Latest / The Joe Rogan Recap / Dustin Poirier (2026) - Weight Cutting, Calf Kicks & Fighter Pay

Transcript

Dustin Poirier (2026) - Weight Cutting, Calf Kicks & Fighter Pay · The Joe Rogan Recap

• 0:00
  Welcome to the Joe Rogan recap and before we get going, please
• 0:03
  follow us right here on Spotify to make sure you get sight of
• 0:06
  our latest episodes in your feed.
• 0:08
  O today we are bringing you a deep dive into, honestly, some
• 0:11
  staggering realities of human performance.
• 0:14
  We're pulling from this massive, just fascinating conversation on
• 0:17
  The Joe Rogan Experience, specifically MMA show #176
• 0:22
  featuring Dustin Poirier. Yeah, it's a it's a heavy one
• 0:25
  because our mission for this deep dive isn't just to, you
• 0:28
  know, recap a standard sports interview.
• 0:31
  We really want to extract the hidden and frankly, often brutal
• 0:35
  mechanics of what it actually takes to survive at the absolute
• 0:39
  peak of a violent profession. We're looking at the extreme
• 0:42
  physical tolls, the the dark history of chemical
• 0:45
  enhancements. Oh man, yeah, the chemistry is
• 0:47
  wild. It really is.
• 0:48
  Plus these bionic recovery methods that sound straight out
• 0:51
  of a science fiction movie. And, of course, the profound
• 0:53
  existential dread of life after the Cage.
• 0:56
  Yeah, exactly. So whether you are a hardcore
• 0:59
  MMA fanatic or you know, just someone who is fascinated by the
• 1:03
  absolute limits of human endurance, you're going to want
• 1:06
  to stick around because there are some profound aha moments
• 1:09
  we're going to unpack for you today about what it takes to
• 1:12
  survive in that environment. Absolutely.
• 1:14
  It's really a master class in extreme dedication.
• 1:17
  It is. So let's start our journey
• 1:19
  before the cage door even locks. Because before 2 fighters can
• 1:23
  even test their martial arts against each other, they have to
• 1:26
  survive this preliminary test of extreme biological manipulation.
• 1:30
  I mean the terrifying reality of weight cutting.
• 1:33
  Yeah, weight cutting. It happens before a single punch
• 1:35
  is thrown, yet it routinely hospitalizes world class
• 1:38
  athletes. I mean, the source material
• 1:40
  highlights guys like Alex Pereira is a prime example here.
• 1:44
  Here is a guy who would dehydrate his body completely
• 1:47
  down to 185 lbs just to step on a scale, and then literally 24
• 1:52
  hours later he steps into the Octagon weighing 225 lbs. 40
• 1:56
  lbs. I mean 40 lbs Of mass back onto
• 1:58
  his frame in a single day. It's hard to even comprehend.
• 2:01
  It is. Just put yourself in that
• 2:04
  position for a second. Think about the last time you
• 2:06
  had a bad flu, right? You get slightly dehydrated, you
• 2:09
  get the headache, the lethargy. Poirier himself talks about the
• 2:12
  sheer danger of this process. He describes being so intensely
• 2:17
  dehydrated during a cut that just standing up from a chair
• 2:20
  made his vision go black. Oh wow.
• 2:22
  Yeah, he felt like he was going to pass out just from the change
• 2:25
  in blood pressure. You are intentionally draining
• 2:28
  the fluid that cushions your brain inside your skull just
• 2:31
  hours before a trained killer tries to kick you in the head.
• 2:35
  This raises an important question, right?
• 2:37
  Like, why on earth do athletes willingly push themselves to
• 2:41
  that literal brink of death? Because we can't just write this
• 2:44
  off as being crazy. There's a reason.
• 2:46
  Exactly. It's an issue of systemic
• 2:48
  design. The incentive structures in the
• 2:49
  sport make this biological portrait practically mandatory.
• 2:53
  If a fighter decides, hey, I want to preserve my organs and
• 2:56
  fight at my natural, healthy, hydrated weight, they're going
• 3:00
  to step into that cage against an opponent who did endure the
• 3:04
  torture of the cut. OK, let's unpack this because
• 3:06
  imagine for a second that you are the lead mechanic for a
• 3:09
  multi $1,000,000 Formula One team.
• 3:11
  OK, I like where this is going. Right, so it is the biggest race
• 3:14
  of the year, but to meet a completely arbitrary weight
• 3:18
  requirement for the pre race inspection you decide to drain
• 3:22
  every single drop of oil and coolant out of the engine.
• 3:25
  Just completely dry. Completely dry, the car is
• 3:28
  essentially dying on the scale. Then, just moments before a 200
• 3:33
  mile per hour race, you furiously pump all those fluids
• 3:36
  back in, cross your fingers, and pray the engine block doesn't
• 3:40
  explode when the driver hits the very first corner.
• 3:42
  It sounds like sheer lunacy when you put it like that.
• 3:45
  You are deliberately sabotaging the structural integrity of the
• 3:48
  machine right before asking it to perform at its absolute
• 3:52
  limit. Exactly.
• 3:53
  But in MMA that's just Thursday afternoon.
• 3:55
  Because if you don't do that, you are suddenly locked in a
• 3:58
  cage with someone who is naturally 20 or 30 lbs heavier
• 4:01
  than you. Precisely.
• 4:03
  And in striking, that means absorbing blows from a heavier
• 4:06
  mass. But in grappling, it's an
• 4:09
  absolute nightmare. Grappling is a game of leverage,
• 4:11
  gravity and skeletal frame. So fighters willingly risk
• 4:15
  destroying their kidneys, developing agonizing kidney
• 4:19
  stones and severely compromising their brains shock absorption
• 4:23
  simply because the alternative is getting physically crushed by
• 4:26
  a larger human being who gained the scale.
• 4:29
  Yeah, and the regulations are desperately trying to catch up,
• 4:31
  but they're lagging. The sources mentioned
• 4:33
  California's athletic Commission trying to implement a rule that
• 4:36
  caps dehydration at a specific percentage of body weight,
• 4:39
  usually around 15 to 20%. Which is still a lot, but at
• 4:42
  least it's a cap. Right, because without it,
• 4:45
  athletes will push past the point of organ field failure.
• 4:48
  But this absurdity isn't just isolated to the letter weight
• 4:50
  classes, right? They discussed the completely
• 4:53
  illogical nature of the heavyweight limit in MMA, which
• 4:56
  is capped at 265 lbs. Yeah, that cap creates A
• 4:59
  uniquely bizarre dynamic. I mean, in professional boxing,
• 5:03
  the heavyweight division is unlimited.
• 5:04
  If you weigh 220 or 320, you just fight.
• 5:07
  Yeah, why cap it at all? In MMA, if two giant guys want
• 5:10
  to fight, let them fight. Well, it comes back to the
• 5:13
  physics of grappling we just talked about.
• 5:15
  If a £300 Elite wrestler gets on top of a 220 LB fighter, the
• 5:20
  sheer gravity makes it virtually impossible to escape.
• 5:24
  It stops being a martial arts contest and just becomes a
• 5:26
  physics equation that the smaller guy cannot solve.
• 5:30
  But. By maintaining that 265 LB cap,
• 5:34
  the sport is practically begging these massive, naturally
• 5:37
  gigantic athletes to put their cardiovascular systems through
• 5:41
  an absolute ringer just to qualify for their job.
• 5:44
  So if fighters are willing to starve and severely dehydrate
• 5:48
  themselves just to gain a physiological edge before the
• 5:51
  fight even starts, I mean it perfectly explains how extreme
• 5:54
  they will go inside the cage or frankly inside the pharmacy to
• 5:57
  stay ahead of the competition. Oh absolutely, the arms race.
• 5:59
  Right, the arms race. Let's look at the biomechanical
• 6:02
  edge first. The devastating rise of of the
• 6:04
  calf kick. The calf kick represents A
• 6:06
  definitive line in the sand is where the entire technical
• 6:10
  timeline of the sport visibly shifted.
• 6:12
  Historically, fighters targeted the thigh with leg kicks.
• 6:15
  The thigh is a massive muscle group.
• 6:17
  Right. It hurts, but it can take it.
• 6:19
  Exactly. It can absorb a lot of trauma,
• 6:22
  but the lower leg, the calf, is a completely different
• 6:26
  biological landscape. Yeah, Poirier talks about
• 6:29
  realizing just how incredibly dangerous this kick was when he
• 6:32
  fought Jim Miller. He got his calf absolutely
• 6:35
  shredded. And to understand why it's so
• 6:37
  uniquely destructive, I mean, just look down at your own leg
• 6:39
  right now. Your thigh has biological
• 6:41
  drainage chambers. When it takes trauma, the blood
• 6:44
  and fluid can disperse. Your calf does not have that.
• 6:48
  The fascia, which is the connective tissue wrapping the
• 6:50
  muscle, is incredibly tight down there, so when that muscle takes
• 6:53
  massive trauma, the internal bleeding and swelling literally
• 6:57
  have nowhere to go. Yeah.
• 6:59
  The medical term for this is compartment syndrome, and it is
• 7:02
  a localized severe emergency. The fluid gets trapped in this
• 7:06
  tiny pocket and the pressure builds inward instead of
• 7:09
  expanding outward. It gets so pressurized that it
• 7:12
  chokes off the blood supply and actually stops the nerves from
• 7:14
  firing. It's terrifying, Poirier said.
• 7:17
  Doctors at the hospital were discussing slicing his leg open.
• 7:20
  Like literally making a massive vertical incision down his calf
• 7:23
  to filet it open just to release the pressure.
• 7:27
  Good Lord. Yeah, because if you don't
• 7:29
  relieve that internal strangulation, the tissue dies
• 7:32
  and you threaten the permanent loss of function in your foot.
• 7:35
  You you get what they call drop foot where you can't even lift
• 7:37
  your toes. But the brilliant, almost
• 7:39
  insidious part of this evolution is how that traumatic experience
• 7:43
  became a weapon. Poirier took the exact technique
• 7:46
  that almost cost him his leg function, and he later
• 7:49
  weaponized it against Conor McGregor.
• 7:51
  Right, the rematch. Exactly, and the mechanics of
• 7:55
  the kick are what make it so hard to defend.
• 7:58
  You don't have to pivot your hips heavily like a traditional
• 8:00
  Muay Thai kick. It snaps out incredibly fast,
• 8:04
  with almost 0 landing right below the opponent's knee on
• 8:07
  that vulnerable bundle of nerves.
• 8:10
  McGregor, despite his elite striking pedigree, had never
• 8:13
  faced it at that level and it completely dismantled him.
• 8:16
  But the arms race isn't just biomechanical, right?
• 8:18
  If you are inflicting that kind of structural damage on an
• 8:21
  opponent, you have to recover from it yourself.
• 8:23
  Enter the chemical arms race. The.
• 8:24
  Wild history of doping in MMA. Yeah, the deep dive sources
• 8:28
  bring up the Pride era in Japan, which is just mind blowing to
• 8:32
  look back on. Fighter contracts and Pride
• 8:34
  literally stated in all caps. We do not test for steroids.
• 8:38
  They wanted you to know. Yeah, it wasn't a secret.
• 8:41
  It was an explicit green light. They wanted absolute monsters in
• 8:44
  that ring. And even as the sport
• 8:46
  transitioned into the United States and became heavily
• 8:48
  regulated, we saw the TRT testosterone replacement therapy
• 8:52
  area in the UFC. You had fighters like Alistair
• 8:55
  Overeem stepping into the cage with a physique that looked like
• 8:58
  it was drawn by a comic book artist.
• 9:00
  Unbelievable proportion. Right.
• 9:01
  Or Antonio Bigfoot Silva, who was an absolute juggernaut while
• 9:05
  undergoing TRT. But the moment the rules changed
• 9:09
  and the US anti doping agency USADA brought in strict random
• 9:13
  testing, Silva's durability just vanished.
• 9:16
  He went from absorbing massive blows to getting knocked out
• 9:20
  repeatedly by glancing shots. Here's where it gets really
• 9:22
  interesting, though, and I kind of have to push back on the
• 9:25
  standard narrative here. OK, let's hear it.
• 9:27
  People look at doping as simply, you know, cheating to hit
• 9:30
  harder. But we just talked about guys
• 9:32
  dehydrating themselves to the point of organ failure.
• 9:35
  We talked about kicks that cause compartment syndrome and
• 9:38
  threaten amputation. Given the absolute insane
• 9:41
  physical damage these athletes endure, wasn't the juicing era
• 9:45
  almost a logical survival mechanism?
• 9:47
  That's a fascinating way to frame it.
• 9:49
  Right. I mean, if you are signing up to
• 9:51
  systematically destroy your body for public entertainment, isn't
• 9:55
  utilizing chemical recovery just a rational consequence of the
• 9:58
  job? That is the dark irony of the
• 10:01
  entire situation, and you make a very compelling point.
• 10:04
  The damage is profound, and these fighters were ultimately
• 10:07
  searching for a way to survive their own brutal profession.
• 10:11
  The chemicals drastically altered their capacity to absorb
• 10:14
  damage. The elevated testosterone
• 10:17
  increased their red blood cell count, their bone density, and
• 10:20
  their sheer neurological durability.
• 10:22
  It's. Literal armor.
• 10:24
  Exactly. The line they were walking
• 10:26
  though was between genuine medical recovery and creating
• 10:29
  superhuman entities capable of inflicting unnatural, life
• 10:33
  altering damage on their opponents.
• 10:35
  And before the era of random year round testing, the drug
• 10:38
  testing wasn't really a test of morality, it was an intelligence
• 10:41
  test. An intelligence test.
• 10:42
  Wait, how? So because when the athletic
• 10:44
  commissions only test on the actual day of the fight, it
• 10:47
  didn't catch the people who were using it, only caught the people
• 10:50
  who had bad chemists. Oh wow, yeah.
• 10:52
  It just meant checking if a fighter's corner knew exactly
• 10:55
  the half life of a substance, like how many days it took to
• 10:58
  clear their system so they could pee clean on Saturday night.
• 11:02
  The scientists engineering the performance enhancers were
• 11:05
  always miles ahead of the regulators trying to catch them.
• 11:08
  So what does this all mean? When the regulator's finally do
• 11:11
  catch up, when you saw it comes in and completely removes that
• 11:15
  chemical safety net, the testosterone and the steroids
• 11:18
  vanish, but the physical damage? The compartment syndrome from
• 11:22
  those brutal calf kicks that stays.
• 11:25
  The sport didn't get any less violent.
• 11:27
  Right, so fighters have had to turn to space Age bionic medical
• 11:31
  science to rebuild their broken bodies.
• 11:33
  And the shift from chemical enhancement to this sci-fi
• 11:36
  medical intervention is one of the most fascinating aspects of
• 11:40
  modern sports science. They're utilizing protocols that
• 11:42
  sound like they belong in a spaceship.
• 11:44
  Seriously. The source details fighters
• 11:47
  practically living in hyperbaric oxygen chambers.
• 11:50
  Euriza Faber used them extensively to recover his
• 11:53
  pulverized leg. There's this Israeli university
• 11:56
  protocol mentioned where fighters undergo 60 sessions
• 12:00
  over 90 days in these high pressure oxygen tanks. 60
• 12:03
  sessions, That's a massive time commitment.
• 12:05
  It is, and the pressure forces oxygen deep into the blood
• 12:08
  plasma, reducing inflammation. But the crazy part is the claim
• 12:12
  that it actually lengthens their telomeres.
• 12:14
  Right. And for context, telomeres are
• 12:17
  essentially the protective caps at the end of your DNA strands,
• 12:20
  much like the plastic tips at the end of a shoelace.
• 12:23
  As we age or endure massive stress, those caps fray and get
• 12:27
  shorter, which leads to cellular aging.
• 12:30
  The protocol suggests that this intense hyperbaric therapy
• 12:32
  actually rebuilds those caps so drastically, reversing the
• 12:35
  biological age of the cells. That's wild.
• 12:37
  And they combine this with the use of peptides, specifically
• 12:40
  things like BPC 157. Yeah, the.
• 12:42
  Peptides are huge right now. Breakdown BPC 157 for me because
• 12:45
  it sounds like a Droid from Star Wars.
• 12:47
  Like what is it actually doing in the body?
• 12:49
  BPC stands for Body Protection Compound.
• 12:52
  It is a synthetic sequence of amino acids that was originally
• 12:55
  discovered in human gastric juice actually.
• 12:57
  Wait, stomach juice? Yeah, weirdly enough, what it
• 13:01
  does is essentially signal the body to massively accelerate
• 13:05
  angiogenesis, which is the creation of new blood vessels.
• 13:09
  So when a fighter has a torn ligament or pulverized soft
• 13:12
  tissue that usually gets very little blood flow, injecting A
• 13:15
  peptide like BPC 157 commands the body to build new delivery
• 13:20
  routes. Oh, to flood it with.
• 13:21
  Nutrients exactly. To flood that specific area with
• 13:24
  healing nutrients, it rapidly accelerates the healing of soft
• 13:28
  tissue damage that would otherwise take months to repair.
• 13:30
  It is incredible but honestly even peptides pale in comparison
• 13:34
  to the surgical lengths these guys will go to.
• 13:36
  The most terrifying detail to me from the sources was the hip
• 13:38
  resurface. Oh man, yeah, that is rough.
• 13:42
  Guys like Paul Felder, Georges Saint Pierre, and Dustin Poirier
• 13:45
  have all dealt with extreme hip degradation from decades of
• 13:48
  kicking and wrestling. Listen to the reality of this
• 13:50
  procedure. To fix the joint, surgeons
• 13:52
  literally dislocate your leg entirely out of the hip socket.
• 13:56
  Just the thought of it I. Know they take a saw and shave
• 14:00
  the top of your femur bone down. Then they drill micro holes deep
• 14:04
  into the bone so that you're on stem cells, leak out of the bone
• 14:07
  marrow and form a brand new biological bone surface.
• 14:11
  The procedure itself is medieval, but the recovery is
• 14:14
  agonizing. Oh the recovery is a nightmare.
• 14:17
  You can't put an ounce of weight on it for 8 weeks.
• 14:20
  Worse, to keep the newly shaved hip capsule from healing too
• 14:23
  tight and literally freezing your leg in place with scar
• 14:26
  tissue, you have to sleep strapped into a continuous
• 14:28
  motion machine. I can't even imagine trying to
• 14:30
  sleep like that right. For two straight months, your
• 14:34
  leg is mechanically pushed back and forth, bending and extending
• 14:37
  all night long while you try to rest.
• 14:40
  I mean, think about how much you complain when you tweak your
• 14:42
  lower back sleeping on a bad mattress.
• 14:44
  These guys are willingly signing up to have their legs
• 14:47
  dislocated, shaved down, and rebuilt like Terminators just so
• 14:51
  they can go back to work. It perfectly highlights the
• 14:54
  central paradox of the modern elite athlete.
• 14:57
  Today, fighters have access to incredible wearable technology,
• 15:01
  right Devices like whoop straps or aura rings that monitor their
• 15:05
  sleep architecture, the resting heart rate, and critically,
• 15:08
  their heart rate variability, or HRV.
• 15:11
  And HRV is basically the measurement of the time gap
• 15:13
  between your heartbeats, right? Exactly that.
• 15:16
  A high HRV means your nervous system is relaxed and adaptable.
• 15:20
  A dramatically low HRV means your nervous system is locked in
• 15:24
  a state of high stress fight or flight panic.
• 15:27
  So these fighters wake up, look at their Aura ring app, and the
• 15:30
  data is explicitly telling them they are deep in the red.
• 15:33
  Like do not train today, yes. Their HRV is tanked, their
• 15:36
  nervous system is fried, and medical science is flashing a
• 15:39
  giant neon stop sign begging them to take a day off.
• 15:43
  Yet to reach the elite cardiovascular conditioning
• 15:45
  required for A5 round championship fight, they must
• 15:48
  deliberately look at that science, ignore it, and go to
• 15:50
  the gym to spar. Extreme mental discipline in
• 15:53
  this arena requires systematically overriding your
• 15:56
  own physiological common sense. They have to purposefully push
• 15:59
  past the biological red line to force their bodies to adapt to
• 16:03
  the trauma. But you know, science can
• 16:05
  reconstruct a shaved femur with stem cells.
• 16:08
  It can use peptides to heal a pulverized calf muscle.
• 16:12
  But what happens to the mind of a fighter when the stadium
• 16:14
  lights finally turn off and they can no longer do the one single
• 16:18
  thing that gave their life structure?
• 16:20
  That brings us to the psychology of violence and the terrifying
• 16:23
  transition to being a quote UN quote civilian.
• 16:26
  We talked about the physical damage so much, but the
• 16:29
  psychological Cliff they fall off after retirement is often
• 16:32
  the hardest fight of their entire lives.
• 16:34
  Yeah, Poirier talks openly about the dread of retiring at 36.
• 16:38
  Imagine this. You wake up, the alarm goes off,
• 16:41
  and suddenly you have nowhere to be.
• 16:43
  You are just a guy. For 20 years, there was a heavy,
• 16:46
  omnipresent cloud of fighting hanging over his every waking
• 16:49
  moment, Every meal he ate, his sleep schedule, his social life.
• 16:52
  Every single day was dedicated to a singular, violent goal.
• 16:56
  And when it's gone? When that goal is permanently
• 16:59
  removed, it creates A profound, disorienting loss of identity,
• 17:03
  he said. He literally has to relearn who
• 17:05
  he is without that cloud. Because fighting isn't just a
• 17:08
  sport or an activity, it is an unyielding organizer of time and
• 17:13
  priority. It dictates the terms of your
• 17:16
  existence, and it also creates A deeply unique psychological
• 17:19
  state that is impossible to replicate in normal society.
• 17:23
  Yeah, he mentions this strange, almost unbreakable intimacy of
• 17:26
  violence. Think about spending an hour
• 17:29
  locked in a steel cage trying to beat a man like Max Holloway
• 17:32
  into unconsciousness while he tries to do the exact same thing
• 17:35
  to you. Poirier notes that going through
• 17:38
  that fire creates A lifelong, unspoken bond.
• 17:41
  You learn exactly what another man is made of.
• 17:43
  You see them stripped down to nothing.
• 17:45
  Right, you discover the absolute breaking point of a human soul,
• 17:48
  and when someone refuses to break, you carry that knowledge
• 17:50
  of them forever. It strips away all the polite
• 17:53
  societal performance we all do everyday, leaving only the
• 17:56
  absolute truth of a person's resilience.
• 17:59
  It is a profound connection, but the ultimate proof of fighting
• 18:03
  is an organizing purpose. As something that gives profound
• 18:06
  structure to absolute chaos is the Angola prison story
• 18:11
  discussed in the sources. That story completely blew my
• 18:14
  mind. The Angola maximum security
• 18:16
  prison in Louisiana, which is one of the toughest
• 18:19
  penitentiaries in the country, has a fully sanctioned boxing
• 18:22
  league. We are talking about inmates,
• 18:25
  many of whom are serving life sentences for murder, fighting
• 18:28
  in an organized ring. It's.
• 18:30
  Hard to believe it's real. The fights are filmed on closed
• 18:33
  circuit television and broadcast to other prisons.
• 18:35
  And what are they fighting for? Extra food in the cafeteria and
• 18:38
  a little bit of free time in the yard.
• 18:40
  The craziest historical detail they mentioned is a pardoned
• 18:43
  Angola prisoner known as the Black Rhino, who actually got
• 18:47
  out of prison and went on to fight Mike Tyson professionally.
• 18:50
  It is wild to think about in the darkest, most restricted,
• 18:54
  hopeless place on earth. Organized combat provides these
• 18:57
  men with discipline, intense focus, and a reason to
• 19:00
  physically wake up and train in the morning.
• 19:02
  If we connect this to the bigger picture, the Angola story
• 19:05
  perfectly explains why the transition to civilian life is
• 19:08
  so perilous. For elite fighters like Poirier,
• 19:12
  fighting is the ultimate organizing principle.
• 19:15
  When your entire world, your entire nervous system, has been
• 19:18
  oriented toward imminent survival and physical dominance
• 19:21
  for decades, ordinary life feels terrifyingly quiet.
• 19:25
  Yeah, just mundane. Exactly.
• 19:27
  Going to the grocery store, paying your water bill, sitting
• 19:30
  in traffic with no imminent physical threat, It feels
• 19:32
  entirely directionless. The structure of extreme
• 19:35
  consequence is gone, leaving a massive psychological void.
• 19:38
  It really puts our own daily complaints into perspective,
• 19:41
  doesn't it? We have covered an incredible
• 19:44
  journey today. We started with the absolute
• 19:47
  biological torture of draining fluid just to make weight.
• 19:50
  We examine the biomechanical destruction of calf kicks
• 19:53
  causing compartment syndrome and the dark intelligence test era
• 19:57
  of chemical enhancements. We really went through it all.
• 19:59
  Yeah, we walked through the bionic surgical arms race where
• 20:02
  athletes are drilling micro holes in their dislocated femurs
• 20:05
  just to get back to work. And finally, we stared into the
• 20:08
  quiet, terrifying psychological void that waits for every single
• 20:12
  fighter the morning after they retire.
• 20:15
  It is a comprehensive look at the furthest boundaries of human
• 20:18
  endurance and it leaves you with the thought to really Mull over.
• 20:21
  We look at the extreme, almost monk like discipline of a
• 20:25
  professional cage fighter or even an inmate boxing for an
• 20:28
  extra meal in Angola and we see that their life structure is
• 20:32
  born out of absolute necessity and singular focus.
• 20:35
  Right. If a pursuit as violent, chaotic
• 20:37
  and physically destructive as cage fighting can give a human
• 20:40
  being that much profound meaning, clarity, and life
• 20:43
  structure, what essential fight, what demanding all consuming
• 20:47
  purpose might be completely missing from our own modern,
• 20:50
  comfortable civilian lives? Man, that is a question that
• 20:53
  sticks with you long after the deep dive is over.
• 20:56
  What starts as an attempt to build a high performance,
• 20:59
  indestructible machine ends with the realization that maybe it is
• 21:03
  the very act of breaking ourselves down for a singular
• 21:06
  purpose that gives us our meaning.
• 21:07
  Thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive.
• 21:09
  Keep digging into the fascinating world around you,
• 21:11
  keep asking the hard questions, and we will catch you on the
• 21:14
  next one.