Wrestling has given the UFC some of its greatest champions from Khabib Nurmagomedov to Daniel Cormier. After all, it is an advantage to be able to take your opponent down and sap them with ground-and-pound or look for a submission. The recent Alex Pereira vs. Jan Blachowicz bout at UFC 291 is a case in point. Pereira’s elite-level striking was mitigated by the Pole’s  takedowns of the Brazilian, who just about managed to eke out a victory on the scorecards.

And as everyone knows, Joe Rogan loves fighting and hypothetical matchups, whether they be between tigers and lions, bears and gorillas, or the “scariest wrestler of all time’ Aleksandr Karelin. In a conversation on episode 2012 of the JRE podcast, Rogan speculated what Karelin’s career would look like in today’s UFC.

Joe Rogan predicts how Aleksandr Karelin would do in the UFC

Joe Rogan told Canadian psychologist and academic Gad Saad, about the legendary Russian wrestler Aleksandr Karelin’s MMA fights in Japan. However, Rogan implied that those fights were fixed, and thus, could not be used to accurately judge his MMA prowess. “He had like one fugazi MMA fight it was like a fake MMA fight because they did a few of those in Japan,” he said

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In addition, the Boston native conjectured that if the Russian fought in the UFC, all the fighters would be in trouble. “It seems like he got involved in one of those where they gave him a s***-ton of money and they said come over here. It’s kind of pro wrestling but kind of not, we’ll say it’s an MMA fight it’s one of those deals. But if he did fight MMA, everyone would be f****d. Everyone. Everyone would be f****d. And if he figured out how to strike, Oh my Jesus,” he said.

Rogan spoke about ‘The Experiment’s extraordinary strength, dexterity and flexibility. This enabled him to pick his opponents up and throw them around. To prove his point, he pulled up a video of Karelin walking on his shoulders across the floor as an example. In fact, Joe has a printed picture of Karelin to remind himself of “what a b**** I am” as Joe so eloquently put it. Aleksandr Karelin is probably the greatest wrestler in the history of the sport. At the end of his extraordinary career, he finished with a record of 887 wins with 2 losses. The numbers, as they say, speak for themselves.