Search Engine - The Rage in the Cage

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

Can you tickle your way to victory in an MMA fight? An investigation into a sports scandal with journalist Pablo Torre. See videos mentioned in this episode. Check out Pablo Torre Finds Out on Youtube or Spotify. Support Search Engine! Comment on this episode. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, search engine listeners. Before we start the show, a quick reminder, this Friday, October 17th, which is today, if you're listening to this the morning, it comes out. At noon Eastern, we're doing a live event where I take your stumper's. Those are unanswerable questions, and I will intellectually humiliate myself trying to answer them. I'll be joined by a friend of the show, Califasane, who will also go down fighting. If you're an incognito-mode subscriber who subscribed through search engine. dot show, there will be a link to this live event in your inbox.

And if you miss it, we'll have a live recording of this for our incognito mode listeners up next week. If you're hearing this in the morning, there's still time to send me questions, please do. PJVote85 at gmail.com. Okay, some quick ads and then this week's story. This episode of Surge Engine is brought to you in part by Square. Square, the easy way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, manage staff, and keep everything running in one place.

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Before we get into the story or the question, can you just introduce yourself? Yeah, my name is Pablo Torre. I am a journalist and the host of a show that is a video, do we call them video podcasts? At this point, I don't know if it's like, if podcasts are audio podcasts or video podcasts, I don't know what we're doing exactly.

I think that's a fair summation. I also don't really know what I'm doing exactly. But I do it a lot. You do it a lot. You answer questions and sometimes do investigations, but the world that you like to cover is sports. And for me, it's interesting because, like, you and I know each other a little bit,

you launched your show, Pablo Tori finds out, around the same time as search engine. I feel like we have similar sensibilities, but it's just your sensibility as being applied to a world that I know very little about. Yeah, I see sports as a liberal arts education, a sentiment that makes me ostracized in the world of sports. What do you mean when you say you see sports as a liberal arts education?

It's a way to get to everything. I've been a sports journalist for my entire professional life, And I've never lacked for a reason to connect it to politics, culture, business, religion, race. I am a recovering sociologist, that's what I studied in college, and sports is this giant tent in American life in which you'll sit next to somebody who does not vote the same way as you or think the same way as you, but you are engaged in the same blood feud against another tribe as them. And so in that, you get to this position, I think, where we are right now, where sports ends up being useful to study as a way of understanding, I don't know, what the fuck America is anymore. If Pablo's thesis is right, and we can learn about America through sports,

then the story he was here to tell me had some strange lessons about our country embedded within it. It was a story of a sports scandal, which had drawn me in at first just because it seemed so deeply silly, a novel form of misbehavior was threatening to dishonor the core identity of a brutal American sport. Okay, so the story in question, we were on the phone you told me about a scandal,

a scandal with video, which we are going to watch. First, I just want you to explain to our audience, which I think is less sports first than yours. Like, what happened? So there's a lot of mixed martial arts content that happens on the internet, including this stream of a fight that was taking place in April of 2024

between a gentleman by the name of Mason Lewis, against a fighter named Tim Fargo. This was a title fight in a lower division. It was, in fact, a New York State bantam weight fight. Bantam means they're not very heavy? Yeah, 135. Okay. 135.

And this thing happens that kind of takes over the world of mixed martial arts in a way that I don't think mixed martial arts was prepared for. Because Mason Lewis, if you've ever seen, I'm trying to translate all of this for you, If you ever seen that device Suzanne Summers sold called The Thighmaster. Yeah. Mason Lewis basically had his head between Tim Fargo's thighs like he was being thigh mastered. And that was like a way for him to like make him submit.

Yes. They were on the ground, horizontal, all of this, if you're not visualizing it as deeply homoerotic, feel free to. Okay. Yeah, yeah. It's a lot. Okay. And Mason Lewis is stuck. Homorotic because his massive, powerful thighs are restraining this man's, like, head and face between.

Yes. Yes. And also, there's just – M.MA mixed martial arts, there's a lot of grappling. Yeah. And these guys are deeply shirtless and sweaty and unapologetic. Right, because men are socialized. God, I'm telling such a liberal arts we need. But, like, you don't have, like, super masculine straight men often just don't touch each other.

But here, there's a lot of touching each other. They're so masculine that they're always touching. We've come around all the way around on the masculinity spectrum. And so we find ourselves at this inflection point in this title fight and Mason Lewis decides to do something that I would say violates the fundamental code of masculinity. Which is what? He begins to tickle the bottom of Tim Fargo's foot. And what type of tickle is it?

like cartoon tickling the ivories, a feathery tickle. Like you might tickle your, you know, little brother. Right. So I just want to bring up the clip. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So this is from Full Contact Promotions on YouTube. Mason Lewis versus Tim Fargo, 135 pound MMA title fight,

Rage in the Cage 24. Okay, what do we see? It hasn't happened yet. It hasn't happened yet, but one guy looks like he is absolutely screwed. Yeah, it starts his head, which is like red face and clutch between these muscular thighs, does like totally submitted. Yeah, like they were locked into one position and then this hand with cut off fingers in this fighting glove, which is a key detail because the fingers are available for manipulation. In a way where the boxer can never tickle. Absolutely. This is a very MMA story for that reason.

It seems to almost like a mere cat pokes its head out from its burrow. Mason Lewis unsheaths these little fingies and begins to feather the bottom of the foot of the leg and the thigh that had, yeah, truly turned his skull a color of red that I think a pantone color wheel would only describe as rage in the cage. Rage in the cage red. Rage in the cage red. And now, like, several seconds later, the tickler is now on top. That's crazy. It's also just like the arena itself is so dark, black, dank, cavernous. Like, it's a black box theater, PJ.

We're tickling should never occur. Like, I can feel the inappropriateness of it. Yeah, and there's a referee, and he's sort of just like making sure everyone's still alive, and they are. And then suddenly, the tickler, he's the one on top. And spoiler alert, Mason Lewis wins the. fight. So he wins, but he wins by doing this thing. It seems to violate many codes of ultimate fighting championship, like, masculinity.

It's something that I had never seen before. And it sounds based on the way that MMA responded to it, like, most. of them had neither. It was a taboo. And so, like, you, basically every week you look at the world of sports and try to find what the unusual thing is. You have seen lots of unusual things happen in sports. When you saw this clip of this thing happening, like, what happened inside your mind?

Like, what was your reaction? What questions were you asking yourself? The number one question I asked myself was, given that the tickler just won this fight, why aren't more MMA fighters tickling? Because it just seemed like an obvious tactical step forward. It just seemed like a thing that worked and I had never considered it. It never occurred to me that maybe the only thing you can do in some scenarios in which it seems like you're about to lose consciousness is to go the other way. Don't try and use brute force.

Kind of use what feels like the opposite, which is a little, you know, it's like inventive silliness. Whimsy. Whimsy. Whimsy, of all the places that Wimsy might live, like a UFC, like, cage match seems like not one of them. It feels like a place

that is militantly and culturally opposed to Wimsy. After the break, Pablo takes us into this place that is militantly and culturally opposed to Wimsy and tries to figure out if these anti-Wimsy forces

have overlooked how devastating tickling can be in a no-holds-barred cage match. We'll get to hear from everybody, the tickler, the tickly, and more. We'll also get an answer to another question I've actually wondered a lot about. How did mixed martial arts and the UFC become such a prominent part of American masculinity?

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You should tell the people who we are and what our new show is. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein. And we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. and some of the worst people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies in the history of business. We struggled to come up with a name, decided to call it, business history.

You know why? Why? Does this show about the history of business? Available everywhere. You get it. Welcome back to the show. Tell me just like for table six, like just tell me about UFC as an institution.

Like for total neophytes to this, like what is the UFC? How did it start? It stands for the, ultimate fighting championship, it is, again, something that has zero irony in it. Like, it's meant to be the most serious display of combat sports in the world. And specifically, it is mixed martial arts. So the brand, the league, it's almost like the NFL is the national football league,

but the sport is football. The ultimate fighting championship is the league. Mixed martial arts is the sport. And so like you have, before the UFC ever existed, you had boxing, where it's the combat sport, but people are restricted to just punching. If you have the UFC where there's mixed martial arts, does that mean any form of martial arts and any combination of those forms you can bring to fight? Oh, it's kind of like the ultimate, I mean, it is the ultimate way of answering the question. Like, what if Batman could beat up Superman? What if Bruce Lee fought Muhammad Ali?

it's this way of people from different disciplines proving who is, yeah, the best fighter among all of them. And so you're not just seeing the best fighter. It's like I guess you're also seeing the best fighting style or the best combination of that. It is a clash of many things, style being one of them. But the boxing parallel is a good one because boxing, of course, is self-evidently violent.

It's funny, we wring our hands around football in America because, of course, of CTE and neurological trauma. boxing is consensual concussions. That's what boxing is. But mixed martial arts as a sport was regarded as so violent that it was illegal in many states in America for a really long time, like into the 90s. John McCain, late Senator John McCain, referred to it famously as human cockfighting. And how did this start? Like, why did people, like, I understand why people had a problem with it.

I understand what John McCain meant when he said human cockfighting. Like, boxing feels like it's on the edge of what a lot of people will tolerate, and this is pushing that edge further out. But, like, why did the people who want it want it in the beginning? Oh, it's because it's the ultimate tough guy contest. Yeah, so UFC 1 is the first of its kind. Long before there were dozens of rages in the cages, UFC 1 was born.

and at the time, M.M.A. was still outlawed in many states in America. Let me find out exactly what date it was. I want to get this right. But UFC 1, UFC 1 was on November 12, 1993. And really, it didn't get anything resembling, I would say, broad mainstream appeal or legitimacy until 2005, when a reality show called The Ultimate Fighter brought MMA into living rooms. On this season of the Ultimate Fighter. Yeah, I'm on edge. I'm not saying, shit the fucking nobody, and I'm cooking my food.

Next question? It's reality television, this American Idol-style competition, in which aspiring UFC fighters have to do these challenges on television against these other aspirational professionals. I think I can take Chris out, but he's definitely going to be a, a challenge and he is a tough fighter. He's like, It's your call, dude, if you want to do it, you know?

If not, I'll step in there and I'll fight Alex. The end of the show ends with someone getting awarded a contract to actually compete in the UFC. You do win the six-figure contract with the UFC. You are the ultimate fighter and the 185 pounds. And so that's how it kind of hijacks into mainstream culture. And what is the, like, the audience that's showing up for the, this. I remember people watching clips of UFC fights on YouTube, but it was still relatively

underground. And it was just like a very like, it just seemed like for teenage boys, it's like, here is unrestrained, like, totally like edge of civilization, masculinity just unleashed. Like, what's your understanding of beyond the four people I remember from the Pennsylvania suburbs? Like, the audience is showing up, like, what is the culture that they're celebrating? What is, What are they feeling when they're watching these matches? There is a bit of, again, to use another internet reference, there's a bit of faces of death in this where it's like, I don't know if we should be watching this.

Right. We're sort of like getting these clips passed around in which someone gets like an elbow to the eyeball. And you're like, this is going to be a thing I remember for a long time. Look, a key part of MMA versus boxing and not to be so simplistic about it, is that you can use your legs. And why is that a big deal? Because in boxing, you can only use your arms.

But why is that? Why does it matter? Because now you can kick and like... And you can grapple and you can get on the ground and you can put people into these like arm leg locks, like these really painful, torturous positions that are illegal in boxing. I mean, flatly illegal.

They're the things that make it so dangerous. Like there are clips of UFC fights in which one guy, leg kicks another guy, and the guy who does the kicking, his leg snaps off and begins to dangle inside the packaging of his skin. And so you just see breakages of bone. That's crazy. I mean, there are highlight reels of stuff like this.

Right. Yeah, there are a lot of sports that basically dilute their products when it comes to we're here for the theater, the performance, the litigation of toughness, where it's like we all want the fights. Yeah. But it's sort of like contained in this larger politeness. Mixed martial arts is like the uncut Colombian cocaine. I'm just like, we know what you're here for.

And it became extraordinarily popular. And were you watching this as it was coming up? Like, what's your relationship to UFC? So I've covered boxing for a really long time. I grew up a fan of boxing. And that felt like enough in terms of like sating my personal bloodthirst as a sports fan. Again, I was born in 85. I grew up in an era in which this all felt kind of gross.

But I do remember distinctly, I was a younger Porter at Sports Illustrated, my second year on the job, I got this email. This was 2008, and it was inviting me to cover an MMA fight. And I really didn't have any interest until I looked closer at the email. And this event, a strike force, a different MMA promotion, a different sort of competitor UFC, this event was going to be held at the Playboy Mansion. And so I did what any young reporter would do,

which is I said, I would like one credential, please. And I don't even remember if I told my bosses I was doing this. I was just like, yes, I will cover this and then paid for my own way to Los Angeles and showed up. And it was at the Playboy Mansion? So the other thing about mixed martial arts is that it takes place in this octagon. It's called The Octagon.

Okay. And there's a mat at the bottom, and it's not that big. So, like, unlike a football field or a basketball court, you can sort of, like... Put the octagon wherever. Absolutely. And the Playboy Mansion has a yard. And you can put an octagon in the yard. And they put that octagon right in the middle of that yard.

Good evening to you, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the world famous Playboy Mansion in Beverly Hills, California for Strike Force at the Mansion, too. A big night of mixed martial arts. And in the sort of like back part of the estate, you could hear, they had like a zoo back there, like a literal zoo. Okay. I hear the Playboy match is famous for its peacocks. I found one right here. Let's go see if we could get one.

It kind of felt like an unlocked part of the map of, like, Grand Theft Auto, honestly. Because it's just like so much spectacle in one place. And it was over the top. And you were invited, like, take a tour of the ground. Just took some pictures in the grata. Is that what it's called? Grotto. Grotto.

Yeah, we just took some pictures. And I'm really excited to be here. Like, there's the grotto. You know, you're wandering through. Again, in my mind, Hugh Hefner was just, like, wandering around in his smoking jacket. I don't know if I hallucinated that, admittedly, but I'm pretty sure he was there. It was his house, after all. Various Playboy bunnies were like, you know, they were hosting the assembled MMA press

and traveling parties for all the fighters. But this is what MMA was like in 2008. They were like desperate for someone like me who had zero experience covering it and just came out of nowhere. They were like cold emailing people. Like, will you cover this thing? Dot, dot, dot. It's at the Playboy Mansion. And I was like, you had me at the second to last word.

Right. How does it grow from, like you said one big inflection point is the reality show Ultimate Fighter? Like, how does it grow from there? Yeah. I mean, by the, we're talking about the 2010s. now, it truly became one of the fastest growing sports in the United States. It became popular. And so states all around the country started legalizing it. And simultaneously, it was also global. Like Brazil, Brazil is also a cradle of mixed martial arts. Brazilian jiu-jitsu happens to be

one of the dominant forms, one of dominant styles that won the marketplace of beating the shit out of each other. Suddenly, before you realized it, by 2015, you look up. up and suddenly the UFC and MMA is in lots of the respectable places that had truly said, you're not allowed here anymore. And pay-per-view fees, broadcasting rights, merch, all of this stuff, people realize that, oh, you can make actual money in this. So the UFC creates a national market for televised mixed martial arts combat. And later, as more and more entrants join the space, the sport gets popular. enough to move from the fringes of American culture towards its center. And somehow it gets pretty

popular while maintaining this whiff of taboo to it. Like part of the pleasure of watching it is that it feels like you're not supposed to. There is one more vector taking MMA mainstream, though. A popular podcast that in its early episodes mostly talked to male comedians and MMA fighters, the Joe Rogan experience. Because before Joe Rogan was even a podcaster, he was already a prominent figure in the then niche world of mixed martial arts. Truly is an honor to welcome back to the broadcast team here in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the host of NBC's Fear Factor Joe Rogan, our old sideline guy interviewing the fighters years ago.

Rogan in the clip looks like a different person. He's younger with a full head of hair, much less beefy, perhaps at the very beginning of his transition from L.A. stand-up and sitcom actor to eccentric philosopher jock. I'm a huge fan of Ultimate Fighting, all mixed martial arts. Literally, I don't care about other sports. Like, the Lakers won their third championship the other day. I couldn't care less. If they made basketball illegal, it wouldn't even bother me.

Joe Rogan is the announcer during the rise of all of this. He is the face, you could argue, of mixed martial arts. The Joe Rogan experience started as an MMA podcast. And we're live. So literally this morning, I had this thought. I thought about it a bit yesterday, and this morning I thought of it. I was like, why don't you just do it? I said, I need to do like some sort of an MMA recap show

because there's always so much shit that's happening. And I guess as a shorthand heuristic, everything Joe Rogan is, the multitudes he contains, idiot, but also at times like truly a master of subject matter. Yeah. Obscure and otherwise. Someone who can read books to completion and enjoy them. And also have these characters on who are absurd, if not,

outright problematic in meaningful ways. All of that is under the tent of mixed martial arts. Pablo had promised us a liberal arts view of sports, and I think we'd arrived at it. Just to stay in that view for a second, I think Joe Rogan confounds liberal arts types, because he represents a version of masculinity that's fairly alien to us. To be a good man right now can often feel like an unwinnable game.

So it's an anxious identity, And the solution most liberal arts men gravitate toward is to just talk about other men a lot. How they're bad, toxic, lonely. It's an identity you could understand many men not particularly enjoying. And Joe Rogan offers men a different path. He says that actually, it's very good to be a man, and that he can help you be even better at it. He'll tell you what exercises to do. Everything from Nordic curls.

Do you do those? Do you do Nordic curls? I should. I should do more than I do. Yeah, leg curls. He'll tell you what to put in your body. Did you incorporate peptides in your recovery? I didn't.

Do you hate healing? Do I hate healing? No. I didn't use peptides. And Joe Rogan believes that men should fight. Men should spar. There's no better stress reliever in the world than jujitsu or martial arts. There's no better.

You leave there. You're the kindest person in the world. You're just like, heal all of your aggressions out of your system. Yeah. And it's a phenomenal stress. This particular Rogan conversation is from earlier this year. with Mark Zuckerberg, who showed up to talk about meta, but also about combat. Regardless of what you're going through day-to-day with Facebook and meta

and all the different projects you have going on, it's not as hard as someone trying to choke you unconscious. It's not as acute. I think it's like sometimes you have someone trying to choke you unconscious slowly over a multi-month, multi-year period, and that's business. Right. But, no, I think that sometimes in business the cycle time is so long that it is very refreshing to,

just have a feedback loop that's like, oh, I, like, had my hand down, so I got punched in the face. It's like that's like... This is a sport, again, that has like a new gentlemanly sort of air to it, even if it is really appealing to those nerds, those gentlemen, on the basis of being able to confer the hyper masculinity that they seek. Yeah. I'm trying to decide if... Like, I have questions and thoughts about this, but maybe they're...

It's just, there's a, I'm so, I feel like I spent the first half of my life feeling so, like, all the problems that we culturally have with masculinity, I feel like I discovered for myself on my own getting beat up by men for, you know, 20 years. And also now in this moment where, like, American culture doesn't know what to do with masculinity other than sort of label it as troubled and bad. But like men have to find a version of being a man that works for them. as goofy as tech CEO grappling with people is, I've sympathy for, well, what am I supposed to do? Like, what am I supposed to do?

And, like, this feels good. I don't know. I have sympathy for it. Oh, by the way, like, it's sports. Like, the whole thesis of sports is you're going to enter this ecosystem in which your ego is on the line, in which you need a workout to be good at it, in which you need to sort of be ascetic in some ways

that will cost you in other areas. of your life. You've got to really devote yourself to it. But the rewards are, I think, I dare say, one of the healthier ways to perform the theater of gender. Yeah. Like, I hope that rather than, I don't know, tilting an election, the next tech CEO just learns Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I'm totally good with that. Of course, if this theory of the octagon is right, that male aggression might need contained socially acceptable places, to express itself. This leaves us back to the question of the week.

What happens when you take that sacred space and introduce to it an unmanly bout of foot-tickling? After these ads, we return to our scandal. Springstiles are at Nordstrom Rack stores now, and they're up to 60% off. Stock up and save on Ragginbone, Made Well, Vince, All Saints, and more of your favorites. How did I not know Rack has Adidas?

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Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening. Alongside politicians and thinkers like Corey Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Walts, Katanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Charlemagne, the God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts. So to go to the scandal that took place in this Octagon, like, just give me again, what is the date this transpires, who's the tickler, who's the ticklee? Yes, so we're returning to April 2024.

The tickler is named Mason Lewis. The ticklee remains Tim Fargo. And as always, we are talking about rage. in the cage 24. And so rage in the cage 24 provokes this scandal. Why, for the just normal UFC viewer, why were they offended by the dittly, dickly little foot? Because this question was one that immediately

became thorny to sort of like disentangle. Because fundamentally there is the whole thing of this being anti-masculine. It feels like you've discovered Sort of like a hack in a video game where it's like, if it worked, you shouldn't have done it because this isn't like honorable. Yeah. But I think the actual real opposition to it was not that this works too well. It's that how dare you suggest that this tickle is the reason why he won.

There was something almost more insulting about the fact that you think that these two guys who were putting their lives on the line in this way. You think that this was settled because of the tickle? Like, clearly, the people who made such a big deal of it, we were told. They were the ones. Those people were the ones who were just uneducated about how MMA really works. Oh, so it's not. So the online fandom for MMA is angry. But they're not angry at the thing I would have assumed.

They're not angry necessarily that a tickle transpired. It's sort of like they're angry at how outsiders are understanding this story. Like, the fact that I'm here is bad. I was going to say, the fact that I'm sitting in this studio with you, I feel like is a concern for them because there's a bit of a, you know, there's like a samurai code around this. And so you get curious about this. As you're watching the reaction to this grow, is it like, is it immediate that people are upset? Or is it like, as it gets outside attention, people are getting upset? It's really when we started reporting this.

Oh, you were making people upset. Yeah, so me and Dave Fleming, who's my friend and correspondent on this episode, who was himself a D1 college wrestler, the thing that Flem discovered, as we were both just sort of like asking around, like media friends, was that like they didn't want to participate in this story because it felt like it was insulting and demeaning to this thing they loved, which had fought, as you now understand, this long campaign for a certain respectability, a certain integrity that was not being jeopardized here because. it was too violent, ironically, given the long arc of the mainstreaming of the sport, it was a threat because it was reducing it to something of a punchline. Like the lack of violence in this one move, the tickle, was the thing that threatened, it seemed to us, to tug at these threads that might unravel more than a lot of defenders of the sport wanted to entertain. So the problem isn't that you're making the sport like ultra-violent.

That's like the fun of the sport. is that you're making it look goofy. Yeah. And their argument is a tickle happened in this match, but the tickle wasn't as decisive as you, the sort of snickering outsider, wanted to have been. So can I introduce the character of Big John at this point? Please.

So there's a guy whose name is Big John, and Flam interviewed him over Zoom, so you are going to hear from Flam a bunch in the tape. I know who you are, but will you introduce yourself just for our recording and sort of just give a little bit of your background for our audience that might not know. My name is John McCarthy.

If you're going to go to MMA, they call me Big John McCarthy. And he is basically the number one rules authority in mixed martial arts. At the very beginning at UFC 1, I was kind of part of the show. I was holding on to stuff, being a bodyguard, ended up being asked to be the referee for UFC 2, and continued on for a little over 25 year career. and it was a lot of fun. So he's been there basically from the very start, and if you want to envision Big John,

just envision Steven Segal. Okay. And you're close enough. Okay. The guy has himself like a highlight reel of him, like in the octagon, basically being like a third fighter there to enforce the rules

upon these ostensible maniacs. So he's like the institutional knowledge of justice in the sport. He is the guy who actually literally helped write the rulebook of MMA. And what was your expectation going in, like, of what you were going to find

talking to someone like him about this? I thought that Big John would be less dismissive of the angle of our reporting. Every time we went to Big John and pushed him on whether this worked and why shouldn't more people be doing this,

he basically found any excuse to diminish the premise. The mind starts to work in a different way. And that's why I said, tickling doesn't work to get you out of something while someone is creating pain. So he's just like, you guys are reporters looking for a funny story, tickling, transpired, but again, not pivotal. And also, even if it was in any way impactful, it would have been on the level of, okay, this was kind of like surprising. Yeah, because it doesn't really happen. But then that would be the ceiling of its effectiveness.

And Big John also communicated to us that because of this Mason Lewis Tim Fargo thing, which he knew of. about immediately as soon as we started asking about tickling. He was like, you're talking about amazing Louis and DeVargo? Like, yeah. I know the exact fight that you're talking about, because I had a lot of people sit there and say, is this legal? Yeah, it's legal. Absolutely legal. Is that why the person got out? No, it's not why the person got out. Lots of people had apparently online commented enough about this that he was also exhausted. Oh, he's just tired of talking about it. He's like these fucking idiots thinking that tickling is going to be the next great move in the toughest sport in the world. It's never true.

truly worked in any realm that I've ever seen. I've seen guys try it, trying to be funny. I've never seen tickling ever stop anything in a fight. This is the guy who inscribed on effectively stone tablets, what is and is not allowed in MMA. And he just was unconcerned in the way that we were concerned about, like, isn't this thing important? This thing that we just saw, isn't that kind of fascinating?

And he just wanted to make it very clear that we, We're wrong. So Big John tells you to fuck off. Would you try to talk to, like, the official, like the UFC League? Like, do they have anything to say? Well, the rules of UFC are helpfully published on their website. And as Big John confirmed, it's legal. You can tickle if you want.

It's just that why would you want to? Right. Why would you want to risk? I mean, this was Big John's argument. if you tickle me if you want to tickle me while I'm punching the shit out of you in the face go ahead and try but again

be careful when you do it because if you're doing it while someone can punch you in the face it's probably going to happen so his thing was like we don't need to ban tickling it's just not even worthy of that level of constitutional amendment I see this point like I can see the argument so then this sort of because you were not willing to abandon your premise

correct you wanted to talk to we saw the video it does feel You do watch the fight change. Like, I'm sorry, I'm not an expert, but I see a man in a thymaster lock with no way out. I see his little fingies come out. I see him tickle. And I see the fight change. So I feel like, objectively, something transpires.

Something transpired, and we can debate how big an impact it was. But that is enough for me to not take Big John as the final authority. It was like, let's continue to interrogate this. And you know that Big John has a. stake in the sport not being a goofy laughing stock. Can I tell you I'm a little worried about how much I'm talking shit about Big John? Why? Because he is big. And he's very online. Like Big John of your search engine listener as well. Just know that all of this comes from a place of genuine journalistic inquiry. And I respect you and your works. Established, for the record. We'll keep

it in. Where do you go next? Like I assume you want to talk to both the tickler and the tickly, although I could imagine either one having reasons for not wanting to talk. Well, first, we got to get to the tickler. And so did you feel at all worried that the tickler would not want to talk to you? I mean, I cannot stress how annoying it became, that we loved the story and the reporting, and we pride ourselves and get into the bottom of things, and the tickler was ghosting us.

Yeah. We made contact once, And from then on, there was no response. I texted him multiple times. We emailed him. We called him. Dave Fleming did the same. Tried just the front door.

We tried talking to people that he trained with. We tried talking to people who were associated with him in various record surges that we found. It became a worry that we had that he was avoiding us because he thought that what he had done was shameful. Or I could imagine just when there's a lot of heat kicked up online, you don't want to step out in front of it. Like, even if he thought it was okay, now it's like a weird, loose thing that could blow back on him

if you guys poke at it. And perhaps whether or not he knows Big John personally, perhaps he was of the opinion, which would have been fair, that this isn't the best brand to have? The tickler. The tickler isn't exactly,

I mean, yeah, it's like you've got like the most badass like Brazilian jiu-jitsu guy, like the person you can do like this, and then you've got the guy that you've got to keep your little featsies away. from him. Can I give you some MMA nicknames? Yeah. The Korean zombie. Rampage. The axe murderer. Shogun. The Iceman. Crow cop. Yeah, all these people sound like they broke out of Arkham Asylum.

And then you got Gucci-Goochoooooooo. Yeah, the natural-born killer and the tickler, not exactly peers in this way. But so do you get him? Oh, we got him. So it's like four hours before his bout. But the tickler is outside the Wyndham right now, warming up or, I don't know, just getting loose. I don't see any tickle-tickle going on, but you never know. All right. We got him because we sent Dave Fleming to perhaps the most opposite place in the world to the Playboy Mansion. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thunder Ballroom Dome.

And by that, I mean, we sent him to... the ballroom of the Wyndham Hotel in downtown Rochester, New York. Why was that the location to send him to? Because it turns out that we waited long enough that the tickler, Mason Lewis, was actually going to fight. Oh. He stands at 5.7. Official weight of 135 pounds.

He is Mason. And did he talk to Dave? After eight hours of amateur MMA fighting, in which this call. Carpeted hotel ballroom had an octagon place to top it. And just the visuals on this, it's just like, you know, there's the local dispensary has tables out in the hallway. The carpet is immediately stained with blood. It smells like hot dogs, and it's unclear if it's the hot dogs or the people in the octagon.

Yeah. And then... All right, nice to meet you. I'm Dave Fleming. Nice to meet you, Dave. From Pablo Show. Pablo Show. Dave.

waiting waits around long enough, such that he can directly approach the tickler, Mason Lewis. Can you give us five minutes? Yes, I can give you five minutes. Are you done with your family? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Guys, give me five minutes. Yeah. Give me five minutes, okay?

Awesome. Let's just go over here. Yep, you got it. You got it. Mason Lewis is in person so baby-faced and young looking. Like, he's actually an amateur fighter. He was, like, playing up a level at Rage in the Cage 24. Okay.

And he sat down and was shockingly, shockingly open to discussing anything we wanted when it came to his nickname that we had imposed. And what did he have to say for himself? So the first thing about the tickler, Mason Lewis, is that he's very intentional. And I don't even mean that in terms of his MMA strategy. I mean that in terms of the fact that he, like, journals. Really? He's thoughtful. I'm very conscious in the cage.

A lot of people just disassociate and they leave. almost their mind, I want to say. I do a lot of meditation. I do at least an hour of meditation day. And I feel like that allows me to be conscious in every moment of my life, truly. And so the reason he said that he wasn't getting back to us was because he doesn't really use his phone that much.

Oh, wow. He's like one of those guys who, like, is big into journaling and not being on social media and not even really texting. And so whatever. We took that as a kind letdown, but nonetheless, he provided his credibility on the matter by just, like, openly talking about this. I don't know, I don't know why I did it.

It was just like, you know what, screw it. I'm just going to tickle the foot to get out of this. You know, we're in a weird position. If he can let go of this from a tickled, then so be it. And the thing we asked him was, A, did he think that this worked? And so that thing, the tickling, like, was that the difference? Yeah, that could have been, yeah. You know, it could have been the difference bigger, yeah.

And I knew people are ticklish. People let go. So I figured if I took it. his foot, he might let go. So that's just what I did. And the answer, of course, was yes. We followed up with... Would you tickle

again? Would he tickle again? And there was no hesitation. 100%. Okay. And that's what it takes. That's what it takes. Of course he would. Because it worked. Because it worked. And did he have a view about the reaction to the thing that he'd done?

He was, I think, a bit mystified as to how big a deal it was. because to him, it was a function of his hyper-competitiveness. So he didn't feel like he was breaking the rules. He didn't feel like he was swerving too far into taboo. From his point of view, a thoughtful, meditative, phone-avoiding,

thinking man's brawler, your job is to win. Your job is to win within a very short set of rules. And he thought of something nobody had thought of before, and so, of course, he was going to do it. And also, it turns out, that Mason Lewis is the youngest child of six siblings. Oh.

So he was probably tickled quite a bit. He became the machine he raged against. Wow. You can use the master's tools. Well, the other thing that he says, he's like, you know, we ask him. So given that you're the youngest of six, what would happen if someone tickled you? And he was like, oh, I'd be screwed. He would just have no defense.

You would have no difference. I mean, I will say, like, one of the problems that I feel like nobody's pointing out in the tickling debate is that people's ticklishness is something that I think you're born with and can't change. Like, so there's people, I'm basically immune to tickling. Like, maybe at the edges if you're lucky, but I'm pretty hard to tickle. But there's people who are just very ticklish. And yeah. But I guess that's true of, like, everything in sports. People are different heights.

People are different, which is part of it. The genetic lottery. has many, many forms. Yes. There is height, there is strength, there is your hormone level, and there is ticklishness.

And it sounds, what I'm finding out is that, PJ, you have a competitive edge in the world of the Octagon. I'll be in the Octagon. So he's unrepentant. He doesn't care

what the raging online commentary at things about what he's done. He believes his way is the way. What about the tickled person? You guys talk to him. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The tick Lee, Tim Fargo. He wants a rematch. My coach wants me to fight him again.

He wants me to fight him so bad. He was so respectful of Mason Lewis. And had been, of course, familiar with all of the jokes. Lots of people had been asking him about this, too. The Internet was unkind to the tickly. They were unkind to the tickly. Because he lost to the tickler. And they think that if they were in the octagon,

they never would have flinched at a tickle. Well, I think it's also just, like, embarrassing. Right. It's like you go to be the most masculine man and somebody gives you the equivalent of a wedgy. And he was on the way to absolutely dominating that fight. And so you could argue that he kind of choked. But Tim Fargo, the tick lead, didn't see it that way.

He just saw it as he lost a match. He saw it as he lost a match to an upcoming young friend. who did a thing that he was surprised to encounter? I just think no one really thinks of it, because there's so many other techniques from most positions that we're always practicing, and no one really teaches that. So it kind of took a second,

and then I realized what he was doing. But it kind of just got me, like, mentally out of it a little bit more than, like, actually making me want to let go, because then you're just thinking, like, this guy's tickling me in a fight. He just kind of gets you out. He testified to its effectiveness that it did, in fact, work on him. And it worked on him so well that he basically said,

if we get back in the Octagon and we did get both of them to agree to want to fight each other again in this rematch, he would absolutely be willing to tickle. If I had to, if there was nothing else left, if I could get him in a tickling position, then I would. That's amazing. I mean, he was radicalized. So you could imagine a future where the two of them were squaring off amongst the like bunches and the kick and the grindling, they would just be out there with their little tickling claws

trying to tickle each other? I mean, I'd pay for that. I would totally pay for that. That would be my first UFC match. Absolutely. I would definitely go to ultimate tickling championship. It just feels like a lot of ingredients are being put into a soup in a very unusual way. Yeah.

And so do you think that, like, Part of the reason there's a push to not recognize tickling as effective is just because, like, there's all sorts of behaviors that we recognize work, but which we think are bad for, like, the larger system that they're in. Like, yeah, people can do this and they'll succeed, but we don't want people to do this. And so we'll try to find ways to discourage it. And do you think that that is what tickling is in this context? Like, a useful tool that maybe for the league is bad for it to exist. But, It exists and it works. That is my most core suspicion that they know, they have a sense that this would work, and they're afraid if lots of people start doing it. And the product would fundamentally perhaps change as a result. Sports is full of stories like this, by the way. Sports is full of stories in which there are these hacks that get more points.

Right. I'm not exactly arguing that tickling is the equivalent of something that's so effective that it would completely tilt the competitive landscape of this sport. But I do think that there might be yet another incredibly tense climactic moment at which someone is about to lose consciousness and their ego and their humiliation is absolutely on the line. And the thing they think of is the thing that Mason Lewis very intense, intentionally decided to do. And at a certain point, I think it's entirely possible that the highlight real, the viral clip of that moment,

may not be exactly what the founding fathers of MMA had envisioned. It makes me so happy to know that. It makes me so happy to know that tickling is something that they don't yet have a vaccine for. Rogan, what do you think about that, huh? Pablo, thank you. Thanks, PJ. Pablo Torres.

His excellent show is called Pablo Torre finds out. You can go there to see some of the videos we referenced in this story and listen to their other stories. One of our staff favorites is Pablo's interview with director Ezra Edelman about his prints documentary that was squashed by Netflix. It's so good. Go check it out, and please tell them we sent you. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey.

It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Truthy Pinnameney. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Additional production support and fact-checking by Kim Kupal. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armand Bizarion. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. And thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Moira Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schuff.

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