JRE MMA Show #87 with Kamaru Usman

Joe Rogan (0:00)

Three, two, one.

Champ! What's up, how are you?

Kamaru Usman (0:05)

What's up, Joe? I'm good, I'm good, life is good.

Joe Rogan (0:09)

Life is good.

Kamaru Usman (0:10)

It's good, stressful, but it's good.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

Well, I mean, it has to be stressful. You're the king of the hill.

Kamaru Usman (0:15)

Yes, yes, and that's a lot of things they don't tell you.

Joe Rogan (0:19)

Dude, I remember.

Kamaru Usman (0:20)

You know, I'm way up there.

Joe Rogan (0:20)

Matt Hughes, when he lost to BJ Penn, I was interviewing him in the octagon. He said something like really honest and very shocking. He said, honestly, he goes, it's a relief.

He goes, like, being a champ and the stress of it all, he goes, I feel relieved to have been lost. Like, first of all, to lose, it's very, like, the fact that he had the balls to say that, like, just admit it, like, hey, it's a relief. Like, you know, he just choked me out, but I'm happy. I'm happy it happened.

Kamaru Usman (0:46)

It is, for guys like that that have reached that status, it is the Anderson Silva, the George St. Pierre, those guys, it is a relief because, you know, and I'm just, I'm starting to see a little bit why.

Because as soon as I walk out of there, defending your title, as soon as you just beat this kid up, fans can't wait to say, oh no, this is the guy that's gonna beat you. That's the guy that's gonna beat you. So there's really no come down, you know, let me take a vacation, let me do this. No, because fans are on it. They want a guy to step in there with you tomorrow to beat you.

Joe Rogan (1:21)

That's always gonna happen though, isn't it?

Kamaru Usman (1:22)

Yeah, you know, but.

Joe Rogan (1:23)

With everybody, anybody who's a champ.

Kamaru Usman (1:25)

Yeah, but that's, now imagine doing that five, six, seven times over and over, like these guys, George St. Pierre, for decades have done.

Over, it just gets overwhelming because it's like, nothing's ever good enough for you guys. You know, I can't go out there, put on a flawless performance win and just have you guys say, you know what, he's the best. No, it's like, you were good, but yeah, this guy's gonna beat you. This guy, this guy's good enough to beat you.

Joe Rogan (1:50)

Well, there's always gonna be a certain percentage of people that are not happy with anything. I saw a lot of people that are tweeting, talking shit about Conor after he just won flawless victory, 40 second knockout of Donald Cerrone, and they were like, that doesn't prove shit. He's gonna fall apart if he fights anybody good. Soon as he gets in there with a wrestler, this and that, blah, blah, blah. It's like, some people are just negative.

Kamaru Usman (2:11)

Absolutely.

Joe Rogan (2:12)

You can't fix them. You just gotta accept them the way they are. Just like, eh.

Kamaru Usman (2:15)

I know, and it's one of the advice that Rashad gave me early on, is make friends with this. Make friends with, because you get worked up before a fight. So he's like, no, make friends with that feeling. Because that's a good feeling. Or you're backstage before your fight, you're super nervous, you wanna take a shit, you wanna pee, you pee like 50 times, you're barely drinking water, but somehow there's some kind of pee coming out.

And he's like, no, make friends with that feeling. The moment you accept that feeling, it's not that big of a burden anymore.

Joe Rogan (2:49)

Rashad's a wise man.

Kamaru Usman (2:50)

A super wise man.

Joe Rogan (2:51)

That's a very, that's a very wise piece of advice, because you can really change your perception based on how you approach something and just deciding, this is all right, this is a part of the process, this is what's up, this is how it works.

Kamaru Usman (3:04)

It's big for me right now. It's very, very big for me, because I'm a creature of a routine. I love having a routine.

And it's a fine line between routine and obsessive compulsive.

It's a very, very fine line. Because, and it started on for me early on. When I started to succeed in wrestling, I was like, okay, this is my routine. Okay, I'm looking at the, okay, I'm 10 matches out. So that means I need to get up, and I need to warm up. My warm up was the same. Okay, I'm gonna jog back and forth twice, before I, I skip back and forth twice, before I do my lunges back and forth twice, before I do my stance in motion back and forth twice.