The transcript below is from the video “Why MMA SUCKS For Self-Defense” by Jesse Enkamp.

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“You’ve probably heard the case of UFC fighter, UFC light heavyweight, one of the top guys and he experienced a home invasion. And this caused some controversy because the articles about this were labelled, something like, ‘It was the Toughest Fight of my Life.’ And if you hear from him, it’s like, okay, that makes sense.”

Anthony Smith:

“You know, if I end up dying from a gunshot wound or whatever, at least he’d be hurt enough to take a deal with it. So, that was my mindset going in to that situation and fortunately, he wasn’t armed.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“Alright, some crazy guy on drugs, just high out of his mind, breaks into his house in the middle of the night. He’s sleeping. He is not ready for a fight. I mean, nobody is in those situations, right?”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“No.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“This crazy guy comes in. He wrestles him down to the ground; he tries to control him. And from my perspective, I’m seeing, okay, there’s a trained cage fighter trying to control violence.”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“Yeah.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“And there’s a crazy meth-out crack head trying to inflict violence.”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“He might have a weapon.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“And those two are very different…yes, so he might have a weapon, and that’s something, you know. Anthony brought it up again and again. He didn’t know if this guy had a weapon. He thought he might die. He thought he might get shot, stabbed, something like that.”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“Right.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“He just wanted to make sure his family were safe.”

Joe Rogan:

“He said, ‘No normal human being is able to fight like that.’ He said, ‘I am by no means the baddest dude on the planet.’ But listen, he’s top one hundred. Out of all the humans in the planet, Anthony Smith is one of the top hundred baddest motherfuckers that’s walking the earth. But he’s a regular Joe and had a hard time dealing with him. ‘And he took everything I gave him: every punch, every knee, every elbow. He took every single one of them and kept fighting me.’ At one point, Smith said, ‘His mother-in-law brought him a kitchen knife that she held…’”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“To take a skill set like mixed martial arts or combat sports, and try to apply that to MMA…or try to apply that to self-defense.”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“Yep.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“In some ways, it’s not enough. For example, if there’s a weapon, a force multiplier, it’s not enough. No matter what your hands and feet can do, it’s simply never enough. And in other ways, it’s too much. If somebody attacks you, you choke them unconscious. In some states in the US, that means you’re serving prison time.”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“Exactly.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“Even if you don’t kill them.”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“Right. Right.”

Joe Rogan:

“But the guy took it. The fact that the guy only weighed a hundred and seventy pounds, and it says, ‘Smith fights at two hundred and five pounds.’ He’s walking around two thirty, easy. And he’s smashing this dude that’s a legit sixty pounds lighter than him, which is crazy. He said he experienced a wide range of emotions afterwards.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“I’ve got two small children. One’s seven; one’s four. Sometimes, I’ll be like lying on my bed and then they run in in the morning while I’m sleeping and jump on my chest, like, feet first, and I’m like, ‘Oh! That hurts!’ And they’re like, ‘Daddy, you’re supposed to be a cage fighter! Suck it up.’ Oh, I wasn’t ready.”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“Exactly! Yeah!”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“It’s not the same!”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“So, even like, small kids can catch you with the element of surprise.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“So, there are so many variables to self-defense that is simply not addressed by combat sports and the overwhelming majority of martial arts – which is why when people ask me about self-defense, I generally say, ‘Self-defense is a legal term. You want a self-defense expert? Talk to a lawyer.’

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“Yeah.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“Find out what the laws are where you live.”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“Right.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“They will vary widely. So I gotta ask you, how much do people ask you about self-defense on your YouTube channel?”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“Well…”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“It’s gotta come into play, right?”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“I mean, since the original purpose of karate is supposed to be self-defense. Then, people who are interested in the origins or the traditional aspect, they always want to learn more about self-defense and how to apply these esoteric moves that we do today, the original way. But people who do modern sports-based karate, they might not be as interested. They might see it as an exotic hobby to learn how to use the moves in self-defense but they would rather just score points and become world champions, maybe. And that’s a completely different skill set, right? And somehow, I try to bridge that gap between these two worlds because I call myself a ‘karate nerd,’ because I love to embrace all aspects of the art.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“Right.”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“And when I look at the Kata, for example. You know the forms, same as one would do in kung fu, for example.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“Yeah. Yeah.”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“Then, these techniques that were recorded and transmitted, and you know, shared on the island of Okinawa among these different masters and later became what we know today referred to as karate, they were supposed to be used in self-defense in ways that you won’t see in MMA, even though MMA is supposed to be like this full-contact brutal cage fighting. Like, for example, there are moves where you learn how to defend against a hair grab. No one is going to grab your hair in an MMA fight.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“Especially not mine.”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“There are moves where you defend against multiple opponents…Right, exactly! And so, the contextual premise is so different but people who only scratch the surface think that they’re the same. But when you start digging deeper – which is what I do because I’m a karate nerd, right? That’s literally my job – Then you start to see that, well, there are differences, right? And I think that once you start exploring these differences, then you can truly learn the difference and understand how self-defense works because you also have verbal de-escalation tactics and situational awareness. Now, all of these things that somebody who might experience a home invasion might not be prepared for, even though they’re a trained MMA fighter just like you said. You’ve tried a lot of these self-defense techniques with your MMA fighters, right? What has the experience been from those experiments?”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“Okay. You know, most of them, I can’t tell right away that this is not gonna work, because being in this massive variety of positions…I mean, you just spend like 5 minutes sparring and you’ll go through hundreds of different positions. And, if you spend a thousand hours sparring, ten thousand hours sparring, you can see right away. Like, yeah, that’s not the way pressure works. That’s not the way position works. That’s not the way leverage works, right? But every once in a while, like, there was this one I honestly began to question. There was this woman named Debbie Stevens and she has some good self-defense channel. Like, most of it is, I would say pretty good information. But then, she had this one video, just this one, where she taught that a slap on the side of the neck, like an open-hand slap, would instantly knock somebody out, and I was like, that doesn’t seem right. I mean, I’ve never tried it so let’s go to the gym and try it. So, I had my student, Joyce, this female MMA student. She just slapped me as hard as she could repeatedly on the side of the neck and I was like, no, it’s not comfortable, it’s not nice to get slapped.”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“Right. Right.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“But it’s like, still fully conscious. And now, assuming I had bad intentions towards her in the first place, there would be worse intentions at that point.”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“Right.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“So, again, even good self-defense instructors can make mistakes, like that, obviously. Anybody can. So, my whole point of making those videos is to get people to question a little bit. Just try out your stuff before you put a hundred-percent confidence in it. Just put it to the test even if that test is mild resistance.”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“And that’s what’s so lacking in many of the traditional arts. That pressure testing. And to me, that’s one of the greatest things about MMA.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“A question I get all the time is how…what about street fights? What about street fights? And I always tell people don’t get into street fights.”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“Yeah.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“Well, how do I not get into street fights?”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“Yeah.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“And my simple answer is don’t be the type of guy that people want to fight!”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“Yeah.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“And sometimes people…Yeah, I’m not saying don’t try to be…”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“I had a friend who always attracted violence. Just like you say, he would end up in street fights all the time. And he was a pretty okay guy. I mean, we were friends. He wasn’t a douchebag or an asshole. But still, he ended up in fights a lot. He get robbed a lot. And he just lacked that situational awareness. It’s what I like to call it. The Japanese term is zanshin – just knowing where you’re gonna be and not be at the wrong place at the wrong time, essentially. I mean if you’re walking down the street, and you see a gang coming at you, just walk to the other side of the street. Don’t think that just because I’m a martial artist, I should be able to walk and face this gang of thugs, right? It’s just so stupid. And for this reason, I’ve won every single street fight in my life by not ending up in a street fight.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“Yes, exactly. Same here, man. Same here!”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“Right.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“I get asked constantly, like, how many street fights have you been in? And my answer is zero.”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“You’re undefeated.”

Ramsey Dewey (MMA Fighter):

“And people are like, ‘What?!’ Undefeated in street fighting, exactly! And if you get in hundreds of street fights then, you are the problem, basically.”

Jesse Enkamp (The Karate Nerd):

“Yeah, yeah. You are doing something wrong. I just hope that my future kids enjoy that same lack of manhood.”