Robert Downey Jr. on How Martial Arts Have Improved His Life | Joe Rogan

And honestly, particularly in the last 15 years when I started really taking martial art seriously, half the stuff that I've been able to do right in my creative life are principles that I learned on the mat with my seafood. Mm. You know, guard your center. Keep your eye on the lead elbow. Get to the blind side. You know, how often do you do that? I started. I think I'm in the 15th or 16th year. Sifu was over day before yesterday. So, you know, a bunch of times a week. And if I'm working on something or if he can make it to location, we'll have long stretches where we're doing it every day. And there's gratings. So you've got to prep for those, you know. Mm-hmm. It's a... So what are you doing? Are you doing Kung Fu? Is it a very particular style? Traditional Wing Chun. Really? Yeah. Which is... Very underrated art form. Yes. Also, so many trade secrets and so different than how I see it when I'm looking at videos. In that, in UFC, everything is out in the open and it's discussed and you see. And a lot of the Eastern stuff, there was a turf wars and we're not really going to show them our footwork. We're not going to do this. So, but anyway, it's been a real deep dive with my Sifu Eric Orem, whose Sifu, my Seagun, is Grandmaster William Chung, renowned kind of Hong Kong rooftop, fights, all that stuff. Amazing lore, but very technical, difficult to build and easy to use. You know, you very rarely see that in the UFC. One of the best fighters in the UFC uses it regularly. Tony Ferguson. Tony Ferguson uses trapping hands. The Mook Jung. Yeah. He grabs wrists and comes over the top with elbows. He does straight winged Chung. He does it all the time. And he even practices on a wooden dummy. Yeah. I got my ass kicked by a wooden dummy for about three years and then I finally understood the principle of don't fight force with force. And, you know, it's just nuts. So anyway, half the time, if I would be in a critical artistic situation, I would just say, because Wing Chun problems are life problems, life problems are Wing Chun problems. And I would just go back to how did this kind of relate to because I don't like getting clocked and get my teeth knocked in because we tend to sometimes we glove up, but we're not wearing mouthpieces. It's very. Why do you wear a mouthpiece? It's certainly not because he's very good at pulling his punches and he's also even better at making sure that I don't accidentally hit him. But we get as close as we can to what the real experience would be. But again, it's like everything. I'm sure, you know, a few clicks back down the road, there's things that instructors were doing that would be considered illegal to do to a group of students nowadays. Yeah, for sure. So not just a few clicks while I was coming up. That's what I would imagine. Yeah. Oh, there's. Yeah. They'd hit each other. It's students would get beat up. Yes. It was a normal thing. Yes. You. So did you start training for Sherlock Holmes or you start training before that? I didn't. It absolutely coincided with my recovery. And the two things just somehow or other seem to to lock in and and talk to you off the record and afterwards about any and everything to do with my recovery as far as it locked in with this. It was an apprentice, an apprenticeship, and it was an apprenticeship that was contingent on me being in a certain headspace. Well, it's a good thing, too, because it's it's a very addictive thing. People get very addicted to martial arts and it's a good substitute for sometimes negative addictions. You know, Bourdain, before he died, he was obsessed with Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Yeah, became really obsessed with it at 58 and got really good. He was he was training every day and he was training twice a day every day. So he went from when I first met him, he was chubby. He was smoking cigarettes. He drank every night. He still kind of still drank every night. But, you know, he just did enough to enough healthy things keep his body together. And then his ex-wife got really into Jiu Jitsu. And then he decided to follow one day to classes and he was kind of mocking it and laughing at it at first and then became obsessed and then really got good. I mean, he was at the guy won in a tournament. I mean, oh, my God. Yeah, he's fucking 60 years old. What's really crazy is a picture of him walking. Down the street in I think they were in Rome and he has no shirt on and he's fucking ripped Anthony Bourdain full six pack. Yeah, dude, he was obsessed. He would take a private every day. Look at him. Look at that photo. That's crazy. He's like 60 something years old there. So he would take a private lesson every day and then he would take a class. So we take a private lesson, sharpen up techniques and then we roll. Yeah, we take group classes too, which is very, very critical. We got a role with different people. 100%. Yeah. And so he was in there like and it became a good thing for him to sort of become addicted to this positive thing. Yeah, I mean, for me, it wasn't going to be golf. It wasn't going to be something passive like that. Right. I hear it's great, but it's been it's just been a great gift. And it's also the thing where, you know, you're just you're never done. I made black belt five years ago for another grading and now we're doing a lot of weapons stuff. And it's just I just. That's awesome. Congratulations. Yeah. My tag window teacher said something to me when I was very young. They said that it is a tool for developing your human potential. Yeah. And I never forgot that because I'm like, yeah, it's because it's really difficult to do. All martial arts are really it's really difficult to get your body to move that way and to be able to be effective in a conflict situation. And if you can do it and you can do it over and over again and you can overcome that difficult thing and you thought it was insurmountable and then you figured out how to do it. Eventually you get to this point where you realize, well, everything in life is like that. Everything in life is like something that's a puzzle. You have to figure out what how am I approaching it wrong? What can I do to make it better? How do I get more competent at this particular skill or this particular discipline? Yeah. And just the humility to I mean, if I've noticed anything in the last couple of years, just in in UFC, which, by the way, I was doing a Robert Altman film called The Gingerbread Man back in the 90s. And I UFC had just started off and I was getting the VHS tapes and watching them. And so when they go back on the twenty five years ago, I was like, I've been I've been I've been there from jump. That's awesome. But we watch. It's just that thing of no matter what you think. The the tides are changing quickly. And yeah. And you just got to keep keep working. Well, that was a real wake up call for a lot of martial artists was the UFC because a lot of the stuff that they were doing really wasn't effective. Yeah. They thought it would be if everybody was playing by the rules and the dojo and sort of following along the. But once you really saw the actual cage event where people were just going balls out, you realize, oh, a lot of the stuff just doesn't work. Yeah. And I love how messy it was at the beginning because the style of matchups were so almost crazy laughable until you. Until you saw the violence and no weight classes.