It has been a difficult year for the U.F.C., the company that helped to turn mixed martial-arts, or M.M.A.—what some people once called “cage fighting,” and others still do—into a sport popular enough to rival boxing, at least in America. Despite the continued success of Ronda Rousey, a breakthrough star, the year’s U.F.C. schedule was nearly as notable for the many fights that didn’t happen, often due to injury, as for the ones that did. Largely as a consequence, Standard & Poor’s lowered the corporate credit rating of the U.F.C.’s parent company, Zuffa, and announced that it might lower Zuffa’s corporate debt rating, too, suggesting that profits might fall forty per cent. Standard & Poor’s assessment was also a kind of ultimatum: “A negative rating action could occur if we are not confident that Zuffa’s operations are recovering meaningfully by the first quarter of 2015.”

One change for 2015 has already inspired ambivalent reactions from fans and fighters: the U.F.C. announced, on December 1st, a new sponsorship deal with Reebok. No longer will fighters arrive at the cage wearing shorts and bearing banners emblazoned with the logos of miscellaneous sponsors; instead, starting in July, they will compete wearing Reebok-branded outfits, in exchange for extra compensation linked to their positions in the official U.F.C. rankings. Needless to say, fighters are worried about whether the new Reebok money will make up for their lost sponsorship income.

Last Saturday night, the mediagenic heavyweight Brendan Schaub fought Travis Browne at U.F.C. 181, but he said that the looming Reebok arrangement scared away most of his sponsors. “I make twice as much money off sponsors than I do what the U.F.C. pays me,” Schaub said. He said that, before the Browne fight, about six of his sponsors pulled out. “It’s the lowest I’ve ever made on sponsorship money,” Schaub said. He said this on Monday night, during a recent episode of his popular podcast “The Fighter and the Kid,” which he co-hosts with Bryan Callen, a comedian. You can hear and watch the exchange, at least for the moment, in this video, starting at 1:07:44; as the site Bloody Elbow pointed out, the official podcast edits out the four-minute discussion about Reebok.

If this was censorship, it may have been unnecessary—it’s likely that few listeners, at the end of the two-hour podcast, were thinking about Reebok. The episode was astonishing, and easily as memorable as any fight this year. The guest was Joe Rogan, the comedian, podcaster, and onetime kickboxer who is also, in his capacity as a commentator and an interviewer, the face and voice of the major U.F.C. broadcasts. The podcast was streamed live on Monday night, two days after Schaub’s fight with Browne. It hadn’t gone well: Browne, who is taller, mainly kept Schaub at arm’s length. (“This is the first time Brendan’s ever fought somebody that big,” Rogan told viewers. “You can tell he’s having a hard time closing the distance.”) Then, as Schaub rushed in, Browne connected with a short, sneaky right uppercut, which dropped Schaub to the mat, with Browne on top of him. Schaub writhed and parried for nearly two minutes, trying to avoid the punches of Browne, who sat on his stomach, and then sat on his back, reaching around to pummel the side of Schaub’s head. With eleven seconds left in the first round, and Schaub making only wan attempts at defense, the referee shouted, “Stop! Stop! Stop!” and the fight was finished.

When Schaub agreed, forty-eight hours later, to talk about the fight with Rogan, he probably expected some candid analysis, though surely not as much as he got. “You looked very stiff,” Rogan said. “You didn’t look fluid. You just didn’t look good. It didn’t look like you were well-prepared. Like, your movement just didn’t look like an élite fighter’s movement.” The more Rogan talked, the more definitive his verdict became. “The reality of your skill set, of where you’re at now—I don’t see you beating the élite guys,” he said.

ROGAN: It’s not like you don’t have good qualities, but if you had a wrestling match with [heavyweight champion] Cain Velasquez, how well do you think you’d do?

SCHAUB: Straight-up wrestling? I think people would be surprised.

ROGAN: Really? You think so? I think you’d be surprised. I really do. I think he’d fuck you up. And I say that as a friend, and a guy who loves you.

This wasn’t a pep talk, though; it was more like the opposite of one. Far from telling Schaub to work harder, Rogan told him, in essence, to quit. “Look,” he said, “you’re a very good fighter. That’s not what the issue is. The issue is, Can you become a champion? If you can’t become a champion, are you comfortable with getting knocked out three or four more times over the next five or six years?” He said he worried that Schaub wasn’t “a hundred per cent focussed”—and for good reason. “You’re a smart dude,” Rogan said. “And the problem with smart dudes is smart dudes think about variables. You think about the future. You also think about brain damage. You think about concussions. You think about how many you’ve already had, how many you’ve got coming up, how much damage you’re taking in training. When does damage start to show up in your life?”

When football fans and players started to learn the severity and extent of brain injuries among players, some of them were shocked, and that shock has reshaped the N.F.L. in recent seasons. But in M.M.A., as in boxing, no one can claim to be shocked. Everyone knows that causing a concussion is one of the best ways to win, and we know, too, that you can often tell an old fighter from a young one by hearing him talk. Partly as a result, the concussion debate hasn’t much changed M.M.A. or boxing—these are, everyone knows, dangerous sports. “We all know fighters that are fuckin’ gone,” Rogan said, and he mentioned Muhammad Ali and Terry Norris.

Schaub, who was uncharacteristically (but understandably) quiet during the podcast, agreed. He said, “Name a old-school fighter you’ve seen and you’re like, ‘God, that guy is sharp’—said no one ever.”

Rogan pressed on. “You’re a sharp dude,” he said. “So I know you know that, if you keep going, that’s coming.”