JRE MMA Show: #172 with Gable Steveson (Transcript)

How and what are we doing?

JOE ROGAN: Well, you would get flexible. The thing is, a guy like you’d figure out how to get flexible. The flexibility thing drives me nuts because I’ve tried to show stuff to guys before, MMA fighters, and they’re like, “I’m not flexible.” I’m like, “What does that mean? What does that mean?” This is not like you’re not tall, okay. You can get flexible.

GABLE STEVESON: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: You just stretch.

GABLE STEVESON: Okay, we can rewind now. And I could say, I am flexible.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you certainly could get flexible.

GABLE STEVESON: You can.

JOE ROGAN: Anyone can get flexible, but it’s not…

GABLE STEVESON: Can you get flexible? Do you want to get flexible?

JOE ROGAN: That’s a good question.

GABLE STEVESON: Do you want to do something?

JOE ROGAN: This is a good question. It’s a lot of work to get flexible. And would it compromise anything? You know, some people say it compromises some stability, you know, to have completely over flexible hips and flexible joints, that it could possibly compromise some stability that maybe… But, I mean, Yoel Romero is pretty f*ing flexible.

The Yoel Romero Phenomenon

GABLE STEVESON: And he’s explosive.

JOE ROGAN: Crazy, super explosive, bro. How about that match with Pat Downey?

GABLE STEVESON: He went out there and made Pat Downey look like a beginner wrestler. And it’s crazy because Pat Downey is…

JOE ROGAN: Really good, but really good.

GABLE STEVESON: Yoel’s 48.

JOE ROGAN: I know, 48 shooting blast doubles like…

GABLE STEVESON: He just like he’s back in 2004 Olympics.

JOE ROGAN: It doesn’t make any sense. He’s a freak. He’s a real freak, man. And I mean, he’s 48, allegedly. We don’t even really know how old he is because he’s from Cuba.

GABLE STEVESON: How old do you think he is, for real?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I don’t know, man.

GABLE STEVESON: 35 at this point.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, he’s obviously at least 48, but it’s just crazy.

GABLE STEVESON: But you know what the best part about it is? When guys get older and they kind of get a little bigger, they don’t look good in a singlet. And this is crazy to say, but Yoel looks really solid in that singlet.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, bro, he looks solid everywhere, man. He’s still got a six pack.

GABLE STEVESON: Still does.

JOE ROGAN: And, you know, now he’s doing dirty boxing, and he’s still fighting MMA. He’s just… He’s a freak. I mean, and we really didn’t even get him in MMA until he was past his athletic prime.

GABLE STEVESON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, he really started fighting in the UFC. How old was he when he first fought in the UFC? I want to say he’s like 35.

GABLE STEVESON: I don’t know that, but it seemed really late because when he was going through Olympics, he was sound in every position. And like you said, I mean, in a couple interviews back, if he would have started that early. Just imagine. Oh, my God, just imagine.

Freak Athletes in MMA

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but that’s the thing that you have, too, is athleticism. And the thing about MMA is the real freak athletes, they go to football, they go to basketball, they go where all the money is, and they go where all the traditional sports avenues are, and it’s just not… There’s not a lot of freak athletes that wind up making their way to MMA. And when they do, they really shine.

And, you know, when I first started seeing you competing, you know, first, obviously, in wrestling, and, you know, if you can win a gold medal in the Olympics in wrestling, I mean, you have to have everything. You have to have everything. You have to be a freak athlete. You have to be unbelievably dedicated, disciplined. Nobody gets there easy. No, that is not, you know, “Oh, he’s just gifted.” It doesn’t exist. You got to have everything.

GABLE STEVESON: There’s got to be a lot of tools.

JOE ROGAN: A lot.

GABLE STEVESON: A lot of tools.

JOE ROGAN: A lot of tools and a lot of fortitude. The thing about wrestling that I’ve always said is not only is it the best base for MMA, because if a guy can dictate where the fight takes place, that is the most important aspect of fighting and you can learn everything else, but it’s also… It’s the mental toughness that wrestlers have, the ability to grind out those practices, the conditioning that’s involved in wrestling, it’s above and beyond, I think, all other sports.

MMA Wrestling vs. Traditional Wrestling

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah, I think it’s the next level thing. And you see in UFC right now, the guys that are dominating and winning are kind of putting that wrestling base first, but making it MMA wrestling.

You know, I feel like when a lot of guys, a lot of D1 wrestlers come to MMA, they kind of don’t make the switch of how to take the right shot and how to finish the right shot and how to use your feet to trip their feet out on the cage. And if you get stuck in a guillotine, how do you move from that spot?

And I think you see the guys that are doing it best, the Islams, the Hamzats, are really going out there and attacking and making sure that people can understand that, “Hey, you got to fear this.” And then next I’m going to come with the hands.

And so I think that’s the biggest thing that we’re working on now, is that I’ve wrestled my whole life, and I’ve done great things and won the Olympics and multiple national championships, but I think the main thing is going out there and understanding that you are that bad dude. But when you show them hands now, you got to have to respect both. And I think that’s where a lot of this is going to come into play when I finally get to that point of reaching that competition.

Gable’s Striking Journey

JOE ROGAN: Now, how long have you been striking for?

GABLE STEVESON: I’ve been going into a little… So I’m from Minnesota, Apple Valley. I’m actually from Portage, Indiana. I moved to Apple Valley, Minnesota when I was 11 years old. And in college I met a guy named Billy Simon. He’s from Prior Lake. He fought nothing too big, just on a regional scene in Minnesota.

He has a house on Prior Lake and he has a place in his basement that is built out for MMA and stuff like that. When I was maybe 21 years old, I started hitting the pads and mind you, stiff as a board, don’t really know what I’m doing. But he’s kind of started and guided me along the way.

JOE ROGAN: And how old are you now?

GABLE STEVESON: I’m 25.

JOE ROGAN: So just four years.

GABLE STEVESON: Just four years. But I think really, really striking. Seven months.

JOE ROGAN: That’s so crazy, really after it.

GABLE STEVESON: So crazy, really time consuming. “Hey, this is what I want to do. I’m not going to wrestle. I’m doing MMA.” I would say seven months, but…

JOE ROGAN: When you watch your dirty boxing match, I would have never believed that, except I know what an athlete you are. It’s just… It’s so crazy how someone who really knows how to use their body can learn other things.

Training with the GOAT

GABLE STEVESON: Well, I think the main thing also is I’m all ears. You know, you can’t go out there and think that you can do something without putting that time and effort in like we talked about with the Olympics or like you talked about.

But I think the main thing is if I can go out there and be all ears and soak up game from the people that are trying to show me the way, I think I can do a lot of great things, and that’s all I do. I’m all ears. I want to show up twice a day. I want to do the best thing that I can. If I got to show up three times a day and I feel like it, I’m going to go do it.

JOE ROGAN: Because it’s also to be an elite athlete like yourself, you have to be coachable. You have to really like the guys who already know things. Like, “I’m going to do it my way.” They never get elite.

GABLE STEVESON: It doesn’t work. No. And I think you got to put that guard down. You got to trust somebody, and if you don’t trust anybody and, man, I think I can do it alone. I think I can kind of wing it. I think I can maybe not practice today. You got to trust somebody and you got to put your heart into somebody.

And I feel like I have a good group of people around me to kind of put that heart into, and they’re leading me in the right direction, and I’m grateful.

The Buffalo Bills Experiment

JOE ROGAN: So you were doing a bunch of different things, right? So you become an elite wrestler, and then for a while, you were thinking about playing football. So you played football for a short amount of time.

GABLE STEVESON: Buffalo Bills? Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. How long do you play it for?

GABLE STEVESON: I never played football in my life.

JOE ROGAN: Never played?

GABLE STEVESON: No. That was the first. Hey, that was the first time I ever played football. I promise.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. First time you played football was professional?

GABLE STEVESON: It was in the NFL. My mom was always scared. The high school coaches at Apple Valley High School in Minnesota were like, “Hey, come play football.” They were trying to call my mom and dad, and I’m like, you’re not going to convince her. She is scared to death of football the whole time I’m wrestling. So where do we bridge this gap at?

JOE ROGAN: Right, right.

GABLE STEVESON: And I just get done with WWE, and I go out there, and I’m chilling. I get a call saying, “Hey, you want to try out for the Bills?” And I tell Sean McDermott and Brandon Beane, and I said, “Hey, don’t expect much, but I could put on shoes. But I’ve never had football cleats on. I never had pads on. I don’t even know how to put the tights on anything.”

And I went out there and I sprinted my ass off, though, in that tryout. I was sprinting down and back and forth. I said, “Hey, if I don’t know any technique for D line, you’re going to see effort.” And McDermott saw effort, and that’s all he needed to see, and he gave me a chance.

JOE ROGAN: What was that like? Jumping into a completely new sport.

GABLE STEVESON: Hard. Because it’s not just football.

JOE ROGAN: How old were you when you did that?

GABLE STEVESON: I just turned 24.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

GABLE STEVESON: I just turned 24. I know you see it. You see that stance? That’s the beginner stance. That’s the beginner stance. But I came out there, no gloves, just winging it, and I told them, just give me a good chance.

But football is not just football. It’s the playbook. And the playbook is crazy, because I went from, “Hey, go out there and wrestle someone one on one” to “See if the guard is light on his feet or see if he’s leaning forward to see if the center is going to silent count, maybe, or see if the guard taps the center to snap the ball.” There’s a lot of different things that you got to know.

And I’m out there with this big ass helmet on. I’ve never put a helmet on, Joe. So I’m out there with this big ass helmet.

JOE ROGAN: My head’s down and I can’t—

GABLE STEVESON: Look up and I don’t know what I’m doing. But I knew if I gave effort that someone would give me a chance. And I went out there in my first game, I think I had a tackle, a QB rush, and I was kind of unheard of at the time because I’ve never played ball before, but it was crazy. Once in a lifetime experience, most definitely.

The NFL Journey Continues

JOE ROGAN: And when you got cut, did you think about trying somewhere else? Did you think about doing it more?

GABLE STEVESON: Once I got cut from Buffalo, I was the last one to get cut from the room. I remember going in to see McDermott and they were going to do practice squad, but I knew they were going to do practice squad. So I was like, “Yo, just send me home. I’ll figure it out. I’ll try again.”

So my plan was to go back to college and wrestle already, but I sat around for maybe a month. Baltimore Ravens called me, and Baltimore was like, “Hey, do you want to come to a tryout?” I said, “Okay, you know, I never played football before, just to let you know, if it’s a little shaky.”

I went out there and I dominated the tryout. And I had like 10 minutes of work, but it was a great 10 minutes. And they’re like, “Okay, we’re going to take your physicals. You’re going to be here and stay.” The injury report comes back and the injury report says they need a D end and a linebacker. So you got to compensate for the spot because you need someone to play next week.

And I probably needed like six weeks on practice squad to play. And so I get sent home, they say, “Give me a week, we’ll bring you back.” A week comes, they don’t bring me back. And so I’m like, “Okay, I see the writing on the wall, let me move on.”

I sit for a little bit. Indianapolis Colts call. They just got ran over by a team. They said, “We need a run stopper.” So I go out there, do the trial. I think it went well. They said, “We’re not taking anybody today.” And then from there I was like, you know, maybe this is not it. And so I went back to wrestle.

The MMA Decision

JOE ROGAN: Did you ever think about MMA at that time? Was it in the back of your head?

GABLE STEVESON: MMA was in the back of my head since the Olympics. But I wanted to make sure that if I was going to go to MMA, that let me try things first before going all in on something that I need to go all in on. And I did my tryouts, I did my things, and now I want to go in all in on something that is finally here.

JOE ROGAN: And when your mom was scared of you doing wrestling, how did she feel about you doing MMA?

GABLE STEVESON: Oh, you know, she’s sh*tting off. Oh, my God. She can’t even watch. She didn’t even watch me wrestle. And so now I’m like, “Mom, I got a dude about to punch me in the face. Maybe if he can get to me. Are you sure you want to come and watch?” And she’s like, “Yeah, I’ll come watch.”

And she comes, has a good time and has her drinks, and when I step out, I’m like, “Where were you?” “Oh, I was in the back.” So you didn’t even see me fight? Why you even come then? So out of the three fights I’ve had, she’s sat in the back and she’ll be like, John will go and get her and be like, “Gable’s done.” And she’ll be like, “Oh, what happened?” And John will be like, “Good, it’s all day.”

JOE ROGAN: So did she get nervous? Is that what it is?

GABLE STEVESON: Oh, my God. She’s sweating. She’s nervous. But I kind of give her that look of like, if this is one of them ones, I’m going to tell you, but I haven’t gave her those looks yet, so no.

WWE Experience

JOE ROGAN: So when you make this—so you decide football’s not going to happen, WWE is not going to happen. You did like one televised match with WWE?

GABLE STEVESON: I did, yes.

JOE ROGAN: Right, yeah. What was that like?

GABLE STEVESON: Honestly, I had a great—from me being real and honest, I had a great experience. I have nothing wrong with anybody there. TKO was great. Triple H, Paul Levesque was great. Stephanie, Vince, everybody was great. I just had a competitive drive that I needed to get out. And so, you know, when you have that gap is there, you can’t do both.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

GABLE STEVESON: And I was trying to bridge both. And I wasn’t giving my 100% to the business. And if I’m not going to give 100% to the business, then you might as well X me out because it’s already over with. So that’s practically how it happened.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, no slight on pro wrestling, but it’s just like, if you really want to compete—

GABLE STEVESON: You got to get it all out.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

GABLE STEVESON: And so I would love to go back in the future. I would love to do a sport and go out there and dominate, and then—

JOE ROGAN: Hey, maybe after the UFC Heavyweight Championship, for sure.

GABLE STEVESON: Maybe after a couple times. And so I would love to go, and if it meant well, and I would do it again, most definitely, because I have no hard feelings to them, and that’s how it goes.

Making the MMA Transition

JOE ROGAN: So when you make the decision that you’re going to go into MMA, what is that like? What are the steps that you take?

GABLE STEVESON: I got done with NCAAs, and I said, I flew down to Miami. I met with John and a couple other people, and I said, “Hey, I want to fight.” You know, Jon had me in his camp.

JOE ROGAN: So we’re talking about Jon Jones. And did you know Jon before this?

GABLE STEVESON: I knew Jon because I knew John from Instagram. John likes wrestling, so I knew John from IG. He sent me a DM. He sent me his number. And if you know John, he don’t answer the phone worth anything, and it’s crazy, but he sent me his number. He said, “Call me.”

So I called him. And this was before he got hurt for the first Stipe fight. He was like, “I want you to come practice with us. You know, I want a wrestling partner.” I left him and played football. The next year comes—no, I’m sorry. I don’t even know where I was at at the time, but skip, we go, and he’s like, “I want you to come back for the second camp.” He’s going through it. Me and John hit it off like that.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

GABLE STEVESON: We hit it off.

JOE ROGAN: So when you guys started training together in camp, is that when it really sunk in your head when you’re like, “This is what I want to do”?

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah, he really—I needed somebody to kind of engrave it in me. With the wrestling, I had my father, I had the University of Minnesota. I had a lot of good people around me, kind of say, “Hey, this is how we’re going to do it. This is where you need to go, and this is how it’s going to happen.”

And when I saw Jon, I saw that drive of like, “D*mn, you know, this guy’s winning. And people get close, but they can’t get past him. And why is that?” So I really sat back and watched his mental. And how he went about a lot of things. How he talked to people, how he greeted people, how he walked, how he punched, maybe how he looked when he was in the pocket, when he needed to get out, when he rested his hands.

And I saw everything and I was like, “Wow. Man, this guy’s a superstar, super superstar.” And we all know that, and people know that for a long time now, but I really saw him and I was like, “D*mn, I want to be that.” And that’s what flipped my switch right there.

JOE ROGAN: What an amazing opportunity. You know, you haven’t done any MMA and you get to go in there and train with the goat.

Training with the GOAT: Jon Jones

GABLE STEVESON: It’s crazy, man. You know, it’s hard to explain. I tell people, people ask me all the time, what was it like seeing Jon for the first time? Because I’m 25, so when Jon was super peak, I was 12, 13 years old. And I’m looking at this guy beat Gustafsson and Reyes and Thiago Santos and stuff like that.

So it’s different. You see a different side of people. And when I saw Jon, I was like, wow. I’ve seen you for my whole life and I get to see you in person. How cool is that?

JOE ROGAN: And for people that don’t even know the close fights that Jon had, they were really only close because Jon wasn’t training. That’s really all it is, 100%. Jon was partying and he was what I would call playing with his food. He didn’t like to, the Gustafsson fight is a perfect example. Didn’t train at all for the Gustafsson fight.

I mean, I talked to Greg Jackson and he was like, I swear to God, he barely showed up. I’m like, that is so crazy. And then he gutted it out in the last rounds. That’s what’s crazy. It’s a close decision. But he wins the fight by gutting it out in the final rounds when he’s done relatively no strength and conditioning.

GABLE STEVESON: Nothing so crazy, fantastic to see.

JOE ROGAN: Then really gets motivated for the second fight with Gustafsson, blows him out, smokes him, blows him out, which is what you expect when Jon is in prime form. He’s the greatest of all time, most definitely. For you to be able to be a young guy who’s thinking about MMA and train with the greatest of all time now two division world champion, it’s crazy.

GABLE STEVESON: Amazing opportunity. And it’s amazing because you don’t see the guy that’s. You see the best of the best right away.

JOE ROGAN: We’re back. So anyway, where were we?

GABLE STEVESON: Jon Jones.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So you’re saying you, so you were talking about what it’s like to first start training with them. So you had no MMA training really before that at all. You had just been doing a little bit of striking with this guy.

GABLE STEVESON: Joe, I kid you not, I didn’t even know really how to defend punches.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

GABLE STEVESON: I didn’t know how to defend punches. And you probably saw a video of him throwing the knee at me because I’m so hard headed. I’m like, let me shoot on Jon. But whole time I forgot he’s a national championship wrestler, right?

So I didn’t even know how to defend a punch, I didn’t know how to defend a kick, I didn’t know how to do anything. But I went in there and I said, hey, if you need somebody, it’s got to be me. And that’s how hungry I was. And I feel like that’s how kids should be nowadays about getting that opportunity. Man, just be hungry because someone’s going to respect you.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, for sure. But I mean, not a whole lot of people get that opportunity. That’s a crazy opportunity. It’s also like Jon is an elite wrestler as well. And so learning how to incorporate elite wrestling into all the other aspects of MMA and to be able to go right into camp with Jon is just, this is amazing, incredible opportunity.

GABLE STEVESON: Super incredible. I’m grateful for it every day. And especially he’s still here in my corner to this day. We talked this morning. He’s still giving me all the pointers, all the advice, even when we’re not even fighting, just telling me how I should say things, what I should say, how I need to go about life, how I need to go about business and meeting people and greeting people. So it’s a true opportunity.

JOE ROGAN: That’s awesome. That’s really awesome. So when you’re in camp with him, you’re going through the camp. Were you planning on MMA then? Or how does it work? What were you thinking the moment you started training with him? Is that when it really started, the fire in you?

GABLE STEVESON: Yes, I had a little bit of burn for it, but in the…

JOE ROGAN: Back of your mind.

GABLE STEVESON: Yes, but a little burn. You got to have the heart. You got to have the heart. So what kind of, what was the stamp on? It was, I went to Madison Square Garden with him, and Jon was just doing Jon things, just being a superstar. Everybody knew who he was.

And I was like, man, you know, I got Olympic gold medal, maybe I should be getting some too. Jon showed me the way a little bit, so I’m trying to have him show me the way. He’s bringing me to every place, meeting every person, showing me the opportunities that he has. And he looks at me, and he was like, “You can have this, too.”

And that was kind of the cherry on the top, but we can put another cherry on the top and do a double one when he won the fight. And then I’m holding the belt with him, and I got to see this guy face to face. And he’s just the most popular man on earth for that day. And it’s kind of like, wow.

You don’t really get to see the backstage moments. You get to see the guy go out there on TV and fight, but I got to see the backstage of everyone taking the pictures with him, the superstars. I’m walking out the Knicks game, and I see Queen Latifah, and I’m like, damn, that’s Queen Latifah. And I’m taking a selfie with Queen Latifah. I’m like, yo, can I send this to my mom? And she’s like, yeah, go ahead.

And I see Fat Joe talking to him and everybody. And I’m like, wow. This is what it is to be a real fighting star. And fighting is one on one, and people want to watch someone fight. But I think in other sports, like we talked about earlier, there’s a full team with helmets on, with jerseys on. But in fighting, people want to meet that badass dude and they want to meet the champ. And that’s what I want to be.

The Fight IQ Advantage

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So what is training with Jon like? What is the training camp like? When, you know, you obviously haven’t gone into training camp with any other elite fighters. But one of the more interesting that separates Jon from everybody else is Jon doesn’t take no short notice fights. Jon game plans for everybody. He studies them.

His fight IQ, I mean, obviously he has everything. He obviously has all the skills, obviously has all the drive and everything else, but the fight IQ is the big one. That’s the big one. Because if you don’t have a good driver, who gives a f* how fast your car is?

GABLE STEVESON: True.

JOE ROGAN: It’s really the mind behind it that puts it all together.

GABLE STEVESON: He’s sitting in a Ferrari with Ferrari gas. A lot of people sit in a Ferrari with 87 gas, and the car don’t work. So when I got to see those tendencies of him watching people, and he does it to me now, where he’ll send me videos on Instagram of the top UFC guys.

Big, oh, watch how he steps. Watch when he throws a punch, how he comes back and he doesn’t reset this certain way. And he’s kind of already installing those tendencies in me. And so now when I was wrestling, I never used to watch people wrestle. I went out there on a limb and I was just beating guys. Even in Olympics, I never watched anyone wrestle. I never watched their film.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

GABLE STEVESON: Never. I told coaches, don’t show me one video because I don’t want to focus on that one thing he did. And that was me being hard headed. If a guy had a great double leg, and I’m like, damn, how do I stop this double leg? And I’m worried about stopping a double leg instead of doing my offense.

And so I never watched anybody. I went to the Olympics and I said, show me the guys I’m wrestling. And I said, let’s do it. The only guys right there banging their…

JOE ROGAN: Head against the wall listening to this. Damn. He did that to me. That’s crazy.

GABLE STEVESON: I said, let’s do it. I said, it’s me or you as do or die. And this tournament, I’m not dying. You can’t beat me in any way possible. And that’s when I was at my best, when I had that mindset. And he’s kind of putting that back into me, and I feel really good about it.

The Future of Heavyweight

JOE ROGAN: That’s amazing. It’s amazing. So when he’s sending you videos, do you have a, do you save all this s? Do you have a folder? We have all these different fighters and different moves because you’re basically brand new at something. But let me just tell you what I said. You had a fight, an MMA fight, where you hit that dude with a left hook and then took him down while he was out cold. I sent Dana White a text message. I said, “Everyone’s fed.”

GABLE STEVESON: I did. Well, I appreciate it.

JOE ROGAN: Thank you. Because I was like, that kind of speed is crazy. That kind of speed and incorporated with elite wrestling is crazy. I’m like, what do you, the heavyweight division is so shallow right now. You got Tom Aspinall, Ciryl Gane, Jon Jones, if he chooses to fight again, Francis, if some, by some miracle they can work something out and bring him back to the UFC.

Other than that, there’s no one compelling for a championship caliber fighter. It’s, there’s basically four or five guys on earth that are in this championship caliber class, and you’re already there, which is nuts. And you haven’t even fought in the UFC yet.

When I watched you move and I watched you fight, I was like, okay, how do you stop that? Who’s got the skills to be able to stop that? And in my mind, there’s only a few guys where it’s going to be a problem. There’s the Francis Ngannou, the Ciryl Ganes and the Tom Aspinalls. That’s it.

There’s a few guys and everybody else on the way up. The only problem is going to be you getting fights. That kind of speed is just bananas for a 250 pound man. And when you have that and you’re 25 years old, it’s a very rare thing that you see in MMA.

And it’s kind of crazy because the heavyweight division is of course, the most prestigious division in the world. The heavyweight champion of the UFC is the baddest motherf*er on the planet. And right now it’s kind of a toss up because Ciryl Gane had this fight with Aspinall. Jon is kind of semi retired. Whatever he decides to do, it’s kind of up in the air. He’ll probably have one more fight, right?

GABLE STEVESON: I want him to. I think he’s got the juice in him.

JOE ROGAN: The White House.

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah, he would love the White House. He’s told me many times he wants to be main event on the White House, and he wants me to be a couple slots behind him and kind of have us both win. And that’s his last leg right there. I would love for him to do one more if he really wanted to. In his heart he should. But if he doesn’t, Jon’s not going to do it.

JOE ROGAN: They should do Alex Pereira and him at the White House.

GABLE STEVESON: I told people, I said Alex Pereira would be a great matchup for Tom.

JOE ROGAN: A heavyweight version of the BMF belt, you know what I’m saying?

GABLE STEVESON: It’ll be perfect. There’s nothing else to it besides two guys going out there. It’s Alex Pereira, the baddest light heavyweight, and it’s Jon Jones, baddest heavyweight right now. And regardless if someone else has the belt, Jon Jones is still the badass heavyweight out there.

JOE ROGAN: The belt doesn’t mean jack shit when it’s Jon Jones.

GABLE STEVESON: It doesn’t.

JOE ROGAN: You know, there’s so many fighters could do that. They could just step away from the belts, abandon the belts and then come back. And it’s really just about the fighter. Everybody knows who Jon is, everybody knows what Jon does. It’s like, people will pay to. You don’t need a belt. That belt doesn’t mean anything.

Jon Jones’ Unstoppable Training Camp

GABLE STEVESON: Yo, this is a crazy story. I had a French bulldog that passed away. So I like to go out there and I adopt French bulldogs, and I kind of give them a better home and I either ship them to a new home or I keep them. And so at the time, I had a baby French bulldog. He passed away. And I told Jon, I was like, “Yo, my dog died, I got to go home.” He let me go home.

I came back and I came back on a Tuesday. I didn’t see Jon till Thursday. And mind you, this is a week before he’s going to go out there for Stipe. He’s sick, like super sick. And I watched this guy do five rounds on a Thursday and they shark baited him, five new people and he’s dead tired.

And this is when I knew he was unstoppable. He went out there, nobody could touch him. And I’m telling you, high class PFL fighters, ex UFC fighters, ex Glory kickboxers were going in there after him, and he was just mopping them. And I was like, “Damn, this dude is beyond next level.”

And that was like, you know, you got to see greatness, and I see it at the fight, but you also got to see it when, how does this guy be great before the fight? And I saw that and I was like, “God damn.” I said, “Excuse me, Jon, you think I can go in there with you?”

JOE ROGAN: And he was like, no.

GABLE STEVESON: And I was like, “Why do you think so?” He was like, “You don’t know how to defend.” And it was kind of a funny joke because a partner got hurt. And I was like, I raised my hand, I told Greg Jackson, I said, “Greg, let me in there.” And Greg was like, “Not today, Gable.”

And this is when I didn’t know how to defend or anything. He was like, “Gabe, not today.” And I was like, “Man, why? You know, I can go in there and take him down.” And he was like, “This is different.”

And when I saw that, that was like the epitome of like super greatness in my eyes. Because I like hard workers. I like guys that beat on guys. I don’t like guys that go out there and do the little extras that they to look cool. I mean, just go out there and dominate and let’s go home. And I saw that and I was like, “Yeah, it’s over with for Stipe. It’s going to be a long night.”

JOE ROGAN: Well, unfortunately, they met when Stipe had already had a lot of miles on the clock.

GABLE STEVESON: A lot, a lot of miles.

The Perfect Spinning Back Kick

JOE ROGAN: And Jon was still elite. It’s crazy that Jon essentially developed a spinning back kick, a real spinning back kick, when he’s 36 years old.

GABLE STEVESON: Crazy.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so nuts because, I mean, he tried it earlier in his career, but it was like he would spin instead of go straight, you know what I mean? But when he hit Stipe, it was perfect. It was perfect. That picture, we showed a video of it and then freeze, froze the heel, it was halfway into his rib cage. It was crazy.

GABLE STEVESON: I wouldn’t have got up either.

JOE ROGAN: Well, very few people would. Very few human beings can take that kick. It’s so powerful. And when it comes from a big guy like Jon with those long ass legs and all that leverage with perfect technique, and it goes right into the sweet spot like that, like, good luck.

But it’s such brilliant thinking on his side, because he’s like, “Okay, I have to fight heavyweights, and I need something that can take them out with one shot. Like, what is that?” Well, it’s the most powerful kick, which is the spinning back kick. And so he trains it constantly.

GABLE STEVESON: Constantly.

JOE ROGAN: You know, which is just, very few people have the mindset to be able to do. Very few guys develop new skills late in life, you know, late in their career, they start incorporating new skills like that.

GABLE STEVESON: I think that’s a thing where he was, he’s always all ears, too, and that’s kind of what he’s putting into me also. I watched him do a spinning back kick the night before at midnight when we were practicing in the hotel lobby.

JOE ROGAN: So he was just planning on that?

GABLE STEVESON: He was planning on it, the showstopper. He told me he wanted to take Stipe down, and then all of a sudden, he does a spinning back kick. And I was like, “You sly motherf*er.”

JOE ROGAN: Did he bring in a Taekwondo coach? How did he develop that technique so far?

GABLE STEVESON: He’s got a, there’s a kickboxing taekwondo coach named Alex. He’s got a long, he’s got a long last name because I think he married a Thai lady. So I think he changed his last name. But he’s from New Mexico. He works out of Jackson. He’s got a lot of tattoos on him, and nobody, if you saw him, you would never know, but the dude can kick hard as shit, and it’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: And so he worked with Jon on that?

GABLE STEVESON: Yes. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: The only other guy that I would say developed a crazy new technique late in his career was Vitor. When Vitor was like 35 or 36, he developed a wheel kick. It was crazy. Out of nowhere, when he fought Luke Rockhold, all of a sudden he’s throwing wheel kicks. Like, Vitor never threw wheel kicks.

GABLE STEVESON: That’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Crazy. Vitor never threw wheel kicks.

Watching Fighters Evolve

GABLE STEVESON: Crazy. But I think it’s honestly got to be cool from, because you sit right next to the cage, so it’s got to be cool to see people grow up through their career. And then all of a sudden, at the end, you see a guy does a spinning wheel kick or a guy does a spinning back kick, and you’re like, “Damn, where’d that come from?”

And I feel like, does it give you a high to kind of see a person grow through a new stage of seeing a new move from them?

JOE ROGAN: I just love excellence. That’s what I love. I love when someone shines, when they just figure a way to eclipse everyone else. When they figure a way to, when they just, like the Petr Yan Merab Dvalishvili fight.

When you see a guy like Petr Yan who loses the first fight to Merab and comes back and dominates in the second fight, I love that shit. I love it. I love watching someone put in an insane amount of work and dedication and then shining on fight night. I love it.

GABLE STEVESON: It’s cool too, because you see, Petr Yan is the new blueprint for guys that are coaching kids to do moves. I mean, he went out there and threw a fake hook and liver kicked Merab. And then he goes out there and he hits a sotagari and trips guys.

I mean, what other film tape blueprint can you use from someone else? I mean, he’s done everything in all of his fights. His flow state is amazing.

Petr Yan’s Mastery

JOE ROGAN: His flow state’s incredible. And he’s so good at mixing up trips along with inside fighting. His stand up is so good. He’s so hard to hit clean too. I think the only guy who really hit him clean was Sugar Sean. Sean hit him with a knee, like a really good knee, timed it perfectly in their fight and dropped him.

But other than that, he very rarely gets hit. And when you do hit him, you’re hitting him and he’s kind of rolling with it, you know, he keeps that super high guard. He does, huh? Yeah, he keeps his hands straight in front of you. He’s something special, man. And you know, that dude’s still only 32 years old.

GABLE STEVESON: He’s only 32.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I know, it’s crazy.

GABLE STEVESON: What do you think if he doesn’t…

JOE ROGAN: 32 or 34. How old is Petr Yan? He’s either 32 or 34, but, you know, we’ve seen him and I think he’s 32.

GABLE STEVESON: 32?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I mean, we’ve seen him in the UFC since he was like in his mid-20s.

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah. If he doesn’t lose to Merab that first time, where do you think his path goes?

JOE ROGAN: It’s a good question, you know, I mean, because he did lose to other guys as well. He lost to Sean and he lost to, the Aljamain fight was fed. The first fight was fed, but the second fight, Aljamain dominated him.

But I think he probably overestimated himself in the second Aljamain fight. It doesn’t seem like he was just prepared. And the thing about Aljamain is his wrestling is very good and his back control is the f*ing best in the business. When Aljamain gets your back, you’re in deep shit. He’s so good at back control. He’s so good at rear naked chokes.

And you know, Aljamain just really struggled to make that 135.

GABLE STEVESON: It’s got to be hard.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, but if he got it right and he got it right in that second fight, you know, and he just did what he does at his best. It was one of his finest performances. So he lost that fight, but it didn’t mean that he was done. It just mean he realized, “Okay, he had to have a camp like he had for Merab in order to beat Aljamain.”

You know, and I just don’t think everybody’s willing to go through that kind of camp every fight. Merab went through four.

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah, I think so.

JOE ROGAN: Four in a year.

Fighting Frequency and Sustainability

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah. For blueprint. How do you like that? Because I know guys kind of take the two fight a year approach. Maybe three.

JOE ROGAN: If you’re doing well, I think that’s more sustainable. Alex Pereira did the same thing. He’s fought a lot of fights and he’s fought fights short notice. You got to admire that mindset of a guy who’s like, “I don’t give a f*, let’s fight.” You know, and, but Alex has fought with broken toes.

GABLE STEVESON: He’s done everything.

JOE ROGAN: He fought with a norovirus and, you know, he had a f*ed up hand the first time he fought Ankalaev. But then, you know, same thing. He comes in for the second fight with Ankalaev fully healthy and just smokes him. Smokes him in the first round.

GABLE STEVESON: If you, what do you think about if you gave Alex Pereira like a solid great wrestler, like an Islam of light heavyweight, heavyweight. How do you think that he does?

JOE ROGAN: It’ll be a problem. Yeah, I mean, I think less of a problem certainly now than early in his career. Like, if you see his first fight in the UFC with Michailidis, he gets taken down the first round. That’s not going to happen now. And if it does, he gets up.

You know, it’s different, but it gets up against, who does he get up against? A guy like you, you know, it’s a different, there’s different levels. Right. You really saw that with Jack Della Maddalena and Islam. Right? There’s levels. And when you got a guy that’s at Islam’s level, that’s just a super elite grappler. Unless you face that before, you don’t know what to prepare yourself for.

GABLE STEVESON: I think people all the time, that’s…

JOE ROGAN: The thing with Petr Yan. He had been in there with Merab for the first fight, and so he knew what to expect. And he’d seen all those crazy fights. He saw the fight with Sandhagen, he saw the fight where the rematch with Sugar Sean, where he submitted him, he’s like, “Okay, this guy’s a f*ing monster. He’s a monster now. You got to prepare for a monster.” And he was ready.

But unless you’ve experienced that before, there’s really no one like that in the light heavyweight division, unfortunately, there’s not some super elite grappler in the light heavyweight division. And I think that’s one of the reasons why Khamzat is thinking about going up to light heavyweight.

GABLE STEVESON: And I think he should. I’m a big fan of Khamzat. I love his style. I love his intensity. His intensity is the best thing ever.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, he’s an animal.

GABLE STEVESON: It’s the best thing ever to watch. Because when I was wrestling, I like to go out there and just put the hammer down and dominate. And he’s got it. He’s got that touch.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, he’s an animal. And that animal part of him almost killed him because he refused to stop training when he had Covid. When he had Covid, he was just showing up at the gym and putting in two and a half hour sessions and vomiting blood. It’s nuts.

GABLE STEVESON: That’s crazy. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: They said the real problem with Hamzat was that you couldn’t get him out of the gym, and he was always over trained. So then he brings in Sam Kalavita. And Sam Kalavita, training lab, right?

GABLE STEVESON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: So he’s monitoring his heart rate, he’s monitoring his recovery, and he’s working on him with his strength and conditioning. And they’re doing it scientifically. And then you’ve seen the Dricus du Plessis fight. I mean, he just didn’t gas at all.

GABLE STEVESON: That was the same thing as Islam and Madeleina. Very similar. They tried to do the, maybe what if he can outbox him? But it’s hard when you got to worry about so many things.

And I think Islam did a great job of showing the leg kicks, making Jack switch. Jack didn’t really push forward. And Islam, when he did shot the double or he shot an outside single. And that’s hard. It’s hard when you got to think about so many things.

The Evolution of Elite MMA Striking

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, Khabib is without doubt one of the all time greats, one of the greatest to ever do it. But the difference between Khabib and Islam is Islam is elite, stand up wise. Khabib was a very good standup, but Islam knocked out Volkanovsky with a head kick. That’s not in Khabib’s repertoire.

Islam is on another level. It’s one more level above. He can knock you out standing, he can knock you out on the ground, he could submit you, he could take you down. He’s f*ing huge for the weight class, especially 155.

There’s so many aspects and you’re always thinking about that grappling when you’re striking. So when you say who’s better striker, Islam or Jack Della Maddalena? Well, it depends. Because if you got to worry about that takedown, your striking is not going to be the same. It’s just not going to be the same because everything he does, you’re always looking for that takedown. And that factor leads to guys getting hit all the time.

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: If you go back and watch old fights like Kevin Randleman versus Cro Cop. Kevin Randleman knocked out Cro Cop because Cro Cop was worried about the takedown. He was worried about the takedown. All of a sudden, randomly comes with a big left hook.

GABLE STEVESON: And Kevin Randleman was a NCAA champ. Where?

JOE ROGAN: Ohio State, I believe. Wasn’t Ohio State. I believe he was Ohio State.

GABLE STEVESON: 184 or 197. Was he heavyweight?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know. Three time Big Ten wrestling champ at Ohio State.

GABLE STEVESON: What? Whoever won the tournament? Heavyweight. Wow. Who do you lose to in the tournament? Oh, it says heavyweight. I’ll look that up real quick.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, but that was the thing about Randleman. The speed and the takedown was always this big threat. And so because of that, you’re thinking about one thing and boom, you get hit with a big shot.

The Old Days of MMA

GABLE STEVESON: I’ve seen Kevin Randleman wear shoes in his matches. What’s the early days? What’s the difference of wearing? I seen a guy wear shoes now. I was on Instagram, I saw maybe a kickboxing match or something like that. Why can’t they wear shoes now? Is there a rule that you can’t?

JOE ROGAN: It’s not now. All those things are old.

GABLE STEVESON: Those are old.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, those are all old. Pride used to allow you to wear shoes.

GABLE STEVESON: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: Early UFC used to be able to wear shoes.

GABLE STEVESON: I saw that. Yeah, I remember. The first UFC video I seen was that big Hughes dude and that little dude that knocked him out. Was he the big black dude? Which guy? It was an old video.

JOE ROGAN: Super old. That’s not descriptive enough.

GABLE STEVESON: Okay, give me a second.

JOE ROGAN: Big, huge dude.

GABLE STEVESON: Bobby sat maybe?

JOE ROGAN: No, that wasn’t you.

GABLE STEVESON: Who was the big video?

JOE ROGAN: And then the white dude came out.

GABLE STEVESON: There, and he was just whooping him, and the big dude tried to grab him. I might be tripping, but I saw the video.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I don’t think you’re tripping. I mean, there’s been so many fights. It’s so hard to figure out what fight you’re talking about. But there’s an advantage to wrestling shoes, for sure. Without a doubt. I mean, the grip on the ground. I mean, how many times you’ve seen guys? Yeah, it is one. Oh, Keith Hackney. Yeah.

And Keith Hackney had a very strange style. It was like, I think he was a Kempo guy. And he hit him with a bitch slap. Like, you ever see how he knocked him down? Look at the difference in the size. Emmanuel Yarborough, who is a sumo wrestler, but Emmanuel was probably like, look at that. See, he overhand bitch slapped him. This is crazy. He basically stepped in and palm striked him to the head.

GABLE STEVESON: You think he looks, if he’s still alive, you think he looks back at this video and be like, damn, I got slapped. Probably. Damn.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, Emmanuel fought a bunch of different things. He fought, I think he fought in Pride as well.

GABLE STEVESON: If I’m…

JOE ROGAN: Oh, oh, they forgot to lock the cage. He flew out the cage. Look at thin, big John McCarthy.

GABLE STEVESON: He lost. Mark Ryland. Mark Ryland of Iowa.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, there you go. That’s random, but we’re talking about, yes. Yeah. The old days were wild, man. It’s wild. It’s wild to go back and watch those fights.

Fear Factor Memories

GABLE STEVESON: It’s like, since you’ve been kind of a huge figure your whole life, have you gone back and watch Fear Factor?

JOE ROGAN: I watched it because my kids were watching it. My kids were watching Fear Factor because there was a whole Fear Factor channel. Was it True TV or one of those?

GABLE STEVESON: One of those things.

JOE ROGAN: They had Fear Factor on all day long, and my kids were watching it. They thought it was hilarious, man.

GABLE STEVESON: I was watching it, too. I’m just going to tell you right now. And all the sh*t they was doing. Hell, no.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. A lot of it is in your head. A lot of the stuff that they had to eat is not that bad. Some of it was f*ing disgusting.

GABLE STEVESON: Were you trying some while they were trying?

JOE ROGAN: I ate a bunch of things.

GABLE STEVESON: What was the worst thing?

JOE ROGAN: None of the things I ate were that bad. I ate a Madagascar hissing cockroach. It’s a cockroach the size of this lighter.

GABLE STEVESON: Damn. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

GABLE STEVESON: That wasn’t bad. It was just crunchy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. This doesn’t have much flavor to it.

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah. What was the…

JOE ROGAN: More in your head than anything, I’m sure.

GABLE STEVESON: What was being on that show. What was the worst thing you saw someone tense up about?

JOE ROGAN: The worst thing was what they had to eat. Watching people throw up. I watch people throw up every day. You know how the smell of throw up makes you want to throw up? That went away after a while.

GABLE STEVESON: It was that bad.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I saw people throw up every week. Every week I was watching four or five people throw up. This is totally normal to be around.

GABLE STEVESON: You look like a candle for you.

JOE ROGAN: Because they were throwing up in front of me, and I was telling them that they keep going. I’m like, don’t worry. You can keep going. You keep going. Don’t put that in your head. This is a task just you. You want to win? Okay, you can do this. I can help you. I can talk you through this.

But you just got to, just you. You are in control of your body. Force yourself to eat it, chew it, swallow it, get it down. Let’s go. But that was the worst, is the eating sht. Holding your breath underwater was hard. There’s a lot of things they had to do that was hard. It’s a crazy fing show.

GABLE STEVESON: There was one where they had to jump out a helicopter and swim and grab some while the helicopter propellers were blowing the water so they couldn’t.

JOE ROGAN: We did a few of the things like that. Yeah.

GABLE STEVESON: Were you ever scared?

The Bull Riding Episode

JOE ROGAN: For some of them, I was worried when they had a ride bulls. That one scared the sh*t out of me because the stuntmen are animals. If you ever meet stuntmen, they are some of the bravest, toughest dudes alive.

And the stunt guys had this attitude about the bull. They’re like, oh, that’s a stunt bull. That’s a practice bull. And I go, does a f*ing bull know he’s a practice bull? I bet he doesn’t. I bet he didn’t get that memo.

GABLE STEVESON: He don’t know that he’s just a…

JOE ROGAN: Bull. That’s a f*ing huge animal. And you’re going to get a hundred pound lady to ride this huge animal. That’s crazy.

GABLE STEVESON: It’s over with.

JOE ROGAN: And they got launched and almost got kicked and we, they rolled the dice a lot and got lucky that no one got seriously injured, I think. And the bull one was the big one for me. I was like, you can’t predict that.

You can if you got a car stunt. You got to jump a car off a building into this big cushion. Okay, cool. You kind of know what’s going to happen. You know, this is the thing. This could go wrong. And this is how we’re going to prepare against it going wrong or prepare for it.

But you can’t prepare for a bull. There’s not much you could do. If the bull decides to stomp this person, that person could die like that. That’s a real possibility. Especially people that have no business riding bulls. Yeah, bull running is hard for bull riders. Bull riding is tough.

GABLE STEVESON: It’s crazy. And they got a good seven seconds on that bull. If they’re great, if they’re great. If they’re great.

JOE ROGAN: And when you’re watching it, you’re like, oh, my God. You watch the bull kicking and jumping up in the air.

GABLE STEVESON: Crazy. I know. Their lower back kills after that.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, we had one guy on Fear Factor who was a professional bull rider and his shoulder was so destroyed, he took his shirt off to show me he had scars all around his shoulders. My shoulder pops out all the time. It just will pop out of socket. He’d go reach for something, his shoulder would pop out of socket. It was just destroyed. It was hanging on by a thread.

GABLE STEVESON: Jeez, that’s disgusting.

JOE ROGAN: Ugh.

GABLE STEVESON: How do you live like that, though?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know, man. I guess you just deal with it. I guess you just, that’s the price you pay for greatness.

GABLE STEVESON: Got to pay something.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, they all pay. Every bull rider pays. You see those guys later in their career, they’re all stiff because they got fused discs and fing messed up bolts in their back and sht.

GABLE STEVESON: They’re all f*ed up spines rubbing. Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a terrible, messed up, terrible way to live.

GABLE STEVESON: I can’t believe that bull riding is a real thing.

JOE ROGAN: I know, it’s nuts.

GABLE STEVESON: It’s fascinating though, because you could really see guys go out there and be like, you’re facing the devil.

JOE ROGAN: Literally.

GABLE STEVESON: The bull is going to win all the time.

JOE ROGAN: Every time. Even if you can do is hang on for seven seconds. There’s no goat who could just hang on the bull as long as possible. I’ll hang on that bull for 30 minutes.

GABLE STEVESON: He can get a bitch.

JOE ROGAN: He’s going to get you off. Everybody goes flying eventually. Everybody.

GABLE STEVESON: Everybody. It’s going to happen one way or another.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. There’s no human being that could just stay on a bucking bull.

GABLE STEVESON: No.

JOE ROGAN: And just like, when I decide, I’ll get off.

GABLE STEVESON: Have you rode?

JOE ROGAN: No.

GABLE STEVESON: Okay. I haven’t either.

JOE ROGAN: F* that.

GABLE STEVESON: I don’t think black people do that.

JOE ROGAN: I think there are. Is there a couple? Got to be.

GABLE STEVESON: Oh, look at that dude right there. Bam.

JOE ROGAN: Ezekiel Mitchell. Look at the size of that thing.

GABLE STEVESON: I mean, look at his angle.

JOE ROGAN: You know what I’m saying? He is so.

GABLE STEVESON: The bull is so athletic that he damn near doing a handspring.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

GABLE STEVESON: With the dude on his back.

JOE ROGAN: Right? And he weighs 2,000 pounds. He’s just throwing his body up and through the air. That is. F* all that.

GABLE STEVESON: Like, right there.

JOE ROGAN: Like, you easily get stomped to death right there.

GABLE STEVESON: It’s game over.

JOE ROGAN: You fall wrong, he lands on your face. And that is a wrap. Your f*ing head is pulverized.

GABLE STEVESON: I wonder what the size of that thing. Yeah. I wonder what the numbers are on, like, if a bull stomps, like, the velocity of and the mass of it, like, what is the generator force?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, it’s got to be insane. You guys have died.

GABLE STEVESON: None that I know. Hopefully.

JOE ROGAN: None that I know. But, I mean, there has to be, like, an enormous number of guys that have died bull riding.

Extreme Sports and Calculated Risks

GABLE STEVESON: What’s the, what’s like the, since, since, like, on a crazy topic, what is, what is like, the craziest thing outside of, like, me fighting taekwondo that you’ve done that you’re like, damn. Like, that shit felt good.

JOE ROGAN: I never did anything other than I had three kickboxing fights, but other than fighting, that was the scariest shit that I ever did. Yeah. I mean, I’ve never done it. I’m not like a, you know, parachute. No.

GABLE STEVESON: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: I’m not a bungee jumper. I mean, I’ve done bungee jumping on vacation. I did zip lining. I was like, what am I doing? This is stupid. I don’t like doing stuff like that. I don’t like dumb risks.

GABLE STEVESON: No. I’m big. So I went on a zip lining one time. You know you got to jump off the thing, right? You got to jump off the platform. I thought I was going to fight Joe. I’m kidding you not. That might have been my last day on earth if that, that line didn’t hold me.

JOE ROGAN: Right? Because what do you weigh, about 250, like 255.

GABLE STEVESON: And it bounces and you’re like, uh huh.

JOE ROGAN: I was in Thailand and I went to do this thing. It was a bungee core thing. And they said I couldn’t do it because I was only 200 pounds. And I was like, that’s crazy. Like, what happens if you get a guy that lies about his weight?

GABLE STEVESON: It’s over with.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, because people lie about their f*ing weight all the time.

GABLE STEVESON: I seen the ones where the guys, they got the squirrel suit on and they jump off the building or they jump off the rocks and they go down and they come up and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they don’t come up.

JOE ROGAN: My friend Andy did that jumping out of a f*ing plane.

GABLE STEVESON: He made it.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

GABLE STEVESON: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: He held the world record at one point in time for the longest squirrel suit flight. What are they called? What do they call those things? Wingsuit.

GABLE STEVESON: Wingsuit.

JOE ROGAN: He held the record for it. It’s ridiculous, but Andy’s nuts. He’s a Navy Seal.

GABLE STEVESON: 18 miles.

JOE ROGAN: 18 miles, one flight.

GABLE STEVESON: What do you think he’s thinking at like, mile nine? Maybe I drop.

JOE ROGAN: He’s a psycho. I don’t know.

GABLE STEVESON: 18 miles is crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s crazy.

GABLE STEVESON: I would never do nothing like that, ever.

JOE ROGAN: No, I’m not interested in parachuting. I’m not interested in any of that.

GABLE STEVESON: I might get on a wake boat and surf. That’s about all.

JOE ROGAN: You fall in the water. Not that big a deal. With a life jacket. Yeah.

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That sounds reasonable. It’s a reasonable thrill.

GABLE STEVESON: Falling up. Hey.

JOE ROGAN: Falling up.

GABLE STEVESON: The sky is crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Falling, the sky is crazy. But at least falling out the sky, you, you have equipment. You check the equipment. You make sure you double check you’ve done it before. It’s done. You know when to do it. With a bull, there’s no safeguards, you know, I mean, you have like some sort of a chest protector on some people. You have a helmet. You’re not. There’s no safeguards. He could land on your hip, you’re never going to walk again.

GABLE STEVESON: It’s over with. F* that. It’s game over. I couldn’t. I can’t fathom riding a bull. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Doesn’t Donald do it? Does Donald Cerrone? He rides bulls.

GABLE STEVESON: He’s got the name Cowboy. You better do something.

JOE ROGAN: He’s out of his f*ing mouth.

GABLE STEVESON: You got to do something with the name Cowboy.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a dude that has a real adrenaline problem.

GABLE STEVESON: He’s got a. I mean, rightfully so. He looks crazy.

JOE ROGAN: He’s got a real adrenaline problem. He told the story about getting trapped in a water. He was diving and he got trapped in a cave. And the guy he was with panicked because his cords got tangled up and the water was cloudy and he couldn’t figure out how to get out. That was one of the most. I knew he was okay because he was right here telling me the story. But it was one of the most terrifying stories anybody’s ever told me. But that dude loves that kind of shit. He loves, like, thrills.

GABLE STEVESON: I can’t. I don’t think I can get behind thrills. I can’t. No, it’s too much. And especially your heart be like, mm, Is today my day? And I can’t be my day.

First Fight Nerves and Mental Preparation

JOE ROGAN: Was fighting for the first time. Was that, what was the difference in, the difference in the way it felt the first time you fought versus wrestling?

GABLE STEVESON: My, when I, when I wrestle, I’m not really nervous. I’m more anxious to, like, perform and put on a good show. When I went out there for my first fight, my heart was beating on my chest because that pin drops and it’s like, it’s me or you. And I always had the mentality of, like, it’s me or you. It’s do or die. Today’s not my day. You got to go.

But that first time, you’re like, I kid you not. My heart was like jumping. And John had it, like looking me in the eyes like, oh, you’re good. Rely on what you know. We’ve been here before. You’ve done this before. There’s 2,000 people here you’ve wrestled in front of 20. Just think about it like that. And when I thought about it like that, my heart rate calmed down. You know, you kind of get, like, shaky a little bit. You kind of feel like your legs are not there.

And that was kind of my first time fighting after that at dirty boxing, I wanted to kill that dude, which.

JOE ROGAN: Is really crazy because you couldn’t even rely really on your wrestling in that.

GABLE STEVESON: Which is what I wanted. Right. I wanted to. I wanted to go out there and show you that, that I can throw punches without having to look down at that leg. And that’s exactly what we did.

JOE ROGAN: Was that a calculated decision to try to do that as well as just like, to just have a pure striking fight just, just so you could show that you could do it and then in your own mind, not have your, your main skill set to rely on?

GABLE STEVESON: Yes. I really wanted to handicap myself because I wanted to show the people to. And I, and I kind of, hopefully, I did show him a great show, and I was.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, you definitely did.

GABLE STEVESON: I want to show the people. I want to show the people at home that are a casual viewer that, who doesn’t know Gable, like, hey, can I turn on dirty boxing? And the mom and dad and kids are sitting there watching saying, hey, what is about Gable Steveson that’s special? And he’s a wrestler, so what can be special besides wrestling? And then I go out there and I get this knockout, and I jump over the ring, and I was, and I’m doing the Arthur Jones sack dance.

The Viral Knockout Celebration

JOE ROGAN: The crazy thing was the way you leapt over the ring like it was nothing. That was banana. What does it feel like to not have. Oh, there it is. Boom. But this is the, the nuttiest part right here.

GABLE STEVESON: The big jump.

JOE ROGAN: Like, it was nothing. That is, that is crazy athleticism. But it’s.

GABLE STEVESON: It’s.

JOE ROGAN: What’s wild about that is you look like a, like a really good boxer, and you have only been boxing for a very small amount of time. Just.

GABLE STEVESON: I just, I always had very good confidence in myself. I’ve always spoke about myself highly. I’ve always, like, wanted to be over the top, you know, like, like a WWE, you know, when he gets on the microphone to John Cena’s.

JOE ROGAN: Like, “you can’t see me.”

GABLE STEVESON: Or Roman Reigns, like, “acknowledge me,” you know, when I go out there, I don’t want to have to say those things I wanted to. When you see me, that’s him. And I’ve always tried to be, that’s the bigger than Gable person. But also, like, if we had, like, a routine convo, you can see, like, man, he’s real human, you know, you can talk to him. He does real things. We put on the, we put on shoes the same way. We put on pants the same way.

And I feel like a lot of superstars don’t really show people that side of them, and it’s up to them if they want to or they not. But I’ve always really liked showing the families and the kids that, like, man, look at Gable, you know, he’s a normal human being.

JOE ROGAN: But when you compete, it’s different. It’s special, it’s different. But it’s just crazy to be able to do that in a sport that you’re relatively new at.

GABLE STEVESON: I mean, just, man, just think big about yourself.

JOE ROGAN: I get it.

GABLE STEVESON: I tell every kid. I tell everybody.

JOE ROGAN: What’s crazy about that, honestly, is, like, I know you’re just going to get better at it. That’s what’s crazy. When you watch someone strike that well early in their striking career, like, your striking journey is so new that the sky’s the limit. As far as your potential, Joe, in.

The Worst Version of Himself

GABLE STEVESON: The nicest way possible, I really want to say this. That’s the worst I’ll ever be. The worst I’ll ever be, of course. And for whoever who’s going to watch this, that’s the worst I’ll ever be. Just think about it. 14 seconds.

And then now think about if you’re going to put some time into me, some effort into me, and I’m putting effort into myself, that dirty boxing is probably the weakest I’ll ever be in the sport of MMA.

JOE ROGAN: I believe you.

GABLE STEVESON: I believe you.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, it only makes sense if you’ve been training that short amount of time in striking. Now, when you train striking, are you training boxing? Are you doing Muay Thai? What kind of striking training are you doing? Are you incorporating it all together in MMA?

Training Regimen and Approach

GABLE STEVESON: I do it all. So a lot of days I go in. So I kind of have a really good schedule right now since I’m not going to go into a fight. So I do every day besides Sunday, some days are two a days, because I go to Lifetime and play basketball. I go to Lifetime and sit in the cold tub and sauna and stuff.

But when I strike, I go in there. One round’s maybe boxing. Next round is kicks, teeps, knees, everything, elbows. The next round is what the blueprint I have of what moves I need to really do to get in to kind of get to my shots or I’m going to fake, shoot and punch, and then I probably go 10 rounds, 12 rounds of that, five minutes each.

JOE ROGAN: So you always incorporate all the MMA skills together in a workout?

GABLE STEVESON: I try to.

JOE ROGAN: It’s interesting when I was talking to Ilya Topuria, when he’s particularly when he’s not training for a fight, he doesn’t do that. He is very rare in that. When he goes and he works on his boxing, he’ll just box, he just boxes. When he works on his jujitsu, he just does jujitsu. When he works on his wrestling, he just does wrestling.

Then he puts them all together with MMA training, but he spends an exorbitant amount of time on each individual skill by itself to really hone and tighten those things up, which is, it’s an interesting choice. And obviously for him, it’s worked out spectacularly.

But there’s no real, I guess if you want to be an elite soccer player, I’m sure there’s a program that they’ve kind of devised, like, this is the very best way to become a good soccer player. They have coaches and they game plan, they know what to do with MMA. There’s all these different approaches. Everyone. Alex Pereira’s approach is different than Merab’s approach, which will be different than your approach. Everybody’s got a different thing.

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah, it’s just like you said, it depends the person, and it also depends the team that you have. I’m just really big on, I’m still very new, so I’m really big on just trying to make sure I can absorb all the information possible.

And kind of when I go into these fights, these first few fights kind of showcase what I can. And sadly, they have ended early. Not sadly, but in a good way. You know what I’m saying? But just go out there and showcase who I am.

And when I go train, I don’t mind sitting in there all day. Sometimes me and John will practice for hours, just sitting there repeating, repeating. And then all of a sudden, we go on at 8 o’clock, it’s midnight.

But I like that, though, because it makes me feel good. It makes me feel like there’s someone invested in me that makes me feel like I’m here for a purpose. And it makes me feel like this is what I’m, there’s someone out of the country, there’s someone in Russia. When I’m sleep, he’s up, and I don’t want that he’s up working.

So when I can get all the time possible, I’m making sure I get all that time because I don’t want that dude to show up one day and he’s got a little inch on me and I just can’t, I can’t think about that happening.

The Heavyweight Division

JOE ROGAN: I always have that thought in my head in terms of UFC fighters. There’s such a shallow division. The heavyweight division is so shallow. I’m like, there is got to be some elite Russian wrestlers that are thinking about going the Fedor Emelianenko route.

They’re thinking about, I know Nemkov, who just won the PFL title. He’s a very high level guy. But there has to be some really high level wrestlers that are considering going into MMA right now.

GABLE STEVESON: Russian heavyweights are really not as good as people think in wrestling. Really. They got a guy named Abdur Shizat alive. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him.

JOE ROGAN: I have. DC told me about him.

GABLE STEVESON: Man, he is crazy. If he came to fighting, it’s over with. Not for heavyweights, for the other groups, because he’s got to go through me if he comes, if he comes heavyweight.

But Iranians, heavyweights are really good. I think that’s where the heavyweight field should start coming from is Iran. They got a lot of good, they got two good guys that are, one’s my age, I’m 25, and another one is, I think, 22. They battle for the Olympic spot every year, but the older one wins just by a little bit. The time is going to pass where that guy steps up and he’s going to take the spot. So I would watch out for him.

Wrestling Background in MMA

JOE ROGAN: You know what’s interesting with MMA is some guys have a background in wrestling and then they learn how to strike, and then they fall in love with striking, and then they hardly ever wrestle when they fight. You know, it’s kind of weird.

Josh Koscheck is a good example, who’s a very good amateur wrestler. And then when he fought in MMA, very rarely wrestled, it was mostly striking. He could knock guys out standing. And I think guys kind of fall in love with that.

And then there’s also the amount of effort. It’s so tiring to wrestle along with all the other things that sometimes guys just put that aside and they just decide to stand and bang with people.

GABLE STEVESON: I really love wrestling. I grew up wrestling, and if I had a chance, I would love to go to the 2028 Olympics and win a gold medal. That’s how much I still love wrestling, but right now, my path is MMA.

And I knew the first couple of times that I would get those knockouts. You look at your hands, and it’s like, Spider Man, you got superpowers. I got lightning in my hands. I would have never thought in my 25 years of life that I would go out there and I would left hook somebody and he would be out cold, and I would double leg and flip him. Who would have ever thought that would ever happen?

And so you’re right. You get obsessed with knocking people out. But I still think my base is wrestling. I just haven’t used the best base yet. And that’s just, I just want to show people that my best base doesn’t need to be used, because the second best one is just as good as the first.

JOE ROGAN: Well, and the second best one is getting better all the time. That’s the thing. And again, I keep going back to this, but if you can get that good at wrestling, you can get that good at anything. It’s just a matter of putting in the time and dedicating yourself to that thing.

But it’s the mindset that allows someone to become an Olympic gold medalist in wrestling. Boy, if that person, that’s a scary person. That person decides to focus on whatever the f it is. Fing pickleball. Who gives a shit? They’ll be elite at it. They just have to, you will put their mind on it.

The Mental Game

GABLE STEVESON: It’s 100% a mindset thing. It ain’t nothing else. You can have athletic ability. You can hard work all day. You can be so disciplined in the world, but if your mind doesn’t think it. That’s why I feel like that’s why I beat a lot of people before I even walked out. I knew it. I just, you just got to know. And some people ship mindset. Some people just don’t feel it. And you just got to feel it.

JOE ROGAN: You know, it’s like I was talking to a friend of mine. I don’t want to mention any names because then you’ll connect it to the fighter. But he said, “Man, he goes, I don’t want to f* with anybody anymore that needs a mental coach.” And I said, “Really? Why?” He goes, “It’s just like this. Just too much. He goes, I want to do, don’t need that shit.”

GABLE STEVESON: You don’t need it.

JOE ROGAN: It’s interesting because some guys do, and some guys, that mental coach takes them over the top, and then they find a way to win where, you know, maybe they’d have mental hiccups in the past.

But his mentality was I want a guy who has no problems. If I’m going to coach a guy, I don’t want a guy who’s a head case. I want a guy who goes in there and already has this, “I’m going to f*ing dominate.” And if I don’t, I’m going to learn why I didn’t dominate and I’m going to come back, I’m going to get him next time.

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah. And I feel like that’s the person I am. I just want to go in there and dominate. And I also think that a lot of people kind of rely too much on a lot of outside things to kind of make them feel good about themselves to go out there and perform instead of just, just putting that switch on and just saying, “Hey, we here.”

JOE ROGAN: Outside things like what? What do you mean?

GABLE STEVESON: Just, you know, mental coaches, you know, someone, you got to get someone else to be maybe a breath working coach, another coach, another coach. There’s so many labels for coaches out there that you don’t need.

And when I was wrestling at Minnesota, I had Brandon Eggam, Luke Becker, who’s the assistant and head coach, and Trevor Bramble. That’s all I had. I didn’t have nobody else because I didn’t want anybody to interfere with the connection that we had.

And I think when you get a great bond with somebody and then you bring in more people, the bonds get mixed up. People are paying attention to too many different things instead of practicing. Maybe I got to work on my mind. Instead of working on my mind, maybe I got to go do something else. Maybe I got to take care of something else.

JOE ROGAN: So sort of like when you were talking about not watching video on your opponents because you’re thinking about his double, how am I going to stop his double? Instead of thinking about what am I going to do?

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah, I would rather be productive for the team instead of productive for eight different people. And maybe three of them don’t care about you as much. You know, they’re there just to get a little something from you.

Training Locations and Philosophy

JOE ROGAN: Where are you training now?

GABLE STEVESON: Right now I’m still in Minneapolis. I’m having a baby girl this Sunday.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, congratulations.

GABLE STEVESON: This Sunday, my little girl’s coming out. I appreciate it. She’s going to pop out. My lady’s going to hopefully get induced that day. If it comes early, it comes early. So that’ll be really nice.

So I’m in Minneapolis right now, but when I do all the main training, New Mexico. Jackson Wink.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, so in Minneapolis, where are you training?

GABLE STEVESON: That guy? With that guy, Billy Simon, a priority.

JOE ROGAN: Same guy, really?

GABLE STEVESON: I’ve been with him forever.

JOE ROGAN: So you’re in this little tiny gym.

GABLE STEVESON: I’m in that little gym. Nobody sees us. We got partners that need to come in, but rather than that, I don’t want the big lights.

When I was growing up in Portage, Indiana, I had a wrestling mat in the garage and me and my two brothers would wrestle, and that’s where we got the most work in. My dad said, “Go in there and hand fight, and whoever comes out comes out.” And it was definitely not me at the time, but maybe right now it’s me.

But we would go in there and hand fighting, if you get, my dad’s philosophy was we had Iowa style wrestling, and Iowa style wrestling was brutal. If his face needs to be run into the wall, run his face into the wall. And that’s how we grew up. And if you don’t want your face ran into the wall, you better put his in first.

JOE ROGAN: And so when you train with this guy, are you training, are you training, I could get a call in a week to fight and I’m ready to do that, or are you training just like developing skills constantly?

Training Philosophy and Fight Preparation

GABLE STEVESON: I just religiously train to develop skills constantly. I try not to never stop. I don’t like stopping because I’m kind of a, this is crazy, I’m a thicker body, so if I sit for a little bit, I feel like I’m getting fat and I want to feel that way. So I just try to always keep myself in shape and try to keep the best look possible.

So if you need me on one week, which I don’t want to do any short notice, just how me and John do it. No short notice. Like, if you need me in a week, I look good, I’m ready, but we just take our time.

JOE ROGAN: So John coach you about that? Like, give you some thoughts about that? Because I think that’s a giant mistake that guys make. And like, the Alexander Volkanovsky fight is a good example. The Islam Makhachev fight, he took that fight on 11 days notice. He’s just been hanging around, drinking, partying, just being himself, just chilling. And then he also gets this opportunity for a rematch. First fight was razor thin decision. He lost. And he’s like, I can do better, but you can’t do better without a camp.

GABLE STEVESON: You got to have time to be yourself.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, you have to have time to peak. And one of the things I really always admired about John is like, even a fight like the Chael Sonnen fight, they offered him, Chael Sonnen on short notice, he was like, nope, nope. And they were like, what do you, we need you to do this? He’s like, nope. I’m a professional world champion. I prepare for my opponents and I don’t want to fight unless I’m prepared for my opponent, period.

GABLE STEVESON: It’s the smartest way.

JOE ROGAN: Look at him, he’s the GOAT. I mean, it’s just so many guys, they get, and I do appreciate that Alex does take those short notice fights and he wins some of those short notice fights, but how many times he’s fought injured? Like really injured. Like the first Yuri Prochazka fight, he had a fed up knee, man. And when he stopped Yuri, there’s a moment when he’s on top of Yuri and he’s beating on him and the referee stops it and he goes to step up and he rolls off of him. The reason he rolled off him, he couldn’t support himself on his knee. That’s how fed up his knee was. And he was in a world title fight.

GABLE STEVESON: It’s bad.

JOE ROGAN: Crazy.

GABLE STEVESON: Well, I feel like this is the only sport where they will let that happen. Just because football you sitting on, you sit on IR.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

GABLE STEVESON: We don’t have no IR. Right. It’s either you do it or you say no.

JOE ROGAN: Right. And if you say no, they get upset at you.

GABLE STEVESON: A lot of people get timid. Yeah. And I mean, once you get past that barrier of, I think right now, since I’m going to have this daughter, I think my tone and mindset has changed to kind of really be more of a father figure for her, but also for, like, if kids want to look at me and be like, wow, Gable’s normal also.

But I think just you got to say no to a lot of people. You got to be generous in a lot of ways, but you also got to be able to go out there and say, I don’t like this. I don’t feel this way about this. And this is why. And be cool on both sides. But some people get scared about that moment.

Strength and Conditioning Regimen

JOE ROGAN: Are you doing, what kind of strength and conditioning are you doing?

GABLE STEVESON: So I still lift with the college team, so everything they do with wrestling.

JOE ROGAN: College wrestling team, yes.

GABLE STEVESON: Everything they do at the University of Minnesota, I still do. I still got the same strength coach with them. Bike sprints, Aerodyne sprints, Watt Bike, versa, climbers, everything. We try to mix it in all rowers, everything, just to stay active. And if it’s not where we’re getting close to a fight, just maybe just take longer breaks in between just to keep the heart rate up. But I don’t like when my heart rate takes a break. I like to kind of keep it consistent so when I ramp up, it’s already ready to rock and roll.

JOE ROGAN: You already have a very high baseline. Yeah. And like, when you’re doing strength and conditioning, as far as, like, weightlifting and stuff like that, like, are you trying to put on weight at all?

GABLE STEVESON: No.

JOE ROGAN: You like 250?

GABLE STEVESON: I like to stay where I’m at. I do a lot of band work, a lot of explosive work, a lot of jumps, a lot of light weights with high reps, just to kind of keep the body moving and kind of keep the cutness and the strength there, but not also put too much.

JOE ROGAN: Where you’re stiff and you’re naturally a large guy anyway. It’s not like you have to put on a ton of weight. But, like, when you see a guy like Francis, who’s 265 natural, and he used to have to cut a little bit of weight to make 260, which is kind of crazy, isn’t it? Isn’t it crazy? But it’s also crazy that the UFC has a weight limit that you have to make at heavyweight. You have to cut weight to make heavyweight. How different you think it would be.

GABLE STEVESON: If they didn’t have 265 and it was just maybe 300?

JOE ROGAN: It should be no weight. It’s heavyweight.

GABLE STEVESON: It should be.

JOE ROGAN: What they really need is more weight classes, the UFC. There’s gaps that are just enormous. Like the gap between 85 and 205 is crazy. 20 pound weight gap in between categories is, that doesn’t make any sense to me. 10 pounds. 10 pounds is still a lot, but at least it’s reasonable.

GABLE STEVESON: How many weight classes boxing have? Like 30.

JOE ROGAN: A shitload. They have so many. Boxing has so many weight classes.

GABLE STEVESON: Boxing got like eight champions for each weight, too.

The Value of the UFC Championship

JOE ROGAN: That’s a problem. That’s a problem. MMA does as well, right. If you think about it, there’s the one champion, there’s the PFL champion. But the difference is really only the UFC champion in terms of the public perception. Like we talked about Nemkov, who’s an excellent fighter, nobody knows who the f* he is. Not in America. You go to a regular kid, some kid on the street, and you say, who is Vadim Nemkov? And they’re like, what?

GABLE STEVESON: But I bet you that kid knows IShowSpeed.

JOE ROGAN: I bet they do, right? I bet they do, right? They know IShowSpeed. They probably know who Alex Pereira is. They probably know who Islam Makhachev is. They know who the UFC guys are. The UFC, that title is worth so much. It’s the name. It is the Combat Sports Leader. And if you’re not in the UFC, I don’t care. I mean, look, you can go to the PFL and you can win that million dollar tournament and you can make money, and I’m all for that, and I’m very happy for those guys. They get to feed their family and they provide and they make a great living and they can retire with some money in the bank.

But the reality is, part of what you’re doing is you’re trying to be the best. And if you’re going to be the best, you kind of have to be in the UFC.

GABLE STEVESON: Agreed.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, that’s just what it is.

GABLE STEVESON: There’s so many great leagues, but like the most prestigious people. You can say PFL, you can say anything, and you can go to any place and make a s* ton of money, but once you get that stamp of he’s a UFC champ, you’re like, damn, man, that’s him.

JOE ROGAN: That’s it.

GABLE STEVESON: That’s him.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s it. They put that UFC belt on you and it’s on ESPN and everybody sees it. That’s it. The PFL is just another belt. It’s like, boxing has, so they have the IBF, the WBA, the WBO, the WBC. It’s like, it’s just like so many f*ing organizations, it just gets so crazy. It’s like, then they try to make.

GABLE STEVESON: Terence Crawford pay for his belt.

JOE ROGAN: Ridiculous.

GABLE STEVESON: How crazy is that?

JOE ROGAN: Terence Crawford’s like, f* you, I’m the champ.

GABLE STEVESON: I just wanted 300,000.

JOE ROGAN: Everybody saw it. Is that what they wanted from him, 300 grand?

GABLE STEVESON: Can we get a look on this? Because I might be tripping, but I think they stripped him with like.

JOE ROGAN: Percentage of purse, and I think it was like 3% of his, whatever he made. So it was.

GABLE STEVESON: That’s so nuts. That is so nuts. That is so nuts that they get paid that much. Just be a sanctioning body and what are they doing? They’re not doing anything. Like, it doesn’t mean anything.

GABLE STEVESON: Well, they just get the best looking guy to maybe throw a belt on you.

JOE ROGAN: That’s about all.

GABLE STEVESON: They don’t really get nothing else.

JOE ROGAN: You get nothing, you get a belt. But the, everybody knows he beat, beat the brakes off Canelo Alvarez. That’s it.

GABLE STEVESON: Man.

JOE ROGAN: I love Canelo.

GABLE STEVESON: He’s the champion.

JOE ROGAN: I love Canelo as well, but, I love what Terence did, because what Terence did was crazy. He goes all the way up from 47 to 68. He had one fight at 54, wins the title at 54, and then goes all the way up to 68. And everybody’s like, Canelo’s going to be too big. Canelo’s going to be too big.

GABLE STEVESON: No way.

JOE ROGAN: No skill. His next skill is king.

GABLE STEVESON: Yep. And, but I think 38. He’s 38. He could do a couple more if you wanted to. I don’t think he does, but he don’t want to.

JOE ROGAN: I think he’s done, and I love it.

GABLE STEVESON: I love that.

JOE ROGAN: He’s done 300,000 dethroned over $300,000 fee.

GABLE STEVESON: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

GABLE STEVESON: Do you think that’s right?

JOE ROGAN: No. No. Unpaid fees and brief reign is undisputed chairman. It doesn’t matter. He’s the fing champion. You can’t take the guy’s belt because he’s not willing to give you money. F you.

GABLE STEVESON: He won.

JOE ROGAN: He won. F off. F off. He won.

The Future of Boxing and Zuffa

GABLE STEVESON: Well, now I see that. Is there going to be a new boxing promotion? Zephyr.

JOE ROGAN: Zuffa.

GABLE STEVESON: Sorry.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So the UFC is doing something with the Saudis, and they are, I think they’re launching their first event in January. I think they’re launching their first event the night before the big UFC on Paramount event.

GABLE STEVESON: So it’ll be the 23rd?

JOE ROGAN: Yes. I don’t think they’ve announced anything in terms of the card, who’s going to be on it. I mean, that’s not a lot of time. That’s only not even a month from now. So I don’t even understand how they’re doing that. But they’re probably going to do the same thing that Riyadh season’s doing.

GABLE STEVESON: Which is really smart. Riyadh season is great. I mean, it’s putting guys into that next level category of, hey, you are.

JOE ROGAN: A star, and Turki Al Sheikh is throwing crazy money.

GABLE STEVESON: Rightfully deserve for a lot of these guys.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, they deserve it. Oh, they definitely do. But it’s, if you do that, you’re going to get people to fight that would avoid each other ordinarily, and we’ve seen that already. The Saudis have already been able to do that, get guys to fight. And you’re going to put on the most exciting fights, you’re going to put on the best matchups.

And so I think the UFC is trying to do that same kind of model. And now that the Saudis own Ring magazine, so they have the Ring Magazine belt, which has always been the most prestigious belt. Like, there’s always a bunch of different champions in different weight classes. But if you’re a fan of Ring magazine, like I am, when you would get Ring magazine and they would have the ring champion, at Marvin Hagler, like, well, that’s the f*ing champion.

GABLE STEVESON: That’s him.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s it. There might be a WBO guy out there, a WBA guy out there, but the reality is that’s the guy. That’s the guy. And boxing needs like a unified champion thing like that. So, like, when you see Terrence in there with five belts, like, it’s great that he’s got all those belts, but why? It should be one belt. Like, this is the super middleweight champion of the fing planet, period. F all your sanctioning bodies. That’s the guy. That’s it. One belt is all he needs.

GABLE STEVESON: And they all different colors, too.

JOE ROGAN: They’re all cool looking. They’re all cool looking. He’s got them all. I mean, you go over his living room, it’s probably dope.

GABLE STEVESON: The Instagram picture look cool?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it looks great. It looked great when he was in the ring and he’s got them on his shoulders and one on his waist. And I wonder if they fight over who gets to be on the waist, you know, like, I’ll give you an extra 100 grand if you put it on your waist, you know.

But the reality is, it’s like the belt doesn’t mean anything. The fighter means something. And when we all know who the champ is, we all know it’s Terrence. If this other guy gets the belt, like, okay, you didn’t beat Terrence Crawford, so you’re not really the 168 pound champion.

GABLE STEVESON: But isn’t that hard, do you think, for a boxer like that? Is that a hard shadow to live in? Or do you think it’s a shadow? Or is that labeled as a shadow? You know, because Terrence leaves and then you step up.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s different. When Terrence leaves, if he gives up all the belts and he really does decide to totally leave, which I’m not totally convinced because I think they wanted him to have a rematch with Canelo and I think he threw a big number at them. This is all, I’m reading rumors online. I don’t know what’s, see if you find out what if that’s true. Did they offer, did Terrence Crawford demand, like a certain amount for a Canelo Alvarez rematch? Because he’s coming in soon. I’ll ask him in person, but I feel like you could probably entice him for one more big fight.

GABLE STEVESON: Probably could.

JOE ROGAN: You know, one more big fight at 168 or maybe even at 154. I mean, really, he could fight at 147. I mean, when do you…

GABLE STEVESON: When do you think there comes a point where people need to just stop and like, you know, there’s always going to be money thrown at you, but when you come up, when do you think there’s a point that, like, it’s…

JOE ROGAN: Different money person, you know?

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So here it is right here. So Bernie Davis revealed that Terrence Crawford’s price for a Canelo rematch, and it’s massive. According to Davis, Crawford won’t return to the ring with Canelo Alvarez unless he’s paid $100 million. And he deserves it.

GABLE STEVESON: Rightfully so.

JOE ROGAN: Crawford earned $50 million for the first fight in September. But after a tactical, low action bout that disappointed many fans. F off. Who the f did that disappoint? You got to be a casual if that disappointed you. Tactical, low action bout.

GABLE STEVESON: Bleh.

JOE ROGAN: Who wrote this? I don’t know. F* off.

GABLE STEVESON: I think I could write a better one than this.

JOE ROGAN: I think boxing has some very disrespectful journalists. I see some disrespectful stuff they write about boxers. Go back to that little thing, what it said there. So, anyway, pressure now with Turki Al Sheikh to decide whether the rematch is worth that kind of money. Fans already calling for other opponents. Benavidez, Beterbiev, Bivol, fighters they believe bring real action. Oh, so this is kind of disrespectful.

GABLE STEVESON: It’s kind of messed up.

JOE ROGAN: Real action.

GABLE STEVESON: Why is she dissing? Why are they dissing them like this?

JOE ROGAN: They do that a lot. There’s a lot of talking in boxing, which I guess, fine. I like that there’s not that much in MMA. MMA is much more respectful.

GABLE STEVESON: Really. Standard and respectful.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And that guy deserves everything. He’s one of the greatest to ever do it and one of the best switch hitters in the history of the sport. Are you putting him above Floyd? It’s hard. It’s, you know, it’s hard. You know, they never fought each other, which I think would have been amazing. If they’re both in their prime at the same time, that would have been fantastic to watch.

Floyd Mayweather vs. Mike Tyson

GABLE STEVESON: Ain’t Floyd supposed to fight Mike? Am I tripping? Yes, I think I’m tripping. But I mean, I feel like that’s going to be like Floyd versus, or, excuse me, like Mike versus Roy or like Mike versus Logan. It kind of looks more like sparring a little more like sparring really than a fight fight. How is Floyd going to fight Mike Tyson?

JOE ROGAN: Have you ever spoke to Mike Tyson?

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah, I’ve had him on a couple times.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. He’s my favorite.

GABLE STEVESON: He’s my favorite bro.

JOE ROGAN: He’s, when he was in his prime, there was nobody like him. There was nobody like him because he had that speed. That speed. And that’s something that you have. The speed of a head of a lighter person in the frame of a heavyweight is an extraordinary gift. Because so many of these heavyweights, man, they got big power, but like Francis big power, but they don’t move like a lightweight guy. They don’t move like 170 pound guy.

When Mike was in his prime, he was so fast, you could see guys trying to calculate and calibrate because it was different. They were used to fighting heavyweights. And all sudden you got this guy bobbing and weaving and moving towards you and like, ah, it’s crazy. Your brain is being overloaded with all the possibilities. It was just, it was a totally different thing.

GABLE STEVESON: He’s by far my favorite.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. In his prime, he’s the most extraordinary heavyweight that ever existed because, and it was, every show was an execution. It wasn’t like, you know, oh my God, is Mike going to lose this one? No. In his prime it was just all executions.

GABLE STEVESON: And I think the best thing about that, like being popular back in the day, like, he was such a big time fighter. I was watching a lot of videos, like Will Smith and Magic Johnson were showing up and Jordan and stuff. How crazy it is nowadays that we have social media that you don’t have to go and watch someone live. But back then, like when you see the videos of Michael Jackson and this hotel and you look out and it’s like, wow. It’s Michael Jackson. That wow factor is like super cool. And he had that.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

GABLE STEVESON: To the highest degree.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Everybody dressed up in the best clothes. They all showed up. Chains on, watches on, everything, everybody. It was an event to be seen at. And if you were one of the people that was ringside, like, you were, you know, you were an elite celebrity. And that was, you know, the Mike Tyson era. That was, I mean, it was different. It was different than, it was different than any other heavyweight, like, since Ali.

So you had Ali and then Larry Holmes, who doesn’t get the credit that he deserves.

GABLE STEVESON: He was fantastic, too.

JOE ROGAN: I watched all those videos, too. Amazing fighter. But he lived in the shadow of Ali, you know, and a lot of people hated him, too, because he beat up Ali when Ali was already done.

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah, that was tough to watch.

Larry Holmes and Muhammad Ali

JOE ROGAN: And, you know, he had been Ali’s sparring partner when Ali was younger, you know, and so, and everybody knew how good Larry Holmes was, and everybody knew that Muhammad Ali was older. And what’s that?

GABLE STEVESON: Would you do that if he was a sparring partner for your homie? And that’s got to be a difficult combo because you burn, you burn a bridge.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, you burn a bridge with the whole society. But part of it is, like, you kind of have to, right? Because if you are the heavyweight champion of the world and they want to set up a fight with Muhammad Ali, Muhammad Ali wants to fight you, and they want to give you $10 million, and it’s going to be on TV and everybody’s hyped up about it, like, what are you going to do? Say, no, I won’t fight him. I’m going to relinquish my crown? What are you going to do?

Like, I don’t know if he had any opportunity to do anything other than fight him, but it’s just like he was, Muhammad Ali was so beloved, not just as one of the greatest fighters of all time, but also as a cultural figure that watching that man beat him up like that, just beat the stuff out of Ali. And then seeing Ali afterwards when he had the shakes and he had Parkinson’s, and everybody knew that that was trauma related Parkinson’s. And knowing that Larry Holmes dished out a lot of that, I think in a lot of people’s mind that sort, and I think that to this day is why Larry Holmes does not get the credit that he deserves. He had one of the greatest jabs in the history of the sport.

GABLE STEVESON: Crazy. I just saw a video. He was flicking it.

JOE ROGAN: Oh. Even when he fought Mike. When he fought Mike, he was way past his prime. You know, he had been out for a long time.

GABLE STEVESON: Mike did his thing.

JOE ROGAN: But you know, there was a round in that fight where Larry Holmes was popping that jab, where it made you think, like, man, what would this fight have been like if Larry was in his prime? You know, it would have been very interesting, I think. I think Mike was on another level, though.

GABLE STEVESON: He was. He was. When I, when I see him, he just had the veins, you know, like, that was, that’s my, like, wow for people. He was just…

JOE ROGAN: He was a speedy tank and just the skill, too. And also that style, that peekaboo style was just so different than anything else anybody was doing. So it was so hard to prepare for. You got most, most of these heavyweight boxers were standing straight up. You know, they throwing jabs and moving, moving like Foreman or moving like Ken Norton or whoever they were. But Muhammad Ali, you know, was the only guy that moved like a lighter guy.

GABLE STEVESON: He was.

JOE ROGAN: He was different. But Mike Tyson was crouching and bobbing and weaving and coming at you. It was a totally different thing to prepare for.

GABLE STEVESON: You can’t prepare for something like that. That’s like, when someone is too athletic, that’s like preparing for Myles Garrett right now. You just can’t. He’s going to have 25 sacks this year. And it’s like, how do you prepare for something like that besides try to psych yourself into, maybe I can do it, but this is not going to happen.

Athletic Freaks and Training Evolution

JOE ROGAN: There’s always going to be freaks. There’s always going to be these athletic freaks that can just do things that no one else can do.

GABLE STEVESON: Now there’s more than now. There’s even more. Because you see high school football, guys, 6’5″, 281 at Ohio State, I’m like, damn, what they got. People are bigger.

JOE ROGAN: Also, people are doing things for their kids at an early age to optimize their growth and making sure that they come out bigger and stronger and faster, getting them training younger, strength and conditioning and plyometrics and stuff when they’re real young to get them prepared for things. I mean, look, you know Vasyl Lomachenko.

GABLE STEVESON: Yes. So that’s fast.

JOE ROGAN: That dude’s dad took him out of boxing for two years to have him learn Ukrainian dance so that he’d have better footwork.

GABLE STEVESON: And he was dancing on people. I see, I watched his highlights on Instagram.

JOE ROGAN: Footwork was insane.

GABLE STEVESON: Usyk’s the same.

JOE ROGAN: Same coach.

GABLE STEVESON: Usyk’s the same person, same coach. I really like Usyk.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Oh, my God. Usyk’s crazy again. One of the greatest heavyweights of all time. And not a big guy either. You know, he just knows where to…

GABLE STEVESON: Go and when to go. Which is nice.

The Art of Movement and Striking

JOE ROGAN: What’s also, he’s constantly moving. He’s never right in front of you. He’s constantly stepping, stepping and stepping and stuff. And he’s setting you up and he’s always downloading and calculating your movements and your reactions to things. It’s so skillful.

That, to me is the most beautiful thing about boxing, is that someone could stand in the fire and be so skillful that, like Crawford, that, I mean, standing right in front of Canelo, there was one point in the fight where he was pity patting him. Here’s Lomachenko when he’s in his prime. The movement was bananas and it was just his ease of footwork. And it wasn’t footwork like trying to get away from you. It was footwork standing right in front of you and stepping off to the side and cracking.

That kind of shit. These angles is just, unless you have tried to do that, you don’t know how ridiculously difficult that is.

GABLE STEVESON: The conditioning on that is crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. Your legs have to be in peak form. Super peak form. It’s just there’s so many guys out there that you could learn from by watching. And they set the bar so high. And that is the difference between watching, like Keith Hackney versus Emmanuel Yarborough way back in 1993 versus watching Jon Jones in 2025.

It’s like we get to see now these guys that seen it all, the Pyotr Yan’s, the Ilia Toporia’s, the Islam Makhachev’s. You get to see the elite of the elite today. And these young kids that are coming up now, they get to see that and learn from that and incorporate all these things. And you’re seeing these guys that are fighting on Dana White’s Contender Series that are, they look like world championship caliber fighters and they’re not even in the UFC yet.

GABLE STEVESON: Most definitely the latter guys. Most definitely the latter guys.

Revitalizing the Heavyweight Division

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. There’s so many good guys now, but in the heavyweight division, it’s still fairly shallow. I know where Gable comes in.

GABLE STEVESON: It’s funny, I think I heard you say “shallow” about three times. And Joe, in the most nicest way, because I like to be, I like to be humble with the words and I like to talk with the confidence. I really think I can go out there and do right by this big promotion and go out there and just be fantastic.

JOE ROGAN: I think you can too. And I think you can do what Mike Tyson did, which is revitalize the heavyweight division. Because, I mean, other than Jon, who’s of course a superstar, but he’s kind of semi-retired, the Tom Aspinall, Ciryl Gane thing was a fing disaster. And that’s a disaster. I mean, Tom Aspinall still can’t see. He’s got a fed up right eyeball.

GABLE STEVESON: Still really bad. Right.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, the reality is he might not ever fight again. Who knows? If he has surgery on his eye and it doesn’t go well and he can’t see out of the eye, apparently he’s still fed up in his right eye. There’s some tendon damage or something. And eyes are so tricky. You never know, unless you’re a fing complete psychopath like Michael Bisping, who fought 11 fights in the UFC blind in one eye, which is so crazy that he did that.

Do you know what he did, that crazy motherf*er?

GABLE STEVESON: What he do?

The Michael Bisping Eye Chart Story

JOE ROGAN: He memorized the eye chart. He memorized it so that he could, they could cover his left eye. Oh, my God. And he could just…

GABLE STEVESON: So whenever he went to do an eye exam, he knew the letters.

JOE ROGAN: They would say, “All right, read the third chart” and you would say, “A, B, C, D, E.” He knew what the letters were.

GABLE STEVESON: Oh, he’s smart.

JOE ROGAN: He’s crazy. He couldn’t f*ing see out of one of his eyes and still fought world class fighters. I think 11 fights he had only being able to see out of one eye.

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah. I’m not really sure how to engage with the eye talk on Tom Aspinall, but I think he’s a fantastic fighter. I think…

JOE ROGAN: What do you mean by “engaged with the eye talk”?

GABLE STEVESON: I feel like getting poked in the eye sucks. And I just don’t know how he feels that he got, you know what I’m saying? So I’m not going to…

JOE ROGAN: We don’t know what he was experiencing during the fight. Yeah.

Comparing Tom Aspinall to Olympic Competition

GABLE STEVESON: And nobody ever, and nobody ever knows. But critics going to go online and say X, Y and Z, but I’m just going to stand the middle ground. I say I think Tom’s a fantastic fighter. Ciryl is great also, and I think a lot of them are also great also. You’re going to always say it’s really shallow, and I believe it’s shallow too. And I believe I can go out there and do the best I can and really dominate when I need to.

But just when I see Tom Aspinall, Tom Aspinall reminds me of a guy from Turkey that I wrestled in the Olympics. He was a 2016 Olympic champ. His name, Taha Akgul. He was six foot four, same size as Tom, same build, same everything. And I went out there and I beat him 8 to 0. And I was in his face for that six minutes and I let him know that I was here.

And I feel like in that instance, that’s when the tides change. And I feel like with a guy like Tom, I think I look at him as like a guy like Taha Akgul. He’s on top, he’s the leader. He’s still fresh. But I think there’s another hungry guy that’s going to come and hopefully it’s me that’s going to come and go out there and do what I need to do.

JOE ROGAN: Well, listen, I hope Tom gets back in because again, we don’t know what’s going on with his eye. And for all the critics need to know this, the right eye, that’s the problem. But if you look at when he fought his left eye, the finger went deeper in his left eye than it did his right eye. So if you think he’s faking it, he was knuckle deep in that f*ing left eye.

GABLE STEVESON: He was all up in that eye.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I mean, it’s horrible to see, to undergo multiple eye surgeries, multiple eye surgeries, and that’s horrible. “By the time a statement goes out, I’ll probably have surgery on one eye already. Neck surgery is coming mid January.” Neck surgery. So he’s having surgery on both eyes.

Post-Fight Reactions and Mindset

GABLE STEVESON: It’s really messed up, but I think the way the post fight interview went, because I like to look at how people approach the world also too. And he was just upset how the people were reacting, saying, “Why the f* are you booing? Why are you doing this?” I mean, there could have been a, there could be a great approach to that of him saying, “Man, I got my eye poked, but I’m going to come back stronger from this.”

JOE ROGAN: Well, the problem is people are always going to doubt you when you get poked in the eye. There’s always going to be a bunch of people like, “Oh, you’re fine,” because people have gotten poked in the eye and they have continued fighting. But is that smart? It’s a foul.

First of all, I think every time a guy gets poked in the eye, one point deduction immediately, instantly, maybe even two points. You should never do that to a person. Never. One thing you notice about Petr Yan’s fight with Merab, he fights like this, his hand is in a fist. So when he’s got his hand up like this and the front hand’s extended, he’s not doing that.

GABLE STEVESON: He’s kind of guiding you. Yeah, honestly.

The Eye Poke Problem and Glove Design

JOE ROGAN: Well, he’s letting you know this motherf*er’s coming. And he’s also in a shell, very well protected by having that one hand up like that and have that shoulder. He’s got the chin blocked, and then he’s doing this with this hand. It’s a very good defensive position. Also very skillful, because he’s so good defensively in terms of his movement and the way he’s able to roll with punches and get out of the way in time.

But he never pokes in the eye. He’s not doing that. Ciryl Gane has a habit of doing that.

GABLE STEVESON: Why do you think that is?

JOE ROGAN: You could speculate. You could speculate all day long. You could say he wants to do it. I mean, ask Jon. Jon’s poked people in the eyes.

GABLE STEVESON: He does it all the time.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

GABLE STEVESON: I mean, even if you would have took the points from him, he still would have won.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I know. It’s just, it’s one of those things. It’s like, here’s a problem. Why are the fingers out in the first place? Why don’t they cover that shit up? Why don’t they have it like one of those Everlast bag gloves where it’s like a mitt? Yeah, yeah. I mean, have the thumb out. Because you don’t grapple with these anyway. You don’t do this. You never do this.

So why do the fingers have to be loose? If you grapple, you’re grappling like this or like this. If you’re clenching your hands together. You’re never clenching your hands together like this. You never interlace your fingers together. So why the f* are they open in the first place when it only causes problems?

If they developed an MMA glove that covered the tips of the fingers like a mitten, we would have way less problems with this shit. You’d occasionally probably have a thumb in the eye every now and again, but you would have at least eight less possibilities each fight of things going into your eye.

GABLE STEVESON: True.

JOE ROGAN: It just makes sense. And it wouldn’t hinder grappling. You just have a thin piece of leather that, the padding goes over the knuckles, the piece of leather goes over the tip of the fingers, and have it come down like this, like a mitten. But not hard to design.

GABLE STEVESON: If it was a mitt and I’m on top and I grab wrist control. Do you think the leather of the mitt sticks harder?

JOE ROGAN: Probably, yeah. Probably aid grappling. It probably make fights better. It probably do stuff like, you’d probably be able to get more takedowns, maybe. I don’t know, man. Maybe when the leather gets wet, maybe it becomes slippery like a finger. We’d have to find out, but at least we would have less eye pokes. And it’s not going to hinder the striking at all. There’s no need to have these fingers exposed like this.

GABLE STEVESON: No, there’s no need. But two great fighters, I mean, accidents happen.

JOE ROGAN: Accidents happen. And also purposeful fouls happen. And I’m not saying that Ciryl Gane did it on purpose, but he did it like five times in that fight. I rewatched that fight a couple of times, and every time Aspinall came towards him, he was doing this every time. Fingers outstretched, pointed towards the face.

It’s just, it’s illegal. You’re not supposed to ever do that. Your fist should always be balled up when it’s moving towards your fight, your opponent’s face. But we don’t have to have these goddamn fingers covered like that or open like that. They should be covered. It’s not impossible to do. It could be really easy to design a glove like that. I don’t understand for the life of me how the sport’s been around since 1993 and no one has introduced gloves like that. True.

GABLE STEVESON: No, you’re right. A really good thing I wanted to ask you is, for someone new coming in to a sport that a lot of people know, how do you think they should bridge the popularity of the sport and also the real life of who the person is? I might be saying this in a hard way.

JOE ROGAN: No, I know what you’re saying.

Bridging Fame and Authenticity

GABLE STEVESON: How do you think they should? Because I’ve been around a lot of people, but it always gets bigger and always gets bigger. And how do you bridge that gap of keeping that same mind frame of, like, “Man, I’m the guy.” But I need to reset. I always need a reset. I need to make sure…

The Pressures of Fame and Success

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, it’s going to be dependent upon you, right? And it’s going to be a rocket ride that you’re on. And the pressure and just the overall, like, not being able to go to the mall is going to be weird, you know, it’s going to get weird. It’ll get weird. You’re going to get mobbed at the airport. It’s going to get weird.

And you’re going to have to figure out a way to have your own private time. That’s very important. When guys never have private time, they’re always surrounded by people and they’re always—you could lose yourself, you could lose your way and just fame itself. Fame itself is very complicated. It’s very complicated for people, especially for fighters.

When your entire identity relies on the way other people perceive you, that’s not good. It feels good when you’re on top because everybody’s like, “Oh, there’s Gable. He’s the fing man. Oh, you’re the man. You’re the man.” But if you rely on other people’s opinions of you for your self-esteem and your self-worth, then the moment you have a stumble—what if you get eye poked? And then also, “Gable’s a bitch. Gable, f.” And you’re like, “What? What?”

And you’re dealing with the opinions of morons, and they’re affecting your own feelings about yourself. And then there’s all the other pressures that come with money and people trying to scam you and business deals and bullshit and this and that, and they want you to do movies and that kind of shit.

Look, that’s the bane of fighters’ existence. When Hollywood gets involved, that kind of, in a lot of ways, led to the decline of Ronda Rousey. In a lot of ways, Conor McGregor. People start f*ing throwing everything at you. You’re doing cell phone commercials and all this different shit. And that stuff gets in the way.

Yeah, it gets in the way of your training, but it also gets in the way of your ability to have that deep pressure time to be yourself and to be alone with your thoughts, which I think is very important just to solidify your own understanding of who you are as a human being. And you don’t want to be defined by other people’s opinions and perceptions.

And then there’s also like, the UFC does a fantastic job of showing who a fighter really is. The Countdown series, the UFC Embedded series. So when they’re doing stuff like that, and you get to see this person interacting with their family, going through training camp, going through the weight cut, and you get to see who they are joking around with people, hanging out with their friends, laughing.

That’s important too, because people really want to relate to you. They don’t want this guy who just appears every five months, you don’t know shit about him. And then all of a sudden there he is in the ring again and you’re putting all these things on him and imagining what he’s like.

The more they can get to see behind the curtain, the better it is for you. Especially if you’re a good person and you’re an interesting person and they get to see. It’s also inspiring for people. They like you, like to talk about yourself like you’re a regular guy. You put your shoes on one foot at a time like everybody else, but like, wow, look at the greatness this regular guy can accomplish.

Maybe I can do this, maybe I can do something like that. Maybe in whatever I’m doing in life, if I’m a f*ing skier, whatever your job is, maybe I can be great and be a normal person. Like this guy is true?

GABLE STEVESON: No, 100%. Well, that’s a fantastic answer because I just feel like at some point I’ll get to that spot. How do I know if someone’s not real? How do I know if someone is in that space of things change and there’s leeches, there’s bad people. So it’s always a nice thing to have someone that has surpassed that level that you can finally see and be like, man, how did you—

Jon Jones as Mentor

JOE ROGAN: Well, Jon’s a great guy to talk to about that. Obviously Jon’s had his stumbles, which is—when people talk about Jon and the things that Jon’s got in trouble with, I’m like, listen, you want a wild motherfer or not? Okay? If you want a guy to be the greatest of all time in fing cage fighting, he’s going to be wild. That’s one of the reasons why he’s great.

When Jon was—what is he, 22 years old when he won the title?

GABLE STEVESON: 23.

JOE ROGAN: He’s fighting 23, Mauricio Shogun Rua, who’s an all-time great Pride legend. He opens the fight with a flying knee. Who does that? Who does—you got to be wild. You got to be a wild fella. That’s Jon.

And obviously there’s stuff he shouldn’t have done. There’s a lot of extracurricular activities, a lot of partying. It’s not healthy, it’s not good, but that is what comes with being that—

GABLE STEVESON: Kind of a guy.

JOE ROGAN: And Jon could probably tell you more about this than anybody that’s ever lived. Like, what were the stumbles? What could I have done differently? And he probably could help prepare you more than anybody ever.

GABLE STEVESON: Most definitely. He’s already kind of put a big foot into it and man, he’s amazing with a lot of things now. He talks so well now. A lot of things are in a sense of—he’s trying to look out for me in business opportunities and places that I need to go. And it’s amazing.

A lot of people don’t do that, especially when you see the peaks and valleys of that person and their public info also. And a lot of people don’t want to give people the chance because you see something about someone until you finally meet them and it’s like, man, this guy’s a whole different person. You would have never expected.

And so, man, with Jon, he’s just opened a lot of doors and kind of he is doing that guiding of me.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s great too because Jon is essentially guiding his replacement, which is really hard for a lot of people to have that kind of self-awareness. Know that there’s only a certain amount of time that I can do this for. And I see this young great man who’s coming up and I’m going to help him and I’m going to give him some advice that maybe it would have been amazing if someone gave me.

Because Jon didn’t have some heavyweight champion training with him that could teach him those things. He’s satisfied, especially not someone at that level, the level that he’s at.

GABLE STEVESON: Man, I know he’s honored. We’re both honored. Yeah, he just—like I said, he called me today, he was just, “Man, I really think you should just let the world know who you are and just kind of give people the real feel of who you need to be.”

And I’ve always loved to have like you just talked about with the UFC Embeddeds—you see the real human being and I’ve always liked people seeing a real human being because we all do shit the same way.

JOE ROGAN: There’s nothing special.

GABLE STEVESON: There’s nothing special. Some people just have more money, some people just have more status. But at the end of the day, hopefully we can all sleep in a bed. And I know some people don’t, which is sad to see, but it’s just some people live different lives and I want to live a life where it’s happy and healthy with the people I have and I can meet so many people and I feel like I’m doing a great job right now.

So man, any input I can get on how to be better, how to be more mature, how to be more sound, especially from Jon, I’m getting a lot. But to hear from you—you get different perspectives of you were in a different realm than Jon also. But you guys also in the same place. Like you do the podcast and Jon’s semi-retired, but you see the two different lives of two different well-respected people.

Protecting Your Focus and Excellence

JOE ROGAN: Well, that mindset that you have to really want to acquire that information and really sort it out and know that these challenges are coming your way. The money and the fame and all that stuff is the thing that everybody focuses on, but really the focus is on excellence. Excellence is what brings you the money. Excellence is what brings you the fame.

And the moment you start thinking about the fame and the money and not thinking about the excellence, you’ve lost your way. You’ve lost your way. And a lot of people lose their way. A lot of people, that money and that fame that it starts coming and all sudden you’re just thinking about numbers, you’re thinking about the house you’re going to buy and the car you’re going to drive and all that stupid shit and you lose your way.

And one of the things that I always try to tell people, I try to see young comedians especially, is that think of the attention that you have. Like it has a number value. Like the attention—imagine like if you had $100, you can only spend $100. Let’s imagine your mind only has 100 units of focus. You have 100 units of focus.

Any focus that you have on other shit outside of the thing that brings you excellence is just robbing from excellence. That’s all it is. If you’re concentrating on haters on social media, or if you got a crazy bitch in your life that’s ruining everything, or you got some friend who’s a hater and you think he’s like maybe hoping you fail.

All that stuff that’s distracting and it’s just robbing attention from excellence. And some of it’s unavoidable and some of it actually strengthens your resolve to have a certain amount of shit in your life just to understand how to maintain and still be excellent despite of all that. There’s probably some resilience building that comes from that.

But protect your focus, it’s precious. Protect your time, protect that energy that you have to invest in things. It’s so precious. The mind, your focus and your drive. That is everything in your life. That’s everything. And anything that steals from that.

I remember this was one fighter, and he was a very good fighter that was fighting in Pride, and he had this crazy girlfriend. And every time he was going to fight, like the day before the fight, the girl would start problems and she would start fights, and she’d screamed the hotel, like one o’clock in the morning and went down to the bar.

She wanted him to fail. She wanted to be more important than his fighting career. And his fighting career was so important and so overwhelming that she felt like she wasn’t getting the attention that she needed. So she would go get attention from him and she would steal from him. It was crazy.

And this guy, and he never wound up being a champion. He was a very talented guy, too. I don’t want to say his name, but it was one of those things where it’s like, man, there are people in your life, you got to recognize when you’re dealing with that kind of a person, you got to cut them out. You got to get rid of them.

They’re stealing. They’re stealing from your focus. They’re stealing from your ability to create excellence. And that’s what you’re in the business of. You’re in the business of excellence. And anybody that’s trying to steal from that, like, those are liabilities there. That’s like you got a hole in the bottom of your boat. You got to patch that shit up.

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah. Well, it’s just like Mike Tyson kind of said, “Once you’re favored by God, you’re also favored by the devil, too.”

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that’s so true, too. Yeah. The temptations will come.

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then also you start believing your own bullshit. I mean, look at Jon when he wasn’t training. But luckily for Jon, he was so much better than everybody in the division that all it took was like a readjustment.

Like the Dominick Reyes fight. He almost lost that fight. And Dominick Reyes, as great as he was that night, should not have been beating Jon Jones. I think Jon Jones with a real focus and a real drive towards destroying Dominick Reyes would be on another level.

GABLE STEVESON: I think so, too.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like he could—

GABLE STEVESON: He could.

JOE ROGAN: He is the best guy to be in your corner, man, because he’s made all the mistakes and still come out the goat. Like, who better to tell you how to do it right.

GABLE STEVESON: There’s no one better, man. Probably the greatest. Of course, the greatest by far. Yeah.

Downtime and Relaxation

JOE ROGAN: What do you do for chill time? Like, what do you do to unwind?

GABLE STEVESON: Honestly, right now, I like Call of Duty. I play a lot of Warzone Ronnie, 2K. You know who that is? The dude that made the basketball game.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

GABLE STEVESON: So I got my own player on 2K, and it says my real name. When I load into the game, people know you’re playing against me. So it’s either I’m playing Call of Duty or 2K. I mentioned before the French Bulldogs. I mean, I like to take care of French bulldogs. I feel like Jamie’s got one.

JOE ROGAN: You do?

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, he’s soaking today. We didn’t know you were into French bulldogs.

GABLE STEVESON: So I had, sadly, two pass away. I just had one pass away. He had IVDD in his neck. And that’s a bad disc disease that happens in French bulldogs because they’re bred so bad. So my first one had it in his back. He was playing all day, and then I turned, and he was paralyzed in an instant. And I was like, oh, man, that’s not good. So I had to put him down.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that’s horrible.

GABLE STEVESON: And then I adopted one after. This is like, I adopted one a year ago. He just passed away a couple weeks ago. His name was Archie. My little guy, he had it in his neck. And I had him on painkillers for six months. And I looked, and one day he kind of rolled wrong and he kind of yelped again. And I was like, we got to take him in.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that’s horrible.

GABLE STEVESON: So it’s bad. You know, I got bad attachments to French Bulldogs. They’re like my, since I’m having a real baby now, that’s like my second baby.

JOE ROGAN: You’re going to be amazed how much you love your real baby more than you love your dogs. As much as I love my dogs, it just…

GABLE STEVESON: There’s just another level.

The Love of Dogs

JOE ROGAN: Oh, it’s beyond. It doesn’t even compare. One of my dogs went to surgery today. He had a hernia. I have a golden retriever and a King Charles spaniel. He’s the cutest little dog. He’s so f*ing cute. He’s seven months old, and he was born with a little hernia. It’s like some of them get that little hernia, so they had to go stitch him up.

But when I was playing with him last night, I was so scared. I was like, what if something happens to him? I can’t take it, you know, because I love him so much. He’s so sweet. He just, when I pick him up, he kisses me constantly. And he makes noise. And sometimes he barks while he’s kissing you. And you’re like, I love you, too.

GABLE STEVESON: I love you, too.

JOE ROGAN: And his little tail’s wagging. He wags his tail. His whole body, his whole body’s…

GABLE STEVESON: Wagging, wiggling all over.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

GABLE STEVESON: Mine would go after the ears.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, he does.

GABLE STEVESON: And he would nibble. Put a whole nibble on the ear and then he’ll switch sides. And then he would switch sides.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

GABLE STEVESON: Let me live for a little bit. But I’m his whole world, and I feel like sometimes we forget that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, they’re little love devices. They just want love from you and they want to give you love. They never have bad days, they’re never shitty. They’re never in a bad mood. They’re always cool. You know, every day is the same thing. Every day I see him in the morning, like, good morning.

GABLE STEVESON: He’s so crazy.

JOE ROGAN: And you just, I get on the ground with them.

GABLE STEVESON: On the carpet and roll all over.

JOE ROGAN: I love dogs. If it was up to me, I’d have 50 dogs.

GABLE STEVESON: I wish we could make them live longer. Making them live long would be crazy. Cats are like 20 years. Why can’t a dog be 20 years?

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think they are working on that. I think there’s actual startups right now that are working on animal longevity. Yeah, they’re working on different medical interventions that can allow dogs to live longer, which is fascinating. And then sometimes people, they clone their dogs.

GABLE STEVESON: Tom Brady just did that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

GABLE STEVESON: I don’t know how he did it, but I mean, that’s weird. Hey, have a good time.

JOE ROGAN: That’s Pet Sematary sh*t.

GABLE STEVESON: That is. That might be hereditary.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I don’t know if I’m into that.

GABLE STEVESON: I don’t know how I feel about that.

JOE ROGAN: I feel like every dog has their own unique personality. And as much as I love the dogs that I have now, look, I had my dog Marshall, he’s almost nine, or he just turned nine, rather. And I’ve had him since he was a puppy. I love him to death. But then I got this new dog, Charlie, and I love him to death, too. He’s a totally different personality.

I don’t mind new dogs and new personalities. I don’t need the same dog over and over and over again. You know what I mean? I think that’s weird. You should try French bulldog.

GABLE STEVESON: They got 12 different personalities.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I love Carl. Jamie brings Carl in. He’s a little psycho.

GABLE STEVESON: He’s got too many personalities.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, he runs at you and just wants to play.

GABLE STEVESON: They got that bowling ball head. I know.

JOE ROGAN: He’s a little ball muscle, too. Carl’s jacked. Carl’s got, he’s built.

GABLE STEVESON: I need to see a picture.

JOE ROGAN: You got pictures of him? Pull up a picture of Carl. He’s adorable. He plays at my golden, and he just throws himself like a meat missile at my golden, because my golden’s so gentle, which is great because Charlie is only 15 pounds, my little dog. And so my golden is playing, and he gently puts a paw over him when they play. That’s Carl. Look at that in the face.

GABLE STEVESON: Look at that in a face. I just know he does everything extra. Oh, yeah. Oh, look at him sleep. He’s really nice.

JOE ROGAN: He’s adorable. But when he plays with Marshall, it’s really crazy. We got a video of him playing with him.

GABLE STEVESON: Did you get his nose done? Nope.

JOE ROGAN: No, he’s just…

GABLE STEVESON: Wow, that’s perfect. He had a good nose. That’s really good.

JOE ROGAN: Some of them have f*ed up noses.

GABLE STEVESON: Well, they come out like this, and then they can’t breathe, and so they breathe out their mouth. And sometimes they got to get it soldered. They clean that out. They make a bigger hole.

JOE ROGAN: Awful.

GABLE STEVESON: But some of them have it where you have to go in and kind of help the esophagus because their face is flat. So you got to help the back and kind of cut it to where it can go down the pipe.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, no.

GABLE STEVESON: Crazy. Crazy. I wish people, I wish those dogs could live forever. Those dogs got a million different characters.

JOE ROGAN: I know. Well, I love all kinds of dogs, man. I love working dogs. I love German Shepherds and Belgian Malinois.

GABLE STEVESON: Cane Corso. Be cool. They’re a little dangerous, but that’s what I’m hearing. They only loyal to one person, if I’m not mistaken.

JOE ROGAN: They don’t like to listen.

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah, well, never mind.

JOE ROGAN: My boy Mark, delegate from Sityodtong Muay Thai. He coached a lot of UFC fighters. Coach Kenny Florian, great Muay Thai coach. Great guy. Works for the UFC. He had a Cane Corso they had to put him down. Bit his hand. Chomped down on him. Yeah. And he had it for years out of nowhere.

Well, you know, he’s testing them. Sometimes those dogs, and not all of them, but some of them, they will test you. And you just can’t have a dog that’s biting you. No.

GABLE STEVESON: Because what else?

JOE ROGAN: Your kid. Yeah. What if it bites your wife?

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: What if it bites the mailman?

GABLE STEVESON: You never know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. When it’s just like those and it’s not all of them. I’ve had pit bulls and I never had a pit bull that even wanted to bite a person. They were always the sweetest with people. But then you hear stories.

GABLE STEVESON: You hear stories, which is crazy. I know. Because how can I go online and see a pit bull just not letting go of somebody, but all of a sudden, the next video, I see a pit bull wearing a Christmas sweater with paw shoes on.

JOE ROGAN: I know.

GABLE STEVESON: So it’s weird.

JOE ROGAN: I know. It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t. But it’s just like people. Some people are born crazy. Yeah.

GABLE STEVESON: Some people are born crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

Conspiracy Theories

GABLE STEVESON: Are you big into anything? What do you believe in conspiracy wise? What’s your big one?

JOE ROGAN: Don’t open up that door, Gable. Don’t open up that door. Oh, my God.

GABLE STEVESON: Yo, my dad. My dad’s die hard conspiracy. If you and him had a talk.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, what is his big one? What’s the big one with him?

GABLE STEVESON: I don’t even know, but I know he’s really bad. I think that the biggest one right now, he just said it, but I don’t even know. I don’t even want to say it wrong, but that’s my thing. But I’m big on conspiracy theory.

JOE ROGAN: What is the subject? Do you remember the subject?

GABLE STEVESON: Something about, I don’t even want to say it.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

GABLE STEVESON: I don’t even want to say it right now. Okay.

JOE ROGAN: We’ll talk off air.

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

GABLE STEVESON: But I believe there’s a lot of things we don’t know as people. And I believe there’s a lot of…

JOE ROGAN: A lot of conspiracies are real. That’s the problem. The problem with conspiracy theories is some of them are crazy and ridiculous. But the reason why people entertain crazy and ridiculous ones is because some of them are real. And they’re so nuts that you go, they did what?

When you just, when you find out about US history alone, you know, you find out that the reason why we got into Vietnam was…

GABLE STEVESON: I don’t know this. Who got it?

JOE ROGAN: Okay. It’s called the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was supposedly the North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong, attacked one of our ships, but it was fake. They faked it. It’s not real. It’s called a false flag. And they did it just to have a story so that we would have an excuse to invade Vietnam.

GABLE STEVESON: So we sent all those people to Vietnam for nothing.

JOE ROGAN: A lot of people died for nothing. A lot of people died for nothing. And a lot of people made a lot of f*ing money. And it probably had to do with drugs, too, because they were moving heroin out of Vietnam. I mean, there was, it was, control of the heroin trade was a big part of it.

That was also why one of the reasons why we were in Afghanistan. While we were in Afghanistan, heroin production in Afghanistan was 94% of the world’s heroin.

GABLE STEVESON: What does…

JOE ROGAN: And it ramped up after we invaded Afghanistan. It went up. Heroin production. Not only did it go up, but we were guarding poppy fields for the Taliban.

GABLE STEVESON: Why do we need to guard for the farmers, rather? Why do we need to guard them? Well, are we using them for medical here or they’re just getting used?

The Dark Reality of Drug Money and Corruption

JOE ROGAN: No, it’s money. It’s money. There’s people, there’s dirty money that gets moved around. For sure. When you’re dealing with something like the drug trade and billions of dollars are going all over, people want a piece of that.

And there’s high level people that are dirty and they get involved in that and they make decisions based on that, and they put people’s lives at risk and people die because of it. And that probably happened in Afghanistan and definitely happened in Vietnam.

And people don’t want to believe that. People are hearing this right now. “Oh, stop with that nonsense.” But it’s true. I mean, there’s a video of Geraldo Rivera interviewing these military guys that were guarding poppy fields in Afghanistan. And the guy who’s interviewing is very reluctant to talk about it, but it was on Fox News and he had to talk about it because everybody was aware of it. It was becoming a big conspiracy online.

And they were coming up with some sort of irrational reason why they needed to guard their heroin production. Because, you know, “we need them to tell on the Taliban” and like, really?

GABLE STEVESON: Really.

JOE ROGAN: So we’re letting the farmers poison young people and heroin addicts all over the world because we want them to give us information about. Is that really what’s going on? Or are you motherf*ers making money out of this?

GABLE STEVESON: They got to be making a lot of money too. A lot of money. A lot of money. Well, I just saw the story about that guy from. He was a football player from Australia. He was selling drugs. What was that story? He was. He’s not from Australia. He went to USC. Quarterback.

JOE ROGAN: He was selling drugs.

GABLE STEVESON: He was selling drugs out of an apartment in Australia for a cartel that was from Tijuana. I forgot his name. It’s his quarterback. I feel like a lot of people know it.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a real recent story.

GABLE STEVESON: It’s a real story. A recent story from recent. From what I’ve seen, it might be older. It might be like a couple years older. But yeah, he got caught because someone along the way was a middleman for a lot of. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Wild, true story behind cocaine Quarterback signal caller for the cartel. Wow.

GABLE STEVESON: And they said he was making like a million dollars a day in cash. And he was trying to move it through Las Vegas casinos. But the middleman, someone messed up the bet and he lost the money. So he had a loan money from someone. And that someone was like an undercover waiting for him like a year later and caught him at a McDonald’s before he went across the road to Tijuana or something.

It’s crazy, yo. You know, drugs control a lot of things and it’s messed up.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s the money. When you think about how much money gets moved around in the drug game, people get tempted by that. And then, you know, you get a hold of some legitimate businessman and say, “Listen, there’s a way for you to get 10x return on your money. You know, you invest in this. We do that. It’s simple. You’ll never get dirty. All the money goes to offshore accounts. No one will know about it. You can retire when you’re 45.”

GABLE STEVESON: Crazy.

JOE ROGAN: And then people start getting roped. And it’s also, it’s the excitement of doing something naughty. That’s part of it too. Some people just get, you know, like, some people like to ride bulls. Some people like to do some shit they’re not supposed to do. They get addicted to doing things that they are not supposed to do. They get addicted to the life. DEA agents. A lot of DEA agents become drug dealers.

GABLE STEVESON: Well, it’s just like that show Narcos Mexico. Yes. It’s the same thing.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly, exactly, exactly. Or Cocaine Cowboys. Have you ever watched that documentary?

GABLE STEVESON: No. What’s that about?

Cocaine Cowboys and Miami’s Corruption

JOE ROGAN: Amazing. Cocaine Cowboys 1, and then there’s Cocaine Cowboys 2. There was so much corruption in Miami during the 1980s during the cocaine crime, that one graduating class of the police academy, the entire graduating class either wound up murdered or in jail.

GABLE STEVESON: How do you do that?

JOE ROGAN: Because they were all corrupt. They were all involved in cocaine dealing with all of them because there was so much money. Everybody’s driving a Corvette, everybody’s living large, everybody’s doing blow and wearing diamonds.

GABLE STEVESON: It’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like you get caught up in that life and if you’re involved in, like, is your police officer and everybody around you is dirty, you know, like, it’s more likely you’re going to be dirty, too.

GABLE STEVESON: Well, now. Now, aren’t they kind of blowing the Ecuadorian ships up that are coming to here that are having a lot of drugs on them?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, Venezuela, right?

GABLE STEVESON: Venezuelan ships. Yeah, they just blowing them up. I don’t even know. I’m not educated on stuff like that, but I wonder if it’s for. To keep the trade here.

JOE ROGAN: No, I doubt it. I think more likely what it is is because Trump genuinely hates that they’re bringing drugs into this country. Is there other things involved, too? I don’t know. I mean, I’m sure some of it has to do with perhaps with politics. I mean, I think that’s a reasonable assumption.

But, Jamie, I just sent you something. Here’s what’s interesting. One of the things that Trump was saying is “they’re poisoning our kids” and that 100,000 people are dying every year from drug overdoses. “We have to put a stop to this.”

From the time Trump’s been in office, deaths by overdose have dropped off a cliff. Look at that. Look at 2024 and leading into 2025. Look at that. These are all deaths from overdoses. I mean, that’s kind of crazy. Like, look at that. From all drugs, which is the top one? Look at that drop. I mean, that’s crazy.

So you see, the peak in. Was in 2022, or it looks like actually 2020. Between 2023 and 2024, that’s the peak where people are dying. And then from the time Trump’s in office, it’s taking a f*ing sharp downturn.

And why is that? Well, part of it’s because they’re blowing up these f*ing boats that are bringing in all the drugs, and not just drugs, but drugs that are tainted with fentanyl.

The Fentanyl Crisis

GABLE STEVESON: Fentanyl is terrible.

JOE ROGAN: Terrible.

GABLE STEVESON: Because a little piece can kill you.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. It’s smaller than a penny and you’re dead.

GABLE STEVESON: And people are snorting lines of it.

JOE ROGAN: And they don’t even know what’s in there. And the cartel, they’re buying, you know, they’re taking shitty drugs and mixing it with fentanyl. So it has an effect. And people are getting it from what they think is a Xanax, and it’s not a Xanax, it’s fake, and it’s got Fentanyl in it. And they’re dying from that. They’re dying from coke, that they think it’s coke and fentanyl’s in that. You know, it’s horrible.

GABLE STEVESON: There’s so much access to things in this world right now that I feel like there’s so many attainable things that people don’t even think about that a lot of shit happens in this world that we just have no clue.

And it’s kind of weird and I just don’t know, like, kind of the variety that I’m bringing to the combo. But I’m just saying it, like out of just to say it. But it’s different. There’s like a social media. You can meet so many people and just going to random places and meeting people, and then you can get roped up in the wrong things. And it’s 100% of the downhill starts.

JOE ROGAN: Yep. You take a bad turn and next thing you know, you’re on a bad road and you keep going. You know, “eventually I’m going to get out of this game.” And no, then you’re in jail or you’re dead.

Ed Calderon’s guy’s been on this podcast many times. He used to work for the Mexican military. Now he’s an American citizen, but he’s a cartel expert. And you know the stories that he’s told us about the f*ing cartel and the amount of money they have. I mean, they essentially, they have giant military operations. It’s all cartel. The car. And they go to war with each other. It’s crazy.

GABLE STEVESON: Is it Pablo Escobar that had the money in the walls of his house?

JOE ROGAN: I mean, probably, I don’t know.

GABLE STEVESON: Or who died. And he buried it all over in different places.

JOE ROGAN: I’m sure they all do that. I’m sure Escobar did that. I think they all do that. They have so much money. That was one of the things of cocaine cowboys was this pilot. They had millions of dollars buried in his backyard. He would just take garbage bags, fill it with millions of dollars of cash, dig a big hole in the backyard and bury it there because he couldn’t bring into a bank.

GABLE STEVESON: Why not just give it away?

JOE ROGAN: I’ll f* give it away. Because they’re doing coke and they want more money. They just don’t know what to do with it, you know. And they can’t just have it all laying around their house. And someone will break in their house and kill them and take their money.

GABLE STEVESON: It’s like, then it’s over with.

JOE ROGAN: It is a crazy game, but I can’t recommend that documentary enough Cocaine Cowboys. You watch it, you go, “what the f*.”

GABLE STEVESON: Where’s the streamed at?

JOE ROGAN: It’s probably on everywhere. Where is Cocaine Cowboys?

GABLE STEVESON: Got to get it. Sounds like Amazon Prime.

JOE ROGAN: I’m sure it’s on everything. It might even be on Netflix. But it’s incredible because you realize like, wow, like cocaine built Miami. Miami had more banks per capita. I don’t know if it still does, but at one point in time, more banks per capita than any other city in the country. And it’s because those banks were laundering money.

GABLE STEVESON: Damn.

JOE ROGAN: They were laundering cocaine money. It was all coming in.

GABLE STEVESON: And Miami never sleeps either. So it was all night affair. Yeah.

Jon Jones’ Mentorship and Staying Disciplined

JOE ROGAN: That is a crazy f*ing town. That is not a good town. If you want to be a fighter and live like a low key, disciplined life.

GABLE STEVESON: No, you can. All of a sudden you’re here, then you end up here, then all of a sudden it’s 8am. Right? You’re at the beach at 12. Can’t be right. No, can’t be right. That’s a dark hole that a lot of people should not be in. But how do you get out though?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know. Ask John. I mean, he seems to have navigated those waters better than anybody, you know, because usually it ruins everything in your life. He’s obviously had some missteps but still comes out the greatest, you know, which is not everybody’s path, you know.

But obviously John is smart in that he spends a lot of time doing the things that he wants to do. Spends a lot of time training his dog, doing, you know, tactical stuff. He’s always shooting guns and training and you know, you got to have things outside of that life, you know, that you enjoy other than just partying.

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah, you got to have fun. You got to have some type of gap and some release. Yeah, and he’s got a, he’s got a good release and he’s got a good mentality of what the release should be and how it should go and where he needs to go with it.

And then, I mean, I’ve been with him now since we have this close connection. I’ve been with him to two places and he’s always, he’s always kept me on a straight path, and which is really, really nice. You know, a lot of people that may have, you know, like to like to take shots or like to do something like that. You know, there’s always a little man.

JOE ROGAN: Do you want one? Right?

GABLE STEVESON: But there’s never. There’s never been a time where he’s like, “Man, I think you should try.” And it’s great, because as an older. As a younger kid that’s coming up, he sees the potential, and that’s all that matters. And I just need someone to see it. And, man, he’s been great with it, for sure. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: When you’re around a bunch of people that party and they drag you into that world, it’s so easy for people to get hooked. It’s so easy for people to just get roped into that lifestyle, because people essentially, for the most part, imitate their atmosphere.

And if you’re around that kind of an atmosphere, those are the type of people that you’re with, and those are the type of thrills that they’re seeking. You can get caught up in that, you know, and it’s the bane of every fighter’s existence is women in partying. Yeah.

GABLE STEVESON: He’s always been like, “Hey, you got to stay. You got to stay clean. Go home.” And that’s been the best part about it.

The Timeline and UFC Negotiations

JOE ROGAN: That’s great, man. That is f*ing great. So what is the timeline right now? Have you signed a deal with the UFC? I know they’re talking to you. What’s going on?

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah, they’ve reached out many times, but I told them I’m kind of on the lines of right now, I’m waiting for my little girl to come out. So January is kind of a dead month for me.

JOE ROGAN: But are you signed with the UFC?

GABLE STEVESON: No, no, I’m not signing anybody.

JOE ROGAN: Have they offered you a fight yet?

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah, they’ve reached out about a couple things, but no one specific. They just offer dates.

JOE ROGAN: Do you want to have fights in other organizations first? One of the problems with a guy like you is that you’re so talented that you could have 12 fights in the UFC and all of a sudden be fighting a top contender, which I think you would do well.

But if I was a manager of a boxer and a guy with your potential, I would do what Cus D’Amato did with Mike Tyson. You have him fight a bunch of different guys, like you did with dirty boxing. Small organization MMA fights, build up those skills, get experience while you’re constantly training and growing and getting better. And then once you enter into the UFC, you’re essentially already the champion. It’s just nobody knows it yet.

GABLE STEVESON: I would really like to debut at the White House.

JOE ROGAN: Debut?

GABLE STEVESON: I would like to debut at the White House. I would like to do one or two more fights before then, and then if I can sign, do a big release, “Hey, he signed. Good job.” And then debuted at the White House. That’s my perfect world.

JOE ROGAN: Is it hard to get fights right now?

GABLE STEVESON: Maybe a little bit. I don’t ask. I just say yes, and then just keep moving. I kind of leave it up to Jon to watch the people and all the coaches to watch and see what goes on. But I mean, if a guy says no, there’s no hard feelings. I mean, just keep it pushing, and hopefully I can get to the guy that says yes.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the problem is that when a guy gets so much hype around him, there’s a lot of guys who want to eventually be a world champion and go, “I’m not ready for this guy yet.” Good guys. This guy’s not on another level right now.

GABLE STEVESON: But just when, if they do think that, just whenever you think you are ready, I will be there waiting.

JOE ROGAN: That’s terrifying.

GABLE STEVESON: I will be there waiting. That’s terrifying.

JOE ROGAN: A lot of people heard that. I don’t want to wait.

GABLE STEVESON: I don’t want to wait.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a mouth. But also, the smart move might be to get a hold of you now before you get better.

GABLE STEVESON: You can try now, too.

JOE ROGAN: But you know what I’m saying.

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know what I’m saying? I mean, pick your poison.

The Worst Version of Gable Steveson

GABLE STEVESON: I mean, like I said, dirty boxing, and that last fight in November with that double leg, that’s the worst I’ll ever be. And it’s kind of neat to repeat that to the world, to kind of let them get a refresher. That is the worst Gable Steveson will be, and the best is when he’ll come back his next time. But after that, that’s the last worst I’ll ever be after that.

JOE ROGAN: So do you have a blueprint, like a map of where, what you’d like to accomplish in your career?

GABLE STEVESON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Long term.

GABLE STEVESON: Yeah, long term. I’d like to be champion, UFC champion. I think Stipe has about five defenses, if I’m not mistaken. I would like to try to beat that record if I can, and if I can’t, die trying.

I played in the NFL. I won the Olympics. I would just like to be just an overall good man. A lot of people want to look at, like we just talked about, a lot of people want to look at the success, the money. I just want to be an excellent man.

I want to look back and be like, “Damn, Gable did that.” And I saw Dana White, he had a picture, and he said, “Let your last name be the reason that people remember you.” And I want the Steveson last name to be something that people remember, and I want them to look at me and be like, “Damn, through the peaks and valleys, Gable stood up and he became someone in his life, and he provided for his family, and he went home healthy,” and that’s what I want.

Championship’s going to come, but I feel like a lot of people are so obsessed with “I got to do this,” but I’m obsessed with being the best version of Gable, because if I’m the best version of Gable, you’re not going to be able to beat me.

JOE ROGAN: Keep that mindset, and you will accomplish these things, my man.

GABLE STEVESON: I appreciate it.

JOE ROGAN: I believe it. Well, I appreciate it. Thank you very much for being here.

GABLE STEVESON: Yes. You already know.

JOE ROGAN: Pleasure.

GABLE STEVESON: Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: And I can’t wait to see you fight in the UFC, man.

GABLE STEVESON: I can’t wait to do it.

JOE ROGAN: Going to be fun. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Bye, everybody.

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