#111： Why Men Fight & Why We Like To Watch With Jonathan Gottschall
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Summary
Jon Gottschall is an English professor who wanted to find the answers to the questions: Why do men like to fight? Why do we like to watch other men fight and to compete? What role does violence play in a man's life, even in the modern world? In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, host Brett McKay talks with Jon Gottschalks about his journey to becoming a professional MMA fighter.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. So why do
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men like to fight? Why do we like to compete? Whether it's boxing or MMA, football, basketball,
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any other type of, we'll come up with a competition for anything. Not only that,
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why do we like to watch other men fight and to compete? What's going on there? Well,
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our guest today is an English professor that wanted to find the answers to those questions.
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So he decided to train to become an MMA fighter. His name is John Gottschall. He's the author of
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the book, The Professor in the Cage, Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch. And this is one of the
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best books I've read so far this year. And one of the best books about masculinity I've read.
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He weaves in a story about his training to become an MMA fighter with anthropological, biological,
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sociological studies about male violence, male competition, and male status. And it just
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provides a lot of fascinating insights to how these aspects of masculinity have shaped men throughout
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time, throughout cultures. And he makes the provocative case that ritualized combat,
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whether it's boxing or MMA, competition and, you know, violent sports like football serve a role
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in society and actually a pro-social role. So we're going to talk about what role violence should
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have in a man's life, even in the modern world. Again, it's fascinating, provocative argument and
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discussion. I think you're really going to like this one. So let's do this. John Gottschall,
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The Professor in the Cage. Jonathan Gottschall, welcome to the show.
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Thank you for having me. I appreciate you having me on.
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All right. So your book is The Professor in the Cage, Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch.
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So the first question is naturally how you're an English professor by trade. How did an English
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professor end up training to become an MMA fighter and explore violence and masculinity?
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I guess three or four years ago, I was an English professor, but I was an adjunct
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English professor at a small liberal arts school. And I had never managed to find my way onto the
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tenure track. And I was kind of finally facing the fact that I was basically never going to.
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So I was at midlife and I needed a new path through life, but I didn't know what it should be. And then
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one day I was at my office hours and I was kind of pacing around. I look out the front window and
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this new business had moved in across the street and it's called Mark Schrader's Academy of Mixed
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Martial Arts. It's a cage fighting gym. And I could look across the street, you know, about as far as I
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could throw a snowball. And I could see the guys in there in the cage and they're dancing around,
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they're hitting, they're tackling, they're rolling. And I was just ambushed by this powerful sense of
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envy. You know, I envy those young guys over there who seemed so alive in their cage while
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here I was across the street, you know, rotting away in my office cubicle. And then I had this
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kind of funny thought and the thought was, wouldn't it be funny if I went across the street and joined
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them? Me, you know, this, you know, chubby 40 year old, never been in a fight, English professor.
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And then my next thought was, of course, well, maybe that's my new path in life. Maybe there's
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a book in that, you know, a sort of nonfiction fight club, a book about the allure of violence.
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And so a couple months later, I worked up my courage. I crossed the street, uh, tried to learn
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how to fight and, uh, wrote the book. What did your fellow colleagues think of this?
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Um, you know, it's funny, you know, when I, when I said that my, I had this fantasy of crossing the
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street to learn how to fight. And initially the fantasy was a career suicide fantasy.
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I was hoping that my colleagues would see me, you know, fighting in the cage and they would
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say, oh, this is beyond the pale of academic respectability. We must fire this guy. And
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so it was kind of like this, uh, career suicide fantasy I was having, but my colleagues, unfortunately
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were a lot more tolerant than I hoped. Uh, and, uh, they didn't, they didn't fire me over.
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They thought it was kind of funny and, uh, they were pretty supportive in the end. I'm interested
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to see what the rest of, uh, the sort of intellectual, uh, academic world is going to make of the
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book once they get ahold of it. Um, whether they'll see it as sort of this, uh, I don't
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know, glorification of barbarism or if they'll see it as a more thoughtful project that I intended.
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Have you got any feedback from other academics?
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Not yet. You know, the book has only been out for a few days. You know, I've had a few reviews,
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but not from sort of the most pointy headed intellectuals. Sure. I'm sure that will come
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soon. Yeah. Um, what did your wife think of this? You know, your, your dad, you got two
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daughters, you're 40 years old. Uh, was she kind of worried about this? Well, yeah, you
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know, at first, you know, I didn't even want to tell her. I was, I was embarrassed to even
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confess this to her, but eventually I kind of had to. And I'm like, you know, well, you
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know, I just kind of told her my whole dumb plan for trying to become a cage fighter. And
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she said, no, first kind of wanted to see if I was joking or not. And then she said,
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well, you know, you know, you don't have any skills. You'll be killed. Uh, she said. Um,
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and it always hurts to have your wife question your skills. Uh, but, um, but eventually she
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sort of, you know, came around to it and she got so comfortable with it. In fact, that it
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depressed me. I'd be like, you know, I don't know how my shoulder hurts and I can't see
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straight. I got hit so hard today. And I just, I'd want to whine about it or something.
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And she'd be like, you know, did you want to go to the dishwasher? And I'd think, my
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God, woman, don't you love me at all? Aren't you, aren't you worried about me at all? She
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got, she got used to it. She was very supportive.
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That's great. So did you have any assumptions about male violence going into this experiment?
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Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I was going in partially to verify a theory that I have. And the theory
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was basically that MMA was this metaphor for something really dark and rotten in human nature,
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something black and violent, you know? Um, I had all the stereotypes that most people
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had, uh, that the fighting was, was bad. Um, and that it, you know, that the fighters must
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be, I don't know, bullies or sociopaths or sadists at the least. And I just didn't find that
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at all. You know, almost all of my assumptions going in were overturned by the process of
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doing the research of meeting the guys, fighting myself. And basically, you know, guys don't
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go into mixed martial arts because they're dreaming of hurting people. You know, they
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don't, they don't do it because they fantasize about, or they take some kind of pleasure in
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doing violence. Most guys get into it, I believe, because they're attempting to defeat
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a weakness and timidity inside themselves. And these are guys who are in need of a quest
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Yeah. There aren't really opportunities for quests for men and like the traditional, we
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That's right. That's right. You know, if you have a world where the, the world is getting
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safer and safer, you know, it's getting softer and softer, uh, and the traditional masculine
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virtues are held in lower and lower regard. And there's very few places where a young guy
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and overwhelmingly young guys that do this can go to get a sort of rite of passage, uh,
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into manhood. And I think that's what a lot of these guys are seeking. They're seeking
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some sort of test of their courage and their character. They want to know if they're real
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Yeah. And to your point about, um, you know, MMA fighters, not being bullies, like my experience
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with MMA fighters, like there's something like the nicest people I've ever encountered.
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And just totally, I mean, it's not what you think you'd, you kind of think you'd have
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these kind of just jerks, but they're just like the nicest guys in the world.
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I totally agree with you. I totally agree with you. I don't know if it attracts nice
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guys. I think partly it's the culture of MMA. It's a martial arts culture, which is based
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on respect. Um, but there's also something like, you know, inside the gym, it really pays
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to be nice because if you're not nice, people be too up worse. You know, they don't want
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to work with you. You, you, you, you would need to play nice inside the gym. And also
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I think outside the gym, I think these guys are at pains to put people at ease. They don't
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want, they want to, they want to make a very strong, uh, display of the fact that even though
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I'm a mean person in that cage, I'm a very nice person outside the cage and you don't need
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to be uncomfortable and you don't need to be worried.
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Yeah. Well, let's talk about some of the, um, cause you know, you, you, you weave in your
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story about training with all this fantastic research about masculinity and, and particularly
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how it relates to violence. And I love, you start off the book talking about honor and
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it sort of underlies what violence, what role violence plays in masculinity. So what, what
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role does honor play in male violence? And I guess the first thing would be, how do you,
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how do you define honor in this sense? Cause I think most people have a definition of honor.
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Yeah. Honor is, is it, I think it's always been a sort of fuzzy concept, always been sort
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of hard for people to put their finger on what they mean, but honor, uh, if you, if you substitute
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the word respect, you won't be far, far wrong. Um, so, so a man of honor is a man who demands,
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who demands to be respected. Uh, and you know, so the, the most, the most classic honor dispute
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is the formal aristocratic European duel where a man feels dishonored. He says to his opponent,
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you must apologize to that for this. If you don't, if you won't do it, we're going to have
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a gunfight or a sort of fight at dawn. Now the classic European duel is dead. No one does that
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anymore, but we still do. We still have the, the duel in a sense of an escalating dispute over honor
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is still the leading cause of conflict and violence and even homicide among men. You know,
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so for example, you're at the bar, some guy walks past you, you clip shoulders, somebody spills their
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drink, someone insults someone. Um, and before you know it, it's escalated to, uh, beer bottles,
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uh, to the top of the head. That is in a way, a duel in that, in that limited sense I'm talking
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about. It's a, it's a, it's a dispute over honor that gets out of control. Gotcha. And I love how
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you talk to, we've, we've had a, uh, a professor who specializes in like civil war honor and she
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talked about the difference between, uh, like aristocratic duels and like the lower class duels,
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like the rough and tumbles. I think you can talk about that. It's amazing. You talk about that in
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your book, right? It's just no holds barred. Basically you're the whole point is to gouge someone's
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eye out. That was, that was like the touchdown pass. Yeah. Yeah. It was called, it was called
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feeling for a feller's eye strings. The idea was to, the idea was to, you know, get your
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thumbs into the corners of the eyes and pop out the whole eyeball. So it's bouncing around
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around the string. Man. Okay. Yeah. When I read that, it just made me wince in pain. But
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that is an example of a duel, but for lower class. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So
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the duel is dead, uh, people say, but the duel is only dead in that sort of stuffy, elaborate
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aristocratic form. There's various other kinds and other forms of the duel, um, that, that,
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that still exists today. You talk about how duels and the other forms that exist today
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are basically ritualized violence. Yeah. And that these forms of ritualized violence, uh,
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actually have a benefit society. So can you talk, explain what you mean by ritualized violence
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and how does this actually keep violence in check? Sure. Well, you know, so again,
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the history of the duel. So if you have historians talking about the duel, they usually go back 500
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years or so, uh, in Europe, but they really need to go back millions of years. So if you've seen
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a couple of elephant seals clashing in the surf on like a nature video or a couple of rams squaring off
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and cracking skulls on the hillside in a nature video, that's what biologists call ritual combat.
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It's this way that many, many different species have evolved to decide who's the bigger, stronger,
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fitter animal without the dangers of fighting it out to the death. And what I argue in the book is
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that the same is true of people only more so. So yeah, humans are a complicated, complex animal,
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but we're animals still. And the term I have for this is called the monkey dance. And the monkey dance
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is my term for human versions of ritual combat. Everything from, you know, formal duels to dead,
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like deadly duels, to verbal duels, to play fights of boys, to sports. But probably the best example of
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this is again, going back to that bar. So if you have, uh, the choreography of a standard fist fight.
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So a fist fight almost always goes the same way. It's been studied by sociologists pretty extensively.
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And they almost always have the same sort of patterns. It begins with some sort of insult,
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some sort of trespass. A man will feel dishonored, disrespected. There's a challenge.
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They close the distance. There's a push. Uh, at any time, either man can call it off and sit and walk away,
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say, I'm sorry. But if you won't, it'll escalate to a real fight. There'll be a push. There'll be a punch.
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There'll be a tackle. They'll roll around the ground and gouge each other. So the choreography
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of a standard fist fight, the back and forth dance of it, the moves that, that, that people
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carry out seem to be about as hardwired into us as those two rams cracking skulls on a mountainside.
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Now the key is that all this stuff looks silly. It looks ridiculous. It looks pathetic. And sometimes
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it ends in tragedy. But for the most part, our monkey dances are a good thing. They keep our
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contests civilized and without, without codes and rules and rituals to govern the way that men compete
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and even the way that men fight, the world would be quite a lot more dangerous and, uh, dark.
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Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like my next question I was going to ask you is like, are there downsides?
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It seems like there's a lot of push, you know, everyone talks about it. We're becoming softer
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and, you know, we're, we're afraid of that sort of monkey dance. And so we're trying to do things to
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eliminate it almost. Uh, there's talks of getting rid of football. There's talks of regulating boxing
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even more and MMA even more. I mean, are we opening up a Pandora's box by doing that?
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I think arguably, um, I mean, one of the kind of cool, uh, things I've read and again,
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in the work of sociologists, um, is arguments for the re-institution of a dueling culture,
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for instance, in inner city neighborhoods or in, uh, prisons. And they're talking about
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specifically a culture of boxing duels. And the point of this is that what you have in an
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inner city neighborhood or many inner city neighborhoods, and certainly in, uh, serious
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prisons are cultures of honor without dueling codes. And if you are going to have a culture
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of honor, a culture where men are incredibly touchy about self respect, about disrespect
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and willing to, uh, claim respect with physical violence, you don't want to have that kind of
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honor culture without a dueling code. Because if you have that kind of honor culture without
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a dueling code, then you get things like Hatfield, McCoy, blood feuds. You get things like prison
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shankings. You get things like drive-by shootings. So the idea of a, of a, of a culture of boxing
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duels would be that it makes those other forms of violence dishonorable. It makes it, you, you're
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branded a coward and you have to eat a lot of shame if you go outside of the dueling code.
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So I think there's at least an argument to be, to be made that in certain situations,
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a reinstitution even of, of, uh, dueling codes could be a good thing.
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Um, so I just had a question, but it left my mind. Okay. Yeah. I wanted to like hit the
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point. So the big point here with like ritual combat or ritualized violence with, within humans
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and even animals, the goal isn't to kill your opponent, correct? It's just sort of tough,
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That's right. That's right. Normally with what happens with ritual combat among animals, for
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instance, is almost always, it doesn't come to a real fight because the animals will pose at each
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other back and forth. They'll puff up, they'll bluster and threaten each other. And one guy will look at
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the other guy and say, Hey, you're bigger than me. You look like you're fitter. And I'm just going
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to, I'm going to, I'm going to seed this territory to you. They only have a real fight if they're very
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evenly matched. Um, and then at some point the weaker guy taps out, he says, okay, okay, okay. You
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went, he backs down. Uh, and that's basically the way it is with people too. You know, there's,
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there's, there's, there's systems built in, um, where we're able to determine who the better man
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is without having to fight it out to the death. Gotcha. All right. So your book is called Why Men
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Fight. Um, is, what does the research say about why men are drawn to violence more so than women?
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Is it biological? Is it cultural? Is it a mixture of both? What's going on there?
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I think it's, I think it's largely biological. Um, you know, we're animals. We seem to like to
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forget that, but you know, the, the, the stallion differs from the mayor and the cow differs from
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the bull and the female chimp or gorilla or monkey differs from the male version. And they differ not
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only in their bodies, but they differ in their behaviors. And why should it be different
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for us? So wherever you go around the world, you'll never find a society where men don't do
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the lion's share of the violence. This is throughout human history. Uh, it's across cultures. I mean,
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there's literally never been a documented example where women did most of the fighting, where they
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did most of the warring and where they caused most of the social chaos in the group by, you know,
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causing fights within the group. And human males have been shaped by this evolutionary history of
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violence. It's why men are bigger than women. It's why men are faster. It's why even in trained
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athletes, men have much higher cardiovascular capacity. It's why men are stronger. And it also
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affected our behaviors and our psychologies. It's why men are more physically aggressive. It's why
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men are more prone to taking really idiotic risks. And it's why men are more willing to resort to
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physical forms of aggression. Now, all that said, this isn't to say that culture plays no role.
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And it's not to say that everything about gender is biologically determined. But when it comes to these
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questions, the questions that I'm looking at in my book, questions about, um, violence, about intensely
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competitive behavior, about physically aggressive behavior, this is where the sex differences are
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at their most massive. And it's where the biological roots of those differences are least controversial.
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Okay. And so the second part of your subtitle is why we like to watch men fight. So why, why is it
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everyone, I remember everyone's probably that moment in high school where, you know, there's like meat,
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there's gonna be a fight after school. So you go to some undisclosed location, you form the circle,
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and like, you get really excited. Watch this. I remember you get the chills, right? And you get
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the hair lift up on your, but it's exciting. Uh, why do we like to watch men fight?
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That's a great question. And that's a great example of it. And that really brought me back
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to my own childhood. Um, yeah, I think, I think there's at least a couple of answers to this.
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Uh, and I started thinking about this really intensely as I was working on the book and as I was watching a
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a lot of cage fighting and I'd be thinking to myself, you know, I'm a civilized person.
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I'm a peace loving person. Uh, I'm apparently not a sociopath. So why am I watching this?
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You know, what's wrong with me and what's wrong with us all? Because, you know, even if you wouldn't
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be caught dead cheering at a cage fight or a boxing match, almost certainly you consume a huge diet of
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violent entertainment in your movies and your films and your books, your video games and so forth.
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So part of the reason I, I mean, this is kind of an uncomfortable truth, but I do think it's a truth
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is that we all claim to hate violence while we're just stuffing it into our heads at all times.
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We were, we're spooning it up saying that we hate the taste of it. But the truth is that we seem to
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like violence. You know, there's a creature in us that likes violence and likes it more than we'd like
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just about anything else. But there's a other side of this, I think, you know, um, when it comes
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to a fight, when it comes to a sport fight, I think what draws us in is not so much the barbarism
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or the bloodbust. So I don't know about you, but I don't ever want to watch an ISIS torture murder
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video. No, no. And I don't think most people want to watch it, but I find it very hard not to watch
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men fighting. And I think because it's, because it's such an incredibly intense drama, you know,
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it's such an incredibly intense spectacle and the men have so much riding on it and it's real,
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you know, it's truly reality TV. And, uh, you know, so a fight will set up these conditions of
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incredible adversity that allow the best elements of human nature to shine through. So talk about
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things like courage and boldness and extremes of grace and endurance. So I think I will sound to
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many people like an apologist for violence, but I think what draws us into combat sport as viewers
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isn't that we're succumbing or we're reveling in the worst aspects of human nature. I think we go to
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a sport fight to honor and to celebrate the best aspects of human nature.
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That's kind of what, uh, Joyce Carol Oates wrote about.
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Yes. Yeah. And that's a, she wrote a fantastic book. That's one of my favorite, really my favorite
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book about fighting, uh, her book on boxing. Um, but she's, but she's, you know, like all of us,
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uh, she's flopping around a little bit. She's trying to figure it out herself. What am I doing
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watching this stuff? And I think she, uh, is even more ambivalent about it than I am. I mean,
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she, uh, ambivalent is the proper attitude, by the way, toward, to a sport fight, I believe. I think
00:23:42.440
we should be kind of repelled by it. I think we should feel morally, uh, uh, compromised by it to
00:23:48.960
some degree. Um, but there's also something noble about it in my opinion. Yeah. You, you,
00:23:55.040
you quoted, uh, William James, that is the steeps that, uh, it's sort of like an anti-war, um,
00:24:03.000
essay, but he was basically making the case to, if we didn't have war, we'd sort of lose
00:24:07.320
those chances to display nobility and courage and I'd be kind of born basically.
00:24:12.560
Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. The steeps of life is a great line.
00:24:16.520
Yeah, it is. And that's, and that's, and that's, you know, once I read that line, I was like,
00:24:20.820
oh, that's what we're after, uh, in, in, in, in mixed martial arts. These are young guys who,
00:24:27.060
um, are a little bored of their, of their, of the flats of life, of these flat roads of,
00:24:33.040
you know, the softness and ease of life. And they want this steepness. They want this challenge.
00:24:39.040
They want this Everest to climb. That's the kind of quest that I was talking about.
00:24:42.720
Yeah. So I'd like to get your opinion on this after going through this whole experience. Are you
00:24:46.400
still training mixed martial arts? Do you still go to the gym?
00:24:48.720
Um, I, I, uh, I expected to fight for, to, to train for a year, have a fight and quit. Um,
00:24:57.920
I continued training, uh, for another two years afterwards. And then I had to give it up basically
00:25:04.120
because I was just too beaten up. Um, so I do kind of go, I do go back in now and then every
00:25:10.140
few months. I'm like, I get itchy for it and, uh, miss the guys and I go in. Um, but I'm just
00:25:17.880
not holding up to it physically. Like I used to. Yeah. So it sounds like you developed a
00:25:21.600
really great camaraderie with these guys. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's like, uh, I, yeah,
00:25:28.440
there's something about, there's something, it's something weird that happens. This is one
00:25:31.920
of those things that I just wouldn't have known if I hadn't done it. Um, but there's something
00:25:36.060
about a sport fight and about sparring in particular that really draws guys close together. You know,
00:25:43.640
one of the things I, one of the lines I wrote in my mixed martial arts diary that I, that
00:25:48.060
I wrote in every night after training was that there's this weird paradox that, that nothing
00:25:54.200
makes men love each other so much as a good natured fist fight. It's kind of true. So yeah,
00:26:01.660
I, so that was one of the hard things about giving it up was I was giving up this, uh, the
00:26:07.340
physical challenge of it, but I was kind of also losing my peer group.
00:26:10.740
Yeah. Yeah. I call it aggressive nurturing. It's what guys do.
00:26:15.960
Yeah. Yeah. I think it's right. I think it's right. And there's some, there's this weird,
00:26:19.920
I call it this weird, pathetic alchemy whereby guys transform aggressive words and aggressive
00:26:28.540
actions into terms of endearment. You know, I punch you in the shoulder and I, you know, it's,
00:26:35.140
it's violent, but it means I love you. Yeah. You know, I call you some name, but it means
00:26:39.300
I care for you. You know what I mean? And there's this weird process of translation that,
00:26:44.220
that men are able to, um, automatically translate. Whereas I think women are like, what, what are
00:26:51.700
Yeah, they shouldn't do that. Let's stop that. Um, so through your experience, your training,
00:26:57.400
I mean, okay, we live in a society where effectively we've outsourced protection to the state. You know,
00:27:02.520
we have police officers, we have a military that 1% of the population serves in, and most,
00:27:07.020
for the most part, society is safe. It's not a very violent world, despite what the
00:27:11.980
news says, but at least in the United States. Um, I mean, is there any reason a man should
00:27:16.940
like be capable of fighting and being tough and strong? I mean, should a man strive for
00:27:26.080
That's a good question. Uh, I guess there's a couple ways looking at this. First off, you
00:27:32.560
know, I'm 40 years old. I live in a suburb, uh, middle class. Um, violence is, you know,
00:27:38.920
less and less likely to occur, uh, to me. You know, I'm less likely to get into a monkey
00:27:44.640
dance with somebody. I don't cross paths with, with violent men on a regular basis, but not
00:27:51.620
everybody lives in a neighborhood like I live in, you know? Um, and for young guys, especially,
00:27:56.600
I think it's, it's, it's much more likely that you'll find yourselves in these monkey
00:28:00.680
dancing situations. Uh, so yeah, I, I feel like there's a, still a role for self-defense,
00:28:08.020
practical, uh, self-defense, but I think more than that, there's a self-respect angle to it.
00:28:15.020
Don't you think? Like, I think that whether or not you're going to be violent or face situations
00:28:20.300
of violence, you still, in order to sort of respect yourself as a guy, you want to be able to feel
00:28:27.360
that you're capable of handling yourself and you're capable of defending yourself and defending the
00:28:32.480
people that you love and you care for. So I, I do think that there's a sort of, even though that
00:28:38.200
this, this, I don't know, we're less, we're less likely to need it. It still is part of our makeup,
00:28:43.800
you know, to, to want to be able to handle ourselves. Gotcha. Uh, yeah, I agree completely
00:28:51.420
with that, uh, sentiment. Um, through your training at MMA, did you find that it provided benefits in
00:28:58.940
other areas of your life? Did it like, was there carryover? Yeah, yeah, I do. Um, you know,
00:29:06.200
part of, part of what I was, I was after was self-respect. You know, I, I, you know, part of my,
00:29:11.660
my own personal history of violence was I'd never been in a fight and I had dodged, uh, quite a few
00:29:18.200
fights in my adolescence. And it's weird how much psychic weight that put on me, you know, like even
00:29:25.600
as a 40 year old, I'm still able to look back at how I behaved when I was like an undersized,
00:29:31.200
you know, 15 year old getting pushed around by bullies. And it still has the power to, to fill me
00:29:36.880
with shame. Weirdly, man, you know, weirdly, all, all I've accomplished, the things I've done,
00:29:44.340
they matter, but, but still that stuff makes me blush. So, um, part of, so there was carryover.
00:29:52.100
Yeah. I, I was, I was, I wanted to know whether or not I was a coward, you know, I wanted to know if
00:29:58.680
I was capable of doing something brave. And for me getting into the cage and fighting was scary
00:30:06.220
and it did take bravery. And so I was able to kind of prove to myself that I, you know,
00:30:11.280
I'm not the bravest guy in the world or the toughest guy in the world or anything like that,
00:30:13.940
not even close, but I was able to do what was for me a brave thing.
00:30:20.900
Um, the Dutch translation of my book, the title that they didn't consult me on at all,
00:30:29.160
it's called real men fight, which is a horrible title, you know? So I'm not, I'm not, I'm not
00:30:36.040
saying that you have, in order to be a real man, you have to fight. Um, I'm not saying that,
00:30:42.340
you know, I'm not suggesting that every guy in order to feel like he's truly masculine, uh,
00:30:48.360
has to be a, uh, you know, a trained killer. Um, but I think a lot of guys are attracted to it.
00:30:54.520
You know, they, they, you know, we've watched these, you know, we watched Bruce Lee movies as
00:30:58.220
kids or John Claude Van Damme movies, and we've wanted to be that guy. And so for guys who are
00:31:04.980
interested in it and do have, uh, and do lean in that direction or have wondered about it,
00:31:09.720
I would definitely recommend doing it. I think the main reason people don't do it more often,
00:31:14.100
or most guys don't do it more often is because they're afraid of it. They're afraid,
00:31:18.360
excuse me, uh, they're afraid of the violence, but also afraid of walking into the gym for the
00:31:24.340
first time and what it's going to be like. And I know that because I was too, and everyone who
00:31:30.080
goes into the gym for the first time is scared. But if you go in there, you know, you're not going
00:31:33.420
to get, uh, you know, beaten up on the first night. You're not going to get strangled to death
00:31:37.840
on the first night. Uh, it's a pretty nice and nurturing atmosphere. So yeah, I'd recommend it.
00:31:45.380
I mean, if I could just say one more thing, there's a political scientist who had this
00:31:50.340
little phrase that I liked and he had visited West Point, uh, the American, the, uh, the military
00:31:56.340
academy at West Point. And he described West Point as a little taste of Sparta or a little
00:32:02.720
touch of Sparta in the midst of the American Babylon. Cause you have this society that is sort
00:32:10.020
of, I don't know, it's soft and it's, uh, it's all iPhones and Twitter and consumerism. And then
00:32:17.400
you go to the MMA gym and it's very gritty and it's very real. And you're doing things that are
00:32:23.500
very gritty and very real. You're kind of back in Sparta and you're with your, your friends,
00:32:28.800
you're in a sort of warrior band and you're working to make each other tougher and stronger.
00:32:35.560
You're cooperating and beating the fear and the timidity out of each other. And, uh, it was just
00:32:42.700
a really positive experience for me. So yeah, um, I have a bit of a convert zeal for MMA, you know?
00:32:48.880
So I, yeah, I recommend it to everybody if you're interested, but if you're not interested,
00:32:53.540
I understand that too. Sure. Well, this has been a fascinating discussion. I, we just, we really did
00:32:58.360
just scratch the surface of what, what's in your book. Um, but where can people find out more about
00:33:02.980
your work and about the book? Um, they could, uh, Google me. Oh, I have my website. It's
00:33:09.240
Jonathan Gottschall.com or they can just Google me. Okay, great. Go check that out. Well, Jonathan
00:33:14.480
Gottschall, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure. Well, thanks for having me on. I
00:33:18.700
really appreciate it. And I, uh, I'm a big fan of the whole art of manliness project. Thank you.
00:33:25.040
My guest today was Jonathan Gottschall. He is the professor of the book,
00:33:28.120
the professor in the cage, why men fight and why we like to watch. You can pick it up on amazon.com.
00:33:34.160
I recommend you go out and get it. It is again, one of the best books about masculinity I've read
00:33:38.760
in a while. And it's just really, it's got a great story because you get to see what happens to him
00:33:42.720
when he finally fights and enters the cage. So go get it today, amazon.com, the professor in the cage.
00:33:48.600
Well, that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice,
00:33:53.360
make sure to check out the art of manliness website at art of manliness.com. And if you'd enjoy our
00:33:57.800
podcast, I'd really appreciate it if you'd go to iTunes or Stitcher, whatever it is you use to
00:34:01.700
listen to the podcast and give us a review that would really help us out a lot. Also recommend
00:34:05.900
this to your friends. It's one of the best compliments you could give us. So until next
00:34:09.080
time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.