Radio Rahim and Joe Rogan dissect how online criticism—like the Hollywood Bowl incident targeting Dave Chappelle—fosters toxic discourse, warning that even casual threats escalate with unstable individuals. Rahim’s Till This Day podcast, inspired by Chappelle, explores adversity through raw interviews like Jon Stewart’s regret over failing to combat media disinformation or Mike Tyson’s emotional struggles, contrasting corporate news with YouTube’s unfiltered, introspective platforms. Both critique boxing’s fragmented titles but praise elite fighters—Shakur Stevenson’s precision, Katie Taylor vs. Serrano’s dominance, and Canelo Alvarez’s heavyweight ambitions—while debating Jake Paul’s spectacle-driven "prize fighting." Their shared fatherless upbringings shaped survival mentalities, with Rogan’s martial arts obsession (including Carlson Gracie vs. Gracie dojo wars) and Rahim’s rejection of external validation proving resilience is the ultimate measure of success, not just wins. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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?
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.