On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe talks about the impact of the Ebola Pandemic on the U.S. and the impact it has had on his life and the people around him. He also talks about how he dealt with the aftermath of the pandemic and how he and his family managed to get through it. Joe also discusses the UFC and what it's like to go to a fight without an audience and how it's different than going to one with an audience. Joe also gives his thoughts on the UFC post-fight and how to deal with the pressure of being in the spotlight and the pressure to perform in front of a live audience. Joe finishes off the episode by talking about the upcoming UFC Fight Night in Las Vegas and what he's looking forward to in the future of UFC events without fans in attendance. Joe is a long time friend of mine and I really enjoyed this episode and I hope you enjoy listening to it! -Joe Rogan -The Joe Rogans Experience -Training by Day -By Night, All Day - by Night, by Night - by Day, By Night - By Night, By Day, All Night - by Night by Night Thanks for tuning in! -Your Support is greatly Appreciated! Thank you for listening! Cheers, Cheers. -J.R. and God Bless You! xoxo -Jon & Marcus Music: "AstroFabulous" -Jon Soriano - "Ace" - "The Joker" "The Man Who Couldn't See It" - "A Little Too Much" -"A Good Day" -"Outro: "Outro Song: "Solo" by Fade" by Chacho "The Real" by & "The Good Guy" by "The Bad Guy" by "Mr. "Brujor" by Caliber "Alfie" "Feat. "Avenger" (feat. "Crispy Girl" by Mr. "Goodbye" by Pizzi "A Goodbye" by Jeffree "Bennie "A Day " by "Cecil " and "The Way" ? ( ) , "The Big Man " " " " & "Alyssa" "Auntie" ( ) "Amber Guy "Alicia"
00:00:53.000I mean, when we suffer together, then there'll always be those that are trying to figure out ways to get us back to where we're supposed to be.
00:01:01.000Well, it seems like Texas did a much better job of relaxing once the pandemic hit where people just, you know, for some folks it's very dangerous, but it seemed like Texas did a much better job of just going like, wait a minute, why is everybody freaking out over this?
00:02:48.000It's quicker for them to get into the octagon.
00:02:50.000Once they arrive there, they just warm up, and then they go in there.
00:02:53.000They don't have to get to the arena early in the day and stay there all day.
00:02:57.000It's a different vibe, but it's great.
00:03:01.000You know what I compare to the difference between a concert where you're at a filled arena with a rock band, electric guitars, versus a small acoustic show?
00:03:18.000Because the anticipation of it, once that punch goes, if not a lot of people are looking, that's the hardest part about being a fighter, I would imagine.
00:04:43.000He takes his wildness, and then he tempers it, and that's one of the things that makes him the greatest of all time is because he's figured out how to, like, take all the wildness.
00:04:53.000Like, when he fought Shogun, he was 22 years old.
00:05:21.000I think he did because he realized, like, these poor choices he's making outside of the octagon, outside of his career, they could ruin everything.
00:05:29.000I mean, he has this insane opportunity.
00:05:30.000I mean, he had a contract with Nike that went away.
00:05:33.000I mean, he had all these great things that went away.
00:05:45.000Yeah, that's a big thing that's missing today, right?
00:05:48.000With all this cancel culture bullshit.
00:05:51.000Some girl just got canceled for some fucking tweet she made when she was 17. Like, now she's 27. She's an editor at Vogue or something like that.
00:06:33.000Once it gets established that there's things that people want you to say and don't want you to say, then there's people that are going to be bullies.
00:06:40.000That when someone steps out of the line or when someone says something that's questionable, they're going to try to attack them.
00:06:45.000What it really is is a bunch of really shitty human beings that just want an excuse to go after someone.
00:06:51.000And they want to pretend they're doing it because they're morally outraged.
00:06:54.000But really, they're just shitty human beings without any empathy and without any forgiveness.
00:07:07.000They have mental health problems because they've been locked up inside their house and they're losing their job and they're losing their career.
00:08:08.000Toning you for what you're saying is fine, and I think we should all agree when we've made mistakes to recognize those mistakes and to also recognize that you're evolving.
00:08:19.000When you're talking about someone, especially that girl who's 17, Jesus Christ, thank God there wasn't social media when I was 17. Yeah, that's unbelievable that they would do that to her.
00:08:27.000Because, I mean, that says you can't grow.
00:11:47.000That's the scariest thing, I think, for people in the martial science and in jiu-jitsu.
00:11:50.000They don't want to go in and think the minute you walk in there that it's like an octagon, you're just going to get your ass handed to you.
00:11:55.000They don't realize that it's, no, just show up, and then we'll start from what you don't know.
00:11:59.000Yeah, they're going to treat you like a beginner, and they're going to be kind to you.
00:12:03.000I mean, the good ones, you'll get hooked like that.
00:12:07.000Yeah, it's just a matter of having the courage to be a beginner, and that's where a lot of people, they just don't know how to humble themselves like that.
00:12:58.000Marriage is funny, the stuff that you figure out going through it, because you figure out the differences.
00:13:03.000I never knew that we could be sitting somewhere and listening to somebody talk, and we hear the same sentence, but what we interpret are two different things.
00:13:49.000And then Mellie and I were getting some arguments about something, and I realized if it goes past a couple of different conversations, we're saying the same thing just differently.
00:15:15.000No, I mean, I watched my wife give birth to our kids, and I was like, honey, you're the toughest thing I've ever seen.
00:15:20.000You know, back in the day when they split, you know, man and woman standing for the first time, and God's like, which one of y'all want to have to go through this?
00:15:32.000If a baby came through your dick and made your dick explode and they had to sew it back up every time, there'd be four people on the planet.
00:15:38.000Bro, after a bunch of surgeries, I had to take Vicodin and, man, that stuff would stop you up, feel like your pecs.
00:17:52.000To back it up to the book and how that all happened, or you back it up to the military, wherever you want to start, We can go all different directions with it, but I was in the hospital.
00:18:03.000So when I got back, I was in the hospital for a while, and then they...
00:18:06.000I went back into the teams and started doing another workup for deployment, and then in between that, I was getting called to the boss's house.
00:18:20.000I've always been watched over on high ground.
00:18:55.000I just got out of the hospital and I was doing physical therapy with the team and they called me up and they said, hey, we're going to declassify part of this operation.
00:19:04.000And we're going to put it out into a book.
00:22:17.000There's a certain amount of bullshit, and I don't know if there's any bullshit in terms of the reality of the experience versus the film version of it, but there was no gloss to that film.
00:22:34.000I'll talk about when I met Pete for the first time.
00:22:36.000I got pulled up to LA to interview all of them.
00:22:39.000I was traveling around Just getting to meet everybody.
00:22:44.000Oliver Stone, I sat down in front of him.
00:22:46.000I mean, they threw me through the gate.
00:23:24.000But he was great because he was a British guy, tall, skinny, and he would wear the sweaters tied around his neck in the white and black wingtips.
00:27:21.000Some of the guys would show up at his house in the middle of the night, grab him out of bed, spray him with bear mace, throw him in the pool, take all the liquor in his bar and leave.
00:28:55.000And this situation we're in now, it's like we've had all these blanket protections.
00:29:01.000We've had all this softness and we've had people like you out there protecting us from the worst aspects of human nature.
00:29:07.000And then because of that, people get soft and uncomfortable and then they look for all these weird reasons why people are evil and people are bad.
00:29:19.000They've never experienced what you've experienced.
00:29:22.000And it's my belief that only people like you that have stared into the heart of evil, that have stared into the heart of darkness, that have been there, that have lost brothers and got as close to a human being,
00:29:37.000as close as you can to losing your own life and come back.
00:29:42.000You can tell people what the fuck is really going on when people are at their worst.
00:30:18.000It's so hard to gather up all the information to make a good assessment of what it means to be a person.
00:30:25.000But one of the things, one of the lessons, one of the most important pieces of information, what it means to be a person, is the people that have gone through the worst, and the worst is war.
00:30:38.000The most dangerous thing down here is an undisciplined human mind.
00:30:54.000And in order for someone who had to go through something so hard to obtain something so great to enjoy it, then you'd want to pass that down.
00:31:01.000Well, that next gen will never understand it.
00:31:28.000And when they come in swinging something...
00:31:30.000It all depends on where they're from, what they're going through.
00:31:32.000And as we go through our life and we go through those hard times, it's incumbent upon us to look back into our hard times, to understand what somebody at a certain age is going through.
00:31:42.000Can't get ahead of it, can't get below it.
00:31:44.000You can study something, just like in school, if you're a freshman, study some senior stuff, but you're still going to have to go through the class.
00:31:50.000Like with the millennials, they have the iPhone.
00:31:52.000Like they can touch a picture on that screen and it'll show up to the door.
00:33:18.000One time I went hunting with my friend Steve Rinella, and we went to Prince of Wales in Alaska, and it was raining every day, all day long.
00:33:56.000That feeling of like relief, unless you've experienced the feeling of being under the gun of something, under the pressure of, under the feeling of never getting warm, always being cold, always shivering, always being soaked.
00:39:14.000And then, like with us, you see, when you open yourself up in every avenue that we have, I know there's people in here that they say stuff and you're like, man, I understand that.
00:39:23.000I thought like that, too, at that time.
00:40:02.000You know, a lot of them are running right now, listening on earbuds, or they're driving in their car on their way to work, and they're listening to the speaker by themselves, and they're a part of this conversation.
00:43:20.000And no matter how hard the training comes down, and I'd be the first person to tell you my father was hard on me, but my wife loves the way I turned out.
00:44:37.000It's just we kind of, we want to put them into groups.
00:44:41.000And it's almost like a trick because you're trying to emulate all the people that you see that are successful or that you admire around you, but you have to recognize that you are not them.
00:44:50.000And even if you emulate them as much as you can, as good as you can, as well as you can, as often as you can, you're still never going to be them.
00:45:23.000And you can learn lessons from those people that are successful, learn lessons from those people that have gone through the fire, learn lessons from the people that have made mistakes and have learned from those mistakes.
00:46:01.000There's a lot of really, really talented people.
00:46:03.000They often fall short because they're so talented, they don't want to work hard.
00:46:07.000And then the determined little wolves...
00:46:11.000There's some guys that maybe they don't have the best genetic tools or maybe they didn't have the best childhood or whatever it is, but they have determination.
00:46:18.000And they figure out a way to become great.
00:51:09.000Fucking terrible neighborhood with terrible relatives and terrible neighbors and terrible bullshit And they just did they just didn't have the tools whether it's mental or spiritual or psychological to overcome and They're in this position where they're an asshole.
00:51:24.000It doesn't mean that they're always going to be an asshole They can recover we can all recover we can all move if you're alive if you're breathing if you can if you can do anything whether you can progress forward you can get better and And if you can get better, then you can not be a moron,
00:51:39.000you can not be an asshole, and you could be someone that everybody can hang out with.
00:52:09.000With you, look at your vocabulary, your mental prowess, what you're capable of physically, everything that you've trained for, who you've met, what each one of those have trained you for.
00:52:18.000So there will be people younger than us that haven't been through this that will go into a situation and be like, God was the biggest dick, man, just blah, [...
00:52:34.000Who wants to be the badass and who really isn't.
00:52:58.000Yeah, there's funny videos online where a black belt will show up at a school and pretend to be a white belt and start rolling with people.
00:53:03.000And then you can see the people get super confused when they're purple belts or brown belts, and they start getting strangled.
00:54:16.000They've been training this one move all week and a set up.
00:54:19.000But it's that obscure one that you're not looking for, so you're doing your thing and all of a sudden you're like, oh, there's no way he knows this one.
01:00:52.000It sounds like it's exaggeration, but I don't think it is.
01:00:55.000I think there's something that's moving through him that is forcing other people to action, and it makes him greater than just an individual.
01:06:55.000Because we went through BUDS together.
01:06:56.000BUDS stands for Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL Training, but it also means if you take everything away from us, we're still BUDS. Because we survived in hell.
01:07:04.000And, uh, when we went back out there, matter of fact, the first gunfight I ever got in, I remember taking a knee and kind of sitting there going, what in the hell am I doing here?
01:07:56.000I mean, it was just like that first fight, like when you start getting beaten up again, and then you realize, like, wait a minute, I'm a fighter.
01:08:02.000And then I was like, okay, well, let's go.
01:08:04.000And then I stood up and made the call.
01:08:06.000But there are, in any situation you go into, there's going to be that kind of hesitation.
01:08:11.000I hear people all the time, like, man, I've been training so long for this, but I still have the fear.
01:08:16.000And I was like, well, that's different.
01:11:26.000When we go down in the gym and I'll work out chest as hard as I can, then that night and the next day, I'm a two-day guy, so the pain feels like my chest is being ripped out.
01:11:33.000I feel like sometimes I work out so hard and I bleed and I puke that I'm being torn apart.
01:12:22.000But if you take someone who's never experienced pain and put them through the same thing that's normal for you, for them, they'd be like, this is horrible.
01:13:12.000And I think those things are really nonsense.
01:13:15.000And I think that the people that live in that world and that exchange the currency of that nonsense, they're only doing it because they don't have anything greater.
01:13:28.000So the reason why they dwell on color or gender or all these things that aren't important, what's important is the character of you as a human being.
01:13:38.000And if you concentrate on color or gender or sexuality or whatever the fuck it is that you're boiling people down to, you're only doing that because you lack the other experiences.
01:13:52.000Sure, like I said earlier, man, it's what's different makes us unique.
01:13:55.000We all drive similar cars, similar colors, but what do you do?
01:13:58.000You throw a bumper sticker on it, hang some stuff in a mirror, like lower it, raise it.
01:17:38.000They walk in, they have white shirts on, buttoned down, all starched up, pants, and they got a rig on there that looks like it's made out of the Old West, and they got a 10-star and a hat on.
01:17:46.000I was always taught never even to look at them, because they'll just find some reason to mess with you.
01:17:50.000Not pick on you, just like, hey, you know, they're the real deal.
01:17:53.000They've been through a lot in our Rangers or something.
01:17:56.000So, there's kind of a, it's always a bragging right.
01:17:58.000Because Captain Hayes, Jack, all them guys, what they had to go through.
01:18:01.000I think he gave a speech to his troops right before he died.
01:18:04.000He was sitting in camp telling him, like, hey, I'm proud of you.
01:18:06.000And they just promoted him to cabin and he freaking died.
01:18:09.000And there's some good ones with the stories that come out of that.
01:18:14.000I actually have a book that was gifted to me that has the signatures of all the Texas Rangers current and a lot of them that are past.
01:18:21.000That's one of the coolest things I got.
01:18:31.000Does it feel weird because your story has been elevated to the point of, like, Hollywood movies and, you know, Marky Mark played you in a movie and all that weird shit?
01:22:40.000Because the difference when I tell between the movie and real life is like, this is as far as we could push the actors and the stuntmen without killing them.
01:22:46.000The one thing about team guys is when we learn how to operate, we learn how to get efficient, just like every other Green Beret and Ranger.
01:22:52.000But then after, SEALs try to look cool while we're doing it.
01:22:55.000And the thing on the mountain is when we're falling, like in the movie, it kind of looks sexy while they're doing that.
01:23:48.000But with us, I was like, hey, if the families were satisfied, and I told Pete, this is kind of a little thing, I was like, hey man, if I see this on TNT during Veterans Day, you did a good job.
01:29:39.000And I mean, there's everything in there in between, right?
01:29:41.000And then when you're kind of sitting there and they think about it, and I'm like, I'll tell you what, I'll just pick the other, help you with the other guys.
01:29:56.000I mean, he didn't nail it, because it wasn't you, but it was the best, like, vehicle for carrying your story, because he's a legit movie star, and he did a great job, and there was no bullshit in it.
01:30:10.000There's no fluff in that movie, you know?
01:31:18.000But all you need to do is tuck them arms underneath them titties, put that pistol right there, and wherever you point them headlights, that's going.
01:31:27.000So you can overtrain somebody, or you can just, over my life, through all the martial arts and SEAL teams and everything I'd ever been trained and worked with, you realize, and I'm a medic.
01:31:36.000Like, I know all the body functions, I know how they work, path of blood, everything.
01:31:41.000So I know where to go to shut something off.
01:31:44.000Like, a lot of people, when they get in a fight, I'm like, no, no, man, if I'm gonna shut you down, like, self-defense will just shut you down.
01:31:50.000As big as I am, as much as I weigh, I don't give a shit who you are.
01:31:53.000If I come at you and I'm coming from your throat, there's nothing you can do to stop me.
01:33:49.000The problem is when people are vulnerable or they're insecure or they just don't understand who they are, and then you have to do this sort of slow dance with them and get to be comfortable with them.
01:34:27.000Your life is just a wild spectrum of experiences and some people have had a limited number of those and those people are the scariest because those people they don't know who they are and they want to establish themselves and they want to force themselves on you and they don't even know who they are yet.
01:34:51.000The people that know who they are, like a guy like Jocko or a guy like Goggins or you or Cam Haynes or people who know who they are, they're so easy to meet.
01:35:04.000And if the world was like that, if the world was filled with men who have accomplished things, who understand who they are and know their weaknesses and know their strengths...
01:36:04.000They don't even go outside their own wheelhouse, so...
01:36:08.000As they progress through the ranks and you stay there, you'll develop your own reputation in that town.
01:36:13.000It's usually when someone like us runs into that town and we run into them and There's no reason why I should ever be insecure about things that you're proficient at.
01:37:01.000You get a community or a civilization that literally learns how to run so proficient, then you're like, okay, you know, as kids, as boys, man, it's got to be hard.
01:37:18.000Your opinion of yourself should be based on your experiences in life and other people's opinions of you should be based on what you've accomplished and who you are and how you are when you meet them and it should be undeniable.
01:37:37.000Because they don't know what you're going through, and they may catch you in that part when you're on the downtrodden, or you're getting your ass handed to you, or you're on the peak of it.
01:38:12.000Very similar experiences, and then all of a sudden you're getting all this focus and attention.
01:38:18.000Did you feel like it wasn't warranted, you didn't deserve it, or you felt like you need to spread it around to all your other brothers who you knew had also died?
01:38:32.000And when they were telling me, like, hey, we've got to debrief this, put it into a book, into a movie, I was like, wait a minute, are you kidding me?
01:40:26.000I learned this watching the leadership.
01:40:28.000I was like, I hear all the younger guys bitching about the headshed, the leaders, because they won't let them fight, or they this, that, and the other.
01:40:35.000I'm like, man, it takes both sides to get us into this.
01:45:25.000We filmed the movie around the gunfight because that's when everyone was alive.
01:45:28.000I was like, you shouldn't have known that I was going to be the guy to make it out.
01:45:31.000When they were picking the actors, I was like, so if you get somebody, like an A-list actor, and then everybody, they'll know that he's the one that made it out.
01:45:38.000I was like, when you're watching the movie, you shouldn't know that.
01:45:41.000Of course, Hollywood kind of does their own thing.
01:45:46.000But the craziest part about that whole operation was getting me out of there.
01:52:28.000And then the kids and everybody, they were laughing and whatnot, and they pulled me into this room, and they doctored me up, stopped my bleeding, patched me up, gave me all the water I could drink, and then the Taliban came in after that and snatched me up.
01:52:39.000So how much of what was in the script, I know you didn't see the movie, but how much of what was in the script was accurate?
01:56:54.000And they put us through things, and like, hey man, you know, you go through this, this, that, and the other, and then they sent me overseas, and they killed every one of them in front of me.
01:57:53.000So I always try to think about it like, man, all right, you know, there's got to be one guy down there that gets his ass kicked so everybody can look at, like, hey, you can get an ass whooping and come back.
01:58:04.000So, I had to continually tell myself that, and everybody I would run into, when they put me on the lecture circuit, and I got to run into all of our people and everything, they were like, hey, good job, man.
02:00:48.000Like imagine them not understanding your language or understanding who you are or why you were there, but recognizing that in their eyes this enemy was on their mountain.
02:04:47.000And I was laying there and I looked up at him and I was bleeding.
02:04:52.000I didn't realize how bad I looked until I got home when they dropped the ramp on the plane and they were carrying me off there and there was a girl sitting there.
02:04:59.000I'll never forget her covering her face, crying.
02:05:02.000I was like, I must have looked a lot worse than I thought.
02:05:06.000But no matter what I looked like, he got me back here.
02:10:16.000When men get to the point where we fight so hard where we want to kill each other, like tear each other apart, there's something that happens.
02:11:01.000So yeah, that mud and that blood, when you're sitting there and you're thinking about it, you're like, man, all I have to do is sit and watch.
02:14:15.000I think people's thoughts and ideas and consciousness, sometimes when someone has had an experience that's so intense as yours, that it reaches out and it grabs a hold of other people's consciousness.
02:14:36.000I know this sounds crazy, but I think it touched me in the middle of the night because I knew I was going to talk to you today, and it hit me.
02:14:52.000I was thinking, why do I have this feeling?
02:14:55.000I woke up to take a leak, and I'm like, this is an intense experience of this dream where I had dirt in my mouth, and I needed to drink water, but I couldn't.
02:15:05.000I was trying to rinse the water out to get the dirt out of my mouth so I could drink water.
02:16:56.000It's like, man, sometimes you run into things, you're like, well, I thought there was going to be, and then you run into the one that's like the real deal, and you're like, oh, yeah.
02:17:02.000But as you go through life, it's hard to sort out.
02:17:05.000It's like you've got to sort out what's real and what's not real, and that's why you appreciate the real so much.
02:17:09.000It's because you experience so much bullshit and so much nonsense.
02:17:14.000The way I was always taught to think about that is everyone thinks of perfection.
02:17:18.000Like if we were all, like this perfect picture.
02:17:39.000And then as you go through it, when the connection comes in, like you're supposed to be here and you're supposed to see this and you're supposed to learn that, and then it kind of creates that picture.
02:18:31.000In our world, like where you and I grew up, martial art world, I mean, everything that we learned how to do, like you and I running together, the last two we should have been hooking up with is them two.
02:18:52.000It's also like recognizing that you need these opposites and these different forces in order to get you to understand yourself better and how you relate to other people.
02:19:05.000Everyone's different and the best way to experience that is to encounter these different people and to love them.
02:19:13.000Yeah, some people come up like, hey, immediately you're supposed to love this person.
02:19:21.000You're supposed to love what they are.
02:19:22.000I'm like, well, where does that exist?
02:20:01.000With you and I, man, what we are, what we're designed to be, we're trained for certain reasons, you have a reputation, so when they see us piling around with something completely opposite of us, like, what the hell's going on?
02:24:07.000It's one of the more unique aspects of being a person is this recognition that there are people that will capitalize on these weird little openings in society and culture.
02:24:32.000There's conflict with China, conflict with Russia, conflict with Syria.
02:24:36.000This conflict internally, this conflict with the right and the left, this conflict with people that want to be a socialist or a capitalist, this conflict with people...
02:24:46.000With every fucking aspect of our culture, there's these weird little struggles for dominance.