Joe Rogan on When Fighters Should Retire

There's got to be fitness in my fucking jeans somewhere, man, because my mom's dad was a boxer. Like, growing up, like a guy, and he had a record. He was Kid Dixie Schultz. Growing up, like, in my grandmother's house, there was a picture of a guy, like, in that position with trunks, but old time he like, and I was like, who's that? And she's like, that's grandpa. And he didn't look like grandpa, so I never associated it. But apparently, he was a boxer. Well, that would be a fun thing for you to do too. Not even box somebody, but have somebody hold pads for you, and you learn how to punch and hit pads, because it's exciting. It's fun to do. It's like an interesting thing to do. I can pretend to be Batman. When do you hit things? Like Batman. Batman? That's how you sell it. Does Batman hit pads? He hits fucking, you know, injustice and crime. Oh, right, right, right. Shit like that. My boxer grandfather, I want to see if you agree with this too. Okay. So you've been the man in the ring, so to speak. You've been at the epicenter of attention of the thousand, five thousand, bunch of people as a man on stage. Even the man in the ring sometimes when you're doing a UFC event and stuff like that. You know what it's like, the surge, the energy that comes from like, I'm here and everybody's, I got their attention, I command the fucking room. That's part of why we do what we do. My grandfather, having been a boxer, must have felt that, right? Like fucking probably way more than I feel when I walk up on stage or we're on the reboot road show tour. I'm like, oh, I feel clever sitting in the back watching the movie with the audience and hear him laugh. This is a guy who is like, I'm the man in the ring and like, it's all up to me in my fists and I could be a god or a goat tonight. And like, and then it becomes primal and there's pounding and shit like that. You would imagine there's a, if you got in the ring and he pursued it enough to have a record, there must have been some sort of call, some sort of satisfaction to it all. Maybe. Sometimes people do it for money, right? Maybe it would have been a way to make a living. No. This guy, I don't know. He may, I mean. You don't think he did it? I think he was hoping for purses, but I don't think it was just like this or mailman or the, although that's where the story's kind of gone, not mailman, but this was a guy who boxed professionally. And the story was that my grandmother, like when they had their first kid, my Aunt Virginia, my grandmother was like, you can't be a boxer anymore. And so he was like, all right. And then he stopped being a boxer. And then my grandfather became a custodian in the Newark courthouse. And every day he would like get dressed up in a suit and take the bus to the Newark courthouse. They lived in a different section of Newark. And then he'd put on his custodian outfit and like clean the toilet, sweep the floors and stuff like that. Noble, salt of the earth shit. So my whole life I never questioned this. You know, your wife says, you quit and you quit and stuff like that. Until I became older and I became something of the man in the ring myself. I know what it's like to stand, you know, at attention for everybody, where everybody, you were the focus of thousands, where you get a level of affection from a, from a, of one vociferous mass that you is unparalleled from any amount of affection you could give from any other single human being in this world. It is, I've never done heroin, but I imagine it's better than heroin. It's one of the greatest drugs. It fuels us. And you know, we obviously like it. We keep fucking doing it. We make money off it. Yes. But there's many ways to make money and we like it and we do it because there's power to it and it feels fantastic. And you feel like, man, they like me. They really like me. And then I started thinking, why would he have put that all to the side? Like how do you step outside all that? Just because your wife is like, I don't want you to do that anymore. And then it made me reconsider my grandparents and I figured out, and I want to see if you back me on this play. You don't know these cats, so you got no skin in the game, so you can't offend anybody. Doesn't that sound like she did dirty shit that nobody else did? In the bed, you mean? Yes, son, where else but the bed? I didn't have that thought at all. My thought is that he recognized that it's very dangerous and he probably knew people who died and he probably wanted to find a way out of it anyway, which most fighters do. Most fighters at some point in time they realize, I'm going to have to jump off this ride one day. I can't stay on this ride until I'm a dead man, until I'm 90 years old or 100 years old. It's not feasible. It doesn't exist. There's no 98 year old boxers out there. You think he faced his own mortality? Every boxer does. Every fighter does. You hit someone and you see them get hurt. Well, then he's probably been hurt. You see people get hurt. You see people get pummeled. You see people get knocked out, maybe you've been knocked out yourself and you realize that this is something that is unsustainable. If he's not making any money at it, it's extremely dangerous. And you start thinking, what could happen to you? What can happen to you? It happens to people. You see it happen. If it hasn't happened to you, you watch it happen to other people. If you're around combat sports enough, you're going to see people get fucked up. And when you see people get fucked up, you realize like, hey, this is voluntary. There's other ways to make a living. I don't have to do this anymore. I can get off this ride. Or you're the type of person that doesn't give a fuck and you want to be a champion. And your thought is you are here for glory. You are here for a legacy. You're here to leave your mark. You want to go down in history as a great. And if you don't feel that way, I tell people to get out. I think fighting is one of the most singular pursuits a person can get into. Yeah. You're not only giving like the, I'm dedicating myself to something. You're giving your body. Something that like you're taught your entire life, protect this. It's also the consequences are so grave. The consequence is zigging and zagging. You go the wrong way. You run into a knee. Wrong way. You run into a head kick. Wrong way. You run into a punch. You duck into an uppercut. Your fucking lights go out. You're laying on your back. They're going to flashlight in your face and ice on the back of your neck. And you don't even know what day it is. You don't know what, and then that you never get back and you can only get so many of those in your life. You know, there's, it depends on the person, but you get knocked out three, four, five times, whatever the number is, there's a certain number that your life is going to be fucking different now because now your brain doesn't work good anymore. That's a fact. And maybe it'll get a little bit better over time. Maybe you can go through some cognitive therapy. There's some different things they're doing with magnets and different things they're doing with stem cells where they're shooting them straight into your cerebral spinal fluid. And they think that that might have some sort of a positive impact on CTE, but man, the reality is combat sports are a fucking brutal, brutal business. And people- So you think it's possible he just got to a place where he was like- Yeah, he's probably smart. Like, this is my perfect excuse to not fucking hear it. Yeah, because he wasn't making any money doing it either, it sounds like. I gotta tell you, he gave me, he gave him his dignity back. I honestly was like, he gave it all up because she gave up the ass. I doubt it. She was like a dirty German girl who was just like, I will let you do the anal, but you've got to get out of the ring. And he was like, she was like, I'll give you one ring for the other. And he was like, fuck. God damn it, Gussie. He called her Gussie. Are they more likely in love? Did you imagine fucking calling somebody Gussie? More likely in love and family. No. Yeah. I knew these motherfuckers love- Kids. He's got a kid, right? They had a few. That was their first one. Well, when he has a kid, man, everybody loves their kids. And you want to be around to see those kids grow up and you don't want to be brain dead. And everybody, look, I personally know a lot of people that have combat sports induced brain damage. There's no doubt about it. No ifs, ands, or buts. ZT stuff. Yeah. That's why when I see anybody who's like half in, half out, I go fucking hard in the paint. I tell them, man, you got to get the fuck out of this now. You got to trust me. And you know, and I've done it to the point where people think I'm mean. And I'm like, look, I'm not mean about very many things in this life. But when it comes to people who are delusional about their abilities in combat sports or their future in combat sports, I get fucking mean because I think you got to know. You got to know with no uncertain terms, I can't be protective of your feelings. I have to go in hard because no one else is going to. People don't. They bullshit you. Coaches bullshit you. Trainers bullshit you. They tell you you got a chance. Promoters willing to put you on fights when you really should retire. It is a dirty aspect of the business. And I don't play that shit. If I think that someone should get out, I go hard and I tell them and you know, I've done it to friends. I've done it to, you know, guys that I've done commentary for. They've asked me and they pulled me aside and I said, you got to get out, man. You got to get out because you could talk right now. You're okay right now. But how many more shots can you take? How many more times can you get knocked out? One KO can change your whole fucking life. Mel Jert Taylor got knocked out by Julio Cesar Chavez and Mel Jert Taylor was an Olympic gold medalist. A fantastic boxer. Was the fastest fuck lightning fast combinations. Beautiful skill. But Julio Cesar Chavez just kept wearing on him and wearing on him and boom. He dropped him in the final round and they stopped the fight with like seconds to go in the fight. Richard Steele stopped the fight. It was a big controversy like, oh my God, how could he stop the fight? Mel Jert was ahead in the score cards and you know, there was only a couple seconds to go and Mel Jert would have won a decision. It was a right call because he was done after that fight, man. After that fight, he was never the same. You hear him talk today. It's the saddest shit in the world. He can barely put together a sentence. And he had a few fights after that against Terry Norris, who was a brutal knockout puncher and a couple other guys. He just was never the same again. It was at one fight, one fight, one beating too much. And it was just, it all fell apart on him. And that can happen. That can happen to any fighter. And when you're done, you're done. The only way you should ever compete as a fighter is if it is, this is your fucking calling. This is the thing that you're obsessed with. It is your 100% focus. And as soon as it's not, as soon as you have doubts, get out because there's a bunch of people out there that don't have doubts. And I always try to tell people, like think about Mike Tyson before he won the title. Think about the Mike Tyson that destroyed Marvis Frazier. Think about that motherfucker. That guy's all in. You don't ever want to face a guy who's all in when you're half ass in it. And a lot of people are half ass in it and they don't even realize they're half ass in it. And they're just thinking in their head, well, I'm training pretty hard. I'm doing good. I got good skills. I can beat this guy. But when someone's in, they're in. Combat sports are uniquely dangerous in terms of the consequences of you not being committed. So you got to know when to get out. And no one does. Very few people. There's like a few guys. Andre Ward, retired, undefeated, Olympic gold medalist, two division world champion. He's the rarest of the rare. Most guys, they keep going until they get fucked up. They keep going until they get knocked out. They get brutalized and then you meet them afterwards and they can barely talk, man. They could barely talk. I've seen so many guys. They could just barely string words together. Everything's a mumble. All the words are slurring to the next word. It's horrible, man. And I saw it in the gym. I saw it in the gym with guys who never made it. They still got brain damage. The fucking gods of combat sports, they don't give a fuck if you win a title. If you're eating shots, you take punches to the head, kicks to the head, you're getting fucked up, man. No matter what- It seems like, why? How come they didn't talk about that for years and years? They didn't know. They did know that people get punched drunk, but they didn't know what was causing it. It's not even knockouts. It's sub-concussive trauma that does the vast majority of damage. They have a lot in the world of hockey as well. Yes. Sub-concussive trauma is terrible, but knockouts are also horrific. And then for me, my discussions with guys like Dr. Mark Gordon, who's an expert in traumatic brain injuries, and he works with a lot of soldiers, and he runs his TBI Foundation to deal with injuries that soldiers and football players and fighters face. His descriptions of it will scare the fucking shit out of you. He's like, people can get brain damage from fucking jet skiing. Just blah, blah, blah. All that bouncing up and down can get you fucking brain damage. Like, you're in a jet ski accident, just like. Just jet skiing. And if you jet ski accident, it's exacerbated. But he's talking about like people, some people get in accidents, some sort of a, something happens to you, we get knocked out, and they are never the same again. This is a real thing. You can get a shot to the head, a golf ball, somebody misses, they crack you in the head with a golf ball, right? You get hit with a line drive. That kind of shit changes people forever, forever. So your grandfather probably wanted out. First, all right, some thoughts. Number one, sober October gives you a different Joe Rogan. Yeah. Oh my God, you're so dialed in, it's beautiful. You're the Ken Burns of combat sports. I can listen to you spin yarns, tell tales. You know what, that's unfair, the Ken Burns. I call you the Gene Shepherd of. I don't know who that is, but I hope he's awesome. You love Gene Shepherd, remember Christmas story? Yeah. He's the guy that narrates Christmas story. He wrote the books, the essays that it's all based on. My other thoughts, that is far more dignity than I ever afforded my grandfather. I appreciate it. My mom is going to appreciate that. And then fourth, fuck, I lost my point. I thought I hit enough of him.