In this episode, we talk about the UFC Fight Night event in Las Vegas, UFC 232, UFC 246, and UFC 246. We also discuss the UFC 246 post-fight press conference. We also talk about UFC 246 and UFC 244. We have a special guest on the show to talk about his time as a referee and what it takes to be a good one! Also, we have a new segment called "Your Dad's a Bad Referee" where we have our Dad's take on refereeing mistakes in the UFC and the history of refereeing in MMA. If you like the show, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and we'll give you 5 stars! Thanks again for listening and Good Luck Out There! Cheers, EJ & Jon! -Jon & Matt -Your Dad is a Good Referee! -Jon talks about his experience as a UFC official and the mistakes he's made throughout his career in officiating UFC fights. Jon talks about what it's like being a refereeing a UFC fight and how he thinks it's one of the most difficult jobs he's ever done. EJ talks about some of his favorite fights of all time and talks about how he's been a part of the UFC Hall of Fame and what he's learned from his time officiating at UFC 246! Jon & Jon talk about how to be the best referee in MMA and what's going to come next in UFC. . Jon gives us some advice on how to prepare for UFC 246!! and much much more! We hope you enjoy this episode and we hope you guys enjoy it! Thank you for listening, Jon and Jon have a great time! XOXO! Love ya, Jon & Brett -J.J. -Sue -Ronda Rousey -Jon and Brett <3 -Jon is a good friend of the show & much more Thanks Jon and Brett is a great guy too! -Josie is a lot of love, Jon talks a lot more! <3 Jon talks some good stuff! ~Jon talks a little bit about this episode JB talks about the upcoming UFC fight night and much more!! -BJ talks some other stuff too! And much more... of course, we hope that you enjoy the UFC fight of the fight night!
00:03:49.000Because you can get a guy stronger, you can lift weights, and you can be physically stronger.
00:03:53.000I think you can take it to, like you said, you can take it to a certain degree and teach a guy to really turn over a punch, stuff like that.
00:07:01.000I don't believe there are early morning people.
00:07:04.000There's people that just wake up earlier than you and they want you to think they're early morning people so they have some sort of edge on you.
00:13:17.000Some lady that got the job because she knew somebody in the commission?
00:13:20.000I mean, for people who don't know anything about MMA that are listening to this, you would think that we're exaggerating, but we're not exaggerating.
00:13:30.000The worst out of any sport in the world that you could think of where you have experts that are watching the contest at the highest level and they're aware of the subtle nuances of ebb and flow of the fight world.
00:13:45.000Well, that must be the case in MMA, surely, where there's billions of dollars on the line.
00:13:50.000Multinational corporations owned by Viacom and people called Zufa.
00:13:55.000They would ensure that these things are judged correctly.
00:14:03.000They're the worst judged contest probably in all of professional sports is MMA. There's more incompetence in MMA judging and more judging being done by people who have no idea what they're watching.
00:15:13.000There's too much going on in MMA. In boxing, that system makes sense because you're only boxing.
00:15:18.000But when you have boxing with knees, elbows, kicks, and then takedowns, and then submissions, and then ground and pound, all those variables that don't exist...
00:15:30.000In a boxing scoring system, the 10 points is just not enough.
00:15:35.000What if they do like a 30 point system?
00:15:42.000You'd have to know what the fuck is going on.
00:15:44.000Like you'd have to know, like sometimes a guy's caught in a guy's, like a guy has a guy's back and a guy's in a lot of trouble.
00:15:52.000And sometimes the guy's not in trouble at all.
00:15:54.000And you have to be able to differentiate between a guy who's defending really well and a guy who's not defending well at all, who's on the brink of getting finished at any second.
00:17:15.000They kick that one spot, and they kick it twice, and you're like, fuck, I'm over this.
00:17:19.000Ernesto Hoos used to always get that spot right above the knee, where the bone meets the top of the quad, or the bottom of the quad.
00:17:26.000Stop the Igor Vovchanchin with kicks in K1. Yeah, there's a few of those guys that tried to venture forth into K1 from MMA. Didn't always work out so great.
00:17:50.000I mean, it kind of sucks now hearing him talk about retirement and hearing him, he's still fighting, but you can tell he's kind of on his way out, doing it for the money.
00:18:55.000I mean, sometimes a round's obvious, but even when I'm doing commentary, I don't know, because when I'm doing commentary, I'm trying to point out all these different things about a round, and I'm not doing it...
00:19:06.000I think if you're going to score a round, you should shut the fuck up, and you should have a piece of paper in front of you, and you should be marking things down.
00:19:12.000You know, Eddie Bravo used to do it in between fights.
00:19:15.000In between rounds, he would talk about the round...
00:19:18.000And, you know, they have like unofficial scorekeeper, like they have Harold Letterman for boxing.
00:19:24.000And Eddie used to have two columns, one for each guy, and he would have all these marks down as far as like hard kicks that were landed, punches that were landed, near submissions, and he had a whole system that he would do.
00:22:54.000This is a perfect example of why one round being a 10-9 and this round being a 10-9 is ridiculous.
00:23:00.000So the round that was really close, if that was a 10-9 for either one of those guys, and then this is a 10-9 round for Cub, that's fucking crazy.
00:23:07.000That highlights how fucked up the system is.
00:23:10.000Because Cub is schooling them in this round.
00:23:12.000And Cub also schooled him in that other round.
00:29:51.000I think that was a big part of it, and you know, you're supposed to be a boxer, and you get cracked, and you turn into a wrestler, but I'm not going to get out-wrestled by an Englishman.
00:29:59.000That would be embarrassing, wouldn't it?
00:30:00.000Yeah, you know, but I talk shit, but I got fucking taken down by a Brazilian, so I've jumped into it.
00:30:06.000But so, again, I say stupid shit all the time.
00:30:09.000You're comfortable with saying stupid shit.
00:31:39.000You know, that kind of attitude is almost always perpetrated by losers.
00:31:43.000And it's just a matter of thinking a certain way that you will constantly chase down an Ian McCall and shit all over him and try to hurt his feelings, try to reach him online, try to...
00:34:04.000You're mad that he's ducking Gustafson.
00:34:06.000He wanted to fight Daniel fucking Cormier, Olympic wrestler, undefeated both as a heavyweight and as a light heavyweight, a guy who's been running through people, destroyed Dan Henderson.
00:34:17.000He wants to fight him, and you think he's a coward.
00:34:31.000I just want to hear you express it one piece at a time and everything falls apart.
00:34:35.000Also, the other thing that fucks people up is the platform of being able to do a Twitter post or a blog entry or anything where you're not addressing a human.
00:34:46.000A person's not challenging what you say.
00:34:49.000Like, if you're saying something, even if you're saying something to me, if you're not talking to Jon Jones, you're saying something to me that doesn't make any sense, I'll go, wait, hold on.
00:35:02.000But instead, they get to just blah, blah, blah, blah, There was an experiment at Stanford University where they put people in masks and had them shock people.
00:35:26.000And what it is, they had a control group where one subject didn't have masks on.
00:35:31.000And they were behind this glass and they were shocking people when they would answer questions a certain way.
00:35:35.000Then they took a group of people and put masks on them and did the same experiment.
00:35:39.000And people would hit the button like incessantly.
00:35:44.000As soon as they became anonymous, they would hit that fucking thing when they said the right answer, when they didn't even talk in.
00:35:50.000And they realized when you make people, and this is like 1972, and they realized when you make people anonymous, They will do horrible shit incessantly.
00:36:00.000As soon as they put masks on, they would hit the shock button constantly throughout the experiment.
00:36:29.000My thing is, like, I like, you know, if I like something, I'm a reasonable, normal human being, and I don't like pickles, and I like the Pittsburgh Steelers, I've never gone online and talked about either one of those subjects.
00:36:44.000Most people that like something, or don't like, just go, oh yeah, I like, you know, Jimmy Smith's alright, they're not gonna get on a forum and yell about me.
00:36:52.000It's, the vast majority of people that like something and just enjoy it, Generally don't make a big deal about it.
00:36:58.000We're talking about a very slender part of the population that is just loud and obnoxious about stuff.
00:37:42.000If you're doing death threats to the government, they know who you are immediately.
00:37:48.000You could try to hide behind a proxy, but they're going to find you.
00:37:52.000They're going to find you really quickly.
00:37:54.000And ultimately, that kind of ability is going to trickle down to the common man.
00:37:58.000Everyone's going to have that ability to do.
00:38:01.000And the world is going to know that you're a cunt for doing that, too.
00:38:04.000Have you found out, like, you remember that Reddit thing that happened a while back where there was a guy who would post all kinds of fucked up shit on Reddit, and he, like, creep shots, like upskirt shots and stuff, and underage shots, and all this different weird, creepy shit, and then they found out who he was in real life,
00:38:20.000and they contacted his employer and showed him all the stuff that he put online.
00:40:17.000I've always supported other comedians.
00:40:19.000I think the main competition is always with yourself.
00:40:23.000And when you bring in someone else who's good, or you have someone around you that's good, and you have to compare yourself to them, I think it makes you better.
00:40:34.000How many times do you see guys that are training and they're in the same goddamn weight class and they're helping each other out and you know that one day they might have to fight each other?
00:43:37.000Well, it can fuck up, especially if, you know, you got too many people talking over each other when action happens or they don't, like, specific roles, like, especially when it comes to, I think you and I both do something very different than other sports, too, where there's a color guy and a play-by-play,
00:43:54.000We do color, but we also do play-by-play, especially when shit goes to the ground.
00:43:58.000Because the play-by-play guy doesn't really know what the fuck is happening.
00:44:02.000Well, they do a little, but you kind of have to do that, where you have to explain every nuance of the position, and then start to explain what could be bad if this happens, and what could be good if that happens.
00:44:25.000When he started doing color commentary for the UFC, it became a color medium just because if you watch boxing, my mom knows what's happening in a boxing match.
00:44:34.000They would ask Emmanuel Stewart little stuff, or it was George Foreman for a while at HBO, and But the play-by-play guy, that's the voice of HBO, is Jim Lampley, basically.
00:44:46.000With MMA, color guys have to talk a lot more because there's a lot more the audience doesn't know.
00:44:50.000The audience has never done jiu-jitsu.
00:44:52.000The audience has never done Muay Thai.
00:44:54.000The audience knows boxing a little bit.
00:45:34.000Eddie's too busy these days, he wouldn't do it, but someone who's a real experienced guy, that would be a good thing to do, to have a Dominic Cruz or someone along that lines.
00:45:45.000Who's really good at breaking things down.
00:48:02.000Yeah, because otherwise, you know, I've been watching more fights lately now that me and my dad live together, and that's fucking all he does.
00:48:22.000When you're in between camps, say after a fight, and you don't have anything scheduled for a while, how much time do you spend training and working on things, and how much is just decompressing?
00:49:57.000We just fucking drove to YPO and it's got a little shitty old truck he doesn't care about and drives it through the river and it's got no sound.
00:50:05.000Electrical's been shorted so it's no radio or anything.
00:50:08.000He just drives through the most fucking beautiful country you can and then we go in there and we just beat the shit out of each other.
00:51:32.000When you can make another man cry, another man who deserves a title shot at your title, you can beat him up so bad that he cries, and then you fucking lick his blood off your gloves and bang your head after her.
00:53:05.000We built like a fucking, and like, with like a Unimog, you know, like Mercedes Unimogs, you can put a fucking ditch digger on the back and like...
00:53:46.000They're trying to make the Hawaiian superfood, a taro root, and it's a really starchy vegetable that, you know, that's why Hawaiians punch so hard.
00:55:28.000It's like, you're protected by the Constitution, allegedly.
00:55:31.000Go to BJ's, and have him take you to YPO, and you feel like you're in French Polynesia or something, because the people talking, you're just like, oh, me, Tinkum, go buy some fish, you know, walk around, smoke some weed, bro, it's cool.
00:55:42.000And you're like, what did he just say?
00:55:48.000And then BJ starts rattling off stuff, and then you start drinking, you know, like homemade sake down in the valley, and then you just, it just turns into a Grime, man.
00:56:54.000But it's, you know, it's wilderness enough where you fucking see Nevada, parts of Nevada, and you're like, where the fuck am I? Right, yeah.
00:57:01.000There's parts of Nevada where they have crazy elk hunting, where they're bugling elks, and you hear these elks, like fucking 1,200-pound beasts, come rolling over the hill, 30 and 40 of them at a time.
00:57:10.000Her cousins are all trappers and hunters out there.
00:57:13.000They're like the two of the best young guys out there.
00:57:14.000Isn't that funny that people don't think about that when they think of Nevada?
00:57:17.000You think of only Vegas and then nuclear waste.
00:57:19.000The Safari Club is the biggest fucking hunting club in the world.
00:58:14.000If you go to the free fun, like the river, and people have blow-up mattresses going down and shit, but if you can just, you know, say that's hilarious, and then kind of, you know, have your own life.
00:58:45.000When you go somewhere else, take a place like Reno, especially near Tahoe, where it's just all nature and beautiful, and you feel like you relax.
00:58:57.000You're not stuck in traffic for 20 minutes.
00:58:59.000You're going to go two miles in 20 minutes.
00:59:02.000If you're in Vegas and you're trying to go down the strip and you're trying to go from one end of the strip to the other end on a Friday night, good fucking luck.
01:01:41.000People realize that we're fucking everything up, and we're douchebags, and everyone's like, okay, but it's just so outdoorsy, and it's still got the fucking casinos, and they're starting to become nicer.
01:01:52.000But there's always something going on.
01:01:54.000The only other guy I know that lives in Reno is my friend Remy.
01:01:58.000There's a show called Solo Hunters, where he goes hunting by himself.
01:02:02.000He's a guide, and he's kind of a famous hunter, and he goes by himself.
01:02:09.000And just brings, like, these cameras and GoPros and shit and films everything and then edits it all together.
01:02:14.000These crazy, crazy hunts that he goes on.
01:02:16.000I want to kill something with a sword.
01:12:39.000It didn't burn as bad as it did on the way down.
01:12:41.000It was burning like, oh, this is uncomfortable.
01:12:43.000We're not, oh, shit, I'm in big trouble burning.
01:12:45.000And then the next night, we went to this old-school sushi place in the middle of Tokyo, and they have a thing where it's like a mug, like a beer stein full of turtle blood.
01:12:56.000They have this turtle soup, and they put the blood in this thing.
01:12:59.000And they usually mix with alcohol, but I don't drink, so they had to mix it with some kind of juice.
01:13:04.000And they mix it all up and they're like, here you go!
01:22:27.000He had been in Iraq and had been a bodyguard in Iraq and had done some amateur fights.
01:22:33.000So he just didn't have the wherewithal to go, You know when you're fighting six guys I'm gonna make it look good for three of those guys and then for the rest I'm slipping and moving and you know I'm working on my using my defensive skills.
01:22:45.000So when the water got too deep he would just get hammered like hammered and I'd have to talk to producers and go you can't one time we were in Indonesia and He's a real jovial guy.
01:23:58.000Which is the big argument about this TRT shit, because they're saying if these guys need TRT, it could be because they're getting kicked in the head all the time.
01:24:05.000It's either that or steroids, or there's a medical issue on top of that.
01:24:08.000So how many people have that medical issue?
01:24:34.000There's something that's happened to fuck you up.
01:24:36.000You shouldn't be thinking about TRT therapy until you're like 45, 50. Until you're literally not, you know, I'm not producing enough stars when I'm getting too old.
01:24:44.000It's like a prime athlete shouldn't have that.
01:24:46.000The only doctors I've talked to have given me, they've said, shouldn't happen if you're that age unless something's wrong.
01:24:51.000Yeah, there were guys in the UFC that had in their 20s.
01:25:19.000So a guy like Chael Sonnen is kind of like the canary in a coal mine.
01:25:23.000He's kind of like one of the first guys.
01:25:26.000And had the issue after the Anderson Silva fight where they said it was clear, but it wasn't clear, and almost won the title, and then was suspended for a long time, and then came back, and then failed that test, and then failed this new test.
01:25:45.000The last test he had that obviously was things to deal with the TRT therapy, what I've read, and the argument's going to be, how does this affect his legacy in that he had...
01:26:00.000Did he retire because he knew he had pissed off for this other test and didn't want that becoming public?
01:26:04.000It just raises all these questions about, well, he's on all this other stuff.
01:26:09.000He knew he took the test already, the one in Oregon.
01:26:12.000Was he retiring because, oh man, I pissed off for this one too?
01:28:58.000It was before that fight that it all came out.
01:29:01.000And his teammate, one of his teammates, his old coach told me, he goes, they were worried Anderson Silva versus Shale was going to be on an undercard because his other performances had been so weird that they were going to kind of punish him.
01:29:11.000So that Shale went, fuck, I got to sell this thing.
01:29:13.000And just started running his mouth off and made a fight that on paper...
01:29:17.000I don't think it was super compelling into must-see TV. And then it became must-see TV. And then it became a thing.
01:29:23.000The problem with the character, and I tell this to fighters all the time, if it's not you, be careful.
01:30:30.000Don't create a character to hype a fight, and for the rest of your life, you are Hulk Hogan, or you're the ultimate warrior, or you're some character you don't believe in.
01:32:31.000It's like a Blair Witch-style filming.
01:32:34.000Like these people that went out looking to make a film about Bigfoot, and then they piece together this documentary based on their unedited footage.
01:32:58.000That is way too much logic for most people, because most people, when you start talking about, you know you need a breeding population of something, they look at you with this blank stare, and you go, there has to be enough of them to have genetic variety and have babies.
01:34:46.000It's weird to see, because their biggest When you see a seven foot tall bear standing up on his back feet and he's near a tree and if you see that from really far away and if you're in the woods the problem also is you're not seeing it's not like it's in a field you're seeing it in between trees So you're not getting a good view of it.
01:35:23.000And then if you convince yourself that it was a guy standing up that was black and covered with hair, you're like, oh my god, I saw Bigfoot.
01:35:29.000And then you start painting it in your head that it was Bigfoot.
01:36:25.000See, the thing about Gigantopithecus that's really fascinating is they didn't even know it existed until the 1920s.
01:36:31.000Some guy was in an apothecary shop in China, and they found a tooth, unknown primate tooth, tried to figure out what it was, asked the guy, where'd you get this?
01:36:40.000They take them to this place, they find more bones, and they find a jawbone that seems to indicate a bipedal hominid.
01:36:45.000Because of the position of the jawbone, when animals that are walking on our floors, their jaws position differently than someone standing straight up.
01:36:52.000But based on jawbones and a couple other pieces...
01:37:45.000But if that thing did come and lived in the Pacific Northwest, the idea is that a small amount of them would still be there.
01:37:50.000There is a thing in Siberia, they call them almas, that's their word for the wild man, that are like either big Neanderthal or small Neanderthals.
01:39:27.000It is interesting because now they're starting to think that Neanderthals are way smarter than we thought they were.
01:39:32.000Because their brains are actually larger than Homo sapiens.
01:39:35.000And they thought that those brains that were larger was to compensate for the extra muscle mass and all the different functions that their body was able to perform that ours weren't.
01:39:43.000Because they were way stronger than people.
01:39:46.000If we had a Neanderthal that was fighting in the UFC, he would make...
01:43:04.000I used to love getting up in the middle of the night or staying up in the middle of the night and watching those cards take place live from Japan.
01:47:03.000He was the first wrestler, in my opinion, that really learned how to not just take guys down and ground and pound them, but learn how to hit things like that far side arm bar that he hit on George St. Pierre when George St. Pierre went for that Kimura.
01:54:50.000When you're in with a guy like that that moves like Floyd does, until you see that, you don't know what the fuck that is.
01:54:56.000You're not going to get that in training.
01:54:58.000Who's going to be your sparring partner that's undefeated, world champion, one of the 8 or 10 best fighters that's ever walked the face of the planet?
01:55:06.000The first time you see something, you don't want it to be in a fight.
01:55:09.000You want to have seen that before at some point in training.
01:55:59.000And he tried to sue the Athletic Commission for letting Louis Resto fight with the padding removed from the glove and not protecting his son.
01:56:07.000So it kept Billy Collins from fighting because they were suing.
01:56:10.000And so he was just sitting around and just getting worse and got depressed and that was all she wrote.
01:56:19.000Yeah, and Panama Lewis is the same fucking guy who gave Aaron Pryor that bottle he mixed, and he came out against Alexis Arguello and just supercharged.
01:56:30.000Like, whatever it was, it was in that bottle.
01:56:32.000Louis Resto said that he used to give him...
01:57:59.000I thought it deserved mentioning that, you know, his brain had to be pudding at that point.
01:58:03.000But didn't he have a big, wasn't there like at some point in time, wasn't there during the incident, whatever killed him, wasn't there a head trauma?
01:58:46.000And then we said, oh, she had people beat him up.
01:58:48.000And no, he was beat up in the cab when he was in the back of my cab.
01:58:52.000And then he was found on the ground, and the only thing that makes zero sense to me, zero, of all, the whole story I can see both sides of it, the only thing that makes zero sense is the wife claimed to have seen him in the morning and thought he was asleep.
01:59:05.000If you see the photos of Arturo Gatti, which I have, on the ground, he's dead in a pool of his own blood.
02:01:01.000Well, in boxing, that was like the first...
02:01:11.000You know, what's different in combat sports that's Unique in combat sports.
02:01:18.000It's different than in other, especially team sports.
02:01:22.000Popularity and ability just don't go together.
02:01:25.000The best guy isn't the most popular guy.
02:01:27.000And Arturo Gatti was that guy that I would pay to watch that guy fight no matter what, no matter when, even though there were much better guys out there.
02:01:36.000Watching Arturo Gatti fight was really something special.
02:01:38.000And when he got with Mickey Ward and they had that amazing trilogy...
02:02:27.000I mean, knock that Russian dude down in the 10th round at 49. But style-wise, he's the kind of guy, if you looked at all his fights, the big knock on Hopkins is he never took a lot of risks.
02:03:28.000160. 160, lightning fast, and then, you know, look at the performances that he's had at light heavyweight, and, you know, look at, what's his name, from Pittsburgh, the white kid?
02:04:16.000He's so good at being in the right place to make a guy move.
02:04:21.000You know how you see a guy, like today, there was one point in time where Cub Swanson winds up and I'm seeing him getting ready to throw a kick.
02:04:31.000It's because we've seen a guy getting ready to throw a kick.
02:04:33.000We've seen the subtle changes in when a guy's getting ready to throw a kick.
02:04:37.000Bernard Hopkins, he's seen so many guys in front of him do things.
02:04:42.000So many guys try to hit him with punches.
02:04:44.000He knows what they're going to do before they know what they're going to do.
02:04:47.000So when he's stepping and forcing guys into positions where he knows what they're going to do once they get into that position, they don't even know what they're going to do.
02:04:55.000He's like two and three steps ahead of them.
02:04:57.000So because of that boxing knowledge that he has, you get to see this really pure execution of boxing from him.