#921 - Dominick Cruz

Dominick Cruz (0:00)

These are sick. It's like those MREs.

Joe Rogan (0:03)

Two, one, bam.

Yeah, Dominick Cruz is sitting here, he's looking at this thing called Green Belly Meal, Meal to Go. The guy who created this is like this long-distance hiker. Like, he does those, like, do you know that trail, what is it called, the Appalachian Trail that goes from...

Dominick Cruz (0:19)

I know of it.

Joe Rogan (0:19)

You know of it, yeah. What does it go from, like, Georgia to Maine or something crazy like that? And these people walk it.

It takes, like, six months.

Dominick Cruz (0:29)

Yeah, I'm into stuff like that, but that's, like, a whole different part of your life, I feel like, you get to when you do stuff like that.

Joe Rogan (0:35)

Well, you gotta have a real commitment because you're not doing anything but that for six months.

Dominick Cruz (0:39)

Yeah, it's a different lifestyle change.

Joe Rogan (0:41)

Yeah.

Dominick Cruz (0:41)

It's, like, a different time in your life, I feel, when you do something like that.

Joe Rogan (0:44)

Yeah, but, like, being a fighter, do you feel like, like, you're pretty limited as to what you can do outside of fighting, as far as, like, you're always recovering from training, you're always involved in something related to either promotion or preparation?

Dominick Cruz (1:01)

Yeah, agreed. It's, I mean, I'm not telling you anything you don't know. How many of these things have you done with pro athletes?

Joe Rogan (1:09)

I've done a lot, yeah.

Dominick Cruz (1:10)

You know that it's all or nothing. Because everybody's so good that if you don't invest every ounce of yourself into something, there's somebody else that is, in my opinion. So it's like, you have to do that, or else you get passed by.

Joe Rogan (1:24)

Yeah, and you also feel like you have to be super objective, too, about where you stand and where your skills are at. Of course. You're either at a point of constant improvement or you're at some sort of stagnation or a decline.

Dominick Cruz (1:39)

Yes, I think so. But then that question always comes to mind according to win and loss ratio, which doesn't always tell the truth, because that's not always the fact. It could just be a bad night and a good matchup and they had a game plan or you lost and now you're going to sit and go to the drawing board and say that everything was off because of one loss. That doesn't really make sense to me. So it's kind of a mixture.

You got to find the happy medium that comes down to trust in the people around you.

Not having nothing but yes men around you. And I feel like as long as you have a good solid base of people that give the truth to you, then you don't have to think with your emotion and you can think with logic. And then I think it's important to have those people around you so you don't steer off the course.

Joe Rogan (2:23)

Right, because even if you, I mean, even if you do have a loss, it's not saying that everything is off, but certainly something wasn't adequate in that particular matchup. Yeah. So you're just getting off of the second loss ever of your mixed martial arts career. The first one, you got caught by Uriah with a guillotine and then the second one, this Cody no love fight.

What are your thoughts on it now? Having time to reflect and look back and...

Dominick Cruz (2:52)

Well, my thoughts are...

I pretty much laid it all out right away because I wanted to just do that, which was at the press conference, the post-fight press conference. I pretty much just wanted to... I literally laid every ounce of every thought I had at that moment out there for everybody to hear in a point where I'm very vulnerable. And I did that on purpose to show that we're not all the same.

Some people don't want to show their vulnerability.

Some people want to just be seen as only perfect, only tough, only strong. And really the truth of what makes the strongest people in the world is their vulnerability early until they learn how to be tough. And losing is part of that lesson, unfortunately, for everybody. And being unsuccessful is part of that lesson for people just as much as losing. So it's like, you do what you can with it. And that's how I feel now, is like I do what I can with it. And the only way to make the best of it is to accept it right the second it happens. Understand that that's just the way it is. That's the way that this has been slated for this portion of my life. And just move forward. And as long as you embrace it, don't make excuses for it.