Actor and martial artist Michael Jai White believes American boys are too soft these days.
“That’s another thing that’s sad about the United States: We’re not making men anymore,” White told Joe Rogan on Rogan’s podcast Wednesday while discussing “rites of passage” for men in countries like Australia and New Zealand.
“Not a lot of them,” Rogan agreed. “When they are, they stand out.”
White claimed that non-Americans are often cast in movies now to play the “American alpha male. … It’s very rarely an American. It’s such a trip, man.”
Rogan agreed that “over the last couple of decades,” American masculinity has been “demonized.”
White said he’d seen the “beginning” of that trend when he was a schoolteacher.
“I was right on the forefront, seeing, like, everybody gets a trophy,” the 58-year-old said of participation awards. “These kids, you know, they’re — it’s about their self-esteem, and you got to protect that. I’m like, ‘Come on.’ And, you know, taking away competition? I saw the beginning of that.”
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Because of that, he said, kids don’t know how to deal with losing anymore, “and then they end up shooting a classroom.”
Rogan agreed that “losing is the best medicine.”
“The Dark Knight” actor, who holds black belts in several different disciplines, told Rogan he became an athlete on his high school track team in a “fluke” race when he beat one of the fastest runners at the school.
Gillian White and Michael Jai White in Los Angeles, California, on Feb. 16, 2026. Getty Images
His experience in track later taught him to evolve his martial arts, “because nowhere is there a benefit of like cutting off fractions of seconds in movement like track.”
“As far as efficiency of motion, all the things I had to do with track, I started applying in fighting,” he explained. “And that’s what kind of gave me cheat codes into things to where being super-efficient really helped.”
White also said he felt his natural athleticism sometimes hampered his growth in martial arts because it made it easier not to try as much as other guys who succeeded through pure grit and hard work.
“Fighting was easy to me, but I learned that when I was the celebrated fighter that [I] was less of a good martial artist because then I kind of would kind of flake off other things. Like, I wasn’t, I didn’t try as hard as other people,” he explained.
Michael Jai White attends the 8th Annual American Black Film Festival Honors in Beverly Hills. FilmMagic
He gave the example of a hypothetical fighter who gets fatigued after 100 kicks when White might get fatigued after 1,000 kicks.
“And he pushes to 120, and I push to 1,001. Who’s the better martial artist? He is. because he’s pushed [out of] his comfort zone,” White said.
He said because of that, he no longer compares himself to other fighters when he trains but works “to my ability.”
“That really taught me something as far as, like, again, why I put myself through these things and the benefit of it by really like what the martial arts really teaches,” he said. “And the fact that, yeah, I had these gifts, but if I use those gifts as a crutch, I’m limiting what I can be.”