Cory Sandhagen
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
Sounds about right.
Well, I think John is just so fucking talented that he could pull that off.
Makes sense, though.
That's the outlier.
It's like he was just so good.
He was so good.
He could do it.
He could party and still fuck guys up.
He's a psycho.
Like when he said to Cormier at the press conference for the second fight, I beat you when I was on coke.
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This is the thing.
When guys are that talented, they're playing with their food, essentially.
I always point to, with John, the first Gustafson fight, which, by all accounts, he didn't train.
Oh, really?
Barely trained for that fight.
Barely trained.
Just partying.
And beat Gustafson and pulled it off in the last rounds, which was really crazy.
But then comes back in the second fight and is like, okay, motherfucker, now we're trained.
And just destroys him.
Well, I think it's just talent, man.
And it's also genetics.
Like, both of his brothers are super athletes.
You know, he's just a phenomenal specimen.
And then he's got a great mind for fighting.
You can't discount his in-cage IQ because it's fucking phenomenal.
That's true, too.
When you're a guy like Jamie, Jamie's got a simulator out there, so he's whacking balls every day.
It gets you.
It gets in your blood.
But the thing about relaxing, one thing that I do like about vacations is that at the end, I'm ready to go to work.
When I'm done, when it's day, if I'm on an eight-day vacation, it's day seven.
He makes the best fucking MMA gloves that have ever been made, and the UFC should have bought them out a long time ago.
I'm like, I can't fucking wait to get back to work.
I can't wait to get shit going.
I don't get that.
I was like, let's just stay here.
Isn't that, it's a weird thing about momentum, right?
Like when you're training really hard all the time, you have this like constant momentum in your head of improvement.
Good to see you, brother.
You're like, you're on the path.
You're in the process, you know, and you're feeling that.
And when that gets disrupted, when guys get injured and they have to come back or they get sick and they have to come back, there's like, you got to like rebuild that momentum.
and get it going again so it's a part of your mind.
You wake up, time to go.
I think he wanted some crazy amount of money or something.
What is the difference between your training, like regular training, and then training once you get into camp?
What is a normal day when you're not in camp for you?
I think it was some nutty deal.
Unfortunate.
I know.
They should have just licensed it.
They should have just made some sort of a deal.
When you say you're less competitive when you're just normal training, is that conscious?
Do you decide to be less competitive?
And why do you do that?
We'll sell the gloves.
You make the money.
Let's just get the athletes the best gloves bought.
win win win just doing whatever it takes to win that round exactly yeah because that's an important skill to build and when you're less competitive when you're just training and you're not in camp you'll try things you'd be a little more playful try to like sort stuff try new new skills and i'm definitely not sparring hard as fuck like i do in camp too
What's happening?
They're so much better.
So you visualize the walkout, you visualize like stepping into the octagon, all that?
The shape is better.
The protection of your hands is better.
We were talking about golf and Jamie, who's a full-blown addict.
How so?
I forgot who you fought your last fight.
I fought Figgy last.
That's right.
Figgy blew his knee out.
So that's essentially the same position that you got in with TJ, right?
And that's like you're – so this is all Ryan Hall stuff, right?
And so you're putting him in a position where if he doesn't know what you're doing and he tries to get out of it, he's going to blow his knee.
Yeah, that's awesome.
He's so fucking smart, too.
That dude, his analysis of jiu-jitsu and the way he's broken down different positions, it's really exciting to watch.
Is he fighting?
I know he's had like nine surgeries or something crazy, right?
Why is he having all these surgeries?
Like what's going on?
I just really wish that him and the UFC could make a deal.
What are the surgeries that he had?
I know.
Because they spent so much time and money to develop those new gloves, and then they threw them out.
General anesthesia.
First of all, that is so bad for you.
That is really bad.
So bad for you to go under general.
Can you go back up there, what it says there?
It says tearing his ACL the following years and many surgeries.
Jiu-Jitsu specialist wasn't out of the woods just yet.
That is so crazy.
Okay, so he had to fix a planter plate, so that's his foot.
Got fallen on again.
Had to have a tightrope surgery, the one that Pat Mahomes got and a lot of other people have had.
I don't know what that one is.
Do you know what that is?
Tightrope surgery?
Nope, no idea.
ACL got infected.
Had to have a couple of septic arthritis.
The tightrope is actually allergic to the hardware they put in me.
Oh, my God.
So you had to have that redone.
Came to injuries, he said, completely bulletproof for 15 years until his training camp for Teporia where he tore his hip right before the fight.
Tightrope is used to stabilize ankle.
oh wow that is crazy yeah he said more than half the surgeries of ones where oops we screwed up let's do that again it's six elbow surgeries and five knee surgeries holy shit holy shit yeah i don't like taking any type of medication ever so that would probably really bother me having to be under that much it would probably really fuck me up
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What's up?
Three knee surgeries under the knife.
Wasn't that what happened to Ben Askren?
Wasn't it a staph infection that turned into a pneumonia?
Oh really?
I don't know.
Is he doing okay?
He's not doing okay, man.
He needs a lung transplant.
Oh fuck.
Yeah, he had, I think they call it necrotic pneumonia.
So essentially it was rotting holes in his lung tissue.
So they had to put him on a ventilator and apparently one of his lungs is just gone and they have to replace it, which is, that's so crazy because then you have to be on medication for your entire life.
Because your body wants to reject the lung because it's not your lung.
So you have to take these immunosuppressant.
So now your immune system is severely suppressed because you have to take immunosuppressant drugs in order to have this.
What's up?
I have a friend who had a heart transplant and he's all fucked up because of it.
It's just like you're always worried about getting sick because your immune system is very compromised.
And that's going to change his life.
Oh, my God.
I mean, he's still in a medically induced coma, I believe.
I think he's out of the coma now.
He looks at people and he can kind of talk a little bit.
But, I mean, this is all going on for many, many weeks now.
Mm-hmm.
And I think what happened was he was feeling like shit, and he didn't know how bad it was, and he went to a Bitcoin conference.
What's the issue with the new gloves?
He traveled, and then it got real bad.
And then he realized, oh, this is serious.
So it was a staph kind of inside of his lung?
Can you see if we can find that, if it started with a staph infection?
I don't think enough people pay attention to staph.
I don't either.
I mean, how many guys, like, fight and they're on antibiotics?
It happens all the time.
What did they not like about them?
Like, when Marab fought Umar, apparently he had staph on his shin and he was on antibiotics when he fought.
How many times have you had staph?
Yeah, it's such a scary thing because it fucking kills people.
The staff gets systemic, gets in your bloodstream, and you can die.
I think the whole idea was it was easier to close your hand, so it was going to eliminate some of the eye pokes.
Wow, that's fucking terrifying.
I know, but sometimes you just got to do that.
Sometimes you have to cancel a fight.
I know nobody likes to hear that, but it's so different than boxing.
Boxing, you get so few fight cancellations.
It's much less.
But when you're wrestling, when you're grappling, you're constantly getting kicked and punched.
You're doing so many different things.
The odds of you getting injured are so much higher.
Gordon got staff for a fucking year.
Like that's why his stomach is all fucked up.
Gordon Ryan was on antibiotics for a year and his internal gut bacteria, his flora is just torched.
He's just a mess.
Can't keep food down.
He has this like constant fight or flight reaction in his body where he wants to vomit all the time.
And he's going through training camps and beating everybody in grappling matches against the best in the world.
That's how good he is.
Like with staff for 12 years or excuse me, 12 months.
And then on top of that, this lingering stomach thing because of that, that no doctor seems to figure out.
They can't fix it.
He's gone to like every fight.
They've given a bunch of different shit.
He's tried peptides and this and that.
You get a little bit of improvement.
He starts training hard again, comes back.
There's gotta be something.
There's gotta be something.
But I would think like a fast where you just, I feel like you're just completely let your gut reset.
I mean, I don't know.
Do you do those?
I've done a day.
I've never done like the long one.
Dana just did a long one.
He did like three days.
He said it was awesome.
I said, by the end of it, you feel fucking amazing.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know.
I mean, maybe it's variable.
Bread's fucking terrible for you.
It's not even pizza.
It's American pizza.
It's our wheat.
Our wheat is poisoned.
It really is.
It's sprayed with folic acid, and all the nutrients are pulled out of it.
There's glyphosate in the wheat.
That's what's really going on.
It's also a re-engineered wheat, so it's got more gluten.
It's more complex gluten, so it's got a higher yield per acre.
So your body's like...
What is this?
Causes all this inflammation.
When I go to Italy, I eat pizza over there.
I eat a whole pizza.
I feel great.
I feel great.
I never have a problem shitting.
But I do feel bloated.
My gut swells.
I'll eat a giant bowl of spaghetti or something like that.
And then I look like I'm pregnant.
It's horrible.
I feel so tired.
Just like I got shot with a tranquilizer.
But I'm so dumb.
I keep going back to it.
It's just, it's so delicious.
Like I see a plate of lasagna.
I'm like, fuck it.
We're going in, you know, but I know what I'm getting into when I do it.
I mean, your hand is in a permanent position like this.
What's an average meal for you?
So for you to do that, it's an effort.
Which when do you do that?
You only do that when you're blocking things or, you know, maybe, you know, when you're sliding an arm under to get a choke or something like that.
Floyd Mayweather drinks soda.
He'll drink a Coca-Cola after training.
When you're training that hard, it's not like people say, oh, soda's bad for you.
Well, sure, if you're just drinking soda.
But if you're fucking running marathons or something crazy like that, or you're doing something really exhausting, it's really good for you right after a workout.
What's the sources of protein?
Is it pea protein?
So it's vegan protein?
But I don't think they're specific, significantly bulkier.
There's certain protein bars, like Peter Atiyah has this great protein bar called David.
They're fucking so delicious.
but whenever I eat one, I have to go outside because my farts are so bad.
I don't know what's in them.
They're delicious.
It's low-calorie, high-protein.
I think it's like a small bar.
It's like 30 grams of protein, but whatever it is, your body's just like, fuck this.
What is this?
I generally think that anything that does that to you can't be ideal.
So I'd rather just eat a piece of steak or something like that.
Do you, like, take fermented stuff, like kimchi, things along those lines?
Garlic, apparently, there was a study that was done with garlic with, like, external staph infections, and it's as effective or more effective than antibiotics.
Yeah, garlic fucking kills everything.
There's a reason why, like, a lot of people use it in their food.
A lot of cultures use it in their food.
It's to prevent food poisoning.
Why did you go with the pills and not the cloves?
I think the idea of the new gloves was that there weren't as many knockouts, which also doesn't totally make sense.
Just because it's more convenient?
I eat garlic cloves sometimes.
You cook them?
No, I just eat them raw.
Because it feels like it's doing something.
If I'm not feeling good, I'll eat garlic.
I'll eat raw cloves, like three or four cloves.
Then your body's like...
Oh, really?
A little bit, maybe.
But really what it does is it feels like you just took a drug.
It feels like you took a medicine.
Three, four.
I'll try that.
Some fat cloves.
Just chew them down.
They taste nasty.
Like while you're eating it.
But I mean, I think there's something to like ancient medicine.
Like people have been taking garlic.
I mean, obviously it has something to do with taste.
Thousand-year-old onion and garlic eye remedy kills MRSA.
Thousand years old.
Whoa, look at that cool ass language.
Look at that cool language.
What is that language?
Look how wild that language is.
Old English, I guess.
So, astonished to find an almost completely wiped out methicillin-resistant staphylococcus.
How do you say that?
Staphylococcus?
Staphylococcus?
Staphylococcus aureus, otherwise known as MRSA.
Their findings were presented at a national microbiology conference.
The remedy was found in Ball's leech book, an old English manuscript containing instructions on various treatments held in the British Library.
Isn't that wild, man?
There's stuff that works that people have been doing for thousands of years, but people dismiss it as being voodoo.
No, I take a lot of electrolytes.
I used to.
I used to, but then I realized I drink Element like every day, basically.
Oh, really?
Maybe that's why I don't cramp up.
I eat a lot of spicy food.
No kidding.
I wonder what the mechanism is of that.
That's interesting.
Yeah, I love hot sauce.
So I have my own, like, kind of hot sauce.
Like, Senior Lechuga made, like, a little line of three hot sauces for me.
But how do spicy foods prevent cramping?
Science is simple.
If your neurons are too busy firing off to your mouth, they won't have time to bother cramping up your muscles.
That sounds pretend.
That's crazy.
That sounds pretend.
It does.
Dr. McKinnon.
Just trick them.
Trick your body, stupid.
Distract them.
Look over here.
Found that spicy drinks help prevent these short bursts of muscle cramps.
He teamed up with a biotech company to produce a product that can be sold online and found on the shelves at select stores.
Hot shot.
I don't think they would do that.
There it is.
A drinkable shot mixed with ginger and cinnamon.
Ironman champ Craig Alexander is an avid user of the supplement along with several other Rio Olympic runners.
Muscle cramps must be brutal when you're cutting weight, right?
No, but there were a lot of people complaining, said that they weren't as hard as the old gloves.
Because you're draining your body of basically everything.
The week is a calorie restriction in the beginning and then water restriction?
How do you do it?
Is that what you drink?
But Whitman gave me some of his, and I was like, these are the best gloves ever.
How much of a performance hit do you think you have?
I mean, obviously you're in phenomenal condition, but how much of a hit do you think you have in dehydrating yourself 24 hours before a fight?
15% to 20%?
So what would you think about if the UFC instituted more weight classes and they eliminated weight cuts?
Because for some guys, it is the most dangerous part of the fight because some guys go hard.
Some guys are losing 26, 30 pounds within a couple of days, and they just look like hell.
But how do they cheat it?
But then your weight would be higher, right?
It's got to be more scientific because sometimes my piss is pretty yellow.
It just meant I drank a lot of vitamins.
I think there's like an actual test where they test the levels.
Would that be ideal for you?
I feel like the UFC should have more weight classes, and I've said this for a long time.
I just think there's some gaps that are crazy.
Like the 85-205 gap is nuts.
20 pounds is nuts.
that's not that's three weight classes at least in between fights like that's in between classes rather that's nuts i just don't understand that yeah if you i mean i think that the way that old sports kind of do things they do things for a reason so like boxing and wrestling they all have like it's every seven pounds or whatever it is the ufc is like oh too many champions that way it's too confusing i'm like what are you talking about it's one ufc champion per weight class yeah
You'd have more champions, and then you could also have more champion versus champion fights.
Because it wouldn't be, like, Ilya going up 10 pounds is not too crazy.
But Alex, when he went from 85 to 205, that was pretty crazy.
Yeah, that's crazy.
That's a big-ass jump, man.
Yeah, yeah.
Obviously, he could do it because he's one of the craziest weight cutters of all time.
He was fighting 85 and weighing in at 226 the day of the fight.
Really?
Oh, yeah, when he fought Adesanya, he was 226 when he got into the cage.
Holy shit, dude.
That's crazy.
He's also a giant.
He's an enormous guy.
It's like a lot of body mass.
And apparently it's easier to cut weight like Yoel Romero style, like when you're that muscular because most of the muscle is water.
which is kind of counterintuitive.
You think like a fat guy would, you could be able to lose more weight, but no, it's actually to dry out.
The big muscular guys can lose more weight.
Yeah, how important is that?
And it's like having training partners that are conscientious and that aren't going to fucking blast you.
Right.
That would be cool.
Like look at Pacquiao.
He just keeps going up in weight classes and yeah.
I think that it'd just be better for the athletes, and I think it'd be better for the sport in general.
You're still going to have incredible fights because the level of competition, particularly at the lowest weight classes, is so high right now.
I think your weight class, featherweight, and lightweight are the most competitive weight classes in the sport, and there's almost too many top contenders.
Like the miles that guys take off of the clock when they're training is so big.
Mm-hmm.
where guys are forced to take fights that maybe you really shouldn't take that fight because you're kind of in title contention, and then, oh, you lose a close decision.
Fuck, now you're back to the drawing board.
Now you've got to fight this guy.
Oh, you got injured in camp.
Fuck, you lose to that guy too.
Now you're set back when you could have been a champion.
There's a lot of weirdness going on with possibilities and just luck, bad luck, and good luck.
You lost though but it was a competitive close fight.
What did you think went wrong?
Like, for a guy who's just like a fucking face first, you know?
You know, there's styles that enhance longevity, and you have a style that enhances longevity.
Looking for the big shots is always such a trap.
I know.
Until it's not.
Yeah, you land the big ones, and you've landed a lot of the big ones.
And you've had so many of those moments, like the Frankie Edgar fight or, you know.
There's been quite the Marlon Marais fight.
Because not only do you not get hit a lot, but you're also, like, you're a puzzle.
And you finished them with a wheel kick.
No, because it's a thing where, you know, if you...
you don't expect it from a guy who doesn't really throw a lot.
You know?
And so like you see his foot turn and you're like, what's going on here?
You know, you're not, it's not like, oh, here he comes.
And before you know it, it's too late.
And that heel is headed towards your dome.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, it's a terrifying.
It's like, wait, what's going on here?
My during my Taekwondo days, I used to feel like I was always going to be fine.
Like I'd be I was like I felt like.
You know, I was young.
I was 19.
I felt invulnerable.
And I was really good.
And I fought in the nationals in California.
And I hit this kid with a wheel kick and he never got up.
You know, there's a lot of thinking that a guy has to do when they're interacting.
And he was snoring.
Like, face plant, out cold, taken off in a stretcher, taken to the hospital.
And I never felt the same about fighting again.
Because I was always scared that that could happen to me then.
Because I was, like, doing this for nothing.
There was no money whatsoever.
I was doing this for nothing.
I had no health insurance.
I was poor.
Yeah, and I was like, what am I doing?
Yeah, like this is like I could have easily got hit by that same kick Mm-hmm, but I was better than him and I landed but there's guys that are better than me and if they hit me like that Face down snow.
You know, you have so much, so many feints and so many stance switches.
I mean it was my heel hurt for days I was limping the next day my knee hurt after the Frankie fine.
Yeah, that was such a good knee though
That's your sport.
That's your living.
This is what you do.
For me, I was a young kid doing this thing that I was really good at and it just gave me like some sense of purpose.
And then I was like, what the fuck, man?
I had dreams to go to the Olympics.
Definitely.
Was that a realistic dream?
You were that good?
Yeah, I was that good.
I had won national tournaments, and I had beaten guys that had been in high ranking, and I had a very close decision that I thought I should have won
It's such a smart style, man.
the year that Taekwondo made it into the Olympics against the national champion.
I love watching you fight because it's like, it's so, you can see that the fighter, if they don't, and by the way, they're probably not used to training with somebody like you because there's not a lot of guys like you.
So I was good.
And I was really young, so I was getting better all the time.
But then I started kickboxing.
And when I started training in kickboxing, I realized that Taekwondo was kind of bullshit.
Because my hands sucked, and I would spar with kickboxers, and I was getting cornered in the ropes, and I didn't have the skills.
And I was like, oh, this is like, I have this distorted perception of my ability to fight based on my ability to fight in Taekwondo.
I was really good at that.
But then when I started boxing and kickboxing, I was like, that piece that's missing in Taekwondo without the face punching, it nullifies so much of what Taekwondo is good at.
But then when I learned that stuff, I realized like, oh, but I have a massive advantage with my legs because they have to close the distance with me and I can do things they can't do.
Like regular kickboxers, I was amazed at how many of them were just kind of boxers who learned a few shitty kicks.
Mm-hmm.
And they would stand on the outside, and they would take a step forward, and I'd just blast them.
And they just had no idea what to do, like a really hard kicker.
And then I started doing Muay Thai.
And I was like, fuck, leg kicks.
And so I went from American kickboxing above the waist to Muay Thai.
I was like, there's too much to learn.
And then I was doing comedy at the same time, so I just quit fighting.
I was like, I got to get out before I get hurt.
When did you start grappling?
When I was 30.
Yeah, I started grappling right at, I guess I was 29.
It was right after the first UFC.
Yeah, I wrestled in high school, but only one year because I was doing Taekwondo at the same time and I had to pick one.
And I did a year of both.
And then I was like, the problem with this is like, I'd rather kick someone and knock them unconscious.
To just whack and hear the whole crowd go silent was the wildest thing.
I fucking loved it.
It was my favorite thing in life.
I was like, wrestling is cool.
It's good to know.
It's good to be able to pin people, but there was no UFC back then.
Everything you were doing was just like you had to find a thing and get really good at it.
You can see how there's all these adjustments that they have to make on the fly that makes you think differently.
But the disillusionment of going from Taekwondo to boxing and kickboxing and then to Muay Thai and then jiu-jitsu.
So when I started doing jiu-jitsu, I was like, oh, my God, I'm fucking completely helpless.
So I had this thing in my head.
Well, at least I know how to leg kick.
I know how to box now.
I know how to fight.
Oh, my God, I'm tapping out constantly.
And so then I was like, fuck, I got to learn how to do jiu-jitsu.
But it was this thing where, you know, I feel real fortunate to have grown up in a time where no one knew what was the best style and then see the UFC emerge in 93 and then watch this incredible transformation of martial arts where martial arts advances more in 10, 20 years than it had the last 30,000 years.
It was incredible to watch.
No one knew, man.
And we were all delusional.
I was so delusional.
Like, I remember I used to do Taekwondo with a friend of mine.
We were kickboxing at the time, and we were doing it at this gym where these judo guys were.
And I was like, look at these idiots with this stupid judo.
That's useless.
Meanwhile, I had no idea.
If those guys got a hold of me, I was fucking helpless.
Yeah, because judo guys will slam you on your head.
Dude, rolling with judo guys.
I remember I rolled with Carl Parisian once.
I was like, he's like a chimpanzee.
He was so strong.
It didn't make any sense.
We were roughly the same size.
And he just ragdolled me around.
I was like, there's something to throwing bodies all the time.
If you're a 180-pound guy, you're throwing a 180-pound person over and over and over again.
And your whole core is just fucking primed for that.
And their balance and their ability to adjust your weight and use it against you.
It's going to get some fucked up necks, too.
So many of those guys, like you see them later in their career, they got like one small arm because their fucking nerves are all shut off and fused discs.
And they're just like, I did a good job, a fucking great career.
Well, you've got to learn how to kick from both sides.
That's so important.
That's one thing that I really admire about your style, because I think that there's going to be a time where that is just ubiquitous, where everybody switches.
Because there's so many guys that are just like, oh, he's a southpaw.
Oh, he fights orthodox.
Man, that's just leaving too much to predictability.
Especially if you're just as good with both sides.
Yeah, just forcing yourself to just constantly be in that position.
Because everybody wants to be in the position where they're the most strong.
Especially if you're trying to be competitive in sparring, right?
That's what's so important about... The Gracies always talk about keeping things playful.
Learning how to... Don't try to win.
You're trying to develop your skills.
And to be able to switch.
I think TJ in his prime, when TJ fought Hennon Barau, that fight to me was one of the best...
championship performances that I ever saw.
I agree.
Because nobody thought TJ was gonna win that fight.
Hennenborough was thought to be the number one pound for, it was him and Aldo would make the argument of who's the best.
Hennenborough was, I think he was undefeated or maybe had one loss early in his career.
He was an animal at the time.
Animal.
Animal.
Animal.
And TJ pieced him up and it was like he was sparring.
He looked so in the zone and relaxed and he was constantly switching stances and footwork and angles.
It's crazy that Dwayne developed that style, but he didn't fight that way.
That's what's crazy.
Like Dwayne had like more of a traditional, you know, he's boss rooting inspired style.
And then he realizes like, you know, the best way to fight is actually to constantly be changed.
And then he develops this system and, you know, Dwayne's like super focused.
I know you know this, but for people who don't know, Dwayne has like a notebook, like fucking just filled with notes.
And it's all like, he's got systems.
This is his life.
Yeah, it's not like what Adesanya likes to call button smashing when you're playing a game.
No, it's very systematic.
And TJ, I think, in that Henn and Burrell fight was the greatest expression of what Dwayne teaches.
But Ilya's not that easy to hit.
He rolls with stuff, like the Josh Emmett fight.
You know, he, like, slides away from stuff, and these big bombs are coming his way.
Well, you have to have that touch of death.
And he's got that God-given power.
His power is fucking crazy, man.
That shit drives me nuts.
It just drives me nuts.
And catering to the casuals.
Right.
You have your shoulder behind the other shoulder.
Fuck off.
Like, whenever someone, like, boos and then they separate people or stand people up, I go crazy.
Well, it's going to be interesting seeing him at 55.
He's a much bigger guy.
Think about Mauricio Rufi.
He's a 55er.
And he's fucking gigantic.
How tall is Rufi?
I mean, he's got to be 6'1", maybe 6'2", and he's 55, and he's not thin.
I mean, he's lean, but he's not like scrawny.
He's got muscle.
He's fucking huge for 55.
There's some 55.
And Ilya, as powerful as he is, he's not that big.
And it's going to be interesting to see because of this 10-pound.
10 pounds is just like it's a lot of weight, man.
It's like when you're dealing with a 155-pound person, it's a significant percentage of your body weight.
I don't know what roof he cuts, but when I see him walking around, he looks like he's 190 pounds.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, like Islam.
Islam's fucking huge.
He's big, dude.
When I interview him in the cage afterwards, I'm always like, how?
How are you 155?
He's thick as fuck.
He's got a giant back.
And when he gets a hold of guys, it's like he's just got this leverage, this grappling squeeze that it's... I remember when he fought Drew Dober, and when he got Dober down to the ground, I was like, that's a wrap.
It's a wrap.
As soon as he gets on top, and then he starts clamping down and squeezing, and guys are just like, Oliveira was tapping the moment it was on.
He was like, fuck this.
And he's also – his striking has leveled up significantly.
Like his striking is much, much better than it was when he was younger.
He's just – he's a threat everywhere.
Like when he knocked out Volk with that high kick.
That was crazy.
Crazy.
But granted –
If I was in folks corner, I would say no you're not taking it You've been fucking drinking beer and eating kebabs like there's no way you're taking this fight on ten days notice I don't care how confident you are.
I don't care how much you like fighting.
That's a crazy thing I don't care how much money they're paying you because you look at the slide that his career took right he Arguably won that first fight with Islam very close fight loses a decision or was it a draw?
Either way, Islam keeps the title.
Was it a draw?
Why do I think it was a draw?
Maybe it was something like that.
So super close fight with the pound for pound best fighter in the world, 10 pounds up.
Everybody's like, Volk might be the best pound for pound fighter in the world.
And then he takes that fight on 10 days notice, gets head kicked.
And then he comes into the fight with to pour you what four months later or something like that Compromised clearly you got head kicked shin to the dome Stopped unconscious and then you've got a fight the scariest fucking boxer in the division and you get knocked out You know and so then this big slide
And then he comes back full year off, and you see against Diego Lopez, looks like the Volk of old.
Looks like he's back.
Well, I would have liked to have seen that Volk versus Ilya.
That would have been an exciting fight.
First one was a decision, second one was a... Yeah, KO.
Okay, so it was a decision.
I like those.
Um, they're a brain stimulants.
Uh, I got a one car that I got that I bought called alpha.
That's pretty good.
Although I did kind of get a little annoyed that they ripped off alpha brain.
Cause it's, it's, you know, I like these, these are great too.
These gummies, these alpha brain gummies are fucking awesome.
Small cup of coffee.
Really?
You have low iron.
Do you eat red meat?
Caffeine can inhibit iron absorption primarily due to the presence of tannins and other polyphenols in coffee.
I'm a coffee junkie.
I take days off of these things.
What are those?
These are Breakers, Lucy's.
These are nicotine.
I like them when I do podcasts.
I like them before I do stand-up.
But I take days off because I was like, boy, am I addicted to these things.
I'm fucking sucking on these things all day long.
But I took a couple days off, like, no, I feel fine.
I feel fine.
But I've taken days off coffee, and I'm like, brr.
I'm fucking falling asleep in the morning, just like, ugh.
That makes a lot of sense, man.
Drinking coffee and other caffeinated beverages with a meal associated with 39% to 90% reduction in iron absorption.
Oh, wow.
Isn't that crazy?
That is crazy.
Fuck, I might have to try it.
A fighter is probably, out of all the professional sports, I think a fighter probably is the most in tune with their body.
Well, it's hard to judge, too, which is a real problem because there's judges that don't train and never have trained, which is, to me, fucking crazy.
Because the consequences of not being in tune are so grave.
It's so different than any other sport.
Adesanya never cared about his nutrition.
Never took care of it.
And then he got older, he realized like, hey, I've got to really fucking do everything.
Yeah, that's also youth.
God, to be young.
When you're really young, you can get away with anything.
You really can, dude.
I used to just be hungover, rolling in and just fighting hard as fuck.
It's crazy how much you can get away with when you're young.
But it's like the other thing is like hard training for long, prolonged periods, years and years and years.
You get all these little micro injuries, those little things, things are slowing down.
You're just demanding so much of your body.
If you're not taking care of your nutrition, it's like...
Are you serious about this or not?
Like, what are you doing?
You were fucking six hours in the gym and then you're eating pizza?
That's crazy.
You're an idiot.
dumb yeah so dumb and cake the night before a fight it's so crazy ilia famously he said he only did it twice but he was and they made it seem like in the countdown shows that he did it a lot he would drink wine yeah he was weight cutting yeah the whole time i was watching that i was like he doesn't do that every time i was like come on this is like media stuff you know i was like you're not convincing me that he does that you know he did it twice he said and he said but i was like what am i doing sounds fun it
That's like judging a Chinese spelling bee and you don't speak Chinese.
And then you're dehydrating yourself more because of the wine.
So it probably aids a little bit in the water cut because it does dehydrate you.
But then that hangover when you got no water in your body.
I don't fuck with hangovers anymore, dude.
That's why I stopped drinking.
I stopped drinking, I guess it's like close to four months ago.
And I used to have days where I would get, you know, I'd work at the club, do stand up, have a couple drinks.
And the next day I'd be working out going, oh, what did I feel?
I was like, that's just life.
Just deal with it.
Drink your electrolytes.
Get through it.
I have no days like that now.
That's nuts.
Even if last night I only had five hours sleep, but I worked out this morning, I feel fucking great.
I know it.
They don't understand it.
All the bad days have gone away.
I'm like, you moron.
They understand when someone's on top.
That's the thing is like I thought you missed it.
Like I remember Boss Rootin telling me that.
I quit drinking and not just as much fun.
I'm like, right.
Just as much fun.
Oh, he's on top.
But it's true.
It's like you're having fun because you're with fun people.
And you're just having laughs.
You don't have to be drunk to have fun.
I know.
But, you know, there's so many like near submission attempts that I think should count.
And as a professional athlete too, you realize like this is just not good for you.
It's punishing yourself.
Well, it's just becoming wiser, too.
You know, that's why, like, when you see that John Jones thing, I'm sure you saw the police cam.
Did you see that?
It's a new one.
He's drunk on the phone talking to the cops, and you're like, oh, no.
Like, I always go to the Oliveira, Armand, Sorokin fight.
The girl in the car said he was driving.
The car was wrecked and John was gone and she ratted him out.
John Jones did it.
And then John's on the phone with the cops and apparently allegedly threatened the cops when he was on the phone, which is not good.
Yeah, not good.
And he's already got a history of running from accidents.
Yeah, I hope so, too.
But, you know, it is what it is.
They like riding the lightning, bro.
He liked riding that lightning.
And I think that's one of the things that made him so good, too, because he was so wild.
He was just a wild dude.
And I just genuinely didn't give a fuck and really had this ultimate confidence and so skillful and so smart.
But eventually, you know, one more drink, then like that, that, that, that, and then your body's just like not what it used to be.
Because I think Oliveira won that fight.
And Aspinall is a fucking beast, man.
I know there's a lot of questions, never been out of the first round, a lot of questions, but never been out of the first round because he fucks everybody up in the first round.
Because Oliveira came close to finishing him twice.
Like, that's a factor.
You know?
And Sorokin stayed on top, and he had a lot of control, and it was a very close fight.
Well, it's also money fights, right?
Because I think he's wrong because I think Aspinall's a star.
I really do.
And I think he's saying, who is he?
He's no one.
Aspinall's a star.
When people ask questions to me all the time, like casuals on the street, is Jon Jones going to fight Tom Aspinall?
It's constant.
That's like the constant question.
To me, the real fight would have been Jon Jones versus Francis.
That's the real fight.
If I, like, clearly I'm not responsible for making decisions because I would have made a lot of different decisions and I would have, like, Francis, let's talk.
But I think those fucking moments where a guy is, like, at nine.
Let's work this out.
That guy's a star.
Francis is the fucking scariest heavyweight of all time.
That's a star.
You know, like, that guy as the heavyweight champion is so fucking marketable.
He puts people into orbit.
You know, he flatlined Stipe.
He flatlined Alistair.
He flatlines people.
He's fucking terrifying.
Like, that's the heavyweight champion.
And for that guy to walk away from the belt and then almost beat Tyson Fury and then get knocked out by Anthony Joshua and then to come back and destroy that dude in PFL.
You know, if ten is checkmate, he's at nine twice.
What's his name again?
The big, tall Brazilian dude that he ground and pounded into unconsciousness.
Ferreira.
That's right.
Yeah, and he's the guy that KO'd Ryan Bader in the first round.
He looks phenomenal.
He's terrifying.
And Francis just destroyed him.
I'm like, that's the guy.
That's the guy.
Oh, no.
And everybody knows that's the guy.
That's the fight that...
That's the big fight.
It's a shame when that shit happens in the sport, dude.
That's big, man.
You don't want to be there.
That guy got you there.
He's got a fucking locked-in triangle.
Yeah, you got out of it.
But still, that's big, man.
Jon's not a natural heavyweight either.
That too.
I mean, Jon still could make 205.
And like 240 and a little soft is I mean, think about how much Pereira cuts.
Right.
That should count.
He got that weight like he could still make 205 and might still be the champ at 205.
You know, which is kind of wild.
And Tom Aspinall ain't making 205.
That guy's fucking huge.
And damage leading up to a KO or that doesn't lead to a KO is very significant in the scorecards.
in ghana was not making 205 francis would cut to get to 265 natural sure which is just bananas yeah he's a fucking hulking man yeah yeah he's a scary dude how do people get that big genetics man is that what it is genetics yeah i mean that's just pure genetics
Hockey or fucking baseball or something.
Or football.
But the brain damage you get in football is significantly more probably than the brain damage you get in fighting.
You like hockey?
I like watching it.
Hockey's pretty cool.
But a submission that doesn't lead up to a submission doesn't count.
The thing about hockey is it's never been as popular as football.
It's always been the stepson.
It's not quite the same.
Not in the same... They don't reach the same... You have a few Gretzky's, Bobby Orr.
You have a few guys that become national celebrities.
But for the most part, there's not a whole ton of them that everybody, the general public, knows about.
And I don't understand that.
So because of that, they're probably...
a little more dedicated, a little more humble, a little more on the grind.
You can't just count damage.
It's a very athletic sport, man.
The fucking amount of energy that those guys expend, the speed.
They're fast.
Constantly sprinting on ice and maneuvering and gliding around those blades.
It's incredible to watch.
I like soccer.
I like watching soccer.
You have to count, like, near falls or near subs.
You know when I really enjoyed soccer?
When I went to see a live match.
I was like,
And then I was talking to my friend Ed, who's one of the owners of the Austin Club here, and he was explaining to me, like, this is the reason why it never becomes popular in America.
They don't take commercial breaks.
There's no time for a commercial break.
The fucking clock is always running.
Oh, I never noticed that.
And these guys have legs.
They're like fucking quarter horses.
They have these fucking huge legs, and they're just running constantly.
They're constantly sprinting.
They have to be in insane shape.
As someone who appreciates athletic performance, this is a crazy sport, a really demanding sport.
They're constantly running.
It's like seven to nine usually.
That's bananas.
They're not jogging.
They're fucking sprinting seven to nine miles, which is crazy.
Well, you'd have to go overseas.
And then the competitiveness of the soccer over there or the football, what they call it over there, is so much higher than in America.
It would probably be a long adjustment to reach their level.
No, I've only been to the Austin games.
It's pretty chill.
We played some clips of basketball games in Serbia.
And you see the crowd in Serbia.
They go hard.
I know.
The cheering is like, it gives you goosebumps.
Like, holy fuck, man.
These are war-like people.
And they're putting that kind of fucking same energy to basketball.
You're like, boy, when those guys come over here, everyone's fucked.
And you're kind of seeing that now.
There's a bunch of Serbian players that have made their way to the United States, and those guys are fucking badass.
They're ready to fight the entire time, probably.
And they're scary, hard dudes, man.
Which is really interesting to see this influx of guys from Russia, Dagestan, Chechnya, some of these guys that are making their way into the UFC now.
These are fucking hard dudes, man.
You know, it's really interesting.
I think another thing that's really cool about it is when someone is elite, no one cares what country they're from.
They just love that guy.
It's like if Adesanya gets in there, no one cares he's from New Zealand.
Everybody gets pumped.
If Pereira gets in there, it's Alex Pereira's fighting.
You don't say, USA.
No, they're just fucking psyched to see Alex Pereira.
So it's really great in that regard that you can become a true international superstar and you're embraced essentially by all the nations.
Think about the Russians that are over here.
No one cares.
No one's like, oh, Russians, fuck you.
They're like, oh, that guy's badass.
If I went over to Russia, I'd be like fucking super worried they'd poison my food.
You know, like some crazy Russian, like, fuck him, fuck this guy, you know, and fucking throw something in your tea.
Who knows?
You know, like, they're fucking, they're hardcore.
America embraces, but we're a melting pot, right?
That's the difference between this country and all the other countries is that we are consistent entirely of immigrants.
At one point in time, everyone, unless you're Native American, everyone was an immigrant.
So it's like, we kind of accept that people come from different parts of the world.
It's kind of nutty in that regard.
And, you know, boy, it's worked out.
In a lot of ways.
Even what's going on in the UK.
People are getting arrested for Facebook posts.
Yeah, thousands of them.
All my old friends from high school, like my old friends that I was friends with when I was really young, they're on Facebook.
things that are known not just like okay this person won by a mile but it's like in kickboxing they do if you get knocked down in a round it's automatically a 10-8 round you like that for mna or no i do but if a guy is tuning you up for like the entire round and you clip him and drop him and he gets back up and he's still okay i don't think that's a 10-8 round i think
Old dudes love Facebook.
My mom and dad are on Facebook.
They argue about politics on Facebook.
Like, fucking miss me with that shit.
I got zero time for any of that stupidity.
But this thing that we've done over here is allowing people to express themselves.
Whether you agree or disagree, that is just so gigantic.
And they're squashing a lot of that in other countries, and that scares the shit out of me.
That's what I was really scared about in this last election because –
Because I'm friends with Elon, I knew what was going on in Twitter behind the scenes.
I knew how the government was stepping in and silencing posts.
I'm like, this is fucking dangerous, man.
Because if they get a real grip on social media and you no longer can protest about things and express yourself about things, including a lot of things that happen to be true, like during the COVID crisis.
And that's what people have to realize when it's so easy when, especially in this country, all tech is primarily left.
And they have a very strong ideology, this very progressive left-wing ideology, which is all over the tech world.
And when they were in control and they were silencing things, I think the attitude was this is good because we're right and we need to stop these fascists or whatever we want to call them.
But the problem is then what if the fucking right gets in place and they use the same rules that you used on them?
Now we don't have a country anymore.
Now we're fucked.
Now we're just like every other dictatorship.
I think MMA should be a completely different scoring system than a 10-point must system.
And that acceptance and love is empowering both to you and to them, whereas hate of other people, I mean, it might motivate you in some way, but it's also crippling.
What is that old expression that anger is the emotion that poisons the vessel that holds it?
Mm-hmm.
You're wasting energy.
You're wasting life.
And you're wasting your potential because you're thinking only in terms of negative all the time.
And negative is never constructive.
You don't have to.
You don't have to think like that to be successful or to be competitive or in any way.
We just stole this boxing system, which is a great system for boxing because you only have two weapons and you only have your hands.
You can be empty.
Did you develop this philosophy from reading?
Were you taught it?
I think that's the answer.
When you were asking me what's the answer to world peace, it might be that.
You don't even have elbows, right?
So think about all the different factors in MMA and we're limited to 10 points.
What was your first loss?
To me, that seems silly.
I think it should probably be 10 points for each aspect of the sport.
Like, okay, who landed more kicks?
Who landed more punches?
I feel exactly the same way.
I've always said, someone come up with a great cult.
Yeah, do it.
Come up with a really great cult.
I'll join.
I'll come up with one.
If you fucking...
And then calculate all that shit up together.
Like have like a really benevolent leader that really is an actual real guru and it makes sense and no one's fucking everybody.
I was going to say, are we allowing everyone to have sex with each other?
It's usually a leader gets to fuck everybody.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The leader gets to fuck everybody and he wants your money.
You know, who had more takedowns?
But if that could be avoided, but it would just make things easier, but it really wouldn't.
You're better off without a real belief system, but sort of entertaining a lot of belief systems.
What, am I gay?
Who landed damage from the top?
Yeah, yeah.
They're gay.
If you're afraid of writing, you're gay.
What kind of writing?
How do you write?
It should be a comprehensive system.
And I think there should be more than three judges.
You know, when you have a split decision and like some of them are so crazy, you know, you see like a five round split decision and it's, they gave like four judges or two out of the three judges rather give like three out of five rounds and the other person gives them the whole five rounds.
You don't plan on publishing it?
It's a heavy comic book, man.
Like this is too much variability.
There's too much weirdness to it.
And if you're a fighter, especially in MMA because of the win bonus, which also drives me crazy,
Yeah, maybe not.
I think we're in this very bizarre stage right now where I don't think people realize what's coming.
And I think it's going to hit us like a fucking freight train.
I think if you had three more judges, so if you have six judges, six judges would balance it out, six good judges.
It might be actually what really does happen.
Well, the best case scenario is we evolve and we merge with AI and we evolve and it's better for everybody.
And we become something superior to what we are now.
Worst case scenario is we become irrelevant because they don't need us anymore.
So the ones that fuck up and make mistakes, they'll be canceled out by the better judges.
We're outdated.
I think the hive mind thing is promising, and I have a feeling that that's where we're headed.
I have a feeling that with either some wearable or some sort of technology with an implant where we no longer require language to communicate with each other, and we essentially have instantaneous access to everyone all the time.
And the thing that people are going to have to deal with is that there's going to be no more secrets.
There'll be no more lies.
It's going to be impossible to deceive.
Everyone's going to know exactly what's going on in your soul, like how you interface with the world itself.
That's cool.
I think that's probably where we're headed.
I think if we don't, we're going to become obsolete.
I think it's one of two things.
Either we become obsolete and AI becomes a new digital form of life that's far more intelligent, far more capable than we are, and then it makes better and better versions of itself until it makes God.
Or we merge and we just transcend whatever this state of being these primitive territorial apes with very sophisticated weapons.
We become something different.
Well, that's best case scenario, right?
I think it's also very strange that we are in this position.
It's very strange that we are living our lives at this unbelievable, unique moment in history.
where things are going to change in this undeniably radical way.
Unless something happens, unless we blow ourselves up or we get hit by an asteroid, it's gonna happen.
And it's gonna happen probably within the next 10 years.
Like 10 years from now, we're gonna be looking back, remember the old days of 2025 when you didn't know what was coming?
Just the invention of AI.
Old school UFC.
Yeah, I mean, it's UFC 1.
The whole world is going to be really weird.
And, you know, one of the things that always freaks me out about Elon and Neuralink is one of the statements that he said, you're going to be able to talk without using words.
I don't know how that would work.
Well, the hive mind.
We're going to be able to interact with each other.
I've often thought about the parallels of religion.
with what's currently going on and one of them being like christ was born of a virgin mother right so christ was born without sex and emerged like what else is born without a without a mother ai ai is born without a mother christ is going to come back ai is coming another one is the tower of babel
Yeah, weight classes, sure, but no time limit within the weight classes.
That's fucking awesome.
It seems like it.
That's awesome.
Right?
If you think that God is going to return, well, wouldn't it be?
That completely makes sense.
That's awesome.
The other one is the Tower of Babel, right?
So if we all have a universal language and we are working on this fucking tower to get closer to God.
Go the stairway to God.
And do it right and you make it there.
do it wrong, and it becomes completely chaotic and divided, and you're scattered across the world with a thousand different fucking languages, and nobody can communicate with each other, so nobody understands each other, and it's just chaos, which is what happened to the human race.
Yeah, that'd be sweet.
If we develop a universal language, and if this universal language is transmitted through whether it's this implant or wearable, some sort of interface with technology,
That would be pretty wild.
then we bypass.
We bypass this primitive state of chaotic tribal monkeys, and we become something superior.
Yeah, that'd be pretty crazy.
I mean, I don't know shit about golf, but from what I know.
Because you know, two guys are facing off each other, and they know.
yeah dude that's a that's a cool ass idea about ai i'm gonna put that in my book i'm gonna steal that idea yeah because if you think about it what what what is ai going to be well if super intelligence gets achieved and then you're attaching that to quantum computing right quantum computing right now is only able to just like do integers and you know do do equations
But what if quantum computing and AI merge?
Then you've got some insane amount of computational power attached to an insane intelligence that is going to make better and better versions of itself.
There's no rescue every five minutes.
Well, if you scale that up exponentially, 10, 20, 30, 50, 100, 1,000 years, if you keep going, you get a god.
is so confusing and it's so powerful that they think it might be evidence of the multiverse.
Now, I talked to Roman Yampolsky, who's a scientist who talks about the dangers of AI, and he thought that that was all nonsense.
He might be right, but there's a lot of scientists that believe that it's correct and that this is why quantum computing is so powerful.
Because Marc Andreessen said this, and it's the fucking craziest quote ever, that quantum computing, it can solve an equation
That if you converted the entire universe, like every molecule, every atom of the universe into a supercomputer, it would take so long for the universe as a supercomputer to solve this problem that the universe would die of heat death before it solved it.
And quantum computing can solve it in minutes.
What the fuck does that mean?
Oh, that would be real.
But again, the casuals would have a hard time with it because it would probably be a much more moderate pace or unless someone just tries to go for it right off the bat.
You're a sorcerer if you go back to the 1400s and show them an iPhone.
None of it makes any sense.
The fact that you could FaceTime someone in New Zealand right now, that's bananas.
All that stuff is fucking completely insane, and it's real, and it's happening right now.
Daniel told me, DC told me that he started off and he was just kind of okay.
And the other thing about AI being if artificial super intelligence creates something that we can't even imagine.
We're just dealing with this –
framework, this structure that's so antiquated because it's all been created by humans.
If you get something that's 1,000, 10,000 times more intelligent than us, and it's going to have solutions to things that we can't even comprehend.
One of the things that always weirded me out about these stories about UFO encounters and in particular the Bob Lazar story is that when he was working on back engineering these crafts that were supposedly from somewhere else, one of the things that he said is there's no controls.
That could be a strategy.
There's no controls in this thing.
They don't know what is happening between these beings and this craft that they power it.
But they're probably completely connected to this thing.
What you're seeing with those little grays is probably us in the future.
I mean, it does work.
That's probably what every primate eventually becomes once it integrates with technology.
There's so many fights where... Did you see the past, the Azerbaijan fight?
Well, you know, if artificial superintelligence does become live, all belief systems are going to get thrown into the wood chipper.
We're not going to know what the fuck is what.
Unless it tells us.
Yeah, I mean.
But I have a feeling that a lot of these stories, like these ancient religious stories, they're based on truth.
It's just truth that was a spoken word thing by people who really couldn't even read because they were illiterate.
And they had these tales that were told for a thousand years before anybody wrote them down.
They're writing them down in these ancient languages that even when you take those ancient languages and you try to translate into like modern English, a lot is lost in the translation.
But I think there's something to all of it.
There's something they're trying.
They're not telling stories for no reason.
I think they're telling these stories because they're trying to document something.
And I just don't think we get a full picture of it.
But there's so much truth in those stories.
And there's so many lessons in those stories that are applicable and that resonate today.
I think it'd be foolish to dismiss them.
It was... Who was it?
Mota and the other guy from Azerbaijan.
See if you can find his name.
Salikov?
I hadn't seen him fight before.
What weight class was it?
I think it was 45.
No, it was lightweight.
Sadikov and Nicholas Mota.
But over the time, between the Holloway fight and his fight with Fazeev, he didn't do anything but play golf for a year.
Nazim Sadikov and Nicholas Mota.
Fucking crazy fight, man.
It was so good that Dana White gave him double bonuses.
Oh, nice.
But Mota landed a 75-punch combination.
That is cool.
Yeah, where it is good.
What was it like returning to fighting after this, like trying to find yourself period?
Like, I'm not kidding, man.
He landed, like, and then Sadikov came back and stopped him.
Oh, shit.
It was wild.
Like, a wild fight.
There's a payoff.
It's a process.
So how was the fight?
Like, a fight like that where two guys just fight.
Well, I remember one time we talked and you said that you'd made this adjustment in your head from trying to fight and win to really trying to hurt people.
And Mota, like, basically emptied out the tank.
Are you still on that same?
But Sadikov had fantastic defense.
Just kept covering and moving.
Getting bombed onto the body, into the head.
But he looked like he was getting close to stopping.
Just this Zen state of just existing in whatever comes, whatever you're supposed to be doing, you do that.
And he comes back and you see Mota's taking these big, deep breaths.
And, whew, it was wild.
So you're in a position right now where you're next in line.
And when you look at my Rob, he presents so many unique challenges like this is a.
he's a there's a few guys that are very skillful but they also have unique physicality and that's marab so like when when you see that fight first of all have they given you a date uh they haven't there i think it's one i mean that stuff takes a little bit they told me november december is when i'm looking so maybe mass is greg arden
If you won the world title...
In Madison Square Garden, that means a lot.
There's something about Madison Square Garden.
Like when you're in the building, you're like, man, a lot of shit has gone down in this building.
That's the problem.
Like the floor part is huge.
It just feels different.
I did stand up there.
And just being there and walking out to this enormous crowd in Madison Square Garden, I was like...
The blitz, sprint, and very few guys.
This is the fucking garden.
In the center of it?
Because it's oddly intimate.
So even though there's 16,000 people, the people on this side are seeing the people laugh on this side.
And everyone's seeing everyone laugh.
And you're just walking around in a circle.
Oh, cool.
It's oddly intimate for 16,000 people.
You know, we were talking about Deitchie and golf, and I was saying that I'm scared of golf, and you were like, I don't have time for golf.
It's my favorite way to do arenas.
I thought it would be distracting, too, because I've done arenas where you're on stage facing the crowd, and it feels oddly impersonal.
It's like you're just doing a show for this massive amount of people.
It's fun, but that... I kind of preferred clubs, but a giant arena in the round seems like a giant club.
It's like...
But there's a lot of, like, doing it in Boston was huge because, like, I did the TD Garden because that was, like, where I grew up, and that's where I started doing stand-up.
But there's something about Madison Square Garden for fights where when you go there, it's like there's an extra tingle in the air.
Like, whoo, boys, we're at the Garden.
So you fighting Marab at the Garden would be fucking insane.
When you think about him, what do you think about this matchup?
How do you approach it?
The thing that happens with golf is it takes so much time, and it's so addictive, that it's going to take away time from other stuff, no matter what you do.
And when you look at a guy, like I always point to Marab because Marab,
The day after he beat Shawn, the first fight, DC went to his house to go talk to him, and he was out running.
He played like 260 days in a row.
Do you have to do anything different to deal with that endurance?
The day after.
That's a guy who does not stop.
And that extreme physicality and that extreme endurance, because he is just constantly working, that means something.
Well, I'm pumped for it.
Thanks.
I can't wait to watch.
I think you're one of the more exciting guys in the sport and one of the more interesting guys in the sport.
I love listening to your thought process.
It's very cool.
Thanks.
So thanks for being here, man.
Appreciate you very much.
Oh, yeah.
And, again, I can't wait.
I'm looking forward to it.
Thanks for having me on.
Thanks for everything.
My pleasure.
All right.
Bye, everybody.
It counts.
If you take months off, you take, you know, like this was the thing that I was thinking about with Jon Jones.
Jon Jones said he needed six months to prepare for Aspinall, if he was going to fight Aspinall.
So they were trying to make a deal, and then he decided to retire.
And he said his handicap just kept getting better and better and better and better.
But it's six months because he's not training.
Like, at all.
He just doesn't train.
Like, in between fights, just doesn't train.
He used to do that a lot when he was younger, too, which I always thought was crazy.
He said the next time he played, he was like, holy shit, he's really good now.
Well, look at John.
It's like, how did he do that?