The Story Behind the "To This Day" Deontay Wilder Meme w/Radio Rahim | Joe Rogan

So dude, let's just get into this man. We had this conversation at the Comedy Store, I'm like, you gotta come on the podcast, we gotta talk about this because you are a part of probably the most iconic boxing interview of our day. You with Deontay Wilder, when Deontay Wilder freaked out on you, it became this huge, huge fucking thing. To this day. To this day. He puts it on his Instagram, he puts it in hashtags. Till this day. He sells sweatshirts with till this day on them. There's a store that's adjacent to the Barclay Center. It's connected to the Barclay Center and it's full of shit that says to this day on it, he had a grand opening there, I was invited to it. Like, this is, so that's just an iconic meme, this is now a major part of my identity. Do people associate you with it though? Do they like automatically or do they just, cause it's, you see the side of your face, but you see him angry as fuck, arguably the scariest heavyweight of all time. I mean Mike Tyson's right up there, Mike Tyson, see Off, off ring, outside the ring, Deontay is a sweetheart. He's a really nice guy. So to see him angry outside the ring is kind of weird because I had him on the podcast. He couldn't be a nicer guy. He's a really nice guy. And so to see him angry at you, to this day, and like giving you crazy eyes that was like, and when you explained it, it's like, yeah, that's what you do in an interview. You want someone to expand and say, what do you mean by that? And listen, man, this is not like the first day we met. It's not like that just happened upon this heavyweight champion of the world screaming and decided to piss him off. We've had multiple conversations, sat down for hours at a time. In fact, in Belfast, in Germany, he, Ireland, I'm sorry, we sat down for an hour. And I don't know what I mean. So I'm going to give you the context of what I was thinking in the moment. Okay. Right? He's on stage. Tell him, because some people might not be aware of exactly what happened. So just try to... Okay. So here it is right there. In a couple of weeks, we're going to see it again. I don't know if we're going to see the exact same thing happen. It comes off. It's going to come off. It's seasonal. Deontay Wilder is facing Tyson Fury. Tyson Fury is a British gypsy. Okay. He is a boisterous, very animated showman in boxing. Heavyweights, mind you. These guys are giants. First time they met. This is December 18. So I travel the world covering boxing everywhere. Like I said, I sat down with this guy in Ireland. I've covered Tyson Fury in England. I've covered him in America. I've covered boxing literally everywhere. So I'm familiar with what you also know that fighting, even combat sports, boxing, MMA, there is a regional aspect to it. Like everybody's culture brings something to it. The Irish fighter feels like he's got a certain style. He's got a certain history. He's got a claim to the warrior legacy. Same for the British fighter. Of course, the American fighter. But both of these guys come from what's like an underclass of their society. Travelers, gypsies in England are looked down upon. These people are cultural fighters. And I don't mean necessarily just the oppression of being an underclass, but fighting is part of their tradition, almost like it is to Mexicans in Mexico. It's something that they do that bonds the clan. They believe in the history of it. Obviously, Deontay Waters from Alabama. You know, he's as dark as midnight. He is a descendant of slaves for sure. He's got a history coming to any fight bringing what he experiences in this country to this element of the face off one man, one man versus one man. So when Tyson Fury is on stage during the press conference, it's something possessed him to say, you know, I'm coming from a fighting people. My people have been fighting for 200 years. Well, in context, he means that the culture of travelers of gypsies is one of we're fighting men. I'm a fighting man. That's something that they say about themselves and each other. So that's what he's bringing to this argument. That's how he's challenging Wilder. But Wilder takes that and says, 200 years of fight. My people have been fighting for 400 years. Of course, he's talking about the black experience in America, slavery, all alike. But mind you, he's talking to a British fighter. He's talking to a world audience. It's not like he's fighting Dominic Brazil. You know, saying, well, it's two Americans probably not going to get that much international attention. The world's watching, particularly communities that don't necessarily know when a black man says 400 years. You know, I know, you know, because we grew up in America, you know what we're talking about. The world doesn't know that. I travel the world. They're not just they're not steeped in black American history. I've had conversations with him. He loves to talk about the plight of the black man in America and how it relates to his career, how he feels, you know, disadvantage in certain ways. And he carries the mantle in other ways. He's a champion of black America in certain ways. And he's a victim of white America in other ways. So when I see this argument happening, I'm like, oh, OK, well, this is definitely a moment. But I'm not a pool reporter. Right. So in this particular instance, it's unusual for me to be part of the scrum, is what they call it, collection of reporters. Everybody's kind of shouting questions out, just trying to evoke responses. Usually I'm a one on one guy. I'll wait my turn. Right. But on this particular day, I didn't have a haircut. I wasn't really I was coming. I just got back from Dubai. I went to Dubai with like, you know, Dave Chappelle. I'm hanging out after Thanksgiving. I was like, you know, I'm going to kind of mail this one in, to be honest. I'm thinking, let me throw something out because I know what he's talking about. And I also know that the audience around us in the world, especially, may not have caught that reference. But he is. He's a high watermark right now. It's Thursday and the fight Saturday. So he's amped up. Yeah, that's the other thing. Fight week fighters are not them. So it's not the guy you were sitting across from doing the experience. You know what I mean? That guy was having a good day. This guy's been waiting to fight for at least three months, if not, you know, 10 weeks ramped up, ramped. Right. He comes off stage. He answers a couple of other questions. And then just to be sure, because I've been doing this a long time, not an idiot. I know he's amped and I want him to get the question clearly. Deontay Radio Raheem. I say my name so he knows who it's coming from, not because he doesn't know me, but because he does. So Radio Raheem, you just said your people have been fighting for 400 years. OK, first of all, I'm in the midst of my question. I don't do these things haphazardly. I have one of my questions very carefully. Yes. But in the ears of black America later in this later in the story, you'll find out that your people, that part of the question became incredibly important and people were very sensitive about that. Because you said your people said our people. Said of our people, but I'm fucking quoting the guy. OK, I'm not speaking for him. I'm quoting what he said. He said my people have been fighting for four years. So if he had said our people, I would have said our people. But I can't take possession of your quote. It's not me saying it. You saying it. Right. Your people have been fighting for 400 years. What did you mean by that? So I mean, laser focus turns to me. He's already at 10. Like there's no ramp up at this time. And he started shouting my face like your people, too. Like, you know what I'm talking about. He says, don't try to bait. You know what I'm talking about when I say these things when I'm like, well, yeah, do can you tell them what you're talking about? Trying to get him to expand. Trying to get him to explain to the world what he said to me on numerous occasions in different interviews and off camera. I know exactly what he's talking about. And I know that this is the moment that he finally gets to talk about it. Right. To people who have never been listening to him before. Right. But. When he heard your it was a trigger for him, too. I'm so oblivious and I even looking back and like, man, how did you miss that? I do. I swear to God, I didn't know what the fuck was the problem. He starts saying shouting your people. And I'm like, well, what it took me here. He could he needed to keep saying it. I didn't know why he was saying that. Yeah, my people, too. My people, too. Oh, there's a moment I'm like, oh, oh. Oh, no. I thought he's shouting at them. Oh, my goodness. Oh, no. You know, our people have been fighting for 400 years to this day, to this day. And so what I wanted, what I wanted, what I thought was happening was that, OK, this moment now has become about him like attacking me because he thinks I'm attacking him. He thinks because I do know what he's talking about. He knows we've spoken about it numerous times. He thinks I'm pretending not to know like some air quotes, Uncle Tom or what, you know, the numerous names I've been called on the Internet since as though I'm trying to pretend like, oh, I don't want 400 years. What does what does that mean? You know what I mean? I'm like, OK, OK, OK, fine. So when he's screaming at you, what is going through your mind when he's hitting you with is it to this day or till this day? Because there is a debate on that. First of all, let's let's see. Let's play it. Play it. All right. You know what I'm talking about. You know, I know what I'm talking about, man. Don't sit up here and try to bait. It's not know what I'm talking about. You know, what the fuck I talk about when I say these things. You are people to explain it. I am not everybody knows what you're talking about. Radio Raheem. I don't have to explain what's understood, man. You know what I mean by that. You know what I say about it. I ain't got to go further. And if nobody if anybody don't understand that, then God be with them. Go look up the history. Go look up the history. You see, don't everybody believe in Google? Go Google that shit. See what I'm talking about. You know what I'm talking about, man. You know what I dare you to sit up there and say explain. You know what I'm talking about, man. He's fighting people. You know, we've been fighting for one and still fighting to this day. To this day. To this day. You just sit here, you don't know what I'm talking about. I'm in on my day, bro. Let's go. Let's go. Yeah. Fuck. You know, they keep playing it. But just so you know, there's more to this video. In fact, the last thing I said is, oh, we know we know what he's talking about. That's what I just said at the end. But that clip everyone in the world has seen. Very neatly on Instagram in a minute. Oh, no. So you missed the beginning and the end. But the welcome to 2020 or 19 or welcome to the new age of clips and things being taken out of context. So listen, this is not the first time I've had an interview that has, you know, gotten a major attention. Not the first time a fighter has been pissed off of me. I knew that this was going to be a big thing. I knew people were going to talk about it, bro. I had no fucking concept of what was about to happen to my night. Like I'm like, basically, when you're a reporter like this, you're like, OK, well, that was dramatic. We got a hot one. That one might get me a few hundred thousand, if not a million views. Maybe like this is the other we have the champ. But also I'm thinking, you know, it's something of a success like, OK, we got him to express at least it is in that moment something that we don't usually see. It's Fight Week. We talked to this guy a million times. Everyone's had their interviews. He's been on every show. And that was like the realist moment in the whole buildup. So for me, that in and of itself is something of a victory. Like you you've created a moment here where you got to see inside the champs heart. You got to see like his passion. When I get home, though, I got to take a nap. Like it's a little long day. It's good. So as as these stories tend to go, I'm woken up by chimes on my phone to think to think to think to think to think. What's going on? What's going on in the interim? He's posted on Instagram just a minute of what is really like a two and a half minute interview where it looks so bad. And then he's written like a paragraph, essentially, about having to like, you know, teach people like basically not to be on the times or how you get it like straighten it out. Like there's a whole like civil rights diatribe. And I'm the pin cushion. Right. I'm the straw man. I'm the guy. Oh, my God. I start to, of course, read the comments. I'm like, well, maybe is there any possible way this is good? Bro, everybody's like, fuck that guy. Uncle Tom, Uncle Rugo, Salo, you know, I always hated this motherfucker like, oh, no. Oh, no. I'm also not like a stranger to criticism, not a stranger. YouTube comes. I live on YouTube. It's one of the most vicious places on Earth. If you ever want to like just get humbled, if you ever feel in too big of a zone, post a YouTube video, let it sit there for about an hour and then start reading the comments. I don't care who you are. It'll bring you down a notch. But this is another element. Bro, Rihanna was like upset, like you. At me. Oh, I don't want Rihanna mad at me. I don't even know Rihanna. Like why? I don't want to start our relationship this way. What is going on? Snoop Dogg Snoop Dogg, who we all now know can be incredibly vicious when he's upset at somebody over something. Yeah, nobody. Yo, yo, teach that son like, yeah, you know, put it in his place like, bro, Snoop Dogg's mad at me about these things. What are you feeling when this is going on? How many knots are in your stomach? I'm panicking. I'm panicking. I'm way more comfortable with him shouting in my face and having no idea whether or not like this can go any kind of way. But at least I understand the moment. Like at least I'm in control of half of it. Right. This is a this is a train on fire off the rails. You know what I mean? And of course, the more people respond to it, celebrities and, you know, other fighters and alike, the more emboldened he is to double down on it. Like, hell, this is a moment. The fight's not selling well. You know what I mean? They've been giving him stick overseas for not being known anywhere. They're saying you can walk down the street and, you know, Eddie Hearn did this video where he's asking people in New York, like, do they know Deontay Wilder? And he made a whole video of them saying no. So at this moment, you also have to give context of what's happening in his career. At this moment, he's knocking everybody out. WBC heavyweight champion. He can't get the fight to unify like with Joshua. They're saying he's a nobody, essentially. He can't. He's not worth the money because nobody knows who he is. He's fighting arguably the toughest fight he could have possibly picked. Tyson Fury is an incredibly technical fighter. No one thinks of Deontay Wilder as a technical technician. Like they're thinking this guy's going to get outclass. He can lose his belts this way and not be making it. It's not like he made a shit ton of money for that fight. So now that all his attention is on him and like I said, it's a subject he loves to talk about. He's a hero. He's like a champion of black America in this moment. The only the only I'm just like, you know, collateral damage. That is the casualty. Boost the fuck out of that fight, though. Ticket sales through the roof. The the moment's viral. It's everywhere. People didn't even know the fight was happening until this meme just is in their inboxes. People people are like, look at this. The to this day meme is taking over the Internet and it'll speak to your soul. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. This became like the flagship moment for black woke people to tell like, you know, the black mean to class it's Kermit with a fucking oxygen mask on. And it says you still in your parents phone me dot with this day. Right. The Internet is so goddamn funny. It's undefeated. Oh, my God. At this point, it's kicking my ass. Oh, my God. Damn, dude. Yeah. So as this thing gets bigger and bigger, I start to realize that it's well out of my control. And then I have to start to think about what my role really is. It's not about me. It's not what I do isn't so that people can feel one way or another about me. It's really, again, taking myself back to that initial moment of showing them something about the fighter that they haven't seen. Let's get a look inside this guy and get him to share something. Usually, just verbally that they didn't know or that he didn't come to the room expecting to share. Right. And I support people understanding the culture from which he we come as black Americans. I wanted to give him the stage to do exactly that. Right. Didn't turn out like I expected. But it did become an iconic like civil rights, I guess, type of moment. It became one of those things that people identify with black power, black information being like, yo, this is this is what we're experiencing. And this is how deep it still runs at that time in 2018. Did you think about it like in retrospect? How could I phrase that better? I mean, I'm sure you did. Right. What could you have said? Because you wanted to get that out of there. You wanted to get him to expand on it. I think that it was exactly the right thing at the right time. I couldn't have predicted in a million years it would have went that way. But that's the way it was supposed to go. If I have phrased it so-called better and he had given a more reason, thoughtful answer, we wouldn't be sitting here. He would have made less money, too. The fight would have sold us tickets, less pay per views. No, that wouldn't have went viral. You wouldn't have gave a shit about my side of the story. The moment doesn't exist. Right. Right. And that's the beauty of what you were telling me in the back of the comic store. I'm like, oh, shit, that's you. Right. Oh, my God. So the blessing and the angle on the camera work in some regard is some people don't know it's me. And I'm so happy for that. Oh, my God. And the but the ones who do there is enough who do. So I'm telling you, Joe, every day since then, it's been over a year now. Someone somewhere every time I've left my home and sometimes while I'm still in it has shouted in my face to this day. That's how they say hello. People don't even know my name to this day. My God. Oh, my God. Yeah. Oh, my God. But, you know, hey, man, it's a godsend, really. It's something that captured everybody's attention in a moment. And if there's been anything else, I can't imagine how it would have done that. Right. It wouldn't have. No, it had to be that crazy in his eyes because he's so ramped up getting ready for that fight. He's so angry. He takes the glasses off. I'm like, I remember watching. I was nervous. I was nowhere near him. Yeah. You must have been shitting your pants. OK. But you know him. Right. So you probably weren't shitting your pants. But you're probably like very uncomfortable. I absolutely was not shitting my pants. I wasn't. In fact, in the in the exchange, I'm quite calm. I'm just trying. On the one hand, I'm trying to figure out what's happening in the beginning because I didn't understand, like, the rage being directed at me for. I'm telling you, for a minute, I thought he was just talking to white America. I was like, yeah, get him. You know what I mean? I'm half way through this thing. Oh, my goodness. This is this is my bad. According to it. Oh, my goodness. Oh, yeah. Get him. So once he's like, you know, I'm done, you know, man, like he walks off in disgust. I then find him 20 minutes later and I interview him again this time and much more calm and reason fashion. I let him lay out what it was about what I expected to happen the first time. A lot of people have seen it. Not a fraction of the people who've seen that. I do know the guy. But as you know, these people are warriors, man, and their blood's running high and they and he saw red like at that time. We weren't friends. We weren't homies. He didn't remember Belfast. He didn't. He thought I was coming for him. So even though I know him, I don't know him. No, I mean, I don't know what's really going to happen in this moment. Right. I'm just doing my job. I can't be afraid to do that. So whatever happens in this moment, this is what's going to be. You've got a great perspective on it, though. You're so right that without that moment blowing up like that, the fight doesn't become as big as it is. The meme doesn't exist. You don't become more popular. Right. And he even did like a segment before a fight on Showtime where he like went through black, like a black history segment on Showtime because of this. Like it actually created a moment that put him in position to be the kind of representative of that issue that he wanted to be. And it gave me an opportunity to be seen, even though in a lot of quarters initially negatively, I was also seen as a journalist who pulled that out. Like I'm the other guy. I'm the guy on the other side of that camera that, yes, created that moment. And I've been doing this long enough to where my fan base, people who know my work, who understand me, they know that I think they know I'm not an idiot. And I like to think they know I'm not a sellout, but they don't really know me because I don't ever make it about me. I don't like this interview we're having is a is a unicorn. Like I've maybe done three or four or five days in my entire life where I'm talking about my perspective on anything. I'm entirely showing up at every press conference, every fight, every way in, every media workout, trying to get something out of the fighter to be consumed by the audience in a way that maybe they hadn't seen it before. Not just for the audience's sake, but I want the fighter to get in touch with something like there's so many of these platitude questions and the same old shit. And nobody's really like digging deep. These aren't one dimensional characters. These aren't actual bulls. These aren't just gladiators. They're fathers, they're sons. They're like they have civil rights issues. They have cultural things are bringing to this thing. They have all like depression. We know all the things that fighters go through, but they only want to show you one side because they don't want to show any vulnerability and their fans aren't interested in like anything other than who's up and who's down. If that's all you're feeding them. Yeah. So I try to get out of the way. I don't want to get in front of the work. So when people see me in this line, a lot of people are just like, oh, this guy must be a fucking Uncle Tom, man. And Wilder, Rihanna and Snoop Dogg think so. Clearly, that's who this guy is. Have you talked to Snoop since? No, I didn't talk to Snoop then. He just like he just went on Instagram. That's what I'm saying. Oh, no. But I have talked to Wilder many times since then. And to this guy's credit, never even even the even the 20 minutes after. You're right. We didn't know each other. We do have a history. And he is now knowing the moment they created and knowing what he did to me in that moment has always been especially gracious. He's always been especially helpful. I can always get access to him. We have a bond now. Like we share this thing. That's inextricable no matter what happens. You know what I mean? Oh, my goodness.