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Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman at UFC 279


Chapters

0:0 UFC backstage
2:54 Weigh-Ins
5:44 Pool hall
7:3 Anthony Cumia
8:17 UFC fights

Transcript

Is that a camera? Yeah. That's incredible. DJI, look at it. Is that better than your phone? Yeah. Maybe because you don't have a knife? It's incredible quality. Yeah. Here with Joe Rogan at the weigh-ins. Oh, hi. You get nervous before these things? No, I get excited, though. How do you prepare for all the names you have to read off?

I have to get them written out phonetically. When you look at these guys, do you see excitement? Do you see fear? What do you usually see? The fighters? Yeah, when they stay up. You never see fear. You saw fear when Anderson Silva was in his prime. You saw some fear.

When guys reach this unstoppable level, you see some fear. But you don't generally just see anxiety and tension. You see guys getting fired up for a fight. Intensity? Intensity, for sure. Who is the most intense guy you've seen at the weigh-ins? Ever? Conor gets pretty fucking intense, but so does Khabib.

It all depends on whether or not they have real animosity towards each other. Nate Diaz is probably somebody that gets pretty intense. Oh, yeah, he's going to get intense. That's going to be a good one. I don't know how they're going to separate him from Hamza and him from everyone else.

You think it's going to get crazy today? It could get crazy. And what are you going to do? Are you going to be all right? I'm going to get the fuck out of there. If shit gets wild, I'm not getting in the scrap. You're going to watch me look like a coward.

Also here with Shane Gillis, you're going to step up if shit goes down? I'll get in there. I might have to get in and get knocked out by a 120-pounder. Do you ever lose your voice with these things? No. No, I yell all the time. You get it. Because of doing comedy, my voice is pretty strong.

This is like such a surreal moment in human history, the war of combat. Like, more innovation has happened in combat in the past 20 years than maybe ever in human history. You're at the center of it. Yeah. Does that hit you? At which point does that hit you? Before big fights, it's always like goosebumps.

It starts building up? Yeah. Like before Leon Edwards and Kamaru Usmano, it's like, "Whew, here we go." You know, your whole body just tingles. All your skin tingles. And then the shock might happen like it did in that fight. Oh, yeah. When something crazy happens, your whole body just jolts.

It's so wild, you know? You see people standing up and screaming, "Oh, my God," behind you. And then you become a meme. Yeah, I'm a meme often. But the last one, when Leon Edwards knocked out Kamaru, you see me and DC freaking out behind us. Tony Hinchcliffe goes, "Oh, my God!" That's amazing.

It was amazing. All right, brother. Thank you for giving us a behind-the-scenes look. My pleasure. Here we go! Give it up for Hunter! Sean Shelby and Nick Mayhem! Last night was extraordinary! We had a lot of changes in this car, but I think it's even better! How do you feel after that?

It was exciting! Very intense. It was, uh... It's gonna be one of those cards where it's like, no one prepared for that opponent. So you have three fights that have been completely reworked. And so these guys have to adjust, and, you know, there's very different opponents. Okay, well, what happened was Hamzat Shumayev didn't make weight, and he missed weight by eight and a half pounds, which is so crazy that they wouldn't let them fight each other.

So they had to move that. So now you have Li Jinglian versus Daniel Rodriguez. Rodriguez was supposed to be fighting Kevin Holland. And then Hamzat was supposed to be fighting Nate Diaz, missed weight by a ton. But honestly, Tony Ferguson versus Nate Diaz is a much better fight. Much more competitive fight.

And Hamzat versus Kevin Holland is a real test for Hamzat. Kevin Holland is a big guy. He fought at 185 pounds before. He was very successful, knocked people out, including Joaquin Buckley at 185. You think Holland is ready for the fight? That's a real test. It's chaos. It's a surprise.

It's a totally different kind of fight. He's a chaos kind of guy, though. I mean, I think it's an exciting fight. I'm excited about it. You think Hamzat is ready? Well, I don't like the fact that he missed weight. That's a lot to miss weight by. So there's, like, two things could happen.

He missed weight because he didn't prepare properly, which usually indicates either that he was sick or injured, or he didn't want to make the weight. You know, maybe he was, like, so worked up by all this Nate Diaz stuff that he didn't want to get in the sauna. He didn't want to cut the weight.

Who knows what's going on. We don't know. We really don't know. You'd have to get friends with him where he could confide in you and he'd tell you the truth. It was amazing to see you do this in person and amazing to see the fighters in person. It's intense.

Tomorrow's going to be even crazier. So you have to know what the angles are. So, like, this shot right here, this is a perfect example. This seems like an easy shot. But you know what's not an easy shot? It's getting to that ball down there. Yeah. So that ball, when the ball's down there like that, like kind of in the middle, but not in front of that hole or that hole.

There's only two places to be on that hole. You have to be on the right side of the ball or the left side of the ball. Now, when you have something like this that's right in front of the hole, it seems like, well, that's an easy shot. But you have to make sure that you have the right speed to hit this here.

And then it's got to go like this and then all the way down to here. Oh, so two walls. It's got to bounce on this one, that one. All right. Basically three rails, maybe. Three rails. And that little, like, a tap on the other one. But it's all like a gentle touch.

Yeah. Got it. Wow, that's strong. That's strong. See the difference? Yeah. It looks like that's easy, but that's not easy at all. That's like one of the harder shots is to get yourself where you're in a perfect position to make the next ball. How'd you get into oping, Anthony?

I was in bands with my brother, and I would write song parodies about everything that was happening in the news. And the OJ thing, you might have heard of that, happened, and I wrote a song parody about it. Opie played it on his show, WBAB on Long Island, and people loved it.

And he goes, "Hey, can you come in and do it live?" And me and my brother were like, "Yeah, I came in, did it live." And I thought this was my shot. I just poured everything out. I started doing impressions. I was commenting on the news. And Opie goes, "Dude, that was really good.

Why don't you come in next week again?" And it just snowballed from there. We got an offer to go to Boston, and I never looked back. I threw my sheet metal worker tools out on '95 on my way up to Boston. It's all about knowing the cue ball speed and knowing how a ball is going to come off the ball when it contacts it at an angle.

And you get completely obsessive because it's so hard to predict. And then the more you do it, the more you get muscle memory, and the more you kind of understand where the ball is going. So you're not even thinking too much. You're using intuition. There's a lot of thinking and a lot of intuition.

It's like both things are happening at the same time. It's super complicated. It's fascinating.