In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the host talks about the life and career of former NBA Champion Mike Tyson and how he became one of the greatest athletes of all time. Joe also talks about how he got into jiu-jitsu and what it takes to be a champion in jiu jitsu and how to deal with the pressures of being a professional jiujitsu fighter. Joe also discusses how he went from being a college basketball player to becoming a professional martial arts fighter and how that led him to become the first black man to win a World Series of Fighting title in the history of the sport and how it changed the way we look at martial arts and martial arts as a whole and how we view martial arts in general as a sport and as an art form. Joe and Joe also talk about how they met and fell in love with the late Kobe Bryant and the impact he had on the way he became the greatest athlete the world has ever seen and how they became the best friends they've ever had. Joe and Mike discuss how they got to where they are now and how their friendship is forever changed and how important it is to have a good relationship with each other and respect for one another. Thank you for listening and supporting the show and Joe for being a friend of the show. I hope you enjoy it and tweet me if you like it! with your thoughts on this episode! Timestamps: 1:00 - What's the craziest thing you ve ever seen? 3:30 - Mike Tyson? 4: What do you think of Mike Tyson did? 5: What would you do with his legacy? 6:20 - What is your favorite piece of food? 7:00- What kind of food do you like to eat? 8:40 - What was your favorite meal? 9:30- What s your favorite restaurant? 10:00 - How do you would you eat after watching a movie with someone else? 11:15 - What are you looking for in a movie or TV show? 12:00: What are your favorite movie? 13:00 | What s the crazier than a movie that you re watching right now? 15:30 | Who do you want to see me talk about? 16: How do I feel about the most powerful man in your life? 17:40 | What do I need to be more?
00:01:48.000Mike Tyson is like such a sweet guy, and then Mike Tyson signed up for the Roy Jones fight, and the next time he came in, he was 225, forearms were jacked, and he was intense, and I made a decision to make the table wider on my podcast studio, because I was so nervous being that close to him.
00:03:06.000Things I've ever witnessed when he was on the stage and The reporter said something and Mike started talking about if we were in jail, I would do this Oh, that's right.
00:05:32.000He was in a situation where he wasn't the man because he was so used to being the biggest, baddest mug in there and in a situation where he wasn't, he goes, I have to go primal.
00:08:07.000I ain't got no mouthpiece in my mouth.
00:08:09.000And if I would have bit him, that would have been like a reaction for a guy that usually will walk around in most places around this world as the alpha.
00:08:19.000And then when he finds himself on the bottom as the alpha, he's got to find a way to survive.
00:10:04.000You obviously don't go chest down, you're trying to pin him.
00:10:06.000He would put me on my back in those situations with my fresh partners and I would have to get off my back not to get pinned.
00:10:13.000So I just never got pinned in my whole career.
00:10:16.000I wrestled from 10 to 30 and I... I might have got pinned like three or four times in all those years because I was just so afraid of going to my...
00:10:57.000So when we're doing commentary and we're talking about the fight and somebody gets taken down.
00:11:04.000And a guy starts to get into the positions where I get quiet because you're better there, and you start walking through the submissions, how it's getting set up, and I'm like, oh, this dude's done.
00:12:44.000I bet when you go back, because you do a lot of re-watching fights, when you go back to the days before, whenever I was watching as a fan, thinking...
00:12:55.000Unbelievable to watch Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz and these guys fight it.
00:12:59.000The way that they fought today, it's like prehistoric.
00:14:39.000But that guy was one of the first guys to implement really unusual training, like wheelbarrows filled with rocks and shit, pushing them uphill.
00:14:47.000That pit, that training center that he had in San Luis Obispo.
00:17:40.000He had become so reliant on those abilities that, not even the ability, because he never lost the ability.
00:17:46.000He had become reliable on the comfort of knowing the stuff that he had done prior would make sure he's not tired, he was more in shape, he had more muscle, and it messed with him towards the end of his career.
00:19:59.000Well, the other thing is if you're not doing anything, like if you're not taking anything, then your recovery from like really heavy power lifts is kind of significant.
00:20:10.000Didn't he lift like 600 pounds or something?
00:22:08.000The kicks to the body and the knees, because you know me, me and Kane were forward, forward, forward, head movement, get close, punch, punch, punch, take you down.
00:22:18.000But with him, he was a southpaw, so his lead leg was right there, so I wanted to grab a single leg.
00:22:23.000But this dude would be stepping back, kneeing me.
00:28:11.000But then, because you don't train in that off stance, you fight Pereira, next thing you know he's got your leg beat up, you're switching to southpaw, which is what Yuri did.
00:33:21.000They cut from 185, 180. To get to 155. To get to 155. So you know you're getting the best fighter of all men around those weights in that weight class.
00:33:34.000But if you get a 65, 55, 45, 35, 25...
00:33:59.000And I always felt like, if you're going to have an example of weight cutting, I always felt like Aljamain had the perfect frame for 35. Yes, he does.
00:34:05.000Because he's so big and strong, and he manages to get there, and then he puts it right back on.
00:34:10.000And then when you see him on fight day, you're like, my God.
00:34:13.000Like, when you see that dude's abs and all that much, he looks like a 160-pound man.
00:34:29.000I was one of the first to tell me, but he doesn't cut all of his weight.
00:34:34.000So with us, we would go on Thursday night, if I weighed 216 and I had to be 205 by Friday morning, I would get as low as I possibly could and then try to go to bed.
00:34:46.000So if I'd get to 207, I would hope that by the morning I'd be 206, I'd only have to lose a pound in the morning.
00:34:53.000So I'm dehydrated for 12, 13, 14 hours.
00:34:57.000Those guys today are going to bed At that weight, Joe, 10, 11 over, and waking up at like 4 or 5 in the morning and cutting the weight.
00:35:07.000Because they said if they cut all that weight, they don't sleep, which I can attest to.
00:35:11.000It don't matter how much melatonin you take.
00:35:45.000Because the worst possible feeling is when you go through your entire routine and you expect to lose eight, but you might lose six or five and a half.
00:36:20.000So I would, two weeks before the fight, or three weeks before the fight, when I first started to go to 205, I would go on a Saturday and I would just cut some weight.
00:36:28.000I'd get to 210, 211. I'd lose nine pounds.
00:36:31.000Okay, I know if I do this for an hour, I'll lose nine pounds.
00:36:39.000So then it became a thing where I knew in the right circumstances, with the right temperature in the room, I could lose nine pounds.
00:36:46.000As long as it wasn't 65 degrees I was fine anything over 70 as most gyms are I was getting nine off so I would I had this routine I would Get up Get my body water loaded.
00:37:02.000I would go into the sauna with just my stuff.
00:37:10.000Sweat till 10. Then start putting all my clothes on in the sauna.
00:37:14.000So I would have my socks, my shoes, my sweats, my t-shirt, my hat, my plastics.
00:37:19.000I would put them all on in the same way every time.
00:37:22.000Plastic pants, sweatpants, socks, shoes, long sleeve t-shirt under the plastics because I didn't like it against my body, plastic top, sweat top, hat, gloves, and everything just tucked in.
00:37:36.000And then I would go right out of there because that would take me like 15 minutes in the sauna.
00:37:39.000I would walk straight to the treadmill, Joe.
00:40:33.000What if they had, like, a thing where you had to say, hey, I'm planning on taking an IV. Will you guys come and test me before I take the IV? Yep, yep.
00:46:50.000He wouldn't have fought Peoria and he wouldn't have fought TJ Dillashaw.
00:46:53.000He would have got none of that if he got up.
00:46:56.000So while he might have gotten people to dislike him, he still lived as the champion, made a boatload of money, and he will always be remembered now as one of the better Bantamweight champs in the world.
00:47:06.000And it's hard to compare fouls, right?
00:51:10.000I get up, and then you continue to punch me in the head until, one, I either fall down again and go to sleep completely, or we get to the end of the round where you come back and you punch me in the head again.
00:51:21.000In MMA, when you get knocked down or kicked in the head or whatever the case may be, the guy jumps on you, boom, boom, fights over.
00:51:32.000I don't have that recovery time to where I think my brain is okay, I go fight more, and then I get destroyed more.
00:51:40.000I think boxing is a much more brutal sport, and I love boxing, than mixed martial arts, because of that.
00:51:46.000Because of that 10 second count to kind of clear the cobwebs, or at least think you're clearing the cobwebs, and then go out there and fight again.
00:52:11.000And then I hit him with the two follow-up shots to end the fight.
00:52:14.000I would like to see how long that sequence took.
00:52:17.000Because if Stipe Miocic and I were fighting, and I did that to him in boxing, for as bad as he was, he would get up and I would get to hit him again.
00:52:26.000Just like, my knockdown on Stipe was no worse than when Deontay Wilder dropped Tyson Fury.
00:52:32.000Tyson Fury looked like a dead man walking, but because he's so tough, he sat himself up, got up and continued to fight.
00:52:39.000That was one of the craziest recoveries ever.
00:55:56.000We were saying that karma brought that dude to Sean Strickland.
00:56:00.000Because that dude had apparently beat up a woman and then drove drunk, crashed his car, abandoned his car, and was hiding in Sean Strickland's driveway.
00:56:10.000Of all the driveways to get stuck in, you end up in Sean Strickland's driveway.
00:56:14.000And then Sean's like pushing him down.
00:58:42.000I saw a video today on Twitter, because I was in this fighter meeting, and...
00:58:48.000I don't know they were just kind of having a conversation like they were done talking about the fight so I kind of got on my phone I start playing on Twitter and I was watching that another website I watch it's called Morbid Knowledge.
00:59:03.000I'm fucked up Joe like I get bored and it just popped up on my Twitter and there were two airplanes they were these people were like jumping out of the plane the planes crashed You can hear somebody go, oh no!
00:59:16.000And then they fall off the wing, but they're all wearing parachutes because they were going to go and jump.
00:59:25.000But I mean, these two planes came together and then hearing a person go, oh no, was crazy.
01:00:05.000And he was hunting with those old school guns.
01:00:07.000You know those old school guns where, dude, this dude, they had like a fucking lion or a cheetah was just killing people in this village in Africa or in England.
01:00:24.000They brought this old dude from Europe down there to track this animal.
01:00:28.000This dude tracked this animal between three different cities in this area and finally got that son of a gun because he shot it and it was trying to attack him to kill him.
01:06:47.000When I was about to start fighting and when I started fighting, I said, man, when these Russian dudes from these regions start to come, it's going to be a problem.
01:06:55.000Because you know how good they were as wrestlers, right?
01:07:00.000What's going to happen when these guys come into fighting?
01:09:12.000The guy was just tremendous in everything he did.
01:09:16.000So I would have to set my mind every day going into the room like I was about to wrestle in the Olympic Games because I knew how hard it would be to try to go with this cat.
01:09:25.000Then he would be beating on these dudes in MMA. He'd take against the wall like it was impossible to take him down.
01:10:43.000When they were 7th and 8th grade, they were doing their homeschool year.
01:10:47.000So reclassifying is a big thing in sports now.
01:10:50.000Where if you and I are supposed to graduate in 1998, we will reclassify to graduate in 1999. Bro, I took those kids when they were in 7th and 8th grade, and I sent them to Dagestan for a month.
01:13:07.000It's like, they're just getting better and better.
01:13:10.000Now that they know that these guys from that region are, like, if you're a kid and you're growing up in that region, now you know, oh, I can follow that same path.
01:13:53.000In terms of what closest with the kind of striking or at least the plane of the striking ensemble, that's as good in terms of preparing you for mixed martial arts.
01:14:40.000I think every human being, if they do themselves justice, has some sort of interaction against another human being where it's a bit of a fight.
01:15:08.000I think everybody should have at least one sort of...
01:15:12.000Whether it's sparring, whether it's an exhibition fight, whether it's a high-intensity jujitsu match, whether it's a high-intensity wrestling match, I think you should have some sort of competition in your life that pits you against another individual.
01:15:42.000They're trying to promote more manliness in China.
01:15:46.000If someone tried to do that in America and they said, well, the way we're going to implement this is we're going to have mandatory combat sports participation for all males.
01:16:17.000Earrings and colored hair on male celebrities appearing on television.
01:16:20.000Earlier this year, the education ministry announced a plan to cultivate masculinity in schoolboys, including hiring more gym teachers and promoting sports.
01:17:26.000In Roosevelt's scheme of things, imperialism was a necessary manly duty that American men needed to take up or risk letting the reins of global power be seized by a more manful race.
01:17:37.000Sickly and asthmatic in his childhood, Roosevelt I'd continued to endure attacks on his manliness into his youth as he started out in politics, with newspapers lampooning his high-pitched voice and dandy clothes.
01:18:51.000I think everybody should have it, man.
01:18:53.000I think it's so good for you to have that experience where you stare across from another human being and you know that it will be on you with no weapons to go out and win.
01:19:04.000Whether it's pinning them, whether it's submitting them, whether in a boxing, it's out pointing them in a boxing fight.
01:19:10.000I think that we should all have some sort of competition with another human being.
01:20:53.000To be able to know that no security, no anything, if push came to shove, you could at least defend yourself enough to be safe and your family.
01:21:03.000You could take care of them enough to be safe because of the skills that you've attained over the course of your life.
01:21:10.000To be able to walk around the world like that.
01:21:12.000You watch those Instagram videos, the same ones I watch of dudes who have no idea what the fuck they're doing and they get in these crazy brawls.
01:26:13.000They caught him because he was trying to take a little girl from a school.
01:26:19.000Hey, Joe, and when they caught that, when they finally got this dude at the end, Joe, they met him in jail because he had been rotten in jail for years.
01:27:20.000They said when they went to see this dude, and he's dying in jail, and they start bringing up these women that they had found, they said it was almost like he was going to a place of euphoria.
01:27:32.000Because even though he was on his deathbed and he couldn't move, he was thinking back to those times.
01:29:24.000I know people that come back, and they start acting normal again, and they go out there again, and you never know which one you're going to get when you talk to them.
01:31:31.000And they don't know how much of this guy's story is true, because apparently he took credit for a lot of murders that he couldn't have done.
01:31:38.000But he definitely killed a lot of people as well.
01:31:41.000And they would just pick people up randomly.
01:31:44.000They would drive around the country randomly, find someone and kill them.
01:32:03.000The ex-husband's been stalking her, there's some shit going on, and then you break them down under questioning.
01:32:08.000But if it's just a random, if someone just pulls up to a bus stop and shoots someone waiting for the bus and then gets back in their car and drives off and no one sees it.
01:32:52.000Because the lady was, it was two in the morning, and she was randomly like up, which I don't understand why, and she saw a white van parked outside, she took a photo.
01:33:01.000And she gave him the license plate of the van that the people were using.
01:33:04.000So it's like, it feels like if you're doing something wrong, for the most part, somebody's gonna witness it.
01:33:11.000Well, the thing is, yeah, you're very likely to get caught.
01:33:32.000Yeah, and he stabbed a bunch of people in this house.
01:33:36.000It was was it like a sorority house or a dorm house?
01:33:40.000Yeah, yeah, so this guy they think he killed some people in western in the western states, too They think he killed some people in I think it was Washington some people turned out missing that it seems like so this guy is He was pursuing a PhD in Criminology.
01:34:00.000So he's like studying crime while he's a fucking serial killer.
01:36:37.000You look like you're worried about me.
01:36:39.000I'm just saying, I'm just saying, because for me, it's like, I don't know, Joe, I swear, Joe, I don't know if I see people react any weirder than when they're around you.
01:37:44.000Yeah, I was kind of one to that, right?
01:37:46.000When you come up to the fights and we're all like having a great time and then, you know, we kind of go back on our life and sometimes we text about the fights and it's awesome.
01:37:53.000Then I'm like, I wonder if Joe like has more friends that aren't guys from back in the day like us, right?
01:39:16.000When I went to Oklahoma State, like when I went to AK, I'm hanging out with these random guys because they're always wanting to do what I wanted to do.
01:39:24.000But then ultimately, I started hanging out with Kane and all those guys.
01:45:20.000I believe, Joe, for everyone we watch in this beautiful sport that we have the honor of calling, no one, no one has done more with less than Colby Covington.
01:49:03.000It's like, you could feel good for people.
01:49:06.000Like, when I saw, this was way back in the day, when John Ennick did his first UFC pay-per-view, I knew how he had started from ESPN. This dude was doing overnight highlights, right?
01:49:22.000And then he did all those fight nights and then he got up to the pay-per-view and it was you guys and I said look at John and I was like happy for him.
01:49:29.000Yeah, I think that's probably like the biggest Thing is to have an ability to feel good for someone when they accomplish something great because accomplishing great things is not easy.
01:51:13.000There were times when I got to 37, 38, when I was the UFC champion, where I would get so beat up because I wanted to train like I was taught to train my whole life that I would crawl up the stairs.
01:51:28.000I hear stories of Kamaru Usman walking down the stairs backwards.
02:05:05.000But you know, Luke's biggest issue was when people realized, and it was Bisping, When people realized that if you hit him, you could hurt him, they started throwing caution to the wind.
02:05:17.000And that's when he started to struggle.
02:05:19.000Because we used to beat each other up quite a bit in the gym.
02:06:43.000Yuri Prohaska, like, up until this Pajeda fight, he was one of the most interesting guys in the light heavyweight division.
02:06:52.000Because he just does everything so weird.
02:06:54.000Yeah, he's a very unorthodox guy, but he's also a guy that was groomed outside of the UFC. One night, he beat C.B. Dalloway and King Mo on the same night.
02:07:56.000Yeah, but it can get better, and Glover's a great coach.
02:08:00.000It's good to be with Glover to pick up the finer points of grappling, especially grappling for MMA. Is it just about him, when he gets taken down, survive?
02:08:08.000Because that's what he did against Jan, knowing that he doesn't get tired and he can beat you up.
02:11:05.000That's the one he got the guy with in the beginning.
02:11:06.000In the UFC. You know, so when you see a guy like that that's doing that at two different weight classes in kickboxing, you can't wait to see a guy like that fight now in MMA. I want to ask you this.
02:11:22.000He spoke about, after the fight with Islam, how he was in his own head when he didn't have anything.
02:11:29.000Now he's fighting against Ilya Teporia very quickly.
02:11:33.000I wonder a lot if Alex Volkanovski will have any lingering effects from that knockout because when we see him we're all like raving he's the best.
02:12:40.000So it's dependent upon how hard you were training.
02:12:43.000How hard were you training before you took this fight on 10 days notice?
02:12:46.000Were you preparing for potentially fighting two months from now and you already ramped up training and you already have like real good cardio and you're already sparring?
02:12:53.000Or have you been just kind of fucking off here and there and then you're like, I can fucking do it.
02:12:59.000Because I can fucking do it is not a good strategy against the best pound for pound fighter in the world.
02:15:18.000The thing is, man, if the dude really can just survive under everybody if he gets taken down and then just beats your legs up, it's a real problem.
02:15:27.000He beats your legs up and then he forces you to make a mistake and he takes advantage every single time.
02:15:33.000But I think Jamal Hill's a real challenge for him.
02:20:52.000When dudes that play with Brett Favre, their hands are tore up because he's throwing so hard that he's knocking their fingers back and stuff.
02:21:20.000How long before you think MMA gets to the point where you see athletes of that caliber consistently entering to MMA? It's going to be a little bit.
02:25:17.000It's like it really is like now whereas before when Strikeforce got absorbed You had Ronda and Nick Diaz and Gilbert Melendez and myself and Luke Rockhold and Jacare and Josh Thompson and Alistair Overeem and Josh Burnett and all these guys, right?
02:25:37.000So it felt like not a competitor, but at least a legit number two where you had championship-level fighters fighting.
02:25:45.000But the UFC has now grown to a point where it's like the NFL in fighting.
02:25:53.000And as there is nothing else in basketball that we compare to the NBA or to the NFL, CFL, XFL, all that, that's how it is with UFC. So it's like no matter what they do, it's never going to feel as important.
02:26:08.000When in reality, you have some really good fighters.
02:27:06.000It's going to be interesting to see if someone with this new merger, if they change the name, if they stick with the PFL, what are they going to do?
02:27:15.000So what I heard is Bellator does pretty good overseas, so they're going to run their events over there.