JRE MMA Show #2

Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day. Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day, ladies and gentlemen, coming at you live from paradise. I'm in Hawaii right now, and I was going to watch the bisping fight, the Bisping Kelvin Gestlam fight live of and do sort of a breakdown of it while it was happening. But the shit was going on at like 02:00 in the morning out here, and it wasn't happening. I have been eating like a pig and drinking. I've been doing vacation type shit. I'm a strong believer in that. You need to do vacation time. Vacation time is important. You can't just be working all the time. Occasionally you have to just fuck off. And so that's what I've been doing. I've just been fucking off. So I was tired and I decided I am not going to stay up late. And so I watched it in the morning. I watched it this morning, and I've got a couple thoughts on it. First of all, Brendan Chauffe said this on his instagram, and I could not agree more. I don't think you should be allowed to fight three weeks after you have a brutal fight like Michael Bisping did with GSP. He got rocked. He got choked unconscious. And then three weeks later, he's fighting a really dangerous young and up and coming Kelvin Gastelum. And Kelvin is a beast. He's got nasty boxing, and that is what he showed in that fight. He hit him with a beautiful straight right jab and a right hand behind it. And oh, my goodness, that kid is just on fire. He's just on another level, right? I'm super, super impressed with Kelvin. Kelvin has got lightning fast hands, and he's an interesting guy because he's what I would call a tweener. And what that means is that I think Kelvin, in the best of times, like, if Kelvin has the best camp and the best performance, it's entirely possible that he could beat anybody at 185 pounds. But should he be at 185 pounds? Boy, I don't know, because Chris Wideman is at 185 pounds. And when Chris Wideman got Kelvin to the ground, it really did look like you're talking about two completely different weight classes. And Chris Wideman was able to choke Kelvin out. And obviously, Weidman is a former champion, and there is absolutely no shame in losing to Chris Wideman. But it's just the way it looked when you were watching the fight. To me, it looked like two different weight classes. And there's a lot of people that think that really, Kelvin should be fighting at 170 pounds if he got the proper diet, and he was doing that for a while at one point in time. I know Dolce was working with him for a while, and he had his diet in line, and he looked fantastic. And then just things happened, and he didn't want to pay the dolce money. And I don't know who he's working with right now as a nutritionist, but I think he's a phenomenal fighter. I just don't know if 185 pounds is the right weight class for him. It could be. It could be that maybe what he really needs to do is just lose some body fat, put on some muscle, and maybe 185 pounds will be his weight class. It's just that constant debate of whether or not you should weaken your body and drop down to the minimum weight you can, or whether or not you should fight at a natural weight and have a healthy body. It's a real good argument, and I'm pausing right now because I'm pulling something up. There's a girl that just died in Australia. She died very recently. She was preparing for a moi thai fight, and it's just part of what this sport is about, unfortunately. It really bothers the fucking shit out of me. I think it's the scariest thing. Here it is. Teenager dies training. Here it is. The girl's name, she was 18 years old, and her name was Jessica Lindsay, and she died while she was cutting weight. She was an amateur kickboxer in Australia. I cut weight a bunch of times when I was doing taekwondo tournaments, and it is brutal. It's terrible. I was bad at it, too. I didn't do it correctly. I just worked out real hard the night before and wore rubber suits and the whole deal and dehydrated myself, and I didn't rehydrate myself well either, so I felt like shit the next day when I was fighting. And a lot of wrestlers back in the day used to do the same thing. My weight cut, though, was nowhere near as extreme as some of the MMA fighters do. Some MMA fighters, I mean, they're getting on death's. I just. I just think it's one of the most disturbing and most unfortunate aspects of MMA. Kevin Lee said before his last fight with Tony Ferguson that he felt like he was dying when he was cutting weight, and he made the weight. Habib Nemurgomedov, who's the, if not the best, one of the very best lightweights in the world, undefeated, had his body shut down last time he tried to make the weight and couldn't make the Tony Ferguson fight. They pulled him out and took him to the hospital. I mean, I'm beating on a dead horse here because it's something that everybody knows, everybody's aware that it's a terrible, terrible aspect of our sport. And in my mind, it's contrary to what martial arts is supposed to be about. So in that sense, I encourage Kelvin to stay at 185 pounds because obviously the guy's knocked out Vitor Belfort at 185. He just knocked out former champion Michael Bisping at 185 pounds. I mean, he could knock out anybody at 185. But a guy like Chris Wideman, who's very smart about cutting weight, he cuts a lot of weight, but he does it the right way, rehydrates the right way, and he's just a fucking beast. He's just so much bigger. And when he got Kelvin to the ground and submitted him with a head and arm choke, boy, it just really seemed like that's the wrong weight class for. And then you see Kelvin next fight fights Bisping and just fucking lights him up in the first round. Now, would he have been able to do that if he fought the bisping that was training for George St. Pierre? I mean, if Bisping did not have the George St. Pierre fight and just went right into the Kelvin gasoline fight, would the same result have happened? It could very well have. The way Kelvin hits, he's fast as fuck. His hands are beautiful. He throws really crisp, straight punches. And in this sport, there's not a whole lot of guys who have crisper, sharper hands at 185 pounds than Kelvin. He just has beautiful head movement and boxing. And when he moves in for the kill with those hands, whoa. You saw in the Vitor Belfort fight, he just fucked vitor up with those straight punches, and he throws them efficiently and they have snap to them. And on top of that, he's a very good wrestler. A lot of people forget how good his wrestling skills are. On top of all that, he's just a real threat at 185 pounds. Fascinating thing, because it's just such a wide open division. He just called out Robert Whitaker, who's the interim champion of course, and called out Whitaker and wants Whitaker to fight him next. But of course, Robert Whitaker is waiting for the big payday. I would too, if I was him, to fight George St. Pierre. So it's a wide open division now that St. Pierre choked out Michael Bisping, and then Kelvin just lights up bisping. And of course, you've got to think that Weidman is still in the mix. I mean, even though Weidman lost to Yoel Romero and then lost to Gigard Musasi, he's still in the mix. He was winning that Yoel Romero fight, in my opinion, until he got caught with that wicked flying knee. But that's the danger of fighting Yoel Romero. Yoel Romero could do that to anybody in the world. He's just such a fucking freak. So really, really wide open division. I'm bummed as fuck that Gehgard went over and decided to fight for Bellator, but I get mean. These guys got to go where other money is. And at Bellator, he easily could be a champion. I think he could be a champion in the UFC as well, and maybe we will see him in the UFC again. I mean, he could easily fight a year or two over in the UFC and then come back over. Gagard is still relatively young, but it's nice to have competition. I think competition is good for everybody, and I think it really elevates the sport. It elevates the level of sport. And you can see by the results that a lot of these UFC fighters are having, especially Lorenz Larkin, who is very good. He's a very, very good striker. He loses to Lima in a bid for the title and then