Joe Rogan has long been one of the most influential people in the bjj community and out of it. The 52 year old stand-up comedian, mixed martial arts color commentator, podcast host, and businessman is notorious for his intense work outs – after all he is a black belt both under Jean Jacques Machado and Eddie Bravo the 10th Planet system.

During high school, Rogan was a practitioner of Taekwondo and gained a black belt at age 15. He soon became the Massachusetts full contact Tae Kwon Do champion four consecutive years. By the age of 19, Rogan won the US Open Tae Kwon Do Championship and, as lightweight champion, went on to beat both the middle and heavyweight title-holders to obtain the Grand Championship. He started judo at the age of 20 and after a year of training received blue belt.

In tis video, taken from his recent podcast with Rickson Gracie, Joe Rogan talks about how delusional some Taekwondo practitioners are about their fighting abilities. Rogan shares his journey, starting with Taekwondo in the 1980s and moving through boxing and Muay Thai. He recalls how, despite being strong and in shape, he was easily overpowered by a BJJ practitioner, leading him to realize the effectiveness of BJJ and the need to learn it:

“I was doing taekwondo in the 1980s. Everybody thought, everybody that was training with we thought taekwondo was it. Yeah this is all you needed to learn a couple of kicks and yeah it’s done.”

“Then I started training boxing and Muay Thai and I started getting beat up and I was like oh I thought I knew more than I knew and then I went to jiu jitsu and I was like oh my god I can never felt like tis before. i’ve i’ve talked about it before, where one of the first days ever training, I was a white belt and I was training with this kid. He was a purple belt and I thought I was a tough guy I couldn’t believe that this guy could do whatever he wanted to me. He’d play with me yes. He’d just strangled me and he wasn’t bigger than me he was my size yes and he wasn’t younger than me…”

Rickson Gracie discusses the importance of cross-training to compensate for weaknesses in any given martial art. He talks about his own approach to dealing with strikers and the necessity of integrating different styles to become a more complete fighter.