settle down.

Settle down.

There's all the things that you think are valid plus other stuff.

That's the thing that people have to recognize.

You can't be rigid with what you believe in because sometimes it's wrong.

That's the part where I can't believe how much I've opened up and been just receptive.

And a lot of it's because I'm sober and it's like, fuck, I don't know shit, man.

Like when you look at the bigger picture stuff, I know so little.

Dude, nobody knows shit.

That's the scariest thing.

There's a bunch of people pretending they've got it figured out, but they're full of shit too.

Every one of us is a talking monkey flying through space.

There's just great way to look at everything over our head.

We are in a convertible organic spaceship hurling through the universe.

That alone, once you start with that, that's your foundational.

Okay.

This is foundational to your view of the world.

The problem with us is that we don't fucking see the stars anymore.

That's a giant problem with human beings.

We've screwed ourselves up with light pollution.

And it's not a coincidence that the people that live in the most populated cities are the most diluted, ridiculous people that are the furthest away from nature.

Not that they're not awesome people, but what I'm saying is, like, you, you are so far away from nature.

You're so diluted from being like a wild animal.

So, you know what?

I've actually done the last cookie.

I've hugged trees.

I've literally hugged trees and it feels beautiful.

Yeah, that's real.

It really is like

walking barefoot, right?

Like on grass and getting connected.

connected and you know i at first you would have said to me 10 years ago i'm like yeah okay whatever dude you know but it's like okay who says it who says it's not i think nature's a vitamin oh yeah i think plants hey where did the term tree hugger come from did it come from the time where hippies were doing acid probably

because then that would make so much more sense

because if you were on acid and you hugged a tree you would be like oh i love you

i love you tree you're so fucking amazing.

Oh, shit.

That originated a while ago.

From a series of nonviolent environmental protests in India, beginning with the

Bishnoy?

Bishnoy?

Bishnoy.

Bishnoy community in 1730.

Wow.

Who physically clung to trees to prevent them from being cut down?

See, those people are probably on mushrooms.

Whoa.

That's why they worship cattle.

That's what I think.

I would.

Why else would all those poor people not eat cows?

Oh, my God.

Cows are so good.

But doesn't that make no sense at all?

It makes no sense at all.

It makes no sense.

You guys have food everywhere and you're starving.

Starving.

And your religion won't let you eat that food.

Boy.

Okay.

How'd you come to this?

The only thing that makes any sense to me is those cows were giving you the mushrooms.

They had to.

Because that's where the mushrooms grow.

That's where they grow.

The best source of psilocybin

is cow poop.

Duncan used to live in, my friend Duncan Trussell used to live in Asheville, North Carolina.

And the farmers out there used to put a certain kind of feed into their diet to make sure that fungus couldn't grow in their shit

so that the kids wouldn't go in the field and pick the mushrooms because there were so many spores in that area.

These kids would go just get bags of mushrooms and go to other planets.

So the farmer had to feed.

The farmer had to feed him

some anti-mushrooms.

I want to see if it's still there.

I wonder if it is.

I bet there's parts of this country where they just grow naturally.

I would imagine.

Because once those spores get out there.

I would imagine.

Yeah.

I would imagine.

I was supposed to actually go down to Brazil and ayahuasca.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Isn't it crazy that you have to go to Brazil to do that, too?

That's nuts.

Yeah.

A friend of mine, we actually went down

to stem cells in Panama.

It's called Origins.

And so we go down there and he starts explaining like this.

For him, it was like seeing the face of God.

He said it changed his whole entire, whole entire being.

And he's like, it's in the jungle.

So there's no like, it's...

Yeah.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And he goes, it's, it's, it's life-changing.

I just picture Alex Pereira walking towards it.

Dude, totally, man.

Totally.

Like, that's a scary motherfucker, man.

I swear to God.

He's the scariest.

Oh, dude.

His walk-in is the scariest.

Oh, my.

Oh, God, man.

It's the dopest, too.

That music starts playing.

It's this like, I'm coming to eat you.

And nothing you can do about it.

Yeah.

Yeah, he's built for one thing.

And I bumped in him in Chicago and like, he's built for one thing.

He's built to fight.

Yeah, he's built to fuck you up.

Oh, he's built to fight.

Weird,

weirdly strong guy.

Oh, yeah, like, like, literally, it's like, like...

Like, he shouldn't be able to do what he's doing.

It's like, you know, I go, there's no wind up in his kicks, his low low kicks nothing there's no no tells no tell

like he looks sneaky really sneaky but he's got unbelievable power but the thing is he puts it together with technique it's not like he's just waiting after you trying to exchange with you and land first no no he's setting you up and while he's setting you up he's taking your legs away and you're not seeing the tells because

they're not there at all

yep that's it they don't move i'm sure by the time you think it's coming it's already there and you're like oh

and that's the whole thing is that you go, okay, you're thinking you're going to pick up on it.

And it's like, oh, you're never going to.

Yeah, he's very clever with that.

And he does it with both sides, too.

He's just as good with the left leg with a switch kick when he's fighting a southpaw.

He just starts chewing up those calves really quick, man.

I can't believe that he's even a thing.

Is that that nerve?

Yeah, it's a horrible nerve.

Oh my god.

That wasn't a thing when you were fighting.

No, it wasn't

crazy.

Oh my God.

You have to know it now.

Oh, my gosh.

Like looking at it going, oh my God, he's taking him out.

He can't walk.

Look at it's like five kicks in.

You're like, oh, fuck.

He can't push off of it.

Isn't it crazy that you went your whole career without seeing that?

Like, where did it, like, who discovered it?

Michael Bisping.

Yeah.

Even Michael Bisping said it.

I went through my whole career without getting calf kicked.

That's so crazy.

Yeah.

World champion.

Never got calf kicked.

Like, that's a good thing.

Yeah.

It was just really good thing.

But it's amazing that it came along so late.

Because it's unbelievable you would think that something that looks that innocent is so debilitating.

Well, Benson Henderson was the first guy to start implementing it in the UFC.

And then Mighty Mouse did it to Henry Cejudo and made his leg go limp.

Did you ever remember that?

He started doing it.

But this was like around the time where it started catching on.

There was one fight between Dustin Poirier and Jim Miller.

Oh, that was a horrible one there was a lot of calf kicks in that fight yeah i mean that's a copycat league right it's a copycat thing like watch another fighter go i'm gonna try it now we see everyone has it yeah everyone has it you have to have it and you have you can't take too many no no matter who you are no it doesn't matter i mean it's just one of those where it's so vulnerable it's it's one of those where it's like there's there's other than checking it or getting out of the way there's not a fucking shit you can do well pereira has a very interesting way of checking it so he checks it like the hacky sack way.

Do you know what I'm talking about?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, like, when you throw a kick at him, he just lifts his leg.

Yeah.

He just lifts his shit.

He has his knee there, and he just picks his leg up.

So the kick just kind of goes with it.

And he goes, it takes all the impact on it.

Because he was saying, as far as checking it, like, you don't want to check it because it fucking hurts too much.

Like,

even if you're just checking it, now that leg is fucked up.

Yeah.

Because why check it when you can just do that like hacky sack thing?

And he was showing us with it, like, see, oh, that's a different one.

He does that one.

That's a different hacky sack one where he uses the back of his foot.

Yeah.

But what I mean is

he is picking up his leg like at the knee.

His ankle is coming up parallel.

Yeah.

I know exactly what you're talking about.

You're not going to see it, but he's just,

he's clever.

There's a lot of cleverness, and it seems to be very creative, like the style that he has, like how he figures out how to, because he knows he's just got to land one.

So he's got these very creative little ways that chop out the legs yeah i still i still think sean o' mally's got the best feints oh he's got phenomenal faints i mean just so i i remember watching him before he got to the uoc and a friend of mine was like no no no you got you got to watch this kid you got to watch this kid you know and watching him going it would be like this just again and again and again and just realizing oh fuck that's what he was setting up yeah it was 14 feints right

to get to what he wanted to get to.

And then it was like a faint here, faint on this side, faint here.

And all of a sudden, he's got a tendency, and now it's like attack time.

Did you ever see the Eddie Wineland one?

He faints an uppercut and he comes over the top of the right hand.

I've seen it, but I haven't seen it.

Oh, you got to see it.

Yeah.

It's so pretty.

It was one of his prettiest knockouts.

He like, he stepped in, like, fainted like he was going to throw an uppercut and turned it into a left hand.

Oh, my God.

It was so clean.

Yeah, he's watching this.

Watch this.

Watch how he's.

That's amazing.

Look at that.

He faints a left uppercut and comes over the top with the right hand.

Watch that again.

And that's one of those words.

That's so crazy.

That is.

That's.

Oh, my God.

That's silly.

Bro, that's so bad.

Oh, my God.

That's like one of those things where it's like, you can't teach it.

You can't teach that stuff.

It's so slick.

It's such a slick move.

I cannot teach it.

Did you watch the Terrence Crawford Canelo Halver as fast?

Yeah, I did.

Woo!

Talk about slick.

Oh, my goodness.

Crawford just outbox, man.

Like, fucking unreal.

Who's ever done that?

Who's ever jumped up two weight classes like that?

Scary.

It's crazy.

Scary.

So, so realizing, like, watching it, going, Carnello has such a bully style,

right?

He's going to get in.

He's going to bang with you.

He's going to power.

And watching Carnello just or Crawford just

box.

Just box.

Beautifully.

Oh.

Beautiful.

Like, I watched the whole thing.

I'm like, that's art.

That is art.

He's so clever.

And just like the way, and it got to the point where he got so comfortable, he's like, pit-patting him.

And then,

what?

Bap, bop, bap, bang.

And you're like, you're watching, like, wow.

Towards the end, towards the final rounds, he really started getting comfortable and really started putting it on him.

I'm like, this is amazing.

You know, one of those rare, like, that's history, obviously, right?

Watching somebody do.

You shouldn't be able to do that.

You shouldn't be able to fight at that weight for the first time ever.

Against one of the greatest undisputed greatest of all time

and do what you did.

It is beyond, like my favorite, an outlier.

You're beyond an outlier.

You're something, you're an anomaly.

Yeah.

Something special.

Something really special.

I believe he's 37.

Yeah.

One of those where you shouldn't be able to do that

by any account.

By any account.

37.

My body was so wrecked.

I'm like, fuck you.

You know,

I can barely go bowling.

I watched a video of Dolph Lundgren the other day.

Like,

that guy was like, remember in Rocky III?

He was the first guy that was scientifically trained.

Yeah.

Whenever I think of like UFC fighters, like,

talking about guys doing everything scientifically, Dolph Lundgren in Rocky III.

Oh, my God, man.

That was a Rocky IV.

Rocky IV, right?

That was a stereotype.

That was a stereotype.

Like the Russians, you know, oh, they're manufactured.

You know, like

these biologically manufactured.

I came from a test tube, you know, type.

He totally looked like a Russian experiment in that movie.

He did.

That was the first time I saw a VersaClimber.

I was like, oh,

conditioning.

Look at that.

He's unstoppable.

Yeah, I was on a VersaClimber two days ago.

They're brutal.

Oh, fuck.

I hate them.

Not a lot of fun.

No.

Not an enjoyable thing.

I do an aerodyne, VersaClimber, a rower, and then a skier.

All the things that suck.

All the things that suck.

Like going, just shit, just, you know, but it's one of those where I'm like, you know what?

I don't have to do it for anything other than the challenge of just doing it.

Yeah.

You know, I think everybody needs a little bit of a challenge.

And just getting over the challenge of doing, like, I'm doing 45 minutes on this elliptical machine, period.

That's it.

Yeah, that's good for you.

Oh, it's huge.

Yeah.

It's huge.

It's given.

Because it's just like when I trained, it comes small wins, right?

I just need a win.

It's Some days I just need fucking a win.

That's it.

I don't care what it is.

Right.

You know, I just need a win.

Right.

Being nice to my wife, you know, being nice to, you know, just whatever it is.

I just need something that day.

Right.

You know, it's like, fuck, I'm going to go to the gym.

I don't want to get on a fucking thing that I hate.

And I'm going to fucking do it for 45 minutes.

And

that's a win.

And I think if you looked at the proportion, like if you looked at this, if there was a study done on people that are happy versus people that are not in this life, I bet the people that would gen

generally say they're happy get more of those

get more of those wins in over themselves yeah get more of those doing some shit that you did want to do but you did it there I'm done yeah I feel better and that that's that's the for me that's the link to get to where I am today is that I didn't understand how huge those components were yeah because when you're competing and stuff it's easy because every day you need you need to get wins right and you're stacking them right?

I'm stacking them.

I need every day.

I need a good training day.

I need a good training day.

And then you get to regular life.

It's like,

okay, what's the fuck?

I'm not, I'm not, like, what's my win?

I'm not doing anything.

Yeah, what's my win letting somebody in on traffic?

That's a giant problem for fighters, too, because

you're at fucking 9,000 RPMs for years, and then all of a sudden, boom.

Yeah.

And you're supposed to go to normal life now?

No.

No.

And I didn't, so this is, this is again where fucking this idea of like, of like, I didn't understand how much of myself was tied up in it and how much I needed to go, it's what I did, not who I am.

And understanding like this who I am has a lot longer career than this fighter.

Right.

It's understanding who I, like,

really getting into the fact that, you know, I'm much more than just a fighter.

You know, and understanding like, okay, what is that?

You know, I'm a compassionate person.

I'm empathetic.

You know,

I'm trying to be kind and understanding the people around me.

I try to bring, I call it emotional sobriety, right?

Like if I'm emotionally honest with the people in my life, everybody else fits in.

If I'm emotionally dishonest, people get fucked up.

My environment gets all fucked up.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

You know, so it's like, it's understanding these aspects about my life going, oh, God, man, I need to to make these the important parts of where I'm building and what I'm building in my life.

And it's been, you know, it's been a process.

It's been, some days I'm like, fuck this, man.

Fuck this.

And other days I'm like, that was just a day.

As long as you can keep that clarity of knowing that these fuck this days are going to pass.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

Well, I call it, well, in my Hall of Fame speech, I call it, you know, like when I was first getting sober, it was like, I just, I would try to get through a minute.

I go, I just need to make it through this minute.

That's all.

And then I just need to make it through this next minute.

This, I just need to get through this next.

Some of them are fucking hard because I just wanted to fuck this because I'm so uncomfortable.

You know, and I'd get through that minute.

I go, I just need to make it through this hour.

I need to just make it through this day.

And then it'd be this week, you know, and then all of a sudden it's like a month goes by, but I'd still have to go back.

I just need to make it through this fucking minute.

Right.

You know, like it, like, so like, it's just, it's just how I'm built.

You know, like this, this just self that just is so restless inside.

You know, it's like, fuck.

You know?

Amazing.

Do you think that that was accelerated by fighting?

Or do you think that was a preexisting thing that drew you to fighting?

I think it was accelerated by fighting.

You know, I do.

You know, a lot of it just, you know, I'm a competitor.

Being a competitor allowed me to fight, but fighting was like hurting another human being to the level that I had to hurt them.

That was a whole nother experience.

You know, it's like I could wrestle, I can compete, I can do grappling, but to physically beat, I had to flip a switch and turn into this other person that I'm like, fuck, I'm glad I know he's there.

But it's like, that's not, that's not me.

Right.

You know, it's just this weird dichotomy or this weird that nobody ever really gets to experience except for someone like you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or maybe at another level, a higher level, someone at war.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

That's, I mean, that's,

you know, I understand why there's, you know, a lot of the veterans and what they go through.

It's like, that's normally that's not how you're built as a human being.

Right.

You're not supposed to experience that and then come back and just be normal.

Normal.

Yeah.

Like, it's like, oh, fuck.

That movie Hurt Locker when he's walking around the supermarket until he wants to go back.

My God.

Because it's just one where it's like, it's not how I'm built.

You know,

I have

a lot more compassion

for other human beings.

But, you know, I was glad to know that if I got put in a fucking room with another dude, I was coming out, motherfucker.

That was a good thing to know.

It's a good thing to know, right?

Yeah.

It's a good thing to know.

Do you, when you look back, do you, I mean,

if you were going to give yourself advice, when would you think would have been a good time for you to stop fighting?

After Fejita.

After Fejita?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because that was, you know what?

And

like, if people understood, like, at that time period, like, I got sober.

I just fought Ensign.

And then I went and did Abu Dhabi and I won my weight class, won the all-around, which was a big deal for me at the time.

It was a huge deal.

And then if I would have won that championship,

if I would have won the Pride Grand Prix, it would have been mic drop.

I could have walked away and it could have been a Khabib moment where it's like, oh, I wonder how good he,

I wonder how good he could have been.

You know, it would have been a complete fucking mic drop, right?

Right.

But it's just at that moment, I knew that something had changed in me, that I didn't

have that thing in me that I needed to do it.

Because you need a thing in you to do that.

You do.

And that's what we're talking about, like a gear.

You need a different gear.

You need a different component to get to that level.

And if you don't have it, it's like, you know, they say in the NFL, if you're thinking about retirement, you shouldn't be playing the game.

So you were at a point where

your

dislike of hurting people was interfering with your job.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because, I mean, just, I had to, I had to just get to a place, which is just,

you know, just a place that I just didn't like being.

Right.

No, it makes sense talking to you, you know, because it's, it's funny you talk to certain people like yourself and and George, like George St.

Pierre.

I was just hanging out with him the other night and he,

my friends are always like, he's so normal.

This is so weird.

Like, it's so hard to believe that that guy is one of the greatest fighters of all time because he's so normal.

Yeah.

But

that that's also the beauty in it it's that's why people are fascinated by fighting because they want to know what can a normal person do yeah what can a normal person turn himself into what is possible yeah and that's that's the i answer that question for myself right and it's one where it's like okay

you know and

to get for me to get there was was so not difficult, but like I would watch film of me walking out and I couldn't even recognize myself

like my facial expression how i walked how i carried myself i'd look at it and go wow that doesn't even look like me

like transforming like into a completely different person and it's understanding like like compartmentalizing everything

like no emotions no nothing singularly focused to one thing and that thing was i'm gonna impose my will on you till i fucking take yours that's it

and for me it just was a darker place for me to go.

Right, of course.

And probably unsustainable if you want to be a happy person.

No, you can't.

But you can't.

In order to be the Mark Kerr that everybody loved, you kind of had to go there.

That's the only way to do it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's the wildest thing that most people will never understand.

Only a person like yourself who's actually experienced it will really truly understand what those words mean.

I mean, it's just one word.

It's a nutty requirement of someone.

Fuck yeah.

A nutty request.

Hey, you want to go fight in front of the whole world?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because it's, it's fucking, you talk about vulnerable, like vulnerable,

like fucking barren your soul.

That's

because you you get to a place of exhaustion.

You know, it's weakness.

You know, you're showing everybody you're in there you weren't strong enough to train to the capacity you need to train to to fight.

And look at this dude.

He's beating the fuck out of you.

And you got fucking hot pants on.

Boom.

Right?

I had a little fucking insult, right?

You have fucking hot pants on.

He's beating the fuck.

So, I mean, there's that whole thing.

It's very fucking vulnerable to fight.

Because there's, it's just, it's just very, like the loneliest place in two loneliest places in the world is walking into the ring and after the fight's over.

The two loneliest places I've ever been in my entire life are those two places.

Because there's no help when you're walking into the ring.

It's just fucking you, And you know that.

And after the fight, it's just you.

And you have to live with whatever experience you just had, win, lose, or draw.

You know, times I won, I felt empty because it felt like I needed to go do something again.

It felt like I needed to go achieve something again.

Like everything was so focused on this thing.

Once this thing's over, I need another thing.

I need to go chase that thing.

Oh, wow.

It's this never-ending.

Like for me, it was this never-ending because I was trying to to be enough.

I was just trying to be enough, and I could never get there.

Isn't it crazy that that kind of addictive behavior and thinking is almost the only way to make true excellence?

I know, because it fucking,

it's just so fucked up, right?

Like, like, come on.

Because I know, I know it doesn't only apply to fighters.

I know it's actors.

Oh, shit.

And I know it's artists.

And, you know, people that, yeah.

Do you think Steve Jobs had fucking,

I mean,

that's, again, singularly focused.

Singularly focused.

I mean, it's just this, it's the, it's the, you know, madness and brilliance, you know, are almost of the same vein.

Right.

And, you know, this driven component of me, the, the bane of that is that once that thing was over,

I had to go fucking chase something else.

And I can never fucking sit in that moment and be okay with whatever.

And,

you know, again it's one of those things where it's like thankfully i am designed the way i am you know because i'm finally in a place where i'm like i'm okay with me i'm completely okay with me you know and it's taken me a long time to get here well that's awesome dude i'm i'm glad that you got there and uh i'm glad to just be able to sit down with you and talk to you and tell you how much i appreciate first of all your career but you've been able to do that smashing machine documentary i think wasn't just eye-opening for a lot of people to realize like wow, a lot of these guys are struggling in a way that we couldn't even possibly comprehend.

It's all they're doing in private.

This guy just let us into his life.

Holy shit.

Like, how many more stories are there out there like this?

Opens people up to the conversation.

But also, like, having the courage to let people look at your life like that, I think it's pretty powerful, man.

No, I appreciate it.

And the movie's great.

And The Rock, you fucking nailed it.

Oh, my God.

I mean, The Rock, Emily, you know, she nailed it.

Oh, my God.

She goes crazy with it.

She got an A-plus.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, exactly.

For that craziness.

Well, thank you, sir.

Thanks for being in here, man.

I appreciate it, man.

I appreciate it.

Smashing Machine.

It is out October 3rd, right?

Is that what it is?

Yeah, October 3rd, yeah.

Yeah.

It's very good.

I appreciate it, Joe.

Thank you, Michael.

And boss Rutan tells it in it, too.

Yeah.

Feels great.

All right.

Thank you.

Bye, everybody.

All right, cheers.