#821 & Fight Companion - Joey Diaz

Joe Rogan (0:06)

I get so pumped up for these. Uh, Fight Companion. If you've never heard one of these before, ladies and gentlemen, I'll probably explain this in the introduction for the people that have to listen to the audio version of it only.

Uh, we just watch fights and we talk shit. We may or may not discuss the actual fight itself. Uh, most of the time, we don't. But today, it's with the great Joey motherfucking Diaz.

Joey Diaz (0:29)

Thank you for having me.

Joe Rogan (0:30)

Thanks for being here, brother. I'm excited, I'm excited about our show at the Cot Theater tomorrow night.

Yes.

Joey Diaz (0:36)

Out of all the fights on the card, Dos Años, Alvarez was the fight.

Joe Rogan (0:42)

Really?

Joey Diaz (0:42)

That was my fight.

Joe Rogan (0:43)

For the whole weekend?

Joey Diaz (0:44)

The whole weekend. I didn't know when it was. I thought it was on the undercard. I didn't know when it was.

Joe Rogan (0:49)

Yeah, this one tonight.

Joey Diaz (0:50)

I've been waiting for it. This, to me, is a fucking barn burner.

Joe Rogan (0:54)

I'm looking forward to it, for sure, because Alvarez is very tough, and he makes every fight tough. He's a tough dude, and I think he's going to have a real good game plan coming in. I think he's going to be as prepared as you're ever going to see him, because you've seen him off some hard fights in the UFC, you know.

He had that war with Cowboy Cerrone, got lit up, especially his leg.

His leg kicked. He just got introduced to the next level of MMA. But coming off of a victory like that over Pettis, and he beat Gilbert, too, and if I had to fight through adversity in the Gilbert Melendez fight, he had a seriously fucked up eye. Remember his eye-sport shot?

Joey Diaz (1:29)

Yes, that's right.

Joe Rogan (1:30)

He's a tough dude.

And that's tough to fucking do. He's as game as they get. But this dude is special. This Dos Anjos is special.

He's hit a very high level over the last couple of years, and his skill level is higher than it's ever been. It's like a bunch of different things coming together. One, it's Rafael Cordero. Rafael Cordero is such a good coach. The coach of Kings MMA, the original guys from Shoot the Box in Curitiba, Brazil, those guys were so badass. I mean, he's from such a badass lineage. He's from the early days of Ninja and Anderson Silva. And he's the guy who took Fabricio Verdun from a guy who really wasn't a striker at all. Just a jujitsu artist. And he brought him to the heavyweight title. And now you look at Fabricio striking, he made a big mistake, obviously, in the Stipe Miocic fight, but I think Stipe Miocic is a bad motherfucker. If he catches you, he catches you. He tried to go to war with Stipe, and Stipe just was better at moving away and countering him, and he got careless and left some openings. And it could have been because he was in Brazil, he was real emotional, you know. Who knows? He fucked up, and Stipe is a bad motherfucker. So those two are a bad combination together. But that said, you look at Verdun striking against Travis Brown, it's excellent. His striking against Cain Velasquez, it's excellent, excellent. Long, snaps that jab out, keeps you at a distance, throws hard kicks, because he wants you to take him down. How about that? He wants you. Put him on his back. Good luck with that.

Good luck with the nastiest guard the heavyweight division has ever seen, arguably. He's a motherfu- I mean, Frank Muir snapped arms. I mean, you got to go with- like, if you want to look at, like, effective submissions in the heavyweight division in MMA, it's tough to not give the nod to Frank Muir. Tapped Lesnar with a kneebar, snapped Minotaro's arm, snapped Tim Sylvia's arm, just maybe not for his overall career, because he's definitely had ups and downs, but been in some amazing fights, but his submission victories are fucking horrendous. He breaks bones, man. Who the fuck else breaks bones? Frank Muir's breaking bones with arm bars, breaking bones with Kimura. He broke fucking Minotaro's arm, snapped it in half, where he was looking over at it, like, holy shit.

So it's hard not to give the nod to Frank Muir when it comes to, like, overall MMA guard skill. But that said, man, the technical ability that Verdun has is off the charts. The way he wraps you up is so neat. He just tucks everything tight. Like, that Phaidor arm bar, oh my god. I mean, he just slapped that on him, where Phaidor was stuck in that guard, and you could see in his eyes, he was like, oh shit. Like, this is like, the water's heavier, I can't drink it.