Bas Rutten was, by most measures, the most dangerous man in whatever room he walked into. Three-time King of Pancrase, UFC heavyweight champion, retired without losing any of his last 22 fights, and once credited by FightMetric with the highest significant-strike accuracy it had recorded.
So the thing I did not expect, when I sat down to talk with him, was to spend most of the conversation talking about calm.
Not the calm of a man who has nothing to fear. The calm of a man who taught himself, over decades, not to be ruled by the thing that made him dangerous in the first place. And the more he talked, the more it sounded like something I have been reading about for years in Seneca and Epictetus, only he arrived at it in a ring in Japan rather than a library in Rome.
Here is what stayed with me.
The two voices
Bas found his calm in the worst possible classroom. His first fight in Japan, he learned on the day that his opponent was 33 pounds heavier, that the round was 30 minutes long with no breaks, and that there were no rules he recognised. He had no ground game. Everything was new.
And strangely, that is what settled him. He realised that if he came out swinging he would empty the tank in ninety seconds and have twenty-eight minutes left to die in. So he wrote a large "R" on each fist with a marker. R for rustig. Relaxed.
What he describes next is the part I keep thinking about. Mid-fight, calm enough to overhear two Australians in the front row discussing a house move, he noticed there were two voices in him. "There was the bad voice, the aggressive one who wants to go, no, no, no, no. And there was the other voice that really kept me calm."
The Stoics would have recognised that instantly. The whole discipline of assent is learning to notice the first voice, the automatic impression, and not hand it your body before the second voice has spoken.
Why the relaxed man wins
I train jiu-jitsu, not MMA, but I know the feeling he is describing. He put it more bluntly than any coach ever has: "The relaxed person will beat the aggressive person nine out of ten times. Always."
The aggressive fighter contracts every muscle, breathes wrong, and carries his own body weight up and down with every panicked breath. The relaxed fighter waits, moves, takes a beat, and lets the other man burn himself out. Aggression feels like power. It is mostly just expensive.
This is the bit that transfers cleanly off the mat. Most of the situations that feel like fights are not fights. They are emails, meetings, someone cutting in front of you in traffic. The person who stays relaxed is not being passive. He is refusing to spend energy on a fire that will go out on its own.
The worst thing that can happen
Before every fight, Bas ran a small ritual in the locker room. He asked himself, "What is the worst thing that can happen?" The answer he kept landing on was almost funny. "I could get knocked out. Is it really bad? There's a referee. He's not going to hit me ten extra times."
He turned down early no-rules fighting for exactly this reason. Without a referee, a knockout could become brain damage. With one, the catastrophe had a ceiling. "If there's a referee, sign me up."
That is premeditatio malorum, the Stoic rehearsal of adversity, done by a man who had never read the term. You do not calm fear by pretending nothing bad can happen. You calm it by walking all the way to the worst case and discovering it has a floor you can stand on.
The voice you feed grows
We got onto anger, and Bas drew the line I think most people miss. Aggression, to him, is a moment you can summon and release. Anger is something that stays in you and asks to be fed. "Which voice grows the fastest? The one you feed the most."
His practice for cooling it down uses the same move Epictetus keeps returning to: step back from the impression before you assent to it. "Remove yourself from the situation. Put your best friend in that exact situation. What would you tell him to do?" You would never tell your friend to lose control. If your own car breaks down it is the end of the world. If your friend's car breaks down you shrug and say that is a shame. Same event, different distance.
He had a sharper version for the road. If a stranger cuts off six cars ahead of you, you think, what an idiot, and forget it. If he does it to you, suddenly it is, how dare he. "That's pride." Nothing changed except that it was now about you.
What kind of man do you want to be
The line that got the biggest reaction in his talks, and the one I suspect will get the biggest reaction here, is the one he uses as a compass.
"What kind of man do you want to be? A man who can overcome his weaknesses, vices, and imperfections. A man who's not a slave to his passions, emotions, and desires, but a man who's completely in control of himself."
He is honest that he has not arrived. He told me about the beers on the 4th of July and getting back on the wagon the next morning. That honesty is exactly why I trust him on it. He sounds less like a guru than another patient comparing notes on what is working. Bas talks the same way. The people I distrust are the ones who claim to have finished.
Practice, not theory
The thing Bas has that most readers of philosophy do not is that he is a practitioner all the way through. He did not read about discipline. He built it, on days when a childhood asthma attack meant crawling down a flight of stairs three steps at a time.
You can watch the same split in anyone who picks up Stoicism. Some people read Marcus Aurelius, think "that's nice," and put it down. A few actually run the drills. Notice the impression before you assent to it. Rehearse the worst case until it loses its charge. Step back and ask what you would tell a friend. Do the one thing you do not want to do today.
My son goes to a Catholic school, and he came home at five or six years old proud that he knew what the word temptation meant. I have been thinking about that ever since I spoke to Bas, because his whole life is a demonstration of the same unglamorous truth. The knowing is easy. The doing is the entire game.
Bas closed with a line I have kept. "Don't make it a race. Make it a journey."
The full conversation with Bas Rutten is on YouTube and the podcast. If you want to train these ideas rather than just read them, that is what we do inside the free 7-Day Stoic Challenge.