May 6, 2022 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:25:54
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Oh yeah, and last time, I guess I talk really loud, apparently. | ||
| No, you don't. | ||
| Oh, you read comments. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Don't read comments. | ||
| You told me that last time. | ||
| Never read comments. | ||
| I told Don L. When Don L. and I did a podcast with the RZA, it was so much fun. | ||
| After it was over, I gave him a big hug. | ||
| I said, that was fun. | ||
| Don't read the comments. | ||
| And he went on, like, for weeks, for weeks, he was, like, on this, like, defensive campaign. | ||
| But Dono, maybe he should read a few of the comments. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I like him perfectly flawed. | ||
| I like him as he is. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good way to describe it. | ||
| I don't want him to change at all. | ||
| I mean, I'd like him to grow and get better as a human being, but that whole interrupting thing that he does, that's great, man. | ||
| That's him. | ||
| I'm a very sensitive guy, though. | ||
| I need to know what... | ||
| I've said how that affects people. | ||
| You're in the wrong business. | ||
| If you're a sensitive guy, you're in the wrong business. | ||
| Fuck, you gotta get out of those comments. | ||
| Don't read them. | ||
| If they said that you were too loud, that means one fucking person thought you were too loud, and they've put it out there, and then another person reads that and goes, yeah, he's too loud. | ||
| I was like, am I too loud? | ||
| No, you're not too loud. | ||
| You're not too loud. | ||
| That's not real. | ||
| Do you not go into your own comment section on Instagram? | ||
| Like, never? | ||
| It is the Wild West in there. | ||
| And every check mark, every legitimate celebrity, everybody's trying to beat each other, not just to be the first to comment on anything you post, but to have the smartest quip or the funniest one-liner. | ||
| Well, that's good. | ||
| It's a talent show. | ||
| Well, that's good. | ||
| Because you get 100 followers from having one solid comment on a Rogan post. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| The people actually do that. | ||
| They try to get followers from... | ||
| Look, I probably would do that too if I didn't have a lot of followers. | ||
| I'm not saying that because I'm above it. | ||
| I'm in there too. | ||
| What's a good one-liner for this? | ||
| Well, it is kind of a thing on YouTube, right? | ||
| When I read YouTube comments on other people, I do read them on other people's videos, but it is funny how people, they develop a little community, they fuck with each other and go back and forth, and they... | ||
| You know, and then you let go, oh, this guy always has funny things to say, and you read his comment. | ||
| And they dogpile on you. | ||
| Oh, they dogpile. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They definitely dogpile. | ||
| That's why it's... | ||
| But it's like, that's the kind of people that are doing that. | ||
| The kind of people that are leaving a lot of comments are the kind of people that complain a lot. | ||
| Like, you don't want... | ||
| And they're going to be more prevalent, because there's more of them. | ||
| So it's a biased sample group. | ||
| It'll give you a distorted perception of what the actual show was like. | ||
| People who... | ||
| People want to be heard. | ||
| They want to have their own say on things that really have nothing to do with them at all. | ||
| It's just their moment to grab a little spotlight. | ||
| People like to talk. | ||
| And also, you've got to always take into consideration, there's a lot of people out there that are doing this while they work because they hate their job. | ||
| Their job sucks. | ||
| So they just complain about shit. | ||
| Fuck this dude. | ||
| And that's fun to say. | ||
| Fun to say, fuck that guy. | ||
| He talks too much. | ||
| He's too loud. | ||
| He's not funny. | ||
| He's that. | ||
| You need some feedback, but lucky as a comic, you get feedback from audiences, and I do audit myself. | ||
| I do think about my own self, like what I do, if it's too loud or too this or too dumb or not funny or whatever. | ||
| I'm my worst critic, so I don't need other critics. | ||
| And you performing in front of an audience on a regular basis, you have like real-time reaction. | ||
| Person doesn't have an opportunity to say he's not funny after he's finished laughing. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Too late to bullshit. | ||
| Yeah, that's a problem. | ||
| It's just, it's like, you know, we're just navigating this whole new world of social media. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's new. | ||
| It's not like our grandparents did it, and boy, when you get on Twitter, I'll tell you what happened to me when I got on Twitter. | ||
| No, they don't have any data. | ||
| No one knows. | ||
| Well, we're in the moment, I think, that we're learning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And we're learning a real valuable lesson right now as to how that, what Chappelle likes to call, not a real place, Twitter, affects our real lives. | ||
| Like, this line is being blurred between what's happening online and what's happening in real life. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know, I... You weren't with Dave at the Hollywood Bowl, correct? | |
| Yeah, this is what I'm saying. | ||
| We'd probably be remiss if we didn't address that off the top. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because I'm, what, 36 hours removed from that, like one sleep away from what, in the moment, I recognize as an assassination attempt on my best friend. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, we get... | ||
| We have the... | ||
| Incredible good fortune to be able to be laughing about it now and there's the memes and everybody is making fun of how this guy got broken up into a pretzel and Dave's good reflexes and all that only is entertaining because we don't have to have an inconsolable moment of grief. | ||
| Which was one thought in this guy's mind away from that being the reality today, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean well, I think the guy was like legitimately mentally ill But also the security of the Hollywood Bowl sucks every dick that's ever walked the face of the earth not the dicks walk But the fact that you let that guy apparently people were saying to security hey this guy passed the barrier and Like, he got through the barrier and they ignored him. | ||
| They were just watching the show. | ||
| And then he literally made a run for it. | ||
| Their security is fucking terrible. | ||
| The fact that that guy got to where he got is terrible. | ||
| But that's the case with a lot of venues, man. | ||
| A lot of venues we do, we look around. | ||
| We were in Jacksonville. | ||
| There was a fucking guy that was sleeping. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sleeping. | |
| Security during the show. | ||
| They're not paying attention. | ||
| They're not paying attention to shit. | ||
| It just happens. | ||
| Security at a venue is most likely minimum wage workers. | ||
| Not that the amount of money that you're being paid necessarily indicates how seriously you take your job, but it's going to be hard to get... | ||
| 50 people work in one venue at minimum wage that take their job incredibly seriously or have gone through some extensive training to be qualified for that job. | ||
| They definitely get paid more than minimum wage, but the point is like they should hire cops. | ||
| They should have off-duty police. | ||
| They should have people that are near the stage. | ||
| Especially when it's Dave after all that shit that went down with Netflix and just I don't know what kind of assessments they do about people and like threats and stuff like that but that guy actually had made a tweet saying Dave Chappelle you're next after Will Smith got slapped or excuse me after Chris Rock got slapped by Will Smith. | ||
| I don't know that there's any level of security that insulate you from real life. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| A guy like that who we can't say his name. | ||
| I don't even want to reference this motherfucker because it's the kind of attention that they want. | ||
| Like part of the idea of a person like that is that now they become something. | ||
| They become special. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For a moment, we want to look at their videos. | ||
| We want to look at their tweets. | ||
| We want to figure out who this guy is and speak their name. | ||
| And for him, that is everything. | ||
| That's worth everything that happened. | ||
| But for us... | ||
| The idea that anybody in this world can get at you, that any thought that somebody has in their head can change literally the course of history and take the people from us that we love. | ||
| They don't have to be famous. | ||
| They don't have to be of great impact to the entire world. | ||
| But I've lost loved ones. | ||
| I know you've lost loved ones. | ||
| Seeing in that moment that I might Actually have lost my best friend on the world stage in front of everybody on cameras all of us there Thinking that we could protect them all of us there thinking well it couldn't possibly Be a guy jumping a barrier jumping on stage with a clean run of Dave with the weapon with a knife that's shaped like a fucking gun That's inconceivable that couldn't possibly happen right if it can happen there It didn't happen anywhere. | ||
| Well, not only that, there's a lot of video of it. | ||
| What happened to those fucking cell phones being in a bag? | ||
| I mean... | ||
| A lot of people had knives. | ||
| A lot of other people had knives, too. | ||
| They cut those fucking bags open. | ||
| They need metal detectors at Dave shows now. | ||
| I'm sure they're going to ramp up things now. | ||
| We have metal detectors. | ||
|
unidentified
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What? | |
| That guy went through a metal detector with a knife? | ||
| If he came through the normal order of security, then he had to walk through a metal detector. | ||
| How did he even get a ticket? | ||
| He was a homeless guy. | ||
| I mean, you know, these questions are the kind of things that will twist you in knots and keep you tossing and turning all night. | ||
| The broader emotion I'm struggling with is the reality that we have to, like, have a bit more gratitude for the people that we have on this planet, in our lives, in our sphere of entertainment and influence, While they're here. | ||
| Like, I don't want to be posting about how much, oh, we all love Dave and what we missed, you know, what we could have said, and I don't need a Nipsey Russell moment, you know what I mean, or Nipsey Hussle. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What I need is people to, like, just think for a minute about how we approach the people, even with whom we disagree, with this veil of violence, with this veil of like, yeah, like, you know, fuck that guy is one thing, but kill that guy is another thing. | ||
| Stop that guy. | ||
| Somehow, removing that guy from the planet removes the idea that we don't like that that person has, or whatever we disagree with must be silenced forever. | ||
| That is what you were saying earlier about Twitter spilling over into real life. | ||
| That's what I'm talking about. | ||
| The attitude that people take when they're removed from social cues, from looking in a person's eyes, from emotions, when you're angry about a person, that's one of the weird things that social media does. | ||
| It removes you from humanity because you're not really talking to a person. | ||
| You're just typing letters. | ||
| You don't see the person reading them. | ||
| You hope that they feel bad because it's fun, but you don't even know them. | ||
| You can interact with someone. | ||
| So when you could say, Chappelle, you're next. | ||
| You could say that, but if you were right in front of them and you said, Chappelle, you're next. | ||
| He goes, what did I do? | ||
| And you're like, well, you said this. | ||
| He goes, I never said that. | ||
| And then now you're having a conversation. | ||
| He's like, you're anti-trans. | ||
| He goes, I am not anti-trans. | ||
| And then you have this conversation, and all of a sudden, you realize it's just two human beings. | ||
| But instead of that, you've got, Chappelle, you're next, in a tweet. | ||
| And then this motherfucker, living in this weird, disconnected world, decides he's actually going to make a physical, violent move. | ||
| And there's so much of that, that you could ignore somebody saying, Dave, you're next. | ||
| Because there might be a thousand people saying that, but the one guy who actually means it... | ||
| Right. | ||
| Could change all of our lives forever. | ||
| So instead of trying to find that needle in the haystack or hoping that the Hollywood Bowl security is on top of their game, or to be fair, all of us who were there backstage in the audience, side stage, who love him, could get there in the moment and save him from impending doom. | ||
| What if we just police each other in the public space? | ||
| What if we don't accept that on social media from our peers, from each other? | ||
| Somebody jumps on and says some shit like that. | ||
| We can't wait till he's on stage at the Hollywood Bowl to be like, hey man, maybe we should take a look at that guy. | ||
| Yeah, but you're talking about, you're trying to manage at scale amongst hundreds of millions of people if you're talking about that. | ||
| Like the amount of people that are interacting with people online, within every minute of every day, there's just millions. | ||
| It's just constantly. | ||
| There's no way anybody could ever manage that. | ||
| But you can manage yourself. | ||
| Yes, you can manage yourself. | ||
| But he's a homeless person who's got mental illness problems and black nail polish, and he calls himself a they-them. | ||
| The dumbest fucking weapon ever, by the way. | ||
| It's a fake gun that's a knife. | ||
| A smart weapon is a fake knife that's a gun. | ||
| That's smart, because it looks like a knife. | ||
| Ah, you can't get me. | ||
| You're over there. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| Bang. | ||
| That's a smart weapon. | ||
| My point is to make that guy stand out more as an anomaly than a casual, normal comment you might see on anybody's page at any time. | ||
| Well, he's more of an anomaly. | ||
| It's just there's a lot of anomalies when you're dealing with hundreds of millions of people that are tweeting all day long every day. | ||
| It's just, the discourse in this country is so fucking poison. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| There's so many people fighting back and forth in this way where they're disagreeing in text. | ||
| You know, it's just a shit way to communicate with people. | ||
| Yeah, and as you said, it removes the humanity from it. | ||
| Completely. | ||
| Yeah, I see this person entirely as a thought. | ||
| Or this one comment he made or a joke that he made that I thought went too far, I didn't like it. | ||
| And now all this, everything that I feel about that moment or that comment is heaped upon this actual human person. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's a mess. | ||
| It's a fucking mess. | ||
| That turmeric coffee gets in your throat, right? | ||
| Ahem. | ||
| We were talking before this podcast about your former cigarette habit. | ||
| You were two packs a day? | ||
| Two packs a day, Joe. | ||
| And I couldn't put it down until I realized that, you know, smokers are, it's a routine thing also. | ||
| So my thing was I would have two cigarettes left in the pack At the end of every night, so in the morning, before you have that first, like, you know, pee even sometimes, you gotta have that first cigarette. | ||
| Like, that's the start of the day. | ||
| How did you quit? | ||
| Phase withdrawal. | ||
| Phase withdrawal. | ||
| That's what I call it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So what I would do is, for instance, those moments where you need the cigarette, like right after you eat, right before you go to the bathroom first thing in the morning, I would take one of those elements away. | ||
| Like, okay, I'm still smoking. | ||
| I'm still going to enjoy as many cigarettes as I want. | ||
| I'm going to have breakfast first. | ||
| I'm just not going to have that first cigarette in the morning before I eat. | ||
| And then the rest of the day is carte blanche, whatever I want to do. | ||
| And this is your idea? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've tried the cold turkey. | ||
| I've tried like, oh, I'm just not going to smoke anymore. | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| But what did work was finding spots, just spots, when you're not allowing yourself to smoke and giving yourself free range the rest of the time. | ||
| And the more spots you remove, the less smoking you actually do. | ||
| And you hold to that and hold to that. | ||
| And after a while, you've phased yourself out enough where then you can kick maybe six or seven cigarettes a day instead of 20. You know what I mean? | ||
| And so when you got down to six or seven cigarettes a day, then you went cold turkey? | ||
| Yeah, then it's just like, then you've got some discipline. | ||
| That's smart. | ||
| That's a smart way to do it because I think they say that that's the smartest way to do alcohol unless you do it in a medical setting because alcohol is one of the rare drugs that when you kick it, it can actually kill you. | ||
| You become so dependent upon alcohol that your body, if you're an alcoholic, like a severe alcoholic, your body needs alcohol to function. | ||
| Same as benzodiazepines. | ||
| Benzodiazepines, Xanax and the like. | ||
| If you have a severe addiction to those and then you kick it, you'll die. | ||
| It's one of the rare drugs. | ||
| I've drank a lot in my day. | ||
| I've dabbled in other drugs. | ||
| The only thing I still have cravings... | ||
| I still drink, but not as heavily as I once did. | ||
| I haven't had a cigarette in 14 years. | ||
| I still get cravings. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Do you smoke weed? | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| No. | ||
| So you don't smoke weed, no cigarettes, no tobacco products at all, never dip? | ||
| Do you ever use those fucking... | ||
| Brandon Schaub was here last week. | ||
| He tried to get me to try those little pouches. | ||
| Right, that's coffee. | ||
| Yeah, it's the turmeric. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Like somebody's down there tickling my throat. | ||
| Yeah, like, ahem, it coats your throat. | ||
| It's really annoying. | ||
| I stopped doing it for a long time and then Laird Hamilton sent me another one of those coffee machines and I used it here and I'm like, goddammit, now I got that ahem again. | ||
| So I used to do a lot of things like in abundance, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So drinking now, I actually did the same thing with drinking because for a while in the pandemic we all slipped a little bit too deep into like whatever our comforts were. | ||
| And I was fortunate enough to be in an environment where I was very happy and energetic and we were up and we were doing things and producing stuff. | ||
| And, you know, alcohol is my elixir of choice. | ||
| So I went a little too far with it, right? | ||
| And it wasn't like, oh, you know what? | ||
| I drink too much and this isn't healthy and I need to get like, you know, a better mental state and I should be sober. | ||
| Bro, I started looking in the mirror and I could see alcohol in my face. | ||
| What did you see? | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| I was getting like puffy face and baggy eyes and I was starting to look fucking old, like alcohol old. | ||
| Alcohol will fucking age the shit out of you. | ||
| I did not know that. | ||
| So my route to everything was just like vanity. | ||
| I was like, I can't. | ||
| We talked about that. | ||
| It was an incredible motivator. | ||
| During those days, man, when we were doing those shows at Stubbs, it was weird because it was like the world was still kind of shut down. | ||
| Everything was kind of shut down, but then we would have that COVID bubble and we'd all be hanging out backstage with no masks and celebrities would come back there and party with us and we were all drinking and having fun. | ||
| It felt really special. | ||
| It felt... | ||
| Because it wasn't just that it was fun. | ||
| It was fun when no one was having fun. | ||
| But it wasn't because we were being reckless or incredibly cavalier. | ||
| There's a regiment of testing and we did all the stuff so that we could have that freedom inside our space. | ||
| Yeah, not just testing, but we tested the entire fucking audience. | ||
| We tested everybody in the audience, we tested everybody backstage, and then there was a couple of knuckleheads that violated protocol and fucked it up for everybody. | ||
| It's interesting when that happened, when a couple people decided they're going to hang out with other people and do podcasts and shit, and then they got sick. | ||
| It's like, hey, what are you doing? | ||
| We had a fucking rule here. | ||
| Everybody gets tested. | ||
| You can't just show up on some random podcast without testing people. | ||
| And that's the thing. | ||
| You have to respect how much effort and attention, energy, money went into making sure that we could all feel safe and feel comfortable. | ||
| You go outside of that for your own personal advancement or your daily desire. | ||
| Well, you're being a real asshole. | ||
| That's not the fault of the infrastructure. | ||
| These guys put together something That was really difficult to do at the time. | ||
| It required that they pay very close attention to what the CDC was saying and how we could stop any kind of spread if somebody did go outside the bubble. | ||
| And so even though, granted, ultimately we all got COVID, we kept it at bay for very long and it didn't become like a super spreader where people outside of our little world got it. | ||
| We were able to recover and come back because they were so serious about But you guys got it because of a guy that violated. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Like, if that guy didn't do that, you would have never got it. | ||
| Well, you might have got it anyway. | ||
| We wouldn't have got it then, anyway. | ||
| That year. | ||
| Yeah, I got it going to an arena. | ||
| I was doing arenas by the time I got it. | ||
| It was like, listen. | ||
| Yeah, but you have a different crowd, Joe. | ||
| I was like, let's go. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Enough is enough is enough. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Let's see what happens. | ||
| I can't thank Dave Chappelle enough for making a space during that time for all of us to do our thing. | ||
| The podcast that is premiering today that I've been working on for two years, it's inception, like the beginning of it. | ||
| Was in Yellow Springs, Ohio during that summer camp. | ||
| I mean, it was March 20 when I got this deal with Luminary to do a show that followed me around the world as I covered boxing. | ||
| It was the perfect idea for me. | ||
| I was excited. | ||
| We signed the paperwork, everything. | ||
| Second week of March. | ||
| And needless to say, by the fourth week of March, there was no boxing world to follow me around in. | ||
| There was no fights that were gonna be able to be had. | ||
| Everybody's calendar was getting eliminated. | ||
| And I had this deal For a show that I clearly couldn't do and Dave created this space in Yellow Springs these shows that attracted like the brightest biggest stars from the comedy world and all these different industries and I decided like well it wasn't so much a decision as kind of an epiphany like what am I missing from the life I've been having My entire adult life, since I was a teenager, I've been in a wildcard boxing gym. | ||
| I was shooting sparring sessions. | ||
| I was covering fights. | ||
| I've been talking to boxers. | ||
| That's what my life driving force has been about. | ||
| And in a matter of a month, that's just taken from me completely. | ||
| So what is it that I miss most? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| I had to start to do some introspection about what that part of my life meant. | ||
| And I realized it was about the fight In the fighter that I'm talking to with even though the context is boxing I think the thing that separates my interviews maybe from other ones is that In addition to speaking about the opponent in the ring, I often take a look at what that person is hurtling internally, like what got them to this place to even be able to climb through the ropes and challenge for or defend a championship. | ||
| And the interesting ways that people get there is entirely part of what makes me fascinated about combat sports and athletes. | ||
| I'm from all walks of combat sports, but boxing is my passion, right? | ||
| So I ended up surrounded by friends And associates that were incredibly accomplished at all different walks of life. | ||
| A lot of them were comedians because Dave was putting on a comedy show. | ||
| But he attracts people from all over the world, all different kinds of disciplines. | ||
| And I said, you know, that fight that's in these boxers, these life hurdles, well, that exists in everybody. | ||
| And the people whose names we know, whose accomplishments we can list, Well, they've won their fight, or at least they're constantly besting whatever their hurdle is. | ||
| And I want to talk about it. | ||
| I want to learn about the fighting people outside the ring. | ||
| So because of what Dave did, because he was able to create this magnet of excellence in Yellow Springs, Ohio, I was able to sit down with these people, and they were so gracious to talk to me about that very same subject, the fight inside them. | ||
| And I created this show. | ||
| You'll love the title. | ||
| Till this day. | ||
| Yeah, we talked about it. | ||
| For people who don't know why till this day, it's interesting. | ||
| There's a very famous interview that you did with Deontay Wilder where you were trying to get Deontay to elaborate on things and he, for whatever reason, because he was upset and he was getting ready for a fight and fired up, he had... | ||
| Decided that he was gonna, like, explain to you what it's like to struggle as a black man in America that till this day you're like, yeah, I know, I'm just trying to get you to talk! | ||
| And so he's like yelling at you that we're going to this to this day, and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah! | ||
| You know, it's funny because now with this a bit longer view of it and the events that happened the other night, I got a lot of death threats from that. | ||
| You know, I joke about the celebrities and shit that were mad at me. | ||
| Wait a minute, you got death threats from that interview that you did with Deontay? | ||
| Oh, are you kidding me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| You know, I had to take that in stride because I didn't take it that seriously. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But... | ||
| To this day, I still get inboxed threats. | ||
| People took that moment to think that I was some kind of Uncle Tom or I was trying to pretend as though slavery didn't exist or something ridiculous like that. | ||
| It was so obvious that you were just trying to get him to expand on his feelings. | ||
| That's his face! | ||
| We talked about it the last time you were here, but that interview was a classic. | ||
| But for people who don't know, it's like now I'm the renowned Uncle Tom. | ||
| That one moment can define how somebody sees you forever. | ||
| It's not about me, right? | ||
| They hate whatever... | ||
| They believe in Uncle Tom represents to them. | ||
| And they think, okay, well in that moment, man, that guy, he is that. | ||
| So I am going to aim all my negativity and hatred and visceral fucking comments his way. | ||
| And it takes one moron. | ||
| That's not me. | ||
| Whatever this person's built up in his head about who I am or what I mean to him... | ||
| I have no idea that's happening. | ||
| And if that guy decides that he wants to actually do what he fantasizes about, how am I going to stop that? | ||
| How am I going to see that coming? | ||
| Yeah, that's the problem with the world we're living in. | ||
| So my last 36 hours, really, I've tried to subside the anger and certainly best the fear, but it's about gratitude. | ||
| It's like we can't take for granted anything. | ||
| I can't take you for granted. | ||
| I think I made a post when I got a job at Probellum. | ||
| Which is a huge moment in my career, right? | ||
| I got to be the in-the-ring interviewer post-fight. | ||
| As I've said, the way you do it is a beacon to me. | ||
| I love that aspect of your work, and that is my claim to fame. | ||
| That's my passion, and I had an opportunity to do it on this platform. | ||
| I'm still doing it, but when I got that opportunity, I thought, you know... | ||
| You put me on this show the first time around about this till this day controversy, if you want to call it that, and it gave me another level of notoriety. | ||
| It provided other opportunities for me because you were gracious enough and generous enough with your platform to do that. | ||
| Well, you know, not long ago, people were furious with you. | ||
| Some people still so. | ||
| I'm fine with everybody having their opinion or being pissed. | ||
| Everybody gets an opportunity to do that. | ||
| There's a right to do that. | ||
| But talking about taking Joe Rogan out of the sphere of conversation? | ||
| Idiots talking about kill Joe Rogan? | ||
| That's my friend. | ||
| That's a good guy. | ||
| It doesn't matter whether or not you agree with everything he says. | ||
| It doesn't matter whether or not you agree Do your own experience. | ||
| I came here today because I wanted to be a part of the Joe Rogan experience. | ||
| Not anybody in the comment section. | ||
| Not anybody in their think pieces. | ||
| Not anybody in their editorials. | ||
| I'm here for the Joe Rogan experience. | ||
| And that has been an incredibly wonderful experience for me. | ||
| Why should you or anybody else be able to take that from me? | ||
| I think people think too much about why. | ||
| People think too much about this idea that you can stop someone from talking. | ||
| And that's the whole idea about cancel culture, right? | ||
| Is that you're going to remove someone from the conversation. | ||
| And it's worked for some people. | ||
| I mean, rightly so for people like Harvey Weinstein, right? | ||
| They... | ||
| That's cancel culture in its best form. | ||
| That's the best version of it. | ||
| I've never heard Harvey Weinstein's perspective on anything. | ||
| He's a serial rapist. | ||
| Yeah, let's remove him from society. | ||
| But we didn't find out about that until people were outraged. | ||
| Until Ronan Farrow wrote that piece. | ||
| That was like an open secret in Hollywood. | ||
| That was the non-cancel culture. | ||
| That was a let people slide culture. | ||
| He's going to help us and get us an Academy Award. | ||
| Yeah, he's a scumbag, but thank him when you win your Oscar. | ||
| Well, I make a serious distinction between someone's actions that harm other people as opposed to someone's opinions that you have to go somewhere to hear. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| Obviously, obviously. | ||
| But what I'm saying is this is a weird time in terms of people being able to express themselves. | ||
| It's so unique and unprecedented that untold millions of people at any time can pick up their phone and go onto Facebook or go onto Twitter or whatever and just start putting your opinion out there. | ||
| Go onto YouTube, make a video. | ||
| You know, I was listening to the radio, Rahim. | ||
| He talks too fucking loud. | ||
| And you can read that and you can listen to that and that can affect you. | ||
| And that's why you have to be careful about, you know, people talk about your diet. | ||
| In terms of what you eat. | ||
| You have to have a good diet in terms of what you take in mentally as well. | ||
| It's very important. | ||
| And that's why you don't want to read comments. | ||
| Because you're taking in complaints. | ||
| And you can only take in so many complaints before you start internalizing them and thinking like, man, maybe I do suck. | ||
| Or maybe you get a little defensive. | ||
| I've seen a lot of people get ultra defensive and get really weird because of reading too many comments. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| You should do your own personal auditing. | ||
| You should be objective and introspective and think about yourself and your life and who you are and what you say and how it affects other people. | ||
| But you can't take all those negative things in too much. | ||
| It's like drinking too much alcohol or smoking too much cigarettes. | ||
| It's not good for you. | ||
| And you can't take for granted, though, the freedom of being able to express one's views and be authentic. | ||
| I'm not trying to shut down the comment section by any stretch of the imagination. | ||
| When it gets violent, though, when it gets to pointing out an individual for harm, which, I mean, excuse me if I'm ill-informed, but I don't believe I've ever heard you do. | ||
| No. | ||
| I've certainly never heard Dave do that. | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| You guys, to me, are models of what it is to be free men in society. | ||
| You have to work hard to defend this space. | ||
| And you have some responsibility to not abuse that space. | ||
| But it's the Joe Rogan experience. | ||
| And for people to put on you that anything you say has to be according to Hoyle Truth and this space here where you get to talk about your experience and get from others theirs has to all of a sudden meet the standard of nightly news. | ||
| Well, the nightly news doesn't hold up to its own standards. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're completely full of shit, and they're completely bought and paid for by advertising money. | ||
| So in the absence of that, in the absence of credibility on the nightly news, where we were all supposed to be able to go get the unvarnished truth and the actual facts, then we find other spaces that are more... | ||
| A place where we are receptive to what the messages that are being put out. | ||
| The places where it resonates with people. | ||
| It makes sense because the person seems like they're just a normal human being. | ||
| They're not a human being that's been hired to say a certain thing a certain way because that's the way the network profits the most. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That's their job, though. | ||
| That's where we're supposed to be able to go and get those truths, where we're supposed to be able to go and get actual facts, not two people debating what a fact is, but being told the truth. | ||
| If they're in the vacuum that the absence of that credibility creates, well, then you'll find all kinds of spheres of people who will give you the truth that is most agreeable to your predisposition. | ||
| That's dangerous. | ||
| That's their fault. | ||
| Well, a lot of it is their fault, but what they don't understand is when you spend so much time talking about a person in a negative light, you're going to make a certain percentage of those people investigate whether or not you're accurate. | ||
| And then those people are going to go, hey, that show's pretty good. | ||
| I mean, I've talked about this before, but I gained two million subscribers during the whole cancellation time. | ||
| That's a lot of people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's only helped because it's not true. | ||
| It's like if you listen to what I'm... | ||
| I'm not like a minister of disinformation trying to... | ||
| Tell people, don't get vaccinated, don't take medicine, the pharmaceutical companies are out to get you. | ||
| No, but I'm being honest. | ||
| I'm being honest about what they have done in the past. | ||
| I'm being honest about the dangers of certain medications. | ||
| I'm being honest about expressions of free speech and what it means to me and how important it is that people be able to express themselves. | ||
| It's an amazing time that a person like me can have this much of a Voice and I do pay attention to it and I'm aware of it that it's unusual I'm aware of it. | ||
| I'm aware of it. | ||
| That's a tremendous responsibility But all I can do is do what got me here and that's just be me be me be honest try to be caring try to be kind try to be is as Generous as I can as nice as I can. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Yeah, and also you're On a consistent basis, telling people, go do your own research. | ||
| If that's what you've... | ||
| Well, tell people to read the actual pertinent information. | ||
| That's actually a joke now. | ||
| Do your own research. | ||
| I did my own research. | ||
| No, you should trust the experts. | ||
| Well, not anymore. | ||
| You know, it depends on what you're talking about. | ||
| Should you trust the experts on nuclear physics? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Should you trust the experts? | ||
| As soon as money gets involved, this whole trust the experts thing gets fucking weird because we know that people have influenced people to make certain statements that do not jive with the facts. | ||
| And if you look at all that accurately and you say, you know, trust the experts, like which ones? | ||
| Which experts? | ||
| You want to trust the experts in math? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Those guys can't lie, because you can do the work. | ||
| Everyone can see it. | ||
| It's math. | ||
| It's as clear as it gets. | ||
| Trust the experts in ancient history? | ||
| Sure, as long as they agree. | ||
| If they don't agree with each other, then which experts? | ||
| I was just reading this thing about Clovis yesterday, and I sent it to a friend of mine, who is an expert in it, and I said, hey, what do you think about this article? | ||
| And he sent it to another guy. | ||
| So these people are like passing, these experts are passing this article around. | ||
| Like here's the problems with this. | ||
| You know, the idea is that people were in North America thousands of years earlier than they thought. | ||
| And this is like pretty much established now. | ||
| That's true because they keep finding bones and all sorts of artifacts that are far older than they thought they were. | ||
| The new article came out just a few days ago about how re-examining Clovis first and that might be accurate. | ||
| And so I sent this article to these other guys. | ||
| I said, well, who's right? | ||
| Is it that people were here 30,000, 40,000 years ago? | ||
| Or is it the Clovis people were the first people? | ||
| And so they're all breaking this down. | ||
| So experts don't even agree. | ||
| This fucking guy who wrote this article is an expert. | ||
| And I sent it to some other experts, and they sent it to other experts. | ||
| And they're all going... | ||
| So when you say, trust the experts... | ||
| On what? | ||
| On what? | ||
| And science is an ongoing study, right? | ||
| That's part of it, to continue to question. | ||
| And there are things that are proven to work and things that have been established over years that we can rely on. | ||
| I think the part that makes it so confusing is what we spoke about earlier, the lack of credibility of institutions. | ||
| What institutions do you trust? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| That's exactly what it is. | ||
| Because when you just trust the people that are in power, then you get a dictatorship. | ||
| You can't just trust anyone who has authority. | ||
| That's nonsense. | ||
| You have to know why they know what they know, and how did they come about, and are they being influenced, and do they have an agenda, and do they have a vested interest in this being accurate as opposed to that? | ||
| Is there a financial gain involved in it? | ||
| And oftentimes there is, and that's real. | ||
| That's real human beings, and most people know that. | ||
| And when you can get people to just fucking step in line and just listen to authority, The problem with that is, that doesn't go away. | ||
| They keep that fucking attitude, and that's the attitude that they have in all these communist dictatorships where the people are under the boot of these fucking evil thugs. | ||
| How did that come about? | ||
| It came about because they just had to listen. | ||
| They have to listen. | ||
| And so, free speech, in a free form, you being able to say that without having some totalitarian government come down on your head, or even People in the sphere of cancel culture try to eliminate the show from existence is the difference between, | ||
| yeah, it may be a cliche, it may even be a punchline, do your own research, but you have the option to listen to what you think is credible and juxtapose that with what might not be in line with your current beliefs. | ||
| How much you invest in that investigation, that's entirely up to the character and the desire for you to know the truth. | ||
| True. | ||
| You can't police that in other people, but the opportunity for them to get that information can't be hindered. | ||
| Don't you think it's also a factor of no one has enough time? | ||
| No one. | ||
| No one has enough time. | ||
| If you really want to find out about the fucking Spanish flu from 1918, do you have the time? | ||
| How many people have the time? | ||
| Do you have the time to research the waves and how people started wearing masks and when people died and where it came from? | ||
| Did it actually come from Spain or did it actually come from America, they think. | ||
| Nobody has the fucking time! | ||
| So even things that are happening right now, like when they're talking about, oh, you know, we've got to stop being so dependent on foreign oil. | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| I got to go research foreign oil? | ||
| I got to start thinking, like, how bad was fracking? | ||
| Some people say fracking's the devil. | ||
| Other people say fracking's necessary. | ||
| It's going to fuck up some spots, but it's going to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. | ||
| Fuck, I gotta research this? | ||
| I gotta go and find out who's right and who's wrong? | ||
| I've had experts that had completely different opinions on climate change, and it's exhausting. | ||
| You know, I'm just like, who's right? | ||
| One guy is saying that solar and wind can take care of a lot of our energy needs, and we need to optimize those, and if we don't do that, we're fucked, and here's all these examples of pollution, and this is what the carbon's doing through the atmosphere, and then there's another guy that goes, here's like a thousand-year chart. | ||
| Of how the temperature of the earth just keeps going up and down. | ||
| We're on course. | ||
| It has an effect, but it has a small effect, and there's a lot of people that are profiting off of freaking everybody out, and the control that they're going to get from some sort of climate crisis, the same as they would get it from a war crisis, the same as a health crisis, if they have the opportunity to close in and get tighter and tighter control on your actions and what you're allowed to do and not allowed to do, then it's easier to be a dictator. | ||
| Because there's a lot of people that are out there that don't like the idea of people voting for things. | ||
| They would rather just run things. | ||
| They would rather just tell you what to do. | ||
| And in certain cases, they can do that. | ||
| In cases of war, in cases of any sort of extreme medical emergency, in cases of any sort of civil disobedience, they can impose martial law. | ||
| That stuff's scary. | ||
| That stuff's scary because then you have an incentive for those things to take place so that you can control things. | ||
| And then even after you're done controlling things, you could allow things to relax a little bit, but you have more control over the people now than you did a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, before the crisis. | ||
| It's what they did with 9-11. | ||
| I don't think that the United States caused 9-11, but I most likely think, I most certainly think, that they used 9-11 to get the Patriot Act through. | ||
| A lot of stuff that was in the Patriot Act existed before this, long before 9-11. | ||
| They couldn't get it through. | ||
| There's a lot of ideas. | ||
| They do that with bills. | ||
| They shove a bunch of shit in there. | ||
| And you're like, wait a minute, why does it say things about crosswalks? | ||
| In a thing about something that's totally unrelated. | ||
| Do you guys have a deal with the Crosswalk Union? | ||
| This is a bad example. | ||
| But why do they have provisions in certain bills that have nothing to do with what the title of the bill is? | ||
| And the life of those provisions. | ||
| That may... | ||
| Long outlive the crisis at hand. | ||
| Yes forever like the Patriot Act like the TSA one guy tries to blow his shoes off We have to take our shoes off forever like what is that what fuck and it just it's forever and it just keeps going and it's just that you don't when you lose power when you lose power over your decision to make Choices and whether or not you want to do this or do that and what you're allowed to do and freedom once you lose that you don't get it back you You never get more freedom. | ||
| You always get a little less. | ||
| And you go, we're still better off than Haiti. | ||
| We're still better off than Cuba. | ||
| We're still better off than China. | ||
| The fucking reality is we're not better off in terms of our ability to make decisions for ourselves than we were before they imposed these things. | ||
| We're not as free in terms of government surveillance. | ||
| The idea that the government could be looking out for terrorists and stop terrorists, yeah, that would be nice. | ||
| It would be nice if you could prevent a terrorist attack. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, the only way we can do that, Rahim, is we're going to have to look at all your emails and read all your text messages, whether you like it or not, and listen to every call you ever make. | ||
| No, but they do that. | ||
| They can do that. | ||
| Why can they do that? | ||
| They can do that under the guise you might be a terrorist. | ||
| Which is crazy! | ||
| That's like the ultimate guilty until proven innocent. | ||
| It's like 330 million people are guilty until proven innocent? | ||
| And you gotta check everybody's text? | ||
| Well, that's the kind of thing that happens when they get a little bit of control. | ||
| And it's a normal human thing, man. | ||
| And you can get people... | ||
| You might even get me to say yes in a moment of crisis. | ||
| Like, okay, it's 9-12, and if you need to check my emails to make sure that, you know, aircrafts are safe, or I can go into the mall without getting blown up... | ||
| Check the fucking emails, please, and my neighbors, too. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But now, it's 20, 22. But what if it's you are criticizing? | ||
| What if Trump gets in office again and he has his power? | ||
| And what if it's you're writing something very critical of Trump? | ||
| So he starts investigating you and fucking with you. | ||
| Because he finds out it's you. | ||
| Because he's looking at your tweets. | ||
| He's looking at your text messages. | ||
| Even though he's not supposed to know it's your account. | ||
| He's looking at your phone. | ||
| He's seeing who you're calling on a daily basis. | ||
| That's what a dictator can do. | ||
| And I'm not even saying that it's Trump. | ||
| Imagine it's someone else. | ||
| Imagine it's Kim Jong-un. | ||
| Kim Jong-un runs America. | ||
| You know, you gotta think, like, that's a real human being in 2022. I know he doesn't live in America, and I know it's different over here. | ||
| I know we're heavily armed. | ||
| But that's still a human being in 2022 that if you tweeted badly about him, you're a dead man. | ||
| You're dead. | ||
| He's gonna fucking kill you. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| He kills his family members. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| He has them assassinated. | ||
| That's a real guy. | ||
| You have to think that's a possible pattern of behavior that human beings follow. | ||
| It's wild shit, dude. | ||
| Right, and this entire government, of course, is for the people by the people. | ||
| So whatever pattern human behavior follows, so shall government. | ||
| Have you ever read what they said about Kim Jong Il's first day of playing golf? | ||
| No. | ||
| Ali Sadiq told me about this. | ||
| I thought he was fucking with me. | ||
| Until we started reading it. | ||
| It is one of the craziest things you've ever read in your life. | ||
| His first day playing golf? | ||
| Dude. | ||
| He's the greatest golf player the world has ever known. | ||
| Like a god of golf. | ||
| Read about this. | ||
| That is kind of Trumpian. | ||
| Dude, he's... | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Kim shot 38 under, including 11 holes in one, at the 7,700-yard championship course at Pyongyang in the very first golf round of his life, according to the North Korean state media. | ||
| It was 1994 when Kim was 52 years old, even more impressive... | ||
| Kim stood just 5'3", yet he was able to overpower a course as long as any ever played in major championship history. | ||
| Who knows how good Kim could have been if he had taken up the sport earlier? | ||
| Who knows how many times he bested 38 under in the 17 years since his first round? | ||
| How crazy is that? | ||
| I mean, come on, Joe. | ||
| Yo, this has to remind you of Trump's first health report. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, boy. | |
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, to your previous point. | ||
| Tremendous health. | ||
| The healthiest president ever. | ||
| Healthiest president they've ever had. | ||
| The thing that freaks me about him is he didn't age in the White House like everybody else does. | ||
| Biden has aged so much in a year. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think he was worried about as much. | ||
| I don't think he was worried about shit. | ||
| I think he was watching Fox News. | ||
| They like me. | ||
| They love me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think, you know, just a finer point on your previous topic. | ||
| Maybe I don't know is an acceptable answer. | ||
| I don't know what fracking is going to do ultimately to the earth. | ||
| It is acceptable, right? | ||
| Yeah, you would think, but it doesn't seem to be an acceptable answer. | ||
| Nobody wants to admit that, you know, I don't know. | ||
| I know some things. | ||
| Oh, this seems to make sense. | ||
| Math supports that. | ||
| That seems provable. | ||
| We've had an experience here that we can point to that makes this... | ||
| Information credible, but do I know enough to say for certainty and game out what happens in 20 years if we take this process? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| So we're going to have to make some decisions based on the unknown. | ||
| The problem if you say, I don't know, is someone will come along and say, I know, and they might not necessarily know. | ||
| And then another expert right next to him will be like, he doesn't know, he's wrong, and we need to debate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's so many things to pay attention to, man. | ||
| There's so much to pay attention to. | ||
| You know, it's just... | ||
| It's a strange time, man. | ||
| It's a strange time because there's so much information, but you only have so much storage. | ||
| You only have so much room in your head. | ||
| You only have so much time. | ||
| Yeah, you made an interesting point about how much time people have. | ||
| I'll have to confess that I have probably an inordinate amount of time to think about what I think about stuff. | ||
| Yeah, you have a nice life. | ||
| I've not made my life about my opinion. | ||
| I'm not like an opinion piece guy. | ||
| Nobody is coming to me to hear my perspective, necessarily. | ||
| But this show that I just debuted... | ||
| Till this day. | ||
| Till this day... | ||
| Is the first time it made me think about why I do things, which is how that show came about. | ||
| And talking to people about what they see as their opponent, that's how I phrase it. | ||
| Identify. | ||
| The first question I ask anybody before we go on air, and there's no pre-interview, there's no setup, I ask them one question to prepare. | ||
| Name, identify, or somehow describe the opponent in your life. | ||
| What is the thing, the hurdle that you've had to best or overcome consistently as adversity to who you want to be or what you have become? | ||
| Give me that in a bite size or a noun. | ||
| And I've talked to 17 people. | ||
| Completely different people. | ||
| I haven't heard an answer repeated once. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And so when people say, you never know what people are going through, you never know what somebody's struggle is, boy, I never knew that more truly than I have in experiencing this show that I've done. | ||
| Think about that question asking people and how few people ever have that conversation with another person, right? | ||
| Most of the people you meet, when you're working with them, they're going throughout their day, you never try to break down what was the hardest thing for them to overcome to get to where they're at. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| These are my friends. | ||
| Most of the people on the show are my friends, or at least associates I've had for years, people I think I know. | ||
| They're public people, people we think we know as audience members or fans. | ||
| Well, these people are just like everybody else in that they have internal struggles. | ||
| They have things going on that you would never think of as much as you think you know them. | ||
| And I learned a lot. | ||
| Just from having the experience of other people's lives and the lens through which they see their own life. | ||
| I gotta talk about Jon Stewart, who was there the other night at the bowl. | ||
| One thing that mortified me because I look up to him so much as an interviewer in particular was that the kind of information that we're talking about, him being at the forefront of that information war when he was the most trusted news source in America on a comedy show that was satire, | ||
| but because the institution was trusted, because the guy was pointing out The song and dance show of the nightly news and the political spin, we could trust him. | ||
| He felt like he lost that battle. | ||
| He felt like, well, they won. | ||
| I didn't have enough of an impact, if any impact at all. | ||
| I was shocked by that. | ||
| I thought, like, not only did you win, but I had no idea internally he would have thought anything else. | ||
| But that's how true he was to the cause. | ||
| Like, because it's still going on, because there is still a Fox News, because there is still disinformation happening on all news channels, he feels like he didn't accomplish what he could have. | ||
| He should have stayed in the game. | ||
| Look, the guy's back and doing his show now, but when he was the host of The Daily Show, he was the fucking man. | ||
| It was, I think, maybe it was too much, maybe he got worn out, maybe it was like, you know, he felt like he'd done enough and he wanted to do something different, take some time off or something like that, but I think you get better at something the more you do it, you know? | ||
| I think it's important that there is a way, there's a way to distribute comedy And have it wrapped up in the news and it actually is informative and helpful. | ||
| And that's one of the things The Daily Show did when Stewart was running it. | ||
| He's so likable and he's so smart and so obvious that he's smart that you hear him talk about stuff and you go, oh yeah. | ||
| It resonates. | ||
| It makes sense. | ||
| I think he's so true to that mission that maybe he cared even too much. | ||
| It must be a tireless fight to feel like you're the only voice and have this platform that... | ||
| Every other nightly news, cable news show should be doing what you're doing and instead you're like fighting them every night and having to point out how terrible they are at doing the thing they're most importantly tasked with. | ||
| So if you see that as a constant struggle and they seem to be unaffected by it ultimately, even though people are listening to The Daily Show and understanding some of the song and dance about mass media, It's still not changing the bottom line, at least from his perspective. | ||
| It might just be exhausting, man. | ||
| I'm sure it's exhausting. | ||
| One of the things that's come out of this, the corporate news not being trusted, is the rise of these independent news platforms. | ||
| That's what's interesting to me. | ||
| What's really interesting to me is watching how these, like, online YouTube people and online Substack journalists are changing the way people get their information. | ||
| Because there's certain people that have ethics as a journalist, as a reporter, as someone who's trying to explain the truth the best they know, and their ethics are unflappable. | ||
| And they happen to be on YouTube, or they happen to be on Substack, and people find them. | ||
| And they're gravitating towards them now. | ||
| And so those other ones, they don't work anymore. | ||
| It's like school lunches. | ||
| Like, you could do better than a fucking school lunch, bitch. | ||
| I know what food is. | ||
| And that's what this is like. | ||
| The nightly news on a lot of these fucking networks, it's like a school lunch. | ||
| Cable news is like school lunch. | ||
| Like, this is edible, but it sucks. | ||
| I'm all about that. | ||
| There's no secret my career began on YouTube. | ||
| I couldn't break into the... | ||
| The big market. | ||
| I wasn't being sat at the table or ringside on the major networks. | ||
| You've got to make your own market because there's not enough seats at the table, right? | ||
| If you think about how many major fights are going on on a daily basis, there's not enough seats, you know? | ||
| But there's also not enough opportunity. | ||
| I think especially when I was getting in, it was thought of to be like an old white man's job or an ex-fighter. | ||
| You're not one of those two. | ||
| You want a broadcaster that's established, that has the resume that you're looking for, and the salty gray hair, the porcelain skin, or you've had to have been a fighter. | ||
| But the people like myself, Who are in the boxing gym shooting sparring sessions, no fighters personally. | ||
| I was training, never thought I would be a boxer, but so much passion for the sport that I felt I had a personal experience, a connection to it. | ||
| I know the sport. | ||
| I can do this job, and I'm young and energetic and able to... | ||
| Handle a broadcast, never get the job. | ||
| Right, but they would never hire you. | ||
| They would never hire you. | ||
| But that's okay, because it's better this way. | ||
| Because if they hired you, they would never allow you to be you. | ||
| If someone just hired you straight up with no YouTube videos, no nothing, they would try to get you to be like, hey, I'm Bobby McPhee, and I'm over here with all the... | ||
| You're acting normal. | ||
| You're acting like what you think a reporter is. | ||
| It's not... | ||
| It's not an accident that almost all those old-timey reporters talked like old-timey reporters. | ||
| They all had a pattern they had to follow. | ||
| You couldn't just be yourself. | ||
| And you couldn't just focus on things that you think are interesting, like sparring sessions, like the stories about people's struggles, like stuff that you actually think is interesting. | ||
| The beautiful thing about something like YouTube or any kind of platform that's putting up videos and audios, it's like So many people can contribute and you can find those unusual voices. | ||
| There's a lot of them in MMA journalism too. | ||
| I could ask the questions that no network would ever permit me to ask. | ||
| You could ask the questions that you want answers to and so then the audience gets engaged with this. | ||
| It's not like some cookie cutter bullshit question and you give your cookie cutter bullshit answer to the reporter. | ||
| No, you guys are having a conversation. | ||
| That's what people love. | ||
| When I talked to Mike Tyson, he was explaining to me his childhood and then what it was like to meet Cuss and what the experience was like. | ||
| Learning boxing and being hypnotized by this guy who was a master of psychology as well as a master boxing coach who just happens to be a fucking hypnotist. | ||
| Who just happens to be dying. | ||
| Who just happens to be at the end of his life and he's got the best prodigy he's ever experienced. | ||
| And this guy will do anything. | ||
| And he's ready to go and he's fucking super talented at 13. Like holy shit. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| It's like his whole life built to that moment. | ||
| Like all the work with Floyd Patterson and Jose Torres and all that stuff. | ||
| That built to that moment where he met Mike Tyson. | ||
| And as he leaves this earth, Mike Tyson becomes the greatest heavyweight of all time. | ||
| At that moment. | ||
| Mike Tyson's smashing people at that moment. | ||
| Mike Tyson's destroying Marvis Frazier. | ||
| Mike Tyson's knocking out Larry Holmes at that moment. | ||
| In every bit of work, every single day, every round, for every other fighter, before he left this earth, he got to experience the culmination of all his wisdom in being imparted to this one lump of incredibly talented silly buddy. | ||
| He shaped this guy. | ||
| You're not gonna get that perspective in a regular cookie-cutter interview. | ||
| That guy's gotta be able to just talk. | ||
| Right, you can't sum that up in 13 and a half minutes for a commercial break. | ||
| And you gotta let Mike Tyson smoke weed. | ||
| I think you have to let combat athletes smoke weed. | ||
| I don't know if anybody shouldn't be allowed to smoke weed. | ||
| Well, isn't it still banned in the NFL? I mean, as far as I know, I'm no authority. | ||
| I was just reading something about these NFL guys that are pissed off because marijuana is banned there. | ||
| And it's a pain-reducing drug, right? | ||
| And how many drugs can they use to reduce pain that are far more dangerous, addictive, destructive than marijuana? | ||
| Oh, look at this. | ||
| NFL players no longer face the possibility of being suspended from games over positive tests for any drug, not just marijuana. | ||
| So this is new under February 1st, 2022. Under a collective bargaining agreement. | ||
| Instead, they will face a fine. | ||
| The threshold for what constitutes a positive THC test has also increased under the deal. | ||
| But even then, it's like... | ||
| Well, that's a fine. | ||
| It's not permitted. | ||
| You're still penalized for it. | ||
| I don't want to smoke a million-dollar joint. | ||
| It's a fine, right? | ||
| NFL players are balling. | ||
| You have to hit them hard to make them change their ways. | ||
| You have to hit them with a big fine. | ||
| You shouldn't be high playing, maybe, but don't basketball players love to play high? | ||
| They love to play high. | ||
| Jamie, hit me with this. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| They all play high, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, not all, but... | |
| I would imagine that it's like anything else that requires a feel. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, there's a thing about... | ||
| You feel things... | ||
| Like, jiu-jitsu players love to get high. | ||
| It's very common. | ||
| Because you feel movement better. | ||
| You feel balance. | ||
| You feel... | ||
| You think THC is a performance-enhancing drug? | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| It is for some things. | ||
| I can't even... | ||
| Hit the pads high! | ||
| Yeah, but that's just you, man. | ||
| Everybody's different. | ||
| Everybody's different when it comes to the way alcohol affects them. | ||
| People are different. | ||
| It's just, I guarantee there are people that have a positive net benefit, and I'm one of them, when they do certain things while high. | ||
| Marijuana enhances my pool game greatly. | ||
| When I play pool, I'm one ball better. | ||
| This is not like a bullshit pool assessment. | ||
| I'm one ball better. | ||
| I'll explain that. | ||
| 85% of NBA players smoke weed. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Of course we do. | ||
| I don't smoke weed now, but there was a day. | ||
| I mean, don't get me wrong. | ||
| Like, you know, I smoke weed a lot. | ||
| I think I've hit my threshold, which is why I can't smoke anymore. | ||
| One more joint, I'm a lunatic. | ||
| Like, I'm a basket case. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're fine. | |
| You're fine. | ||
| I would hate to get you high right now and prove you wrong. | ||
| It would be terrible. | ||
| I got Mike Tyson weed, too. | ||
| This is Mike Tyson weed. | ||
| But when I did, which was for a decent amount of time when I was young and really able to train crazy, I could smoke after training and it would help me with the pain, the muscle pain, the joint pain, the swelling, all that shit. | ||
| Great. | ||
| I'm having a hard time understanding how... | ||
| Being THC high helps a combat athlete. | ||
| It didn't make my reflexes faster. | ||
| I wasn't able to focus better. | ||
| I understand your experience. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But for me... | |
| When I hit the bag when I'm high, I feel better. | ||
| I feel like I move better. | ||
| I feel like my balance is better. | ||
| I feel like there's maybe some little subtle things that I wasn't thinking about before that all of a sudden they're at the forefront because it makes you focus on a single thing. | ||
| It's really good for that. | ||
| And when that single thing is something like martial arts that I've been doing my whole life, there's something about being high that gives me like a new lens for it. | ||
| A new lens where you feel the way your body's moving. | ||
| You feel your hips extending. | ||
| You feel your abs contracting. | ||
| You feel when it's the time. | ||
| What's the timing in it? | ||
| You feel things more. | ||
| Maybe I should push off my toes more. | ||
| Maybe I feel my toes more. | ||
| I feel things more. | ||
| Instead of just going on autopilot because I've done it my whole life, now all of a sudden I'm thinking and I'm feeling stuff. | ||
| It's great for stretching. | ||
| For stretching, it's the greatest thing of all time. | ||
| You get super duper high and just you feel your fibers just extending. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| It feels amazing. | ||
| I take you at your point. | ||
| I think this has everything to do with the type of person you are. | ||
| I am not feeling anything. | ||
| In fact, that is almost the point of fighting. | ||
| It's a meditative state. | ||
| I can fight drunk, everybody can fight drunk, but if I had to choose a thousand times over, I would rather be a little buzz on a drink than a little buzz on a joint because I'm not thinking about anything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Nothing's creeping into my mind. | ||
| It is entirely just the action of what I'm doing. | ||
| Somehow I think that helps me deaden the pain even. | ||
| So maybe I'm more of a sensitive person, and if you get me in my head like weed does, I'm starting to think about too many things. | ||
| Well, I'm in my head every day. | ||
| I overthink it. | ||
| The thing is when you don't get high a lot, and then you get high, then you're in your head. | ||
| And you're like, oh shit, but I'm always in my head. | ||
| Because I'm always high. | ||
| I get high all the time. | ||
| Your default position. | ||
| Do you know what it's like to train not high? | ||
| Maybe that's the thing. | ||
| Maybe you have no comparison. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I train not high most of the time. | ||
| David Goggin said something to me once, and fuck, I've never been able to get it in my goddamn head. | ||
| He goes, I don't train listening to fucking music. | ||
| He goes, you train listening to fucking music, then you need that music. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| He goes, that shit's a crutch. | ||
| There ain't no fucking music! | ||
| There ain't no music out there in the world, motherfucker! | ||
| Yeah, I think you just found my custom auto. | ||
| And he said that to me, and I think about that when I want to smoke a joint and hit the bag. | ||
| I think about that when I want to listen to music and lift weights, or especially cardio. | ||
| There's something about boring, dull-ass cardio with no stimulation at all. | ||
| I used to love cardio, like listening to books. | ||
| But if you just got to do cardio, just your breathing, that's such a different thing. | ||
| Just breathing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Just staring at the clock, thinking about your life, knowing you have 40 minutes to go. | ||
| That's what running is to me. | ||
| That's what running is. | ||
| But at least you're going somewhere. | ||
| At least when you're actually running, you're going somewhere. | ||
| There's something about cardio machines, you know, when you're like fucking just staring at the screen on an elliptical, knowing you have 45 more minutes of this nonsense, and you can't even listen to music? | ||
| No music! | ||
| There's no fucking music out there in the real world! | ||
| I never thought in any way I was going to be a professional athlete. | ||
| I never thought I would compete, right? | ||
| But I started boxing in fifth grade. | ||
| There was a guy in my neighborhood that had boxing equipment in his garage. | ||
| I would go in there and he'd train fighters. | ||
| Now I wish I knew more then to remember who was there and if this guy ever became a real boxing coach of any type. | ||
| But it was such a childhood memory of mine where this whole idea started. | ||
| And the fact that I never thought I would do anything for a living that didn't involve talking, I knew that was my thing. | ||
| I could speak, right? | ||
| That my godfather was my first adult trainer when I was like 19. And he's like, you're not training to compete with athletes. | ||
| You're training to win a fight. | ||
| Now, boxing is your discipline of choice, but the fight you're going to have won't be in the ring on Thursday at 8 o'clock, as the two men have decided. | ||
| It's going to be at 3 o'clock in the morning after you leave a club in the parking lot with some fucking idiot, and you're going to be drunk, too, and you're going to be tired. | ||
| So that's how we're going to train. | ||
| And so, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yes. | ||
| I would leave clubs. | ||
| I got 22, 23 years old. | ||
| My best friend at that time was Bokeem Woodbine. | ||
| Dana Bratton trained both of us. | ||
| And we would go from the club, from the bar, from the party, to the gym and spar. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Hit pads and train. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You drunk sparred? | ||
| A thousand times! | ||
| So, if I were boxing in a ring, I'd want to be sober, but if I'm in the street where any of my real fights are going to take place, I'm probably better fucked up. | ||
| That's how we train. | ||
| We train to win fights completely trash. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| That's a funny way to do it. | ||
| Did you ever learn any martial arts other than boxing? | ||
| Learn? | ||
| No. | ||
| Try? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Judo. | ||
| Judo was the first thing. | ||
| Dislocated my elbow in the least masculine way possible. | ||
| You know how they throw you and you're supposed to slap the mat? | ||
| So I got thrown. | ||
| I went to slap too early. | ||
| Oh, you landed on a hypersender. | ||
| Jackknifed my elbow. | ||
| Ouchie, wow, wow. | ||
| Yeah, so that got me out of judo. | ||
| I love martial arts like any kid. | ||
| In my time, I was a Bruce Lee fan, like big time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| So then I wanted Jeet Kune Do, where there was no place to learn that, so I tried Taekwondo, and I loved the kicking of it all. | ||
| But to be honest, I just didn't have the money. | ||
| My mom wasn't going to be able to afford to send me to any... | ||
| Martial arts class and pay for the gi and all the stuff and then I go consistently. | ||
| So part of it was the money. | ||
| Another thing was I just wasn't able to be committed enough to make it worth the extra effort to spend that money. | ||
| Whereas the boxing... | ||
| It's a poor man's sport. | ||
| It's like all you need is some old guy in your neighborhood with a hanging bag and a couple hours on his schedule every day. | ||
| And so that ended up being what I did. | ||
| I respect the shit out of martial arts, man. | ||
| I want the mental focus that it takes and the discipline to stay in a particular style or another is what is more... | ||
| Attractive to me? | ||
| Maybe the mixed martial arts? | ||
| And then it might just be because of my understanding of it, right? | ||
| But what I like about boxing also is the finite nature of it. | ||
| It's no disrespect to MMA. Like, that is a discipline unto itself that I don't have any personal experience with, really. | ||
| But the limited amount of resources that a boxer has, the fewest things you can do, and the other guy has those very same few skills. | ||
| And so that's how I see the science of it, the chess match, the game of millimeters, really, in split seconds. | ||
| Because both guys are proficient, and they only have these finite amount of tools to work with. | ||
| The combination of those two things colliding is what really fascinates me about the execution of boxing. | ||
| That's what fascinates me as well. | ||
| It's specialists. | ||
| People that are doing, like, that's what fascinates me about watching jujitsu matches, too. | ||
| Because if I'm watching jujitsu matches, those are two experts. | ||
| They're not kicking each other or punching each other. | ||
| They're just doing this one thing at the highest level possible. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you see, I'm sure you saw Shakur Stevenson. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| This guy is a beast. | ||
| He's on another level. | ||
| That's a great example of that. | ||
| Because he's fighting Valdez, who is undefeated as well, and a real fucking world champion, elite fighter. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And Shakur just put on a shit. | ||
| And just show that with his training, his execution, his technique was superior. | ||
| His strategy was superior. | ||
| His ability to close the distance and move just out of the way. | ||
| When the punches were coming to him, they were coming like right here. | ||
| It was like, it was just touching his face. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It was wild. | ||
| Millimeters. | ||
| And then he fired back. | ||
| And he was firing back and landing flush. | ||
| And it was genius. | ||
| It was just genius shit to watch. | ||
| That's what I love about boxing. | ||
| I mean, people say, yeah, you can't do that if somebody's leg kicks you. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| You can't do that that way if someone's leg kicks you. | ||
| Or if someone takes you down. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| But if that... | ||
| If you want to see the highest expression of that, of using your hands, you have to have only guys using their hands. | ||
| And that's when you get these super elite striker... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That's like somebody saying, you know, I'm on a motorcycle and I'm running an obstacle course. | ||
| You can't do that in a car. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, no, because I'm on a fucking motorcycle. | ||
| That's why I can do that. | ||
| That's why people would not recommend boxing as a martial art to practice if you're drunk after a bar and you're going into like... | ||
| I would tell you, like, learn how to take people down. | ||
| Learn how to trip people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Listen... | |
| Joe, you're not going to get an argument from me there. | ||
| As far as, like, Street Fighter, the more things you can have at your disposal to end the fight as quick as possible, the better you're going to do. | ||
| Your hands break so easy. | ||
| Hands break so easy, man. | ||
| You swing wrong and catch a guy on a forehead and you're fucked. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, I'm not shy about—I wouldn't want to fight a mixed martial artist at the level of a boxer that I am, however good I am. | ||
| If there were a guy equally as good at mixed martial arts as I am at boxing in a street fight, he's going to win! | ||
| I mean, you know what I mean? | ||
| If we're only left with our body resources, now I might pick up a bottle, I might hit this guy with a brick, but I understand that the more you're able to do, the more quickly you can end a fight. | ||
| And in the street, That's what it's all about, in the fight as quickly as possible. | ||
| But what we're both talking about is that if you are only doing one thing, that one thing, if you see, like, imagine if that's how they played baseball. | ||
| If baseball also featured tackling. | ||
| You know, baseball also has fights now. | ||
| Baseball also, you have to do it on skates. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| Like, it's too many things. | ||
| You're going to lose... | ||
| If you have one thing, just one thing like boxing, you get to see the best expression of it. | ||
| One thing like jiu-jitsu, you get to see the best expression of it. | ||
| And, like, that was one of the reasons why, you know, Jordan Burroughs is? | ||
| No. | ||
| Olympic gold medalist, elite, super, super elite wrestler, like, top of the food chain, and had been given some opportunities to fight mixed martial arts. | ||
| But he's like, look, I'm an elite wrestler. | ||
| That's what I do. | ||
| I can learn all those things. | ||
| And I can... | ||
| He'd take any... | ||
| You know, regular MMA player down at will. | ||
| He's that good at wrestling. | ||
| But would he want to leave this thing that he specializes in, that he's at the top of the food chain at? | ||
| Right, and could he actually get to the point of taking them down? | ||
| For instance, the MMA guy that I'm theoretically fighting at this bar, well, he's going to have to get through the jab. | ||
| He's going to have to get through the two-piece. | ||
| If he gets inside, I'm probably in a lot of trouble. | ||
| But the finite nature of the sport, in the context of... | ||
| Professional athletes in their sports. | ||
| That's what I love about boxing. | ||
| I appreciate it in the street. | ||
| It's a mixed martial art landscape. | ||
| The reality is, when people are talking about MMA fighters making the crossover to boxing, no one can compete. | ||
| There's not one... | ||
| MMA fighter who is gonna be a world champion at boxing unless they 100% dedicate all of their time to it for a long period of time and then you're gonna have to make your way But to be able to beat the elite of the elite in their own given sport unless you're some rare outlier Freak of an athlete with one punch death power with fucking eight ounce ten ounce gloves on that's there's not a lot of those guys and I don't see that ever happening. | ||
| I mean, even if we had a Bo Jackson of MMA... But that would be a good example. | ||
| That would be a good example. | ||
| A Bo Jackson. | ||
| A freak, super freak athlete. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And he was that. | ||
| Hershel Walker. | ||
| In both cases, though, there is a team surrounding him that could put him in the best role in that team sport. | ||
| But because each MMA and boxing are such individual sports, the amount of skill he would have to have in each... | ||
| Context. | ||
| I just don't think one man could get... | ||
| The way you stretch, the way your muscles have to work and contract in boxing, and then in MMA, and they don't... | ||
| It's not the same. | ||
| You can't have all of those... | ||
| Yeah, you... | ||
| Defense is different. | ||
| Yeah, for a guy that would... | ||
| And people sometimes take for granted how... | ||
| Smart fighters have to be. | ||
| I'm not talking about, you know, your mathematician skills or how well-versed you are in history, but I don't know any fighter at an elite level that isn't fucking brilliant in the ring or in the octagon. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| You're using your mind to make choices and decisions and react. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| If people think that the only information or the only intelligence that's worthwhile is intelligence so you can recite information, that's crazy. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| Yeah, it's absurd is what it is. | ||
| And so to diminish the idea that these fighters are intelligent is a huge insult and probably means you're not that fucking smart. | ||
| Well, it's just a lack of objectivity because too many people equate intelligence with education. | ||
| I mean, it's not that education doesn't enhance intelligence. | ||
| It most certainly does. | ||
| But you have a lot of people with great minds that don't wind up using them well. | ||
| There's a lot of people out there. | ||
| Just because you have a great ability to do something doesn't mean you ever do it. | ||
| There's a lot of people that are incredible natural athletes that never get into sports. | ||
| I know people that are ridiculously physically gifted and they just don't do anything with it. | ||
| They just don't care. | ||
| They're not motivated. | ||
| So that could be the same with intelligence. | ||
| It could be the same with a lot of things. | ||
| And so my point for saying that only was that to have a mind of a fighter that could compete and succeed even at the elite levels and then the mind of a mixed martial artist that could compete and succeed at the elite level and be able to do both simultaneously, that would be a next level type of genius. | ||
| The only way someone could do that Is they would have to be an elite specialist in one sport and then cross over at a young age. | ||
| That is a possibility. | ||
| And we have had guys like Mirko Krokop. | ||
| He was an elite kickboxer who made his way into MMA and became an elite MMA fighter. | ||
| So he was in a sport with no grappling. | ||
| And he learned takedown defense. | ||
| He learned grappling to the point where he even won some fights. | ||
| He submitted Kevin Randleman in a rematch. | ||
| So while he was doing that, was he still winning kickboxing competitions? | ||
| He would occasionally fight kickboxing fights in his career, but for the most part, most of his career up until like the later ages was all MMA after he started fighting in Pride. | ||
| So it took a few years. | ||
| It took a few years for him to, well it didn't take even a few years for him to adapt, but he was a very specific kind of kickboxer. | ||
| He was a fast twitch explosive kickboxer. | ||
| And if you have other guys that are more technicians and set things up, they'll be more fucked. | ||
| Because you want a guy that can explode. | ||
| Because he's gotta explode to get away from takedowns. | ||
| He's gotta explode to close the distance and knock a guy out with one punch. | ||
| You might only have one shot. | ||
| There's guys that are not gonna knock you out with one punch, but they'll knock you out if they could piece you up for a few rounds and fuck you up and butter you up. | ||
| Like Julio Cesar Chavez, one of the greatest fighters of all time. | ||
| Of all time! | ||
| Julio Cesar Chavez, one of the greatest of all time! | ||
| Very rarely just stepped forward and smashed a dude with one left hook and flatlined him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| He beat the fuck out of you. | ||
| All night. | ||
| He tenderized your ass and then cooked you. | ||
| I mean, he was a monster. | ||
| A monster inside the ring. | ||
| But that's not a style that would translate well to MMA. Because if he couldn't stop the takedown and someone was leg-kicking him, he doesn't have enough power in his hands to just fuck you up with one shot. | ||
| A guy like Mike Tyson, even if he never fought MMA, if he's fighting against a kickboxer, his power was so substantial. | ||
| If you give him those little gloves, how are you going to keep him off of you? | ||
| I don't think you're going to keep him off you. | ||
| I think a guy like Mike Tyson could have gotten all the way to wrestlers before he was fucked. | ||
| Okay, with that said though, and school me, because maybe I'm ignorant, but how long a career is that if as soon as you get to a wrestler, you're in a lot of trouble? | ||
| Does he have to get to elite wrestlers, or can an average wrestler beat a Mike Tyson? | ||
| An average wrestler would take almost everyone down. | ||
| But you would not fight in an MMA fight without having some training on wrestling takedown defense. | ||
| And I would assume you would do some live rounds with wrestlers. | ||
| No one's just gonna jump right in. | ||
| Except James Toney. | ||
| James Toney jumped right in. | ||
| James Toney just wanted a payday, man. | ||
| He's like, look, if this dude stands in front of me, I'll fuck him up. | ||
| But if he takes me down, what am I gonna do? | ||
| He's talking about side check kicks and shit. | ||
| He was making up words. | ||
| And we weren't talking about a prime James Toney. | ||
| I'm not sure it would have went differently if we were, but it might have. | ||
| But he's a good example of why I don't want some people to fight in MMA, because James Toney's boxing was beautiful. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| James Toney's boxing, his ability to shoulder roll and then fire back that counter right hand... | ||
| My God, he was so smooth, man. | ||
| I think we have to accept on both sides of this combat sport equation that these are different disciplines. | ||
| It doesn't make you a lesser MMA fighter because an average boxer can beat you and vice versa. | ||
| And now if you want to come up with some hybrid sport, I mean, I've seen people try it. | ||
| I saw something like in the round and I've seen different promoters try to come up with some hybrid, but until one of those things becomes a thing, these are just apples and oranges. | ||
| You know what would be the craziest shit of all time? | ||
| The craziest shit of all time. | ||
| If Tyson Fury says, I'm just going to take a couple years off, and I'm going to learn MMA, and I'm going to come back, and I'm going to be the MMA heavyweight champion of the world, and I'm going to fuck everybody up. | ||
| Well, I'll tell you this. | ||
| The first fight... | ||
| You won't find a place big enough. | ||
| Won't find a place big enough. | ||
| There won't be a second fight. | ||
| You'll have to have the first fight on Earth. | ||
| It would just be destination Earth. | ||
| Everyone is going to want to tell me where it's Stonehenge. | ||
| We would all go. | ||
| Yeah, but I think that that would be, in terms of what people would be interested in, that would be massive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think with Francis Ngannou's first leg kick, he would be like, oh no. | ||
| Yeah, that's my point. | ||
| Oh no, what have I done? | ||
| The interest exists, but the payoff is not going to be near worth the ticket price. | ||
| It's going to be the obvious. | ||
| His fight against Dillian White was magical. | ||
| It was magical. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| It's interesting to see a guy like that big, that tall, you know, that is in his prime, you know, and just deciding he's going to step away, which I don't buy for a fucking hot second. | ||
| I don't believe that he could resist the opportunity to fight undisputed and then really retire as undisputed, undefeated... | ||
| Heavyweight champion of the world, if that is presented to him as an option and he truly believes that he can beat any heavyweight in the game, including the title holders at the current time, so whoever ends up with all the other belts except the WBC, I'm certain he has a belief he can beat that person. | ||
| Him passing on that opportunity, I don't see it happening. | ||
| He's too competitive a guy. | ||
| It's too big a fight. | ||
| And the seduction of being able to be that one guy that ever did that, he can't pass it up. | ||
| I have a theory. | ||
| And this is not my own theory either. | ||
| This is a theory that somebody labeled at me, threw it at me. | ||
| I wish I could remember who told me this, but I think it's right. | ||
| They said, now, he made his intentions known after the fight. | ||
| He brings over Francis Ngannou and says we're going to have a hybrid fight with these four ounce gloves on. | ||
| That doesn't sound like boxing to me. | ||
| Sounds like a hybrid fight. | ||
| What do I need all these fucking boxing commissions? | ||
| Everybody's going to get their piece? | ||
| The fuck out of here with your piece. | ||
| I quit. | ||
| I retire. | ||
| Have someone fight for this bullshit title that you know is mine. | ||
| You know it's mine. | ||
| He beats his fucking title, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So what are you going to do? | ||
| You take it away and give it to somebody else? | ||
| Everyone's going to know Tyson Fury's still around, but he just retired, so he doesn't have to pay you. | ||
| He doesn't have to pay the WBA or WBC or whoever the fuck has the title reigns. | ||
| And to your point, he made that exact case when he came back the last time. | ||
| Like, you know, no one's ever beaten me. | ||
| I'm still a lineal champion. | ||
| I'm still the guy to beat. | ||
| And thus far, that has remained true. | ||
| No one has yet beaten him. | ||
| So if you put on those little gloves, I'm telling you, it's going to be an incredible promotion. | ||
| I'll be front row. | ||
| I'll hopefully be sitting right next to you. | ||
| But there is no way that Ngannou wins that fight. | ||
| If it's just boxing, he's going to have a really hard time hitting him. | ||
| The smaller the gloves, the more trouble he's in. | ||
| This guy is a gypsy king. | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| He'd just do hand wraps if you let him. | ||
| And it's only going to make it harder for Ngannou to stay awake. | ||
| I want to see the fight. | ||
| Don't let me fuck it up. | ||
| But I'm trying to tell you, this guy's in a lot of trouble. | ||
| And Gano does have the nuclear option, though. | ||
| He really does. | ||
| He does have nuclear one-punch knockout power. | ||
| One of his knockouts of Alistair Overeem was one of the most terrifying knockouts I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| He spun Alistair's head behind when he was looking at the back of his feet. | ||
| That's how hard he hit him. | ||
| Now, is he going to land that on Tyson Fury? | ||
| It's going to be real fucking hard. | ||
| But the problem is, what kind of hybrid rules are we talking about? | ||
| Are we allowed to clinch? | ||
| Because if we're allowed to clinch, Tyson's in a lot of trouble. | ||
| Because if Francis can clinch you and can hold on to you and just punch you in the face in a way that's illegal in boxing, watch this again. | ||
| Okay, that is very impressive. | ||
| He does that to everybody. | ||
| He does that to everybody. | ||
| I know, but look at that. | ||
| Oh, it's terrible. | ||
| From the hip. | ||
| That's a Will Smith punch, man. | ||
| Ah! | ||
| It's a terrible technique in that regard, but he was doing it because he knew the opening was there and he was just winging it. | ||
| That's not going to work that way on Tyson Fury. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| No chance. | ||
| But he's not going to fight that way on Tyson Fury either. | ||
| He's fighting that way on Aleister because he knows that Aleister is not in his prime. | ||
| He's just going to smash him. | ||
| He's trying to make his statement of being the top heavyweight contender in the UFC at the time when he knocked him out. | ||
| You know, last I was here, I think, what were we talking about? | ||
| Pacquiao, Conor McGregor maybe? | ||
| We were talking about some other MMA. Yeah, they were talking about that for a while. | ||
| They were talking about doing that for a while. | ||
| Yeah, and I was like, I don't want to see it. | ||
| I'm going on record right now. | ||
| I want to see it. | ||
| I have no interest in that. | ||
| I want to see it. | ||
| Small little MMA gloves and these two behemoths. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I want to see it, but not because it's competitive, but because that's how much a sucker I am for a heavyweight knockout. | ||
| Yeah, but even if it's not competitive, I want to see it be uncompetitive. | ||
| I want to see Tyson Fury pitch a shutout. | ||
| I want to see him lighten him up. | ||
| I want the world to see what it's like when the best motherfucker on earth, at his given thing, gets to express himself with someone who's trying it out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Full-blown destruction is what happens. | ||
| Unless they allow clinching. | ||
| Okay, but they don't have to allow it. | ||
| In boxing, technically, you're not allowed to hold. | ||
| Right, but if you can hold and hit, because you can in MMA, it's called dirty boxing. | ||
| Guys grab the back of your head and smash you in the face. | ||
| Oh, you mean like... | ||
| I mean, hold on to you. | ||
| Keep you in place. | ||
| See, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| You'll get fouled for that, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, but that's not in a hybrid rule situation with MMA gloves. | ||
| If Francis Ngannou gets Tyson Fury to agree to let him hold it hit, Like, you could put a guy in a headlock and just... | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Oh, yeah, no. | ||
| Yeah, see, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| If you could hold onto a guy, if you could just get an overhook, and just completely tie up that arm, and just smash him in the face. | ||
| If you could get him in a collar tie, where you're holding the back of his neck, and you're smashing him in the face... | ||
| That's legal in MMA. That happens all the time. | ||
| I would say the closest, you know, ironically, the closest I've seen to that in boxing that was pretty effective and not entirely illegal, why it have been Klitschko-Fury. | ||
| Like, don't forget, that was a very clinch-heavy fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And Fury was able to make the fight dirty boxing inside. | ||
| Klitschko made everything clinch-heavy. | ||
| Jab, clinch. | ||
| Jab, right hand, clinch. | ||
| But only Fury was able to turn that against him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So even in this scenario, I get, okay, that gives Ngannou a much better chance because that's something he's skilled at. | ||
| But Tyson is not unskilled at that. | ||
| That's how he won all those belts in the first place. | ||
| Right, true. | ||
| And being the Gypsy King, those bare-knuckle travelers are known for having fights bare-knuckle. | ||
| That's the whole thing. | ||
| They have a fucking whole culture behind it. | ||
| Bare-knuckle fighting in the Gypsies goes back forever! | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| He's like, you know, please Mr. Ingato, don't throw me in that briar pack. | ||
| Smaller gloves, oh no! | ||
| I would love to see it, no matter what. | ||
| And I love Francis Ngannou, so I'd like him to get a giant payday, and I think it would be an enormous payday. | ||
| Oh, huge. | ||
| Huge. | ||
| It would be spectacular. | ||
| Francis Ngannou versus the Gypsy King for the undisputed baddest man on the planet. | ||
| Oh my god, it'd be so much money. | ||
| That's what I want for Francis. | ||
| And if it's little gloves, man. | ||
| You can't fuck around with little gloves. | ||
| You know, we can't talk about Shakur Stevenson without mentioning the other fight on the night. | ||
| I still didn't watch that girl fight. | ||
| It was crazy good, but it wasn't the fight of the night. | ||
| I still haven't seen it. | ||
| Did you just say you didn't watch that girl fight? | ||
| The girl fight, yeah. | ||
| It's a girl fight, right? | ||
| It's a women's boxing world title, unification, undisputed bout, Joe. | ||
| But they were ladies. | ||
| I didn't watch that fight. | ||
| I heard it's amazing. | ||
| It's fight of the year. | ||
| It's fight of the year. | ||
| No male-female distinction. | ||
| But again, like I was saying, I don't have time to research climate change. | ||
| I don't have time to research fracking. | ||
| Sometimes I don't have time to watch every fight. | ||
| You know? | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, I'm not... | ||
| At all lesser a fan of women's boxing than I am of men's boxing. | ||
| And so the journey that women's boxing has taken to there is a competitive field of women's fighters, only now I think are we experiencing that. | ||
| We've had some... | ||
| Spikes, we've had some stars, obviously. | ||
| The coal miner's daughter, Christy Martin and Leila Lee, Lucia Riker. | ||
| The names that we know for sure have had their moments, but I don't think ever was there a time like there is now where there are so many good women able to box and making competitive fields. | ||
| Clarissa Shields is one of the guests on my show and I would have to say in this era she's definitely a pioneer that her accomplishments in the Olympics to gold medals her verbose nature and her ability to back it up makes her a star in the sport and it inspires another generation of women to be like you know this is something that's open to me a lane I can I can pursue yeah these ladies Man, | ||
| I'm telling you, Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano put on as good a boxing match as any two guys could have ever hoped to do. | ||
| To a sold out, not the theater, the actual garden, sold out Madison Square Garden, and every person got value for dollar that night. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| So we might be looking at a new era in boxing where, you know, you won't be so cavalier about missing a women's fight like that. | ||
| Like, these girls are, like, coming... | ||
| I'm not Cavalier. | ||
| I'm just busy. | ||
| I try to watch as much as I can, but I've been overwhelmed the last few weeks. | ||
| Look, I was always a fan of people that are good. | ||
| I don't care if it's women or men. | ||
| I like watching girl fights in UFC. There's a big girl fight this weekend. | ||
| Carla Esparza versus Rose Namajunas. | ||
| It's a giant girl fight for the strawweight title. | ||
| I'm pumped about it. | ||
| I watched as much MMA as possible, and to your point, if she was on the other foot, I probably missed a lot of very important MMA fights because I don't have time. | ||
| Also, what is going on? | ||
| Whose fault is this? | ||
| What's going on, you? | ||
| I feel like you know. | ||
| Why is it that every time there's a big boxing match on a Saturday, there seems to be, just coincidentally, a big UFC fight on that same Saturday? | ||
| Well, this is May Cinco de Mayo weekend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Cinco de Mayo weekend. | ||
| Boxing always has big fights. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They always have big fights. | ||
| But here we are again with the UFC fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Same night. | |
| I know for a fact the UFC scheduled this a long fucking time ago. | ||
| And they have... | ||
| Because it's in Phoenix, too. | ||
| It's not even in Vegas or one of the places we go a lot. | ||
| But we have been going to Phoenix. | ||
| See, there's some places that still had restrictions. | ||
| And so they stopped going to those places that still had restrictions. | ||
| But the UFC puts on a big pay-per-view every month. | ||
| Right, but maybe I'm making too much of this. | ||
| It's not a conspiracy. | ||
| They're not doing it, no. | ||
| Listen, that would be a dumb thing. | ||
| Because why would you ever want to go back against the wall with Canelo Alvarez having a pay-per-view? | ||
| When you want all those Latino fans, are you fucking crazy how much money that is? | ||
| I think the same thing. | ||
| That's why I can't figure it out. | ||
| But they do it. | ||
| They know. | ||
| But they didn't do it because of that. | ||
| They did it in spite of that. | ||
| Because one beautiful thing about streaming services like ESPN Plus is that if I can just stay, don't talk to me. | ||
| If I can just avoid spoilers, I can get home and I can watch it anytime I want and I play it like it's happening live. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's very hard to do. | ||
| But if you get pay-per-view and it's on a DVR, you've got to go back, you've got to record it, you've got to fast-forward through it and get to the spot. | ||
| It's a little more complicated because you've got to go home. | ||
| You've got to watch it on television. | ||
| There's no way they would want competition. | ||
| If they could have a big pay-per-view event, like this one this weekend, and not have it go back-to-back against Canelo Alvarez, they definitely would. | ||
| That's the best way for business. | ||
| Because if you have two options, you can't watch both things. | ||
| Most people are going to order one. | ||
| They're going to order one. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Most people. | ||
| And if you're a boxing fan, Canelo Alvarez. | ||
| And Bival's a real threat. | ||
| Big-ass fucking Russian light heavyweight. | ||
| Real talented, undefeated, real challenge. | ||
| Well, you gotta do. | ||
| They're not doing that. | ||
| It's not a conspiracy. | ||
| It happens so frequently, though. | ||
| It's because we put on a lot of shows. | ||
| The UFC puts on a show every fucking month, almost every week. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Because UFC has shows at the Apex Center. | ||
| They have their own small arena in Vegas. | ||
| And so a lot of the fights, all the fights that we did under quarantine, shit, we did a gang of fights at the Apex Center. | ||
| World title fights at the Apex Center with no audience. | ||
| Now, you know, I say that to say this. | ||
| I'm a big proponent of the Sunday night boxing match, which is not some, like, bending of the knee to give away Saturday night to the MMA, but in my regard, let them fucking have it, Sunday night is the night for fights. | ||
| - That's 'cause you're single and you go out on Saturday night. | ||
| Everybody else is like, look at, you know, if you're married, like, have the boys over. | ||
| Have a fucking fight night. | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| Could that possibly be true? | ||
| Could that be my whole blind spot? | ||
| Well, not only that, you're best friends with Dave Chappelle. | ||
| Saturday night, you're out doing shows. | ||
| Like, fuck, I don't want to miss the fight. | ||
| So you're trying to catch the fight on an iPad or something. | ||
| Oh, no! | ||
| I've had a huge blind spot. | ||
| Oh man, I was so teed up to give my bitch. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Of course Saturday night's the way to go. | ||
| When people look for entertainment, Saturday night's the night you want. | ||
| Because Friday night, even when we do shows, right? | ||
| Friday night shows, I always tell people, like when young guys are opening for me, I go, you always got to think that that Friday night late show, these people are tired, man. | ||
| They've been up all day. | ||
| They worked all day. | ||
| They got up at 7 o'clock in the morning. | ||
| They fucking busted their ass. | ||
| They commuted. | ||
| They took care of their family. | ||
| They got out! | ||
| Finally got out. | ||
| And now they're here, and they're fucking exhausted. | ||
| So you can't dilly-dally on them 10 o'clock shows. | ||
| You gotta come out guns blazing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And I think Saturday's the entertainment day for people. | ||
| They slept in. | ||
| They don't have to go to church if they're religious. | ||
| They sleep in. | ||
| They wake up, finally, one fucking day where they just don't have an alarm. | ||
| The one day! | ||
| And then you're hanging out with your buddies. | ||
| Hey, we're gonna go see Chappelle. | ||
| Let's start drinking. | ||
| And then they start drinking, and then they're out. | ||
| And then they're out having a great time. | ||
| That's for a fight. | ||
| That's for anything. | ||
| Saturday night is the night. | ||
| See, I'm thinking, because of what you just said, there's so much Saturday night competition and so many other places you want to be instead of front of a TV. If you got tickets to the fight, well, that's a different thing. | ||
| But if I want to stay home and watch a fight, even with my seven closest friends, that does not compete with the things I could be doing out in the world when I don't have to wake up in the morning. | ||
| It depends on who's fighting. | ||
| But Sunday night. | ||
| If Marvin Hagler's fighting Sugar Ray Leonard and it's Saturday night, you want to be in front of that fucking TV and your hands are going to be sweaty. | ||
| You're going to be like, holy shit, it's about to go down. | ||
| But that's the same is true for Sunday. | ||
| And people are home on Sunday evenings. | ||
| More people are home on Sunday evenings anyway. | ||
| Sunday's okay. | ||
| I don't hate it on Sunday. | ||
| If they want to fight on Sunday. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| Didn't Tyson and Roy Jones fight on an off night? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Yes! | ||
| What night did they fight? | ||
| Wasn't it? | ||
| Was it Sunday or Thursday? | ||
| It was an off night. | ||
| It might have been Sunday. | ||
| I think it might have been Sunday because this might have been even where I first was like, you know what? | ||
| That does work. | ||
| That's just for your own lifestyle. | ||
| It's your own lifestyle, dude. | ||
| I guarantee you. | ||
| You're just, you know. | ||
| You're best friends with one of the greatest comedians ever walked the face of the earth and you do shows with them all the time. | ||
| You're always hanging out. | ||
| Well, that's not true. | ||
| Saturday night. | ||
| You don't want to fucking go somewhere, watch a fucking fight when it could be Sunday when you got the night off. | ||
| It's just personal convenience. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm okay. | |
| I will admit that there may be some personal gain to me in it, but I'm about the people, Joe. | ||
| This is like- You also don't have a regular job, so you don't have to go to work Monday morning, commute and all that. | ||
| That's what most people don't want. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can't you just let me have this? | |
| Sunday's the day of rest. | ||
| It's the Lord's Day. | ||
| You know, the two promoters of that girl fight, as you put it. | ||
| The girl fight? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Eddie Hearn. | ||
| You're going to make me have to have those girls on and apologize. | ||
| Shit. | ||
| And Jake Paul. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| Jake Paul was a promoter? | ||
| Yeah, without Jake Paul, that fight doesn't happen. | ||
| He's, you know... | ||
| He's like a full-on promoter now? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Look, the kid's got to hustle. | ||
| You got to give it to him. | ||
| The kid's got hustle. | ||
| He is a successful hustler. | ||
| I don't even know. | ||
| I think he might be... | ||
| He's got hustle. | ||
| He's not a hustler. | ||
| This guy's a legitimate businessman. | ||
| Yeah, a legitimate businessman, but he makes so much money doing other shit that the fact that he wants to do that as well and promote fights as well, I'm impressed. | ||
| He put her on his undercard. | ||
| She got a lot of visibility there. | ||
| People in boxing, of course, are already familiar with her, but it gave her much bigger notoriety by being on his cars. | ||
| And then he and Eddie Hearn put this fight together. | ||
| Again, I can't stress it enough, a sold-out, an actual Madison Square Garden, sold-out main arena fight. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Good for him. | ||
| That was value for dollars. | ||
| Sunglasses. | ||
| Yeah, he's doing the same. | ||
| It's the only thing. | ||
| I like it, man. | ||
| I don't think this fight happens without him. | ||
| You know, the conversation he had with Eddie Hearn, where he said, I will knock out any one of your guys that has under 10 fights. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| He goes, whoever you want to have, bring me any guy that you have that's under 10 fights. | ||
| You can see Eddie Hearn like, shit. | ||
| He's kind of stuck there. | ||
| You think? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Because those guys under 10 fights, like, what if Jake Paul knocks one of them out? | ||
| Like, what if you get a guy that, like, hasn't been tested, and maybe has some promise, and maybe gets wrapped up in the hype, and maybe gets a little nervous, and this is his first chance at a big, big, big show, and Jake Paul can crack. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A hundred percent. | ||
| That knockout of Tyron Woodley is legit as fuck. | ||
| He can crack. | ||
| But Eddie's point in that interview, and I think the point that just about every boxing aficionado would say is that Tyrone Woodley is not a boxer. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And nor is Ben Askren, who he knocked out as well. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We would have gotten some answers if Tyson Fury didn't get injured, or excuse me, if Tommy Fury didn't get injured leading up to that fight because he was the initial opponent. | ||
| So if he fought him, we would have got some real answers. | ||
| And that would be an interesting fight. | ||
| Agreed. | ||
| And to your point, I saw people in boxing, when that fight seemed to actually was going to happen, start hedging their bets. | ||
| Well, Fury isn't this, Tommy isn't that. | ||
| I don't buy any of that. | ||
| I think Tommy is absolutely a legitimate boxing opponent for Jake Paul. | ||
| Entertain this perspective. | ||
| If Jake Paul wasn't Jake Paul, If he wasn't this YouTube guy, he was just a boxer. | ||
| And you see a boxer knock out the former UFC welterweight champion, not just the former, but one of the best ever, knock him out with one punch like that. | ||
| You'd be like, oh man, have you seen this Jake Paul dude coming up? | ||
| He's fucking for real. | ||
| Because nothing about watching him fight, to me, screams like he's in over his head. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| He looks like a real boxer. | ||
| He looks like a real boxer. | ||
| He doesn't look like a guy who's attempting boxing. | ||
| That's the difference. | ||
| The feints, the foot movement, the way he lands shots, he fights like a boxer. | ||
| He doesn't fight like a guy who's trying to box in a celebrity boxing match. | ||
| He fights like a boxer. | ||
| So if he wasn't that guy, I'm saying if he wasn't that big YouTube star, and you just saw him as a boxing contender, you'd be like, that dude's got dynamite in his hands. | ||
| Okay, so there's two points to be made here. | ||
| First of all, if a guy in his pro debut and the first five fights of his career are knocking out people whose names we know, you're absolutely right. | ||
| That person is going to get a huge amount of attention and everybody's going to be like, wow, who the fuck is this guy? | ||
| But also, if a guy who is on the track to be somebody who has potential from the Olympics or he's got a great amateur record, we're going to turn this guy into somebody. | ||
| In their first fights, they're fighting guys who are like 5 and 27. They are fighting other debut opponents who don't have a great track trajectory in front of them. | ||
| They're fighting tomato canes, bums, you know... | ||
| Just completely not competitive. | ||
| Just to get experience. | ||
| And that's fine, right? | ||
| So when we expect Jake Paul to be fighting higher level competition, it's not because he has under 10 fights. | ||
| It's because he talks a lot of shit. | ||
| Yeah, but that's also why we're talking about him. | ||
| And that's exactly true. | ||
| But I think on both sides of the equation, we've got to admit that Young fighter under five fights isn't fighting great competition So if you're calling Jake Paul a legitimate boxer and then you're expecting him to do what legitimate boxers do I'm not sure he's not doing that and probably more. | ||
| That's what I'm saying about the knockout of Tyron Woodley Because it was just a regular boxer who's just coming up and what does he have six fights? | ||
| Yes, I don't know. | ||
| Something like this. | ||
| What does Jake Paul have? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah Something like that, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| I think that was his six. | ||
| I was looking at a post he had where he said 6-0 coming soon. | ||
| 6-0. | ||
| So he's got five fights. | ||
| Now, anybody who had just five fights was doing small cards and then knocks out Tyron Woodley. | ||
| Tyron Woodley says, I'm going to try boxing. | ||
| And some guy starches him with one punch and talks mad shit. | ||
| You'd be like, wow, that guy's hot. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But the fighter doesn't... | ||
| A 5-0 fighter who's knocked out five guys isn't... | ||
| Saying, I'm ready for Canelo. | ||
| Like, no guy... | ||
| But you do if you're crazy and you just talk a lot of shit. | ||
| It's not like Canelo's waiting to fight him. | ||
| Canelo's got a lot of things he's doing. | ||
| He doesn't have any time to be waiting around on Jake Paul. | ||
| He's not really going to fight him. | ||
| He's got to fight Golovkin in the rematch if he beats Bival. | ||
| He's got things lined up. | ||
| He's talking about fighting Usyk. | ||
| Have you seen that shit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| And he's interested in that. | ||
| And so am I. Yeah. | ||
| So am I. Yeah. | ||
| And I see Eddie Hearn trying to put that together. | ||
| Please put that together. | ||
| Please put that together. | ||
| I'm interested. | ||
| Imagine if he wins. | ||
| The trajectory Canelo is on. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| Canelo Alvarez expresses interest in heavyweight title fight with Alexander Usyk at 201 pound catchweight. | ||
| Which, by the way, Usyk used to be a cruiserweight champion. | ||
| The fact that not only is Canelo interested in this fight verbally, but I actually believe him. | ||
| Most fighters that would say something as crazy as that would be like, alright, well, he's trying to get some headlines, he's trying to say something that's not going to happen. | ||
| I think Jake Paul probably knows he's not getting that Canelo fight anytime soon, but to say something crazy like that to show that much confidence in yourself is going to get people's attention. | ||
| This guy means it. | ||
| And the opponents that he's chosen thus far, with the ability that he has to guide his own career, you can't take anything from him. | ||
| Not a thing. | ||
| I don't know that I could name another fighter, certainly not in the modern era, that has challenged himself more consistently than Canelo Alvarez. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| You can't criticize who he's facing. | ||
| And no matter who he faces, is it going to be somebody else you want him to fight? | ||
| But you can't say that the guy in front of him right now isn't a worthy opponent. | ||
| And he goes one quality fight to another quality fight to another quality fight. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Bivol is a hell of a fighter. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| The weight that they're fighting at, 175 pounds? | ||
|
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|
Mm-hmm. | |
| For Canelo to just decide to fight at 175 pounds again in a title holder of Beevil's ability... | ||
| Which is a step up of Kovalev. | ||
| Kovalev was on the slide. | ||
| When he knocked out Kovalev, Kovalev was kind of on the slide. | ||
| Yeah, and the challenge in it, and people would try to criticize that, but I'm like, he's 175 pounds even on the slide. | ||
| That's a huge challenge for Canelo. | ||
| And, on my scorecard anyway, Canelo was losing the fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Until the knockout. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so for him to decide to dabble in those deep waters again, if he was losing a fight to Kovalev, who, you know, arguably has less skills than Beevil, although bigger, I think. | ||
| The one thing is that Kovalev is a big 75. Beevil is not. | ||
| I think these two guys are going to be about the same size on fight night. | ||
| So with the exception of the weight differential that happened, or the size differential with Kovalev, the skill matches up much better with Bivol. | ||
| If he beats Bivol and acquires another title at 175 pounds, you have to actually start talking about Canelo. | ||
| Already in the annals of history, like where does this guy place now before he retires? | ||
| No matter what happens from that day on, this guy's got to be in the conversation. | ||
| And if he goes up and he beats Usyk, now you're in crazy town. | ||
| If he goes up and fights Usyk... | ||
| Does Usyk have an automatic with Anthony Joshua? | ||
| Are they exercising that? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So they would have to pay Joshua step-aside money. | ||
| Yeah, I don't see that happening. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I do. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| Didn't they offer Anthony Joshua step-aside money for Usyk to fight Tyson Fury? | ||
| Wasn't that on the table? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How much did they want to offer him? | ||
| I mean, you know, there's only rumors, right? | ||
| What'd you rumor? | ||
| What'd you hear? | ||
| I heard 10 million all the way up to like 30. 10 million to just chill? | ||
| Ready to chill? | ||
| But who knows what the truth is? | ||
|
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The only guys who know the truth is the guys who got offered the money. | |
| Two versions of it right there. | ||
| Okay, two versions of it. | ||
| Anthony Joshua denies step-aside deal. | ||
| He denied that he's agreed. | ||
| Okay, but they might have offered it to him. | ||
| A report earlier this week claimed that Joshua was close to accepting 15 million, oh, 15 million pounds, 20 million American dollars Deal at his end, but he's since hit back at this and branded it bullshit. | ||
| Hearn told DAZN Boxing Show, there's been an offer, there's been several discussions with myself. | ||
| Okay, so he wasn't close to accepting. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| But they did offer. | ||
| Well, see, here's the thing. | ||
| We don't actually know. | ||
| Like, those conversations are behind closed doors, and no one's going to tell you what actually happened, right? | ||
| So we know that offers were on the table. | ||
| I do believe it was a possibility, though. | ||
| Now, let's not forget, Joshua was shopping for trainers. | ||
| If he doesn't take that fight immediately, That doesn't mean anything other than he is being smart. | ||
| If he doesn't have a trainer that he's confident in at the time, why would you immediately run into the rematch? | ||
| Also, Usyk was fighting in the war in Ukraine up until like a week ago. | ||
| Yeah, that's current. | ||
| But while we were having that discussion, the Ukraine war wasn't even like a thing. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Wouldn't you take $20 million to not fight all day, especially with that shallow pool of talent in the heavyweight division? | ||
| He's the top of the food chain. | ||
| He's always going to be a guy. | ||
| You need a big opponent for a big fight. | ||
| Anthony Joshua's there. | ||
| Who the fuck else is there? | ||
| There's Anthony Joshua, Deontay Wilder, Luis Ortiz is 150,000 years old, right? | ||
| And he's still in the conversation, right? | ||
| Andy Ruiz hasn't won, well he did, he beat Chris, what's his name? | ||
|
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|
Rumor. | |
| Oh, Areola. | ||
| Areola. | ||
|
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|
Rumor that he asked for more. | |
| Oh, heavyweight champion Tyson Fury is said to have gone berserk when his boxing rival Anthony Joshua asked for an extra 3.7 million pounds in step-aside money for the Usyk rematch. | ||
| So he wanted more than the 20. But if you could take that just to like... | ||
| Who do you have? | ||
| You have Andrew Ruiz is fighting. | ||
| He is fighting Luis Ortiz, which is an interesting fight, right? | ||
| Because Andy Ruiz is getting in shape now. | ||
| He looks good. | ||
| He's lost a lot of weight. | ||
| He's taking it more serious. | ||
| But Anthony Joshua beat him in the rematch. | ||
| That's just how it is. | ||
| Yeah, like a clinical beating. | ||
| Yeah, he had his moment in the sun, and then he came back, and he also was like 380 pounds during the fight. | ||
| Yeah, he admitted that he didn't train, he didn't commit to that, which is like the cardinal sin of boxing. | ||
| Being beaten in a heavyweight fight is not... | ||
| Something to be ashamed of unless the reason you were beaten is because you didn't prepare. | ||
| That's a disrespect to everything the sport means. | ||
| After the biggest victory of your life, changed your life. | ||
| You'd knocked out the heavyweight champion of the world. | ||
| But my point is, Anthony Joshua is always top of the food chain. | ||
| If he just takes 20 million bucks, stays top of the food chain, got 20 million in his pocket, more time to train, More time to, like, whatever the corrections and changes this new trainer is going to give him. | ||
| More time for those to set in. | ||
| More time to recover. | ||
| All those things are true, but I think Anthony Joshua is very aware of the inconsistent nature of boxing. | ||
| And you can't count on anything tomorrow. | ||
| Like, nothing. | ||
| That's why you should take 20 free million dollars. | ||
| Free 20 million bucks. | ||
| I mean, I guess to your point, if he had taken that step-aside money, the fight still hasn't happened. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But what if... | ||
| Okay, let's say he takes the step-aside money, 20 million. | ||
| This guy is not, like, missing any meals. | ||
| So 20 million in his bank account right now isn't going to make a change in his lifestyle. | ||
| Don't you think he lives a luxurious lifestyle that needs to be funded? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| But Joe, if he passes on that opportunity and Usyk fights Fury... | ||
| Fury beats Usyk. | ||
| Fury retires. | ||
| Those belts scatter across the pond like little lilies. | ||
| No, he retires, then Usyk and Joshua rematch for the title. | ||
| It's simple math. | ||
| No, but that's not how... | ||
| This is not MMA. 100%. | ||
| This is not MMA. No, no, no, no. | ||
| Then each sanctioning body gets to decide... | ||
| Fuck that. | ||
| Ring Magazine. | ||
| Call Ring Magazine up. | ||
| Guys, let's cut the bullshit. | ||
| I'm only fighting for your title. | ||
| Fuck all these people. | ||
| In legacy matters to Joshua, pride, I think, might have been part of the equation. | ||
| To be a boxer at all, you've got to be a bit delusional. | ||
| He can't accept that maybe it's better for him to step aside or lose the opportunity to reclaim all your titles at once. | ||
| I feel like there should be one boxing champion in each weight class. | ||
| Of course there should, buddy. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| This whole governing body thing doesn't make any sense if there's so many of them. | ||
| There should be one news channel that tells you all the truth. | ||
| Yeah, but that's different. | ||
| No, we're talking about a 147-pound world welterweight champion, right? | ||
| There's one. | ||
| There's only one. | ||
| You can't be world champion if that guy's world champion. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| That's crazy, right? | ||
| When they do that in MMA, I cringe. | ||
| Which belt is the belt then? | ||
| Ring Magazine. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Fuck everybody else. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| They're historians of the sport. | ||
| They're people that follow the sport. | ||
| They don't make a living just off of sanctioning people, but the Ring Magazine's a cherished belt. | ||
|
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|
You know all that? | |
| It's the only publication that has a cherished title attached to it. | ||
| All that would really require is that everybody agree. | ||
| Like, if fighters stop fighting for the other titles, and if people stop... | ||
| This is how we get killed. | ||
| There's so much money involved in sanctioning bodies. | ||
| Let me rephrase that. | ||
| If that's what you want, Joe... | ||
| That's not what I want. | ||
| I would like four or five more people to step in and start sanctioning fights. | ||
| More belts, the better. | ||
| As much as I agree with that, and I do... | ||
| I have been seduced now into this undisputed kind of world of, well, you know what? | ||
| Having to go around and collect all the belts to get, like, there's champions, and then there's, like, undisputed, which is king of kings, which is, like, the guy who's been, and that's the elusive, like, moniker everybody wants now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So there is something too—I think there's too many. | ||
| Like, I would be far happier if there was just three, period. | ||
| And no international champion and no, like, regional interim, but just three titles in every division, and then the undisputed champion if you can get all three. | ||
| That might be something that's more doable, and I kind of like the idea that just winning one belt, beating one guy, doesn't necessarily make you king of the division. | ||
| I'm giving you an argument for you, for your position on this. | ||
| This is what I like. | ||
| You can't have Usyk vs. | ||
| Joshua and Tyson Fury vs. | ||
| Deontay Wilder for heavyweight titles because they can't all fight each other. | ||
| If there was only one heavyweight title, then those fights aren't heavyweight world titles. | ||
| They have to be heavyweight world titles. | ||
| Usyk vs. | ||
| Joshua 100% is a heavyweight world title fight. | ||
| Tyson Fury vs. | ||
| Deontay Wilder is 100% a heavyweight world title fight. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| But you can't have those fights as world title fights if only one guy holds the heavyweight title. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| We had there what I like to call the final four of boxing when we thought that this thing was actually gonna bottleneck and everything was gonna work out perfectly. | ||
| That was maybe the most exciting idea in heavyweight boxing. | ||
| In decades. | ||
| In decades! | ||
| And you just can't trust boxing to get out of its own way and let a series of fights happen the way they should go. | ||
| Well, there's still potential. | ||
| I'm not... | ||
| I really think that Tyson Fury, like, I forgot who fucking told me that, that that's how they were going to do it. | ||
| I wish I could remember. | ||
| But that Tyson Fury's going to give up his titles. | ||
| I've retired! | ||
| And then he's going to fight Francis Ngannou with the little gloves on, make a fuck pile of money, and then take a little time off, and then, oh, I'm back. | ||
| I changed my mind. | ||
| I'd like to fight for the title again. | ||
| But then what happens to that WBC title? | ||
| Who gives a fuck? | ||
| Let it float. | ||
| Throw it in the river. | ||
| Who gives a shit? | ||
| Just keep moving. | ||
| He comes back. | ||
| Who gives a fuck who's got the title? | ||
| Tyson Fury's back, baby. | ||
| I've never been beaten. | ||
| Okay, but do you agree? | ||
| Let's say Tyson Fury comes back and they don't reinstate him as the WBC heavyweight champion. | ||
| No, they don't reinstate him. | ||
| He fights for the title. | ||
| He's a challenger. | ||
| Who gives a shit? | ||
| That title, who knows who's going to have that at that point? | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| He's only got to come back to fight undisputed. | ||
| Like, you can't come back and fight for every belt but the WBC or just fight for the WBC again. | ||
| Listen, if Usyk and Joshua... | ||
| Okay, let's say Usyk and Joshua fight, and this time Joshua wins. | ||
| Okay, so Joshua beats Usyk. | ||
| He beats him in the rematch and decides he's going to retire. | ||
| Fuck it, I'm good. | ||
| I'm done. | ||
| And then Tyson Fury comes back and Joshua says, actually... | ||
| I'm not retired anymore. | ||
| Let's go! | ||
| Neither one of them has a belt. | ||
| Who gives a fuck? | ||
| Who gives a fuck? | ||
| I'll come up with the JRE World Championship and I'll fucking fund that. | ||
| I'll fund that. | ||
| It's a world title. | ||
| We only have one fight, heavyweight division, world title. | ||
| It's for the JRE belt. | ||
| You would think. | ||
| You would think. | ||
| But I think... | ||
| The legacy of it, the history of it would matter. | ||
| Tyson Fury retired undefeated. | ||
| Anthony Joshua revenged his two losses that he had. | ||
| Revenged both of them. | ||
| He's the fucking world champ that retired. | ||
| Tyson Fury's the other world champ. | ||
| Call it undisputed. | ||
| That's the name of the promotion. | ||
| That's a prize fight. | ||
| Undisputed. | ||
| They call it undisputed with no belts. | ||
| Just undisputed. | ||
| That's a prize fight. | ||
| And I think that might be what Jake Paul... | ||
| Is actually doing. | ||
| He should. | ||
| Prize fighting. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| Yeah, I made a video. | ||
| I made kind of like one of my very, very few editorials that I put on YouTube about what this Jake Paul experience is and means to boxing. | ||
| And I categorized it as a prize fight, which isn't a diminishing term to what this guy is doing. | ||
| It's phenomenal. | ||
| But to try to put... | ||
| Him in the context of a traditional boxer who has taken the path of a career fighter in boxing and make what he's doing make sense in that context. | ||
| You're always going to have like a screaming match on both sides because that's not really what he's doing. | ||
| He's creating a revenue based, attention oriented audience for a spectacle that not anybody else, at least to this point, who isn't a traditional boxer who hasn't built their legacy that way has been able to do. | ||
|
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|
Right. | |
| Like you say that Tyrone Woodley fighting a guy who's under five fights and getting knocked out. | ||
| Well, that's going to put attention on the guy. | ||
| But in that fight, Tyrone Woodley would have had to have been the draw. | ||
| It wouldn't be this guy that we've never heard of. | ||
| And they certainly wouldn't get those pay-per-views or sell out that building. | ||
| The difference is everybody wants to see Jake Paul fight, whoever Jake Paul picks to fight, and he is an expert at picking guys that people want to see and turning that thing into a spectacle. | ||
| Well, prize fighting was a part of boxing history. | ||
| Prize fighting is something unto itself, and to hold that... | ||
| That stage is something that I think should be regarded. | ||
| That's like its own category. | ||
| You're never going to convince boxing purists that Jake Paul is a boxer of any tradition, except prize fighting. | ||
| If you can find a guy who can pack a fucking stadium, who can sell pay-per-views, who you want to see either win or lose, and facing a guy who's got a chance... | ||
| Well, that guy has created an audience for boxing that is not traditional but is to be respected and is clearly worth a few hours on a Saturday night. | ||
| Or a Sunday. | ||
| Or a Sunday if you're smart. | ||
| I think this prize fighting thing, which is what I also think of when we see Tyson and Jones come back for the one night, that's a prize fight. | ||
| Like you say, there's no belts on the line, doesn't even make a lot of sense, we just want to see these guys fight. | ||
| Do you think Jake Paul has the stones to really follow up on a Mike Tyson fight? | ||
| Because he talked about fighting Mike Tyson. | ||
| I think it would be a terrible idea. | ||
| A terrible idea. | ||
| You would realize when you see him warming up across the ring, that's still Mike Tyson. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even though he's 55, that's still Mike Tyson. | ||
| When the bell rings and you see him shuffling for you, bobbling, weaving, you're like, oh no. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh no. | ||
| There might be a moment of reality there. | ||
| I bet he can be 30-year-old Mike Tyson for about 45 seconds. | ||
| That's all he needs. | ||
| The problem with that fight is that, first of all, if he does beat Mike Tyson, we're going to hate him forever. | ||
| If he KO'd Mike Tyson? | ||
| The guy would be shunned from society for giving us that. | ||
| People need to know how bad people hated Larry Holmes after he beat Muhammad Ali. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| People hated him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Larry Holmes is one of the most underrated heavyweight champions that's ever lived. | ||
|
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|
Ever. | |
| Because people didn't love him because he came after the most beloved heavyweight ever. | ||
| That is exactly right. | ||
| And to take a guy like Mike Tyson out of retirement who we all love, and the only reason we want to see him in the ring again is because we want to see some glimpse of the old Tyson. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And if you make him look like an old man or you hurt him in front of us... | ||
| No amount of reason or logic is going to keep people from hating you forever. | ||
| Forever. | ||
| And then if he goes in there and Tyson, like, destroys him, well then you've just ruined your whole, like, premise for being a cash cow. | ||
| Why would you do that? | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Yeah, both things are lose-lose. | ||
| It's a lose-lose. | ||
| Total lose-lose. | ||
| And, to be fair, I don't even want to see it. | ||
| Like, if that fight was, I was like, ah, I don't know. | ||
| You'd be right next to me, buddy. | ||
| We'd be holding hands. | ||
| I would feel like I had to watch it, but I wouldn't be like, oh, I can't wait to see this. | ||
| The moment that bell rings, you would be fucking excited as shit. | ||
| Are you crazy? | ||
| I would only be curious about impending doom. | ||
| Because we talked about this, if that happens, you and I are going. | ||
| We're fucking going. | ||
| If that takes place... | ||
| Because I think if he backs up the Brinks truck and brings it to Mike's house, I think Mike will sign on board for that. | ||
| You remember how it felt watching Holyfield? | ||
| Yeah, but that was different. | ||
| That was different. | ||
| First of all, I watched Holyfield train, too. | ||
| I didn't like the way it looked. | ||
| It didn't look like he was kind of like shuffling through things. | ||
| When I was watching Mike Tyson hit mitts with Rafael Cordero, I was like, holy fuck. | ||
| That was holy fuck. | ||
| Popping and weaving, moving forward, ripping to the body. | ||
| I'm not saying he's Mike Tyson when he was 20 years old. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's still Mike Tyson at 55. Mike Tyson at 55 is like, how deep was your well originally? | ||
| You know? | ||
| We've lost a few hundred thousand gallons. | ||
| Okay, but how deep's your fucking well? | ||
| Some people have a deep ass well. | ||
| That motherfucker has the deepest well that's ever been. | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| If you can do that now, what could you do then? | ||
|
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|
He can pull out. | |
| He can pull out. | ||
| Also, with today's... | ||
|
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|
Science! | |
| Like, a 55-year-old man is not really a 55-year-old man. | ||
| He's doing all kinds of crazy shit with electrodes, you know, where they put these, like, electrical muscular stimulation devices on you, and they have you lift weights, and it leads to, like, great gains in strength and recovery of range of motion, and he's got, like, legit scientists with him. | ||
| Yeah, it does make you wonder, like, the athletes of old, if they lived in today's modern technology, what they'd be able to do. | ||
| But I wasn't comparing Holyfield to Tyson's modern conditioning or even opportunity to win, but just the feeling of watching Holyfield get beat down. | ||
| It stays with me. | ||
| Like, it's sad, and it's infuriating, and I wish I never had to see that. | ||
| And what we love about Mike Tyson and what gets you excited right now watching him train, I don't want that diminished. | ||
| I want this guy to ride off into the sunset of life with us all being like, he's still got it. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Yeah, so who would he fight then? | ||
| He was supposed to fight Holyfield. | ||
| Nobody! | ||
| Like, stop fucking fighting! | ||
| What if he wants to have fun? | ||
| What if he wants to have fun? | ||
| I mean, I feel like he's gotten away with it thus far in grand fashion. | ||
| Like, man, I was against, I'll be honest with you, I was against the Jones fight. | ||
| I was like, one of these guys is going to get hurt or something is going to happen that we will never forgive ourselves for just because we all want it one more night. | ||
| Do you think they made an agreement? | ||
| That it wasn't going to get, like, I think they may have said as much, like it wasn't a knockout kind of fight. | ||
| It seemed like that was not on the table. | ||
| Yeah, which is good, thank God, because they didn't promote it that way for obvious reasons, but if that was agreed to, which I think you're correct about, then thank God. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's not the right size anyway. | ||
| Roy is just not the same size. | ||
| As great as Roy was when he beat John Ruiz, he was one of the lightest heavyweight champions ever. | ||
| He was a 200-pound guy, and he was barely 200 pounds. | ||
| And he's always known for being a super middleweight and a light heavyweight. | ||
| That's Roy Jones. | ||
| Mike Tyson's a fucking heavyweight! | ||
| A real heavyweight. | ||
| He was 190 when he was 13. I mean, that is what makes the idea that a Canelo would fight an Usyk as crazy. | ||
| And that Roy Jones has won the heavyweight championship of the world before. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| I wish Roy, when he had come back from beating Ruiz, had really taken his time to get down to 175 again. | ||
| Or maybe never did it again because it is not easy to lose muscle. | ||
| It's not easy. | ||
| And when he went up, if you see, pull up a video of Roy Jones Jr. vs. | ||
| John Ruiz Jr. Because John Ruiz, the quiet man. | ||
|
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|
Mm-hmm. | |
| He was a legit heavyweight champion. | ||
| He was a big guy. | ||
| And Roy was quite a bit smaller than him and not an ounce of fat at 200 pounds. | ||
| Now, if he had to go back down and fight at 175, what is he losing, man? | ||
| I mean, he's losing muscle. | ||
| There's just no way he's not going to lose muscle. | ||
| I think he weighed in, if I remember correctly, like 201 or some shit like that. | ||
| He was real light. | ||
| But you see Roy's considerably muscled up. | ||
| He looks great. | ||
| Let's not forget, he's also not 23. For the guy to have had the career he'd already had and now be challenging for a heavyweight title and winning it is crazy. | ||
| And against a guy, look at John Ruiz, hit him with some big shots. | ||
| Yeah, John Ruiz is no pushover. | ||
| Yeah, they were going after it. | ||
| John Ruiz was a legit heavyweight fighter. | ||
| I mean a legit world champion. | ||
| So to go from this fight, which also, here's another thing. | ||
| You know like every fight you're in, like you see Ruiz clipping him with a big right hand there. | ||
| Every fight you're in takes something off. | ||
| Every fight. | ||
| Every war takes something off. | ||
| When you move up multiple weight classes above your natural weight class and then fight for a heavyweight title, that fight's gonna take a lot off. | ||
| The shots you get hit with by a heavyweight, they take a lot off. | ||
| And then you drop down to weight to 175. You gotta dehydrate the shit out of yourself. | ||
| I remember when I watched him fight Antonio Tarver, I was looking at his body and I was like, man, he looks smooth. | ||
| He doesn't look like he used to look. | ||
| He used to look shredded at 175. And I think that... | ||
| Sometimes the struggle of getting down in weight, the juice is not worth the squeeze. | ||
| Guys' bodies just get so weakened by it. | ||
| You can't maintain striated muscle mass. | ||
| It didn't look good. | ||
| He didn't look like he was a coiled spring ready to go like when he fought James Toney. | ||
| Back in those days when he was fluid and loose and fucking punches were lightning bolts, man. | ||
| It seemed like that weight loss, that's not an insignificant factor. | ||
| Look at what you're demanding of your body. | ||
| Let's say you're not paying attention to hitting a weight mark at all. | ||
| Just training in that way with that intensity, the demands you put on your body, your joints, your muscles, even your digestion, everything that it goes into just being in that kind of conditioning. | ||
| And then on top of that, you want to be 200 pounds today and 175 tomorrow and then back to 68 until you go back to 75. Terrible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's stress. | |
| Terrible. | ||
| Your body's incredibly stressed. | ||
| And then you have to perform at the highest level. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Again, imagine doing that, and then also, on the weekends I fight MMA. Like, what the fuck? | ||
| This is not happening. | ||
| I really would like to see one person jump over and try it. | ||
| If anybody could do it, I think it would be Crawford. | ||
| Because Crawford has a background in wrestling. | ||
| And Crawford's sons wrestle. | ||
| And I don't even know if he would need to kick. | ||
| He would just need to know how to stop kicks. | ||
| How to check kicks and how to move close enough to close the distance. | ||
| He knows how to wrestle. | ||
| Terence Crawford is an elite athlete and he's the best switch hitter alive in boxing right now. | ||
| His ability to switch stances, that's a big deal too. | ||
| Because there's a lot of guys who, say if you're a right-handed person, in boxing you would stand with your left hand forward, while in wrestling you'd stand with your right hand forward. | ||
| So a lot of wrestlers, when they're fighting a striker, a dangerous striker, you'll see him take a southpaw stance. | ||
| Because then all they're thinking is, I gotta get a hold of that fucking leg. | ||
| So the left leg, his left leg is in front of you, right? | ||
| If he's a boxer. | ||
| I want my right leg in front of me. | ||
| I don't want to have my left leg there. | ||
| That's an extra couple of inches and I'm not used to grabbing that way and I'm not used to pushing off of my left leg. | ||
| Wrestlers when they're right handed are used to primarily pushing off their right leg. | ||
| So they want that right leg out front. | ||
| Terence Crawford could switch hit. | ||
| He's the best at it. | ||
| I understand where you're coming from ability-wise. | ||
| What I love about Terence Crawford, one of the many things... | ||
| What is he doing? | ||
| He's wrestling somebody? | ||
| There's a bunch of videos of him wrestling. | ||
| Who's he wrestling? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| That dude's got a flannel shirt on. | ||
| Really unlucky guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's in a radio show or something. | |
| Is that a video show? | ||
| There's a lot of videos of it. | ||
| Oh, Terrence can fucking wrestle. | ||
| See, this is my point. | ||
| Like, look at him here. | ||
| Like, he wrestles like a real wrestler. | ||
| And he's the best switch hitter in boxing, so he doesn't give a fuck if he has his right leg forward or his left leg forward. | ||
| He'll fuck you up either way. | ||
| He's the only guy in boxing that can do that. | ||
| Like, fights just as good southpaw as he does orthodox. | ||
| And he's the only guy in boxing that I know of that fights at a world championship, top of the food chain, pound for pound, best level, that also has this kind of wrestling skills. | ||
| Yeah, and more than all of those things that are incredibly important, he's got this competitive killer instinct. | ||
| Killer instinct with everything. | ||
| If you put somebody else across from him, I don't care if there's a cage around you or ropes or a... | ||
| Playground! | ||
| Whatever you want. | ||
| He'll do whatever the fuck. | ||
| He's going to do whatever he has to do to win. | ||
| And by the way, he'll do that with Frisbee. | ||
| What do you want to play, bitch? | ||
| You know? | ||
| He's a killer. | ||
| He's just trying to win. | ||
| He was challenging me to a game of pool. | ||
| I was like, what are you saying? | ||
|
unidentified
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Are we gambling? | |
| And then he smoked a joint and was like, nobody beats me high. | ||
| He realized as we started talking that it was a bad idea. | ||
| I was like, no. | ||
| I forgot. | ||
| He's a pool player, though. | ||
| He likes to... | ||
| Lennox Lewis thought he was, too. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| I lit him up. | ||
| Sorry, Lennox. | ||
| I didn't know this about you. | ||
| For regular people, I play real good. | ||
| You know, for a pro, I play like shit. | ||
| I'm like a B-level. | ||
| A B-player. | ||
| But a B-player is so much better. | ||
| A B-pro is pretty good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When I'm playing at my best, I play like a B-player. | ||
| You ever play pickleball? | ||
| I have not played pickleball, but I hear it a lot lately. | ||
| I think it's because I'm getting old. | ||
| Old people start talking to you about, let's play pickleball. | ||
| I'm going to go shoot things. | ||
| Not a lot of movement. | ||
| The fuck is pickleball? | ||
| I refuse to act like an old person. | ||
| I do young people things. | ||
| Let's not frame it that way. | ||
| There's not a lot of 25-year-old dudes on a Saturday night looking to play pickleball. | ||
| They're too busy watching the fights. | ||
| If the fights are on Sunday, we'd be playing pickleball on Saturday night. | ||
| I just didn't even know what pickleball was until a year and a half ago. | ||
| Yeah, I played it at a friend's house. | ||
| He's a friend in a retirement community? | ||
| No. | ||
| He has a court at his house. | ||
| Oh, what kind of crazy person has a pickleball court at the house? | ||
| Did he put it in there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, he installed it, and all his friends go and play, and I was fortunate enough to get invited over, and I've been obsessed ever since. | ||
| It's like, you know, I like tennis too. | ||
| You know what, Joe, if I weren't covering boxing, The only other sport that I really love is tennis. | ||
| I don't play it at all because it's too fucking hard to be like, because I'm so young, running back and forth. | ||
| Rough on the knees. | ||
| But yeah, the pickleball was a welcomed A sport that was close enough to tennis that I could play it and have as much fun. | ||
| Don't get into the old man shit. | ||
| Just accept that there's something new that can be brought to your life that can be fun and athletic. | ||
| I'm just talking shit, my friend. | ||
| That's what I do. | ||
| I talk shit. | ||
| If you bring up something like pickleball, I gotta talk about retirement communities. | ||
| Listen, I bowl. | ||
| I bowl with my kids. | ||
| I like to go bowling. | ||
| That's a stupid old person sport, too. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Old people love bowling. | ||
| My grandfather loved bowling. | ||
| He was a bowling champion. | ||
| He had bowling trophies in his house. | ||
| He was all happy when he bowled. | ||
| They would have a bowling league, and they had League Nike. | ||
| Guys back in those days, man, Like, old dudes, they would love that there was an excuse they could all get together one night a week and take away some of the drudgery of working every day. | ||
| You know, so one night. | ||
| Wednesday night, it's league night. | ||
| I'm going out with the boys. | ||
| And you get your fucking bowling ball, and you get in your car, and you drive, and you have, like, an obligation to the boys. | ||
| Gotta go to the league. | ||
| And you're rolling some stupid ball down this wooden fucking platform until it hits some pins. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I only know that culture from watching these old TV shows, like Jackie Cleason, you know, with his bowling shirt. | ||
| I loved it, man. | ||
| That culture back in my grandpa's days, that was what they did. | ||
| They all bowled. | ||
| Everybody bowled. | ||
| Now, yeah, but archery is your sport now. | ||
| Well, archery is a discipline. | ||
| Archery is something that I love to do because when you're pulling back a bow and you're aiming, you don't think about anything other than perfect execution of the arrow. | ||
| That's all you think about. | ||
| And there's meditation in that. | ||
| I think it's like a martial art. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I think archery is a martial art. | ||
| I don't think it's a martial art in terms of like you'd use it in a fight, but obviously it started out as something that people used in war, and to get good at it and accurate meant that you could kill more things. | ||
| I wonder what it actually started out. | ||
| I wonder if it started out as a weapon of war or it started out as a weapon of hunting. | ||
| I wonder what they used first. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hunting. | |
| Had to be, right? | ||
| I would imagine so. | ||
| I would imagine the imperative would be to get food before it would be to fuck somebody up, unless that person had some food. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Think about how easy it is to get food today. | ||
| The way we get food. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For now. | |
| For now. | ||
| They keep talking about fucking food shortages. | ||
| Inflation, food shortages. | ||
|
unidentified
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Isn't there food? | |
| Isn't there plenty of food? | ||
| Why are you guys talking about food shortages? | ||
| Is there, though? | ||
| How about prepare so that there isn't food shortages? | ||
| I mean, I'm a city boy. | ||
| If the supermarket's closed, I'm in a lot of trouble. | ||
| There's no farming. | ||
| I don't have tomatoes in my backyard. | ||
| If Postmates is not delivering, I'm going to starve to death. | ||
| You just got to get to Dave's house, go to Yellow Springs. | ||
| A place like that, like Ohio, is a great place to be if the shit goes sideways. | ||
| Because there's plenty of farms, there's plenty of- Yeah, but there's also the kind of people who live on farms. | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| I don't want to be in Ohio if this shit goes upside down! | ||
| Where do you want to be? | ||
| You don't want to be in New York. | ||
| No. | ||
| You don't want to be in LA. You know what, man? | ||
| You might want to be in Ohio. | ||
|
unidentified
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You've got to ride it out like COVID and take a couple of years. | |
| I'm going to be at the Joe Rogan experience. | ||
| Wherever you are, that's where I'm going to be. | ||
| You're the only guy I know that has a bow and arrow and is a good shot, has some idea what we should eat if it were raw, for Christ's sake. | ||
| You can eat most things. | ||
| Most meat. | ||
| Most of my friends don't have that mentality about meat. | ||
| You can just eat most things. | ||
| I can definitely help you get meat. | ||
| But I would use rifles. | ||
| If I do bow hunting because it's harder and because it's a discipline and because I love archery, but if we're just trying to survive, we're bringing bullets. | ||
| I'm not taking any chances on missing an animal. | ||
| Look, if you are close enough to an animal and you have good discipline and you practice with a rifle, it's pretty much a gimme. | ||
| With a bow and arrow, it's never a gimme. | ||
| With a bow and arrow, you have to wait for the perfect shot. | ||
| They have to turn a perfect way. | ||
| You want to catch them broadside because you don't want the arrow to hit bone. | ||
| When it's a bullet, you don't give a fuck. | ||
| You're blowing right through the front shoulders. | ||
| You're killing that animal with one shot. | ||
| I've never even considered whether or not my arrow might hit bone. | ||
| This is why. | ||
| I've got to be wherever you are. | ||
| I don't think Dave's ever thought about whether or not that arrow is going to strike bone. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| You have to use the right arrows, too. | ||
| You probably got enough elk meat in your freezer to last this right through the apocalypse. | ||
| You probably wouldn't even have to go out. | ||
| I got about a year's worth of meat right now. | ||
| I like to keep a lot of meat. | ||
| I have two commercial freezers that I keep here. | ||
| Yeah, these big-ass freezers filled with wild game meat. | ||
| And then I have freezers at home, too. | ||
| Yeah, if you don't have meat, you don't know how you're going to eat. | ||
| If you don't have rice, if you don't have food in your house, I don't have to go anywhere to eat. | ||
| I could stay home for weeks and not have to go anywhere to eat. | ||
| That's important to me. | ||
| Because I don't trust... | ||
| After, like, this COVID thing and the power went out here for a week last year and everything got kind of sketchy, the roads were all shut down because they don't have any fucking plows here. | ||
| Like, I don't trust things to be always okay. | ||
| I like when they're always okay. | ||
| I'm not, like, hoping that I get to use my prepper skills and fucking the apocalypse. | ||
| But I keep an eye on where the deer are in my neighborhood. | ||
| I watch them. | ||
| I say hi to them. | ||
| My kids say, oh, so cute, so cute. | ||
| And I say, yeah, they're beautiful. | ||
| They're beautiful. | ||
| But I think about putting one right behind that front shoulder. | ||
| Every time I drive by, I look at their front shoulder. | ||
| I go, right there, buddy. | ||
| Right there, buddy. | ||
| Because I'm going to eat you. | ||
| You've been at this a lot longer than COVID existed in our minds. | ||
| Yeah, but it's just society. | ||
| Society is run by people and people are wholly untrustworthy. | ||
| Not always. | ||
| Most of the time they're trustworthy. | ||
| Most of the time people do their job and they keep it together. | ||
| But people fall apart all the time. | ||
| People kill themselves. | ||
| People have drug overdoses. | ||
| People steal. | ||
| People fucking ruin other people's businesses for no reason because they're assholes. | ||
| People are nuts to trust people and to say, well, the people that are in charge of agriculture, they would never do us wrong. | ||
| They would never fuck this up. | ||
| Everybody could fuck up everything. | ||
| You gotta have a certain amount of autonomy. | ||
| So if things do get fucked, you can at the very least survive. | ||
| I can survive. | ||
| I know how to survive. | ||
| How long have you been this way? | ||
| I grew up without a dad. | ||
| So I've been this way forever. | ||
| I haven't talked to my father since I was seven years old. | ||
| So I didn't grow up with anybody taking care of me. | ||
| I grew up with people telling me I was a loser or I was never going to amount to anything or whatever the fuck they said that was discouraging. | ||
| And I was like, oh, okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That was always my idea. | ||
| My attitude was always, I don't trust any of these fucking people. | ||
| I've watched people that were supposed to be people in positions of power be shitty. | ||
| I watched people be mean to their spouse and mean to their parents. | ||
| I watched a lot of that growing up. | ||
| So I never trusted people. | ||
| I felt like you could find some people and trust them. | ||
| And you need to find people of exemplary character. | ||
| And where do you find those people? | ||
| They have to be doing difficult shit. | ||
| So I gravitated towards martial arts. | ||
| Because the people that were all really good at it, they had the ability to overcome incredible obstacles. | ||
| To get good at something that's very difficult. | ||
| Those are people of considerable character. | ||
| Those are the people that I was interested in. | ||
| I was interested in people that figured out how to make it in a thing that's very hard to make it in. | ||
| And that's why to this day I'm still obsessed with fighting. | ||
| You want to become an Alexander Usik. | ||
| You want to become a Terence Crawford. | ||
| You want to become an Earl Spence. | ||
| You're a fucking unusual human, man. | ||
| That's a human of exemplary ability. | ||
| Very unusual. | ||
| Outlier status in terms of their discipline, their mind, their ability to push, their ability to find a way to victory. | ||
| That's what's exciting to me. | ||
| Most people fall apart. | ||
| Most people crumble. | ||
| Most people panic. | ||
| Most people, when the shit hits the fan and everything's on the line, they don't know what the fuck to do. | ||
| Because they don't know who they are. | ||
| Because they have all these ideas. | ||
| Because maybe they base who they are on what other people's opinions of them are. | ||
| And so when things go sideways, they're fucked. | ||
| When a girlfriend breaks up with them, they're fucked. | ||
| When they get in a dispute with a friend and the other friends take that friend's side, even if they're right, they're fucked. | ||
| Because they don't know who they are now. | ||
| Now my friends are mad at me? | ||
| My girl left me? | ||
| I lost my job? | ||
| You don't know who the fuck you are because you're all tied up in all these things. | ||
| You and I have that in common. | ||
| I didn't grow up with a father either. | ||
| My father, in fact, was murdered when I was two years old by his best friend. | ||
| And so, growing up with the reality of death looming is part of what makes something like It Happening the Other Night so real to me. | ||
| And it can overshadow so many other incredible things that are happening on that night. | ||
| That was the fourth night at the Hollywood Bowl. | ||
| Fave Chappelle sold out all of the nights. | ||
| That happened right before Blackstar came on stage to wrap some of their album, the first album back after 24 years. | ||
| All that was happening that night. | ||
| The people that were on the side stage, that's because they all showed up to see Dave, see Blackstar to be a part of that moment that Dave created there in that building and some It's hard for me to even characterize this individual, was willing on that one moment to take it all away from us. | ||
| You know what a lot of this is? | ||
| I mean, with that guy in particular. | ||
| There's people that are left out in society. | ||
| And that's a guy that was left out in society. | ||
| That was a homeless guy. | ||
| I mean, a homeless guy who's non-binary calls himself they-them on his Twitter. | ||
| Like, to be a part of any group is so special. | ||
| And to be a part of a group that's united against someone who he probably never even watched as special. | ||
| He doesn't have a fucking TV. How's he going to watch it? | ||
| You probably just hear Dave Chappelle's transphobic, so he's going to attack him. | ||
| And to get the love of those people. | ||
| If you actually did it, you know how much love you would get? | ||
| If you want to attack this person, you know? | ||
| Yeah, for attention. | ||
| For some kind of validation. | ||
| Oh, my life means something now. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Because I ripped this life away from everyone else. | ||
| Look, you were very fortunate that when your father died, you made it through and became a great adult. | ||
| But many people have horrible things happen to them along the way, and then they find themselves homeless, they find themselves drug addicted, they find themselves falling apart. | ||
| We have... | ||
| A whole sea of possibility of potential bad results and good results in all of our communities. | ||
| But nothing like the homeless community. | ||
| The homeless community is almost 100% bad results. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it all comes down to how you deal with that adversity. | ||
| The way you describe your father not being in the home and what that did to your young psychology. | ||
| Well, that set you on a trajectory. | ||
| That set you on a course. | ||
| Didn't mean it was going to be sustainable. | ||
| I'm sure you've had many moments in which you had to find your resolve. | ||
| Is this really... | ||
| Can I do another day of this? | ||
| Can I find my way in the world in spite of this and that and the accumulation of trauma and challenges? | ||
| That's also what my show is about. | ||
| That kind of thing. | ||
| The difference between Joe Rogan and a guy right out by the lake in a tent might be one choice. | ||
| One thing that he couldn't overcome that made the difference between millions and millions and millions of people listening to the Joe Rogan experience and this guy begging for food outside of a tent in a lake in Austin. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think a lot of it is exposure to dangerous drugs. | ||
| Like some people, when they do need an escape early on, they have close proximity and they have exposure to something like fentanyl. | ||
| And they get something that they get hooked on. | ||
| Something like heroin, they get hooked on it. | ||
| Meth, hooked on it. | ||
| And then, you know, some people do break through from that and actually even wind up being athletes. | ||
| You know, there's been guys in the UFC that were elite fighters that fought that had fucking overdoses and had to be resuscitated. | ||
| They were dead. | ||
| They'd be brought back. | ||
| They're beating those demons. | ||
| They're winning whatever that fight is. | ||
| And I don't think that the fight is drugs when it's drugs. | ||
| Like drugs is a symptom of whatever is underneath there that you're trying to overcome or that you're trying to forget about. | ||
| When you talk about your dad and putting you on that focus, is that like a survival mentality or is that like I'm going to be something because he wasn't there and people don't think I can be anything? | ||
| There's probably both of those things happening simultaneously, but there's definitely a survival thing because you realize that no one's looking out for you. | ||
| You know when you realize that no one's looking out for you and then you look at the flimsy structure of society and How all would have to do is like power goes out for a week? | ||
| Then what are you gonna do all the refrigerators are bad all the foods bad? | ||
| Where how are people getting in how you getting in and out? | ||
| There's no transportation anymore because you're out of gasoline because you can't pump it you can't refine it because there's no power and All it would take is the power grid to get killed, and it wouldn't take much, a solar flare, an attack from a foreign government. | ||
| The foreign government wanted to take out the United States power grid with missiles. | ||
| They used drones, and they sent drones over with missiles and took out the power grid. | ||
| That's totally doable. | ||
| If the power goes out, man, how long do you think it is before we figure out how to turn it back on? | ||
| Could be a long time. | ||
| If it's up to me, it's never coming back on. | ||
| But even if it's up to the best minds, if the grid gets crushed by a solar flare, for instance, there's solar flares that... | ||
| We talked about this once, Jamie. | ||
| There was one that took out... | ||
| What are those things? | ||
| Morse code. | ||
| And then there was the other thing that they used, the old-timey, the Western. | ||
| They would send a telegraph. | ||
| Remember those? | ||
| It took those out. | ||
| It took those out in the 1800s. | ||
| There was a solar flare that was so powerful that it fucked up anything that was electric. | ||
| Electrical devices and... | ||
| We're lucky. | ||
| The same strength solar flare didn't happen today when everything is electronic and everything is using electricity. | ||
| It could have fucking torched our society. | ||
| A real legit solar flare, which is a fairly rare event in terms of the length of time that a human being lives, but very common in terms of the length of time the sun lives. | ||
| It's just whether or not you catch one while you're alive. | ||
| So while you're alive, a massive solar flare erupts and torches the entire power grid. | ||
| We're fucked. | ||
| I don't imagine that would have ever occurred to me had you not brought it up. | ||
| And I don't think you trust anything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do. | |
| I trust a lot of people. | ||
| I trust my instincts. | ||
| I trust truth. | ||
| I trust a lot of things. | ||
| It's not that I don't trust things. | ||
| It's just that I see the whole picture. | ||
| I see all the vulnerabilities. | ||
| It's like I used to have a problem when I was young. | ||
| In particular when I was young, I couldn't just accept a person for what they were. | ||
| I would always find their vulnerabilities, always find their weakness, and it would annoy me. | ||
| I'd be like, this lazy bitch is three minutes late every day. | ||
| Like, get up three minutes earlier. | ||
| I would obsess at it. | ||
| I would find, like, the holes in them. | ||
| I bet he quits easy. | ||
| I bet if shit gets... | ||
| I would think of people that way. | ||
| I would think of people like, what would it take to get that person to cry? | ||
| What would it take to get them to quit? | ||
| What would it take to get them to fall apart? | ||
| Because I was a fighter. | ||
| I was finding vulnerabilities in people. | ||
| I was like a little predator. | ||
| So the problem was that I wouldn't just accept what a thing was. | ||
| I would say, okay, but what happens if this happens? | ||
| What happens if that happens? | ||
| Is there a fallback plan? | ||
| Does anybody know what the fuck to do if the power goes out? | ||
| Does anybody ever? | ||
| No, no one's ever just showing up at work every day and hoping the coffee machine works. | ||
| No one is paying attention. | ||
| Like, this could go sideways, and it has throughout history, multiple times. | ||
| Numerous times where civilization's been basically brought down to its fucking knees by natural disasters, and then society had to rebuild. | ||
| If you do that with people that you know and your friends and that you love, that's got to take a hell of a toll on your relationships. | ||
| If you're finding- Yeah, I stopped doing that when I was young. | ||
| It took me until I was in my 20s. | ||
| My early 20s, I realized I was doing that all the time. | ||
| I would pick on people for what they did that was lazy and weak. | ||
| It would drive me crazy because I hated it in myself. | ||
| Dude, I was so crazy when I was young that I was married to the idea that pleasure was weak. | ||
| I had to figure out a way when I was in my teens that I didn't feel like a pussy because I wanted to have sex with a girl instead of training. | ||
| I literally had to put it in my head that the idea that pleasure Wasn't bad. | ||
| I felt like pleasure was weak because it was like weak. | ||
| It was too easy to slide into anybody could have pleasure You can go out pleasure. | ||
| Oh great. | ||
| What's what's difficult to do? | ||
| It's difficult to train hard and it's difficult to fight It's difficult to go out there and win and that's what you should think about not getting your dick sucked and fucking and all that stupid shit No, you should only be thinking about fighting Is that because fighting is discipline and pleasure is giving in to a desire? | ||
| Oh, are you going to take a nap afterwards? | ||
| Is that shit? | ||
| So dumb. | ||
| I mean, so contrary to the way I think now, but I remember very clearly when I was young thinking that. | ||
| What changed it? | ||
| I just got smarter. | ||
| I just I realized what was wrong with the way I was thinking because I am always I'm always editing my not editing I'm using introspective thinking on my own life on my own like if I have an interaction with someone like if I have a disagreement with them I always want to like okay I don't want to believe that I was right when I was wrong like I need to know what the fuck did I say how did I say it and Could I have said that better? | ||
| Maybe they misinterpreted it. | ||
| I always want to know. | ||
| I had a conversation just yesterday with a good friend of mine, and we were talking, and he was telling me about this story. | ||
| I go, okay, do you know for sure that that's how he took it? | ||
| Maybe he took it this way. | ||
| Did you ask him this first? | ||
| I want to know, did you do this work Do you want to call me and tell me that you and this guy got in an argument because you want me to tell you you're right? | ||
| Or do you want my actual opinion? | ||
| And the only way I want to get my actual opinion is I need to know what your opinion is. | ||
| And the only way I can trust your opinion is if you've looked at your own self. | ||
| So if you tell me, I got in a fight with this guy, man, I sat down. | ||
| I thought about it. | ||
| I was like, okay, was I being a dick? | ||
| What did I do wrong? | ||
| And then I thought, well, no, because he knew this, and I know he knew this because he brought this up. | ||
| So maybe I didn't explain myself right, and so then I'll think about how I explain myself. | ||
| And I was like, well, maybe they misinterpreted what I was saying and thought I was joking around. | ||
| Then I'll try to think of that. | ||
| I'll do the work. | ||
| So if I ask someone a question, if they're having an argument with someone, okay, do you know of this? | ||
| And then they start raising their voice, and they'll, fuck him. | ||
| Okay, you haven't done the work. | ||
| So you're so attached to being correct here that you're ready to dig your heels in the sand and then fight for your side regardless of whether or not it's correct. | ||
| That's Twitter. | ||
| That's Twitter in a nutshell. | ||
| That's what people do. | ||
| That sense of certainty is something that does come with youth. | ||
| I had it. | ||
| I had anger issues. | ||
| I wasn't a provocateur or aggressive. | ||
| I wasn't a bully, but I had a very, very thin line between I'm totally cool with this and I'm ready to kill anybody that's involved in this. | ||
| There's no yellow light. | ||
| That's also not being protected when you're young. | ||
| That's a lot of that comes from. | ||
| And also exposure to violence while in the womb. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, that's what's really crazy. | ||
| Michael Irvin told me that once on a fucking flight to Australia. | ||
| He was on a flight to Australia, just randomly, same flight. | ||
| And he was going over there for a football thing, and I was going over there for the UFC thing. | ||
| And we were talking, just because of a fucking $16 flight, and we were just hanging out in the galley, chit-chatting. | ||
| And he was telling me about these guys that he works with that are experiencing... | ||
| These guys came from an environment where their mother was exposed to violence in the womb. | ||
| So they're getting hit or they're seeing violence and the cortisol level rises and it's literally preparing the fetus for a violent world. | ||
| So those guys come out of that world and they have a shorter fuse, Quicker to violence, and a lot of these guys wind up playing football. | ||
| And then what happens when you wind up playing football? | ||
| Well, then you're in a place that rewards violence. | ||
| It rewards explosive behavior, explosive speed, and you're getting hit all the time, and then you get hit all the time, and what happens then? | ||
| Well, you get even more impulsive. | ||
| Guys who have CTE, guys who get brain damage, they make poor decisions, they're more impulsive, more prone to violence. | ||
| And so you're dealing with this literally from the fucking womb. | ||
| But to come to that realization, to understand that, usually is attached to an experience. | ||
| It's not, you didn't just get smarter. | ||
| Things happen to you, you experience things where you had to pay a dividend for being dumb. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what's that? | ||
| Like there had to have been a moment where you- It's not a moment, it's cumulative life experiences. | ||
| But it's also learning early on from martial arts that you have to pay attention to all of your weaknesses and you have to fix those. | ||
| You can't have like a weakness of technique. | ||
| You can't have like one thing you only do and you can't do other things because you'll get hit. | ||
| You can't have like bad defense. | ||
| Okay, that's fair. | ||
| You can have bad footwork. | ||
| But you described pleasure as a weakness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And training as the discipline. | ||
| So train instead of fuck because this is something that I can do that makes me stronger and this is just giving into a weakness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How did you recognize that? | ||
| I realized it was just dumb. | ||
| I realized it was dumb. | ||
| I was just like alone thinking about how stupid it is. | ||
| Or just horny? | ||
| Oh for sure I was horny. | ||
| But I think I also abandoned it because I stopped fighting when I was like 22. So it was young enough so that I had adopted a new life. | ||
| I started doing stand-up at 21 and somewhere along the line I realized I can't do both and then I quit. | ||
| I think I had my last fight. | ||
| I was either 21 or 22. I had three kickboxing fights. | ||
| So that was young enough that I could have abandoned my old life. | ||
| The old life of extreme discipline and this crazy focus on this one thing. | ||
| Because this other thing needed a different approach. | ||
| Comedy. | ||
| Yeah, comedy. | ||
| One of the things I used to think of when I bombed early on was like, fuck this, I'm going to go back to fighting. | ||
| Because in fighting, I didn't give a fuck if people liked me. | ||
| I would just take naps. | ||
| Before I would fight, I would go to tournaments. | ||
| I would look at everybody and be nervous and I would just lie down and go to sleep. | ||
| I liked it. | ||
| I liked the fact that they didn't have to like me. | ||
| I liked when people were cheering against another person. | ||
| I liked it. | ||
| I liked it. | ||
| I'm like, no one can help you. | ||
| When you're in here, as soon as this starts, no one's going to help you. | ||
| All these people that are here, there's no one here for me. | ||
| I'm here for me. | ||
| And that was this attitude that I didn't care because I knew that I was working hard enough. | ||
| I knew that I was putting in all the work. | ||
| I didn't need anybody else's opinion. | ||
| But in comedy, you needed everybody's opinion. | ||
| You needed everybody to like you. | ||
| You needed to be likeable. | ||
| Then you're like, God damn, I have some blind spots. | ||
| Then I realized I had some blind spots in my own personality. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because my personality was geared towards success in a violent execution world. | ||
| That was all it was about. | ||
| I was kicking people in the face. | ||
| So that was what I was geared for success at. | ||
| We really are flip sides of this same coin. | ||
| The fighting was so personal for me. | ||
| I would never want to do it in front of people for the sake of that. | ||
| Or it wasn't even about destroying the other guy. | ||
| It was about working through that anger and working through all of that pent-up Aggression and getting it out and healthy, it felt like getting high. | ||
| But the liking me part and being an affable guy and being able to communicate well and speak, huge, huge objective. | ||
| I wouldn't even like to admit how much and how important it was, especially for me younger, to be liked but also to be thought of well. | ||
| I think that's for everybody though. | ||
| Don't you think everybody wants to be liked when they're young? | ||
| I think maybe the aspect of not having a father could be a blessing in the sense that I don't need this one guy to like me. | ||
| Maybe that one guy wants you to do a specific thing. | ||
| Or just can't accept who you actually are and you spend your whole life trying to be whatever that guy wants you to be. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| And so, but at the same time, it gave me this desire to not be the stereotypical, because you're a white man, but a black guy without a father is a stereotype. | ||
| White man without a father, well, that's sad. | ||
| So, for me, it's like, well, only this much is available to you. | ||
| This guy's a single mom. | ||
| I didn't have any siblings. | ||
| We didn't come from any kind of real money, so he's only going to be able to do this. | ||
| He's only going to be able to go that far. | ||
| He's a likable guy, but there's no way he can achieve anything beyond something very average. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I didn't go to college, but that was because I was pursuing something that I believed I had special talent at. | ||
| But even then, even though I had success in high school, I had a radio show in high school, I was very well liked. | ||
| Not going to college, well, and that's it for that guy. | ||
| He's only going to be able to go this far. | ||
| Wait until that dream putters out. | ||
| That's why I went to college. | ||
| And that's why I didn't. | ||
| I went to college just so people wouldn't think I was a loser. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the only reason I went. | ||
| I mean, I'm so glad I didn't fall into that trap. | ||
| Well, I got out of it. | ||
| I mean, I did three years of college, but it was not full-time most of the time. | ||
| But my feeling about what we're saying is that it's... | ||
| All that adversity can fuck you over or it can really help you. | ||
| It really depends on how you address it and how you get through it. | ||
| Obviously it helped you. | ||
| It helped you form your opinion. | ||
| Most people that I know that have had bizarre lives are interesting. | ||
| It gave me resolve. | ||
| It gave me resolve that knowing the finality of life at such an early age, I'm not living it for anybody else. | ||
| With that said, I want people to like me. | ||
| Part of my career choice is going to require that I have an audience that wants to hear what I have to say or at least trusts me and likes me enough to come back tomorrow. | ||
| But I'm not going to trade my desired experience on this planet for somebody else's judgment. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And the way I see you attacking life, well, you went to college just so that people wouldn't think you're a loser. | ||
| How important was it at some point that it wasn't that everybody else didn't think you were a loser, but that you realized that you weren't a loser? | ||
| When did you stop? | ||
| Well, I realized I wasn't a loser when I got really good at martial arts, but the problem was there was no money in it. | ||
| And so, the saying that I didn't want people to like me, or I didn't care if people liked me, well, I didn't care if people liked me in the realm of the most important thing in my life, which was competition, because it didn't matter. | ||
| Like, you didn't have to like me. | ||
| If I weigh, you know, 154 and you're in my weight class, you don't have to like me. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| The most important thing is this chaotic moment that happens when we have to bow to each other and then we fight. | ||
| So that was all I was focused on, because that's what matters. | ||
| That's the crazy thing. | ||
| When that didn't matter anymore, because then I wasn't doing it anymore, then I had to address my whole way of approaching life It was so aggressive and it was so weird. | ||
| It was so like that I was only focused on this one extreme thing and then I realized like oh like I missed out on like most high school experiences that a lot of people had. | ||
| I was traveling around the country fighting in tournaments my whole high school all through like 15, 16, 17 until I was 21 years old. | ||
| I was fighting everywhere. | ||
| That's all I did. | ||
| So all the stuff of partying, I wasn't partying. | ||
| If you party, then you're hungover. | ||
| If you're hungover, you get kicked in the face. | ||
| You have to train. | ||
| You're going to train and get kicked when you're hungover? | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| It's not worth it. | ||
| There's nothing worth it. | ||
| It's too scary. | ||
| So I didn't party. | ||
| I can count on one hand the number of times I got drunk or high when I was a teenager. | ||
| It was very few. | ||
| Very rare. | ||
| When you stepped outside of the ring or stepped off the mat, does all that other shit come rushing back? | ||
| No, because I felt like... | ||
| The thing that I learned from martial arts is that I can be... | ||
| There was a first time in my life where I didn't feel like a loser. | ||
| Like I felt like, oh, all I have to do is learn how to get really good at something. | ||
| Like put a lot of effort into it, a lot of thinking, and you can get really good at something. | ||
| And when you get really good at something, all of a sudden people admire you. | ||
| So instead of being a loser, When I was four-time Massachusetts state champion and I would enter into this weight class and I would see people get upset that they were going to have to fight me. | ||
| I'd be like, that's right, bitch. | ||
| Here it comes. | ||
| Because for me, it was exciting. | ||
| I was a somebody now. | ||
| I was something. | ||
| You know it's like when you don't have anything and then also you become a something like you realize like oh What did I do? | ||
| How did I get here? | ||
| I found a thing I found good instruction I found good training partners and I fucking fully completely dedicated my whole life to it because so although like my approach to it was so aggressive and probably not healthy in the realm of the rest of the world like I What I learned from that, though, is that by completely focusing on one thing, you can get better at it. | ||
| And you're not a loser. | ||
| You're just someone who hasn't... | ||
| You haven't done anything yet. | ||
| That's all it is. | ||
| You haven't figured out how to be good at something yet. | ||
| With no guarantees in life, nobody to just pad your path, you found something you were good at. | ||
| You were really good at it. | ||
| It satisfied that need in you. | ||
| How do you then leave that for something like the comedy stage, where again, there's no guarantees. | ||
| You can't be very good at it at the beginning. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was a lot of luck. | ||
| A lot of luck. | ||
| But why would you even do it? | ||
| Well, one of my good friends, this guy Steve Graham, talked me into doing that when I was like 15 years old. | ||
| He told me I was funny. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| Because what it was like, I would make people laugh in the locker room because we'd all be real nervous. | ||
| We'd have to go out there and spar or we'd be in a bus on the way to a tournament. | ||
| Everybody would be nervous. | ||
| And I would be the one who talked a lot of shit. | ||
| Because when we're nervous, like for me, it was an opportunity for me to get attention. | ||
| Like everybody's nervous, so I'm gonna say some fucked up things so everybody laughs. | ||
| And I realized that it's a good icebreaker and people enjoy it because they want some sort of a relief from the weirdness of knowing that you're gonna go fight in a full contact tournament. | ||
| And so I would be the guy that would crack people up by doing impressions of people and talking shit. | ||
| And so my friend Steve was like, dude, you really should be a fucking comedian. | ||
| And I was like, you think I'm funny because you like me. | ||
| I go, other people think I'm a fucking asshole. | ||
| But I went to an open mic night, and then I realized on an open mic night, I was like, oh, everybody sucks. | ||
| They all start out sucking. | ||
| I thought, you're Richard Pryor, or you're not. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It's like everything else. | ||
| And then I applied my martial arts mind to it. | ||
| I was like, oh, you just gotta be dedicated. | ||
| You gotta find out what that thing is. | ||
| But then I realized, no, there's so much emotional intelligence that I'm lacking. | ||
| Because all I've been thinking is kicking people in the face for most of my life. | ||
| So I had to rethink what I thought was funny, rethink how people thought of me, rethink why did people think of me this way. | ||
| Why was I nervous when I was around some people but relaxed around other people? | ||
| I had to try to work my way through it. | ||
| But what I was worried about was brain damage. | ||
| I was in a place in Boston where, especially when I was kickboxing, we would do some hard sparring. | ||
| Hard sparring. | ||
| They're basically fights. | ||
| We were fighting with 16-ounce gloves on. | ||
| And I remember watching guys deteriorate. | ||
| Guys had been doing it longer than me. | ||
| And then I'd seen them, you know, like maybe when I was 21, they were 30. And I'd see them start to slur their words. | ||
| And I'd see them, you know, like do fucked up things like drunk driving and, you know, getting in a fight with their girlfriend. | ||
| They get arrested. | ||
| And then they're back in the gym. | ||
| And I'm watching the deterioration. | ||
| And then there's still hard sparring. | ||
| And they take a lot of pride in the hard sparring. | ||
| And I would be laying in my bed, and one night I really remember in particular, I was laying in my bed with a headache. | ||
| My head was pounding. | ||
| Bang, bang, bang, just from being hit. | ||
| And I was realizing, like, I'm giving myself brain damage. | ||
| Well, someone else is doing it to me. | ||
| But my choices for sparring and fighting, I'm getting brain damage. | ||
| And I'm like, how do I know when I become that guy? | ||
| Does he know? | ||
| Are you 100% aware when the deterioration sets in? | ||
| Because the quality of my thinking, my ability to solve problems is what kept me sane. | ||
| My ability to work my way through things, my ability to obsess at things and figure out how to get better at them, that was the only thing that brought me any joy. | ||
| And all of a sudden, that's gonna go away and I'm relying on what? | ||
| Only my physical gifts? | ||
| But what about my mind? | ||
| Am I going to have a hard time communicating? | ||
| The quality of my thinking is going to suffer based on my choices? | ||
| And then I started really thinking about it. | ||
| I was like, I can't keep doing this. | ||
| And thank God for me at the time, there wasn't a viable professional option. | ||
| Because if there was a professional option for fighting for me, I had thought about boxing. | ||
| One of my good training partners actually became a middleweight boxing champion in New England, Dana Rosenblatt. | ||
| He was a good training partner of mine. | ||
| We sparred a lot. | ||
| And he went on to beat Vinnie Pazienza. | ||
| He beat Howard Davis Jr. He knocked out Howard Davis Jr. He was a legit pro boxer. | ||
| And when we started out together, he was a kickboxer. | ||
| And he had made a career in behind. | ||
| I was like, man, but that's... | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| I just knew that that road was fraught with peril and there wasn't a clear path. | ||
| It wasn't like when I was starting out doing Taekwondo where there was a clear path, like I wanted to get into the Olympic Games. | ||
| It wasn't a clear path with boxing or kickboxing. | ||
| That's probably what saved me. | ||
| Because if there was a clear path, I would have just dedicated myself to being a fighter and I would have never become a comedian. | ||
| Did you mourn it when you had to step out of the ring? | ||
| You mourn the excitement, the fear, the fear of competition, and then the fucking exhilarating feeling of victory. | ||
| The exhilarating feeling of victory is wild. | ||
| When you're at home and you're looking at this gold medal, you're like, holy fuck, I did it. | ||
| So for me, the person who was, like I said, I felt like I was a loser most of my life until I was 15 or 16 and I started getting good at martial arts. | ||
| I was like, oh my god, I'm good at something. | ||
| And this insecure feeling like a loser was replaced with this feeling of accomplishment and confidence and just a good feeling that I didn't really have in any other... | ||
| I didn't have that good of a feeling, the feeling of accomplishment, of victory. | ||
| So I was gonna do everything it took to keep that feeling. | ||
| That feeling was my new friend. | ||
| So that feeling was like, what does that feeling need to keep it going? | ||
| Oh, it needs me to train every fucking day? | ||
| Good. | ||
| I trained every fucking day. | ||
| I was teaching. | ||
| I mean, I was teaching at Boston University when I was 19. I was teaching an accredited Taekwondo course. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'd won the American Open by then. | ||
| I'd won the state championship four years in a row. | ||
| I was all in. | ||
| That's all I did. | ||
| Did comedy give you some of that feeling back? | ||
| No, comedy kicked me right in the dick and taught me... | ||
| Comedy doesn't give a fuck how good you are at kicking. | ||
| Comedy wants you to be funny. | ||
| And so it was a completely new challenge that made me rewire what I thought was necessary. | ||
| It's not just effort. | ||
| It's intelligent effort. | ||
| Just effort. | ||
| I'm just going to write all the time. | ||
| No, you have to think. | ||
| You have to think. | ||
| You can't just write. | ||
| You can't just perform. | ||
| You have to think about what are you performing. | ||
| You have to create your own material. | ||
| Because comedy is one of the weird things. | ||
| Comedy makes you. | ||
| You are a writer. | ||
| You're the producer. | ||
| You're the editor. | ||
| And you perform it. | ||
| You have to do the whole thing. | ||
| I'm like, oh god. | ||
| It's so difficult, but not unlike fighting. | ||
| You've got to punch, you've got to defend, you have to have footwork, you've got to be able to grapple a little bit, you've got to be able to win in the clinch, you've got to remember your game plan, you've got to best the other guys. | ||
| When you step off the stage and you killed, you got the last or the bitwork, is that comparable to winning a match? | ||
| No. | ||
| Not even close. | ||
| Not even close. | ||
| It's normal. | ||
| It's normal. | ||
| And you don't think about it too much because you think, got another show tomorrow night. | ||
| Get the notes out. | ||
| Enjoy it. | ||
| That was fun. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| But I almost don't... | ||
| The more successful I get, the less it's extraordinary. | ||
| And the more it's just like, that's what you're supposed to do, stupid. | ||
| Get back to work. | ||
| But fighting was always like... | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| I remember going back to my house and sitting in my room after a big tournament looking at a medal going, what the fuck, man? | ||
| And then I had VHS tapes, so I'd watch a VHS tape of me kicking someone's head off and going, what the fuck, man? | ||
| You're watching your VHS tapes instead of porn. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| I had porn too, but we it just seemed fake It seemed like because the stark contrast between being a loser and being a winner was like so immediate Because it was like I was a loser when I was 13 I was a winner when I was 16 and I was winning all the time It's like this is crazy and luckily I had physical talent like just natural born with certain amount of physical abilities and So that like when I learned, I didn't just learn, I was really fast. | ||
| I was really fast and I could hit really hard. | ||
| It was unusual. | ||
| So I'd found a thing and it wasn't just a thing that I could focus on. | ||
| It was also a thing that I had gifts for. | ||
| Is it the being a winner or the not being a loser that's driving you? | ||
| They're the same thing. | ||
| No, they're not, though. | ||
| Yeah, they're the same thing. | ||
| If you're not a loser, you're a winner. | ||
| And if you figure out a way to not be a loser, it doesn't mean that you're not going to lose. | ||
| You're going to lose. | ||
| But what is a loser? | ||
| A loser is a person who just gives into losing, and you never figure out how to get better. | ||
| It's not you win every time. | ||
| That's not a winner. | ||
| Like a winner is someone who is in the process of evolving and developing and getting better. | ||
| A loser is someone who quits. | ||
| You give up. | ||
| You can't take it. | ||
| You lay down. | ||
| So like when I would see that in other people, that would drive me crazy. | ||
| That was like the predatory... | ||
| I could smell it. | ||
| I would just smell the weakness. | ||
| I was like, ugh! | ||
| Like I couldn't be friends with people like that. | ||
| It would drive me nuts. | ||
| I'd want to pick on them, like a dog does. | ||
| That's an evolved way to look at it because the competitive nature of me, and we both talk to very competitive people all the time, every loss feels a little bit like a loser. | ||
| It's almost a reminder that at any point, well, I can go from being a winner to being a loser. | ||
| If I lost this... | ||
| What if I never win again? | ||
| I believe that and I think that most fighters feel like that and when a fighter loses his title, you know, like when Anthony Joshua lost to Usyk that night, I guarantee you he felt fucking terrible, right? | ||
| I'm not, but what did he do? | ||
| He immediately went back to the drawing board, immediately called for a rematch, immediately started searching for other trainers because he's not a loser. | ||
| He's a winner. | ||
| He just lost. | ||
| The difference is someone who just fucking lays down and says, woe is me, and you know, you can make that argument for Tyson Fury at one point in time, even though he didn't lose, he acted like a loser. | ||
| Like he was gonna commit suicide, he was drinking, he was fucked up, he had depression, anxiety, but, because he's not a loser, He figured out this is not good. | ||
| He's like, I gotta course correct. | ||
| And he did course correct and went back and became the fucking heavyweight champion of the world again. | ||
| Because he's not a loser. | ||
| He's a guy that lost, but it doesn't mean that you can't fuck up. | ||
| It doesn't mean that you can't make mistakes. | ||
| It doesn't mean you can't come up short in whatever you're attempting to do. | ||
| But figure it out. | ||
| Regroup. | ||
| Get back in there. | ||
| How'd you figure that out though? | ||
| Time. | ||
| Just time. | ||
| Just time. | ||
| Time and thinking. | ||
| You know, the lessons that you learn, that you apply from martial arts, you can apply to everything. | ||
| The things about really difficult physical pursuits that involve emotions like fighting. | ||
| And nothing involves emotions like fighting. | ||
| Someone beats you in a basketball game, they beat you. | ||
| You could always say, but I could fuck you up. | ||
| If we want to take this shit outside, talk a lot of shit, I'll smack you in front of the fucking... | ||
| In front of the coach. | ||
| I don't give a shit. | ||
| I'll fight you. | ||
| If I fight you, that's real beating. | ||
| If someone beats you up, you can't say, yeah, but I could fuck you up in basketball because no one cares. | ||
| No one cares. | ||
| Fighting is the end of the line. | ||
| It's the end of the line. | ||
| There's emotions involved in that that they're inescapable. | ||
| But you can't let them define you. | ||
| When you lose and you have those horrible emotions, you've got to use that as fuel and you've got to get back into it. | ||
| Oh man, I wish I could have thought my way through to that epiphany. | ||
| I'm there with you, but it was a hard road. | ||
| Yeah, it's a hard road. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's not easy. | |
| I burned my life down a few times. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| And each time I was like, well, this is it. | ||
| I guess it's the ashes for me. | ||
| Well, there's a lot of people out there that think that way right now, listening to this. | ||
| Yeah, and again, I hope there was something more grand in my character than simple vanity, but if I'm honest, to point to, like, well, I can't be here in the ass, it's all dirty, and I look like shit here. | ||
| I can't have this fat face. | ||
| Stomach, yeah, all these people. | ||
| I gotta quit drinking. | ||
| I can't die of lung cancer and be coughing in front of girls. | ||
| Oh my god, man, it's that. | ||
| I was like, I can't live the rest of my life at this level, so I find something else to get back on my feet and take what I've learned and take a little bit of what I can get out of the ashes and put that as a part of the next thing. | ||
| And so, you know, here I am, and hopefully this house doesn't catch on fire, and certainly I'm not the one with the match. | ||
| It's so difficult, man. | ||
| Yeah, it's difficult, but you're not going to catch your life on fire. | ||
| You're not. | ||
| You're not dumb. | ||
| It's like people define themselves by failures and successes, which is good and bad. | ||
| It's good because you can kind of get a tally and a running score of whether or not you're doing the right thing, but it's bad in that with each... | ||
| Thing that doesn't go right you have this feeling that nothing's gonna go right and this is it from here on out I'm just a fucking loser it's all gonna fall apart and some people that becomes They're fulfilling a self-fulfilling prophecy. | ||
| They decide that that's who they are, and they don't course-correct. | ||
| They don't regroup, and they never do. | ||
| They never rebuild. | ||
| That's unfortunate. | ||
| And they'll sabotage. | ||
| They'll believe, you can only get this far, and then if I get any place past that, then they end up destroying it themselves, because they can't see themselves in a different light, anything better than what they've conceived of prior. | ||
| Yeah, it's very limiting. | ||
| It's very scary, too, because when you get stuck like that, man, fuck, dude, it's so hard to get out. | ||
| It's so hard to get out when you're stuck like that. | ||
| It's so hard to, like, you'd have to find something that you're successful in and then sort of build up your confidence from there. | ||
| Yeah, it's something to live for bigger than your anxiety or bigger than your defeatist mentality. | ||
| That's hard, especially if you're a grown adult, right? | ||
| See, with me in martial arts, I found it when I was a kid. | ||
| So I didn't have a job. | ||
| I couldn't have a job. | ||
| It's not even legal. | ||
| It's not legal for me to have a job. | ||
| I have to work out. | ||
| So I had to do something. | ||
| But if you are an adult and then you have to pay your bills and you have a family and you're falling apart and you have an idea of some new thing you want to try but it's really risky, Yeah. | ||
| Ooh, that's hard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's tough. | |
| That's fucking hard. | ||
| That's the hardest. | ||
| Is broadcasting MMA a way you found back to the sport that maybe you thought for a while you were gone from completely? | ||
| No, because I never stopped training. | ||
| I always did something. | ||
| I started doing jujitsu. | ||
| I kickboxed for a while, even when I wasn't fighting. | ||
| I always trained. | ||
| I had a knee surgery that I had to get done in the early days of my comedy career. | ||
| I had a tore ACL. That's actually probably one of the things that kept me from fighting again, too, because I probably would have, from bombing, I would have at least tried a couple of times just to get a good feeling because I knew I could win some fights. | ||
| But when I went to different gyms, like in California, I was doing the Jet Center. | ||
| I was training there. | ||
| And then I started doing jujitsu later after that. | ||
| So I always did something. | ||
| And then the UFC needed a backstage interviewer. | ||
| And there's just sheer luck. | ||
| My manager, my comedy manager, was friends with one of the guys who was the producer of the UFC, this early producer, this guy, Campbell McLaren, who's a great guy. | ||
| And he hired me. | ||
| He's like, do you like the sport? | ||
| I go, I fucking love the sport. | ||
| Because I was watching like the UFC on, you know, it was on like satellite. | ||
| It wasn't even on cable back then. | ||
| I used to have to get like the red box, like the, had to get the jimmy little box so I could watch it on the scraggly channel. | ||
| It was banned from cable. | ||
| I got DirecTV specifically because that was the only way you could get UFC fights. | ||
| Because they banned it from cable. | ||
| That's how crazy it is. | ||
| And now it's on ESPN+. You get it on your fucking phone. | ||
| It's on ESPN, regular ESPN. People were getting their arms broke. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| People were getting fucked up. | ||
| With their heads split open. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Bro, the first events that I went to live when I worked as a post-fight interviewer, you didn't even have to wear gloves. | ||
| You could wear wrestling shoes, bare knuckles, punch people in the dick. | ||
| Guys in there with geese and, like, intentionally breaking arms. | ||
| Like, it was no... | ||
| You could give guys wedgies. | ||
| For real. | ||
| Was that a thing? | ||
| Yeah, you could grab guys by their cup and, like, yank their fucking... | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Yeah, somebody had their cup broke in a match. | ||
| Valid Ishmael, uh, Valigi, he's, uh, this, uh, like, legendary jiu-jitsu guy. | ||
| He was fighting, and it was, like, UFC 13 or some shit. | ||
| I forget which one it was, but it was early, early in the day. | ||
| And the dude he was fighting was, like, literally, like, giving him a wedgie while he's fighting. | ||
| Well, like, half his butt cheek was hanging out of his, uh, his shorts. | ||
| God, did he tap? | ||
| No, he beat the fuck out of the dude. | ||
| I don't remember who won the fight, actually, now that I say that, but he's a guy who had a jiu-jitsu match with Hoist Gracie on the beach in Rio de Janeiro when Hoist Gracie had won the UFC and he choked Hoist Gracie to sleep on the beach. | ||
| That's not easy to do. | ||
| Oh my god, it was incredible. | ||
| See if you can find that. | ||
| W-A-L-I-D. When you say on the beach, what do you mean on the beach? | ||
| They set up mats on the beach. | ||
| I think it was at Copacabana Beach. | ||
| And then they surrounded it with just spectators. | ||
| No octagon, no fence. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| This is them. | ||
| That's literally sand. | ||
| That's sand around the mat? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| There's a match and then there's sand. | ||
| And this is... | ||
| They're literally fighting on the fucking beach. | ||
| And this is BJJ history, right? | ||
| Because this is... | ||
| For them, and it says that in the title of the match, and this is 100% true, because this was also different schools of thought in terms of the strategy of jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Carlson Gracie was a hard style. | ||
| That was where Valid Ismail came from. | ||
| And Hoyce was with his dad, Ilio Gracie, which is a more technical style. | ||
| And Valid, at this point in time, he was a fucking animal, man. | ||
| Physically super, super strong guy. | ||
| And came from this real aggressive team, Carlson Gracie team. | ||
| And Carlson Gracie was also one of the early pioneers of jujitsu no-holds-barred matches. | ||
| So he had no-holds-barred matches, and he beat guys that Elio Gracie, who's Hoyce's dad, lost to, like Waldemar Santana. | ||
| So they brought in Carlson to beat him. | ||
| Carlson was like one of the greatest jiu-jitsu fighters that ever lived. | ||
| And that was the first gym that I started out was actually Carlson Gracie's place. | ||
| So when he, well actually I did Hickson's first, but I only did it for one class. | ||
| But when he choked out Hoist Gracie, he got him with what's called a clock choke. | ||
| And put Hoist Gracie to sleep. | ||
| It was... | ||
| Is that what we're looking... | ||
| Is that what... | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| No, not yet. | ||
| They're still scrambling right now. | ||
| But he's... | ||
| Well, actually, he might have a hand on the collar right now. | ||
| Yeah, he did. | ||
| He's got it already. | ||
| He's got it. | ||
| He put him to sleep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh! | ||
| How do they even... | ||
| That was it, yeah. | ||
| So he did have it already. | ||
| How do they even see that he's asleep down there? | ||
| I haven't done the gi clock choke in a while, but the way the gi clock choke works, you get a grip on this like this, like here's a person's collar, you grip here, and then this hand goes underneath the armpit, and you spin like this. | ||
| And when you spin, you have his neck wrapped up in his collar, and then you have your arm on the other side. | ||
| So it's like if you had a rope. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Watch how he does it. | ||
| So if you watch how he rolls, he's rolling. | ||
| It's hard to tell because it wasn't the best cinematography. | ||
| But he's got his one arm is wrapped completely. | ||
| See that? | ||
| His left arm... | ||
| Is under and attached to his neck, and the right arm is under and attached to his collar, and he puts him to sleep. | ||
| Yeah, he's lucky. | ||
| This was fucking huge in the jiu-jitsu world. | ||
| Because there was a... | ||
| The jiu-jitsu world is pretty united now. | ||
| Like, everybody's... | ||
| There's competition, but everyone is just, like, supportive of the fact that jiu-jitsu is this amazing martial art. | ||
| But back then, there was, like, some serious factions. | ||
| There were schools of thought. | ||
| There was teams that hated other teams. | ||
| They would fight on sight if they saw each other. | ||
| Like gangs. | ||
| Oh man, like gangs. | ||
| Yeah, there was a lot of like dojo wars back then where guys from one school would show up at another guy's school and want to fight. | ||
| Like an actual kung fu movie. | ||
| That's what every kung fu movie is based on. | ||
| Those were real, dude. | ||
| We had those in the Taekwondo days too. | ||
| Guys would come in from other gyms. | ||
| They'd want to spar right away. | ||
| They wanted to fight. | ||
| They wanted to come and fight and you would fight, you know, full contact in the middle of the gym with someone you just met. | ||
| And somebody coming to your gym asking for a fight is mad disrespectful. | ||
| That was the old days. | ||
| They all did it. | ||
| It was Dojo Wars. | ||
| They all did it back then. | ||
| This great video is called Gracie in Action. | ||
| And the Gracie in Action videos, a lot of those videos are... | ||
| Someone would come to their gym and talk some shit, and they'll go, do you want to fight? | ||
| And they're like, I want to fight you right now, motherfucker. | ||
| Like, okay, great, we're going to set up a camera. | ||
| And they would set up a camera, and this guy would come in and try to do some kung fu, and then someone like Hoyce, or Hickson, or Horian, or any of these Gracies would take them down and fuck them up. | ||
| And Horian, in his infinite wisdom, used that as an advertisement for jujitsu. | ||
| See if you can find some Gracie in action, because first of all, Horian has that beautiful Portuguese-Brazilian jiu-jitsu accent. | ||
| His original language is Portuguese, so the way he talks, everything sounds so smooth. | ||
| So he's explaining to you, the jiu-jitsu practitioner takes him to the ground easily and submits him with a choke. | ||
| These videos, this is Horry and Gracie back in the day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
See, it's beautiful, right? | |
| Straight out of Scarface. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For us to introduce the first series on the basics of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. | |
| I feel confident that the simple techniques that you will learn on these videos will increase your effectiveness on self defense. | ||
| By the way, let me just say this. | ||
| Jorge and Gracie back in the day, when they made this video, he offered money to fight Mike Tyson in Playboy magazine. | ||
| He said he'd fight Mike Tyson in a no-holds-barred match for a million dollars. | ||
| Yeah, no thanks. | ||
| Yeah, no thanks, but if he got a hold of him and grabbed him and dragged him to the ground, Mike Tyson would be fucked. | ||
| I'm saying no thanks for Mike Tyson. | ||
| On his behalf, no thanks. | ||
| So he was trying to find ways to popularize Jiu Jitsu and he wound up starting the Ultimate Fighting Championship. | ||
| Horian Gracie is the mastermind behind the UFC. So when the UFC is taking place this weekend and I'm doing commentary, None of that shit would have happened if it wasn't for that man that you just saw in that video. | ||
| See if you can find the Gracie in action. | ||
| Just title Gracie in action videos. | ||
| I think that the Gracies is what got me so addicted to the UFC back in the day when I had the hotbox. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those are the guys breaking people's arms and shit, right? | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| Go back and I'll tell you. | ||
| That one right there where it says combatives in action. | ||
| See right there? | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Perfect example. | ||
| See, this guy's got fucking pants on. | ||
| Thinks he's a badass. | ||
| And he's going to get strangled. | ||
| And there's a shit ton of these and they're all like really grainy VHS tapes where these people didn't know what they were doing and they thought they were badasses and they went and tried to have a street fight and now he's tapping. | ||
| But there's a ton of these. | ||
| Well, that's actually Henner. | ||
| Henner Gracie, when he's just doing this and showing... | ||
| But this is an actual challenge match. | ||
| But there's a ton of them, man. | ||
| They have a shitload of them. | ||
| And they basically accumulated a database of showing that they have a superior martial art. | ||
| So it was a style war. | ||
| Like, okay, we fight this way, you fight that way. | ||
| The early UFCs were basically an infomercial for Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It was basically an infomercial for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu eventually. | ||
| And then it became an infomercial for the power of steroids and wrestling. | ||
| Ground and pound. | ||
| Then it was like Muay Thai, kickboxing, leg kicks. | ||
| And there was a lot of different styles that sort of showed what they could do until it became what it is now, where it's like just fighting. | ||
| Like the best fighting. | ||
| What's your style? | ||
| How would you characterize your style? | ||
| Well, I started off as a striker. | ||
| I started off kickboxing and taekwondo, but then I have a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. | ||
| I learned jiu-jitsu later in life. | ||
| I have a black belt in gi, and I have a black belt in no gi. | ||
| So two different kinds of jiu-jitsu. | ||
| It's both Brazilian jiu-jitsu, but one, you're wearing that... | ||
| And the other one, you don't grab clothes at all. | ||
| The other one is no gi. | ||
| And in no gi, it's just about clinching and submission holds and position dominance. | ||
| It's more like you're using wrestling control and then applying submissions to it. | ||
| Nobody in modern MMA would be wearing a gi anymore, right? | ||
| Some guys do in other organizations. | ||
| They still allow them. | ||
| In Japan, they used to allow guys to fight with the gi. | ||
| And it was a huge advantage for the guy that's used to using a gi because you can do a lot of chokes with it. | ||
| If a guy comes at you and he has a gi, you're going to grab it. | ||
| You don't even know why. | ||
| If he's trying to grab ahold of you, you're going to hold onto his clothes because you think, oh, yeah, well, I'll fucking grab your clothes. | ||
| Yeah, that's what they do every day. | ||
| So if you're a guy who doesn't train with a gi, and you fought Hoist Gracie back in the day, Hoist would just close the distance, and people would just grab him. | ||
| They couldn't help themselves. | ||
| They just grabbed that gi, and the next thing, boom, they're on their back. | ||
| Boom, their arm's getting fucked up. | ||
| Boom, they're getting triangled. | ||
| You said that you thought about returning to jujitsu when you bombed on stage. | ||
| No, that wasn't jujitsu. | ||
| That was kickboxing. | ||
| Yeah, because I just wanted to do something that I was good at, because I sucked at comedy. | ||
| What was that? | ||
| It was just like bombing in comedy, like a depression? | ||
| Bombing is like, I always say it's like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother. | ||
| But I think there's someone... | ||
| I can't risk it. | ||
| What the fuck are you talking about? | ||
| There's someone out there that probably likes sucking a thousand dicks in front of his mom. | ||
| Like, I'm doing this because of you, mom! | ||
|
unidentified
|
99! | |
| 100! | ||
| There's someone out there that would like sucking a thousand dicks. | ||
| No one likes bombing. | ||
| No one likes it. | ||
| It's just utter failure. | ||
| You'd have to hate yourself so much to like bombing. | ||
| If you like bombing, you'd probably hate yourself so much you shouldn't be alive. | ||
| Well, okay, so let's call that depression. | ||
| It's not fun. | ||
| But it's just a loss. | ||
| It's just a big loss. | ||
| The thing about fighting is if you lose to someone, it fucking sucks. | ||
| It fucking sucks. | ||
| It eats at you, and it drives you to get better, and it just rematch. | ||
| But there's something about bombing on stage. | ||
| They don't like you. | ||
| It's not like your performance sucked. | ||
| They don't like you. | ||
| Like, I don't like you. | ||
| Like, whatever you are sucks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck. | |
| Boy, yeah, you're right. | ||
| I gotta stop reading the comment sections. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| Don't read the fucking comments. | ||
| How do you deal with that? | ||
| I mean, everybody bombs. | ||
| As you said, you can't win them all. | ||
| You gotta deal with all losses as an opportunity to learn and grow. | ||
| But then, before you were this wise... | ||
| I wasn't that wise back then, but I was wise enough to know that inherently. | ||
| And I just had to regroup, deal with it, suck it up, and keep going. | ||
| And it wasn't easy. | ||
| That's the thing that I think makes a lot of... | ||
| Potentially really good comics quit is they can't take the pain of sucking and there's no structure, right? | ||
| There's no like if you want to learn music you can go to Juilliard, right? | ||
| You can go to there's people that teach guitar lessons. | ||
| You can go and you can learn, you know You can watch videos and you can pick up technique and you can learn how to play saxophone It's it's it's available. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| There's no one could teach you to be funny And I can't teach you because your style might be different than Donnell's style. | ||
| Donnell's style is gonna be different than my style. | ||
| My style is gonna be different than David Tell's style. | ||
| David Tell's style is gonna be different than Jim Brewer's style. | ||
| Everybody's got a different style. | ||
| There's no style dojos for comedy. | ||
| There's nothing. | ||
| There's no classes. | ||
| The classes are all taught by has-beens or wannabes, right? | ||
| Most of the time. | ||
| I'm sure there's some professional comedians out there that teach comedy classes. | ||
| I don't want to discourage them or disparage them. | ||
| But most of what I've seen, when I see people teach comedy, they're not good at it in the first place. | ||
| And they're applying, like... | ||
| I've seen a few classes where they're applying things that probably would be detrimental to your overall career, like cookie-cutter, formulaic versions of how to write comedy. | ||
| But what they do do is at least they allow people to get on stage for the first time. | ||
| So that might be enough. | ||
| They just get their beak wet, get them moving, and then next thing you know, they're actually doing comedy. | ||
| And they're showing up at open mic nights, and they're part of the community, and they're trying, and they're writing and getting better. | ||
| When you showed up at that open mic, the first time in front of people who were not your friends already. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Did you bomb? | ||
| I didn't bomb the first time, but I did not have a good set. | ||
| The second set I ever had was pretty good. | ||
| I had a bunch of laughs, and that was super encouraging. | ||
| I didn't bomb, I think, until maybe the fourth or fifth set. | ||
| I had a bad one. | ||
| I was like, oh, I didn't know that could happen. | ||
| But none of them were good. | ||
| None of them were like, I'll tell you, my material was polished. | ||
| But I got some laughs. | ||
| I got some laughs. | ||
| To the point where, okay, I see the road. | ||
| I don't know how far I have to go, but I see the path, and I think I'm going to keep going. | ||
| It was one of those things. | ||
| Like goal-oriented? | ||
| You see the path to being a comic on TV with a special or a sitcom, like, oh, this is my road to somewhere? | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| No, I thought I could make a living. | ||
| I think I could be a professional. | ||
| I think I could be a professional. | ||
| That's what I thought. | ||
| I saw professionals in town in Boston, and I was like, that guy's pretty funny. | ||
| I wonder what it's like to be him. | ||
| He's a professional. | ||
| He makes a living just telling jokes. | ||
| He doesn't have to deliver newspapers or do construction or whatever the fuck I was doing at the time. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Were you doing other jobs at the time? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| In the early days, for sure, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, the early days, I was teaching for a little while, but then I realized I couldn't teach and do comedy at the same time because I wasn't into it. | ||
| I wasn't just teaching, I was teaching and taking people to tournaments. | ||
| So I would take students to tournaments and I would coach them, and I was realizing I wasn't in it. | ||
| I wasn't in it mentally. | ||
| Before, I was obsessed. | ||
| And if someone was a student and they were obsessed too, I would take them to tournaments. | ||
| I'd help them fight. | ||
| I'd train them. | ||
| There was quite a few people that I'd taken, even young people, that I'd taken and brought them up through the ranks and gave them higher belts and brought them to tournaments. | ||
| I couldn't do that anymore. | ||
| I didn't care. | ||
| I wasn't thinking about that anymore. | ||
| All I was thinking about was comedy. | ||
| And I was trying to get good at comedy, so I had to quit. | ||
| And I did everything else. | ||
| I just delivered pizzas. | ||
| I drove limos, construction. | ||
| I worked for a private investigator for a while. | ||
| I did a bunch of things. | ||
| What did you do for a private investigator? | ||
| It was a guy that became a very good friend of mine who died a few years ago. | ||
| Dynamite Dickless Dave Dolan. | ||
| He was the best. | ||
| Probably the funniest guy I've ever met that wasn't a comic. | ||
| Like, definitely the funniest guy I've ever met. | ||
| Did he name himself that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, well, he's hilarious. | ||
| He would leave messages on my voicemail. | ||
| Dynamite Dickless Dave Dolan here. | ||
| He was a character. | ||
| But he had lost his license from drinking and driving. | ||
| And he just needed a driver. | ||
| And it said, like, private investigator's assistant. | ||
| I'm like, well, that looks like a fun job. | ||
| So he hired me as a private investigator's assistant. | ||
| I can already see you in the fedora, like the gumshoe, the smoky door with Rogan on the front. | ||
| You have to wear normal clothes. | ||
| The whole idea is you've got to blend in. | ||
| A lot of it was insurance, like busting people that were pretending they were hurt, but they were really working under the table somewhere else. | ||
| They were taking insurance money. | ||
| Because this is pre-internet, you know? | ||
| People could get away with that shit. | ||
| There was a lot of that. | ||
| No, like cheating spouses? | ||
| One of those. | ||
| There was one of those that was pretty significant. | ||
| I wasn't involved in that case too much, because I think Dave had already got his license back by then, but my God, he loved telling me about it. | ||
| I would help him sometimes. | ||
| I would go with him sometimes if you needed a certain person, because Dave and I stayed friends. | ||
| And it was just by sheer coincidence, Dave was the cousin of a guy named Bill Downs, and Bill Downs was one of the owners of the Comedy Connection. | ||
| Sheer coincidence. | ||
| So when I start working for him, he tells me that his cousin owns the fucking Comedy Connection. | ||
| So I saw him at the comedy club, too. | ||
| He was a guy who quit drinking like that, too. | ||
| I was always super impressed by that. | ||
| He had that one fucking car accident, ran from the cops, got a DUI, realized, what the fuck am I doing, and just quit. | ||
| He didn't go to meetings. | ||
| He didn't fucking, oh, I got my coin. | ||
| None of that. | ||
| He didn't give a fuck. | ||
| He just quit. | ||
| He goes, that wasn't for me. | ||
| I had a good time, but I'm done. | ||
| And he never drank again. | ||
| That's admirable. | ||
| That's admirable. | ||
| I think that might have been my weed experience, believe it or not. | ||
| Dude, it's already 5 o'clock. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| Yeah, we've been talking forever. | ||
| How long have we been talking? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He said... | |
| How long? | ||
| 3.20? | ||
| 3 hours and 20 minutes. | ||
| How crazy is that? | ||
| That's a good mark. | ||
| I like 320. That's a good way to end. | ||
| Till this day, it's available on Luminary. | ||
| Is it available on anything else? | ||
| Well, yeah, it's going to be on Apple Podcasts. | ||
| You can get that show there, and you can subscribe to Luminary. | ||
| But, Joe, I have one more question for you. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We went down this road. | ||
| I want to know what or whom or how you would characterize your opponent in life. | ||
| Me. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I mean, there's also stuff on the outside, but ultimately you're dealing with the way you attack it. | ||
| So, why do you attack it a certain way? | ||
| Is it the right way? | ||
| Or are you tricking yourself into thinking it's the right way because it's more comfortable that way? | ||
| Is it all your fault, but you want to blame other people? | ||
| Like, deciphering me. | ||
| Is the hardest. | ||
| And then discipline, you know, because you have adversity in life, but it's not like I have adversity all day, every day. | ||
| I'm dealing with me all day, every day. | ||
| Every fucking day, it's me. | ||
| The alarm clock goes off at 7 a.m., and me is like, fuck that, I want to sleep. | ||
| So I gotta fight me. | ||
| Hey pussy, get up. | ||
| I gotta press the stop. | ||
| Get up. | ||
| Wake up. | ||
| Start moving. | ||
| Walk. | ||
| Drink water. | ||
| Go pee. | ||
| Get going. | ||
| Alright, get to the gym. | ||
| Like, well, maybe I don't have to go to the gym today. | ||
| That's me. | ||
| Every day it's me. | ||
| Fighting with that me guy. | ||
| So me is 100% my biggest opponent. | ||
| Obviously there's external forces and things that are, you know, points of adversity that you learn from in life, failures, but a lot of it was my fault. | ||
| And so, like, a lot of that, other than, you know, the things that I couldn't handle when I was a child, or rather that I didn't have any control over when I was a child, it's all me. | ||
| It's weakness. | ||
| Yeah, weakness. | ||
| I heard what you said. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the one through line for all of it was that you're constantly combating weakness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it makes perfect sense why you look like a monster when I hug you. | ||
| You're like... | ||
| You're like a tree trunk. | ||
| You are disciplined enough to have this experience, the Joe Rogan experience, do MMA, UFC broadcasting, have a comedy career, have all of these things going on simultaneously. | ||
| I still have to compartmentalize the stuff that I'm doing, which isn't all that different from what you're doing, but clearly not at this level, so I can appreciate that. | ||
| How much discipline it takes to put a life like yours together and execute it so excellently. | ||
| Well thank you. | ||
| That's very nice of you. | ||
| The fact that every day and all day you best your weakness? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Might be the greatest victory of all in life. | ||
| Like, if you can beat the weakness inside you, well then all this is possible. | ||
| Yeah, but you really don't even win. | ||
| You just win for the day. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| And the weakness is like, see you tomorrow, bitch. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| See you tomorrow. | ||
| Oh, by the way, you're getting older. | ||
| One of the weaknesses is thinking that you won. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Oh, that's enough. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I also do it for mental health like the working out stuff is like I Need my workouts to be so much harder than anything else I ever do in life because it makes everything else easy So the workouts are so goddamn brutal that everything else is easy. | ||
| So a lot of like my build is a It's a factor of the work. | ||
| It's not like a goal to like be built like a brick shit house It's like the work requires So much strain and so much effort. | ||
| And the end result is you just look jacked. | ||
| But it's just... | ||
| I'm doing it for mental health more than anything. | ||
| It's like I need it to be hard. | ||
| It can't be easy. | ||
| I can't... | ||
| I'm not a stroller. | ||
| I don't stroll. | ||
| I'm not out strolling. | ||
| I'm just going to go for a walk. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not strolling. | ||
| Even that... | ||
| Is an example of you beating the weakness in your mind that, well, this is good enough. | ||
| I could do this level of conditioning and stay in shape, but I'm not challenged anymore. | ||
| There is the guy who does that and just maintains, and then the guy who you are that continuously adds one more plate because that makes it just hard enough to know that boy couldn't get any harder and I still did it. | ||
| That's strength, bro. | ||
| There's a little bit of that to it, too, but it's not even that I don't feel like a sense of satisfaction when it's over. | ||
| I just feel like, okay, we shored up the gates for the day. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Even a great fucking workout, I feel physically good, I feel relaxed, and I feel comfortable, but I never feel accomplished. | ||
| I never feel like, yeah, gotcha, bitch. | ||
| No. | ||
| Every day, it's like, you gotta conquer that inner bitch. | ||
| Every day. | ||
| That's the one. | ||
| The inner bitch. | ||
| The inner bitch is a monster. | ||
| You gotta fight that inner bitch till this day. | ||
| That's the real opponent. | ||
| When I say me, it's my inner bitch. | ||
| We all have an inner bitch. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's what we do until this day. | ||
| I have t-shirts that say it. | ||
| Conquer your inner bitch. | ||
| I've been saying that forever. | ||
| Yeah, you go to higherprimate.com. | ||
| I have... | ||
| I have a lot of faith in that if you could do something that you find that's very difficult and it tests you and it makes you rise, it makes you push. | ||
| It makes the rest of the life easier. | ||
| I really believe that. | ||
| And I think that's a philosophy that a lot of people should embrace. | ||
| It's not my way. | ||
| You could do it other ways. | ||
| You could do it through running. | ||
| You could do it through yoga. | ||
| You could do it through meditation. | ||
| But you should do something that's hard. | ||
| I don't think people should be living a life where everything's easy. | ||
| That's a nonsense life. | ||
| I don't think that's good for you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And comfort and being able to just continuously do what you're good at and not stretch, not go into that other space where it might not work, like the skill set that you have and have home. | ||
| That's what I had to do when COVID hit and boxing stopped. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was the premise for that show till this day. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| And that's what we did here today. | ||
| The conversation you and I had is much like the structure of that show. | ||
| And finding that inner bitch as your opponent is what I had the opportunity to do with my other friends as we had a discussion not unlike ours. | ||
| And it required me to go outside of my comfort zone, not talk to boxers, but talk to people who I thought I knew and see if the conversation there about the passion that I have for understanding the fight in them Could be made something that was interesting to everybody, including the guests. | ||
| And I think that we did that here today, and we did that 15 times until this day. | ||
| Indeed, my friend. | ||
| Luminary is where you find it. | ||
| Apple Podcasts is also where you can get it. | ||
| Joe Rogan, thank you for this experience. | ||
| My pleasure, brother. | ||
| It's always great. | ||
| We'll do it again. | ||
| We'll do it again, for sure. | ||
| Very kind and generous. | ||
| And as are you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. |
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