Joe Rogan on Performing Under Pressure

Hello freak bitches. And then I looked at the audience and it was like, whoo. And I had to breathe a little through my nose, but what do we do on stage? Are we breathing through our nose or are we breathing through our mouths? We fucking talk shit for 45 to an hour. I looked at the special I shot and I'm like, where am I breathing? Yeah. How interesting. We gotta watch that next time. What the fuck are we doing up there? Yeah, you're not thinking. You're just breathing. Yeah, well you just concentrated so much on what you're trying to say that it all just comes natural. Just like right now. Like while I'm talking to you right now, I took a little breath right there, but I wasn't thinking about it. I only need a little bit of air. Right, right, right. Because it's so natural for you. Maybe take me on a conference the first time and I'm gonna be shaking and go running to my ward and then taking a breath. You see that from people that are giving speeches. You do see that when they've not become comfortable with public speaking. Public speaking is one of the most stressful things for people, for some people. Like number two or number one in some people's world. Like it's really bad. I had one time a judge asked me. He was about to sentence me. And he goes, do you have anything to say to yourself? And I had it written down. I had everything Joe Rogan. I started squeaking. He's like, don't worry about it. Guilty. I couldn't talk. I went right into a panic when this little man looked at me. But people get nervous. You know, when you get nervous, your adrenaline kicks in. When your adrenaline kicks in, everything tightens up. You know, it's just, you know, and physiological stress, like yoga positions, can kind of mimic that. You know, like when you're in a position, like when you've got your hands over your head and you're leaning your whole body to the side, it's very hard to stay smooth with your breathing when you're in those spots. Like that's the number one thing that I concentrate on. Holding my body in that position is not nearly as hard as holding my body and breathing smoothly. Breathing smoothly is the most difficult part of that posture, like a lot of postures. And as soon as you change your breathing, you start to change inside and you change outside. Yeah. I see this happening a lot, you know, a lot. What is the first reaction when you're under stress? Tension. But if you look back at what happened when you were in the, I just say, prehistoric? Prehistory? Prehistory? Prehistory, yeah. Prehistory, think about it. You are a prey. What you're doing, like any animal, like a cat in the road, they start to pump his hair up so it becomes bigger, right? Right. So that's what we're doing. We're growing our shapes so the predator might look at us like, oh, we're too big. I'm going to attack a simple predator. We try to, you know, our skin starts to twiggle in, something like, we don't have hair, but we start to do the same, maybe the same things. Is that what goosebumps are? It's like your hair is pumping up to make you look bigger? Wow. Under feel? That's interesting. And if I look in, you know. Well, how come it's like that when you hear a good song? That's a different feeling. You got a goose bump? It's like a lot of people, they misinterpret it or they all think that we go, okay, we go tactical training with all this and we can control fear, reaction, there's two different things you can control when you are really under stress for that kind of situation. So our rate, fears and other things, matter of fact, under eye intensity workout, you become your rat. Under fear, you become your pole. So it's different physiological things going into your body. So the only thing that people do know is misunderstanding that doing some kind of eye intensity workout is how we can control also the fear, real fear, because real fear is another thing. Well, one of the things you see with fighters is they perform better when they're more active, when they fight more often. So if the fighter fights like three times a year, they're used to fighting every few months and they get that feeling of competition becomes a normal natural thing for them. And it's also something that happens when you see a fighter lose. When you see a fighter lose and they come back, they're very tense and they fight. A lot of times they fight different because they're now worried and concerned about the consequences of failure. And you see that fear, that tension, it's in their system and then their whole mode of operating as an athlete changes because of that tension. Because they didn't recover from the shock, from the situation they've been through. Sure. And that's also one of the biggest factors when you talk about the difference between the way someone performs in the gym versus the way someone performs in competition. We've all known these guys that were phenomenal in the gym, but for whatever reason, they weren't able to win in competition. It's so common. With some guys, it's almost like it's crazy. It's almost like there's a spell on them or something. You'll see them in the gym and you're like, this guy's a world beater, but they can't beat anybody in a competition. Why is that? Psychological. It's all psychological. They are imprisoned by their own fears and doubts. They don't have the confidence to rise to the occasion. They don't have the confidence to perform under pressure. They can't just accept the potential failure. They're so overwhelmed and imprisoned by their fear of failure that when they get out there, they can't perform at their best. It's crazy because it forces failure. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy because they can't perform like they do in the gym. They can't just react. They can't flow. When you are fighting, when you're at your best, you're sort of just in this empty space. You're not thinking about the moves as much as they're just happening and you're just relying on your training. The best thing you do is stay calm because as soon as you get emotional, as soon as you get aggressive, you might win being emotional and aggressive. You could catch someone and knock them out, but you're also going to get knocked out yourself. You might do something that's not smart. Like when you're talking earlier about playing chess. Martial arts is a lot of ways very much like chess, but way more complicated because your physical consequences are so severe. There's all this fear. It's not just about losing. It's about getting hit and that punishment of physical consequences is just so significant. It's so much different even than in jujitsu. Like jujitsu, the physical consequences are tapping and losing and those are terrible, but it's nothing like getting kicked in the face or getting one of those Yoel Romero flying knees to your head. That kind of fear, that's an overwhelming fear. For some people, they throw up when they're in the locker room and they panic and they get so scared. They just can't perform under pressure. If you transfer this also to some of the operators, some of the operators are literally dumb. When you say an operator, you're talking about soldiers, special ops guys. They're tough. They are super guys. I'm amazed by those guys. They're just chappot. But it's natural. They say, during the task, I might be shitting my pants. It's physiological. It's physiological. Then you keep going. Then you keep going. They just keep going with shit in their pants. That's the physiological reaction to the stress factor. Your body wants to get lighter to fight back faster or run away or whatever. It's skin control. There's nothing to be ashamed about it. You see it with animals as well. There's a famous video, these two bears fighting. As the bears are fighting, they're shitting all over the place. As they're fighting, they're shitting. I love watching movies like Collateral or something when people go into someplace and they shoot a place up and people's reaction, how they run. That's not usually the case, bro. I've seen it. People drop to the fucking floor. People drop without even getting shot. They don't know what. You just freeze. You being somewhere and being transferred to the sound of gunfire is fucking overwhelming. Some people get it and react to it. Some people just think it's the Fourth of July. It's really weird, but I've seen people fucking drop from fear, drop from fear. Something that I was as a child, and I was two blocks away from, just people dropping from fear. It's so ... I remember when I lived in Aspen, they have the ESI Bodyguard Academy in Aspen. I know that. What is he assigned to inform? I don't know, but the guy supposedly was in a room, 6x12 room, and he killed 12 Mexicans at night point with his bare hands. He opens up this ESI thing. It's 20 Gs. It's a summer long program, and you learn how to adjust up at the high altitude and drive and evasive driving and shooting. They have a course on maritime, how to defend people out on the ocean and all that stuff. See Aspen and all those places, like Woody Creek where you went, is home to the baddest retired soldiers in the world. You don't know who they are. You just think that dude over there with the American flag is mowing the lawn. That guy killed 80 people with one hand in Vietnam. There's a guy in Denver that I know is amazing. I'm telling you, Colorado is where they put them. Why? Because the mountains to keep them away from civilization for these people, just in case they hear Chinese music somewhere on the street. They don't ever want that to happen. Great glass in case of war. And there was a guy that came in that was a Marine, that bro, Joe, you know, anybody comes in with stories. I know one thing. When I see it, I believe it. The motherfucker used to get picked up at Aspen Airport in the helicopter. They sent like a helicopter with two guys jumping out, four guys around him, and he would just wave at Uncle Joey. I was 19. Wow. And he would tell me stories about, you know, the Green Berets and all these guys were sitting around a thing cooking chili and they were all telling how many people they killed. I killed 18. I killed 22. Meanwhile, he was staring the soup with his dick over the fire. You know what I'm saying? Like, that's the type of stories this guy would tell me. He had me all fucked up in the head. And I asked him once. I go, should I go to that ESI? And he goes, listen. I go in there and smack them all with my left hand. He goes, first of all, you can't teach what you need to learn over there. Because four years of Charlie in the bush is a lot better than 12 weeks of you hanging out with some white dude with suits shooting people, targets in the mountains. Yeah, it's not real. It's not. Until there's real consequences. So that's why he said it just wasn't. Don't you think, though, it's better than nothing? I would think that it's better than nothing. I would think that the best thing would be actually being in boot camp, actually going to buds, actually being in some sort of a situation where you realize this is life. This is real. Whereas if you're if you're preparing like up in Colorado and you're just going through that course, right? You might have some things in your mind. But that's one of the things like people say to me like, like, should I take a self-defense class? Like, will they show you how to kick somebody in the knee? I go, listen to me. That shit is not going to like there is. There's this guy on the fucking radio that was he was always talking about. It was on Opie and Anthony show back in the day, and he was always talking about this difference between the street and martial arts martial arts and tournaments. There's no there's rules in the street. There's no rules. And I'm like, I fucking hate when people say that kind of shit because listen to me. The stuff that works on trained killers is the real shit. And if you think that you're going to come in and you're going to throw some fucking karate chop at someone's balls and you're going to somehow or another be able to stop Anderson Silva from kicking you across the room, you're out of your fucking mind. You're out of your mind. You first of all, you're not going to karate chop his balls. He's not going to let you get close enough to him. And if he does let you get close enough to him, he's going to strangle you and you're not going to be able to do a goddamn thing about it. You're going to be 100 percent helpless. So this these ideas that there's a shortcut and the shortcut is like street defense. There's this a certain pressure points around your neck. I could attack that and you will be helpless. No, no, no. You're not going to get my neck. You fuck. Let me grab your finger. Yeah. There was a guy at the store used to pinch down on literally that this is the biggest phony I've ever met in all my years of meeting phony martial arts guys. He's to pinch down on your thumbnail. He was like, there's a pressure point on your thumb. Like motherfucker dudes lie on me with their knee on my neck. Like they'll put all their weight on your neck to try to get you to give up the arm bar. Like if you're in a situation where you're defending, it's an arm bar and the guys on top of you guys will put their fucking knee a two and thirty pound man will put his knee on your neck while he's trying to put all his weight on it. And you're not you're going to not tap in from that. You think I'm going to tap from a thumbnail. If it's funny, I saw people try to get into the special force community. I tried to teach them pressure points. You realize this guy's wearing a bulletproof jacket. Yeah. You know, best of all the material. You're not going to even access to the body. You know, it's so crazy. There's so many stupid martial arts courses. It's so it's so fucking dumb. It's so dumb. There's so many these ridiculous ideas that you're going to be able to defend yourself with some tricks.