JRE MMA Show #34 with Josh Barnett

Joe Rogan (0:07)

Boom, ladies and gentlemen, Josh Barnett, youngest ever UFC heavyweight champion, now retired, sort of, am I?

Josh Barnett (0:13)

No, not retired, just I'm free in the wind. I'm like a bald eagle, I'm just out there, riding on that freedom.

Joe Rogan (0:20)

Just like America.

Josh Barnett (0:22)

Just I decided to leave the fold of the UFC and chase my own futures by my own hands.

Joe Rogan (0:32)

Are you actively competing or going to be actively competing?

Josh Barnett (0:37)

There'll be some grappling stuff this year, but I'm figuring by the start of next year, I'll get back into the MMA circuits, mainly because it's just gonna take some time to set up camps, managers, the structure of everything, where I have proper sparring partners and all that.

Joe Rogan (0:53)

And in the meantime, we were talking about, you're doing commentary for New Japan Pro Wrestling with Jim Ross, and you do it on Access TV, right?

Josh Barnett (0:59)

That's right, every Friday night at eight.

You can see me sit down and run my mouth about rasslin. But we just did the live show up at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, which they've been having sporadic wrestling events there, but it was a big draw in that building in like the 60s and 70s, I guess. So it's a bit of a historical...

Joe Rogan (1:23)

It feels like pro wrestling's making a renaissance. It's like making a return.

Josh Barnett (1:27)

Yeah, I think that there's a certain audience of a certain age group that has come into flourishing in the internet and other ways to go ahead and bring wrestling back up there and show that wrestling, whether it's the biggest company like the WWE, all the way to say number two would be New Japan, and then there's all these independent companies all over the place so that some of them have quite a decent following as well.

Joe Rogan (1:57)

You know Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins?

Josh Barnett (1:59)

Huge wrestling fan.

Joe Rogan (2:00)

He owns, what is the company that he owns?

Josh Barnett (2:02)

The NWA, the National Wrestling Alliance, yeah. So he owns.

Joe Rogan (2:05)

It's hard, NWA is NWA the rap group.

Josh Barnett (2:08)

It's that too.

Joe Rogan (2:09)

You mean, that's what I hear, what I hear, NWA.

Josh Barnett (2:11)

I'm sure there's some attitude involved with the wrestling NWA. Can't speak about the rest of it, but NWA was, is, I guess still, it's a legendary sanctioning body, and so it wasn't any one particular company, but it was a sanctioning body that would then oversee certain titles.

And so if you're gonna be on this show at this time, you're gonna defend the NWA Championship, the NWA Commission would get involved, and they had their specifications as to how the title matches would be run and whether or not you could lose by disqualification or not, or if you could go over the top rope would be a DQ, and little stuff like that.

Joe Rogan (2:53)

Who did Killer Kowalski wrestle for?

Josh Barnett (2:56)

Killer Kowalski? I couldn't tell you.

Joe Rogan (2:58)

Do you remember him?

Josh Barnett (2:59)

I know the name, but I don't really, I mean, he was a famous trainer after the fact as well.

Joe Rogan (3:04)

Oh, was he?

Josh Barnett (3:04)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (3:05)

When I was in high school, probably he was the guy. He was the NWA guy. It was, that's right. Did we talk about that with Billy? I think we did.

He was like local cable when I was in high school. It was like Kowalski.

Josh Barnett (3:17)

The territory days, yeah.

Joe Rogan (3:18)

He had like a claw. He would like grab his own wrist and grab your head or some shit.

Josh Barnett (3:21)

He had an iron claw like Britsvon, Eric, Killer Kowalski.

Joe Rogan (3:26)

Yeah, look at his hand. He's got his hand up the claw.

It's like there's some nostalgia to it. That's one of the reasons why I feel like it's coming back. It's like people who liked it as a kid are now as adults going back to it as nostalgia.

Josh Barnett (3:41)

Not with the internet. It's much easier to go out there and put product out, right? So it makes it more easily disseminated to any audience who might want to see it, especially with shows that are abroad. There are some shows that will go on in Germany and Austria that will get streamed and people get ahold of them. They get to watch them. So it's not like the tape trading days of yesteryear.