Kirk and Chris are joined by the owners of Submissionfighting.com, a website that has been around since the early days of MMA. They talk about the origin story behind the name of the site, the history of the website, and how it came to be what it is today. They also talk about what it's like to be a member of the Association of Athletic Commissions and what it s like to work for one of the most powerful organizations in the industry. They also discuss the state of the sport in general and what the future of MMA looks like in the 21st century. And of course, there's a little bit of everything else. This episode was brought to you by Mastroianni s, a well-known MMA and Mixed Martial Arts website. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE! Subscribe, Like, and Share to stay up to date with the latest MMA and Muay Thai news and discuss all things MMA and all things related to the sport! Subscribe to MMA and RELATED CONTENT Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate/subscribe in Apple Podcasts! Review, comment and subscribe to our new podcast Listen to our other shows: Business of MMA and Relationships - The Athletic Report, The MMA and Fitness Tip of the Week - The MMA Report and The MMA & Fitness Tip Of The Week Subscribe To Our Social Media - Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel! We post a new episode every Monday morning at 7:00am PT. Subscribe & Retweet us your thoughts on this week's episode of MMA & Mixed Martial arts and all the other stuff going on in the MMA and other sports related to UFC and UFC? Send us your voice mail We'll be responding to your comments and other links to us on social media on the next episode of the MMA & UFC Podcasts Subscribe and we'll get a shoutout in next week's MMA & other things we'll be featured on the MMA AND RELATIONSHIP! Thanks for listening to our podcast and much more! on this episode of UFC and other things like that you can expect to hear from your feed in the next instalment of The MMA AND THE MMA AND MORE! - Subscribe and subscribe on your favorite podcast Subscribe? Subscribe so we can spread the word out to your friends can be heard across the entire world! .
00:00:59.000And then my mother said, she would tell her friends what I was up to, and they'd say, what's the URL? And she'd say, submissionfighting.com, and she'd get long looks from them.
00:01:07.000So after my mother started complaining, I changed it to mixedmartialarts.com.
00:01:11.000Then the UFC switched to UFC TV, so we became MMA TV. And then the UFC dropped the TV, so we went back to mixedmartialarts.com.
00:01:24.000They didn't complete $600,000 for MixedMartialArts.com, and we would have dropped it in a heartbeat for that and gone back to MMA TV. Why didn't you take it?
00:02:22.000I would, I mean, I would date that to when everybody got together, when Nick Lembo got everybody together in New Jersey and came up with the Unified Rules, which would have been 2000-ish, and that's when the name sort of started to stick.
00:02:37.000But they were calling it, didn't Big John McCarthy name it?
00:02:40.000I have heard a variety of explanations for where the name came from, and I honestly don't know.
00:03:15.000It's all the athletic commissions in the country come together for a year and drink and just pretty much talk to each other about the issues that are going on in their ACs and they try to...
00:04:16.000The Muhammad Ali Act says that requires, federal law requires that boxing commissions share suspension information so you can't get knocked out in Boston and then the next weekend go up to New Hampshire and get knocked out again and then go to Maine and get knocked out again.
00:05:38.000I guess bodybuilders created it because if they had a body part that wasn't sticking out enough, that wasn't symmetrical, like say, some guys, their calves don't grow very well, so they would have these big upper bodies, big legs, but their calves would be skinny.
00:05:52.000So they would inject this oil into their calves and it makes your muscles swell up, but they're like fake boobs.
00:07:50.000I mean, maybe you guys might want to suspend that guy if he's still a lawyer.
00:07:55.000But, you know, it's so crazy because Mexico is known for its great tradition of fantastic boxers, like some of the greatest boxers of all time have come out of Mexico.
00:08:46.000The website, you guys started, so you've been around for 20 years now.
00:08:53.000We started the site in 98. So I thought you said 95. 95 I started buying the URLs.
00:08:59.000I think in 96 we had the art of NHB fighting on AOL. So if you started in 98, I was a member, I think, in 98. I think I was a member like the first year then.
00:09:10.000If not 98, 99. No, somewhere I've got our first, I think, first 400, and you're definitely on that list.
00:09:35.000Well, it's the best forum, and it's hard to regulate, but you guys have done an amazing job of keeping the douchebags off, or at least keeping them at bay, because that's what ruins those places.
00:09:47.000Like, So many guys used to post there and don't anymore like Tito and a lot of other like Evan Tanner of course is a famous thread that gets bumped up and Every now and then where Evan Tanner was saying hello before he died and It was cool back then that like these guys who are fighting in the UFC would come on on a regular basis But they get run off by these just anonymous shitheads who just say the rudest meanest shit to them after they lost or before the fight,
00:10:14.000you know like I've talked to bunch of fighters like not even to name names, but Even guys like John Fitch are like, I don't go there.
00:10:21.000I gotta stay off there because it fucking fucks up my head.
00:11:18.000And he said, human beings have all sorts of emotional impulses, and we're constrained by society from acting out on a lot of them.
00:11:24.000Maybe you're an unhappy person, you want to swear at every single person you see, but you can't, or you get punched in the eye, or there's other bad feedback.
00:11:30.000But on the internet, all that stuff just comes out.
00:12:48.000Now, when you started, what's really interesting about this sport, for folks who don't know, Mixed Martial Arts, when I came along in 1997, when I first started working for the UFC, it was essentially a banned sport.
00:13:01.000The only way you could get it was DirecTV.
00:13:04.000That was the only way you could get it.
00:13:07.000And when you would talk to people about it, they would talk to you like you were a horrible person for being involved in such a thing.
00:13:15.000And the sport stayed alive because of the internet.
00:13:18.000It was the first sport ever that stayed alive because of the internet.
00:13:22.000The websites, the Sure Dog or MMA Weekly, I don't know when that came along, but there was a bunch of them that came along.
00:13:29.000That was how we found out about the sport.
00:13:31.000That's how we found out about the Pride shows.
00:13:34.000K1 and you know all the different fights that were going on in Japan and in Brazil the only way to find out about them was the internet so we were all like really active like and you would go to these forums and you would try to find out you know what is happening what's going on now and a lot of times you know you would be able to buy tape I used to get tapes from a dude in Canada A friend of mine in Canada had a friend,
00:13:58.000and this dude contacted me, a dude named Brian, and I would buy tapes from him.
00:14:03.000He would get them from Japan, and he would send them down to me in California.
00:14:27.000I actually, many, many years ago, maybe 15 years ago, I tried to get Wired Magazine to do an article on it, because they did, maybe it was 10 years ago, they did an article on the role of the internet in revolutions in countries, and that was starting.
00:14:41.000I was like, hey, I got a sport that was saved by the internet, and they sent them some cool pictures, and they were like, oh, those are cool pictures, we're not interested.
00:14:48.000But I agree 100%, and I try to get some notice of that in sort of the tech community, or at least as much of the tech community as I know, which wasn't his Wired magazine.
00:14:59.000Well, there wasn't very many other sports I can claim that.
00:15:35.000But there was no sport in my lifetime that grew like MMA did, from complete total obscurity to the cover of ESPN, or the front page of CNN, the cover of Sports Illustrated.
00:15:50.000There's never been a sport that blew up like that.
00:15:53.000And when it was at its worst, when it was at its most desperate time, it was sites like yours, really, that kept it alive.
00:16:00.000Yeah, Ultimate Athlete Magazine listed, again, this is going back 10 or 12 years, because they tried to compete with the UFC with a show also using the term Ultimate, and they got sued and disappeared.
00:16:11.000But before they disappeared, they gave out, they did the 20 most important things in the history of the internet.
00:18:28.000I've only worked with Keurig since 06. Before that, I was just an IT guy.
00:18:32.000I graduated college, regular IT job, but I was into the sport, and so I would work IT 8 to 5, and I had the underground up all the time, or I was doing work for him, like on the side, and I had a button on the floor that was attached to USB, and when I tapped it, like an Excel spreadsheet would pop up,
00:18:49.000and like another document, so it looked like I was working.
00:18:51.000So if like a boss came in behind me, tapped the button, looks like I'm working.
00:18:54.000But I'd really just be OG and I'm working on something else all day.
00:21:07.000For the first decade or something, occasionally we would get ahead by a few hundred dollars, and then there'd be some local fighter I know who got a chance to fight in the...
00:21:26.000Maybe 2008. Yeah, we brought in Chris, and Chris kind of got some good deals, and all of a sudden I was like, oh my god, we can make more than $75 a month.
00:21:34.000Yeah, when I came on board, they were like, we have this website, it gets a million views a month, we make $100 a month.
00:21:40.000And I'm like, I think you can make more than that.
00:21:47.000So I reached out to like tap out the big guys in the space and I made big deals that these guys were like, you guys should go ask tap out for 800 bucks a month.
00:21:54.000And I'm like, let's go ask them for 8,000 and see what happens.
00:21:57.000And sure enough, tap out bit at the time and it kind of took off from there.
00:22:01.000That's actually a true story and the numbers are not exaggerated in the least.
00:22:04.000We were literally like kind of angling for $800 a month and Chris literally said $8,000 a month and they literally bought it and we signed a contract.
00:22:11.000It's probably the greatest day of my entire life.
00:22:14.000Tap out is like a great example of the oversaturation of the market.
00:22:18.000Like tap out at one point in time was cool to wear.
00:22:21.000I know a lot of people have a hard time believing that.
00:22:25.0001998, sophomore year of high school, I ordered the Tap Out shirt from InYourFace.com, and I thought I was the shit.
00:22:32.000It said, like, submit to Tap Out to Cry Uncle.
00:23:39.000He said grappling is what I do instead of having health insurance.
00:23:42.000So he pays for grappling instructions instead of having health insurance.
00:23:46.000He was so serious about his lessons at Henzo's that he had moved from Canada, moved from Canada to New York, was taking lessons at Henzo's.
00:24:07.000And there's a hardcore fan base of the sport that's like that.
00:24:10.000Like, if you were like, okay, health insurance or never discussing or having anything to do with MMA, they're, sorry, health insurance, hope I don't break my leg.
00:25:15.000To me, it's like a little piece of history.
00:25:17.000So, I don't think they're ever going to go out of style.
00:25:20.000But there's a certain douchey element that's attached to the t-shirt world of mixed martial arts because it became a way that guys that sort of...
00:25:47.000Yeah, some guys are strikers, some guys are grapplers, I'm both.
00:25:52.000My favorite MMA t-shirt of all time is, Kip did a runoff of it, but a couple of companies have, my girlfriend loves to grapple, but you should see her box.
00:27:14.000I figured the sport was going to die on a national basis, and then we would just sort of build it up over 40, 50 years, and I'd be dead at the end of it.
00:27:23.000And I thought it would build up from the bottom up.
00:27:26.000And so I thought the Internet, at the time at least, was incredibly important to do that.
00:27:30.000So when the sport was at its lowest, I was actually the most excited about keeping the site going.
00:27:36.000I've definitely never for a single moment wanted to turn it off because of all the jerks.
00:27:44.000Well, I always had loyalty to your site for a couple reasons.
00:27:47.000One, because it was one of the first ones that I ever joined, and it was one of the places where, like I said, you would get guys like Josh Barnett would post on there.
00:28:44.000I always had loyalty for two reasons one because of that but two because Karek and I we know people from from Massachusetts like we knew like We're probably pretty close to the same age.
00:28:56.00054 54 we in that time period we knew a lot of the same martial arts people like I'd heard about you I heard about your school in Western Massachusetts Western Massachusetts was always the home of Larry Kelly who's like a really well-known karate guy and He was my business partner for 20 years.
00:29:12.000And he was really popular, or famous rather, for knocking out Billy Blanks back when Billy Blanks was a fucking superhero.
00:30:44.000When we were coming up, and we were talking before the show started about guys who had been knocked out in the gym and all these people that we know, people get knocked out, they would dust you off and push you right back in there.
00:30:55.000That day, five minutes later, right here is Billy.
00:31:11.000There was him and a bunch of other guys like him that were these really big, super muscular guys that were involved in the point fighting circuit.
00:31:21.000And they got real good at leaping in and tagging you.
00:31:26.000And you're starting to see that skill emerge in MMA. I know there's a guy who fights for Bellator.
00:31:41.000And then, of course, you've got Raymond Daniels, who's fighting in glory, who's really picking up the kickboxing game, who also was a great fighter in the point karate circuit.
00:31:52.000And he's got that style, that leap-in style.
00:31:55.000And the ability to cover distance, the ability to jump in and cover distance in a way that you can't.
00:32:01.000There's a lot of guys that are sticking to that Muay Thai style, sort of flat-footed, Tiago Silva, Plod Ford sort of style.
00:32:25.000That ability that those guys had of just closing the distance really quick with that karate-style blitz, I still think that's a missing aspect in a lot of MMA. Machida had it a little bit.
00:32:36.000He has an element of that, but he was more of a counter-striker.
00:32:42.000Larry Kelly, like, in that video, like, demonstrated, like, why that can be, like, super effective, like that.
00:32:48.000It actually came, originally, it came into the sport of a point fighting from Bruce Lee, and Bruce Lee picked it up from fencing.
00:32:56.000Bruce Lee watched all kinds of, like, he watched boxing, he loved Muhammad Ali the same way Dominic Cruz did, try and pick up things from him, and he watched fencing, and Fencers have the quickest footwork and handwork that I personally have ever seen.
00:33:07.000They just explode forward and he picked it up and he showed it to a karate guy named Joe Lewis, not the boxer Joe Lewis, but a karate guy named Joe Lewis.
00:33:14.000And Joe Lewis started smashing everybody with it and so everybody else picked it up.
00:33:17.000And then the point fighting in karate where you stop every single time you land something, which is kind of nutty.
00:33:24.000It started to dissipate, and people started doing what's called continuous point, where you weren't trying to knock each other out.
00:33:30.000You were trying to land super clean shots without a knockout, but you kept going, and that's where Daniels came from, and Michael Venom-Page, and guys like that.
00:33:38.000I do think that it can be applied to the sport.
00:33:41.000And then, you know, in a couple of years, people learn how to counter that and something new will come along.
00:33:46.000But when you can do something new in the sport, you get a little edge for a while, like Machida did with his traditional Shotokan karate.
00:33:53.000Those long, long lunges forward and sort of jabbing super hard and throwing that right hard.
00:33:58.000He had an advantage over everybody until he started bringing karate guys in and they're like, okay, it's not that tough to shut down.
00:34:04.000Once guys figure out what they're doing, you know, once you find a guy who's really good that you can spar with, then you can kind of time it.
00:34:10.000But until then, it's like, what is this new style of movement that I have in front of me that I don't know anybody who moves like this, and it's super hard to judge.
00:35:01.000There's a new level of guys that are coming at the grappling circuit out of John Donaher School.
00:35:06.000And it's like this new level of leg locks.
00:35:10.000Leg locks are really permeating all of grappling and jiu-jitsu now in a very new and strange way.
00:35:15.000I've had some interesting conversations with Eddie Bravo about it, where Eddie really ignored leg locks until a few years back, and then started incorporating it, and a lot of it is because of the success of a lot of these East Coast guys.
00:35:29.000Like I said, Gary Tonin, Eddie Cummings, and a lot of it is under the tutelage of Donaher, but there's a lot of guys in grappling that are really getting good at it, and of course, in MMA, it was Paul Harris.
00:35:40.000It really kind of opened up a lot of people's eyes.
00:35:43.000I'm going to train with Eddie tonight down in LA, and I told someone that, and they're like, yeah, he's been really working on his leg locks lately, so that's what you need to look out for.
00:35:51.000My gym, coincidentally, we've been doing leg locks forever.
00:35:53.000Like, Joe Lozo and those guys, that's their brother and brother.
00:35:56.000They've been doing flying heel hooks for 10 years, and it all came from a guy named Donnie Banville in Fall River, who's actually passed now, but he grew up with a Japanese mother in Judo, and...
00:36:09.000He was like the leg lock king and this is like 2002 and we're like, what the fuck is a leg lock?
00:36:14.000He came into our gym and he taught us like rolling toe holds.
00:36:59.000That was when I wasn't working for the UFC. I was watching that at home.
00:37:03.000And I remember that was the issue with leg locks, was that when someone would attack a leg lock, you would have both your arms committed to the leg lock so you wouldn't be able to defend against punches.
00:37:13.000And as you know, with a guy like Ian Freeman, it only takes one to scramble your fucking senses.
00:37:20.000And then a couple, I mean, Frank got hit by like four or five in a row.
00:37:25.000He just was gone, you know, and it's interesting to see that the progression of these techniques how it changes and how it morphs and One of the things like from like if you look at a guy like Larry Kelly or you look at like a lot of these traditional karate techniques those those techniques were kind of looked at Like,
00:38:12.000I mean, you're seeing these traditional techniques that are just super effective when you get them in the hands of a guy like Edson Barboza, when you get them in the hands of a guy who knows all the other things.
00:38:24.000At various points, I have thought, okay, the sport is done, we've sort of got this body of knowledge, and we've just got to refine what we've got, and we're not going to be seeing a lot of new stuff coming in.
00:38:36.000And every time I had that thought, six months later, something had come along, and And I would be proven wrong.
00:38:42.000Including super simple things like the Ironman guillotine.
00:38:45.000When it first started happening in grappling tournaments, I was reffing.
00:39:59.000I learned it from Denny Propagos, who was a big fan of adding and incorporating all kinds of weird grips to it.
00:40:06.000Different people have different grips that they use with techniques, and it's amazing how just those little subtle adjustments have a huge impact on the efficiency of the technique, how much leverage you can get into the technique.
00:40:18.000Yeah, I think Tom Waller told me that was his grip one day, and I was like, I'll try it.
00:40:22.000It seems weird, but I like that grip now.
00:40:41.000But it's fascinating to me, all the different techniques and the different variables.
00:40:46.000And we're seeing that even with the traditional martial arts techniques, there's still a lot of things that guys are doing wrong with traditional kicks, like sidekicks and spinning back kicks or turning sidekicks.
00:40:57.000There's still a lot of guys that have the knee down instead of the knee up.
00:41:00.000They don't lift the knee high enough because it takes a long time to learn how to do that.
00:41:04.000But when you do do it, then you get that thrusting kick, which just has so much more power.
00:42:00.000Yeah, it's interesting, because all these, you know, these little problems that people used to have, and they still have.
00:42:06.000There's a lot of guys that still have little shitty old cups.
00:42:09.000Like, I don't know what Felder was using, but it looked to me like a regular jockstrap in a cup that you'd buy at fucking a sporting goods store.
00:42:47.000I ran into Mayhem Miller and he had his cup and it was just a cup that you would buy for $14.95 at Dick's Sporting Goods or something.
00:42:56.000The metal cups are, I think they're the best, because if you kick them, you get a broken toe, and if you figure four somebody's body, you can dig the metal cup into their spine, and they'll tap just from that.
00:43:04.000I don't even grapple with all the cups now.
00:45:08.000Oh, the 12 to 6. The 12 to 6 elbow was banned because, and Big John McCarthy told me this, that when they first brought the sport to the athletic commissions, they said, okay, you can do anything, but you can't do this downward elbow strike because I saw a guy on ESPN break bricks in a karate tournament.
00:45:24.000So they thought that this was the most powerful strike known to man.
00:45:28.000Meanwhile, you got Barboza wheel-kicking Terry Edim into another dimension.
00:45:49.000A big part of the impact is the instep or the shin literally hitting that spot where everyone tells you not to hit when you do ground and pound with little short punches.
00:46:01.000Like, someone's telling you you can't hit a hammer fist in the back of the head, you know, when your arm is half-tied up and you're trying to do that, and they're like, watch the back of the head!
00:46:07.000But meanwhile, when you're standing, you just crank it with all that thigh meat and bone and 50 pounds of leg behind it, and BOOM! That's legal.
00:46:21.000The thing about the back of the head that a lot of fans don't know is that both players have a responsibility and that what usually happens, especially with those kicks, is the kick starts to come in and people shy away from it.
00:46:36.000Because the kick's coming in and they expose the back of their head and then they get knocked out.
00:46:41.000But both players, both fighters have a responsibility about that back of the head stuff.
00:46:46.000And if a shot comes in that if you hadn't moved would hit you in the side of the head and then you move and the back of your head starts to get exposed, it's kind of on you.
00:46:54.000Well, the same on the ground as well, right?
00:46:56.000When a guy's pounding on you on the ground and you're moving your head away from the punches to your face and he hits the back of your head and then the referee says, watch the back of the head.
00:47:04.000Well, you were already launching that punch before the guy turned.
00:47:52.000Apparently, I didn't know anything about it.
00:47:54.000When we're little kids, the bones haven't quite grown together.
00:47:57.000And as you get a little older, up until two years old or something, all the bones come together and they form in a little spot right here.
00:48:06.000But he thinks that there's actually a weakness in being hit right here.
00:48:10.000And in the 80s, I remember being at Master Tati's Muay Thai studio in Manchester, England, and we watched a videotape, and Tati said, that guy died on the tape.
00:48:19.000And I was like, holy God, how did he die?
00:48:21.000And it was a downward elbow right to here.
00:48:23.000It sounds like a silly sort of a blood sport thing, but that jumping downward elbow right to this spot here is illegal in Muay Thai.
00:48:31.000So it may well be that that's actually...
00:48:58.000Elbow, it's still, I mean, it's not that specific.
00:49:00.000If you're hitting someone in the forehead, it's that dangerous.
00:49:03.000It may be as simple as a few times, guys, well, a lot of times in Muay Thai, guys have been downward elbowing, you know, winging elbow across the head, and they didn't die, they just got a big cut, and then somebody actually passed away from the straight downward, and they were like, we're not doing that anymore.
00:49:16.000But the problem is, in Muay Thai, you're not dealing with the most stringent athletic commissions that are doing MRIs and CAT scans and making sure the people have their EKGs in order.
00:50:09.000I was like, I shouldn't be this tired.
00:50:11.000My heart shouldn't be beating like this.
00:50:13.000And then try that in a fight when you're adrenalized, and you're bleeding, and he's bleeding, and the referee's screaming, there's 2,000 people screaming, and imagine what your heart would have done.
00:54:01.000But that's like how they get away with, like, you know, when you look at a bag of chips and it tells you how many calories there is per serving.
00:54:06.000Yeah, only 100, because you need three chips.
00:54:10.000But it's interesting how the supplement industry, when it comes to bodybuilding and when it comes to, you know, any athletic training, has really benefited from all these...
00:54:22.000You know, these different, like, regulations get passed where new things become illegal.
00:54:26.000So they come up with some new thing to kind of like fill in the blanks.
00:54:55.000Might as well just go in there and see how you do 100% naturally.
00:54:59.000Let's talk about what's going on right now with MMA, with the testing, because I think it's pretty fascinating that this is a sport where, to be completely and totally honest, most likely a giant percentage of the population of the people involved in the sport were taking some sort of performance enhancing drugs.
00:55:18.000It seems like to get through a training camp, and if you're not familiar with MMA, one of the crazy things about the sport is that it involves so many different disciplines.
00:55:34.000You have to learn all these things, and you have to put them all together, and you also have to do a strength and conditioning program.
00:55:39.000So unlike boxing, where you're learning how to box, and then you're probably doing a little road work on top of that, but that's mostly it.
00:55:47.000It means some guys engage in some calisthenic programs.
00:55:50.000Manny Pacquiao is like his famous ab routine.
00:55:59.000So for them, what's important is just honing those hand skills, recovering and coming back and honing those skills.
00:56:07.000It's counterproductive for them to go through the same kind of workouts that the MMA guys do.
00:56:12.000But for MMA guys, this fucking grind of getting up in the morning every day and doing this for six to eight weeks for a camp, it's almost impossible to do at the highest levels without some kind of help.
00:56:25.000And now the UFC has incorporated this rigorous Incredibly intense testing where they're doing randoms five times a year on people.
00:56:37.000So guys like Conor McGregor, Leota Machida or anybody, they're just going to get tested.
00:56:41.000They're going to show up at your house.
00:56:42.000And if you're in camp, this is what's really fucked up to me.
00:56:46.000Say if you've got to work out at 10 o'clock in the morning and you need your sleep.
00:56:49.000You went to bed at 10, you're looking to get 10, 11 hours sleep, and they wake you up.
00:56:54.000They'll wake you up at 5, 6 o'clock in the morning, pee in this cup right now.
00:57:02.000And yeah, they're only going to do it that one day, but you might go to the gym that one day and be tired because of that, and that might be the time you get injured.
00:58:13.000You could put it under your fingernails.
00:58:13.000Like, your stream would go through your finger, and the paste, whatever the ingredients were, would diffuse the sample or taint it, or...
00:58:19.000I think it's a good thing to find out what everyone's taking.
00:58:23.000I think it's also a good thing to try to figure out what is possible for the human body.
00:58:28.000Like, what kind of condition can you actually get in without help?
00:58:32.000I mean, and if we are really dealing with a sport where 70%, let's say 70, Vitor says it's like 90. Maybe he's right.
00:58:40.000I would say, have used at some point, it's 90. Using right now, I have no idea, but at some point in their career we're using, yeah, it's 90. Do you think that's the case at other sports?
00:58:58.000Although Chris and I spent the good party yesterday with two senior guys from USADA, and for hours they talked about everything that they've gone through ever since.
00:59:11.000Yeah, that's the group that the UFC has contracted with to do all the testing.
00:59:16.000And when we look at it, it does seem completely onerous, but from their point of view, they've been in a decades-long battle against people, particularly in a lot of sports, including maybe most notably cycling, where...
00:59:31.000They told us a story yesterday about one of their testers, and they found this out later, years, years later in deposition.
00:59:37.000One of their testers shows up at the hotel.
00:59:39.000Somebody's waiting in the lobby, and cell phone's up.
00:59:43.000The athlete sprints to the doctor's room, and the doctor grabbed an IV bag and squeezed it in front of him.
00:59:50.000Forced it into him and then put another one in and squeezed it and forced it and there was enough extra liquid in his body from that so his levels were a little kind of weird but they didn't go over any threshold and that's the kind of shenanigans that they've been fighting against and I think that's the origin of that stuff like we're going to show up at 3 a.m.
01:00:08.000In MMA it does seem completely unnecessary.
01:00:11.000But from their point of view, with this decades of trying to fight dirty cyclists and things, they feel like that's the corner that they're forced into.
01:00:36.000Let them all do steroids and just see who wins.
01:00:39.000You can't do that because then the idea is that kids coming up are forced to take performance enhancing drugs because otherwise there's no way to win that sport.
01:00:49.000It's a fake sport in that the results that you're seeing are not normal results.
01:00:53.000They're superhuman results and they only come about because you take a guy and you alter his chemistry.
01:00:58.000You alter his chemistry to the point where he's not a human anymore.
01:01:01.000Like if you look at a bodybuilder, perfect example, and you look at some fucking giant Dorian Yates type character just Veins all over his eyeballs, and his fucking face is ripped, and he weighs 300 pounds, and he's 5'2".
01:02:56.000And then I would think about, what is it like to take Anadrol 50, or some of the really crazy ones that they say, turn you into a wild silverback gorilla.
01:03:06.000Yeah, those guys that would take him like I remember I knew this dude was a football player who told me that they would take anadrol 50 and they would take all this different stuff and Oh, no, no, this is a different guy.
01:03:16.000He's a bodybuilder He told me he became a jiu-jitsu guy became a black belt under Jean-Jacques Machado great guy and He told me that when he was bodybuilding and he took the anadrol 50 stuff.
01:03:26.000He said literally he would see red and And then wake up grabbing someone about to kill them.
01:03:34.000Like some guy said something to him in traffic, and before he knew it, he was out of the car, reaching into the guy's car, ready to kill him, and he was like, what the fuck am I doing?
01:03:46.000But it was this overwhelming rage for almost nothing.
01:03:52.000It just turns you into like an animal like it sets you back like you're strong as a gorilla and you you lose that like human part of you fucking well you don't think you're not really a person you're some you're like you you're mostly person but you got some other element in you and the anadrol 50 stuff is apparently I don't know if still is but that was like the stuff that people would talk about like if you fuck with that like that is that that's the rager that's the rager and that's the stuff that puts 30 40 pounds of just stacked Shredded beef on you.
01:07:08.000That was when everybody thought he was going to kill Randy.
01:07:11.000And Randy just beat him down, took him down, smashed him, and changed his life.
01:07:16.000Like, Vitor before then was this unstoppable force who had destroyed Tank Abbott, destroyed Tellegman and Scott Ferrozo, and everybody was like, Vitor is the fucking...
01:07:24.000Like, people were talking about Vitor versus Hickson.
01:07:26.000There was all this, like, crazy talk back then, you know?
01:07:30.000And then Vitor had like that downward spiral that he went on for a little bit where his sister got kidnapped and all that stuff happened after that.
01:07:52.000And when you force your body to do something totally unnatural like that, The rapid change of putting on 30, 40 pounds in literally 6 to 8 weeks, that is not good for you.
01:08:51.000He's just trying not to get cut, but I don't know.
01:08:55.000I've been thinking about it for years, and I don't know what the answer is.
01:08:58.000See, that one I don't have any problem with at all, because he was born with just a weird eyebrow.
01:09:03.000And also, on top of that, he had so much scar tissue from all of his fights.
01:09:07.000So it wasn't just a matter of the bone was cutting his it was also a matter of like he had to get that scar tissue removed because it would just burst you know scar tissue if you don't know when you have scar tissue around your eye when something heals up it's measurably weaker than it was before that but now they have new methods of dealing with that like Vanderlei like before Vanderlei got his surgery his eyes he would just get hit once and it would swell up and it would like come down and almost close his eye and then would cut open and start bleeding And if you looked at him back then,
01:09:37.000before he had his surgery, his eyes were just a mass of scar tissue, like, all around his eyebrows.
01:09:43.000So it makes everything thicker, because you've got all these cuts, they heal, and there's a knot, and another one, it heals, and there's a knot.
01:09:49.000And all this time that's happening, your eyelids are relaxing also from getting hit a lot, because the muscles get pulverized, and it starts drooping down over your eye.
01:09:58.000So some guys get surgery to sort of raise their eyelids back up and put them in place so they can see better.
01:10:04.000Because when you're fighting for a long period of time, the palooka look, like you always see it in cartoons, they get that thing, yeah, I thought you would, boy, so I'll go knock his brains in.
01:10:15.000That thing where they would get where the eyebrows would drop down, that impedes your vision.
01:10:42.000One thing I wanted to throw in, because there's a huge audience here, and I know as a fact a lot of them are fighters, is when you do get cut, don't let like the EMT or somebody just throw three quick stitches in there.
01:10:54.000Get that cut done by a plastic surgeon.
01:10:58.000That scar tissue comes from people letting, I've actually seen EMTs just, I know how to do that, and they'll put three stitches in and Not very nicely.
01:11:07.000So, guys, when you get a really bad cut in a fight, go find a plastic surgeon.
01:12:55.000Part of the story that Chris isn't telling you is that like any good person from Lausanne MMA, the minute he got a head cut and he was bleeding all over the place, he did a selfie.
01:15:04.000Because he fought 205-er and then I was way bigger and I'm just sitting there like oh this is not going our way and uh the round ends we go in there and John Wood, the syndicate guy, is talking to him.
01:15:15.000He's like, you know, you're doing all right.
01:15:18.000And then the second round starts, and he hits him with a hook from hell.
01:15:23.000The best hook you could ever hit a guy with.
01:15:24.000Well, he threw a few and missed before that.
01:15:26.000The whole first round, he threw like 10. But no, that round, right before he knocked him out, it wasn't like Volante shouldn't have seen it coming.
01:15:33.000He was throwing a lot of hooks, but Volante was convinced he was going to steamroll.
01:15:37.000He was running forward hard, and he ran right into it.
01:16:21.000I've gone to wrestling practices at just like a D3 college program, and they're grueling practices.
01:16:27.000For an hour and a half, shoot across the mat for 20 minutes and drill.
01:16:31.000They just build functional muscle for years in that sport.
01:16:36.000I found a guy at Iowa who did his PhD on the changes in wrestling rules over maybe a 50-year period or something.
01:16:44.000I read his thesis and it was interesting.
01:16:48.000And you can see, they call them concession holds, not submissions, but it's the exact same thing.
01:16:52.000You could see year by year, decade by decade, they took out every dangerous hold from wrestling.
01:16:59.000But curiously, or interestingly, by taking out every dangerous hold, it actually made wrestling better.
01:17:06.000Because it's the one part of combat sports, you can do as hard as you want, and nothing gets broken.
01:17:12.000You can't do Muay Thai, you can't box 100% all the time.
01:17:15.000You sure can't put submissions and roll, you can't do Jiu-Jitsu on people 100%.
01:17:19.000But by virtue of having taken all the concession holds out of wrestling, you can wrestle a guy just as Hard as you want and nobody has to go to the hospital and I think that's what makes wrestling so phenomenal.
01:17:32.000Some of these guys start when they're eight years old and they go as hard as they humanly can for 20 years and they're monsters.
01:17:40.000It's also the mental toughness that they developed.
01:17:42.000There's a mental toughness that wrestlers possess because also they're usually dehydrated, they're cutting weight, they're irritated, almost always overtrained, almost always.
01:17:51.000So you develop this ability to push through discomfort that a lot of people just don't have.
01:17:55.000You know, jiu-jitsu, you can go full blast, but you have to tap.
01:17:59.000And if guys don't tap, that's when problems occur.
01:18:02.000But you can certainly go full blast up until the moment when you have to concede.
01:18:06.000But, you know, a lot of people don't like to concede, and that's where the problem comes in.
01:18:22.000That's the only fucking way you learn.
01:18:24.000You have to put yourself in positions where you're going to tap, and you've got to deal with that tap.
01:18:30.000And if you don't do it, you're never going to get good at it.
01:18:33.000And we've all known so many guys that come from kickboxing that, for whatever reason, they got really good at one sport, and they never could get good at jiu-jitsu because they didn't want to roll with people who could tap them.
01:18:48.000You know, I opened up an MMA gym way before I knew one single thing about the sport in 93, just a couple months after UFC won.
01:18:57.000And for years and years and years, I just didn't want to tap.
01:18:59.000If some new guy came in, if he was a blue belt, that's when blue belts were kind of a big deal, I would lose my mind at the fear that the guy might tap me.
01:19:06.000And then I read an interview with Frank Shamrock, and he goes, oh, I tap all the time.
01:19:48.000I was actually talking to Big John last night about the same thing.
01:19:52.000And he's like, because he has a gym up in Valencia, which is pretty close to here.
01:19:55.000And he's like, when a guy comes into my gym for the first time, they're a little, like, starstruck, but they're close, they want to train jiu-jitsu, and he rolls with them, and he shakes hands like they're going to start, and he taps them three times.
01:20:05.000He's like, cool, you tap Big John, now let's have some fun.
01:20:07.000So they kind of get over that, like...
01:25:57.000My sense is, I've never played football in my life, and I barely know the rules.
01:26:02.000When I watch football, I personally cannot appreciate their athleticism because I don't know what's going on.
01:26:08.000I know that NFL players are probably the best athletes in the whole world, but I can't see it because I don't know the sport.
01:26:14.000My sense is there's a lot of MMA fans that just don't understand the artistry that goes on there, the timing it takes to take somebody down and all the nuances of I think if they did know it, they would love watching.
01:27:12.000No shit, I'm trying to punch him in the face.
01:27:14.000I'm excited by the next level athletes and the next level ability that you're seeing in the sport that I think TJ Dillashaw shows, like those kind of guys.
01:27:25.000I think you're going to see a guy, like eventually, who can move and strike like TJ, but kicks like Edson Barboza.
01:27:43.000We haven't hit that one where we see the perfect Michael Jordan of MMA. They don't exist yet.
01:27:49.000I think you're starting to see glimpses of these possibilities and what TJ showed this weekend I think is a great glimpse of that possibility.
01:27:58.000And that's what excites me about fighting.
01:28:01.000People think, oh, you're a fucking meathead.
01:28:03.000You like watching people beat the shit out of each other.
01:28:22.000And there are extreme, exciting things that you can do with your life if you so choose to.
01:28:28.000I think fighting is one of those things.
01:28:30.000And I think at the very highest level, what it is, is problem solving.
01:28:35.000It's intense consequence problem solving.
01:28:38.000And when you're looking at a guy like TJ Dillashaw, he has created this problem solving solution with Dwayne Ludwig.
01:28:45.000And their problem-solving solution involves incredible athleticism, amazing determination, and a fanatical coach who has a deep, deep understanding of movement and striking in a way that I don't think any other coaches have.
01:29:00.000The way Dwayne teaches his guys is so different.
01:29:16.000I've watched him and TJ hit mitts together, too.
01:29:18.000You watch him rattle out information, like the intensity level and the amount of data that they're crunching and processing and how much thought is behind every single movement.
01:29:29.000You know, a lot of guys, when they throw punches, like you say, you throw a one-two, you sort of move a little bit forward with the jab and then you rotate the shoulders and the hips to throw the right hand.
01:30:35.000One of my heroes in the sport is Andre Pedernaris.
01:30:38.000I think he's my hero, first of all, because he, as far as I understand it, he was the first guy to bring poor kids into jiu-jitsu and into mixed martial arts.
01:31:29.000It really is an interesting thing to watch.
01:31:32.000It's an interesting thing to watch the progress.
01:31:35.000It's so fascinating because, again, if you look back at football from the 1960s, if you look back and you watch some of the great players that played throughout history, you will see better athletes today than you see then.
01:31:53.000If you go back and watch UFC 1 from 1993, I mean, go back and watch a Marvin Hagler fight from 1988, you know, or 1985. Watch Hagler fight Mustafa Hamshou, or, you know...
01:32:19.000I mean, you might see a guy in Floyd Mayweather who has it down to a science, and I think personally, as far as boxing, I think Floyd Mayweather is the best boxer ever, because I think he gets hit the least, he moves the best, and he shuts guys down the most.
01:32:32.000You don't have to like him as a person.
01:32:34.000You might think he's a douchebag or whatever, but I think as far as being a skillful boxer, it's my personal opinion.
01:32:41.000I mean, I got in an argument with Max Kellerman was telling me Sugar Ray Robinson is the best.
01:32:59.000I think if they were the same weight class, I think Floyd Mayweather would fucking pot shot Jake LaMotta and tie him up and cut angles on him and move away from him on the ropes.
01:33:08.000I think, yeah, Ray Robinson might have fought more times and fought more people and went all the way up to light heavyweight and all that jazz, but I think Floyd's the best.
01:33:18.000But when you look at Ray Robinson's fights, it's recognizable.
01:33:43.000You watched T.J. Dillashaw's fight the other night and tell me there was anybody that he was even remotely similar to that just 10 years ago.
01:33:54.000I was talking with my, I'm the records keeper for MMA and my counterpart, the records keeper for boxing is Annie Miramontes.
01:34:00.000A couple of, two, three years ago, I was talking with Annie and John McCarthy.
01:34:03.000And McCarthy was talking about the fact that he owns a gym, and he rolls with all the athletes and stuff, and Andy Miramonte's got kind of a weird look in his face, and he goes, wait a minute, you roll with these people?
01:34:16.000Because in boxing, you have to keep a distance, a separation between the officials and the athletes.
01:34:22.000And what McCarthy said is, this sport is evolving all the time, and I can't do my job unless I'm in there actually rolling with the people.
01:34:30.000And then he showed them a go-go plata.
01:34:32.000And Annie, the boxing guy, was like, oh, that's unbelievable!
01:34:36.000And several years ago, the go-go plata was a fairly new move, and he just threw that out as an example of how...
01:34:44.000So if you're a records keeper or you're a referee, you are refereeing and officiating a sport that's been the same for 50 years, basically.
01:34:53.000You don't have to know all the new things in it.
01:34:56.000And MMA is just changing all the time.
01:34:57.000And if you're an official involved in the sport, you've got to be on the mats every week or something's going to be coming up that you've never seen before.
01:35:04.000Yeah, in jiu-jitsu, there's always some new move that someone figures out.
01:35:36.000Moves to the left, moving to the right.
01:35:38.000Look, every time he's throwing these punches, he's moving.
01:35:42.000I mean, this is like a sponge, next-level athlete, and a kid like TJ Dillashaw, super dedicated, got a perfect mind for the sport, that became best friends with a fucking maniac, like Dwayne Ludwig, who's a world champion kickboxer,
01:36:00.000And it's exactly how they did it in the locker room.
01:36:02.000I was actually back there watching them warm up, and that's exactly how they move when they warm up, and he executes it exactly how Bang wants him to.
01:36:10.000Look at that animated GIF. Like, look at this movement.
01:36:27.000I mean, I don't think there's been a guy in the sport that moves that good.
01:36:31.000And what's really incredible is Dwayne never moved like that.
01:36:35.000Dwayne's teaching him some shit that he figured out that he didn't even do himself.
01:36:39.000I mean, Dwayne was a great kickboxer, but Dwayne was way more linear in his movements.
01:36:44.000Like, what TJ's doing is some really crazy shit that Dwayne sort of figured out that TJ can do.
01:36:49.000And maybe the craziest thing about it is TJ does have a base in something else.
01:36:55.000He started off, obviously, as a wrestler.
01:36:57.000There's a whole new generation coming up that were on the swim team or they played hockey or something.
01:37:02.000They don't have any base in any sort of a thing.
01:37:04.000All they're learning from the get-go is mixed martial arts.
01:37:07.000Guys like Joe Proctor out of Chris's Gym was a hockey player in high school and walked into the gym and never done any kind of combat sport in all his life.
01:37:16.000With the whole next generation of Joe Proctor's is gonna throw up stuff I can barely imagine.
01:37:22.000Well, there's a thought, there's a school of thought that the best way is actually not that way, but rather the best way is to get really fucking good at one thing.
01:37:30.000To get like really good at kickboxing and then dedicate yourself to learning MMA. So you will always have this advantage in the striking because we all know that to get Really incredibly good at something.
01:37:42.000Almost requires a singular dedication.
01:37:45.000Although TJ is one of the world's best mixed martial arts fighters, for sure.
01:37:49.000He's probably not one of the world's best strikers.
01:37:52.000If you put him in glory, and you put him up against Andy Ristey, or one of those really high-level...
01:37:59.000Muay Thai guys, he might not be able to beat those guys.
01:38:02.000But when it comes to putting all that shit together, he's one of the best at it.
01:38:06.000But if you get a guy like Andy Ristie, who learns all the shit that he's doing, that TJ's learning, then he will have an advantage over TJ, at least in that one aspect of the game.
01:38:15.000Whereas TJ will always have an advantage over him in wrestling, because that's his base.
01:38:20.000There's an interesting schools of thought there that some people think that it's best to learn everything from the get-go, like a Rory McDonald.
01:38:28.000And some people think it's better to be like a Damien Maia.
01:38:30.000You come in, you have this one insane discipline, the world-class Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and then everything else you've got to kind of learn to go with it.
01:38:39.000But worst case scenario, you could always take it to that place, and you'll have this giant advantage over everyone else.
01:38:45.000Do you remember when Damien Maia took Rick Story down?
01:38:48.000Rick Story is this fucking beast of a wrestler.
01:38:51.000Super strong guy, but Damian Maia took him down, smushed him, transitioned to his back, and squoze his fucking head like a zit.
01:38:58.000And I remember watching it going, holy shit.
01:39:01.000I never saw anybody do that to Rick Story before.
01:39:04.000But it's that next level jujitsu that he has that no one else has.
01:40:53.000Because this was a huge event in Abu Dhabi, and it was right after Sheik Tok Noon had bought 10% of the UFC. It was kind of embarrassing for them to have that event there and have the greatest fighter in the world at the time, Anderson, fight this guy in Damian Maia who's well-respected and people thinking this was going to be some sort of a crazy war,
01:41:11.000and then Anderson just doesn't fight for the last three rounds.
01:41:51.000And then all of a sudden, he's not the same guy anymore.
01:41:53.000You see him in the Nick Diaz fight when Nick Diaz fell to the ground and put his hands up like he was sleeping because he was bored with him.
01:42:32.000Those moments are crazy because before that, when he fought Stefan Bonner in Brazil and put his back up against the cage, he's like, come on, try to hit me.
01:42:40.000And they just moved out of the way and then blasted him with a knee to the body and took him out and then jumped up on the cage and all the Brazilians went crazy.
01:42:46.000I was like, who's better than that guy?
01:42:57.000How we get this idea in our head, whether it's a Mike Tyson or an Anderson Silva or anybody, we get this idea in our head that you can never be beat.
01:43:04.000And it's one of the great things about any sport, especially fighting, is that you know there's gonna come a day.
01:43:11.000Sometimes you're the hammer and sometimes you're the nail.
01:43:13.000There's gonna come a day when you're the nail, bitch.
01:43:16.000You know, you better get ready for it, or you better get out like George St. Pierre did.
01:43:25.000The mental game, I think, is way under, way, way, way underappreciated.
01:43:31.000And it hit me when I was a kid, I learned that Sir Roger Bannister, the first man to break the four-minute mile, everybody thought you couldn't break the four-minute mile.
01:43:45.000And then when you have an idea in your head in sports, but particularly in combat sports, whether it's I'm invincible or I'm going to beat this guy or whatever, when you have that idea in your head, it's actually physically, physiologically really, really powerful.
01:43:58.000But that got taken away from Anderson Silva.
01:44:01.000He realized he was not, in fact, invincible.
01:44:04.000And then I think life's a lot tougher for him now.
01:44:10.000I think that's why a guy like McGregor right now he really thinks he's invincible and it's that power of his mentality that pushes he literally thinks he can't lose he can call his fights call the round and he does it because he's so confident it's not that he believes it he knows it in his in his own head and it's it's powerful it carries him through just destroying these guys that Chad Mendes is a good fighter Chad Mendes is way out of shape for that fight let's be honest about things first of Chad Mendes and Urias stated this and Dwayne Ludwig said the same
01:44:40.000thing when I talked to him Chad takes time off in between fights.
01:44:43.000He likes to go hunting He likes to spend time doing other shit and for him to accept a fight like that on two weeks notice He did it because he thought he was gonna be able to win anyway But if you gave Chad Mendes a full camp if you gave Chad Mendes six to eight weeks and you know really let him know three months preferable It would be a different fight.
01:46:47.000Here's another example of a guy you think is invincible and then Fabricio Verdum literally out cardioed Cain by training really hard and doing a lot of cardio at 8,000 feet above elevation, above sea level.
01:47:00.000And Kane just thought, hey, I got the best cardio in the sport.
01:47:03.000I don't even need to go to Mexico early.
01:47:05.000So they're fighting in Mexico City as heavyweights at 7,500 feet above sea level.
01:47:27.000He's going back to his corner on rubbery legs.
01:47:30.000He's taking these big, heaving, deep breaths.
01:47:32.000I'm like, I've never seen this from him before.
01:47:34.000The UFC had one of their, I don't know if it was an embedded, some kind of a little video that they shot of Verdum in his camp, and I saw he was sleeping on the floor.
01:47:45.000They showed he had four fighters in the room, and he just had a tiny little, it wasn't even a cot, he just had a pallet on the floor.
01:47:50.000And I looked at that, I looked at the elevation, and I was like, this guy's going to win.
01:47:53.000He's sleeping on the floor for two months at a time.
01:48:46.000I think when you develop in a household where you're constantly competing with your own brother, and in Weidman's case, his brother was older than him.
01:49:16.000Well, I just think that there's an advantage in that, a psychological advantage in not being afraid, because you're constantly going to war with your own brother.
01:49:24.000You know, you just develop a steel-hardened sense of competition where you're just ready to go.
01:49:34.000When Chris Weidman got in Anderson Silva's face, when they first waited and Anderson Silva walked up to him and kissed him, he pressed the face and Weidman didn't move.
01:49:43.000And Anderson's staring at him and said, we'll see you tomorrow.
01:49:46.000He goes, hey, I'm not afraid of you, motherfucker.
01:51:31.000And then once he got Vitor to the ground, the difference between, first of all, the difference between Vitor, the Vitor that fought Rockhold, the Vitor that fought Bisping.
01:54:34.000You remember that fucking blowhard speech that the director went up and gave that Masks He died on a certain day so that he could promote the movie.
01:56:11.000Who are the two guys that tried to fight at the dinner afterwards?
01:56:14.000Like two guys that were in the UFC. Maybe I won't name names, but two guys in the UFC. We were to dinner, but it's still like a somber experience.
01:56:21.000You know, we just came from the funeral, and two guys in UFC almost got into a fight at dinner, like yelling and screaming at each other.
01:56:28.000And someone just said, like, guys, sit the fuck down.
01:57:12.000You know, it's an old, old, old, old line, but you talk about punch a black belt once and he's a brown belt and so on, and Vitor just got punched into being a white belt.
01:57:20.000Well, I don't know, you know, how good Vitor's just straight ground game is.
01:57:24.000I've never seen him roll jujitsu with, like, a high-level guy.
01:57:38.000Leaving it out there it just it wasn't like a difficult arm bar to catch I mean any purple belt who's worth his salt could have got that same kind of arm bar if a guy's like doing that with his arm but I would love to see, like, you know, you hear about guys,
01:57:54.000like, this guy's a black belt, that guy's a black belt, like, what level are they really, like, in a real jujitsu sense, you know?
01:58:00.000It used to be, like, ten years ago, you heard black belt, you're like, this guy's gotta be amazing.
02:00:44.000I always wear ear guards, so my ears are okay.
02:00:48.000I have a little bit of cauliflower in a few spots, but most of it is fine.
02:00:52.000But my nose had been broken so many times that...
02:00:55.000What cauliflower ear is, is when your skin breaks and it fills up with blood, the blood remains in the skin and then it calcifies.
02:01:03.000So when the blood is trapped under the surface of the skin, it bulges up in like that little hematoma or whatever you would call it, that blood becomes hard.
02:01:10.000It calcifies and literally becomes like a stone in your body.
02:01:14.000That's why cauliflower ears are harder than a rock.
02:01:37.000Not only did they have cauliflower ear back then, but an MD in New York saw this and he believes, he's pretty confident, that that's actually draining an ear.
02:01:47.000It wasn't just the guy got hit in the ear and he had cauliflower and he was bleeding.
02:01:50.000He believes that that's a medical procedure.
02:02:23.000One of my favorite cauliflower ear stories is I shot a boxing from a May DVD with Joe Lozano and his brother Danny and their boxing trainer.
02:02:31.000And Danny comes in late and he's like, I can't shoot this.
02:06:05.000I've bought some before from some other companies that make them for hockey players and stuff because I don't fit in regular pants because I have a fucking troll body.
02:06:16.000Really, I wear a 32, but I have to wear a belt.
02:06:20.000I really have a 30-inch waist, but I have big-ass thighs.
02:06:23.000A lot of times I wear 33-inch pants, straight leg, just so I can get them past my mid-thigh.
02:06:30.000Because otherwise, Levi's 501s are a joke.
02:08:44.000I mean, why would they design them for people that don't even wear them, in their world at least?
02:08:49.000But the thing about guys who weight lift, if you lift weights and you develop big-ass fucking football player thighs or something like that, regular pants are just not going to fit you.
02:09:00.000I'm always amazed when I wear XL. I'm like, I'm fucking 5'8".
02:10:18.000Firearms are something that gets subject to a lot more stress than clothing does.
02:10:22.000I mean, if you can make firearms, pretty soon they'll be able to make clothing on demand.
02:10:27.000I think that's what you're going to get, like everything.
02:10:28.000If you want to buy a computer, what you're going to do is you're going to, you know, it's like buying a license for your computer from somewhere.
02:10:35.000You're going to get a license for it, and then you're just going to, like, you know, like a one-click on Apple or something like that, and then you're just going to print up your computer.
02:10:44.000I think you're just going to have, like, a printer, but that printer's going to have raw materials, like metals and, you know, minerals or whatever you need for batteries or what have you, and you're just going to print it.
02:13:31.000And after, I think, four months, she said, you can get a baby chicken.
02:13:35.000Because the you know don't spend a lot of time with people because that's an awful lot of thought and even a cat would be too interactive But she thought a little baby chick would be some human thing you could interact with a little bit low low low But you know a top MD at Mass General Hospital saying buy a chicken to fix your brain indicates at the level of Understanding is as you said very low.
02:13:57.000There's not much they can do don't even talk to people yeah, they do that and She had some family money and sort of cocooned herself away.
02:14:23.000It's like a bobsled on wheels and they go down steep hills.
02:14:26.000It makes you think about all those videos that you laugh at on LiveLeak where a guy gets fucking clipped on his ankles by a car and flips through the air and lands on his back.
02:15:09.000I don't know what the story is, but they were all trying to find this guy, and it was a total hit-and-run.
02:15:14.000He clipped this guy with the side of his car as he was going sideways, and you would think you would, like, fall, like, got knocked back or something.
02:15:22.000No, you flip through the fucking air like you weigh nothing.
02:15:25.000You flip through the air like one of those little paper footballs.
02:15:54.000This one, he got hit with the back and he goes hurling through the air.
02:15:58.000But point being, I can't look at those anymore and not think about the consequences.
02:16:03.000I know there's a woman who fights in the UFC that, not even her last fight, but the fight before that, Fucked her up so much that to this day she's got all these hormone problems.
02:17:22.000But the damage that these guys receive on a daily basis, like we were talking about the Rory McDonald fight, or like a lot of these fights, you watch it and you don't think about it.
02:17:59.000Yeah, Dangerous Danny Rosenblatt, who was a training partner of mine.
02:18:03.000He was one of the guys that convinced me to stop fighting because I realized I wasn't training the way he was training because I was trying to do comedy and all these different things at the same time, but I was still fighting.
02:18:12.000I wasn't realizing how much dedication I had let slip by until I watched him train.
02:18:19.000I trained with him, and I realized, okay.
02:19:18.000The thing about it that I find that haunts me, and I'll be honest, it haunts me because it may start happening in our sport, is CT sometimes doesn't manifest itself until five or even ten years after retirement.
02:19:33.000Could be a commentator on TV. Everything in his brain is working well, and then five years kicks in, six years, and all of a sudden he starts getting a little more aggressive, and his gait isn't as good, and he becomes a different person, and his soul starts to piss away.
02:20:08.000I know guys that have fought like twice in their whole career and already like they just that one fight did them in and they should never fight again because they're just punchy.
02:20:16.000Well you remember Julio Cesar Chavez and Meldrick Taylor?
02:20:19.000They fought one time and Meldrick was never the same again.
02:20:22.000Chavez beat him into a different person.
02:20:25.000No, who also was like that is Sean Gannon when he fought Kimbo for a half hour.
02:20:29.000He was never the same from that day on.
02:20:31.000That fight was fucking crazy and that was an underground exclusive because everybody talked about that on the UG. That was a live streaming fight.
02:21:25.000They talk to everyone who's good at their job, but they don't give a fuck.
02:21:29.000The people that don't give a fuck, they're just looking to be mad at anybody but their mom or whoever's fucking yelling at them at work or whatever your issue is.
02:21:37.000You're taking it out on Kenny Florian, but really you're mad that you live in your mother's basement.
02:22:08.000Jamie, pull that video up because that's a fucking goddamn crazy video.
02:22:11.000That was the first time Kimbo fought someone who actually knew how to fight.
02:22:15.000And, you know, he became this internet celebrity by just lighting these idiots up in backyards and move away from the satellite dish and, you know, look out for that metal thing.
02:22:25.000That's the guy where everyone thought his eyeball came out of his eye too or something.
02:26:02.000Someone easily could have died in that fight.
02:26:04.000Part of the rules were the winners got the footage.
02:26:09.000So there were like six guys with cameras.
02:26:11.000And so, like, I see Mike and those guys, they all had their own cameras, and Sean won, and were like, hand over the tapes.
02:26:18.000So there's all this, we like, we figured they just taped the fights, but there's all this footage of them driving up, flying in their jet, flying in their jet, going to the hotel, and like, you know, we're gonna kill this, I probably can't use their language here.
02:28:10.000He just looks like a completely different guy.
02:28:13.000That's the old Ken Shamrock one from the one Ken backed out of, and then he wound up fighting Seth Petruzzelli.
02:28:21.000Yeah, that's the old one, I'm pretty sure, because Ken looks younger there too.
02:28:25.000Ken already looks fairly old there, but Ken backed out of the fight like last minute, and then he fought Seth Petruzzelli, and I knew that that was deep water for him.
02:28:37.000I was like, yeah, you can't fight that guy.
02:28:41.000But look how good Ken looked there for a guy who's 51. That was a super disappointing fight, though.
02:28:49.000Everybody thought that was a work, but I do not at all.
02:29:29.000I said it looked fake as fuck, because it did kind of look fake as fuck.
02:29:32.000But one of the things that might have made it look fake as fuck, because it was a 51-year-old man who has fought combat sports for 20-plus years, and his body just is not capable anymore.
02:29:42.000I mean, anybody like Luke Rockhold gets your neck like that?
02:29:48.000But just to see Ken not be able to finish a perfectly placed rear naked choke, hand on the bicep, you know, anybody who's really good at jiu-jitsu is going to finish that.
02:30:45.000I wonder what the most anybody's ever made for an MMA fight is.
02:30:48.000It would have to be in the UFC. It would have to be a cut of a pay-per-view in the UFC. Probably four or five million for GSP. I think more than that.
02:33:07.000It's like it moved me because I've been there before when a lot of Brazilians had shown up to maybe see Anderson fight or something along those lines But the level of patriotism that the Irish had was on a completely different scale It was just it was another level like several notches crazier That's why I like I mean For me personally,
02:33:28.000my favorite shows are just the little amateur ones when I'm actually coaching or somebody that I've helped train or something.
02:33:35.000Because the more of a connection you have with a person, the deeper the fight becomes.
02:33:40.000And I think with those Irishmen, they're so tight as a nation that when he's in there, they feel like they're right in there with him.
02:33:48.000And that must make the experience transcendental.
02:34:41.000I'm going not just because it's my job, but I'm very curious to see how they're going to treat her in Brazil, whether or not this Betch Coheia chick has that kind of love and respect, whether they think she has a chance, what kind of crowd's going to show up, what is it going to be like if Ronda beats her.
02:35:04.000I learned that in the late 90s, or it could have been, yeah, it was the late 90s.
02:35:10.000Pat Miletic fought Dan Severn, and I got the tape afterwards from Monty, who promoted it, and they're doing the pre-fight interview, and they say, Pat, what do you think is going to happen?
02:35:20.000And Pat goes, I don't know what's going to happen.
02:35:38.000You throw bones at people, you zig when you should have zagged, and BOOM! Pretty sure we were all thinking when Anderson Silva beats Chris Weidman, what's next?
02:37:04.000You know, and now as a middleweight champion, what's fascinating right now is now that he's passed Vitor, which is sort of a mandatory fight, there are so many good fights there.
02:37:13.000There's Jacare, Yoel Romero, Luke Rockhold.
02:38:58.000My first experience was I was cornering somebody at a show in Massachusetts, and Chris, I think my guy lost.
02:39:04.000I'm just kind of sitting there, arm around him, giving him water or whatever, and Chris goes, there's this new guy, and he's had to suffice, and it's only in five seconds.
02:39:12.000And so he grabs me, and we go running up to the cage, and it was over.
02:39:15.000The fight had ended in 19 seconds, and I know the guy who fought, and the guy who fought is, like, tough and got crushed by him, and Chris just said, this guy is going to be the next one.
02:40:21.000So I cornered him, this is funny, I cornered him in the Michael Kuiper fight in Sweden and we walk in after the first round and he looks at us and he's like, I think I blew my fucking knee.
02:40:30.000And I'm just like, what do you mean you blew my knee?
02:40:33.000And so the other corner, his jiu-jitsu coach is like, you should sit down.
02:40:37.000He's like, I can't, I won't be able to get back up.
02:41:36.000He lived there for years, because he used to, that's where he grew up, like Swansea, Somerset area.
02:41:41.000And he liked Rhode Island, because everything's a small city, everything's close.
02:41:44.000He lived in the nastiest condo you've ever been in.
02:41:47.000It was like cat piss everywhere and like just like smell the you know everything it was terrible but you know he doesn't need all the money so for him like a hundred thousand dollars is like five years of living because he doesn't need you know nice amenities nice things and he just teach jujitsu here and there and do seminars and I don't think he's worked a regular job since since after before fighting he was like a high school history teacher for a while And then just get into fighting and that's it.
02:43:42.000Straight up tell them you can't fight from here.
02:43:44.000I said there's unscrupulous promoters that are looking for sharks versus fish.
02:43:47.000I explained the whole deal to them, how the sport works at the low level.
02:43:51.000There's big ticket sellers that are going to sell 200 tickets at...
02:43:54.000$50 each, $35 each, and the promoter is always looking for some fish to feed to the shark so that the guy will have 200 friends show up and win.
02:44:44.000They'll go to the Taekwondo school that lets them fight MMA with no experience, and then you just see them get killed because they're just not prepared.
02:44:52.000Guys that come to our gym don't fight for years.
02:44:54.000Even amateurs, they come in and they learn everything.
02:44:57.000They learn how to wrestle, jujitsu, kickbox.
02:44:59.000And then maybe if you think they're ready, you take a fight.
02:45:02.000What's your gym, so people are listening?
02:46:01.000But either way, you guys have fucking made it through the storm that was the beginning of MMA, and I think this website was an integral part of keeping the core fan base alive.
02:46:11.000So, Kierik, thank you very much for everything that you've done.
02:46:15.000It gave me a place to waste a lot of fucking time and talk a lot of shit about all kinds of different fights and read a lot of cool information and news.
02:46:23.000And whenever anybody's hurt or breaking news, I always find out about it on the underground.
02:46:28.000Imagine if you tracked the hours you spent on, like how much would that be of your life?
02:46:44.000I don't want to be an ass kiss, but I will be.
02:46:47.000As I've told these guys before, when there's a UFC that you're not on, to me, and again, I don't want to sound like an ass kiss, but it's just what I've said, not in front of you, but to these guys previously, it doesn't feel like a UFC without you there.
02:46:59.000The weigh-ins aren't just, it's just not the same.
02:47:02.000So thanks to you for making the UFC the UFC for me.