MMA Fighting - Coffee Talk with historian Patrick Wyman

Episode Date: April 4, 2020

In this edition of Coffee Talk, MMA Fighting's Esther Lin and E. Casey Leydon talk to historian Patrick Wyman about UFC 249, the coronavirus, and many other topics in this edition.  Subscribe: http://goo.gl/dYpsgH  Check out our full video catalog: http://goo.gl/u8VvLi  Visit our playlists: http://goo.gl/eFhsvM  Like MMAF on Facebook: http://goo.gl/uhdg7Z  Follow on Twitter: http://goo.gl/nOATUI  Read More: http://www.mmafighting.com Subscribe to the podcast: http://applepodcasts.com/mmahour  MMA Fighting is your home for exclusive interviews, live shows, and more for one of the world's fastest-growing sports. Get latest news and more here: http://www.mmafighting.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You're listening to the Vox Media Podcast Network. Let's start recording. Let me go down the coffee thing. Oh, sorry. So we're going to, normally we make a coffee off camera, but during these special times, we're going to make it right here. I did not know.

I love that you have a fire going in the background. That's amazing. Oh, yeah, yeah. Are those jiu-setsu mats? Oh, yeah. Look at that. That's fantastic. I had no idea.

That's so great. Yeah. Yeah, we threw it. We basically, we had like a dining room table here and we just kind of threw it out. We literally threw it out. We sanitized it, put a sign on it that says clean, no germs. Put it outside and it's like gone in like, I don't know, a half an hour. It's very ingible to put your furniture in your front yard.

We are drinking. Here. Go. That. Art dose blend. It was a gift from a viewer who mailed it to us. Twitter user name Steve Midwood, not his real name. This is a dark chocolate redberry toffee, molasses, full body, and mild acidity flavor.

Thanks. And we are using a Hario V60 pourover. So you're not a coffee drinker. I am not a coffee drinker. I have about one cup of coffee a year, and that's probably. about enough for me. Right now, I'm drinking the diet Mountain Dew knockoff flavor of Soda Stream. This is my third one of these today because my children woke up very early this morning. So this is my attempt to keep myself awake. But now that you describe like the acidity and the

flavors and that stuff, maybe I got to switch to coffee. Is this the time? It might be, but also right now is when it's the most difficult to get coffee, I feel like. You get the good stuff? Yeah. Like, we were already having, there was already kind of a worldwide coffee shortage in general. And this is definitely not helping. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

No, like giant pandemic everywhere is not helping coffee supply chains. Yeah. Ooh, Mr. Smarty pants, big, bold statement there. Yeah. Yeah, no, you definitely need to have a PhD to figure out that out. So, okay, so adding a little more water to it now. You can keep talking. All right.

I was going to go get the cap for my coffee maker. All right, go do that. So, Patrick, what did we meet? I feel like, did we meet for the first time at a pro wrestling guerrilla show? I think in person, that's when we met, yeah. Yeah, so that would have been like two and a half, three years ago maybe? Yeah, so. But we had, but we had like known each other.

No, it would have been, it would have been before that. It would have been at like a media lunch. Yeah, that was it. Yeah. Yeah, I think, uh, what's the place downtown that the UFC likes to use? Was that either Hanokey and the bird? That's the one of the big green backdrop of all the plants and, um, the palms. I think it was the palms.

I think that's where I met you guys. And that's where, that's where I kind of got a little star struck a little bit. Oh, oh. No, I mean, I have loved your guys' work for years and years and years and years. One of my, you know, my good friend Jay, Jay has one of Esther's pictures hanging in his house. Like, no, I mean, I've been an admirer your guys' work for years. Like, the video and the photos that you guys do is part of what got me into MMA in the first place. Really?

It's a, yeah, absolutely. Wow. Yeah, no, I mean, this feels like a very long time ago now. I feel like I'm showing my age, but yeah. No, it was like, it was the way that you guys presented it. it made it seem like so much more than just two dudes hitting each other. And that was, I mean, that appealed to me at that particular point in my life in ways that in hindsight seem profound. No, I was, I was about to say I was going to stroke your ego a bit and just talk about like

how I used to love your writing. You wrote for Sherdog mostly, right? I wrote for Sherdog. Then I wrote for Bleacher Report. I wrote some for The Washington Post. and then I finished my MMA writing career writing for Deadspin. Oh, yeah, okay. So, but I remember reading your, I think your fight analysis and your breakdowns. And I just, yeah, I just, I was like, oh, this is more than just two dudes. Like, I'm going to fuck you up more than you're going to fuck me up, you know, so. There's, it turns out that there's some technique to it.

Who knew? Who knew, man? And sometimes you have to train. Yeah. Sometimes. Yeah, hey, Mr. You are a big time trainer. You're doing all sorts of stuff.

still it's amazing yeah it's it's it's kind of it's been a little challenging in the last couple of weeks because I am not close enough to his size for him to get any crap on him but have you've you've been working the pads you've been yeah well I we try we've got a bag in the garage he's been hitting the bag and I've been trying to hit pads with him yeah I just like I just get for the tie pads it's like this is just hold him up this is a workout Just hold it. Yeah, I tried holding pads and, you know, he has to kick real light. Real light, yeah.

Otherwise, I fall backwards. And I tell her, you know what? You're going to hit your face one time, but you're only going to do it once and you're going to learn your lesson. You know, because everyone just does a, you know. Yeah. Oh, God. I think I knocked out a contact lens the very first time that I was holding pads for somebody and it pops right back.

I'm like, oh, God, okay, now I can't see anything. Now, so like, and there's nothing more disgusting than knocking out like a soft contact lens on the mats at a gym. That's literally the grossest thing that could ever happen. Ew. Yeah. And then everyone's just like,

you just like, for somebody's in the gym, you just like, you just, whatever hygiene and protocols you have, like whatever, you just spit on it. Like,

all right, let's go. Yeah, it's all good. Yeah, you just pop it right back in. I think about the kinds of bacteria I introduced to my eyes over the years while I was training

and it disgusts me in hindsight. Like I, I mean, like, gyms are like dirty places to start with and I'm like oh yeah no you just put that in your eye like what the what's wrong with you man uh yeah it's yeah it's been um yeah i've been like saying how this um quarantine like it hasn't been that crazy for me outside of not being able to go to the gym it's just um because because like

when i'm not traveling for fights i'm basically at home or at the gym so i'm just at home now and um Yeah, it's just, now it's just... You're going to eat some cream. Oh, thank you. Yeah, just, it's hard not having that same... I didn't realize how much you need that competition around you. Just like, just that one random dude, like, oh, he's sitting the back harder than me. I guess I better, you know, things like that.

So I've been just going to the park and it's actually really interesting. Everyone's, at least in my neighborhood, I feel like in Englewood, the everyone's, I think really obeying this. Once they took the basketball. hoops down. Everyone's really been obeying the social distancing pretty well. And like people playing soccer, but it's just like two people kicking the ball really far. But, and then there's at least like half a dozen people just doing random squats and things around the park. So I'm kind of looking at a guy like, oh, that guy looks fit. All right, I'm going to do this. There's a guy in our neighborhood that's been running with a sled attached to him. Yeah. Seriously? Yeah.

Oh my God. Yeah. So you've got, you've got some pretty intense exercise going on there. Yeah. There's people running hills in my neighborhood. That's a big thing. There's like a big hill right down the street for me. And so I see people running up and down that. I see a lot of people running in general. I definitely see people who live in my neighborhood who have small children who seem to be walking them around for the first time. Like I've never seen them do that before.

Like, do you just, you just not take your children out? Like, is that you don't do that regularly? A lot of dogs that I didn't know lived in my neighborhood. Oh, yeah. We've got a super long dog walks. A lot of very long dog walks, yeah. Oh, my dog is, my dog is exhausted right now. She's, we did, we did five miles yesterday.

And she's, by about mile three, she was dragon, absolutely dragon. There was a point at which she just sat down and stopped. And I had to, like, coax her to continue. Like, man, it's, we were going to get you in shape. Like, this is going to happen. She's really young, too, right? No, she's like four and a half now. Yeah.

Yeah, she's, yeah, she's, like, I was just, used to her having so much energy as a puppy and now she's just decided that she has a limit to her activity. So yeah, no, she's she's side-eyeing me right now. Like she thinks I might try and, like, she thinks I might try and take her somewhere. Yeah, I used to go on like three to six mile runs of my dogs all the time about five years ago. And now it's about like two blocks are like, I get it. I've already put these miles in. You can't make me keep doing this. I figured my dogs, they're super excited to leave the house and to get back to the house. Everything in between is kind of like whatever. Like, but like we got to get out and they're like, we're home. Yes. You know, it's like, I mean,

do they like take a lot of interest in what they see along the way or are they just kind of going through the motions? They're going through emotions. They have a couple of, they have a couple of dog friends. They know in the neighborhood. So they'll go to their place, you know, you know, pee in front of it, you know, like, all right, you know, see you later. And then that's about it. Yeah. The saddest thing is not being able to meet up. dogs. Like they want to play and I want to let them play but nobody wants to touch each other. So I mean, obviously. So it's just kind of, they've just been like whining at other dogs across the street. So they, they, the dogs too are social distancing. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So but everybody's staying safe.

Yeah. No dogs with the coronavirus. Not that we know. Not that we know. Yeah. I think I even feel weird because like we actually had a friend come over, but did like the social distancing outside thing, you know, like we're in our yard, we kind of just talked a little bit and we're like, are we allowed to touch each other's dogs? Like, we don't know. Like, we're like, can we possibly transmit a viral matter via can I?

Yeah. Can we make that happen? Yeah. It's just like, I find myself talking to people like on the phone or with FaceTime more than I was beforehand, which is kind of weird, but nice, you know,

it's nice to see and talk to people. But I am missing the feeling of like going out and doing something. I miss the routines. That's the, it feels hard to just be stuck at home all the time. And like every day feels exactly the same. And that when this is over and done with, I will never take for granted the ability to go get a cheeseburger again.

How are you working out while it's going on? I panic bought a whole bunch of kettlebells. As soon as it became clear that like, this was going to be a thing. I knew there was going to be a run on them. So I went on Amazon and just bought like several hundred dollars worth of kettlebells and gym flooring. And I keep it all in the closet. I've got I've got a 25, a 35, a 50 and a 60. And I've just been doing that like four times a week. Just swinging bells in my living room like it's the end of civilization. You're the guy that buys a 60. Okay. I'll go to Iraq and I know I grab my 25. It's like, oh,

I'm feeling frisky. I'm going to get the 35 today. I'm like, who's this asshole of the 60? No one uses that. Well, so I want to buy a heavier one, but it's just like, I've spent, I spend so much of my time like doing like powerlifting style training. And so I keep the rep range as pretty low. Like 12 reps is cardio as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah, you always have another in. Yeah, that's like 12 reps is cardio for me. So like that or as as close to it as I feel like I'm going to get. So I really want to keep things in like the six to like, six to eight range, uh, if at all possible. And now I find myself just like gasping for breath having to do like 15 to 20 reps like, oh my God. Like I thought I was done with this. This is just like I have you I have to do five more. Like no one was watching. I did him. Well, so I got a I got the FitBod app. Uh, so I track it all. And so like now I know I know that if I'm not doing it, then I will I will like

hate myself later. But that's just a little pathology. That's just a little bit. just working through my, just working through my issues via app and kettlebell. That's like, I miss the routine of going to the gym. I miss getting out of the house. I miss like, I miss seeing the same people every time I'm there. Like, that's, I really, really miss that. And, you know, like, as lovely as my children and the dog are, they're not great workout companions.

We're not getting a lot of motivation. Yeah, I was thinking about that too. Like, you know, about being at the gym, like, like, how we just like, man, like I see these people at the gym way more than I see outside of Esther, way more than I see anyone else close to me. Like you just see these. And I kind of like that. Like we just, we don't know, I don't know what goes on before they get the gym. I don't really know what goes on after they get after they leave. Which is, it's just, it was, you know, hour and a half you see them and, but you see them four or five times a week. And it's, it's, it's, it's,

when I knew this, when I, when I kind of foresaw this was going to be happening for multiple months. And I didn't really think of that that much until, yeah, like a week two, you're like, oh, yeah. I mean, I think there's there's a certain, it's like people are part of your routine. You're used to seeing the same people and you're used to having those kinds of little bursts of comfortable social activity that are really defined. Like you point out, like you don't know what they do beforehand. You don't know what they do after. But in that space, like you're sharing a thing with them. And that's nice.

And that's like kind of part of the fabric of your daily life. it's part of the fabric of your world. And you don't realize how important that is or how much that means to you until it's taken away, as it's being taken away from all of us right now, or at least should be being taken away from all of us for everybody's health. Yeah. You went from two or three a days to hang out at home. I was like, I became one of those seven in the morning guys.

You know, and then I'll do hour and a half in the morning. And then I go back in the evening. So, like, it was just, then, no, work in between. Yeah, just. So before this, Casey keeps kind of like, sometimes we keep bragging to other people that, like, before this all happened, we actually work together all the time. We've been working together for, like, the last 15 years or something like that. But for the last two years, I've gotten used to him being out of the house for at least four to five, six hours a day at the gym. That's how long he's at the gym.

And so now I'm like, man, I didn't realize how much you were at the gym before. Now you're home all the time. Yeah, I feel like I think that's true of a lot of relationships right now is that people are like, you know, you're used to being with your partner in kind of like, you're used to the routines and you're used to having the kind of set times, okay, this is when we see each other. These are the interactions that we have. And you're just kind of used to that. And now it's like around each other all the time.

Like this was, I mean, I talked to when my dad fully retired and stopped working, my mom has worked from home forever. My dad finds reasons to be out of the house like 12 times a day. Like he's just constantly in and out. And now that he's being forced to be at home all the time, I'm like, how are you doing dad? It's like, well, you know, I'm stripping paint off a door. Like, what do you mean you're stripping paint off a door? Like, like, well, you know, I could have just gotten a new door, but I decided I was going to redo this one. Like, oh, that's because that gets you to this part of the house where my mom is not.

I understand. It makes perfect sense now. Like, that's why you've spent 37 hours stripping paint off this store. I get it. Like, but even if you like each other, you're still used to your routines and you're still used to the rhythm of your relationship in your life. Yeah. And like, it's just weird. I think, and like every time we get like in a little bit of tiff, and I just kind of I just kind of go.

there's nowhere to go shit and I have to go you're correct it's forcing you to work on problem solving skills because there's no escape where could we

like yeah that's when I quit smoking cigarettes I started use I like replaced that particular mechanism of escape with exercise which healthy on the one hand but on the other, like, if you're just like, whenever you get fresh, you're like, I'm going to go to the gym, then you take that mechanism away. Now I'm just like, what am I supposed to do? Like, I can't, I can't run anymore. I like, my knees are dying. What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to deal with these feelings? I have no, I have no capacity to deal with this. I don't have the emotional range to handle my feelings. Are you kidding me? I've been doing a lot of cleaning. Yeah, I love, yeah. You know, we, we, we, we, We were, like, last month, we were thinking about buying a Roomba.

We're like, I didn't know. Let's buy a Roomba. But like, then we're going, nah, we're doing this. We're doing this by hand. We're just dusting. We got time to kill. Yeah, that's true. I mean, there's so much, like, simultaneously, I feel like I have all the time in the

world and I have no time because I'm, like, trying to sneak in 30 minutes of work here and 20 minutes of work there. And it's like, my son is demanding an apple. Like, he's, like, holding me hostage. Like, he's a little, oh, like, he's a three and a half year old jahadi. And I'm like, and so I'm like trying to sneak in work here and there. But also at the same time, every day is so long. Like every day stretches on into eternity.

So like the weeks are passing very quickly. But this is day 20. And I know that this is day 20 because I'm counting. Yeah. You're not the only one who's dealing by cleaning. I think my wife has has been organizing a lot. So she bought like a, a series of metal racks that we're putting up in the closet and she's like organizing the closets.

And I could sense that she was jonesing for something. So I think she's going to help me organize all of my hundreds of books. So we're trying to find ways. We're all coping in different ways. And I think that's I think that's how she's doing it. I respect it. I respect it. Like at least that that's infinitely more productive than any coping mechanism I have. So I do actually have a question about since you are a historian, I had a question about, so in previous like periods of mass death, a disease and stuff like that, what did people do? Were they told to stay at home? Were they did? Okay, so that's a really good question. And it varies.

During the 1918 flu pandemic, the Spanish flu, they was since at that point, they had germ. theory. They were aware that diseases were the diseases microbes and they could spread from person to person. So that's the best analog for our current situation. That's the best kind of parallel we have. And they did a lot of social distancing and the same kinds of stuff we're doing now. Shut down public gatherings, stay away from each other. And the places that did that sooner and more extensively were the ones where fewer people died. They're also the ones where the economy bounce back faster. There's pretty good data to suggest that the more, the places that did that more extensively that had less kind of public health-related disruption were the ones that got back

to normal or something approaching normal afterward. Prior to that, prior to germ theory, even if they didn't understand the mechanisms that spread disease, if they weren't aware of microbes, they weren't aware of how that worked, they did still have concepts of quarantine. So quarantine was the way that you deal with it. Like you know that people are getting sick in this place. Don't let people go from the place when people are sick to the place where they're not. And there were varying degrees of effectiveness for that.

I mean, some diseases much better stopped by quarantine than others. So, like, that's partially why the black death, the bubonic plague was so bad, was because it wasn't spread person to person. It was spread by the fleas that lived on rats or other small rodents. And so unless you shut everything down, at that way, you're still creating vectors for that particular disease to spread. But yeah, so they would quarantine in the recent past, a lot of social distance. I mean, basically the same kinds of measures that we're using now have been pioneered in the past.

That's how we know that something like social distancing works is because we have seen the evidence for it. And this is kind of a weird thing because I don't know how much documentation of it there is, but I assume there were some sporting or entertainment activities. What did people do? Did people do for sports? I mean, like during this time, did they just not, I guess, were there? cancellations of such events? Or is there? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, no, you had to cancel things. There was, I'm really curious. I actually don't know about baseball during the, during the 1918 pandemic. I would assume that a lot of things were shut down. I think it, but I think it varied from city to city. Like, there were some cities that were much more stringent than others that shut everything down immediately and others where they kept kind of trying to do things for a while. Those tended to be the ones where lots more people died, like Philadelphia.

had hundreds of thousands of deaths during that flu pandemic, partially because they just, like, didn't close things down. They had a big parade. Yeah, they had a huge parade. Like, and not coincidentally, workers a few years ago were digging for, were digging to put in something new and they found a mass grave from the 1918 pandemic. So, not a coincidence. That the place that held the parade also had the mass grave.

Yeah, I don't, you know, that's a good question. to think of kind of past pandemics, everything shut down during the, during the black death of the 14th century. We know that for sure. People kind of retreated. Like if you were rich and you had a country house, you went to your country house. Like one of the all-time great works of literature is Bacacacaccio's decamarin. And de Cameron is set in a house with a bunch of aristocrats who have like tried to escape from the plague. And it's just them telling each other's stories to keep each other entertained. Like that's the conceit of the piece. But, but yeah. So, I mean, in the past, yeah, people will just shut things down.

That's the, and so it's not, the, the only thing that's surprising about our current day situation is how much we have to shut down, I think. And so, especially in a sport like MMA, that is inherently global, that has people traveling from all over the place to make any one event happen. I think it's, it's pretty spectacularly set up for disruption under these circumstances. When did you kind of come to terms with like, hey, this is like going to be a real thing? Like, like, I would say, so I was kind of tracking it throughout January. Like as it was a thing in China, I think I realized it was going to be a pandemic around maybe the second week of February. Like so that, oh, yeah, this is going to be a thing. A pandemic just meaning a disease that spreads worldwide, not necessarily.

It doesn't necessarily imply anything about death toll. I think I kept expecting like people to do things about it or like do take the necessary steps and then they just didn't and then by about the last week of February I'm like oh this is going to be really bad. That's the so I don't know I'm not like giving myself a lot of credit for foresight but I would say maybe a little bit quicker than the consensus. But then again on the other hand like because I'm a historian and because I spent most of my adult life studying not just history but bad things like. Like for whatever reason, that's been what I've focused on. Like, a pandemic doesn't seem like out of the blue to me. I'm like, oh, yeah, a pandemic. Sure.

Yeah, this is just a thing that happens. Sometimes a disease spreads very widely and it kills lots of people. And so I think I wasn't thinking enough about the, like the immediate disruption of that. I was like, oh, yeah, this is going to be a big deal. And, you know, they're going to be X number of people who likely perish from it. And it's going to do all of these other bad things. to the economy. Like, that was the thing that wasn't surprising to me at all. I'm like, oh, yeah, every pandemic is a serious economic shock. Like, I think I was surprised at how fast

it rippled, but I wasn't surprised at the fact that it happened. But I was kind of thinking about that stuff on the abstract and then living through it, it's like, oh, yeah, man, that must have been a trip. Like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to ask if, uh, do you have any urge to, I guess, to document what's happening? Or do you know of people who are recording what's happening and just keeping an eye on just making sure that when we look back at this, we still have all the information correct. So that's a, it's an interesting question because I think we live in a data-driven world, right? And like, so there's lots of data available. One of the things that I think this should be making us all realize is like how misleading data can

be. Because you're trying to compare something like death rates or infection rates from country to country, they have different criteria. So, like, you know, what counts as a COVID-19 related death in one place would not be categorized the same way someplace else. And that's just leaving aside the kind of garden variety underreporting. That's leaving aside things like deliberately suppressing information. It's making us realize, like, how these things that we rely on may actually be undercounting or misrepresenting what's actually happening. So as far as that stuff goes, I think it's worth bearing that in mind. And it's also worth applying that to kind of our understanding of the past, too, is the

shortcomings that we have and the sources that are available to us. I'm thinking a lot about what kinds of stories, newspapers are writing. And on the assumption that that's probably going to be the major source that people turn to in the future to try and understand the, the, to try and understand this outbreak, looking at how these stories are framed and how that does or doesn't like fit with your experience of what's happening, I think is a useful exercise because that's going to help us understand like how these stories are being shaped and understood a long time down the road. So like if to you, this seems like a big deal, but the way that you

see like a TV news story framing something doesn't fit with your understanding of it, like that applies to the past too. That applies to that like people were no less fallible or no less inclined to kind of project their biases or their perspective onto the way that they presented information. Oh, so there are instances of the past of trying to, I don't know, mask the severity of disease or whatever or trying to suppress the information going around? Yeah, oh yeah, 100%. That's part of the reason, that's one of the lessons of the Spanish flu, of the, the 1918 flu pandemic is that it was made much worse by wartime censorship, because this is right at the end of World War I. And so there was a lot of pressure to not report or to try and bury,

to minimize the impact of the disease as it was spreading. In some places that was that was an explicit, like, no, we're not going to talk about this. In other places, it was more of a kind of a subtle pressure to, well, you don't want to harm the war effort. So it took a bunch of different forms, but that's why it's called the Spanish flu. It's not because the influenza, that particular strain of influenza came from Spain. It's because Spain was not subject to wartime censorship, because they were a neutral power during World War I. So the Spanish newspapers were the ones that actually told the truth or gave the full story of what was happening. And that's why it got called the Spanish flu.

There are multiple theories for where that pandemic came from, but it was not Spain. maybe an army camp in like a large embarkation zone in France, like close to the front, maybe Fort Riley, Kansas, maybe but probably not China, maybe somewhere in Austria, Hungary. All of those are possibilities. But as sure as heck wasn't Spain, which is part of what makes the whole like, well, what do you call this virus thing? So crazy is like, wasn't a Spanish flu, man. Yeah, so that's just things that have been on my mind.

Yeah, I hope that answers your question. It does. I hope that makes sense. I want to share just a funny story with you. I think you appreciate when we were in Japan for New Year's. So around January 2nd, that was around the same time that the, was it a Nissan guy, who is his name? Carlos Gone. Carlos Gone, he had just escaped from Japan.

Remember that whole story? That was a big deal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was crazy. So we were actually in Tokyo at that time. And we're in a hotel room. We're watching a Japanese news. And, you know, we can't, no understanding, but we see the images and everything. And the first half is all about Carlos Gone, Cardas Gone.

Then the second half, they're only talking about the coronavirus, but how it's in China. And at that point, we're kind of just talking about, oh, we should do this today. We should do that today. But in the background, I'm hearing all this. And it felt just like the first scene of every zombie or apocalyptic film. Well, we're talking about, you know, our office party, but in the background, on riots in Argentina, you know, or something like that. And I look over, I'm like, that's probably going to be a big deal.

Where should we eat today? Yeah. So you guys were ahead of the curve on that. Very much so, actually. Yeah, that's why at UFC 248, which was March 7th, I think, or beginning of March. We've already asking. Yeah. In reality, the country should have been locked down by then.

But I mean, we were in Vegas and no, people are doing the whole hand, like the handshake. Who shakes hands? And we're like, people were making fun of us for not wanting to shake hands. I was like, I was like, I don't know, dude. Like this, you know, that's, you know, that's, and like, at that point people were like, I guess we should wash your hands more. But no one was thinking seriously. And I remember being at the APEC center where they had a media day.

And I was telling the UFC PR, I was like, you know you guys are going to have 249 in that room right there. That's where they do the contender series. And looking back on it, I was such, I was so positive at that, at that point that there. I thought, I honestly thought, was going to be at the Apex Center in Vegas. You thought it would be possible to hold the event. To hold the event there. I knew that there's no way they're going to be able to have it in New York or in it with

Perid Rene. There's just no way. And man, it got way worse than even my pessimistic ass thought. Yeah, that's the thing is like I'm a pessimist by nature. Like I'm not an optimistic person. And it's all gone so much worse than I thought it would.

It's like, like I'm really not an optimist. And at the same time, I'm like, man, this is, who, like, we really did a bad job handling this. That's, and not just, I mean, the United States obviously has a lot to answer for here. But like, there's been a lot of mistakes worldwide. Like, a lot of people have really screwed up. Like, the UK had just a terrible plan based on bad math. Like, that was, like, I mean, a really stunning series of screw ups.

Like in the world, annals of screwing up. Like, it's not author. that you get to make some math errors that are going to cost thousands of people their lives in a really direct and traceable sense. And we've got multiple instances of that right now. Like it's stunning. Really stunning work from our elected officials. From a historian point of view, like why is that? Is it was, because like you said, this has happened thousands of times in the past. Is it just because there's no living memory of it? I think that's a big piece of it. Yeah. I think that's a big piece of it. Yeah. I think that's a

big part of it. The 1918 flu pandemic was the last big worldwide thing that has now passed out of living memory, only the very oldest people alive on the face of the planet were even alive during it. And I don't think none of them would have been adults. None of them would have had really strong memories of it. So I think that's part of it. And even that one, the last major global pandemic happened in the shadow of the First World War. So it's been kind of overwhelmed in cultural memory by the First World War and then the Great Depression and then the Second World War. That becomes more or less a footnote instead of something that deserves its own chapter or its own book in the way that we understand the past.

So I think all of those are factors. I think there's also a lot of hubris, a lot of arrogance about our capacity to technology, our way out of any problems as they come up. I think a lot of human error because this is not the first coronavirus. to be a problem, but we've never made a vaccine for one before. Like the original SARS virus was a coronavirus as well, if anything, scarier than the current one that we're dealing with. But you would think that somebody would have been like, well, this is a whole family of viruses

that clearly have the potential to spread. Maybe we should get a head start on trying to make some serious efforts, like as a contingency, like what would this look like if we were going to do this? And so there's even the people who were trying to do that. And there were some people who were raising alarms about coronaviruses. Like, there was such a disconnects between them and the people who could actually put resources behind that. I mean, and it's a systemic society-wide thing. You know, it's like we've built a really efficient and profitable world.

Like, we've headlined efficiency because efficiency is profitability. And, like, that's great if you're trying to maximize shareholder value and make some people very rich. it's not so great if you're now in a situation where what you need is resilience, where you need multiple redundant systems. Like, you know, if you have hospitals that are designed so that 90% of all the ICU beds are continuously occupied, that means you don't have a lot of slack in your system to deal with something like this. So, yeah, I mean, I think it's just a combination, not having had it and, you know, having

our priorities oriented in very particular directions, you can make your own choices as to whether those are good directions or not. But it's a kind of a basic disconnect between what we've been designing for and what this kind of crisis, and it is a crisis, actually demands from us in terms of responses. Were there structures in the, were there societal structures in the past that dealt with disease better? Like, was there a better way to, I don't know, have a city, maybe less crowded or something? I don't know, but like I'm trying to think of like if there was any society that dealt with this the right way. That's a, I mean, that's a really good question. I think that you get scattered examples of practices that work.

And so that's, I mean, I think that's part of why the social distancing thing caught on so quickly is because we knew that this was the best practice, that we had epidemiologists and public health people who spent their entire professional lives working. on these problems and figuring out like, yeah, we can model this. We can figure out this is going to be the best way to handle it. And I think it's not so much a question of having, there having been people in the past who did it better so much as we have a pretty good sense for what works. And so it's the inability to make that stick now that's kind of jarring is like when you look at the death tolls that are rising and you know that like that doesn't, that didn't have to happen.

Like if we had only done this or that, I think that's the thing that's kind of striking about it. more than the, like, was there somebody who handled their, who handled their business perfectly? Like, one of the things I always say about history is that it's way dumber than you think it is. Like, it's always dumber because people in the past were not any smarter than we are now, you know, like people made mistakes all the time. They did things that they knew at the time. They probably shouldn't have done. And I think the past looks a lot cleaner than it often is, A, because of hindsight.

and B, because the people who are telling stories of the past are looking for a clean story to tell. And that kind of obscures the messiness of everyday life, everyday reality. You were talking about newspapers earlier, like the disconnect between maybe what you're feeling and how a newspaper story presents an event. Like, that was ever been as present in the past, too. And so it's just easy for us to forget that. And it's worth bearing in mind that, like, yeah, people in the past, I mean, there were ideologue governors who didn't take things seriously.

there were people who were much more concerned about their own personal profit than public health. Like all of those dynamics existed in the past, too. And, you know, that's, yeah, it's, it's always dumber. It's always dumber than you think it was. Okay, so you brought up UFC 249 first. That is a great segue. Great segment. Ooh. Yes.

It's, is this, so just for our, our, our listeners, how long did, how long did you kind of cover MMA or like? I covered MMA for about five years. I started working on it in 2013 and I wrote my last MMA piece in 2018. I did my last, I covered my last event in 2018. So I got a I got the eras that I got were the rise of Ronda Rousey, the Connor McGregor era, and then whatever we're calling the post, the post Mayweather McGregor era. The just before the ESPN deal was signed was really kind of the last time I was I was working on it. That was and then I just kind of stopped. Well, I don't think we need to get into reasons why you decided to leave. Like, what do you, like, is, is the UFC right now?

Is this almost just like a microcosm of the world? I mean, or at least our U.S. government? So, I mean, I think the UFC has some very specific incentives that push it in the direction of wanting to do shows right now. Like, the big one is just from a cash flow perspective, like, they need to continuously be doing events to bring in revenue because they're not like, A, they just took a huge dividend payment. and they wiped out a lot of their cash reserves to do that dividend payment. A cynic would say that they're trying to cash out now before bad things happen. That's one way of looking at it. Another is just to say that the UFC's owners, going back to the Fertitas, have always treated it like a piggy bank that they could use for ready cash whenever they needed an infusion into their other businesses.

The Furtitas did that at least once when their casino business needed a few hundred million dollars. So that's one way of thinking about it. And so I think the UFC is really incentivized to just try and think like, well, we can do this. We can make this happen. We need, like, because partially they just have to. That's one way of thinking about it. Another is the really toxic combination of having Dana White as your figurehead and knowing which direction all of Dana's incentives run. Like, that's not a guy who ever thinks he's either going to get the coronavirus or if he does that it's going to do anything to him, who has never shown a lot in the way of

genuine regard for his employees or the people who are fighting in his organization. Like, you know, Dana White is who he is. He's the guy you've got at this particular point in time. Like, if I were going to name a major sports figure who would be taking that line in the midst of a global pandemic, it'd be Dana White. So it's not entirely surprising from that perspective. I think, and also, you know, I think your average fan of the UFC, the person who, your average, like your median buyer of UFC 249 is not going to care all that much that like the fighters haven't been able to train to full capacity. Like there's a very real sense in which, and this does not apply to necessarily like

really hardcore fans or people who love the technique or people who cover it for a living. But there's a real sense for a lot of people that the UFC is just kind of semi-anonymous violence that you can, that you turn on the TV or you turn on your app and you consume. rather than being a thing with, you know, storylines and people that you really care about, people that you're invested in, people whose careers you've been following for a long time, people that you like feel some sort of connection to.

And I think the UFC, as time has gone on, has really like, how you doing, sweetheart? What's that buck? You need water. Can you get it yourself? or do you need that to get it for you? You need to take a break? I'm being called away to get water.

Can I come right now? Okay, I'll be right back. No commercial break right here. Sorry. No way. And now back to coffee talk with E.K. Sadditan and Esther Dinn with special guest, Patrick Wyman. Thank you for that lovely reread it.

So where were we? We're UFC 249? Yes. Okay, so leaving all of that, stuff about the UFC's particular circumstances and Dana White aside, it is still insane to me that they are talking about this. How do you expect people to train? How do you expect people to get on planes? I don't understand. Yeah, I think Jessica Androach said that several of her flights on her journey to Las Vegas to get out of Brazil were canceled, so it took her a lot longer than normal.

And we had a friend that posted a photo of himself flying, and he was one of three passengers on the plane. Yeah. I actually had a question about what you were saying, like, the lack of storylines and things like that. Do you think, this is a little side point, do you think uniforms and fight kits contributed to the anonymization of the average prize fighter? Yeah.

I mean, I think that absolutely plays. plays and played a role in it. And, you know, I think it's, it's hard to make the argument that that wasn't the plan, in large part because it's just easier to sell to investors that way. It's easier to sell to the people who eventually bought the UFC is like, here's your package of things. You have, you have the apparel deal. You have the, you have this many shows run this often with this kind of expected revenue.

Like, investors like stability. They like the guaranteed revenues. and that's what the UFC offered. And if the price of that was anonymization, you know, UFC on ESPN 77 or, you know, this UFC 240, like UFC 249 with no more titles for pay-per-views, like if that was the price of stability, then it was worth giving up the individuality of it.

And I mean, like, it's a move that makes perfect sense. If you're looking at the balance sheets, if you're looking at this as a business proposition, it's nice to have revenue that you can count on. But at the same time, at least for me, it took away a lot of what I really enjoyed about the sport. It just became a lot more homogenous, and it became a lot harder to tell people apart

and to really be invested in it as anything other than skilled violence. And that's, I mean, that's more or less why I stopped covering it as I just kind of got to the point where I'm like, I don't feel anything anymore. Like it stopped making me feel things. and, you know, even if you can still engage with it as an intellectual exercise, I just think, like, it was not that much fun for me at that point. And I don't know if I'm the only person who feels that way. I don't know if, like, other fans felt that way as well.

I just think, like, it's a different thing than it was when I started watching. And, you know, things change. It is what it is. Like, there's no point in being, like, nostalgic for it. But it's worth noting that the change did in fact happen. Going back through your history logs, what was the general morale of the people in the pandemic? Because one of the things I keep going back to with fans is like, okay, run 249 in Florida or whatever. You know, just say it happens.

But in two weeks, I'm sure you agree, but this country is going to be a different place in two weeks. especially since that's the apex. Well, the apex is going to be the country. But yeah, but different, I mean, we're going to know what we're going to, we're going to know it's going to be bad in two weeks. And by two and a half weeks, when the 18th rolls around, like, do you feel, I mean, just from looking in the past, like the country is like, oh, this is what we need. We need to pay $70 to watch a short notice title fight. Yeah. I mean, I just find that weird.

And this is what I do for a living. This is what pays my bills. And yeah, I'm like, ah. Yeah. Casey's an MMA fanatic. Before this, even still now, every day, we'd start our day, reading the news, seeing what was going on in the M.A. We were, even if we weren't working, we were, you know, keeping up every single day.

Yeah. So it's just, yeah. I mean, I think you raised some really good points there. I think it's worth digging into these things kind of one by one. So what's the, so first of all, what's the country going to look like in two and a half weeks, a lot more people are going to be dead and a lot more people are going to be sick. That's, I mean, I think that's point number one. There's no scenario that we're looking at right now where that's not the case. And there is a range for how bad it could be, but it's definitely

going to be worse. Like, that's kind of the surreal thing about this whole deal is we're having all these conversations about, well, what are we going to do? Are we going to shut the economy down? Like, we're not even in the thing yet. The actual thing has barely started here. You know what I mean? So that's kind of the, I think it's hard for. us to even have the attention span in the year of our Lord 2020 to deal with something that's not like here and then gone the next day. Like this is going to be a thing for weeks and weeks and weeks, if not months and months. So that's point number one. So yeah, you're right. Things are going to look a lot different in a couple of weeks because that will probably be somewhere

much closer to the apex of the epidemic, hopefully closer to the end than the beginning of that apex if we're lucky, but maybe not. So yeah, so are people going to want to pay $70 for a thing? And the midst of that, I kind of don't think so. I think if you, worth the ratings for the shows the UFC tried to run really bad. Yeah, the Brasilia one was sub one. It was a 900,000 or something. Yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't good. And it was on ESPN.

On ESPN, no sports to compete with. And it was actually, in from a pure fighting perspective, it was actually, it was an excellent, it was an excellent card on paper and it was excellent card, the actual fights were great. But just. And so, and so people still weren't watching. And I think there's part of your answer. And that's free. Yeah.

And that's a free thing. I think that's even more than going to be even more the case in a couple of weeks is people's minds are just going to be elsewhere. The sports I don't think are going to really feel like an escape in quite the same way in the midst of this. Like this is something like not to be flippant or basic about it, but like this is a bad thing. Like it's a really bad thing. And, you know, a lot of the choices that we make. in our 21st century world are between two things

that are not really that bad. Even if there is a choice that is not as good, it is still not a bad choice. We're in a scenario where there are bad choices and worse ones. And I think that's very hard

on kind of a basic level for us to wrap our heads around. And so something like, the way I think about the UFC 249 thing to bring it all the way back around here is like that to me is like a panic response. The desire to continue doing things, the way that we were going to do them to find a way to make the show happen.

That's like a panic response. The rational response to this is to think, I don't want thousands of people to die. What do we need to do to make sure that doesn't happen? And so that was true of discussions about opening up the economy again, too. Like, that's a panic response. The rational response is, okay, we know that this is going to be a bad thing. We know it's going to be bad. It's a question of how bad it's going to be.

So let's try to make it the least bad thing possible as opposed to just trying to gut it. it out and get through it. Like, that's not really how this works. And I just think there's a real basic disconnect between that reality and the kind of tools that we have to appreciate it. Like, whether those are social or cultural or political, like to try to understand what's happening is, is very difficult. So I'm, like, I'm sympathetic, you know, like, it's, it's hard to wrap our heads around it. And I understand the desire that some MMA fans have to just, like, the show can go on. The show can go on. Like, like, when you, when you admit that it can't, then you're admitting something much larger than that you're not going to get to see some

fights. Yeah, I haven't been able to really award it properly, but yeah, I feel it that way. Like, for some reason, 249 is this point in our brain. If 2.9 doesn't happen, then like, it's real. It's happening. This is our new reality. And for some reason, I think we just come to terms of it a couple weeks ago, a month ago. And, but you can't, I love one of your tweets. It's like you can't, well, you can't, you can't bullshit your way out of a pandemic. And I thought that kind of summed it up pretty well. Yeah, that's the, it's the, I think we're seeing this in all sorts of ways.

It's just like the reality of it is scary and troublesome. And that's true in both the public health sense and the fact that there is literally a dangerous virus that you could catch that could do bad things to you. And also that they're going to be some very serious medium and long term. consequences from it, you know? Like, those are, like, those are real things. And, um, having to, and like, it's understandable that the natural reaction is to be like, well, it's not that big a deal. We don't need to do anything about this. We can continue living our lives. I get it. You know, like it's, um, I understand the attraction of it. And I think that applies to MMA too. Like, you're, you're right that this is an event. People have fixed in their minds. Like, here's this fight that's

going to happen. This is like a shred of normalcy that you can hang. on to. And if you have to cancel it, then yeah, you've really got to come to terms with the fact that this is a thing that's happening and it's a big deal. Come on. And canceling it for the fifth time. That's just, that's just kind of. That's just, that's just cruel. I had tickets to the fight to that fight twice. Twice I had tickets to that fight. Like, so like that's one of the very few fights that's going to, that would cause me to actually watch. Like that, it's that one I watched, I watched Aldo Volcanovsky, because I love me some Alex Wokinovsky. But like, I've only watched like four fights since I quit covering it.

And this would have been one of the ones. So like, I want to see it too. I mean, Jesus. Like I had, I had tickets to the one when Ferguson tripped and tore his ACL on the, on the, on the court. Yeah. Like, I had tickets to that one. I had tickets to the one where was it when Khabib screwed up his weight cut for in Vegas. That was like 2017.

I had tickets for that one. I have a funny story about that one. Habib and I were staying in the same hotel. We read the signature at the MGM. And I got food poisoning that week or what I thought was food poisoning. At that time, I was kind of reading the news and norovirus was going around Vegas like crazy. Because of the way all of the casino share kitchens. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like a mass kitchen in the back. And so Habib ended up getting what he said was kind of like a food poisoning or, stomach flu kind of that week. And I'm pretty sure a lot of people in my hotel got sick that week. I just, just, yeah. A little aside just in terms of like how things just kind of, you know, work their way into canceling that. Yeah, like when they cancel the event, like Esther's like on the toilet going, hey, I got the same thing. Just vomiting. It's the, I mean, it's the Murphy's law of MMA fights. Like, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. If like, like, it's just, it's almost fitting that this time it was a global

pandemic. Like of all of the various things that have gone into canceling that fight over the years like, yeah, no, the greatest global public health emergency in more than a century is what puts an end to it this time. Like, of course, of course that was going to happen. I'm a little afraid of what would happen if they book it a sixth time.

Casey thinks that alien invasion. I'm thinking like alien invasion, like we're all in chains, you know, like, chronos, you know, what are the two Simpson guy, the Simpson? Cotos and what's the other one? Protos? Yo,

Koto, what I don't know. Like, they have their weaponess of chains and then a couple people in the front like, dude, like UFC 280 is kind of rule.

I don't know. He's just like, I'm like, dude, we got aliens invading us. They're like, dude, man, Habib's scared.

Yeah, yeah, no, there's a reason, like he's in a labor camp all the way on the other side of the world. Like he's, he claims he can't get out

to fight Tony Ferguson. I think he's just scared. Yeah, I was like, I know, I read a line, they can get a raft, and they can put him on a raft, and they can, they can, in six months, he'll float over the Atlantic, he'll be here. He's going to do his weight cut mid-ocean. Yeah. Like, yeah, they'll weigh him in somewhere in the Bahamas. Fighters want to fight, bro.

All right, get us out of here, Esther. All right, thank you so much for talking with us. Wait, wait, wait, wait, this is where everyone does the plug? Where can we see and hear your stuff, man? Okay, so you can find my history podcast, Tides of History, on any podcast platform. I've got an episode coming out next week on pandemics in history and what we, hopefully what we can learn from them for no particular reason. No reason I'm not relevant right now.

Otherwise, I've got some episodes coming on early modern history. I've got a deep back catalog on everything from the Black Death to the rise of states and early modern warfare, follow the Roman Empire, it's all there. So that's a big thing you can find me on Twitter at Patrick underscore Wyman. If you're interested in finance and history, I've got a book coming out next year-ish that I'm supposed to be finishing a draft for

at some point in the near future. We'll see if that happens. Yeah, no, so all of those things, give tides of history a listen. I think it's pretty good. It's just me. Yeah, no, it's great. And actually, I was supposed to be ending the conversation,

but we started listening to Against the Grain, and it made me think of you. It's so good. It's so good. It's one of my very favorite books. Oh, it's amazing. So everyone should go listen to that too. Yeah.

We got a lot of time. A lot of time. A lot of time. There's a lot of time to catch up on history. Awesome. Thank you very much, Mr. Wyman, and have fun walking your dogs and enjoying your children 24-7. Thank you so much for having me.

It's an absolute pleasure catching up with you guys. miss you. Let's go to a PWG show soon. Yay. Awesome. Thank you. You're listening to the Vox Media Podcast Network.