Full transcript: Patrick Vickers on London Real
0:16 Hello and welcome to London Real. My name is Brian Rose and with me, as usual, is Mr. Nick Gabriel and joining us today in studio is Mr. Patrick Vickers. Welcome.
0:25 Thank you very much. Good to be here. Before we get started, I just wanted to thank our good friends at onit.com. That’s O-N-N-I-T for those people listening on iTunes. They are the makers of Alpha Brain and thank God because it’s making the world a better place. Patrick has just had his first Alpha Brain. How does it feel?
0:43 No visible change yet. Well, to be fair, it was like 60 seconds ago, right? All right, we’re going to keep an eye on it. I only took 10, though. The overdose.
0:52 Man, I had this guy on Facebook the other day, because we did that Alpha Mary giveaway. And he was like, he’s a doctor. And he was like, oh, this is not proven. And it’s the placebo effect and everything. And he just really pissed me off, because he’s just, when people speak from a position of ignorance, right, he doesn’t know, or he didn’t do his research and find out that a bunch of the stuff in the alpha brain has undergone double-blind clinical trials.
1:17 Has it? Yeah, so it’s like when people say stuff like that, it’s just a bit annoying, right? I should probably have read what was on the back before. You’re going to break out in a rash in the bottom. GPC choline, I think, is the big one.
1:27 But a few people promote this stuff, including ourselves. And yeah, there’s been a lot of blowback as far as people getting kind of quite animated about it, even though a lot of people take fish oil supplements and tons of stuff. But for some reason, the whole new topic We’ll take supplements then on even you know that FDA hasn’t looked at them. They’re not registered They’re not regulated. So, you know, yeah, this is just this is just another one of those and you you know Do you research and you take your chances? Yeah experiment with it. What everyone has found out it including my my Russian Housemaid personal assistant she took some and she had like crazy lucid dreams Like she went and spoke to her grandfather in Latvia from 1965 and stuff. So you might get some crazy dreams I had the craziest dream of my whole life on Alpha Brain.
2:14 Dude, you’ve got to talk about it. Put another dimension or something. Yeah. Jesus Christ. I was in Greece.
2:20 I was teaching a jujitsu seminar. I’d taken Alpha Brain that morning, and then I forgot about it, right? And so my host said, OK, we’ll start the seminar at 5 PM tonight. I’ll drop you at your hotel room and you can have a nap. So I took a nap.
2:35 And I had this weird, first of all, The dreams are way more vivid than ordinary dreams. I mean, you will attest to that. Yeah, vivid and lucid, yeah. And then in the dream, I opened up this wormhole in the fabric of space and time. And I went through this tunnel to this alternate reality and saw my brother and my mom, who I’m having, well, I’ve always had kind of emotional issues with both of them.
2:59 Family always seems to come into these dreams. Right? And so I remember it was, and afterwards, when I woke up after this dream, after I’ve been having this weird chat with them in this alternate dimension. I woke up and I just couldn’t move. I was just lying in the bed like, what the fuck just happened?
3:15 And that’s when I became like a proper alpha brain convert, right? I hope Patrick doesn’t go on and try to purge these right now. Okay. Well, anyways, if you want to buy some, you can go to onit.com and go for alpha brain. If you use the code London Real, you’ll get 10% off.
3:30 And yeah, check it out. You can also get the link on our website, which is Londonreal.tv. So there you go. And I’ve said, I was trying to think of how to introduce Patrick today, and I don’t know what the hell to do. I mean, I kind of…
3:43 I have an idea. Yeah, go ahead. Patrick. Here we go. I was thinking about this on the way over on the train.
3:50 I don’t know you very well. I think we’ve met once before. And that’s usually, I find the best way to like to interact with someone and you don’t know anything about them. So what I wanted to ask you is, what to you represents ultimate freedom? Wow, that’s not a small question. Nick always has the head voice. What represents ultimate freedom?
4:15 I guess having the ability to do what you want and I know that’s a sort of very sort of generic answer but I guess that giving you the time, the resources and the inclination to go off and do your own thing. So okay maybe if I’ll phrase it a little bit differently. What do you think is diametrically opposed to your freedom? What would you believe it would really restrict your freedom in your life? Working for the man and working for someone else, which flows quite nicely into, I guess, something that Brian and I have both done relatively recently, which is say goodbye to working for another large corporation.
4:59 We did it independently, too. When did you leave? What did you leave? I have worked for an investment bank for the last 10 years or for hedge funds or investment banking for the last 10 years and throughout that time I’ve been actively involved in sport. I played a decent level of rugby up until I moved to New York. In New York I couldn’t play as much rugby so I moved across to doing Thai boxing for fitness. I came back and my brother was training for mixed martial arts which other people know is cage fighting and And I have, and so I started doing that, gave up rugby two years ago, and now I, I guess, even though it sounds a bit weird, a professional fighter, so I’ve always had that in my life.
5:44 I was training three hours a day and working 12 hours a day. And that wasn’t really sustainable. And now I’m involved in the business of, I guess, mixed martial arts and earning gyms and, you know, supplements, clothing lines, and that kind of thing. A lot more independent, a lot less structured, and you know, allows me a lot more freedom. Good for you, my man.
6:11 How long did you keep up that regimen before you were working in the city 12 hours a day and training three hours a day? Two, two years, but it really had a negative effect on my body. Yeah, I’m sure it must have. So it took me two years for me to catch up with me, but my last fight I had, I was 15 seconds in and I was exhausted. had taken, if you know Jujitsu, I’d taken the guys back in the first 30 seconds of the fight and couldn’t finish it and was absolutely exhausted.
6:38 Were you even sitting there thinking to yourself, what is going on? Well, my heart rate being elevated, my blood pressure had been elevated beforehand and I just went through it. And actually my blood pressure and heart rate remained elevated for the next two weeks. Yeah, people don’t understand that like, That level of training that most fighters put themselves through, what you’re doing is just rapidly aging yourself. Just causing your body to secrete cortisol, which is the hormone of aging.
7:08 It’s the stress hormone. In massive doses all the time. The funny thing is I was running at 5% body fat at the time. So I had to make weight. I fight 155 pounds, or 11 stone, or 70 kilos.
7:20 And I walk around around 12 and a half. Always hungry, right? Yeah, always hungry, always training. And yes, I was surprised it had taken me two years for that to actually happen, because I was fighting every two months, basically. But it did put a lot of stress on me, and it’s taken me a while to recover.
7:40 But now, training smart, rather than training hard, is definitely something that I believe in. So in Russia, even now, they’re still so far ahead of the US and the rest of Europe when it comes to sport science. Really? Yeah, what Russia did was during the Cold War, one of the pillars of propaganda was sport in Russia. So what they did, because of their socio-political structure, they could plan things out on a long scale and rarely see what worked.
8:15 So they tried everything. They tried steroids. They tried different training methodologies, et cetera, et cetera. And one of the things they do with their athletes is every morning when they wake up, they make them, I can’t remember what the device is called, but the guy has to squeeze this device that measures the pressure of his grip. And they can tell straight away if you’re overtrained or not.
8:36 And I guess I wouldn’t be surprised if you went into a UFC training camp and did this test with a bunch of the dudes, you’d find that they’re fucking totally overtrained. We do slightly different, professional athletes now do slightly different stuff. Every morning they wake up and they have to, if they’re in a structured program, they have to put in their level of soreness and their level of motivation. They also get their base heart rate taken a long time ago.
8:59 So they wake up, get their heart rate done so they can see, yes, I’m in base, or no, I’m 5%, 10% over. They fill in the spreadsheet saying how motivated they are, how sore they are, and that determines their training program for the day. So typically, if you’re a professional athlete, want to train. Personally, I always want to train. It’s kind of that motivation. So if you don’t have that, then it’s a good indicator that you are over training and that you’re tired and you need a rest. Your base heart rate gives you an indication of where you are versus the norm. So that enables, that’s another good indicator. And then obviously how sore you are. So then, you know, an hour later, so they take, do that at seven, they get up, you know, have some food, give their first work at 8.30. There are people managing their programme would have determined already what type of programme they should have, whether it should be intense, whether they need to back off, whether they need to push a little bit harder.
9:52 So in line with what you were you just talking about that sort of stress test, we’re trying to modify that or professional athletes now trying to modify that and put that into their regime. Is this what you guys do? Not at the moment because it tends to be when you’re in a big organised programme say like GB athletics or you know professional rugby teams, professional football teams. at the moment I’m not at that level but I can you know I measure my own heart rate so that I know I didn’t know that and I can obviously judge my own motivation and levels of soreness. I mean if you like if you can’t tell whether you’re tired or not you don’t you know that you’re not an athlete I mean an athlete knows like he wakes up and feels fuck I’m good to go or exhausted I mean it’s pretty so many fighters I mean the UFC guys so five years ago they would just get up and push and push and push.
10:41 So I recently wrote an article, I don’t know exactly where I’m gonna publish it, but it was exactly on over training and ways to work out whether you have over trained and also about the mentality of the UFC and mixed martial arts and how it’s trained hard all the time. We’ve got an obese, we live in an obese world and there’s been a huge backlash to that in sort of like hardcore training circles, which is that you have to smash yourself. CrossFit, for example.
11:03 CrossFit is incredibly bad for you. It’s a great test to do, but it’s not something that you wanna do every day because it smashes your central nervous system. Man, there’s a forum, very interesting mention, there’s a forum I go to and one of the guys mentioned CrossFit and look in the comments section of a specific article. And what he did was posted two pictures before and after of this chick who’s a professional CrossFit model, fitness model, and she does a lot with CrossFit.
11:33 And there was an eight year lapse between when she was a fitness model and then when she became a CrossFit athlete and she was still pretty young, I think it was from between 22 and 30 and she is so haggard, like completely broken down and it’s just the constant cortisol secretion. You know, it’s like- What’s a good example of a CrossFit workout? I mean, I’ve seen a lot of them online. So, do five times, 100 meter sprints, 30, you know, as many pull-ups as you can and then push-ups to failure.
12:05 Right, and do it until 20 minutes or something. Yeah, so it’s just like smash, I can see how you can either use that as a test for yourself or you can do it like once a week, but doing it every single day destroys your central nervous system, completely messes it up. You literally become burnt up. How does that play out when your central nervous system gets fried? You get what I have over training and that was your heart rate goes up, your productivity goes down.
12:27 Delayed reaction times as well. How do you train smarter now than how you used to? I listen to my body a lot more. So today, for example, I’ve been training twice a day this week, and my calves were shot, so I’ve been running and I just thought, you know, I’ve got sparring this evening at 8.30, I’m just not going to do anything. So I listen to myself a lot more, I try and stretch a lot more because, you know, strength requires flexibility, you can’t, you know, the two are not mutually exclusive, they’re symbiotic, so you require flexibility in order to stay strong, especially especially as you get older, it’ll definitely, the more you stretch, yoga Pilates will definitely allow you to prolong your training.
13:10 And I also don’t, you know, you’ve got to pick when you train hard. You think about the number of intense workouts that you do a week. Put down every single workout that you do and look at the intensity of it. And you can go on a sort of a traffic light principle where red is really hard, orange is medium and green is relatively easy. And you have to make sure that you don’t do too many intensive workouts a week.
13:32 So you try and mix things up, and a lot of people feel as if they’re not working out in fighting as though they’re going backwards, but in general life as though they’re getting fat. Now, that doesn’t necessarily happen, as Nixori said, that cortisol gets excreted by the body when you get put under stress. So it can actually be counterproductive to train too hard, and also not just the sort of keeping fat on your body. you look too haggard and you look too thin, you don’t look good. Look at an old person.
14:04 What happens to an old person, they lose all the fat in their face, okay? And that ages you. So having too, you know, having too much fat loss actually doesn’t make you look good in the face. And whenever I train for a fight and I’m losing, you know, when I have to cut down a stone, a stone and a half, I don’t look good. You know, I look a lot, yeah, you look very drawn, you look at any MMA fighter standing on the scales.
14:30 They don’t look healthy. Cutting weight is so unhealthy, especially the way those dudes do it. Joe’s seen some guys up there, he says, and they look like aliens, you know, they’re just so drawn out. And some guys are cutting weight the wrong way. I think there’s a lot more education these days as far as how guys are doing it.
14:45 But the old wrestling way, because American wrestling was the original way to cut weight, and I used to cut weight when I wrestled it at 17 years old. It’s just to sweat it out, And I used to run my trash bags on me. I didn’t know what I was doing. And I think there’s much more intelligent ways of doing it these days. And you’re actually getting a backlash now that some of the fighters like just fighting at their own weight.
15:05 They feel stronger. You know, they feel as though they can go a lot. Yeah, Frankie Edgar is a good example. Frankie Edgar is the prime example. Man, they could solve the whole problem by making people weigh in before the fight.
15:15 But it’s what boxers do, actually. Old school box, I think, right? No, boxers now, you get weighed in a week or, I can’t remember the exact time, but you get weighed in like a week or a month beforehand to check that you’re not cutting too much in a short period of time. So I don’t know whether, you know, it’s, I don’t know what the limit is, so I don’t know how severe, you know, or strict it is, but at least it’s got some semblance of… There was one state in the US that they did that.
15:43 They weighed in like two days before, and then the one day before, and if you dropped too much, they weren’t… And school kids certainly shouldn’t be doing it, and I know that’s huge in the states, like 13, 14, 15 year old kids, and if you listen to, if you look at the people that have died, it tends to be the younger, you know, people have died from weight cutting. So it’s something that if you’re going to do, you should really investigate and you know, you want to start doing small weight cuts.
16:07 So whenever we have guys that are fighting from our gym that are first starting to cut, we make sure that they do small increments first and then they can build up. And you know, there are guys that I know that I train with that cut 15 to 20 pounds on a day, which is a huge amount. But they’ve been doing it for 10 years. So they know their bodies. You don’t wanna be doing that amount right from the start.
16:31 First time. You said you were sparring later tonight. I was just wondering, because you probably wanna just mention all the details of your gym, but he’s over at the MMA clinic, and I mean, you guys spar pretty hard. And I was wondering how you spar without hurting yourself or hurting the other guys. It’s such a fine line, because you guys put the headgear on and the shin kicks and go for it.
16:51 Yeah, so I’m just doing boxing today and I’m doing it with a guy called John Tandy who’s been in 35 corners for world title fights. He’s, you know, two, three stone heavier than me, but he only fights at 40% of his ability. He’s an amazing fighter and amazing coach. So you have 16 ounce gloves and you have headgear on. The chance of doing any damage and cutting your face is actually quite small.
17:16 Yeah, but dude, I mean, I was doing sparring yesterday with exactly that, 16 ounce gloves and head yarn. And- Get hit in the nose. Bro, I got rocked with the right hand and I’ve still got a fucking headache. Really? Yeah, so like, I mean- Well, generally I don’t find problems that, you know, even sparring against bigger guys, I’ve never really had a problem with that.
17:36 Body shots is what’s gonna stop you. Really? You know, if I was doing a white collar boxing match, if you were of similar ability, you’re never gonna stop a guy with shots to the head. But if you hit him in the body, that’s the only way that I see those fights getting stopped of guys that have similar ability because the body shots up. Have you, if you’ve never been hit with one in the liver or in the kidneys or- Take a couple.
17:58 You know? Just a couple. They’re horrible. Baz, from Baz’s- Baz Rutten. Yeah, you were one of the 800 dudes that he knocked down.
18:04 The liver shot, yeah. I was training with Baz about a year ago and I stuck a clip in on our jiu-jitsu episode we did and he’s at the end, he’s talking to me how he hits the liver shot and he’s like, yeah, I go, I go- This is Baz Rutten. Yeah, in LA and he goes, you know bar And he’s like showing me how he goes a left to the body left to the head and then back to the body and he’s like He’s like, I’m not kidding you I’ve knocked out six or seven hundred guys with that shot Yeah, and he’s like he’s like no I would spar six eight times a day in Holland and I mean like he’s crazy But I believe him there’s on an interesting tangent. There’s a website called what would Baz Rutan do It’s got nothing we need to do with Baz apart from they’re using his name But there was an there was something that I want to talk about and feels is I’m relatively passionate about is the use of the term Cage fighting. Okay. Yeah, I think I saw you have a rant on Facebook
18:53 Good come on, but basically at the moment even though the world cage fighting in sort of Popular culture has huge negative connotations Yes, and while in the US the sport is relatively far advanced the USC is hugely popular it’s coming up to levels with the NHL in terms of it’s sort of its public acceptance and its public popularity. It’s on Fox now which is a major sports network. So it’s gone on Fox. Over here you know obviously recently we had those two kids that were doing cage fighting which wasn’t actually cage fighting it was submission wrestling and it was actually wasn’t about it was an exhibition So they would get a submission say an arm lock or a leg lock and they would tap and they would continue So it wasn’t even as though they were fighting it where they were doing a continuous sort of five-minute Okay show but obviously the Daily Mail and all of those other papers jumped on the bandwagon said this is horrific And yes, the context wasn’t great. Okay, it never looks good when they’re you know You’re in a sort of a pub like context and these people are you know being cheered on by a load of adults Was it in a pub?
20:02 No, no. It was in a men’s working club or something like that. So yes, that was bad and that was probably a poor decision made by the promoter. But if they’d been wearing a gi, right, if they’d been wearing, you know, if they’d been in the US, if they’d been, you know, had fancy coloured belts on, no one would have really said very much. But because the word case fighting…
20:25 The UK tabloids would have found a way to spin it and they would have said, oh, these guys are these kids are strangling each other with their jacket they would have found a way but to me it was the word they use the words cage fighting and as soon as that happens you think of John McCain and John McCain compared mixed martial arts to human cop fighting this is 93 or something yeah so a long time ago he was one of the you know the big opponents to the popularization and the sort of the modernization of the sport but and it almost bankrupted the UFC and it’s how the Zuffa brothers bought the UFC and it took a million Four or five years to get it back on television. It’s hysterical because, you know, there was, you guys can tell me if I’m right or wrong, but apparently McCain was in the pocket of the boxing promoters and that’s why he wanted the UFC stopped, right?
21:11 Because I think that’s ultimately, I don’t know, that’s ultimately what it was, the boxing commissions didn’t, because they could see the popularity of UFC and so they were trying to get it suppressed. It was a great scapegoat as well, just to climb on it. Big time. then was really marketing it more as a blood sport. Yeah exactly and so I was making a lot of money on pay-per-views, the original one. Yeah and but to me that’s so to me that’s the problem is that this word is entrenched in British society and has huge negative connotations. So if we as people that are involved in the business side of the sport continue to market it like that, continue to focus on the underground brutal sort of gangster style no holds barred. The kind of meathead sort of crowd gets attracted to as well yeah but it’s but it’s not you look at the demographics of the people that follow the sport they’re you know us three are prime examples you know you don’t have to be you know from you know you don’t have to be gangster like you know skinhead Nazi to enjoy the sport now none of the fighters are because they’re serious exactly to me to me that to me the fighters are like skaters surfers you know snowboarders that’s sort of like alternative lifestyle yeah some of them like to paint their nails some of them like Mohawk some of them like red hair you know but it’s sort of it’s a different way of looking at stuff rather than being sort of fascist or violent or brutal so if we
22:32 Continue to market the sport like that we’ll continue to attract them but then we’re never going to be able to get to the mainstream we’re never going to be able to appeal to the broad market in the United Kingdom which means that fighters are never going to be able to support themselves gyms are never going to be able to support themselves clothing brands journalists well you know this from a first-hand standpoint because you run promotions, you run fights here. So I mean, you know, right? You can see…
22:58 The UK market is very difficult, you know, it’s definitely popular, but you have so much to compete with in London in terms of football, the cinema, theatre, you know, just high-end restaurant. You know, there’s so much choice that it’s difficult, you know, it is very difficult for these shows to compete. The broad fan base isn’t there yet, and I think as long as this word cage fighting is still in people’s, you know, in people’s minds, we’re not going to be able to move away from that.
23:25 Would you prefer a cage cuddling? No, but I mean, I use it. And I mean, funny enough, you actually used it in the beginning of the podcast. I say it too. I was trying to explain it to my doctor the other day.
23:35 And I started talking about it. One thing I will say about MMA is if you start talking about it and you love it, people actually start listening to you. And they’re like, wow. So my doctor was asking me about it. That could be said for anything though.
23:45 It’s true. But I started talking about it. I’m like, these guys are there. They train so hard. doing this, this mixed martial arts, and they look at me and then I usually say, also known as cage fighting.
23:53 Yeah. I refuse to do that. You do? Okay. If some dude doesn’t have the, like, desire to go and find out a little bit more about it, I’m not going to, like, I find a lot of guys drop that word or that phrase, cage fighting, because they think it sounds cool.
24:07 I usually just try to jog their memory, but I shouldn’t. I promise Patrick I will no longer say cage fighting. Me too. I swear. On a similar note, you know, I read this article, I forwarded to you, I don’t know if you read it, about injuries in the NFL.
24:21 Did you read that thing? It’s concussions. I haven’t read it. It’s not just about the concussions. I can’t remember what his name was.
24:26 He played for the Panthers. He was a defensive lineman. And now he’s retired from football and he’s starting a foundation to help dude to spend years of football recover. And it’s a four page article just going into what these guys put their bodies through. Rugby, having played, I didn’t play in the premiership, I played national two national three rugby, which is sort of, you know, the US equivalent would be minor leagues, it was like the fourth division in the country. So you know, we’re playing against professional that you know, guys that are getting paid rugby significantly more dangerous, you know, dangerous sport, you don’t see, you know, there’s 15 people so the number of variables are much higher, you don’t see a lot of stuff that goes on, you’ve got metal cleats, you know, the shoe, the shoulder that you know, the shoulder the damage that gets done is significant.
25:14 Boxing is a far more dangerous part. Repeated head trauma. Yeah, repeated head trauma, and so not only do I get punched less in MMA, but I don’t get a standing eight count. Yeah, that’s dangerous. So I’ve been knocked semi-unconscious, I get given eight seconds, nine seconds to recover, okay, and then I get sent in again to get knocked senseless again, and that can happen multiple times in a round.
25:37 And what people don’t understand- So double concussion. What people don’t understand with boxing is the gloves aren’t to protect his head, they’re to protect your fists, right, so you can hit him more and more. So I’d like you to keep punching. Yeah, 10 ounce gloves. That’s crazy, huh?
25:48 Yeah, no one’s ever, no one ever says you wanna stop. I mean, you can’t say no, no one ever says no. So they go back in in a daze and then they wake up 24 hours after the fight with a brain hemorrhage. That’s true. But professional sport, if you think about, I mean, there’s that expression, I don’t know what it is in Latin, but it’s bread and circuses, right?
26:05 That’s how you keep the population controlled, right? Keep them from, don’t let them get hungry and give them some entertainment. And I would think of ancient Rome, like gladiators, fuck, you know, I mean, and it’s, you know, I was watching the Rugby World Cup, I think it was, what was it, was it last year? Last World Cup? No, this year, it was a few months ago.
26:27 Okay, no, the one before when the dude, the French dude had that, like- Chobale. Chobale. And that was the previous World Cup, right? That was four years ago from what I’m mistaken. So that would have been 2007.
26:38 Yes, exactly. So the one that South Africa won. Yeah. But anyway, there was a camera in the locker room before the French team was gonna go in the field. And the atmosphere was electric, bro.
26:55 These dudes were not gonna go throw a ball around. They were going to war. And that really impressed me about rugby. I’ve never even seen that, even in the locker room of an MMA match, it was incredible. Rugby players are proper warriors, man.
27:08 The concussions in rugby. Do you worry about concussions in MMA? Yes. OK. Well, you try not to, if you think about it, it’s bad.
27:16 But yes, they are around, and it can happen. But not as prevalent as, say, NFL or rugby, where guys are taking these blindsided hits and going back on the field. I would say they’re probably as frequent, because obviously all the trauma is to your head. But the interesting thing is, and it happens in boxing as well, is that you get medically suspended. So after the fight, you get checked out.
27:43 And if you’re, you know, if you’ve been knocked out, it’s an automatic suspension, unless you can show that you haven’t got the symptoms. You know, there are brain tests that you can do, sort of reaction tests. Rugby players do it, you know, they’ll take a baseline at the beginning of the season to see how your, you know, your brain functions and how quickly everything reacts and your synapses fire. And then you’ll get a concussion and you’ll have to pass the test back to within a certain range of how you were at the start in order to be able to play a game.
28:09 So I don’t know whether they do that within, I’m sure they have a similar kind of thing within MMA, but you get checked out afterwards and you get medically suspended straight away. This is in this very, very big show, so the UFC do it. And then it determines whether you’re fit and healthy to play a game. For your shows in London, do you guys do that kind of thing or medical exams? So there is no central commission.
28:34 There’s no central body over here which makes things more difficult, but we have just bought in a mandatory blood testing for all our fight, which is, you know, it’s not obligatory. There are lots of shows where there is no blood testing, so now every fighter that wants to be on our show has to have blood tests. What do they test for? It’s not performance enhancing, it’s for hepatitis B, C, and HIV. So you have to have a test that’s valued within the previous three months, so again, not perfect, but there is no perfect system for that.
29:07 We also have cut men, you get a medical beforehand, but all that really checks is your heart rate and your blood pressure. Okay, do you wanna talk about your gym, the organization, the fights, or your products? So we’ve just had a really exciting couple of weeks. I’ve just come back from Illinois. Yeah, yeah, tell me about that, it’s crazy.
29:27 So we bought a gym in Illinois. Mark Fury is the coach there, and now he was the coach for Matt Hughes. So Matt Hughes is probably the most well-known and the best, you know, the best well-to-weight fighter of all time. Yeah, he’s still fighting, right? He’s still fighting.
29:47 He has the most fights in the UFC, I think. Is that right? I think he’s right on the edge, he’s a 30-some. Yeah, so he, so we have him as our head coach. We have a few fighters that, you know, we’ve increased our stable of fighters that we manage quite substantially.
30:02 We now have three or four guys fighting in the very top shows, two in the UFC, two in Bellator, which is fantastic. So that’s good news in that just we now have gyms in Australia, the UK, Ireland and obviously the States. And we’ve also just signed a deal for our show to be shown on Sky Sports. Fantastic. That’s really good.
30:28 So we’re slowly, we’re about five years behind the US in terms of popular acceptance. So you reckon five. Yeah. It’s a long time. So what we’re doing, hopefully we’re building the foundation so that in five years’ time, we can get the public acceptance that we see the USC has, and putting the right foundations in place.
30:51 All those gyms are the same brand? Yeah, it’s the MMA and boxing clinic. OK. And that’ll be the same in the States? Yeah, it’ll be called either Fury’s MMA Clinic or the MMA Clinic, and then the fight team will be Fury MMA.
31:05 Wow, buying gems. That’s crazy. So what’s it like going from Goldman Sachs to now being like business development head of the gyms? I also want to know if you think that Goldman gets a bad rap or a good rap. Because for me, when I do Goldman Sachs, I think of a bunch of geniuses, but when you tell the rest of the world, I think it’s the vampire squid sucking the money out of humanity.
31:29 So I’ll address Goldman Sachs first, and I don’t have a bad thing to say about it. So you worked there before? Yeah, so I had nearly 10 years at Goldman, and then two years in between at a hedge fund. And very smart people, and the real funny thing is, I think still within the industry, it’s still got quite a cachet, but obviously Matt Taibbi, when he wrote those articles, basically used Goldman as a proxy for every single other investment bank. So there’s a lot of, what’s his, Michael Lewis as well, Michael Lewis did exactly the same thing.
32:05 Yeah. Yes, I’m sure Goldman were as culpable as every other investment bank and maybe a little bit more so, but if you look at the mortgages, CDOs, CLOs, all that stuff, which was one one of the main causes of the credit crunch. Goldman were not the biggest underwriter and not the biggest player in that market. But because of the amount of money that they made and because of this, because they went before the Senate and because they got basically sued by the government, it was a very easy target and then everybody jumped on that bandwagon and used them as a proxy for every other investment bank.
32:48 They’re like the perfect target, right? Yeah, so they were a perfect target. made a load of money, you know, and then it sort of just spiraled from there. So, yes, they’re culpable, but no more than, I would say, anyone else, they were just more successful. And it used to be that they, everybody loved them and there was a huge, you know, you know, there was a huge cachet for working there, and now it’s still probably the same in the industry, but not quite, you know, the public perception is significantly worse. More so for Goldman than, say, JP Morgan or the other banks? I think well the the US government used JP Morgan as their sort of shining light right and you know they bailed out they basically bought best earns and they you know JP Morgan has only gone up I would say in estimation relative to Goldman during that period of time yeah and all the public focus has generally been on Goldman and how badly they have behaved rather like the perfect kind of evil guys to kind of I get asked about it a lot of times from people who aren’t in the industry in the States.
33:50 I mean, I just say, you know, I hate to say the smartest guys in the room, but I think they are. I don’t know what the culture was like over there, but my impression was always it was just the top guys. So what’s an interesting movie that I called, well, it wasn’t actually that great, it’s called Margin Call. Oh, yeah. Have you guys seen it?
34:08 I haven’t. Yeah, it’s all about the, it takes place at a fictional bank, obviously, but it’s all about when they suddenly find out that their assets have been erroneously declared. And they’re actually pretty much underwater. I’m guessing it was probably Lehman Brothers. And just kind of behind the scenes look at the whole thing.
34:27 And I found it wasn’t a great movie, but it was still interesting to see behind the whole thing. I mean, I read another book. I think it was that guy. You mentioned his name, Michael Lewinsky. Michael Lewis.
34:40 A big short. A big short. Man, he was saying that at the height of the CDO madness, he said most of the bankers didn’t even know what was going on. Like these deals that they were structuring were so complex and so like arcane and interwoven and most of them didn’t know what the fuck was happening. You know, and to me, I don’t know.
35:02 What do you guys think? Is that true? Well, you’ve got to define what you mean by bankers. There’s a group, there’s a bunch of salespeople who have relationships with the clients that bought these things. And yes, some of them will have technical knowledge and understand what’s going on, but not all of them.
35:19 You don’t have to completely understand what you do to sell them. And thousands of people at banks have made a lot of money by being good salespeople and having good relationship skills, but not really knowing what they’re selling. But the guys that structure it and the guys that trade it will certainly understand what was going on. Seriously. And people have definitely made mistakes.
35:40 Like a lot of these structures, they presume that house prices couldn’t fall. Now, obviously, that’s an erroneous thing to put in it as an input into your model. But they never really have in the States, have they? Well, since the Great Depression, they’ve always gone up. So another interesting viewpoint that I’ve read was that CDOs and all the rest, they are relatively new financial instruments.
36:06 And what’s happening is people are just testing them. that were pushing the boundaries to see what could be done and what couldn’t be done. There were some crazy products going on where they had like the, what was it, like the squared and cubed and all sorts of. CDO squared, yeah, so they are very new products, but also a lot of what happened is that you had a boom in 2004 to 2008 where you had a lot of inexperienced guys managing risk. And one thing that I’ve learned and one thing that I’ve read recently, and this is gonna bring us onto another potentially interesting topic is that in very skill-based jobs, nurses, doctors, firemen, and I would add trading into that, you need experience.
36:51 Like there’s a 10,000 hours is banded around a lot and to become an expert in something. So yes, you can have smart guys who start doing something and adapt to it quickly. But until you’ve been through, specifically to trading, until you’ve been through two or three business cycles, you’ve seen ups and downs, how can you truly manage risk properly? You need to have the experience of what happened when there’s a boom, what happens when there’s a recession, so you can effectively manage things over a longer period of time.
37:22 And you had a lot of 25 to 30, well guys that had less than five years experience managing a lot of risk. Well, the current argument to that is that in many industries, especially, we spoke about business requiring creativity on a previous show. a lot of industries that require that level of creativity actually favor youth and inexperience because it allows these new guys to look at things with a fresh set of eyes. But the things that I was talking about, doctors, firemen, nurses.
37:49 You don’t want an inexperienced doctor. Land trading’s the same thing. I don’t think that’s necessarily about creativity, it’s about the ability to manage risk. I agree if you’re trying to design an advert for Coca-Cola or you’re trying to be innovative in sort of the computing, you know, or IT fields, then yes. But if you’re trying, you know, if there’s something that, you know, has been tried and tested and, you know, where creativity isn’t something that you’re dependent upon, then I would say that, you know, having experience and seeing, you know, again, going back to trading, seeing how companies behave through different parts of the cycle is extremely important.
38:29 It’s such a young man’s game on the trading floor though. It’s all guys in their 20s and 30s, right? There’s no one really over 40 managing risk on a regular basis. I know, but say you’re 30, and at least you’ve had nearly 10 years of experience, I think half the problem is you have very inexperienced people managing, who haven’t seen how things behave in different parts of the cycle. I just find that phrase, like managing risk, it’s an oxymoron, I mean, by its very definition is something that you can’t manage.
39:00 That’s what a trader does. Yeah, I trade as a gambler, man. Look, I’m a layman. I’ve read a few books. I’ve read that book by Michael Lewis.
39:09 And I take a very shallow interest in it, but I am interested in it. And everyone’s trying to predict markets, but you can’t predict them, bro. That’s why it’s a gamble, man. What’s your take on that, Patrick? Obviously, I think you can manage risks.
39:30 I think the best gamblers take, you know, look at poker. You’re taking, I think poker and trading are very similar. You’re taking educated bets and the more work you do, the more research you do, you know, not all of it’s about fundamentals, a lot of it’s about how you expect the herd to behave. So you have to have some psychology in there and, you know, you’re not, the playing field is not even. Right, you have to, you know, if you’re smarter and you do more work and you have a better understanding.
39:59 Information yeah so I would say in this day and age information is pretty even because you have the internet and you have Google and you know when economic data is coming out you know when a company’s reporting you know you know what the comfort you know how to dial into a conference call to listen to it so I think information is pretty it’s pretty free and available maybe how quickly you get that information isn’t but it’s a matter of seconds or minutes rather than hours how it used to be but I think you know you have to analyze and judge and know how the markets going to react to different things and you know you don’t know for a hundred percent but you you can have a pretty good idea given you know positioning given the research you’ve done about the fundamentals of a company how stuff is going to react so if you look at the top poker players they win consistently yeah and they’re making you know huge I think it’s it’s a good analogy. I just want to say one thing that is a good analogy and that What about get one of our?
41:02 Facebook fans he I said well What should we discuss in the show like give us some suggestions tying into what you said about poker players? He wanted us to talk more about nootropics, and I just read an article this week about It was about provigil and the and the rise in the use of these designer cognitive enhancers right like like These are proper prescription drugs, like Probogyl was developed to help kids with ADHD, similar to Ritalin, and in this article, the journalist interviews this one guy who made a fortune on the world series of poker, like he was really successful, and he used it a lot, and he speaks about how it helped him, and he already started making money once he started But poker is exhausting, you can be sitting down for 12, 24 hours and you have to be like, I would say one of the, to me, one of the biggest things about all sport that I’ve learnt is making decisions under pressure.
42:07 I think that applies to business as well. So if you’re tired, how do you make correct decisions? Taking the emotion out of the equation I guess. But even, like, tiredness isn’t an emotion, it’s just a physical effect that your body is feeling. So, and it’s much harder to stay alert, it’s much harder to stay focused when you’re tired.
42:29 So how do you make the right decision? And if he’s using this, if he’s using this, these pills in order to keep him focused for a longer period of time, then I can definitely see how it happened. In fact, that’s exactly what he said he was doing. He mentioned how long you sit at the table for and how, after a while, you start to with this brain fog and I think they should make them take their sunglasses off it’s cheating but maybe you you really appreciate your opinion on this guy’s one thing I’ve realized about becoming an adult and you’ve become an adult happened just recently yes very recently actually you know I want to debate about physically or mentally mentally I mean that is a part of being a man is learning to make decisions that’s such an important thing and one of my good friends Clay, he always says it’s better to make a bad decision than an indecision.
43:19 And I’m thinking about what you said about the poker, like, I think if you could train your mind to the point where you get to a crossroads, you have to make this decision just to override that anxiety reflex is like, what if I make the wrong choice? Or which is better than just choosing something? Do you think that there’s value to that? Absolutely. I think you make your decision and then you have to follow through with 100%.
43:40 If you don’t, then if you don’t do that, then I think that leads to more problems than making a bad decision, but following through with it. So I firmly agree that you have to make a decision quickly and then follow through with every single thing that you can possibly do to put that into place. That’s the essence of trading really, isn’t it? Making the decision. You make the decision, but then you have to realize, eventually, if you realize you’re wrong, you have to be disciplined enough say I’m wrong. It’s called a stop-loss order. Have you ever heard that term? But even if you don’t put a stop-loss in you need to have the discipline to say yeah I’ve messed this up because these three pieces of information have come up and I now realize that you know the inputs that I use to make the decision were incorrect and now I have to come up with a you know I have to make a new decision I have to reverse what I’ve done. It’s the most difficult part of trading. It’s a highly emotional job. You have to take the ego out of it right? Yeah there’s a lot of of ego involved in trading.
44:38 A lot of ego involved in trading. Say it’s a fear and greed, that’s the old way of describing it. Fear and greed constantly. So you’re there thinking, okay, I’m gonna make a ton of money, and then I’m worried about losing all the money, and it’s a constant battle. And it’s 12 hours a day, and you go home at night with positions, and you think about those two sometimes.
44:53 I think it’s similar to relationships. Maybe. Gotta take the emotions out, a lot of decisions are. Motions are good to get out when you’re trading, but it’s an emotional game, you’re human, so you just have to train yourself out of that. Do you miss it at all?
45:06 I miss them to an extent, I miss a regular paycheck, but you work 10 years so that when the right opportunity comes up, you can jump at it. I also think banks are changing and that the opportunity to make the amount of money that you were making before is significantly reduced. Is it over, do you think? The heyday? Well, the heyday is definitely over.
45:26 Really? So the amount of risk that you’ll be able to take is going to be significantly reduced. In a bank. In a bank. So that means you’re sticking with London Real, right Frank?
45:35 I think brokers will be fine, I still think there’s going to be volume that goes through. Yeah, I was on the slightly different side of the equation. We were the brokers, we were kind of the bookies, the middlemen for these guys placing the big bets and involved at times like this, I would argue, and I’m sure Patrick would too, it’s probably good to be a broker because there’s positions have to be in risk and we’re not taking any risk and we’re a fee based income.
45:57 But you know, in the big days, it was the traders that made the big money. But now with banks being regulated in capital ratios. So yeah, so the amount of money you make is directly linked to the amount of risk that you can take generally So with that going down and being over, you know, the governments don’t want all these people placing placing large bets on the banks balance sheet So that’s going to go down So yes You can make you got banks Sorry bankers and traders and sales people and that kind of thing will be able to make decent money and support their families But they will not be making anywhere near what they used to Bankers have a really bad rep in this country I had no idea like half our half our banks are owned by the government because of half of the UK national government because they you know they placed wrong bets they overextended themselves and didn’t have the money to bail themselves out so that’s you know that’s why yeah so you were always looking to make a move at some point or did you not know if you were going to stay there well i never really knew what i wanted to do in the first place so i applied to um I applied to university originally, changed courses, did law, was supposed to go into the army after three years, had a scholarship through school and through university. Failed my last medical because of a combination of eczema and a torn knee ligament, which I’d done playing rugby even though I was back playing rugby at the time. So failed my last medical
47:21 Having, you know, basically from the age of 16 to 21 I’d had, I knew I was going to the army. My brother was currently serving as a squaddie in the infantry. My dad was a major. My mum was a captain. My grandfather was a lieutenant colonel.
47:37 Was that an army brat? Yes. I was born in Cyprus on an army base. My brother was born in Germany on an army base. Wow, that’s cool. An eczema can keep you out of the army?
47:49 Apparently so. Eczema, knee ligaments. When you mention that, it brings to mind first just how bureaucracy just sure you do need to have I guess hard and fast rules in place but if the the person who was doing the medical had like a little bit of lateral thinking and could see okay this dude’s still playing high level rugby yeah you know he’s gonna be able to be a soldier you know Ronnie Coleman I think he was five or eight times mr. Olympia he was a policeman and he went to do the the test to get into the FBI right now what they do is they look at a chart and they look at your body mass index right they said he was a beast they said he was a beast and the guy’s got like six percent or eight percent body fat but BMI is such a flawed what a stupid measure takes two inputs right yeah just but like yeah bureaucracy dude it’s just you could have been it’s ridiculous but i mean you’re in a good place now but yes you could could have been an amazing soldier and had an amazing time if some dude had just gone yeah you’re cool you’ll be fine you know what I mean not just looked at some chart and gone okay because of this thing he’s not gonna make it yeah so it was it was quite unfortunate because you’ve been you you thought you especially as a child you have that sort of stability I’m gonna be this in you know I’m gonna get a sand test and then so that fell away luckily I managed to get back into university to do a master’s straight away so I didn’t really I didn’t really
49:13 Miss a beat there and then I had no idea what I wanted to do I applied to some law firms I applied to some investment banks and Goldman Sachs offered me a job in London in London so kind of fell on my feet I’d done an internship in sort of capital markets previously so at HSBC so you know and then you know kind of fell into that change from sales I did sales for three years moved to New York which was fantastic good great life experience lovely city I think it’s amazing I had a great three years he trained at Phil nurse there as well Yeah, Phil knows how’s that place? It’s the watt the watt. Yeah, Tribeca and he’s a lovely guy It’s a small guy. Yeah, he’s tiny but Yeah, he is right smallest guys very often are with him, right? I’ve never never never never spar with him. I did some Clinch sparring with him and he absolutely destroyed me even though he weighed 40 pounds like less than these hands I’m gone then go for it. Do his hands have all sorts of like bone? Yeah, exactly they’re like all calcified but he’s you know he trains George St. Pierre Frankie Edgar and John Jones so he has three of the six belts he trains those guys so he’s he’s legit we’ll have to shout out Phil if you’re in London stop by he’s British right he’s from Bolton Bolton that’s crazy man I was in Leicester the other day on Friday night I wasn’t singing how was that it was good I went to a burlesque show which was amazing and basically another word for a strip
50:45 Show dude right but who’s complaining I’ve been to one it was okay but the thing I noticed you know I’ve been living in London this is the ninth year and when I go on vacation or when I leave London it’s to go overseas right so I’ve done so little so little traveling inside the UK and you realize it’s a whole different world London is very different from from outside yeah it’s like New York City come here in New York City to America it’s a Springfield Illinois maybe yeah what was that like well I’ll explain I don’t travel enough in the UK I mean I think about going to the Lake District for Christmas or something but I just I don’t explore it enough and there’s a lot out there speaking of travel burning man oh yeah it’s that the next challenge we’re considering doing Burning Man next year I got to do it before I get because I’m not getting any younger so I figure maybe we’ll go you want to come with us no interest you know anything we should do if you get an RV yeah it has to be done with an RV and properly stocked all right I’m gonna consider it you know um you’re talking I just had a quick flashback you’re talking about New York and about young traders and I was just thinking of my first experience in New I went to work for Bankers Trust when I was 22 years old, and I just graduated from MIT with a mechanical engineering degree.
52:11 And- It’s a great university. Yeah, it was good. It was quite a challenge, that place, the institute. Yeah, it just, they beat the hell out of us there. But, so I got to New York like a month early, I took my Series 7 exam, and I walked into the floor of Bankers Trust, and after like a three-week training program, I landed on the interest rate swap desk, and they sat me down at an extension rate swap trader, and they sat me down, and they gave me the direct line to the futures exchange in Chicago.
52:34 Here’s your spreadsheet. Here’s our probably like $500 billion swap book, go. And I was allowed to trade swaps, these huge notional minimum $1,500 million swaps, get on the futures exchange, buy and sell government treasuries. I mean, I was 22, it’s so green. I was just like, are you sure?
52:56 And they let me trade from day one. And maybe it was because Bankers Trust back then was just this scrappy bank with a balance sheet. and all they had was computers and some smart people. Did you make money? I was about to ask the same thing.
53:07 I made some big screw-ups in the beginning. I had one of the MDs. You got them the wrong way round. When you’re trading futures, I think when you buy, I can’t remember exactly what it is, but when you buy and sell, are you actually doing the opposite of what you think you’re doing? I mean, there’s some times in that, yeah.
53:18 Yeah, we screwed up a couple times. And I had remember the head of sales, his name was Kevin Hudson. He later got snagged in the scandal the bankers trust had. And he yelled at me across the floor because I had screwed up some tear-up swap or the coupon was different than Markerain. I’d lost like 50 grand or something, whatever.
53:32 And he was just like, that’s coming out of your bonus. And I was just like, oh, so you were like, I’m gonna get 50 grand? And I was like, I was never gonna get 50 grand in my first year. Okay, so would it have been different if you were on Alpha Brain? It would have been much better if I was on Alpha Brain, but the funny thing is, I mean, I don’t know, I don’t think I’m saying anything out of school here, but later Bankers Trust was, some lawsuits were pulled that they were taking huge cuts out of a lot of trades they put on, and this guy, Kevin, was going out with this woman named Allison, which she was on the financials desk, Kevin was on the corporate desk.
54:03 And what he would do is he would do some big trade with Procter & Gamble where he’d make like $20 million. And he would get on the phone with her, she was like 20 feet away and she’d be like, Allison, I just made a ton of money off Procter & Gamble, blah, blah, blah. And they subpoenaed all the recorded lines at Bankers Trust and they got all this on tape. And so basically if he had just walked over and said, hey honey, it wouldn’t have been recorded. So they recorded all of those lines and then they put in phones next to all of us that were not recorded.
54:29 And yeah, so there’s another. You’ve got a dark past, Brian. I had no idea, man. I had nothing to do with it, Your Honor. I’m just a stupid broker.
54:40 That’s intense. Tell me, besides the MMA matches and stuff coming up, what are the challenges in your life at the moment, Patrick? Learning to deal with a lack of structure. So having gone from a place, from a job where A, I knew I had a paycheck, and B, I knew where I was going to be every hour of, or at least every half the day I knew where I was going to be. Now I have to make things happen, and being an entrepreneur, which is effectively what I am, I don’t have an IT department, I don’t have a man to call, you know, I don’t have a sales force.
55:13 You have to be self-motivated. A, I have to be self-motivated, I have to get myself out of bed, and I have to make things happen. And the most interesting thing is looking at my business partner, as he’s, you know, everything basically out of nothing he said I’ve got this idea I need to how do I put it into effect and so he’s created relationships with suppliers and relationships with estate agents and relationships with his clients and has made it happen and so you have to be very strict on yourself you have to be very disciplined because otherwise you can just fall into a oh I’ll get out I’ll get up out of bed at 10 o’clock or you know I won’t do this today and you really have to be focused and you really have to you know control your life and work extremely hard in a lot of different facets.
55:54 I think being an entrepreneur and trying to open up these gyms on my own and trying to run these shows has, it’s going to teach you a lot more than working for, at Goldman everything was I had a sales force. If anything went wrong with my computer, I had someone to call my phone, I had a different person to call. Everything is there and there’s a huge value in the franchise. everything of value is created by me so you learn lots about you know if I ever got put back into having to run a business I think I’d love it know a lot more and be a lot better at it because I’ve had to you know start from the bare bones and create it myself so that’s cool you’re just doing it all on your laptop or do you have I have I have an iPhone basically and all my I can the beautiful thing about it is that effectively I could work from anywhere in the world so I’m going to Brazil on Sunday and I can answer all you know I can be in touch with the gym in Illinois I could be in touch with my partner that’s gonna be on Australia and I can answer all the questions for people that have got issues in in London so it’s crazy isn’t it? It’s very Tim Ferriss that’s one of the yeah the four-hour workweek exactly so I actually bought that book and gave it to my partner when I first started working with him said you should read this and a lot of it is going to be stuff that you know and and a lot of it’s gonna be common sense, but if you take five or six things out of it,
57:17 Then it’s been worth reading. And all Tim Ferriss does is take other people’s ideas and put them into a coherence, he’s basically an editor. So, yes. And he makes tons of money. And he makes tons of money.
57:30 And he hikes the hell out of it. The information diet, that’s what I got from the four hour work week, where I used to just check my email once a day and not every 10 minutes. And then people would know that if something was urgent, they would call and otherwise they would email and just training people the way to get your information. On that note, I did a seminar the other day with a very cool guy, Scott Sonnen, and… No relation to Chael?
57:51 No, no, unfortunately not. Big ups to Chael, by the way. He’s a guy that you should get on this show. Chael. Chael Sonnen.
57:57 That would be hilarious. He would be fun. Open invitation to Chael. But anyway, this dude said that at least 50% of his success has come from eliminating the distractions in his life. And when he said that, like, psh, Lambeau went off, kick the chick out of my bed, got work to do.
58:14 But seriously, I think there’s something to be said for that. And even where you live, a lot of people, their lives are so cluttered just physically, right? That’s deep, I’m going to think about that. But it is true, though, right? I was babysitting a kitty for like four days here.
58:30 He’s a little white kitty. And I found myself, I mean, I had to stop myself because I was running around the house playing kitty games with him, and I’d be like, you just spent an hour playing with this cat, stop it. That’s a good example. So he’s gone, as you can tell. Never have anything in your life that you can’t walk out on in 60 seconds, right?
58:48 Love that line for me. Do you find that you need to eliminate distractions in your life, or do you naturally eliminate them?
58:58 My place, I think working from your home is a bad idea. Yeah. Because, oh look, there’s the TV, or, oh, I’m just gonna have five minutes extra sleep. Or, you know, you’ll always find something, so you try and get out of the house, And even though my life is not particularly structured, I leave the house between eight and 10 every day and don’t get back till nine o’clock. And yes, some of the time I’m in the gym and I’m not always in the office, but I’m always either thinking about work or when I’m in the gym, I’m thinking about work because I’m thinking, oh, maybe we could do this better or we need to get this bit more equipment.
59:35 So I like being outside of my, of my I don’t I don’t like being in my in my flat all the time I think working from there is not particularly productive. I completely agree with you. So I guess that’s one way of eliminating distractions because your home has more of them than anywhere else probably in the world but yeah I think you know you need to be focused in order to get stuff done and it you know there are tons of distraction in this day and age you know you can spend a day on the computer yeah internet’s a total time so okay exactly dangerous yeah really So we only have a few minutes left guys. I just wanted to just ask you one question. That’s always been on my mind What makes you want to continually get into the MMA?
1:00:17 I hate to say but it is a cage and and fight MMA with guys that are ready to just knock your head off because I Trained you do to train you to a Nick. I’ve trained box and I spar, but I’ve never gone in there and I don’t think I’m going to but I’m just wondering what makes you do that. So it is the loneliest place in the world when you go in there but that’s when you learn the most about yourself and I know it sounds like a real cliche but how you react to defeat you know how you you know how you react to winning how you train yourself how disciplined you can be you know I know I have to get to a certain weight by certain time you know I’ve got three weddings coming up am I going to drink at those weddings and no I’ve been to lots of my friends weddings and not drunk you know that kind of thing that kind of self-discipline is you know something that I actually quite enjoy in terms of sort of testing myself so that’s probably why I do the do the sport to a certain degree and yes it is it’s scary when you get in there but learning to control you know learning to control the adrenaline dump learning to control control the fear and you know then just the you know the highs of of the highs of winning and what I actually find is that usually the winning is an anti-climax.
1:01:32 So you win, you’re exhausted, everyone else is going out trying to celebrate and have a good time and all you wanna do is really go to sleep and it’s actually, and again it sounds bad, but the journey of getting there is a lot more interesting than the 15 minutes that you spend actually doing the act. And yes, it’s fine. I remember I lost a fight in March of this year and I looked across the guy afterwards and his hand was raised. I looked, I said, mate, that was a lot of fun and it was fun, but the dedication and the camaraderie with my teammates and seeing myself improve, seeing myself develop, those are all things which I value quite highly.
1:02:14 So the journey rather than the actual end is to be more important. Wow, that sounds like a familiar tagline. I know, that’s why it sounds like such a cliche, but that’s why I spent some time trying to define what I actually meant. Because it is a cliche saying the journey rather than the goal, but it genuinely is. The things that I enjoy most are in the gym and self-improvement and testing myself, not what actually happens in the cage.
1:02:41 Wow, that’s pretty well said. No, our tagline for the show is, it’s about the journey. It’s London Real, it’s about the journey. So, with something Nick and I talk about all the time. And it’s good you said that.
1:02:49 It just made me think about the show and everything that Nick and I are doing. And we put a lot of pressure on ourselves as far as getting the show out there and getting it popular, and we want the whole- To be fair, you put a lot of pressure on ourselves. I put a lot of pressure on, because I think this is a great product. I think this show is great, and I think millions of people should watch it, because we’ve got a guy in Georgia that watches this show, and he said, I don’t have that many interesting people to talk to in my town, but I put you guys on, and I get all these new cool ideas, so.
1:03:15 Yeah, big shout out to you, Richard. That’s cool, but it’s just good to be reminded. Maybe a good note to finish is I read something in a book that I’m currently reading, and I really love reading it’s one of the big things I’m trying to have a lot more time for, and it said, for where we’re going, there are no maps. And I think that ties in with what you were just talking about, and who knows where we’re gonna end up, but let’s just get out there and enjoy it.
1:03:38 Half the reason why I get by my job is because life’s too short to be spending working for someone else and not really enjoying yourself, so. You could be dead. Like everyone’s going like, oh, what about the future? But you could be dead tomorrow, dude. Yeah.
1:03:52 Might as well like do something you enjoy now. I don’t want to be that guy that you probably sat next to on the drinking floor. That’s just like, oh man, I wish I would have done this. But then he gets dependent upon doing it because he needs to support his lifestyle and he’s got three kids that are in expensive schools. He’s got a big mortgage that he can’t really afford.
1:04:06 You know, he has to keep going and going and going. It’s called the Golden Handcuffs, right? Yeah, Golden Handcuffs. A lot of guys in the city they just have to keep running away. Like he says that the wife has to buy in my cell.
1:04:14 They need to get the house in the country. The kids are in private school, and they can’t walk away, you know what I’m saying? Yeah. Wow, that’s good. No, dude, it’s been good to meet you, Patrick.
1:04:22 Yeah, nice to meet you. Let’s train, man. Let’s train some time. Yeah, it’s nice having you, Michelle. We trained a little bit a couple weeks ago, so…
1:04:28 Did you bust them up? It was all good fun. Nice. It’s good you trained, like, with a proper fighter. Yeah, mate.
1:04:34 So, yeah, let’s do that again too, sometimes. Okay, excellent. All right, cool. Can you check them off? It’s about the journey.
1:04:38 Yes. All right, yes. From where we’re going, then, I know Matt’s. Mee-ha! All right.
1:04:46 I hate that this show is so short, you know? The time flew, it just flies, right? Yeah.
