Joe Rogan and Radio Rahim dive into boxing’s raw power—like James Toney’s relentless sparring clips or Deontay Wilder’s single-punch knockout of Andrew Ruiz—while critiquing its flawed judging, including Wilder vs. Tyson Fury’s disputed referee count. Rahim’s Gym Wars revolutionized combat sports journalism, blending behind-the-scenes footage with fighters’ personal stories, but contrasts boxing’s "shtick" culture with MMA’s respect for discipline, like Jon Jones’ decade-long dominance or Anderson Silva’s striking mastery. They debate risks: boxing’s ten-count rule masking injuries (e.g., Gerald McClellan’s collapse) vs. MMA’s no-recovery brutality, yet agree modern fighters are far more skilled. The conversation ends with skepticism over Pacquiao’s Paradigm deal, preferring elite matchups like Crawford or Spence to prove greatness. [Automatically generated summary]
That's why I named the podcast Joe Rogan Experience.
I ripped off the Jimi Hendrix Experience and I was in Hawaii and I went to this art gallery and they had all this rock and roll art and they had this really dope collaboration of Hendrix, his mugshot was like six, nine.
Nine images?
Nine square images of Hendrix's mugshot.
I go, that looks cool as fuck.
And so I bought it.
And I also bought the Rosa Parks one, and I also bought the Elvis one.
They had three different, just nine squares on one piece of artwork.
And I thought it looked cool.
So I said, oh, that would be a good backdrop for the podcast.
So the old podcast studio, I had those behind me.
And then I started picking up other ones.
I got Janis Joplin in the bathroom.
I got Johnny Cash.
I got James Brown.
I got Pryor on the wall here.
I got Jim Morrison.
I got Steven Tyler on the wall over there.
I just started collecting them.
And there's no real rhyme or reason to it.
I got Lenny Bruce.
I just found mug shots and I just started collecting them.
Like I said, my screensaver was that for like a year.
And I even had Sinatra in my room Big, you know, a big one on the wall and whatnot, and I'm like, you know, what is this shit about?
It occurred to me, like, everybody that became an icon and became a legend, like, you have to break the rules.
There's nobody who just, like, followed every rule and that's what they're famous for.
Like, hey, this guy never stepped out of line, did everything that everyone said he was supposed to do, did it all the ways that you're within the rules, and that's the fucking legend that you love.
I know a lot of people have pulled their dick out.
It's a weird thing, like that moment where the society that's trying to contain these artists lashes out and captures them briefly, but they don't even realize they're just making them bigger.
He's a boisterous, very animated showman in boxing.
Heavyweights, mind you.
These guys are giants.
First time they met.
This is December 18. So, I travel the world covering boxing.
Everywhere.
Like I said, I sat down with this guy in Ireland.
I've covered Tyson Fury in England.
I've covered him in America.
I've covered boxing literally everywhere.
So I'm familiar with what you also know that fighting, even combat sports, boxing, MMA... There's a regional aspect to it.
Everybody's culture brings something to it.
The Irish fighter feels like he's got a certain style.
He's got a certain history.
He's got a claim to the warrior legacy.
Same for the British fighter.
Of course, the American fighter.
But both of these guys come from what's like an underclass of their society.
Travelers.
Gypsies in England are looked down upon.
These people are cultural fighters.
And I don't mean necessarily just the oppression of being an underclass, but fighting is part of their tradition, almost like it is to Mexicans in Mexico.
It's something that they do that bonds the clan.
They believe in the history of it.
Obviously, Deontay Wilder is from Alabama.
You know, he's as dark as midnight.
He is a descendant of slaves for sure.
Okay?
He's got a history coming to any fight bringing what he experiences in this country to this element of the face-off one man, one man versus one man.
So, When Tyson Fury is on stage during the press conference, it's something that possessed him to say, you know, I'm coming from a fighting people.
My people have been fighting for 200 years.
Well, in context, he means that the culture of travelers, of gypsies, is one of, we're fighting men.
I'm a fighting man.
That's something that they say about themselves and each other.
So that's what he's bringing to this argument.
That's how he's challenging Wilder.
But Wilder takes that and says, 200 years?
My people have been fighting for 400 years!
Of course he's talking about the black experience in America, slavery, all alike.
But mind you, he's talking to a British fighter.
He's talking to a world audience.
It's not like he's fighting Dominic Brazile, you understand, where it's two Americans, probably not going to get that much international attention.
The world's watching, particularly communities that don't necessarily know when a black man says 400 years, you know, I know, you know, because we grew up in America, you know what we're talking about.
The world doesn't know that!
I travel the world, they're not just, they're not steeped in black American history.
I've had conversations with him.
He loves to talk about the plight of the black man in America and how it relates to his career, how he feels, you know, disadvantaged in certain ways and he carries the mantle in other ways.
He's a champion of black America in certain ways and he's a victim of white America in other ways.
So, when I see this argument happening, I'm like, oh, okay, well this is definitely a moment.
But I'm not a pool reporter, right?
So, in this particular instance, it's unusual for me to be part of the scrum, is what they call it.
Collection of reporters, everybody's kind of shouting questions out, just trying to evoke responses.
Usually I'm a one-on-one guy, I'll wait my turn, right?
But on this particular day, I didn't have a haircut, I wasn't really...
I just got back from Dubai.
I went in Dubai with Dave Chappelle.
I'm hanging out.
It's after Thanksgiving.
I'm just like, you know what?
I'm going to kind of mail this one in, to be honest.
I'm thinking, let me throw something out because I know what he's talking about and I also know that the audience around us, in the world especially, may not have caught that reference.
He comes off stage, he answers a couple of other questions, and then, just to be sure, because I've been doing this a long time, I'm not an idiot, I know he's amped, and I want him to get the question clearly.
Deontay, Radio Raheem, I say my name so he knows who it's coming from.
Not because he doesn't know me, but because he does!
So, Radio Raheem, you just said your people have been fighting for 400 years.
Okay, first of all, I'm in the midst of my question.
I'm trying to get him to explain to the world what he's said to me on numerous occasions in different interviews and off camera.
I know exactly what he's talking about, and I know that this is the moment that he finally gets to talk about it to people who have never been listening to him before.
You know, our people have been fighting for 400 years.
To this day.
To this day.
And...
So, what I wanted...
What I thought was happening...
Was that...
Okay...
This moment now has become about him attacking me because he thinks I'm attacking him.
He thinks because I do know what he's talking about.
He knows we've spoken about it numerous times.
He thinks I'm pretending.
Not to know, like some, you know, air quotes, Uncle Tom or whatever, you know, the numerous names I've been called on the internet since, as though I'm trying to pretend like, oh, I don't, what 400 years?
So listen, this is not the first time I've had an interview that has gotten major attention.
It's not the first time a fighter has been pissed off at me.
I knew that this was going to be a big thing.
I knew people were going to talk about it.
Bro, I had no fucking concept of what was about to happen to my night.
Basically, when you're a reporter like this, you're like, okay, well, that was dramatic.
We got a hot one.
That one might get me a few hundred thousand, if not a million views, maybe.
Yeah, we got the champ.
But also, I'm thinking, it's something of a success.
We got him to express, at least in that moment, something that we don't usually see.
It's fight week.
We talked to this guy a million times.
Everyone's had their interviews.
He's been on every show.
And that was like the realest moment in the whole buildup.
So for me, that in and of itself is something of a victory.
Like you've created a moment here where you got to see inside the champ's heart.
You got to see like his passion.
When I get home though, I gotta take a nap.
It's been a long day.
It's good.
So, as these stories tend to go, I'm woken up by chimes on my phone.
What the fuck's going on?
What's going on?
In the interim, he's posted on Instagram just a minute of what is really like a two and a half minute interview.
Where it looks so...
Bad!
And then he's written, like, a paragraph, essentially, about having to, like, you know, teach people, like, basically not to be Uncle Tom, and how you gotta, like, straighten it out, and, like, there's a whole, like, civil rights diatribe, and I'm the pincushion, right?
I'm way more comfortable with him shouting in my face and having no idea whether or not...
This can go any kind of way.
But at least I understand the moment.
At least I'm in control of half of it.
This is a train on fire off the rails.
You know what I mean?
And of course, the more people respond to it, celebrities and other fighters and the like...
The more emboldened he is to double down on it.
Like, hell, this is a moment.
The fight's not selling well.
You know what I mean?
They've been giving him stick overseas for not being known anywhere.
They're saying you can walk down the street and, you know, Eddie Hearn did this video where he's asking people in New York, like, do they know who Deontay Wilder is?
And he made a whole video of them saying no.
So at this moment, you also have to give context of what's happening in his career.
At this moment, he's knocking everybody out.
He's WBC heavyweight champion.
He can't get the fight to unify with Joshua.
They're saying he's a nobody, essentially.
He's not worth the money, because nobody knows who he is.
He's fighting, arguably, the toughest fight he could have possibly picked.
Tyson Fury is an incredibly technical fighter.
No one thinks of Deontay Wilder as a technical technician.
Like, they're thinking this guy's gonna get outclassed.
He could lose his belts this way and not be making...
He's not like made a shit ton of money for that fight.
So, now that all his attention is on him, and like I said, it's a subject he loves to talk about, he's a hero.
He's like a champion of black America in this moment.
But the ones who do, there's enough who do, so I'm telling you, Joe, every day since then, it's been over a year now, someone, somewhere, every time I've left my home, and sometimes while I'm still in it, has shouted in my face, TO THIS DAY! That's how they say hello!
Like, it actually created a moment that put him in position to be the kind of representative of that issue that he wanted to be.
And it gave me an opportunity to be seen, even though in a lot of quarters initially negatively, I was also seen as a journalist who pulled that out.
Like, I'm the other guy.
I'm the guy on the other side of that camera that, yes, created that moment.
And I've been doing this long enough to where my fan base, people who know my work, who understand me, they know that I think they know I'm not an idiot.
And I like to think they know I'm not a sellout, but they don't really know me because I don't ever make it about me.
This interview we're having is a unicorn.
I've maybe done three or four or five of these in my entire life where I'm talking about my perspective on anything.
I'm entirely showing up at every press conference, every fight, every weigh-in, every media workout, trying to get something out of the fighter to be consumed by the audience in a way that maybe they hadn't seen it before.
Not just for the audience's sake, but I want the fighter to get in touch with something.
There's so many of these platitude questions and the same old shit, and nobody's really digging deep.
These aren't one-dimensional characters.
These aren't actual bulls.
These aren't just gladiators.
They're fathers.
They're sons.
They have civil rights issues.
They have cultural things they're bringing to this thing.
They have depression.
We know all the things that fighters go through, but they only want to show you one side.
Because they don't want to show any vulnerability.
And their fans aren't interested in anything other than who's up and who's down if that's all you're feeding them.
So I try to get out of the way.
I don't want to get in front of the work.
So when people see me in this line, a lot of people are just like, oh, this guy must be a fucking Uncle Tom then.
There's one where like, remember when Larry Merchant was talking to Floyd Mayweather, he's like, you were 20 years younger, or if I was 20 years younger, I'd kick your ass.
I feel like what Merchant did that people objected to was he had his own standard by which you had to win the fight and by which you had to get his respect even if you won.
And one of the things I think about internet commentary in the age of the internet is you're accountable.
You're accountable in a different way.
Back then...
If you were Howard Cosell or if you were anyone who was commenting on sports, you really could kind of get away with it other than what radio guys would say about you or journalists would say about you.
In fact, I encourage a regular person to have something to say.
It's these strange motherfuckers that are like, really should probably pipe down.
If you, and you do, because you're on YouTube and you're on the internet, the amount of comments that are useful or thoughtful or like, eh, okay, interesting.
90%.
Maybe 92%.
But there's like 8%.
That 8% of really just like vitriolic, racist, sexist, like violent trolls.
I think that the internet now is to a place where you can drag people, you can change their lives, you can actually put them in harm's way by stirring up a fervor around being violent towards them, that everybody should have to be identified on the internet.
I don't believe in this anonymous Posting, shit posters, all this shit.
The problem with that is there's a lot of people that have things to say that are important.
They don't want to suffer consequences at work or their job.
They want to be able to whistle blow and say, hey, there's like some safety problems here or there's some sexual harassment here or there's this or that.
There's benefits to being anonymous and then there's negative aspects of it.
I feel like if someone is saying some horrible shit, then yes.
But if someone is just explaining something that's going down, like, there's people that have talked about, like, unfair labor practices or things that are going down at work, and they literally have to be anonymous in order to leak this information.
Particularly if they're talking about someone from another country and they're doing it through a VPN. Like, they have to do it this way.
They have to do it anonymously.
Otherwise their life is in danger.
And they need to get the word out.
There's real crimes taking place.
There's a real issue.
I see your perspective that there's a lot of cunts online and they think it's cute and those fuckers should be outed.
You don't have to be listening to what they're saying about you.
Say if you were talking about, you know, you're going to interview Canelo or someone through an interpreter, you would, you know, there's plenty of people with perspectives on Canelo.
You don't have to listen to anything they have to say about you.
I mean, you don't have to, but this is my perspective.
This thing that can abuse us, the internet, with comments and 15-year-old assholes saying mean shit to you.
What it also is, is an avenue for you to put your stuff out there that would not have existed before.
Before, you would have had to been hired by CBS or ABC or whoever, name it.
You don't have to be hired by anybody anymore.
But the other side of that is the comment section.
Now, you could be one of those guys that turns the comment section off, but...
Man, I don't think that's a good idea.
I don't think that's a good idea either.
We accidentally had the comment section turned off back when we used to stream...
Because we were streaming live and it wasn't that we turned it off, but we had it off.
We had the chat off on the streaming because people would just like say a bunch of rude shit just so that other people had to read it while the podcast was going on.
I'm like, look at these people are just taking advantage of this.
But something happened when we flipped it over to live.
There was a bug.
And for how long was it that it did that, Jamie, where the comments were turned off?
It wasn't that long, but it was long enough for people to freak the fuck out.
And I'm like, hey, hey, hey, I'm not turning any comments off.
Like, you fucking say whatever you want to say.
I'm not reading it, but you say whatever the fuck you want to say.
Go have fun.
So, this medium, this avenue for putting out content never existed before.
It exists now.
But also, people's ability to comment exists.
And I think most people are rational.
Most people, the vast majority, are just commenting on it.
They might disagree with you, they might think you suck, they might tell you why you suck, but they're pretty rational.
They're like, man, he just talks about himself, or he does this, or he has to bring it back to that, or he blah, blah, blah.
You know, there's going to be people having their perspectives, and then they debate those perspectives with other people in the thread.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But there's going to be a certain percentage that are out of their fucking mind, or they're 15, and they're angry.
And, you know, like, I was just talking about this in the last podcast with my friend Justin Martindale.
I was like, when I was 15, man, thank God Twitter wasn't a thing.
Well, they're doing that to kids now that get gigs.
And then they're finding their tweets when they were 17 and 18 years old.
And now they're 24. Like, hey, it's a different fucking human being, man.
Like, we need a path to redemption for people.
And Twitter and Facebook and all these comments that are permanently on the record, they make it really difficult for kids.
I would not want to be in high school today with a Twitter account saying the dumbest fucking shit in the world and then having that come back to haunt me when I want a job someday.
I do love about this phone thing and people sharing so much when I talk about the different cultures in combat sports.
That gives me access to everybody being on their phones.
The one thing that's everywhere is YouTube.
I don't know if you know this, but like you said...
There was a time when the only way you could have a voice or certainly comment on boxing or MMA or sports is if you got hired by a major network that had a reach where people could see you.
What I did with this footage, ultimately, was I took it and went to an editor named Brian Hardy, who was the editor for Max Boxing at the time, and he got Doug Fisher, who's now the editor-in-chief of Ring Magazine, and I to commentate that footage as though you're watching it on HBO. Oh, wow.
Right?
So, Doug's doing the color.
I'm calling the fight.
I'm the Lampley, and he's the Kellerman.
And we showed the whole thing.
I talked about the context of what had happened, like I told you.
And we're calling the fight.
And this show, Gym Wars...
It blew up.
It was like the first big boxing thing on the internet at all.
And so I would go around to different gyms and get fighters, and they all started at wildcard, and then I would branch out and get fighters to agree, let me shoot the sessions and turn it into a show called Gym Wars.
And so the way...
These guys now get their phones and their cameras and they go interview fighters and all this shit.
I started that.
That wasn't a thing before I started doing it.
I'm the one who created this medium by which you now receive boxing news.
And so interviewing fighters is now my claim to fame because everybody thinks they're reinventing the wheel now.
You can't shoot anybody sparring or anything like that.
So that show had to go away.
But the way that I relate to and understand fighters and what it is that's inside them, that they're experiencing, that's driving them, I think is unique.
Because although I would never, ever classify myself as a fighter, that's such a...
A unique and cherished banner that you can really hold if that's really what you do.
Well, those people, particularly the MMA people, they demand it.
You can't be a casual observer of MMA. You can't.
They won't allow it If you don't know what the fuck you're talking about You saw what happened with Stephen A. Smith recently?
I did Yeah, that's what happens, man And part of it is like Luke Thomas has an interesting He's a really good MMA journalist He had a really interesting take on it Where he's saying that part of it is that There's a thing in this sport Where they don't want outsiders Like, people that cover other sports, like, no, no, no, you don't know this sport.
But if you do jump in, god damn, you gotta know what the fuck you're talking about.
That shit does not fly in MMA. These guys are literally fighting for their life.
I mean, they literally are moments from death several times in certain fights.
There's moments where guys are out cold and you see a guy dropping an elbow on their face and smashing their orbital bone before the referee can get to them.
Well, sports where people hit each other are different, man.
They're just different.
It's a different thing.
The reason why Deontay was so amped up and wild before that fight, you're not going to see a basketball player like that four days before the NBA Finals.
They'll be tuned up and ready to go, but they're not ready to go to war.
They're literally putting their fucking health on the line.
You can't criticize somebody as though they are just doing what you're doing because, oh, I'm talking, I got a job, I'm an important guy, I'm at this level of shit, so...
So the kind of love that you have for combat sports, the kind of love that you have for what it is that you comment on, it comes through because you do it.
But when you see combat sports today, and you see the landscape of boxing, I feel personally that this is an amazing time.
I mean, I feel like the heavyweight division has never been more exciting and more turbulent, because there's so many great fighters now.
To have Andrew Ruiz jump out of nowhere and knock out Anthony Joshua, I think was a godsend for the sport.
Because all of a sudden you see, like, look at this chubby Mexican just fucked up, this dude who looks like a god.
Like, this is crazy.
Like, and this is, for the Mexican community, it's huge, having their first Mexican heavyweight champion, but it's also like, wow, this is a crazy division.
Look, you got Deontay just knocks the fuck out of Luis Ortiz with that one punch to the forehead.
You're like, what the fuck?
You got the rematch with Tyson Fury's coming up in two weeks.
Now, what you're talking about earlier is exemplified in what happened after the Ruiz fight, where you see, like you say, a chubby guy, that's fair, the guy's chubby!
And if you think just because he's chubby, you can take a knock at the guy, especially after he won the title, as though he won the lottery or he won a scratch-off, and this shit just happens, it doesn't.
It reminded people of what the heavyweight division is.
I think it's great that he got his title back, but I felt like one thing that happened in that fight that disturbed me was even though Ruiz came in out of shape and clearly didn't look like he was prepared correctly, Joshua did never really enforce his will on him.
He never really had a moment where he was beating the fuck out of him.
Where he was like, you know, I trained hard for this fight.
I'm gonna dominate you now.
Now I'm gonna take you out the way you took me out.
There was none of that.
It was boxing.
Just stick and move.
Make sure you get the decision.
Make sure you get the decision.
That is in stark contrast to the way Deontay finishes fights.
Which is why that matchup is so intriguing, which is why no matter what happens between the two of them, hopefully they remain undefeated for their own sakes and can make that unification fight.
I saw his commitment to discipline, Joshua I'm talking about, as a good thing.
Because Kovalev, he's not the same guy he used to be.
After Andre Ward knocked him out in the second fight, he just seems like a different guy.
He just seems like he doesn't.
And he's also had a lot of legal troubles outside the ring.
Rumors of booze and abuse and all kinds of other shit.
Sometimes fighters, they hit this point in their career where they don't have the same level of commitment that they did when they first started fighting.
And when Kovalev, in the early days, man, when he was the crusher, you know, he was fucking everybody up, man.
Even though that kind of thing is salacious, and I would love to know for sure, I feel like if you turn up on the night, and you get to that first bell ringing, we're in a fight.
Everybody's struggling with something.
You know, my hand hurts, I pulled a hamstring I'm not telling you about.
But here's the thing, if he was suffering from the residual effects of being KO'd, and then he's like, I really shouldn't be fighting right now, fuck, I can't believe I have to fight right now, and then he's starting to freak out.
Because I know that's happened in MMA. In MMA, that's definitely happened, where guys have been KO'd badly in the training before the fight, and then they get to the fight and they really shouldn't be fighting, and they know it.
And by the way, there's a fucking million people that would love to judge.
It doesn't make any sense.
It's not like we're short of people that understand it.
In MMA, we have an additional problem, is that we go to places like we were in Texas this past weekend, and we had terrible judging.
And those people weren't even, some of them weren't even MMA judges.
They had backgrounds in boxing, and they transitioned over to MMA. And some of them really didn't understand what was going on, and there was really, really bad decisions.
But when we travel to places like Texas, where we were this past weekend, and you run into problems where they just don't get world title fights very often.
And then the main event was a very controversial decision, but close enough that it wasn't.
I don't think it was a robbery.
Close enough.
Close enough.
And you know, I think you give it to the champion.
He dominated the last two rounds clearly in my eyes and could have won the third.
You know, I watched it again today actually.
But some of the earlier fights were fucking preposterous.
Like, respected world-class trainers, respected fighters, respected experts in martial arts that watch these fights or boxing matches, and then tally it up.
Then you would never have a...
Triple G vs.
Canelo first fight.
Because 90% of the people thought that Triple G won that first fight.
Which is interesting that Canelo won the second fight.
Because Canelo fought very differently in the second fight.
But he had a style that was crafty enough to have some longevity in it without taking that kind of damage.
Like, Roy will embarrass you.
But he's still there in front of you, which is what's the embarrassing part.
So if your motor skills slow down, if your reflexes slow down, you're going to get hit.
He ain't knocked out.
He ain't even fucked up.
But what he told me in an interview, and it might be one of those moments when I was talking to a guy and he said something that was like, I thought I should have known until I heard it.
And then I was like, oh, I can't believe I didn't realize that.
The hundreds and hundreds of rounds to thousands of rounds that you're fighting that nobody sees, that you're not getting paid for, you're taking that punishment, headgear or not, that's what you're seeing at the end of a fighter's career.
It was like the eighth round where he had Kovalev in deep shit.
That was a crazy thing.
His philosophy, if I remember correctly, Yard's philosophy was if you don't get hit at all in training, you will be so much fresher when you get to the ring.
So he was doing just ridiculous mitt work and bag work and drills, and he already knew how to box.
So his idea was that he will have some sort of an advantage.
But the mental side of it is that to each individual to handle, to be faced with death like that, at that age, whatever the moment was when you were flying through the air, not knowing if you're going to live.
But when you see what Mikey Garcia would happen to him when he went up against Errol Spence, you go, oh, Errol's just way bigger and stronger and better.
If I had to choose one thing, I would keep doing stand-up because it's probably the most challenging.
Podcasts are probably the easiest, but they're challenging too, depending upon the guest, especially if it's a really intricate subject.
You know, it's about physics or history or something where I have to do some reading and really try to keep up with it.
But podcasts are fun because I like talking to people.
To me, it's like the easiest job because I've always loved conversations.
I've always loved like, tell me how you do that.
What are you thinking when you're doing that?
Like what's going on?
Like I'm always trying to figure out my own mind.
What are my own motivations and how do I get better at things?
How do I get better at being a person?
And one of the best ways is to talk to people that are exceptional and try to figure out, how are you doing that?
What is your approach?
How do you prepare?
What's your thought process?
What are you eating?
How are you sleeping?
That kind of stuff.
So to me, I've always been curious.
So it almost becomes natural.
And then I've been doing it so long, even though it doesn't seem like it should be, conversation does become a skill.
It's something you get better at not being annoying.
You get better at not talking over people.
You get better at formulating sentences and being inquisitive.
The UFC is just a massive passion of mine from, you know, the time I've been a martial artist for as long as I can remember.
So for me, and like dedicated from the time I was 15 on, like dedicated, like my whole life.
I didn't do any partying in high school.
All I did was fight.
All I did was compete, travel all over the country, and compete in Taekwondo tournaments.
That was my whole life.
So My life has been deeply enriched by martial arts.
So then when the UFC came around and I realized, like, oh, this is the future.
This is what martial arts really should be.
This is the stuff that really works.
We didn't really know before that.
Before the UFC came along, there was all speculation.
What's better?
Is judo better?
Is boxing better?
Is wrestling better?
And then when you see them go after it, you're like, oh, it's a combination of things.
And everybody has their own unique way of implementing this combination of things.
And then you get to the highest levels of the game and you find some constant variables, but things change and the sport's ever evolving and shifting and the new guys now in 2020 are so much better than the guys in 2010 and way better than the guys in 2000 and way better than the guys in 1993 when the first...
UFC was held.
So for me, that is like a hobby, I would have to say, or just a thing that is a constant part of my life.
But that's one of the easiest jobs, because all I have to do is be interested in it, and I'm already interested in it.
So I'm already watching fights.
And then before the fights, I'll re-watch certain important championship fights.
And I'll re-watch fights where fighters had difficulty and stuff like that.
But I do that because I love it.
I might do that anyway, even if it wasn't my job.
So by the time I get to a John Jones-Dominic Reyes fight this past weekend, I've watched hours of footage of those guys just that week.
Just because I'm interested.
I just keep watching stuff, and I keep watching difficult fights, and easy fights, and dominant fights, and I watch training footage.
But that's like, I probably would do that anyway, if I had the time.
Like, if I'm sitting in my computer and, you know, I don't have shit to do, I'll watch some training footage, I'll watch a countdown show, I'll watch, I want to see what's going on.
Yeah, see, I'm the same in that everything that I do somehow informs that single passion that I have.
Like, talking to fighters...
Looking into a fight and figuring out what the narrative really is, how many things hang in the balance, not just a championship belt or somebody's bragging rights, but all the things that they bring to it personally and the communities that they represent and all the things that are on the line down the line.
I get caught up in that shit.
But when I'm working out my mind, I'm in the gym.
When I'm hitting the bag, when I'm sparring other guys, even conversations can be sparring sessions.
I gotta be prepared for that kind of back and forth.
And I use that information I collect about myself and how to react and respond to other people.
I think all three things work together in some strange way.
They all work together.
Doing live stand-up makes doing podcasts easier.
Because live stand-up is, you need a reaction.
There's so much preparation.
There's writing.
There's thinking about subjects.
There's listening to recordings.
There's going over them.
There's multiple reps.
You have to do, like, I'm doing two sets tonight.
I'll do two sets tomorrow.
I got one on Thursday, two Friday, two Saturday, and this is a normal week.
That's normal.
You have to do those reps.
If you don't do those reps, you won't be sharp.
You have to be sharp if you want to do shows, especially now I'm doing arenas, like a lot of these arenas.
It's a lot of fucking people, man.
You gotta be ready.
You can't be, I'm pretty ready.
You've got to be ready, right?
So there's a lot of discipline involved in that.
And then the podcast expands my perspective.
Just being able to talk to people and see the way people think.
Just talking to you about your experience with Deontay Wilder, the way that you framed that in an incredibly positive way, that it helped you and helped everybody.
There's a lot of people that would have been tortured by that moment, and it would have fucked them up, but you became empowered by it.
And you looked at it as a growing, learning opportunity, but also an opportunity for the growth of, like, you as a broadcaster, for the fight, for everything.
And then it becomes this crazy meme, who's ultimately only positive, although in the moment, you know, you're tied up in knots, reading the comments, like, fucking Beyoncé's mad at me.
All these people are mad at me.
Snoop's mad at me.
This whole thing, they all work together, you know?
And then the UFC, being able to have the honor of calling these fights live with the greatest fighters in the world and being able to put words to their performance and give a description of the heart and the courage and the skill that these guys exhibit and the discipline involved in getting to this state as a mixed martial artist.
Like, how...
What an epic commitment you have to have to excellence to become a John Jones.
To become a Henry Cejudo or fill in the blank.
It's a special type of human.
So I think when you're around those special types of humans, you have a higher appreciation for excellence.
You have a higher appreciation for discipline.
And I think just seeing what they do and watching it manifest itself in real life, a Conor McGregor or Max Holloway or Alex Volkanovsky, all these different killers that I've had this opportunity to call their fights, it makes me appreciate excellence. it makes me appreciate excellence.
So he and they did this sort of co-promotion for that big fight, and then they're working on some other thing with Floyd, where Floyd wants to get involved with them to promote something else.
It might involve MMA fighters, it might involve boxers, and they've actively talked to a bunch of other boxers, and they're trying to put some stuff together.
But yeah, Zufa boxing is a real thing.
UFC wants to put together some boxing matches, and maybe even some crossover fights.
Tyson Fury and Deontay, I think, is a simulcast between Fox, if simulcast is the right word, and ESPN. In other words, they're going to have their own separate pay-per-views that you can watch whichever production you like, which is going to be something like...
I love Andre Ward for a bunch of reasons, but one for the fact that that guy undefeated, gold medalist, two division world champion, goes, you know what?
The ego after you retire is the biggest fight of your life.
You're exactly right.
This guy's undefeated.
I'm sure if you're going to talk to him off camera, I could beat Canelo.
You know what I mean?
Of course he must think that just because of who he is.
You've got to think that.
So to stop yourself from the money, the glory one more time, the possibility, could you imagine coming out of retirement and beating Canelo Alvarez?
To be able to be like, you know what, it's better for me and it's better for boxing if I stay retired and keep sitting ringside and talking about these fights in the way I do.
But he also has this issue with his right shoulder.
You know, his right shoulder was basically broken most of his career, and he got it fixed before the second Kovalev fight, and he actually wound up hurting Kovalev real bad with a right hand.
If you watch his career, he was like a left-handed fighter.
His super spinatus was ripped off.
Like, it was really fucked up, and he tried to rehab it with bands instead of going through surgery when he was young.
And so most of his career, he beat the best fighters in the world, Carl Frotch, all those guys, one-handed, which is even more insane.
Even more insane.
And then, you know, had the surgery, rehabbed it, but he said it's still not 100%.
Well, there's certain great fighters that for whatever reason, they never really captured the public's imagination, even though they were great.
You know, like Marlon Starling, who's a fantastic welterweight, knocked out Mark Breland, who was actually now Deontay Wilder's trainer.
But I remember when Mark Breland was coming from the Olympics, and he was this really long, tall welterweight, and he fought Starling, and Starling wasn't really appreciated enough.
And Starling put it on them.
And you realize that there's guys out there that for whatever reason, people don't appreciate them as much as they should.
It's unfortunate, but as much as we hate just guys putting on an act or hyping themselves up with these characters they create, that is bankable.
We all know guys who don't deserve the shots that they continue to get, but because they bring an audience with their shit-talking or with their antics and all the show that they put on, it's better than the fight!
Listen, we can't not talk about Pacquiao when we talk about the welterweight division.
Because he's 40 and he's not in the news all the time, he's not at press conference, and we only talk about him when he's got a fight sign, that sometimes in these conversations we forget, yo, he's a world title holder.
He just dominated a guy that there's no way at his age he should have been able to dominate, considering who Keith Thurman was.
Two years prior, before his surgery, Pacquiao could ruin everybody's shit.
I don't think that fight happens for multiple reasons.
I wouldn't suggest it if I was in his camp.
Also, I don't think that any more than they want to make the Spence-Croffer fight, do they want to put Pacquiao in that kind of harm's way and give top-ranking ESPN an opportunity to dethrone him.
Like, you know, he's with the Heyman camp now.
It's the same with Spence.
So...
That is going to protect him.
He's not going to have to say whether or not he really wants to fight because I don't think he can get it.
I believe in world champions, although there's way too many of them in every weight division.
This fucking, like, oh, undefeated fighters are the only ones that are worth talking about.
If there's one thing I love about the UFC and MMA culture, period, is that losing a fight doesn't mean losing your whole fucking brand.
If you go out there, comport yourself well, leave it all in the octagon, you live to fight another day and people still respect the effort you put forward.
They recognize that if you're fighting guys at your level, you'll win some and you'll lose some and hopefully you'll win more than you lose and that's how you become the man.
They knew, when they were singing the anthem, the Mexicans were singing the Mexican anthem before the fight, and I was sitting there with a friend of mine, also a fellow journalist, Sean Zattel, and we were sitting up in the rafters.
We weren't even sitting in the press row.
We were sitting like...
I didn't want to be bothered with all the yammering that goes on in the press row, so I found seats up above the ring.
And when they were singing that anthem, we looked at each other and we're like, uh-oh.
Something is about to happen here tonight.
We knew it was a special night.
And bro, when he knocked out Manny Pacquiao, he should have crowd surfed to Mexico and never ever laced up a pair of boxing gloves again.
And it is a dark thing to see a fight where you see a guy get beaten down and the referee stops the fight and they see him slump into the corner and collapse.
You know, MMA has some pretty exceptional referees that are very aware of the dangers of guys taking extra shots.
There's also a thing where they don't get a chance to recover like they do in boxing, where a guy gets knocked down and then they give him an eight count.
There's none of that shit.
When you get knocked down in MMA, if the referee thinks it's over, they just wave it off because there's too many weapons.
You're elbowing people in the face.
You're kicking them.
If they think you're done, you're done.
They don't give you that chance.
The standing eight counts.
That ten count, there's something about that ten count.
It's great because it makes for moments like Tyson Fury rising off the deck to win the rest of the round with Deontay Wilder in that twelfth.
But it also gives your brain a false sense of recovery.
When I first started watching MMA, there was no UFC, right?
I had the bootleg box in my room, and we'd get the fuzzy channel, and people were getting their fucking arms broken and shit, and head-butted and blood all over it.
Between you and I. Which one did you like better?
Did you like the first iteration of pretty much everything?
The guys are way more skillful and that's what's interesting to me.
What's interesting to me more than anything is the growth of the understanding of what works and what doesn't work.
Of skill, of technique.
That's the most important thing to me.
Guys like Mighty Mouse.
He was one of my favorite fighters to watch because he would fuck people up and not even get hit.
He'd be moving on people in ways where they didn't even know what was happening until he was doing it.
It was too late.
He'd already hit you.
He was moving these different angles.
He'd catch people with arm bars.
He'd fuck you up with knees in the clinch.
He was, in my opinion, the greatest expression of mixed martial arts talent.
And because he was so next level in terms of his ability to implement his strategy on you, and you couldn't do shit to him.
But he didn't get a chance to fight the level of talent as a guy like Jon Jones.
Jon Jones is fascinating to me because he's been able to stay on top for almost a fucking decade, only fighting world-class, top of the food chain, world championship caliber fighters, which is just amazing.
No one's been able to do that.
Jon's undefeated.
He has one loss by disqualification.
It's a bullshit loss that was from a bullshit rule where you're not supposed to elbow like this.
Elbow from 12 to 6. It's supposed to come down at an angle, which makes no sense, and I've described it too many times to go into details.
It's an ignorant rule.
It shouldn't exist.
But he beat the fuck out of Matt Hamill winning that fight.
There was no way Matt Hamill was winning that fight.
John dominated him.
So John's undefeated, and he's been undefeated, youngest ever world champion, 23 years old, won the world championship in the UFC, and has dominated ever since.
I mean, that's insane.
That, to me...
Is one of the most impressive things in all of sports.
Watching that guy achieve a record that might never be achieved again.
The thing about boxing that has my imagination and my fascination continually spark is the finite nature of the tools and the weapons that you have to use.
I respect and appreciate MMA, but it's almost like the antithesis of that in that they have so many things they can use and whatnot.
It's an entirely different discipline.
But you're coming from a martial arts background.
So I grew up on kung fu movies, right?
And so when I started watching this shit, these guys were in geese.
They were like, you know, I said, like, it's the Gracie's breaking arms, whatnot, and that made sense to me.
And I understood why a boxer wouldn't fight a karate man or a judo guy or whatever.
Because that's what the science is for me.
Like what you can do with these two hands and your two feet are the only way you can evade and all of that.
But why can't the karate man?
Why isn't there like a Bruce Lee of MMA? As a martial artist, can you still believe in like one discipline after all this MMA is proven it doesn't work?
There's no real one discipline that will work best in MMA. You have to know everything.
But if I was going to say what discipline is the most important, I would say wrestling.
Because if you can't keep a guy from taking you down, he's going to be on top of you, he's going to hold you down, he's going to punch you in the face.
It's a giant advantage to be able to hold a guy down, be able to punch his face in, and you can't really do much when a guy's on top of you.
That said, from there, you have to understand jiu-jitsu.
Because if you don't, you could hold a guy down, then all of a sudden he wraps his legs around your neck and you caught a triangle and you go to sleep.
And every fight starts standing.
So you have to have some understanding of striking.
Because you have to be able to close the distance.
But There's no one way to do it.
That's what's interesting to me.
It's like there's Anderson Silva's way to do it, who's the greatest middleweight of all time, and his way to do it was through striking.
He would just stay up with guys and just fuck them up with timing and precision and Muay Thai.
But then there's guys like Daniel Cormier who'd take guys down and beat the fuck out of them, choke them, you know?
And there's a bunch of different people with a bunch of different styles in between.
But if you look at the majority of world champions, The majority, except maybe a couple weight classes, they're dominated by wrestlers.