June 9, 2021 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:49:32
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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The Joe Rogan Experience. | |
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Joshua, good to see you. | ||
| Good to see you, my bro. | ||
| What's happening? | ||
| I'm just in awe. | ||
| I love the new digs, man. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I'm super happy for you. | ||
| It's come together. | ||
| If you were here six months ago, it looked pretty shitty. | ||
| But Matt Alvarez has kicked some ass. | ||
| So let's continue this conversation. | ||
| Because you guys were just talking about golf. | ||
| And you were talking about how you don't want to hate golf. | ||
| Yeah, because everybody, it's like an inevitability. | ||
| It's happened the one or two times I've played this year by a whole 12 out of 18. You're like, I want to get the fuck out of here. | ||
| I suck. | ||
| I'm tired of sucking. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| Let's end this suck. | ||
| Have you hired someone to coach you? | ||
|
unidentified
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No, no, no, no. | |
| I don't want to get that far yet. | ||
| I feel like you can't come back. | ||
| I would imagine that it's like anything else. | ||
| If you don't get a coach, then you learn bad habits, and those are hard to break. | ||
| Yes, but I am breaking bad habits I had started with from my whole life of everyone trying to say, like in the four or five times you play, you're doing this wrong, keep your head down, we'll watch the ball for you, all that kind of shit. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| I just started swinging the club however I wanted to and the ball was going straight and far. | ||
| And I was like, that's the goal of golf, right? | ||
| Straight, far. | ||
| Or at least you know where it's going. | ||
| They were all talking shit about you the other day at barbecue. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| They were like, Jamie just whacks the ball as far as he can. | ||
| That's what Tony says. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's exactly what Tony was saying. | |
| Of course, because Tony saw me play golf once, and he can't hit as far as me. | ||
| Oh, so it's envy. | ||
| A little. | ||
| And you were saying that you don't like it, Josh. | ||
| I don't know if it's driven by me sucking, or if it's that the culture, what's in my mind about what the culture of golf is, is like... | ||
| You know, people all tucked up in whites. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then... | ||
| Or the few times where I've played and felt pressure from people that were behind me to move it the fuck along. | ||
| I don't know what it is. | ||
| I have a very negative association when people tell me, well, deals are made on the golf course. | ||
| I'm like, I don't know what kind of deals you're making, but... | ||
| I get how peaceful it is, and I know that... | ||
| My hatred is driven by my insecurity around sucking at it. | ||
| But having played baseball, I think there's this little ball. | ||
| I should be able to hit it real far, and then I swing and miss or make a big hole in the course, which apparently isn't good. | ||
| Divots, I think they call them. | ||
| I don't play, so I don't know. | ||
| I'm scared of it. | ||
| Sometimes you want to divot. | ||
| Oh, you do? | ||
| But it's... | ||
| There's a lot to it. | ||
| You know how many strokes of like, you've taught me without playing with you, a pool. | ||
| Like, I'd hit it this way, hit it this way, hit the ball here, here, and I can do this kind of stuff. | ||
| Same kind of thing. | ||
| There's like 12 or 15, maybe 30 different kinds of strokes to make the ball flight, go different ways, roll backwards, stop. | ||
| Yeah, I've seen that, where they make it land and then it actually, like a draw shot. | ||
| Yeah, like a draw shot in pool. | ||
| Am I having a mushroom flashback? | ||
|
unidentified
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Shooting star. | |
| Oh, okay. | ||
| The ceiling has shooting stars, folks. | ||
| I wasn't going to say anything the first time, but then the second time I was like, oh no, this could go bad quick. | ||
| No, we have a shooting star. | ||
| It goes across the top of the ceiling. | ||
| Yeah, those games, any game like that, the problem with golf for me is that once you're committed, you're on this course. | ||
| You've got to go walk around. | ||
| It's a long-ass place to go. | ||
| It'll take you hours. | ||
| I have upped that, though. | ||
| You've upped that? | ||
| Get a simulator. | ||
| You don't have to go anywhere. | ||
| You stay still. | ||
| So you have a simulator in your house? | ||
| Yeah, but you can't putt. | ||
| But that's half the fucking game. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But is it helping those long, straight shots? | ||
| I've just started, yeah. | ||
| So yeah, you need to practice a lot. | ||
| I need to get thousands of strokes done so I can figure out what I'm doing. | ||
| And there's only one way to do that. | ||
| You have to swing hard and do it. | ||
| You can't hit foam balls. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so you have it set up in your house where you can swing full blast. | ||
| That's pretty dope. | ||
| There's not a lot of things like that where you can simulate in your house that usually you do outside. | ||
| Seems like a bit of a cop-out. | ||
| If you're gonna get in there, you gotta get in there. | ||
| It's been raining all month here, too. | ||
| But it's also like if you want to do numbers, you can't just whack balls unless you go to one of those top golf places. | ||
| And we work all day. | ||
| So at night, I can get in 200 strokes. | ||
| At least I know where it's going. | ||
| Listen, again, this is driven by my insecurity. | ||
| I think it's probably a great thing to have a simulator. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know how I am with games, and I know that golf seems to me, from the outside in, looking like one of the most addictive games ever. | ||
| It seems super addictive. | ||
| And now that I think about it, I forget which Malcolm Gladwell book it was, whether it was Blink or Outliers. | ||
| And I do ascribe to the 10,000-hour rule that if you're going to get good, it seems like a way to get good. | ||
| So I don't know what I'm talking about. | ||
| You got me on golf. | ||
| I'm real out of water. | ||
| Yeah, it's a weird one though, right? | ||
| Because it's a thing where it's the only game that's really connected to business. | ||
| Tennis isn't necessarily connected to business. | ||
| Like, you know, because golf, you don't have to be that athletic. | ||
| I mean, there's a physical movement involved to it, but you don't have to be able to explode side to side like you do with tennis. | ||
| See, and that's where I guess you just touched the nerve. | ||
| I think that that's where my aggravation comes from with golf is I think if you got into this conversation with a golfer, they would chew you alive about, oh, really? | ||
| It's not a sport? | ||
| Because I think it's a game. | ||
| I don't think it's a sport. | ||
| It's a skills game. | ||
| It's a skills game. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's not that it's not a physical movement that you do, but you don't get exhausted. | ||
| No one's whacking you. | ||
| There's no defense. | ||
| Yeah, and you could have somebody that is really struggling with alcoholism and drug addiction be at the top of the game like that guy John Daly was, right? | ||
| And I don't think that there's any sport where you could say the same thing. | ||
| That guy said he drinks how many? | ||
| 16 Diet Cokes a day? | ||
| I thought Coors Light. | ||
| I don't know about Diet Coke. | ||
| He doesn't drink water. | ||
| He only drinks Diet Coke. | ||
| And he gets Diet Coke from McDonald's because they have the best Diet Coke. | ||
| Yeah, they have that petrified ice. | ||
| Well, they also have, like, the syrup is stronger, I guess. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think it's awesome. | ||
| Look, I have extraordinary reverence for people that become skillful at anything. | ||
| I'll often look around a room and be like, How the fuck did people, you know, invent light bulbs or microphones or get great at this game with this little ball? | ||
| So, you know, I'll lay awake tonight regretting the fact that I was shitting on golf. | ||
| And there goes my existential, you know, angst. | ||
| I'm kind of with you about all these things. | ||
| Like, I'm impressed when people get good at Dance Dance Revolution. | ||
| Watch him do those fast footwork movements. | ||
| It seems kind of useless, but probably actually for fighters, actually, if you really think about it, the ability to do that kind of footwork, to move the feet that quick, like Lomachenko, right? | ||
| That's how he really got good with footwork is that Ukrainian dance. | ||
| I mean, the guy can do things that, not just dancing, but, you know, you ever see what he does with a tennis ball tied to his head on a string? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was like, well, that'll be good for hand-eye coordination. | ||
| What did you think of his fight with Lopez? | ||
| I thought that there was something off about him. | ||
| I remember you and I spoke about it before the fight. | ||
| And it seemed like his slow starts might catch up to him. | ||
| It seemed like that happened there. | ||
| I mean, I just think he's a mesmerizing athlete. | ||
| And I feel like he always gets started four or five rounds too late. | ||
| And I think Lopez had this weird, sort of awkward, smothering, you know, in-and-out, cat-and-mouse style. | ||
| Look, people can say what they want about Lopez. | ||
| He's quick. | ||
| He's accurate. | ||
| He's a little awkward. | ||
| So I was disappointed because I think Lomachenko and his dad are good guys and great athletes, and they sort of... | ||
| They broke the paradigm of how you're supposed to ascend to a championship, and they got there quick. | ||
| Well, I think he's too small for Lopez. | ||
| Lopez is a monster. | ||
| That motherfucker hits so hard, there's so much danger in getting close to him. | ||
| And Lopez is constantly pressuring, and he's got incredible endurance for a heavy hitter. | ||
| A lot of guys who hit real hard like he does, he basically doesn't throw anything half speed. | ||
| I saw him in the gym when a guy that James Prince and I managed, of course, Stevenson, was in his third or fourth fight. | ||
| And for a guy that hits as hard as he does, he's very—it may not seem so when you see it. | ||
| But he doesn't expend a ton of energy in getting off a big power shot. | ||
| And I was like, wow, this guy, he's technical in a way that doesn't seem intuitive because you're looking for the sort of hallmarks of a technical puncher. | ||
| He doesn't seem that way, but boy, does he hit for his size. | ||
| He hits fucking hard, and he knows how to get his knuckles on your chin. | ||
| He's got ring intelligence. | ||
| He's got that torque to his punch, which you can't teach. | ||
| Well, he's got, he definitely has natural power, right? | ||
| And you know better than anybody that you either have that or you don't. | ||
| He's got it. | ||
| He's got it, but what's unusual with him is he also has volume. | ||
| You know, he doesn't fade. | ||
| And he, like, he won the 12th round, which is like Lomachenko came back and was winning the 11th, right? | ||
| That was when he was making his big push. | ||
| But then Lopez came back and won the 12th, and he wins it with power because it's so dangerous getting close to him. | ||
| I mean, he's obviously got great skill as a boxer, but his style is such an assaulting power style. | ||
| He's just always pressuring, always pressuring, always throwing big shots. | ||
| It's just the consequences of getting too close to him are so dangerous. | ||
| Well, you know, you put your finger on something that I think is important, that people Even people in boxing or in MMA, any combat sport, you know it when you see it. | ||
| You look at Golovkin, for instance. | ||
| If you see him, and you see him next to other people in his division, and you didn't know anything about the sport, and you said, that guy's the biggest puncher in his prime, people would be like, come on. | ||
| The kid with the nice haircut and not overwhelming looking. | ||
| Big drama show. | ||
| Big drama show. | ||
| Listen, there's something about the way the fucking guy punches, the torque on his punch. | ||
| He knows how to put everything together just right with the right kind of torque and the way he turns his knuckles over. | ||
| He's also so well-schooled. | ||
| He's just so good at finding openings. | ||
| You know, I felt like he won the first Canelo fight, and I felt like the second fight was arguable, but, you know, could even have been a draw. | ||
| But his last fight, who the fuck did he fight in his last fight? | ||
| I forgot. | ||
| He nuked some dude, but... | ||
| I forgot. | ||
| He looks good. | ||
| He looks good in a way that makes me suspicious. | ||
| Well, you have... | ||
| Because he's a little older. | ||
| Yeah, you have reason to be suspicious of these guys that get more endurance and stronger. | ||
| 38? | ||
| No, it's not... | ||
| Mama nature doesn't ordain it that way. | ||
| Back in the day, remember when Larry Holmes came back to fight Mike Tyson? | ||
| People don't realize that. | ||
| I think he was only 36. That felt much older back then, didn't it? | ||
|
unidentified
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I know! | |
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| Like 36 back then was fucking old. | ||
| Even when George Foreman came back and knocked out Michael Moore, I remember looking at him being like, how's this old man doing it? | ||
| But he was like in his early 40s. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Well, he was 45, right? | ||
| Was he that old? | ||
| I think he was 45 because I think that was the oldest a person has won the heavyweight title. | ||
| He looked every bit of 45, too. | ||
| He was so thick. | ||
| He would walk forward and put those hands up like this. | ||
| What crazy style? | ||
| Crazy style. | ||
| Archie Moore's drive style, you know? | ||
| Yeah, he was like, if you could sneak one in there, I'll eat it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he could take a shot, too. | ||
| That's the other thing about Foreman. | ||
| He could take a shot, and his hands are as big as his fucking table. | ||
| The nicest guy you'll ever meet, too. | ||
| Sweetheart of a human being. | ||
| I believe it. | ||
| Yeah, he really is. | ||
| His whole family. | ||
| His career is so interesting. | ||
| Takes 10 years off, becomes a priest, right? | ||
| And he's a preacher. | ||
| And then comes back. | ||
| When he comes back, he's like 330 or something like that. | ||
| Way overweight. | ||
| Big fat. | ||
| Everybody's making a joke out of it. | ||
| Like, LOL. Look at George Foreman, mountain a comeback. | ||
| And then you keep seeing him winning. | ||
| And then every time he wins, looks a little slimmer. | ||
| Every time he wins, looks a little smaller. | ||
| And then he gets in there with Jerry Cooney and beats the fuck out of him. | ||
| I mean, that was... | ||
| That was like, if you ever want to show, here's what could happen to you, even at the highest levels of the sport. | ||
| Pull that up. | ||
| George Foreman versus Jerry Cooney. | ||
| And that was a time where Cooney was trying to make a comeback, and people weren't sure whether or not George was ready for top-notch fighters. | ||
| That was pre-the Tommy Morrison fight, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So Tommy Morrison was one of the few guys that beat him. | ||
| He figured out how to But look, George did not look bad there. | ||
| Yeah, he was slim. | ||
| And this was back when Jerry Cooney was still fucking dangerous. | ||
| He had a crazy left foot. | ||
| You see that catch move he was starting to get down. | ||
| And in this fight, George was looking pretty slim, too. | ||
| Not looking real overweight, but just very skillful. | ||
| And the power, the George Foreman power is just something to behold. | ||
| See, like, that little left hook? | ||
| Stung Cooney. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Right at the ear. | ||
| He knew where to throw it. | ||
| Such an interesting style of defense, that style that he uses. | ||
| It's really interesting. | ||
| Because, like, you don't see a lot of guys target his body, you know? | ||
| I mean, it wasn't, like, a thing that ever got him in trouble. | ||
| There was not, like, some guy... | ||
| Like, a guy like Cooney had a really good left hook. | ||
| But he wasn't really known for a left hook to the liver. | ||
| His left hook was mostly up top. | ||
| He was always a headhunter, especially after the Ken Norton fight. | ||
| That was like the big fight to put him on the map, right? | ||
| You know, the one thing that I asked George once why he never got attacked to the body more. | ||
| I know his son, one of the Georges, really well. | ||
| And he was a big fan of Lennox's. | ||
| And he would always... | ||
| every now and then he'd come to camp and he said that people were reluctant to attack him to the body because that exposed them too much for him to come upstairs right because you got to lower your hand so much more to go to his body well there's when you get a guy who's a big puncher like George Foreman is one of the all-time great punchers right A guy who's a big puncher, there's so much consequence to any mistake you make, any time you get close to him. | ||
| I mean, in the UFC, you saw that with Francis Ngannou and Stipe Miocic when Francis knocked him out to win the title. | ||
| There's so many consequences. | ||
| You can't fuck up with him because he hits so hard. | ||
| Jesus Christ, George is swinging for the fucking bleachers here. | ||
| Well, you see how much stronger he is, too. | ||
| He just bowls him back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Two of the nicest guys, by the way, outside of the ring that you'll ever meet. | ||
| Cooney, too? | ||
| Cooney established a pension fund for fighters, right? | ||
| And he has this organization in New Jersey, and he is Gentleman Jerry. | ||
| Very fitting name. | ||
| Just the nicest guy you'll ever meet. | ||
| Kind of amazing that he never developed a right hand that goes along with his left hook, you know? | ||
| Because his left hook was sensational. | ||
| It was so good. | ||
| But look at him. | ||
| He's like 80% lefts. | ||
| He'll throw the occasional right, but look, it's jab, jab, jab, left hook, jab, jab, jab, left hook, left hook, left hook. | ||
| Look, it's all left hooks. | ||
| Kind of crazy, right? | ||
| And he also was, you'll notice that he was pretty good on his feet, and people missed with him a lot. | ||
| See that? | ||
| Subtle little moves on the inside. | ||
| Oh, he was a skillful boxer. | ||
| He just came along when Larry Holmes was the baddest motherfucker on earth. | ||
| Yeah, one of the most underrated fighters ever. | ||
| Yeah, but look how many lefts he throws. | ||
| It's kind of crazy. | ||
| He's probably, other than Andre, but Andre had a reason for it because of his right shoulder being fucked up. | ||
| He's probably one of the most left-handed heavy fighters of all time. | ||
| Yeah, I can't think of another one. | ||
| You watch, he's probably thrown 30 left hands. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| In this round that we're watching. | ||
| It's all lefts. | ||
| I mean, he was known for it. | ||
| It was a jab and then a hook. | ||
| Or two jabs and two hooks. | ||
| And even in these exchanges, like, everything is coming from the left side. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| The right side, it just seems like, you know, he's like... | ||
| Way less effective, way less confident. | ||
| But I never understand that unless there's an injury. | ||
| Like, why wouldn't a fighter... | ||
| I mean, he's a professional boxer. | ||
| Why wouldn't he develop a wicked right hand? | ||
| Like, how does a guy just have one... | ||
| Oh, there it is. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's a wrap. | |
| George Foreman with that fucking tremendous power. | ||
| Talk about reverence. | ||
| I could never... | ||
| I don't care if they're 110-pounders. | ||
| I can never be critical, even in a casual conversation of a fighter. | ||
| I just can't. | ||
| I don't care what sport it is. | ||
| You mean in terms of their performance and their ability? | ||
| Yeah, just because I just feel like... | ||
| And I don't want to unearth anything, but hearing guys like Stephen A. Smith or Morrow or any of these guys that are like, don't have any experience fighting, period. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Having even fought just like, you know... | ||
| Bullshit amateur tournaments. | ||
| You try to hold your hands up for three minutes. | ||
| Forget about having to worry about being punched or punching. | ||
| It's fucking hard. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| And these guys are so brave. | ||
| And even being close to it as a manager in it and representing fighters, I will never, ever, ever, even in private conversation, be like, he sucks. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| They're fucking great. | ||
| It's a different thing, right? | ||
| It's not like a guy sucking at golf, right? | ||
| A guy sucks at golf, he sucks at golf, right? | ||
| I feel much more comfortable saying he's got no business on the golf course than saying he's got no business in an octagon or in a bare knuckle fight or in a boxing ring. | ||
| As do I. I feel the exact same way. | ||
| There's more laid out. | ||
| It's like you're laying something on the line when you get into a ring and you're fighting. | ||
| It's a different thing. | ||
| You're exposing yourself. | ||
| You're much more vulnerable and I feel like they deserve a level of respect. | ||
| You could say things about their technical proficiency. | ||
| I don't have any problem with that. | ||
| But these terms that people like to use with basketball players or baseball players, like, oh, he fucking sucks. | ||
| He should quit. | ||
| You fucking boo. | ||
| You get paid to do nothing. | ||
| You bum. | ||
| That kind of shit they do at baseball games. | ||
| They scream out at people. | ||
| I can't take it. | ||
| I can't take it. | ||
| Doing that to boxing, the problem is a lot of these sports guys, and we had a problem with that early on in the UFC, is that you would get these sports guy writers who would try to write about the athletes, the fighters, in this really disrespectful AM sports guy way. | ||
| You know those AM radio sports guys? | ||
| It's like all insults. | ||
| It's like what they do with some of them. | ||
| It's like they have this style of attacking all the different players' work ethics, and they got signed for too much, they're not worth it, fucking trade them, get rid of them. | ||
| They were doing that same thing with fighters, and I'm like, hey man, this is a different thing. | ||
| These guys are literally laying their health out there. | ||
| And did you put your foot down early? | ||
| Oh, a bunch of times. | ||
| Yeah, a bunch of times. | ||
| I had some real heated exchanges with some people about it. | ||
| I just didn't... | ||
| I don't like it. | ||
| I don't like that way of disrespecting fighters. | ||
| It drives me nuts. | ||
| And if you let that culture... | ||
| Like, if you let that get into the sport, it diminishes the culture of martial arts. | ||
| And I think you can make an argument that shit-talking does that, too. | ||
| And I can see that argument. | ||
| I can see how they would say that, like that shit-talking and like the Conor McGregor-style shit-talking, that that kind of diminishes the culture of martial arts, too. | ||
| But that, in my eyes, is a tactic. | ||
| Because you're fucking with someone's emotions and you're testing a person's mettle. | ||
| You're testing a person's composure. | ||
| How are they going to be able to handle the emotions of hating someone? | ||
| Someone gets you to hate them. | ||
| They say terrible things to you. | ||
| They mock you. | ||
| They insult you. | ||
| And then that fucks with your head. | ||
| And then when you go to fight, you're very emotional and you leave yourself exposed. | ||
| That's an old school Miyamoto Musashi tactic. | ||
| Well, there's a big difference, isn't there, too? | ||
| Because, like, I had my son, I took him to his first Yankee game where he could actually comprehend what was going on, right? | ||
| He's nine now. | ||
| So I had taken him when he was four or five. | ||
| So he's nine, and there's a guy sitting behind us. | ||
| He's a college-age kid. | ||
| And, uh... | ||
|
unidentified
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Fucking suck, you know, take him out of the game. | |
| And I, you know, first of all, you know, not that I need to cover his ears from curse words, but, you know, he was, he asked me, so why is he so, why is he being so mean? | ||
| And I said, you know what the irony is, son? | ||
| He probably, you know how to stop someone dead in their tracks, dead in their tracks, and say, What level did you get to in baseball or basketball or football? | ||
| You know, 99% of the time, someone yelling that shit sucked in Little League and probably never made it out of Little League. | ||
| And there's something that I think is remarkably consistent with fighters, even guys like Conor McGregor, even Floyd. | ||
| At the end of it... | ||
| They will freely admit, after the battle is done, that was all in prospect of promoting the fight. | ||
| And there's always this, I know I've told you, it's remarkable how these MMA fighters come together and they celebrate each other's success at the end. | ||
| Very rare, it seems to me, even in boxing, that at the end... | ||
| There isn't like, you know, you get knocked out. | ||
| It's like, what are you gonna say? | ||
| You got me. | ||
| Very rare that you get like a Deontay Wilder making up these conspiracy theories about his gloves, about the opponent's gloves being loaded and something was put in my drink and it was this fault. | ||
| Most of the time what I see Especially with fighters, which is, I guess, why I love them. | ||
| And I always have a soft spot for them, even though I've promised my wife, all right, no more boxing, no more. | ||
| There's something about it that's in your DNA. You're not handling any boxers anymore? | ||
| No, no, I am. | ||
| I'm still, James Prince and I are still partners. | ||
| But you still promised your wife no more boxing? | ||
| No, I promise her that I won't get as emotionally caught up in it because I fall in love with fighters in a way because they're sensitive people. | ||
| They're introspective. | ||
| They have, you know, I think existential angst like me. | ||
| There's something that they're struggling with that they're trying to work out a lot of the time, and I find them to be fascinating people, but I'm not the way I was when Lennox was fighting or You know, when Andre was fighting, earlier on I'd be going to all the fights. | ||
| I can't because I want to be with my kids and my wife, but it'll never be gone. | ||
| But yeah, we have Shakur Stevenson and some of the best, you know, this great heavyweight prospect named Jared Anderson, who I think is going to be heavyweight champion. | ||
| We have a ton of fighters. | ||
| How many fights do you have? | ||
| Jared's, I think, 9-0. | ||
| How old is he? | ||
| Nine knockouts. | ||
| He's 22. Ooh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One of the most decorated heavyweight amateurs. | ||
| He was, you know, going to be on the Olympic team, and he decided to come out early. | ||
| Just remarkable. | ||
| You'll see that Tyson Fury has had him as his sparring partner and repeatedly has said, this guy's amazing. | ||
| What do you think about what's going on with Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder? | ||
| Do you think that Tyson knew that he was going to have to defend against Deontay and that this whole Anthony Joshua thing, because that's what Joshua thinks, that he knew the whole time that he wasn't going to be able to make that fight and they were just letting them get all hyped up about it, but knew he had to really face Deontay Wilder because of the lawsuit? | ||
| No, it's 100% not true. | ||
| Not true? | ||
| No, there was an arbitration going on. | ||
| And they were actively trying to, you know, and I know this on firsthand knowledge, they were actively trying to make sure that they, he was trying to get out of the third fight. | ||
| He thought that he had a contractual right not to have to fight that third fight because it had to happen at a certain time. | ||
| And they, I mean, the arbitration's confidential, but I know what was going on, and I know that they were actively trying to make sure that he didn't have to fight that third fight. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| So I don't believe in the conspiracy theory. | ||
| I think Tyson Fury is... | ||
| He's... | ||
| Call him whatever you want, but that's a man right there. | ||
| He'll fight anyone. | ||
| That's a fact. | ||
| I mean, he's... | ||
| If you ever see him live in a gym... | ||
| I mean, everyone who's watching the sparring's jaw is on the floor to watch this guy, as big as he is, with back fat... | ||
| I do love that he gets fat. | ||
| That back fat is like some stubborn... | ||
| They look like two ham hocks. | ||
| And you see him and you're like, what the fuck? | ||
| That's beer. | ||
| He moves like a fucking gazelle. | ||
| He is... | ||
| I've never seen anything like it. | ||
| Lennox has watched him and be like this. | ||
| I can't believe what I'm seeing. | ||
| He's just remarkably gifted. | ||
| Well, he's always moved like that. | ||
| From the time he was young, he's moved like that, so it's just part of his style. | ||
| Now he can punch a little bit, though. | ||
| Yeah, well, now he sets down and he moves forward instead of just trying to box and box and box. | ||
| That was the key to the Wilder fight, was the 12th round. | ||
| 12th round of the first fight. | ||
| We had Wilder on his heels and he realized, okay, this is how you fight this guy. | ||
| You go after him. | ||
| Because if you just try to move around, then he can move forward and set his punches in and put his weight behind his punches like he did in that 12th round and dropped him. | ||
| But then when Tyson got up and then had Deontay backing up, as soon as he had Deontay backing up, it's almost like he was like, oh, this is how you fight this guy. | ||
| And he can't fight backing up, in my humble opinion. | ||
| Here I am again. | ||
| This is my humble opinion. | ||
| He can fight backing up. | ||
| It's just not his best. | ||
| It's not his best position to be in. | ||
| He's got that, what Teddy Atlas calls the eraser. | ||
| All mistakes erased with one shot. | ||
| That's another guy. | ||
| It might not look as conventional, but he pulls the plug on their consciousness in a way that... | ||
| How about Ortiz? | ||
| Hit him in the forehead. | ||
| Flat-lined him. | ||
| That was it. | ||
| And that guy, Ortiz, by the way, he fought a fighter that I managed with James, Brian Jennings, who's super tough. | ||
| And he got hit with bombs, Ortiz, in that fight. | ||
| And he was just like, alright, what's for lunch? | ||
| Alright, now give me dinner. | ||
| He just is a tough hombre. | ||
| And he got... | ||
| And that was a competitive fight. | ||
| That second Ortiz-Wilder fight was a competitive fight. | ||
| Well, the first one, he almost took Wilder out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He had Wilder in real trouble. | ||
| He had him hurt in the garden. | ||
| Put up Deontay Wilder KOs Lewis Ortiz. | ||
| Because that is one of my favorite KOs ever. | ||
| Because it was just... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Blap! | |
| One shot out of nowhere, sweat sprays, and he walks off. | ||
| He just pivoted and walked off because he knew. | ||
| He's like the guy. | ||
| He's like Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle or one of these home run hitters that right off the bat, if you watch him, he turns his back and he's like, it's over. | ||
| And I think what happened with Tyson Fury is he felt the same way. | ||
| And Tyson got up. | ||
| Tyson got up. | ||
| Like Lazarus. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| He got up and won the round. | ||
| That's what's crazy. | ||
| And you hear the announcers are just, they think it's a wrap. | ||
| He's lying on his back with his hands over his head. | ||
| Where many referees, that's where it gets subjective, right? | ||
| Many referees would have just called it, right there. | ||
| It made me believe in a higher power to watch him get up the way he did. | ||
| He just was like, alright, I'm getting up. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| Yeah, he's an unusual person. | ||
| Yeah, bag it up a little bit. | ||
| Watch this. | ||
| I love this knockout. | ||
| Just, blap! | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Sets it up. | ||
| Right on the top of the head. | ||
| And just walks away. | ||
| I mean, look at Ortiz's arms paralyzed. | ||
| He's trying to fit his mouthpiece in. | ||
| But look at how it sets it up. | ||
| Bam! | ||
| Watch him turn around. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Just pivot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
See ya. | |
| Walk away. | ||
| See ya. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Crazy power. | ||
| Look at the spray flying off his head. | ||
| I mean, who the fuck hits harder than that guy? | ||
| No, and you know, that's another thing. | ||
| He could say all these crazy things about the gloves and his water and everything. | ||
| But he can do that. | ||
| You know, I saw his first pro fight live. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was in Nashville. | ||
| And it was, you know, his balance was so bad, he could barely... | ||
| He would throw a punch, and then he would be dancing all over the place. | ||
| He just couldn't get his balance down, which is not uncommon for big heavyweights. | ||
| Lennox was like that before he got with Emmanuel Stewart. | ||
| He had a big problem with his balance. | ||
| And the notion that this guy would make it as far as he's... | ||
| He has this far and then developed the right hand. | ||
| He knows that his balance is improved. | ||
| What he had to do to improve it is widen that stance so wide that his back foot is so far behind him. | ||
| He can't really do anything about that because his balance will get all fucked up again. | ||
| But a guy that, you know, there's something to be said about a guy that says, all right, this is my moneymaker and I'm just going to figure out how to Dance around, stay in the fight, figure out when I can unload it. | ||
| I mean, that's, to me, I marvel at that. | ||
| I think it's just, it's extraordinary to see. | ||
| Well, if you look at his career on paper, he's the most extraordinary knockout artist in the history of the heavyweight division. | ||
| No one has had a record like his. | ||
| He literally has only won one fight by decision. | ||
| The Stiverne fight. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Every other dude he beat went night-night. | ||
| Watch this. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| James Prince calls me one day and he's like, this guy remains Stiverne, wants us to represent him and negotiate his rematch against Wilder. | ||
| And I said to Jay, you sure we want to do that? | ||
| Because this guy went the distance. | ||
| So the problem was that Stiverm was represented by Don King. | ||
| So, you know, we had done so much business with Don, and Don kind of knew not to... | ||
| We had like an unspoken understanding that... | ||
| You can't fuck around too much with us. | ||
| I had been involved suing Don. | ||
| James had been involved suing Don over the years. | ||
| So we had this one meeting before the fight where we're in a hotel room in Brooklyn where Don is trying to grind down Steverne's purse. | ||
| We finally negotiated these terms and Don kept on bringing up, well, if he wins the fight and if he wins the fight, we were all looking at each other. | ||
| And I think the three of us looked at each other and burst out laughing at the same time because we knew we were all, you know, Stavurn's a big, strong guy. | ||
| He came out in the rematch and while there was like, this is the one guy that I went the distance with, he blew him out in the first round in a way that I was like, this guy is going to get hurt. | ||
| Stay down, you know? | ||
| It was a wild first round, too. | ||
| Like, he threw everything behind those punches. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, pull that up. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Because the way he knocked him out was so ridiculous. | ||
| Look at that one-two. | ||
| I mean, come on, son. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| Just show that again. | ||
| That one-two's insane. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Boom! | |
| I think he gets up, if I remember. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, he got up, but he was fucked. | |
| He's in real trouble. | ||
| He was like, I told him I didn't want to do this again. | ||
| What does he say to the ref right there? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what he said. | ||
| He's in real trouble here. | ||
| Don't make me do it again. | ||
| Look at Deontay's hands down. | ||
| That guy's a badass. | ||
| He stands there with his hands down like a charging bull. | ||
| He just stood there with his hands down like, why? | ||
| Would you really want some of this? | ||
| And Stavurn got up again. | ||
| That's what's crazy. | ||
| He almost made it out of the first round. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Wiping his gloves off. | ||
| The referee's giving him plenty of time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at Deontay just runs towards him. | |
| Boom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| That's it. | ||
| Look, now he's fighting off the referee. | ||
| Get off me! | ||
| I would never. | ||
| I mean, to get up. | ||
| To get up from two punches like that. | ||
| But it's not just that. | ||
| It's like the brazenness. | ||
| You know, like, Deontay had zero fear of this guy. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| Step to the side. | ||
| Bang, bang, bang. | ||
| I mean, totally unnecessary. | ||
| I'm trying to find myself and Prince and King. | ||
| We must have been on the other side of the ring in the crowd because after the second knockdown, I remember Don King turned around and looked at us and started laughing. | ||
| It was terrible. | ||
| And he represented them. | ||
| He promoted him. | ||
| He didn't represent anything but himself. | ||
| Only in America! | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| But, you know, I could watch that. | ||
| And be like, look, we're laughing because it's, you know, we're laughing in awe of both of these guys because you have to be a badass to get knocked down like that and get up. | ||
| And want more. | ||
| Twice. | ||
| Twice. | ||
| I don't care what you're saying to the ref, shaking your head. | ||
| So I will always be in love with men that are willing to risk that much. | ||
| Because what's never been lost on me, not to get too introspective or poetic about it, it was always... | ||
| Like, even with Bermain and Severn, it was a quick representation, but James and I got him paid. | ||
| And, you know, this is a sport that plucks, you know, the most disenfranchised people most of the time out of the worst circumstances, out of the poorest neighborhoods, and it's like the fucking Wild West. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, I think Dana White and the UFC get a lot of shit For, oh, well, it's a monopoly. | ||
| It's this big thing. | ||
| All right, look, there's some organization there. | ||
| There's a central body. | ||
| You know, in boxing, you have, like, when I shut my eyes and think about it, it's like a bunch of rabid vultures that are looking to pluck flesh off of people, eat it, and throw them aside. | ||
| Well, this is what's going on right now where a bunch of fighters are upset because Logan Paul and Floyd Mayweather just fought and Logan Paul made 20 million bucks and Floyd Mayweather made 100 million bucks and they're looking at this like, hey, what about me? | ||
| Like, how come I'm not making that kind of money? | ||
| I think what they have to understand is, whether you like it or not, even if you are an elite, the elite of the elite, a Kamaru Usman or, you know, pick any stylebender, some of the best fighters in the UFC, even the elite of the elite, the money comes from people wanting to buy your pay-per-view. | ||
| It's real simple. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It shouldn't maybe, you know, maybe in a perfect world, it's the most skillful fighter gets the most amount of money, but that's not how it works here. | ||
| In the world of combat sports, professional prize fighting, it's all about how many eyes are gonna watch you. | ||
| And that fucking Logan Paul kid has a lot of eyes on him. | ||
| He's on a YouTube channel since he was 14 years old. | ||
| He's been on Disney shows. | ||
| He's this controversial, larger-than-life, you know, internet celebrity. | ||
| People are willing to pay a lot of money to see if he can box with literally one of the greatest fighters that's ever lived in Floyd Mayweather. | ||
| Hey, look. | ||
| I'm not mad at it. | ||
| I'm not mad at it either. | ||
| Yeah, and you know what? | ||
| The best fighters and some of the best fighters to ever fight, Lennox Lewis, Andre Ward, these guys that I had the honor of representing, you never hear out of these elites that they're pissed. | ||
| Like, good for them. | ||
| Because I think that they get on a fundamental level... | ||
| That as human beings, we unfortunately were hardwired to watch the train wreck. | ||
| We want to see carnage. | ||
| We want to see a freak show too. | ||
| It is a freak show. | ||
| That was a freak show. | ||
| It's a circus. | ||
| I was looking forward to it. | ||
| I really was. | ||
| I was so excited before the bell rang for the first round. | ||
| It's like going to the circus almost. | ||
| It's like a dude wrestling a bear. | ||
| Can he wrestle a bear? | ||
| You know what it reminded me of? | ||
| It reminded me of when Rocky fought Hulk Hogan in one of the Rocky movies. | ||
| Well, the difference, though, is that Floyd... | ||
| First of all, you've got to give credit to Floyd Mayweather for doing that because it's so crazy to fight a guy 35 pounds heavier than you. | ||
| That's so big. | ||
| He looked like he was fighting a giant. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And to watch him... | ||
| Look... | ||
| People have a lot of opinions about Floyd Mayweather, what he does, how he spends his money. | ||
| Listen, the guy's brilliant in a lot of ways. | ||
| He's tapped into something that human beings want and want to see, but I was watching him in the fight. | ||
| The guy outweighs him by 40 pounds, and he's walking to him. | ||
| Walking right to him with his hands up. | ||
| I was like, listen, he is a badass. | ||
| And listen, the guy Logan Paul, he's got balls to get in there and to do that. | ||
| How could you ever be mad at that? | ||
| I mean, you could take a step back and be like, oh God, what a society come to. | ||
| I mean, it's come to watching the freak show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's come to watching the freak show. | ||
| And maybe not just that, because there were some professional fights on the undercard, but no one's talking about those. | ||
| You know, it's just the big fight was the freak show fight. | ||
| And you want to know what? | ||
| I think that this is going to continue until somebody shuts these kids up. | ||
| And, like, people want to see... | ||
| Now, they want... | ||
| I think it's the same sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that Mayweather sort of tapped into. | ||
| It's like, I realize the more I run my mouth, the more I make people have an emotion towards me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Love or hate. | ||
| Mostly hate, right? | ||
| Mostly, they're going to be pissed at me. | ||
| Now they want to tune in to see me lose. | ||
| And that's just as valuable, if not more valuable, than wanting to tune... | ||
| So I think that on a... | ||
| He gets human behavior and human thinking more than he gets credit for. | ||
| I'm not here to weigh in on his life or his lifestyle because who am I? I'm just another human being. | ||
| But I think that the same thing is happening with these two. | ||
| People want to see them lose now and they realize how there's currency in that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, there's a lot of currency in that. | ||
| It's super valuable. | ||
| People want to see him get fucked up. | ||
| And, you know, we were at the UFC recently, and Jake Paul was in the audience, and the whole audience was chanting, Fuck Jake Paul! | ||
| Fuck Jake Paul! | ||
| And he was laughing and holding his camera up and filming it and shit. | ||
| And DC got in his face. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which I love to see. | ||
| That was so cool. | ||
| But it was like... | ||
| Then the story became... | ||
| Cormier confronts Paul. | ||
| And look, there's part of me that is like... | ||
| You spend your life racking your fucking brains. | ||
| How do I make it in this world? | ||
| How am I gonna support my family? | ||
| What am I gonna do to make a difference? | ||
| So there's a part of it that I get where people are like, and these two fucking kids, what did they do? | ||
| How did they get famous? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They pissed people off. | ||
| Yeah, but they got famous first. | ||
| This is what's interesting. | ||
| They got famous first and then it turns out they can fight. | ||
| Especially Jake. | ||
| That kid can knock people the fuck out. | ||
| He knows how to punch. | ||
| Can he knock fighters out, though? | ||
| Well, we don't know. | ||
| I mean, we saw Askren, right? | ||
| But Askren, first of all, coming off of a hip replacement surgery. | ||
| It's a brilliant move, right? | ||
| You get a guy who's arguably the worst striker in elite MMA, which is Ben Askren. | ||
| And that's no disrespect to Ben Askren. | ||
| He'd probably admit to that. | ||
| He's a wrestler, right? | ||
| Phenomenal wrestler, like elite wrestler. | ||
| Great guy. | ||
| Not a good striker. | ||
| You make him box. | ||
| It's like the worst thing that he does. | ||
| And then Jake Paul starches him with one punch. | ||
| But you looked at his body. | ||
| He looked severely out of shape. | ||
| He looked like he hadn't trained for a long time and then kind of got in good enough shape so he could compete. | ||
| The guy knows how to fight. | ||
| He knows how to win. | ||
| But that's not his sport. | ||
| It's not his sport at all. | ||
| He just took a paycheck. | ||
| I'd like to see this guy, Jake Paul, fight someone... | ||
| He's gonna fight Tyron Woodley. | ||
| Well, after he fights, can Tyron Woodley fight? | ||
| Can he box? | ||
| Well, I know he can punch. | ||
| He punches really hard, but he doesn't punch like a boxer. | ||
| He throws big bombs and sets up takedowns and, you know, he can crack, though. | ||
| With one shot, he could fuck anybody up. | ||
| But the thing is, the way he throws shots, he'll throw a bomb and then set up a takedown or set up a clinch. | ||
| He's not a guy who's going out there with peekaboo style, throwing jabs and hooks to the body. | ||
| That's not his style. | ||
| He's never been a guy who boxed. | ||
| He's been a guy who uses boxing in MMA, but he uses everything. | ||
| Does Jake Paul beat him, you think? | ||
| Oh, we won't know until they get in there. | ||
| The thing about it is he'll be the most dangerous guy that Jake's fought for, sure. | ||
| Not even close. | ||
| Not even close. | ||
| And no one more dangerous than Tyrone Weather. | ||
| Well, if he beats an MMA fighter... | ||
| Tyrone's not just an MMA fighter. | ||
| Tyrone is a UFC world champion and one of the best welterweights of all time. | ||
| If you looked at all the UFC welterweights of all time, he's top three. | ||
| He's fucking phenomenal. | ||
| But there is something fundamentally different about MMA fighters fighting a boxer. | ||
| Yeah, because there's other stuff that you incorporate into your movement. | ||
| You're worried about leg kicks. | ||
| You're worried about takedown defense. | ||
| You're worried about all these different things. | ||
| You have all these different variables on your plate. | ||
| Now you remove all those variables. | ||
| You give Tyron a pair of shoes and you just let him punch. | ||
| You know, he punches really fucking hard. | ||
| And when he doesn't have to worry about wrestling, he doesn't have to worry about getting as tired, and he can pick his shots, he'll be the most dangerous guy that Jake Paul's ever fought, for sure. | ||
| But it doesn't necessarily mean that he wins. | ||
| And I think Jake Paul can fucking box. | ||
| If you look at that Nate Robinson fight, I know Nate Robinson didn't know what he was doing, but the way he landed those punches, he cracked him and knocked him out moving backwards. | ||
| He can move backwards and then He doesn't have big wind-up movements. | ||
| His brother has more wind-up shots. | ||
| His brother was throwing more windmill-y type arm punches. | ||
| Jake throws things straight and hard. | ||
| They're dangerous. | ||
| Much more dangerous. | ||
| Here's why I have more respect for the older brother for what he just did. | ||
| Yes, he outweighed him by 40 pounds, but he got in there with perhaps the best fighter to ever get in a ring. | ||
| I'd love to see how Jake Paul fares against someone similar in size that is a boxer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you know what, man? | ||
| He's only got a couple of fights. | ||
| Here's how you have to look at him. | ||
| Look at him like any other guy who only has a couple of fights. | ||
| If you saw a guy who was coming up and he didn't have an amateur career and he's only had a couple of fights, he'd go, man, he's got some promise. | ||
| Yeah, no, but these guys aren't in it for the long haul to become boxers? | ||
| Jake says he is. | ||
| They're in it to become spectacles. | ||
| But imagine if this guy gets all the way up to a world title fight. | ||
| Imagine. | ||
| Imagine if he actually works his way through some professional boxers. | ||
| That would be remarkable, wouldn't it? | ||
| It wouldn't just be remarkable. | ||
| The fucking money he'll be able to earn. | ||
| Well, how about fighting a recently retired... | ||
| You know who would fuck him up? | ||
| Who the fuck am I right now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Andre Ward. | |
| Andre Ward. | ||
| Andre can't fight professionally anymore because he's had some physical problems. | ||
| But Andre's still in shape. | ||
| He's recently retired. | ||
| Maybe he'll... | ||
| Are you trying to set something up? | ||
| You're looking away. | ||
| You're like the worst poker player ever. | ||
| He's like, well, maybe. | ||
| Well, I just know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Look, that's my brother. | ||
| I mean, I know that he's like... | ||
| Has he thought about it? | ||
| He's thought about it. | ||
| He's thought about it and be like, we've talked about it recently. | ||
| I texted him after he announced that he wasn't going to take the Canelo fight and retire, and I said, I admire him so much, and I admire the way he carries himself so much, and I think it's so valuable for the sport of boxing, because here's a guy who wins an Olympic gold medal, wins two world titles in two different weight classes, is undefeated, not only undefeated, but fought the majority of his career with one arm. | ||
| He retires, undefeated, and then says, you know what? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I will best serve boxing as a commentator and as a representative, and that's what he decides to do. | ||
| And he's so eloquent and so composed and such a great spokesman for boxing and such a great commentator. | ||
| I love the fact that he got out with all his marbles, got out with plenty of money, got out with his health. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Here's the thing about Andre, too. | ||
| When you get to know him, there's a reason why you have respect for him in those ways and others, because you've gotten to know him a little bit. | ||
| He is a once-in-a-lifetime streaking comet of a human being. | ||
| And I say that not because of what he accomplished as a fighter, but if you look at his childhood, and he's been out there about the fact that his mother and father struggled with addictions. | ||
| His father dies suddenly, and he had every reason to go in a completely opposite direction. | ||
| He is like a brother to me in so many ways, but I'll spend hours on the phone with him just talking about life and existence. | ||
| Everything that you've said about—he's the rare instance of a human being that what's projected about him publicly is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of how— I get emotional thinking about him because he's so important to me as a human being. | ||
| And if you look at his family, he's a guy that all his dreams came true. | ||
| And to one child to the next, everybody that he touches, he has that impact on. | ||
| And he's a guy that when he makes mistakes, he'll admit his mistakes. | ||
| And we're both stubborn and have our ups and downs. | ||
| But I could not be happier to be associated with him. | ||
| And you're right. | ||
| A lot of money was put on the table for him to fight Canelo. | ||
| And we still get, James and I still get asked about it. | ||
| And he just, he has that stick-to-it-ness. | ||
| But why would he be willing to fight Jake Paul then? | ||
| Because I think it's, in his mind, it's an exhibition. | ||
| And I don't think that he looks at it as even a remote threat, that it could tarnish his legacy or that he would have to expend too much physically. | ||
| I think that he's probably sitting back looking at this and like, you know what? | ||
| I could now secure not just my children's, but my great-grandchildren's futures. | ||
| I think that there's a part of Andre, if you know him well, everything that I've set aside, oh, he's got some dog up in him. | ||
| If you ever watch his fights, if he gets hit, you'll see him... | ||
| Now I'm going to get you four times. | ||
| You know, he is a mean SOB in the ring. | ||
| And I think that there's a part of him that sees this and is like, these guys need to be put in their place. | ||
| And I could do it pretty easily. | ||
| But do you think that Jake Paul would be willing to fight a guy like Andre Ward, Olympic gold medalist, multiple division world champion, undefeated fighter? | ||
| No. | ||
| Who's still young? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, how old is Andre? | ||
| 35? | ||
| Yeah, just turned 35. 36. He's still in the prime of his athletic career or close to it, close enough to it. | ||
| But he's a little banged up physically. | ||
| He basically... | ||
| You trying to sell this fight? | ||
| No. | ||
| That's what it seems like to me. | ||
| I'm not trying to sell it. | ||
| Seems like you're trying to... | ||
| I would love for the guy... | ||
| I would love for Jake Paul to be like, you know what? | ||
| I'll take that on. | ||
| But in my mind, it's like, that would never happen. | ||
| The guy's very risk-averse. | ||
| I don't know about that. | ||
| Tyron's a risk. | ||
| Tyron Woodley's a real risk. | ||
| And he's also offering to bet Tyron his purse. | ||
| He said he'll donate Tyron's purse to charity. | ||
| I noticed that Tyron did not take him up on that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's a... | ||
| I noticed that. | ||
| I said, Tyron is just saying, I'm not saying anything. | ||
| I think Tyron needs that money. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think he's planning 100% on that money, and if he were to lose the fight, it's not good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I think he's the biggest threat, though. | ||
| Hey, listen. | ||
| He can knock him out, and I think he's got a legitimate shot at hurting him. | ||
| He fucking hits hard, man. | ||
| I have a question for you. | ||
| What do you make of all of these exhibitions that have caught fire? | ||
| I don't know if it's because of COVID that people began thinking, well, I've got to watch something. | ||
| I'll watch anything. | ||
| And then they watch... | ||
| Tyson and Lennox are now talking about an exhibition. | ||
| That might happen. | ||
| I think it probably will happen. | ||
| I think that there's something... | ||
| I'm biased... | ||
| There's something interesting to me to see. | ||
| How will a guy in his mid-50s get in shape enough? | ||
| Because Lennox is a perfectionist. | ||
| How will he get in shape to the point where he feels comfortable getting into a ring? | ||
| That would be interesting to me to watch. | ||
| It's pretty crazy. | ||
| It is interesting. | ||
| See, it doesn't necessarily matter who's the most skillful. | ||
| It matters what's the most entertaining. | ||
| I'll give you an example. | ||
| Arturo Gatti and Mickey Ward. | ||
| It's not saying that those guys weren't skillful. | ||
| They're both very skillful fighters, but they weren't the best in the world. | ||
| But what a fucking matchup that was. | ||
| And when those guys fought, the whole world watched. | ||
| And no one was under any illusion that those guys were going to be the best in the world, that they were the world champions. | ||
| It didn't matter. | ||
| It was just like, this is a recipe for a fucking really incredibly exciting fight. | ||
| It was an apocalyptic, cataclysmic explosion. | ||
| I went to the second fight, and it was like in that boardwalk hall in Atlantic City. | ||
| The place was fucking vibrating. | ||
| There's fights that it doesn't... | ||
| It's not important that they're not the best in the world. | ||
| What's important is how they match. | ||
| A good example in MMA is Diego Sanchez versus Clay Guida. | ||
| One of the wildest fights of all time. | ||
| Have you ever seen it? | ||
| No. | ||
| Jamie. | ||
| Pull that shit up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Because it is one of the wildest fights of all time. | ||
| First of all, this was Diego Sanchez in his prime when he was a fucking savage. | ||
| Still is a savage. | ||
| But in that day, I mean, he fought like nobody else. | ||
| He would just come at you like a wild animal, like a wolverine. | ||
| Just like a Wolverine trying to steal your food. | ||
| And the two guys just went to war. | ||
| And I believe it was at the Palm in Vegas. | ||
| Diego just runs at him. | ||
| This is the beginning of the fight. | ||
| This is the fucking- Oh, this is the first round? | ||
| This is the first seconds- I thought you were showing me highlights. | ||
| No, man. | ||
| This is the first seconds of the fucking opening round. | ||
| They were going after each other. | ||
| I mean, first of all, Clay Guida takes a shot like fucking no one on the planet. | ||
| Does he survive this round? | ||
|
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|
Yes! | |
| He almost wins the fight and arguably did. | ||
| He lost a split decision. | ||
| It was a crazy ass fight, but he got hurt in this fight. | ||
| But I mean, the way they fought, they did this for three fucking rounds. | ||
| Klay wound up taking him down and winning at least one of the rounds with some ground and pound. | ||
| And some people thought that maybe it was close enough that he pulled it off, but it was... | ||
| Maybe even a draw, but Diego, I mean, I'm not arguing against the decision. | ||
| I'm just saying it turned out to be pretty fucking close. | ||
| Well, how fitting is it that he's wearing a Chicago Carpenters Union endorsement on his trunk? | ||
| Well, that's who he is. | ||
| It's his nickname, the Carpenter. | ||
| Clay the Carpenter Guida. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Yeah, but that fight is like that for three rounds. | ||
| Just fucking madness, where the whole place is screaming, and it was nuts. | ||
| I still, look, maybe boxing people will jump on me for this. | ||
| I have never... | ||
| I went to my first MMA fight live for the Masvidal-Diaz fight, and I have never seen a live sporting event that was that exciting ever. | ||
| And that includes when Lennox fought Mike Tyson. | ||
| That includes any pro fight I've ever seen. | ||
| There's literally nothing like it. | ||
| And I know this is like a boxing fanatic. | ||
|
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|
How could you say that? | |
| It's just a fact. | ||
| MMA is more exciting. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| There's more elements going on. | ||
| Boxing feels like watching a baseball game after you go to an MMA fight. | ||
| You have to appreciate the skill and the science and the art of it, which I do. | ||
| But in terms of pure excitement and product, the entertainment, it's just... | ||
| Yeah, it's different. | ||
| Although, like, you know, when a guy like Canelo fights... | ||
| See, it's like when Mike Tyson was in his prime, too. | ||
| It's the same kind of thing. | ||
| Like, a guy who could just take anybody out with one shot. | ||
| There's something about that, because you're watching this guy stalk someone. | ||
| Like, when Canelo fought Billy Joe Saunders, one uppercut, boom, breaks his face and points at him. | ||
| He's like, I broke your face. | ||
| And then does this to the crowd. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Like, I got it. | ||
| That guy's... | ||
| He's special. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| Shakur Stevenson, who I think is special, one of the most special fighters in the world right now. | ||
| Shakur says to me, watch him in the pocket. | ||
| Watch him make people miss, and he'll give me time stamps to watch this round. | ||
| How does he do it? | ||
| He makes people... | ||
| And Shakur is a very... | ||
| How should we say self-assured young man? | ||
| He doesn't think anyone, but he said, that's the goat right there. | ||
| The guy stands in the pocket and with these little subtle dips of his shoulder or angles on his head, he just knows how to make people miss. | ||
| He's remarkable. | ||
| Well, he learned so much from that Floyd fight, right? | ||
| He fought Floyd and Floyd was so hard to hit. | ||
| I think that was a real eye-opener for him. | ||
| Because he's this murderous young puncher, just seek and destroy, Mexican-style fighter. | ||
| And then he fights Floyd Mayweather and he can't hit him. | ||
| And he's like, oh, shit. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| This is the thing. | ||
| The first time I went, I managed a kid named Kermit Cintron, who was a welterweight champion of the world. | ||
| I remember him. | ||
| Best athlete to this day. | ||
| Pure athlete that I've ever managed. | ||
| He could bowl like a 280. Jamie, he could golf. | ||
| Fucking great golfer. | ||
| He could play basketball. | ||
| Amazing balance. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| So I had him training with Emmanuel Stewart at one point, but Ronnie Shields, the great trainer in Houston, trained him. | ||
| And he got a fight with Canelo. | ||
| This was maybe eight years ago. | ||
| And he was fighting in Mexico City. | ||
| And we went down to Mexico City. | ||
| James Prince wouldn't come. | ||
| He's like, I don't know why you're going to Mexico City. | ||
| He's like, black eyes and Jews don't belong in Mexico City. | ||
| We're all going to get kidnapped. | ||
| So we go down to Mexico City, and the fight is in a fucking bullring. | ||
| All right? | ||
| Now, Canelo was smaller physically back then. | ||
| The first round, Mauricio Suleiman, who's the head of the WBC, comes over to me and says, do you want a drink? | ||
| I said, no, I'm good. | ||
| They were warming up in trailers set up like it was a movie set. | ||
| We walk into this bullring. | ||
| There's 9,000 people and it's like they're right on top of the ring. | ||
| And this guy, Canelo, came out in the first round, and he hit Kermit with a 1-2, and the matchmaker standing next to me goes, this guy is going to fucking put a hole into Kermit. | ||
| He's going to put a hole. | ||
| I have never seen a guy that size punch the way he punched, like a fucking mule. | ||
| And Suleiman must have seen the look on my face. | ||
| He didn't come over and say, do you want another drink? | ||
| He handed me a double scotch. | ||
| LAUGHTER And just walked away. | ||
| I was like, that's about right. | ||
| And Kermit just didn't make it out of the third or fourth round. | ||
| He just overwhelmed him. | ||
| Powerful, skillful, and just, he's got that, there's like a dominant gene in his genetic sequence where he's just like, there's just something special about him. | ||
| I don't think he's going to be beat. | ||
| He's a monster, and he's so dedicated. | ||
| It's not just that. | ||
| What is that guy, Graham Elwood? | ||
| Is that the guy's name? | ||
| He does interviews on YouTube. | ||
| Is that his name? | ||
| I forget the guy's name. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| But the guy has a bunch of interviews on YouTube. | ||
| He's a really good interviewer, and he goes to Canelo's home. | ||
| And he interviews Canelo and Canelo gives him a tour of all of his cars and shows his house and all these different things that he does. | ||
| And Canelo basically, he's going over his philosophy on staying at the top. | ||
| And he's like, you know, a lot of times people get to the top and they're not hungry anymore. | ||
| And he's like, but I'm very, very hungry. | ||
| He goes, I want to be the best ever. | ||
| And he goes, and I just, it's all about hard work. | ||
| And he just keeps working harder and harder and harder. | ||
| He keeps putting in that time. | ||
| You could see it in his head. | ||
| He's dedicated on this path. | ||
| He's not full of himself. | ||
| He's obviously super confident but aware that all this could go away if he starts to think about it the wrong way. | ||
| If he starts to think that he's already made it or that he doesn't have to work as hard because he's so much better than everybody else. | ||
| He doesn't think that way. | ||
| Cool motherfucker too. | ||
| Treats everybody respectfully. | ||
| Just seems like a super grounded guy. | ||
| He's amazing, man. | ||
| And you need those outliers. | ||
| You need those people like him to shake up the industry. | ||
| You need people like him that are so good and so dedicated and so physically dominant. | ||
| And I always go back to the fight with Danny Jacobs. | ||
| That, to me, was the clearest progression of his defensive skills. | ||
| Because, you know, Danny can crack, and he's dangerous. | ||
| He's a super athlete, too. | ||
| He's a big guy. | ||
| And he's coming at Canel throwing bombs, and Canel is just... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Bobbing and weaving and standing in front of him. | ||
| Using it as an opportunity almost. | ||
| Some of the best defense I've ever seen in a fight. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| And Danny's a tremendous athlete, great kid. | ||
| I know him since he's like 15, 16 years old in New York. | ||
| Clips of Canelo, defense, Danny Jacobs. | ||
| Because it's fucking incredible. | ||
| It's when you know how good Danny Jacobs is, and you know how... | ||
| This is a big fight, and a lot of people thought Danny had a chance. | ||
| He's a big guy for the division, power puncher, real elite boxer, world-class skills, and you see him... | ||
| And it was a good fight. | ||
| Still a good fight. | ||
| Yeah, it was a good fight. | ||
| And you think about what that guy's overcome. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You know, stage three or four cancer, like a tumor wrapped around... | ||
| What kind of cancer did he have? | ||
| Some sort of bone cancer, I believe. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Blood cancer. | ||
| I mean, look at that. | ||
| I mean, look at this fucking head movement. | ||
| I mean, it's just so smooth. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| And he's doing it so efficiently, right? | ||
| Look, right in front of him. | ||
| And his feet are always in proper position. | ||
| I mean, it's really amazing. | ||
| He also, you know, the Golovkin fights, I think, taught him a lot. | ||
| About how to stand in front of a power puncher. | ||
| He was so much better in the second fight than he was the first fight. | ||
| I think in the first fight, Golovkin got robbed. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| Yeah, I thought Golovkin won that fight. | ||
| I thought he won that fight. | ||
| But, I mean, this fight's incredible. | ||
| This fucking defense is phenomenal, man. | ||
| He literally can't land a punch on him. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| But also, he's doing it from right in front of him. | ||
| That's that in-the-pocket stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He knows where everything is coming from. | ||
| It's just incredible. | ||
| I mean, who's better than this guy? | ||
| Fucking nobody. | ||
| You know what I watched today that's pretty goddamn impressive that I forgot? | ||
| Oscar De La Hoya's Instagram page. | ||
| It's his fight with Julio Cesar Chavez. | ||
| And I know Julio was older when they fought, but goddamn, I forgot how good Oscar was. | ||
| When Oscar was young, when Oscar was on fire... | ||
| When he was young and pretty. | ||
| He's still pretty as an older man. | ||
| He's not bad looking. | ||
| But look how fucking good he looked here. | ||
| I mean, these combinations from Oscar and this left hook, the way he would leap in with the left hook. | ||
| Like, watch this here. | ||
| Yeah, he was fast as shit. | ||
| Fuck yeah! | ||
| Look how good he looked, man. | ||
| Like that left hook. | ||
| Like step in, left hook to the body. | ||
| And the footwork and the movement, light on the toes. | ||
| Yeah, he never stops bouncing when he's younger. | ||
| And Oscar's one of those rare guys who's a southpaw. | ||
| He's a left-handed fighter that fights with his left hand forward. | ||
| It's hard to see that. | ||
| I know. | ||
| He destroyed him. | ||
| Another great guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And in his prime, one of the greatest of all time. | ||
| In his prime, he was just a perpetual motion machine. | ||
| Him, Roberto Duran. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| That's where, by the way, that's where Tyson got a lot of his... | ||
| He's told me this before. | ||
| He used to watch Roberto Duran and shit he would say, and the way it would get a rise out of people, and he would watch tapes of him and say, aha, now I see how to... | ||
| Put the needle in and then maybe rub something in the wound, maybe a little salt, but then when I pull it out, let me pour alcohol in it. | ||
| Let me really sting people. | ||
| And if you watch, Roberto Duran will call people Dogs. | ||
| Their mother's a dog. | ||
| Yeah, your mother's a whore. | ||
| Your mother's a whore. | ||
| You say all sorts of shit. | ||
| Apparently, you know, you ever see a documentary where Sugar Ray Leonard talks about his experience with Roberto Duran and that after their fight, they had to do some sort of press thing before their second fight, and Sugar Ray's kids were there, and he was worried about his kids being around Duran. | ||
| But Duran was a total gentleman, like super sweetheart to his kids. | ||
| And, like, when it wasn't, like, promoting for the fight, when it wasn't all that, like, he was, like, super calm and cool and collected. | ||
| And he said it was really impressive, though he was really nice to his children. | ||
| There's something about the society, too, that especially we're in this... | ||
| This very digestible tidbits of things that we can pop in our mouth and then make a decision on. | ||
| It's like when you know that there's... | ||
| These guys are showmen. | ||
| They're in the entertainment business, so they don't get enough credit. | ||
| Roberto Duran knew what motivated people back then before we were in this ubiquitous... | ||
| Media is everywhere. | ||
| It's all-encompassing. | ||
| He got human emotions, the way Tyson got human emotions, the way Mayweather gets it. | ||
| So people make decisions that he was an animal. | ||
| He was a showman, is what he was. | ||
| And he was a calculated showman that knew that, you know, I'm not going to cross those lines. | ||
| I guess there are some people that do, but most of the time what I find, whether I'm dealing with, like, boxers or even in, like, you know, people talk about juries. | ||
| People are dumb. | ||
| They don't think this way. | ||
| The lay people don't think this way. | ||
| Let's deal with people individually and give them a little bit more credit than they deserve. | ||
| I actually think that there's a lot of people that are a lot smarter than they get credit for. | ||
| And I think Duran's one of them. | ||
| I think that what you pointed out shows some smarts in my mind because it shows the self-awareness that I'm not going to be a shithead of a human being All the time. | ||
| I'm going to do it when I think it might help promote my career for better or for worse. | ||
| Or help get under the skin of my opponent and get him to be emotional. | ||
| And then there's that. | ||
| Like Sugar Ray was in the first fight. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The first fight, Sugar Ray tried to fight him the way Duran wanted him to fight him. | ||
| Like stood toe to toe, mano a mano. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That didn't work out so good. | ||
| It was pretty close. | ||
| You know, it was a good fight. | ||
| Didn't play to his strengths, that's for sure. | ||
| No, it didn't play to his strengths. | ||
| But he wanted to show that he could stand in their slug with Roberto Duran. | ||
| I would have liked to have seen what would have happened if Duran prepared correctly for the second fight. | ||
| Because of the second fight, they knew he was fat and out of shape. | ||
| They made it short notice, so he had to kind of get in shape. | ||
| He was overweight. | ||
| He apparently had a really hard time making the weight, and then after the weight, just ate a bunch of food and had cramps. | ||
| And then quit. | ||
| You know, it just looked like shit. | ||
| Sugar Ray was like, I'm going to move this time. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would have loved to see that Sugar Ray, though, fight Duran the first time. | ||
| I would have loved to see if he could do it. | ||
| You know, I wonder if he would have been able to utilize that same sort of strategy against a prime Duran that was ramped up from trying to kill him, like the first fight. | ||
| You know what that fight reminded me of, that second fight? | ||
| If you ever played tennis, that's a sport, right? | ||
| Tennis is a sport, yeah. | ||
| Where you know that somebody's going to gas out, so you just hit lobs to this side of the court and that side of the court. | ||
| If you watch that fight, Sugar Ray would potshot him, walk around, go the other direction, get on his bike, switch directions, and he knew he could just tire him out. | ||
| I think they knew Duran was fucked going into that fight. | ||
| I mean, people know. | ||
| You know, you have camps that have spies in them and people tell you, you know, he's fat, he's out of shape, he's drinking, he's doing this, he's doing that, you know? | ||
| Boxers also are human, right? | ||
| They have, they fall like, you get into a camp for eight weeks and there's temptation and women and all kinds of shit around and They're not just men, rather. | ||
| They're not just humans. | ||
| They're humans that do the most savage thing you can do for a living, and they're risk-takers. | ||
| So they're addicted to risk-taking. | ||
| So they're always like, maybe I'll just drink one night. | ||
| Like, Jon Jones used to get fucked up before every fight, and he said he did it to have a built-in excuse. | ||
| He kind of admitted it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, he said he always had a built-in excuse. | ||
| Like, if I lost, at least I was partying. | ||
| Like, now next time I won't party and I'll really be dedicated. | ||
| An excuse to himself? | ||
| I don't know if it was to himself, if it was to other people. | ||
| But he still never lost. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's such a lonely thing, I think. | |
| It's a crazy way to make a living, man. | ||
| And you also, you're getting hit in the head. | ||
| And when you get hit in the head, you become more impulsive. | ||
| You take more chances. | ||
| You become more erratic. | ||
| The more you get hit in the head, the more you accumulate damage. | ||
| It's just a fact of being a human being. | ||
| Yeah, that's my love-hate with the sport. | ||
| Mine too. | ||
| That's why I've stiff-armed it a little bit more when you said, are you still involved with fighters? | ||
| Once you start to care about these guys in a way that they become family to you, you try to talk them out of doing anything that's going to get them exposed to being in there. | ||
| That's why I thought it was so amazing what Andre did. | ||
| You know, in his prime, with this big fight, you know, this big potential. | ||
| This was after Canela knocked out Kovalev. | ||
| That's when they offered him the fight, and he's like, nope. | ||
| Hey, Lennox did the same thing. | ||
| They offered him a major rematch with Klitschko, the bigger one, who I think was the better one. | ||
| And he walked away from 25, 30 million dollars. | ||
| The bigger Klitschko could hit harder. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| That was the thing. | ||
| It's like, not that Vladimir can't hit hard, but the bigger Klitschko hit hard and also could take a shot. | ||
| He was awkward. | ||
| Iron chin. | ||
| Awkward and strong. | ||
| Lennox hit him with the biggest uppercut he's ever thrown and landed. | ||
| And the guy was out on his feet, but he stood up. | ||
| Well, he's also super fucking smart. | ||
| Doesn't he speak like multiple languages? | ||
| He's the mayor of Kiev. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, super bright guy. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Nice guy, too. | ||
| He's a fucking tank of a man. | ||
| That's an interesting group of brothers, those two guys, the Klitschkos. | ||
| They're very boring, but very interesting. | ||
| Well, Vladimir was boring up until the Joshua fight. | ||
| The Joshua fight was not boring. | ||
| That fight. | ||
| I'm just saying, as human beings, you talk to the nicest guys in the world, but you're like... | ||
| What else? | ||
| Jab and hold. | ||
| Jab and hold. | ||
| They figured out a way to win fights, Vladimir did, without getting his chin tested. | ||
| Somebody said that he might fight Shannon Briggs. | ||
| There's some rumor that Vladimir might come back to fight Shannon Briggs. | ||
| Well, Shannon Briggs went on a years-long campaign of tormenting Vladimir Klitschko. | ||
|
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|
Show up. | |
| He would show up on like paddle boarding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, I mean, he showed up at restaurants. | ||
| I mean, that was fucking hysterical. | ||
| Crazy that he kept doing that. | ||
| That was crazy. | ||
|
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He made his life about- He drank his water. | |
| He showed up. | ||
| He goes, where you eat, I eat. | ||
| Where you eat, I eat, champ. | ||
| And then he slipped. | ||
| Let me hear that. | ||
|
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|
that play that he starts eating his food shit shit He's telling him, have some food! | |
| Enjoy your food! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Could you imagine? | |
| What was all that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You put water on my head? | |
| Is the water in my head? | ||
| Yes, Shannon. | ||
| What he did was, after you pulled up to his table and began eating his meal, he dumped water on your head. | ||
| But it's the way he fell down after the water pulled over his head. | ||
| It was like a scene in a movie. | ||
| It was a work, right? | ||
| Show that again. | ||
| Show the water get poured on his head. | ||
| It's like a pro wrestling work. | ||
| Watch this. | ||
| What? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| What is happening? | ||
| He pushes the table over, falls down. | ||
| The other guy grabs him just in time. | ||
| He goes down again. | ||
| I mean, come on, man. | ||
| Do you think they planned that? | ||
| No. | ||
| Definitely not? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Klitschko's not that guy. | ||
| But if you didn't know, you would think they planned it, right? | ||
| It looked like a work. | ||
| Well, you gotta think... | ||
| Wait, like, what is happening? | ||
| Pour the water! | ||
| He falls down! | ||
| You gotta think who'd be in on it. | ||
| The restaurant owner's gotta be in on it? | ||
| No, I don't think the restaurant owner would be in on it. | ||
| But whoever that big guy is, man, he got in just in time. | ||
| The big guy that grabbed Shannon... | ||
| Yeah, that guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| By the way, how courageous is that guy? | ||
| I know Shannon. | ||
| He's one of the funniest human beings you'll ever meet. | ||
| I love that dude. | ||
| Always smiling. | ||
| I just love that whole let's go champ thing. | ||
| I say that to people all the time. | ||
| Let's go champ! | ||
| He's got hats and shirts. | ||
| He's got a whole line around it. | ||
| I love the guy. | ||
| So they were talking. | ||
| See if you can find that. | ||
| Because they were talking, at least I saw something. | ||
| I mean, you know, the problem with the internet today is like, something shows up in your Instagram feed, you're like, is that real? | ||
| And you just fucking keep, you know, somebody calls you, you go about your business, you go to try to find it again, ah, can't even find it. | ||
| I don't even know whose account it was on. | ||
| I don't know what's real anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ha ha ha! | |
| At all. | ||
| About anything. | ||
| I don't think anybody knows. | ||
| It's like our relationship to reality has gotten really slippery because it depends on what news channel you watch. | ||
| It depends on what political party you're involved in. | ||
| It's hard to know what to trust, what to believe. | ||
| It is a confusing time to be alive. | ||
| The most confusing. | ||
| The most confusing with the most information. | ||
| According to Shannon Briggs, he accepted a fight against Vladimir Klitschko. | ||
| Oh, look at this. | ||
| Vladimir Klitschko linked to shock boxing comeback against Shannon Briggs. | ||
| Here's the quote. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Fate has it as it is. | ||
| Just today I accepted to fight Vladimir Klitschko in his comeback fight, Briggs said, disguised, toe-to-toe podcast. | ||
| You're the first person to know it. | ||
| My wife doesn't even know this. | ||
| She's outside. | ||
| She don't even know this. | ||
| You guys are the first people to know this. | ||
| I swear to God, I'm in my mother's grave. | ||
| No one knows this. | ||
| You're the first people to know this. | ||
| It's so funny because you've got to read that in Shannon's void. | ||
| It says givemesport.com. | ||
| I don't know if I believe it. | ||
| It's the only place I found it. | ||
| We could ask Shannon. | ||
| He's very gray now. | ||
| Yeah, his crazy gray beard. | ||
| Says the guy with the crazy gray beard. | ||
| Yeah, he's got to be close to 50, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shannon's got to be 50. I think he's over 50. 50 December 4th. | |
| Wow. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'll say I wouldn't watch it, but then I'll watch it. | ||
| I'll tell you, I watch him spar all the time. | ||
| He spars on his Instagram feed. | ||
| He puts sparring rounds up. | ||
| He still looks good. | ||
| Tyson versus Briggs. | ||
| That ain't happening. | ||
| Why is he doing that? | ||
| Like, scroll down and watch some sparring footage. | ||
| Right down the right-hand side. | ||
| Lower right-hand side, right there. | ||
| Watch that. | ||
| I mean, he still looks pretty good. | ||
| This is recently. | ||
| He's a little overweight. | ||
| I think he said he's like... | ||
| What was that? | ||
| Him being silly. | ||
| He's out of shape, and he said that he's been working seven days a week, so he's quite a bit overweight. | ||
| Oh, yeah, he's 284. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he wants to be 249. | |
| He said he's 49,000 years old. | ||
| I mean, the guy he's boxing with, though, does not look like he wants to be in there with him. | ||
| Yeah, I think the guy he's boxing with might have drove him there in the Uber. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| He said it's his friend, I think. | ||
| Yeah, his nephew. | ||
| So he's beating up his nephew. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| That's something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's doing something. | |
| At least he's out there doing something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He's out there doing something. | ||
| Like, who knows? | ||
| I'm interested. | ||
| Like, we were talking about, like, people fighting crazy exhibitions. | ||
| Him versus Vladimir Klitschko. | ||
| You could show so much footage of Shannon torturing him. | ||
| Like, the paddleboard incident. | ||
| Oh, I mean... | ||
| Where he knocks him off the boat. | ||
| He's laughing. | ||
| From an entertainment standpoint and packaging it up. | ||
| It'd be great. | ||
| It'd be terrific. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's why, you know, I have... | ||
| I realized that as you get past 40, for me it was past 40, and then you have kids, your bandwidth starts to shrink. | ||
| So while I find it still entertaining and there are things about it that I love, I decided to pivot in a big way because you only have so much... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm haunted by time. | ||
| I'm haunted by how much time I have and have left. | ||
| That's because you're smart. | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what that makes me. | ||
| It makes me tortured, but I really cut boxing out of my life from the standpoint of being so emotionally involved with the fighters. | ||
| I sort of like... | ||
| Got that. | ||
| I backed into it at a young age, in my 20s, to manage the heavyweight champion of the world for his last few fights. | ||
| I got that out of my system and then I was like, alright, this criminal justice reform is where I want to be. | ||
| That's where I get... | ||
| I feel like I can make more of an impact. | ||
| Although you can make an impact on people's lives, I guess, in boxing because you can help make sure they don't get ripped off. | ||
| You can help make sure that they don't get taken advantage of I know what you're saying, though. | ||
| It's a crazy, chaotic thing to get involved with. | ||
| And at the end of the day, you're getting involved with this thing that's sanctioned violence. | ||
| Yeah, I have a—it's interesting because we spent the last hour or so talking about it, and I feel like I'm sitting here with this shit-iddy grin on my face, and I'm like, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| Because there's a part of me that is, like, hovering outside of my body with the streaking stars on the ceiling being like, what are you doing? | ||
| being as attracted to it as I was and apparently am to some extent because, you know, I have seen people get hurt really bad. | ||
| And when you start to care about them, you know, that's what bound Andre and I and even me and Lennox where I was like, you know, do you really need to get hit in the head Right. | ||
| Not that they wouldn't have retired without me, but I became very unpopular to the people around Lennox, for instance. | ||
| Because they wanted it to keep rolling? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, the circle around him... | ||
| Talk about a circus. | ||
| It was a traveling circus. | ||
| There were people that had grown up with him that had tethered their very existence to him financially, spiritually, and otherwise. | ||
| And when he decided not to fight and leave all that money on the table, they were like, well, what the fuck am I going to do now? | ||
| And to his credit, he's like, listen, it was a good ride, but I don't know. | ||
| Figure it out. | ||
| And they didn't like him. | ||
| They blamed me for it. | ||
| They were mad at him? | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| So what did he have, like a giant entourage? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He didn't have a giant entourage, but he had enough of an entourage where he was employing people that he was being loyal to. | ||
| He had guys that he went to high school with. | ||
| Guys that he grew up with. | ||
| One of them was his trainer. | ||
| One of them was, you know, took care of his, you know, mother's house and properties. | ||
| And he made sure to employ them all. | ||
| But when it was over with and he was like, look, I don't have tens of millions of dollars coming in anymore. | ||
| I can't employ you guys anymore. | ||
| I don't need you to be security at the gym. | ||
| He didn't need it anymore. | ||
| Oh, they were pissed. | ||
| And they blamed me for it because I didn't like seeing my friend get punched in the face anymore by guys that were 260 pounds. | ||
| That's a crazy thing, right? | ||
| Look at his situation. | ||
| He's saying, hey, I have to stop this game that you can only do for so long. | ||
| No matter who you are, you can only fight for so long, and it's time to end it. | ||
| And they're like, what am I supposed to do? | ||
| They're upset at him that he doesn't want to do this thing anymore, so now they have to figure out a thing to do. | ||
| They would rather him continue doing this thing that you have to quit eventually. | ||
| Just don't quit now, keep going, get hit from me. | ||
| Go get hit from me so I can get paid. | ||
| It was fucked up. | ||
| That's a crazy request. | ||
| It happens a lot. | ||
| It happens a lot. | ||
| You know, yes men. | ||
| You gotta have something else going on in your life. | ||
| And there's also an element, the thing that got me down about it always and still does, I think why I... Got away from it, aside from my wife being like, really? | ||
| You're going to be fielding calls from people like, my internet doesn't work in camp, what do I do? | ||
| Is like, you know, you're part of boosting up someone else where I wanted to sort of... | ||
| Be on my own and do my own thing. | ||
| So there's that also. | ||
| The obligation of the entourage is a big issue for a lot of very popular people, whether it's celebrities or athletes. | ||
| But with a fighter, it's particularly egregious. | ||
| It's particularly creepy because they'll let a fighter take beatings when they shouldn't. | ||
| They'll let a fighter keep fighting when they should have retired. | ||
| Or tell them... | ||
| Tell them they can still go. | ||
| Tell them they can still go. | ||
| Or if you would have done this different... | ||
| Everybody becomes an expert, by the way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Boxing trainers, the strength coach becomes an expert. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, the nutritionist becomes an... | ||
| A lot of people start to think that because I'm around this a lot and I see it as a fan, I think I could give him the keys to victory, which is a dangerous proposition when people are risking their lives. | ||
| Very dangerous. | ||
| Super sketchy. | ||
| It's like when you're in that sort of situation, you know, you could be, like Muhammad Ali, perfect example, right? | ||
| Towards the end of his life, that guy took all the really horrible beatings, like the Trevor Burbick, Larry Holmes, all those terrible beatings. | ||
| He took all those beatings and all his entourage, like, they were still with him. | ||
| You know, they were still riding around with him. | ||
| They were still showing up and they let him. | ||
| You know, I went to his 70th birthday party. | ||
| At the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville. | ||
| I was like Lennox's date. | ||
| I forget whether his wife just had one of their kids or was about to. | ||
| And I went with him and they have like this entire floor of this museum essentially called the Muhammad Ali Center. | ||
| And it's all his contributions to the civil rights movement and to society is an entire floor. | ||
| And then there was this reception for him upstairs. | ||
| And it was a private birthday party. | ||
| And he was just... | ||
| It was frightening. | ||
| It was... | ||
| He was falling asleep. | ||
| And there are these people around him which, you know, should have been just this great celebration. | ||
| And I don't know if he was able to comprehend what was going on, absorb it. | ||
| It was frightening on many levels. | ||
| And that was a bit of like a... | ||
| I don't want to say a wake-up call, but I was like, you know, you're constantly living. | ||
| If you have warm blood pumping through your veins and you're honest with yourself, you're constantly living with a sense of guilt being involved in a combat sport, I think. | ||
| I don't know how it is for you. | ||
| No, it is that way. | ||
| I think about that when I see fighters that should have retired and are still doing it and I know they've got problems or guys have vision issues. | ||
| On one hand, it's like a choice that they make and they can make a good living doing it and if they become a champion, they can make a great living doing it and they have glory forever. | ||
| They have this legacy. | ||
| And for a lot of fighters, that's all they ever wanted. | ||
| All they ever wanted is to be professional, to be elite, and hopefully to win a championship. | ||
| And that's what they want. | ||
| But the ones that don't know how to get out and don't know when to get out and make a mistake and stick around too long, you see them be a shell of what they used to be. | ||
| You see them not be able to take a punch anymore. | ||
| You see the slurring of the speech for all the words. | ||
| That's the worst. | ||
| All the words sort of garbled together. | ||
| They forget what they're talking about while you're in the middle of talking to them. | ||
| That is very hard to deal with. | ||
| But for guys like that, you look at a guy like Andre Ward and go, look at that. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| You can do it right. | ||
| And Andre has always been a guy that learned defense. | ||
| He learned defense first. | ||
| He learned to be elusive. | ||
| He learned how to be in the right position. | ||
| He learned how to be in a place where he could strike and he can't get struck back. | ||
| He did it all the right way and even retired the right way. | ||
| Everything was perfect. | ||
| Andre Ward is the blueprint. | ||
| Now I feel guilty for having said anything about an exhibition. | ||
| On the flip side, in MMA, there's George St. Pierre. | ||
| He's a similar situation. | ||
| You know, George, unlike Andre, has a couple of losses, but phenomenal fighter, won world titles in two different weight classes, the whole deal. | ||
| And then, gentleman, great spokesman, you know, you talk to him now, he's got all his, he sounds great, he's not slurring his words, he has intelligent conversations with people. | ||
| You're like, I love it. | ||
| I love when a guy gets out. | ||
| Yeah, it's nice to see. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And, you know, George got hit a lot, too. | ||
| But he also recognized, like, after he fought Johnny Hendricks, he recognized he had to step away. | ||
| He's like, I gotta stop. | ||
| I'm just like, this is too much. | ||
| That's why a backup plan when you're a fighter is never underrated. | ||
| It's so fucking important, man. | ||
| So fucking important. | ||
| A backup plan is so fucking important. | ||
| It's so important. | ||
| And having people that know that you're going to get out and they're helping you. | ||
| This is the plan. | ||
| This is what we're going to do. | ||
| Yeah, it's fleeting. | ||
| It's also fleeting. | ||
| And I just, you know, again, like for me personally, it was more like I feel like I have something different to, you know, offer in terms of my energy. | ||
| And I feel like it's okay at some point to say, you know what, I did this. | ||
| I did it at a high level. | ||
| I feel like I made an imprint on some people's lives. | ||
| But I feel like I have something different to contribute in a way that is much more meaningful. | ||
| Because I think that, like, for me... | ||
| To exist in this world, if you're not trying to help other people in some way, then what the hell's the point? | ||
| And that could be your kids, your family, but to me it was always like, alright, let me find a wrong and try to right it. | ||
| So for boxing, for me, I got involved because Lennox got stolen from him. | ||
| He had a lot of money stolen from him. | ||
| And I got hired to help pick a jury in his case. | ||
| That's how I met him. | ||
| He had this promoter and manager steal like $10 million for him. | ||
| And I, you know, look, I was never starstruck. | ||
| I was more annoyed. | ||
| I remember the first time I met him, I was more annoyed because I had to prepare him to testify on, I remember it was Super Bowl Sunday. | ||
| And I was going to a Super Bowl party and I was more annoyed that I had to miss the Super Bowl because his trial was starting that Monday or Tuesday. | ||
| And I was like, it was so fucking sad that he would meet this guy, trust him. | ||
| And whether it was send money to my mom in Canada where they had to convert British pound sterling to Canadian dollars. | ||
| Guy would jack up the inflation rate and keep the difference. | ||
| He would find little ways. | ||
| It was like death by a thousand accounting paper cuts. | ||
| And you had to go through everything to find these? | ||
| Yeah, that's how I got involved in the sport was that I had to understand the business to understand how he got ripped off. | ||
| And then little by little, we just, you know, he was hanging in New York City for, you know, six weeks before he fought Tyson. | ||
| And we just got to, we were similar in age or off by seven or eight years or nine years, whatever it was. | ||
| But, you know, he was single, I was single, and we would just play basketball. | ||
| And I was preparing him to testify, but it was awful. | ||
| You know, he got all this money stolen from him. | ||
| And then when we won those cases, I just started to get fighters calling me. | ||
| Hey, I got ripped off too. | ||
| And then you realize you've unearthed this very dark underbelly of this unsanctioned sport where people take advantage in any way they can. | ||
| So that was what I was originally attracted to. | ||
| And then you realize at some point that You can't cure everything. | ||
| And if you could touch a few people's lives along the way and change them and educate them as to how they can take care of themselves, then you've done your job. | ||
| Well, you're a guy that you relish the role of taking care of people that have been fucked over by the system. | ||
| I mean, this is why you got involved with the Innocence Project and why you've done so much work with people that were unjustly accused and imprisoned for crimes and managed to get a lot of people out of jail now, which is pretty fucking amazing. | ||
| Yeah, thank you. | ||
| It's a very admirable path, the path that you've taken. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, look, I think that, first of all, I appreciate it. | ||
| And I view myself as like, I have this feeling of... | ||
| Urgency. | ||
| That there's so much to be done in that regard. | ||
| And it's almost like an addiction to me to help people. | ||
| And I always feel like there's so much more to do. | ||
| Just since the last time we spoke, we talked about a case last time I was on. | ||
| About this guy, Albert Wilson in Kansas, who was accused of, you know, a black man, accused of an assault of a white girl, and that I felt he was unjustly accused, and we had honored some things about the alleged accuser. | ||
| It's a difficult situation because I have daughters, and you know, but, you know, I was very, very solid in my belief, and since then, His conviction has been thrown out. | ||
| I was able to successfully get his conviction thrown out. | ||
| And the way that I end up getting involved in these cases almost feels like... | ||
| I hate it when people say this. | ||
| So when I say it, I want to stuff the words back in my mouth. | ||
| But it feels like it's for a reason. | ||
| Because it's almost like the universe is telling me, all right, now you got to do this next. | ||
| I'm walking out of court in November... | ||
| And the hearing is in Lawrence, Kansas, the armpit of the middle of the country. | ||
| The only thing that's there is KU, you know, the school. | ||
| And when I say armpit, I don't mean that in a pejorative way. | ||
| It's like one of these forgotten towns. | ||
| I guess there's no other way but pejorative when you say armpit. | ||
| So it was a poor choice of words. | ||
| But... | ||
| The hearing was being broadcast live over YouTube because the courts want to maintain the integrity of having a public hearing. | ||
| So I walked out of the hearing. | ||
| The case hadn't been overturned yet. | ||
| And there's like 100 people outside the courthouse in the middle of the pandemic rallying for this guy's conviction to be thrown out. | ||
| And this mother... | ||
| She runs up to me and she hands me a newspaper article. | ||
| And there was an activist with her and she says, this is the case of my son. | ||
| Can you read about this? | ||
| And I was like, okay. | ||
| I stuffed it in my bag. | ||
| She said, I was watching you in court and he needs you. | ||
| Please don't turn your back on this community. | ||
| And, you know, when you put it that way, I'm like, you know, Jesus, I already start to feel guilty because I'm riddled with existential guilt. | ||
| So I'm like, the last place I want to come back to for a murder trial, this is a guy that was accused of this awful homicide. | ||
| So I just put it in my bag. | ||
| I get on the plane to go home, and I take out the newspaper and I start reading about this case. | ||
| It's the case of this guy named Ron Taurus Washington. | ||
| And I start reading about it on the front page of the paper. | ||
| And I like, I started talking to myself in my seat. | ||
| And the guy next to me goes, he goes, excuse me, are you talking to me? | ||
| Like what do you, like I must have been disturbing him. | ||
| I kept on saying, holy shit, this guy is accused of a murder. | ||
| He spent six years in pretrial detention before he got a trial. | ||
| He's sitting in jail for six years. | ||
| And he... | ||
| I talked about the Clemente Aguirre case last time we talked. | ||
| About how this... | ||
| He goes to a neighbor's house and he walks into a crime scene and then they accuse him of it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's the exact same fucking thing. | ||
| This guy lives down the hall from this murder victim. | ||
| He sees the door cracked open and he knocks on the door to see if everything's okay. | ||
| He walks in, gets a little bit of blood on his sandal... | ||
| And they accuse him of the murder. | ||
| And it's so obvious, so obvious that the husband of this victim killed her. | ||
| Her blood on his shirt, his hair in her dead hand. | ||
| And I'm thinking to myself, how does this guy get charged with this? | ||
| And then I'm sitting here on the plane thinking, what are the chances... | ||
| That I'm going to get the mother of an accused person, a black man in Kansas, where the former prosecutors were accused of all sorts of racial insensitivity, all sorts of prosecutorial misconduct, where I'm going to get this guy This guy's mother shows me a newspaper article about the case. | ||
| It's got so many stunning similarities to another case I did in Florida. | ||
| A neighbor walks into a crime scene, gets accused of the murder. | ||
| All the forensic evidence points to someone else. | ||
| So I went home and I looked at my wife and I said, I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm going to have another case in Kansas. | ||
| There's no way I'm letting this go. | ||
| So you're right. | ||
| It's this sense of like, when I feel I can make an impact on righting the wrong, I can't turn away. | ||
| I can't look away. | ||
| And, you know, there's a real problem in this country. | ||
| Really, really bad with our justice system and how it meets out punishment and injustice on people of color to the point where, you know, like I'm gripping the table because it angers me. | ||
| When I see what happens. | ||
| And I know that if you give people that otherwise wouldn't have it resources and the same sort of attention that they would get if they were another color or in different financial circumstances, it could be the difference between saving their life or them spending the rest of their life in prison for something that they more than likely did not commit. | ||
| Well, you're the man for the job because you have that conscience, because you have that thought process where it chews away at you and you have to go back. | ||
| I mean, that's your calling, man. | ||
| I mean, it really is. | ||
| You have the perfect personality for it because you're not a pacifist, right? | ||
| You want to fight for those guys. | ||
| You want to help them and you recognize the wrong and it becomes a huge part of the way you think. | ||
| It's... | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| One day they're going to look back at the way people were prosecuted and the way people were tried and imprisoned, and it's going to be a dark stain in our history. | ||
| When you look at the fact that what percentage of the people that are imprisoned in cages right now are for nonviolent drug offenses. | ||
| What percentage of the people that are in jail are innocent? | ||
| What percentage of the people that are in jail came from abusive childhoods and horrific neighborhoods and no one gives a fuck about it and nobody changes it or fixes it? | ||
| They expect these people to just figure it out on their own. | ||
| You know, someone who grows up in a nice middle-class suburb in Connecticut expects some kid who lives in the South Side of Chicago where gunshots are going off every day and the guy you emulate and the guy that you want to be the most, the guy you envy the most, is a drug dealer. | ||
| Like, you expect that guy to live the same way you do? | ||
| You expect that guy to have the same opportunities in past and behavior in life as you do? | ||
| And we as a country At some point in time, someone has to step in and say, there is no way we can continue to allow these neighborhoods to be crime ridden and drug addled and filled with gangs and expect people to come out of them and behave the same way everybody who lives in nice neighborhoods does. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| You know, it's interesting to me because what you just articulated, I'm like furiously writing down notes, is that, and this is not meant to stroke you in any way, but you get it in a way that struck me from the first time we spoke. | ||
| You just get it, and with all respect, it shouldn't be that hard to get. | ||
| When you take an entire race of people, steal them from their homeland, put them in bondage, Dislocate them. | ||
| Expose them and treat them as savages, as less than human. | ||
| As property. | ||
| As property. | ||
| And then you put them in a foreign land. | ||
| You've completely fucking ruined them. | ||
| And then you say, all right, now you're free. | ||
| But then in our lifetime, excuse me, in our parents' lifetimes, they couldn't urinate in the same bathroom. | ||
| Couldn't drink out of the same fountains. | ||
| Couldn't drink out of the same fountains. | ||
| And we are the aftershock generations of this, of slavery. | ||
| That should not be controversial to me. | ||
| So when my accountant says to me, you can't keep giving away your money, all right? | ||
| I say, I'm sorry, I'm going to keep on giving it away because I'm going to keep on pouring it into resources Because that will be lasting. | ||
| And here's a good testament to how if you see past the bullshit of what divides us and labeling people this and that, you can always, because we had a lot, Jason Flom and I, you know, who's a board member at the Innocence Project, we were overwhelmed by the outreach just from being on your show and talking to people. | ||
| How can I help? | ||
| One thing you can do to help is always keep an open mind regardless of who you're dealing with. | ||
| That's an easy way to help. | ||
| Watch this. | ||
| I represent the chairman of Marvel Entertainment. | ||
| His name is Ike Perlmutter. | ||
| Billionaire many times over. | ||
| He happens to be closest friends with Donald Trump way before he was president. | ||
| I could have used that as a way to separate myself from him, to dismiss him. | ||
| And I represented him, I still do, in this wild case where his DNA was stolen and he was accused of something he didn't do. | ||
| And Ike Perlmutter at one point said, you're not paying enough attention to my case. | ||
| And it was because I was working on an exoneration case in Florida, Clementi's case, actually. | ||
| And he started following the case in the press. | ||
| And this isn't a guy that was like some criminal justice reform advocate. | ||
| He said it struck him that if I didn't have you and Roy Black, who's a famous criminal defense lawyer that was handling this civil case, if I didn't have you and the resources to fight this, I would have been accused of a crime I didn't commit. | ||
| And it struck him that he had the resources to make a difference. | ||
| So he started making gifts in my honor to the Innocence Project, substantial gifts. | ||
| And I could have, everybody around me said, you're friends with this guy, you've become friends with him. | ||
| And he got enlightened to the point where in December, I'm in Florida. | ||
| A week before the Capitol riot, he called me and said, Josh, look, I want to help get somebody executive clemency if I can. | ||
| And I want you to figure out one person that you think is, you know, the most deserving candidate for it. | ||
| And let's try to get it before the president. | ||
| I was in Florida. | ||
| He was in Florida. | ||
| He said, you're going to meet with the president. | ||
| And look, a lot of people would have said to me, you're fucking crazy. | ||
| How could you meet with him? | ||
| I said, I don't care about any of that. | ||
| I'm trying to save a life. | ||
| So there's a retired judge, federal judge named John Gleason, who started this project called the Holloway Project. | ||
| Where he started to realize exactly what you were talking about, people on nonviolent drug offenses, where there were just disproportionate sentences. | ||
| He had a list of people where, you know, to come up with one was difficult. | ||
| But I asked him, Barry Sheck, who's one of the founders of the Innocence Project, and various others, Who do you think is, if you had to give me a list of 10. So I got lists, and Judge Gleason's client was this guy named Jawad Moussa, who was in Baltimore, the worst possible circumstances. | ||
| He gets arrested on this reverse dry sting, they call it, where he's asked to cobble together $20,000 and make a heroin purchase in New York. | ||
| And no drugs ever existed. | ||
| It was all a scheme. | ||
| It was a setup by an informant. | ||
| He cobbles together five of the $20,000, goes to New York, gets arrested on the spot, and sentenced to life in prison. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| So I read about about him he's in jail for over 30 years oh jesus he has he has 52 degrees certificates um by all accounts judge gleason said look he pointed out areas in the law that i had never considered So I could not get this guy off my mind. | ||
| So I finally put him forward as the person. | ||
| So I thought that I would submit paperwork and it would go away. | ||
| So, one week before the Capitol riots, Ike called me and said, you're gonna come to dinner tonight with your wife, and you're gonna present the case to various people in the White House at Mar-a-Lago. | ||
| Now, there are some Democrats, left-leaning or otherwise, you're gonna go to Mar-a-Lago? | ||
| And I would always say, hell yes, I'm going there. | ||
| I'm gonna try to save someone's life. | ||
| I met with Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and just explained to them the case. | ||
| And I gotta tell you, she said, look, I really admire your work at the Innocence Project. | ||
| I think this is really noble. | ||
| We think that this is a great candidate for executive clemency. | ||
| And it was like throughout the dinner, it was on to the next person, on to the next person. | ||
| So at one point, there's a table, like we're sitting at a table, and literally, the distance you and I are from each other, there's two empty seats. | ||
| And it dawns on me that we're going to be having dinner with the president and his wife. | ||
| So at some point, he walks out, and everybody stands at Mar-a-Lago and claps when he comes out. | ||
| Like Kim Jong-un? | ||
| It was worse than that. | ||
| Have you ever seen the Kim Jong-un clapping? | ||
| I saw the videos of it. | ||
| You see the recent one? | ||
| No. | ||
| The recent one is mind-blowing. | ||
| We'll get to that in a minute. | ||
|
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So I said to Ike, do I have to stand and clap? | |
| And he goes, if you want your pardon, you do. | ||
| So I stood and clapped. | ||
| So dinner is progressing and we're not talking. | ||
| We're not talking about this. | ||
| So finally, Ike says to me, look, He wants to talk to you about this case now. | ||
| And he asked me a bunch of very pointed questions. | ||
| So all of a sudden, then I find myself at a table, my wife, myself, the president, the first lady, Ike Perlmutter and his wife. | ||
| And he says, look, I hear great things about you from Mike. | ||
| Tell me about the case. | ||
| Tremendous, tremendous things. | ||
| I mean, it was so fucking loony. | ||
| I remember him saying, I want ice cream, ice cream, two scoops. | ||
| I want two scoops, two scoops, he kept saying. | ||
| I don't know why that stuck with me. | ||
| But he said, he told me this story. | ||
| He said, you know, do you... | ||
| Do you think he's innocent? | ||
| I said, no, I don't think he's innocent. | ||
| I'm the executive of Clemency. | ||
| We're asking you to pardon him. | ||
| It was a nonviolent drug offense. | ||
| I explained the whole case to him and he said, I can't. | ||
| I had Jim Brown come to me, the famous running back. | ||
| And the guy was a murderer. | ||
| I couldn't do that. | ||
| I only want nonviolent drug offenses. | ||
| And he said, where is he going to work when he gets out? | ||
| And I said, I've offered him a job. | ||
| He has his paralegal certificate that he got in jail. | ||
| And he said, you'll employ him? | ||
| I'll employ him. | ||
| A week later. | ||
| So I meet with him. | ||
| He tells me, call White House counsel. | ||
| And then a week later, the fucking Capitol riot happens. | ||
| So everybody involved in this potential presidential party is like, well, this is a wrap. | ||
| This isn't happening. | ||
| The last day of his presidency, the last day, I was at Ike's apartment with my wife and kids. | ||
| And the phone rang and he goes, it's the White House. | ||
| He said, don't go anywhere, because we were walking out. | ||
| And he walked out and he said, the pardon was just signed. | ||
| And I don't know this man. | ||
| I never met him. | ||
| My immediate release of a... | ||
| I started to weep openly. | ||
| You know, there's just no feeling that you can ever put into words when you help restore another human being in that way. | ||
| Now, Jawad Musa... | ||
| And I met for the first time over FaceTime. | ||
| You know, four days later, I flew his brother to meet him. | ||
| He was in Colorado, some awful facility in Colorado. | ||
| I flew his brother out there. | ||
| He got out like that. | ||
| The pardon happens, and then you're out. | ||
| He was flown back to Baltimore. | ||
| We met in the airport on FaceTime. | ||
| And we were immediately felt like bonded like brothers. | ||
| He now works for me. | ||
| And his insights in the four or five months that he's been out, his insights on cases, a man that spent 30 some odd years working on it became like a jail lawyer. | ||
| You realize that there are people, human beings, that have been forgotten, that have so much potential if someone just cares. | ||
| So now he's, you know, it's not without problems. | ||
| He's working on getting his official out-of-jail paralegal certificate. | ||
| But you realize that if you just create connections and allow... | ||
| I don't want to sound like some silly infomercial, but I easily could have... | ||
| Found reasons why not to try to enlighten someone whose politics were different than mine, and Ike Perlmutter was the least likely person, but he's now, I've found that if you tap into it and turn his mind on to the human suffering, he now wants to start a criminal justice reform center that we're working on together. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| So I just feel like sometimes in a world where our politics are so divided, it was one of the more bizarre meals I've ever had. | ||
| Two scoops. | ||
|
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Tube scoops! | |
| But it was worth it, man. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| First of all, it's shocking that someone could, over a $5,000 heroin deal, wind up in jail for life where there's no heroin. | ||
| I mean, if that doesn't seem like you're getting railroaded, if that doesn't seem like a setup, if that doesn't seem like, that that shouldn't be legal. | ||
| It's called a reverse dry sting. | ||
| It's so crazy. | ||
| Look, you've read about cases where, for low-level drug offenses, Mostly people of color. | ||
| The way that they were forgotten about is that our justice system said, let's accelerate the forgetting about you process. | ||
| Look at the Innocence Project. | ||
| Close to 60% of our clients are African American. | ||
| There's a reason for that. | ||
| It's not an accident. | ||
| Well, it seems to me that in this country, there's a real... | ||
| Well, first of all, there's a real problem with the fact that the legal system is essentially a game, right? | ||
| And if you are on a team, your team is trying to win the game. | ||
| And if you're on a team that's trying to prosecute someone and you have the ability to figure out a way to push it through, to, you know... | ||
| Show someone in a light that's not accurate, to not have certain evidence be admitted, to withhold evidence that might have exonerated that person. | ||
| This is all part of this game. | ||
| And we know about this at very high levels that this exists. | ||
| It's not justice, right? | ||
| It's a game of winning and losing. | ||
| The same thing with dirty cops, right? | ||
| If a cop plants drugs on someone, what are they doing? | ||
| They're cheating on the game. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| And it is a game in that cops have a certain amount of arrests they're supposed to make. | ||
| In certain places, they have quotas. | ||
| They have to make quotas. | ||
| I don't know if they still do that anymore, but I know cops have told me that that's sort of an untold thing. | ||
| In some places, they have quotas where you have to arrest a certain amount of people. | ||
| Well, it's certainly a gauge for how effective they are at their job. | ||
| So you put your finger on exactly the point of all of this. | ||
| Where I found success is trying to disarm people. | ||
| And having them understand that this isn't about winning or losing. | ||
| We're dealing with a human being here. | ||
| A person of flesh is a life. | ||
| So let's talk about while we respect the victim. | ||
| You know, it's making them understand that it's less about winning and more about let's just take an objective look at the evidence. | ||
| Look, there's a DA, a new DA in this county where this Ron Torres Washington case is being tried. | ||
| Now, I have now signed on I guess it was kind of predictable with the Midwest Innocence Project, which is a different Innocence Project, but it's part of the Innocence Network, and a local lawyer to represent him. | ||
| The case was tried once to a hung jury, and now we're retrying it. | ||
| The woman that ran for DA I ran on a platform that the Albert Wilson case, the case that we got the conviction thrown out, and the Ron Torres Washington case were problematic prosecutions, and that she was going to take a close look at them when she became DA. And at least she is giving me a forum. | ||
| And saying, I will let you come in and present to me why we shouldn't go forward with this prosecution. | ||
| Now, is she still, now that she's DA, is she firm in her belief that Ron Torres committed the crime? | ||
| I think she is at this point. | ||
| I think when we get before her and we're able to convince her... | ||
| That this is not a sound prosecution. | ||
| I'm confident that, you know, she ran on this platform. | ||
| So let's see if she'll live up to it. | ||
| So far, I've been pleasantly surprised. | ||
| But it takes, that's such a small, that's a grain of sand on a beach that stretches this whole country. | ||
| And so that's where the sense of urgency comes, is that the more people we can get being focused on identifying the problem, And as you correctly put it, a lot of it is about winning and losing. | ||
| I'm working on a case right now where the latent print examiner in the case was making up matches of fingerprints and palm prints. | ||
| And it took a whistleblower in the latent print unit to say, if we don't agree with her, there's this process by which you verify. | ||
| When a latent print examiner says that is Joe Rogan's fingerprint on the murder weapon, she then has to give it to another print examiner for what they call verification. | ||
| It's a process called ACE-V, right? | ||
| The V stands for verification. | ||
| You know, analysis, comparison, evaluation, verification. | ||
| If that person doesn't agree that that is an identifying print that can be matched to Joe Rogan, you can't call it a match. | ||
| What she was doing is when she wouldn't get an agreement from one of her colleagues, she would say, fuck you, I'll go to a different one, go to a different one. | ||
| And it got so bad and it got to the point where she started sending them out to a guy that retired out of the latent print unit because he had health problems so severe that he admittedly, quote, lost his eye for identification. | ||
| And she'd get the verification from him. | ||
| So watch what it takes. | ||
| This woman writes a whistleblower complaint saying there's a big problem here. | ||
| So this happened in Florida, where a lot of weird shit seems to happen. | ||
| And Florida says, alright, let's call in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. | ||
| And let's call in an independent consultant and reexamine some of her cases. | ||
| They found five cases where she made positive identifications to prints on murder weapons that were totally fucking made up. | ||
| Why did she do it? | ||
| She wanted to win. | ||
| She wanted to have an amazing record. | ||
| I mean, that's one of the things that people hang their identity on, is how well they do at defense or prosecution, right? | ||
| I mean, it's not just that. | ||
| It's like these prosecutors come out of their prosecution units, out of these offices, and then they oftentimes switch to the defense. | ||
| And they want to come in and say, I never lost the case. | ||
| Well, okay, you never lost the case. | ||
| You know, the reason the conviction rate in most jurisdictions is upwards of 98% is because most people assume that if you have been accused and charged with a crime, you have done it. | ||
| That's just the assumption. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And when you're black or Latin, person of color, I would venture a guess that that rate of assumption jumps to 99.9%. | ||
| Because what sells papers is not... | ||
| You know, we hear about these cases when it's frankly too late. | ||
| After someone served 10, 20, 30 years in jail for a crime they didn't commit, if someone would just stop... | ||
| Before decades pass and lives are ruined, and take stock in the wake of destruction that a prosecution leaves in its path and says, let's just take a deep breath at the outset. | ||
| Let's put the winning and losing aside. | ||
| Let's just take a real close look at the evidence. | ||
| You know, there would not be as many wrongful incarcerations and wrongful convictions. | ||
| And we hear about these cases where it takes, I mean, to get an exoneration is like pushing 14 boulders up a hill with your back, you know, and getting rolled down upon so many times. | ||
| You hear about them after the fact and they're great stories and they sell and everybody's, but if you saw what's behind it, It's devastating. | ||
| It's heart-wrenching. | ||
| And I think that if more people paid attention and did not jump to that assumption of guilt rather than do what we like to believe we can do in this country, which is presume innocence, There would be a lot less of this because we have to be real about the fact that nobody presumes innocence. | ||
| No. | ||
| That's just a natural thing. | ||
| You know, it's as soon as someone gets accused of something in that. | ||
| Why is that though? | ||
| Why do you think that is? | ||
| I don't know because we're, in a lot of ways, we're callous. | ||
| In a lot of ways, we're angry about crime. | ||
| You know, if you hear someone get accused of murder, you automatically go, oh, he murdered somebody. | ||
| It's like a... | ||
| A thing that goes off. | ||
| And part of it, I think, is also because of pop culture. | ||
| I mean, how many fucking Law& Order episodes do we have to see? | ||
| How many of these cop shows do we have to see? | ||
| We're fed this narrative, right, that the cops are the good guys, they prosecute people that are guilty, they go after them, and they finally get them. | ||
| We very rarely get the narrative of someone unjustly accused. | ||
| It's much more rare. | ||
| And it's novel. | ||
| When that's a narrative in a movie, it's like, wow, that guy's innocent. | ||
| And then it's usually like the really nice people are going to get him out of jail. | ||
| Yay, Josh Dubin did it. | ||
| You know, that's really how they look at things. | ||
| They look at things like a movie or a television show. | ||
| Well, that's why, you know, why I'm so appreciative and thankful that you give us a forum to speak. | ||
| I don't think I'd give you enough. | ||
| I think we should do this more often, and I think we should try to figure out a way to highlight these cases because I have to think that what it looks like to you is like an ant going up against an army. | ||
| I mean, there must be so many cases. | ||
| Well, you put, yeah, there are so many cases. | ||
| You've put, you know, Jason Flom and I decided to sort of take it on our own. | ||
| Shout out to Jason Flom. | ||
| Because we have said- Because you're good people. | ||
| No, but we could help make a difference by giving resources and assembling teams. | ||
| Outside of my affiliation with the Innocence Project, because the Innocence Project is a big organization that has, you know, I can't speak on behalf of them. | ||
| I'm the ambassador to the Innocence Project, so sometimes I work on cases where they ask me to take a look. | ||
| You know, and I'm an advocate for the Innocence Project, but, you know, it traditionally was an organization that just looked at cases where there's DNA. And if there's not DNA, which is evolving, they're starting to take on more cases, but take the case of Juwan Musa. | ||
| You know, I mean, that's not an Innocence Project case. | ||
| It's just a case where someone has to care. | ||
| And I think that the more we can help promote the narrative that you need to take a deep breath, and you should not hear about wrongful accusations or wrongful convictions when it's too late. | ||
| Because the reality is, Joe, is that these guys and gals — you know, Rosa Jimenez was just exonerated here in Texas — look, They're not... | ||
| There are no happy endings. | ||
| By and large, there is no way to undo the psychological damage that is done. | ||
| No way to undo it. | ||
| They are... | ||
| The stories don't always end up... | ||
| They don't... | ||
| This morning... | ||
| A dear friend of Jason and I, you know, Jason helped send him out to Vegas with his new wife. | ||
| He just got out in Pennsylvania for something he didn't do. | ||
| He went to Vegas, I think, for the first time, sat down at the airport and dropped dead yesterday. | ||
| His name is Cory Walker. | ||
| And you can read about it online, about the framing of Cory Walker and Lorenzo Wright. | ||
| They think he might have died of an embolism. | ||
| I have to think that what happened to him might have killed him, right? | ||
| I don't know for sure. | ||
| But these guys don't get medical care, these guys and gals, and it's just that, you know, I have clients that smoke a cigarette and stomp it out and then pick it up and put it in a baggie because they're afraid they're going to get framed again. | ||
| They're paranoid. | ||
| They live under a cloud of suspicion for the rest of their lives because oftentimes what we call an exoneration, states will say, is just not enough evidence to proceed with another prosecution because they know that when they admit that they're wrong, speaking of right and wrong, they're going to get sued. | ||
| So the cloud of guilt still hangs over that person's head. | ||
| And especially the way the rest of the people look at it. | ||
| Like, oh, he didn't get exonerated. | ||
| They just didn't have enough evidence. | ||
| It's scary when you're on the outside of it. | ||
| I can't imagine being one of those guys. | ||
| I remember reading this story about a guy who got set up, I believe it was by the FBI. He was kind of like mentally impaired. | ||
| There was something wrong with him. | ||
| And they tricked this guy into detonating a bomb that didn't exist. | ||
| It wasn't a real bomb. | ||
| I believe it was in Dallas. | ||
| See if you can find this. | ||
| FBI tricks... | ||
| FBI prosecutes man for... | ||
| It was like some sort of a sting with a bomb that you set off with a cell phone. | ||
| And the moment he went to press the buttons, they move in and get him. | ||
| But they gave him the bomb. | ||
| They set him up. | ||
| They gave him the idea. | ||
| The whole thing. | ||
| They told him what to do. | ||
| And this guy was like this wannabe terrorist. | ||
| And he was probably just a guy who's not that bright. | ||
| Who got talked into doing something. | ||
| You know, there's a legal concept that should cover that. | ||
| It's called entrapment. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they don't, you know, it doesn't get credited enough. | ||
| You know, there's a big push right now, a big reform push, to make it illegal for police to lie to suspects during interrogations. | ||
| To say, hey, we know your friend told us this, so we know you have it. | ||
| Yeah, and it's an accepted practice in all 50 states. | ||
| It's starting to get attention. | ||
| And, you know, it is a devastating... | ||
| talk about psychological warfare. | ||
| This is devastating psychological hand-to-hand combat. | ||
| When you lock someone in a room, a windowless room, deprive them of food, sleep, communication to the outside world, and say, we have your fingerprints on the murder weapon. | ||
| And they don't. | ||
| And they don't. | ||
| And they can do it. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| And now, is this recorded? | ||
| And can that be reviewed after the fact? | ||
| They're allowed to do it. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| They're allowed to do that. | ||
| They're allowed to do it. | ||
| So if you play that in court and then you say, you know, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, there was no fingerprints on the weapon. | ||
| He did not have – he was lying here. | ||
| Because the convention – yeah, they can do it and the convention – Okay, yeah, this is the guy. | ||
| He was provided a fake bomb by the FBI agents posing as members of Al-Qaeda. | ||
| He placed the device in the parking garage under the building and activated it with a cell phone. | ||
| Instead of setting off a bomb, the cell phone rang a phone number at the FBI offices. | ||
| Samadhi pleaded guilty to attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. | ||
| Under the terms of a plea bargain, an additional charge of bombing a public place was dropped and a sentence of not more than 30 years was recommended. | ||
| On October 20th, 2010, he was sentenced to 24 years of imprisonment. | ||
| He will be deported from the United States after serving a sentence. | ||
| So this is really crazy. | ||
| He was a citizen of Jordan. | ||
| And he was unaware that he was under continuous surveillance and that the other members of the sleeper cell were all federal agents. | ||
| So it was a fake sleeper cell. | ||
| So this guy was like in this group of people that he thought were all terrorists, and he was going to be the fucking man. | ||
| You're going to do this. | ||
| You're the fucking guy. | ||
| They give him the bomb. | ||
| He's on this mission. | ||
| They talked him into it. | ||
| They give him a fake bomb. | ||
| Like, how is that... | ||
|
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Legal. | |
| Listen. | ||
| Do you know what I'm saying? | ||
| I'm acutely aware of what you're saying and the sense of injustice and just how wrong that feels to you. | ||
| It feels wrong, but it also feels wrong that a guy could press the buttons on the cell phone to blow up the building. | ||
| So I'm torn. | ||
| But what I had heard, see if they find that there, that he was mentally impaired. | ||
| There was something wrong with him. | ||
| You can't play to someone's, assuming there's mental impairment or not, There's no place for law enforcement to set up a situation where they're playing to someone's mental illness or proclivity to commit crime. | ||
| What the fuck are we doing as a society when we're saying to someone, here, just do it. | ||
| You know you want to do it. | ||
| Think about all those facts. | ||
| There was no real sleeper cell. | ||
| There was no real bomb. | ||
| There was no plot. | ||
| They made him do it. | ||
| They talked him into doing it, and then when he did it, they're like, gotcha! | ||
| He's only 19 also. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| 19 and from Jordan, right? | ||
| One of the things you can do, one thing I know works is Pressure breaks pipes, okay? | ||
| It's that way in sports, it's that way in, you know, reform, and it's that way in these prosecutions. | ||
| The more people we can get to pay attention, right? | ||
| And, you know, people feel powerless and then they default to doing nothing, right? | ||
| And I think what we have an opportunity to do is once we get people interested and affected You know, you are not only interested, but you're affected. | ||
| We can get people to pay attention and do things. | ||
| What would be really cool is if whether it was once a quarter, biannually, we had an exoneree with us on the show or a case or cases where we can have a call to action and people can take action, we will get exonerations. | ||
| If it's a reform initiative, like making sure that people don't lie to suspects in jail, you have to pressure these fucking politicians and embarrass them into doing shit sometimes. | ||
| I know of no more powerful tool Than using the press so that a politician feels like, you know what? | ||
| Let's play to their sense of, let me not burn my constituents. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, if your constituents are all saying, don't do this anymore or make this practice end, whether it's lying to people or it's cash bail, where we just know that people are staying in jail because they don't have the money to get out. | ||
| You know, you can make these practices end if they feel like there's a legal threat, and let me qualify that, where there's, you know, the legal threat is, the threat is, I might not get reelected. | ||
| People won't like me as much. | ||
| This is going to be an unpopular decision. | ||
| The more we can get people interested in tapping into the sense of injustice about whatever issue it is, the more results we're going to get. | ||
| Because if I can change Or be able to get to a point where, you know, the chairman of Marvel, who's a right-wing, not a right-wing, he's a Republican, who's best friends with Donald Trump, was so affected. | ||
| And the guy's become one of my closest friends. | ||
| We have political differences. | ||
| We have differences in approach. | ||
| He's in his 70s, an Israeli, and he doesn't have kids. | ||
| We couldn't be more opposite on paper. | ||
| My kids call him Uncle Ike now because they saw what he did. | ||
| They saw that he took his time to help someone. | ||
| If I could change the way that man thinks or open his eyes and his wife Lori to that, so much that they went to the President of the United States and said, you need to help us. | ||
| And I don't care about all the other people that people say, oh, but he exonerated or he gave... | ||
| Presidential pardon to this guy and that guy. | ||
| Okay, but he also gave a pardon to Juwan Moussa, and he gave a pardon to other people that deserved it. | ||
| I don't care if it was for his political gain or not. | ||
| I think the more we can do that, the more we can make a difference. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And just because someone's a Republican doesn't mean they're evil. | ||
| They're usually just conservative fiscally, and they want things that are good for their business. | ||
| That's a lot of people. | ||
| We've got this narrative in this country that there's good people and bad people. | ||
| We've got this narrative that there's people that care about people, and those are the people on the left, and there's people that are evil, and those are the people on the right. | ||
| And a lot of that is exacerbated by the way Donald Trump treated the press and treated people and talked about things, and it ramped up this us versus them, which was already a problem. | ||
| There was already a tribal problem in this country, but Trump's method of rallying the troops Well, obviously, a lot of people felt that led to the January 6th invasion of the Capitol. | ||
| All that stuff is connected together for the reason why people think about people on the right as being evil and stupid and the party that's wrong and everything that's wrong with America. | ||
| But there's a lot of people that are Republican that are very good people. | ||
| They just have values that are different than some of the people on the left. | ||
| And there's a lot of people on the right that believe in a woman's right to choose, and they believe in civil rights, and they believe in gay rights, and trans rights, and all these things that a lot of people stand for, but they don't agree with it fiscally and economically with the people on the left. | ||
| Fiscally and economically, they think that the ideas of democratic socialism are just not founded in any real basis of human nature and any real logic. | ||
| They don't think it's going to work. | ||
| They think this is frivolous and they spend too much money on these programs and they waste it on bureaucracy and so they vote Republican. | ||
| But they're not bad people. | ||
| I know a lot of people like that. | ||
| We have a bad narrative in this country that if you're a person on the left you're not supposed to be talking to a person on the right. | ||
| And if you do they accuse you of being a right-wing person. | ||
| I get accused of being a right-wing person all the time because I've had a bunch of right-wing people on the podcast and I've had civil conversations with them. | ||
| But conversely, I have a lot of left-wing people on the podcast and I have civil conversations with them. | ||
| I never get accused of being some radical lefty. | ||
| I don't because it's not convenient to slander someone or to put someone in that category, to mischaracterize someone. | ||
| But you can mischaracterize someone as a right-wing person and it does two things. | ||
| One, it makes you self-censor. | ||
| So for someone like me that interviews people and talks to people, has conversations with people, I should say, it makes you not want to have controversial figures on because then you get attacked. | ||
| And then people who hear about it are like, well, I'm not that. | ||
| Why are they saying that? | ||
| Why are they saying that about me? | ||
| Oh, they're saying that about me because I had that guy on. | ||
| I had Ben Shapiro on or I had Dan Crenshaw on. | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| I'll probably not have those guys on again because last time I had them on, people got mad at me. | ||
| And that's what's going on, man. | ||
| People self-censor. | ||
| And what it does is it makes people more tribal. | ||
| They separate even further. | ||
| They get more polarized. | ||
| And it's not good for anybody. | ||
| The only way to find common ground is to have communication with people that you might have differences in philosophy or politics or whatever the fuck your difference is. | ||
| But as a civil person, as a person who can have a nice civil conversation with someone. | ||
| You should be able to have conversations with people that you don't agree with everything on. | ||
| And maybe you could find common ground. | ||
| And that's what you found with that guy. | ||
| His common ground is his humanity. | ||
| His common ground is maybe he's a Republican. | ||
| Maybe he's friends with Donald Trump. | ||
| Maybe he's a billionaire that's protecting all that money. | ||
| But at the end of the day, he's a human being with a heart. | ||
| And he cares. | ||
| And he doesn't want someone to be in jail for something they didn't do. | ||
| And that's how we all feel. | ||
| And I think that's how we all feel about anybody. | ||
| Because it could be your son. | ||
| It could be your daughter. | ||
| It could be your brother. | ||
| Anyone could get wrongly accused. | ||
| And you could be under the grip of an evil prosecutor and a corrupt cop, and then you're fucked. | ||
| And then that becomes your life. | ||
| And then the next 10 years, 15, whatever years, that's your life now. | ||
| Because you got stuck into this system, and when you weren't in that system, you didn't care. | ||
| Because you're like, why am I spending time worrying about this system when it doesn't even affect me? | ||
| Well, look, what you say hits me on so many levels because... | ||
| Dude, I gotta pee so bad. | ||
| So do I. Thank you. | ||
| We'll pause. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| You rolling? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, where were we? | ||
| Well, what I was going to say was, besides thank you... | ||
| Was, you should not be the exception to the rule. | ||
| And, you know, it's unfortunate that you are. | ||
| Because I learned that, you know, you have to be willing to take a step back because I could fall into that. | ||
| Our default should not be us versus them and this tribal mentality. | ||
| It's part of our DNA. It's part of who we are as mammals called human beings. | ||
| But what I learned was my immediate aversion to this man could have literally cost someone his freedom. | ||
| So it was such a valuable lesson to me that I feel like we should be so much better than defaulting to, fuck you, I don't like you because of the way you think. | ||
| Or I'm not going to have anything to do with you. | ||
| Or I'm going to cancel you. | ||
| And it takes more. | ||
| There's more effort involved in getting to know someone. | ||
| We don't fall into neat boxes or neat categories of information that comprise who we are. | ||
| We're complicated. | ||
| Life is messy. | ||
| Human beings are messy. | ||
| When I pick juries, judges will often say, there's a big problem with jury selection in this country. | ||
| When someone's accused of a crime, In a federal court where your freedom is on the line, a jury is often seated in a couple of hours. | ||
| Someone could be facing 20 years in jail and judges think that they're the best at it. | ||
| Federal judges. | ||
| Now look, they're appointed by the president. | ||
| They deserve to be respected. | ||
| They're some of the most brilliant legal minds in the country. | ||
| I wrote a book with a former federal judge and she caught a lot of shit when she was on the bench. | ||
| Because she had this novel idea that attorneys in federal courts should be able to ask questions during jury selection. | ||
| You know, it's called voir dire, you know, to learn the search for the truth, you know, the Latin translation. | ||
| You should be able to say to someone, how many of you think that my client... | ||
| It's probably guilty because they were indicted. | ||
| The hands will fly up. | ||
| And judges never allow you to ask that question. | ||
| And here's what they do all the time. | ||
| And I'm going to relate it back to what you were saying. | ||
| Someone will say, you know what? | ||
| I have preconceived ideas about this case. | ||
| I read about your client in the press. | ||
| Certainly seems like they must have done something. | ||
| And the judge will say, but can you put that aside and be fair and impartial? | ||
| Now think about the mindfuck here, okay? | ||
| Think about this for a second. | ||
| You're in a room full of strangers. | ||
| Let's back up. | ||
| You start with the proposition that we all want to be able to view ourselves as fair and impartial people. | ||
| That's a given. | ||
| We all want to view ourselves as that. | ||
| Now that you're in a room full of strangers, do you want to admit that you're biased in any way? | ||
| Do you want to admit it to an authority figure? | ||
| Because there are certain kinds of bias that suck. | ||
| You know, bias against someone because of their, you know, sexual preference, their, you know, religion, their ethnicity. | ||
| Those are terrible, ugly biases. | ||
| But we're all biased. | ||
| We're all biased. | ||
| If you've been antagonized and fucked with by cops, you're not going to like cops very much. | ||
| If cops have done nothing but help you and your uncle, cousin, brother, and great uncle are cops, you're going to have reverence for them. | ||
| We view life through the lens of our life experiences. | ||
| But it's too much of an investment. | ||
| At the most critical moment of a trial, to sit and really think it through, is this the best person to be sitting in judgment of that accused person's freedom? | ||
| It takes more of an investment. | ||
| So to your point, you just articulated a very intelligent, tolerant view of other people who you may have differences with. | ||
| I have to confess, I didn't always have that approach, because it's easier just to say, fuck you, I disagree with you. | ||
| It's really easy. | ||
| And it's sad that we can't, as the most evolved... | ||
| It's encouraged, right? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| It's encouraged to say, fuck you. | ||
| It's encouraged. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you got balls, you got this, you got that. | |
| Other people in the tribe will let you know that they support you. | ||
| I like how you did that. | ||
| Tell those Republicans, go fuck off, or tell those Democrats to eat shit. | ||
| It's encouraged more than open discourse is encouraged. | ||
| It's much more encouraged to be openly tribal. | ||
| You know, and I think that you get, there's some endorphin rush when you tell someone off, I guess. | ||
| Some cheap sense of, I felt, I told them. | ||
| There's also an endorphin rush that you get from signaling to the tribe that you are committed. | ||
| You're committed to this ideology. | ||
| You're, you know... | ||
| Yeah, I never really thought about it that way. | ||
| People love that. | ||
| They love when the group supports them and that they support the group. | ||
| There's a lot of really ridiculous things that get pushed through based on ideology. | ||
| How about this whole case of transgender women in sports? | ||
| A lot of this is people supporting it because they're progressive, because they consider themselves good liberals, and they want inclusiveness, and so they say it's okay. | ||
| And they're looking at someone who's a man... | ||
| Who competed as a man and then switched over and became a woman and now is weightlifting and is breaking world records and they think it's good. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's inclusive. | ||
| It's like, no, this is not fair for biological women and you're not willing to look at it this way because you want to be pro-trans and you want to be pro-inclusivity and you want to be a good person. | ||
| And you're afraid of the backlash, frankly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And by signaling that you're okay with all these things that are very controversial, hormone blockers for young people, there's a lot of these things that fall into this category that are super complicated. | ||
| And people immediately have a side. | ||
| It's like they've read the peer-reviewed papers and they've got this really well-informed opinion, but they don't. | ||
| They just have an opinion that supports their ideology. | ||
| And a lot of the times their ideology, whether it's someone who's pro-life, Or whether it's someone who's, you know, anti-trans participation in sports or pro-trans participation in women's sports. | ||
| These are complicated things a lot of times that people haven't thought out. | ||
| These really controversial third-rail subjects, they exist in so many different ways. | ||
| And prison reform is one of those. | ||
| If you talk to a lot of right-wing people on prison reform, they will give you a non-thought-out opinion. | ||
| Fuck that. | ||
| We need stricter sentencing. | ||
| We need more people in jail. | ||
| That'll drive you crazy, too, because it's like, hey, man, do you fucking know anybody in jail? | ||
| Do you know anybody who's been railroaded through the system? | ||
| Have you never committed a crime? | ||
| We've all committed. | ||
| Listen, man. | ||
| We've all, you know, what's the saying? | ||
| But for the grace of God, there go I. I mean, something like that. | ||
| I mean, for all the people that are saying that, how many of you got in a car after a few cocktails and, you know, chanced it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, God forbid you hit someone and killed someone, you could be one of those people. | ||
| You could be one of those people, yeah. | ||
| And, you know, I think that the only thing that—because sometimes I feel overwhelmed and feel like, can you ever change the conscience of an entire, you know, country? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| But, look, the Baltimore Sun did a front-page story on the exoneration of Jawad Musa. | ||
| And it talked about my involvement with Ike Perlmutter and how Ike Perlmutter did this. | ||
| It was the first public interview Ike had done in over, I think, 36 years. | ||
| He wouldn't speak to the press. | ||
| And I encouraged him. | ||
| I said, people need to know because... | ||
| The way we break this cycle of characterizing someone, you're this, therefore you will act like that. | ||
| The way that that breaks is by telling the story as much as you can that, you know, here are two people that couldn't be more different. | ||
| I was afraid that he would see tattoos on me and make a judgment about me. | ||
| And I would always wear long-sleeved shirts around him because I didn't want to offend him before I got to know him. | ||
| Is he Jewish? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, he's Jewish. | |
| So he's probably like, you're not going into the right cemetery, you piece of shit. | ||
| What are you doing with these? | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| The first time, not only is he Jewish, but he fought in the Israeli army in the Six-Day War and won't talk about it. | ||
| He came to this country with literally 200 bucks and would translate at funerals. | ||
| Hebrew to English, because he knew English. | ||
| That was his first job. | ||
| Selling shit on the streets. | ||
| I mean, here's a guy that came here with nothing. | ||
| And when I finally said to him, once we got to know each other better, they did the interview of me for this Baltimore Sun piece. | ||
| And they were FaceTiming with me and took a screenshot and didn't tell me. | ||
| And then that got printed in the paper. | ||
| And I was like, shit, this guy who I built this relationship with, I said, did you think twice? | ||
| He said, are you crazy? | ||
| Do you think I care about that? | ||
| And here I was worried about something that didn't require being worried about because I made an assumption. | ||
| And I think that that's where we go wrong a lot. | ||
| We assume... | ||
| Words are a cheap excuse. | ||
| How are you doing today? | ||
| Fine. | ||
| How are you doing today? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Great. | ||
| And who the fuck knows what we're actually thinking? | ||
| If we just take a little bit more time to hear people out, I think you can start to see that we're more similar than we are different. | ||
| And look, this behavior is learned. | ||
| I watch my own kids and I see how they feel. | ||
| It makes them feel good to help other people. | ||
| And I don't think that that's a Democratic thing or a Republican thing. | ||
| I don't think that that's whether you're fiscally conservative or if you believe in socialism. | ||
| I just think that what is innate in us is to help each other and to do something. | ||
| That is the drug that I'm addicted to now. | ||
| Yeah, you know and I think that as corny as it sounds the more that we can you meet somebody that has survived a wrongful incarceration or any type of incarceration these people You know, I would be a puddle on the floor to have to endure what some of these people have gone through. | ||
| And the fact that they can make it and just be functioning human beings on the other side blows my mind. | ||
| And I find I learn more from people like that than I do from someone preaching to me about how my ideology is wrong because I'm a Democrat or an Independent or a Republican. | ||
| And I just think that, unfortunately, we're lazy. | ||
| We're lazy in certain regards. | ||
| Well, it's easy to be lazy in that regard. | ||
| It's easy to categorize people in a certain way or to have only a casual communication with someone, not have a deep conversation. | ||
| Deep conversations are hard and they require honesty. | ||
| You have to get past the shell. | ||
| You've got to put out the facade that you put up when you communicate with people. | ||
| You've got to get through that and you've got to let them in. | ||
| It's very hard to be vulnerable. | ||
| It's very hard to be honest and to really think about how you really feel about things and why you feel about those things. | ||
| And then when you're looking at something that seems so insurmountable like the legal system and someone who's stuck in the legal system unfairly, and then you think, well, how many more of these people are like this out there? | ||
| How many more people are having their lives ruined because of circumstance, because of their economic status, because of their racial status, because of who they are in life and things completely outside of their control? | ||
| Uncontrollable variables that have left them in this situation where their life is now going to be spent rotting away inside a cage. | ||
| Yeah, and I think it's also—it requires a certain bit of understanding. | ||
| You know, like, even me, I'll tell you this. | ||
| I used to, in my mind, demonize bad cops or demonize cops in cases that I was involved in. | ||
| And I learned a real valuable lesson from Barry Sheck, who was one of the two founders of the Innocence Project. | ||
| He came to see me in court, and this was a case where my clients were framed outright. | ||
| They took, the police took the hair of the victim and planted it in his van. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Oh yeah, you told me about this. | ||
| Because of the hair root. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So I told you about this. | ||
| So I would always think that these were bad cops. | ||
| And a lot of times it's not. | ||
| They're just trying to make... | ||
| They think the guy's guilty. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they want to make it stick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I think that it's that same level of understanding you have to have and apply it in different areas. | ||
| I find it like a puzzle. | ||
| You know, I told you about that before, so I find it like a puzzle trying to figure out, okay, well, how can I find out to sort of get in touch with this person's humanity? | ||
| And if you can get in touch with it, you know, I think that you can make change happen. | ||
| And when you can make change happen, and it's to help people that otherwise wouldn't have... | ||
| You see, the thing that I guess is most frustrating is that it starts with recognition. | ||
| What drives me absolutely fucking insane is to hear people, and I've lost some who I thought were good friends over this. | ||
| What's wrong with people of color? | ||
| Can't they just pick themselves up by their bootstraps and just, you know, come on, enough complaining already. | ||
| I fucking hate that. | ||
| It fucking drives me insane. | ||
| It's one of the most heartless perspectives. | ||
| It's let them eat cake. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It's a version of let them escape. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I lost a close friend over it, someone that I grew up with, where I just had enough of it. | ||
| And it's like, you know, to me, it's so simple that you can't see, like, what happened. | ||
| It's pretty obvious that you talk about whether it's African Americans, whether it's, you know... | ||
| Immigrants. | ||
| Immigrants of any kind. | ||
| Look, you know, so many of my clients were... | ||
| Where, you know, it doesn't have to be some outward manifestation of it, like, let's get him because he's the Latin guy, or let's get him because he's the black guy. | ||
| When you see that they're only investigating, you know, undocumented immigrants, and not the white girl who actually committed the crime, it's pretty obvious what's going on there, right? | ||
| Any old undocumented Latin man will do, you know, or any old black guy will do. | ||
| And, you know, unfortunately, that is the, you know, that's the mentality. | ||
| And once you realize that it's not always a conscious decision that they're making, you know, there are ways that you can fight back against this. | ||
| And if I could get the chairman of Marvel to care enough that he wants to start, you know, something at, you know, we're going to start something together at Cardozo Law School, which is where the Innocence Project was born. | ||
| And it's going to be called some form of the Perlmutter Center for Criminal Justice Reform or for Legal Reform. | ||
| We're going to have something called the Redemption Project where we seek to redeem people that whether it's a bad conviction based on DNA or bad forensic science or just that it's some disproportionate sentence for someone that deserves a second chance. | ||
| We're going to get law students involved in it. | ||
| You know, if I can do that just by making him care, he had to care in the first place, he and his wife. | ||
| They're remarkable people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They gave... | |
| An untold fortune to the NYU Cancer Center is called the Perlmutter Cancer Center. | ||
| And there's another example, right? | ||
| Oh, he's just some billionaire. | ||
| He's giving away hundreds of millions of dollars as a philanthropist. | ||
| Yeah, but that is a majority of that some billionaire thing. | ||
| It's such a weird one because we put these people into a negative category. | ||
| We put uber-successful people, businessmen in particular, into this negative category. | ||
| They have to be heartless or shitheads or... | ||
| Oh, he's one of those guys. | ||
| Some people are billionaires just because they had an amazing product. | ||
| I mean, there's a shit ton of them out there. | ||
| But we decide that if someone is really successful in business in particular, that they have to be a bad person. | ||
| It's just a fucking billionaire. | ||
| Isn't it a fucking irony? | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| We have politicians. | ||
| Fucking tax the rich. | ||
| AOC sells shirts for like, how much were those shirts? | ||
| They were really expensive. | ||
| Sweaters. | ||
| But I don't get it. | ||
| So you work your whole life. | ||
| Maybe you went to charity. | ||
| To try to break the cycle, right? | ||
| And you do great things along the way. | ||
| And then once you make it to where you're told you have to strive to be, you're torn down. | ||
| Yeah, well, we don't like winners. | ||
| We do like winners, but we don't like winners, right? | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| We like winners, but we don't like when they win too hard. | ||
| Well, how about this? | ||
| And you'll probably shut me up because you'll tell me... | ||
| You don't know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You don't know my opinion? | |
| It'll sound like blowing smoke. | ||
| I was taken aback when I first got to know you. | ||
| And I was taken aback by the fact that you were rooting people on. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Here's a guy that genuinely... | ||
| Like, outside of what the public sees about you... | ||
| You know, here's a guy that wants to see people succeed. | ||
| And I remember thinking to myself... | ||
| What the fuck is up with this? | ||
| And I had to stop and say, wait a second. | ||
| Isn't that the way it should be? | ||
| You know, like, you genuinely want people to do well and succeed. | ||
| But I have been conditioned that other people are always... | ||
| You know, I think that it's like when you achieve some modicum of success, people are trying to tear you down or poke holes in you. | ||
| And it was like a breath of fresh air to me. | ||
| And that's the way you sort of... | ||
| You never knew that I thought this, but it kind of lit a match... | ||
| You know, under my body, like, look, lift people up more. | ||
| Because when you lift people up, it sort of changes their perspective. | ||
| And I think that it's bothersome to me that, you know, we are hardwired as human beings. | ||
| You know, as the rule rather than the exception, to want to, like, sort of tear each other down in a way that's so unproductive and unhealthy that I sometimes am like, can you really make a difference on a macro level? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, the tearing down and the building up thing, to me, the tearing down thing is 100% insecurity. | ||
| We're all insecure, right? | ||
| No one is enlightened. | ||
| No one has achieved this perfect state of bliss. | ||
| But the insecurity involved in tearing down people just because you find them threatening because they're successful is an intolerable weakness to me. | ||
| Intolerable to me. | ||
| I mean, I understand it when I see it in other people. | ||
| I will not tolerate it myself. | ||
| I just think it is a terrible way to look at things. | ||
| Because anybody who is successful in anything, you can learn something from them that will make you better at what you do. | ||
| Whatever you do. | ||
| I don't care if you're a fucking painter or a singer. | ||
| If you see someone who's kicking ass and someone that has some incredible level of discipline and focus, you can get something out of that, man. | ||
| You can get something out of a song. | ||
| You can get something out of a book. | ||
| You certainly can get something out of people that are kicking ass. | ||
| Now, if you see someone out there that's kicking ass, the idea that somehow or another that takes away from you in any way, shape, or form is crazy. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I love when people do well. | ||
| I love when I see people pull themselves up when they're not doing so good and then all of a sudden they are. | ||
| I love when people lose weight. | ||
| It's one of my favorite things. | ||
| I have people in here that lost 100 pounds. | ||
| I'm like, fuck yeah. | ||
| I know how hard that is. | ||
| So hard. | ||
| It's incredible to see someone do something like that. | ||
| I love when people get successful. | ||
| I love when people have a great attitude towards things and they help others. | ||
| But I genuinely love pumping people up. | ||
| I genuinely love encouraging people, and I love people getting successful. | ||
| And doesn't it feel good when you do that? | ||
| You know, I had this thing happen. | ||
| I told you before, my son, he's nine now. | ||
| When he was six, he got diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, right? | ||
| And, you know, I took him... | ||
| My wife said, look, he loves sneakers. | ||
| Like, we would collect, you know, Nikes, and he loved Air Jordans, and we... | ||
| My wife said, well, there's this thing that a parent at the school owns this sneaker store in Manhattan in the Lower East Side. | ||
| I go to this thing where they're going to explain the history behind Air Jordan and Nike. | ||
| And I'm at this place, at this sneaker store, and they're not new. | ||
| They're like second-hand sneakers. | ||
| They're brand new sneakers, but they're not sold by Nike. | ||
| They're like these rare Air Jordans, not even so rare. | ||
| And I'm sitting here with my son, watching this guy, and the whole time I'm thinking to myself, this poor schmuck. | ||
| How the fuck is he going through his existence and how did he end up in the second-hand sneaker sales business? | ||
| And I'm sitting there feeling bad for him, thinking they must be on some sort of financial aid. | ||
| And I leave with my son and I Google him. | ||
| And see that he just sold the company for $250 million. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| I know exactly who you're talking about. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So I have become... | ||
| Listen to this. | ||
| I have become... | ||
| This guy's become like a brother to me. | ||
| His name is John McPheeters, right? | ||
| He's just some knock-around guy from Manhattan. | ||
| Who made it. | ||
| And we have become super tight friends. | ||
| His son is friends with my kid. | ||
| His wife is this dynamite person. | ||
| And he's a guy that I'm like, I've told him the story of what I was thinking. | ||
| And I'm so happy for him. | ||
| I really am. | ||
| And it feels good to be happy for him. | ||
| And he will like read about a case. | ||
| And send me like that a boy. | ||
| And I'm like, dude, where's this guy been? | ||
| It's great to have someone like that in your life. | ||
| And I'm so happy. | ||
| What are the odds? | ||
| And he went through a shit storm to build up this business. | ||
| He worked at this sneaker place and that sneaker place. | ||
| He traveled all over the world. | ||
| And him and his partner built that up. | ||
| It blows my mind and I love it. | ||
| And it feels good to root for him, you know? | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Yeah, stories like that are fucking awesome. | ||
| You know, stories like that, that's one of the reasons why I like fighting. | ||
| I like athletics. | ||
| I know how hard it is for someone to get really great. | ||
| You know, and you can be around those people. | ||
| It's one of the things about fighting in particular, when you can be around a champion and you watch what they've done and how they can improve and achieve and how they can, you know, become a guy like Canelo Alvarez or a guy like, you know, Francis Ngannou or fill in the blank, whoever it is. | ||
| That's an exceptional person. | ||
| You can learn something from what they did. | ||
| That's one of the hardest things in the world to do. | ||
| Now, that guy's story, Francis and Donna. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| I was openly weeping. | ||
| I knew that he had worked in a sand mine when he was a boy. | ||
| I did not have any idea the extent of the journey that he outlined when he was on the show. | ||
| And he was explaining how his trip to try to escape from Cameroon and make it to Europe took 14 months. | ||
| And that they caught him and captured him seven times and sent him back to the Sahara Desert to die. | ||
| Like, holy shit. | ||
| I could not believe that a man as big as he was surviving in the physical circumstances that they put him in. | ||
| It seemed like there needs to be a movie made about the guy's life. | ||
| There probably will be one day. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| And also, he's probably the scariest fucking heavyweight that's ever lived. | ||
| I'd love to see him box. | ||
| He probably could do well. | ||
| Well, first of all, his power is extraordinary. | ||
| I mean, just really, truly extraordinary. | ||
| It's something to behold. | ||
| Seems like a dynamite human being, too. | ||
| He's a natural 275. Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A natural. | ||
| How tall is he? | ||
| 6'4"? | ||
| Is he 6'4"? | ||
| 6'4", I think? | ||
| 6'5"? | ||
| He's a big fella. | ||
| He's a very nice guy, too. | ||
| Super sweet guy and soft-spoken. | ||
| I mean, the guy telling his story. | ||
| I mean, you could see in his face the lessons that he learned and who he became from that 14-month journey, two of those months in prison in Europe. | ||
| Yeah, the part of the story where he is captured, I think it was for like the fifth or sixth time, and I think he said to you, like, I thought it was over for me then. | ||
| I didn't know what they were going to do to me, something like that, but I knew it was going to be something bad. | ||
| Look, those kinds of stories should be not only told but celebrated, right? | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| So I love it when somebody makes it. | ||
| Look, and I think that that's what attracts me to guys and stories like, you know, Andre Ward, for instance. | ||
| We talked about him earlier. | ||
| When you surround yourself with people like that, it makes you want to be better. | ||
| Yeah, it rubs off on you, for sure. | ||
| It definitely does. | ||
| You know, and here's the thing that's very interesting about the Francis Ngannou thing. | ||
| What he did was not legal, okay? | ||
| I mean, there's a difference between something that's not legal and something that's admirable. | ||
| It's also admirable. | ||
| It's not legal, what he did. | ||
| But thank God he did it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Well, he had to. | ||
| Well, you know, there's people in Cameroon right now that never did that, right? | ||
| But he decided that he had to. | ||
| That was his journey. | ||
| And obviously, now it's become an insane success story. | ||
| He's the heavyweight champion of the world. | ||
| Not just the heavyweight champion, but he knocked out the most successful heavyweight of all time. | ||
| Stipe, right? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Right now I think the plan is, there's not a date booked, but the plan is, I guess, for him to have a rematch with Derrick Lewis because I think Jon Jones wants more time to get to heavyweight and he wants more money. | ||
| I think one of the ways he thinks he's going to get more money is if Francis beats Derrick Lewis, which is a big if because Derrick beat him the last time they fought. | ||
| Then Jon Jones gets to say, hey, there's no real big money contenders out here. | ||
| I'm the guy. | ||
| I'm the fucking greatest light heavyweight of all time. | ||
| Arguably the greatest mixed martial arts fighter of all time. | ||
| I'm ready. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's go. | |
| The way you're moved by his story... | ||
| I'm moved that way, and I think you would be. | ||
| And I guess I'm angling for it by some of these exonerees. | ||
| When you hear them tell you what they had to survive, be it on death row or avoiding gang violence or sexual assault, sometimes they're not able to avoid it, any of the above. | ||
| And the stories of, you know, I think what we're attracted to also, it's not just success. | ||
| It's, you know, endurance and beating the odds. | ||
| And you're right. | ||
| It's all, you know, when you were talking earlier about it being rooted in insecurity, it is. | ||
| Because I think, like, I put myself in those shoes and say, I don't know if I could survive that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then I think our natural instinct is to say, all right, so let me tear it down. | ||
| And you have to be able to get past that and say, you know what, let me just marvel at this person for what they were able to do. | ||
| You know, like, I got arrested when I was on my way to my office in a case against Don King. | ||
| I was representing terrible Terry Norris. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| I remember Terry. | ||
| And it was an awful case. | ||
| Don was accused of giving a loan that was a 24-hour demand note to Terry Norris' manager, meaning that if this guy did not pay Don in 24 hours, Don King could take his property, take his home from him. | ||
| How much was the loan? | ||
| I forget what it was, several hundred thousand dollars. | ||
| And he only had 24 hours to pay it back? | ||
| If Don ever said, I want it in 24 hours, if he didn't pay it back in 24 hours, Don could take his home, take his property. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So what's going on here? | ||
| The manager's job is to get the highest purse for the fighter. | ||
| The promoter's job is, you know, let me get the expenses down. | ||
| And one of those expenses is the fighter's purse. | ||
| So there's this natural, you know... | ||
| That's why the Muhammad Ali Act now codifies this as a firewall between the manager and the promoter. | ||
| They can't have any financial interest in each other. | ||
| So Terry Norris was a mess during the trial. | ||
| He could barely speak cogently and they would talk about his brain injuries. | ||
| He would fall apart. | ||
| So I am on my way There was going to be a hearing about whether or not, you know, people of color were being excluded from the jury. | ||
| It's called a Batson hearing. | ||
| Another story for another time. | ||
| But I come out of the battery tunnel and I get pulled over on the West Side Highway on Christopher Street in Manhattan. | ||
| And the cops said, you have a suspended license. | ||
| This was in like 2001. 2002. And I got arrested. | ||
| And it was a mistake. | ||
| I had paid the ticket. | ||
| My license shouldn't have been suspended. | ||
| The whole thing got thrown out. | ||
| This cop books me as Christopher Dubin because I got arrested on Christopher Street and puts me in jail. | ||
| And I had the next day to be back in court for what at the time was the biggest trial I'd ever been involved in against Don King. | ||
| It was being covered by ESPN. And I was petrified. | ||
| And I was told, you're going to be here for three days because the judge is so backed up. | ||
| I finally got a friend of mine who's a lawyer to get me out that night in night court, and they couldn't find me in the jail because they booked me as Christopher Dubin instead of Josh Dubin. | ||
| And it was like that scene out of the hurricane. | ||
| I called my brother. | ||
| I said, I can't do the time, man. | ||
| And I was in there for like 15 hours. | ||
| And I always think about that. | ||
| Would I have adapted? | ||
| Would I have, you know, and I'm like, shit, I was a mess after one day. | ||
| And I have to be honest with myself enough to say, you know, I want to be a tough guy here and say, oh, it was no problem. | ||
| It was nothing. | ||
| I'm fucking scared out of my mind. | ||
| And that was for something I knew would get cleared up. | ||
| I knew it wasn't going to be a big deal. | ||
| It was a traffic infraction. | ||
| And I think about what some of these people have endured. | ||
| Falsely accused of murder. | ||
| Trapped in jail for decades. | ||
| For decades. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, just thank God there's someone like you out there and more people like you out there. | ||
| There's a ton more like me out there. | ||
| Jason Flom and the Innocence Project. | ||
| And all the people that are involved in trying to do this, but the system itself has got to be overhauled, and I don't know how the fuck you do that. | ||
| I mean, you've got to figure out a way to find out truth, right? | ||
| And truth is, is it dependent upon evidence? | ||
| Is it dependent upon memory? | ||
| Like, how do you know whether or not someone did or did not do something? | ||
| It's really hard. | ||
| When you have these cases like the guy walked into the room where the woman had been killed by her husband and he gets some blood on his shoe. | ||
| There should be a way to dissect that. | ||
| There should be a way to figure that out. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I'm going to keep telling these stories. | ||
| That's one way. | ||
| But the answer is brick by brick. | ||
| All right? | ||
| And we have, you know... | ||
| My homework will be to propose to you, again, when you can fit us in, quarterly, biannually. | ||
| Yeah, let's do quarterly. | ||
| Quarterly is the best move, right? | ||
| That way we'll just get it into people's head. | ||
| Every three months. | ||
| Listen, here's some new ones. | ||
| We should know about these, and we have a significant problem. | ||
| And here's how you can get involved. | ||
| Now look, we could do... | ||
| I'll give you one quick example, and then we'll wrap. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because I know that look. | ||
| Or maybe I don't. | ||
| You know, our memory, human memory, is among the least reliable evidence. | ||
| Least reliable. | ||
| So eyewitness identification... | ||
| As is fingerprints, are synonymous with being the gold standard of evidence. | ||
| I saw him do it. | ||
| I saw her do it. | ||
| And there's so much scientific literature of how unreliable our memory is. | ||
| Fingerprints, we look at as the gold standard. | ||
| So if we talk about it in the context of cases, it becomes apparent how it can go wrong. | ||
| And when you enlighten people, your listeners will be jurors one day. | ||
| They'll be related to people that will become jurors, and they start to convey these stories so that maybe one day when they go into jury selection, we can cut the problem off at the pass, right? | ||
| So instead of reading about, you know, some awful story about someone that spent all this time in jail for a crime they didn't commit, it could just be a murmur to a friend. | ||
| I helped make sure someone didn't get convicted for something they didn't do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think the more people are aware of these problems, I think people are kind of peripherally aware, but when someone like you explains the intricate details, all the important aspects and all the infuriating aspects, All the corruption and all the bullshit and the lies and the bad cops and the planting of evidence and all that stuff. | ||
| And you realize, again, that could be me. | ||
| That could be someone I love. | ||
| That could be someone. | ||
| And also, fucking, even if it's not someone you love, it's a human being. | ||
| There's no way that should happen, ever. | ||
| No innocent person should happen. | ||
| And when you see when these people get out and you see a guy who's got gray hair and he's been in jail for 30 years or something he didn't do, how do you fix that? | ||
| You don't. | ||
| Do you have a fucking time machine? | ||
| You don't. | ||
| You don't. | ||
| So are we monsters now? | ||
| Because this is how our criminal justice system is set up? | ||
| We as a society, have we tolerated this stealing of lives? | ||
| We have, unfortunately. | ||
| And it takes... | ||
| I'm one person. | ||
| I mean, there is a... | ||
| There's an army of heroes all across the country that are fighting for this. | ||
| Nina Morrison, Vanessa Pakin, people of the Innocence Project that have been there forever. | ||
| My friend Rebecca Brown fighting for reform. | ||
| But I feel like we're complicit by our silence and our inactivity. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I think most people don't know where to start or where to begin or even the extent of the problem itself. | ||
| Most people don't know. | ||
| You've extended an olive branch to me. | ||
| I'm going to grab every twig of it and yank on it, and you have my word that I'll help provide interesting stories that are enlightening and that we can help people know a little bit better. | ||
| So let's plan on doing this again in September. | ||
| I love it, bro. | ||
| All right. | ||
| My man, you're the best. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great to see you, bro. | |
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Always great to see you, too. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Tell everybody your Instagram. | ||
| Tell everybody what's the best way to review more of this information online if they're hearing this and they're interested. | ||
| Yeah, that'd be great. | ||
| Let me give you my Instagram is dubin.josh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
D-U-B-I-N, I believe. | |
| Shit. | ||
| Yeah, there you are. | ||
| Dubin.josh. | ||
| Okay, and then what's the best place to... | ||
| You know, innocenceproject.org is a great way to learn about the Innocence Project. | ||
| And I make it a point to only really post on my Instagram about cases and causes. | ||
| And, you know, a great way to learn about what we do at the Innocence Project is going to the website and our Wrongful Conviction podcast that Jason and I do. | ||
| You know, my Jung Science series just got nominated for a Webby, which was pretty cool, where we go through each discipline of forensic science. | ||
| And explain, you know, what is wrong with each discipline of forensic science. | ||
| But you just have to be willing to invest the time and learn. | ||
| And hopefully through the, you know, our future podcasts with you, we'll keep the word out. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| We'll do it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, buddy. |
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