091： Why Men Fight ｜ Jonathan Gottschall
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Summary
Why do men fight and why do we like to watch? These are questions I have asked myself before and one that we attempt to answer with my guest today, Jonathan Gottschall, an English professor with some real world experience in MMA. Today we talk about the nature of fighting, how fighting has evolved, the role honor plays in combat, where the desire to make men more civilized comes from, and a ton more.
Transcript
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Why do men fight and why do we like to watch? These are a couple of questions I've asked
00:00:03.860
myself before and one that we attempt to answer with my guest today, Jonathan Gottschall,
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an English professor with some real-world experience in MMA. Today we talk about the
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nature of fighting, how fighting has evolved, the role honor plays in combat, where the desire to
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make men more civilized comes from, and of course, a ton more. You're a man of action.
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You live life to the fullest. Embrace your fears and boldly chart your own path. When life knocks
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you down, you get back up one more time, every time. You are not easily deterred or defeated,
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rugged, resilient, strong. This is your life. This is who you are. This is who you will become
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at the end of the day, and after all is said and done, you can call yourself a man.
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Men, what is going on today? My name is Ryan Michler, and I am the host and the founder of
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Order of Man. I want to welcome you to the Manly's podcast on the planet. That's right,
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on the planet. Guys, in fact, I was looking at the iTunes rankings, and we have officially moved
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up to the number 29 position in all of the business category, which is a huge feat, and I want to thank
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rating and review. And also, if you're new to the show today, guys, we are having some great
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conversations, some serious conversations on what it means to be a man. I'm talking with the world's
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most successful men, authors, athletes, warriors, entrepreneurs, and we're going to extract all of
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their lessons, their habits, their tools, their tactics, everything that they're doing and implementing
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on a daily basis, and then we're delivering them right to you. So I've got a great one lined up for
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today, as I always do, with an English professor of all things who decided, guys, to step up to the plate
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and start MMA training, and even fight in the cage. So before I get too much into that conversation
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and I introduce you to him and the conversation that we're having today, I do want to let you know
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that you can get the show notes for this show at orderofman.com slash 091. And also, if you haven't
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done this already, make sure you join our closed Facebook group. We've got 12,500 plus men in there
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right now. And again, we're having some great conversations about what it means to be a man and how you can be
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slash groups slash order of men. And third, guys, this is the big one. Make sure you check out our
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elite mastermind. I don't know if you've checked it out yet, but I want you to go take a look at the
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iron council. This is a group of men who are working each and every day on becoming better men. I'm going
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to give you some more details during the break, but until then, just understand the iron council is all
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about giving you the guidance and the tools and the direction that you need to achieve at high
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levels. So you can learn more at orderofman.com slash iron council. Now, with all that said,
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I do want to introduce you to my guest today. This is a fascinating discussion that I have with
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Mr. Jonathan Gottschall. And like I mentioned before, he is an English professor. In fact,
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he's a distinguished fellow at Washington and Jefferson college. But the reason I invited Jonathan
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to come on the show is because of his latest book, which is called professor in the cage,
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why men fight and why we like to watch. This is what makes this conversation so fascinating though.
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He didn't just write about fighting. He started fighting. He noticed a gym across the street from
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his office and decided to throw his hat in the ring and train. He trained for three years and he even
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competed in a fight. So I'm not going to ruin the surprise on how that went. I'll let Jonathan do that
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in the conversation that we have today. But the bottom line is that this is a guy who I hold in
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high regard because he has actually done what most people would only talk or dream or think about
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doing. And he's got some fascinating views on men and fighting from a credible perspective because
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he's been willing to put it all on the line. So I hope you enjoy the conversation today.
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Jonathan, thanks for joining me on the show today.
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And this is part two, right? Because I talked to you a couple of weeks ago. Most of the guys
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listening to this know that my computer crashed. They all have experienced similar things. And I just
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appreciate your flexibility in coming back on the show.
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Well, I appreciate your honesty. I'm surprised you're fessing up to this on the air.
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Yeah. You know, the one thing that I have been pretty good at doing, I think I'm pretty good
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at doing is saying that I don't have it all figured out and just putting it out there because
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everybody knows there's no reason to hide it, right?
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That's true. That is true. Well, let's talk about this. The initial conversation that we had
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was about your book, which is The Professor in the Cage, Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch,
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which I was fascinated by the concept because I'm enthralled with fighting. My boys are enthralled with
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fighting. We do fight nights around here. Why is it that men are so interested in the notion and
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Yeah. That was what drew me to the project as well. I've been watching, you know, cage fighting
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on TV for almost, you know, 15, 20 years before I started this project. And the whole time I was
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watching it with this sort of sense of guilty fascination because I was drawn to it, but also
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repelled. And I was thinking to myself, what kind of person am I? Who would want to watch this stuff?
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What kind of monster would want to watch this spectacle of human suffering? And so there's
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the big question, one of the big questions for me was why are we drawn to it? And so most of us are
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pushed away a little bit. We're a little bit repelled by what we see in the cage. If it's a really bloody
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fight, if a guy gets knocked out or injured, it seems kind of grotesque. But we're drawn to it too.
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And I think we're drawn to it less by a certain bloodlust than by a desire to sort of celebrate
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some of the best elements of human nature. So what a fight does is it sets up this artificial
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situation, an incredibly dramatic artificial situation, sort of like the climax to a great
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movie where you have this incredible showdown between two characters and they compete in a very
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direct and real way. And that artificial situation forces the best elements of human nature to show
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themselves. Talking about strength and courage and perseverance and skill and extremes of endurance
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and grace, toughness. So I think that we are drawn to fighting less by a desire to celebrate or succumb
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to what's worse than human nature and more by an urge to celebrate what's best in human nature.
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Yeah. I really want to get into this conversation of what you're talking about, discipline, courage,
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bravery, all the things that we celebrate and we admire. I think that's really important. And I think
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that's one of the elements, especially, and I don't know if I want to be so bold as to say this,
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but I think women maybe in general overlook this other element of it because they think it's more
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violent than maybe it is. And they don't see and appreciate this other side of this. But before I get into
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that, I want to know, is this something that just the notion of fighting, is this something that men,
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modern men specifically, are more interested in living vicariously through other people? Or,
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I mean, because you don't see guys just walking around, you know, getting in fights on the streets
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anymore, right? No, you don't. And I think most of us would say that on the whole, that's a good thing.
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I mean, we don't need to be nostalgic. It doesn't mean to, we're not repudiating masculinity. We're not
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repudiating manliness by not being nostalgic for a vision of masculinity where guys, you know,
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are swaggering down the streets, knocking shoulders into each other, trying to pick fights,
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getting in duels, you know. I mean, we used to do this. We used to, you know, you'd insult me on the
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street or I'd feel insulted and I'd insult you back and no one would apologize. And we'd go meet in the
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morning and have a gunfight, you know. So this is not something to be nostalgic for. But there is,
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I do think that there is a vicarious component to it. You know, we watch these guys in the cage
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and what we are seeing there is an absolute epitome of a certain ideal of masculinity, right?
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Of these guys who are just incredibly strength, strong. They're incredibly brave. They're incredibly
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tough. They're incredibly skilled. They are so incredibly everything we want to be. They are our
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heroes. And so I do think we go there to celebrate a certain vision of masculinity, but it's also part
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of what makes cage fighting so controversial. You know, in this day and age, we don't feel as
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comfortable as we used to or the whole culture doesn't feel as comfortable as we used to celebrating
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this sort of raw masculinity that's on display in a cage fight. And by the way, I think this is part of
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the reason why cage fighting, even though it is arguably safer than boxing because there's less
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damage to the brain, um, has never, hasn't caught on to the same degree that boxing did in the old
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days. In the old days, all the great writers, Plimpton and Mailer and Hemingway and many, many
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others, uh, wrote about boxing. There's a whole literature about boxing. Great writers don't go
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near it, uh, anymore. I have this whole field practically to myself. Um, and it's partly because
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we're just, you know, the sort of elite culture, smart people, intellectuals just aren't as
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comfortable with that idea of a sort of traditional masculinity as they used to be.
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Why has that changed? I mean, I'm at, I imagine I almost look at this as, as someone might say
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the term, you know, this is barbaric. This isn't necessary. Is there more to it than that?
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You, you said that, that women have a different response to it and maybe they, they don't,
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they think it's more violent than it actually is. But I think when women see it, they're seeing
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it very clearly. This is incredibly violent and there is a real barbarism to it. You know,
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I mean, when you get right down to it, combat sports like boxing and like cage fighting are
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really very, very intense. What you have is basically a brain damage contest, right? Uh,
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these guys put on these gloves, the gloves do not civilize the sport. The guy, the gloves
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weaponize the hand because you can throw that thing around with wild abandon. If I'm fighting
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you bare fisted, I have to be very careful because I will break my hands. Yeah. You got to protect
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your, you got to protect that fist a little bit better. I get that. Exactly. So, so cage fighting
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and boxing come down to, uh, this brain damage contest where it comes down to who has the
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skill and the strength to inflict more blunt force trauma on the other guy's brain and
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who happens to be blessed with the genetic gift of a good chin of the ability to absorb
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neurological damage from, from your opponent. So a cage fight really is a, a, a brutal thing.
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And it is right. I think that, uh, society is wary of it. I think that the proper attitude
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towards boxing and cage fighting and other combat sports is not, uh, an effete, uh, rejection
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of it. And it's not an uncritical embrace. The proper response is ambivalence. What you're
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seeing there is very, very inspiring and also very, very horrifying.
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How does, how has this evolved? Because it's gone from, and you talk about this in the book,
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you talk about dueling and, and the monkey dance, which I want to get into and talk a little
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bit more about that. But how has this evolved from you offended me or you offended my honor
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or my family to now we're going to fight because I want to see if I have what it takes. And I want
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to see if I am in the position or the strength or whatever it may be that I want to be. It's almost
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like you're competing against yourself. Maybe I'm misunderstanding this a little bit.
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No, no, I think that's exactly right. You know, one of the things that surprised me
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most going into the gym, because you said you were, you, uh, set the tone by being
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honest at the outset. I'll be honest too. I was never a brave guy. I was never a tough
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guy. I was never a very courageous person. I was almost 40 years old and I'd never, uh,
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been in a fight before. And then this mixed martial arts gym opens up the, across the street
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from the English department where I teached. And I sat there day after day watching these
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guys compete in the cage. And I would have, and I had this very powerful emotion that I
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didn't expect. And the emotion was envy. I'd watch them in the cage fighting and I envied
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them and I envied them because they seem so tough and they seem so young and they seem so brave
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and watching them. I wasn't sure thinking back that I had ever done a brave thing. What drew
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me to it was this was the desire to do a brave thing. I get in the gym and I didn't find the
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type of guys I expected. I expected to find the guys that used to shove me into lockers,
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you know, high school, the bullies. Yeah. But bullies don't need martial arts. If you are
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tough and strong, or if you believe you are tough and strong, you don't go into martial arts. People
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go into martial arts when they fear they are weak and they don't wish to be weak anymore. Yeah. And so
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most of these guys are not the bullies. They are the guys more like the, the bullied types and
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they aren't there at all to, out of a desire to swagger around in the world and oppress people.
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They are there because they fear they are weak and they, and they want to be stronger and they want
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to do battle, not with the other guy, but with this sort of weakness and timidity inside themselves
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that they don't respect. And that was certainly the case with me. And I, and again, I'll be
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completely honest. This is a swear to God moment for me. I never wanted to hurt anybody. You know,
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I went in there, I trained for three years. I got really good at, I did not get really good. I got
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much better. I got much better at violence, but there was never this kind of fantasy of, in my head
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of going into the cage and like knocking somebody's head off. You know, some guys felt that way. I never
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felt that way. To me, it was always about doing battle with myself. I just wanted to see if I could
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go into a cage where everything is scary and you're completely alone and you're locked naked,
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almost naked into this cage to do battle with the other guy until one of you can't do battle.
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And I just wanted to know if I could face that situation and basically compete bravely,
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if not skillfully. Do you think this idea or the lack of wanting to quote unquote hurt somebody
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affected you negatively as you went into your training and fighting?
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Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It was a major inhibition. There's two things you have to get over, uh,
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when you're learning how to fight. And this is different than a martial arts gym where there's
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not really like, like a karate gym, a Kung Fu gym or something like that. There's usually not very,
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uh, intense sparring. Uh, but in a mixed martial arts gym, you are, the sparring really comes
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80 to 90% of an actual fight. And it's very, very hardcore, heavy sparring. Um, and so there's two
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things you have to get over, uh, in that situation. One is you have to get away from the instinctive
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fear you feel. So my coach would always say that kickboxing in particular, that the striking element
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of fighting in particular is a war against instinct because your instinct is screaming at you. There's
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a, there's a big, scary, skilled guy in front of you. He's trying to hit you. Get the hell out of
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there. Run for it. Turn your back, uh, cower. And you have to fight that instinct. The other thing
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though, it's as much less intuitive is that there's a very strong inhibition against punching
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someone really hard in the face after you've kind of been trained your whole life not to do this.
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Right. Um, and so I had a very difficult time getting over this personally. And if I have one
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regret about the whole experience I had in mixed martial arts for three years was that I never once
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really let go. I never once really let go and hit another person with my whole heart behind it.
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Occasionally I hit somebody really hard, but it was always by mistake. You know, like a punch just
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gets away from you. He's moving in at the same time you're throwing the physics of that workout badly.
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He goes down, but I never, I never really tried to hurt someone. And I'm kind of glad because I left
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the project with a little bit of my innocence intact, but I'm also, I also think I'm missing something.
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Uh, the, the, the project was incomplete because I never had that experience of really,
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of really letting go, uh, with the intention with, with sort of bad intentions.
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What's your thought on how this might translate over into a competitive business environment,
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for example? I mean, are, are men holding back because of what you're talking about when instead
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they should go for the kill in certain situations? I suppose so. I suppose so. There's
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rules though. There's rules in any fight. So there's rules in a cage fight, right? I can't just haul
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off and kick the guys in the nuts. Right. And I can't poke him in the eyes and I can't bite him
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on the face. You know, there's things you can't do. And there are rules and codes and rituals in
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the business world, the professional world as well, uh, that you violate at your peril,
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you know? So yeah, I think guys should compete hard, but I think they should also compete like
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cage fighters do, to be honest. They should compete according to an honor code. And the honor code is
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basically, you just, you know, you'd be a decent human being and this is not something you would
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expect from cage fighters. You'd expect them to be kind of bad guys. But if you've watched any of
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this sport at all, it's shocking how impressive the sportsmanship is, how much good feeling there
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is between the fighters, how fair they are to each other, how decent, how much warmth and affection
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is generated, uh, by the competition. So yeah, I think men should be, be aggressive, but they should
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compete in, uh, honorably as well. Yeah. I'm always fascinated by the idea behind competition
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versus cooperation. And I look at cage fighting. I even look at, you know, professional football,
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for example, is another version or variation of this is everybody says it's about competition
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when in all reality it's, yes, it is competition. You are competing against another team,
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but there's a lot of cooperation that go because you're, you're adhering to those rules. You have a
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referee that you've agreed upon and you've agreed to follow these rules. And there's penalties if you
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don't follow those rules. Absolutely. There's penalties, uh, in terms of being like penalized by the
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losing points and, you know, maybe being disqualified from the fight, but there's also an honor code.
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And if you violate the honor code, there's a, there's, there's social penalties. So you will
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be considered to be a dishonorable person and people will consider that to be frankly unmasculine.
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Um, and you'll lose status, uh, by doing this instead of gaining it. I'm trying to think of a good
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way to put this, but when you're in the fight, you don't dislike the other guy. The other guy is not
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like, he's not your enemy. In fact, he's kind of your friend because you want to go through this
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intense experience. You want to have this test. You want to do something dangerous. And the only
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way you can do this particular test is if this other man is willing to go through it too. And so
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you have this sense of, uh, camaraderie and this sense of gratitude to him, uh, at the end of the fight
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because yeah, you know, it's, he's, he's like the mountain for the mountain climber without him.
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Uh, you can't, you can't have this experience that's important to you.
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Yeah. This makes sense. You know, I had Scott Keneally. I don't know if that name rings a bell,
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but he's the director and writer of rise of the suffer fest. Yeah. Yeah. I like that guy. Oh yeah.
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Really cool guy. He was on the podcast several weeks ago, maybe a month or so ago.
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And I think what he's talking about in some of the projects that he's been involved in is
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overlapping with some of the work that you're doing, because I think there's a sense of
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restlessness and mediocrity and just complacency in men today. Am I understanding that this is the
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same thing you guys are trying to achieve here? I think it's very similar. The suffer fests are
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about, about suffering and about the value of suffering and about doing things that are really
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hard. And so I think that the two projects have that in common. On the other hand, what I think is
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different about the cage fighting scenario and what makes it more extreme is, you know,
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if you do one of those Spartan races, uh, they'd be very, they're very hard. Right. And that really
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may maybe push you to your limits and maybe you injure yourself and maybe you get dirty and maybe,
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uh, I don't know, it's, they're hard. Uh, but they're not terrifying. You know, there's no,
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there's no, there's no primal fear. And what makes, you know, people ask me why I did the,
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the cage fighting book instead of like, well, why don't you go climb a mountain or do a Spartan
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races or whatever, any, or run ultra marathons. And the answer was very simple is that they didn't
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scare me. I wanted to do something that was scary. And cage fighting was, you know, again,
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this situation of primal fear where you're locked into a cage with a, basically a trained killer.
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And this man is encouraged, absolutely encouraged by the rules to do everything in his power to murder
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you with his bare hands until the ref says stop. But until then, as much murderous violence as he
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can humanly muster. And that was scary. And so, so part of the book at a personal level was finding
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things that were finding something that was very, very scary for me to do in order to find out if
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I was brave or not, or if maybe, who knows, maybe I'm, maybe I'm a coward.
00:20:25.040
Men quick pause to tell you about our elite mastermind, the iron council. I'm sure you're
00:20:29.000
thinking about how 2017 is going to be different than 2016. And as much as I hate to burst your
00:20:34.400
bubble on this guys, it's probably going to be the exact same as it has always been, unless you
00:20:39.700
actually do something different than what you've always done. So if you're looking to keep your
00:20:44.660
marriage alive or maximize your earning potential or lose the spare tire or connect with your kids
00:20:49.920
on a deeper level, maybe you want to ask for a raise, maybe you want a promotion, or maybe you just
00:20:53.540
want to feel better about yourself or any other goal that you might have on your mind. The iron
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things in the coming year, tools, the resources, the discussions, and the big one guys, the
00:21:07.280
accountability from the other 175 men inside of the council. So if you're interested in learning more
00:21:11.900
about that and ensuring that this year is actually different, then join us at order of man.com
00:21:16.960
slash iron council. It's time to take your life to the next level. Again, check it out at
00:21:21.260
order of man.com slash iron council. And I hope to see you inside. Now, let me get back to my
00:21:25.240
interview with Jonathan. How has this element of bravery and courage changed since you participated
00:21:32.400
in the fighting for the three years that you did? And how does that now transition over into
00:21:37.220
writing books and the things that you're doing in your every ordinary day life?
00:21:41.520
Well, this is a great question. Boy, I'm glad you asked that question. I wasn't expecting spillover.
00:21:47.800
I was expecting, again, I go in the cage, I'd fight for a year, and then I would quit. But it was
00:21:53.320
always like, I always expected to be a self-contained sort of thing. Maybe I would come out of it with
00:21:58.300
some fighting skills. I was looking forward to that. But I didn't expect it to have major
00:22:03.260
implications for my whole personality. And I think it did. I was under a certain misimpression.
00:22:10.920
And the misimpression was that you're kind of either born brave or you are not. You just have it or you
00:22:17.380
don't. And I think that's wrong. I think that I came out of it feeling that bravery, courage,
00:22:22.960
these are actually skills that you can work on, that you can train, just like you would train any
00:22:29.240
physical skill. So you go into the gym night after night, you face these sort of scary situations,
00:22:34.440
and you get better and better at habituating yourself to fear. And it has had a certain spillover
00:22:41.080
into my life. I do think I'm a braver person. Again, this is on a very small scale level of
00:22:47.720
bravery. I know you have a lot of soldiers, for instance, in your audience. I'm not suggesting that
00:22:51.880
my bravery is anything on that level. But I'm braver than I was. And it has affected my work.
00:22:57.960
It has affected how I approach my life. And in fact, I've started, I have a very basic
00:23:03.780
decision-making structure now. Like if I have a hard decision to make, I often just ask myself,
00:23:09.640
what is the scarier option? And that is what I choose. The scarier and the harder option,
00:23:16.720
in my experience, always seems to be the right choice. It always seems to be the thing that you
00:23:21.740
should do. And so I more and more often force myself to do that. Yeah. I mean, this is something
00:23:27.220
that we talk about all the time with the guys is trying to do scary things, trying to do difficult
00:23:31.600
things, and how that actually builds that muscle and develops that inside of yourself. How many
00:23:35.080
fights? How many professional fights did you have? I can't remember what we talked about. One.
00:23:38.200
Just one. Yeah. And tell me how that went. Badly. It went even worse than I expected it would go.
00:23:46.240
Oh, man. I expected it would go badly. Yeah. Yeah. You know, this is part of where my inhibition
00:23:51.520
was trouble. Like I went into the fight not really understanding it. Not really understanding.
00:23:58.140
My coach said something very gruff to me right before the fight. Like he gets me by the shoulder just
00:24:03.720
about a week before the fight. He grabs both my shoulders, looks me directly in the eye and says
00:24:07.540
very solemnly, when you go in that cage, you got to be ready to tear off that guy's head and shit
00:24:12.900
down his throat. Yep. And I was like, oh, that's gross. I don't want to do that. But, you know,
00:24:18.340
he was saying in his sort of gruff way that you are about to be in an extremely violent confrontation.
00:24:25.960
And you need to be prepared for that. You need to be prepared to inflict grievous harm
00:24:32.400
on this man. And I kind of blew that off. It didn't really sink in. It wasn't until afterwards
00:24:37.620
that it sunk in. You know, this is, you know, this is a very, very violent thing and I have
00:24:43.640
to be prepared to do violence. And I wasn't. So I got in the cage more in a sort of wrestler's
00:24:49.500
mindset rather than a fighter's mindset. Sure. And without giving the whole book away,
00:24:54.800
I lost very quickly and very catastrophic catastrophically. So I trained about 15
00:25:00.200
months for a for a 47 second fight. Let's go back to part of what you talk about in the book a
00:25:06.220
little bit, which is the concept and the idea of a monkey dance. I want to tell I want you to tell us
00:25:10.360
what that is and then how things confrontations more than likely are going to end up rather than
00:25:17.180
maybe the way we believe, which is catastrophic most of the time. The book is about a lot of
00:25:20.860
things, you know, related to fighting, but sort of the intellectual spine of the book is this concept
00:25:25.980
called the monkey dance. And that's a term that I adapted from a violence expert named Rory Miller.
00:25:33.280
And I use the term in a different way than he does. But if you've ever seen like a nature video,
00:25:38.520
a couple of elephant seals clashing in the surf or a couple of mountain goats on a hillside cracking
00:25:43.360
their skulls together, biologists call that ritual combat. And ritual combat is a way that
00:25:48.780
this incredibly diverse array of animal species, almost always the males have developed to figure
00:25:55.980
out who is bigger, tougher, stronger, fitter, faster without the danger of fighting it out for real,
00:26:04.280
And humans are animals too. We're complicated animals. We're cultured animals, but we're animals.
00:26:09.720
And the monkey dance is my name for human versions of those ritual combats. So it's everything from
00:26:17.660
pistols at dawn to the sports, to the roughhousing of boys. And the thing about these monkey dances
00:26:27.200
that we need to grasp is that they often seem very silly. You know, watch a couple of guys get into a
00:26:34.160
fight at a bar, argue at a bar or whatever. It seems very silly, kind of pathetic, but they serve a
00:26:40.320
purpose. They help channel our conflicts down relatively safer pathways. So for instance, the
00:26:48.500
most common form of the monkey dance is that you're at a bar, you chuck shoulders with some guy, he spills
00:26:54.060
his beer. He says, you asshole. You say, you're an asshole. It escalates, it escalates. And before you
00:27:00.740
know it, one of you is down on the floor. So that's the monkey dance, that back and forth sequence of
00:27:07.360
moves. There's a sort of choreography to it. And sometimes it ends up in a disaster, but usually
00:27:14.540
it'll end faster than that. One guy will back down. He'll call you an asshole. You say, hey man,
00:27:19.300
I didn't mean to do that. Let me buy you a beer and it's over. So the main thing about it is that
00:27:24.560
these are ways not of encouraging human violence, but are ways of setting up codes and rituals and
00:27:30.560
rules around violence that actually make a human conflict a little bit less dangerous.
00:27:36.580
Right. And I mean, this is, this is all about survival as well. If you, if you look at a guy
00:27:40.320
and he's six foot four, 250 pounds, like he can rip your head off. Then of course, you're probably
00:27:45.280
going to try to try to back down from that situation. You find a faith. Yeah. And he'll probably allow you
00:27:50.900
a face saving way out because the truth is as big as he is, he doesn't want to fight either.
00:27:56.120
Right. He doesn't want to get injured. He doesn't want to expose himself to that threat either.
00:27:58.920
Yeah. Yeah. He wants all the, he, yeah, exactly. He, he, he can get what he wants,
00:28:03.760
which is you backing away without having to throw a punch. He'd rather do it that way.
00:28:08.000
I want to go back to what you had just said about in the previous comment that you had made about,
00:28:12.760
about your fight, your one fight that you had and that you weren't adequately prepared and ready.
00:28:17.560
Is there really another way for you or any other fighter to learn what it really means to step
00:28:23.960
into a cage other than just to do it? No, no. I almost the second the fight ended or,
00:28:29.820
you know, or just right afterwards, I was like, Oh, you know, I was like, I almost wanted to beg the
00:28:33.240
guy, can we do this again? Uh, because now I get it. Now I understand what this is. Um, and I
00:28:39.240
couldn't have understood that, uh, through just sparring in the gym, for instance, there's a real,
00:28:44.360
you know, the best thing about this project for me was doing participatory research. So I'm an
00:28:51.960
academic, you know, I'm a scholar. My whole life I'd spent in libraries reading other people's books
00:28:56.240
and trying to integrate that knowledge and writing my own books out of those books. Um, whereas this
00:29:01.680
was a much more firsthand participatory project where I learned by actually doing it. And it is
00:29:07.340
tremendously educational to get punched in the face. You know, it's tremendous. I mean, I'm, I'm,
00:29:13.100
I'm serious. Like this guy punches you in the face and you feel that you feel your brain slosh,
00:29:19.800
you know? And, and you say, Oh, and that's where I got this, you know, I'm like, Oh, this is,
00:29:24.520
he's not punching me in the face. He's punching me in the brain. My face is just getting in the way,
00:29:28.900
right? You know, men are trying to shut down each other's brains and you kind of know that on an
00:29:34.420
intellectual level, watching fights or watching football, for instance, you know, it's not good for
00:29:38.400
the brain, but it's a different thing to feel it. And the same thing went with my fight. You know,
00:29:42.760
it was, it was, I had to be in that situation to be in an actual fight to realize it and realize
00:29:49.700
what it was. And I had to lose that fight. Um, I think I, I would have done better if I would have
00:29:55.140
done it again. But at the same time, I was 40 years old at the time. And I, I didn't, I didn't,
00:30:00.020
I didn't really want to fight again. You know, I didn't want to, I didn't really want to take that
00:30:03.280
risk. I kind of proves what I wanted to prove to myself that I'd at least be willing to get into the
00:30:08.440
cage and take the risk. And that was enough for me. Right. Which is more than a lot of people,
00:30:12.100
most people are just sitting in the sidelines and admire what other people do. And which it sounds
00:30:16.160
like is what you were doing from that office window, but, but to be able to step up into the
00:30:19.840
cage and go into the gym. And I know how intimidating that can be. So good on you for doing that.
00:30:25.180
What do you consider to be the future of cage fighting and maybe even the future of
00:30:31.000
confrontation and violence, uh, knowing what you know, and the research that you put into this book?
00:30:35.100
You know, we're living again, this is, this is something that it's very hard for people to believe
00:30:39.400
even to get their heads around, but we're living in, uh, the safest moment in the history of the
00:30:44.600
world. You know, there's never been a safer, more civilized time to be alive. Uh, if you are in a
00:30:50.220
first world type of nation, your odds of dying by violence are much, much lower than they've been
00:30:56.340
at any time in the past. And, uh, hopefully there will not be a descent into barbarism that reverses
00:31:02.780
this trend toward peacefulness and, uh, safety in terms of cage fighting. It'll be, it'll be
00:31:08.700
interesting to see how this evolves in the future at any moment, like the next, yes, tomorrow, you
00:31:13.920
know, the next, whenever the next fight is somebody can die. Um, somebody is going to die in a UFC fight
00:31:21.100
eventually. And it will be interesting how the culture freaks out around that. Uh, there's other
00:31:27.000
dangerous sports. Uh, there's, you know, you can be a parachuter, you can be a wingsuit flyer,
00:31:32.160
you can be a bull rider. Um, you can be a motocross racer, all kinds of extreme sports
00:31:37.580
where people, people occasionally die, but there won't be calls to ban those sports after
00:31:42.160
someone dies. Uh, in cage fighting, it'd be interesting to see what happens. Here's what
00:31:47.780
I would like to see happen in cage fighting. Cage fighting, as I said before, the gloves are
00:31:52.240
not to make the sport safer. People have the wrong idea about the gloves. They say, well,
00:31:55.620
they're pillows on your hands. It must make it safer for the brain. They don't. They make the
00:31:59.440
hand such a good club that you can just punch, punch, and punch, and punch and do so much
00:32:03.780
damage. What I would like to, so, so the current level of neurological trauma you see in combat
00:32:09.080
sports is not intrinsic to the sport. Violence is intrinsic to it. A certain rawness and savagery
00:32:15.360
is intrinsic to it. But the neurological trauma trauma at the levels we see right now is an artifact
00:32:20.900
of the gloves. What I would like to see isn't take the gloves off. This would be, it's a hard
00:32:26.400
cell, but it becomes easier if people, the more people appreciate the neurological catastrophe
00:32:32.900
of fighting with gloves. So you take the gloves off and you'd have a sport that was still raw,
00:32:39.040
still savage, still, still tough, but without this kind of really unacceptable level of neurological risk.
00:32:46.680
Would that be similar to, let's say, for example, making the distance from home plate to center field
00:32:53.180
longer and you don't see as many home runs and that takes away some of maybe the excitement and
00:32:57.180
glamour of that from a spectator standpoint? That's a beautiful way of putting it. Yes,
00:33:00.960
that's exactly the problem. It's exactly the problem because people like to see home runs,
00:33:04.300
right? Right. And people also like to see knockouts and there'd be fewer of them.
00:33:07.840
So if you take the gloves off, especially in MMA, what you'd find is guys would throw their hands a lot
00:33:12.320
more carefully and they would, uh, they, they, and they wrestle a lot more because wrestling is very,
00:33:17.040
very safe for the hands would be a lot more jujitsu. So there'd be a lot more hugging on the mats and the
00:33:21.720
fans, especially casual fans like to see slug fests on the feet. Uh, so this is why this is, uh, not a
00:33:28.640
very plausible change that I'm suggesting until the lawsuits start pouring in. Sure. At some point
00:33:36.480
it might become more cost effective for fighting sports to make these sports safer. Even, even if
00:33:43.220
the fans revolt because you know, they're, they're getting sued and people are done at that point.
00:33:48.980
So in the research that you've done, I'm really curious to know if you see any,
00:33:54.360
this is probably not worded correctly, but any downside in the progressive civility that we are
00:34:00.800
experiencing in modern culture? I think civility is great. No, I don't. I, I, I think civility,
00:34:07.620
civility is great. If you changed the word to like PC or something, then I might agree with you,
00:34:12.480
but civility is a good thing, right? And to be a man doesn't mean to always be
00:34:17.360
blunt and savage in your discourse. It doesn't mean to be swaggering in the way you act.
00:34:23.760
I think civility suggests a gentlemanliness, um, that you should be a, should be a gentleman.
00:34:29.920
Um, I do think that there's a certain attempt, a sort of cultural attempt to neuter, uh, maleness,
00:34:37.560
and there's a certain degree of discomfort and it doesn't come from nowhere. You got to remember
00:34:43.460
that this doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from a realization that in many ways, I think we have
00:34:50.040
to face this in many ways, the great problem of history is masculinity run amok. It is men behaving
00:34:58.700
badly. Isn't that true? Yeah, I can see that. Definitely. And so there is a, it doesn't, it makes
00:35:04.360
sense to try to civilize masculine savagery, but we don't want to take it so far that we lose
00:35:11.920
all the positive elements of masculinity, things like strength and bravery and courage and toughness
00:35:17.540
and all these traditional virtues that we really should be trying to cultivate. So all societies
00:35:23.880
have dealt with this. All societies have dealt with this. How do we get the best aspects of men
00:35:29.400
and encourage those while suppressing and trying to chain up the worst and most aggressive elements
00:35:39.060
of men? Our, our society is struggling with this just like all other human societies have struggled.
00:35:45.140
Do you, and, and, and in your experience, I mean, is the type of fighting that we're talking about now
00:35:50.340
adding to that solution or detracting from the solution?
00:35:53.780
I think that fighting, um, certainly does not encourage men to behave aggressively in the real
00:36:01.960
world. I don't think that at all. I, the guys I met, I never met a guy at my gym. I met hundreds
00:36:07.560
of them who ever got in a fight outside of the cage, who went out to the bars and was looking for a
00:36:12.840
fight. And I don't think that you, for instance, after watching a cage fight on TV, say, Hey man,
00:36:18.180
I'm going to go out to the bar and beat somebody up. Right. Who thinks that way? Um, that's a very
00:36:22.640
simplistic social science sort of argument that consuming a lot of aggression will turn you
00:36:28.080
aggressive yourself. But people just aren't that stupid. We know that there are, that, that inside
00:36:34.040
that fighting cage, the rules of society, all the laws, all the codes are temporarily suspended.
00:36:41.480
And it's a sort of magic space where for just for a little while, there's an, there's an enchantment
00:36:46.540
and there's this rule that, you know, all the, all the rules are in abeyance. And we know that,
00:36:50.560
that when you go to the bar or you go out on the street, that you're not allowed to act that way.
00:36:54.820
So no, I don't think that this encourages people to behave aggressively in real life.
00:36:59.280
I think that the lesson people get from this is, boy, wouldn't it be great to be brave and strong
00:37:04.540
and, uh, and, and, and to be enduring in the face of suffering and misery. I don't think they say,
00:37:10.680
boy, I'd like to go out and pound somebody's face on.
00:37:13.580
Right. Right. Well, Jonathan, this has been so insightful. In fact, uh, just as good,
00:37:18.020
if not better than our first conversation that we had, I really appreciate it. I'm relieved.
00:37:21.700
I really appreciate you coming back. Uh, as I enjoyed it, I enjoyed it the first time and I
00:37:25.820
enjoyed it this time. I enjoy talking to you. Good, good. Well, I appreciate it. Well, so as
00:37:29.260
we wind things down today, I do want to ask you the question I asked you the first time,
00:37:32.200
and that is what does it mean to be a man? Okay. Yeah, this is a great question too. And it's one
00:37:37.760
of these questions that I love and hate, and I love it because it's, it's deep and penetrating
00:37:41.800
and I hate it because it's so damn hard. Uh, it's one of these incredibly, it seems simple,
00:37:47.360
right? But it's very, very hard to, to nail it down. However, I spent a lot of time trying to nail
00:37:51.760
this down when I was working on the book and trying to sort of boil masculinity and manhood down to
00:37:57.360
its absolute essence. And gender studies departments, uh, on, on university campuses,
00:38:04.060
sociology departments, uh, really the whole, the whole university has been trying to muddle
00:38:08.760
this question and make, to make manhood and masculinity seem, uh, incredibly complex and
00:38:14.960
incredibly shifty. Like, like, like it was some sort of invention that was invented like in the 19th
00:38:20.360
or 18th century. And it's incredibly culturally fluid. Like if you go to Africa, it'll be different
00:38:26.480
than it was in South America, than it was in Antarctica or wherever you find humans, you know? Um, but
00:38:31.540
that's not what you find. You find, uh, that, that masculinity and manhood are defined pretty much the
00:38:36.340
same all around the world, uh, almost without exception. There's a very few outlier societies
00:38:42.340
where there's some sort of controversy about whether or not manhood and masculinity are defined
00:38:47.120
the same way. So what is manhood? What is it to be a man? What is it to be masculine? It's very simple.
00:38:53.980
Masculinity is strength. Masculinity is strength and toughness, toughness and strength of body,
00:38:59.400
toughness and strength of mind. It's about that simple. It's been, it's, it's defined that way all
00:39:04.160
around the world. There's other ways for men to be men can be, uh, sweet and men can be caring and men
00:39:11.920
can be very good at taking care of their parents, uh, and their children. And that's not unmasculine,
00:39:18.160
but that is not part of the definition of masculinity, uh, around the world. What's masculine
00:39:24.080
is strength. Well, Jonathan, I appreciate you being on the show again. I appreciate the work that you've
00:39:28.800
done. I enjoyed the book. I know the guys that have read this have probably enjoyed the book and those
00:39:32.380
who want to read it will enjoy it if they do. So thanks again for being on the show today.
00:39:36.460
Tell us how we connect with you. If we want to learn more about you or your works and pick up a
00:39:40.060
copy of the book. Oh, the books, uh, you know, on Amazon, places like that. Uh, you can go to my
00:39:45.540
website, Jonathan got shawl.com. It's probably the, or you just Google me and you'll find all my
00:39:49.100
information pretty quick, but I want to thank you for having me on. And, uh, I really am kind of
00:39:54.160
inspired and, uh, fascinated by this whole movement that you're associated with this sort of asking this
00:40:00.640
very basic question. Like, how do you be a good man? And that was part of what I was looking into
00:40:05.360
too. So I really applaud you and, and your work. Well, thank you. I feel the same way. And I'm,
00:40:09.440
and I'm glad that, uh, I got to know you and, and that you're, you're on the same path, you know,
00:40:13.680
you're learning some of this as well. And you're answering that question as well. And that's
00:40:16.780
definitely a service to me and the rest of the guys that are listening. And so Jonathan, thanks again.
00:40:23.640
There it is, man. Mr. Jonathan Gotchel talking with us about what a fight represents the future of
00:40:28.800
fighting and why society in a way is trying to neuter masculinity. Again, just want to remind
00:40:33.280
you about the iron council this week, guys, we're specifically talking about exploring new paths.
00:40:37.260
There are a ton of men out there who have an idea or a vision for the future, or maybe it's just that
00:40:43.200
you know that you're meant for something more. So what we're doing for the entire month of December
00:40:47.800
is breaking down the concept of finding your path and purpose. You're going to have the structure,
00:40:53.820
the tools, the resources, the accountability, everything else you need to accomplish big things this
00:40:58.000
year. You can check that out at order of man.com slash iron council guys. I look forward to talking
00:41:02.940
to you on Friday for our Friday field notes, but until then take action and become the man you were
00:41:07.380
meant to be. Thank you for listening to the order of man podcast. You're ready to take charge of your
00:41:12.260
life and be more of the man you were meant to be. We invite you to join the order at order of man.com.