The Rage in the Cage

Can you tickle your way to victory in an MMA fight? An investigation into a sports scandal with journalist Pablo Torre. See videos mentioned in this episode. https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/the-rage-in-the-cage Check out Pablo Torre Finds Out on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@PabloTorreFindsOut or Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/4SnPenz2D55YPQi0m5Q27k. Support Search Engine! https://searchengine.supercast.com/ Comment on this episode. https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/the-rage-in-the-cage

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

  Hello, Search Engine listeners. Before we start the show, a quick reminder. This Friday, October 17th, which is today, if you're listening to this the morning it comes out, at noon Eastern, we're doing a live event where I take your stumpers. Those are unanswerable questions, and I will intellectually humiliate myself trying to answer them. I'll be joined by a friend of the show, Calif Asane, who will also go down fighting. If you're an incognito mode subscriber who subscribed through searchengine.show, there will be a link to this live event in your inbox. And if you miss it, we'll have a live recording of this for our incognito mode listeners up next week. If you're hearing this in the morning, there's still time to send me questions. Please do. [email protected].

• 0:43PJ Vogt?

  Okay, some quick ads, and then this week's story.

• 0:48PJ Vogt?

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• 1:31PJ Vogt?

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• 2:16PJ Vogt?

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

• 2:21Speaker 02

  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?

• 2:30PJ Vogt?

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

• 2:37Speaker 02

  I think that's a fair summation. I also don't really know what I'm doing exactly.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  But I do it a lot.

• 2:47PJ Vogt?

  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 Torre 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.

• 3:12Speaker 02

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

• 3:19PJ Vogt?

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

• 3:22Speaker 02

  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

• 4:07Speaker 02

  America is anymore.

• 4:13PJ Vogt?

  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, 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?

• 4:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:08PJ Vogt?

  Bantam means they're not very heavy?

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, 135.

• 5:10PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  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 Somers sold called the thigh master?

• 5:30PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 5:31Speaker 02

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

• 5:38PJ Vogt?

  And that was like a way for him to, like, make him submit?

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Yes. They were on the ground, horizontal. All of this, if you're not visualizing it as deeply homoerotic, feel free to.

• 5:49PJ Vogt?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  It's a lot.

• 5:51PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  And Mason Lewis is stuck.

• 5:53PJ Vogt?

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

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:00PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 6:00Speaker 02

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

• 6:05PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  And these guys are deeply shirtless and sweaty and unapologetic.

• 6:11PJ Vogt?

  Right, because men are socialized, God, I'm sounding such a liberal arts weenie, but like, you don't have, like, super masculine straight men often just don't touch each other. But here, there's a lot of touching each other.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:42PJ Vogt?

  Which is what?

• 6:43Speaker 02

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

• 6:48PJ Vogt?

  And what? What type of tickle is that?

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Uh, like cartoon, tickling the ivories. A feathery tickle, like you might tickle your, you know, little brother.

• 7:04PJ Vogt?

  Right. So I just want to bring up the clip.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:07PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so this is from Full Contact Promotions on YouTube. Mason Lewis vs. Tim Fargo, 135-pound MMA title fight, Rage in the Cage 24.

• 7:24PJ Vogt?

  Okay, what are we seeing? It hasn't happened yet.

• 7:29Speaker 02

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

• 7:34PJ Vogt?

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

• 7:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:55PJ Vogt?

  In a way where the boxer can never tickle.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  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 unsheathes these little fingies 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.

• 8:25PJ Vogt?

  Rage in the Cage red.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Rage in the Cage red.

• 8:27PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  It's a black box theater, PJ.

• 8:40PJ Vogt?

  Where tickling should never occur. Like, I can feel the inappropriateness of it.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  ISKA bantamweight champion and new FCP bantamweight champion out of the red corner, Mason Lewis.

• 9:16PJ Vogt?

  So he wins, but he wins by doing this thing. It seems to violate like many codes of like ultimate fighting championship, like masculinity.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  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 had neither. It was a taboo.

• 9:38PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 9:53Speaker 02

  The number one question I asked myself was, given that the tickler just won this fight, why aren't more MMA fighters tickling?

• 10:04PJ Vogt?

  Because it just seemed like an obvious tactical step forward.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:32PJ Vogt?

  It's like inventive silliness.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Whimsy.

• 10:35PJ Vogt?

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

• 10:42Speaker 02

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

• 10:52PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 11:24PJ Vogt?

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

• 11:58PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show. Tell me, just like for table six, like just tell me about UFC as an institution. Like, for total neophytes to this, like, what is UFC? How did it start?

• 12:09Speaker 02

  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 League, but the sport is football. The Ultimate Fighting Championship is the league. Mixed martial arts is the sport.

• 12:41PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 12:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:16PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  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 football in America.

• 13:34PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Because of course of CTE and neurological trauma. Boxing is consensual concussions.

• 13:42PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:02PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 14:19Speaker 02

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

• 14:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  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.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm on edge. I'm not saying nobody and I'm cooking my food. Next question.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 15:33Speaker 04

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

• 15:38Speaker 05

  It's your call dude, if you wanna do it, you know, if not, I'll step in there and I'll fight Alex.

• 15:44Speaker 02

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

• 15:50Speaker 06

  You do win the six-figure contract with the UFC. You are the ultimate fighter in the 185-pound division.

• 15:59PJ Vogt?

  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 that 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?

• 16:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:46PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  We're sort of like getting these clips passed around in which someone gets like an elbow to the eyeball. And you're like, ugh, this is gonna 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.

• 17:02PJ Vogt?

  And why is that a big deal?

• 17:04Speaker 02

  Because in boxing, you can only use your arms.

• 17:06PJ Vogt?

  But why is that, why does it matter? Because now you can kick and like...

• 17:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:47PJ Vogt?

  That's crazy.

• 17:48Speaker 02

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

• 17:52PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:04PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  But it's sort of like contained in this larger politeness. Mixed martial arts is like the uncut Colombian cocaine. I'm just like, we know what you're here for.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  And it became extraordinarily popular.

• 18:18PJ Vogt?

  And were you watching this as it was coming up? Like, what's your relationship to UFC?

• 18:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:30PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  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.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 19:23PJ Vogt?

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

• 19:26Speaker 02

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

• 19:32PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  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.

• 19:40PJ Vogt?

  Put the octagon wherever.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And the Playboy Mansion has a yard.

• 19:45PJ Vogt?

  And you can put an octagon in the yard.

• 19:46Speaker 02

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

• 19:49Speaker 07

  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.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  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.

• 20:08PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  I hear the Playboy Mansion is famous for its peacocks. I found one right here. Let's go see if we could get one. It kind of felt like an unlocked, uh, part of the map of like Grand Theft Auto, honestly.

• 20:18PJ Vogt?

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

• 20:21Speaker 02

  And it was over the top. And you were invited, like, take a tour of the ground. 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.

• 20:43PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  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. But 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.

• 21:16PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 21:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Brazil is also a cradle of mixed martial arts. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu happens to be one of the dominant forms, one of 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 realized that, oh, you can make actual money in this.

• 22:34PJ Vogt?

  So the UFC creates a national market for televised mixed martial arts combat. And later, as more and more entrants join the space, this 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.

• 23:16Speaker 08

  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.

• 23:25PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 23:38Speaker 09

  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.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  Joe Rogan is the announcer during the rise of all of this. He is the face, you could argue, of mixed martial arts.

• 23:57PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  The Joe Rogan Experience started as an MMA podcast.

• 24:01Speaker 10

  And we're live. So literally this morning, I had this thought. I thought about it a bit yesterday, and then 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 a, an MMA recap show, because there's always so much shit that's happening.

• 24:19PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 24:31Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 24:31PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 24:51PJ Vogt?

  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 be a man and that he can help you be even better at it.

• 25:36PJ Vogt?

  He'll tell you what exercises to do.

• 25:38Speaker 10

  Everything from Nordic curls. Do you do those? Do you do Nordic curls?

• 25:42Speaker 11

  Um, I should. I should do more than I do.

• 25:44Speaker 10

  Yeah, leg curls.

• 25:46PJ Vogt?

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

• 25:47Speaker 10

  Did you incorporate peptides in your recovery?

• 25:50Speaker 11

  I didn't.

• 25:52Speaker 10

  Do you hate healing?

• 25:54Speaker 11

  Do I hate healing? No.

• 25:55Speaker 10

  Well, I didn't use peptides.

• 25:56PJ Vogt?

  And Joe Rogan believes that men should fight. Men should spar.

• 26:00Speaker 10

  There's no better stress reliever in the world than jujitsu 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.

• 26:10Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 26:10Speaker 10

  And it's a phenomenal stress.

• 26:11PJ Vogt?

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

• 26:18Speaker 10

  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.

• 26:27Speaker 11

  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.

• 26:36Speaker 10

  Right.

• 26:37Speaker 11

  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 like-

• 26:50Speaker 02

  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-

• 27:07PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  That they seek.

• 27:09PJ Vogt?

  Yeah. I'm trying to decide if, like, I have questions and thoughts about this, but maybe there, 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?

• 27:52Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 27:52PJ Vogt?

  And like, this feels good. I don't know. I have sympathy for it.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  Oh, by the way, like, it's sports. Like, the whole thesis of sports is, you're gonna enter this ecosystem in which your ego's on the line, in which you need to work out to be good at it, in which you need to sort of be ascetic in some ways that will cost you in other areas of your life. You gotta 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.

• 28:24PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 28:24Speaker 02

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

• 28:33PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  I'm totally good with that.

• 28:38PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 29:01PJ Vogt?

  After these ads, we return to our scandal.

• 29:34PJ Vogt?

  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 tickly?

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Yes. So we're returning to April 2024. The tickler is named Mason Lewis. The tickly remains Tim Fargo. And as always, we are talking about Rage in the Cage 24.

• 29:56PJ Vogt?

  And so Rage in the Cage 24 provokes this scandal. Why, for the just normal UFC viewer, why were they offended by the tickly little foot?

• 30:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 30:29PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:07PJ Vogt?

  Oh, so it's not, so the 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.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  I was gonna 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.

• 31:37PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 31:48Speaker 02

  It's really when we started reporting this.

• 31:52PJ Vogt?

  Oh, you were making people upset?

• 31:54Speaker 02

  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 Flem 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,

• 32:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 32:49PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:55PJ Vogt?

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

• 33:04Speaker 02

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

• 33:08PJ Vogt?

  Please.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  So, there's a guy whose name is Big John, and Flem interviewed him over Zoom. So, you are gonna hear from Flem a bunch in the tape.

• 33:18Speaker 12

  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?

• 33:26Speaker 13

  My name's John McCarthy. If you're gonna go to MMA, they call me Big John McCarthy, but uh...

• 33:31Speaker 02

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

• 33:37Speaker 13

  At the very beginning at UFC1... 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 two and continued on for a little over 25 year career and it was a lot of fun.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  So he's been there basically from the very start. And if you want to envision Big John, just envision Steven Seagal.

• 34:00PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  And you're close enough.

• 34:02PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 34:14PJ Vogt?

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

• 34:18Speaker 02

  He is the guy who actually, literally helped write the rulebook of MMA.

• 34:24PJ Vogt?

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

• 34:31Speaker 02

  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.

• 34:50Speaker 13

  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.

• 34:58PJ Vogt?

  So he's just like, you guys are reporters looking for a funny story, tickling transpired, but again, not pivotal.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  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.

• 35:11PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Cause 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.

• 35:27Speaker 13

  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.

• 35:37Speaker 02

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

• 35:42PJ Vogt?

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

• 35:44Speaker 02

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

• 35:51Speaker 13

  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.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 36:23PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 36:31Speaker 02

  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?

• 36:45PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  Why would you want to risk? I mean, this was Big John's argument. If you tickle me.

• 36:52Speaker 13

  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 gonna happen.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  So his thing was like, we don't need to ban tickling. This is not even worthy of that level of constitutional amendment.

• 37:09PJ Vogt?

  I see his point. Like, I can see the argument. So then, this sort of, because you were not willing to abandon your premise.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 37:16PJ Vogt?

  You wanted to talk.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  We saw the video.

• 37:18PJ Vogt?

  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 transpires.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 37:47PJ Vogt?

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

• 37:52Speaker 02

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

• 37:55PJ Vogt?

  Why?

• 37:56Speaker 02

  Because he is big.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 38:08PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Well, first, we gotta get to the Tickler.

• 38:24PJ Vogt?

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

• 38:28Speaker 02

  I mean, I cannot, 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.

• 38:43PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  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 searches 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.

• 39:12PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  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?

• 39:34PJ Vogt?

  The Tickler.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  The Tickler isn't exactly, I mean...

• 39:38PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, it's like you've got like the most badass, like, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu guy, like, the person who can do like this, and then you've got the guy that, you gotta keep your little feetsies away from him.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Can I give you some MMA nicknames?

• 39:48PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  The Korean Zombie,

• 39:52Speaker 02

  Rampage, The Axe Murderer, Shogun, The Iceman, Cro Cop.

• 39:58PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, all these people sound like they broke out of Arkham Asylum, and then you got Gucci Gucci Gu.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Natural Born Killer and the Tickler are not exactly peers in this way.

• 40:09PJ Vogt?

  But so do you get them?

• 40:11Speaker 02

  Oh, we got them.

• 40:18Speaker 12

  So it's like four hours before his bout, but the Tickler is outside the Wyndham 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, alright?

• 40:33Speaker 02

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

• 40:40Speaker 03

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thunder Ballroom Dome.

• 40:49Speaker 02

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

• 40:55PJ Vogt?

  Why was that the location to send him to?

• 40:58Speaker 02

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

• 41:06Speaker 03

  Oh. He stands at 5'7", official weight of 135 pounds. He is Mason Lewis!

• 41:21PJ Vogt?

  And did he talk to Dave?

• 41:22Speaker 02

  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

• 41:46PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  in the octagon. Yeah, and then...

• 41:52Speaker 03

  Alright, nice to meet you. I'm Dave Fleming. Nice to meet you, Dave. From Pablo's Show. Pablo's Show.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  Dave Fleming waits around long enough, such that he can directly approach the Tickler, Mason Lewis.

• 42:04Speaker 03

  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.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  Mason Lewis is in person so baby-faced and young-looking. Like, he's actually an amateur fighter. He was like playing upper level at Rage in the Cage 24.

• 42:26PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  And he sat down and was shockingly, shockingly open to discussing anything we wanted when it came to his nickname that we had imposed.

• 42:37PJ Vogt?

  And what did he have to say for himself?

• 42:39Speaker 02

  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 like journals.

• 42:49PJ Vogt?

  Really?

• 42:49Speaker 02

  He's, he's thoughtful.

• 42:52Speaker 14

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

• 43:06Speaker 02

  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.

• 43:11PJ Vogt?

  Oh, wow.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  He's like one of those guys.

• 43:13PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 43:27Speaker 14

  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.

• 43:37Speaker 03

  And I gotta say.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  And the thing we asked him was, A, did he think that this worked?

• 43:43Speaker 03

  And so that thing, the, the tickling, like was that the difference?

• 43:48Speaker 14

  Yeah, that could have been, yeah. You know, I, it could have been the difference maker, yeah. And I knew people are ticklish. People let go. So I figured if I tickled his foot, he might let go. Um, so that's just, that's just what I did, but.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  And the answer, of course, was yes. We followed up with.

• 44:05Speaker 03

  Would you tickle again?

• 44:06Speaker 02

  Would he tickle again? And there was no hesitation.

• 44:10Speaker 14

  A hundred percent.

• 44:11Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 44:11Speaker 14

  And that's what it takes, that's what it takes.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  Of course he would.

• 44:14PJ Vogt?

  Because it worked.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  Because it worked.

• 44:17PJ Vogt?

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

• 44:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 44:31PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 44:53Speaker 02

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

• 44:58PJ Vogt?

  Oh. So he was probably tickled quite a bit.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  He became the machine he raged against.

• 45:05PJ Vogt?

  Wow. You can use the master's tools.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 45:23PJ Vogt?

  He would just have no defense.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  He would have no defense.

• 45:26PJ Vogt?

  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

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:48PJ Vogt?

  But I guess that's true of like, everything in sports. People are different heights. People are different. This is part of it.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  The genetic lottery has many, many forms.

• 45:57PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  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 edge in the world of the octagon.

• 46:11PJ Vogt?

  I'll be in the octagon.

• 46:16PJ Vogt?

  So he's unrepentant. He doesn't care what the raging online commentary thinks about what he's done. He believes his way is the way. What about the tickled person? You guys talked to him?

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The tickly, Tim Fargo, he wants a rematch.

• 46:33Speaker 15

  My coach wants me to fight him again. He wants me to fight him so bad.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  He was so respectful of Mason Lewis.

• 46:42PJ Vogt?

  Huh.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  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.

• 46:52PJ Vogt?

  They were unkind to the tickly?

• 46:54Speaker 02

  Because he lost to the tickler.

• 46:57PJ Vogt?

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

• 47:01Speaker 02

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

• 47:05PJ Vogt?

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

• 47:10Speaker 02

  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 tickly, didn't see it that way.

• 47:20PJ Vogt?

  He just saw it as he lost the match?

• 47:22Speaker 02

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

• 47:30Speaker 15

  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, 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. Cause then you're just thinking like this guy's tickling me in a fight. He just kind of gets you out.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 48:16Speaker 15

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

• 48:22PJ Vogt?

  That's amazing.

• 48:23Speaker 02

  I mean, he was radicalized.

• 48:26PJ Vogt?

  So you could imagine a future where the two of them are squaring off amongst the like punches and the kick and the grab. Like they're just be out there with their little tickling claws, like trying to tickle each other.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  I mean, I'd pay for that.

• 48:41PJ Vogt?

  I would totally pay for that. That would be my first UFC match. 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.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:53PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 49:26Speaker 02

  That is my most core suspicion that they know.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  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.

• 49:52PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 50:39PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  Rogan, what do you think about that, huh?

• 50:49PJ Vogt?

  Pablo, thank you.

• 50:52Speaker 02

  Thanks, PJ.

• 50:59PJ Vogt?

  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 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 sell them we sent you.

• 51:55PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Trudy Pinamaneni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Additional production support and fact checking by Kim Kupel. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Our executive producer is Leah Reese-Dennis. And thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. Our agent is Orin Rosenbaum, 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. You can join incognito mode at searchengine.show. Follow and listen to Search Engine wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.

• 52:40PJ Vogt?

  We'll see you in two weeks.