Dr. John Gottschallen talks about how he became a martial arts fighter, and why he decided to take up the sport of mixed martial arts. He also talks about his new book, "The Fighter in the Cage," and how he uses martial arts as a metaphor for the dark emotions at the heart of human nature. This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. The album art for this episode was done by our super talented Ameya Vellian and was mixed and produced by Matthew Boll. Our ad music was made by Mark Schrader and our ad music is by Joseph McDade. Special thanks to our sponsor, Zapsplat. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and tell a friend about this podcast and/or share it with a friend who needs a good friend to listen to this episode. Thank you so much for all the support, it means a lot to us and we can't wait to bring you more episodes like this to the podcast. Sincerely. -Jon Sorrentino and his team Jon Gottschalkschnich and his book, The Fighter In the Cage by Dr. John A. Gottschess and his amazing book, The Fighter in The Cage by John Rocha, which is out now! is out on Amazon. Learn more about the book and how to buy a copy of the book here. It's available for only $99.99. or you can get a copy for $99 or buy it for $200.00, plus shipping it free, shipping included shipping it anywhere else you get a maximum of $50 or $99,00. and shipping includes shipping is free, you get two copies for shipping is $99 plus shipping starts will get you an additional $50,00 shipping starts, shipping starts start plus shipping is also a maximum shipping starts and shipping is included in your choice of $24,000, plus they'll get you two months of shipping a maximum starting rate of $25,99,000 shipping a month, plus free shipping starts are $5,000 a month and a limited shipping discount, plus two months, plus a discount, and shipping starts get you a maximum, you'll get two months free, and they'll also get an additional shipping discount.
00:02:18.000And that's the violence that I think that everybody has a problem with.
00:02:21.000What you're engaging in is martial arts, and although violent action happens in martial arts, overall, it sounds contradictory, but it's not necessarily about violence.
00:02:37.000So I go, you know, when I'm first looking at the cage from across the street, I'm looking at it with all the stereotypes that most outsiders have about the spore.
00:02:46.000And to me, it looks really, really violent.
00:02:47.000I assume that the guys over there must be of a screw loose.
00:04:39.000Publicity stunt, that's not really why I did it.
00:04:41.000I did it because you really don't know anything about it unless you've done it.
00:04:45.000Unless you've gone over there and gotten into the cage and been sort of locked up inside there.
00:04:50.000They literally lock you up in there half naked, you know, and you're with this other guy and this other guy's really scary, you know, he's a savage killer.
00:04:56.000And the only way to get out of that cage is to somehow survive these next few minutes you're going to spend with this guy.
00:05:03.000So there's an intensity to that thing that you know is there when you watch it from the outside But it's much different to actually feel it to feel what's actually happening to you to feel what it's like to get punched in the face really hard It was a tremendously educational experience to actually do it Did it change the way like did you watch martial arts before that or were you like really an outsider when you did you watch any UFC matches?
00:05:26.000Dude, I've been a fan forever Forever.
00:05:28.000But you still had, like, some preconceived notions when you saw the cage.
00:06:01.000And so I was not new to the UFC, I was not new to cage fighting, but I had a very much of an outsider's perspective on it.
00:06:10.000And I was confused about what draws people to these kinds of spectacles.
00:06:14.000What draws people not only to compete in the cage, that's an interesting question, But also, what draws people to watch combat sports or watch other forms of violent spectacle?
00:06:23.000People who are decent, civilized human beings.
00:06:55.000And when I went to my sensei and said, hey, you know, sensei, very carefully, you know, there's authority in these dojos, there's tradition that you question at your peril.
00:07:06.000And so I went in and said, yeah, you know, sensei Bill, you know, I've been watching these tapes.
00:07:10.000I watched them on Blockbuster, you know, Blockbuster tapes of these UFC fights.
00:07:15.000And long story short is guys like us, they're not just losing.
00:09:40.000It was just all about kicking, and when guys are only kicking you, there's a lot of things you can get away with that you can't get away with when they're punching you.
00:09:47.000And I had this, like, big enlightenment moment, like, man, I've been wasting my time.
00:09:51.000Not really, it turned out in the long run, because I learned a lot of things, and I developed dexterity that's very unusual.
00:10:11.000And so there's a lot of guys that took that style, like Anderson Silva's one of them, and started out as a Taekwondo guy, and then eventually developed all the martial arts skills, takedown defense, wrestling.
00:10:24.000But yeah, when the UFC came around, most people who are on the outside, they'll look at it like I've had so many people say that it's not martial arts, it's a sport, it's a martial sport, and there's all this silliness attached to it.
00:10:37.000But what they need to know is that no one knew.
00:10:57.000When I watched, I mean, I remember seeing the first couple of them, and I watched them religiously at first.
00:11:03.000I'd pause, I'd slow down, I'd rewind, I'd watch the movie, try to etch it, you know, into my memory banks.
00:11:08.000But I watched with a sinking feeling, like, oh my gosh, this is not at all...
00:11:16.000I started jiu-jitsu almost immediately after discovering it.
00:11:19.000I found out about it in 94 or 5. I think I found out, it started out in 93 and I think I came out to LA in 94 and somewhere in mid 94 I found out about the UFC. Yeah.
00:11:30.000And I didn't see the first one, I saw like the second one and I watched it on video.
00:11:58.000Yeah, I remember I was training at the Jet Center, which is a famous kickboxing gym in Van Nuys.
00:12:03.000It was right before it went under, because they had gotten damaged in the earthquake, and then once rain came after the earthquake, they got massive flood damage, and they eventually went under.
00:12:13.000But before they went under, that was where, when I first moved to California, I started working out.
00:12:17.000And Benny the Jet Orquidez is like one of the pioneers.
00:12:20.000Of not just kickboxing, but incorporating low kicks and fighting against the Thais and the Japanese with their low kicks, and then fighting in sort of no-holds-barred tournaments back then.
00:12:32.000And Benny had this, and his brother-in-law, I guess, Blinky Rodriguez, who's a famous kickboxer as well, would teach classes there, and It was a crazy environment, because Blinky had some family tragedy involving gang violence,
00:12:48.000so he had a lot of gang members that would train there and work out there.
00:12:54.000I remember this one guy had this really shitty prison tattoo on his back that said whatever his gang member was, La Plata's, and then underneath it it said, Fuck the rest.
00:13:04.000Like, tattooed big on his back like a 12-year-old drew it in there.
00:14:05.000There was a lot of extreme promotions.
00:14:07.000Yeah, but they had a montage, like a training montage thing for one of the fighters, and he was training at Carlson Gracie's.
00:14:15.000And I knew that Mario Sperry trained there, and he was like one of the big guys at the time.
00:14:20.000Murillo Bustamante was there and Vitor Belfort was there before he made his UFC debut I came in there right when he was making his debut he had just I got there when he was about to fight John Hess in Hawaii and he fought John Hess in Hawaii who had fought in the UFC and beat the fuck out of him in about 10 seconds it was like one of the craziest fights ever he got on top of him and just I think he went knee to the belly on him and just uncorked about 50 punches to his face like Nobody had seen anybody like Vitor.
00:15:00.000Immediately upon going to Carlson Gracie's, I was just manhandled and thrown around like a little baby and strangled left and right.
00:15:10.000I was like, Jesus Christ, I'm fucking helpless.
00:15:12.000I had this delusional idea that I could defend myself.
00:15:16.000But as a white belt in jiu-jitsu, even with a year of high school wrestling, I kind of knew how to wrestle a little.
00:15:21.000I knew how to get on top of guys, and then I'd get triangled or armbarred or guillotined, and they'd take my back, and I didn't know what the fuck to do with the gi.
00:17:03.000Because if they go easy, they're afraid that their guy's going really hard all the time.
00:17:07.000If they go hard, it's practically a coin flip that they're going to get through to the fight without getting injured in some way.
00:17:14.000Well, one of the best gyms, American Kickboxing Academy, Dana White was just talking about how they train like cavemen, like they've got to get out of Stone Age.
00:17:49.000The problem is, like, other sports would have this problem, except they have an authority that governs it and makes everyone behave the same way.
00:17:59.000So the NFL, for instance, or the NCAA, like football teams, for instance, they're allowed to practice so many hours a week, and that's it.
00:18:21.000Because anytime anybody goes, well, the people in the NFL, well, people in the NFL, first of all, that fucking whistle blows, and you get a nice, juicy break.
00:18:29.000You know, you get to catch your breath, walk around offsides, you get that guy talks, and he says a bunch of shit that went wrong, and everybody complains, and it's a joke.
00:18:39.000If you compare the amount of effort you have to put forth in an NFL, sure, the collisions are horrific, sure, I mean, you've got to work out hard to be that fucking big and strong, there's no doubt about it, but As for, like, the life and death experience of being in the cage,
00:19:32.000So I think he expected, as a lot of guys who opened those gyms did, that the level of popularity as a spectator sport would track with the level of participation.
00:19:44.000So maybe most nights would be 15 guys there, something like that.
00:20:52.000And after that, he didn't exactly go easy on me, but he let me live.
00:20:57.000And that happens, I was pretty explicit about it, but I think that kind of language, that kind of communication is going on a lot at a gym.
00:21:18.000Like, you'll automatically go in defensive mode, which is also very dangerous for the guy who's the best guy in the gym because you can get a very inflated sense of your abilities if you're always...
00:21:30.000There's certain fighters that fought in lower-level organizations and then came over to the UFC. And as they came over to the UFC, one of the first things that was clear was that they had never faced another killer.
00:21:41.000Like, they might be a killer themselves, but they had never faced another killer.
00:21:44.000And then when faced a killer in the UFC, they'd be like, oh, this is what it's like to fight me.
00:22:30.000But that's, you know, it's finding that perfect balance of competition, but of also, you know, like, you've got to figure out how to not kill each other inside the gym.
00:22:42.000You've got to compete and push each other.
00:22:44.000And oftentimes it's just a matter of just pulling back on shots of not trying to knock each other out because the guys who try to knock each other out man that fucking that style of sparring that just cannot cannot maintain No,
00:22:59.000I think it's really dominant there are guys in my gym like that guys who apparently can't pull the punch either by either by lack of athleticism and You know what I mean?
00:23:08.000It's kind of actually a hard thing to throw the punch as hard as you can.
00:24:22.000Are you still, after you wrote the book?
00:24:23.000I did, you know, this was a big thing that, this was the big surprise for me about doing this whole project was, again, I look at it from across the street.
00:24:30.000I'd always been a fan, but I never really wanted to do it myself.
00:24:33.000I wanted to do jujitsu, but I didn't really want to be a cage fighter.
00:25:19.000I have this really dull life in a lot of ways.
00:25:23.000And then for a few hours a week, I go in and I take these risks in the gym and I experience these big emotions and these big highs, you know.
00:25:32.000And then about a year ago, I got so beat up that I really just couldn't continue anymore.
00:25:37.000And giving up was one of the hardest things I've ever done.
00:25:39.000It was like, you know, I kind of felt like this romance in my life had come to an end.
00:25:44.000And I was too brittle and too old, you know, to recapture it.
00:25:52.000I always expected for it to end badly.
00:25:54.000You know, I knew I was kind of pushing my luck, and I figured I'd go out on my shield at some point, you know, go out on a stretcher after some horrible head injury or blow up my knee or something like that.
00:28:23.000Yeah, you can't do that, obviously, if you're fighting for your life against someone good.
00:28:28.000If you're grappling with someone really good, jujitsu's harder, because it's fighting to the death.
00:28:33.000If there's someone who's just a little bit better than you, or a solid notch better than you, and they're trying to kill you, but they're not good enough that you're in total defensive mode, you're still in the game.
00:28:46.000You get to heart attack stages where you're like, this might end right here.
00:28:50.000This whole fucking life on this planet might end right here for me.
00:29:02.000I mean, I was going to write something about it.
00:29:04.000I might write it still like a blog entry about it.
00:29:07.000How there's this life or death struggle that's going on in these hot rooms all over the country and no one knows how difficult it really is.
00:29:15.000Everybody thinks it's like really easy because a bunch of women are doing it.
00:29:19.000I think guys don't get it at all because I'm always there and I kind of like the female environment of it.
00:29:24.000I like that it's such a big transition from the gym, you know, where like it's non-competitive and the whole, even if there's a male teacher, The whole culture is still female.
00:30:10.000I do get the feeling that I am working harder.
00:30:13.000Because I'm newer and I have to work really hard to get into these positions because my flexibility sucks.
00:30:19.000And with these women, a lot of them are super flexible and they seem to get into those positions pretty effortlessly and hold them with less vibration.
00:31:34.000But, you know, again, I think there's a balance issue.
00:31:37.000And I think when you're all the time just...
00:31:39.000All the explosion, lifting weights, kettlebells, and fucking...
00:31:44.000I think it's good to do, like, static tension-relieving, long-holding those poses, stretching, elongating the muscles, stretching out all the tissue, stretching out all the hamstrings and the back muscles, and there's so much stretching going on,
00:32:01.000I realize what I'm doing, and I'm like, I don't ever do this.
00:32:17.000I don't think you should have only yoga.
00:32:19.000I think it's good to put weight on your body and your muscles because it's good for your density of your bones, it maintains mass, it keeps you from getting frail, especially as you get older.
00:32:31.000Stretching and yoga positions should be almost mandatory for people to get their shit together You know, it's it's it makes you way calmer.
00:32:38.000I don't know why I mean, I wish I wonder if it's just physical tension being released or if just Stretching itself if there's something in the act of doing so that just when it's over Everything else just seems like calm and relaxed like the difficulty of those poses.
00:32:57.000Yeah I always felt like it burns so much energy.
00:33:03.000You don't have anything left to torture yourself with afterwards.
00:35:58.000I mean, part of what you were feeling when you saw those guys across the street and they were living their life, you realize that you were contained.
00:37:12.000An adjunct is like not a full-time faculty member.
00:37:15.000So, you know, for like almost 10 years, I've been making about 16 grand a year, you know, just kind of chasing this dream of being a boyhood dream, really, of being a college professor, of being a scholar.
00:37:28.000I wanted to be that guy, like the guy who makes some small but Meaningful contribution to knowledge and I've been chasing that dream for a long time and writing books and doing the articles and doing all kinds of stuff but it just wasn't my research was a little bit non-conventional and it just wasn't I wasn't making it you know what I mean and so and I just didn't have the courage to quit it wasn't I don't know if it was a courage thing or if it was a A desire thing.
00:37:58.000I don't like quitting on something I've invested in.
00:38:01.000You know, it's like if you're gambling, you know, you throw money in the pot.
00:38:03.000You don't want to fucking fold, even though you know you should fold.
00:38:07.000And so when I started, when I went across the street that first time, I made that joke at my own expense.
00:38:13.000It wouldn't be funny if I went over there.
00:38:14.000Part of it, part of what was driving me to cross over there was a career suicide fantasy.
00:38:19.000I was thinking to myself, well, you apparently don't have the courage to quit your job and move on to something else.
00:38:23.000Maybe you can do something offensive enough to people in your profession that will get you fired.
00:38:29.000And so if I showed up in the cage, everybody in my department would be able to, honest to God, like look up from the poems they were reading, you know, reading their poems, they look up and they'd be able to see me right across the street, you know, engaged in blood sport.
00:38:43.000And they don't really approve of blood sport in English departments.
00:38:46.000What has the reaction been amongst your peers?
00:39:16.000The bigger question is what effect will it have within the larger profession?
00:39:21.000Will it be an effective career suicide strategy once other people in the profession get a hold of the book?
00:39:26.000And I do think probably it'll be a success as a career suicide strategy.
00:39:32.000About two weeks after the book came out, this article came out about me and about the book in this magazine that no one reads in the real world called The Chronicle of Higher Education.
00:39:41.000But it's the main trade magazine for academia.
00:39:45.000And the book comes off pretty much as a...
00:39:49.000Glorification of macho barbarism in their thinking.
00:39:53.000You know, a dumb glorification of butchery and barbarism.
00:40:12.000So that could be effective in ending my career, because that's a guy, like I read about that, and I read the article, I said to my wife, like, okay, that ends it.
00:40:54.000So, one example he quotes in the book is, like, we're at lunch.
00:40:58.000You know, and we're having a nice time, and at some point, I lean across the table toward him, and I say to him, like this, you know, across the table in an intimidating fashion, what would it take?
00:41:11.000What would I have to say to get you to punch me in the face?
00:41:50.000Well, maybe that's just how he took it.
00:41:53.000Some people are super uncomfortable with any idea, like any form of conflict, you know, and they would like to categorize any kind of violent interaction, even voluntary violent interaction, like a mixed martial arts competition, as being barbaric,
00:43:26.000And you have to do that intelligently, and it has to be done in the watchful eye.
00:43:30.000of trainers and along the way there's all these variables you have to take into account strength and conditioning what kind of a body type are you dealing with what you know what skill set do you have what needs to be improved objectivity objectively and analyzing your strengths and weaknesses looking at your skill set looking at the weapons that you have that you need to keep sharp and looking at ones that you need to acquire there's so many variables to me it's the ultimate Problem-solving,
00:44:00.000I don't think there's anything like it.
00:44:02.000But I have a problem with a lot of the assholes.
00:44:06.000I have a problem with a lot of the thuggish behavior.
00:44:08.000I have a problem with, I mean, even though I know a lot of it is psychological warfare and trying to intimidate each other, I have a problem with some of that.
00:44:15.000I have a problem with the damage that guys take.
00:44:20.000I have a real problem with guys not knowing when to get out, with their friends telling them, listen man, just gotta put together one hard camp.
00:44:26.000You're like, no, no, he's been knocked out seven fucking times.
00:44:29.000Like, no, he needs to preserve his brain for the rest of his life.
00:44:33.000Have you ever met an old man that used to fight?
00:45:13.000Yeah, it's possible that there'll come a day where I can't do it anymore, that I don't want to do it anymore.
00:45:18.000I'll probably always be a fan to some extent.
00:45:22.000But like my favorite guy is Mighty Mouse.
00:45:24.000You know, people think like my all-time favorite guys Some of the craziest like Vanderlei Silva is one of my all-time favorites because his fights were fucking chaos You knew if you're gonna watch a Vanderlei Silva fight that dude across the ring and he's wiggling his wrists back in the pride days doing this shit He was probably one of the best middleweights ever You know,
00:45:47.000or light heavyweight in that division is 203, but they called it middleweight.
00:45:51.000They called the 185 pound division was Walter weight, I think.
00:45:58.000But Vanderlei, who was just the opposite of like...
00:46:47.000He doesn't get the attention because of that.
00:46:50.000No, but other than that, Fedor, who was just violence, every one of his fights was violence, but intelligence, and Anderson, who was just a wizard.
00:46:58.000Anderson in his prime was the wizard of all wizards.
00:47:01.000He would pull off things where you'd just go, get the fuck out of here, what did I just see?
00:49:06.000When he was on the bottom and Rockhold was beating him up, he said to the referee something and pointed to his mouth that he didn't have a mouthpiece in, and the referee didn't pick it up.
00:50:03.000But at the same time, we know it costs these guys too much.
00:50:07.000I guess my question is, is there any way out of this devil's bargain?
00:50:10.000Is there a way that we can make these sports safer than it is?
00:50:17.000Well, I think you and I are both in agreement with the gloves issue and you wrote something about it and I discussed it with Sam Harris.
00:50:25.000I've discussed it with a bunch of people.
00:50:26.000I feel like This would kind of be contradictory for people who don't train in martial arts, but I'll try to explain it visually for people who watch this, which is a much smaller percentage of the population.
00:50:39.000If you look at someone's wrist, your wrist, when you hit things, Your wrist tends to wiggle around.
00:50:47.000It's very hard to keep your wrist stiff and hit things hard, especially repeatedly when you're bouncing your wrist off of elbows and shoulders and even foreheads.
00:50:58.000You tend to break your hands much easier if you don't have wraps.
00:51:02.000And when you see a fighter in the UFC and they have those gloves on, those gloves aren't really protecting the other opponent, the opponent, the person you're punching, nearly as much as they're protecting the person who's punching the opponent.
00:51:13.000But the big thing to me is not just the gloves, it's the wraps.
00:51:17.000I feel like when you tape up your wrist...
00:51:21.000Yeah, you tape up your wrist, you tape up your hands, you make that thing hard as fuck.
00:51:26.000Before I work out, before I hit the bag or hit the pads or anything like that, I tape this fucking bitch down, I go in between my knuckles, I have these pads that I put over my knuckles, and I tape over them, and then I go everything with athletic tape, and at the end of it,
00:51:43.000You can slam things with it, and it just, it's unnatural.
00:51:47.000You have an unnatural situation with your hands, and when people say, well, it looks barbaric if you bare knuckle, let me tell you something, you would be way better off with me bare knuckle punching you than you would with me kicking you with my shin.
00:52:04.000Head kicks, heel, like, when you see, like, Terry Edom versus Edson Barbosa, and Edson Barbosa wheel kicks him in the head, there is not a fucking punch that's ever been thrown by a human being, ever, that has the kind of power that a fucking wheel kick has.
00:52:20.000Your legs are, I mean, especially not that weight class, you'd have to have, like, the biggest, most giant heavyweight boxer, and still, I don't think they could probably punch as hard as a world-class kickboxer can throw a kick like that.
00:52:33.000I mean, one of the things that was interesting to me is there's a paper out in some journal, like the Canadian Journal of Criminology, not Criminology, sorry, Sports Medicine or something like that, went through all the UFC fights over, like, I'd say a decade, and saw how they ended.
00:52:50.000And when it came to KOs and TKOs, 85% of them were from the hands.
00:52:56.000So my feeling is, you know, again, people have the wrong idea about these gloves.
00:54:10.000It's a well-intended thing where a well-intended humanitarian gesture will make the sport safer by putting these pillows on these guys' hands.
00:54:18.000And the UFC made exactly the same mistake 130 years later or something.
00:54:24.000They were on the verge of getting outlawed.
00:54:27.000They were having all kinds of political problems.
00:54:30.000They said, we're going to outlaw these really brutal-looking techniques, and we are also going to take away the prime symbol In the public's mind of the savagery of cage fighting, which is bare-fisted fighting.
00:54:44.000When we say, we're going to take the gloves off, that means we're going to resort to a really primitive style of brutality.
00:54:51.000And so So it was a well-intended gesture that backfired in a tragic way.
00:54:58.000So people think that the sort of savagery and the damage and the danger, the neurological danger especially, of fighting is intrinsic to the sport and unavoidable.
00:55:12.000You could massively decrease the danger, the neurological danger of the sport, just by taking off the gloves.
00:55:19.000But could you, because a big percentage of the blows that guys receive, they receive in training, and you're very unlikely to train bare and uncle.
00:56:16.000I think if you had, like, there is a position that you could get where you could have your arm wrapped around a guy's neck and grab your own shorts and use your own shorts to aid in the choke.
00:56:29.000I wonder if you could do it offense, I probably should know this, seeing as I do it for a living, but I know that you can use it defensively, which is big with Kim Warris.
00:56:37.000If a guy's going for a shoulder lock and you reach deep into your shorts and you hold on to them, it could be just enough to protect you, to keep you from getting tapped.
00:56:48.000But I think, you know, if you take the gloves off, too, I've argued with some people about this.
00:56:53.000They're like, well, if you did that, then guys would just throw more kicks, they'd throw more knees, they'd throw more elbows.
00:57:27.000If you get a guy who's a really good kicker and you take away the gloves, you just made his kicks better because now he doesn't have to worry nearly as much about the other guy's punches.
00:57:39.000The defender wouldn't be as vulnerable to the kick because he can look for the kick more because he doesn't have to beware of the other guy's fist.
00:57:47.000But you're right, the kicker doesn't have to worry about it.
00:57:50.000One of the biggest problems with the gloves is the fact that the fingers are wide open and guys are poking each other in the eye all the time.
00:58:34.000I'll take the less likely to get the eye pokes.
00:58:36.000Because I think the eye pokes, that's a huge tragic issue.
00:58:40.000For people who aren't familiar with the sport, Muay Thai, the art of Thai boxing, they have a very specific style of using the hands.
00:58:53.000Well, they'll put the hands on the forehead and they'll throw knees.
00:58:56.000They'll put the hands up and they'll throw kicks.
00:58:59.000They have a lot, especially in different practitioners, they have a lot of ways of using it.
00:59:05.000But when they're doing it in the gym or in the ring, they're usually wearing big boxing gloves.
00:59:09.000And the boxing gloves don't have anything free to poke.
00:59:12.000But fingers, in the MMA gloves, the fingers are completely exposed.
00:59:16.000And when guys utilize the same techniques to try to keep a guy off them, they oftentimes wind up poking guys right in the eyes, and they cause irreparable damage.
00:59:25.000Guys like Alan Belcher, he's been out of the UFC for a long time.
00:59:28.000He had knee eye surgery, like significant eye surgery.
00:59:31.000Michael Bisping had significant eye surgery.
01:01:59.000Because a rematch with TJ Dillashaw, the fight was one of the fights of the year, one of the upsets of the entire history of the UFC, one of the biggest upsets.
01:02:08.000Spectacular performance by T.J. Dillashaw.
01:02:10.000Hennenborough trains like a monster ready for this comeback and then passes out in the sauna or the bathtub, I guess, and cracked his head off the wall and they wouldn't let him fight him.
01:02:20.000He knocked himself out trying to get up out of the tub.
01:02:42.000You think about what these guys have to do in the fucking sauna to drop 20 pounds of water weight and that they do it every three or four months.
01:02:51.000Yeah, I only had one actual fight, but I cut weight twice because the first fight I showed up to and my opponent, fearing the legendary fistic prowess of English professors, He backed out.
01:03:23.000You know, it's small-time, amateur shows, and a lot of guys just say, hey, you know, well, this seemed like a good idea a couple months ago, but, you know, as it got close, he wasn't hurt or anything.
01:03:33.000We had a guy from our gym that would have panic attacks, and there was a couple fights.
01:03:37.000One fight where he almost couldn't do it.
01:03:40.000Like, he was just falling apart backstage, and he went out there and did it, but he lost.
01:03:45.000But then another fight where he just pulled out backstage, day of the fight, Getting prepped, warming up, wrapping the hands the whole day.
01:03:54.000You know, it happens at the UFC. It happens at the UFC and people don't know.
01:03:59.000You know, there's guys that wind up fighting and there's guys that are pretty highly ranked.
01:04:03.000I don't want to name any names, but Shaw, Brendan Shaw and I were actually having a conversation about this the other day about guys that were warming up while he was back there.
01:04:12.000And they would say to their coach, I don't want to fucking do this anymore.
01:04:24.000That's amazing to me because part of the reason I fought finally was because of the social pressure.
01:04:31.000Once you've started off down this path, it becomes like this thing where you've told people you're going to do it and everybody at the gym knows you're going to do it.
01:04:39.000So one time I kind of tried to back out.
01:04:43.000Months before my actual fight, I said, you know, other riders have done this, and I'm all hurt.
01:04:49.000And I went in and told one of the guys at the gym that I was kind of leaning away from doing it.
01:04:52.000He's like, well, so you're pussying out, huh?
01:04:55.000And then I told another guy, and he said, so you're pussying out, huh?
01:04:59.000So everybody's kind of said that, and it becomes this huge pressure to do it.
01:05:05.000And I felt more fear of a failure in courage than I did of the sort of whatever was going to happen to me in the cage, breaking my nose or whatever.
01:05:17.000I felt much more fear that I would just find a way to chicken out in the end.
01:06:04.000Torn ACLs where their ACLs were completely blown out and they really had no stability like they would they would try to move one way or another and then they would just give right out yeah and there's I mean there's got to be nothing more terrifying than being in the octagon and competing against some highly trained Well-prepared killer,
01:08:53.000I was, I had a friend like that, you know, he played big time college football and he was six, seven, 200, high 200s.
01:09:00.000And I'd stand with him at the bar, and it was like, and I'd be looking at his tits, you know, and I'd be like, this is how you had to talk to him.
01:09:07.000I'm like, this is what it feels like for women.
01:09:20.000But it's more worrisome, like, is he gonna try to fuck me?
01:09:23.000Because I hope he doesn't, because I'll have no choice.
01:09:26.000Yeah, there's no equality when it comes to physical attributes.
01:09:30.000There's certain people that were just given a way better genetic roll of the dice.
01:09:34.000I mean, that's why we have weight classes.
01:09:36.000That's why Mighty Mouse can never fight Jon Jones.
01:09:39.000The argument can take place as to who's better pound for pound, John or Mighty Mouse, and there's a lot of arguments both ways, but as far as like what would happen if they fight, there's no argument.
01:10:05.000More tragic for the woman he hit with his car, but so tragic for him because I don't know him well enough to know where his mind's at or who he's talking to.
01:10:14.000You hear all these bad things, like the people that he's hanging out with and the people that he surrounds himself with.
01:10:19.000You hear some of them from his coaches, so there's got to be some validity and truth to it.
01:10:24.000For every guy like that that's super fucking talented, it seems like it's so hard to stay on track.
01:10:35.000You know, and Customato was not just a great trainer, but he was also a great mental coach.
01:10:41.000Like he had instilled lessons in Mike Tyson about fire and fear and all the different aspects of competition that are gonna arise and how the hero and the coward feel the same thing.
01:10:53.000It's just the hero reacts to it differently.
01:10:55.000The more you prepare your body, the less, not fear, but the less confusion you have when you get into that ring, the less doubt you have, the more clarity you have.
01:11:09.000You're 100% confident in your conditioning.
01:11:11.000You're 100% confident in your training.
01:11:12.000There will be certain fear, but you can mitigate some of that.
01:11:16.000And all this was, Customato just was a genius with Tyson.
01:11:51.000When you saw him grab ahold of Daniel Cormier and wrestle Cormier to the ground the first round, you're like, listen, this is another fucking level of shit you're dealing with.
01:11:59.000You're dealing with like another level of greatness, another level of ability.
01:12:04.000And when you, you know, you see a guy like that get involved in...
01:12:07.000I mean, the cocaine thing, man, that didn't bother me that much.
01:12:10.000It's like, you know, so he's doing coke three weeks out.
01:12:42.000What's worse for you, alcohol or cocaine?
01:12:44.000Well, I don't know how much John was doing, but a little line here and there is probably not as bad as the amount of Budweiser that Donald sucks down.
01:12:54.000I think part of the issue that people have with a guy like John, who's just so uber-talented, and he's so young, and all these things come handy to him, or come so easy to him, is that when a guy like that professes to be very moral and very religious,
01:13:11.000and then you see all this craziness, like testing positive for cocaine, and the drunk driving, crashing into the tree with strippers in his car.
01:14:02.000I've seen that many times where guys were way favored over their opponent, but they took it lightly because they were favored and their opponent was terrified because they were the underdog.
01:14:12.000So they trained like a demon and the other guy slacked off and went in there with a false sense of confidence and also a Minimized sense of danger.
01:14:20.000Yeah, like nobody likes that fucking feeling man you and you went through it, right?
01:14:24.000That feeling of being the locker room.
01:15:29.000Whereas, if you were to walk out in the parking lot right now and some guy picked a fight with you, That would be bad, but you wouldn't have the same kind of fear, that anxiety, the buildup to it.
01:15:39.000So, yeah, I was glad to get that out of my life because I lived with that for a long time because it took me a long time to get a fight.
01:15:45.000It took me a long time because I was old, and the state commission makes it pretty hard for older fighters to allow a certain matchup.
01:15:52.000And fights kept falling through, or somebody would not show up, or I would get hurt, or the other guy would get hurt.
01:15:57.000And so I lived with that sense that the fight was right around the corner.
01:16:21.000There's no point in actually having the actual fight.
01:16:23.000So I was glad to get that out of the way, and I was glad to get out of the weight management, because that was the other hard thing about it.
01:16:29.000So for those six months, I was staying at a very...
01:16:40.000And then I, you know, so I could fight at 185. I could fight at 205, you know, bulk up and, you know, fight the huge guys.
01:16:49.000But I decided to fight all the way down to 170. So I cut down to where I was walking around like 180. Because at the amateurs, you don't have 24 or 30 hours, whatever it is to rehydrate.
01:18:40.000All of the more significant deaths, brain damage, all the big issues in boxing, almost all of them, except for a few isolated events, which were horrible beatings, which is why I think Eric Perez was involved in one.
01:18:56.000The heavyweight guy was involved in some horrible beating of this Russian guy, and that guy suffered some pretty significant brain damage, which is a heavyweight bout, which is very rare.
01:19:31.000Gerald McClellan's, another one, who was a notoriously huge guy, would cut a tremendous amount of weight to get down.
01:19:37.000I think he was fighting at 175. Was he 175 or 168?
01:19:41.000I forget what he fought at, but Gerald cut a tremendous amount of weight, got down, fought Nigel Benn, and he was bleeding inside the octagon, or inside the ring rather.
01:19:54.000He had an episode where he had a stroke.
01:19:58.000Inside the ring like in the middle of his fight.
01:20:01.000He had to take a knee and then just quit and realize something was way wrong.
01:20:05.000And people were like, I can't believe he quit.
01:20:06.000And then he collapsed in his corner and you know, the rest is history.
01:20:33.000But he fought Nigel Benn, and Nigel Benn was just tough as shit, and they went to war.
01:20:39.000Gerald had him all but knocked out had him knocked out of the ring like he went through the ring got back into the ring got back and but just Nigel Benn would not quit and there was a period in the fight somewhere where they collided heads and that was one of the big ones Nigel definitely landed some big punches on him but they collided heads and you could tell like after the headbutt like he was all fucking woozy and whacked out and then you know you had to take a knee and then it was over and And he's blind now.
01:21:17.000Yeah, and you said, you know, earlier on, you said, you know, how do you stop it?
01:21:20.000And I think it is one of those things that's really, really hard to stop because, as you've talked about on the show, any kind of new measure you set up, there's a way to beat it.
01:21:30.000There's still going to be cutting weight.
01:21:32.000I think amateur wrestling has dealt with this.
01:21:35.000Little kits by body fat percentage things or maybe hydration measurements, like you can measure how much...
01:21:44.000Hydration they have, so you can tell when the kid is cutting weight through dehydration.
01:21:49.000I'm not sure if that would be possible to measure hydration levels.
01:21:53.000That might be one way to deal with it.
01:22:30.000I mean, even if they listen to me, they rationalize, like, oh, you got some good points, and then there would be a butt, blah, blah, blah, we can't, because blah, blah, blah.
01:23:10.000I think the major obstacle to it, if you thought it all through, the major obstacle to it would be the upside of this is there would be a lot less neurological damage.
01:23:21.000The downside to it would be there'd be a lot less neurological damage.
01:24:46.000Yeah, because your fist will just explode on contact.
01:24:50.000Some people wouldn't have any problem with it.
01:24:52.000Some people would like big giant hands like Brock Lesnar hands or Shane Carwin hands.
01:24:56.000Those guys probably wouldn't have nearly as much problem.
01:24:59.000But if you can go back to the old UFC's and you see when guys fought bare knuckle you very rarely saw like blistering combinations like you'll see like a guy like Vitor throw.
01:25:18.000So, you know, I start off that article I wrote with a retrospective on, remember this fight, one of the greatest fights in the UFC, Hackney versus Yarborough?
01:25:44.000What happens when a normal-sized man fights a giant...
01:25:48.000And, you know, long story short, Hackney hits him in the head 41 straight times, I counted, with his right hand.
01:25:57.000And at some point, you know, he gets Yarbrough turtled up on the ground, and he's hitting him from the back, and he's hooking him from behind.
01:27:43.000I think if he stuck with that, he probably wouldn't have broken his hand, which is kind of amazing, but for whatever reason, you can hit things really hard like that with the palm of your hand.
01:27:53.000Well, it's partly because you can't hit very hard that way.
01:28:13.000And they also didn't allow punches to the face.
01:28:15.000You could kick a guy to the face, but you were wearing wrestling shoes.
01:28:18.000And then on top of those wrestling shoes, you had this big fat shin and instep pad.
01:28:24.000So there's this big padded-up shin thing, and then you had nothing on your hands, so the guys would kind of slap at each other and try to kick each other.
01:28:34.000You couldn't throw closed hands, I believe.
01:28:36.000You could not throw closed hands, but you could throw closed hands to the body.
01:28:39.000But Bas Rutten, who's a Dutch kickboxer and had this fucking power explosion style, he was the first guy that figured out if you just pull your hand way back, you throw that bitch just like a punch.
01:28:51.000And he would uppercut guys and hook guys, and he would beat, like when he fought Funaki, he beat the fucking shit out of him.
01:28:57.000And he beat him like a guy who was throwing punches.
01:29:00.000I mean, he would come at you with his hands pulled back like that, and instead of doing what everybody else was doing, which is kind of throw these wild bitch slaps, Boss Root was throwing him straight down the pipe, and somehow or another, he had stretched his hand out, where he could pull his hand way back.
01:29:15.000So he was just palming your fucking nose into your brain.
01:29:36.000One of the beautiful things about watching the UFC since 1993 all the way up to 2015, where we are today, is the evolution of the understanding of the techniques, of what's effective in certain positions, the distances.
01:29:49.000Those guys like Bas Rutten were critical for establishing that stuff.
01:29:53.000You know those real pioneers fucking nobody before him and pancrease they were fighting like that.
01:29:57.000There's nobody He came along with big power in his kicks and ridiculous punching power and figured out how to do it with the palm You know and then you see him fight in the UFC when he could use punches before his body started failing him like he's had Significant neck injuries and to the point where he has significant atrophy of one of his arms one of his arms he calls baby arm and It's like,
01:30:20.000yeah, he's had it fixed and had some stem cell stuff done and some operations and has discs fused in his neck and bad stuff.
01:31:25.000It's an important time, historically, to watch those fights, to see the difference between the way they fought then and the way they fight now.
01:31:36.000There's still room to grow, but the problem is you have athletic commissions, you have bureaucracy, and you also have Look, I love the UFC. I love working for the UFC. It's been an honor to work for them all these years, but you're gonna have a certain amount of stagnation when you have one group and one organization that's so dominant over the other ones.
01:31:56.000I disagree that it's a monopoly because Viacom owns Bellator and Viacom has untold fucking billions of dollars.
01:32:17.000And they're also getting guys from the UFC now.
01:32:20.000They have Phil Davis just signed with them.
01:32:22.000Yeah, it's sort of the senior league for the UFC. And there's also, they picked up this wrestler, this guy who helped Chris Weidman prepare for one of his recent fights.
01:32:32.000They're starting to get these big-time names, guys that are coming up.
01:32:37.000And a lot of that is also because of the Reebok deal.
01:32:39.000The UFC has a Reebok deal that doesn't allow them to get their own sponsors.
01:32:42.000They have to use the Reebok sponsorship, so some guys are shying away from it because of that.
01:32:46.000So, like, the concept of a monopoly, I just don't think it's fair.
01:32:58.000The people that direct it and produce it are better.
01:33:00.000They're just the best at what they do, because they've been doing it a long time.
01:33:04.000In having that, like that, there's a certain amount of stagnation.
01:33:08.000Because if someone came along and had a bare-knuckle UFC-style mixed martial arts event where they fought not in a cage, but in a basketball-sized mat, If you have an arena for basketball, you have this big,
01:33:24.000gigantic space that you have a wooden floor, this parquet floor on.
01:33:28.000How about do something like that with mats and have mixed martial arts?
01:33:33.000And when they go out of bounds, you bring them right back to the center again, and you have them duking it out again.
01:33:40.000Interesting, but it hurts visually you can't see that good me I can't see that good.
01:33:44.000I have the best fucking seat in the house for the UFC I'm touching the floor that they're fighting literally touching the floor.
01:33:51.000I see you looking at the monitor all the time Yeah, sometimes I have to sometimes when when fighters like to the left or to the right and the backs like they're like up against the cage I have to look at the monitor.
01:34:01.000Otherwise, I don't know what's going on if you ever looked at the crowd We're all looking at the monitor, too.
01:34:37.000Thought was Paul Ophelia I think someone used the ropes want to catch a guy on an arm bar like you had the guy like they were trapped inside the ropes The guy's arm was trapped in the rope while I was getting arm barred and I was realizing like whoa He just used the rope to get that submission.
01:34:52.000This is kind of fucked like the rope came into play It's almost like what tank Abbott submitted Steve Jenham He had his knee to his head and he grabbed the fence and he was holding on the fence and pulling and smashing him in the face.
01:35:04.000Yeah You know that using the cage back then like you can't grab the cage Just like you can't grab the ropes and pride.
01:35:11.000Yeah, but it did come into play Yeah, too.
01:35:14.000Oh, yeah, it comes into play still too much to be interesting I'd like that because there's so much of the action now is pushed up against the fence I think if a guy grabs a fence immediate one-point deduction immediate immediate one point and The problem is it's so reflexive.
01:35:39.000And there's a big difference between a guy grabbing the fence when you're trying to take him down and then being able to stand up and then kicks you in the head and a guy not grabbing the fence and you take him down and you dominate him for the rest of the round.
01:35:49.000And they seem like they're never penalized on it.
01:36:23.000Yeah, those are cool But what I'm saying is something to cover the tips of the fingers because as a jiu-jitsu guy like if I had like Say like you know those Everlast bag gloves.
01:36:33.000Yeah, you know those style that come over the tips like those aren't really gonna impede my grappling that much because I don't do this and I don't do this and You know, you never, what I'm saying, I'm showing something, obviously, to people who are listening, but interlacing your fingers.
01:36:49.000You grab in, like, an S-grip, or you grab in a gable grip.
01:36:53.000And these grips that you do, most of the really strong grips, don't ever involve your fingers sliding into the grooves of each other, of the opposing fingers.
01:37:02.000But I feel like something like that maybe could work, where the tips of the fingers were covered up, and it wouldn't affect you as much if you eye-poke somebody.
01:37:12.000We're kind of like going into a dark territory here Having this experience and I wanted to get back to your peers because we didn't I don't think we really completely We kind of got off track with that yeah having these people stand outside and watch you do this was there Did the reaction vary or was it pretty uniform?
01:37:37.000Or was there extremes on both ends where people were like, what the fuck are you doing?
01:37:40.000And other people were like, I want to be like you.
01:37:43.000I don't know if anybody was saying I want to be like you.
01:38:12.000So, but again, the bigger problem is in the wider profession where people don't know me.
01:38:18.000And that, you know, when those sort of people get a hold of the book, I hope they read it, you know, because the book is, it's not really even about mixed martial arts, you You know, it's about using mixed martial arts as this bridge into big questions about human behavior,
01:38:33.000especially human male behavior and the nature of masculinity and all the dumb stuff we get up to.
01:38:39.000And it's one of the reasons, you know, I thought of you as I was writing the book, actually.
01:38:45.000You know, a lot of people write a book and they don't have anybody in mind for it.
01:38:48.000They have like a vague, nebulous sense of who the readers are going to be.
01:38:59.000And I thought of you a lot when I was reading this book.
01:39:01.000As a person, like, who would be interested in the subject matter, charitable and generous about it, because these are things that you wonder about, too, and also sort of meshes with not only your interest in fighting, but your whole interest in human behavior, and especially your basically evolutionary outlook.
01:39:24.000It's sort of an evolutionary exploration of the basis of masculinity and manhood.
01:39:30.000That's a that's a very interesting way of approaching it because I think that's one of the issues that people have when it comes to the idea of mixed martial arts or the idea of any sort of combat sport is that in Embracing that and supporting it or in even just pursuing it Somehow or another we're doing a disservice to the idea of a cultural evolution that we kind of all agree is going on if you compare Society and human beings and our behavior today with what
01:40:00.000we know about several thousands of years ago We know that we're in a far safer time far more civil time For the most part in most places of the world obviously there's exceptions, but yeah overwhelming but the people that are communicating now we're communicating about We have an understanding about what we would call you know what they the the super progressives like to call toxic masculinity man Part of me understands where they're coming from.
01:40:27.000And part of me also thinks that they're kind of copping out.
01:40:31.000And they're denying certain aspects of their own life and their own masculinity that maybe they feel are weak.
01:40:41.000And maybe they feel like they can't compete in these areas.
01:41:33.000Especially if you look at some parts of the world, they're like, they're fucking way closer than we are to Russia.
01:41:39.000You look at what North Korea has threatened to do to South Korea, or what Pakistan and India, when they look at each other, and you motherfucker, I've got a missile with your name on it.
01:41:48.000All it takes is the wrong guy with the right amount of power, and that can happen.
01:41:52.000And it's very likely that we're saying guy for a reason.
01:41:57.000And yeah, there's a certain reality to that.
01:42:00.000But there's also a certain reality to the fact that The reason why we have these thoughts and ideas and we have this quote-unquote toxic masculinity in the first place is because it served our genes well.
01:42:12.000That's why we got to 2015. That's why we fought off the competition and unfortunately I think there's a yin and a yang to life.
01:42:20.000There's a give and a take, and there's an action and a reaction when it comes to aggression and when it comes to fear and danger.
01:42:28.000And that reaction is innovation, reinforcing the safer aspects of society, law enforcement.
01:42:36.000There's all these different reactions to violence that lead to a better world.
01:42:42.000Yeah, and that's really what the focus of my book is.
01:42:46.000Again, I expected to write a book with MMA as a metaphor for this darkness, this blackness, this danger, this nastiness at the core of human nature.
01:42:56.000I wrote a very different book than that.
01:42:58.000The book ended up being a book about something that I call the monkey dance.
01:43:02.000And if you've ever seen like a nature video of two elephant seals clashing in the surf or two mountain goats cracking skulls on a hillside, biologists call those sorts of contests, they call it ritual combat.
01:43:16.000And ritual combat is a way that a huge diversity of animal species have developed to figure out who's bigger, who's tougher, who's stronger, who's fitter, without fighting it out to the bitter, bloody end.
01:43:29.000Like chimps grab sticks and they pull them out of the ground.
01:43:31.000They beat the shit out of trees with them more than they fight.
01:43:48.000And the monkey dance is my name for human versions of ritual combat.
01:43:53.000And it's a broad diversity of things that mainly men get up to.
01:43:56.000Things like deadly duels and verbal duels, play fights among boys, and especially sports.
01:44:03.000And so a lot of these behaviors The key thing is that a lot of these behaviors seem silly, they seem stupid, they seem pathetic.
01:44:11.000They're often volatile, and they're in danger of escalating to something truly dangerous.
01:44:16.000But on the whole, these monkey dances are a good thing.
01:44:18.000They're a way that men can work out their problems, thrash out their status hierarchies, in ways that fall short of all-out sorts of violence.
01:44:29.000So the chimps are a great example of this.
01:45:25.000But what my take on it is, is that there's a big difference between that and what guys are doing to establish greatness.
01:45:35.000When you achieve greatness in martial arts, what you're essentially doing by becoming a champion is you're showing a genetic superiority, you're showing a mental superiority, a character superiority.
01:45:49.000That makes you more preferred for breeding.
01:45:53.000I mean, that's just the reality situation.
01:45:55.000Like, I joke around about it, but it's kind of true.
01:45:57.000The only reason why anybody gets laid is because Luke Rockhold didn't get there first.
01:46:00.000I thought that was the greatest line, and it's completely true.
01:46:25.000I mean, when it comes right down to it, you walk around the world and you see these differences between men and women, and you see physical differences, you see behavioral differences, and you naturally ask, you know, where does all this stuff come from?
01:47:15.000A good provider but also someone who can deal when the shit goes down some dudes They you know when they'll they'll chirp all around about toxic masculinity or negative male behavior But the reality is they don't have any fucking character and if something happens really bad in their life They start weeping and they fall apart.
01:47:34.000That's unattractive and the reason it's unattractive to your friends If you have a friend and every time something goes wrong in his life he starts crying he wants a hug you like Jesus bitch get your fucking shit together and Come on, dude.
01:47:45.000And that's how you're supposed to feel.
01:47:47.000Because you know that that guy, if anything goes wrong, that guy's not going to be reliable.
01:48:05.000I mean, one day we might come to some point where we have so much control over the world that we live in that masculinity won't be unnecessary.
01:48:12.000And if that's the case, we'll probably evolve to the point where we look like the aliens that are depicted, you know, in every movie with the giant head, no muscles, and the giant head that uses telekinesis to move things.
01:48:23.000I mean, that's probably where we're headed.
01:48:27.000I mean, the world has gotten softer and softer and safer and safer, and we're still...
01:48:31.000Carrying this baggage, this evolutionary baggage of a sort of masculinity that's best suited to a world where, you know, there's barbarians at the gates and bears in the woods and all that stuff.
01:48:44.000But in this same world, there are avenues to express this masculinity where you can be completely civil, where you can be completely kind, you can be a generous person, but...
01:50:17.000I mean, the only time you would threaten a 100-pound man is if that 100-pound man was threatening a 100-pound woman or something, or another 100-pound man.
01:50:23.000You're trying to step in and keep the peace.
01:51:14.000They are right You know either you're willing to fight another top contender who's just as capable of beating you as you are of him Or we're wasting fucking time here.
01:51:23.000Yeah, you know, and we don't want to watch that you gotta understand like true What did you sign up to do?
01:51:28.000You signed up to be a fucking gladiator, okay?
01:51:31.000You signed up to be the most noble of all martial arts combatants of all time.
01:51:36.000You're competing at the highest level we've ever achieved in martial arts.
01:51:40.000Today, make no mistake about it, the fighters of today are the highest skilled, the most competent There's been some great judokas of the past.
01:51:52.000There's been some great Taekwondo competitors and great Muay Thai fighters.
01:51:56.000But as far as the overall combination in the form of a mixed martial artist, today, they're the best that they've ever been.
01:52:37.000Because they come from really good camps, they're really well trained, they have a bunch of success under their belt, but they're always terrified of the one guy who's going to expose them.
01:52:45.000It's one of the most fascinating aspects about fighting.
01:54:32.000But, you know, and that was one of the big findings for me at the gym is like, You know, you go into the gym and it's like, what's a fighter?
01:54:40.000And for most people, I think most people think a fighter is like, I don't know, a person who's strong and fit and has developed this toolkit of, you know, all these sophisticated techniques and all that stuff.
01:54:49.000But you talk to fighters, they don't define a fighter that way.
01:54:52.000They define a fighter as, you know, a person who's really tough and who will fight.
01:55:28.000I think there's also, it's curious to me that there's a bunch of people that are fight fans, and even fighters, that don't respect people that don't put themselves at risk.
01:55:42.000Like a Floyd Mayweather is a perfect example.
01:57:31.000I mean, with that fight you have these two guys.
01:57:33.000You have the good guy, you have the face, you have the heel squaring off in this incredibly climactic showdown that's going to define the story of their entire careers.
01:57:44.000And you're expecting some sort of epic battle to go down that's going to be incredibly gripping drama.
01:57:50.000And then as a sort of dramatic spectacle, I think it sort of fell flat.
01:57:55.000Which is why that's my sort of theory for why the the reaction to the fight was so negative Yeah, I guess man.
01:58:03.000I mean just when you're dealing with two of the best boxers of any generation who I think Manny Pacquiao, I think it's safe to say that 95% of them don't know anything about boxing That is a problem, boxing fans.
01:58:18.000That's what Roger Mayweather always says famously.
01:58:20.000It's a quote, most people don't know shit about boxing.
01:58:26.000Anytime there's anything on the underground, every time people talk about boxing.
01:58:30.000But you're able to appreciate as an aficionado and somebody who's really sophisticated in your knowledge of the sport, whereas most people are just wanting to see an intense drama.
01:58:39.000Well, I watched it with my wife, who has never been in a fight in her life and doesn't know jack shit about fighting, which is kind of funny, you know, because, you know, if you look at our DVR, it's like two competing philosophies.
01:59:01.000But it's like when our interests cross and she watches what I watch, it becomes hilarious because she doesn't know anything about fighting.
01:59:27.000This guy is, he's doing what he wants to do.
01:59:29.000If he stood in front of Manny Pacquiao and they just went rock'em sock'em robots, fucking anything can happen.
01:59:35.000But the way he's doing it, he's controlling all the variables.
01:59:40.000He's controlling it, but he's controlling it with his skill and his dedication, his practice and his knowledge, and he's information chunking.
01:59:47.000That's something that I really, truly appreciate about high-level jujitsu artists, about high-level martial artists in any venue.
01:59:55.000I love watching people problem-solve in real time much better than anybody else is doing.
02:00:11.000When Manny Pacquiao would step in and throw that right hook, and Floyd would dip to his left and duck and slide right off the ropes, it was genius.
02:00:49.000He just seeks and destroys, seeks and destroys, and just slowly chips away at the best of them to the point where they just can't take it anymore, and their body starts giving out.
02:03:03.000But, you know, I watched a video of him wrestling Luke Rockhold, and I'm like, how come a fucking guy who fights at 155 is wrestling the biggest 185 pounder the world has ever known?
02:03:38.000I mean, you got the best grappler, I think, in the division in Habib versus one of the very best strikers in all of the UFC. I mean, Donald is such a good Muay Thai striker.
02:05:05.000I get to go off his shirt and his whole like is is he had like lines Everywhere connecting his shoulder to his his jigsaw puzzle.
02:05:15.000So I said like how many times you had surgery and he had some fucking ungodly number of shoulders so I don't remember like nine or ten And he goes anything goes wrong.
02:05:23.000It just pops out Like if he falls wrong, it just pops out and then he needs someone to like yank on it Yeah, I guess you gotta extend it in a pop back in place like yeah, our friend who has that Yeah, and all for what?
02:05:35.000So you can get that eight seconds on a monster?
02:05:38.000It's the same thing with MMA. You know, it seems crazy to people from the outside, but there's a certain challenge to it.
02:06:16.000Yeah, I was at this fair one time, and they had one of those mechanical bulls, and everybody's riding, you know, doing it right the one-handed way.
02:06:24.000I'm gonna beat this thing, and I just clench it.
02:06:28.000I get on, two hands, hold on to it, bury my face into it, and just hold on.
02:07:03.000I'm very curious now, because I rode one of those things for some stupid MTV thing, and I was shocked at how easy it was for them to fly me off of that fucker.
02:07:11.000I don't know if it lasted five seconds.
02:09:10.000Yeah, bullfighting is way more fucked up because I don't think there's anything bad that really happens to the bull.
02:09:14.000He doesn't like those people on his back and he bucks them off ferociously and they're only on there for eight seconds.
02:09:19.000And some of these bulls are smart and they figure out how to hurt people.
02:09:22.000Like they know if they buck in just a certain way while throwing their head back at the same time, you know, they can really do damage to people and get these people off their back.
02:09:56.000It's barbaric, but one of the great books about combat sport is Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.
02:10:02.000If you haven't read that, I'd really recommend it because almost everything he says about bullfighting is relevant to other forms of combat sport.
02:10:19.000The spears are basically what they do.
02:10:21.000They drain energy from the animal and they also force it to put its head down.
02:10:26.000And that's important because the killing stroke needs to be delivered over the horns.
02:10:31.000And so what they want is a very clean, balletic type of kill, which means that they have to get the animal's head arranged in a downward position so they can get the sword to go home.
02:10:45.000So where are they trying to drive it into?
02:11:20.000What's called a steer and they take a bull and they cut his balls off when he's young and they let him grow to size and then they kill him.
02:12:35.000It's just, it's a fucking unbelievably powerful animal that, I mean, if he got older, he would have these huge fucking saloon doors growing out of his head, and then he would use those to slam into other dudes who also have those things.
02:12:59.000And my friend shot a water buffalo in Australia, and he said they cooked the back strap, which is like the most tender part, and he said he had a piece of meat in his mouth that he chewed for half an hour.
02:13:11.000Yeah, he said he was practicing with his bow and arrow, and he was practicing for a half an hour with one piece of meat in his mouth that he was trying to break down.
02:13:30.000I felt embarrassed about it a lot of times about how scared I was when I would think about, like, how much harder, you know, other people have it.
02:13:37.000You know, I was reading other memoirs of people, like, who did dangerous things, especially, like, war reporters.
02:14:19.000And, you know, bullets are flying and he's got his head up.
02:14:23.000What kind of fucking PTSD does that guy have?
02:14:25.000Well, his friend died, you know, like a week after, not a week after, but soon afterwards, his friend, the other cameraman, a guy named Tim Hetherington, was killed, I believe, in Libya.
02:14:36.000And so, yeah, I think he's got some pretty severe emotional, psychological damage from it.
02:15:14.000That's one of the things that I really wanted to talk to you about.
02:15:17.000When I had heard this concept, the professor in the cage, the protecting of essential cognitive function, which is necessary to pursue your career.
02:15:34.000The first time I got punched really hard in the face.
02:15:37.000It's really educational, you know, because watching from outside the cage, you kind of know, like, you know, this isn't good for these people.
02:15:44.000You kind of know it's a brain damage contest, but it's different to actually feel it.
02:15:49.000And the first time I got knocked around pretty good, and afterwards kind of felt concussed, even during the attack, even when I was taking these shots, I was able to think to myself, you know, I make my living trying to think smart thoughts, and I better quit while I still know my alphabet.
02:16:23.000I felt like it was, you know, I described it as sort of like a translucent blanket.
02:16:26.000Thrown over my head and slowed my thinking and clouded my perception.
02:16:30.000Did you ever get that same sort of feeling just from hard training where you're exhausted?
02:16:35.000No, this was definitely a time where a couple times I got, you know, again, one of these situations you're in sparring and guys hit you too hard.
02:16:41.000And there was a couple guys who were notorious for it and I got really jacked up by a few guys.
02:16:47.000One time where, you know, this guy just landed this brutal left hook against me.
02:17:17.000There's also, there's an accumulative damage issue, but there's also, I've met guys where I knew them, and then they had one really hard fight, and then they were different.
02:17:27.000Yeah, so I didn't have anything like that, at least not to my knowledge.
02:17:30.000I mean, I'd have short term repercussions of it.
02:18:07.000But a guy like you is different because you're not really, I mean, you are an MMA fighter in that you did fight, but that's not like what your pursuit.
02:19:09.000There was a level of anxiety that was always there.
02:19:14.000I was glad, however, that I didn't feel the terror that I felt that I might fear.
02:19:19.000I was afraid that I'd be so scared that I'd chicken out or just behave in a cowardly fashion.
02:19:27.000And there was a lot of anxiety, but it wasn't as bad as I expected.
02:19:30.000And when I got in the cage, one thing that was really interesting to me, because I didn't know this would happen, is all the fear pretty much evaporated.
02:22:27.000We didn't know if he was a striker, a grappler.
02:22:29.000We didn't know if he was left-handed or right-handed.
02:22:30.000These are all really bad things not to know.
02:22:32.000And so the game plan was just we'd take him down and try to make him fight me off his back because that's what I did best.
02:22:39.000So, you know, right off the bat, you know, within a few seconds I shot, got the takedown, got him down against the fence, was about this close to securing the mount.
02:22:49.000You know, he kind of had me in a headlock.
02:22:52.000I swept my foot up and Was almost in the mountain then you know that then was the first clue that I was out of my league and right away He just did this really kind of fancy Sophisticated thing where he drew me effortlessly into the guard and started working on that armbar and I I didn't and I knew something was bad something bad was happening So I got up and I yanked and yanked and yanked and yanked and got out and ran for it Okay,
02:23:16.000he rolls to his feet and chases me and And at that point, that was when an experienced fighter would have said, okay, it's not a good idea to roll around with this guy on the ground.
02:24:55.000One of the things, and this is going to seem weird, that I've been noticing about yoga, is getting into yoga again recently, is the various complexities of each position.
02:25:07.000It's not as simple as like, put your leg here, stand up.
02:25:42.000Like Helsing Gracie, Steve Maxwell, famous strength and conditioning coach, jujitsu black belt, been on this podcast a few times, described how Helsing Gracie describes jujitsu.
02:25:54.000And he goes, because he's got kind of a pretty deep accent, he goes, you do this, then I do that, then I do this, then you do that, forever.
02:26:07.000And the more you understand about each position, the more you understand about where could things go wrong, where can things go right, what are you trying to achieve?
02:26:18.000And when you don't know that, like the way you're describing it, like what's happening?
02:26:26.000And so what happened was like why I wanted to fight again like right then afterwards was because I knew that you know I'd chosen exactly the wrong game plan to fight this guy and afterwards we became Facebook friends and I see all of his pictures on his Facebook page are of him with gold medals on his chest from winning jiu-jitsu competition tournaments.
02:28:10.000Like hanging on to this guy for a long time and riding the bull.
02:28:14.000But this guy was a dedicated athlete and one of the things that he did was he radically improved his flexibility while he was there.
02:28:22.000When he first started out, you know how you sit there like with your legs in a butterfly position and try to push your knees down to the ground?
02:28:30.000His knees are like stuck up like this.
02:28:33.000He couldn't push him down at all, but that fucking guy would be there after class for 40 minutes longer than anybody else, just stretching, just pushing his soft tissue to the limit every day.
02:28:45.000And it's that kind of dedication that led to a year plus later, like my friend Eddie Bravo, my jujitsu instructor as well, He always talks about that guy, this one guy.
02:28:56.000He fucking put in the time, put in the numbers, and he got really flexible.
02:29:00.000I mean, he was almost at a full split after like a year and a half.
02:29:03.000But it was the kind of dedication that led him to be a football player.
02:29:07.000I mean, he was a professional athlete.
02:29:57.000I don't know how much you stretch, but I do know that I watched this guy do it, and I watched this guy get way more flexible, and it was amazing.
02:30:02.000But my point is, there are unquestionably physical gifts that you can't achieve, like fast twitch muscle fibers, speed and power.
02:32:25.000You're starting out from 39, 40 years of doing jack shit to stretch out, and then all of a sudden you're trying to take these mature, older muscles and pull them apart.
02:34:01.000There's one thing if you're a dedicated professional athlete, you've been doing it a long time, and your body knows how to grow, and there's a certain amount of muscle memory that comes into play.
02:34:10.000When you see someone who is really big, but then they lose the muscle mass, like maybe they'll get into something else and they'll stop lifting, they can get really big way quicker than the average person.
02:34:23.000Like, say if you used to weigh 230 pounds, you're a big fucking giant dude, and then you drop down to 170, you could gain, like, if you took two dudes that weighed 170, and they were both, you know, reasonably fit, and one of them used to be enormous, he will get bigger quicker.
02:37:00.000But, you know, in his mind, I think he had a very small window to achieve something, and he probably was correct in assuming that he wasn't the only one doing it.
02:37:13.000He's probably correct in assuming that it's almost impossible, not almost impossible, but it's really hard to get to win the belt without it.
02:37:20.000Well, Jose Aldo had a really interesting thing to say.
02:38:40.000Yeah, there's a lot and there's also I think that there is nothing this is my opinion I think that it is not only is there nothing wrong, but there may be a case for doctors to prescribe Some sort of steroids some controlled amount of some sort of steroids for catastrophic injuries like massive leg breaks or you know the pec tears or there's some Pretty fucking significant injuries.
02:39:08.000Hector Lombard went through a bulging disc, like a significantly injured disc, and then was fighting, you know, I think he had a fight schedule like six months later.
02:39:19.000Good luck trying to recover from something like that in six months.
02:39:22.000I mean, you kind of can, but can you recover enough in three months to go through a three-month camp?
02:40:42.000I mean, Ensign Inouye sat in the very seat you're sitting in and was laughing about his contract for Pride where they told him that we don't test for steroids.
02:40:52.000Does that mean that Fedor was not on it?
02:42:01.000Yeah, they wanted to make an example out of him, and they said, you know, we're gonna give you a lifetime ban.
02:42:05.000Well, that's fucked up, man, because this guy, this is his life, this is his living.
02:42:09.000He essentially took away his living from one violation, the only violation of his entire professional career.
02:42:17.000You know, suspicions aside, and there's certainly suspicions of when he was competing in Pride, and even possibly suspicions of when he was competing in the UFC. But the reality is, the guy never got caught except for the one time when he evaded a test.
02:44:34.000And you juice them up, and yeah, that's dangerous.
02:44:36.000You can most certainly, if you're on EPO and human growth hormone and testosterone, you can most certainly hit someone more than you would be able to if you were not on that.
02:45:41.000ESPN's Brett Akimoto reported via Twitter that the judge did agree that the Nevada State Athletic Commission had jurisdiction over Silva despite being an unlicensed athlete at the time, but that there was not sufficient evidence to support a lifetime ban.
02:48:14.000And then, you know, Rafael Cordero, a guy who's gone from that gym and now is training like Fabrizio Verdum, radically increased his striking.
02:48:23.000Rafael Dos Anjos radically increased his striking.
02:48:34.000And they just also know about putting pressure on motherfuckers.
02:48:38.000Like Dos Anjos versus Pettis, that was just aggression and pressure.
02:48:44.000But again, after that fight, I've got Nick Curzon, the guy who trained him in his strength and conditioning up, I think he's here next week.
02:48:55.000And I'm really interested to talk to him about it because his style of training fighters...
02:49:03.000He learned from the Marinovichs, the same guy that got B.J. Penn in the best shape of his life, back when he fought like Diego Sanchez.
02:49:11.000That B.J., I think, one of the greatest fighters of all time for sure, B.J. Penn, but I think that B.J. is the prime B.J. So I'm really curious to see what their approach was to get a guy in the kind of condition where he could fight five retarded hard rounds like that.
02:49:29.000In the amateur divisions, we did two-minute rounds.
02:49:31.000And if you were in a, you know, in really intense rounds where the striking was heavy and you mix in the grappling with it, all the heavy exertion of grappling, I was more, you talked about having a heart attack doing hot yoga.
02:49:43.000I felt that way all the time, like I'm gonna die.
02:49:46.000And I watch these guys on TV doing five minute rounds after five minute rounds and sometimes walking back to their corners after this crazy round with their mouths closed.
02:50:20.000Just insane work ethic and never getting out of shape and never abusing your body and always Eating the right foods, getting the right rest, putting altitude tents up in your house.
02:51:27.000I don't even read hardcover books anymore.
02:51:29.000Well, like I said, you know, when I was writing it, I was thinking to myself, sometimes, like, you know, if Joe Rogan doesn't like this book, I'm fucked.
02:51:55.000I mean, intellectually is personally, right?
02:51:58.000Personally, you know, I'd been through a sort of lifetime of, I don't know, like, I was a late bloomer as a kid, real small, always sort of the runt of my in school.
02:52:12.000I'm a sort of average-sized guy now, but I came to my growth really late.
02:52:16.000And so I sort of have a basic, you know, schoolboy story about getting pushed around and bullied.
02:52:31.000It wasn't like I had some noble, high-minded reasons for avoiding the violence.
02:52:34.000It was that I was scared, and I knew I was going to get my ass kicked.
02:52:37.000But I've always kind of felt like that's no excuse for not for fighting, you know, that you should stand up to the bully.
02:52:43.000I've always felt that way, even though I never did it.
02:52:45.000So I've So part of what I wanted to do was I wanted to go into that cage and I wanted to sort of stand up to guys who were stronger than me and more skilled than me and sort of take in those beatings that I felt like I should have taken 20 years ago.
02:53:29.000So part of it was a redemption story for me about whether I could do something to redeem myself, at least in my own eyes, for those times when I'd flinched as a kid.
02:54:31.000One time when I was, I think I was about like 19 or 20, when I was already a black belt and I was working out at my gym where I used to teach in Boston and I was just doing these heavy rounds on the back preparing for this tournament.
02:54:45.000I looked up, and this guy was watching that used to bully me in junior high school.
02:54:50.000This guy, not even from my high school, I went to a really rough junior high school in Jamaica Plain, which is kind of gentrified now, but at the time it was a really sketchy area in Massachusetts.
02:54:59.000And I looked up, and I felt bad for the guy.