Joe Rogan | Muhammad Ali's Psychological Warfare

You know what's good too is the rap. You know, when guys are going to fight, you know, like... Rap it on the edge. Well, no, it's like I used to beat guys like you up on the way to a fight. Practice falling, asshole. You know, all that shit. I like that. Just like in basketball, you know, that the... Trash talk. Trash and talk, yeah. Sometimes it works. There's a thing about when someone gets inside your head, someone's really mean to you. I was kind of thinking that. When you see Liston and Ali, right? Mm-hmm. How could, like, it look like Liston was like afraid of him. How could he be? Well, if you go back to that fight... You know, he's stronger. The reason why, and this is Ali did this on purpose, he acted like a crazy person. Because he's like that Sonny Liston was a bully and Sonny Liston was a big scary man. And what he felt like Sonny Liston would be afraid of is a crazy person. Someone who wasn't afraid of him. So in all the press conferences and all the different things leading up to the fight, he would scream at him. He would show up at Sonny Liston's house and honk the horn in the middle of the night and get on his lawn and scream and yell at him. Like, he did a lot of crazy shit to Sonny Liston to fuck with him psychologically. He wanted Sonny Liston... He did. He did it psychologically, didn't he? He wanted Sonny Liston to think that he was a crazy person and that, you know, that he would never stop. Yeah. And that's, I mean, he essentially did it. There was one point in time when they were... See, we just... Let me hear some of this. Oh, yeah. He made him know that he wasn't scared of him. He let him know he wasn't scared of him. And they were doing his blood pressure, and his blood pressure was so high, his heart rate was so high, they weren't going to let him fight. They're like, what are you doing? Sonny? No, no. Alys. He had to calm himself down because he got himself worked up into a lather. He was just so, so angry and so, you know, so hyped up trying to act like a crazy person that when they were doing his pre-fight medicals, they were like, hey, you know, like you can't fight. You're fucking... There's something wrong with you. Here it is. They're calming him down. He had to relax and calm down. I'm the greatest. I'm the greatest of all time. I beat him all. He was just so, so smart at like psychological warfare. There'd never been anybody like him psychologically that could just... He would... First of all, he was very funny. He would say hilarious shit. Like Howard Cosell said to him, champion, seemed very truculent. He goes, whatever truculent it is, if it's good on that. The timing was just perfect. So he would, you know, say things that were funny. He would say poetry. He had that guy Bondini Brown behind him. Yeah, that's true. And they were always, you know, they were always like laughing and joking around together. Like he had a tremendous support team. And on top of that, he could fight his fucking ass off. And he was a heavyweight that moved around like a middleweight. Unbelievable. I mean, he was a 200 plus pound, 215, 220 pound man. And he would shuffle and move and bomb and weave. And he would be out there almost like a welterweight. Do you think he's the greatest? It's boy, it's hard to say who's the greatest heavyweight of all time, but he's certainly in the conversation. I mean, you would have to say, how would he have done against some of the bigger, stronger guys of the past, like a Lennox Lewis, who, you know, was in his prime, the high 240 pound range. She was a much bigger, much bigger guy. But there was nobody like... See Ali also comes in two stages. There's Ali before 1967, when they took his license away. And there's Ali after 1970, when he came back. And when he came back, he was never as fast. He was never his fleet of foot because he didn't work out at all for three years. He didn't do shit. No. And when he came back, his return fight, he just didn't look right. He didn't look like he had the same movement. His body didn't have the same musculature. He just, he fought Jerry. No, it wasn't Jerry Quarry. Jerry Quarry. That's who it was. And he beat him, you know, he beat him up, but he just didn't look like the Muhammad Ali that fought like... Do you still go to boxing matches? Yeah. Yeah. I still go to boxing matches.