Name: Joe Rogan Experience #649 - Jonathan Gottschall
Uploaded: 2015-05-19T02:29:23.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #649 - Jonathan Gottschall' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-05-19. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #649 - Jonathan Gottschall' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-05-19. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #649 - Jonathan Gottschall

okay good good good all right man john gosh all what's up buddy i say right got
shawl got shawl
you got it it's not that difficult it just looks difficult right right right uh
the fighter in the
cage so a professor rather in the cage i got your book right here and i was
fascinated when i heard
the concept and uh even more fascinated to talk to you about this you decided
to write a book about
taking up mixed martial arts and competing yeah what what caused this this bug
well i was working
as a english instructor at a small liberal arts college in western pennsylvania
just outside
pittsburgh and i was pushing up on middle age i was i think i was 38 and a half
at the time and i was
i don't know why i did that it's like five-year-old talk i know i don't know
why i did that yeah i have
some little kids in my house maybe that's why me too um so i was 38 and a half
at the time and i was
sort of i don't know i was career wasn't going that well i had never made it
onto the tenure track and
it looked like i was never going to so i sort of needed something new in life
and one day i'm at my
office hours and i happened to look out the front window there used to be this
auto parts store across
the street about as far away as uh you know i could hit it with a snowball if i
threw it and this new
business had moved in and it was called mark schrader's academy of mixed
martial arts and i
stood stood stood there at the window and i could see the guys in the cage i
could see them dancing
hitting tackling rolling and i had this unexpected emotion and the emotion was
envy i envied them
they seemed so alive over there so courageous i felt like i was sort of rotting
away you know in my life
in my cubicle um and so i had this sort of funny thought into my head and it
thought was just a joke
at my own expense and the joke was wouldn't it be funny if i went across the
street and joined them
you know me because i'm an i have this incredibly civilized job i've literally
never been in a fight
before i'm almost 40 and i'm very good shape um and then my next thought was
well you know maybe
there's a book in that a sort of non-fiction version of fight club i go across
the street i try to learn
how to fight and along the way though i'd be asking these sort of big deep
eternal questions about
the role that violence has played in human life now there's a difference
between violence in terms of
like people perceive violence as vic there's being a victim yes um and that's
the violence that i think
that everybody has a problem with what you're engaging in is martial arts and
the although violent action
happens in martial art overall it sounds contradictory yes it's not necessarily
about violence yeah i think
that's exactly right i think that's exactly right and that was my journey so i
go you know when i'm first
looking at the cage from across the street i'm looking at it with all the
stereotypes that most
outsiders have about the sport and to me it looks really really violent um i
assume that the guys
over there must be have a screw loose they must be savages um and so i went
over there to test a
theory and the theory was well you know there's a darkness at the core of human
nature and mixed martial
arts is a perfect metaphor for it for this violence at the heart of human
nature then i go over there
and i find that my my theory isn't very good um and what's happening over there
is rough it's often
bloody and painful but it's not really quite even violence i agree you know
because the emotions
behind it are not angry emotions they're not they're not the emotions of uh of
violence um or rage you
know they're the basic uh competitive emotions and it's also in order to
achieve a very high level you have to
achieve something of a zen state and that zen state can be fucked up by emotion
it can be tripped up
your training can be tripped up decisions made under the duress of emotion
right are the worst decisions
right yeah that's one of the things that uh the instructor the main instructor
you've got named
mark schrader warns us about all the time because guys get mad they get hit and
they get mad you know
it's like don't get mad it ruins everything you know you make bad decisions you
also get tired
it tires you out to get mad yeah you get you also really get mad when you chase
someone to try to get
back at them right then you have bad management of energy yeah there's there's
so much involved in
any sort of martial arts competition any any sort of martial arts training that
you don't see unless you
engage in it yeah yeah it was tremendously valuable to me to do this because at
times i thought well you know
i'm not the first writer who had the idea to go and get get in a fight and
write about it you know
george plimpton did it sam sheridan did it i know you've had sheridan on your
show he wrote a great
book about it yeah um and a couple other guys um so i wasn't the first to do it
but and so as a sort
of publicity stunt that's not really why i did it i did it because you really
don't know anything
about it unless you've done it unless you've gone over there and gotten into
the cage and been sort of
locked up inside there they literally lock you up in there half naked you know
and you're with this
other guy and this other guy's really scary you know he's a savage killer and
the only way to get
out of that cage is to somehow survive these next few minutes you're gonna you're
gonna spin with this
guy so there's an intensity to that thing that you know is there when you watch
it from the outside but
it's much different to actually feel it to feel what's actually happening to
you to feel what it's
like to get punched in the face really hard um it was a tremendously
educational experience to actually do it
did it change the way like did you watch martial arts before that or were you
like really an outsider
when you did you watch any ufc matches dude i've been a fan forever forever uh
but you still had like
some preconceived notions when you saw the change yeah i wanted to figure
things out about it like why do
i watch this you know because when i first started watching it i had a really
good excuse i was in my early
20s it was about 1995 and i was a committed but basically inept karate student
and the ufc was a
tremendous education about what worked in a fight and what absolutely did not
and most of the stuff that
i was learning in my karate classes absolutely did not work you know what i
mean and uh so i i i was not
new to the ufc i was not new to cage fighting but i had a very much of an
outsider's perspective on it
and um and i was confused about what draws people to these kinds of spectacles
what draws people not
only to compete in the cage that's an interesting question but also what draws
people to watch combat
sports or watch other forms of violent spectacle people who are decent civilized
human beings why do
we want to watch this stuff now when you were practicing karate like how long
did you practice for i was like
maybe like two years and i gave it up because of the ufc i gave it up because
of the ufc yeah you missed
the boat when machita came along then all of a sudden people started practicing
karate again well yeah
it's true it's true absolutely as long as as long as this as long as you're
mixing it into a system
right rather than sticking with kaikushin uh karate which is what i had um and
so my school was very
purist and when i said went to my sensei and said hey you know sensei uh and
very carefully you know
there's this there's authority in these dojos there's tradition that you
question at your peril
um and so i went and said yeah you know sensei bill you know uh i've been
watching these tapes
i watched them on blockbuster you know blockbuster tapes of these ufc fights
and long story short is
guys like us they're not just losing they're getting slaughtered they're
getting massacred you know they
get a couple feeble punches off they get tackled to the ground beaten half to
death right and so i'd say to
him you know what do we do what do you do if you're taken down in a fight and
he'd be like
and you look at me and be it's obvious just just don't get taken down it's that
easy and and right
then it hit me that he didn't know anything about fighting he didn't know how
often fights go to the
ground he didn't know that not getting taken down is a martial art yes you know
yeah and he didn't know
that if you don't if you're not training for that if you're not drilling and
you're going to get taken
down if you haven't drilled ways to stand back up again you're going to stay
down yeah so what i
realized then that that was we were we were we were we were like larpers live
action role playing
you know what i mean you know larping is no but i do now well it's like it's
like it's live dnd
you go off into the woods with your friends and you play and you play dnd live
yeah it's pretty awesome
it's awful but that's what we were doing basically we were larping as as you
know samurai um and uh so
after that i was pretty disillusioned and i and i gave it up i would have gone
into it earlier but
it took a long time for mma and bjj to make it to my neck of the woods it's
been out here in la and in
new york city for a long time but i've always kind of lived in podunk towns and
it's only it's only
again not until 2010 or 2011 that i had the option to do this where i really
yeah so you had no jujitsu
until until 2010 or 11. what is this you're still the same place outside of pittsburgh
yeah yeah how
far is pittsburgh from you pittsburgh is about a half hour but even pittsburgh
pittsburgh had one bjj
school um it but but that was all you know there wasn't there wasn't there wasn't
there was a fight
club that had gone out of business an mma club that had gone out of business
they're back now and henzo
gracie has a school there now so there is good stuff there now but it's very
difficult to make money
teach in mma very difficult yeah you can do much better teaching jujitsu or
teaching taekwondo even
or karate i think that's right you know i had a similar um martial arts
upbringing yeah i started
out in taekwondo but dedicated you know my entire life to it and then when i
started kickboxing that
was my eye opening it was before even grappling yeah grappling was my second
eye opening my first eye
opening was kickboxing because i realized and then also just training straight
boxing i realized how terrible
my hands were because taekwondo was so kick-centric yeah it was just all about
kicking and when guys
are only kicking you there's a lot of things you can get away with that you can't
get away with when
they're punching you yeah and i had this like big enlightenment moment like man
i've been wasting my
time not really it turned out in the long run because i learned a lot of things
and i i developed
dexterity that's very unusual it's yeah flexibility but anybody could develop
flexibility is the dexterity
is unusual like the ability to throw kicks in positions and in ways that a lot
of other people
can't yeah and it's just because that's all you do you're throwing a lot of
kicks yeah and so there's
a lot of guys that took that style like anderson silva's one of them and
started out as a taekwondo guy
and then eventually developed all the martial arts skills take down defense
wrestling right jujitsu and
whatnot but yeah when the ufc came around most people who are on the outside
they they'll look at it like i've
had so many people say like that it's not martial arts it's a sport it's a
martial sport and there's
all this silliness attached to it but what they need to know is that no one
knew when i was a kid
no one knew until 93 no one knew yeah they didn't know that it was so easy to
take you down and when
they did take you down they would just break your arm like they'd strangle you
in seconds like no one
had any idea how vulnerable they were i know it's it was a shock right wasn't
it a shock total shock
when i watched i mean i remembe