The Rage in the Cage

Hello, search engine listeners.

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Before we get into the story or the question, can you just introduce yourself?

Yeah, my name is Pablo Torre.

I am a journalist and the host of a show that is a video.

Do we call them video podcasts?

At this point, I don't know if it's like if podcasts are audio podcasts or video, like I don't know what we're doing exactly.

I think that's a fair assumption.

I also don't really know what I'm doing exactly,

but I do it a lot

you do it a lot you do it a lot you answer questions and sometimes do investigations but the world that you like to cover is sports and for me it's interesting because like you and I know each other a little bit you launched your show Pablo Tori finds out around the same time as search engine I feel like we have

similar sensibilities, but it's just your sensibility is being applied to a world that I know very little about.

Yeah, I see sports as a liberal arts education, a sentiment that makes me ostracized in the world of sports.

What do you mean when you say you see sports as a liberal arts education?

It's a way to get to everything.

I've been a sports journalist for my entire professional life, and I've never lacked for a reason to connect it to politics, culture, business, religion, race.

I am a recovering sociologist.

That's what I studied in college.

And sports is this giant tent in American life in which you'll sit next to somebody who does not vote the same way as you or think the same way as you, but you are engaged in the same blood feud against another tribe as them.

And so in that, you get to this position, I think, where we are right now, where sports ends up being useful to study as a way of understanding, I don't know, what the fuck America is anymore.

If Pablo's thesis is right and we can learn about America through sports, then the story he was here to tell me had some strange lessons about our country embedded within it.

It was a story of a sports scandal, which had drawn me in at first just because it seemed so deeply silly.

A novel form of misbehavior was threatening to dishonor the core identity of a brutal American sport.

Okay, so the story in question, we were on the phone when you told me about a scandal, a scandal with video, which we are going to watch.

First, I just want you to explain to our audience, which I think is less sports-first than yours, like what happened.

So there's a lot of, you know, mixed martial arts content that happens on the internet, including this stream of a fight that was taking place in April of 2024 between a gentleman by the name of Mason Lewis against a fighter named Tim Fargo.

This was a title fight in a lower division.

It was, in fact, a New York State bantamweight fight.

Bantam means they're not very heavy?

Yeah, 135.

Okay.

135.

And this thing happens that kind of takes over the world of mixed martial arts in a way that I don't think mixed martial arts was prepared for.

Because Mason Lewis, if you've ever seen, I'm trying to translate all of this for you.

If you've ever seen that device Suzanne Summers sold called the Thigh Master,

Mason Lewis basically had his head between Tim Fargo's thighs like he was being thigh mastered.

And that was like a way for him to like make him submit.

Yes.

They were on the ground, horizontal.

All of this, if you're not visualizing it as deeply homoerotic, feel free to.

Okay.

Yes.

A lot.

Okay.

And Mason Lewis is stuck.

Homoerotic because he's, his massive, powerful thighs are restraining this man's like head and face between.

Yes.

Yes.

And also, it's just mixed MMA, mixed martial arts, there's a lot of grappling.

Yeah.

And these guys are deeply shirtless and sweaty and unapologetic.

Right.

Because men are socialized.

God, I'm sounding such a liberal arts weenie, but like you don't have to like super masculine straight men often just don't touch each other.

But here, there's a lot of touching each other.

They're so masculine that they're always touching each other.

We've come around on all the way around on the masculinity spectrum.

And so we find ourselves at this inflection point in this title fight.

And Mason Lewis decides to do something that I would say

violates the fundamental code of masculinity.

Which is what?

He begins to tickle the bottom of Tim Fargo's foot.

And

what type of tickle is it?

Dee, wee, wee, wee, wee, wee, like cartoon tickling the ivories, a feathery tickle, like you might tickle your, you know, little brother.

Right.

So I just want to bring up the clip.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, so this is from Full Contact Promotions on YouTube.

Mason Lewis versus Tim Fargo, 135-pound MMA title fight, Rage in the Cage, 24.

Ladies and gentlemen, let's be surman

okay, what do we see?

It hasn't happened yet.

It hasn't happened yet, but one guy looks like he is absolutely screwed.

Yeah, it starts his head, which is like red face and clutched between these muscular thighs, does look totally submitted.

Yeah, like they were locked into one position, and then this hand with cut off fingers in this fighting glove,

which is a key detail because the fingers are available for manipulation.

In a way, where the boxer can never tick off.

Absolutely.

This is a very MMA story for that reason.

It seems to almost like a meerkat pokes its head out from its burrow.

Mason Lewis unsheaths these little thingies

and begins to feather the bottom of the foot of the leg and the thigh that had, yeah, truly turned his skull a color of red that I think a Pantone color wheel would only describe as rage in the cage.

Rage in the cage red.

Rage in the cage red.

And now, like, several seconds later, the tickler is now on top.

That's crazy.

It's also just like the arena itself is so dark, black, dank, cavernous.

Like, it's a black box theater, PJ.

Where tickling should never occur.

Like, I can feel the inappropriateness of it.

Yeah.

And there's a referee, and he's sort of just like making sure everyone's still alive, and they are.

And then suddenly, the tickler, he's the one on top.

And

spoiler alert, Mason Lewis wins the fight.

ISKA pants and weight champion, and new FCP pantomime champion out of the red corner.

So he wins, but he wins by doing this thing.

It seems to violate like many codes of like ultimate fighting championship, like masculinity.

It's something that I had never seen before.

And it sounds based on the way that MMA responded to it, like most of them hadn't either.

It was a taboo.

And so like you basically every week, you look at the world of sports and try to find what the unusual thing is.

You have seen lots of unusual things happen in sports.

When you saw this clip of this thing happening, like what happened inside your mind?

Like, what was your reaction?

What questions were you asking yourself?

The number one question I asked myself was,

given that the tickler just won this fight,

why aren't more MMA fighters tickling?

Because it just seemed like an obvious tactical step forward.

It just seemed like a thing that worked and I had never considered it.

It never occurred to me that maybe the only thing you can do in some scenarios in which it seems like you're about to lose consciousness is to go the other way.

Don't try and use brute force.

Kind of use what feels like the opposite, which is a little, you know,

it's like inventive silliness.

Whimsy.

Whimsy.

Which, like, whimsy, of all the places that whimsy might live, like a UFC, like cage match seems like not one of them.

It feels like a place that is militantly and culturally opposed to Whimsy.

After the break, Pablo takes us into this place that is militantly and culturally opposed to Whimsy and tries to figure out if these anti-whimsy forces have overlooked how devastating tickling can be in a no-holds-barred cage match.

We'll get to hear from everybody, the tickler, the tickly, and more.

We'll also get an answer to another question I've actually wondered a lot about.

How did mixed martial arts and the UFC become such a prominent part of American masculinity?

After these ads, two liberal arts guys figure out what it means to be a man in America.

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Welcome back to the show.

Tell me just like for table's sakes, like just tell me about UFC as an institution.

Like for total neophytes to this, like what is UFC?

How did it start?

It stands for the ultimate fighting championship.

It is, again, something that has zero irony in it.

Like it's meant to be the most serious display of combat sports in the world.

And

specifically, it is mixed martial arts.

So the brand, the league, it's almost like the NFL is the National Football Football League, but the sport is football.

The ultimate fighting championship is the league.

Mixed martial arts is the sport.

And so like you have, before the UFC ever existed, you had boxing, where it's a combat sport, but people are restricted to just punching.

If you have the UFC where there's mixed martial arts, does that mean any form of martial arts and any combination of those forms you can bring to fight?

Oh, it's kind of like the ultimate, I mean, it is, the ultimate way of answering the question.

Like, what if Batman could beat up Superman?

What if Bruce Lee fought Muhammad Ali?

It's this way of like people from different disciplines proving who is, yeah, the best fighter among all of them.

And so you're not just seeing.

the best fighter.

It's like, I guess you're also seeing the best fighting style or the best combination of them.

It is a clash of many things, style being one of them.

But the boxing parallel is a good one because boxing, of course, is like self-evidently violent.

It's funny, we wring our hands around around football in America because, of course, of CTE and neuroeological trauma, boxing is consensual concussions.

That's what boxing is.

But mixed martial arts as a sport was regarded as so violent that it was illegal in many states in America for a really long time, like into the 90s.

John McCain,

late senator John McCain, referred to it famously as human cockfighting.

And how did this start?

Like, why did people like I understand why people had a problem with it.

Like, I understand what John McCain meant when he said human cockfighting.

Like, boxing feels like it's on the edge of what a lot of people will tolerate, and this is pushing that edge further out.

But, like, why did the people who want it want it in the beginning?

Oh, it's because it's the ultimate tough guy contest.

Yeah, so UFC One

is

the first

of its kind.

Long before there were dozens of rages in the cages, UFC One was born.

And at the time, MMA was still outlawed in many states in America.

Let me find out exactly what date it was.

I want to get this right.

But UFC One

UFC One was on November 12th, 1993.

And really, it didn't get anything resembling, I would say, broad mainstream appeal or legitimacy until 2005 when a reality show called The Ultimate Fighter brought MMA into living rooms.

On this season of The Ultimate Fighter.

Yeah, I'm fing on edge.

I'm not saying to f nobody, and I'm fing cooking my food.

Next question: It's reality television, this American Idol-style competition in which

aspiring UFC fighters have to do these challenges on television against these other aspirational professionals.

I think I can take Chris out, but he's definitely going to be a challenge and he is a tough fighter.

That's your call, dude.

If you want to do it, you know, if not, I'll step in there and I'll fight Alex.

The end of the show ends with someone getting awarded a contract to actually compete in the UFC.

You do win the six-figure contract with the UFC.

You are the ultimate fighter in the 185-pound division.

And so that's how it kind of hijacks into mainstream culture.

And what is the, like,

the audience that's showing up for this?

Like, I remember people watching clips of UFC fights on YouTube while it was still relatively underground.

And it was just like a very, like,

it just seemed like for teenage boys, it's like, here is unrestrained, like, totally like edge of civilization masculinity.

just unleashed like what's your understanding of beyond the four people i remember from the Pennsylvania suburbs?

Like, the audience that's showing up, like, what is the culture that they're celebrating?

What are they feeling when they're watching these matches?

There is a bit of, again, to use another internet reference, there's a bit of like faces of death in this, where it's like, I don't know if we should be watching this.

Right.

We're sort of like getting these clips passed around in which someone gets like an elbow to the eyeball.

And you're like, oh, this is going to be a thing I remember for a long time.

Look, a key part of MMA versus boxing, and not to be so simplistic about it, is that you can use your legs.

And why is that a big deal?

Because in boxing, you can only use your arms.

But why is that?

Why does it matter?

Because now you can kick and like.

And you can grapple and you can get on the ground and you can put people into these like arm leg locks, like these really painful, torturous positions that are illegal in boxing.

I mean, flatly illegal.

They're the things that make it so dangerous.

Like there are clips of UFC fights in which one guy leg kicks another guy and the guy who does the kicking, his leg snaps off and begins to dangle inside the packaging of his skin.

And so you just see breakages of bone.

That's crazy.

It's, I mean, there are highlight reels of stuff like this.

Right.

Yeah.

There are a lot of sports that basically dilute their products when it comes to we're here for the theater, the performance, the litigation of toughness, where it's like, we all want the fights, but it's sort of like contained in this larger politeness.

Mixed martial arts is like the uncut Colombian cocaine of just like, we know what you're here for.

And it became extraordinarily popular.

And were you watching this as it was coming up?

Like, what's your relationship to UFC?

So I've covered boxing for a really long time.

I grew up a fan of boxing, and that felt like enough in terms of like sating my personal bloodthirst as a sports fan.

Again, I was born in 85.

I grew up in an era in which this all felt kind of gross, but I do remember distinctly, I was a young reporter at Sports Illustrated.

My second year on the job, I got this email.

This was 2008, and it was inviting me to cover an MMA fight.

And I really didn't have any interest until I looked closer at the email.

And this event, a strike force, a different MMA promotion, a different sort of competitor, UFC, this event was going to be held at the Playboy Mansion.

And so I did what any young reporter would do, which is I said, I would like one credential, please.

And I, I don't even remember if I told my bosses I was doing this.

I was just like, yes, I will cover this.

And then paid for my own way to Los Angeles and showed up.

And what, sorry, and it was at the Playboy Mansion?

So the other thing about mixed martial arts is that it's an, it takes place in this octagon.

It's called the octagon.

Okay.

And there's a mat at the bottom, and it's not that big.

So, like, unlike a football field or a basketball court, you can sort of like put the octagon wherever.

Absolutely.

And the Playboy Mansion has a yard.

And you can put an octagon in the yard.

And they put that octagon right in the middle of that yard.

Good evening to you, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the world-famous Playboy Mansion in Beverly Hills, California for Strike Force at the Mansion 2, a big night of mixed martial arts.

And in the sort of like back part of the estate, you could hear, they have like a zoo back there, like a literal zoo.

Okay.

I hear the Playboy Mansion is famous for its peacocks.

I found one right here.

Let's go see if we could get it.

It kind of felt like an unlocked

part of the map of like Grand Theft Auto, honestly.

Because it's just like so much spectacle in one place.

And it was over the top.

And you were invited, like, take a tour of the grounds.

Took some pictures in the grotto.

Is that what it's called?

Grotto.

Grotto.

Yeah, we just took some pictures in there.

I'm really excited to be here.

Like, there's the grotto.

You know, you're wandering through.

Again, in my mind, Hugh Hefner was just like wandering around in his smoking jacket.

I don't know if I hallucinated that, admittedly, but I'm pretty sure he was there.

It was his house after all.

Various Playboy bunnies were like, you know, they were hosting the assembled MMA press and traveling parties for all the fighters.

This is what MMA was like in 2008.

They were like desperate for someone like me who had zero experience covering it and just came out of nowhere.

They were like cold emailing people like, will you cover this thing?

Dot, dot, dot.

It's at the Playboy Mansion.

And I was like, you had me at the second to last word.

Right.

How does it grow from,

like you said, one big inflection point is the reality show Ultimate Fighter.

Like, how does it grow from there?

Yeah.

I mean, by the, we're talking about the 2010s now, it truly became one of the fastest growing sports in the United States.

It became popular.

And so states all around the country started legalizing it.

And simultaneously, it was also global, like Brazil.

Brazil is also a cradle of mixed martial arts.

Brazilian jiu-jitsu happens to be one of the dominant forms, one of the dominant styles that won the marketplace of beating the shit out of each other.

Suddenly, before you realized it, by 2015, you look up and suddenly

the UFC and MMA is in lots of the respectable places that had truly said, you're not allowed here anymore.

And pay-per-view fees, broadcasting rights, merch, all of this stuff,

people realize that, oh, you can make actual money in this.

So, the UFC creates a national market for televised mixed martial arts combat.

And later, as more and more entrants join the space, the sport gets popular enough to move from the fringes of American culture towards its center.

And somehow it gets pretty popular while maintaining this whiff of taboo to it.

Like part of the pleasure of watching it is that it feels like you're not supposed to.

There is one more vector taking MMA mainstream, though.

A popular podcast that, in its early episodes, mostly talked to male comedians and MMA fighters.

The Joe Rogan experience.

Because before Joe Rogan was even a podcaster, he was already a prominent figure in the then-niche world of mixed martial arts.

Truly is an honor to welcome back to the broadcast team here on the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the host of NBC's Fear Factor Joe Rogan, our old sideline guy interviewing the fighters years ago.

Rogan in the clip looks like a different person.

He's younger with a full head of hair, much less beefy.

Perhaps at the very beginning of his transition from LA stand-up and sitcom actor to eccentric philosopher Jock.

I'm a huge fan of ultimate fighting, all mixed martial arts.

Literally, I don't care about other sports.

Like the Lakers won their third championship the other day.

I couldn't care less.

If they made basketball illegal, it wouldn't even bother me.

Joe Rogan is the announcer during the rise of all of this.

He is the face, you could argue, of mixed martial arts.

The Joe Rogan experience started as an MMA podcast.

And we're live.

So literally this morning, I had this thought.

I thought about it a bit yesterday, and this morning I thought of it.

I was like, why don't you just do it?

I said, I need to do like some sort of

an MMA recap show because there's always so much shit that's happening.

And I guess as a shorthand heuristic, everything Joe Rogan is, the multitudes he contains, idiot, but also at times, like truly a master of subject matter,

obscure and otherwise, someone who can read books to completion and enjoy them, and also have these characters on who are absurd, if not outright problematic in meaningful ways.

All of that is under the tent of mixed martial arts.

Pablo had promised us a liberal arts view of sports, and I think we'd arrived at it.

Just to stay in that view for a second, I think Joe Rogan confounds liberal arts types because he represents a version of masculinity that's fairly alien to us.

To be a good man right now can often feel like an unwinnable game.

So it's an anxious identity.

And the solution most liberal arts men gravitate toward is to just talk about other men a lot.

How they're bad, toxic, lonely.

It's an identity you could understand many men not particularly enjoying.

And Joe Rogan offers men a different path.

He says that actually, it's very good to to be a man and that he can help you be even better at it.

He'll tell you what exercises to do.

Everything from Nordic curls.

Do you do those?

Do you do Nordic curls?

I should.

I should do more than I do.

Yeah.

Leg curls, Nordic curls.

He'll tell you what to put in your body.

Did you incorporate peptides in your recovery?

I didn't.

Do you hate healing?

Do I hate healing?

No.

I didn't use peptides.

And Joe Rogan believes that men should fight.

Men should spar.

There's no better stress reliever in the world than jiu-jitsu or martial arts.

There's no better.

You leave there, you're the kindest person in the world.

You just like heal all of your aggressions out of your system.

Yeah.

And it's a phenomenal stress reliever.

This particular Rogan conversation is from earlier this year with Mark Zuckerberg, who'd shown up to talk about meta, but also about combat.

Regardless of what you're going through day to day with Facebook and Meta and all the different projects you have going on, it's not as hard as someone trying to choke you unconscious.

It's not as acute.

I think it's like sometimes you have someone trying to choke you unconscious slowly over a multi-month, multi-year period, and that's that's business.

Right.

Um,

but no, I think that sometimes in business, the cycle time is so long that it is very refreshing to just have a feedback loop that's like, oh, I like had my hand down, so I got punched in the face.

It's like, that's this is a sport, again, that has like a new gentlemanly sort of air to it, even if it is really appealing to those nerds, those gentlemen, on the basis of being able to confer the hyper masculinity

that they seek.

Yeah.

I'm trying to decide if, like, I have questions and thoughts about this, but maybe they're, it's just, there's a, I'm so,

I feel like I spent the first half of my life feeling so

like all the problems that we culturally have with masculinity.

I feel like I discovered for myself on my own getting beat up by men for, you know, 20 years.

And also now in this moment where like american culture doesn't know what to do with masculinity other than sort of label it as troubled and bad but like men have to find a version of being a man that works for them as goofy as tech ceo grappling with people is i have sympathy for well what am i supposed to do like what am i supposed to do and like this feels good i don't know i have sympathy for it oh by the way like It's sports.

Like the whole thesis of sports is you're going to enter this ecosystem in which your ego is on the line, in which you need to work out to be good at it, in which you need to sort of be aesthetic in some ways that will cost you in other areas of your life.

You got to really devote yourself to it.

But the rewards are, I think,

I dare say, one of the healthier ways to perform the theater of gender.

Yeah.

Like, I hope that rather than, I don't know, tilting an election, the next tech CEO just learns Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

I'm totally good with that.

Of course, if this theory of the octagon is right, that male aggression might need contained, socially acceptable places to express itself.

This leads us back to the question of the week: What happens when you take that sacred space and introduce to it an unmanly bout of foot tickling?

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So to go to the scandal that took place in this octagon, like, just give me again, what is the date this transpires?

Who's the tickler?

Who's the ticklee?

Yes.

So we're returning to April 2024.

The tickler is named Mason Lewis.

The ticklee remains Tim Fargo.

And as always, we are talking about Rage in the Cage 24.

And so Rage in the Cage 24 provokes this scandal.

Why, for the just normal UFC viewer, why were they offended by the

ticklefoot?

Because

this question was one that immediately became thorny to sort of like disentangle because fundamentally there is the whole thing of this being anti-masculine it feels like you've discovered sort of like a hack in a video game where it's like if it worked you shouldn't have done it because this isn't like honorable yeah but i think the actual real

opposition to it was not that this works too well.

It's that how dare you suggest that this tickle is the reason why he won.

There was something almost more insulting about the fact that you think that these two guys who were putting their lives on the line in this way, you think that this was settled because of the tickle?

Like clearly the people who made such a big deal of it,

we were told, they were the ones, those people were the ones who were just uneducated about how MMA really works.

Oh, so it's not, so the online online fandom for MMA is angry, but they're not angry at the thing I would have assumed.

They're not angry necessarily that a tickle transpired.

It's sort of like

they're angry at how outsiders are understanding this story.

Like the fact that I'm here.

Is bad.

I was going to say, the fact that I'm sitting in this studio with you, I feel like is a concern for them because there's a bit of a, you know, there's like a samurai code around this.

And so you get curious about this.

As you're watching the reaction to this grow, is it like, is it immediate that people are upset?

Or is it like as it gets outside attention, people are getting upset?

It's really when we started reporting this.

Oh, you were making people upset.

Yeah.

So me and Dave Fleming, who's my friend and correspondent on this episode, who was himself a D1 college wrestler.

The thing that Phlem discovered as we were both just sort of like asking around, like media friends, was that like they didn't want to participate in this story because it felt like it was insulting and demeaning to this thing they loved which had fought as you now understand this long campaign for a certain respectability a certain integrity that was not being jeopardized here because it was too violent ironically given the long arc of the mainstreaming of the sport it was a threat because it was reducing it to something of a punchline.

Like the lack of violence in this one move, the tickle, was the thing that threatened, it seemed to us, to tug at these threads that might unravel more than a lot of defenders of the sport wanted to entertain.

So the problem isn't that you're making the sport look ultra-violent.

That's like the fun of the sport.

The problem is that you're making it look goofy.

Yeah.

And their argument is a tickle happened in this match, but the tickle wasn't as decisive as you, the sort of snickering outsider, want it to have been.

So can I introduce the character of Big John at this point?

Please.

So, there's a guy whose name is Big John, and Phlegm interviewed him over Zoom.

So, you are going to hear from Phlegm a bunch in the tape.

I know who you are, but will you introduce yourself just for our recording and sort of just give a little bit of your background for our audience that might not know?

My name is John McCarthy.

If you're going to go to MMA, they call me Big John McCarthy.

And he is basically the number one rules authority in mixed martial arts.

At the very beginning at UFC One, I was kind of part of the show, but I was holding on to stuff, being a bodyguard, ended up being asked to be the referee for UFC 2 and continued on for a little over 25 year career, and it was a lot of fun.

So he's been there basically from the very start.

And if you want to envision Big John, just envision Steven Seagal.

Okay.

And you're close enough.

The guy has himself like a highlight reel of him like in the octagon, basically being like a third fighter there to enforce the rules upon these ostensible maniacs.

So he's like the institutional knowledge of justice in the sport.

He is the guy who actually literally helped write the rule book of MMA.

And what was your expectation going in like of what you were going to find talking to someone like him about this?

I thought that Big John would be less dismissive of the angle of our reporting.

Every time we went to Big John and pushed him on whether this worked and why shouldn't more people be doing this?

He basically found any excuse to diminish the premise.

The mind starts to work in a different way.

And that's why I said tickling doesn't work to get you out of something while someone is creating pain.

So he's just like, you guys are reporters looking for a funny story.

Tickling transpired, but again, not pivotal.

And also, even if it was in any way impactful, it would have been on the level of, okay, this was kind of like surprising.

Yeah.

Because it doesn't really happen.

But then

that would be the ceiling of its effectiveness.

And Big John also communicated to us that because of this Mason Lewis Tim Fargo thing, which he knew about immediately as soon as we started asking about tickling, he was like, you're talking about Mason Lewis and Tim Fargo?

Like, yeah.

I know the exact fight that you're talking about because I had a lot of people sit there and say, is this legal?

Yeah, it's legal.

Absolutely legal.

Is that why the person got out?

No, it's not why the person got out.

Lots of people had apparently online commented enough about this that he was also exhausted.

Oh, he's just tired of talking about it.

He's like these fucking idiots thinking that tickling is going to be the next great move in the toughest sport in the world.

It's never truly worked in any realm that I've ever seen.

I've seen guys try it, trying to be funny.

I've never seen tickling ever stop anything in a fight.

This is the guy who inscribed on effectively stone tablets what is and is not allowed in MMA.

And he just was unconcerned in the way that we were concerned about, like, isn't this thing important?

This thing that we just saw, isn't that kind of fascinating?

And he just wanted to make it very clear that we were wrong.

So, Big John tells you to fuck off.

Would you try to talk to like the official, like, the UFC league?

Like, do they have anything to say?

Well, the rules of UFC are helpfully published on their website.

And as Big John confirmed, it's legal.

You can tickle if you want.

It's just that, why would you want to?

Right.

Why would you want to risk?

I mean, this was Big John's argument.

If you tickle me.

If you want to tickle me while I'm punching the shit out of you in the face, go ahead and try.

But again, be careful when you do it because if you're doing it while someone can punch you in the face, it's probably going to happen.

So his thing was like, we don't need to ban tickling.

It's just not even worthy of that level of constitutional amendment.

I see his point.

Like, I can see the argument.

So then this sort of

because you were not willing to abandon your premise.

Correct.

You wanted to saw the video.

It does feel you do watch the fight change.

Like, I'm sorry, I'm not an expert, but I see a man in a Thigh Master lock with no way out.

I see his little fingies come out.

I see him tickle and I see the fight change.

So I feel like

objectively, something transpired.

Something transpired, and we can debate

how big an impact it was, but that is enough for me to not take Big John as the final authority.

It was like, let's continue to interrogate this.

And you know that Big John has a stake in the sport not being a goofy laughingstock.

Can I tell you I'm a little worried about how much I'm talking shit about Big John?

Why?

Because he is big

and he's very online.

Like, Big John, if you're a search engine listener as well, just know that all of this comes from a place of genuine journalistic inquiry.

And I respect you and your works.

Established, for the record, we'll keep it in.

Where do you go next?

Like, I assume you want to talk to both the tickler and the tickly, although I could imagine either one having reasons for not wanting to talk.

Well, first,

we got to get to the tickler.

And so, did you feel at all worried that the tickler would not want to talk to you?

I mean,

I cannot stress how annoying it became that we loved the story and the reporting, and we pride ourselves on getting to the bottom of things.

And the tickler was ghosting us.

Yeah.

We made contact once and from then on, there was no response.

I texted him multiple times.

We emailed him.

We called him.

Dave Fleming did the same, tried just the front door.

We tried talking to people that he trained with.

We tried talking to people who were associated with him in various record surges that we found.

It became a worry that we had that he was avoiding us because

he thought that what he had done was shameful.

Or I could imagine just when there's a lot of heat kicked up online, you don't want to step out in front of it.

Like even if he thought it was okay, now it's like a weird loose thing that could blow back on him if you guys poke at it.

And perhaps whether or not he knows Big John personally, perhaps he was of the opinion, which would have been fair, that this isn't the best brand to have.

The tickler.

The tickler isn't exactly, I mean.

Yeah, it's like you've got like the most badass, like Brazilian jiu-jitsu guy, like the person you can do like this.

And then you got the guy that you got to keep your little featsies away from him.

Can I give you some MMA nicknames?

Yeah.

The Korean zombie,

Rampage, the Axe Murderer, Shogun, the Iceman,

Crow Cop.

Yeah, all these people sound like they broke out of Arkham Asylum.

And then you got Gucci, Gucci, Gucci.

Yeah, the natural born killer and the tickler.

Not exactly Pierce in this way.

But so do you get him?

Oh, we got him.

So it's like four hours before his bout,

but the tickler is outside the window right now, warming up, or I don't know, just getting loose.

I don't see any tickle-tickle going on, but you never know.

All right.

We got him because we sent Dave Fleming to perhaps the most opposite place in the world to the Playboy Mansion.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thunder

Ballroom Dome.

And by that, I mean we sent him to the ballroom of the Wyndham Hotel in downtown Rochester, New York.

Why was that the location to send him to?

Because it turns out that we waited long enough that the tickler Mason Lewis was actually going to fight.

He stands at

And did he talk to Dave?

After eight hours of amateur MMA fighting, in which this carpeted hotel ballroom had an octagon placed atop it, and just the visuals on this, it's just like, you know, there's the local dispensary has tables out in the hallway.

The carpet is immediately stained with blood.

It smells like hot dogs, and it's unclear if it's the hot dogs or the people

in the octagon.

Yeah, and then.

All right, nice to meet you.

I'm Dave Fleming.

Nice to meet you, Dave, from Pablo's Show.

Pablo's Show.

Dave Fleming waits around long enough

such that he can directly approach the tickler, Mason Lewis.

Can you give us five minutes?

Yes, I can give you five minutes.

Are you done with your family?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Guys, give me five minutes.

Give me five minutes, okay?

Awesome.

Let's just go over here.

Yep, you got it.

You got it.

Mason Lewis is in person so baby-faced and young-looking.

Like, he's actually an amateur fighter.

He was like playing up a level at Rage in the Cage 24.

Okay.

And he sat down and was shockingly,

shockingly open to discussing.

anything we wanted when it came to his nickname that we had imposed.

And what did he have to say for himself?

So, the first thing about the tickler, Mason Lewis, is that he's very intentional.

And I don't even mean that in terms of his MMA strategy.

I mean that in terms of the fact that he likes journals.

Really?

He's thoughtful.

I'm very conscious in the cage.

A lot of people just disassociate and they leave almost their mind, I want to say.

I do a lot of meditation.

I do at least an hour of meditation a day.

And I feel like that allows me to be conscious in every moment of my life, truly, and in the cage.

And so the reason he said that he wasn't getting back to us was because he doesn't really use his phone that much.

Oh, wow.

He's like one of those guys who like is big into journaling and not being on social media and not even really texting.

And so whatever.

We took that as a kind letdown, but nonetheless, he provided his credibility on the matter by just like openly talking about this.

I don't know.

I don't know why I did it.

It was just, it was just like, you know what?

Screw it.

I'm just going to tickle his foot to get out of this.

You know, we're in a weird position.

If he can let go of this from a tickle, then so be it.

And I gotta say, and the the thing we asked him

was, A, did he think that this worked?

And so that thing that,

the tickling, like, was that the difference?

Yeah, that could have been, yeah.

You know, it could have been the difference bigger, yeah.

And I knew people are ticklish.

People let go.

So I figured if I tickled his foot, he might let go.

So that's just, that's just what I did.

And the answer, of course, was yes.

We followed up with, would you tickle again?

Would he tickle again?

And there was no hesitation.

100%.

Okay.

If that's what it takes, if that's what it takes.

Of course he would.

Because it worked.

Because it worked.

And did he have a view about the reaction to the thing that he'd done?

He was, I think, a bit mystified as to how big a deal it was, because to him,

it was a function of his hyper-competitiveness.

So he didn't feel like he was breaking the rules.

He didn't feel like he was swerving too far into taboo.

From his point of view, a thoughtful, meditative, phone-avoiding, thinking man's brawler,

your job is to win, your job is to win within a very short set of rules.

And he thought of something nobody had thought of before, and so, of course, he was going to do it.

And also, it turns out that Mason Lewis is the youngest child of six siblings.

Oh, and that he was probably tickled quite a bit.

He became the machine he raged against.

Wow, you can use the master's tools.

Well, the other thing that he says, he's like, you know, we ask him like, so given that you're the youngest of six, what would happen if someone tickled you?

And he was like, oh, I'd be screwed.

He would just have no defense.

He would have no defense.

I mean, I will say, like, one of the problems that I feel like nobody's pointing out in the tickling debate is that people's ticklishness is something that I think you're born with and can't change.

Like, I, so there's people, I'm basically immune to tickling, like, maybe at the edges if you're lucky, but I'm pretty hard to tickle.

But there's people who are just very ticklish.

And

I guess that's true of like everything in sports.

People are different heights.

People are different.

It's just part of it.

The genetic lottery has many, many forms.

Yes.

There is height, there is strength.

There is your hormone level.

And there is ticklishness.

And it sounds

what I'm finding out is that PJ, you have a competitive competitive edge in the world of the octagon.

So he's unrepentant.

He doesn't care what the raging online commentariate thinks about what he's done.

He believes his way is the way.

What about the tickled person?

You guys talk to him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The tickly, Tim Fargo.

He wants a rematch.

My coach wants me to fight him again.

He wants me to fight him so bad.

He was so respectful of Mason Lewis and had been, of course, familiar with all of the jokes.

Lots of people had been asking him about this too.

The internet was unkind to the tickly.

They were unkind to the tickly?

Because he lost to the tickler.

And they think that if they were in the octagon, like they never would have flinched at a tickle?

Well, I think it's also just like embarrassing.

Right.

It's like you go to be like the most masculine man and somebody gives you the equivalent of a wedgie.

And he was on the way to absolutely dominating that fight.

And so you could argue that he kind of choked.

But Tim Fargo, the tick lead, didn't see it that way.

He just saw it as he lost a match.

He saw it as he lost a match to an upcoming young fighter who did a thing that he was surprised to encounter.

I just think no one really thinks of it.

Because there's so many other techniques from most positions that we're always practicing and no one really teaches that so it kind of took a second and then i realized what he was doing but it kind of just got me like mentally out of it a little bit more than like actually making me want to let go because then you're just thinking like this guy's tickling me in a fight he just kind of gets you out

he testified to its effectiveness that it did in fact work on him and it worked on him so well that he basically said if we get back in the octagon and we did get both of them to agree to want to fight each other again in this rematch,

he would absolutely be willing to tickle.

If I had to, if there was nothing else left, if I could get him in a tickling position, then I would.

That's amazing.

I mean, he was radicalized.

So you could imagine a future where the two of them were squaring off amongst the like.

butches and the kick and the grind like they'd just be out there with their little tickling claws like trying to tickle each other I mean,

I'd pay for that.

I would totally pay for that.

That would be my first UFC matchup.

Absolutely.

I would definitely go to ultimate tickling championship.

It just feels like a lot of ingredients are being put into a soup in a very unusual way.

Yeah.

And so do you think that like part of the reason there's a push to not recognize tickling as effective is just because like there's all sorts of behaviors that we recognize work, but which we think are bad for like the larger system that they're in.

Like, yeah, people can do this and they'll succeed, but we don't want people to do this.

And so we'll try to find ways to discourage it.

And do you think that that is what tickling is in this context?

Like a useful tool that maybe for the league is bad for it to exist, but it exists and it works.

That is

my most core suspicion that

they know.

They have a sense that this would work and they're afraid if lots of people start doing it and the product would fundamentally perhaps change as a result.

Sports is full of stories like this, by the way.

Sports is full of stories in which there are these hacks that get more points.

Right.

I'm not exactly arguing that tickling is the equivalent of something that's so effective that it would completely tilt the competitive landscape of this sport.

But I do think that there might be yet another incredibly tense climactic moment at which someone is about to lose consciousness and their ego and their humiliation is absolutely on the line.

And the thing they think of is the thing that Mason Lewis very intentionally decided to do.

And at a certain point,

I think it's entirely possible that the highlight reel, the viral clip of that moment, may not be exactly what the founding fathers of MMA had envisioned.

It makes me so happy to know that.

It makes me so happy to know that tickling is something that they don't yet have a vaccine for.

Rogan, what do you think about that, huh?

Pablo, thank you.

Thanks, PJ.

Pablo Torre.

His excellent show is called Pablo Torre Finds Out.

You can go there to see some of the videos we referenced in this story and listen to their other stories.

One of of our staff favorites is Pablo's interview with director Ezra Edelman about his Prince documentary that was squashed by Netflix.

It's so good.

Go check it out and please tell them we sent you.

Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey.

It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Truthy Pinamanani.

Garrett Graham is our senior producer.

Additional production support and fact-checking by Kim Koopal.

Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian.

Our executive producer is Leah Rhys-Dennis.

And thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey.

Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schuff.

Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum in UTA.

If you'd like to support our show and get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and even extra interviews, please consider signing up for Incognito Mode.

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