Robert Downey Jr. on How Martial Arts Have Improved His Life | Joe Rogan

The Joe Rogan experience. And honestly, particularly in the last 15 years, when I started really taking martial arts seriously, half the stuff that I've been able to do right in my creative life are principles that I learned on the mat with my Sifu. You know? Guard your center. Keep your eye on the lead elbow. Get to the blind side. How often do you do that? I started, I think I'm in the 15th or 16th year. Sifu was over the day before yesterday. So, you know, a bunch of times a week. And if I'm working on something or if he can make it to location, we'll have long stretches where we're doing it every day. Then there's gratings. So you've got to prep for those. So what are you doing? Are you doing Kung Fu? Is it a very particular style? Traditional Wing Chun. Really? Yeah. Very underrated art form. Yes. Also, so many trade secrets and so different than how I see it when I'm looking at videos. In UFC, everything is out in the open. And it's discussed. And you see in a lot of the Eastern stuff, there was turf wars, and we're not really going to show them our footwork. We're not going to do this. But anyway, it's been a real deep dive with my Sifu, Eric Orum, who's Sifu. My Sifu is Grandmaster William Chung. Renowned kind of Hong Kong rooftop fights, all that stuff. Amazing lore. But very technical, difficult to build, and easy to use. You know, you very rarely see that in the UFC. One of the best fighters in the UFC uses it regularly, Tony Ferguson. Tony Ferguson uses trapping hands. The Muk Jung. Yeah. He grabs wrists and comes over the top with elbows. He does straight Wing Chun. He does it all the time. And he even practices on a wooden dummy. Yeah. I got my ass kicked by a wooden dummy for about three years, and then I finally understood the principle of don't fight force with force. And, you know, it's just nuts. So anyway, half the time, if I would be in a critical artistic situation, I would just say, because Wing Chun problems are life problems, life problems are Wing Chun problems, and I would just go back to how does this kind of relate to, because I don't like getting clocked and getting my teeth knocked in, because we tend to sometimes we glove up, but we're not wearing mouthpieces. It's very. Why are you wearing a mouthpiece? It's certainly not because he's very good at pulling his punches, and he's also even better at making sure that I don't accidentally hit him. But we get as close as we can to what the real experience would be. But, again, it's like everything. I'm sure, you know, a few clicks back down the road, there's things that instructors were doing that would be considered illegal to do to a group of students nowadays. Yeah, for sure. So. Not just a few clicks. Wow, I was coming up. That's what I would imagine. Yeah. They'd hit each other. Yes. Students would get beat up. Yes. It was a normal thing. Yes. So did you start training for Sherlock Holmes, or you started training before that? I didn't. It absolutely coincided with my recovery. Oh. And the two things just somehow or other seemed to lock in. And I talked to you off the record and afterwards about any and everything to do with my recovery. As far as it locked in with this, it was an apprenticeship. And it was an apprenticeship that was contingent on me being in a certain headspace. Well, it's a good thing, too, because it's a very addictive thing. People get very addicted to martial arts, and it's a good substitute for sometimes negative addictions. You know, Bourdain, before he died, he was obsessed with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Wow. Yeah, became really obsessed with it at 58. Wow. And got really good. He was training every day, and he was training twice a day every day. So he went from when I first met him, he was chubby, he was smoking cigarettes, he drank every night. Still kind of still drank every night. But, you know, he just did enough healthy things to keep his body together. And then his ex-wife got really into Jiu-Jitsu, and then he decided to follow her one day to classes. And he was kind of mocking it and laughing at it at first, and then became obsessed. Wow. And then really got good. I mean, he was... look at how he won in a tournament. I mean... Oh, my gosh. Yeah, he's fucking 60 years old there. Jesus H. What's really crazy is a picture of him walking down the street in, I think they were in Rome, and he has no shirt on. And he's fucking ripped. Wow. Anthony Bourdain, full six-pack. Really? Yeah. Dude, he was obsessed. He would take a private every day. Look at him. Look at that photo. That's crazy. Look at me. He's like 60-something years old there. Wow. So, he would take a private lesson every day, and then he would take a class. So, he'd take a private lesson, sharpen up techniques, and then he would roll. Group class, yeah. He'd take group classes, too, which is very critical. You've got to roll with different people. A hundred percent. Yeah. And so, he was in there. And it became a good thing for him to sort of become addicted to this positive thing. Yeah. I mean, for me, it wasn't going to be golf. It wasn't going to be something passive like that, even though I hear it's great. But it's just been a great gift. And it's also the thing where you're never done. I made black belt five years ago for another grading, and now we're doing a lot of weapons stuff. And it's just… That's awesome. I just adore it. Congratulations. Yeah. My Taekwondo teacher said something to me when I was very young. He said that it is a tool for developing your human potential. Wow. Yeah. And I never forgot that because I'm like, yeah, because it's really difficult to do. Like all martial arts, it's really difficult to get your body to move that way and to be able to be effective in a conflict situation. And if you can do it, and you can do it over and over again, and you can overcome that difficult thing, and you thought it was insurmountable, and then you figured out how to do it, eventually you get to this point where you realize, well, everything in life is like that. Everything in life is like something that's a puzzle. You have to figure out, how am I approaching it wrong? What can I do to make it better? How do I get more competent at this particular skill or this particular discipline? Yeah. And just the humility, too. I mean, if I've noticed anything in the last couple of years just in UFC, which, by the way, I was doing a Robert Altman film called The Gingerbread Man back in the 90s, and UFC had just started off, and I was getting the VHS tapes and watching them. And so when they go back on the 25 years ago, I was like, I've been there from jump. That's awesome. But if you watch, it's just that thing of no matter what you think, the tides are changing quickly. And you've just got to keep working. Well, that was a real wake-up call for a lot of martial artists, was the UFC, because a lot of the stuff that they were doing really wasn't effective. They thought it would be if everybody was playing by the rules in the dojo and sort of following along. But once you really saw an actual caged event where people were just going balls out, you realize, oh, a lot of this stuff just doesn't work. Yeah. And I love how messy it was at the beginning, too, because the style match-ups were almost laughable until you saw the violence. And no weight classes.