Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Uploaded: 2025-03-19T17:01:08.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2292 - Josh Waitzkin' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-03-19. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2292 - Josh Waitzkin' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-03-19. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2292 - Josh Waitzkin

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
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Whenever someone is like an interesting person and then I find out they do jiu-jitsu
too,
I go, oh, I could talk to that guy for sure.
Yeah.
You know, like I get excited when interesting people do jiu-jitsu
because I think to the outsider, to a lot of people that are, you know,
they haven't been exposed to what it's like to train
and what it's like to be around high-level jiu-jitsu people,
they don't know that vibe.
They don't know what it's like.
They don't know the beauty of jiu-jitsu.
I feel like jiu-jitsu is beautiful for people who practice it.
You know, like you see like Marcel is a great example, your coach.
You know, Marcelo is probably one of the most beautiful guys to watch
because he just takes advantage of these scrambles in this like really
beautiful way,
like fast and slippery and when the opponents react, he reacts in the other way.
It's all just technique and flow.
It's like, ah!
Like the first time I ever saw him, I saw him live in 2003 in Abu Dhabi.
And it was when he fought Shaolin.
That was the first time I'd ever seen him in the flesh.
Epic. Choked him out in like eight seconds, ten seconds.
Oh my God, this is crazy scrambles.
But no one even knew him.
No one knew of him other than, you know, he was obviously,
I think he was a brown belt at the time.
I don't even think he was a black belt.
I think Marcelo might have been a brown belt.
That's interesting.
I didn't, in 2003.
Find that out.
Was Marcelo a brown belt when he won Abu Dhabi in 2003?
He may have, Eddie Bravo was a brown belt when he tapped out Hoyler.
He told me recently that right before that fight, his, like his grips had
locked up.
So he came, went into that fight.
It looks incredible.
Just that arm drag, take the back, choked him out in seconds.
Yeah, his, like, grips from the fight before were like.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
When, when Eddie beat Hoyler, he was a brown belt.
Yep.
Wow.
Yeah, John Jock took his black belt off of his own waist and put it on Eddie.
Amazing.
Amazing.
Dude.
That's epic.
So it's funny.
My background, we have a lot of overlap in our early jujitsu education.
Because my first teacher was John Machado.
Oh, okay.
He's a Jock's brother.
Yeah.
And I spent years training with John in LA.
Long before, and then I'm, yeah.
And then when did, when did you move to New York?
So I moved to New York.
I think I started training with John.
So I was doing Chinese martial arts for a bunch of years before that, competing
everywhere.
Then I started training, cross-training with John in, I think, 2001, 2002.
And then early 2005, moved back to New York.
Started training with Marco Santos in his school in New York.
And I was training with Zhukau.
And Allison Brites, Zhukau is an amazing old school, Bracey Baja.
Like, you know, amazing fighter.
And I was also cross-training with Lucas Lepri at the time.
And I was, I needed, I was just ready to, and then I met Marcelo.
And I was, and he had moved from New York to Florida.
And I was traveling to Florida to train with Marcelo a bunch.
And I wanted to be pushed all in.
And Marcelo and I had gotten really close.
And then I, I just said to him, hey, man, you know, you want to, you want to
come back to New York and open a school together?
And he really loved New York.
And we'd gotten very close at this point.
Where was he at the time?
He was in Florida.
He was in New York before.
He loved New York, but then he had to move to Florida.
And he'd been, there was just a lot of jiu-jitsu politics flowing everywhere,
as it does.
Jiu-jitsu politics.
The worst.
And, yeah, anyway, long story short, we opened a school together after that.
And it was amazing.
Then I spent so many years all in training with him.
He was such a beautiful, beautiful martial artist.
So in 2002, he's promoted to black belt.
So he was already a black belt because this was 2003.
Yeah.
Sounds right.
So he had only been a black belt for a year and won Abu Dhabi, which is pretty
crazy.
Pretty crazy.
Just that.
I mean, didn't just beat Xiao Lin, won the entire division, and just looked
like no one anybody had ever seen.
Just the scrambles and his ability to arm drag and take the back.
And then once he gets to your side, the ability to transition to the back is
just phenomenal.
And he spends his, like his whole jiu-jitsu life, he spent in the scramble, in
transition.
And that was really a philosophy of his.
Have you seen that old school Arte Suave clip?
Remember the old documentaries, Arte Suave, from back there around him as a
young teenager training at Faber-Guzel's school in Sao Paulo?
And it was so interesting because even then you could see him.
He never held position.
He always let opponents move.
It would be fun to pull that up maybe at one point.
Interesting.
Like he never, a core principle of his was to allow the opponent to move and
spend as much training time as possible in transition.
And while most jiu-jitsu guys, as you know, as they're coming up the ranks, egos
are controlling, they're holding guys.
Yeah.
And this, is this him?
Yeah, he's already a black belt here.
Yeah, this is after he moved to start training with Fabio in Sao Paulo.
And it's such a beautiful thing because if you watch his style, he's not in
this moment, actually.
Now he's fully controlling.
Now he's fully controlling.
But most of the time he's scrambling.
Yeah, he's scrambling.
Did he explain why?
Well, you're maximizing time spent in the in-between.
I mean, I think in the martial arts, people are so focused on position when
they're learning.
Position, position, position.
But the in-between is where the real virtuosity happens, don't you?
Interesting.
And so he spent, he maximized his time in the in-between.
So in stand-up fighting, that would be like footwork and angles.
It would be similar to that.
Because the most important thing about any kind of combat sport in terms of
striking sports is to be in a better position, to land a shot, and be in a
better position to defend.
So if you're fighting southpaw to orthodox, you always want to make sure that
if you're southpaw, your foot is on the outside of your opponent's leg.
That way your opponent has to kind of cross over, try to hit you, but you're in
a position to hit them on the blind side.
And the best ever at that is Vasily Lomachenko.
Because Lomachenko, when he was young, his father made him stop boxing for two
years and just study Ukrainian dance.
Really?
Mm-hmm.
So for two years, he just did Ukrainian dance.
And his foot, have you ever seen him box?
No.
Oh, my God.
Pull up a Lomachenko highlight.
It's all about movement and position with this guy.
It's all about when you punch, he's going to make you react this way, and then
he's going to go that way, and then he's going to spin sideways and he'll be
behind you.
So this is Lomachenko.
Like, the way he moves is so different.
It's almost like he's got just a radar for where their punches are coming from
and knows exactly where to put his feet at all times.
No matter what they do, he knows what they're going to do.
But when you watch his footwork, it's the most extraordinary thing because his
ability to give you all sorts of different reads, like, incredible.
I mean, he won a world title.
I think it is fourth pro fight.
Unbelievable amateur record.
But it's just the movement.
Like, he's never right in front of you.
He's always off to the side.
He's always moving around.
He jumps in and out.
And it's with perfect precision.
Like, a lot of times when guys do a lot of footwork and movement, there's
points in that transition where they're off balance, where they can't really
throw a punch, or their footwork is out of position, or they're leaning too far
over on this side.
He's never off balance.
He's never out of position.
He's always slide to slide, pop out, slide to slide, pop out.
And you never know where the fuck he is.
He's a magician.
It's fascinating to watch him fight.
And very few people have tried to incorporate that.
Like, you see some of his movement.
It's just the way he's able to fool the best fighters in the world and just
have a level of movement that they just don't really understand what to do with.
They just, they get baffled by it.
Because everything is coming from different angles.
It's never, I'm charging straight forward at you, trying to destroy you.
Everything is angles and movement.
Virtuosity is so beautiful to watch.
Oh, it's incredible in anything.
In anything.
In anything.
In anything.
When you watch someone who's just unbelievably extraordinary and unique in
their, whatever their discipline is.
It's always fascinating to watch.
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One way I relate to the transitional training is through frames.
It's like a process of building more frames.
We have position, we have position, and for some people there'll be no space in
between.
But if you spend your time playing in the transitional space between, you build
up frames.
Like an illusionist.
I know you, like, remember you spoke to Darren Brown back in the day.
Yes.
Like, you know, great illusionists, magicians, mind control guys.
They have the ability to see in frames that we don't have the ability to see.
And so it seems like magic.
It seems like illusion.
Yeah.
When martial artists are called mystical, right?
It's because people don't understand what they're doing, for the most part,
technically.
And they have frames where others don't have frames.
So they have more options, more, it's like having a language and you have an
access to a larger vocabulary.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that that's right.
Yeah.
I think that's right.
And people, well, it's like if you think about you're engaging with an illusionist
who has done something, has spent hundreds of hours in a certain specific
routine, and you're seeing it for the first time.
They just have immense knowledge where you have none.
They have more frames, and they can play in frames that you don't have, and it
seems like something's coming from the sky.
Well, that's where Eddie Bravo had a pretty significant contribution to jiu-jitsu,
because he was so creative in some of his attacks and some of the things that
he developed, particularly off his back.
Like the rubber guard variations, they were so systematic and so, like, if you
got good at it, it was surprising to anybody who didn't understand what you
were doing.
Because they didn't know these positions well.
Yeah.
So if you got, like, there's this kid named Jeremiah Vance, who's one of Eddie's
best guard players, and there's a highlight reel of his submissions off of his
back, his rubber guard submissions.
And if you don't have a person that you train with, if you train at a
traditional school and you don't understand these positions, you don't know how
good someone can be at it, there's times where you don't think you're
vulnerable, where you're incredibly vulnerable.
Like, the difference between a really good guard player in MMA and, like, Paul
Craig, for example, he's submitted some of the best two world champions off of
his back in the light heavyweight division.
Jamal Hill and the current cham