On Monday UFC commentator Joe Rogan said to Brendan Schaub all the things we’ve all thought about saying to one pro fighter or another, only he said it on a live podcast to a friend who’d just suffered his second consecutive loss at UFC 181 two days earlier.

It was rough, in other words. Rogan told Schaub that he doesn’t have what it takes to be a champion, that he’ll likely only continue to get his brain knocked around if he sticks around in the sport, that he should probably quit and do something else with his life while he’s still got all his parts in sound working order. The long, uncomfortable silences between exchanges? That’s the sound of dreams of being crushed.

“The reality of your skillset and where you’re at now, I don’t see you beating the elite guys,” Rogan said. “I don’t see you beating Cain Velasquez. I don’t see you beating Junior Dos Santos. I don’t see you beating Fabricio Werdum.”

And honestly, I don’t think there are too many (relatively) impartial observers of this sport who would disagree with that assessment. Then again, if every heavyweight who can’t beat Cain Velasquez has to quit, there won’t even be enough bodies to populate those heavyweight top-10 lists that the internet loves so much.

But anybody who’s ever put any thought into the nature of this business can see Rogan’s point. With a few exceptions, only the champs stand a decent chance of making enough in MMA to live on for the rest of their lives. If you don’t have it in you to be champ, then you have to confront that fact that sooner or later this part of your life will be done, yet you’ll still need to make a living at…something. Once you’ve found your ceiling, wouldn’t it be better to get started on that something sooner rather than later? And wouldn’t you be better off doing it with a fully functional brain, not to mention a face that does not yet resemble a misshapen frying pan?

The answer, of course, is yes. The logic is inescapable. It’s also a lot easier to accept when you’re sitting on Rogan’s side of the table rather than Schaub’s.

This is an old conflict, for both fighters and fans. One of the things most of us love about combat sports, whether we admit it out loud or not, is how high the stakes are. If you go in there against someone better, you don’t just lose – you get beat up. You get hurt. Do it often enough, and you may wind up with the kind of wounds that never heal. A career in this business is a tightrope walk, in that sense. For the spectators, the appeal of the tightrope act is the fact that sometimes people fall.

But we don’t actually want to see them fall. Not really. When it happens, we feel guilty. We start to wonder about ourselves, about what kind of people we are to enjoy watching humans harm each other for money and glory. To assuage our guilt, we try to nudge certain fighters toward the door, reasoning that, if they stop in time, they might suffer no serious long-term effects. And if they refuse to stop? Hey, at least we tried. After that it’s on them.

The problem is, if you’re the kind of person who made it far enough in this sport for us to know and care about you, you’re also probably the kind of person who doesn’t quit easily. When Rogan asked Schaub if he saw himself becoming champion, Schaub said immediately that he did.

“It’s the only reason I do it,” he said.

In the silence that followed, you could almost see Schaub’s two friends – Rogan and fellow comedian Bryan Callen – trying to reconcile Schaub’s unrealistic image of himself with their more honest, yet still affectionate image of him. As much as they like Schaub, they know that, absent a tidal wave that wipes out most of the top heavyweights in the UFC, Schaub will never be the best in the world. It doesn’t make them like him any less, obviously. But it does probably make them sad to think that he’ll continue chasing a dream that’s beyond his reach, and he’ll suffer greatly for it in the process.

And that’s where the analogies to almost any other career field inevitably fail. As Schaub pointed out, Callen is never going to be as funny or successful as a comedian like Chris Rock. He just doesn’t have that in him. If he tries and fails at it though, the worst he’ll get is his feelings hurt. He might waste some time. He might damage his liver drinking away his sorrows in dark comedy clubs. Big deal. For Schaub, his body and his brain are on the line, and he’s going to need those later in life.

But fine, it’s easy for outsiders to tell him to quit. It’s especially easy for Rogan, who could probably quit calling fights whenever he feels like it if it gets too unpleasant for him to watch, which he suggested might happen at some point in the near future. Being rich means having that option to quit your job whenever you feel like it. Aside from the elite few, pro fighters don’t have that luxury, and Schaub knows it.

“I think it’s easy for you to sit there, with, whatever, $12 million in the bank and say, ‘Oh, you need to stop doing this,’” Schaub told Rogan at one point. “It’s easier when you’re set and you don’t come from that background and you’re going home to your wife and kids and $6 million mansion and say ‘Stop doing this and do podcasts for the next 40 years.’”

And good for Schaub for making that point, because it’s one we tend to ignore. We want these young men to dedicate their lives to this sport, which often means sacrificing everything from personal relationships to financial security all in the pursuit of greatness. Then, once we’ve decided that they can’t do it anymore, we want them to pull the plug and do something else.

What’s that something supposed to be? That’s their problem to figure out. We’re not thinking about the resume with a six- or an eight- or even a 10-year work history gap where all it says is, ‘Professional fighter,’ a job that qualifies you for almost nothing else.

We also seem to think that, when we tell fighters what they’re risking by continuing to fight, that we’re giving them information they didn’t have. Most fighters will tell you that they know exactly what can happen from years of brain trauma inside the cage. They just don’t think it’ll happen to them, or else they think it’ll happen to a future version of themselves that is not the concern of the present version.

Like drug addicts, they know they can’t do this indefinitely, at least not without severe consequences. Also like drug addicts, they don’t particularly care about that hypothetical future while they’re in the process of doing it. That’s part of the appeal. That’s why it takes a certain kind of person in the first place.

In a lot of ways, Schaub is lucky. He’s smarter than a lot of fighters, wittier and more interesting to talk to, probably also a little saner. Then again, once you step out of that world it might not be enough to be smart or funny or good-looking by fighter standards. Suddenly you have to consider whether you’re enough of any of those things to compete with the people who have been getting by on them while you were off learning left hooks and double-leg takedowns.

It’s a scary thing, to leave the one career you’ve had for your entire adult life. It’s probably even scarier when it doesn’t feel like it’s your choice to make, and when the best thing your friends think they can do is to convince you to make it by stomping out the fire that drove you here to begin with.

For complete coverage of UFC 181, check out the UFC Events section of the site.