He Took People Down in 53 of 55 MMA Rounds. Then Two Clips Defined Him.

Lex Fridman opens with the fight the internet was still arguing about: Jake Paul versus Tyron Woodley. Askren, claiming no real neutrality, had Woodley winning three of five. He thought Woodley was more effective and more aggressive. Paul had more volume, and that was the only column Askren would give him. Most viewers counted punches. He watched for damage, and he did not think anyone really hurt anyone.

It was a split decision for Paul. Askren was not shocked in the way fans were that an elite combat athlete lost to a YouTuber who takes boxing seriously. Boxing is a narrow rule set, he says. In MMA, Woodley's punches were often set up by level-change fakes; remove takedowns and kicks and you are left with one problem. It was also Woodley's first boxing match. Paul, he concludes, is "pretty solid."

Asked how many times Paul wins in ten, Askren refuses a clean number. He hates giving answers he has not calculated. Paul's corner told him he needed a knockout going into the eighth round, which Askren reads as a tell: if they thought he was winning, why push a stupid risk against a man with knockout power? If Woodley can raise the pace and Paul cannot live with it, it might be 8–1 or 9–2. If the same fight repeats, it is probably close every time, "five to five." One match, he keeps saying, is a weak forecast of the next ten.

Looking back on his own Paul fight, Askren's analysis is blunt: he got cracked with an overhand right. He says he does not really care about the reputational hit. He wanted to do it, enjoyed the training, was not skilled enough to win, and would probably say yes again. The money would not double his net worth, but it would add enough to make life easier. The second reason was high school. He and his friends used to box for free on Friday nights in a basement. Someone offering a lot of money for something he already thought was fun was an easy yes.

A rematch, he thinks, is "probably not very good" for him. He started camp at 215 pounds, the heaviest he had ever been, just off hip surgery. The week he said yes was the first week he had worked out since the operation. After watching Paul box Woodley, he does not think he can beat Woodley either, which makes beating Paul unlikely. "Kind of fun to box someone who I know sucks," he says. The camp was enjoyable. Getting his butt kicked was not.

He did work hard. After the hip replacement he was told not to walk for six weeks, then had six more weeks of low weight-bearing, then three months with almost no training. He pieced a camp together with Mike Rhodes living with him, a Michigan coach called K9 for three weeks, and a week with Freddie Roach. He knew he was never going to become a full-time boxer in three months. If Paul turned out to be bad, toughness and cardio might be enough. If Paul was good, there was not much he could do about it.

After he first retired in 2017, Askren flew himself to Nebraska for four days with Jordan Burroughs, then the only current elite wrestler he had never trained with. They went fully live once, for maybe twelve or fifteen minutes. The rest was simulated live and long talks about positions: a chest strap, a headlock, a throw he still calls the lightning dump after a high-school friend named Lightning Luke Smith. Burroughs already had four or five world titles and was still asking how this position works, then that one. Askren was there because wrestling is fun. Burroughs was still trying to be the best in the world.

Most wrestlers, he says, freeze their style in early college: this is what I do, I will lift, I will grind, I will not add weapons. He has watched Burroughs since 2007 and seen the opposite. The early double-leg was less explosion than persistence, shot after shot from odd angles until he was on you. When the rest of the world dropped its stance, Burroughs built a go-behind series, then a low single and ankle pick, then serious hand-fighting around 2015 to 2017. At the 2021 Olympic Trials, Askren watched defensive sequences that were, purely as technique, "tremendous." Reinvention while staying world-class is the hard part.

During the pandemic, Flow Wrestling needed content, so they ranked the best 165-pounders of the last ten years. Forced to pick a folkstyle winner between Burroughs and Kyle Dake, Askren gave it to Dake, 2–1, on a minute and six of riding time, as close as it gets. Burroughs was furious and demanded to come on the next day. Askren called Dake in secret. Both men showed up and went at it. Dake's standing complaint was structural: every previous meeting, he had to wrestle a hard Saturday gauntlet — Andrew Howe, David Taylor, Isaiah Martinez, Alex Dieringer — then face Burroughs in a best-of-three on Sunday, because a world medalist sits out until the end. Askren thinks the argument is fair and also understands USA Wrestling's side. Reward the medal, or the medalists leave.

The freestyle Burroughs puzzle, he says, is much harder than the folkstyle one. In college Burroughs had maybe ten pins and gained almost no value on top; in freestyle he almost never gets turned and scores on lace transitions. A later Beat the Streets charity match at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden was a different job. Askren was not in wrestling shape, took the bout two weeks out to raise money, and hoped for one takedown or turn. He did not get there. "This is bullshit, you're going too hard," he told Burroughs during the match. His MMA striking, he adds almost as an aside, was never about damage. Including the knockout round against Jorge Masvidal, he got a takedown every round except two: 53 of 55, somewhere in there.

Fridman, fresh off time with Jimmy Pedro, puts the champion cliché on the table: greats hate losing more than they love winning. Askren did not get good until about thirteen, after starting at five, so losing was ordinary for a long time. The philosophy he has been trying to get into a sports-psych book is a two-ball problem. You have to hate losing. You also have to be the person who seeks out challenges, or you never reach the ceiling. In seventh and eighth grade there was no internet, only a wrestling magazine and a father willing to drive two hours because some tough kids might be at that tournament. Some people like being the big fish in a small pond. He wanted that guy, and that guy, and that guy.

The Masvidal loss was his first in MMA, and it was the one that hurt, not because Masvidal beat him up for fifteen minutes. "He got one fucking move on me." Askren thinks he wins that fight way more times than he loses, and thinks Masvidal knew it, which is why the contract took taunting. The pain was historical. After Bellator he was 9–0 and ranked around sixth in the world. In Dana White's office he was told the UFC was not interested and would not make an offer. A year earlier Askren had called White a liar for saying you could not test for drugs, pointing at USADA in every other sport. A few years later he hired USADA himself. He still does not know if that was the reason. He has never had the conversation.

He signed with ONE Championship, won the belt in his second fight, and never had a competitive match. He retired 18–0, left the door open if he ever got a chance to prove he was the best in the world, and a year later became the subject of the only fighter trade he knows of between UFC and ONE. He beat Robbie Lawler, then ran into Masvidal on the path to a title shot he had waited a decade for. The flying knee was not a straight vertical jump. Masvidal took running steps; the trajectory was different from knees Askren had seen, and combat decisions, he says, are mostly subconscious reads of familiar shapes. His hip could not hinge, so the double-leg entry was bent over. He does not think the loss changed his psychology. In wrestling you lose at Big Tens and wrestle nationals two weeks later. In MMA the next chance may never come.

Was he past peak against Masvidal? "Oh yeah." He does not understand why athletes lie about that. His athletic peak was in his late twenties, but wisdom, strategy, and tools can still be rising, so the competitive peak may sit a few years later, at the crossing of those curves. The day after left-hip surgery, the chronic pain on the right side of his back was gone and never returned. If he had known the replacement would work that well, he would have scheduled it for December 1, 2017, the day after he left ONE, just to sleep in more than one position. Fridman says Joe Rogan and he had a Fedor-like sense that Askren might be one of the greats. Askren will not take the compliment. "I didn't prove it. I don't deserve it." Had White made any offer in 2013, the outcome might have been different. History cannot be changed. He accepts it and moves to the academies.

Askren still loves to wrestle. He does not love turning a private go into a spectacle. What he has actually designed, with a friend at the content company Rokfin, is a Gracie-challenge cousin. Start at a thousand dollars. Thirty minutes, one camera in a wrestling room, maybe a referee so nobody argues the pin. Pins only, no points. If he pins you, you go home with nothing and the jackpot rises a thousand. If you last the distance with no pin either way, he covers travel and gives you $500. If you pin him, you take the pot. He would stack easier people first, then bring in names once the audience and the money were large enough.

He is not very worried about being pinned. Burroughs could beat him on points and still would not pin him; Dake the same. David Taylor might, because Taylor is a pinner too. Askren had the fourth-most pins of all time and won the pinning award his last two college years. Unlimited time, he says, stops being a skill contest and becomes a cardio-and-dehydration wait until someone falls over. Thirty minutes is long, and he has done thirty-minute, six-minute, even hour-long goes, but at some point "unlimited" stops being wrestling.

The rule set is also a protest against Eddie Bravo overtime. If Burroughs beats him 16–2 over ten minutes and cannot finish, overtime can hand Askren a cradle and a pin, which would make him "better" on paper. "If someone whoops your ass, they whip your ass." He thinks jiu-jitsu scoring fails to reward the thing the sport actually values. Wrestling gives points for takedowns because they lead toward the pin, and near-falls because they are close to the point of the sport. A match in which Gordon Ryan nearly submits him twelve times and he slips out should not end 2–0 on a takedown. Near-submissions are hard to score. They are also, he says, the most valuable thing in the room.

Askren cannot name the switch that made him want to be really good. In fifth grade he told his parents he liked baseball and was quitting it anyway, so he could wrestle club in March, April, and May, the only months that existed. He now looks at other eleven-year-olds and sees how rare that kind of emotional maturity is, and he treats it as a long-term predictor. As a coach, his biggest job is to get a kid to believe "I can do this," because that belief spreads. The kids who already think they can are the most fun. The kids who have been told they suck by parents or teachers are the ones who need him.

Freshman year he quit football for the same reason. His dad put a mat in the basement. He had to recruit partners. Two kids came once a week, both much worse than he was, so he let them get as close as possible to a takedown before escaping. Sometimes they actually got it and went home happy. He does not know if they ever realized the game. That was the start of his scrambling: he had to find his way out of bad positions and still make Tuesday feel worth coming back to. His academy now has fifty or sixty year-round high-schoolers. When they whine about an imperfect partner, he thinks of those two kids.

In sixth grade he cut from 130 pounds to 100 because he decided he was too fat and weight matters. As a freshman he still wrestled 119, smaller than he had been at eleven, and slow enough that football put him at nose tackle. National success did not come until junior year. As a redshirt freshman he wrestled fifty matches, rare in the sport, and lost ten, some to people who were not very good. Strip the emotion out of competition, he says, and it is only this: see the failure, admit it, figure out what to work on. The next year he made the NCAA finals. In the Missouri room he could not match Tyron Woodley or the All-Americans on strength and speed, so a coach he calls Mike Ironman showed him a few things and then came three to five years of creative expansion. He would lose a single-leg on one person, go home, and obsess: where can my arms go that nobody has told me they can go? He is glad smartphones were not in that bedroom.

By his senior year the people in his head were no longer under orders. They were gray, volumetric, three-dimensional figures, not stick men, and they wrestled the position he was stuck on while he sat in geography class pretending to watch the board. Suddenly something would happen. "That's the move." The next day on the mat, it often was. Fridman hears AlphaZero and self-play. Askren had already called John Smith, the Olympic champion and coach, during a sports-psych independent study. Smith had the same figures. When he started coaching, they went away. The same thing happened to Askren. If Keegan O'Toole, his junior world champion, asks a high-level question, he can force the bodies to move. They no longer arrive on their own.

The robot talk starts from Fridman's earlier conversation with John Danaher about a grappling machine. Askren had been obsessing about it for weeks. Chess is discrete. A knight moves in an L whether it travels at two meters per second or seven. A single-leg can be shot at many velocities, angles, and forces, head inside or out, and every defensive choice opens another tree. You do not stop and ask what the defense is. You have to answer while you are already in. Once you grab someone you become one body: grip force, leverage, weight on each leg, continuous variables a human solves subconsciously. Sometimes he shoots a single at a force he numbers 20, sometimes 15, because he felt something. He could not tell you what he adjusted.

He does not think raw speed and power get a robot through that. You would have to constrain both, then let it learn the inputs. An AlphaZero-style system might still find sacrifices humans miss: put yourself in a bad-looking position, shrink the opponent's choice set because they are not used to it, and drag them into your trap. "That's exactly what my style's based on." The practical objections are uglier. Humanoid robots cost on the order of hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, they would have to wrestle a lot to get good, and few people will volunteer to be the training partner who gets hurt. Rubber coating helps and wrecks tactile feedback. Sensation, he and Fridman agree, is distributed across the whole body, which is a harder sensing problem than vision. Wrestling versus chess is not close.

This is the only stretch where Askren sounds truly angry. NCAA championships live on ESPN. Olympic Trials and the Games live on NBC. Those companies are so large they have no department dedicated to selling wrestling footage, and the rights sit in the same bundle as track and field or Olympic basketball, the assets anyone actually cares about. Want Gable Steveson's last-second comeback? You get a two- or three-minute highlight. "It's all about the build-up," he says: the walkout, the nerves, the first step on the mat. Cut that away and the triumph has less weight. Fridman offers to go to war at NBC headquarters with him.

The IOC's YouTube channel has uploaded masses of matches and left them private. Askren's own 2008 Olympic bout went public the week of the Jake Paul fight, thirteen years later. His reaction was that this was bullshit. He works for Flow and knows how those contracts are usually written: live stream the event, then keep using the footage. That is why old Flow cards still live on the site. NBC, as far as he can tell, does not do the equivalent. Fridman adds the Olympic charter line about lowering barriers. The tape, meanwhile, sits inside a license nobody is trying to unlock.

Did he believe he could win gold in 2008? Yes. The mental game was there. It was his first international season, his first real run at 74 kilograms, which was small for him. Domestically he was beating everyone. Internationally he lost one real match, a competitive one, to Denis Tsargush, who would win three world titles. Then he drew Ivan Fundora, the worst stylistic matchup he could have gotten. His high-school coach, John Mesenbrink, had done the scouting report. He lost in the second round. "I wasn't good enough." If he had kept wrestling he probably would have gotten better. At that point it was not in the cards. No grievance, no alternate history. The same tone he uses for every other loss.

Why does Dagestan keep making champions? He points to the book *The Talent Code*, which maps hotbeds — Korean women's golf, Curaçao baseball, Moscow women's tennis — and assumes the same machinery, even if Dagestan is not in the book. Wrestling is a big deal there. A lot of kids do it. Life is rough. And it is a way out: elite athletes, as he understands it, are compensated and treated far better than the average person. That is why he left for MMA in 2008. "I didn't want to be poor my whole life." If wrestling had paid $70,000 or $100,000 a year, he would probably have kept going. Talent was never the American shortage. A living was. The other piece is the loop of retired adults and coaches coming back, which is hard to fake with a couple of geniuses.

Askren's map has four boxes. Teaching is "you don't know shit, I'm showing you the move." That phase eats enormous time from ages five to twelve or thirteen; with a kid he has coached for ten years he only has to say move your hand. Drilling is reps toward proficiency. Sparring is the gray band between zero resistance and a hundred percent, the 70/40 round where the shooter is trying to complete a high crotch and the defender is not there to win. Live is the fight. A lot of jiu-jitsu schools, in his experience, spend the hour on a from-scratch technique and then a five-minute smash. If you have been in the room two years, he does not want ten minutes on an armbar. He wants fifty reps, with corrections shouted while you move.

Live has the same failure mode. Two people told to "go" will do whatever they already do best. If your single-leg is great and you cannot shoot the other side, the round should force the weak side. When Askren trains seriously he picks a technique, puts a sheet of paper beside the mat, and counts in his head. He is not getting off until he hits it fifty times. He likes numbers and a floor that cannot be negotiated. Fridman cannot find drilling partners, hates the bored look on someone's face, and doubts the famous rep counts. Askren's reply is work. Ten years, every day, is about three thousand days. Ten thousand reps is three a day. He was closer to thirty, some days a hundred, and that is before you count live.

They almost agree once the language is cleaned up. Fridman is talking about a light, intelligent dummy at 20 or 30 percent, which Askren would call very light sparring, not a crash dummy. Askren still thinks the simple movement keeps paying after basic proficiency; Fridman thinks you are polishing 9.7 to 9.8 while whole areas sit unexplored. The practical ladder Askren wants is not a religious dummy: learn the premise in five or ten minutes, complete the technique on light resistance, then on someone worse, then equal, then better. Skipping to the toughest person in the room means you never finish the move, so you never own it. For a high-level kid like O'Toole, the explanation takes a minute. Hitting it on a real athlete takes a mix of drilling and sparring up the ladder.

Joe Rogan once called Askren versus Khabib Nurmagomedov the perfect fight. Askren does not dodge. People will get mad if he says yes, and he says yes anyway. Nobody out-grappled Khabib, but Khabib also never fought what Askren would call a really high-level wrestler, and Askren had a small size advantage. He was disappointed by Justin Gaethje's wrestling in that fight; Gaethje was an All-American, around seventh. Early in Khabib's career, Gleison Tibau gave him trouble. Asked how he would take Khabib down, Askren is honest: he has not the slightest clue until he feels the hips. Single-leg is his best entry. He would fly tomorrow to roll.

He even ran down a rumor. Ed Ruth, an elite folkstyle wrestler who never became a great fighter, trained with Khabib. The story going around was that Khabib beat him up. The version Askren heard, from someone he will not name, is that in straight wrestling Ruth got slightly the better of it. In an MMA setting, with all of Khabib's tools, he does not know. He stresses he did not see it. He still agrees with Rogan that the matchup would have been worth seeing.

Greatest of all time, folkstyle or freestyle, is a question he will not answer before 2000, because he will not rank people whose film he cannot watch. After 2000, Buvaisar Saitiev has the argument. On Kyle Snyder versus Abdulrashid Sadulaev, Sadulaev has to have it until Snyder proves otherwise. He thinks more American wrestlers would go to MMA if the pay in wrestling were not finally decent; heavyweight, he notes, is a terrifying place to take that bet. From Tokyo 2020 he takes a national trend more than a single match: the United States is back to competing with Russia every year, helped by oil-and-gas money in the Caspian regions and by an American upswing since 2012. Russia was even sitting some of its best for the Oslo worlds two months after the Games.

What made the Bellator and ONE run possible? Consistency, first. He lived and trained the same way no matter what else was happening, stayed in his house, and did not vacation. A lot of fighters, he says, get money for the first time, collect obligations and trips, and fall off. Style was the other piece. Only a few people could stop it, and once he was on top it felt like a spider web. He was not as innovative in MMA as in wrestling, but he invented enough in top position that people did not have answers and eventually gave up.

At one point he recalls eight of nine UFC champions coming from wrestling. Technique is only part of it. High-school and college systems teach people to show up on time and work hard, and those two habits travel to American Top Team or AKA on their own. Most wrestlers have competed 1,500 to 2,000 times by their twenties; other disciplines are lucky to hit a hundred. Weight cutting is already a known suffering. Then comes the asymmetry that actually annoys him. How many wrestlers became highly proficient in jiu-jitsu, versus how many jiu-jitsu players became highly proficient in wrestling? The numbers, he says, do not swing both ways. Demian Maia, his last opponent, is the rare man who did get good at wrestling. Other names he will not pick on: if you just learned a takedown, you would get them down, they would not get up, and you would win. Stubbornness is one reason. MMA's "I'm so macho I can stand and bang" culture is the other.

The steal he is proudest of is small. Wrestling has an ancient throw — chin, under the arm, onto the back — that he calls the honey badger, a cousin of throwing a cow. Before jiu-jitsu he was average at it. Good people posted the back of the head and he could not collapse them over the neck. Then he learned the one-arm guillotine, running along the side of the head, fulcrum much lower, head moving the way he wanted. He put that grip into the honey badger and nobody got out. Judo, he adds, is sitting there too: it treats the chaotic transition as the moment to strike, which is why a judoka like Travis Stevens can arrive in jiu-jitsu and dominate. Dan Gable's warning that jiu-jitsu makes wrestlers comfortable on their backs is, to Askren, "so stupid." Athletes understand rules. Freestyle lets you lock hands on the mat; folkstyle wrestlers do not suddenly start locking hands. His own elevator series off bottom is a butterfly-guard-like foot grip, and in freestyle he will accept a double-leg, elevate on the way down, and hip back to the mat — a bailout wrestling alone would not have grown.

Cryptocurrency, for Askren, is a philosophy that arrived before a chart. A friend explained it in Shanghai in 2017, while Askren was fighting for ONE, and he was in immediately. He had read Ron Paul and material on the Federal Reserve, and already thought the system was unfair. A decentralized network nobody controls made sense. He likes Michael Saylor's version of the question: do you trust politicians with your money, or engineers? He is not deep in every technical design. He is deep in what Bitcoin does for people Americans forget exist. In Singapore he watched Indonesian and Filipino workers line up on Sundays for Western Union, losing 8 to 12 percent and five days. Bitcoin is person to person. A large share of the world is unbanked; a much smaller share lacks a phone. A mobile wallet closes that gap. He bought in 2017, sold nothing at the top, "really stupid," and sat through the bear market, which is why the principles had to be real.

He will probably sell a small slice near a bull-market top, which will annoy the hardcore holders. His argument is for people who are not "uber rich." If you bought one coin at $5,000 and it ran to $200,000, selling half to pay off a $200,000 house is life-changing, and you still have exposure if it goes to a million. If you never take anything and it comes back down, the psychological pain is worse when you are financially tight. A co-host on the Onchain Metrics side of his show watches wallets in public. In the April drawdown, holders of a thousand coins or more were still buying. The selling was concentrated in wallets that had held for zero to three months — people who had borrowed a thesis about a straight line up.

Advice to a young person is not a TED talk. Wrestling is a microcosm of a life, which is why he would rather a stuck kid solve the hump on the mat at fourteen than at thirty-two with two children and a job that is going badly. Find a coach who will spend time and has wisdom, then steal all of it. If you get successful at one thing, move that recipe to a partner, a city, a job. Fridman describes walking away from MIT's meeting pile to keep one or two things. Askren knows the difficulty: the more successful you are, the more you are sought, and saying no gets harder. The undefeated decade, he thinks, was the same muscle. Same training, same house, no vacation, while other fighters let the new life break the week.

Late, after they fail to roast each other and wander through Georges St-Pierre, Askren lands on the sports-psych question he actually wants. GSP has always talked about fear. Was he successful despite the anxiety or because of it? Everyday anxiety and in-competition anxiety are different problems. The disaster is anxiety while the match is happening. Wrestling has almost no pause in which to decide you sounded stupid. A high-school coach, watching freshman-Askren unravel at nationals, told him a lot of Type-A people try to hold every possibility at once, which is poison in a performance. The fix was to talk about fishing for the hour before the match. Askren stole it. He finds someone, goofs around about anything but the bout, then steps on the mat. That is how he took the buildup away. The body, in the performance itself, has to finish the job.