Before 1993, jiu-jitsu had no schools in the United States. Today, there is one on nearly every corner. That transformation sat at the center of a conversation Joe Rogan had on a recent JRE MMA Show with Matt Serra, John Rallo, and Din Thomas, where Rogan reflected on how combat sports changed not just training culture but the wider world.
“I think liking MMA has impacted culture and then people training, much more people training in jiu-jitsu has impacted culture,” Rogan said.
For Rogan, the observation is personal. He walked through his own martial arts evolution during the episode, describing a series of wake-up calls that each redefined what he understood about fighting.
“I first started taking karate and I thought karate was good until I stumbled into this really good taekwondo school,” he said. “And then I started boxing. I’m like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t box.’ And then I started kickboxing. I’m like, ‘Oh my god, you kick my legs? I didn’t know you can kick my legs.’ And then I started doing jiu-jitsu. Oh my god, I’m helpless.”
That feeling of helplessness, he said, was common for anyone who came up through single-style martial arts before the UFC existed.
Rogan described what it was like training in taekwondo in 1988, when no one had real answers about which art worked.
“Nobody knew nothing. Nobody knew what worked. Everybody just like saw that guy beats people in that thing and that guy beat, I wonder what would happen if they fought. No one knew,” he said.
Rogan credited the Gracie family directly for building the foundation that made all of this possible. The UFC itself was born from their desire to test styles against each other.
He remembered first hearing about the concept in 1992 at a seminar and admitted he did not believe it would actually happen.
“I didn’t watch it until it was UFC 2 because I would only watch it on videotape,” he said. “Somebody from the gym told me about it and I went and watched it. I got the videotape like Hollywood Video, brought it home and I was like, ‘Oh my god, they did it.'”
The spread of jiu-jitsu academies since 1993 has been one of the quieter but most consistent cultural shifts of the past three decades. The sport that once had no presence outside a handful of cities now sits inside gyms, strip malls, and community centers across the country, built largely on a fan base that first got drawn in watching people compete in a cage.
